The CIA has released documents confirming that it used an alleged deep-sea mining vessel called the Glomar Explorer to raise part of a sunken Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in 1974. This is a step forward for the agency, which in the past has refused to confirm or deny its connection to the Glomar Explorer, but agency officials are still declining to say how much the project cost, how much of the sub they recovered, and what, if any, intelligence they gleaned from the project.
The Soviet submarine sank for unknown reasons about 1,500 miles from Hawaii in March 1968, taking its crew and three nuclear missiles to the bottom of the Pacific. A year and a half later, the CIA established a task force to study the feasibility of harvesting the 1,750-ton vessel from the ocean floor, some 16,500 feet down. The task force concluded that it needed to build a huge, specially designed ship with winches that could lower a sling beneath the sub and gently hoist it to the surface. The government hired Howard Hughes’s Summa Corporation to build the Glomar Explorer, which was disguised as a deep-ocean mining ship.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to the mission: the Cold War began to cool down. As U.S.-Soviet tensions began to ease, some White House advisers ordered a review of the project, “in light of increasing concern that … the developing political climate might prohibit mission approval.” The nation’s top defense officials were uniformly critical of the project. The Chief of Naval Operations, the assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all judged the program to be dangerously provocative, absurdly expensive, and unlikely to produce much valuable intelligence. But CIA director Richard Helms convinced President Nixon to ignore his top military advisers and give the green light to the project.
When the Glomar Explorer and its crew reached their target in the northwest Pacific in the summer of 1974, they were immediately detected by the Soviets. A Soviet Navy ship hovered nearby and launched a helicopter, which buzzed the ship and took photographs from all angles. “What are you doing here?” the Soviet captain asked the Glomar crew, via radio transmission. Just a little deep-sea mining, they replied. The Soviets were not convinced, and sent a salvage tugboat to loiter in the area as the “miners” continued with their task. The Soviet tug left the area just before the Glomar crew managed to bring something – an “intelligence item,” the CIA called it – to the surface. The Glomar then steamed to Maui, where a special team trained to handle the “item” boarded the ship.
The story of the recovery operation began to leak in the press in early 1975. CIA Director William Colby spent days making frantic phone calls to reporters and editors, trying to persuade them to kill the story in the interest of national security. Most of the press was “splendid,” Colby said, but columnist Jack Anderson refused to listen to Colby’s pleas and broke the story. (Colby’s campaign to urge the press to censor itself is an interesting case study in media coverage of national security issues, as I’ve written about here.) Its cover blown, the Glomar was mothballed in the Suisun Bay for two decades, until the government began leasing it for oil drilling.
Last week, in response to its FOIA request, the National Security Archive received a redacted version of a 1985 CIA account of the operation. Before releasing the document, CIA censors blacked out everything related to the project’s cost, which is believed to be around $500 million (in 1970s dollars). Nor does the document disclose anything about what the CIA learned from the “item,” what the item was, or even what agency officials had hoped to learn from the project. Apparently the agency recovered a couple of nuclear torpedoes – there’s mention of dangerous levels of radiation – but we still don’t even know how much of the sub was harvested and whether the haul came close to justifying the phenomenal amount of money spent. This secrecy is continuing despite the fact that a) the Soviet Union knew about the recovery effort at the time; b) the Soviet Union no longer exists; and c) the Obama administration is supposedly committed to “an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”
The author of the CIA report on the operation insists that it had “intangibly beneficial” effects: “a government or organization too timid to undertake calculable risks in pursuit of a proper objective would not be true to itself or to the people it serves.” Sure, most of the nation’s top military and defense officials wanted to kill it, but in the end it provided “tangible proof…that the intelligence profession is dynamic and alive.” In short, it was needlessly confrontational and a waste of money. But it’s nice to know that it made our men in the CIA feel good about themselves.
26 comments
February 15, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Jason B.
“[A] government or organization too timid to undertake calculable risks in pursuit of a proper objective would not be true to itself or to the people it serves.”
It’s a good thing nobody latched onto this kind of thought. Otherwise we might be torturing people, or invading sovereign countries without provocation, or . . . oh, I’m sorry. Carry on.
February 15, 2010 at 9:41 pm
Jackmormon
HP Lovecraft knew what was in that submarine.
February 15, 2010 at 10:15 pm
Spiny Norman
The secrecy was silly but the law of salvage is pretty clear…
February 15, 2010 at 10:48 pm
TF Smith
The financial excesses of the Cold War would make for an interesting study; Airborne Nuclear Propulsion is probably at the top of the list, but JENNIFER comes close…
February 16, 2010 at 3:15 am
ajay
“[A] government or organization too timid to undertake calculable risks in pursuit of a proper objective would not be true to itself or to the people it serves.”
Trans: “The American people are reckless, irresponsible, pugnacious and spendthrift, and the principles of representative democratic government demand that we act the same way!”
February 16, 2010 at 3:21 am
ajay
Incidentally, the law of salvage is not “you get what you grab”. A sunken ship remains the property of its owners. The CIA was entitled to claim compensation from the Soviet Navy but not to hang on to whatever it salvaged.
February 16, 2010 at 3:48 am
silbey
The CIA was entitled to claim compensation from the Soviet Navy but not to hang on to whatever it salvaged
And to add to your point, it’s not even necessary to hang on to it. “Processing” the find before returning it can take a long time, with lots of photographs.
February 16, 2010 at 4:27 am
Matt McKeon
The timing of the operation, just before Vietnam was ending in disaster, could that have something to do with being provocative with the Soviet Union?
February 16, 2010 at 6:09 am
Anderson
The timing of the operation, just before Vietnam was ending in disaster, could that have something to do with being provocative with the Soviet Union?
Judging by that CIA report, more to do with making themselves feel like they’re not a bunch of pussies.
Which has always been a chief purpose of the CIA, from its inception to our recent adventures in torture: boosting its own self-esteem.
February 16, 2010 at 6:41 am
Cosma Shalizi
Charlie Stross knows what they tried to bring up.
February 16, 2010 at 7:37 am
ajay
silbey: indeed. See the defector Viktor Belenko’s MiG-31, which got very seriously “processed” before being returned in bits (though, of course, that wasn’t a salvage case).
Cosma Shalizi: I was wondering how long it would be before that was mentioned…
February 16, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Kieran
Before releasing the document, CIA censors blacked out everything related to the project’s cost, which is believed to be around $500 million (in 1970s dollars).
Wow. Total U.S. Government spending in 1975 (officially, anyway!) was only around half a billion dollars. Crazy.
February 16, 2010 at 6:22 pm
joel hanes
Its cover blown, the Glomar was mothballed in the Suisun Bay for two decades
… until around 1994, when it was moved to an obscure anchorage in a secure site behind the Cargill salt works on the Redwood Creek estuary on the Redwood City bayfront, just off Galveston Drive. I was working startup hours just around the corner at The 3DO Company, and I often walked past the manned-at-all-hours guard station at the entrance. Lots of concertina razor wire, no visible activity, truck deliveries late at night. I used to wonder what that ugly barge might be, and what was going on.
Only in 1996 did we learn that the Glomar was being used as the assembly platform for the stealth submarine Sea Shadow until the day they launched the sub and moved the Glomar back to Suisun.
http://w3.the-kgb.com/dante/military/hmb1.html
February 16, 2010 at 6:29 pm
silbey
silbey: indeed. See the defector Viktor Belenko’s MiG-31, which got very seriously “processed” before being returned in bits (though, of course, that wasn’t a salvage case).
I was thinking of the Belenko case, as a matter of fact. Great minds…
Total U.S. Government spending in 1975 (officially, anyway!) was only around half a billion dollars. Crazy
As long as, by half a billion dollars, you means 332 billion dollars:
http://www.cbo.gov/budget/historical.shtml
February 16, 2010 at 7:16 pm
Kieran
As long as, by half a billion dollars, you means 332 billion dollars
I was relying on the BEA’s NIPA tables, which give $510bn in total expenditures for 1975. I imagine there’s some standard way to reconcile the two numbers or at least explain the difference.
February 16, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Kieran
And indeed there is.
February 16, 2010 at 7:29 pm
TF Smith
Sea Shadow may or may not have been stealthy, but I was not aware that she was designed to be intentionally submerged…much less be able to surface again once submerged.
February 17, 2010 at 1:23 am
joel hanes
TF Smith gently chaffs me :
I was not aware that [Sea Shadow] was designed to be intentionally submerged
As nearly as I can tell with the Google, you are correct.
I had misremembered and not sufficiently checked my remembrance.
I never saw her; only the Glomar.
February 17, 2010 at 2:36 am
ajay
I never saw her; only the Glomar.
Well, you know, stealthy, duh. She could be moored in your bathtub RIGHT NOW.
There’s a vitriolic account of her construction in “Skunk Works” by Ben Rich (“Starve before doing business with the goddamn Navy”), though I don’t think it mentions that it was built in HMB-1. (Note that the HMB-1 barge is a separate thing from the Glomar Explorer; Explorer was a ship, HMB-1 was basically the submersible housing for the Clementine grab, with a roof to stop Soviet satellites seeing what was going on.)
February 17, 2010 at 6:03 am
silbey
was relying on the BEA’s NIPA tables, which give $510bn in total expenditures for 1975. I imagine there’s some standard way to reconcile the two numbers or at least explain the difference.
You said “half a billion” dollars, which is $500 million, not $500 billion.
February 17, 2010 at 8:16 am
Kieran
Yeah, my typo. Half a trillion, rather. Is there a reason you’re being a little pissy about this?
February 17, 2010 at 12:32 pm
silbey
Is there a reason you’re being a little pissy about this?
I wasn’t being pissy.
February 17, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Kieran
OK, no worries (and sorry).
February 18, 2010 at 8:27 pm
TF Smith
Extremely gently…
Best,
February 18, 2010 at 8:35 pm
kid bitzer
just a typo, kieran?
or were you using:
filthy, degenerate foreign numbers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
you know–first they say “billion” when they mean “trillion”. next they start saying “milliard”. then it’s “baudrillard”. then it’s the clove cigarettes and black bérets.
and then it’s the swift descent into cheese-eating and surrender.
February 19, 2010 at 2:11 pm
silbey
OK, no worries (and sorry).
Ditto, and sorry if I phrased things badly.