The Secret Operation Revealed Decades Later

Project Azorian: Recover a sunken submarine

This six-year project was one of the most complicated that the CIA ever undertook. In the late 1960s, a Soviet submarine with the name “K-129” sank about 1500 miles north of Hawaii, taking a trio of ballistic missiles with it. The CIA and the Department of Defense realized that this provided a valuable opportunity to gain some Soviet intelligence. So they began a covert operation to put together a massive deep-sea vessel with a mechanical claw that would lift the submarine the more than three miles to the surface.