Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms Project Azorian's Sunken Sub About this episode A special father’s day treat for you! This week, Ed shares one of his favorite chapters from his NYT Bestselling book SNAFU: The Definitive Guide to History’s Greatest Screw-ups (available at SNAFU-BOOK.com https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsnafu-book.com%2F&data=05%7C02%7Cdylanfagan%40iheartmedia.com%7C97df82c977ab4218596808dda46c32a4%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C638847506803317383%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=xuRsmTjOodY3MPGNazuapba92SnJf%2F7QV%2FOOBjylnoQ%3D&reserved=0 or wherever you get your books.) Selected from the Audiobook rendition, Ed weaves a wild tale of a CIA covert operation to develop a bona fide claw machine aboard a seafaring vessel strong enough to haul up the remnants of a sunken Soviet submarine which held Cold War era nuclear secrets. This one is chock-full of spies, subterfuge, and even Howard Hughes! Enjoy this free sampling of the book and order yours today!
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Transcript 0:04 Speaker 00 Hey all you Snafu fans, or Snafu heads, Snap, Snap, Snafu-ops, Snafu, Snafoodies? I dunno, what are we gonna call you? We'll figure that out. Today, I have a very fun treat for you. A little glimpse into my New York Times bestselling book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. Yes, you heard that right. It is a New York Times bestseller, baby! I'm so proud of this thing. Oh my gosh. Alright, well, listen up. Here's the deal. Father's Day is fast approaching, and we all know what that means. You're scrambling to find a gift for all the great dads in your life. And, let's be honest, neckties, golf balls, that's so 20th century, folks.
0:49 Speaker 00 But never fear, I'm here to help make it stress-free for you this year. Yeah, I think you know where I'm going with this. Grab a copy of my compendium of history's greatest screw-ups! It's dad-reviewed and dad-approved, and yours is gonna love it. Trust me, I know. I'm a dad! The book is full of 30-plus different Snafus. Each chapter is its own contained short story. This is the perfect gift. It is great for beach reading, bedside reading. I'm gonna say it, you can even read it in the bathroom! I mean, go for it. I'm not gonna judge. Anywhere you read is a good place to read. Okay, so just to give you a little snapshot,
1:33 Speaker 00 or a little glimpse into the book this week, I have pulled an exclusive chapter from the Snafu audiobook, narrated in its entirety by yours truly, Project Azorian. A tale stranger than fiction involving Cold War chaos, a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine, a giant claw machine built to withstand treacherous ocean depths, and everyone's favorite mid-century madcap billionaire, Howard Hughes. Yes, even the legendary Howard Hughes is tied up in this one. So don't forget, the book is available in bookstores everywhere, or online at Amazon, or of course, our own website, snafu-book.com.
2:16 Speaker 00 That is snafu-book.com. And now, please enjoy the rip-roaring adventure of the CIA's Project Azorian.
2:32 Speaker 00 Project Azorian: A Sub Above. How the CIA Tried To Win The World's Most Expensive And Difficult Claw Machine. In the early hours of June 5th, 1974, security guard Mike Davis stood outside the building at 7020 Romaine Street in Hollywood. As he enjoyed the balmy 60-degree weather, the light of the full moon shining through the cloudy sky, Mike suddenly felt something pressing into his back: a gun.
3:07 Speaker 00 A group of four burglars grabbed poor Mike and forced him to unlock the door. Why did these thieves want to get inside so badly? Because the building Mike was guarding was the corporate headquarters of Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire aviator, film producer, philanthropist, and all-around, all-American weirdo-rich guy. Think Jeff Bezos, but with a pencil-thin mustache and actually, you know, adventurous. After the burglars forced Mike to let them in, they wheeled in a heavy tank filled with highly flammable acetylene gas. They mazed their way through the art-deco-style two-story building before finally marching into an office that contained a safe and a large vault: jackpot.
3:53 Speaker 00 "Wait a second," you might be asking, "the burglars just waltzed right in there? Shouldn't this famously secretive guy have some sort of security or alarm system for this building that houses his sensitive, top-secret shit?" Well, reader or listener, there was an alarm system. It just wasn't working. Actually, it had been out of order for some time, and Mike was the only guard on duty. Seriously, this place had worse security than the gas station where my friends and I used to steal packs of gum as kids. The burglars turned on the acetylene tank and grabbed their torches. You know the big heist scene in Thief where James Caan puts on a welding suit, lights
4:37 Speaker 00 up a long-ass torch, and drives it straight into a locked metal door as sparks fly everywhere? Just imagine that! And after hours of slowly melting the door off its hinges, one of the burglars took off his suit, wiped his brow, and smirked as he said, "We're in."
4:56 Speaker 00 The burglars stormed into the vault and grabbed everything they could. Four hours after first arriving, the burglars escaped, hauling the acetylene tank with them and all their stolen loot. They ended up with quite the grab bag: sixty-eight thousand dollars in cash, two Wedgewood vases, a ceramic samovar, two butterfly collections, three digital watches, and an antique Mongolian eating bowl. Again, Hughes was a rich weirdo. Maybe he was planning on sitting down to a delicious meal of pickled butterflies perfectly arranged in his Mongolian bowl. But even more valuable than those preserved critters and antiques were two footlockers full of files.
5:41 Speaker 00 Documents that would soon cause an international diplomatic scandal. These documents revealed Hughes's participation in a secret CIA plot that involved a sunken Soviet submarine, underwater nukes, and the most difficult claw game in the world.
6:02 Speaker 00 The Sub
6:04 Speaker 00 It all began six years earlier on March 1st, 1968, when a Soviet submarine named K-129 sailed out from a naval base in Petro Pavlovsk, way out in the Russian Far East and over four thousand miles from Moscow. K-129 was equipped with three nuclear warheads. Each single warhead was nearly seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima. In the case of nuclear war, the sub would fire off its nukes to targets on the west coast of the United States. The sub began its standard peacetime patrol in the North Pacific. But at some point, in the middle of March, the Soviets lost communication with K-129.
6:49 Speaker 00 The sub went radio silent. It's still not clear exactly what happened. A declassified, heavily redacted CIA report, published in 1985, simply says that "the submarine suffered an accident, cause unknown, and sank 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii." The report is also mum about how the CIA came to ascertain the location of the sub sinking. According to military historian Matthew Aid, archival documents have suggested that the US Navy's underwater sonar, the Sound Surveillance System, might have discovered the location of the sunken sub. Whatever the case, the Soviets had lost a nuke-equipped submarine.
7:34 Speaker 00 They fruitlessly searched for it for two months, then gave up. And that whole time, the CIA knew exactly where it was. Why was the CIA so interested in the sub? Because inside was potentially valuable intelligence that could reveal the inner workings of the Soviet Navy. Codebooks, decoding machines, and burst transmitters, not to mention the nukes themselves, which would still be functional. There was just one problem. K-129 lay 16,500 feet beneath the surface of the ocean. How the hell do you get down there in the first place? And once you're three miles deep, how do you then bring the sub back up to the surface?
8:20 Speaker 00 These questions might have left a recovery effort dead in the water, but with such a tantalizing prize on the ocean floor, the CIA couldn't resist. To consider their options, longtime CIA agent John Perengoski convened a task force in an anonymous office near, of all places, Tyson's Corner, the largest shopping mall in the DC area. Today, if you showed up there for a meeting, you could browse the racks at Urban Outfitters and grab a pretzel from Auntie Anne's, but there isn't a secret meeting room anymore. At least Perengoski got in ahead of Auntie Anne, though. According to the book "The Taking of K-129", he was a fair boss, occasionally even friendly,
9:04 Speaker 00 but no one was immune from his temper. I assume Perengoski wasn't very forgiving if you came back late from lunch at the food court. Anyway, Perengoski assembled a team of scientists, engineers, and submarine experts to brainstorm ideas for the sub rescue mission. Imagine a bunch of suits scribbling ideas on a whiteboard. Maybe they could place buoyant material, kind of like a really sophisticated pool noodle, under the sub, and then hope the material was floaty enough to carry the sub all the way up. Maybe instead of a pool noodle, they could simply generate a buoyant gas, like hydrogen or nitrogen, through electrolysis, causing the sub to float back up, without even touching it.
9:47 Speaker 00 All of these ideas were 100% real and actually considered by the CIA. And yeah, if they sounded harebrained and doomed to fail, you'd be right. But believe it or not, the solution Perengoski and company finally landed on was even more harebrained. The doomdest to fail of them all. That's right, folks. Perengoski and company decided to use a literal claw to pick up K-129 from the bottom of the ocean and lift it back up through brute force.
10:24 Speaker 00 The Claw.
10:27 Speaker 00 The claw would consist of five separate grasping claws, connected to heavy-duty winches that would be mounted onto a specially-built ship. The ship had to be able to withstand the weight of the 1,750-ton Soviet sub. The plan was for the claw to descend to the seafloor, slip a sort of metal hammock beneath the sub, and then gingerly lift it back up. You're probably picturing one of those arcade claw games at Chuck E. Cheese right now. And yeah, that's exactly what I want you to imagine. Because think about how hard it is to even pick up a stuffed animal from the bottom of the machine. Those things are impossible to win. Now think about trying to pick up a submarine that's more than three miles underwater
11:12 Speaker 00 and has the weight of about 875 passenger cars. What could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, just about everything. And they knew it too. Senior intelligence officers gave the project a 10% success rate. If you were a civil engineer and designed a bridge that had a 90% chance of collapsing, what do you think your boss would say? Would they be like, "Great idea! Here's an ungodly amount of money to build this bridge that, nine times out of 10, will catastrophically fail." Well, that's exactly what the CIA decided to do. On October 30th, 1970, two years after K-129 sank,
11:55 Speaker 00 the agency authorized Project Azorian, the official name for the mission to recover the Soviet sub. There were definitely concerns about the mission, especially the constantly ballooning cost. Suspiciously, the declassified CIA report redacts any and all specific dollar figures. What it does mention is how, like the making of Apocalypse Now, the project kept getting delayed and going over budget. For example, Project Azorian was first costed at, redacted number, in 1970. In less than a year, it had jumped more than 50% to some, redacted number. We'll probably never know the exact cost,
12:38 Speaker 00 but Matthew Aid estimates it at half a billion with a B dollars at the time. That's over $3 billion in today's money. How much is 3 billion? It's more than the individual GDP of 35 sovereign nations. In other words, this CIA-floating claw machine was more expensive than entire economies. Which, damn, that makes paying a quarter to play a claw game at Chuck E. Cheese seem like a bargain.
13:09 Speaker 00 The Voyage.
13:12 Speaker 00 The CIA had one last problem with Project Dazorian. How do we keep this thing a secret? We can't actually tell everyone we're building a giant claw ship to retrieve a Soviet submarine. By 1971, the United States and the USSR were in a period of détente. The two countries had signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968, and a mission to essentially steal a Soviet sub wouldn't be great for diplomatic relations. So the CIA needed a cover story, and decided to reach out to Howard Hughes. Could Hughes pretend to be constructing a research vessel equipped with a giant claw for the purpose of mining deep-sea metals?
13:55 Speaker 00 Hughes was in many ways a perfect choice. He already had a reputation as a secretive eccentric billionaire who invested in all sorts of expensive projects, and already had a stated interest in deep-sea mining. He had also previously collaborated with the government to develop satellites for classified intelligence purposes. And sure enough, Hughes was more than happy to help. Construction on the Hughes Glomar Explorer, Hughes also agreed to let the claw ship be named after him, began in 1971 in a shipyard in Chester, Pennsylvania, a half hour south of Philadelphia. In November 1972, the ship was christened in the usual way, smashing a bottle of champagne on the hull.
14:40 Speaker 00 Not that things exactly went to plan. The person who was supposed to smash the bottle missed twice, and had to throw a third bottle at the ship as it cast off. Not everything is an omen, but sometimes such occurrences are a little on the nose. The CIA was able to maintain this cover for quite some time. When the HGE, let's call it the HGE so I don't have to keep saying Glomar, finally set sail in 1973, The Los Angeles Times noted, "Newsmen were not permitted to view the launch, and details of the ship's destination and mission were not released." The press chalked up the secrecy surrounding the ship and its mission to Hughes's own propensity for privacy.
15:23 Speaker 00 The HGE first sailed from Pennsylvania to Bermuda. Because it was too big to pass through the Panama Canal, it had to sail all the way around the southern tip of South America. After making a brief pit stop in Chile, the HGE sailed on and reached its destination of Long Beach, California, at the end of September, where it stayed at harbor for several months in preparation for the recovery mission. It also kept experiencing mechanical failures. Literal cracks started showing in the hull, which divers had to seal up. This thing was pretty much held together by duct tape and a prayer. The crew couldn't fix everything and eventually just gave up.
16:04 Speaker 00 One small but persistent seal leak was never corrected, and the seepage of a few gallons per hour was accepted. Thus, the HGE lived with a small puddle in the starboard wingwell. Kind of embarrassing. Imagine a real estate agent trying to sell you a house and explaining that there's a permanent puddle on the top floor because the roof isn't fully sealed. But, the CIA had already invested too much time and too many resources into this over-budget, creaky-ass, claw ship. I guess you could say they'd fallen into the, sorry, sunk-cost fallacy. So sorry. On June 7, 1974, President Nixon personally gave the official and final green light to
16:49 Speaker 00 recover the sub. It was showtime. The Moment of Truth
16:58 Speaker 00 On Independence Day, as fireworks exploded over cities across the country, in celebration of America's 198th birthday, the HGE traveled to a spot 1,560 miles northeast of Hawaii, where K-129 lay at the bottom of the ocean. John Perengoski, the CIA agent who had come up with the whole claw idea, was closely monitoring the mission back at headquarters. But, when the HGE arrived at the site, the mission was very nearly thwarted. The crew noticed Soviet helicopters flying overhead, taking photos. Plus, Soviet Navy ships kept surveilling the HGE.
17:40 Speaker 00 One vessel named Chasma came within a mile of the HGE and sent a radio transmission, "What are you doing here?" The Americans replied, "We are conducting ocean mining tests, deep ocean mining tests." After a few more tense back-and-forths, Chasma signed off with, "I wish you all the best," and went on its merry way to Petro Pavlovsk, the port city that K-129 originally set out from. The Soviets were none the wiser about HGE's true purpose. But even with the Soviets off their backs, the crew still had to worry about maintenance issues, which just kept getting worse. One mechanical failure caused a display of noise, fire, sparks and smoke primarily,
18:25 Speaker 00 and spastic shaking of the derrick. And as I always say, "Whenever there's spastic shaking of the derrick, things aren't looking good." The crew in general weren't confident about the chances for success. In fact, they had nicknamed the sub Clementine, since they figured the sub was "lost and gone forever." But it was too late to back out now. Just after midnight on July 21st, the world's most expensive and difficult sub game began. The ship's onboard computers flashed with real-time info and photos as the massive winch slowly unspooled miles and miles of piping, with Clementine descending into the deepest reaches of the Pacific.
19:09 Speaker 00 According to the book Blind Man's Bluff, one man who recruited sailors for the crew later compared the mission to "lifting a 25-foot-long steel tube off the ground with a cable lowered from the top of the 110-story World Trade Center on a pitch-black night haunted by swirling winds." So, you know, everyone was set up for success. Down Clementine went. Not much lives 16,500 feet beneath the surface of the ocean. That depth is considered the abyssal zone, where there's no sunlight and the temperature is just above freezing. The water pressure can reach up to 600 times the pressure of the atmosphere.
19:52 Speaker 00 The only things swimming around are freaky-looking sea creatures with creepy names, like "faceless fish" and "fang-tooths." It took 11 days for Clementine to reach the bottom of the ocean. Using the built-in cameras, the crew carefully maneuvered the claw to grasp the sub, only for them to miscalculate and slam the claw into the seabed. Whoops. But Clementine, faithful old girl, was still intact. They went in for another attempt, and this time, were right on target. Clementine latched onto the sub and gingerly began lifting it up, at an agonizingly slow rate of six feet per minute.
20:37 Speaker 00 It took another eight days for the claw to rise from the crash site. Imagine the crew's excitement when, after waiting for more than a week, the claw finally returned to the surface. To quote another American military vessel, "Mission accomplished." And then imagine their disappointment, when the claw emerged with only a thirty-eight-foot-long section of the front hull. About two-thirds of the sub had broken off. On Clementine's way up, three of the five grasping claws had cracked and sunk. With only two claws still holding the highly fragile sub, the sub then split off and sank
21:19 Speaker 00 as well, along with the nuclear missile, codebooks decoding machines, and the burst transmitters. Essentially, they lost everything the CIA was dying to reclaim. What the claw did recover were the bodies of six of the sub's crew members, who were trapped in the front ten percent of the sub. Perengoski had ordered that any recovered bodies would be given a proper funeral. The Soviet crew members were buried at sea with full military honors. The funeral was filmed, and the recording was given to the Russian government, a year after the Soviet Union's collapse. There's honestly something touching about that.
22:00 Speaker 00 The crew of K-129 may have been working for America's sworn enemy, but they certainly didn't deserve to die in the depths of the Pacific, thousands of miles from home. At least after their deaths, they were treated with a little humanity. And so it was that on August 8th, 1974, with most of K-129 still at the bottom of the ocean, the Hughes Glomar Explorer began its voyage home.
22:28 Speaker 00 The Blowback.
22:31 Speaker 00 Well, the CIA told itself, "At least we were able to maintain our cover story and no one's the wiser that our mission failed." Some in the government even believed Project Azorian to be a success. In a post-mission White House meeting, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger declared that the operation is a marvel. The CIA figured that even if they didn't recover the entire sub, they'd proved that it was at least possible. John Perengoski pushed for a second attempt, which was scheduled for July 1975. Hopefully, they could keep the nosey press from catching on one more time.
23:09 Speaker 00 But alas, back on June 5, 1974, while the HGE was docked 33 miles south in Long Beach, waiting to launch out into the Pacific, a group of four burglars broke into the Hughes corporate headquarters and stole top-secret documents that revealed the true purpose of the ship. The press discovered these documents, and Azorian's cover story was finally blown in February 1975, when The Los Angeles Times published the first article revealing the actual mission of the HGE. The following month, our good pal Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jack Anderson—you'll
23:49 Speaker 00 remember him from Operation Popeye—broke the story of Azorian on national TV. And, surprise, surprise, our other legendary journalist Seymour Hersh also wrote about the failed mission for The New York Times. Anyone else miss the glory days of gumshoe reporters like Anderson and Hersh? Hersh spoke to an anonymous Navy admiral who pointed out that even if the CIA did recover the secret Soviet codebooks—which would have been seven years out of date by that point—the codes wouldn't mean much because they were automatically randomly scrambled every 24 hours. By June 1975, all this bad press forced the CIA to cancel the planned second recovery attempt.
24:33 Speaker 00 John Perengoski, the agent who had spearheaded Project Azorian, had retired by then. And naturally, the Soviets weren't happy about the news either. The USSR ambassador to the United States pressed for more details about Project Azorian. Perhaps the Soviets were embarrassed that despite heavily surveilling the HGE, they'd failed to ascertain its true purpose.
24:57 Speaker 00 American journalists also kept digging. A journalist named Harriet Ann Philippi filed a Freedom of Information Act request for more info. Walking a diplomatic tightrope, the CIA stated that they could neither confirm nor deny the agency's connection to the Hughes Glomar Explorer's true mission. It's the perfect non-denial denial. "Maybe this thing isn't true, but if it is true, we can't tell you about it." A court case the following year upheld the CIA's "refusal to confirm or deny existence of records." And Philippi's FOIA request was thrown out. You've probably heard this phrase, of course.
25:38 Speaker 00 It became so widespread and infamous that today it's known as the Glomar Response. In perhaps the worst example of branded accounts on Twitter, now X, @CIA's first-ever tweet in 2014 was, "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet." Hilarious. As for the Hughes Glomar Explorer itself, in 1976, the US government tried to auction it off to the public. The maximum offer they received was 2 million, which was nothing compared to the estimated total mission cost of 500 million. Again, the actual mission cost is still classified info.
26:20 Speaker 00 The HGE was put into storage, and over the decades was leased to various private interests to drill for oil and to actually mine for deep-sea metals, before finally being completely scrapped in 2015. All 51,000 tons of it. In an ironic twist, there's probably more of K-129 left than the massive claw machine that was built to recover it. Maybe James Cameron can build another deep-sea explorer and try to recover the sunken Soviet submarine himself. But on the other hand, perhaps it's best to let sleeping subs lie.
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