Project AZORIAN

There's a piece of artwork on the walls of the CIA (available to see by those who have access, it's unclassified) that dramatically shows the recovery operation, including showing the one failed grabber that lost one piece of the sub (if that is to be believed): https://shipscribe.com/usnaux2/AG/glomarexp3b-h09.jpg

"This painting representing Project AZORIAN is displayed in one of CIA's corridors with other paintings of key events in the Agency's history which, while not open to the public, are shown to uncleared visitors as well as employees. It clearly shows the grabber on the capture vehicle that failed, dropping much of the submarine back to the ocean floor."

You can see more on the Shipscribe page here: https://shipscribe.com/usnaux2/AG/AG193-p.html

There's an incredible documentary on this. The scale of the engineering, the secrecy of the project, and the environmental challenges are wild.

Azorian: The Raising of the K-129 -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2042455/

I would have appreciated if there were better captions on the photos rather than repeating “While the public believed the Hughes Glomar Explorer to be a vessel for deep sea mining, CIA was really using the ship to search for a sunken Soviet submarine.”

> Among the contents of the recovered section were the bodies of six Soviet submariners. They were given a formal military burial at sea. In a gesture of good will, Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates presented a film of the burial ceremony to Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1992.

Interestingly, footage of the ceremony and burial is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TOypyBdVZhU

As I understand it, Azorian was just a cover story for the exploration and exploitation of certain technology artifacts which were deemed non-human in nature [0]. The Soviets knew exactly where their sub was but the CIA didn’t, so when Hughes found the artifacts while doing actual subsea prospecting they made up the Soviet sub story to get funding and cover. That Harvard professor [1] is using parallel construction to allow the artifacts to be revealed eventually without tipping everyone off the US has had the material for 50 years.

1. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/avi-loeb-harvard-profess...

A mentor of mine was involved with the project. One way he knew who had been aboard or not was what he referred to as "mint jelly" — I think he meant Vick's Vapo-Rub or a similar OTC preparation.

You see, many of the Soviet sailors didn't die neatly, and while the Agency crew treated what Soviet remains they were able to gather up with as much respect as they could, various bits and pieces started to rot as sections of the sub were exposed to warm air. The corpse smell was masked by the judicious use of Vick's (or something similar) under one's nostrils.

This is great evidence of how embedded the intelligence community is with Hollywood.

The way in which the entire industrial and military might of the country joined forces is hard to imagine today. I suppose the pandemic is a good example of this but nowhere near the breadth of WWs or the cold war.

"A Matter of risk" by Roy Varner and Wayne Coller is a book that covers the story with some interesting details about how this (incredible) operation was carried on.

To show how deep this conspiracy was planted I had science textbooks in the early 90s which had a small section on manganese modules and a photo of the Glomar Explorer, the ship that was designed to explore for them. I only found out in the late 2000s this was an intelligence ruse. This cover had been embedded for so long it managed to wind its way into public school textbooks.

I remember from an old documentary that when the sub broke apart while it was being lifted, the operators were watching a live video feed of the sub, and on that feed they could see an ICBM escaping from its silo before plunging back toward the depths. While the ICMB was sinking, I suspect that if someone farted in the room, only the dog could hear it.

The operation cost about $800 million, or $4.9 billion today.

nit: ostensibly x2 in the same sentence... ugh.

>"The ship would be called the Hughes Glomar Explorer, ostensibly a commercial deep-sea mining vessel ostensibly built and owned by billionaire Howard Hughes, who provided the plausible cover story that his ship was conducting marine research at extreme ocean depths and mining manganese nodules lying on the sea bottom."