The Central Intelligence Agency recently declassified
records concerning Project Azorian also known as Project Jennifer. For those who never heard of Project Azorian
(including myself), it was a secret operation in 1973-74 to raise a sunken
Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
In March 1968, a Soviet Golf-II submarine, the K-129,
carrying three nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, sailed from the naval base at Petropavlovsk to take up a patrol position northeast of Hawaii. The submarine along with the missiles sank in
16,000 feet deep water and all hands were lost. The sunken vessel was located
by the US Navy using an underwater sonar system.
The CIA began to develop a plan to recover the submarine in
1969 and a special-purpose vessel, the Hughes Glomar Explorer was built at the
Sun Shipyard in Chester, Pennsylvania beginning in 1971. After a series of events, including cost
overruns, union strikes and political delays tied to the growing détente between
the US and the Soviet Union, the recovery work by the vessel commenced
on July 4, 1974. Amazingly, arrangements were made with the reclusive Howard
Hughes to use a bogus deep seabed mining venture as a cover story thus
attaching his name to the vessel.
A portion of the vessel was recovered and brought the
remains of the submarine to Hawaii
for analysis. There are varying accounts
as to how much of the vessel was recovered and whether the US recovered
any of the missiles, which they were most interested in. Many sources report
that an accident of some kind, possibly a stress fracture of the lifting claw,
caused more than half of the submarine's hull to break off and fall back to the
sea floor, never to be recovered. According to many accounts, two
nuclear-tipped torpedoes and the remains of six (or eight) Soviet sailors were
recovered. Some report that as many as 70 bodies were recovered, and some
believe that the entire submarine, complete with ICBMs, was recovered
successfully. The CIA returned the bodies of K-129's sailors to the sea, with
full Soviet Military honors, and videotaped the ceremony. This video was made
public after it was presented by CIA director Robert Gates to Russian President
Boris Yeltsin in 1992.
The story was first broken in 1975 by New York Times
journalist Seymour Hersh, and soon thereafter, there were numerous newspaper
accounts linking the Glomar Explorer with a secret US government operation.
My favorite part of this story is tied to legal
wrangling. A Los Angeles Times journalist
named Harriet Ann Phillippi, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with
the CIA for records that might exist that would reveal contact by the CIA with
members of the media to persuade them to drop stories concerning the
vessel. The CIA’s response was to refuse
to neither confirm nor deny the existence of any responsive records. This is the first known instance of the US
Government using a “can neither confirm nor deny” response to a FOIA request
and these types of responses are now commonly known as “Glomar Responses” or “Glomarization”.
