Neither Confirm Nor Deny: The CIA Ship Built to Steal a Soviet Sub

0:00 Cold open

You've heard this sentence. We can neither confirm nor deny. Every government uses it. Every lawyer knows it. It was written to hide one ship. A ship the CIA built to do something no one on earth had ever done. Reach three miles down to the bottom of the Pacific, Grab a Soviet nuclear submarine with a giant steel claw and pull it up while The Soviet Navy watched. The cover story was a billionaire. The price was about four billion dollars in today's money and it ended with A funeral at sea for six Soviet sailors, filmed by the CIA and Hidden for eighteen years. This is Directive 002, Project Azorian.

0:56 The boat that never called home

February 1968. A Soviet submarine slips out of Kamchatka into the North Pacific. K-129. Ninety eight men, three nuclear missiles. Her orders, stay hidden, check in by radio. She never checks in. Moscow sends ships, planes, for weeks they call her name on every Frequency. They're searching in the wrong place because somebody else had heard her Die. America had wired the ocean floor with microphones to listen for Soviet Submarines. On March eighth, they caught a sound. One sharp event, far out in the Pacific. The Navy traced it back, fifteen hundred miles northwest of Hawaii, Three miles down. That summer, a spy submarine, the USS Halibut lowered a camera on a cable And there she was, K-129 on the bottom. The Soviets didn't know where their own submarine was. America had twenty thousand photographs of it.

2:11 The impossible idea

Inside that hull was everything American intelligence wanted, A Soviet nuclear missile, nuclear torpedoes, And maybe the biggest prize of all, the code machines. The Navy ran the numbers. Sixteen and a half thousand feet of water, Pressure that would crush a car like a soda can, Impossible. The CIA said, watch us. No divers, no submarine, a ship. Big enough to lower a claw three miles straight down, Close it around thousands of tons of submarine and haul it up into a secret Pool in its belly, in the open ocean, in front of everyone.

2:56 The billionaire

A ship like that needs a story the whole world will believe. The CIA picked the strangest man in America, Howard Hughes. Billionaire, recluse, a man so odd that nothing he did surprised anybody. The story, Hughes was going to mine the bottom of the sea. Down there, scattered across the seabed are lumps of metal ore, Manganese nodules, scoop them up, make a fortune. Magazines wrote about the coming ocean mining boom, Investors got excited. None of it was real. Outside Philadelphia she took shape. Six hundred and nineteen feet, a derrick in the middle, And underneath, a hidden pool open to the sea with doors that closed below It. The Hughes Glomar Explorer. The Claw was built by Lockheed, hidden inside a covered barge so nobody Could photograph it. They called it Clementine.

3:56 The lift

June, nineteen seventy four, the explorer sails from Long Beach. By the fourth of July she's sitting right on top of the grave. Then the Soviets show up. A navy tug circles, then a missile range ship, The Chazhma. They come close. They photograph everything. A helicopter buzzes the deck. The crew stacks crates on the landing pad so it can't land. And the Americans keep working, pretending to be minors while the Soviets Watch them lower a claw to their own dead. Sixty feet of pipe at a time, day after day until the claw hangs three miles Down. Clementine closes around the hull, they start to lift, Then something breaks. Several of the steel fingers crack. Most of the submarine tears loose and falls back into the dark. The missiles, very likely the code room. Gone. What comes up is a piece of the bow, thirty eight feet, Two nuclear torpedoes, the ship's bell, and six members of her crew.

5:05 Six men

The bodies had been down there six years, The wreck was radioactive, they couldn't be kept. So on September fourth, nineteen seventy four, The CIA held a funeral. Six Soviet sailors, one steel casket. Both national anthems played on the deck. The service read in English, then in Russian. The chaplain said this, as long as men and nations are suspicious of each Other, instruments of war will be constructed and brave men will die, And these men have died in the service of their country. The casket went over the side, the CIA filmed all of it, And locked the film away. In nineteen ninety two, after the Soviet Union fell, CIA director Robert Gates flew to Moscow and handed the tape to Boris Yeltsin. It was the first time Russia saw how those six men were laid to rest.

6:03 The burglary

So how does a secret like this get out? Not spies, burglars. June nineteen seventy four, weeks before the explorer sailed. Thieves break into a Howard Hughes office on Romaine Street in Los Angeles, They crack the safes. They walk out with cash and boxes of papers. Then somebody starts asking for money to give the papers back. The CIA panics. One page about the mission and the cover is finished. The police pull in the FBI, the FBI pulls in more people, And more people means more talking. February nineteen seventy five, the Los Angeles Times prints the first story. The CIA director begs editors to kill it. Some do. Then a columnist reads it on national radio. It's over.

6:58 Neither confirm nor deny

But there's one more twist and it's the one you already know. A journalist named Harriet Ann Phillippi files a freedom of information request. She wants the CIA's record on how it tried to keep the story quiet. The CIA's lawyers are trapped. Say no records exist and that's a lie. Say we have them but they're secret and they've just confirmed the whole Operation. So they invent a third answer. We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the records you have requested. The course let it stand. Lawyers still call it a Glomar response, named after the ship. Every time an agency refuses to say whether something even exists, It's borrowing a sentence written to hide the Hughes Glomar Explorer.

7:46 What the files show

In twenty ten, the CIA finally released its own secret history of the mission. Fifty pages, parts still blacked out, including much of what that piece Of the bow actually gave them. It admits what the cover story never could. The ship worked, the claw reached the bottom, They grabbed a nuclear submarine from three miles down and lost most of It on the way up. A second mission was planned, to go back for the rest, After the headlines it was cancelled. Why K-129 sank has never been settled. Ninety eight men went down with her, six came home, in a way. Ninety two are still out there, three miles down, Inside a hull two superpowers spent a fortune trying to reach. The government's own files tell us this much. We'll keep reading.