CIA Bet $800 Million on a Lie to Snatch a Soviet Submarine

By Desmond Okafor · August 10, 2026

For years the agency hid a secret mission to salvage a lost vessel, eventually using a legal loophole to block Harriet Ann Phillippi and deny the existence of government records.

The ocean floor northwest of Hawaii sits nearly 17,000 feet down, a depth where the pressure is crushing and the darkness is absolute. It was here, according to a summary page from the FAS Intelligence Resource Program, that the Soviet Golf-II Class ballistic missile submarine K-129 came to rest on April 11, 1968. For years, the Soviet Union searched for its lost vessel in vain. They did not know that Naval intelligence at Pearl Harbor had tracked the submarine's descent using underwater listening devices. The United States alone knew exactly where the wreckage lay.

"Deep Ocean Mining"

To retrieve a nuclear submarine from the abyss without alerting the Kremlin, the CIA required a cover story as vast as the Pacific. They found it in the form of Howard Hughes and a fictitious commercial venture. The FAS record notes that oceanographers had identified manganese nodules—small, metal-rich chunks of iron, nickel, and cobalt—carpeted across the sea floor. Under the guise of the Deep Ocean Mining Project, the CIA commissioned the construction of the Hughes Glomar Explorer (HGE) in 1973.

Built by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co., the vessel was a marvel of engineering and a masterpiece of deception. To the outside world, it was a research vessel owned by the Summa Corporation, designed to vacuum precious metals from the deep. In reality, it was a recovery tool for a Cold War trophy. While the FAS summary lists the construction cost in excess of $200 million, public records from Wikipedia suggest the total cost of Project Azorian climbed toward $800 million. This was a staggering sum spent on a gamble that the Soviets would believe the lie of the manganese nodules.

Document imagery from irp.fas.org From the files: irp.fas.org

17,000 Feet Down

On June 20, 1974, the Glomar Explorer went to sea. It found the K-129 and began the delicate process of hauling the fragile hull toward the surface. The Soviets watched the operation with interest, but the cover held; they assumed the Americans were simply mining the seabed.

Then, the mission fractured. The FAS record describes an accident during the lifting operation that caused the "fragile hulk to break apart." This structural failure resulted in the loss of a "critical portion of the submarine," including its nuclear missiles and crypto codes. However, the document notes a contradiction in the historical record. While the official narrative emphasizes the loss, other accounts claim the recovery was more successful, citing the retrieval of two nuclear torpedoes, three nuclear missiles, various code books, and the ship's code machine.

When the mission ended, the ship did not simply vanish. It spent time as a genuine manganese miner between 1978 and 1980 before being mothballed in Suisun Bay, California. For years, the vessel sat in the Naval Reserve Fleet, visible to motorists crossing the Benicia bridge on U.S. Highway 680. Eventually, the instrument of a secret war was sold for parts and repurposed. By the first quarter of 1998, after a conversion costing over $180 million and the removal of 25 million pounds of superstructure, the Glomar Explorer became a commercial deep-sea drill ship for Global Marine Drilling.

Neither Confirm Nor Deny

While the ship's physical transformation was a matter of corporate record, the operation's legal legacy was far more enduring. In February 1975, the Los Angeles Times broke the story of the secret mission. The CIA attempted to pressure the media into silence, a tactic that eventually caught the attention of journalist Harriet Ann Phillippi.

Phillippi filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, asking for any records that might show the CIA's attempts to persuade the media to stop publishing stories about the Glomar Explorer. The agency's response was a pivot that would change the nature of government transparency forever. Rather than admitting the records existed and claiming they were classified, or denying their existence entirely, the CIA responded by refusing to "neither confirm nor deny the existence of any responsive records."

This was the first time a federal agency had used this specific linguistic loophole. The CIA argued that any confirmation of the records' existence would itself be classified under exemption 1 of the FOIA, and that exemption 3 applied because the National Security Act of 1947 protected the functions of CIA personnel. This maneuver created what is now known as the "Glomar response" or "Glomarization."

It is a particular kind of institutional cruelty to tell a citizen that the government cannot even confirm whether the truth they are seeking is being held in a file. The Glomar response turned the FOIA from a tool of discovery into a wall of silence. It allowed the state to operate in a vacuum where the very existence of evidence could be classified.

The Glomar Explorer, once a vessel of secrets, ended its career drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for oil companies. The FAS record notes that in its final form, the ship was equipped to drill in waters up to 11,500 feet—roughly 2,000 feet deeper than any other rig in existence at the time.