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Project AZORIAN
ZORIAN Imagine standing atop the Empire State Building with an 8-foot-wide grappling hook on a 1-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.
The story began in 1968 when K-129, a Soviet Golf II-class submarine carrying three SS-N-4 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, sailed from the naval base at Petropavlovsk on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to take up its peacetime patrol station in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Hawaii. In 1970, after careful study, a team of CIA engineers and contractors determined that the only technically feasible approach was to use a large mechanical claw to grasp the hull and a heavy-duty hydraulic system mounted on a surface ship to lift it. Sailing from Long Beach, California, the Glomar Explorer arrived over the recovery site on 4 July 1974 and conducted salvage operations for more than two months under total secrecy–despite much of the time being monitored by nearby Soviet ships curious about its mission.
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