Sunken sub saga from Cold War comes to light in new book

It was audacious in the extreme, the most ambitious feat of ocean engineering ever attempted by man:

Raise a sunken Soviet submarine, armed with nuclear ballistic missiles, from its resting place three miles down on the Pacific Ocean floor. And do it in total secrecy, right under the nose of the Soviet navy.

Four decades later, the most complete account yet has emerged of this incredible Cold War saga.

Was it a historic achievement or a colossal boondoggle?

The truth lies somewhere in between, says Norman Polmar, co-author of a new book about the CIA's super-secret mission to raise the Soviet sub K-129. It was a marvel of engineering ingenuity and high-stakes spycraft. But it was hugely expensive, and the intelligence payoff was meager.

Regardless, the story opens a revealing window on a little-known chapter of the Cold War and the lengths to which the two superpower rivals - the United States and the Soviet Union - went to get a leg up in the struggle.

It is a story full of head-turning details, such as the role played by the famously eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes in establishing the CIA's elaborate cover story for the operation.

Perhaps most remarkable, however, is the sheer enormity of the undertaking - and the tenacity with which the CIA fought to keep it under wraps for 40 years.

The story first began to emerge within a year after the operation ended, most prominently in a March 1975 expose by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New York Times. There has been a smattering of other articles and books since, but none written with access to any classified records.

The CIA consistently refused to confirm or deny that the operation ever occurred until early this year, when it released a censored 50-page account in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The National Security Archive, a Washington-based watchdog group.

Polmar and his co-author, filmmaker Michael White, believe the CIA's hand was forced by the imminent publication of their book, "Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129." The book is based on interviews with key American and Soviet participants in the episode - including the Soviet submarine division commander - plus logbooks from the recovery ship and other documents.

The book tackles two key questions studiously avoided in the censored CIA account: How much did the project cost, and what, if any, valuable intelligence did it produce?

K-129 sailed from the port of Petropavlovsk in February 1968 en route to a patrol station in the Pacific where it would be available for a nuclear attack on the United States in the event of war.

On the way, 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii, it suffered a catastrophic accident and sank to a depth of 16,500 feet.

In an interview last week, Polmar said the triggering event was the accidental ignition of the startup motors on two of the sub's three nuclear missiles, which caused critical damage to the vessel and emitted exhaust fumes that killed everyone on board within seconds.

The Soviets undertook a massive two-month search effort but were unable to locate K-129. Almost miraculously, the U.S. submarine Halibut found it within weeks, documenting the wreck with thousands of photographs.

Then began a contentious debate at the highest levels of the U.S. military and intelligence establishment. The CIA wanted to retrieve the sub, but some of the top military brass - including Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, the chief of naval operations, and Adm. Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - expressed strong reservations.

No one had ever succeeded in lifting an object of this size and weight - 1,750 tons - from such a depth.

The undertaking would be enormously expensive, the admirals warned, and the potential for getting valuable intelligence was iffy. Besides, there was the possibility of a strong Soviet reaction if the effort was discovered.

The CIA prevailed. President Richard Nixon, acting with input from his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, personally approved the mission.

The project was almost terminated in 1971 as the risk of failure became increasingly apparent and the cost spiraled upward, 66 percent above the initial projection, in the first two years. But again Nixon weighed in with a thumbs-up, and the CIA forged ahead.

The origin of the project's code name, Project Azorian, is murky. Polmar speculates that it was an attempt to mislead anyone who discovered it, since the word "Azorian" means someone from the Azores, in the Atlantic Ocean halfway around the world from the wreck site.

Then there was the involvement of Howard Hughes - another master stroke by the CIA, in Polmar's view.

The son of a wealthy Texas industrialist, Hughes was a flying ace, aircraft engineer and maverick film producer who was fond of dating Hollywood stars, such as Bette Davis and Ava Gardner. He also suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and was known to sit naked in his darkened screening room for months at a time, watching movies day and night and letting his hair and nails grow to outlandish lengths.

The CIA recruited Hughes as the front man for the purchase of a specially constructed ship for the recovery operation, dubbed the Hughes Glomar Explorer.

It was a case of reverse psychology, Polmar said: "Anytime Howard Hughes said or did anything, it was in the headlines around the world. So what do you pick for your cover story? Something that's going to draw worldwide attention. That's brilliant, because the other side would think the Navy would never do anything under his aegis."

Ostensibly intended for mining manganese from the ocean floor, the battleship-size recovery vessel was built at Sun Shipbuilding in Chester, Pa. It was outfitted with a massive lifting assembly, raised and lowered through a trapdoor in the bottom of the hull, with giant claws designed to encircle the sunken sub.

The crew of 178 was composed mostly of CIA employees and merchant seamen. The Navy contributed a handful of senior officers and divers.

The ship was so wide it couldn't fit through the Panama Canal, so it sailed around the tip of South America. It docked in Valparaiso, Chile, in September 1973, just as a CIA-backed military coup was overthrowing the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende - "a bizarre coincidence," in the words of the CIA account.

The ship arrived at the recovery site on July 4, 1974, a day after Nixon concluded a visit with Soviet leaders in Moscow.

As the recovery operation went forward, the ship was watched closely by two Soviet navy vessels that approached as close as 200 feet, taking copious photos. After two weeks, Polmar said, the Soviets "gave three toots of the whistle and sailed away."

Hours later, the remains of K-129 were hauled aboard the Glomar Explorer.

Unfortunately, the ship's claws had been damaged as they sank into the seabed and one of them broke off during the lift, causing the sub itself to break apart. The larger piece, about 100 feet long, sank back to the bottom, leaving only a 38-foot section of the bow to be brought up.

In another bizarre coincidence, the same day the wreck was retrieved, August 9, Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign from office, facing impeachment over the Watergate scandal.

So what did the CIA get for its labors? The retrieved section of the sub contained two nuclear torpedoes with an operating manual and some other documents, Polmar said. And the wreck yielded some clues about the Soviets' submarine construction techniques.

Left on the sea floor, however, was most of what the CIA had hoped to reclaim: the conning tower, missile compartment, control room, radio shack, engine room, codebooks, decoding machines and the remaining intact nuclear missile.

And the cost of the project? About $500 million, Polmar said - roughly the cost of a manned mission to the moon.

There was one more legacy given up by the wreck: the remains of six Soviet sailors. In a solemn epilogue to the mission, the Glomar Explorer held a burial at sea for the lost men.

In 1992, as the Cold War waned, Robert Gates - then CIA director, now defense secretary - delivered a videotape of the ceremony to Russian President Boris Yeltsin as a gesture of friendship.

Against the backdrop of the U.S. and Soviet flags, the flickering tape shows the bodies being placed into a red vault as the two countries' national anthems are played. At the end, to the strains of the Navy Hymn, the vault is hoisted overboard and dropped into the black sea.

Even in the feverish climate of the superpower rivalry, the service strikes a conciliatory note. "As long as men and nations are suspicious of each other, instruments of war will be constructed and brave men will die, as these men have died, in the service of their country," the narrator says.

"May the day quickly come when men will beat their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and nation shall not rise up against nation, neither shall there be war anymore."

Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com