Stuff You Should Know - Project Azorian: The CIA's Super 70s Mission To Steal A Sunken Soviet Sub

Episode Date: April 5, 2018

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 more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

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That's a lot over today. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Here's our ghost podcaster, producer, who's invisible. The ghost of Jerry's past. Yeah. Actually, the ghost of Jerry's present.

Right. Jerry's not dead, everybody. No. That just sounded weird. It did. We're keeping Jerry around. Yes. She just out 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 mean to no harm. Something, something been in trouble with the loss. It's the day we were born. I don't think there is a something, something before then, is there?

Something, something, something been in trouble. Yeah. Right? No. 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 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 sang the theme song? Was it Wachtosh, Whalen Jennings? Wasn't he the narrator? It was Whalen Jennings. What was that first thing you said? Wachtosh. What does that mean?

That's his nickname. Really? Wachtosh Whalen Jennings. I've never heard that. Well, it is. I love Whalen Jennings. Yeah, he's great. Apparently, he and Johnny Cash were roommates.

And highwaymen. Well, way back in the day. Both of them were 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. Oh, really? Well, I guess it came out later that they were like, you were on drugs, and so was I. What? And he's like, I used to keep my drugs in the air conditioner, and Johnny Cash was

like, that's why the air conditioner never worked, and Whalen Jennings was like, I used to keep mine in the TV, and Johnny Cash is, or whoever was like, yeah, their TV never worked, and their AC never worked, because that's where they stashed their drugs without the other one knowing it. What did the drugs do to the TV in the air conditioner? I got them pretty wasted. What a weird start. Yeah, it is a little weird start, especially because what we're talking about has nothing

to do with drugs, Johnny Cash, or Whalen Jennings, or air conditioners, or TV really. No. It has to do with the CIA, submarines, the USSR, Cold War, and Howard Hughes, among other things. Been hitting the Kissinger. Are you kissing him? Interesting. He's still alive, too.

Maybe he'll hear this. I've never seen you hiss before. I know. It's kind of threatening. Is it? Yeah. Because I do have really sharp canine filling. Yeah, you should totally hiss more often.

I should. And I should sharpen these things. I should file them down. Oh, people do that. I know, but surely that has to hurt, right? To file them down? Yeah. No.

How does it not? Don't you have nerve? No, they don't hit the nerves. They just... Yeah, I might do that. In the meantime, let's talk about something. Well, let's go back to the beginning, okay? Okay.

It's 1968. I'm not exactly sure when, because look, the first part of my page ripped. Oh, man. Does it say when in 1968? It does, you want to guess? I feel like I'm holding the keys. May of 1968. Close.

March. It was pre-summer of love, barely. Oh, yeah. Everybody's just getting started. It was the summer of foreplay. Yeah, everyone's getting lubed up. Right. It is gross.

So March of 1968, in the northwestern Pacific, as far as the United States is concerned, which would be between, say, Hawaii and some far out islands in Alaska. And whatever else is out there. There's not a lot out there. Apparently Hawaii is the most remote island chain in the 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 a globe, those teeny tiny islands. Uh-huh. From what I understand. All right. I'll buy that. So, say, Hawaiians, at least. Yeah. Anyway, basically out in the middle of nowhere in the northwest Pacific, there was a Soviet

sub. It was a Gulf II, GOLF II, Soviet submarine. Yeah, they called it the Cabriolet for a little while. But those were the subs with the rag top. Yeah, those didn't work out. Um, the, uh, this Gulf II sub was called the K-129. Surely it had an actual name, right? No, I think they called them the K-whatever.

All right. Well, the K-129 was on a routine patrol mission. These are the Soviets. They weren't glib about, you know, what's called this one. The Hannah Montana. Yeah, exactly. Right. So, it was just the K-129, all business.

Which actually is kind of reassuring because it was a nuclear submarine. Sure. Um, it had not only a nuclear missile, like a nuclear missile, you could come up to the surface and shoot on to, say, the United States. Sure. It also had nuclear torpedoes. Yeah. Which I had no idea were a thing.

Oh, really? A nuclear torpedo, it's kind of overkill, don't you think? Well, not if you're underwater and you want to shoot a nuclear bomb at somebody. Right. Well, okay. Then that really fits the bill. Uh huh. So, some of these nuclear-tipped torpedoes detonated, and there wasn't a full nuclear

detonation, obviously. Well, it's not obvious, but it was enough to blow a hole in the submarine and I think kick off some other detonations in some of the other nuclear torpedoes. And the upshot of all this was that the entire 98-person crew and the Soviet submarine in the middle of the Cold War in 1968 sunk about 1,600 miles or 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii and hit the bottom at 16,000 feet, more than 3 miles down. Yes, and so kicks off the story of Project Azorian and the Glomer Explorer. Yeah.

So, what happens, of course, as the Soviets go looking for this thing? They spend a couple of months, pretty massive search, couldn't find it. The U.S. is kind of laughing and saying they haven't found their own sub yet. Maybe we should go out there and 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 ya and then throw it their way. And in 1968, August of 1968, just quite a few months later, they actually found it. The United States of America located this thing.

Yeah, so this is the official story. Here's the thing that I figured out 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 to the public. This actually may be the story that covers up 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 60s and 70s by the CIA. Okay, so just take everything with the grain assault. 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 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.

Blingulate. Yeah, that is what it would be called. But supposedly 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. Nowhere 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 the sub was, which made us think, maybe

we should check this thing out, maybe we can go get it. Yeah, 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. So they weren't about to go with choice one. No. They came upon the table, and we got our own sub called the Halibut, so we had fun names. The Halibut dropped the 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 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 come up with these names, God love them. Who knows? But Project Azorian was the name of 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 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, there's a submarine, a 2,500 ton submarine, 300 feet long, that's a thing in and of itself, 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 16,500 feet under the surface of the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of nowhere, about as in the middle of nowhere as you can get, and how could we do this, how could we possibly pick 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 sink any ship that they thought was going after this.

I love this stuff more than most stuff in the world, like when there's this incredibly challenging, almost insurmountable task, and people get a lot of smart people together and say, let's start brainstorming on how, if this is even possible, 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, the only way we can try this is by doing this, it's going to involve three large vessels, one is a recovery ship that basically has a chamber

with a bottom that can open and close, like that ship in the abyss, a moon pool, in fact I bet James Cameron totally glow marred this for his own needs, it would have 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 didn't understand how, but yes, that is the understanding. Well I had four legs.

But that's crazy, that means that it had four three mile long legs. Well, that doesn't make much sense, that doesn't. You know what I mean? I need to see a picture. I've seen pictures of them, I still don't know what they're talking about with the legs, yeah. Huh, well I don't know then. That's one, that's the ship that they sail out there to undertake the whole mission,

right? Yeah. There's two others that they have to come up with too. That's right. Captured vehicle, so that had a grabba on it. Yeah, like one of those banana clips that girls used to wear in the 90s, but for a 2,500 ton submarine. Yes, and it wasn't just like hey, use a little grabber like that banana clip, it was specifically

designed to attach to the submarine. Right, it was the one thing it was designed to do. That's correct. So that's step two, if you have one of these things and you're loading it onto a massive ship, I think a 700 foot ship is what they came up with, 618 foot long ship, many, many meters long. So many meters. Somebody's going to say, what is that?

Well the Soviets would. Yes, because they're flying over the U.S. with their spy satellites ever since Sputnik got up there. So they're going to 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? Oh, the grabber? You must be talking about the barge. So this is pretty amazing. This thing had a retractable sunroof basically, and the whole reason this thing was here was to hide everything, right? So they built the grabber vehicle, the vehicle number two, inside the barge, but like you said 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 618 foot ship, ship number one, submerged it underneath the ship, opened up the sunroof on the barge, opened up the moon pool on the big ship, and raised the grabber vehicle into the 618 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. It wasn't just like they had a grabber laying around that fit a Soviet sub or this barge that could become invisible by all accounts. So this is basically what this working group came up with. These are the things you need to do this. And the CIA said, who can we possibly get? Who in the world? Well, Howard Hughes.

Yes, Mr. Howard Hughes, specifically the SUMA or SUMA Corporation, and that was a part of the Hughes Tool Company. And they said, go build this thing at 36,000 tons, 618 feet, like you said. And they called it the 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. It's sort of a disappointing end to what Glomar meant, because it sounds kind of like space agey.

It definitely does. Like, wow, look at the healthy glow from radiation exposure on that thing. Glomar, Glomar's got a great glow. And here's the other cool thing, because there would still be a big behemoth 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, actually, it happened to sink in an area of the Pacific where there are a lot of manganese, really valuable manganese nodules underwater. So we'll just concoct this story that said, Howard Hughes built this thing, you know how

crazy he is, to go out there and try and mine the ocean's depths to get even richer, and people actually bought that, like the press even bought it. They went to the trouble of saying this is actually 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 what a deep sea mining ship looked like yet. Yeah, plus it was very huesy and thing to do. Exactly. Right? He was extremely wealthy. 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 operations and projects

from the outside and just make guesses about it and create rumors, but it didn't matter because it was all just conjecture and rumors, right? So it was a perfect cover story and then add on to the top that Hughes was already in bed with the U.S. 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 the project. Should we take a break? Yeah.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running

and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So, I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. And just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get the podcasts. All right, so this took a while. It was like years had passed between the sub-syncing and them 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, should we go take another look

at this thing? Right. Is it still intact? Should we bother? Is this still relevant? Is it an asset? Or is it just some rusty old, you know, hunk of metal at the bottom of the ocean? Yeah, it's basically like a museum thing now.

Yeah, so they said, and we're not into Russian museums. No. Let's be honest. Not for this kind of money. 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 go down there, guys, because even though these missiles, the SSN5 missiles are no longer like their big threat, they do have the SSN8, 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, let's do it. Come on, guys, let's do it. There was another thing, too, there's this great I09 article on this very project, and the author found some publication of memos about Project Azorian, and one of the things was that they were saying like, yes, it's still worth it intelligence-wise and everything, but more to the point, we're locked in the punch here, like the U.S. 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 risk of pissing off Howard Hughes, I guess, was too great. Right. And I mean, it sort of makes sense in a way, because if he was a big-time contractor for them, he had to keep that relationship going.

Yeah, there's not that many top-secret contractors that you know you can trust, and 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 so. It made an appearance in the last episode, too.

Did I say that? Just now. No, no. The listener-male guy, Peter, about vaping, recently said, I'm pissed off 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 ticked off, and you really shouldn't say that. You should say that I'm going to use my words 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. Is that 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, 1949, there is a proper way that you handle even an, quote-unquote, enemy's remains, and we're going to abide by that, and we're going to take all of 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 semen. Right. So they outfitted the Hughes-Glomar Explorer, the HGE, with, I think, a capacity to handle 100 bodies, which is kind of funny. If you were a sailor engineer on the Hughes-Glomar Explorer, you might have made you a little nervous considering there were 98 sailors on 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. They didn't just round up to a nice even 100 cadaver coolers. I'm sure they're like, yeah, two people will probably die on this mission. That's right. So there's another memo from, I think, the 1974 June 3rd, and it basically said, hey, all this stuff's ready. The ship's ready. The grabber cloth 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 40% chance of success, which they were like, over the moon about. They were over the moon pool about this. Which is interesting, but I guess when it's something that tough to accomplish and that innovative and bleeding edge, apparently 40% wouldn't do bad.

No, not at all. And that was like of 100% success, a 40% chance of 100% success. So well, yeah, sure. So the project is approved June 5th, 1974. And just a few days later, on June 15th, the ship departed. The Hughes-Glomar Explorer departed, I believe, the port of Los Angeles. Yeah, 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-16s.

Well, they probably didn't have F-16. I don't know when the F-16 came about. I think maybe like the 60s 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 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. Someone in the CIA said this, imagine standing 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.

That's what they were doing when they shipped out. That was the task ahead of them, right? Yes, and add to this that- It keeps getting worse. Well, yeah, but the Soviets were still surveilling everything. Right. Remember, they couldn't have a US Navy escort of a deep sea mining ship that just looked really weird. But 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 it to its destination and started working, there were Soviet ships surveilling them basically 24 hours a day for the first 14 days. So these guys are actually undertaking 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, one of the CIA officers on board was like, we need to stack some crates on our helicopter landing pad to prevent them from landing. And there was a, I don't know exactly what alert status it was on, but maybe high alert, which was, there's a chance the 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 charged with 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 on the ship. 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, but just deflect the bullets with your karate chops. So 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 60 foot pieces of steel pipe one at a time, connecting to each other 60 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, get that grabber out, attach it to the hull, and then reverse that whole process by now towing a freaking submarine. Yep. By taking one 60 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? It was at the very beginning when Bill Paxton was in modern days and they were 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 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? You want to be inception? Yeah. No, I know what you mean. The problem is, is there are so many holes in the story.

I need a picture book. But everybody accepts that there's holes in the story because it's a covert CIA operation. And it's just, we'll probably never fully be explained. Although there have been interviews with people who are on this 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 it up kind of close enough to the ship. And they're like, all right, it's 30 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. 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 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 toots three times, they're like, beep, beep, beep.

See you later. And they left 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 is concerned, 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 slowly being pulled up. 60 feet at a time. Yeah, you would not. You'd not be able to.

But there was an engineer who was on the ship, who later recounted in an interview that there was something that felt like about a 10 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. But first mile is the trickiest. Yeah.

So, I mean, I guess, was it an earthquake? No. It was the sub breaking up in the submersible claw. Oh, OK. I thought that caused it to break up. No. He said it felt like an earthquake. That's how big of an energetic release it was.

So the sub breaks apart. I guess it had been down there so long that it just wasn't viable as a single solid piece of metal anymore. But 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 brittle. 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 and some of the sub was able to fall out. Some remained in and held into the grabber. But most of the sub, this is a 300-foot sub, about 260 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 had, like, did anybody think to put felt on this grabber? Right. Or rubber tips on the end of the claws?

No, they didn't. I know. So the most of the sub, including all the stuff the CIA was after. Yeah, all the good stuff. The code books, the con tower, the radio show. They're like, we had the galley. Right. They ate well.

Like, I guess that's okay. I love borscht, so it is a silver lining. Yeah, they only got, what, 10% of this thing? Yeah. Which it was the four of the sub. The four of the sub stayed in the grabber claw and they were able to bring it the rest of the way up in salvage it, which included the nuclear torpedoes. Unfortunately for the CIA and everybody aboard, the nuclear torpedoes were, of course, something

that had detonated, so they all suffered from some plutonium exposure as well. Yeah, so their exposure was consistent with the fact that there was, in fact, nuclear materials, right? Yeah, that they had been exposed to these nuclear torpedoes. 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 their hands on. But one thing they did find on their hands all of a sudden were the bodies of six Soviet

submariners, or submariners, how do you say it? I think submariner. Okay. But we'll get taken to task and told the right way. Well, we said both, so can't get it wrong when you say it both ways. So like we said, they could hold 100 bodies, so they could certainly hold six. And then I guess 94 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, some of it. They've filmed it in color, and I love how you, is it you who wrote this part? Yeah, yeah. I love how you put it, the bizarre and inexplicably futuristic video.

It looks weird. It looks like, it does look like a George Orwellian, like, transmission from the future. But if the future was in the 1980s and it was being written in the 1920s. 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. Just perfectly weird.

Yeah. Yeah. Just go check it out. I guess CIA project Azorian burial at sea, I think, would probably bring it up on YouTube. And eventually this film was turned over to Boris Yeltsin. Somebody still loves you, Boris Yeltsin. In 1992 by CIA director Robert Gates at that time. Yeah.

Um. Should we take another break? Yeah, I think we're. All right. Let's go. All right, we're going to wrap up this whole mess in just a minute. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for

it. We rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. The CIA, for its part, was like, I don't know if there's anything left of that sub. Like it's the 70s now.

We lucked out that it was intact to begin with after a series of explosions. We're pretty sure that the stuff that fell a mile back down to the seafloor probably broke up. I'm suspicious of that. But that was the CIA's position. Just Kissinger and the rest of the Nixon administration were like, how can we do this again? The thing is, right around the same time, 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, and one of the other big reasons was that this whole cryptographic equipment and the codes probably weren't even relevant by that point. And so they didn't think, I mean, they were basically like, there's so little upside to this at this point. Like Kissinger, I think, even finally relented, right?

Yeah, I think so. So it is not worth it. What I found was interesting was that a later interview by an admiral said, even if you found the code books and you found the communications equipment and figured out the arrangement of the burst transmitters and circuits and all that stuff, all you'd be able to do is break the codes for a 24-hour period. But that would have been the case no matter if they'd gotten the whole sub or not at any point.

And it was already years later when they first went down. Right. So I guess you probably would still be a pretty big treasure trove, intelligence-wise, to just get a one-day snapshot of Soviet submarine operations. That'd probably be worth it. Maybe it was more about those warheads, though. I 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 problem was this, by this time, a journalist named Seymour Hirsch, who's written some of the deepest exposés on the US government ever written, wrote about the My Line Massacre. He didn't write or he wrote a few stories on the Frank Olson case that Wormwood was based on. Seymour Hirsch was in that toward the end. He'd 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 Hirsch and said, please don't say anything about this. Please sit on the story. Please sit on the story. And behind Hirsch's back or right from under him, the story ended up breaking in the most bizarre, suspicious way it possibly could have. Yeah. And even before that, a very famous term came about because of this, there was a rolling stone writer named Harriet Ann Philippe, 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. If you've ever heard that, that's where it comes from, which is a great little cherry on top, I think. Yeah, I think so too. Even though this isn't the end. No, it's not. It gets even weirder to tell you the truth.

So Harriet Ann Philippe was asking about Project Azorium 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 rumor that the Hughes Corporation had cooperated and carried out a project to retrieve a lost Soviet sub with the CIA. Learn 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 reason that that was in there, Chuck, was just the weirdest thing that I think is the weirdest part of this story and the most suspicious. Yeah, the fact that all this came together in this way is pretty remarkable. So the Hughes Summit Corporation that we talked about, they were broken into. Their HQ was broken into in Los Angeles. 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 have possession of a lot of these stolen papers. They didn't say we have the CIA document about Project Azorian, but they say we've got boxes full of stuff. We've got binders full of women. And we'll take a half a million bucks to return this to you.

And so there's a couple of points that need to be mentioned. This is the fourth or fifth break in of a Hughes office in the last four or five months. And what they think, they think the Vegas mob and the St. 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 Hughes owned a number of high-level politicians in the United States, and that they actually found it. There was a Senate 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 tipped them off. Yeah. So the CIA tells the FBI about this police report that the LA cops supposedly have.

And this being offered up for sale and for money, and it might have this Project Azorian information. The FBI then tells the LA police about this because they didn't know about this memo. They just knew that they had this box full. They were being offered to exchange this box full of documents for a lot of cash. They didn't know what was inside of it. Apparently the people who 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? I think the CIA was surveilling the LAPD. I probably, as a matter of course, and found out about the LAPD being contacted. Like you said, the CIA contacts the FBI. The FBI contacts the LAPD, and the LAPD says to the intermediary, hey, do you happen to have a document that shows the Hughes Corporation trying to retrieve a Soviet sub for the CIA? Just thumb through the boxes and let me know if you see the word Azorian. And the intermediary says BRB.

And the next thing you know, the LA Times is starting to report on it. Yeah, February 7th, 1975, LA Times article, U.S. reported after Russ sub short for Russian. Sure. I guess they just had one of that big font. Right. They couldn't 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. And again, just a lot of holes in this. However, 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 bets were off, including Seymour Hirsch. And so mysteriously, the day after Jack Anderson mentions it, there's front page in-depth stories about Project Azorian, which they incorrectly 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. That's good stuff.

And it's like, that's the kind of show he would add. Yeah. He's got his fedora with scoop in the bill. Yeah. I'm kind of curious about why Jennifer was the name of the compartment. So this... Okay. So a compartment...

Sounds like some sexist thing to me, if you ask me. I think it was just maybe like a hurricane, like they just... That was up for usage. But the compartment, 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 else right. And so by the time that this story comes out, the U.S. is like, well, the Soviets are about to unleash hell on earth diplomatically, maybe militarily, this is going to be really bad. And the U.S. braced itself for a response. And out of Moscow, crickets. Yeah. 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 U.S. could find it. Super embarrassing. And then they had to admit that we were following them out there in the ocean and saw them doing something. But we turned around and went home. We went, beep, beep, beep, see ya.

Super, triple embarrassment. So they said, yet we're not doing it. And I think it's interesting, I've seen a bunch of stories lately about the Cold War where we knew something that the Soviets knew, but no one could admit it out loud. So there was a lot of sitting 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.

No. So despite that, despite this 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 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. The Soviets had a military presence, a naval presence, around the site the whole time from

that moment on, once the story broke. Fool me once. And they said, that's it, it's done. 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. Or for all we know, this is all gospel truth, I don't know.

Maybe it's sitting next to a spaceship in Area 51, deep within the earth in a bunker. Very well could be, Chuck, don't be so naive. In the end, in 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 ship. Oh, I thought just the barge was.

No, the whole ship was. So it was finally sold only eight years ago to a private company for 15 million bucks. Yeah, I think for scrap. Oh, the secrets therein. 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 the government paid him to build it.

That guy. That guy. Well, if you want to know more about Project Azorian, 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 I09 article, that time the CIA and Howard Hughes tried to steal a Soviet submarine by Mark Strauss. That was a great source.

So too, with Seymour Hersh's 1975 New York Times article on the whole thing, where he mistakenly calls it Project Jennifer and there were 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 going to call this a really great thing that you should think about throwing a few

bucks to. 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. 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 event benefits grace giving, a 501c3 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 300 person

event in roughly three minutes with 170 people in the waitlist. So I just want to publicize this event, that's me talking Chuck. I should do it in voices 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 14th this year in Chicago and our tickets, can you even get tickets to

this thing? Well, I think it's sold out, but I did say donate, huh? Yeah, I did say can people at least donate because this is such a great thing. And even if you've got like $5, 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 is Emmett Cleary, the football player who wrote in about CTE.

Oh, wow. Remember that? Man, alive. So wait, these two roommates have both made stuff you shouldn't have listened to in your mails. Yeah. That's really something. How about that?

That's some sort of trifecta. If you're in your heart to throw a few bucks toward gracegiving, we can encourage you to do so. You can go to facebook.com slash gracegiving24 or just go, you know, Google that stuff on the internet. And that is from Grace and Mike. Thanks a lot, guys. This is very, that's, I think what you're doing is fantastic.

Yeah, keep it going there in Chicago. Yeah. And if you want to let us know about something great that we would want to publicize, you can get in touch with us via Twitter at S-Y-S-K podcast. I'm at Josh on Clark, Chuck's at Movie Crush, we're on facebook.com slash stuff you should know and Chuck's on facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas

are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's to the great American settlers. The millions of you have settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills. Of course, there is something else you could do if you got something to say. Start a podcast with Spreaker from iHeart and unleash your creative freedom. Maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your old boss, hey, I'm no settler, I'm an

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