Project Azorian

us energy.

And the great thing is, mining manganese nodules conveniently requires everything Project Azorian actually needed to do for real.

Because you need a ship that can hover in one exact spot for weeks, massive vertical pipes going miles down, experimental tech no one has ever seen before, and endless delays, breakdowns, and engineering challenges.

In other words, if your ship looks insanely over-engineered and barely functional, that's not a red flag.

Exactly.

In 1974, the CIA, under the Nixon administration, launched Project Azorian.

To build the machine capable of lifting the submarine, they went to the one civilian eccentric enough that no one would question a bizarre billion-dollar vanity project.

Which was?

But the main prize, the code books and the ballistic missiles, were likely lost in the section that fell back.

But the legacy of the operation is what matters for our deep dive today.

When the story of Project Azorian eventually leaked to the press in 1975, it shattered the public's perception of what was possible.

It really did.

I'm Beard Laws.

Across from me is the one and only Luther Grimwood, and today we're investigating Project Azorian, the CIA's secret attempt to steal a Soviet submarine from the bottom of the ocean.

Luther, please tell me somebody at least questioned this plan.

Oh, sure, someone must have, but in that era, questioning just meant, "Can we do this without starting World War III?" Not, "Should we?" And for a while it probably felt like a brilliant plan.

Because for every Gagarin, there might be three or four forgotten names, still orbiting, still burning, still calling for help through dead frequencies.

And speaking of lost voices, what happens when the CIA sends ships to the bottom of the ocean to recover a Soviet submarine and maybe doesn’t tell us what else they brought back? Project Azorian and the Glomar Explorer.

In 1974, the CIA tried to steal a Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and they almost pulled it off.

This is Project Azorian, an audacious, borderline insane Cold War operation where billions of dollars, cutting-edge technology, and one very large lie were deployed in pursuit of one of the rarest things on Earth: an intact Soviet nuclear submarine.

The story begins in March 1968, when the K-129, a Soviet Golf II-class sub, sank in the Pacific about one thousand six hundred miles northwest of Hawaii.

Cause: unknown.

And then there’s the idea that they found something else.

What exactly? No one knows.

Diamonds features the kidnapping of Willard White, Howard Hughes, by Stavro, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, echoing the Gemstone File claim that Onassis had Hughes perhaps kidnapped and brought to his private Greek island of Skorpios.

Hughes, the aerospace magnate, worked with the CIA in Project Azorian, which was to build this massive submarine that could basically swallow other underwater crafts, right? So this is completely, like, directly out of Spectre.

It was directly out of a Bond novel, right? And this is what Howard Hughes is actually up to.

Fleming was a close friend of Aristotle Onassis.

Diamonds features the kidnapping of Willard Whyte, Howard Hughes, by Stavro, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, echoing the Gemstone File claim that Onassis had Hughes perhaps kidnapped and brought to his private Greek island of Skorpios.

Hughes, the aerospace magnate, worked with the CIA in Project Azorian, which was to build this massive submarine that could basically swallow other underwater crafts, [laughs] right? So this is completely, like, directly out of Spectre.

It was directly out of a Bond novel, right? And this is what Howard Hughes was actually up to.

Fleming was a close friend of Aristotle Onassis.

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.

Possibly.

Um, in any event, so that's, that was, uh, Project, uh, Azorian is what it's, uh...

It was specifically called Project Jennifer, was the wider overarching project of plucking submarines off the seabed, so it's generally called Project Jennifer today.

Uh, it's a real, real tragedy that, that, that got leaked, or else we would still be picking up subs.