In 1968, a Soviet nuclear submarine sank 16,500 feet to the bottom of the Pacific, taking 98 crew members with it. The CIA decided to steal it — secretly building the world's largest deep-sea recovery vessel with eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes as the cover story. Six years of planning, $800 million spent, and the Soviets never suspected a thing until journalists broke it in 1975.
The big-picture overview of the most ambitious covert operation of the Cold War — and why the Soviets spent years searching for their own submarine while the CIA had already found it.
The sub at the center of it all: a Golf II-class ballistic missile submarine that vanished in March 1968 with 98 men aboard — whose wreck the U.S. Navy located before the Soviet Navy found their own vessel.
Six years of planning documented in full: how the CIA convinced the White House, designed the cover story, built an impossible ship, and attempted to raise a 1,750-ton submarine from the bottom of the Pacific.
The cover story that made it all possible: how Howard Hughes's reputation for eccentric projects made a 618-foot spy ship disguised as a deep-sea mining vessel completely plausible to the world.
The CIA's own account of the operation on their official website — read carefully for what a spy agency describes as 'one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War.'
The operational details: how the Hughes Glomar Explorer's giant mechanical claw reached three miles down, what shattered during the lift, and exactly what intelligence the CIA managed to recover.
The comprehensive account of the full operation and its exposure — including the birth of the 'Glomar Response,' the CIA's famous 'we can neither confirm nor deny' line that agencies still use today.