The secret on the ocean floor

[alexander koryagin]

Hi, All!

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The secret on the ocean floor

A wave of pioneers is poised to scoop up treasure from the deep sea.
But was this ocean mining boom sparked by a 1970s CIA plot?

Mystery ship

In the summer of 1974, a large and highly unusual ship set sail from
Long Beach in California.

It was heading for the middle of the Pacific where its owners boasted it
would herald a revolutionary new industry beneath the waves.

Equipped with a towering rig and the latest in drilling gear, the vessel
was designed to reach down through the deep, dark waters to a source of
incredible wealth lying on the ocean floor.

It was billed as the boldest step so far in a long-held dream of opening
a new frontier in mining, one that would see valuable metals extracted
from the rocks of the seabed.

But amid all the excited public relations, there was one small hitch -
the whole expedition was a lie.

This was a Cold War deception on a staggering scale, but one which also
left a legacy that has profound implications nearly half a century later.

The real target of the crew on board this giant ship was a lost Soviet
submarine. Six years earlier, the K-129 had sunk 1,500 miles north-west
of Hawaii while carrying ballistic nuclear missiles.

The Russians failed to find their sub despite a massive search, but an
American network of underwater listening posts had detected the noise of
an explosion that eventually led US teams to the wreck.

It was lying three miles down, deeper than any previous salvage
operation. The weapons and top-secret code books were surely beyond reach.

But in the struggle for military advantage, the sub represented the
crown jewels - a chance to explore Moscow's nuclear missiles and to
break into its naval communications.

So the CIA hatched an audacious plan, Project Azorian, to retrieve the
submarine. That would have been hard enough. But there was another
challenge as well - it had to be done without the Russians knowing.

The spies needed to create a smokescreen so they pretended to be
exploring the possibility of deep sea mining.

A PR campaign conveyed a determined effort to find manganese nodules.
These potato-sized rocks lie scattered in the abyss, the great plains of
the deep ocean.

There had to be a frontman - someone rich and eccentric enough to be
plausible. The reclusive billionaire inventor Howard Hughes was perfect
for the role.

Howard Hughes, pictured in 1952 - by the 1970s the billionaire was
living a reclusive existence

He agreed to take part and, in his name, a unique ship was designed.
Publicly, it was fitted with everything needed to dig up the seabed.

But, covertly, the Hughes Glomar Explorer was also built with ingenious
devices straight from a Bond film. The ship's hull had enormous doors
that could swing apart to create a "moon pool", an underwater opening
large enough to accommodate the Soviet sub and keep it hidden.

Tucked away out of sight inside the ship was a "capture vehicle" which
had a giant set of claws to straddle the sub and secure it.


It took until 1974, six years after the sinking of the sub, for the CIA
to be ready. The cost of the project - $500m - was equivalent then to
building a couple of aircraft carriers or launching an Apollo mission to
the moon.

+=====+
We really misled a lot of people and it's surprising that the story held
together for so long"

Dave Sharp, former CIA operative
+=====+

No-one had ever attempted anything on this scale in such incredible
depths. The sub itself had a weight of nearly 2,000 tonnes but the three
miles of thick steel pipe needed to haul it up added even more.

New systems were needed to keep the Glomar Explorer in position as well
as to handle the huge load, and everyone on board was nervous. Dave
Sharp, one of the few CIA figures happy to talk about the project, tells
me it was "really frightening" when heavy seas threatened to tear their
unusual vessel apart.

But even more alarming was the suspicion of the Russians. To convince
them that Howard Hughes was genuinely interested in nodules, executives
were despatched to conferences on ocean mining where they described in
detail their plans to harvest the rocks.

"We made ocean mining seem a lot more credible," Sharp says. "We really
misled a lot of people and it's surprising that the story held together
for so long."

The cover was so good that it prompted US universities to move to start
courses in deep sea mining and it also whipped up the share prices of
the companies involved. "People thought, 'if Howard Hughes is into it,
we need to be too'," says Sharp.

"We even collected a few nodules," he remembers, which was fortunate
because Soviet spy ships kept a constant vigil and once even came close
enough to overhear the Americans' conversations.

"When we realised they were right alongside, we started talking about
nodules, like 'here's a good one' so it looked like we were checking them."

Yet another complication arose. The project needed calm weather and that
was only likely in summer. But just when it was about to begin in summer
1974, US President Richard Nixon was visiting Moscow for a peace-making
summit.

Being caught stealing a Soviet sub would not exactly have helped, so
Nixon insisted that the operation could not begin until he had left
Russia. That was on 3 July. By then the Hughes Glomar Explorer was in
position and the winches whirred into action the next day.

Things did not go smoothly. Sharp recalls that pumps and connections
kept breaking. Huge vibrations rocked the ship as the "capture vehicle"
was "banging back and forth in the waves". But on 30 July, he watched as
underwater cameras relayed video of the sub as well as "dozens of
crawling crab-like crustaceans" and a big white fish that looked like a
shark.

Amazingly, the giant steel claws successfully seized the sub. But then
disaster struck. At some point on the way up, the immense strain became
too much, part of a claw snapped off and most of the sub slipped back to
the seabed.

Only the front section made it up. The bodies of six Soviet submariners
were recovered and were later given a formal burial at sea. But the
missiles and code books were never found.

The CIA official history asserts that the operation was one of the
greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War, but it had cost vast sums
and questions immediately arose about its value. A year later, the
sensational details became public and plans to recover the remaining
section were abandoned.

As Sharp puts it, the revelation that the deep sea mining project was
fake was "a sudden shock" to other mining companies and also to
diplomats at the UN who were right in the middle of negotiating future
rights to ocean minerals. Share prices tumbled amid a wave of
recriminations.

This might have derailed the very notion of deep sea mining for good.
But in fact it proved that with clever engineering and a lavish budget
it was possible - just - to operate in the otherworldly depths. "It's
really difficult but we showed it could be done," says Sharp.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/deep_sea_mining
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Bye, All!
Alexander Koryagin