# The CIA secretly built a ship to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific floor

**Verdict: Proven.** Declassified by the CIA itself in 2010: an internal history confirms the agency built the Hughes Glomar Explorer under a fake Howard Hughes mining cover to recover the Soviet submarine K-129, though how much of the sub's code material and remains actually came up is still only partly public.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: Cold War era · First circulated: 1975 · Believed by: Widely accepted as historical fact once the CIA confirmed it
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/project-azorian

## Summary
Not a rumor but a declassified CIA operation: in the early 1970s, the agency secretly built a purpose-designed ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, to lift a sunken Soviet ballistic-missile submarine from nearly three miles down in the Pacific, all under the cover story that reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes was mining seabed minerals. Leaked to the press in 1975 and partially declassified by the CIA in 2010, it also produced the legal doctrine now known as the 'Glomar response.'

## The claim
That the CIA, under the codename Project Azorian, spent roughly $800 million building a one-of-a-kind deep-sea recovery ship disguised as a commercial mining vessel, sailed it to the wreck of the Soviet submarine K-129 in the summer of 1974, and used a giant mechanical claw to try to raise the entire submarine (nuclear missiles, cryptographic material, and crew remains included) from a depth of roughly 16,000 feet, all without the Soviet Union ever learning what the ship actually was.

## Origin and timeline
- 1968-03: The Soviet Golf-II class ballistic-missile submarine K-129 is lost with all hands in the Pacific, roughly 1,600 miles northwest of Hawaii, after leaving its base on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The Soviet Navy searches for weeks and cannot find it.
- 1968: The US Navy's classified SOSUS hydrophone network, built to track Soviet submarines, has recorded an acoustic event consistent with an implosion; naval intelligence uses multiple listening stations to triangulate a probable wreck location the Soviets never find.
- 1968-07: The submarine USS Halibut, converted for deep-sea intelligence work, locates and photographs the K-129 wreck (over 20,000 close-up images) lying broken on the seafloor at a depth of roughly 16,000 feet.
- 1970: Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger bring a recovery proposal to President Nixon, who approves a CIA-run effort to raise part or all of the submarine.
- 1971: The CIA's Special Projects Staff contracts Global Marine Development to design and build a purpose-built recovery ship at Sun Shipbuilding in Chester, Pennsylvania, under the cover that it is a private commercial vessel.
- 1972–1974: The agency arranges for reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and his Summa Corporation to publicly front the ship (named the Hughes Glomar Explorer) as a deep-sea mining venture harvesting manganese nodules from the ocean floor, a cover story real enough that mining firms took it seriously for years.
- 1974-06/07: The Glomar Explorer sails from Long Beach, California, to the recovery site, arriving in early July after President Ford (having succeeded Nixon in August 1974) and his administration continue backing the mission.
- 1974-08: Over roughly a week in early August 1974, the ship lowers a massive mechanical claw nearly three miles to the seafloor and begins lifting a section of K-129 toward the surface.
- 1974-08-08: During the lift, a large portion of the submarine's structure fails and falls back to the ocean floor. A smaller forward section is successfully brought inside the ship's hull.
- 1975-02/03: The Los Angeles Times first publishes a partial account of the secret operation in February; after CIA Director William Colby persuades several outlets to hold the story, columnist Jack Anderson breaks it open in March and other outlets follow.
- 1975: Journalist Harriet Ann Phillippi files a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records of the CIA's attempts to suppress press coverage of the operation; the CIA refuses to confirm or deny that such records even exist.
- 1976-11: In Phillippi v. CIA, the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rules the CIA may lawfully refuse to confirm or deny the existence of the requested records, the ruling that gives rise to the term 'Glomar response.'
- 1992: The CIA releases footage of the burial-at-sea ceremony for the Soviet crewmen recovered aboard the Glomar Explorer to the Russian government, a quiet diplomatic gesture two decades after the operation.
- 2010-02-12: After a 2007 FOIA request from researcher Matthew Aid, the CIA declassifies a 50-page internal history of the operation, 'Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer,' originally written for its in-house journal Studies in Intelligence; the National Security Archive publishes it.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The CIA built the Glomar Explorer to secretly recover a sunken Soviet submarine.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the CIA's own declassified internal history. The 2010-released Studies in Intelligence article lays out the agency's Special Projects Staff, its contracting of Global Marine Development, and the ship's true purpose: intelligence recovery, not commercial mining. This is the US government's own account of its own operation, not an outside allegation.
- Claim: Howard Hughes was a real front for a fake mining operation, not an actual participant.
  Evidence: Confirmed. Multiple declassified and journalistic accounts agree the reclusive billionaire's Summa Corporation lent its name and public reputation for eccentric, secretive ventures to make a manganese-nodule mining cover story plausible; Hughes had no operational role, and the ruse was convincing enough that other mining companies reportedly explored their own seabed-nodule ventures in response.
- Claim: The recovery operation actually happened, at the depth and on the date claimed.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the CIA history and corroborated by independent researchers and journalists: the Glomar Explorer sailed to the site in the summer of 1974 and lifted a section of the K-129 from a wreck roughly three miles down in early August 1974, using a purpose-built capture vehicle lowered on a pipe string.
- Claim: The entire submarine, including its nuclear missiles and code materials, was successfully raised intact.
  Evidence: Not established, and this is the honest limit of the case. The CIA's own history and independent accounts agree that a large section of the submarine broke apart and fell back to the seafloor during the lift; only a smaller forward portion was brought aboard. Exactly what was inside that recovered section, beyond the remains of several crewmen, is described inconsistently across sources and remains only partly declassified.
- Claim: The government's 'we can neither confirm nor deny' non-answer began with this operation.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the federal court record itself. When journalist Harriet Ann Phillippi sought records of CIA efforts to suppress press coverage of the story, the agency's refusal to confirm or deny the existence of any such records was upheld by the D.C. Circuit in Phillippi v. CIA (1976): the ruling that gave the phrase 'Glomar response' its name, still cited today in FOIA law.
- Claim: The Soviet Union never learned what actually happened until after the fact.
  Evidence: Substantially confirmed but not perfectly certain. Declassified US records show real anxiety inside the Ford administration about a Soviet reaction after the 1975 leaks, and no formal Soviet protest followed publicly, but exactly what Moscow's intelligence services privately concluded, and when, has never been fully documented on the public record from the Soviet or Russian side.

## Why people believe it
- This is one of the rare cases on this site where 'the CIA secretly did something this audacious' is not a theory but a matter the agency has confirmed in its own declassified history, so the pull here is less about doubting the official story and more about marveling that a true story this strange was kept secret for years.
- The unresolved details are genuinely unresolved: because the full recovery inventory and the complete operational film remain classified, informed speculation about nuclear warheads, cryptographic codebooks, and what else the mission may have touched (undersea cable taps, other Cold War projects) fills a real gap in the public record rather than inventing one from nothing.
- It produced a lasting legal artifact (the 'Glomar response') that keeps the episode alive in a completely different context: any time a government agency refuses to confirm or deny a FOIA request today, this Cold War submarine operation is the reason it can.

## Open questions
- Exactly what came up inside the recovered bow section (and what intelligence the United States actually drew from it) is still not fully public. The CIA's own 2010-declassified history is redacted at close to the points where a complete inventory would appear, and outside accounts disagree with each other: participant interviews and CIA-shot video used in Norman Polmar and Michael White's 2010 book describe two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and some cryptographic material coming aboard, while other credible summaries of the same events describe cryptographic material as among what was lost. More than fifty years on, no complete public accounting exists either way.
- Which section of K-129 was actually recovered and which fell back to the seafloor is itself disputed in the details. The mainstream account (the CIA's own history and the eyewitness testimony behind Polmar and White's book) holds that only the forward 38 feet of the hull, holding the torpedo room, came aboard, while the missile compartment and control spaces most likely to hold codebooks and targeting data broke away and were lost. A minority of researchers have argued closer to the opposite: that the valuable compartment was in fact recovered and the public failure was itself a cover story. Nothing in the declassified record settles this, and a planned second attempt that might have resolved the question was abandoned once the 1975 press leaks made further secret work at the site impossible.
- The CIA has confirmed that six Soviet crewmen's remains were recovered and given a formal, filmed military burial at sea on 4 September 1974, sealed in a metal casket reportedly because of radioactivity concerns, with prayers and honors conducted in both English and Russian. Some published accounts identify three of the six by name; the agency has never released a complete roster, medical findings, or the full recovery footage (only a portion of the burial film was given to Russia in 1992), so exactly how the men were identified, and what happened to the rest of the film, remains outside the public record.
- A second recovery attempt aimed at the section that broke away and fell back to the seafloor was reportedly planned before the 1975 press leaks made further secret operations at the site impossible. Whether that fallen section, potentially still holding the submarine's missiles and codebooks, has ever been quietly revisited by any nation, or simply remains where it fell in 1974, has never been addressed in any declassified document.

## Sources
- Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer, Central Intelligence Agency, Studies in Intelligence (declassified 2010) (2010): https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0005301269.pdf
- Project Azorian: The CIA's Declassified History of the Glomar Explorer (Electronic Briefing Book No. 305), National Security Archive, George Washington University (2010): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb305/index.htm
- Phillippi v. Central Intelligence Agency, 546 F.2d 1009 (D.C. Cir. 1976), U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (1976): https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/546/1009/204926/
- Project Jennifer / Hughes Glomar Explorer (declassified document collection), Federation of American Scientists, Intelligence Resource Program (1998): https://irp.fas.org/program/collect/jennifer.htm
- Glomar Explorer, K-129 recovery: Foreign Relations of the United States historical documentation, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State (1974): https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v35/d184
- Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129, Norman Polmar and Michael White, Naval Institute Press (2010): https://www.usni.org/press/books/project-azorian
- During the Cold War, the CIA Secretly Plucked a Soviet Submarine From the Ocean Floor Using a Giant Claw, Smithsonian Magazine (2019): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/during-cold-war-ci-secretly-plucked-soviet-submarine-ocean-floor-using-giant-claw-180972154/
- Document Friday: The Origins of Glomar Declassified, UNREDACTED: The National Security Archive Blog, George Washington University (2012): https://unredacted.com/2012/06/15/document-friday-the-origins-of-glomar-declassified/

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