On 8 March 1968, the Soviet submarine K-129 mysteriously sank in the north Pacific, with the loss of all 98 crew mates on board. For the next six years the CIA secretly embarked on one of the most expensive and technically complex operations of the Cold War in an attempt to salvage its wreckage. Described as both a triumph of espionage and a lavish waste of taxpayers’ money, ‘Project Azorian’ had a lasting impact on the CIA’s public image. Forced to battle press leaks, the organisation coined the infamous phrase “We can neither confirm nor deny” in an ultimately vain attempt to evade public exposure.
K-129 belonged to a class of boats known as Project-629, designed in the mid-1950s to form part of the USSR’s strategic deterrence capabilities. Each submarine was nearly 100m long, and carried an offensive complement of three R-21 ballistic missiles, each with a one megaton thermonuclear warhead – nearly 70 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – and a range of over 1300km. Project-629 submarines also carried several T-5 nuclear torpedoes for defence against attack submarines.
Laid down in 1958 and completed in 1959, K-129 was assigned to the port of Petropavlovsk in the Russian Far East, from where it operated regular combat patrols in the Pacific Ocean. It was on one such patrol in February 1968 that K-129 left port under the command of Captain Vladimir Kobzar and Executive Officer Alexander Zhuravin, for a tour of duty planned to last no more than three months. It proved to be a voyage of no return for all its officers and crew.
K-129 underway circa 1968.
After weeks of radio silence, Soviet authorities became concerned about K-129’s whereabouts. Desperate to locate the submarine, the Brezhnev administration ordered a massive air and seaborne search to commence. However, without any information to help focus its efforts, the Soviet navy was forced to scan a vast swathe of the northern Pacific, which ultimately proved impossible.
At the same time, US intelligence, alerted by the sudden activity of Soviet military assets, trawled through acoustic data from SOSUS, America’s state-of-the-art network of underwater hydrophones and sensors that was used to monitor Soviet submarines. It was found that several listening arrays along the US West Coast and Alaska had detected a major acoustic anomaly on 8 March, allowing the rough location of the disturbance to be approximated via triangulation. The specialist deep-sea research submarine USS Halibut was despatched to investigate the area, successfully locating the wreck on 20 August 1968 at a depth of over 5000m, 1560 miles northwest of Hawaii. Close up photos taken by the Halibut revealed that the boat had broken into two sections on the sea floor.
The cause of K-129’s sinking remains contested. The Soviet navy’s official hypothesis was that the sub slipped too deep while operating its snorkel, which, combined with a mechanical failure of the valve at the head of the snorkel mast designed to prevent the infiltration of seawater, could have flooded the boat. However, this seemed unlikely to have generated an acoustic event of the scale detected by the SOSUS arrays. Many Soviet naval officers privately believed that a US attack submarine, which commonly shadowed Soviet ballistic missile submarines during the Cold War, collided with K-129. The most likely culprit of such an event would be the USS Swordfish, operating off the coast of Japan at the time, whose logbook states she had been “underway on special operations” from 1-17 March. But this was denied by the US government, which officially held that K-129 had suffered a catastrophic explosion while near the surface. This could have originated either from a hydrogen leak while charging its batteries, or from seawater leaking into the missile silos and coming into contact with the missile propellant, starting a fire. The latter scenario is exactly what would later happen to another Soviet submarine, K-219, that sank in the north Atlantic in 1986 – which would seem to confirm its plausibility.
If the wreck of K-129 could be recovered, US intelligence would get the chance to examine the R-21 missiles, T-5 torpedoes, codebooks, sonar, navigation, fire-control and stealth technology that went down with the boat. In the midst of a tense presidential election year in 1968, President Johnson decided to defer action to the next administration, but by 1970, President Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger approved a CIA-led salvage effort.
Raising the wreck would be a technically challenging feat. At that time, such a deep recovery effort had never been attempted. The CIA team, led by noted satellite reconnaissance pioneer John Parangosky, explored a number of outlandish possibilities – such as buoying K-129 to the surface by pumping gas bubbles under its hull. However, the decision was ultimately made to commission a purpose-built ship, with a giant submersible claw to haul the boat back to the surface.
In order to maintain secrecy, the CIA constructed an elaborate cover story. The eccentric business magnate and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes agreed to pose as the owner of the new ship that would bear his name – The Hughes Glomar Explorer – which officially existed to carry out ocean-floor geological research for his company Global Marine Development Inc. The 189m-long ship was laid down in 1971 and launched in 1972, while the capture vehicle was developed separately by Lockheed Martin and dubbed Clementine. The total cost came to $350 million – more than $1.6 billion in today’s money. By June 1974 the Glomar Explorer left Long Beach, California, ready to recover the wreck.
The Hughes Glomar Explorer, with its specialist recovery equipment on prominent display.
While Soviet authorities were tipped off by contacts in the US about the imminent operation, its leaders dismissed the possibility of such a deep salvage. Arriving unperturbed over the wreck on 4 July 1974, the Glomar Explorer lowered Clementine onto the bow section of the boat, which contained the forward torpedo tubes, the conning tower and the missile silos. After successfully latching onto the boat the capture vehicle began its slow rise back to the surface, but in the final stages of its ascent a mechanical failure allowed 2/3 of the portion to go tumbling back to the sea floor, including the conning-tower, the all-important R-21 missiles and the codebooks.
The final haul from the recovery operation was therefore less than expected but not unsubstantial. Two T-5 nuclear torpedoes were brought back to the surface, along with the remains of six Soviet crew members who were buried at sea with full honours. This was not enough, however, to assuage allegations of waste and excess once Project Azorian began to be leaked to the press.
In February 1975, journalist Harriet Ann Phillippi of the Los Angeles Times prepared a story about the Glomar Explorer, after documents revealing its true purpose were burgled from the office of the Hughes company. She contacted the CIA to request an explanation, who replied by stating that “We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified, and could not be disclosed” – an infamous piece of evasion that became known as the ‘Glomar response’.
Despite attempts by CIA Director William Colby to suppress the publication of any more information relating to Project Azorian, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Jack Anderson broke the story to a nationwide audience in a March 1975 radio broadcast – in his words “Navy experts have told us that the sunken sub contains no real secrets and that the project, therefore, is a waste of the taxpayers’ money.”
In the wake of this public fallout, the Ford administration chose to cancel Colby’s proposal for ‘Project Matador’, a second Glomar mission that would have recovered the rest of K-129. In its entirety, Azorian had cost around $800 million – equivalent to $4.7 billion today. But an accurate cost-benefit analysis of the programme is hindered by the fact that key information, including the video recording of the salvage operation, remains highly classified, despite the release of a highly-redacted CIA debrief in 2010. There are those who assert that US intelligence learned far more from Project Azorian than they let on. Some believe, for example, that the Glomar Explorer actually managed to recover the entire front portion of the boat. The fact that the US returned K-129’s ship’s bell to the Russian Federation in 1993, which was kept in the submarine’s conning tower while in port, is presented as evidence for this theory. In reality, there is little evidence to suggest that the bell wasn’t simply stowed further forward in the vessel during its final combat patrol.
Rather, the real legacy of Project Azorian was being part of a string of scandals in the 1960s and 1970s that damaged the credibility of the CIA. In 1975, the intelligence agency came under investigation by the House’s Pike Committee, the President’s Rockefeller Commission and the Senate’s Church Committee, in response to allegations relating to the CIA’s mind control programme (MKUltra), its attempted assassinations of world leaders including Fidel Castro, and its mass surveillance of domestic anti-war and civil rights movements. The ‘Glomar response’ only added to a sense that the organisation lacked transparency. Measures were since introduced to increase accountability; President Ford signed Executive Order 11905 to ban political assassinations and created a new Intelligence Oversight Board. However, to this day, the CIA’s reputation remains marred in the eyes of many.
–
Polmar, N.C., and White, M., 2012. Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129. Naval Institute Press.
Robarge, D. 2012. ‘The Glomar Explorer in Film and Print’. Studies in Intelligence.
You must be logged in to post a comment.