Project Azorian: Lockheed Missiles & Space, the CIA, and a Soviet Submarine

In 1968, a Soviet nuclear submarine, the K-129, mysteriously disappeared in the North Pacific Ocean. Lockheed Missiles & Space teamed up with the CIA, Howard Hughes's Summa Corp., Global Marine Corp and others to bring the sub to the surface and learn its secrets. Hear about this harrowing project from someone who's father was closely involved.

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Transcript for Project Azorian: Lockheed Missiles & Space, the CIA, and a Soviet Submarine 

Maryanne: Welcome to Experience Silicon Valley. I'm Maryanne Mills and I'm here with my co-host Judith Girardi. 

Judith: Hi Maryanne! 

Maryanne: We're here to learn more about the local connection to a top secret government project. But before we even go into that, let me read to you a headline from the March 19th, 1975 New York Times article by Seymour Hirs. Quote, "CIA salvage ship brought up part of a Soviet sub lost in 1968." It's the story of the Soviet submarine K129 lost at sea in March of 1968 and the CIA's secret mission to salvage it for intelligence about Soviet nuclear warheads, electronics, and code books. Today, we're very fortunate to talk to Bob about his personal connection to the project and the local Silicon Valley connection with Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. Bob, I've been reading this book, The Taking of K129 by Josh Dean that you recommended, and I'm so amazed at all the different machinations that the CIA had to go through to keep this as a covered CIA project, to keep it away from the press, the public, and especially the Soviet Union. And I'd love for you to start us off by giving us some backstory to the CIA project and how you are connected. And I'm hoping that you won't mind does interrupting you here and there for some clarification because it's such an amazing story. 

Bob: Glad to. I wanted to point out that what we call Silicon Valley had earlier involvement in a lot of high-tech covert intelligence gathering operations that predate the rise of silicon in the Silicon Valley. So, it's uh it's not something that was new to the Bay Area. There was a lot of covert operations and defense operations that were happening here and it drew a lot of people to the valley. When Lockeed Aircraft Corporation set up Lockheed Missiles in space in Sunnyvale in the 50s, that was what brought my family to the area. My father worked for Lockheed for many years. But there was also the P3 Orions that were flying out of Moffett Field every 15 minutes to go and survey the coast for submarines, suspicious intelligence gathering ships. There was the radar dish up on top of Mount Um that was looking for incoming missiles, incoming planes, lots of things that pre-aged the the growth  of the valley as a hotbed of technology. The particular topic that we're talking about today began in in 1968 as you mentioned. 

This is Project Azorian. This is project Azorian was what it eventually became called. Before that it was just something that was super hush hush that assets of the US government noticed happening in the North Pacific in February March 1968. There was a big flurry of ships canvasing the area going in strange patterns of back and forth back and forth. They had planes going back and forth. 

Maryanne: This is the Russians/ 

Bob: The Russians, Soviets. And the people who job it was to monitor the area noticed this and eventually decided they must have lost something. They were searching a wide, wide area. So they didn't have a very good handle on where it might have happened. Eventually they gave up and went home and US intelligence decided to have a listen on a network of subsea hydrophones that had been established by the Navy. The network was called SOSUS. S-O-S-U-S. And they were originally there to listen for passing submarines that would be on patrol and they could identify them by their acoustic signature was all being recorded. The intelligence people said, "Hey, can you check back on this date in February? We think something happened." Listening to tapes, they said, "Well, yes, here's an acoustic signature for an explosion." They decided that it was a submarine that the Soviets had lost. They didn't know where, but naval intelligence decided that they could probably locate it by triangulating from the different hydrophones/microphones. There was also an Air Force program called AFTAC that had listening stations to detect when a a Soviet test firing of a missile would land in the ocean. They had a number of ways to determine what, when, and where something was happening in the Pacific Ocean. Later they wanted to know more about it and they had some people that were used to this kind of work. One of them was John Craven who was a a genius in naval operations like this. Uh they used the United States submarine, the Halibut, which was specially configured for towing something called a fish that could go way deep, do sonar and photographic analysis of things on the seafloor. For example, Russian missiles that had crashed into the ocean. They sent it out in 1970, I believe, they got the approval to go search for it. 

Judith: The halibit was a... 

Bob: A test a test bed for having missiles on a submarine. It was the first one to launch a a cruise missile from a a special bulbous protrusion on the nose of the submarine. 

Judith: So, it had its own reason for being and they decided to use it for this. 

Bob: Yes. Well, it it had quickly been superseded the type of missiles it was firing and they came up with a different launch theory of launching from a tube instead of from a little hanger on the front of the submarine. So, the the Halibut was just sitting there unused. They they had been using it reconfigured to tow these fish to survey the bottom of the ocean. They had it go out and uh they figured they had about a 5 mile square area to search which was better than the hundreds and hundreds of miles that the Soviets were searching. They sent the Halibut out and it was towing its fish, taking pictures of the area, and they'd have to reel it in every so often and unload film, put in new film, and continue on. And meanwhile, a photo technician on the submarine was developing photos. After 4 weeks, 4 and 1/2 weeks, they they went back to their berth in Honolulu and and reprovisioned. They hadn't found anything yet, and they went back out for another few weeks. And I think after the third week, they finally found what they were looking for and took thousands and thousands of pictures of this thing going back and forth over it, dropping transponders so that they could find the area again. Came back into Hawaii and had handoffs of briefcases that have been handcuffed to operatives wrists, taking those back to Langley and going for analysis to see what they could determine from this. 

Judith: It's very, like Maryanne was saying, very a spy novel. 

Bob: Oh, yes. There were so many things and you couldn't write some of the stories that happened as a spy novel because it'd be so unbelievable. But there were a lot of little funny angles. But then they the naval intelligence people were were looking at it and trying to figure out how they could exploit this. Some people were suggesting sending a little deep submergence mini submarine down to the the wreckage and see what they could pull up. Maybe using explosives to blow holes in the hull to to reach in and grab something like a code machine or book or whatever. And that was quickly decided was uh not going to be practical. 

Maryanne: Is that because of the depth? 

Bob: The depth. It was uh almost 3 miles down 16.5 thousand ft. 

Maryanne: Wow.  

Bob: The pressure down there is is almost 7,500 lb per square inch. Uh dark, cold, and that's uh towing a fish around like that is when you're blind is uh is tough to do without snagging on something or crashing into a a little sea mount or or whatever. So they uh they presented the idea to the CIA and said, "Hey, what would you guys do to exploit this?" And they immediately said, "Bring up the whole thing." Pictures had showed that the submarine was the first front half of the submarine from from the rear end of the sail. the part of the submarine hole that sticks up above the tubular body all the way to the to the bow was in one piece and that had the the interesting stuff in it. It was about 160 ft long. So the CIA immediately said let's go pick up the whole thing. Nothing like that done before. 

Maryanne: I can’t even imagine. 

Judith: And it was how long? 

Bob: 160 ft. 

Judith: And they were going to pick it up, right? So then we have to decide... 

Bob: They estimated it weighed about 2,000 tons. 

Maryanne: That's what I was going to ask you. Yeah. 

Bob: So how do you do that? 

Judith: And that project Azorian is born. Is that where we have birth? 

Bob: That was where the project I think was was born and named and put into a special uh CIA intelligence compartment and that was called Jennifer which was mistakenly picked up later and called project Jennifer but it was never called that. It was project Azorian that was in the Jennifer secret compartment within the CIA. So they eventually decided on after discussing having cables go down that they could loop around the wreckage and maybe haul up or flotation bags that they could put buoyant gas into after it was ash to float the thing to the surface. There was just too many problems with that kind of a scenario. Not least of which was uh what do you do with it when it gets back up to the surface? It's going to be discharging all sorts of debris. It's going to be visible from planes and ships and satellites. So they uh somebody brilliant mind came up with a drill ship. The kind of ship that can lower from the middle of the ship down through a hole in the ship equipment to drill holes in the seafloor prospecting for for gas or petroleum or or just taking core samples. They uh looked around and the probably the lead company in that arena was Global Marine who did a lot of this for oil companies. However, it was on a totally different scale. Nothing they lowered to the ocean was anywhere near that kind of weight. And they were talking about lowering a large device to pick up something that weighed 2,000 tons. 

Judith: I'd heard that what is it? They hadn't gone down to the ocean floor more than like 300 ft or something before that or hardly any.  

Bob: Correct, correct.  

And they were going down how far? 

Bob: 16,700 

Maryanne: 3 miles 

Bob: Yes, close to three miles. But they sat down and penciled it out and said, "Well, if we had a ship this big, if we had this much pipe and it's going to weigh this much, we're going to need to be able to lift that amount of weight plus the object and plus the weight of the capture device plus the weight of the pipe. Can we do this?" And they somehow crunched the numbers and figured they were pushing the envelope, but they were able to do it. It would take a ship that had a large well in the middle that they eventually called the moonpool. I don't think any ship before then had had anything like that. It was 199 ft long. long hole in the middle of the ship and on either side of the well were the wing walls which is connected the front of the ship to the rear of the ship started looking pretty thin. So they had to adjust for that in the design of the hull of the ship. 

Judith: Now what is it? So that they had made it originally so it could get through the Panama Canal. Then the moon pool needed to be so big and they had to reinforce the walls that suddenly it couldn't which made for an even longer journey. Isn't that right? 

Bob: Yes. Plus they were looking at the area that they were having to go to and it usually the seas were pretty rough there. They figured there was a window of favorable weather in late June, early July, maybe into August, but don't count on it. The best amount of time is about a two week window. So, they had to be able to operate within that, drop something down to the bottom, do their grab, and then bring it back up within favorable time for the weather. 

Maryanne: So, if they're lifting this sub off the bottom of the ocean and they don't want anybody to see it, they're going to put it in this moon pool? 

Bob: They're going to pull pull it up through the middle of the moon pool. They would open up two giant doors on the the bottom of the ship, one fore and one aft and drop their equipment through that. So, it's under the center of the ship, all the way down, and then haul it all the way up into the moon pool and close the doors and pump out the moon pool.  

Maryanne: I see. 

Bob: And theoretically, it would not be visible from any direction. 

Maryanne: That’s right. So, everything's happening under this huge ship. 

Bob: Yes, that was the Glomar Explorer is what it was eventually called. 

Judith: You're listening to Experience Silicon Valley. Today, we're talking about Project Azorian. 

Bob: Project Azorian. The natural thing that cropped up was, how are you going to keep this secret. They're building an unusual ship. It's got a really unusual configuration. It's going to be out in the North Pacific and at some point it's going to be holding a position. What is a ship like that doing? They're not fishing. They're not doing surveys. They're not shipping anything. 

Judith: 2 years earlier, the Russians were circling. Is that right? 

Bob: Well, they didn't know the exact place. They probably would be very curious, though. At that time in history, there was discussions about the law of the sea, and they were trying to help out third world countries. that would have a legitimate claim to things happening in the sea even though they had no resources to exploit them. And there was discussions about seabed mining. It's a hot new topic. Hadn't been done before. And they thought this could be a good cover for us. How do we distance ourselves, the government, from this operation? And they eventually settled on approaching Howard Hughes to use his name and corporate structure to shield the operation from public. 

Judith: Or at least to shield the CIA. 

Bob: Yes. Shield the CIA from being publicly associated with this. Howard Hughes was a famous recluse at this time. He was hiding away in hotels in Las Vegas and wouldn't talk to anybody. Nobody had seen him for years except for a few faithful lieutenants. They presented the idea putting his name on this operation. The secrecy would be no big surprise given the recluse nature of Howard Hughes. And he they did have oil field prospecting experience, built a lot of equipment for that. They presented this idea to him and they found out to their pleasant surprise that they were very interested in working with the CIA on a super secret mission. So they uh Global Marine set up a separate shell company called Global Marine Development and they ended up calling the ship the Hughes Glomar Explorer. 

Judith: For Howard Hughes. 

Bob: For Howard Hughes, but he really didn't have a lot to do with steering the operation. He did get a contract out of the thing eventually providing the pipe sections for the operation, but it was all mainly to have a cover story. This was the huge operation. It's the the biggest covert operation ever as far as expense as far as number of people involved, the amount of time involved. Any of those those things could be avenues of investigation for somebody who wanted to see what was going on. It's amazing they were able to keep it secret as long as they did. 

Judith: And that was for six years that they kept that secret. It's five to six years. 

Maryanne: and they had to keep adding more and more engineers from different companies to sign the contract. And a lot of them were kept in the dark for a very long time, right? And then all of a sudden they were like, "Well, why are we doing this?" And then they all of a sudden get a visit right from somebody. 

Bob: Yeah. So the eventually the CIA put out a contract for a ship building company. They had settled on Sun ship building. Sun was owned by the family that ran and grew up with Sunoco which is a petroleum company, drilling company. So that they were familiar with ships and built to a custom design to take on a particular project. This was in Chester, Pennsylvania. They started building the ship. They also contracted with Lockheed Missiles and Space to build the apparatus that was going to be lowered to the seafloor and that's the Silicon Valley connection. They had the heavy lift gear was being provided by Western Gear Corporation. Honeywell was doing the computers and electronics integration and uh the ship was going to be berthed and then launch for the operation from Southern California, Long Beach. So it was a had had facilities all over that were associated with this that they had interconnected to keep secret process. 

Maryanne: Here here's the thing I want to understand is So Hughes is involved in all these companies and what's the what's the public message out there? Why this ship is being built? What what's this cover story? 

Bob: The cover story was that they were going to be investigating the technology of mining the ocean floor for poly metallic nodules that had been discovered. They were nodules of metals and things that would grow rather like a a jawbreaker or something in layers 

Judith: almost like a pearl in an oyster or something. Right. 

Bob: They were just right at the surface of the mud. You could see the They look like a cobblestone street. They would bring up samples. They were anywhere from the size of a potato up to maybe size of a softball, high in molybdenum, cobalt, some other metals, copper, nickel. It looked like it could be a lucrative thing to be able to mine if you could do it efficiently. 

Judith: And that was their cover story. They weren't... 

Bob: The cover story is that they were developing the technology. 

Judith: Yeah. And that's it. What reminds me of when you say that is every single step that they did to keep secrecy brought up a new can of worms. 

Bob: Oh, that was it was constant. The Lockheed angle in the Bay Area. They were going to be building the capture apparatus in Redwood City in the harbor. They had constructed a vessel called the HMB, the Hughes Mining Barge 1, which was visible from the freeway if you were driving up and down 101. You could see it in the water there. It looked like a floating aircraft hanger. Large structure that had a curved side to side roof. Looked just like an aircraft hanger, but people didn't know that the roof was retractable so that they could access something from above. 

Judith: Yeah. I grew up in Redwood City. We used to see that in the area with kids riding bikes over there. And you know your father was part of this. Yes? 

Bob: Right. Working in in Redwood City at the building along side of the shore there and and and on the barge where is where they assembled the capture vehicle. One day the fire marshall from Redwood City came out and wanted to inspect. He'd been going up and down the businesses in the the harbor side looking for fire safety violations and he wanted to come in and inspect. And there was a little bit of dancing to put him off until they could figure out a way to satisfy him. And there was also a problem with the ship when it got to Long Beach. The LA County tax assessor wanted to know about property taxes for the business property that was there. You got this huge ship that berthed here. We need to talk to the owner about that, about doing a property tax return. The federal government doesn't tax itself, but they had to come up with a way to satisfy the authorities. 

Judith: Um, I have a quick question. In Redwood City, what you're saying is that's where the capture vehicle was.That means that that's the secret part. That's the part that's going to live in the moon. That's going to all the way down and capture in one piece this submarine.  

Bob: Yeah. 

Judith: And bring it up. So that was that was not the part that everybody saw, the Glomar Explorer, the big ship. That was that secret. 

Bob: That technology was going to be secret too as far as why this ship needed to have such a big opening in the bottom. 

Maryanne: Yeah. Because you were going to basically take the the um the capture vehicle and eventually put it in the bottom of the Glomar, right? 

Bob: That's correct. Haul it up into the.. 

Maryanne: And so the HMB1 was basically a barge. to keep it secret. 

Bob: It was assembly place that was secret. It couldn't be seen 

Maryanne: so no one could see the capture vehicle being created. 

Bob: Correct. 

Maryanne: Okay. Gotcha. 

Bob: It had retractable roof that closed when it was being assembled. They hauled in the structural steel and the pipes and the motors and pumps and and all the electronics and things that were built into it. Assembled it all out of sight of anybody on land on a boat or flying over. When the barge only went from Redwood City down to Long Beach and then out to Catalina Island to do assembly in the sound where the barge would sink, open the roof, pull the Glomar Explorer over it, lower the docking legs to grab onto the capture vehicle, pull it up into the moon pool, and then sail off, and then the barge would be refloated and taken back to Redwood City. So, there was there was a number of security breaches like that that you couldn't uh couldn't predict, but you had to be able to react to them. 

Judith: Could you tell me a little bit about what this capture vehicle looked like? Cuz remember you said originally, well, they had played with the idea of wires going around or what did they settle on to actually make this happen. What was this like? 

Bob: Well, the media called it a claw, but it was a large structure with two strong backs that were made out of about two 2 and 1/2 in thick steel, 180 ft long with four very large cylinders, one on each corner. And then suspended from the sides of the strong back were things that they called beams that were probably 4x4 ft in cross-section again of the heavy 2-in thick steel. These arms were probably 40ft 50ft long. And at the ends of these arms or beams as they called them were davits which is a articulated claw for lack of a better word that would go underneath the the target object and close and lift to pull it up against the belly of the capture vehicle. 

Judith: And there's four per side, right? So they're just like big fingers that are going to grab it. 

Bob: In the pictures that the halibut had taken, they noticed that the sub was laying on its side. One of the three missile silos was blown open. The second one looked like it had a missile in it, but it was starting to slide out. The cap was gone. And then there was the third missile silo was still closed. But laying on its side, they were afraid with all the jarring and shaking and manipulation of this thing trying to get it back up that things would start coming out. So they had one beam that was attached with a large net made out of heavy chain that would close against the rear of the sail to kind of keep things contained. But other than that, there were just big fingers that would go underneath the target object and close the four cylinders on the corners of the capture vehicle were about 10 ft in diameter. They would be filled with high pressure seawater and a ram would come out of the bottom much like the lifts in a gas station or something cylinder under pressure that would be pressing against something to lift. These would be pressing down against the seafloor to extract the target object from the mud. Once the thing was pulled out of the mud, they could jettison the breakout legs and leave them on the ocean floor since they had done their job. And why why haul up all that weight again when you didn't need them anymore?  

Judith: But the legs themselves were left because of the weight and you were going to bring up something that was very weighty as well. So you had that was a huge consideration. 

Maryanne: Exactly. Right. 

Bob: You could lighten the load. That was what they were doing. 

Maryanne: 3,000 ton sub. Now what I don't get is how number one they kept this ship from rolling in this gigantic waves I'm sure um of North Pacific. And also what in the world was connected to the claw to bring it all the way back up must have been so strong I can't even imagine. 

Bob: Well, they they had settled on Global Marine, who was familiar with pipe handling, which when you're drilling for oil, you have segments of pipe with a drill bit on the end that would go down into the earth and then when you reach the end of the segment that you were working with, you'd hold on to the bottom of that and screw into it another section of pipe and you could go down further. So, they they were familiar with putting together sections of pipe to go down into an area where you couldn't send a vehicle or a person. They just had to scale it up hugely. The pipe that they were using was in in sections that were 30 ft long and anywhere from about 12 in in diameter cross-section to I think 16 in because as the load goes down you're adding more and more pipe. It's getting heavier and heavier and you need a stronger piece of pipe near the top. The pipe had a a hole down the middle of it about 5 in. So there was really thick walls on this pipe. These 15 ft sections were handled in double so they would have two of them screwed together and that was how they were stored and lifted up to the the central derrick on the middle of the ship. 

Judith: These were built on the ship in the middle of the ocean. 

Bob: Well, they put together the pipe. Yes. Yes. And they had to store three miles worth of pipe. 

Maryanne: Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Yeah. 

Bob: It's about 600 sections, I think. 

Maryanne; And as they pulled the the ship up... 

Bob: when they when they're pulling it back up, they're unscrewing the section and putting it back down into storage. 

Maryanne: Okay. 

Judith: So, the pulling this sub up took time because you have to unscrew the pipe. 

Bob: It took about a week to get down to the operating level and do the job and then another week or so to to pull it back up. And that's without snags and problems operating day and night. 

Judith: You had mentioned that there was and Maryanne you brought this up about the weather and about the waves etc. This had to be completely stable because you cannot have this whipping around. 

Bob: Well, first off you had to be able to stay in one spot on the ocean and not influenced by waves, tides, currents, wind. So they had an automatic station keeping system that would operate the main ship's propellers in either forward or backwards thrust. And then also there were some side thruster propellers. There was three three in the bow and two at the stern that would were transversed to the ship in a tunnel. They could operate those to move the ship sideways. They could spin it around in a circle slowly, but they could maneuver and keep to one spot. Then the central tower derrick, which had the pipe handling system, had to accommodate motion of the ship, either pitching with the bow and stern going up and down or from side to side tilting, keeling over. They calculated just how much abuse the pipe string could take and and back off from that and have the central tower maneuver up and down to compensate for for heave from large swells. And then also the there was a gimbal about midway on the central tower that could allow it to pivot forward and back, side to side. People talked about being up on the drilling deck where all the pipe handling happened and be remarkably calm up there and you could look down and see the hull of the ship going up and down, side to side, very unnerving type of thing. But that was to to keep from putting too much side load on the pipe. And that was all controlled by computer. This was in the days before microcomputers. It was a mainframe computer on the ship. For the station keeping, they would run out some buoys a couple hundred yards off the bow and the stern of the ship at the corners. So, four buoys that were cabled back to the ship to tell them, you know, there's a wave coming from this direction. So, they were able to compensate for that with the heave compensation and the gimbal operation of the ship. Everything was so huge on this ship, just unbelievable. The the gimbal that could pivot fore and aft and forward had to be strong enough to be able to bear the weight of what they were bringing up, but it still had to be able to to move. 

Maryanne: A quick question here is, did they test anything? I know they were under a lot of pressure to get this thing before the Soviets found out about it, but it seems to me you would have had to test it somewhere. 

Bob: They didn't have that luxury. There were some very rudimentary tests of the towers and docking legs near the Bahamas and opening and closing the moonpool doors. When they got it up to Los Angeles, they did some more sea trials and they got into some rough weather. Turned out it was banging the doors to the moon pool up and down against the bottom of the ship and it damaged a seal that they could never have time to fix. So that they were had pumps running constantly to keep water out of the moon pool. It was leaking in. It was just... 

Maryanne:  no more testing, let’s get out there.  

Bob: It was just react to the the things as they happened and do your best because they they did not have time to do full tests of anything. 

Judith: It was a oneshot deal really. 

Bob: That’s right. 

Judith: How long was the Glomar Explorer? 

Bob: It was 600 and some feet long I think. 616 feet something in that neighborhood. Size of a battleship. It was just the the overall proportions and I think that maybe the towering structures above the deck of the ship that prevented it from going through Panama Canal. 

Plus, that was a little too close in for people that might have been looking with the binoculars or whatever from the the side of the canal. So, they went around the horn South America to bring it in. Some of the treacherous waters down there didn't do the ship any favors either, I'm sure. 

Judith: And that's because it was created over in... 

Bob: Pennsylvania. 

Judith: but had to be brought over to west coast... 

Bob: Long Beach.  

Judith: Didn't you say that uh they had to do some reprovisioning and they even had a kind of a glitch there too. Is that right? 

Bob: They had planned to stop into Chile. So they were scheduled to go in and fuel up and get some fresh groceries and that sort of thing. And when they pulled into port in Chile, it was the very day of the Allende Revolution down there, the Sandinistas. 

Maryanne: Oh my gosh. 

Bob: And here's this strange looking ship coming into the harbor. It's a recipe for disaster. Somehow they were able to keep revolutionaries off the docks and off the ship, but they didn't stay there very long. And the funny thing was that coup was engineered by the CIA. Somebody wasn't talking to somebody else. 

Judith: So that there was the building of the ship, the traveling around the Horn, the building on the other coast of what was known as the Clementine, the claw, 

Bob: the capture vehicle. 

Judith: Capture vehicle. And then finally they decide to go out to get it. 

Bob: Well, first they had to mate up the capture vehicle to the ship. That was done in the straight between Catalina Island and Los Angeles coast. They needed to have a place where they could sink the barge to sit down on the seafloor a couple hundred feet down. that was close to where the the ship was. Unfortunately, it was a little public, but it was also a test of how well they could keep things covered up, 

Judith: right? And how well their cover story had been had been sold. 

Bbo: But there's there's pictures of of people in their bathing suits on the beach standing out and looking out to the water to see this odd ship that came in and just kind of parked there in the middle of the straight and they were able to.. 

Maryanne: I love I love the fact that you said odd ship. And the reason why I want to call that out is because a ship like this had never been built and this was the first time that any kind of government was going to go after these “nodules”, 

Bob: right 

Maryanne: Uh underwater. And so because it was so weird looking, maybe the Soviets would think, oh yeah, they really are going after nodules, right? 

MaryanneGlobal Marine had ships that were similar to this for drilling, but much smaller. That Explorer was huge, giant. They weren't going to be drilling for oil in the straight. So they they had to keep people away from the ship. All the people in their little rubber pontoon boats or speedboats... 

Judith: all the vacationers, right? They have a lot of vacationers out there and they're like, "Wow, what's this? 

Maryanne: 26 miles across the sea... 

Judith: Do we have a year on this? 

Bob: 1974 when they were going to go out. They uh they finally got the ship all loaded up with the capture vehicle and they set sail on July 4th of 1974. 

Judith: Okay. I'd like to remind people that we're listening to Experience Silicon Valley and right now we're talking about Project Azorian. 

Bob: Before they got underway in earnest, they halted about 30 mi offshore and had a little ceremony where they were transferring ownership of the vessel from Global Marine to the United States government. This was the another factor that weighed into the decision of Los Angeles County to try and assess property tax on the vessel. They had cake with a little design of the ship on it. Uh some family members and things once once they were hauled back to shore on the helicopter they could land on the helipad at the back of the ship. Ship got underway in earnest to head out to the target zone. 

Judith: And that was in the summer, right? Because of the tides. 

Bob: Yes. Yes. They left on July 4th. They had sent out a a submarine ahead to look the area over and see if there was any suspicious activity by the other side in the neighborhood. 

Judith: Oh, that's right. They were worried about Soviet spy stuff, 

Bob: just making sure. And there wasn't anything. So, they said, "Come on in." The way the moonpool operated with the capture vehicle in it, they had to lower it about 100 ft below the deck of the ship into the water. So, they have to flood the moonool, open the doors, and at this point, the capture vehicle is still being held up by the docking leg fore and aft of the the central rig that would lower down and there were big gear teeth on the sides of those towers. You could see them huge motors that would lower it slowly down into the water. Just at that point when they were getting ready to attach the capture vehicle to the pipe string, which is probably the most vulnerable position that they could be in, they had a message from a nearby ship that was in distress. They had a very sick crew member (laughter) and they're trying to keep this secret. 

Bob: The convention and the law of the sea is you render assistance whenever you can. If there's another their vessel in peril. And so they they look and here's this ship coming towards them and it eventually got alongside about 400 yards off. It was called the MV Bell Hudson which was a British registered ship although I think they were operating for a Dutch company. They explained that they had a very sick crewman. They thought he had a heart attack. Did you have any medical facilities on board? And of course the ship had a pretty extensive medically equipped sick bay with a doctor who was a surgeon. They said we we have accomplished medical personnel on board. What What's your problem? They explained it and they sent the doctor over on a little small boat that was lowered over the side on a crane and he decided they needed to come back with him, put him on the operating table and take some X-rays and see what was going on. 

Judith: So, they're bringing an outsider onto this vessel... 

Bob: a couple guys, a couple of ships crewmen and this injured fellow. They were able to do that and not let him wander around. Eventually decided that the guy had a couple of broken lit ribs and they were suspicious that he probably was in a fist fight or something with another crewman. He was starting to perk up after they got on board the ship and you know I'm all right. I'm all right. 

Maryanne: I'm almost worried. I was worried in the back of my mind that this was a spy. 

Bob: Well, everybody was. Yes. Perfect setup. 

Maryanne: Watching too many spy shows on TV. 

Bob: That's right. You couldn't write this stuff. But they they got him patched up, sent him over, and the Bell Hudson crew wanted to express their thanks. So, they sent over a couple of cases of beer and and whiskey which was not allowed on the ship, but the So, another adventure. 

Judith: And that was in the middle right when 

Bob: they were trying to attach the capture vehicle to the pipestring. 

Maryanne: there's already enough stress going on here .  

Bob: So then they they started lowering one pipe piece at a time. The heavy lift system was was doing its job. Although hydraulic pumps that were running the heavy lift were in one of the forward sections of the wing wall and it was a a noisy place when they were operating. These huge hydraulic pumps running at full speed under great strain generating great pressures. You'd need hearing protection to go through there. The crew that was supposed to be monitoring all this stuff, they had to be off into a glass enclosed office so they could look out over it but still preserve their hearing. And every once in a while, one of these pumps would blow up and they'd have to have a hold and fix it. But they they had spare parts and a machine shop and technicians that could repair these things. So 

Judith: So they had to repair all right on the spot. 

Bob: Yes. 

Judith: Now your father was with Lockheed, so he was one of the people who were he was one of the.. 

Bob: operation of the capture vehicle. 

Maryanne: So he was was he on that ship? 

Bob: Oh yes. Yes. Yes. 

Maryanne: Okay. 

Bob: He couldn't talk about this with anybody which I'm sure was frustrating because it was such a fantastic adventure. Eventually uh you know decades later the aspects of the program had had leaked out or was released and uh he was able to talk more about it then. Yeah, he was in charge of uh helping the capture vehicle to do its job. 

Judith: So the building and operating of the capture vehicle there in Redwood City and then he was actually on it. 

Bob: Correct. 

Judith: So they're lowering this pipe and it takes a couple of days to lower. Is that correct? 

How do they know when they're even.. 

Maryanne: I think they had lights on. 

Bob: They had sonar and they had lights. and they had cameras, but they couldn't operate any of the the huge hardware on the capture vehicle until they had positioned it just above the target object. Then they would connect up special fitting on the last piece of pipe that they could hook up to pumps of seawater. They would pump seawater down the pipe string and those would operate the large water motors that move the capture vehicle around or also that pressurized water would be diverted into the breakout legs, fill them up with water and pressurize that and extend the the legs out the bottom once they grabbed onto the target object to lift it up out of the mud. Just like a giant claw machine in the fair, you know... 

Judith: like at a carnival when you go down and you're going to but they have no idea, like you said, what the soil was like. So, it could have been really hard like cement or silt, 

Bob: It could have been real resistant to allowing the davis to penetrate. Just the shock of of the thing landing on the soil, it could have been enough to cause problems with machinery. But, uh, in the end, after a lot of manipulation and to get the the davits underneath the target object and break it out from the the soil with the breakout legs, jettison the breakout legs, and then start pulling back up on the the pipe string. At some point during all of this, they were visited by a Soviet ship, a intelligence gathering ship called the Chazhma that came sniffing around. They had a helicopter on board that they... 

Maryanne: This is when they were pulling it up? 

Bob: Yes,  

Maryanne: of course. 

Bob: When they're very vulnerable 

Judith: they're trying to keep everything still. 

Bob: Helicopter flying around the doing circles around the ship, radio contacting them saying, "Uh, what what's going on here? Are you in trouble? You're not moving. And uh they just said, "We we have uh equipment deployed underneath the ship. Uh we are not in a a position to move at the moment." They had their look around and tried their best to see what was going on, but then in the event they they got called off and took off over the horizon. 

Judith: I think um they said something like the Soviets felt comfortable enough with the cover story and they were running out of gas. 

Bob: The opinion at the time of the Soviets was that it would be impossible to do anything 3 miles down in the ocean. They wanted to keep an eye on it. So few days later the Soviet oceangoing tugboat came and kept company with them for several days and they had a pretty big crew of people that would come out on deck and look over the side look at the ship there was even a couple of women on the ship really perplexed the Glomar explorers crew 

Maryanne: so this is while they're pulling up the sub and that how long did it take to actually pull the whole sub up? 

Bob: it was it was about a week they were nearly ready to pull it up into the ship but they they left it about 300 ft down figured out what to do with this ship that was dogging them. 

Judith: They had to stop it 

Bob: because it was that was deep enough that uh divers couldn't go down and snoop around. 

Judith: Mhm. 

Maryanne: Okay. 

Bob: They were worried that debris might come floating out of the the thing and come to the surface and if they found a, you know, a book printed in Russian or whatever it floated to the surface, they they'd have a big problem. But they luckily didn't have anything happen like that. And eventually that ship went away after the crews were all giving each other dirty hand signs back and forth over the rail to each other. So they went away and then They were able to bring the target object up into the the ship. However, on the ascent about 3/4 of the way, I think to the surface, something happened. There was a big shuttering of the ship. The heavy lift guys were saying, "Well, it wasn't us." Lockheed was in looking at their data and said, "We're getting no readings of pressure from the davit number four and number five, I think, just uh zero on the meters." 

Judith: So, they're pulling something up and all of a sudden there's some weight gone. Is that it? 

Bob: There is some weight gone.  

Maryanne: That's that um shuttering too. 

Bob:Yes.  

Maryanne: Okay. 

Bob: But it wasn't enough weight to imply that the capture vehicle was gone. So the assumption was that uh something had happened to the target object and it kind of broke into pieces. But they wouldn't know until they get it up. And so they carried on with with bringing it up into the moonpool. And uh they eventually found that the back portion of the target object, which would been the middle portion of the sub had broken away and taken a couple of those beams and davits with it. But... 

Judith: the claw lost some fingers is what your telling me. 

Bob: Yes. 

Judith: Okay. 

Bob: But what what could they do? They they couldn't go back and send it back down because it's damaged and they just pulled up what they could and got out of town. And in the end they had about 31 ft of the very front of the sub underneath two arms and davits. So they uh pump it out and on the way back their team for recovery they would suit up in hazmat suits. 

Judith: They were worried about plutonium and radiation. Right? 

Bob: Yes. Radiation, nuclear submarine and everything else that was coming out of that piece of record. But they were in there digging and categorizing interesting objects that would would get put over on a table, cleaned up and put in bags and labeled and stored away to take back to Langley for analysis. 

Judith: All right, so we have the capture vehicle. We've pulled up part of the submarine. Lost a little bit... 

Bob: Lost a lot of it. 

Judith:  And now they're um ready to start taking a look at it. 

Bob: Correct. They did find a few things that they and this is this is the part that's still classified. The items that they found presumably some books, technical manuals, maybe code books, they did find the ship's bell, which uh set off a lot of conspiracy theories because uh people claimed, "Well, the ship's bell happens over on the sail, so you must have gotten the sail back." Well, the ship's bell is taken down when they set out to sea and then it's put back up when they're coming into port so that they can or announce a change of a shift or something. But the the bell was stowed forward in a storage area. They did find human remains. Uh eventually, they were able to identify six bodies and they were prepared for that. They had body bags. They built or had already built a uh container with shelves or bunk beds on the sides that they put the bodies into and kept them in there until they got back to Hawaii. And they were taking apart pipes and tubes and structural pieces inside of this thing. They did find a nuclear tipped torpedo. Eventually decided that the warhead complement of the ship was three nuclear tipped missiles with one megaton warheads and two nuclear tipped torpedoes. And one of those would have been plenty to take out a aircraft carrier or something if the submarine had gotten in trouble somehow. The crew members when they got back to near Hawaii that the ship anchored way off of the shore of Hawaii while they finished their exploitation. They had a burial at sea for the sailors. They wanted to show if they ever had to that they were be treated with respect. 

Judith: There's a beautiful speech that um that they gave. Regardless of how our nations are getting along at this moment, we as servers of our countries really applaud and respect 

Bob: fellow sea men.  And then so they had him a burial at sea with flags and music played the the Soviet national anthem and they were videotaping all of this. Of course eventually I I understand they gave a copy of the video tape to Brezhnev to put a closing chapter on the exploit and they came back into port and figured everything was done but uh it was still just too tantalizing to give up entirely. They sent out the Halibut again to photograph the part that fell back to the ocean floor and it was still in a big enough chunk that they thought they could go after it again. So they quickly were in the winter of 74 into into 75 reconfiguring the capture vehicle for a new attempt. 

Judith: So they decided after they'd only been partially successful, they're going to go in again. They have to fix the claw... 

Bob: recover the the missile tubes. 

Maryanne: And so the rest of the submarine fell about where it originally was? 

Bob: Not far off. 

Maryanne: Not far off. They were able to use the sonar, the Navy sonar to find it again. 

Bob: Yes. They put the capture vehicle back into the barge. They quickly had the barge hauled that back down to Long Beach. When They were assembling the capture vehicle originally in Redwood City, They had it standing on some large metal structures that were essentially jack stands holding the thing up. When they decided they were going to reconfigure the CV and go after the rest of the sub, they had to get that stuff back. So, they had to go out to the scrapyards where they sold that and said, "Hey, we need those things back." So, they put the CV back in the barge, hauled it back up to Redwood City. When they got approval to try and reconfigure it and go after it again the following summer, they initiated what was called Project Matador, which is the follow-up to is Azorian and they got as far as rebuilding the capture vehicle. So they rebuilt that, sent it down to Long Beach and over the winter uh getting ready to go and in the meantime, President Nixon had resigned. President Ford was briefed on all of this. He didn't know anything about it even though he was vice president at the time and they they said, "Yeah, let's go back for it if you think we can do it." Also then about that time in ' 74/75, uh the the story broke in the in the news media. Some people uh Seymour Hirsh had gotten a tip on the story. had he was getting ready to publish back when the operation was ongoing. CIA heard about that and came out and begged him to hold on to it and they'd give him some special access to material later when and he agreed to hold the story. Well, columnist Jack Anderson, who at the time had a radio show, I believe as well as his newspaper column, also was getting ready to release the story and he did before the Glomar Explorer could set sail on project Matador. There was some intense interaction between the Soviet government and the United States government to the point where at some diplomatic party and the Soviet general came over to his counterpart and the US army said we know about your project to bring up our submarine. If any ship goes out to that area again it's going to mean war. So the ship was ready to sail been provisioned and they canceled the mission. 

Maryanne: Wasn't there also a break-in? 

Bob: Yes. 

Maryanne: Hughes and some documents were stolen that showed the connection between the CIA and Hughes. 

Bob: The Summa Corporation did have somebody break into the offices down in uh Hollywood or 

Maryanne: wherever that was. 

Bob: North Hollywood I believe where they're office building was somebody broke in and they were tied up the security guards and they were there for quite a long time rifling through file cabinets and safes and they stole a number of things  

Maryanne: they never caught them did they? 

Bob: didn't but the thing that concerned everybody it was a folder of blueprints and and documents about the Glomar Explorer and it told more than just the cover story hinted at a connection to the CIA 

Judith: enough to get people to ask the wrong questions for sure 

Bob: Right 

Judith: basically as soon as Azorian was over there was enough chaos going on that Matador couldn't quite get its foot in the door to get there. 

Bob: It would have been a real risky proposition to undertake at that point. 

Judith: This sounds like everything from a spy thriller to some kind of an innovative science show all the way to a comedy of errors. This was an amazing story and your father was part of that. Looking back, you hadn't heard anything about that when it was first going on, isn't that right? 

Bob: Not a bit. He was all ready to go out the second time even with the elevated risk just because it was such an adventure and such a mind-boggling experience. 

Judith: You know, in Josh Dean's book, he went around and discussed with so many people the impact that Project Azorian had. It took many years of their lives, and the people he talked to saw this as a crowning moment in their careers. This was a moment that they saw as a real accomplishment, not only an engineering accomplishment, but a way around accomplishment, something they could do for their country. 

Judith: And did you get the feel of that? 

Bob: Oh yes. Yes. It was definitely a high point. in my dad's life to be involved with that in spite of other projects that he had been on with satellites and working on the Hubble telescope and stealth ship. He thought this was the the crowning achievement of his life. As a coda to the the whole operation, 1978, they refitted the Glomar Explorer again to go out and test some actual nodule mining equipment. 

Judith: It was going to be used finally that way. 

Bob: Yes. Yes. And my dad was involved with that. Everybody got box of nodules to take home and They were able to put a little uh mesh bag full of the styrofoam coffee cups that they had on board in the galley. They'd write their name on it and put it in a nylon laundry bag and tie it to the mining equipment. Send it down to the bottom of the ocean approximately the same depth. And when they brought them back up, these these cups have been crushed uniformly down to the size of about a large thimble. Still still shaped like a cup, still with the writing on it. 

One of the lasting legacies of the the whole thing was was when the story was breaking, news media was contact acting the CIA and the Navy and whoever else they could think of to to get details on this and the responding entity developed a response that was mealy mouthed enough to not be actually lying, not exactly spilling the beans. They would say that they could “neither confirm nor deny” any of the items that are being asked about. And this became known as the Glomar Response that was used many times since. 

Maryanne: How about a debriefing session with everybody who was on that boat? Did the CIA do anything like that? 

Bob: No, that was one thing that my dad had a problem with was nobody was debriefed so that they couldn't talk about it even decades later till more and more things came out in terms of uh books, television, news specials. Finally, in 2010, a fellow by the name of Michael White, a British film director, decided to do a project on this and he had a lot of contacts everywhere, both Russian and American. And he made a good uh documentary about it if people want to look for that. It's called Project Azorian: the CIA and the Raising of the K129. There's both a book and a or DVD about that. 

Judith: They probably have it streaming somewhere by now. I'm sure. 

Bob: Netflix had it for a long time. Another book that came out was written by a CIA guy who was actually on the the mission. It's called The CIA's Greatest Covert Operation: Inside the Daring Mission to Recover a Nuclear Armed Soviet Sub by David H. Sharp. He apparently had a great deal of trouble getting the sign off from the the CIA to allow him to publish this. Uh finally he did in 2012. 

Maryanne: Okay.  

Bob: And then uh the third book I could recommend people that are interested in this is the book that Maryanne mentioned called The Taking of K129 by Josh Dean. 

Maryanne: That was a very good book. 

Judith: So these three books um let's see White's Project Azorian, David Sharp’s, the CIA's greatest covert operation as well as the Taking of K129 by Josh Dean. We're going to have um references to those on our website experience valley.org. 

Maryanne: And I have one more quick question: When did the Soviets finally acknowledge that this happened? Did they publicly let the world know that, oh yes, the US got part of our sub? 

Bob: I don't think they ever acknowledged it. The US government acknowledged that yes, this happened, although they kept a lot of it classified. They did acknowledge the basic idea of the thing in 2010. 

Maryanne: 2010. Okay. 

Bob: And so that was kind of when some of these other books and and Michael White's film came out. Yes, it really happened and here's what happened. 

Judith: Well, this was a pretty intense story and uh you had some personal connection in there as well. We'd like to thank you for coming today, Bob. It was great to hear the story and for you to take your time with us. 

Bob: My pleasure. 

Maryanne: Thank you, Bob. 

Bob: My pleasure. It was it was a good story and I think a story that needed to be told. 

Judith: Thank you, Bob. 

Bob: Yes. 

Judith: And thank you, Maryanne. 

Maryanne: Thank you.  

Judith: Um I hope that we're going to be having another visit with Bob about being a kid growing up during the Cold War here in Silicon Valley 

Bob: with a father who was very involved in it. 

Maryanne: Yeah. Get the local flavor and how it was. what it was all about. 

Judith: Well, thank you so much.  

This episode was produced by the co-hosts Judith Girardi and Maryanne Mills. Our audio engineer is Steve Glowinski. Our theme music is Stars Below Us by Spinning Markaba on CC Mixster. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on Experience Silicon Valley. 

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