8.6 KiB
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Intelligence Operation |
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CIA operation of 1969 to 1974 that built the Hughes Glomar Explorer under Howard Hughes's name to raise a sunken Soviet missile submarine, and gave its name to the refusal to confirm or deny. | 1969-07-01 | 1975 | Pacific Ocean | 2026-09-21 | 2026-10-12 |
Project Azorian was the Central Intelligence Agency's attempt to lift the Soviet Golf II submarine K-129, which sank in March 1968 with three nuclear ballistic missiles about 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii, from a depth of 16,500 feet. The ship built for the purpose, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, raised part of the hull in August 1974. The agency's own history of the project, written about 1978, was released with deletions in 2010.1
Organization
On July 1, 1969, the agency set up a CIA Special Projects Staff in its Directorate of Science and Technology under John Parangosky, who had managed its reconnaissance aircraft programs, with Ernest Zellmer, a wartime submarine officer, as deputy. President Richard Nixon approved in August. On August 19 Director Richard Helms placed the work in a security compartment named Jennifer. The keel was laid at the Sun Shipbuilding yard in Chester, Pennsylvania, on November 16, 1971. The ship was described publicly as a commercial vessel and bore the name of Howard Hughes. The contractor was Global Marine Development of Los Angeles.12
The project nearly ended in August 1971 over cost. In August 1972 Deputy Secretary of Defense Kenneth Rush forwarded to Richard Helms memoranda from the chief of naval operations, Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., the assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, Dr. Hall, and the Defense Intelligence Agency director, Vice Admiral de Poix, which to varying degrees pointed to escalating costs and political risks and generally felt that the program should be terminated; Zumwalt, while not recommending immediate termination, stated strong reservations.3 On August 28, 1972 Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to the 40 Committee that he could not support the mission, citing the lower intelligence value of the target since the submarine sank in March 1968, escalating costs and the possibility of a strong Soviet reaction.3 Helms answered on September 14 urging continuation, and on September 18 Rush wrote that, given relations and negotiations with the Soviet Union, the program should be terminated in view of high political and technical risks.3 On December 11, 1972 the President decided to continue the project with the 40 Committee exercising policy supervision, communicated in a memorandum from Henry Kissinger to the committee's principals.3 The agency has not released the cost, which later reports put at as much as 500 million dollars.1
The Lift
Nixon approved the mission on June 7, 1974, on condition that work not begin until he had left the Moscow summit. The ship arrived over the wreck on July 4, the day after his departure. Two Soviet naval vessels watched it for nearly fourteen days. On July 18 the mission director had crates stacked on the helicopter deck to prevent a boarding, and the team assigned to defend the control room while sensitive material was destroyed "was alerted, but guns were not issued." The lift began on August 1 and the section was secured in the hold on August 8. The crew encountered plutonium contamination from the detonation of the high explosive in one or more nuclear torpedoes. By published accounts only a forward section of 38 feet was recovered, and the missiles, code books, and cipher machines fell back to the bottom. A Russian panel reported to President Boris Yeltsin in 1993 that the Americans had recovered at least two nuclear torpedoes. The agency later gave Yeltsin a videotape of the burial at sea of the crewmen found in the wreckage.1
Wackenhut
A CIA security memorandum of July 28, 1975, records: "In November of 1974 it was learned that Wackenhut Corporation was providing guard coverage to Global Marine Development, Incorporated (GMDI), Los Angeles, California, a firm that the Agency office of DDS&T was dealing with. This Agency made no attempt to persuade GMDI to terminate their contract with Wackenhut Corporation." The agency had withdrawn its covert security approval of George R. Wackenhut in April 1967.2
Exposure
A story in the Los Angeles Times ran on February 8, 1975, under the headline "U.S. Reported After Russian Submarine," after what the CIA's history calls "an improbable series of events following a break-in and robbery in June 1974 at Summa Corporation headquarters in Los Angeles"; the history states that "extraordinary efforts by DCI Colby and others were able to contain the spread of the story for a time." Jack Anderson broadcast the story on March 18 and Seymour Hersh published it in New York Times the next day.4 At the White House that day United States Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger recommended acknowledging the "bare facts." Colby, recalling that Dwight D. Eisenhower's admission of the U-2 flight had deepened the crisis of 1960, argued that confirmation would put Moscow under "pressure to respond," and President Gerald Ford took his advice.1
Seymour Hersh had been investigating the operation since as early as January 1974. An editors' note to the March 19, 1975 memorandum of conversation in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, citing the CIA Executive Registry files, states that William Colby urged Hersh to delay publication in conversations on February 1, 1974 and February 10, 1975.5 Hersh's March 19 article in the New York Times gave the operation's purpose, a cost estimated at more than $250 million, the technology and the results.6 On March 28, 1975, Colby argued that a second mission was inadvisable after the exposure.6
When the journalist Harriet Ann Phillippi asked under the Freedom of Information Act for records of the agency's efforts to discourage the reporting, the CIA replied that it could "neither confirm nor deny" any connection with the ship. The court of appeals upheld the answer in Phillippi v. CIA in 1976. The formula has since been known as the Glomar response. In 2010 a retired officer who had served aboard, David Sharp, wrote that the agency's review board still refused to clear a third of his manuscript on the project.1
Footnotes
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Burr, William, ed. "Project Azorian: The CIA's Declassified History of the Glomar Explorer," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 305, February 12, 2010, with "Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer," Studies in Intelligence, Fall 1985, and White House memoranda of conversation, February 7 and March 19, 1975. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb305/index.htm ↩︎
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Central Intelligence Agency, "Wackenhut Corporation, SF# 493 364," memorandum for the record, July 28, 1975. JFK Assassination Records Collection, record 104-10130-10454. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/0318/104-10130-10454.pdf ↩︎
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Central Intelligence Agency, "Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer," sections "Early Political Feasibility Evaluation by 40 Committee" and "The 40 Committee Decision to Proceed," CIA reading room item 0005301269. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-0005301269 ↩︎
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U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, vol. XXXV, National Security, 1973-1976, document 197, editorial note: "On March 18, 1975, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson mentioned the Glomar Explorer on his national radio show, and declared his intention to reveal more details about the operation. The next day, several major newspapers ... published front-page stories." https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v35/d197 ↩︎
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Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, vol. XXXV, Document 197, Memorandum of Conversation, March 19, 1975, editors' note citing CIA, Executive Registry, Job 80M01048A, Box 7, Seymour Hersh, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v35/d197. ↩︎
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Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, vol. XXXV, Document 183, Editorial Note, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v35/d183. ↩︎