The Taking of K-129 Quotes

“Imagine standing atop the Empire State Building with an 8-foot-wide grappling hook on a 1-inch-diameter steel rope. Your task is to lower the hook to the street below, snag a compact car full of gold, and lift the car back to the top of the building. On top of that, the job has to be done without anyone noticing. That, essentially, describes what the CIA did in Project AZORIAN, a highly secret six-year effort to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean floor during the Cold War.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Captain Harry Jackson was back home in Groton, Connecticut, having breakfast with his wife, when a news segment came over the radio, explaining what had occurred on Jack Anderson’s radio program. Once the report finished, his wife looked over and locked eyes with her husband. “Did you hear what I just heard?” she asked. “Yep,” he replied. “Were you there?” Jackson sipped from his mug of coffee. “I don’t know,” he said.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“The specifics of spying are secret and closely guarded, but the fact that spying is being done is very much in the open. Everyone does it. And no one talks about it.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“The trash had no intelligence value. But it was useful as a prank. The next day the trash went out with every item, including a few well-thumbed Playboys as a special gift, covered in a thick slime of Aqua Lube, a green grease used for lubricating pipe joints that is designed for use in deep-ocean environments. It is detergent- and solvent-resistant and is famous for its ability to ruin clothes and stay on skin for days, even after vigorous washing. To make sure the Soviets didn’t miss a single bag of slimy mail, the crew began to pump acetylene gas into the bags. This made them extra-buoyant, so much so that they’d skip across the waves when thrown overboard, often causing the SB-10 to change course and chase them.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“The simulator, like all of the major systems, ran on the most sophisticated computers available at that time. For the capture vehicle, that meant two redundant Honeywell 316s, each worth twenty-five thousand dollars and carrying sixteen kilobytes of hardwired memory in four thousand eight-bit boards.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“But there was so much paper being generated on a daily basis that the shredders kept jamming, and the security guys realized it was sometimes easier to just rip the paper into tiny pieces by hand and then dispose of it the old-fashioned way—by going to the top deck and making it rain. This process worked well enough, with one exception, when an overtired team working the late shift made the mistake of throwing the paper into the wind instead of with it, resulting in a blizzard of classified confetti that blanketed the deck, and causing the poor security guys to scramble and clear the evidence before Jack Poirier awoke and lost his mind.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Every man on the Explorer had a job to do, and with so many of the systems still works in progress, and only a very small window for the recovery, the crew had virtually no downtime. But when they could steal even a few hours, life was comfortable. A crew of fifteen cooks worked in the mess hall, keeping it provisioned twenty-four hours a day. At any moment, a crew member could stop into the mess and get a good, hot meal—rib eye steaks, lamb chops, burgers, seafood, as well as an array of salads, desserts, and freshly baked bread and pastries. For men who had only a few minutes, lounges around the ship were stocked with fresh fruit, nuts, candy, coffee, tea, and soft drinks. There was even a soft-serve ice cream machine. Two native New Yorkers had arranged for the cooks to buy and hide a large supply of bagels, lox, and cream cheese that they managed to conceal in the depths of the walk-in freezer—for a few days, until someone found the stash and word got out.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Colby was a veteran of the OSS’s legendary Jedburghs, a group of spies recruited to parachute behind enemy lines in the early years of World War II and wreak havoc, organizing resistance and blowing up roads and bridges. The Jedburgh motto was “Surprise, kill, and vanish,” and Colby was perfect in the role.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Pendleton tried to keep a straight face when he found one such man up on deck, cursing and scratching his scalp like a flea-bitten dog. “Goddamn, this wig is so itchy I wish I could throw it overboard,” the man said. “But the security guys would kill me.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Up to this point, specific positions on the ocean were still identified the way they had been for centuries—by using a sextant. The Sea Scope was one of the first vessels ever equipped with satellite navigation, which at that time was the size of a refrigerator and built by Magnavox.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Honeywell, in Seattle, was picked to develop a number of the key system components, including the station keeping and sonar, as well as data-processing systems for Clementine. The idea was to put controls for the ship and the capture vehicle all in the same room, on the same console, and it was all based on the very cutting edge of computing power at that time. Specifically, Honeywell would use six computers, each with thirty-two kilobytes of core memory, and a suite of peripherals, including magnetic tapes, alphanumeric CRT displays, card readers, line printers, and plotters.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“The primary function of the office during the design phase was to monitor each piece of the puzzle—the ship, the barge, the claw, the pipe, the electronics, and the many smaller contributions by contractors scattered around America—and to make sure they all worked and could be assembled together in the end into a working tool—a sub-snatching supership.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“For years afterward, engineers traded Savage stories, one favorite being the time a captain, working in the office as a civilian, pulled him aside to point out what he considered a lack of respect. “Perhaps you don’t know this, son, but I’m a naval officer,” the man said, and Savage nodded glumly. “I know that,” he replied. “I noticed the Navy ring when you were picking your nose.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Nodules were first identified by John Young Buchanan, the staff chemist on the scientific voyage of the HMS Challenger, a British vessel that sailed the oceans from 1872 to 1876, covering seventy thousand nautical miles in the hopes of opening up the mysteries of what lay under the sea.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“One early proposal typified the learning curve necessary for a group that had built its reputation on aerospace: What if deep-sea submersibles were used to attach rocket boosters to the wreck? The boosters could launch the sub up through the ocean and to the surface, at which point—well, that’s where that idea fell apart, since no one knew how to catch the rocket-boosted wreck once it hit the surface and before it began to climb into orbit.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“On August 5, 1963, Albert “Bud” Wheelon, former director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, assumed leadership of the all-new Directorate of Science and Technology, and over the next few years he helped build arguably the most powerful development and engineering establishment in American history, a government-funded Skunk Works for outlandish projects—like figuring out how to retrieve a submarine wrecked seventeen thousand feet below the ocean’s surface.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“A single Blackbird could photograph one hundred thousand square miles per hour, with the ability to zoom in up to twenty times, providing enough resolution from eighty-five thousand feet to look down into the hatches of container ships unloading materiel in Haiphong harbor.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“When the supersonic planes returned to base, pilots and mechanics puzzled over the tiny black dots that pitted the windshields. Test samples came back as organic material. The source: insects that had been sucked up into the stratosphere during Russian and Chinese nuclear tests and were just winging around the earth in the jet stream, seventy-five thousand feet up.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Titanium worked—while causing all sorts of problems. For instance, it was so strong that all of the Skunk Works’ existing tools and bolts were rendered useless, forcing Johnson to reinvent those, too. What was more, there wasn’t enough titanium available in the United States, so the CIA had to use subcontractors and dummy companies to covertly buy the rare alloy from, of all places, the Soviet Union.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Bissell arranged for a presidential action to add Groom Lake, as the test area was called, into the AEC territory, so that on maps it would just look like more land partitioned off for nuclear tests. The new CIA base—later nicknamed Area 51—was built for a total of eight hundred thousand dollars. “I’ll bet this is one of the best deals the government will ever get,” Johnson observed.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Two years later, an improved Trieste was ready, and on January 23, 1960, Piccard and Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh traveled seven miles down toward the deepest known point in the Pacific, into a section of the Mariana Trench known as Challenger Deep. They spent only twenty minutes on the floor, staring agog at all manner of never-before-seen creatures, then began the long ascent back to the surface. The entire trip took nine hours and only one human (the film director James Cameron) has been that deep since.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Kobzar was loved by his crew and respected by his superiors, who noted how he personally helped train watch officers, oversaw survival training, and could capably handle any job on the sub. He had a question he liked to repeat to men under his command: “Who is the most dangerous man on a submarine? The one who doesn’t know what he’s doing!”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“delirious, but only in the specifics. What”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Manfred, you’ve got a”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History

“Radio transmitters are not infallible, and Soviet submarines were notorious for equipment failure.”
― Josh Dean, The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History