Angry Planet - The CIA’s Super-Secret Submarine Scooper

Episode Date: October 2, 2017

Sometimes the only way a spy agency can hide a secret is under the brightest of spotlights. This week, we talk with author Josh Dean about how the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology works and about some of its most audacious projects, including the SR-71 Blackbird.According to Dean, though, nothing tops the CIA plan to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from 3-miles deep in the Pacific. Even more than 40 years later, the technology used to do it is nearly state of the art, and the cover story seems even more unlikely.We cover a lot of ground in the podcast, but for even more, check out Dean’s book: The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History. You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Yeah, so once the decision was made to go and steal a submarine, then the question becomes, how do you steal a submarine? No submarine had ever been salvaged from any depth below, I think it's 200 feet. I mean, something absurd, not absurd, just it's so complicated to pull it, very heavy out.

you're talking millions of pounds of steel through water from something on the surface that's bouncing around. I mean, it's just very complicated. And this was at 16,700 feet, I think. So, I mean, beyond orders of magnitude. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Today, we're talking about the CIA, which is famous for some pretty incredible blunders, like exploding cigars and evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which maybe wasn't there. But there are also some successes, and some of those have really faded away from, you know, people's thoughts.

Today, we're talking with Josh Dean. He's the author of Taking of K-129. He's going to tell us about this super secret mission that involve thousands of people, hundreds of millions of dollars, and impossible technical challenges. So, Josh, welcome. Thanks. Can you just start off by giving us a super short version of the story?

I mean, what is K-129 to start off with? Yeah, it makes for a tough elevator pitch because it's a crazy banana's complicated story. But basically, the Soviets lost a ballistic nuclear missile submarine in 1968 for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to this day. But a submarine sank. in the remote North Pacific carrying three ballistic missiles. And the U.S. Navy found it.

Well, actually, a combination of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force using underwater hydrophones, located the wreck, used the first special project submarine, the USS Hallibut, to go film the submarine, make sure it was in good enough condition to plunder, and then hatched a plot to steal it. I mean, you would think that the Navy would get the job to salvage a submarine because they are the Navy. But the CIA at this time had established a incredible 15-year run of audacity and just bananas engineering, where they had built and overseen the construction of the U2 spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird,

which they called the A-12 Oxcart, the Corona spy satellite. So just things that really couldn't have been done within the traditional sort of Pentagon bureaucracy, not because amazing machines are not built there, but it takes a lot of time and it's really hard to do things in secret, especially when they're huge. So the CIA was given the job of creating a plan to steal this submarine. And they did it by creating a ship like none other, a ship and system to salvage something that. That was three miles at the bottom of the ocean. So, I mean, orders of magnitude deeper than anything had been salvaged, anything of size. So that's not a very short explanation, but that's the story in broad strokes.

Were the Soviets aware of what was going on? No, actually, what happened was that when the Soviets lost it, they launched a massive search as you would. So basically, the U.S. Navy had observed. this flurry of activity in an area specific where that wasn't normal. And there was no attempt to be secret. We're talking like submarines, ships, planes, just all hands-on-deck search for something.

And because we were monitoring sub-departures from the harbors, I mean, both sides did that. We sort of knew what had been out at sea and what was unaccounted for and assumed that it was this submarine, probably, the K-129. But the way that the search was conducted and the identification was all in secret.

So I don't think the Soviets really understood the capability of this underwater hydrophone system, which was known as SOSUS, installed by a company that became AT&T, really, well, designed by. So they were very sensitive hydrophones at the bottom of the ocean listening for particular submarine signatures, essentially. Every sub motor and propeller has a particular sound, almost like a fingerprint. So we would listen and try and keep track of where those subs were and sort of piggybacked onto those systems with something called AFTAC, which was the Air Force's nuclear test listening system. So those microphones were listening for nuclear tests and the splashdown of ICBMs in the ocean so that maybe we could go and steal those. So I don't think the Soviets had any idea of the sophistication and the spread and breadth of that system.

so probably didn't realize we could have found it. And then even when it was located, the USS Hallibut went out there. A nuclear-powered spy sub went out and found the wreck and filmed it and took pictures and studied it. Again, there's no way they would have known that either. So it's fairly certain that they had no idea we found it until much later. And they had just given up on it. Yeah, yeah, they had.

I mean, apparently a lot of time, and I forget exactly how much time was spent on the search. a not insignificant amount of time. So it's not like they didn't try, but I think it was clear the sub was lost. It was lost in an area where the ocean is three miles deep, and we're talking up to 17,000 feet. And I think even if they had found it, I don't think the Soviets at that time had the capability to get to it and recover anything of size.

I mean, it was so deep. They probably figured it's lost. We couldn't do anything anyway. And being the Soviet Union, they didn't have the same responsibility to the population that we would, if something like that happens, they kind of brushed it under the carpet and said, well, you know, these guys were lost at sea, but they didn't have to tell it to the newspapers, for instance. And in fact, Soviet submarine disasters weren't widely publicized at all.

So this happened in 1968, the sinking, not the recovery. Yep. There were four subs total that sank that year. It was a bad year for submarines, yes. And I'm wondering if that's unusual. Was there any kind of connection between these sinkings? Definitely unusual. In fact, I would say highly unusual.

I'm not sure there's ever been a year with more than two. Well, okay, World War II, there were a lot of submarines that were sunk all the time. But in the nuclear era, the K-129 was not a nuclear powered sub. It was a diesel-electric sub carrying nuclear ICBMs. But it was highly unusual. Now there are conspiracy theories that will connect. the K-129 loss with loss of the scorpion. Basically saying that the U.S., that the Soviets retaliate, okay, I should back up and say,

inside the Soviet Union and now in Russia, they're convinced that the K-129 sank because of an accidental collision with a U.S. submarine that was tailing it. Oh, really? The Navy has denied that. Yeah, the Navy denies that. There's never any evidence that that happened, but that is the story if you ask somebody in Russia today. So those people, and then people inside of the U.S. who believe that story, for instance, will tell you that maybe the Soviets in retaliation sank the scorpion, and that's how the two are connected. Now, there's no evidence of that.

I don't know what caused the sinking, and I avoided that because it wasn't really important from the way I told the story, which was really from the American perspective, of, like, a submarine has lost, we found it, let's go get it. that's really the summary of how I did the story. Okay, that makes sense, although it does make me think, well, it would be really convenient. It would be pretty easy to know where the sub ended up on the seafloor if you were involved in the accident that left it there. Right. I mean, can I can't say definitively that it's not some part of me that wonders if that's true.

But if that's the case, then there's been one hell of a 40-year cover-up. And it would have required, you know, I mean, not just keeping people silent. but that they would have had to concoct this entire SOSUS Aftac story. And, you know, hit it from the CIA because I've talked to enough people who worked on this operation. Certainly they don't think that's what happened or they don't know that's what happened. So the Navy would have been lying to its sister agency. It would have been lying to the CIA and people within the Pentagon hierarchy. So, you know.

Gotcha. I'll save that for info wars. Okay. Well, before we get into the technology that was used by the CIA, the various tools that were brought to bear and the agencies that did actually have to work together, I wanted to talk a little bit about the engineering division inside the CIA. Typically, I was thinking before I had read your book that, you know, they made some poison umbrellas and they also, you know, having seen enough James. Bond films, I assumed that there were plenty of car submarines and things like that, right? But it never really occurred to me that they were really into the engineering business. So could you take us through just a little bit about the U2 and then the SR71 also?

I mean, because it also made the argument this built up their capacity. Right. So when the Cold War was really heating up in the 50s and nuclear war seemed like a not completely impossible reality that it was conceivable that one side could eliminate the other. There was real concern within the U.S. government and up to the highest levels. I mean, Eisenhower in particular was worried that we did not have good intelligence on the Soviet nuclear capability. That basically it was very hard to get to penetrate the Soviet Union, whereas they penetrated the U.S. very well, which is not to say that they spy better than us, but you can imagine from a human intelligence

perspective, it's a lot easier to spy on Americans because it's a free and open democracy where you can kind of do what you want versus the Soviet Union, which is a closed, incredibly monitored. Just to get an American in there, it's impossible. So you basically have to flip the Soviet, which was very hard. It took a lot of years and a lot of effort. It happened only a few times. So Eisenhower just convened basically the smartest minds in American industry, especially in technology and said, like, how do we fix this? How about we address it through technology? Let's use science and technology.

Like, we have unprecedented brain power here. Let's outspy them with our brains. So ultimately, this led to the creation of a group within the CIA called the Directorate of Science and Technology. Now, that didn't formalize into a directorate until later, but the group that became that directorate was tasked with solving this problem. And the first thing they did was decide to build a spy plane that could get inside and over the Soviet Union film. At that time they were really concerned with the bison bombers that they thought the Soviets had many more nuclear bombers than we did.

There wasn't wildly inaccurate estimates of how many they had. So Kelly Johnson of Lockheed Martin Skunkwark's fame happened to have an idea already that he could build this plane that could fly at 80,000 feet. it was incredibly fuel efficient and had such a giant wingspan that it could get off the ground at very low speeds on short runways. So that became the U-2. They built it in eight months under budget, which is incredible. If you guys talk about the military a lot, I mean, you can imagine they built this like incredible piece of aviation technology in eight months under budget.

And it was tremendously successful. I mean, I can't remember the exact quotes, but there are many statements from CIA directors and directorate heads that basically. say the U2, we learned more about the Soviet Union in the first year of the U2 flights in the previous decade combined. Well, the Soviets saw this thing flying overhead and they tried everything possible to shoot it down. And eventually they did shoot, of course, Francis Gary Powers down on Mayday. I think was that 1960? I can't remember exactly what year. And Kelly Johnson saw that coming. So he and the CIA engineers who worked on the U2 began a second project that became the

SR-71, then known as the A12 Oxcart, which is the compartmentalized CIA operationless codenamed Oxcart because it was the complete opposite of the fastest plane that ever was. And the way CIA codenames work, by the way, is that they're meant to be meaningless, completely divorced from reality. And at that time, there's a desk at headquarters where somebody monitored a box full of note cards and the security officer assigned to a particular project. would call up and be like, okay, this is going to be Oxcart. And the person who took that name had no idea what it was.

All it said was Oxcart and the security officer's name. So that was just so in future when the next operation comes up and you call up and you say, I want to use Oxcar. They're like, well, that's already been used. I won't tell you what it is. And if I did, I'd have to kill you, but it's been used. Right. After Oxcart came Corona.

So in the SR 71, an incredible plane. I mean, just mind-boggling in its innovations. Every part of it was basically purpose-built, and the CIA had to greenlight and pay for an entire new engine, Pratt and Whitney engine plant in Florida that costs like $200 million. I mean, all of this stuff is crazy today. And what you also mentioned, that it was one of the first times that titanium had been used in an airframe.

Am I remembering that right? Yes, yeah, and they couldn't find enough of it. They had to use, like, back-channel sources. Ultimately, a lot of it came from the same. Soviet Union, which is hilarious. And they used the soft version of it that actually began to fail at, I think it was 500 degrees. So then that was why they painted it black because the black added heat resistance. And I'm not an engineer.

So this is where I start to talk out of school. But yeah, I mean, all kinds of alloys. You know, every screw basically was purpose built for the black word. And it was a tremendous success again. But that one actually took longer than they, I think, two years, maybe three years and wasn't quite as under budget. But it was still a bargain compared to what the Air Force would pay for a plane, which is all, you know, a long way of saying the CIA had by that time established a reputation for doing things you wouldn't think it could do. So when Dulles was called in to see, no, it couldn't have been Dulles at that time. I can't remember D.C.I was called in and said, you're going to make this.

boat for Project Azori and they said, well, we're not a Navy. And they said, well, you weren't an Air Force either, but you built the SR 71 in the U2. So essentially saying this group we've created, these very smart people, scientists and engineers, can do anything. You guys built satellite. You weren't NASA, but you built satellites and you weren't the Air Force, but you built the U2 and the SR 71. So why can't you build this ship to steal a sub? So go and do it. And that's essentially what the plan was, right? I mean, it was something, out of, I just remember this book from, I think it was the 70s, you know, Raise the Titanic, which was this Clive Custler novel.

I don't know if you ever even heard of it. I've heard of it, but I didn't read it. It's not good. I mean, it's a Clive Custler novel. Right, of course, it's not good. But, you know, to a seven-year-old, no, it's just the whole idea of bringing an entire thing up from the deep, I guess, is what I was thinking of. So, yeah, tell us a little bit about this ship. I mean, what was their cunning plan?

Yeah, so once the decision was made to go and steal a submarine, then the question becomes, how do you steal a submarine? No submarine had ever been salvaged from any depth below. I think it's 200 feet. I mean, something absurd, not absurd, just it's so complicated to pull it, very heavy out. You're talking millions of pounds of steel through water from something on the surface that's bouncing around. I mean, it's just very complicated. this was at 16,700 feet, I think. So, I mean, beyond orders of magnitude. And they considered all

kinds of things. They were going to, like, attach balloons to it and try and float it up. They talked about, you know, Kelly Johnson wanted to put rocket boosters on it and try to blast it off the bottom. Both of those ideas had two problems. One was that how do you arrest, how do you stop it once it breaches the surface? Like, then you've got the submarine that just shoots up into the air. and the other problem is it's kind of hard to keep that secret like the Soviets are everyone is going to see this thing blasting up out of the water so in addition to being an extremely complicated mechanical engineering problem how do you pull it off the bottom of the ocean you also have to do it in a way that's not going to be obvious to the Soviets I mean when you think about that like it you would think everyone would just be like okay well that's impossible we can't do it then so we have to do it in secret and we have to do something that's never been done before and we have to do it kind of fast. There's no way. But actually, what they came up with is we'll build this enormous ship.

They called it the grunt lift method, and we'll develop some kind of system that can grab it off the bottom of the ocean and pull it back up. And the ship was known as the Hughes-Glomar Explorer. It was built by a contractor named called Global Marine out of L.A. That had been in the oil drill rig business. So they were specialists in deep ocean drilling. So they had worked with pipe strings, long pieces of steel that reached down to the bottom.

And they were the first company to have dynamically positioned ships. So they could keep a ship stationary in the ocean. No small feet at that time because GPS wasn't really a thing. And then Lockheed Martin was hired to develop the grabber. So the system that would go down at the bottom of this pipe string and grab the sub, and then pull it back up. So it was a series of pieces. So if you can imagine the ship had a derrick that was gimbled,

so it was like a steady cam rig. That would remain stationary no matter what the ship was doing because it was very important to keep the pipe string still because if it bounced against the side of the ship, it would snap and that would be very bad for everybody. And then the ship also had heave compensation, so it could remain fairly still even in a somewhat heavy ocean state. And then this pipe string would drop this claw down through a hole in the bottom of the ship.

So the bottom of the ship would open up. This string would go down three miles with a claw. The claw would grab the sub and then they would lift it back up into the bottom of the ship. Then the doors would close and you could have done it without anyone seeing. The only way you could see it was if you had divers in the water. And in the middle of Pacific, that's pretty unlikely. And then when it was finished, you've got a dry space in which to begin analysis of the submarine. you would have wanted to start to pick it apart right away because once it hits air,

it's going to start to deteriorate, and maybe there's nuclear warheads on there, and those are kind of scary. So that whole system was invented, basically, and created and engineered over a series of three years, essentially, start to finish, way faster than you would normally do any of those things. And by the way, then it had to be used and worked the first time, because there was no time to test it and there was really no way to test it. So everything below the waves is hidden, but above the waves there's a ship.

Was there a cover story? You know, what did they say this thing was there for? A big ship. A very big, a 600 foot long ship with a, I forget how tall Derek on it. Not a stealth ship. A big lumbering ship. So, yeah, yeah, that was the other piece of the story. So when you've come up with an engineering solution for a particular problem, which is how do you steal a submarine off the bottom of the ocean?

three miles down. Then it's like, okay, well, we figure that out, but what are we going to tell people that there's this big ship parked out in a place where ships are not usually parked, and it's maybe not that far from where the Soviets lost the submarine that they're kind of still pining for? At that time, discussion had begun in the mining industry about finding a way to harness rare earth minerals that were known to be on the bottom of the ocean, especially at depths below 14,000 feet. These things called manganese nodules, which had nickel and co-be and all kinds of things in them. And it was widely known that they were there,

and it was known that someday we should try and get them because those things are going to run out on the terrestrial earth. And it was just considered to be too complicated and expensive, but it was plausible. Like it's not the kind of thing where people would say, oh, you're mining the ocean. Yeah, right. That's like saying you're mining Venus or something.

People would believe you. But it would really expensive and highly speculative, and it would really require a company that, like who is the company that's going to do that? It's not like your average mining company. It's going to, oh, by the way, we're going to build this ship. We're going to spend $700 million. We're going to go out and mine the ocean.

If you're a public company, your shareholders would say, yeah, no, I think maybe not. And if you're a private company, you would have to have piles of capital and have maybe a reputation for being crazy. And it just so happened that there was a guy named Howard Hughes out there who had a history of working with the CIA. He was known to be like a patriot. He was known for doing questionably sane things. Not afraid to gamble his own money was known to be an eccentric. So it was sort of a perfect storm of, not even a storm. It was like the only person that you could come up with in the entire country who maybe would make this plausible is Howard Hughes.

And he happened to exist already. So it just worked out that he was there. He was willing to do it. and people swallowed it. Everybody believed it. The press, why, oh my God, Howard Hughes is mining the ocean. It worked. You know, it's interesting. I just wonder if we shouldn't tell people a little bit, you know, what Howard Hughes was all about. They did make a movie not that long ago called The Aviator. Right. But he's a long time ago and far away at this point. I remember when I was a kid, he was just this incredible rich eccentric. He's a real life Tony Stark. Yes. Yeah. He sort of, yeah, he was, or he was Elon. Musk before. He was an extremely wealthy industrialist who was born to, I think his father,

if I remember correctly, invented one of the first thrill bits for mining. So it was a mining family. But then he got heavily into aviation and he was, I mean, by the end of his life in all kinds of things, defense contracting. But he kind of made his name in Hollywood and an aviation. And then later for being a opiate addict who, you know, soiled himself and was locked up in the top floor of the Desert Inn Hotel watching movies that he had produced. So if anyone who's listening saw The Aviator, I mean, that's Leo, the germaphybes, sitting with the blinds drawn. I spent several days at the huge archive at American University reading about things, including his, he had a personal enema guy because he was a...

Well, you wouldn't want to use a public enema guy. I have to agree with that. Yeah, and I mean, come on. You've got to have one of the staff, right? Yeah, so one of the side effects of opiates is that they make you constipated. So Howard Hughes had someone on staff who delivered enemas. Just fun fact that you learned here on the podcast. I aspire to make that amount of money that I can have an anima guy.

So that's the person we're talking about here. He was, this is Enema, this is Enema assistant era Howard Hughes. But as far as the public was concerned, he was the kind of guy who, yeah, it would be sort of like Elon Musk today. Like there's basically nothing Elon Musk could say that people would be like, yeah, right, come on. I mean, he has a track record of backing up his ridiculous claims. And Howard Hughes was that guy. So despite their best efforts to keep this thing secret, it did get leaked to the press, right? that this was a rescue mission? It did. Ultimately, through a series of almost keystone cops,

you know, it's like the CIA built this incredible thing. The cover story is like a work of art. You know, it's just the fact that, you know, they had a staff of people who went to, like, mining conferences and delivered talks. Like, everybody believed it. The UN was, like, debating who should mine the ocean floor. It was, like, incredibly effective as a cover story. And one of the most successfully executed compartmentalized operations, when you think about Thalienable, of people and how many years it took. But yes, it ultimately leaked in some way. Again, not totally clear that the facts on this are, it got to the LA Times through someone at the LAPD because of a break in at a Hughes building where they suspected that someone had taken documents

that stated that this was happening or this is what the CIA feared. And the L.A. Times ran a story basically saying that this was now this was after the ship had come back. The initial salvage mission was only partly successful, and the CIA was going to go back and do it again with a modified rig, like a slightly improved submarine grabber. And the LA Times ran a story saying, and they got a bunch of facts wrong. It was like, you know, wildly inaccurate, but it did say that the CIA tried to go out and steal a sub. And this was long before the internet when it was like, you know, so it's just the newspaper. That's the way people find out. the CIA director at the time, William Colby,

immediately launched into a disinfo campaign, convinced the LA Times to kill the story in future editions and get the reporters off the case. And they actually agreed to do it because he appealed to their patriotism and their sense of like, this is an ongoing operation and national security is very much at stake.

So the publisher and editor of the LA Times agreed. And that story seemed like it didn't reach the same. Soviet Union, or at least not in any way that was obvious. And reporters at the New York Times, including the famous Cy Hirsch, picked up the story. We're also on the story. And Colby managed to convince the Washington Post, the New York Times, parade, all kinds of papers and publications that they too should sit on the story and that he would tell them the truth when the time came, but that it was too important.

And actually did manage to convince a number of papers to stay quiet for a month or two. and a famous radio broadcaster at the time, Jack Anderson basically said, screw you. You can't tell me not to do it, and I'm going to do it because I think it's stupid, and it was a boondoggle, and he blew it for everybody. Well, so let's talk about the boondoggle angle, right? The figure that you have in your book is something like $500 million for the program, or at least to build the ship.

Yeah, never confirmed. That's one of the things the CIA won't comment on. I've seen everything from 350 to 600 million. Regardless, I mean, let's say 350 million, I think, is $1.7 billion in today's dollars. So we're talking a lot of money. So tell us what did they get? Well, the target was, you know, I should have said the reason this was considered so valuable in the first place was that the film, the photos that were taken of the wreck, showed one intact ICBM with a warhead

on top. And then a fairly intact conning tower and central section of the submarine, which would have had, you know, the communications area and the command quarters and things, where you would have cryptological equipment and battle plans and firing orders. So it was considered to be extremely valuable from a number of, you know, cryptological, also nuclear material perspective. We could have learned a lot about what their missiles were, how they were made, what the fissile material was composed of, what the detonation package was.

Cryptological machines, obviously important. And then submarine construction. So unfortunately, when they picked this up up, and began to raise it off the floor. So when I said there was no way to test this, they were just hoping everything was going to work. And things were breaking, but they were fixing him along the way.

And it all worked. So the claw grabbed the sub. It lifted it off the floor. It started picking it up. And it was a fairly slow process because you had to retract these pieces of pipe one at a time. They were 60 feet long.

And that was going to take a day or two. So people are like chilling out on the boat relaxing. And the thing gets 5,000 feet up off the floor. And one of the fingers on the. claw breaks and part of the submarine falls back to the ocean floor. So when I said they were going to go back, that's what they were going to go back for. Now they kept about a 40-foot section, I think, was what they brought back. And what the CIA has confirmed was recovered were two nuclear-tipped torpedoes, some sort of journal that was kept by a, like a weapons officer

that apparently revealed things about the ballistic missiles. And then a lot of stuff that was valuable to the Navy, but maybe not super valuable to the CIA. Like I spoke to several, retired admirals who said that, you know, they learned a lot about Soviet submarine construction and, you know, welds and whole thicknesses and all of those things were valuable. But it was considered, I guess, a disappointment from an intelligence hall perspective because they really wanted that ICBM and they really wanted the cryptological equipment and they didn't get those things. One thing you mentioned for sure in your book is that what they did discover about Soviet subconstruction was that it wasn't anywhere near as good as people feared it was. Yep. Yeah, it was

It was inferior. I mean, there were like welds that weren't very good, and I think there were pieces of wood that would actually use in places he would never have had wood. And what seemed to been the case was that, I mean, Soviets spent money where they really needed to. Like, I think their warheads and some of their guidance systems, and there were places where they were every bit are equal, and clearly on the space program side, they were getting rockets up, they were right behind us and even ahead of us.

But they would cut corners where we would never have. And again, I think that probably relates to, you're talking about a country that didn't have the same responsibility to its citizens. I think they didn't want to lose people, but it was less of a big deal to lose a submarine for them than it was for us, for instance. And I think they were struggling to make ends meet to compete with us. You know, the U.S. was a more prosperous economy. So we were ratcheting up the pressure on them to keep up with once they started seeing our planes and our satellites and our submarines and wanting to say a step ahead. And I think we didn't really realize the Navy didn't know how behind us.

the submarines were until they saw these. Now, they were apparently very good at other things. I think their propellers were very, they ran very quiet subs, and some of their propulsion systems were very good. But they were definitely cutting corners. Other than the conspiracy theories, does Russia ever talk about this? Or is it kind of something that they just don't like to discuss?

They've reckoned with it in some other submarine disasters in the last 10 or 15 years, but it was very much pushed under the carpet. Now, you know, I think people whose husbands and women whose husbands and children whose fathers were on the submarine agitated for answers for a long time. And the sort of official Soviet response was we're not going to talk about that. You know, it's secret. You have no right to ask these questions. And there seemed to have been some sort of back channel agreement between then-Secretary of State Kissinger and his counterpart in the Soviet Union that's sort of like,

we know that you know that we tried to do this thing. We're not going to talk about it and further embarrass you. We'll pretend it didn't happen. You guys don't talk about it either. And it became, it was sort of like both countries just pretended that none of it took place until CIA director Gates went after the wall fell in 91 or 92 and delivered the diving bell from the submarine and a video of the funeral that had been held to honor the remains that had been brought up in the sub. That was the first official acknowledgement. And then some stories in the Russian press followed. And they've kind of been reckoning with it ever since.

There have been a bunch of stories about that and four or five other sub. that were lost during the Cold War, where finally journalists were kind of allowed to ask questions, like, what happened? You know, what could we have done differently? Then it's more well-known probably in the 90s and in the 21st century, certainly, than it was in the 60s or the 70s and 80s, when I think nobody talked about it. I have one final question. Is the CIA still involved in doing this kind of major engineering work, do you know?

Well, you know, I think this kind of thing could never be done. And if it can be done, then wow, then I'm even more impressed than I already am with their capabilities based on what they did during the Cold War. But I do think that the spirit of innovation and engineering is very much alive there. I mean, the drones came from the CIA. The early drones, that's where they started. So it's a smaller kind of engineering innovation, but it may be no less influential on the battlefield. Like maybe the differences today, we don't need giant ships in high-flying planes. we need stealthier, more, I don't know, like new generation innovation, more like what you might see out of Silicon Valley.

So whereas at that time they were using Lockheed Martin and these big conglomerate mechanical engineering and defense contracting firms. You know, I wonder today if it's like more on the software and digital. And I feel like they're doing things that we don't know about, but they're not like this. and sort of like NASA came up with Velcro and Tang. You know, like the digital camera comes from the CIA. The satellite program very much led to the development of digital cameras. And all kinds of animations came out of the Director of Science and Technology. I'm sure that's still happening.

It's just like unlike NASA, where they immediately commercialized those things, I think it's a little bit more complicated when it's the CIA. They don't really want to share those things as urgently. And they probably have to do it in a different way because they don't. necessarily want us to know that that's where these things are coming from. And are they still bungling things, probably? I mean, you mentioned a few of the top of the show. I mean, my favorite is acoustic kitty. They wired microphones into a cat and tried to train the cat to, like, go and sit on a park bench near someone that they were trying to eavesdrop on. And the first time they

tested acoustic kitty in public, they like let it out of the cage and it immediately ran out of the street and got hit by a car. And that was the end of Acoustic Kitty. Okay, well, that takes us absolutely full circle from the SR 71 through a ship that picks up a submarine on the bottom of the ocean to a bugged cat that runs out into traffic. Whether it was suicide or an accident, I'm not sure. Maybe that cat just wanted out. I once had a friend who adopted a dog and it was, well, he was, well, he was. a horrible owner, never should have had a pet, and that pet got hit by a car, and I've always said that that dog committed suicide because it just wasn't a bad situation. I feel like maybe

Acoustic Kenny was committing suicide. It's the only way out of the agency anyway. Okay. All right. Well, Josh, tell us, once again, give us the full title of the book because it's about a month long, and we'll make sure we put a link into it also with the show notes and on our Facebook page. So it's called The Taking of K-129, how the CIA used how Hughes to steal a Soviet sub in the most daring covert operation in history. Published by Dutton out now. Yeah, there's a website, The Taking of K-129.com, but available where all books are sold. And I read it and definitely recommend it.

So, Josh, thanks so much for talking with us tonight. Fun to do it. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Thank you. It was a blast. Thank you guys for listening to War College. As always, I've been your co-host, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, is my other lovely co-host. He produced this week's episode.

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