The CIA's Greatest Covert Operation: Inside the Daring Mission to Recover a Nuclear-armed Soviet Sub

by David H. Sharp

March 1968: three miles below the stormy surface of the North Pacific, a Soviet submarine lay silent as a tomb-its crew dead, its payload of nuclear missiles, once directed toward strategic targets in Hawaii, inoperable. No longer a real threat, the sub still presented an alluring target and it was not long before the CIA answered its siren call even at the risk of igniting World War III.
Project AZORIAN the monumentally audacious six-year mission to recover the sub and learn its secrets has been celebrated within the CIA as its greatest covert operation and hailed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as the twentieth century's greatest marine engineering feat. While previous accounts have offered beguiling glimpses, none have had significant access to CIA personnel or documents. Now David Sharp, the mission's Director of Recovery Systems, draws upon his own recollections and personal records, ship's logs, declassified documents, and conversations with team members to shine a bright light on this remarkable but still little understood enterprise.
Sharp reveals how the CIA conceived, organized, and conducted AZORIAN, including recruiting the legendary Howard Hughes to provide the "ocean mining" cover story. He takes readers onto and beneath the high seas to show the problems faced by the crew during the operation, including potential Soviet intervention and tense moments when the recovery ship itself was in danger of breaking up. He also puts a human face on key players like Carl Duckett, the head of the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate; John Parangosky, AZORIAN's program manager; John Graham, designer of the Hughes Glomar Explorer; Curtis Crooke of Global Marine Development, co-creator of the "grunt lift" recovery concept; and Oscar "Ott" Schick, manager of the Lockheed-built capture vehicle and submersible barge.
A mammoth undertaking worthy of the most dramatic and spell-binding espionage fiction, Project AZORIAN harnessed American imagination and ingenuity at their highest levels. Featuring dozens of previously classified photos, Sharp's chronicle of that amazing operation plunges readers deep into the darkest shadows of the Cold War to produce the definitive account of an amazing mission."

Genres: History

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

David H. Sharp's long career in the CIA included communications support for the Bay of Pigs operation; chief communications engineer for the U-2 program; chief electronics engineer for the flight testing of OXCART, a top secret hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft program; and chief of research and development for covert photographic, audio surveillance, and communications devices used by CIA's foreign agents.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Thomas Radigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The technobabble is very hard to follow, but the book is a great accounting on how, after the USA happened to discover a sunken nuclear missile-armed Soviet submarine in the Pacific Ocean in the late 1960's, was uncertain what to do. Not only were there all the political, diplomatic, legal, financial, and moral aspects to consider in whether or not the USA would try to retrieve this submarine, but this would be an unprecedented engineering feat for the early 1970's, when the decision was made to try to retrieve it from the bottom of the ocean, in the days when computer technology and naval engineering was still comparatively primitive compared to the present. Also, by getting the submarine out, how would the Soviets react, let alone the rest of the world?

The attempt is made, of course, with a cover story created that it was an ocean mining operation sponsored by Howard Hughes (who does not personally appear in the story, but his representatives do). A specially made ship is created for the purpose, with the CIA doing everything within its power to hide its real purpose from the world, and the operation itself proves to be extremely hazardous. The book is difficult to follow, but it is not from bad editing or crafting. Definitely a major if little-known piece of Cold War history.

[Thomas J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

You are not going to get a more authoritative narration of the Azorian mission to recover a sunken Russian submarine. The submarine, a diesel powered Golf II class was armed with 3 R-21 nuclear warhead missiles. Sunk in the North Pacific in March, 1968, this book details the technology devised to attempt to recover the forward section of the submarine from a depth of 16,400 feet. Much like the contemporaneous Apollo program, much of the technology and equipment had to be invented.

If you have any interest in the history of the Cold War, this book is a must read!

[Ogi Ogas · Rating 3 out of 5]

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.

[Tony Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

For all of you engineers, especially marine engineers, and submariners, I just completed reading a very interesting book about the Hughes Glomar Explorer, the ship that was designed and built to exclusively "capture" a 1960's-era Soviet sub (Golf II-class diesel boat ) that had sunk in the North Pacific in 1968. I am sure you have read in the past about the exploits of the CIA program that led to the building of the Hughes Glomar Explorer and the covert capture of the Soviet sub, but the recently published book, The CIA's Greatest Covert Operation: Inside the Daring Mission to Recover a Nuclear-Armed Soviet Sub, by David H. Sharp is a very interesting tale. The author was one of the principal CIA operatives involved in the mission and probably one of the few who has all of the notes and documents to tell the tale as to what really happened; that is, as least as much as the CIA editorial staff would permit him to print.

The reason I bring this book to your attention is that in 2006 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers declared the Hughes Glomar Explorer to be a "National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark" claiming that the recovery system was the greatest marine engineering accomplishment of the twentieth century. Yes, there is a lot of interesting details regarding the spook-side of the recovery and how they were able to conduct the recovery of the sub all along while the Soviets had ships harassing them but never knowing what was really going on... the Soviets did not believe that it was physically possible for anyone to make a recovery of a sub at that depth.

The author also brings out many details regarding the politics of the time and the rolls of Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger, as well as Howard Hughes, in the decision making process as well as how the cover-story was developed and successfully executed. For you submariners, the author also refers to a number of incidents that were made public with the publishing of Blind Man's Bluff about submarine Cold War espionage as authored by Sontag and Drew in 1998. For the most part, the book is a "technical" read as well as one of espionage; I would not call it "a summer-by-the-pool" type of read, but one that I think you would enjoy.

[Peter Sheerin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not often that you get to read a story this detailed about clandestine CIA operations, and aside from that trait, there are several remarkable aspects of this book.

First, that it was so well-written. The author, David Sharp, was a key participant and technical manager in the design and operation of the entire project. For an engineer (who completed and defended a dissertation during the project), such good writing and story-telling is unusual. And for him to write well enough to earn the high accolades from the critics and authors featured on the back of the dust jacket is more than a feather in his cap.

Second, within the limits of the CIA redaction, the book is surprisingly open about all aspects of the failures. And in that lies the true value of the book. Today's technology, both civilian and military, is littered with the carcasses of spectacular hardware, software, and integration failures.

All too often, the tendency is to cover them up, so as to not embarrass the guilty. But our best knowledge comes from failure, and the postmortem analysis.

Anyone who builds anything of any complexity (read: anything more complex than a shell script or wooden furniture) should carefully read this book, and look for similarities in the processes and personalities so eloquently described by Sharp.

There are many good lessons in this book, and should I ever get a chance to work with the author on any kind of technical project, I would jump aboard so quickly my feet might never touch the boarding plank.

[Susan Paxton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Retired CIA engineer David Sharp's book may be the closest we get for many years to a definitive history of Project AZORIAN, the secret mission to recover a sunken Soviet submarine in the Pacific. Sharp's style is clear and conversational and he goes into as much detail as the CIA permitted him (his forward on getting the book through the CIA's vetting process is pretty interesting in itself!). While other secret projects like the U-2 and the A-12/SR-71 have been allowed into the light of day and their designer, Clarence "Kelly" Johnson of the Lockheed Skunkworks, has been lauded, the people behind this remarkable project remain in obscurity. Sharp gives them what he can of a moment in the sun.

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent details

[Michael Sharp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well I really liked it for obvious reasons! It gave some perspective to certain things in my life.