Project Azorian

Project Azorian was the CIA'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 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 1972 the deputy secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency all recommended to the 40 Committee that it be terminated, on the grounds of cost, political risk, and the probable value of the take. Nixon ordered it continued on December 11, 1972. 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 Wackenhut in April 1967.²

Exposure

Director William Colby telephoned Franklin Murphy, chief executive of the Times Mirror Company, to stop a story in the Los Angeles Times. It ran on February 8, 1975, under the headline "U.S. Reported After Russian Submarine." Jack Anderson broadcast the story on March 18 and Seymour Hersh published it in The New York Times the next day. At the White House that day Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger recommended acknowledging the "bare facts." Colby, recalling that 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

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