An undated photo of the Glomar Explorer, a surface vessel built for deep-sea recovery operations. The ship was created to recover a sunken Soviet submarine, and may have been successful; it later served as an exploration ship for a number of deep-sea mining and drilling companies. (US Government)

‘Project Azorian’: How the CIA (Sort of) Recovered a Sunken Soviet Submarine

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The clandestine CIA operation was perhaps most notable because the agency’s public response introduced the phrase “neither confirm nor deny” into the vernacular.

In March 1968, a Soviet Golf II-class submarine, K-129, disappeared in the North Pacific along with its entire crew. Soviet efforts to recover the vessel yielded nothing. But the United States, with the benefit of an underwater acoustic surveillance network, detected the event. US intelligence soon located the wreck, roughly 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii.

The discovery had the potential to be an intelligence bonanza for the United States. Though the submarine was clearly damaged from the sinking, it could be examined for information about the Soviet submarine program, and various items aboard it—Soviet ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, cryptographic materials and codebooks, comms equipment, and potentially torpedoes and other weapons tech—could be retrieved for further study. There was only one problem: K-129 was sitting beneath 16,000 feet of ocean, far deeper........

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