CIA admits fishing up parts of Soviet sub

WASHINGTON - In 1974, far out in the Pacific, a United States ship pretending to be a deep-sea mining vessel fished a sunken Soviet nuclear-armed submarine out of the ocean depths, took what it could of the wreck and made off to Hawaii with its purloined prize.

Now, Washington is owning up to Project Azorian, a brazen mission from the days of Cold War rivalry.

After more than 30 years of refusing to confirm the barest facts of what the world already knew, the CIA has released a 1985 internal account of Project Azorian, though with juicy details taken out.

Private researchers from the National Security Archive used the Freedom of Information Act to achieve the declassification.

The CIA describes a mission of staggering expense and improbable engineering feats that culminated in August 1974 when the Hughes Glomar Explorer retrieved a portion of the K-129. Industrialist Howard Hughes lent his name to the project to give the ship cover as a research vessel.

The Americans buried six lost Soviet mariners at sea, after retrieving their bodies in the salvage.

Despite the declassified article, the greatest mysteries of Project Azorian remain buried 5km down and in CIA files: exactly what parts of the sub were retrieved, what intelligence was derived from them and whether the mission wasted time and money.

Soviet vessels watched and sometimes buzzed the Glomar Explorer with helicopters.

The disclosed sections of the article only claim "intangibly beneficial" results such as a boost in morale among intelligence officers and advances in heavy-lift technology at sea.

The author argues the value in mounting the operation was in proving it could be done - an assertion that does not point to a trove of intelligence.

To researchers, that sounds like bureaucratic justification for a project thought to have cost over US$1.5 billion in today's dollars.

Years later, Russian officials concluded the CIA recovered at least two nuclear-armed torpedoes, not much of a bounty. In other tellings, most of the vessel broke up and fell back to the ocean floor, yielding little.

- AP