The CIA's Greatest Covert Operation

Inside the Daring Mission to Recover a Nuclear-Armed Soviet Sub

David H. Sharp

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780700619412
• eBook ISBN: 9780700622511
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

March 1968: three miles below the stormy surface of the North Pacific, a Soviet submarine lay silent as a tomb-its crew dead, its payload of nuclear missiles, once directed toward strategic targets in Hawaii, inoperable. No longer a real threat, the sub still presented an alluring target and it was not long before the CIA answered its siren call—even at the risk of igniting World War III.

Project AZORIAN—the monumentally audacious six-year mission to recover the sub and learn its secrets—has been celebrated within the CIA as its greatest covert operation and hailed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as the twentieth century's greatest marine engineering feat. While previous accounts have offered beguiling glimpses, none have had significant access to CIA personnel or documents. Now David Sharp, the mission's Director of Recovery Systems, draws upon his own recollections and personal records, ship's logs, declassified documents, and conversations with team members to shine a bright light on this remarkable but still little understood enterprise.

Sharp reveals how the CIA conceived, organized, and conducted AZORIAN, including recruiting the legendary Howard Hughes to provide the "ocean mining" cover story. He takes readers onto and beneath the high seas to show the problems faced by the crew during the operation, including potential Soviet intervention and tense moments when the recovery ship itself was in danger of breaking up. He also puts a human face on key players like Carl Duckett, the head of the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate; John Parangosky, AZORIAN's program manager; John Graham, designer of the Hughes Glomar Explorer; Curtis Crooke of Global Marine Development, co-creator of the "grunt lift" recovery concept; and Oscar "Ott" Schick, manager of the Lockheed-built capture vehicle and submersible barge.

A mammoth undertaking worthy of the most dramatic and spell-binding espionage fiction, Project AZORIAN harnessed American imagination and ingenuity at their highest levels. Featuring dozens of previously classified photos, Sharp's chronicle of that amazing operation plunges readers deep into the darkest shadows of the Cold War to produce the definitive account of an amazing mission.

1

Genesis

A Soviet Submarine Is Lost—and Found

In early March 1968, for reasons still under dispute, a Soviet Golf II–class submarine with hull number PL-722 sank in about 16,700 feet of water in the central North Pacific. The sub (designated by the Soviet navy as K-129) was a diesel-powered boat, although it carried three nuclear missiles and two nuclear torpedoes.¹ It had an overall length of 330 feet, weighed about 2,500 tons, and normally carried a crew of eighty-three men. The K-129 wasn’t a fast boat. It could manage a speed of about fifteen to seventeen knots on the surface, and about thirteen knots submerged. That was fast enough, though, to enable it to sail from its home base near Vladivostok to a typical patrol station within a few hundred miles of Hawaii in less than ten days. With an endurance of seventy days, it could spend well over a month on station before returning back to the Kamchatka Peninsula.

The K-129 had left its home base of Ribachiy, near Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, on or about February 25. It was following a route to its likely patrol station 700–800 nautical miles northwest of Hawaii. From there it would be available for nuclear attack on U.S. targets if the Cold War suddenly became hot.²

But the K-129 never reached its designated patrol station. Its covert, submerged transit toward Hawaii was interrupted by a violent and fatal incident that resulted in the loss of the submarine and all of its crew. The sub’s position, when it sank, was almost exactly at the geographic coordinates 40º N, 180º W, an area of the ocean frequently traveled by Soviet submarines on routine operational patrols in the North Pacific.

When the K-129 failed to make its scheduled communications report to its fleet command headquarters on March 7, the Soviet Pacific Fleet commands tried desperately to reestablish communications with the sub. There was no response from the K-129. On March 9, the Soviets concluded that their submarine had been lost. The next day, naval headquarters in Moscow approved a massive search effort to find the K-129 and, hopefully, to rescue any survivors. Although the Soviets had no evidence to explain the loss, there were strong suspicions that a U.S. Navy ship or submarine had been involved.³

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The assumption of U.S. involvement, even without any supporting evidence, was understandable if not provable. During the late 1950s and 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were driven to take dangerous risks in probing each other’s military might and preparedness. This jousting routine of threats, bluffing, and probing sometimes slipped over the line into actual physical conflicts. Airplanes and pilots from both sides were lost without official explanation while engaging in these tactics. In the oceans, both commercial and military ships sometimes fell victim to overzealous tracking or harassment exercises.

No services participated more actively and frighteningly in these Cold War conflicts than the submarine corps of both states. With land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) locations having been identified and targeted by both parties, the nuclear weapons carried by submarines became the tie breaker that could potentially tip the balance of a nuclear war. In order to monitor the locations and identify the operational procedures used by these missile-carrying subs, both the United States and the USSR were willing to take major risks. These underwater cat-and-mouse games brought both countries’ subs into close contact. Sometimes too close. Many near incidents and some actual collisions between submarines, or between a submarine and a surface ship, had already occurred.

At the time of the K-129 loss, both the United States and the USSR were growing increasingly disturbed by these dangerous ocean maneuvers. Concern went beyond the accidental loss of ships and lives. These incidents could potentially turn the Cold War into World War III. The United States forcefully denied having any knowledge about the cause of the K-129’s loss. The Soviet Union was unconvinced.

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Whatever the cause of the sinking, the Soviets understandably went into a crisis mode when they lost contact with their boat. Their concern for the possible loss of a submarine with its ninety-eight crewmen was heightened by the fact that the boat carried nuclear weapons.

They immediately sent out an armada of surface ships and submarines to search for the lost Golf II. The search was intense and covered a wide area. However, they had only an approximate idea as to where the sub’s position might be and only limited search technologies to apply to the effort. Their emergency responses to the loss were essentially confined to attempting communication with the submarine using radio and acoustic signals and, failing to communicate, searching for oil slick, debris, or survivors from a boat that had presumably sunk.

Sonar was also used by both the surface ships and the submarines to attempt location of the boat on the ocean bottom. This was a hopeless task, though, since any sonar return from a sunken submarine at a depth of nearly 17,000 feet would be masked to a large degree by the acoustic returns from the ocean bottom. Eventually, the search was called off. Although certainly devastated by the loss of a submarine and its crew, the Soviets felt confident that the extreme water depth in the search area, coupled with the large size and mass of the submarine, precluded any concerns that the wreckage of the boat and its weapons might fall into the hands of a foreign intelligence service.

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The significance of the K-129’s demise wasn’t lost on the United States. Although confident that no U.S. naval vessel had been involved in the incident, responsible government officials recognized that the tracking and harassment tactics currently being employed by the navies of the United States and the USSR had raised the potential for the occurrence of such a fatal collision. There was genuine concern over the impact that such an incident could have on the relations between the two countries. In March 1968—while the Soviets were still searching for their lost submarine—the United States invited the Soviet Union to participate in the formulation of a bilateral Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents On and Over the High Seas.

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The Soviets couldn’t find their submarine, but the U.S. Navy thought that perhaps it could.⁴ Once it was clear that a sub had been lost, acoustic analysts under the command of Captain Joseph Kelly began looking at the signals from the Navy’s Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) and the hydrophone arrays built by the U.S. Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC),⁵ a system of acoustic sensors used during the Cold War to detect the presence and track the routes of Soviet submarines, and to geolocate the impacts of ballistic missiles that had been test-fired by the Soviet Union. These sensors, with a range of thousands of miles, were used operationally in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. All of the SOSUS and AFTAC detection systems, some of which were colocated, were operated out of U.S. Navy facilities and ships.

Analysts looking at the acoustic records for the time frame in which the K-129 was believed to have sunk were able to identify a set of signatures that were consistent with the sounds that would emanate from a sinking submarine. Using these signatures, recorded at several of the AFTAC acoustic array sites, they were able to pinpoint the location of the event to within a circle about four miles in diameter.⁶

With this discovery, the Navy planned an underwater search mission aimed at finding the lost submarine. For security reasons, the CIA has refused to allow me to publish any details of the Navy’s underwater search capabilities or the results of the search mission. Knowledge of this capability was (and still is) restricted to those with appropriate clearances and a need to know.

However, other authors writing about the search for K-129 have consistently suggested that the search vehicle was the USS Halibut, one of the earliest U.S. nuclear-powered submarines.⁷ The Halibut was originally designed to launch ballistic missiles, but was later modified to perform a wide range of other special missions.⁸ Without confirming or denying the popular belief that the Halibut was the vessel that located the lost Soviet submarine, it was determined that the K-129 had not simply broken into many pieces when it struck the ocean bottom; much of the sub was still intact. Authors Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew wrote, “Although severely damaged, the submarine looked basically intact. . . . Inside the first [silo] was twisted pipe where a nuclear warhead had once sat calmly waiting for holocaust. Inside the second silo, the warhead was completely gone. The third silo was intact.”⁹

The U.S. government has never released any photographs of the K-129 wreckage to the public, in spite of many requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. In fact, the government currently refuses to confirm or deny that such photographs ever existed. Several authors, however, have described the sunken submarine based on first- or secondhand information.

In The Universe Below, William J. Broad quotes an unnamed project architect who asserted that the sunken submarine was badly broken up. However, Broad’s source went on to say, “The only section deemed interesting enough for retrieval was an intact section of the bow and center structure that measured some two hundred feet in length.”¹⁰ CIA’s recovery efforts were focused on recovering that section. It was referred to as the target object, or sometimes just the target.

Sherman Wetmore, who was Global Marine’s chief engineer during the Hughes Glomar Explorer (HGE) mission and had personal access to photos and video recordings of the K-129 on the bottom, also described the target object in a speech he presented to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at a ceremony memorializing the HGE in 2006. Wetmore said, “[It was] generally oblong but not symmetrical; having a length of 160 feet, a width of 64 feet and a maximum height of 55 feet.” As for the weight of the target object, Wetmore said, “2,000 tons was the best estimate given to us as baseline criteria.”

This was exciting. If the United States could somehow gain access to that target, it could confirm the existence of nuclear missiles on the Golf II–class sub, learn what materials were used, and analyze the construction of the warheads. There were other potential intelligence prizes as well. Access to the control room in the sail—the vertical structure above the submarine hull—might permit recovery of the ship’s logs, communications and cryptographic systems, codebooks, and operating manuals. This information could give the Navy the capability to monitor and read classified Soviet communications, providing a tremendous tactical advantage in the continuing Cold War task of maintaining an accurate track on the location and movements of all Soviet submarines.

With the support of the entire U.S. government chain of command, from the president down to the chief of naval operations, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the Navy put its most experienced underwater scientists to work on the task of devising a way to recover the secrets from the Soviet sub.¹¹ This team included Captain Jim Bradley, a submariner who had cut his teeth on diesel boats and was currently responsible for planning underwater espionage missions for Admiral Hyman Rickover’s nuclear fleet. The team also included Dr. John Craven, a senior Navy scientist who was on the special intelligence task force responsible for finding the K-129.

The team, led by these two men highly experienced in submarine operations, came up with a predictable—if not necessarily practical—recommendation. They proposed to use a small mini-sub to descend to the target. The mini-sub would use much of the technology then being used by Craven for the Navy’s Deep Submergence Systems Project,¹² which included development of the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle and the Deep Submergence Search Vehicle, the latter being designed for research and search-and-recovery missions down to a depth of 20,000 feet.¹³ Under the Navy’s plan, the mini-sub would plant small explosive charges on selected portions of the K-129 sail to blow away steel plates, permitting access into the sail area. Remotely controlled appendages attached to the mini-sub would reach into those openings and recover the intelligence objects of interest, returning them to the surface for exploitation. Some tests were reportedly run to verify that the explosives technology could actually create penetrable openings in the sail without destroying the equipment or files to be recovered.

Unfortunately for Craven and Bradley, Admiral Moorer wasn’t impressed with the scheme.¹⁴ He dismissed their ideas of selective recovery of the missile warheads and the cryptographic and communications equipment.¹⁵ He had serious reservations about the use of explosives to surgically open the submarine without destroying the valuable contents, and he questioned the ability of mini-subs at depths of nearly 17,000 feet to remove and recover intelligence artifacts as small as a codebook and as large as a nuclear warhead. Besides, he was impressed with the fact that the main section of the submarine seemed to be substantially intact. Why not, he reasoned, go after the whole thing? And, in so doing, make up in some part for the loss of the USS Pueblo, which had been captured by the North Koreans in 1968.

To the chagrin of Bradley and Craven, Admiral Moorer told his superiors that the Navy had no workable plan to exploit the sunken Soviet Golf II class. Moorer went on to say that, in his opinion, if a way to recover large portions of the submarine could be developed, the value to the country would be immense. Other key members of the intelligence community felt the same way. The potential intelligence coup was too valuable to just forget without looking for other ideas. They decided to go to the CIA to see if its new, ambitious team working in the area of underwater espionage could come up with a scheme for recovering the entire target.

CIA Gets in the Game

On April 1, 1969, Deputy Director of Defense David Packard sent a letter to DCI Richard Helms asking him how his agency might propose to exploit the sunken Soviet sub.¹⁶ Helms was understandably cautious. After all, the CIA was not noted for building ships and had only li...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Genesis
• 2 The Magic Trick
• 3 Living the Lie
• 4 Final Design
• 5 Getting Ready
• 6 The Recovery Mission
• 7 MATADOR
• Epilogue
• Appendix A. Perceptions Management and Disinformation
• Appendix B. The Docking Problem
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery 1
• Photo Gallery 2
• Back Cover