Glomar Explorer

Yeah

... maybe that involvement there." So it's, I mean, literally this, the ship that my grandfather was the first officer on is, i- it's called the Glomar Explorer, and the legal phrase, "Can neither confirm nor deny," is called the Glomar response.

So that's, you know, not a small thing.

Wow.

The refitted Halibut's first clandestine mission was to find and photograph the wreck of the Soviet Golf II class submarine K-129, which had sunk with all hands 2,890 kilometers northwest of Hawaii on March the 8th, 1968.

This mission was part of the larger Project Azorian, wherein the CIA constructed a special ship called the Glomar Explorer to snatch K-129 off of the ocean floor.

The cover story for the mission was that Glomar Explorer was constructed by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes to mine manganese nodules off the ocean floor, a scheme crazy enough to be plausible.

Incredibly, in July 1974, Glomar Explorer succeeded in recovering the forward section of K-129 from a depth of 4.9 kilometers, but, well, that's a story for a different video.

In October 1971, Halibut sailed from Hawaii on a covert mission to find and tap the submarine cable between Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok, codenamed Operation Ivy Bells.

While finding a single 12-centimeter wide cable in thousands of square kilometers of ocean should have been an insurmountable task, Captain Bradley, the architect of the mission, had come up with a laughably simple solution.

Craven triangulated it using three SOSUS microphones, and then a project began to recover K-129 from three miles down in the Pacific.

Is this the Glomar Explorer?

This is the Glomar Explorer.

But before Glomar Explorer became involved, Halibut, our greatest spy submarine, uh, it was-

I didn't know we had a greatest spy submarine.

This is exciting.

even though it's three miles deep."

Our having lost a submarine interrupted his search for the Russian submarine.

[laughs] They got him to build a ship.

They called it the Hughes Glomar Explorer.

Uh, it was supposed to be a, a commercial deep sea mining vessel, um, built by Howard Hughes.

They're like, "Yeah, he's doing...

Um, Then there is Glomar, which is this is the neither confirm nor deny response.

This is named after a lawsuit over a spy ship called the Glomar Explorer.

Now, the CIA and the NSA and parts of the DHS love this move.

The Justice Department's 2026 chief FOIA officer report said tracked components issued for 474 Glomar responses in that period.