"The bubble burst on Friday morning, February 7, 1975, with a front page story in the Los Angeles Times revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had salvaged a sunken Soviet missile submarine." So begins the fascinating account of the attempt to raise the K-129, a Russian submarine that had disappeared in 1968.

The Russian submarine K-219 left its home base and then disappeared somewhere near the Hawaiian Islands. In a spectacular feat of engineering and spycraft, the Navy working with Hughes Aircraft designed a special ship, in the guise of a deep sea mining project to retrieve the sunken Russian sub that was lying on the bottom 16,000 feet below the surface. How they did it boggles the mind.

The K-129 was a Golf II diesel-electric sub carrying nuclear weapons. The CIA knew exactly where it sank thanks to the Halibut (https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/42343) . The CIA was anxious to get it’s hands on one of those nuclear tipped missiles and any codebooks or other secret documents that might have been on the sub. Just one problem; it sank in 16,000 feet of water. In order to help hide what they were doing, the CIA contracted with Hughes, famed for concocting bizarre schemes, to design and build the Hughes Glomar Explorer ostensibly a deep sea mining ship. The plan was to use 16,000 feet of pipe connected to an enormous grappling hook to grab the forward part of the sub and raise it into a specially designed “moon pool”, as it was called, part of the ship open to the sea, to prevent anyone from seeing what they were up to. Josh Dean*** in his book on the project described it in these terms: "Imagine standing atop the Empire State Building with an 8-foot-wide grappling hook on a 1-inch-diameter steel rope. Your task is to lower the hook to the street below, snag a compact car full of gold, and lift the car back to the top of the building. On top of that, the job has to be done without anyone noticing.”

In a review of Palomar’s book by the Naval Historical Foundation, Captain James Bryant write that Palomar told him it was a very difficult book to write because 90% of what he knew was incorrect. “Bruce Rule** was the leading acoustic analyst for the Office of Naval Intelligence for 42 years. In May 1968, the Navy took the acoustic data and compartmentalized it so that not even the Navy’s experts could review it. Consequently, it was not until 2009 – forty-one years after the event – that Bruce’s analysis of the data from open sources determined that the K-129 was lost when two ballistic missiles’ rocket motors fired, melted the launch tubes and filled the boat with burning exhaust. This book gives details of the probable causes.”*

Of course the sinking gave rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories. John Craven who had been very involved with the Halibut —among others like Kenneth Sewell—came to believe that the K-129 was in the process of launching a nuclear-tipped missile against Hawaii at the time of the submarine’s “explosion” and sinking. Palomar deals with this view in Chapter 11.

*https://www.navyhistory.org/2011/09/book-review-project-azorian-the-cia/

** Regarding Bruce Rule’s role, Mr. Role wrote a comment on the review by Capt. Bryant. I quote in full:

In his excellent review of “Project AZORIAN, the CIA and the Raising of the K-129,” CAPT Jim Bryant discusses this writer’s analysis of acoustic detections of the loss of the K-129 first completed in 2009 because the Navy compartmentalized the acoustic data so that not even their own experts at the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) could analyze it.
I thank CAPT Bryant for his acknowledgment of my analysis; however, the basic conclusion (two R-21 missiles fired within the K-129 for 96-seconds each with ignition separated by 361-seconds) was so straight-forward (obvious) that it took less than an hour to come to that conclusion.
There were at least six acoustic analysts at ONI in 1968 who could have derived that assessment with the same facility. Such was the dark side of the Navy’s obsessive compartmentalization which prevented those involved in the approval of the AZORIAN recovery effort from knowing that the area within the K-129 from which they hoped to recovery crypto-equipment and associated documents had been exposed to 5000-degree (F) missile exhaust plumes for more than three-minutes.
Bruce Rule
Louisville, KY
14 September 2011
Those interested in irony will find it in https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/sinking-soviet-submarine-k-219-cold-war.... Note the similarity between 129 and 219. See also In feindlichen Gewässern. Das Ende von K-219 by Peter Hutchhausen.
***https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33864783-the-taking-of-k-129?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=f4PyDsovtq&rank=1 ( )

This book details how the CIA in partnership with other American corporations found a missing Soviet submarine in the early 70's and built a specialized ship to raise it up for intelligence materials. The authors did a great job of research, although I could have done with a little less of their descriptions of how other authors got the details wrong. It also seemed to me that the build up was too long and the chapter of the actual event was too short. Still, I liked the book overall for talking about a Cold War event that I hadn't learned about before. And, of course, if you are a Tom Clancy fan, this will be an interesting read. :-)
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Provides wealth of previously unknown information concerning K-129. A bit short and left the impression that there is still more to the story ( )

I had heard of the Hughes Glomar Explorer before. The kind of science books I read as a kid often featured engineering feats such as the HGE, I can still remember the blurb about the ship being built for seafloor mining of manganese nodules. For reason or another it never worked out, but these books never said why.

It turns out it was all a lie. The Hughes Glomar Explorer was really one of the most ambitious gambits of the Cold War. The HGE was constructed for the singular purpose of clandestinely recovering a sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific.

The ballistic missle submarine K-129 sank on March 8, 1968 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii. The American underwater sonophone network discovered that something had happened, and the position was triangulated. The USS Halibut was sent to locate the wreckage, and was able to accurately locate the wreck and take photographs.

Using this information, the CIA decided to try to recover the submarine, and the HGE was commissioned under the codename Project Azorian. The CIA contacted Howard Hughes and he was more than happy to provide a cover story for the mission and laundering of the money to disguise the true ownership of the ship. His many companies and eccentric reputation made both of these things possible. The cover story was so good that some universities began to offer programs in Ocean Engineering to prepare students for the seafloor mining boom.

The Soviets were fooled as well. They never discovered the true purpose of the ship until after it had already been used. The HGE was constructed in public, but the critical recovery vehicle codenamed Clementine was built inside a submersible barge to prevent anyone from realizing the ship was not actually equipped for mining.

This crazy idea almost worked. The submarine was successfully captured, but broke in half while being lifted to the surface. Only the bow was actually recovered. The Soviets actually watched this lift taking place, but did not know what had been done until the story was leaked in the American press in 1975. This leak scrapped plans to send the HGE back to recover the rest of the submarine, because the Soviets threatened war if an American ship returned to the site.

Project Azorian would ultimately cost $500 million, the same as a lunar mission in 1970. This project pushed the state of the art so far that the ship would not find another use for 40 years, when it was leased to Global Santa Fe for its stated purpose: seafloor mining. The American Society of Mechanical Engineering designated the ship a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 2006.

This is the second Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark I have come across in a month. When I was touring the Johnson Space Center, my fellow associate asked me, "Why can't we make something like this?" We have vastly better technology as engineers. These guys worked on paper! However, I realize now that one of the things we are lacking is money. Project Azorian would cost $2.7 billion today. Not many people are willing to throw down that kind of money on something that will only be used once.

This book was a great read. I read the whole thing in two days while on vacation. The book is well-researched, with the explicit purpose of correcting the earlier mistakes of other books on the HGE and K-129. There are lots of fun asides about Cold War espionage and politics that situate the book in its historical context. Anyone interested in the Cold War, submarines, or just science and history should find this book engaging. ( )

Project Azorian is the best treatment so far of the mission to find and recover K-129. Parts of this story have been told before (with some wild interpretations) but this book is the best overall treatment (and it includes some debunking of some of the wilder myths and conspiracy theories). Serious submarine buffs will find this a quick and satisfying read. They will find few new details, but the overall narrative is tight and includes new insights into the bureaucratic politics involved in organizing the operation. For those who have never heard of this story before, Polmar's excellent survey should be their first stop. ( )