Discoveries
The Secret Mission to Steal a Soviet Submarine from the Ocean Floor
In 1974 the CIA used a ship disguised as a deep-sea mining vessel to lift part of a sunken Soviet submarine from nearly five kilometres down.
24 October 2026 · InMillhouse
In 1968 the Soviet ballistic-missile submarine K-129 sank in the Pacific with all hands. The Soviet Navy could not find it. The United States could [1].
What followed, Project AZORIAN, was among the most ambitious covert engineering efforts of the Cold War. The CIA commissioned the Hughes Glomar Explorer, presented to the world as a vessel for mining manganese nodules from the seabed, with Howard Hughes' business empire providing the cover story [1].
In the summer of 1974 the ship lowered a giant mechanical claw some 16,500 feet to the wreck. According to the agency's own declassified history, the lift partly failed: a section of the submarine broke away during recovery, and only a portion was brought aboard [2].
When journalists began to uncover the story in 1975, the government's response gave the language a new phrase. Officials would 'neither confirm nor deny' the operation — the origin of the so-called Glomar response still used in reply to freedom-of-information requests today.