Proctor in Admiralty

The CIA does or doesn't confirm or deny or both or neither...

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”.

Its not that I haven't been eating out

It's not that I have not been eating out or travelling - its just that I have been too busy to post.  Of course, one of my new year's resolutions is to post more - we shall see if I can keep to that resolution.  

In the meanwhile, I just read a post that I wanted to link to here.  Michael Ruhlman writes with tongue in cheek that Americans are too stupid to cook - or at least that is what the manufacturers of microwavable and other overly processed meals want us to believe.  (Note the use of "manufacturers" rather than "cooks" or "chefs").  Read this post and go out and roast a chicken and even better, make it a chicken from a local sustainable farm (find one here).

400 Years of transportation on the Hudson River

400 years ago Henry Hudson, a Dutch explorer engaged by the Dutch East India Company to find an alternate way to the Orient sailed up the tidal river that now bears his name and found . . . Albany.  This week New York marks the 400th anniversary of that historic voyage with a flotilla of historic, reproduction and modern day vessels sailing the 140 miles from the mouth of the river to Albany.  There are numerous articles and accounts on line including this editorial from the New York TImes discussing the environmental reclamation of the river and this article from the Smithsonian Magazine online describing the construction of a reproduction of the ONRUST, the first covered deck vessel built in New York which played an important role in exploration of the mid Atlantic region during the early 17th century.

For more insight into Henry Hudson and his famous voyage along with the celebration underway, check out both Henry Hudson 400 and Hudson 400 plus NY400 and ExploreNY400.  I am sensing a theme!