What bizarre tale can tie together a sunken nuclear submarine, a mechanical claw, an eccentric billionaire, some manganese, and some Cold War intrigue? That can only be Project Azorian, you murmur. If you do, you have probably listened to a Radiolab podcast called Neither Confirm Nor Deny which is how I learnt about it. This story relates to one of the most massive covert operations ever handled by the CIA. It resulted in the existence of a phrase that has had journalists and lawyers scratching their head for 50 years.
In January of 1968, a U.S. Naval ship was captured after leaving Japan. This made the U. S. worried that the Soviets had their code books and they thought that they should try to get even. Two months later, a Soviet nuclear submarine suffered an internal explosion while on a routine patrol mission and sank in the Pacific Ocean, northwest of Hawaii. The Soviets undertook a massive, 2-month search, but never found the wreckage. However, the unusual Soviet naval activity prompted the U.S. to begin its own search for the sunken vessel, which they found in August 1968. To the US, the soviet sub, if recovered, would provide invaluable information for the intelligence community since it contained code books, missiles, and nuclear-tipped torpedoes.
The problem was that the submarine was three miles below the surface of the ocean, and the pressure at that depth was roughly 7,500 pounds per square inch. No one had recovered anything from such a depth. To get a sense of the scale of the task involved, the Titanic was about 1.5 km shallower. Malaysia Airlines flight 370 is presumed to be at around 800m less depth. Moreover, the recovery had to be done in secret, lest a very real war should break out should the Russians find out. But the temptation to obtain cryptographic equipment that would allow them to decipher Soviet naval codes was too great, so the CIA began a covert operation called Project Azorian.
They'd have to lift something like 6 million kgs. They got some engineers together in top secret to brainstorm ideas to reinvent the science of deep sea recovery. They finally decided to build a huge, eight-fingered claw and put it in a boat, bring it out on the high seas, and then lower the claw on a three-mile long piece of pipe string. They would position the claw over the submarine and yank it off the bottom of the ocean, pulling it back into the boat. Gates would open on the bottom of the boat and the claw and the submarine would come into a chamber.
They got the money and the approval from the president. But they still needed a cover story. So they called up the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and told him to pretend to have a sudden interest in manganese mining from the bottom of the ocean. So his people built a massive ship called The Hughes Glomar Explorer - It was built by a company called Global Marine. Global Marine - GloMar. Altogether, 6 years, and $800 million (more than $2 billion today) worth of unparalleled espionage by the Central Intelligence Agency was invested in the project.
In July of 1974, they got the boat to the right spot, and they lowered the claw. The claw descended three miles to the bottom of the ocean where the submarines was located. The claw had lights and cameras on it so they could see what was happening. The claw wrapped its massive claw hand around this sub and began to pull it back up. 14,000 feet, 12,000 feet ... But there is an age-old problem that often costs mice and men a lot of pain; a pain that the poet Burns so correctly identified - their best laid schemes tend to go astray. About 2.7km from the surface, there seemed to be a bump but everything looked normal on the television screens.
But then it suddenly occurred to the operators that these television images had not been refreshed. And when they refreshed those images and got the real time picture of what was going on, it showed that most of the submarine - the part with the nukes, with the missiles, maybe with the codebooks, and all the stuff they wanted - had broken off, and years of work, millions of dollars just slowly sank to the bottom of the ocean. Meanwhile, a ragtag crew aboard a Soviet tugboat was only 150 feet away keeping a watch on the Americans. On August 6, 1974, with their lost submarine literally right under its nose, the Soviet boat decided it had seen enough of all this “deep ocean mining,” and left for home.
2/3 of their haul might have fallen away, but the men aboard Glomar knew they still had something on the line. What about the part that remained? What they found in that piece has never been disclosed. Not long after that disappointing loss, the story starts to break in the press. Journalists start calling up the CIA, and they have to figure out what to say and what not to say. This a was tricky task because of a diplomatic element and a legal element. US didn't want the Soviets to know either what had been found out or what hadn't been found out; hence the dilemma.
If the US said the truth - that they didn't recover any information on Soviet missiles - then that would tell the Soviets that they don't have to worry about the security regarding their warheads. But the US wanted them to worry. But if they said that the US did recover information on the missiles, but were not telling, then it would be lying which could not be done. Why? Because of something called the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA. The law says that anybody, any American should be able to ask the government for documents and the government has to respond.
But every CIA employee is legally bound to protect intelligence sources and methods. It's not an option, it's a law. So the CIA found itself in a soup - Under the FOIA law, the public has a right to know. On the other hand, the CIA has a legal obligation to not tell. The CIA has to say something, it has to be truthful when it says it, but it also cannot reveal anything. Enter a lawyer who devised a solution in half an hour. Here's what he came up with.
We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified and could not be disclosed.
Journalists fought it in court, and the fight went on for years, but eventually the government won. The judge agreed to their logic, that sometimes, revealing even the existence of documents endangers national security. Since that initial Glomar Response in 1975, more and more government agencies have begun to use it. And it is not the obvious ones related to national security issues. Thus, you now get such a "Glomar response" from the Department of Commerce, Department of the Treasury, Department of Energy, Center for Disease Control.
The government may ultimately lose in all of these cases, but it will lose at a time when the public debate will have moved on to something else. The popular perception about the Glomar Response is that it's just a delaying tactic. By the time the truth finally comes out, people don't actually care anymore. It's ancient history. It embodies the tension between the public’s desire for transparency and the government’s need to keep secrets.
The first tweet by the CIA showed that it had a sense of humour - "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet." The tricky evasion has become the bane of watchdogs and journalists -- but its utility for those seeking to keep things beyond prying eyes has withstood the test of time, as evidenced by its proliferation, even among private companies and celebrities like Will Smith, Pixar characters, legislators.
