January 15, 2022 • 51 mins
In 1974 the CIA undertook one of its most brazen operations – secretly raising a sunken Soviet submarine lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right under the noses of the Russian Navy. With the help of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes, obviously. Learn all about it in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
AHOI everyone. For this week's select I've chosen our episode
on Project Azorean, one of the coolest, most bonkers cold
bar capers the CIA ever attempted. And I don't have
to tell you the CIA did some bonkers stuff during
the Cold War. So sit back, pull up your favorite
volume on naval history, and use it to clench onto
(00:22):
while you're driven to thrills by this episode of Stuffy
Should Know. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
(00:42):
There's Charles W Chuck Bryant. There's our ghosts podcaster producer.
Who's invisible Jerry's past? Yeah, actually the ghost of Jerry's present.
Jerry's not dead, everybody. No, that just sounded weird, it,
did it. We're keeping Jerry around. Yes, she just out
(01:03):
this week. Yeah, there you go. So it's just us, Chuck,
just a couple of boys batching it, just some good
old boys, never meaning no harm. No, something something been
in trouble with the loss. It's the day we were born.
I don't think there was something something before then? Is
there something something, something been in trouble? Yeah, right now,
(01:26):
I don't know, we'll go we'll look it up. You know.
It's funny. There's a great and we might have talked
about this years ago, but there's a great website called
Atlanta time Machine where you can go back and look
at old pictures of Atlanta and compare them to new
pictures and all that stuff. And they have some movie
specific pictures now. And they have the Dukes of Hazard
(01:47):
Pilot shoot photos, which was they eventually moved it out
in the country, but like most of the Dukes of
Hazard Pilot, all those car chases were in like midtown Atlanta.
Really isn't that crazy. But it was the original Bow
and Luke. Wow, who was the Who's sang the theme song?
Was it? Walk Toosh wayal And Jennings? Wasn't he the narrator?
(02:07):
It was whyal And Jennings? What was that first thing
he said? Walk toosh What does that mean? That's his nickname? Really,
walk Toosh Wayalen Jennings. I never heard that? Wow, it
is I love Wayale Jennings. Yeah, he's great. Apparently he
and Johnny Cash were roommates and highwaymen back well way
back in the day. Yeah, and both of them were
(02:28):
on drugs. But they didn't. Other people didn't know that.
So they both used to like be on drugs but
not tell each other about it. Really, And I guess
it came out later that they were like, you were
on drugs, said so was I wods like I used
to keep on drugs in the air conditioner and Johnny
Cash is like, that's why the air condisher never worked
(02:48):
and Whyalen and Jones was like, I used to keep
mining in the TV and Johnny Cash is or whoever was, Yeah,
their TV never worked, in their AC never worked because
that's where they stashed their drugs without the other one
knowing it. Why what are the drugs due to the
TV and the air conditioner? I got them pretty wasted?
What a weird start. Yeah, it is a little weird start,
(03:08):
especially because while we're talking about has nothing to do
with drugs, Johnny Cash or Waylon Jennings or air conditioners,
no TV really, No, it has to do with the
CIA yep, submarines yep, the USSR YEA cold war yep,
and Howard Hughes, Yeah, among other things been hidden with Kissinger.
(03:32):
Are you kissing him to his interesting? He's still alive too.
Maybe you'll hear this. I've never seen you hiss before.
I know. It's kind of threatening, is it, Yeah, because
I do have like a really sharp canine thing. Yeah,
you should. You should totally hiss more often. I should,
and I should shark in these things. I should file
them down. Oh people do that, I know, but surely
(03:55):
that has to hurt, right to file them down? Yeah? No,
how does it? Don't you have nerved No, they don't
hit the nerves, They just Oh, I guess you're right. Yeah, yeah,
I might do that. In the meantime, let's talk about something. Well,
let's let's go back to the beginning. Okay, okay, it's
nineteen sixty eight. I'm not exactly sure when, because look
(04:16):
the first part of my page ripped. Does it say
win in nineteen sixty eight? It does? You want to guess?
I feel like I'm holding the keys. May of nineteen
sixty eight, close March. It was pre summer of barely
Oh yeah, everybody's just getting started. It was the summer
of four play. Yeah, everyone's getting looped up, right, So
(04:36):
it is gross. So March of nineteen sixty eight in
the northwestern Pacific, as far as the United States is concerned,
which should be between say Hawaii and some far out
islands in Alaska and whatever else is out there. There's
not a lot out there. Yeah, apparently Hawaii is the
(04:57):
most remote island chain in the war world. Did you
know that. No, there's no island chain that's further away
from other land than Hawaii, even like when you look
at the globe those teeny tiny islands, uh huh from
what I understand. All right, so say Hawaiians at least. Yeah. Anyway,
basically out in the middle of nowhere in the northwest Pacific,
(05:18):
there was a Soviet sub It was a Golf two.
Golf two Soviet submarine. Yeah, they called it the cabri
Lay for a little while, but but that's Those were
the subs with the rag top. Yeah, those didn't work out.
The this Golf two sub was called the K one
twenty nine. Surely it had an actual name, right, No,
(05:40):
I think they called him the K whatever. All right, Well,
the K one twenty nine was on a routine patrol mission.
These are the Soviets they were glib about. You know,
let's call this one the Hannah Montana. Yeah, exactly right.
So it was just the K one twenty nine all business,
which actually is kind of reassuring because it was a
nuclear submarine. Sure, it had not only a nuclear missile,
(06:04):
like a nuclear missile you could come up to the
surface and shoot on to say, the United States. It
also had nuclear torpedoes, which I had no idea where
a thing, oh, really a nuclear torpedo. It's kind of
overkilled them to think. No, not if you're underwater and
you want to shoot a nuclear bombit somebody, Well, okay,
then that really fits the bill. Well, it turns out
(06:27):
that some of these nuclear tip torpedoes detonated, and there
wasn't a full nuclear detonation obviously, but it's obvious, but
it was enough to blow a hole in the submarine,
and I think kickoffs some other detonations in some of
the other nuclear torpedoes. And the upshot all this was
(06:47):
that the entire ninety eight person crew and the Soviet
submarine in the middle of the Cold War in nineteen
sixty eight, sunk about sixteen hundred miles or fifteen hundred
miles north west of and hit the bottom at sixteen
thousand feet more than three miles down. Yes, and so
(07:07):
kicks off the story of Project as Orean and the
Glomar Explorer. Yeah, so what happens, of course, is the
Soviets go looking for this thing. They spend a couple
of months, pretty massive search, couldn't find it. The US
is kind of laughing and saying, they haven't found their
own sub yet. Maybe we should go out there and
(07:30):
take a look, because we could probably get some intel,
maybe salvage a nuclear warhead for ourselves, spray paint a
smiley face that says something like right back at you,
it's a good one, and then throw it their way.
And in nineteen sixty eight, August of nineteen sixty eight,
just you know, quite a few months later, they actually
(07:51):
found it. The United States of America located this thing. Yeah,
so they they this is the official story. Here's the
thing that I figured up from researching this story. You
can also go ahead and assume that all of this
is fabricated and that there's actually other stuff that was
actually going on. Yeah, this is the story that's been
handed like this. Actually maybe the story that covers up
(08:14):
an assassination in Brazil or something like that. That could
be the whole reason this story exists. Because we're talking
about a covert operation in the sixties and seventies by
the CIA. Okay, so just take everything with the grain
of salt. But the story as it was reported and
as far as the CIA has ever admitted, was that
the Air Force and the Navy both had listening devices
(08:37):
throughout the Pacific, and somebody at some point said, well,
wait a minute, why don't we get these two together
and see if there's any data, any sounds that were
picked up from the sub exploding, and see if we
can pinpoint it basically triangulate with only two data points,
which is I guess straight line gulate, right, Yeah, yeah,
(08:57):
that is what it would be called. But suppose they
did it and they found where the sub was, and
like you said, the US was laughing because they were
watching the Soviets look in all the wrong places. We're
near it. And then after a couple of months, the
Soviets called off the search. And it was quite obvious
to the Americans that the Soviets had no idea where
(09:18):
the sub was, which made us think, maybe we should
check this thing out. Maybe we can go get it.
Yeah they so we have two choices. We can call
them and let them know where it is, or we
can go get it ourselves, and this is the height
of the Cold War. Yeah, So they weren't about to
go with choice one. No, so option two came upon
the table and we got our own sub called the Halibits.
(09:38):
We had fun names. The Halibit dropped a camera down
there on a sled and took a bunch of pictures
of this thing. Verified it's down there, it's intact. We
don't know for sure if we can go get it,
but we should try because if we can get this thing,
not only do we have potentially information on how these
(10:00):
warheads are being built by them, but we might also
be able to bust their codes with this cryptographic equipment
they have down there. And so let's launch a project.
And we love naming things, so let's name it Project Azorian. Yeah.
I guess that's the name of a person from the Azores.
Maybe maybe no idea where they'd come up with these names,
(10:21):
God love them, who knows, But Project as Orion was
the name of this this idea to go see if
we can get this sub right, yeah, which means, of
course we're not going to go out there next week
and start looking like there's a long process that has
to be undertaken before we can even figure out if
we can do this right. So they actually did get
(10:41):
together like a working group, a top secret working group
of engineers and nautical engineers and any kind of engineer
you can think of, and said, how would you do this?
It was a submarine, a twenty five hundred ton submarine
three hundred feet long. That's a thing in and of itself.
(11:04):
It's a big sub like that'd be hard to pick
up off land, sure, but it's not on land. It's underwater.
It's sixteen thousand, five hundred feet under the surface of
the Pacific Ocean in the middle of nowhere about is
in the middle of nowhere as you can get. And
how could we do this? How could we possibly pick
(11:25):
this up? And wait, wait, wait before you answer, you engineers,
the Soviets can have no idea what we're doing, because
they will probably think any ship that they thought was
going after this, I love this stuff more than most
stuff in the world. Yeah. Like, when there's this incredibly challenging,
almost insurmountical, insurmountable task and people get a lot of
(11:48):
smart people together and say, let's start brainstorming on how
if this is even possible? Right, I just think it's
really cool that and I bet these people, the engineers
are like, oh my god, this is a dream to
come up and try and solve this problem. Plus the
CIA said that they are holding my family hostage, so
I better get to work. So they decided, here's what
(12:10):
the only way we can try this is by doing this.
It's gonna involve three large vessels. One is a recovery
ship that basically has a chamber with the bottom that
could open and close like that ship in the Abyss. Yeah,
a moon pool. In fact that James Cameron totally glow
marred this totally for his own needs. It would have
(12:33):
a docking leg system that basically turned it into an
underwater on the ocean floor platform that I did not get.
I think just basically it goes down there instead of
like hovering in place, turns into a building. But I
don't understand. I didn't understand how. But yes, that is
the understanding. Well, I had four legs, but that's crazy.
(12:54):
That means they had four three mile long legs. Yeah,
that doesn't make which since that does? You know what
I mean? I need to see a picture. I've seen
pictures of it. I still don't know what it really
meant with the legs. Yeah, well I don't know then. So,
but that's that's one. That's the ship that they sail
out there to undertake the whole mission, right, Yeah, there's
(13:15):
two others that they have to come up with. Two.
That's right, capture vehicle. So that had a grabber right
on it. Yeah, like one of those banana clips that
girls used to wear in the nineties. Yeah, but for
a twenty five hundred ton submarine. Yes, and it wasn't
just like, hey, use a little grabber like that banana
clip it had. It was specifically designed to attach to
(13:38):
the submarine, right. It was the one glove, the one
thing it was designed to do. That's correct. So that's
that's step two. If you have one of these things
and you're loading it onto a massive ship. I think
a seven hundred foot ship is what they came up with.
Six hundred and eighteen foot long ship, many many meters long,
so many meters. Somebody's gonna say, what is that, Well,
(14:04):
the Soviets would yes, because they're flying over the US
with their spy cydlites ever since Sputnik got up there,
so they're gonna want to know what that is. The
Soviet analysts are going to point this out. So if
you have this big long ship that sticks out like
a sore thumb, because what are you doing with that thing?
What are you also doing with this big grabber? How
do you get around the grabber part at least chuck
(14:27):
oh the grabber? Yeah, well you must be talking about
the barge. I am, so this is pretty amazing. This
thing had a retractable sunroof basically, and it was the
whole reason this thing was here was to hide everything
right right, So it was they built the grabber vehicle,
the vehicle number two, inside the bargees. But like you said,
(14:52):
the barge had a sunroof. The thing about the barge
was it was also designed to be submersible. So what
they did was they built a barge that they built
the grabber inside of, floated the barge out to this
huge six and eighteen foot ship, Ship number one, submerged
it underneath the ship, opened up the sunroof on the barge,
(15:14):
opened up the moon pool on the big ship, and
raised the grabber vehicle into the six hundred and eighteen
foot ship, so that the Soviets never even knew the
grabber vehicle existed. They never saw it. It just didn't exist.
And they had to build all this stuff from scratch, right.
It wasn't just like they had a grabber laying around
(15:35):
that vit a Soviet sub precisely, or this barge that
could become invisible file accounts and they so this was
basically this is what this this working group came up with, like,
these are the things you need to do this? Yes,
And the CIA said, who can we possibly get? Who
(15:56):
in the world, Well, Howard Hughes, Yes, mister Howard Hughes,
specifically the Suma or Summa Corporation and that was a
part of the Hughes Tool Company. And they said, go
build this thing at thirty six thousand tons six and
eighteen feet like you said. And they called it the
(16:16):
Hughes Glomar Explorer because Global Marine was the company that
operated it. And that's just an abbreviation of Global Marine.
I did not know until a couple of days ago. Yeah,
it's sort of a disappointing end to what Glomar meant. Yeah,
because it sounds kind of like space ag It definitely does, like, wow,
look at the healthy glow from radiation exposure. On that thing, Glomar,
(16:40):
Glomar has got a great glow. And here's the other
cool thing. Because this would I mean, there would still
be a big beheamoth ship out there in the ocean
in the Pacific, and the Russians would wonder what was
going on. So they said, here's the deal. There are
actually it happened to sink in an area of the
Pacific where there are a lot of may Nganese, really
(17:00):
valuable manganese nodules underwater. So we'll just concoct this story
that said, Howard Hughes built the thing. You know how
crazy he is right to go out there and try
and mind the ocean's depths to get even richer. And
people actually bought that right. The press even bought it.
They went to the trouble of saying, this is actually
(17:21):
a really good cover story because there was manganese deposits
in the area. It checked out. There was the idea
of deep sea mining was very new, so there wasn't
There was the idea that this would be a good idea,
but no one had tried to undertake it yet, so
the Soviets couldn't have been like, that's not a deep
sea mining ship. No one knew it a deep sea
(17:42):
mining ship looked like yet. Yeah, Plus it was very
Huesy in thing to do exactly right. He was extremely wealthy,
so he had the kind of money to just undertake
deep sea mining and be the first one. But he
also operated in strict secrecy, and the press used to
watch his operation and projects from the outside and just
make guesses about it and create rumors. But it didn't
(18:06):
matter because it was all just conjecture and rumors, right, yeah,
so it was a perfect cover story. And then add
on to the top that Hughes was already in bed
with the US government in a number of ways, but
including making spy satellites in highly classified, top secret projects.
It was they couldn't have come up with a better
person to helm the actual carrying out of this of
(18:30):
the project. Should we take a break? Yeah? All right?
(19:04):
So this this took a while. It was like years
had passed between the sub sinking and then actually saying
all right, I think we have a plan to do
this and we can get this done. And by the
time that came around, they said, wait a minute, like
should we even should we go take another look at
this thing? Is still intact. Should we bother? Is this
(19:24):
still relevant? Is it an asset or is it just
some rusty old, you know, hunk a metal at the
bottom of the ocean. Yeah. Is it basically like a
museum thing now? Yeah, So they said, and we're not
into Russian museums. No, let's be honest. So they did
form another committee. We're great at that, and they did
take another look, and they said, you know what, let's
(19:46):
go down there, guys, because even though these missiles, the
ss N five missiles are no longer like their big threat,
they do have the ss N eight. Maybe we could
glean some technology and how these things operate, and there's
still that cryptographic equipment down there, which would be a
good asset for our intelligence. Right, So they said, okay,
(20:07):
let's do it. Come on, guys, let's do it. There
was another thing too, there's this great IO nine article
on this very project, and the author found some publication
of memos about project as orient Yeah, and one of
the things was that they were saying, like, yes, it's
(20:29):
still worth it intelligence wise and everything, but more to
the point, we're locked in the punch here, like the
US can't afford to seem wishy Washy to its contractors.
That's crazy, So we need to do this regardless. Yeah,
that's kind of nutty when you think about it. That
the the risk of pissing off Howard Hughes. Huh. I
guess was too great, right, And I mean it sort
(20:52):
of makes sense in a way because if he was
a big time contractor for them. Yeah, I feel like
that relationship going. But yeah, there's not that many top
secret factors that you know you need trust and yeah,
you don't want to take them off, right. Very interesting though,
are we saying pissed off? Now? Sure? Is that a thing?
I guess it made an appearance in the last episode two?
Did I say that just now? No? No, the the listener,
(21:16):
male guy Peter Oh about vaping. Yeahbody said, I'm pissed off.
If you can't if you can't tell, well, I'm not sure,
but I appreciate you drawing attention to it. Well. I
guess we'll find out if Jerry bleeps all this out
or if we get booted out of the sixth grade
classes around the world. Yeah, kids, what you should say
is off, ticked off, and you really shouldn't say that.
You should say that I'm going to use my words
(21:36):
and let you know that what you just said bothered me.
Oh is that what you're supposed to say? Yeah? Okay,
speak like an adult. So how adults speak? I say,
pissed off. Here's the other side note, and this will
come into play later, is that there was another memo
that said, you know what, there are bodies down there,
and according to the Geneva Convention nineteen forty nine, there's
(21:59):
a proper way that you handle even and quote unquote
enemies remains, and we're gonna abide by that, and we're
gonna take all the stuff we need to make sure
that we can do that in a respectful way, because
this will eventually probably come out and at least maybe
that'll be a slight goodwill gesture to the Russians that say, hey,
we were very respectful of your dead seamen. Right. So
(22:22):
they outfitted the Huge Glomar Explorer Bloor Explorer, the hGe
with I think a capacity to handle one hundred bodies. Yeah,
which is kind of funny. If you were a sailor
engineer on the Huge Glomar Explorer might have made you
a little nervous, considering there were ninety eight sailors on
(22:44):
the sub that you were going to get. So they
made room for two more two more dead guys. Don't
think that was by accident either. Yeah, they didn't just
round up to a nice even hundred cadaver coolers. They
I'm sure they're like, yeah, two people will probably die
on the mission, that's right. So there's there's another memo
(23:05):
from I think the nineteen seventy four June third, and
it basically said, hey, all this stuff's ready. The ship's ready,
the grabb Her class vehicle's ready, the barge is even ready.
Everything's ready. Let's do this. Are we going to do
it or not? They estimated a forty percent chance of success,
(23:28):
which they were like threw the moon over the moon about. Yeah,
they were over the moon pool about this, which is interesting.
But I guess when it's something something that tough to
accomplish and that innovative and and bleeding edge nice, the
apparently forty percent wasn't too bad, No, not at all.
(23:49):
So and that was like of one hundred percent success,
A forty percent chance of one hundred percent success, yeah, okay,
so well oh yeah, sure, so they the project has
approved June fifth, nineteen seventy four, and just a few
days later, on June fifteenth, the ship departed. The Hughes
Glomar explored departed I believe the port of Los Angeles. Yeah.
(24:13):
And another wrinkle that will come up a little bit
later is because this was so covert, they couldn't surround
it by battleships or have F sixteen's. Well they probably
didn't have. I don't know when the F sixteen came about.
I think maybe like the sixties or something. I'm sorry
to all the aviators, I'm sure we're way off, but
whatever fighter jets they had at the time, they couldn't
(24:38):
draw attention to themselves by being protected like that. It
would be really weird if there was a naval or
air force escort for a manganese ship. Right. Yeah, this
is a pretty I want to read this. So this
is pretty great. This quote from the CIA to kind
of just drive it home of what a task was
before them. Some in the CIA said this, Imagine standing
(25:02):
atop the Empire State Building with an eight foot wide
grappling hook on a one inch diameter steel rope. Your
task is to lower the hook to the street below,
snag a compact car full of gold, and lift the
car back to the top of the building. And on
top of that, the job has to be done without
anyone noticing. And that essentially describes what happened there, right,
(25:23):
That's what they were doing when they when they shipped out.
That was the task ahead of them, right, yes, and
add to this that it keeps getting worked well. Yeah,
but the Soviets were still surveiling everything. Right, So remember
like they couldn't have a US Navy escort of a
deep sea mining ship. That just looked really weird. But
(25:45):
that's not to say the Soviets didn't send their navy
out to see what was up. So for the first
two weeks after the Hughes Glomar Explorer made made it
to its destination and started working, there were Soviet ships
surveilling them basically twenty four hours a day for the
first fourteen days. Yeah, so these guys are actually undertaking
(26:07):
raising a Soviet sub within sight of Soviet naval ships
watching them, and the Soviet they were really nervous at
this point. They didn't know if the Soviet navy was
going to try to board the Glomar Explorer just to
be like, what are you guys doing. You're making us
nervous and apparently the CIA. One of the CIA offers
on board was like, we need to stack some crates
(26:30):
on our helicopter landing pad to prevent them from landing.
And there was I don't know exactly what alert status
it was on, but maybe high alert, which was there's
a chance of soviets are going to board, there's sensitive
materials on board. The team that's in charge of destroying
those sensitive materials. You guys are on alert the people charge,
(26:51):
but defending the team, you guys are on alert, but
we're not going to give you guns yet because we
haven't reached that point. This is the tension. But what
were they supposed to do? Like karate chop? I think
karate chop? Wow. It was like you can karate them,
but don't shoot them. They're probably going to shoot you, yeah,
but just deflect the bullets with your karate chops. So
(27:12):
they're out on the ocean. It's very complicated mission, to
say the least. So you've got your ocean currents at work.
You have to maintain your position through those. That's hard enough.
Then you had to lower this capture vehicle by doing this,
adding sixty foot pieces of steel pipe one at a time,
(27:32):
connecting to each other sixty feet at a time, three
miles down right to lower that recovery vehicle down to
the sub and then when it gets down there, it
has to be just in the right position to straddle
over that submarine and get that grabber out, attach it
to the hull, and then reverse that whole process by
(27:55):
now towing a freaking submarine yep, by taking one sixty
foot length pipe off at a time until you're raising
the sub like that. You know what I need to
see to understand this fully is remember the beginning of
Titanic when James Cameron did that terrible obvious recreation of
what happened to sink the Titanic. Was at the very
(28:15):
beginning when Bill Paxton was in modern Days and they're
out searching for the Jewel of the Sea, and he says, well,
that guy with the beard, you know, the nerd, fat
bearded guy that's in every movie, to explain what's going on,
And he said, here's how the Titanic sunk, And it
did the little recreation on the screen and showed exactly
how it happened, just so everyone would know. That's what
(28:36):
I need to see. Yeah, oh of this, I need
a chubby bearded guy to explain to me visually. That's
not me or Ellen Page. You want to be an
inception and you want to be inception. Yeah, no, I
know what you mean. The problem is is there are
so many holes in this story. I need a picture book.
(28:58):
But everybody's everybody accepts that there's holes in the story
because it's a covert CIA operation. Yeah, that is just
we'll probably never fully be explained, although there have been
interviews with people who are on the ship. They could
probably tell you, we'll look them up after this. Yeah.
And at the very end of that whole process of
bringing this thing up, then it's not like they get
(29:18):
it up kind of close enough to the ship and
they're like, all right, it's thirty feet below us, we'll
just glide in from here. Then they had to suck
it on board and stow it in the docking well
right successfully. Yes. I could you imagine getting it to
where it's right below them and then it breaks free.
I'd be so nervous. And that's kind of almost what happened.
That's close to what happened. So remember the Soviet navy
(29:40):
is circling them, and they're lowering this claw down to
the sub, but also like, we're not doing anything over here,
just no guns, right, So they reach the sub and
start doing the submersible claw thing, and at that time
the Soviet Navy twots three times like peep peep, peep,
(30:01):
see you later, and they laughed for good. And so
the Glomar explorer starts raising the sub. They get it.
I have no idea how they know they've gotten it,
but they've got the sub. I don't know how they
directed this thing over the sub. I don't understand either.
I'm totally with you, But as far as the story's concerned,
(30:21):
the claw got the sub and they started raising it,
and they got it over the course of a few
days a mile up and then all of a sudden.
That's an extremely incredible accomplishment. I know. Imagine trying to
sleep while this thing is like slowly being pulled. Yeah,
you would not, you'd not be able to. But there
was an engineer who was on the ship who later
(30:43):
recounted in an interview that there was something that felt
like about a ten second long earthquake on the ship.
And he said, you knew something bad had happened. Yeah,
and this was right after he said it's going great, everybody.
We can't lose now that first miles the trick. Yeah. So,
I mean, I guess was it an earthquake? No, it
(31:04):
was the sub breaking up in the submersible claw. Oh okay,
I thought that caused it to break up. No, he
said it felt like an earthquake. That's how big of
a an energetic release it was. So the sub breaks apart.
I guess it had been down there so long that it, uh,
it just wasn't you know, it wasn't viable as a
(31:26):
single solid piece of metal anymore. Here's what I think
happened based on some other stuff, like later memos. They
said that they needed to redesign the claw so that
it wasn't as britty. Yeah, the banana clip, so that
it wasn't as brittle, and that it was well, so
it wasn't as brittle. I think the claw broke up
(31:48):
and some of the sub was able to fall out.
Some remained in it's held into the grabber, but most
of the sub, this is a three hundred foot sub,
about two one hundred and sixty feet of it broke
off and fell back a mile down to the ocean floor.
So I thought you meant that the grabber should have
(32:08):
had like, did anybody think to put felt on this
grab of right or rubber tips on the end of
the clause? No they didn't. Oh I know. So the
the most of the sub, including all the stuff the
CIA was after all the good stuff, the the the
code books, the con tower. They're like, we had the galley, right,
(32:29):
they ate, well, like, I guess that's okay. I love borshed,
so that it is a silver lining. Yeah, they only
got what ten percent of this thing, yeah, which which
was the four of the sub The four of the
subs stayed in the grabber claw and they were able
to bring it the rest of the way up and
salvage it, which included the nuclear torpedoes. Unfortunately for the
CIA and everybody aboard. The nuclear torpedoes were of course
(32:53):
something that had detonated, so they all suffered from some
plutonium exposure as well. Yeah, so it was it was
their exposure was consistent with the fact that there was
in fact nuclear materials. Right. Yeah, they had been exposed
to these nuclear torpedoes. Not they didn't get their hands
on the nuclear missile they were after, right, Basically none
of the prize that they were looking for they got
(33:13):
their hands on. But one thing they did find on
their hands all of a sudden were the bodies of
six Soviet submariners. Yeah, for submarriners. How do you say it?
I think sub mariner. Okay, but we'll get taken to
task and told the right way. Well, we said both,
so you can't get it wrong when you say it
both ways. So, like we said, they could hold a
(33:33):
hundred bodies, so they could certainly hold six. And then
I guess ninety four other guys on board worried I
would guess, so, and they did. They had copies of
Soviet burial manuals American burial manuals. They had a ceremony.
Did you watch the video of this? I did, well,
(33:54):
some of it they conduct They've filmed it in color,
and I love How is it you who wrote this part? Yeah?
I love how you put it. The bizarre an inexplicably
futuristic video. Yeah, it looks weird. It looks like it
does look like a George Orwellian like transmission from the future. Right,
But if the future was in the nineteen eighties and
(34:14):
it was being written in the nineteen twenties, right, and
the reason why I put my finger on it. Finally,
it's men wearing matching coveralls in hard hats disposing of bodies,
and the video quality is just weird. It's just perfectly weird. Yeah,
just go check it out. It's a I guess CIA
project is z Orian Burial at C. I think would
(34:36):
probably bring it up on YouTube. And eventually this film
was turned over to Boris yeltson Somebody Still Loves You
Boris Yelton in nineteen ninety two by CI director Robert Gates.
At that time, yeah, do we take another break? Yeah,
I think we're going all right, go wow, all right,
we're gonna wrap up this whole mess in just a minute.
(35:26):
So they found it. Once they got part of it,
should they go again? That was the big question, right,
And there was a lot of discussion that the CIA,
for its part, was like, I don't know if there's
anything left of that sub like it's the seventies now, right.
We lucked out that it was intact to begin with.
After a series of explosions, Yeah, we're pretty sure that
(35:49):
the stuff that fell a mile back down to the
seafloor probably broke up. Yeah, I'm suspicious of that, but
that was the CIA's position. Regardless. Kiss and the rest
of the Nixon administration were like, how can we do
this again? The thing is, right around the same time
(36:09):
Nixon resigned, and all of a sudden, everybody who'd been
high flying and freewheeling and overthrowing governments and all that
were suddenly like, nothing, we're not doing anything. There's no
operations going on whatsoever. So the idea of a second
project being undertaken was pretty doubtful for a number of reasons. Yeah.
(36:31):
And one of the other big reasons was that this
whole cryptographic equipment and the codes probably weren't even relevant
by that point. Yeah, And so they didn't think I mean,
they're basically like, there's so little upside to this at
this point, they Kissinger. I think he even finally relented, right, Yeah,
I think so, it's not the worth it. What I
found was interesting was that a later interview by an
(36:53):
admiral said, even if you found the code books and
you found the communications equipment and figured out the arrangement
of like the burst transmitters and circuits and all that stuff,
all you'd be able to do is break the codes
for a twenty four hour period. Yeah, but that would
(37:14):
have been the case no matter if they've gotten the
whole suburbine at any point, so that it was already
years later when they first went down, right, So I
guess they you probably would still be a pretty big
treasure trove intelligence wise, to just get a one day
snapshot of Soviet submarine operations, they'd probably be worth it.
But maybe it was more about those warheads though. I
(37:36):
think that was definitely part of it too. But they
said there's probably not a good chance we're going to
do this. The other the other problem was this, by
this time, journalists named Seymour Hirsch, who's written some of
the most some of the deepest exposees on the US
government ever written, wrote about the Mili massacres. He wrote,
(38:02):
he didn't write, or he wrote a few stories on
the Frank Olsen case that Wormwood was based on. Seymour
Hurst was in that towards the end. Yeah, he's written
a bunch of stuff. He had this story down cold.
He had everything for well over a year before it
finally broke and the CIA director went to Hurst and said,
(38:24):
don't please, don't say anything about this. Please sit on
the story. Please sit on the story, and behind Hirsh's
back or right from under him. The story ended up
breaking in the most bizarre, suspicious way it possibly could have. Yeah. Well,
and even before that, a very famous term came about
because of this. There was a Rolling Stone writer named
(38:44):
Harriet and Philippi, and she flat out asked the CIA
to reveal its existence. And that's where the phrase we
can neither confirm nor deny its existence came into play,
which is now known as the Glomar response. Right, if
you've ever heard that, that's where it comes from. Yea,
which is a great little cherry on top. I think
I think so too. Even though this isn't the end,
(39:04):
No it's not. It gets even weirder to tell you
the truth. Yeah. So, Harriet and Philippi was asking about
Project as Orion because there is a cryptic, weird, little
short news blurb in the Los Angeles Times that was
basically about some gossip and rumor that was circulating at
the LAPD and among cops in LA There was a
(39:25):
rumor that the Hughes Corporation had cooperated and carried out
a project to retrieve a lost Soviet sub with the CIA.
Weren't any other details about that. They said it was
in the Atlantic Ocean. There were a lot of problems
with this story, but for the first time ever, it
started to see the light of day. And the whole
(39:47):
reason that that was in there, Chuck, was just the
weirdest things that I think, the weirdest part of this
story and the most suspicious. Yeah, the fact that all
this came together in this way is pretty remark So.
The huge Summa corporation that we talked about, they were
broken into. Their HQ was broken into in Los Angeles.
(40:09):
They got cash, they got boxes of documents, including a
memo describing this secret project to the CIA, and no
one knew for sure whether or not they had this
document or not, right the thieves yes, until a few
months later there was this I guess sort of deep
throat intermediary person that called up and said, hey, we
(40:32):
have possession of a lot of these stolen papers. They
didn't say we have the CIA document about Project Hazorian,
but they say we've got boxes full of stuff, we
got binders full of women, right, and we'll take a
half a million bucks to return this to you, right.
And so there's a couple of points that need to
be mentioned. This is the fourth or fifth breaking of
(40:53):
a huge office in like the last four or five months. Yeah,
and what they think They think the Vegas mob and
the Saint Louis mob was involved, but they don't know
who they were working for. Were they working for the government,
were they working for Howard Hughes. Who were they working for?
But they were very clearly after some specific papers. They
think what they were after was definitive evidence that Howard
(41:16):
Hughes owned a number of high level politicians in the
United States and that they actually found it. There was
a Center report that was repressed at the last minute.
So they do think that they found evidence of just high,
high corruption, but that they didn't know that they had
this CIA document in their possession until the CIA accidentally
(41:40):
tipped them off. Yeah. So the CIA tells the FBI
about this police report that the the LA cops supposedly
have h and there's being offered up for sale and
for money and it might have this project is orient information.
The FBI then tells the LA police about this because
they didn't know They didn't know about this. They just
knew that they had this box full. They were being
(42:03):
offered to exchange this box full of documents for a
lot of cash. They didn't know what was inside of it.
Apparently people I had it didn't know what was inside
of it. So the LA police told this dude who
tried to broker the deal and the CIA. That's how
the CIA found out about it, right this. I think
the CIA was surveiling the LAPD, I probably as a
(42:24):
matter of course, and found out about the LAPD being contacted.
Right like you said, the CIA contacts the FBI. The
FBI contexts the LAPD, and the LAPD says to the intermediary, Hey,
do you happen to have a document that shows the
Hughes Corporation trying to receive retrieve a Soviet sub for
the CIA thumbed through the boxes and let me know
(42:46):
if you see the word Azorian And the intermediary says
b RB Yes, And the next thing you know, the
La Times is starting to report on it. Yeah. February seventh,
nineteen seventy five. La Times article US reported to russ
sub short for Russian. Sure, I guess they just had
a They wanted that big font right, They couldn't get
(43:07):
it get Russian in there. So, according to reports circulating
among local law enforcement officers, Howard Hughes had contracted with
the CIA to raise a sunken Russian nuclear submarine from
the Atlantic Ocean. Not true. It was a Pacific right,
and again just a lot of holes in this. However,
(43:27):
it was now out there. So there's a dude named
Jack Anderson, I believe, who had a nationally syndicated radio show,
and he was the first to really mention this thing,
and he said he was going to get to the
bottom of it and reveal some more stuff about it.
And by this time, once he did that, all of
the reporters who were sitting on stories about it, all
(43:48):
bets were off, including Seymour Hirsh And so mysteriously, the
day after Jack Anderson mentions it, there's front page in
depth stories about Project as Orion, which they rectally called
Project Jennifer on newspapers around the country. And the cat
was out of the bag. As they say, I'm Jack
Anderson and that's the last word. It sounds like that's
(44:12):
the kind of show he would add. Yeah, Yeah, he's
got his fedora with scoop like in in the bill. Yeah,
I'm kind of curious about why project or why Jennifer
was the name of the compartment. So this I okay,
so it comes like some sexist thing to me if
you asked me, I think it was just maybe like
(44:32):
a hurricane, like they just that was up for usage.
But the compartment, it's it's kind of like all communications,
all memos, all everything that has to do with this
project goes into this compartment. And somebody thought the compartment
name Jennifer was the name of the project, so they
messed that up. Yeah, but they got just about everything
(44:53):
else right. And so by the time that this story
comes out, the US is like, well, it's the Soviets
are about to unleash hell on Earth diplomatically, maybe militarily.
This is going to be really bad. And the US
braced itself for a response and out of Moscow crickets. Yeah,
(45:15):
and for very good reasons, all of which kind of
tie back to embarrassment. Three things. Mainly, they would have
to admit that they lost a sub which would be embarrassing.
They would have to admit that they couldn't find it
and the US could find it super embarrassing, and then
they had to admit that we were following them out there.
(45:36):
In the ocean and saw them doing something. But we
turned around and went home. We went beep beep, so
super triple embarrassment. So they said, nyet, we're not doing it.
And I think it's interesting. I've seen a bunch of
stories lately about the Cold War where like where we
knew something that the Soviets knew, but no one could
(45:57):
admit it out loud. So there was a lot of
city back and like, all right, are they going to
say something? Uh? Huh are they going to say something?
All right, they're not saying anything. So despite that, despite this,
this this uh assessment that the Soviets weren't going to
publicly acknowledge this, and the United States certainly didn't publicly
acknowledge it either. Despite that, it was clear that the
(46:20):
Soviets also weren't going to be like, sure, go ahead,
try to get the rest of the sub. They were
worried that if they did go back out, the Soviets
would maybe sink whatever ship tried to go out there. Yea,
the Soviets had a military presence, a naval presence around
the site the whole time from that moment on. Once
the story broke and they said that's it. It's it's done.
(46:41):
So for all we know, they went back and managed
to sneak it out from under the Soviets. For all
we know, this never happened, and that all of this
is actually a cover story for that break in of
the Hughes Corporation. That's what I think. Yeah, or for
all we know, this is all gospel truth. I mean,
maybe it's sitting next to a spaceship in the area,
if one right deep within the earth, and a bunker
(47:02):
very well could be Chuck, don't be so naive. In
the end, and today's money, it cost about three billion bucks.
And here's the kind of fun ending is that Glomar explorer.
Remember the barge. It was eventually retrofitted to be a
regular deep sea drilling barge. The whole the whole ship.
Oh I thought just the barge was. No, the whole
(47:23):
ship was. So it was finally sold only eight years
ago to a private company for fifteen million bucks. Yeah,
I think for scrap. Oh the secrets they're in, I know,
can you believe it? But they actually finally did do
deep sea mining and then get this, Howard Hughes got
a free deep sea mining ship out of it because
(47:43):
the government paid him to build it. That guy, that guy, Well,
if you want to know more about Project the Zorian,
you should probably go back in time and join the CIA.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Oh,
and shout out to the great IO nine article that
time the CIA and Howard Hughes tried to steal a
Soviet submarine by Mark Strauss. That was a great source.
(48:05):
So two with Seymour Hurst's nineteen seventy five New York
Times article on the whole thing where he mistakenly calls
it Project Jennifer Law. And there are a bunch of
other sources too. And we'll go ahead and shout out
pinto madness again. Why not? Because why not? All right,
listener mail, Yeah, I'm gonna call this really great thing
(48:25):
that you should think about throwing a few bucks too. Hey, guys,
want to preface this by saying I'm not looking for
a shout out. It's always a good way to get
a shout out. Yeah. I run a charity trivia night
every year in honor of my late wife that passed
away from brain cancer a few days after we got
married in the hospital. The events the event benefits Grace
(48:46):
giving a five h one C three we started for
brain cancer research donations, mainly for our trivia event. We
created the event three years ago and now in year three,
we sold out our three hundred person event and roughly
three minutes. It's awesome with one hundred and seventy people
on the waitlist. So I just want to publicize this event.
That's me talking Chuck. I should do it in voices. Yeah,
(49:10):
that way people would know. Do this guy's voice like
really high pitched. No, I'm not going to do that
to Mike. Mike's a really good guy. We've been emailing
back and forth. So it is April fourteenth this year
in Chicago, and our tickets. Can you even get tickets
to this thing? Well? I think it's sold out, but yeah,
I did say, can people at least donate because this
(49:31):
is such a great thing, and even if you've got
like five dollars, it's what this family's been through and
what they're doing now is pretty amazing. So I want
to say thanks for helping me out these last few years.
Love the podcast. Really enjoyed the PR Live show that
you put out. By the way, and by the way,
my roommate roommate is Emmett Cleary, the football player who
(49:51):
wrote in about CTE. Oh wow, remember that man alive?
So wait, these two roommates have both made Stuff you
Should Know. Listen to your mails. Yeah, that's really something.
How about that's some sort of trifecta. So if you
have it in your heart to throw a few bucks
toward Grace Giving, we can encourage you to do so.
You can go to Facebook dot com slash Grace Giving
(50:13):
twenty four great or just go you know, google that
stuff on the internet. And that is from Grace and Mike.
Thanks a lot, guys. It's very it's I think where
you're doing a fantastic Yeah, keep it going there in Chicago. Yep.
And if you want to let us know about something
great that we would want to publicize, you can get
in touch those via Twitter at sysk podcast you can
(50:36):
send us an email. This Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot
com and has always joined us at our home on
the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
AHOI everyone. For this week's select I've chosen our episode
on Project Azorean, one of the coolest, most bonkers cold
bar capers the CIA ever attempted. And I don't have
to tell you the CIA did some bonkers stuff during
the Cold War. So sit back, pull up your favorite
volume on naval history, and use it to clench onto
(00:22):
while you're driven to thrills by this episode of Stuffy
Should Know. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
(00:42):
There's Charles W Chuck Bryant. There's our ghosts podcaster producer.
Who's invisible Jerry's past? Yeah, actually the ghost of Jerry's present.
Jerry's not dead, everybody. No, that just sounded weird, it,
did it. We're keeping Jerry around. Yes, she just out
(01:03):
this week. Yeah, there you go. So it's just us, Chuck,
just a couple of boys batching it, just some good
old boys, never meaning no harm. No, something something been
in trouble with the loss. It's the day we were born.
I don't think there was something something before then? Is
there something something, something been in trouble? Yeah, right now,
(01:26):
I don't know, we'll go we'll look it up. You know.
It's funny. There's a great and we might have talked
about this years ago, but there's a great website called
Atlanta time Machine where you can go back and look
at old pictures of Atlanta and compare them to new
pictures and all that stuff. And they have some movie
specific pictures now. And they have the Dukes of Hazard
(01:47):
Pilot shoot photos, which was they eventually moved it out
in the country, but like most of the Dukes of
Hazard Pilot, all those car chases were in like midtown Atlanta.
Really isn't that crazy. But it was the original Bow
and Luke. Wow, who was the Who's sang the theme song?
Was it? Walk Toosh wayal And Jennings? Wasn't he the narrator?
(02:07):
It was whyal And Jennings? What was that first thing
he said? Walk toosh What does that mean? That's his nickname? Really,
walk Toosh Wayalen Jennings. I never heard that? Wow, it
is I love Wayale Jennings. Yeah, he's great. Apparently he
and Johnny Cash were roommates and highwaymen back well way
back in the day. Yeah, and both of them were
(02:28):
on drugs. But they didn't. Other people didn't know that.
So they both used to like be on drugs but
not tell each other about it. Really, And I guess
it came out later that they were like, you were
on drugs, said so was I wods like I used
to keep on drugs in the air conditioner and Johnny
Cash is like, that's why the air condisher never worked
(02:48):
and Whyalen and Jones was like, I used to keep
mining in the TV and Johnny Cash is or whoever was, Yeah,
their TV never worked, in their AC never worked because
that's where they stashed their drugs without the other one
knowing it. Why what are the drugs due to the
TV and the air conditioner? I got them pretty wasted?
What a weird start. Yeah, it is a little weird start,
(03:08):
especially because while we're talking about has nothing to do
with drugs, Johnny Cash or Waylon Jennings or air conditioners,
no TV really, No, it has to do with the
CIA yep, submarines yep, the USSR YEA cold war yep,
and Howard Hughes, Yeah, among other things been hidden with Kissinger.
(03:32):
Are you kissing him to his interesting? He's still alive too.
Maybe you'll hear this. I've never seen you hiss before.
I know. It's kind of threatening, is it, Yeah, because
I do have like a really sharp canine thing. Yeah,
you should. You should totally hiss more often. I should,
and I should shark in these things. I should file
them down. Oh people do that, I know, but surely
(03:55):
that has to hurt, right to file them down? Yeah? No,
how does it? Don't you have nerved No, they don't
hit the nerves, They just Oh, I guess you're right. Yeah, yeah,
I might do that. In the meantime, let's talk about something. Well,
let's let's go back to the beginning. Okay, okay, it's
nineteen sixty eight. I'm not exactly sure when, because look
(04:16):
the first part of my page ripped. Does it say
win in nineteen sixty eight? It does? You want to guess?
I feel like I'm holding the keys. May of nineteen
sixty eight, close March. It was pre summer of barely
Oh yeah, everybody's just getting started. It was the summer
of four play. Yeah, everyone's getting looped up, right, So
(04:36):
it is gross. So March of nineteen sixty eight in
the northwestern Pacific, as far as the United States is concerned,
which should be between say Hawaii and some far out
islands in Alaska and whatever else is out there. There's
not a lot out there. Yeah, apparently Hawaii is the
(04:57):
most remote island chain in the war world. Did you
know that. No, there's no island chain that's further away
from other land than Hawaii, even like when you look
at the globe those teeny tiny islands, uh huh from
what I understand. All right, so say Hawaiians at least. Yeah. Anyway,
basically out in the middle of nowhere in the northwest Pacific,
(05:18):
there was a Soviet sub It was a Golf two.
Golf two Soviet submarine. Yeah, they called it the cabri
Lay for a little while, but but that's Those were
the subs with the rag top. Yeah, those didn't work out.
The this Golf two sub was called the K one
twenty nine. Surely it had an actual name, right, No,
(05:40):
I think they called him the K whatever. All right, Well,
the K one twenty nine was on a routine patrol mission.
These are the Soviets they were glib about. You know,
let's call this one the Hannah Montana. Yeah, exactly right.
So it was just the K one twenty nine all business,
which actually is kind of reassuring because it was a
nuclear submarine. Sure, it had not only a nuclear missile,
(06:04):
like a nuclear missile you could come up to the
surface and shoot on to say, the United States. It
also had nuclear torpedoes, which I had no idea where
a thing, oh, really a nuclear torpedo. It's kind of
overkilled them to think. No, not if you're underwater and
you want to shoot a nuclear bombit somebody, Well, okay,
then that really fits the bill. Well, it turns out
(06:27):
that some of these nuclear tip torpedoes detonated, and there
wasn't a full nuclear detonation obviously, but it's obvious, but
it was enough to blow a hole in the submarine,
and I think kickoffs some other detonations in some of
the other nuclear torpedoes. And the upshot all this was
(06:47):
that the entire ninety eight person crew and the Soviet
submarine in the middle of the Cold War in nineteen
sixty eight, sunk about sixteen hundred miles or fifteen hundred
miles north west of and hit the bottom at sixteen
thousand feet more than three miles down. Yes, and so
(07:07):
kicks off the story of Project as Orean and the
Glomar Explorer. Yeah, so what happens, of course, is the
Soviets go looking for this thing. They spend a couple
of months, pretty massive search, couldn't find it. The US
is kind of laughing and saying, they haven't found their
own sub yet. Maybe we should go out there and
(07:30):
take a look, because we could probably get some intel,
maybe salvage a nuclear warhead for ourselves, spray paint a
smiley face that says something like right back at you,
it's a good one, and then throw it their way.
And in nineteen sixty eight, August of nineteen sixty eight,
just you know, quite a few months later, they actually
(07:51):
found it. The United States of America located this thing. Yeah,
so they they this is the official story. Here's the
thing that I figured up from researching this story. You
can also go ahead and assume that all of this
is fabricated and that there's actually other stuff that was
actually going on. Yeah, this is the story that's been
handed like this. Actually maybe the story that covers up
(08:14):
an assassination in Brazil or something like that. That could
be the whole reason this story exists. Because we're talking
about a covert operation in the sixties and seventies by
the CIA. Okay, so just take everything with the grain
of salt. But the story as it was reported and
as far as the CIA has ever admitted, was that
the Air Force and the Navy both had listening devices
(08:37):
throughout the Pacific, and somebody at some point said, well,
wait a minute, why don't we get these two together
and see if there's any data, any sounds that were
picked up from the sub exploding, and see if we
can pinpoint it basically triangulate with only two data points,
which is I guess straight line gulate, right, Yeah, yeah,
(08:57):
that is what it would be called. But suppose they
did it and they found where the sub was, and
like you said, the US was laughing because they were
watching the Soviets look in all the wrong places. We're
near it. And then after a couple of months, the
Soviets called off the search. And it was quite obvious
to the Americans that the Soviets had no idea where
(09:18):
the sub was, which made us think, maybe we should
check this thing out. Maybe we can go get it.
Yeah they so we have two choices. We can call
them and let them know where it is, or we
can go get it ourselves, and this is the height
of the Cold War. Yeah, So they weren't about to
go with choice one. No, so option two came upon
the table and we got our own sub called the Halibits.
(09:38):
We had fun names. The Halibit dropped a camera down
there on a sled and took a bunch of pictures
of this thing. Verified it's down there, it's intact. We
don't know for sure if we can go get it,
but we should try because if we can get this thing,
not only do we have potentially information on how these
(10:00):
warheads are being built by them, but we might also
be able to bust their codes with this cryptographic equipment
they have down there. And so let's launch a project.
And we love naming things, so let's name it Project Azorian. Yeah.
I guess that's the name of a person from the Azores.
Maybe maybe no idea where they'd come up with these names,
(10:21):
God love them, who knows, But Project as Orion was
the name of this this idea to go see if
we can get this sub right, yeah, which means, of
course we're not going to go out there next week
and start looking like there's a long process that has
to be undertaken before we can even figure out if
we can do this right. So they actually did get
(10:41):
together like a working group, a top secret working group
of engineers and nautical engineers and any kind of engineer
you can think of, and said, how would you do this?
It was a submarine, a twenty five hundred ton submarine
three hundred feet long. That's a thing in and of itself.
(11:04):
It's a big sub like that'd be hard to pick
up off land, sure, but it's not on land. It's underwater.
It's sixteen thousand, five hundred feet under the surface of
the Pacific Ocean in the middle of nowhere about is
in the middle of nowhere as you can get. And
how could we do this? How could we possibly pick
(11:25):
this up? And wait, wait, wait before you answer, you engineers,
the Soviets can have no idea what we're doing, because
they will probably think any ship that they thought was
going after this, I love this stuff more than most
stuff in the world. Yeah. Like, when there's this incredibly challenging,
almost insurmountical, insurmountable task and people get a lot of
(11:48):
smart people together and say, let's start brainstorming on how
if this is even possible? Right, I just think it's
really cool that and I bet these people, the engineers
are like, oh my god, this is a dream to
come up and try and solve this problem. Plus the
CIA said that they are holding my family hostage, so
I better get to work. So they decided, here's what
(12:10):
the only way we can try this is by doing this.
It's gonna involve three large vessels. One is a recovery
ship that basically has a chamber with the bottom that
could open and close like that ship in the Abyss. Yeah,
a moon pool. In fact that James Cameron totally glow
marred this totally for his own needs. It would have
(12:33):
a docking leg system that basically turned it into an
underwater on the ocean floor platform that I did not get.
I think just basically it goes down there instead of
like hovering in place, turns into a building. But I
don't understand. I didn't understand how. But yes, that is
the understanding. Well, I had four legs, but that's crazy.
(12:54):
That means they had four three mile long legs. Yeah,
that doesn't make which since that does? You know what
I mean? I need to see a picture. I've seen
pictures of it. I still don't know what it really
meant with the legs. Yeah, well I don't know then. So,
but that's that's one. That's the ship that they sail
out there to undertake the whole mission, right, Yeah, there's
(13:15):
two others that they have to come up with. Two.
That's right, capture vehicle. So that had a grabber right
on it. Yeah, like one of those banana clips that
girls used to wear in the nineties. Yeah, but for
a twenty five hundred ton submarine. Yes, and it wasn't
just like, hey, use a little grabber like that banana
clip it had. It was specifically designed to attach to
(13:38):
the submarine, right. It was the one glove, the one
thing it was designed to do. That's correct. So that's
that's step two. If you have one of these things
and you're loading it onto a massive ship. I think
a seven hundred foot ship is what they came up with.
Six hundred and eighteen foot long ship, many many meters long,
so many meters. Somebody's gonna say, what is that, Well,
(14:04):
the Soviets would yes, because they're flying over the US
with their spy cydlites ever since Sputnik got up there,
so they're gonna want to know what that is. The
Soviet analysts are going to point this out. So if
you have this big long ship that sticks out like
a sore thumb, because what are you doing with that thing?
What are you also doing with this big grabber? How
do you get around the grabber part at least chuck
(14:27):
oh the grabber? Yeah, well you must be talking about
the barge. I am, so this is pretty amazing. This
thing had a retractable sunroof basically, and it was the
whole reason this thing was here was to hide everything
right right, So it was they built the grabber vehicle,
the vehicle number two, inside the bargees. But like you said,
(14:52):
the barge had a sunroof. The thing about the barge
was it was also designed to be submersible. So what
they did was they built a barge that they built
the grabber inside of, floated the barge out to this
huge six and eighteen foot ship, Ship number one, submerged
it underneath the ship, opened up the sunroof on the barge,
(15:14):
opened up the moon pool on the big ship, and
raised the grabber vehicle into the six hundred and eighteen
foot ship, so that the Soviets never even knew the
grabber vehicle existed. They never saw it. It just didn't exist.
And they had to build all this stuff from scratch, right.
It wasn't just like they had a grabber laying around
(15:35):
that vit a Soviet sub precisely, or this barge that
could become invisible file accounts and they so this was
basically this is what this this working group came up with, like,
these are the things you need to do this? Yes,
And the CIA said, who can we possibly get? Who
(15:56):
in the world, Well, Howard Hughes, Yes, mister Howard Hughes,
specifically the Suma or Summa Corporation and that was a
part of the Hughes Tool Company. And they said, go
build this thing at thirty six thousand tons six and
eighteen feet like you said. And they called it the
(16:16):
Hughes Glomar Explorer because Global Marine was the company that
operated it. And that's just an abbreviation of Global Marine.
I did not know until a couple of days ago. Yeah,
it's sort of a disappointing end to what Glomar meant. Yeah,
because it sounds kind of like space ag It definitely does, like, wow,
look at the healthy glow from radiation exposure. On that thing, Glomar,
(16:40):
Glomar has got a great glow. And here's the other
cool thing. Because this would I mean, there would still
be a big beheamoth ship out there in the ocean
in the Pacific, and the Russians would wonder what was
going on. So they said, here's the deal. There are
actually it happened to sink in an area of the
Pacific where there are a lot of may Nganese, really
(17:00):
valuable manganese nodules underwater. So we'll just concoct this story
that said, Howard Hughes built the thing. You know how
crazy he is right to go out there and try
and mind the ocean's depths to get even richer. And
people actually bought that right. The press even bought it.
They went to the trouble of saying, this is actually
(17:21):
a really good cover story because there was manganese deposits
in the area. It checked out. There was the idea
of deep sea mining was very new, so there wasn't
There was the idea that this would be a good idea,
but no one had tried to undertake it yet, so
the Soviets couldn't have been like, that's not a deep
sea mining ship. No one knew it a deep sea
(17:42):
mining ship looked like yet. Yeah, Plus it was very
Huesy in thing to do exactly right. He was extremely wealthy,
so he had the kind of money to just undertake
deep sea mining and be the first one. But he
also operated in strict secrecy, and the press used to
watch his operation and projects from the outside and just
make guesses about it and create rumors. But it didn't
(18:06):
matter because it was all just conjecture and rumors, right, yeah,
so it was a perfect cover story. And then add
on to the top that Hughes was already in bed
with the US government in a number of ways, but
including making spy satellites in highly classified, top secret projects.
It was they couldn't have come up with a better
person to helm the actual carrying out of this of
(18:30):
the project. Should we take a break? Yeah? All right?
(19:04):
So this this took a while. It was like years
had passed between the sub sinking and then actually saying
all right, I think we have a plan to do
this and we can get this done. And by the
time that came around, they said, wait a minute, like
should we even should we go take another look at
this thing? Is still intact. Should we bother? Is this
(19:24):
still relevant? Is it an asset or is it just
some rusty old, you know, hunk a metal at the
bottom of the ocean. Yeah. Is it basically like a
museum thing now? Yeah, So they said, and we're not
into Russian museums. No, let's be honest. So they did
form another committee. We're great at that, and they did
take another look, and they said, you know what, let's
(19:46):
go down there, guys, because even though these missiles, the
ss N five missiles are no longer like their big threat,
they do have the ss N eight. Maybe we could
glean some technology and how these things operate, and there's
still that cryptographic equipment down there, which would be a
good asset for our intelligence. Right, So they said, okay,
(20:07):
let's do it. Come on, guys, let's do it. There
was another thing too, there's this great IO nine article
on this very project, and the author found some publication
of memos about project as orient Yeah, and one of
the things was that they were saying, like, yes, it's
(20:29):
still worth it intelligence wise and everything, but more to
the point, we're locked in the punch here, like the
US can't afford to seem wishy Washy to its contractors.
That's crazy, So we need to do this regardless. Yeah,
that's kind of nutty when you think about it. That
the the risk of pissing off Howard Hughes. Huh. I
guess was too great, right, And I mean it sort
(20:52):
of makes sense in a way because if he was
a big time contractor for them. Yeah, I feel like
that relationship going. But yeah, there's not that many top
secret factors that you know you need trust and yeah,
you don't want to take them off, right. Very interesting though,
are we saying pissed off? Now? Sure? Is that a thing?
I guess it made an appearance in the last episode two?
Did I say that just now? No? No, the the listener,
(21:16):
male guy Peter Oh about vaping. Yeahbody said, I'm pissed off.
If you can't if you can't tell, well, I'm not sure,
but I appreciate you drawing attention to it. Well. I
guess we'll find out if Jerry bleeps all this out
or if we get booted out of the sixth grade
classes around the world. Yeah, kids, what you should say
is off, ticked off, and you really shouldn't say that.
You should say that I'm going to use my words
(21:36):
and let you know that what you just said bothered me.
Oh is that what you're supposed to say? Yeah? Okay,
speak like an adult. So how adults speak? I say,
pissed off. Here's the other side note, and this will
come into play later, is that there was another memo
that said, you know what, there are bodies down there,
and according to the Geneva Convention nineteen forty nine, there's
(21:59):
a proper way that you handle even and quote unquote
enemies remains, and we're gonna abide by that, and we're
gonna take all the stuff we need to make sure
that we can do that in a respectful way, because
this will eventually probably come out and at least maybe
that'll be a slight goodwill gesture to the Russians that say, hey,
we were very respectful of your dead seamen. Right. So
(22:22):
they outfitted the Huge Glomar Explorer Bloor Explorer, the hGe
with I think a capacity to handle one hundred bodies. Yeah,
which is kind of funny. If you were a sailor
engineer on the Huge Glomar Explorer might have made you
a little nervous, considering there were ninety eight sailors on
(22:44):
the sub that you were going to get. So they
made room for two more two more dead guys. Don't
think that was by accident either. Yeah, they didn't just
round up to a nice even hundred cadaver coolers. They
I'm sure they're like, yeah, two people will probably die
on the mission, that's right. So there's there's another memo
(23:05):
from I think the nineteen seventy four June third, and
it basically said, hey, all this stuff's ready. The ship's ready,
the grabb Her class vehicle's ready, the barge is even ready.
Everything's ready. Let's do this. Are we going to do
it or not? They estimated a forty percent chance of success,
(23:28):
which they were like threw the moon over the moon about. Yeah,
they were over the moon pool about this, which is interesting.
But I guess when it's something something that tough to
accomplish and that innovative and and bleeding edge nice, the
apparently forty percent wasn't too bad, No, not at all.
(23:49):
So and that was like of one hundred percent success,
A forty percent chance of one hundred percent success, yeah, okay,
so well oh yeah, sure, so they the project has
approved June fifth, nineteen seventy four, and just a few
days later, on June fifteenth, the ship departed. The Hughes
Glomar explored departed I believe the port of Los Angeles. Yeah.
(24:13):
And another wrinkle that will come up a little bit
later is because this was so covert, they couldn't surround
it by battleships or have F sixteen's. Well they probably
didn't have. I don't know when the F sixteen came about.
I think maybe like the sixties or something. I'm sorry
to all the aviators, I'm sure we're way off, but
whatever fighter jets they had at the time, they couldn't
(24:38):
draw attention to themselves by being protected like that. It
would be really weird if there was a naval or
air force escort for a manganese ship. Right. Yeah, this
is a pretty I want to read this. So this
is pretty great. This quote from the CIA to kind
of just drive it home of what a task was
before them. Some in the CIA said this, Imagine standing
(25:02):
atop the Empire State Building with an eight foot wide
grappling hook on a one inch diameter steel rope. Your
task is to lower the hook to the street below,
snag a compact car full of gold, and lift the
car back to the top of the building. And on
top of that, the job has to be done without
anyone noticing. And that essentially describes what happened there, right,
(25:23):
That's what they were doing when they when they shipped out.
That was the task ahead of them, right, yes, and
add to this that it keeps getting worked well. Yeah,
but the Soviets were still surveiling everything. Right, So remember
like they couldn't have a US Navy escort of a
deep sea mining ship. That just looked really weird. But
(25:45):
that's not to say the Soviets didn't send their navy
out to see what was up. So for the first
two weeks after the Hughes Glomar Explorer made made it
to its destination and started working, there were Soviet ships
surveilling them basically twenty four hours a day for the
first fourteen days. Yeah, so these guys are actually undertaking
(26:07):
raising a Soviet sub within sight of Soviet naval ships
watching them, and the Soviet they were really nervous at
this point. They didn't know if the Soviet navy was
going to try to board the Glomar Explorer just to
be like, what are you guys doing. You're making us
nervous and apparently the CIA. One of the CIA offers
on board was like, we need to stack some crates
(26:30):
on our helicopter landing pad to prevent them from landing.
And there was I don't know exactly what alert status
it was on, but maybe high alert, which was there's
a chance of soviets are going to board, there's sensitive
materials on board. The team that's in charge of destroying
those sensitive materials. You guys are on alert the people charge,
(26:51):
but defending the team, you guys are on alert, but
we're not going to give you guns yet because we
haven't reached that point. This is the tension. But what
were they supposed to do? Like karate chop? I think
karate chop? Wow. It was like you can karate them,
but don't shoot them. They're probably going to shoot you, yeah,
but just deflect the bullets with your karate chops. So
(27:12):
they're out on the ocean. It's very complicated mission, to
say the least. So you've got your ocean currents at work.
You have to maintain your position through those. That's hard enough.
Then you had to lower this capture vehicle by doing this,
adding sixty foot pieces of steel pipe one at a time,
(27:32):
connecting to each other sixty feet at a time, three
miles down right to lower that recovery vehicle down to
the sub and then when it gets down there, it
has to be just in the right position to straddle
over that submarine and get that grabber out, attach it
to the hull, and then reverse that whole process by
(27:55):
now towing a freaking submarine yep, by taking one sixty
foot length pipe off at a time until you're raising
the sub like that. You know what I need to
see to understand this fully is remember the beginning of
Titanic when James Cameron did that terrible obvious recreation of
what happened to sink the Titanic. Was at the very
(28:15):
beginning when Bill Paxton was in modern Days and they're
out searching for the Jewel of the Sea, and he says, well,
that guy with the beard, you know, the nerd, fat
bearded guy that's in every movie, to explain what's going on,
And he said, here's how the Titanic sunk, And it
did the little recreation on the screen and showed exactly
how it happened, just so everyone would know. That's what
(28:36):
I need to see. Yeah, oh of this, I need
a chubby bearded guy to explain to me visually. That's
not me or Ellen Page. You want to be an
inception and you want to be inception. Yeah, no, I
know what you mean. The problem is is there are
so many holes in this story. I need a picture book.
(28:58):
But everybody's everybody accepts that there's holes in the story
because it's a covert CIA operation. Yeah, that is just
we'll probably never fully be explained, although there have been
interviews with people who are on the ship. They could
probably tell you, we'll look them up after this. Yeah.
And at the very end of that whole process of
bringing this thing up, then it's not like they get
(29:18):
it up kind of close enough to the ship and
they're like, all right, it's thirty feet below us, we'll
just glide in from here. Then they had to suck
it on board and stow it in the docking well
right successfully. Yes. I could you imagine getting it to
where it's right below them and then it breaks free.
I'd be so nervous. And that's kind of almost what happened.
That's close to what happened. So remember the Soviet navy
(29:40):
is circling them, and they're lowering this claw down to
the sub, but also like, we're not doing anything over here,
just no guns, right, So they reach the sub and
start doing the submersible claw thing, and at that time
the Soviet Navy twots three times like peep peep, peep,
(30:01):
see you later, and they laughed for good. And so
the Glomar explorer starts raising the sub. They get it.
I have no idea how they know they've gotten it,
but they've got the sub. I don't know how they
directed this thing over the sub. I don't understand either.
I'm totally with you, But as far as the story's concerned,
(30:21):
the claw got the sub and they started raising it,
and they got it over the course of a few
days a mile up and then all of a sudden.
That's an extremely incredible accomplishment. I know. Imagine trying to
sleep while this thing is like slowly being pulled. Yeah,
you would not, you'd not be able to. But there
was an engineer who was on the ship who later
(30:43):
recounted in an interview that there was something that felt
like about a ten second long earthquake on the ship.
And he said, you knew something bad had happened. Yeah,
and this was right after he said it's going great, everybody.
We can't lose now that first miles the trick. Yeah. So,
I mean, I guess was it an earthquake? No, it
(31:04):
was the sub breaking up in the submersible claw. Oh okay,
I thought that caused it to break up. No, he
said it felt like an earthquake. That's how big of
a an energetic release it was. So the sub breaks apart.
I guess it had been down there so long that it, uh,
it just wasn't you know, it wasn't viable as a
(31:26):
single solid piece of metal anymore. Here's what I think
happened based on some other stuff, like later memos. They
said that they needed to redesign the claw so that
it wasn't as britty. Yeah, the banana clip, so that
it wasn't as brittle, and that it was well, so
it wasn't as brittle. I think the claw broke up
(31:48):
and some of the sub was able to fall out.
Some remained in it's held into the grabber, but most
of the sub, this is a three hundred foot sub,
about two one hundred and sixty feet of it broke
off and fell back a mile down to the ocean floor.
So I thought you meant that the grabber should have
(32:08):
had like, did anybody think to put felt on this
grab of right or rubber tips on the end of
the clause? No they didn't. Oh I know. So the
the most of the sub, including all the stuff the
CIA was after all the good stuff, the the the
code books, the con tower. They're like, we had the galley, right,
(32:29):
they ate, well, like, I guess that's okay. I love borshed,
so that it is a silver lining. Yeah, they only
got what ten percent of this thing, yeah, which which
was the four of the sub The four of the
subs stayed in the grabber claw and they were able
to bring it the rest of the way up and
salvage it, which included the nuclear torpedoes. Unfortunately for the
CIA and everybody aboard. The nuclear torpedoes were of course
(32:53):
something that had detonated, so they all suffered from some
plutonium exposure as well. Yeah, so it was it was
their exposure was consistent with the fact that there was
in fact nuclear materials. Right. Yeah, they had been exposed
to these nuclear torpedoes. Not they didn't get their hands
on the nuclear missile they were after, right, Basically none
of the prize that they were looking for they got
(33:13):
their hands on. But one thing they did find on
their hands all of a sudden were the bodies of
six Soviet submariners. Yeah, for submarriners. How do you say it?
I think sub mariner. Okay, but we'll get taken to
task and told the right way. Well, we said both,
so you can't get it wrong when you say it
both ways. So, like we said, they could hold a
(33:33):
hundred bodies, so they could certainly hold six. And then
I guess ninety four other guys on board worried I
would guess, so, and they did. They had copies of
Soviet burial manuals American burial manuals. They had a ceremony.
Did you watch the video of this? I did, well,
(33:54):
some of it they conduct They've filmed it in color,
and I love How is it you who wrote this part? Yeah?
I love how you put it. The bizarre an inexplicably
futuristic video. Yeah, it looks weird. It looks like it
does look like a George Orwellian like transmission from the future. Right,
But if the future was in the nineteen eighties and
(34:14):
it was being written in the nineteen twenties, right, and
the reason why I put my finger on it. Finally,
it's men wearing matching coveralls in hard hats disposing of bodies,
and the video quality is just weird. It's just perfectly weird. Yeah,
just go check it out. It's a I guess CIA
project is z Orian Burial at C. I think would
(34:36):
probably bring it up on YouTube. And eventually this film
was turned over to Boris yeltson Somebody Still Loves You
Boris Yelton in nineteen ninety two by CI director Robert Gates.
At that time, yeah, do we take another break? Yeah,
I think we're going all right, go wow, all right,
we're gonna wrap up this whole mess in just a minute.
(35:26):
So they found it. Once they got part of it,
should they go again? That was the big question, right,
And there was a lot of discussion that the CIA,
for its part, was like, I don't know if there's
anything left of that sub like it's the seventies now, right.
We lucked out that it was intact to begin with.
After a series of explosions, Yeah, we're pretty sure that
(35:49):
the stuff that fell a mile back down to the
seafloor probably broke up. Yeah, I'm suspicious of that, but
that was the CIA's position. Regardless. Kiss and the rest
of the Nixon administration were like, how can we do
this again? The thing is, right around the same time
(36:09):
Nixon resigned, and all of a sudden, everybody who'd been
high flying and freewheeling and overthrowing governments and all that
were suddenly like, nothing, we're not doing anything. There's no
operations going on whatsoever. So the idea of a second
project being undertaken was pretty doubtful for a number of reasons. Yeah.
(36:31):
And one of the other big reasons was that this
whole cryptographic equipment and the codes probably weren't even relevant
by that point. Yeah, And so they didn't think I mean,
they're basically like, there's so little upside to this at
this point, they Kissinger. I think he even finally relented, right, Yeah,
I think so, it's not the worth it. What I
found was interesting was that a later interview by an
(36:53):
admiral said, even if you found the code books and
you found the communications equipment and figured out the arrangement
of like the burst transmitters and circuits and all that stuff,
all you'd be able to do is break the codes
for a twenty four hour period. Yeah, but that would
(37:14):
have been the case no matter if they've gotten the
whole suburbine at any point, so that it was already
years later when they first went down, right, So I
guess they you probably would still be a pretty big
treasure trove intelligence wise, to just get a one day
snapshot of Soviet submarine operations, they'd probably be worth it.
But maybe it was more about those warheads though. I
(37:36):
think that was definitely part of it too. But they
said there's probably not a good chance we're going to
do this. The other the other problem was this, by
this time, journalists named Seymour Hirsch, who's written some of
the most some of the deepest exposees on the US
government ever written, wrote about the Mili massacres. He wrote,
(38:02):
he didn't write, or he wrote a few stories on
the Frank Olsen case that Wormwood was based on. Seymour
Hurst was in that towards the end. Yeah, he's written
a bunch of stuff. He had this story down cold.
He had everything for well over a year before it
finally broke and the CIA director went to Hurst and said,
(38:24):
don't please, don't say anything about this. Please sit on
the story. Please sit on the story, and behind Hirsh's
back or right from under him. The story ended up
breaking in the most bizarre, suspicious way it possibly could have. Yeah. Well,
and even before that, a very famous term came about
because of this. There was a Rolling Stone writer named
(38:44):
Harriet and Philippi, and she flat out asked the CIA
to reveal its existence. And that's where the phrase we
can neither confirm nor deny its existence came into play,
which is now known as the Glomar response. Right, if
you've ever heard that, that's where it comes from. Yea,
which is a great little cherry on top. I think
I think so too. Even though this isn't the end,
(39:04):
No it's not. It gets even weirder to tell you
the truth. Yeah. So, Harriet and Philippi was asking about
Project as Orion because there is a cryptic, weird, little
short news blurb in the Los Angeles Times that was
basically about some gossip and rumor that was circulating at
the LAPD and among cops in LA There was a
(39:25):
rumor that the Hughes Corporation had cooperated and carried out
a project to retrieve a lost Soviet sub with the CIA.
Weren't any other details about that. They said it was
in the Atlantic Ocean. There were a lot of problems
with this story, but for the first time ever, it
started to see the light of day. And the whole
(39:47):
reason that that was in there, Chuck, was just the
weirdest things that I think, the weirdest part of this
story and the most suspicious. Yeah, the fact that all
this came together in this way is pretty remark So.
The huge Summa corporation that we talked about, they were
broken into. Their HQ was broken into in Los Angeles.
(40:09):
They got cash, they got boxes of documents, including a
memo describing this secret project to the CIA, and no
one knew for sure whether or not they had this
document or not, right the thieves yes, until a few
months later there was this I guess sort of deep
throat intermediary person that called up and said, hey, we
(40:32):
have possession of a lot of these stolen papers. They
didn't say we have the CIA document about Project Hazorian,
but they say we've got boxes full of stuff, we
got binders full of women, right, and we'll take a
half a million bucks to return this to you, right.
And so there's a couple of points that need to
be mentioned. This is the fourth or fifth breaking of
(40:53):
a huge office in like the last four or five months. Yeah,
and what they think They think the Vegas mob and
the Saint Louis mob was involved, but they don't know
who they were working for. Were they working for the government,
were they working for Howard Hughes. Who were they working for?
But they were very clearly after some specific papers. They
think what they were after was definitive evidence that Howard
(41:16):
Hughes owned a number of high level politicians in the
United States and that they actually found it. There was
a Center report that was repressed at the last minute.
So they do think that they found evidence of just high,
high corruption, but that they didn't know that they had
this CIA document in their possession until the CIA accidentally
(41:40):
tipped them off. Yeah. So the CIA tells the FBI
about this police report that the the LA cops supposedly
have h and there's being offered up for sale and
for money and it might have this project is orient information.
The FBI then tells the LA police about this because
they didn't know They didn't know about this. They just
knew that they had this box full. They were being
(42:03):
offered to exchange this box full of documents for a
lot of cash. They didn't know what was inside of it.
Apparently people I had it didn't know what was inside
of it. So the LA police told this dude who
tried to broker the deal and the CIA. That's how
the CIA found out about it, right this. I think
the CIA was surveiling the LAPD, I probably as a
(42:24):
matter of course, and found out about the LAPD being contacted.
Right like you said, the CIA contacts the FBI. The
FBI contexts the LAPD, and the LAPD says to the intermediary, Hey,
do you happen to have a document that shows the
Hughes Corporation trying to receive retrieve a Soviet sub for
the CIA thumbed through the boxes and let me know
(42:46):
if you see the word Azorian And the intermediary says
b RB Yes, And the next thing you know, the
La Times is starting to report on it. Yeah. February seventh,
nineteen seventy five. La Times article US reported to russ
sub short for Russian. Sure, I guess they just had
a They wanted that big font right, They couldn't get
(43:07):
it get Russian in there. So, according to reports circulating
among local law enforcement officers, Howard Hughes had contracted with
the CIA to raise a sunken Russian nuclear submarine from
the Atlantic Ocean. Not true. It was a Pacific right,
and again just a lot of holes in this. However,
(43:27):
it was now out there. So there's a dude named
Jack Anderson, I believe, who had a nationally syndicated radio show,
and he was the first to really mention this thing,
and he said he was going to get to the
bottom of it and reveal some more stuff about it.
And by this time, once he did that, all of
the reporters who were sitting on stories about it, all
(43:48):
bets were off, including Seymour Hirsh And so mysteriously, the
day after Jack Anderson mentions it, there's front page in
depth stories about Project as Orion, which they rectally called
Project Jennifer on newspapers around the country. And the cat
was out of the bag. As they say, I'm Jack
Anderson and that's the last word. It sounds like that's
(44:12):
the kind of show he would add. Yeah, Yeah, he's
got his fedora with scoop like in in the bill. Yeah,
I'm kind of curious about why project or why Jennifer
was the name of the compartment. So this I okay,
so it comes like some sexist thing to me if
you asked me, I think it was just maybe like
(44:32):
a hurricane, like they just that was up for usage.
But the compartment, it's it's kind of like all communications,
all memos, all everything that has to do with this
project goes into this compartment. And somebody thought the compartment
name Jennifer was the name of the project, so they
messed that up. Yeah, but they got just about everything
(44:53):
else right. And so by the time that this story
comes out, the US is like, well, it's the Soviets
are about to unleash hell on Earth diplomatically, maybe militarily.
This is going to be really bad. And the US
braced itself for a response and out of Moscow crickets. Yeah,
(45:15):
and for very good reasons, all of which kind of
tie back to embarrassment. Three things. Mainly, they would have
to admit that they lost a sub which would be embarrassing.
They would have to admit that they couldn't find it
and the US could find it super embarrassing, and then
they had to admit that we were following them out there.
(45:36):
In the ocean and saw them doing something. But we
turned around and went home. We went beep beep, so
super triple embarrassment. So they said, nyet, we're not doing it.
And I think it's interesting. I've seen a bunch of
stories lately about the Cold War where like where we
knew something that the Soviets knew, but no one could
(45:57):
admit it out loud. So there was a lot of
city back and like, all right, are they going to
say something? Uh? Huh are they going to say something?
All right, they're not saying anything. So despite that, despite this,
this this uh assessment that the Soviets weren't going to
publicly acknowledge this, and the United States certainly didn't publicly
acknowledge it either. Despite that, it was clear that the
(46:20):
Soviets also weren't going to be like, sure, go ahead,
try to get the rest of the sub. They were
worried that if they did go back out, the Soviets
would maybe sink whatever ship tried to go out there. Yea,
the Soviets had a military presence, a naval presence around
the site the whole time from that moment on. Once
the story broke and they said that's it. It's it's done.
(46:41):
So for all we know, they went back and managed
to sneak it out from under the Soviets. For all
we know, this never happened, and that all of this
is actually a cover story for that break in of
the Hughes Corporation. That's what I think. Yeah, or for
all we know, this is all gospel truth. I mean,
maybe it's sitting next to a spaceship in the area,
if one right deep within the earth, and a bunker
(47:02):
very well could be Chuck, don't be so naive. In
the end, and today's money, it cost about three billion bucks.
And here's the kind of fun ending is that Glomar explorer.
Remember the barge. It was eventually retrofitted to be a
regular deep sea drilling barge. The whole the whole ship.
Oh I thought just the barge was. No, the whole
(47:23):
ship was. So it was finally sold only eight years
ago to a private company for fifteen million bucks. Yeah,
I think for scrap. Oh the secrets they're in, I know,
can you believe it? But they actually finally did do
deep sea mining and then get this, Howard Hughes got
a free deep sea mining ship out of it because
(47:43):
the government paid him to build it. That guy, that guy, Well,
if you want to know more about Project the Zorian,
you should probably go back in time and join the CIA.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Oh,
and shout out to the great IO nine article that
time the CIA and Howard Hughes tried to steal a
Soviet submarine by Mark Strauss. That was a great source.
(48:05):
So two with Seymour Hurst's nineteen seventy five New York
Times article on the whole thing where he mistakenly calls
it Project Jennifer Law. And there are a bunch of
other sources too. And we'll go ahead and shout out
pinto madness again. Why not? Because why not? All right,
listener mail, Yeah, I'm gonna call this really great thing
(48:25):
that you should think about throwing a few bucks too. Hey, guys,
want to preface this by saying I'm not looking for
a shout out. It's always a good way to get
a shout out. Yeah. I run a charity trivia night
every year in honor of my late wife that passed
away from brain cancer a few days after we got
married in the hospital. The events the event benefits Grace
(48:46):
giving a five h one C three we started for
brain cancer research donations, mainly for our trivia event. We
created the event three years ago and now in year three,
we sold out our three hundred person event and roughly
three minutes. It's awesome with one hundred and seventy people
on the waitlist. So I just want to publicize this event.
That's me talking Chuck. I should do it in voices. Yeah,
(49:10):
that way people would know. Do this guy's voice like
really high pitched. No, I'm not going to do that
to Mike. Mike's a really good guy. We've been emailing
back and forth. So it is April fourteenth this year
in Chicago, and our tickets. Can you even get tickets
to this thing? Well? I think it's sold out, but yeah,
I did say, can people at least donate because this
(49:31):
is such a great thing, and even if you've got
like five dollars, it's what this family's been through and
what they're doing now is pretty amazing. So I want
to say thanks for helping me out these last few years.
Love the podcast. Really enjoyed the PR Live show that
you put out. By the way, and by the way,
my roommate roommate is Emmett Cleary, the football player who
(49:51):
wrote in about CTE. Oh wow, remember that man alive?
So wait, these two roommates have both made Stuff you
Should Know. Listen to your mails. Yeah, that's really something.
How about that's some sort of trifecta. So if you
have it in your heart to throw a few bucks
toward Grace Giving, we can encourage you to do so.
You can go to Facebook dot com slash Grace Giving
(50:13):
twenty four great or just go you know, google that
stuff on the internet. And that is from Grace and Mike.
Thanks a lot, guys. It's very it's I think where
you're doing a fantastic Yeah, keep it going there in Chicago. Yep.
And if you want to let us know about something
great that we would want to publicize, you can get
in touch those via Twitter at sysk podcast you can
(50:36):
send us an email. This Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot
com and has always joined us at our home on
the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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