The CIA, Howard Hughes and the plot to steal a Soviet sub
DRAMA: The K-129 before it sank... it was recovered with the help of Howard Hughes, inset with Ava Gardner
Almost 50 years after Russian nuclear missile submarine K-129 sank, a new book reveals how the intelligence agency used the eccentric billionaire in its most daring secret Cold War operation
Iin Los Angeles N THE black depths of the north Pacific the 98 crewmen of Soviet nuclear missile submarine K-129 frantically fought with the controls as the vessel plunged ever deeper, its steel hull flooding with frigid water.
Captain Vladimir Kobzar, a rising star in the Soviet fleet, could only watch helplessly as his state-of-the art Golf class submarine plummeted into the abyss. All souls aboard were lost.
And so was the sub, complete with three ballistic nuclear missiles and two nuclear-tipped torpedoes.
The Soviet fleet sent 36 vessels and 50 planes to search for its lost treasure but after weeks they were forced to give up emptyhanded. But the Americans were not so easily defeated.
So began one of the most extraordinary stories of the Cold War: a real-life cross between Hollywood dramas The Hunt For Red October and Argo.
It would become the CIA’s biggest covert operation ever, a clandestine adventure costing £1billion in today’s money, ensnaring the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes in its grasp in a project rivalling the moon landing in complexity and engineering innovation.
The undersea drama unfolded in March 1968, at the height of rivalry and distrust between the world’s two superpowers, yet the story has lain buried beneath the ocean waves for decades. Only in recent years was information declassified and it is now the subject of a gripping new book, The Taking Of K-129, by Josh Dean.
“If the US Navy could locate the sub’s precise location it might be able to access the wreck and mine it for valuable intelligence,” says Dean in New York. “Communication codes, code-breaking machinery and, most compelling of all, the nuclear warheads atop the ballistic missiles. Any combination of these things would provide the greatest intelligence haul of the Cold War to date.” But first the Americans had to find the sub.
It was a prize that the Soviets were loath to lose: in service since 1960, K-129 boasted the fleet’s newest navigation system, and each R-21 nuclear missile carried a one megaton warhead, 65 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.
Its mission had been to patrol the ocean north of Hawaii, evade US hunter-killer subs, and return two months later to its base at Petropavlovsk on Russia’s remote Kamchatka peninsula.
The US Navy had seen it leave port and kept a distant watch as it headed for Hawaii. And then… silence. K-129 had disappeared. Since the 1950s the US Navy had installed a system of underwater hydrophones across the Pacific seabed, yet acoustic data analysis revealed no sound of K-129’s final journey.
But at the Pentagon, Captain Jim Bradley, assistant for undersea warfare in the Office of Naval Intelligence, realised an imploding submarine would make a brief but loud noise that might have been captured by an array of underwater seismographs designed to sense explosions of Soviet test missiles. Amazingly, the listening array had picked up such a noise on March 11, 1968, off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, and the Pentagon was able to triangulate its position: the submarine lay 1,560 miles northeast of Oahu, Hawaii, close to the International Date Line, at almost 17,000 feet beneath the Pacific.
The US Navy, using its most sophisticated underwater search equipment, scoured 1,200 square miles of ocean and found the wreckage. Recovering a submarine from such depths seemed impossible but President Nixon overruled his military advisers, and the CIA launched Project Azorian.
The challenge: to secretly build a recovery ship with claws capable of raising the sub through three miles of roiling ocean, while remaining stationary, and outwardly appearing to be a deep sea mining operation that would not alert the Soviets to the sub’s discovery.
The CIA asked US engineering group Global Marine, which designed the world’s biggest floating deepwater offshore drilling ships. Billionaire businessman and playboy Howard Hughes not only dated movie stars, including Ava Gardner, but also owned companies with US weapons contracts, and was urged by the CIA to provide a cover story.
“Hughes agreed to lend his name to the recovery vessel, named the Hughes Glomar Explorer, and pretended the ship was designed to mine manganese from the ocean floor,” says Dean. At 619ft long and 57,000 tons, it was the biggest floating salvage ship ever built, attempting the deepest recovery ever.
“Hughes was vital to the operation. He was the only person rich and crazy enough to try offshore mining, and the CIA relied on his maverick reputation for cover. In reality, Hughes was deep in his drug addiction phase, holed up in his Las Vegas hotel watching movies with the blinds drawn.”
THE vessel was designed to lower a mechanical claw through a hole in the middle of the ship, suspended by 60ft steel pipes known as “pipe string”, as used in oil rig drilling. Once K-129 was grasped it would be pulled up three miles into a giant hidden compartment beneath the Glomar Explorer, so that the recovered submarine could not be seen by aircraft or spy satellites.
Six years after K-129 sank, the Glomar Explorer sailed for the north Pacific. Intelligence reached the Soviets that a salvage operation was underway but its military experts deemed recovery impossible, and they didn’t know where to even begin looking. K-129 had broken in two but the Glomar Explorer succeeded in grabbing the largest portion, 138ft long, and was raising it when disaster struck. One of the grappling fingers failed and K-129 broke apart, sending two-thirds of it back to the ocean floor.
Only 38ft of the bow was recovered, including the two nuclear torpedoes and bodies of six Soviet seamen, along with military code books, sonar equipment and instruments, but the CIA was ecstatic. “It’s one of the CIA’s greatest successes of the Cold War,” says the author.
K-129’s sinking remains a mystery, however. “The wreckage suggests the catastrophe occurred at or near the surface and it sank fast,” says Dean. “It could’ve been a malfunction during a missile launch test, or a hydrogen explosion while charging the batteries, even a collision with a US submarine.”
Some military experts believe the CIA continues its cover-up and recovered the entire submarine and its nuclear weaponry, scoring a massive Cold War intel coup.
“Even today we don’t know the full story,” admits Dean. “The CIA are among the world’s best-trained liars. They may know a lot more than they’re telling.”
To order The Taking Of K-129: How The CIA Used Howard Hughes To Steal A Russian Sub In The Most Daring Covert Operation In History, by Josh Dean (Amberley, £20), call the Express Bookshop with card details on 01872 562310. Or send a cheque/PO payable to The Express Bookshop to K-129 Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or visit www.expressbookshop.com. UK delivery is free.