Enemy’s secrets fished out of the sea

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

Unlike most spy stories, which are based on hearsay or are the product of vivid imagination, this one is real. Although there have been several previous attempts to describe what the CIA did in 1974, David H. Sharp was actually there. He was a participant in the Hughes Glomar Explorer mission, which nearly recovered a sunken submarine. The CIA had embarked on Project Azorian, which became an audacious six-year mission, hailed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as the 20th-century’s greatest marine engineering feat. The Azorian team salvaged parts of the sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and may have picked up a nuclear warhead along with valuable cryptographic equipment, which allowed Washington to break a series of secret codes.

The Soviet Golf II-class strategic ballistic-missile-carrying diesel-powered submarine with hull number PL-722 and designated K-129 by the Soviet Navy sank in the Pacific Ocean 1,560 nautical miles (2,890 kilometres) northwest of Hawaii in 1968 allegedly because of an on-board explosion, killing all its crew (Golf II submarines carried 83 sailors although it was not known how many were on K-129). Moscow mounted a search and rescue effort but Washington, which had acoustic sensors monitoring the Soviet submarine activities, concluded that the sunken vessel could not be located. There are interesting discussions in the book but Sharp does not reveal how the US Navy tracked down the ship lying at a depth of more than 5,000 metres.

He recounts how the CIA conceived and conducted Azorian, including recruiting the legendary Howard Hughes to provide the “ocean mining” cover-up story given his company’s experience in large offshore drilling ships. Apparently, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company designed a “capture vehicle”, which was a large multitoothed claw that would be lowered to the target to close around it and provide support along its length.

In 1970, based upon extensive photography conducted by minisubs, secretary of defence Melvin Laird and national security council adviser Henry Kissinger proposed a clandestine plan to recover the wreckage so that the United States could study Soviet nuclear-missile technology along with any cryptographic material. The then president Richard Nixon and CIA director George H.W. Bush accepted the proposal.

There is little in the book about the intelligence derived from the Glomar mission. Instead, we have an amazing human story and the appraisal of men such as Carl Duckett, the head of the CIA’s Science and Technology Directorate; John Parangosky, Azorian’s programme manager; John Graham, designer of the Glomar; 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. These are the men who attempted the impossible and nearly managed to recover the entire wreckage.

Starting in July 1974, the Glomar went to work with the deployment of the capture vehicle that, miraculously, managed to lift the submarine. The author carefully describes how the entire mission was carried out away from the view of spy ships, aircraft and satellites. About two thirds of the vessel sank back to the bottom of the ocean when heavy cables attached to the capture vehicle broke. What happened was that several of the “claws” intended to grab the submarine fractured, possibly because they were manufactured from maraging steels — carbon-free iron-nickel alloys with additions of cobalt, molybdenum, titanium and aluminium, which make them stronger. Unfortunately, the claws were not very ductile, meaning they could not be stretched. Still, portions were recovered along with the bodies of six crewmen, who were subsequently given a funeral with military honours as they were buried at sea in metal caskets because of radioactivity concerns.

Sharp’s narrative is lucid, despite the jargon that accompanies these kinds of books, and there are black-and-white photos of both the mission and people involved. Readers will appreciate the illustrations by Michael White from his documentary, “Azorian: The Raising of the K-129”. There are also titbits that describe Sharp’s legal disputes with the CIA when he sought to publish the book. While the book is truly engrossing, what really stands out, beyond the technical prowess, is the ingenuity of the people who came up with a plan to lift a 2,500-tonne vessel from such depth.

Azorian, in the guise of a private enterprise engaged in purely commercial explorations, completely fooled the Soviets. Of course, we are not told whether the Americans got their hands on one of the three nuclear missiles or any cryptographic documents and equipment said to have been on-board, though one must assume they did.

Dr Joseph A. Kéchichian is the author of the forthcoming Legal and Political Reforms in Saudi Arabia (Routledge, 2012).