Original subtitles

During the Cold War,

both the United States and the Soviet Union

deployed submarines with ballistic missiles.

The K-129 was a Soviet ballistic missile submarine.

The submarine sank.

To find a sub in the ocean

is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

It would be a remarkable treasure,

uh, to be able to get your hands on a Soviet submarine.

And so that's what we set out to do.

The CIA needs a cover story.

They go to Howard Hughes, multibillionaire.

"Build a ship that can salvage

a Soviet submarine with a nuclear missile."

Howard Hughes says, "Okay."

A submarine at 16,000 feet?

It was just unprecedented to even think about

undertaking something that ambitious

and to do it in secrecy.

This was more complex,

in some respects, than going to the moon.

I joined the CIA in, uh, June 1966.

My first assignment was

at the National Photographic Interpretation Center.

I became kind of an expert in that.

The Cold War was essentially a competition

between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Essentially, conflict between democracy,

capitalism, and socialism.

Well, during the Cold War,

the United States developed what they called a "Triad Response"

to the foreign threat.

The triad consisted of submarines, submarine-launched ballistic missiles,

and aircraft to deliver weapons.

Fortunately, no one pushed the button,

but it was a very tense period.

The US and the Soviet Union routinely spied on one another.

The main object was to monitor the activities of Soviet submarines,

to determine what their capabilities are, where they were headed,

'cause that was important to track Soviet submarines,

uh, in the event of a nuclear exchange.

Almost three quarters of the Earth's surface is covered with water,

and America's two newest states,

Alaska and Hawaii, are thrust deeply into the Pacific.

And most important,

the most powerful nations in the world border the oceans and the seas.

This global disposition of land and water

may be likened to a gigantic chess board,

where play many strategies and many weapons.

The Soviet program, naval program, was very aggressive.

At the time, they were building both surface ships as well as submarines.

With the development of the nuclear weapon,

both countries then began to think about,

"Well, where can you deploy your missiles that would carry a nuclear warhead?"

This was a highly classified program within the Soviet Union.

And this question still remained,

what was the nuclear capability from a submarine-launched missile?

We didn't know that.

I'm Captain First Class Igor Kurdin.

For 25 years, I had served in the Russian Submarine Fleet.

It became clear that one of the main components of war at sea

must be the submarines with nuclear ballistic missiles.

Golf-class submarines turned out to be very successful,

so we built 24 of them.

This was a thermonuclear unit

with a missile range of 880 miles.

The K-129 was a modernized submarine,

which was armed

with a set of three ballistic missiles

with a load of more than one megaton.

And the most important thing, as a result of modernization,

was that these missiles could fire underwater.

From the depth of 150 feet, very quickly,

a submarine could release its three ballistic missiles.

Both the Soviet Union and United States

were interested in where each other's submarines are.

Soviet Union launched their missiles submerged

and had their engines running out of the tubes,

and we considered this extremely dangerous.

K-129 submarine departed Petropavlovsk

and steamed towards the West Coast of the United States.

Its mission was to go on patrol

and to take up station at a position

in the event of a nuclear exchange with the United States.

The task of the K-129

is to stay in an area

that permits firing at more than one target.

For example, San Francisco,

but also other targets on the US territory.

If there are military objects,

the more targets that are within

the K-129 missile range, the better.

I am the son of Dr. Cherepanov.

My father, captain third class,

was major of medical services on the K-129 submarine.

I was ten years old at the time.

My father wasn't supposed to be deployed on this mission.

It was coincidence. It was decided by chance.

Father, of course, knew the whole crew.

This crew was his crew, his commander.

And I knew many of these people.

This deployment was supposed to be his last deployment, his last sea voyage.

K-129 was on full radio silence mode.

But it was supposed to send control reports

when it arrived at control points.

When we didn't receive the control radio dispatch from K-129,

the Navy command, and especially the Pacific Ocean Fleet command,

rolled out a search operation, including search boats and airplanes.

They immediately started sending out aircraft, submarines,

and surface ships to look for the submarine.

They knew the approximate area for the K-129, but not an exact position.

This search continued. Unfortunately, there were no results.

There was no official statement acknowledging

the loss of the submarine and death of 98 members of its crew.

They just told them that they died while fulfilling their military duty.

What tipped US intelligence was the Soviet search, a massive search.

US watchers couldn't miss it, but the trick was to locate the sub.

And for that, the United States used its underwater surveillance system

that was run by both the Navy and the Air Force

that was designed to track the movements of Soviet subs,

but also from the Air Force's perspective, to track Soviet missiles.

When it had its accident,

it created a very strong acoustic signature

that was picked up by the underwater surveillance network

that we had set up around the world,

both in the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean,

where we could follow the movement of the submarines.

The US was able to triangulate that data

to locate very precisely the remains of the K-129.

The Navy's response

was to use one of its specially configured submarines,

the USS Halibut, to go and photograph the debris on the bottom.

The USS Halibut returned with thousands of photographs.

They showed the K-129, where it was,

and in a recoverable condition and position.

They wanted to see if there was any imagery looking down

towards one of the open missile tubes,

to see if there was still a missile or warhead,

and they were looking for an object that was approximately

three miles below the surface.

I was allowed to see the photography

because my responsibility was to try to see it better.

I was fascinated by the photography.

It was my first time ever looking at something like that.

It was really very captivating.

I wrote a report about that, basically saying,

"There is probably a missile in that tube."

It was very, very sensitive.

Henry Kissinger, advisor to the president,

sees the photographs, says,

"I want the nuclear warhead on that third missile."

Initially, the task of devising a plan to recover the K-129

was given to the US Navy.

And the Navy developed a plan,

but that plan was thought not to be feasible.

And so, in 1969, the job was given instead to the CIA.

John Parangosky, a career CIA officer,

was asked to assemble a team to do that,

and he became what we call the "Program Manager" for the project,

which was given the name "Azorian."

The objective of Project Azorian

was to raise the targeted portion of the K-129

in order to recover the valuable items thought to be on board,

which included nuclear warheads and missiles and cryptographic gear.

Studying nuclear weapons had always been

the first and foremost intelligence task.

Second, they could gain

secret codes for radio connections,

including using a fast-acting system.

All the secret codes.

They could read these secret documents, these telegrams,

and put together quite a good idea

about our Navy fleet tactics, especially for the submarines.

The K-129 was a warship.

Recovering a warship is illegal under international law.

It was a highly risky operation.

CIA go to a company called Global Marine.

Global Marine builds ships to do ocean floor drilling,

drilling for oil on the ocean floor.

The objective of the CIA was to recover the K-129.

It required hundreds, thousands of people to do that,

and the development of huge, enormous technology.

And so the cover story that the CIA selected in 1969

was to hide that undertaking in plain sight

under cover of a deepwater ocean mining operation.

And to front the operation, the CIA selected Howard Hughes.

He has a pre-existing relationship with the US intelligence agency.

He had been a defense contractor for years,

but according to declassified documents,

that included providing cover arrangements for CIA people working overseas.

And the thinking was, well, only one person, Howard Hughes,

an eccentric, was thought to be crazy enough

to undertake something,

deep ocean mining, an industry that didn't exist at the time.

That immediately focused so much publicity.

Here there were headlines in newspapers,

"Howard Hughes starts seafloor mining."

Fantastic.

It was a brilliant cover story, and it worked.

I was involved with the Glomar Explorer from its inception until it finished,

from 1970 to 1975.

It was a challenge. Us engineers love challenges,

so it was something I looked forward to getting involved with.

We built a ship. It ended up 600 feet long,

weighed 63,000 tons.

Was a lot of things to do other than just build a ship.

They had to build a capture vehicle.

They had to make sure that the materials

that were used in the capture vehicle were strong enough.

In metallurgy, there's a trade-off between the ability of something to bend

and its ability to be strong at the limit.

Below deck was really where the action was,

and included an enormous moon pool,

which housed the capture vehicle

that was designed to go down three miles to collect the sub,

and then, presumably, would house the sub itself when it was recovered.

Once the ship was completed,

it left Philadelphia and actually had to sail down

and go through the Straits of Magellan to get to Long Beach, its home port.

The ship arrived from Pennsylvania to Long Beach.

Strangely, a dock right next to Hughes' flying boat.

So that made perfect sense.

Howard Hughes was selected for a lot of reasons.

His company, Hughes Tool, was privately owned.

There were no stockholders to answer to,

no Securities and Exchange Commission reports to file.

And so it was a perfect black box.

But nighttime burglary at a Hughes-owned warehouse in Los Angeles took place.

The burglars reportedly stole thousands of dollars in valuables,

but mostly papers.

Those papers included a memo

that was written by a Hughes aide in 1970,

and this aide explained to Hughes via this memo

that the CIA had approached Hughes to raise a Soviet sub,

and explaining exactly what the CIA wanted from Hughes,

and what the operation was and asking for Hughes' approval.

The CIA and Colby were concerned about the memo,

because if it would continue to go missing,

that the program, the cover will be blown.

The location of the target was in the North Pacific Ocean.

The operation itself had to be conducted at a time of the year

when the ocean was most calm.

As soon as the Glomar Explorer reached the area,

the Soviets immediately became suspicious.

They sent a ship to observe.

It was very foggy.

We couldn't see anything, and as it got lighter and lighter

as fog started to burn off, we saw this beautiful, white ship

with a bunch of radomes on it.

We then identified it as the Chazhma, a Russian ship,

and it was evidently holding station with us.

They opened the doors in the back of the ship,

and out comes this little helicopter.

The Glomar Explorer had a helicopter pad.

The last thing they wanted was the Soviet helicopter landing,

so they immediately took boxes, packing gear, anything they could find,

filled up the helicopter deck on the Glomar

so that the Soviet helicopter could not land.

The ship was mostly unarmed.

It was unescorted, and it was alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Ostensibly, a commercial ship.

And the fact that there were Soviet vessels hovering nearby,

many crew members certainly did feel that they were vulnerable.

One concern was that the Soviets were unpredictable,

especially some of their ship operators,

and it was possible that they could decide to

"accidentally," in quotes, ram the ship.

The Soviet Union was very interested in the ship.

The cover was a mining vehicle deployment.

Therefore, they would assume that's what it was

and not feel like it was any kind of a threat.

They came to the conclusion that the Glomar Explorer

was performing deepwater work,

with the purpose of mining some useful fossils or crude oil,

which they reported to the command and left that area very fast.

At this point, there was no belief that the Russians were aware of...

The mining activity seemed to have held fine.

And then this tugboat came up.

It was a tug, but it was a Russian Navy tug.

Didn't look like it was any threat other than getting in our way,

which it did a few times, just to harass us.

Then they'd come by every few days,

and come real close again, see if we were doing anything.

We didn't open the gates and lower the rig until they parked,

and they hung all around us the whole time that we went down.

The claw, which was named Clementine,

had cameras mounted on it, and lights,

so they were able to monitor exactly what was happening.

So, Clementine makes its way down.

Folks were hopeful that they would succeed.

When we went to pick up the sub,

everything was going well.

The claws went under the submarine into the ocean floor.

The bottom was harder than they anticipated.

Then they called us

and told us to take over control for lifting it to the surface.

So there was a high level of anxiety.

"If we get the submarine into our ship, what do we have?"

Key question was radiation.

The submarine had three nuclear missiles,

two nuclear torpedoes.

They had been under pressure at 16,000 feet for a couple of years,

plus the salt water.

What was the effect of that environment on a nuclear warhead?

No one knew,

especially because we didn't know that much about Soviet nuclear warheads.

There were individuals on board

that were demolitions experts and defusing experts,

that were trained to make sure that the weapons,

if there were any recovered, did not explode.

One morning, we were in the mess room.

I was having a meeting with my guys, and I felt this little shake,

like a small earthquake,

or a barge or something bumping the side of us.

Something had gone wrong, we knew instantly.

I went to the heavy lift control room. They said, "Fine here."

Then someone realized, "Oh wait, those are old images,"

and somebody pressed the refresh button, and then they realized,

"Oh, part of the submarine has broken away."

We had 12 cameras on the capture vehicle, and they were multiplexed.

We could then read the weight that we had left on the thing,

and we had lost about a thousand tons.

We had lost the major part of the submarine that we were after,

the one with the missiles,

but we still had about a 40-foot-long section of the bow,

so we just kept coming with the pipe.

And then the Russian naval vessel

blew their whistle three times,

which is the maritime farewell, and sailed away.

All they got into the Glomar Explorer was 38 feet.

The ballistic missile that Kissinger wanted

fell to the ocean floor

with that other section of the submarine.

You had a success and a failure at the same time.

What was aboard the sub,

what did US experts believe was aboard the sub,

that information has been declassified.

What they recovered, that has not been.

We had trained to take things apart

and categorize them, dry things out.

They did find parts of six bodies.

These bodies were recovered,

removed from the submarine,

buried at sea, in the location of the Glomar Explorer.

This service is being conducted to honor Viktor Lokhov,

Vadim Kostyushko, Valentin Nosachev,

and three other unidentified Soviet submariners

who perished in March 1968 in the North Pacific Ocean.

CIA officers prepared to bury those remains

in accord with the Geneva Conventions

and to do so in a respectful way

in case the Soviets ever asked a question,

'cause this was, again, a very high-stakes operation.

And so you wanted to bury the remains in a way that would be respectful

and follow the conventions, um,

to answer any concerns that the Soviets might have.

Yes, I've seen the video.

And the only thing I regret

is that it was done by American sailors.

The exploitation, then,

of the third of the submarine started immediately.

After a covert operation of this magnitude and type,

there's always the question about, "Well, was it worth it?"

"Did we get anything of any particular value?"

Definitely, the result of Operation Azorian,

for the American fleet, was of great importance.

Probably helped them discover

the technology behind Russian submarines.

Immediately after the Glomar Explorer returned to the United States,

the CIA began planning to go back with the Glomar Explorer

and recover that section of the submarine that had broken off,

pick it up, to get the nuclear warhead from that third missile.

Project started immediately.

They took photographs of the ocean floor,

of what that part of the submarine looked like,

so schedules were made up.

It was going to be a very successful mission,

and everyone was very enthusiastic about going after the piece that dropped.

It was called "Matador."

The cost factors were such

that the agency went back to Henry Kissinger for confirmation

that the project should continue,

and that was revalidated by Mr. Kissinger saying,

"Yes, we think this project is worth the cost."

But in early February 1975,

the LA Times leaked a story about the Hughes-CIA connection,

and the fact that it was going after a sunken submarine.

The reason that it blew had to do with events that took place months earlier,

uh, when a burglary at a Hughes-owned warehouse in Los Angeles took place.

That investigation leaks,

and in February of 1975,

two local beat reporters for the Los Angeles Times

publish the first garbled account of the project.

The CIA was to silence the press

in hopes that the US could still continue the operation.

Seymour Hersh follows up with a credible account

on the front page of the New York Times the next morning, May 19th.

So at this point, the operation is fully blown.

Soon as that happened, within ten days or so

of that newspaper hitting the newsstands,

the Soviets put a ship out at the spot where the Glomar had been operating

and just circled the area, making sure that no one else came back.

President Ford said, "Okay."

"Based on that, we're not going to go back."

And we didn't.

So that's how it got terminated and why.

There are still a lot of mysteries

regarding the Azorian Project, things we don't know.

One of them is regarding what, exactly, the US hauled up,

and that information has still not been declassified.

The best source on this

is a French edition of William Colby's memoirs...

30 YEARS OF CIA

...which were published beyond the reach of CIA censors.

And according to that,

the US did not recover the full targeted section of the sub.

There are three nuclear missile warheads on the bottom of the North Pacific.

One of them is intact.

Has anyone gone back? No.

The CIA would never comment on it.

It was a secret of all secrets.

The response that was developed

to requests for information about Project Azorian

was to neither confirm nor deny those reports.

And that language, "neither confirm nor deny,"

has become part of our culture today.

It's one of the major, um, legacies of the Azorian Project,

which became known as the "Glomar Response"

that the US government has used for years.

The first tweet from the CIA account was, cheekily enough,

"We can neither confirm nor deny this is our first tweet."

There are a lot of theories as to what happened to the K-129.

That it went rogue, and some tried to detonate a nuclear device on board,

um, but what we do know

is that it suffered some kind of an internal explosion, uh, and sank.

The most realistic version

is the one I was told

by an American officer from a surface ship.

That the K-129, under the periscope,

was in shallow depth for an underwater diesel operation

and was unintentionally hit by a surface ship, the American destroyer.

The destruction of the submarine itself was so fast,

there was no time for them to send an emergency signal.

Many critics felt that Azorian was scandalous.

It was a high-cost operation.

The exact figure remains classified today.

Estimates are approximately $350 million and up,

and that was a large figure at the time.

One of the costlier US collection efforts in intelligence history,

so there was a cost factor.

But the other thing had to do with the target itself.

By 1975, the K-129

was an older vessel.

It was really a historical relic,

and many questioned whether this was a wise investment.

Was the Glomar Explorer, Project Azorian, a failure?

No, it was not a failure.

We did it.

Was it successful?

Only partially.

It failed to obtain that nuclear warhead.

Glomar Explorer was laid up, mothballed, in California, Suisun Bay,

for about 20 years.

Now, the ship's getting old and outdated, and sold it for scrap.

It's gone.

I have heard people compare the Glomar Explorer to going to the moon,

and to me,

that's pretty fantastic as well.

And there were certainly challenges.

I can't really compare them. Uh...

It'd be nice to think that it was that way as being personally involved,

but my ego won't let me go that far.