The CIA, Howard Hughes, Lockheed, Nuclear missiles ...Russians
The CIA Tried to Steal a Russian Nuclear Submarine
And almost got away with it
The Pacific Ocean looks empty until you look under the surface.
Three miles down, at a depth that crush steel like a soda can, a Soviet nuclear submarine lay broken on the seafloor. It had missiles. It had secrets. And in the middle of the Cold War, it was the kind of prize that made very serious men do very crazy things.
The CIA decided to steal it.
When a Submarine Just… Vanishes
In 1968, the Soviet Navy lost contact with K-129, a ballistic missile submarine on patrol. No distress call. No survivors........ just gone.
The Americans didn’t hear silence. They heard impact.
Deep beneath the Pacific, U.S. hydrophone arrays (Designed to listen for nuclear testing) picked up a sound no one wanted to miss: a submarine failing catastrophically. Analysts replayed the signal over and over, triangulating its origin until a location emerged—remote, deep, and unreachable by anything that existed at the time.
Or so everyone thought.
Inside Langley, someone asked the question out loud:
What if we go get it?
The Most Ridiculous Plan Ever Approved
The plan that followed sounded insane even by Cold War standards.
Build a ship that could:
-
Hover precisely over one point in open ocean
-
Lower a mechanical device three miles straight down
-
Grab a shattered, 2,000-ton submarine
-
Lift it back up without anyone noticing
Then hide the whole thing behind a lie so weird no one would question it.
Enter Howard Hughes.
Hughes was rich, unpredictable, and already famous for doing strange things behind closed doors. The CIA slapped his name on the project and announced he was funding a ship to mine metal nodules from the ocean floor.
The ship was called Hughes Glomar Explorer.
It was a perfect cover—because it was technically true.
Built by the Best, Hidden from Almost Everyone
This wasn’t a one-company job. It was an all-star lineup of American engineering muscle.
-
Sun Shipbuilding built the massive hull.
-
Global Marine Development handled offshore engineering and ship operations.
-
Lockheed, used to making missiles and spacecraft, designed the real star: a giant mechanical claw known as the capture vehicle.
The claw lived inside the ship, folded up and invisible. A massive internal bay—called a moon pool—hid everything from curious eyes. From the outside, it looked like a clunky industrial barge. Inside, it was a covert recovery machine straight out of science fiction.
Even most of the crew didn’t know what they were really doing out there.
Three Miles Straight Down
In 1974, the Glomar Explorer arrived at the target site.
The ocean floor below was pitch black, under crushing pressure. Engineers began lowering steel pipe segments, one at a time, locking them together into a rigid column nearly three miles long. At the end: the claw.
It took days.
When the claw finally reached K-129, it found a submarine already broken by time and pressure. The arms closed anyway. The lift began.
Then everything went sideways.
Halfway up, the stresses became too much. A huge section of the submarine snapped off and plunged back into the abyss. Alarms blared. Engineers stared at readouts in silence.
The mission could have ended right there.
Instead, they kept lifting.
What Came Aboard
The Glomar Explorer surfaced with part of K-129 still in its grip.
Inside was a treasure trove of intel, radioactivity and the remains of six Soviet sailors.
This was no longer just an intelligence operation. It was a grave.
The CIA made an unusual call. The sailors were given a military burial at sea—with uniforms, solemn ceremony, and the Soviet anthem played over the deck. The moment was filmed and sealed away, not revealed to Russia until decades later to ensure they could limit some of the political fallout if and when this operation was discovered.
The Secrets Everyone Wanted
Officially, the CIA says very little was recovered.
Unofficially? The speculation is endless.
Even partial wreckage could reveal:
-
Missile design details
-
Hull construction methods
-
Metallurgy and engineering shortcuts
-
Fragments of cryptographic systems
It wasn’t the jackpot some had hoped for—but it was enough to justify the risk, the money, and the audacity.
The operation cost hundreds of millions of dollars and pushed deep-ocean engineering forward by decades.
The operation was so secret that it gave us the phrase “we can neither confirm nor deny” — known today as the Glomar response.
The whole thing might have stayed secret forever—if reporters hadn’t caught the scent.
A Ship, a Sub, and a Lot of Nerve
The Hughes Glomar Explorer wasn’t just a ship. It was a flex.
It proved that with enough money, enough engineers, and enough nerve, the U.S. could reach into the deepest, darkest parts of the planet and take what it wanted—without firing a shot.
And somewhere under the Pacific, the rest of K-129 still sits, crushed and silent, a reminder that the Cold War wasn’t just fought in the sky or on land.
Sometimes, it happened three miles straight down.
If you wish to learn more about one of the greatest Black ops the Documentary Azorian: The raising of of K-129 from 2009 has some fantastic interviews with the original engineers and footage of the Hughes Glomar Explorer and the CLAW.
The Crew of the Glomar were issued uniforms to complete the story of a civilian mining operation. This shirt is a modern replica based on some of the patches that have surfaced online.
