April 5, 2018 • 50 mins
In 1974 the CIA undertook one of its most brazen operations – secretly raising a sunken Soviet submarine lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right under the noses of the Russian Navy. With the help of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes, obviously.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's our ghost
podcaster producer who's invisible, the ghost of Jerry's past, actually
(00:26):
the ghost of Jerry's present. Jerry's not dead, everybody, No,
that just sounded weird. We're keeping Jerry around. Yes, she
just out this week. Yeah, there you go. Um, So
it's just us, Chuck, just a couple of boys batching it,
just some good old boys, never meaning no harm. No,
(00:46):
something something bit in trouble with the loss. It's the
day we were born. I don't think there's something something
before then? Is there m something something, something been in trouble. Yeah,
right now, I don't know. Well, go well, we'll look
it up. You know. It's funny. There's a great and
we might have talked about this years ago, but there's
a great website called Atlanta time Machine where you can
(01:08):
go back and look at old pictures of Atlanta and
compare him to new pictures and all that stuff. And
they have some movie specific pictures now, and they have
the Dukes of Hazard Pilot shoot photos which was. They
eventually moved it out in the country, but like most
of the dukes of Hazard Pilot, all those car chases
were in like midtown Atlanta. Isn't that crazy? But it
(01:30):
was the original Bowen Luke. Wow, who was the Who's
saying the theme song? Is it walk Tosh? Whale Jennings?
Wasn't he the narrator? It was Whale Jennings. What was
that first thing he said? Walk Tosh? What does that mean?
That's his nickname? Really, walk Tosh Whale Jennings. You never
heard that? Well it is? I love Whale Jennings. Yeah,
(01:51):
he's great. Apparently he and Johnny Cash were um roommates
and highwaymen back well way back in the day. Yeah,
both of them were on drugs, but they didn't other
people didn't know that. So they both used to like
be on drugs but not tell each other about it.
And um, I guess it came out later that they
(02:13):
they were like, you're on drugs, said so was I.
It's like I used to keep on drugs in the
air conditioner and Johnny Cash is like, that's why the
air conditioner never worked and why and Jones was like,
I used to keep minding the TV and Johnny Cash
is whoever? Yeah, their TV never worked in the a
C never worked because that's where they stashed their drugs
without the other one knowing it. Why what are the
drugs due to the TV and the air conditioner? I
(02:34):
got them pretty wasted? What a weird start. Yeah, it
is a little weird start, especially because what we're talking
about has nothing to do with drugs, Johnny Cash or
Waylon Jennings or air conditioners. TV really has to do
with the CIA, submarines, the USSR, and Howard Hughes, among
(03:00):
other things. Been hitting a kissinger? Are you kissing him?
His interesting? He's still alive too. Maybe you'll hear this.
I've never seen you hiss before. I know. It's kind
of threatening, is it, Yeah, because I do have like
really sharp key nine. Yeah, you should. You should totally
(03:20):
hiss more often. I should, and I should chart him
these things. I should file them down. Oh people do that,
I know, but surely that has to hurt, right to
file them down? Yeah, how does it not? Don't you
have nerd? No, they don't hit the nerves, They just
I guess you're right. Yeah, I might do that in
the meantime, let's talk about something. Well, let's let's go
(03:41):
back to the beginning. Okay, it's I'm not exactly sure, Wayne,
because look, the first part of my page ripped. Does
it say when in night it does? You want to guess?
I feel like I'm holding the keys May March. It
was pre summer of barely. Oh yeah, everybody's just getting started.
(04:03):
Is the summer of four play? Everyone's getting looped up? Right?
It so? Um March of in the northwestern Pacific, as
far as the United States is concerned, um, which should
be between say Hawaii and some far out islands in
Alaska and whatever else is out there. There's not a
(04:26):
lot out there. Apparently Hawaii is the most remote island
chain in the world. Did you know that there's no
island chain that's further away from other land than Hawaii,
even like when you look at the globe, those teeny
tiny islands. From what I understand, so say Hawaiians at
least anyway, basically out in the middle of nowhere in
(04:48):
the northwest Pacific, there's a Soviet sub It was a
Gulf to go O l F two Soviet submarine. They
called it the Cabriola for a little while. But but
that's those were the subs with the rag top. Yeah,
those didn't work out. Um, the the this golf to
sub was called the K one. Surely it had an
(05:09):
actual name, right, No, I think they called him the
K whatever. All right, Well, the K one twenty nine
was on a routine patrol mission. These are the Soviets state.
They weren't glib about you know what's called this one,
the Hannah Montana exactly right, so that it was just
the Kine all business, which actually is kind of reassuring.
(05:31):
Because it was a nuclear submarine. Um, it had not
only a nuclear missile, like a nuclear missis you could
come up to the surface and shoot on to say,
the United States, it also had nuclear torpedoes, which I
had no idea where a thing a nuclear torpedo. It's
kind of overkilled them to think. No, not if you're
(05:52):
underwater and you want to shoot a nuclear bomb at somebody, Well, okay,
then that really fits the bill. Well, it turns out
that some of these nuclear tip torpedoes detonated, and there
wasn't a full nuclear detonation obviously obvious, but it was
enough to blow a hole in the submarine. And I
think kickoffs some other detonations in some of the other
(06:15):
nuclear torpedoes and the upshot. All this was that the
entire person crew and the Soviet submarine in the middle
of the Cold War sunk about six hundred miles or
fift hundred miles north west of Hawaii. Uh and hit
the bottom at sixteen thousand feet more than three miles down. Yes,
(06:38):
and so kicks off the story of Project as Orient
and the Glomar Explorer. Uh So, what happens, of course,
is the Soviets go looking for this thing. Uh. They
spend a couple of months pretty massive search, couldn't find it.
The US is kind of laughing and saying, they haven't
(06:59):
found their own sub yet. Maybe we should go out
there and take a look, because we could probably get
some intel, maybe salvage of nuclear warhead for ourselves, spray
paint a smiley face that says, uh, something like right
back at you, that's a good one, and then throw
it their way. Uh. In In nineteen August of nineteen
(07:20):
sixty eight, just you know, quite a few months later,
they actually found it. The United States of America located
this thing. Yeah, so they they this is the official story.
Here's the thing that I figured up from researching this story.
You can also go ahead and assume that all of
this is fabricated and that there's actually other stuff that
was actually going on. Yeah, this is the story that's
(07:40):
been handed like this. This actually maybe the story that
like covers up an assassination in um Brazil or something
like that. That could be the whole reason this story exists,
because we're talking about a covert operation in the sixties
and seventies by the c I. A okay, so just
take everything with the an assault. But the story is
(08:01):
it was reported, and as far as the CIA has
ever admitted, was that the Air Force and the Navy
both had listening devices throughout the Pacific, and somebody at
some point said, well, wait a minute, why don't we
get these two together and see if there's any data,
any sounds that were picked up from the sub exploding,
and see if we can pinpoint it basically triangulate with
(08:23):
only two data points, which is I guess straight line right, Yeah, yeah,
that that is what it would be called. But supposedly
they did it, and they found where the sub was,
and like you said, the US was laughing because they
were watching the Soviets look in all the wrong places.
And then after a couple of months, the Soviets called
off this the search. And it was quite obvious to
(08:46):
the to the Americans that the Soviets had no idea
where the sub was, which made us think, maybe we
should check this thing out, maybe we can go get it.
So we have two choices. We can call them and
let them know where it is, or we can go
get it ourselves. And this is the height of the
Cold War. Yeah, so they weren't about to go with
choice one. No, so option to came upon the table,
(09:08):
and we got our own sub called the Halibu, so
we had fun names. The Halibu dropped a camera down
there on a sled and took a bunch of pictures
of this thing. Verified it's down there. It's intact. We
don't know for sure if we can go get it,
but we should try because if we can get this thing,
not only do we have potentially uh information on how
(09:32):
these warheads are being built by them, but we might
also be able to bust their codes with this cryptographic
equipment they have down there. And so let's launch a project.
And we love naming things, so let's name it Project
as Orian. Yeah, I guess that's the name of a
person from the Zores. Maybe maybe no idea where they'd
(09:52):
come up with these names, God love them, who knows,
But um, project as Orian was the name of this.
This this idea to go see if we can get
this sub right. Yeah, which means, of course we're not
gonna go out there next week and start looking like
there's a long process that has to be undertaken before
we can even figure out if we can do this right.
So they actually did get together like a working group,
(10:15):
a top secret working group of engineers and uh nautical
engineers and any kind of engineer you can think of,
and said, how would you do this? There's a submarine,
a hundred ton submarine three feet long. That's that's a
thing in and of itself. It's a big sub like
(10:37):
that would be hard to pick up off land, sure,
but it's not on land. It's underwater. It's sixteen thousand,
five hundred ft under the surface of the Pacific Ocean
in the middle of nowhere about is in the middle
of nowhere as you can get And um, how could
we do this? How can we possibly pick this up?
(10:58):
And wait, wait, wait, before you answer you, and and years.
The Soviets can have no idea what we're doing, because
they will probably think any ship that they thought was
going after this. I love this stuff more than most
stuff in the world. Like when there's this incredibly challenging,
almost insurmatical, insurmountable task and people get a lot of
(11:20):
smart people together and say, let's start brainstorming and how
if this is even possible. I just think it's really
cool that. And I bet these people, the engineers are like,
oh my god, this is a dream to come up
and try and solve this problem. Plus the CIA said
that they are holding my family hostage. I better get
to work. So they decided, here's what the only way
(11:42):
we can try this is by doing this. It's gonna
involve three large vessels. One is a recovery ship that
basically has a chamber with the bottom that could open
and close like that ship in the Abyss. Yeah, a
moon pool. In fact that James Cameron totally glow marred
this totally for his own needs. Uh, it would have
(12:05):
a docking legs system that basically turned it into an
underwater on the ocean floor platform that I did not get.
I think just basically it goes down there instead of
like hovering in place, turns into a a building. But
I don't understand. I didn't understand how, But yes, that's
that is the understanding. Well, I had four legs, but
(12:25):
that's crazy. That means they had four three mile long legs.
That doesn't make much sense, that does you know what
I mean? I need to see a picture. I've seen
pictures of it. I still don't know what really with
the legs. Yeah, well I don't know then. So but
that's that's one. That's the ship that they sail out
there to undertake the whole mission, right, Yeah, there's two
(12:47):
others that they have to come up with. Two. That's right,
captured vehicle. So that had a grab right on it. Yeah,
like one of those banana clips that girls used to
wear in the nineties. Yeah, but for tons submarine. Yes,
And it wasn't just like, hey, use a little grabber
like that banana clip. It had. It was specifically designed
(13:09):
to attach to the submarine. It was the one the
one thing it was designed to do. That's correct. So
that's that's step two. If you have one of these
things and you're loading it onto a massive ship, I
think a seven hundred foot ship is what they came
up with. Foot long ship many many meters long, so
(13:30):
many meters um. Somebody's gonna say, what is that? Well,
the Soviets would yes, because they're flying over the US
with their spy satellites ever since Sputnik got up there,
so they're gonna want to know what that is. The
Soviet analysts are going to point this out. So if
you have this big long ship that sticks out like
a sore thumb, because what are you doing with that thing?
(13:52):
What are you also doing with this big grabber? How
do you get around the grabber part at least chuck?
Uh oh, the grabber. Yeah, we must be talking about
the barge. So this is pretty amazing. This thing had
a retractable sunroof basically, uh. And it was the whole
reason this thing was here was to hide everything right right,
(14:14):
So it was they built the grabber vehicle, the vehicle
number two, inside the barge. But like you said, the
barge had a sunroof. The thing about the barge was
it was also designed to be submersible. So what they
did was they built a barge that they built the
grabber inside of floated the barge out to this huge
(14:36):
six eighteen foot ship, Ship number one, submerged it underneath
the ship, opened up the sunroof on the barge, opened
up the moon pool on the big ship, and raised
the grabber vehicle into the six eighteen foot ship, so
that the Soviets never even knew the grabber vehicle existed.
(14:59):
They never saw it. It just didn't exist. And they
had to build all this stuff from scratch. It wasn't
just like they had a grabber laying around that fit
a Soviet sub precisely, or this barge that could become
invisible Bible accounts and and they so this was basically
this is what this this working group came up with,
(15:20):
like these are the things you need to do this? Yes,
And the CIA said, who can we possibly get? Who
in the world, Well, Howard Hughes, Yes, Mr Howard Hughes
specifically the Suma or Summa Corporation, and that was a
part of the Hughes Tool Company. And they said, go
(15:42):
build this thing at thirty six thousand tons six eighteen
feet like you said. And they called it the Hughes
Glomar Explorer because Global Marine was the company that operated it.
And that's just an abbreviation of global marine. I did
not know until a couple of days ago. Yeah, it's
sort of a disappointing end to what glomar meant. Yeah,
(16:02):
because it sounds kind of like space ag. It definitely does, like, Wow,
look at the healthy glow from radiation exposure on that thing, glomar.
Glomar has got a great glow. And here's the other
cool thing. Because this would, I mean, there would still
be a big beheam of ship out there in the
ocean in the Pacific, and the Russians would wonder what
(16:23):
was going on. So they said, here's the deal. There
are actually it happened to sink in an area of
the Pacific where there are a lot of manganese, really
valuable manganese nodules underwater. So we'll just concoct the story
that said, Howard Hughes built this thing. You know how
crazy he is uh to go out there and try
and mind the ocean's depths to get even richer. And
(16:47):
people actually bought that, right, the press even bought it.
They went to the trouble of of saying this is
actually really good cover story because there was manganese deposits
in the area it checked out. There was the idea
of deep sea mining was very new, so there wasn't
There was the idea that this would be a good idea,
(17:07):
but no one had tried to undertake it yet, so
the Soviets couldn't have been like, uh, that's not a
deep sea mining ship. No one knew it a deep
sea mining ship looked like yet. Plus it was very
exactly right. He was extremely wealthy, so he had the
kind of money to just undertake deep sea mining and
be the first one. But he also operated in strict secrecy,
(17:29):
and the press used to watch his operations and projects
from the outside and just make guesses about it and
and and create rumors. But it didn't matter because it
was all just conjecture and rumors. Right, So, um, it
was a perfect cover story. And then add on to
the top that Hughes was already in bed with the
US government in a number of ways, but including making
(17:51):
spy satellites in highly classified, top secret projects. It was
they couldn't have come up with a better person to
helm the actual carrying out of this of the project.
Should we take a break, Yeah, m all right, So
(18:37):
this this took a while. Um it was like years
had passed between the sub sinking and then actually saying
all right, I think we have a plan to do
this and we can get this done. And by the
time that came around, they said, wait a minute, like,
should we even should we go take another look at
this thing still intact? Should we bother? Is this still relevant?
(18:57):
Is it an asset or is it just some rusty, old,
you know, hunk a metal at the bottom of the ocean. Yeah.
Is it basically like a museum thing now? Yeah, So
they said, and we're not into Russian museums, let's be honest.
So they did form another committee, were great at that,
and they did take another look and they said, you
know what, let's go down there, guys, because even though
(19:20):
these missiles, the S S N five missiles are no
longer like their big threat, they do have the S
S IN eight. Maybe we could glean some technology and
and how these things operate, and there's still that cryptographic
equipment down there, which would be a good asset for
our intelligence. So they said, okay, let's do it. Come on, guys,
(19:41):
let's do it. There was another thing too, there's this
great um I O nine article on this this very
Project um and the author found some uh publication of
of memos about Project is orient and one of the
things was that they were saying, like, yes, it's still
(20:01):
worth it intelligence wise and everything, but more to the point,
we're locked in the punch here, like the US can't
afford to seem wishy washy to its contractors. That's so
we need to do this regardless. Yeah, that's kind of
nutty when you think about it. That the the risk
of pissing off Howard Hughes, I guess was too great.
(20:23):
And I mean it sort of makes sense in a
way because if he was a big time contractor for them, yeah,
that relationship going. But yeah, there's not that many top
secret contractors that you know you can't trust, and yeah,
you don't want to take them off, right. Very interesting though,
are we saying piste off now? Is that a thing?
I guess it made an appearance in the last episode two.
(20:43):
Did I say that? Just no, no, no. The the
the listener, male guy Peter Oh about vaping. Yeah, he said,
I'm piste off. If you can't if you can't tell, well,
I'm not sure, but I appreciate you drawing attention to well,
I guess we'll find out if Jerry bleeps all this
out or if we get booted out of the sixth
grade classes around the world. Yeah, kids, what you should
(21:03):
say is ticked off, and you really shouldn't say that.
You should say that. I'm going to use my words
and let you know that what you just said bothered me.
Oh is that what you're supposed to say? Yeah? Okay,
speak like an adult. So how adult speak? I say,
piste off. Um. Here's the other side note, and this
will come into play later, is that there was another
(21:24):
memo that said, you know what, there are bodies down there,
and according to the Geneva Convention, there's a proper way
that you handle even in quote unquote enemies remains, and
we're gonna abide by that, and we're gonna take all
the stuff we need to make sure that we can
do that in a respectful way. Uh, because this will
(21:44):
eventually probably come out and at least maybe that will
be a slight goodwill gesture to the Russians that say, hey,
we were very respectful of your dead seamen. So they
outfitted the huge Glomar Explorer Blorer Explorer, the h g
E with UM I think a capacity to handle one bodies,
(22:06):
which is kind of funny. If you were a sailor
engineer on the huge Glomar Explorer might have made you
a little nervous, considering there were ninety eight sailors on
the sub that you were going to get two more
dead guys. I don't think that was by accident either.
They didn't just round up to a nice even hundred
(22:27):
could ever coolers they I'm sure they're like, yeah, two
people will probably die on this mission, that's right. So um,
there's there's another memo from I think the V four
June three, and UM. It basically said, hey, all this
stuff's ready. The ship's ready, the UM grabb her claws,
(22:48):
vehicles ready, the barge is even ready. Everything's ready. Let's
do this. So are we gonna do it or not?
They estimated at chance of UM success, which they were
like threw the moon over the moon about. Yeah, they
were over the moon pool about this, which is interesting,
but I guess when it's something something that tough to accomplish,
(23:11):
UM and that innovative and and bleeding edge apparently wasn't
too bad, No, not at all. So and that was
like of a success, chance of ercent success. Yeah, okay,
so well, oh yeah, sure, so they the project has
(23:32):
approved June five, and just a few days later on
June the ship departed the Hughes Glomar explored departed I
believe the port of Los Angeles. Yeah. And another wrinkle
that will come up a little bit later is because
this was so covert, they couldn't surrounded by battleships or
(23:53):
have F sixteen. Well they probably don't have X. I
don't know when the sixteen came about. I think maybe
like the sixties or something. I'm sorry to all the aviators,
I'm sure we're way off. But whatever fighter jets they
had at the time, um, they they couldn't draw attention
to themselves by being protected like that. It would be
(24:14):
really weird if there was a naval or air force
escort for a Manganese ship. Right. Yeah, this is a
pretty uh I want to read this. So this is
pretty great. This quote from the CIA to kind of
just drive at home of what a task was before them.
Someone in the CIA said this, imagine standing atop the
(24:35):
Empire State Building with an eight foot wide grappling hook
on a one 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. And on top of that,
the job has to be done without anyone noticing. And
that essentially describes what happened there. That's what they were
(24:56):
doing when they when they shipped out. That was the
task ahead of them, right, yes, and add to this
that it keeps getting worse. Well, yeah, but the Soviets,
we're still surveilling everything. Right, So remember like they couldn't
have a U. S. Navy escort of the deep sea
mining ship. That just looked really weird. But that's not
(25:17):
to say the Soviets didn't send their navy out to
see what was up. So for the first two weeks
after the huge Glomar explorer made made it to its
its destination and started working, there were Soviet ships surveilling
them basically twenty four hours a day for the first
fourteen days. So these guys are actually undertaking raising a
(25:40):
Soviet sub within sight of Soviet naval ships watching them,
and the Soviet they were really nervous at this point.
They didn't know if the Soviet navy was going to
try to board the Glomar Explorer just to be like,
what are you guys doing. You're making us nervous, And
apparently the CIA, one of the CIA offers on board,
like we need to stack some crates on our helicopter
(26:02):
landing pad to prevent them from landing UM. And there
was a I don't know exactly what alert status it
was on, but maybe high alert, which was there's a
chance of soviets are gonna board, there's sensitive materials on board.
The team that's in charge of destroying those sensitive materials.
You guys are on alert. The people charged with defending
(26:24):
the team. You guys are on alert, but we're not
gonna give you guns yet because we haven't reached that.
This is the tension. What were they supposed to do
like karate? I think karate chop. It was like you
can karate, um, but don't shoot them. They're probably gonna
shoot you, but just deflect the bullets with your karate chops.
So they're out on the ocean. UM. It's very complicated mission,
(26:48):
to say the least. So you've got your ocean currents
at work. You have to maintain your position through those.
That's hard enough. Then you had to lower this capture
vehicle by doing this, adding sixty ft pieces of steel pipe,
one at a time, connecting to each other sixty ft
at a time, three miles down right to lower that
(27:10):
recovery vehicle down to the sub and then when it
gets down there, it has to be just in the
right position. Two straddle over that submarine and get that
grabb her out, attach it to the hull, and then
reverse that whole process by now towing a freaking submarine
by taking one sixty ft length pipe off at a
(27:32):
time until you're raising the sub like that. You know
what I need to see to understand this fully is
remember the beginning of Titanic when James Cameron did that
terrible obvious recreation of what happened to sink the Titanic.
Was at the very beginning when Bill Paxton was in
modern days and they're out searching for the Jewel of
(27:52):
the Sea, and he says, well, that guy with the beard,
you know, the nerd, fat bearded guy that's in every movie,
to explain what's going on, And he said, here's how
the Titanic sunk. And it did a little recreation on
the screen and showed exactly how it happened, just so
everyone would know. That's what I need to see. I
(28:12):
need a chubby bearded guy to explain to me visually
that's not me or page. You want to be up
and you want to be inception. Yeah, no, I know
what you mean. The problem is that there are so
many holes in this story. I need a picture book.
But everybody's everybody accepts that there's holes in the story
(28:33):
because it's a covert CIA operation. Yeah, that is just
will probably never fully be explained. Although there have been
interviews with people who are on this ship. They could
probably tell you, we'll look him up after this. Yeah.
And at the very end of that whole process of
bringing this thing up, then it's not like they get
it up kind of close enough to the ship and
they're like, all right, it's thirty ft below us, we'll
(28:54):
just glide in from here. Then they had to suck
it on board and it in the docking well successfully. Yes.
I could you imagine getting it to where it's right
below them and then it breaks free. I'd be so nervous.
And that's kind of almost what happened. That's close to
what happened. So remember the Soviet navy is circling them,
and they're lowering this claw down to the sub. But
(29:17):
also like, we're not doing anything over here, just right.
So um, they reached the sub and start doing the
submersible claw thing, and um at that time the Soviet
Navy two's three times, so like pee pee peep, see
you later, and they laughed for good. And so the
(29:37):
the Glomar explorer starts raising the sub. They get it.
I have no idea how they know they've gotten it,
but they've got the sub. I don't know how they
directed this thing over the sub. I don't understand either.
I'm totally with you, But as far as the story
is concerned, the claw got the sub and they started
raising it, and they got it over the course of
(29:58):
a few days of my file up, and then all
of a sudden, an extremely incredible accomplishment. I know, imagine
trying to sleep while this thing is like slowly being Yeah,
you would not, you'd not be able to. But there
was an engineer who was on the ship who later
recounted in an interview that there was something that felt
(30:18):
like about a ten second long earthquake on the ship.
And he said, you knew something bad had happened. Yeah,
and this was right after he said it's going great, everybody.
We can't lose now that first mile is the trickiest. Yeah. So,
I mean, I guess was it an earthquake? No, it
was the sub breaking up in the subversible claw. Oh okay,
(30:39):
I thought that caused it to break up. No, he
said it felt like an earthquake. That's how big of
a an energetic release it was. So the sub breaks apart.
I guess it had been down there so long that
it uh, it just wasn't you know, it wasn't viable
as a single solid piece of anymore. Here's what I
(31:01):
think happened, based on some other stuff, like later memos.
They said that they needed to redesign the claw so
that it wasn't as britty. Yeah, the banana clip, so
that it wasn't as brittle, and um that it was. Well,
so it wasn't as brittle. I think the claw broke
up and and some of the sub was able to
(31:22):
fall out. Some remained in it's held into the grabber,
but most of the sub this is a three ft
sub um about two hundred and sixty feet of it
broke off and fell back a mile down to the
ocean floor. So I thought you meant that the grabber
should have had like, did anybody think to put felt
(31:43):
on this grab right or rubber tips on the end
of the clause? No they didn't, I know. So the
the most of the sub, including all the stuff the
CIA was after, the the the code books, the con
tower that we had, the galley, right, they ate, well, like,
I guess that's okay, I love borished, so that it
(32:04):
is a silver lining. Yeah, they only got what of
this thing? Yeah, so which which it was the four
of the sub. The four of the sub stayed in
the grabber claw and they were able to bring it
the rest of the way up and salvage it, which
included the nuclear torpedoes. Unfortunately for the CIA and everybody aboard. Um,
the nuclear torpedoes were of course something that had detonated,
(32:26):
so they all suffered from some plutonium exposure as well. Yeah,
so it was it was their exposure was consistent with
the fact that there was in fact nuclear materials, right, Yeah,
that they had been exposed to these nuclear torpedoes, not
that they didn't get their hands on the nuclear missile
they were after. Basically, none of the prize that they
were looking for they got their hands on. But one
(32:47):
thing they did find on their hands all of a
sudden were the bodies of six Soviet submariners for submarners.
How do you say it? I think submarner okay, but
we'll get taken to task and told the way. Well,
we said both so can't get it wrong when you
say it both ways. So like we said, they could
hold a hundred bodies, so they could certainly hold six.
(33:08):
And then I guess ninety four other guys on board
worried I would guess, so uh, and they did. They
they had copies of Soviet burial manuals American burial manuals.
They had the ceremony. Did you watch the video of this?
I did, well, some of it they conduct They've filmed
it in color, and I love how is it you
(33:30):
who wrote this point? I love how you put it.
The bizarre and inexplicably futuristic video. Yeah, it looks weird.
It looks like it does look like a George Orwellian
like transmission from the future. But if the future was
in the nineteen eighties and it was being written in
the nineteen twenties, right, and the reason why I put
my finger on it. Finally, it's men wearing matching coveralls
(33:55):
in hard hats, disposing of bodies, and the video quality
is just weird, just perfectly weird. Yeah, just go check
it out. I guess, um C I a project Orian
Burial at Sea. I think would probably bring it up
on YouTube. And eventually this film was turned over two
Boris yeltson Somebody Still Loves You Boris yelts By CI
(34:18):
director Robert Gates. At that time, Um, did we take
another break? Yeah, I think we're alright, alright, we're gonna
wrap up this whole message just a minute. So they
(34:58):
found it. Once they got part of it, should they
go again? That was the big question, right, Um, And
there was a lot of discussion that the CIA, for
its part, was like, I don't know if there's anything
left to that subs the seventies now, right, we lucked
out that it was intact to begin with. After a
series of explosions. We're pretty sure that the stuff that
(35:22):
fell a mile back down to the sea floor probably
broke up. I'm suspicious of that, but that was the
CIA's position, regardless. Kissinger and Um. The rest of the
Nixon administration were like, how can we do this again?
The thing is right around the same time Nixon resigned,
and all of a sudden, everybody who had been high
(35:45):
flying and freewheeling and overthrowing governments and all that were
suddenly like, nothing, we're not doing anything. There's no operations
going on whatsoever. So the idea of UM a second
project being undertaken was pretty doubtful for a number of reasons. Yeah,
And one of the other big reasons was that this
whole cryptographic equipment and the codes probably weren't even relevant
(36:08):
by that point, and so they didn't think I mean,
they were basically like, there's so little upside to this
at this point, they Kissinger. I think he even finally relented, right, Yeah,
I think so. It is not the word it UM.
What I found was interesting was that, and later interview
by an admiral said, even if you found the code
(36:28):
books and you found the communications equipment and figured out
the UM arrangement of like the burst transmitters and circuits
and all that stuff, all you'd be able to do
is break the codes for a twenty four hour period.
But that would have been the case no matter if
they've gotten the whole suburb at any point, so that
(36:50):
it was already years later when they first went down, right,
So I guess they you probably would would still be
a pretty big treasure trove intelligence wise, to just get
a one day snapshot of Soviet submarine operations, that'd probably
be worth it. But maybe it was more about those
warheads though. I think that was definitely part of it too.
But they they said, there's probably not a good chance
(37:13):
we're going to do this. The The other the other
problem was this, by this time, UH journalists named Seymour Hirsch,
who's written some of the most um the some of
the deepest expose s on the US government ever written,
wrote about the Myli massacre. Um he's he wrote, Um
(37:33):
he didn't write or he wrote a few stories on
the Frank Olsen case that Wormwood was based on. UM.
Seymour Hurst was in that towards the end. Um he's written,
He's written a bunch of stuff. He had this story
down cold, He had everything for well over a year
before it finally broke, and the CIA director went to
(37:55):
Hurst and said, don't please don't say anything about this.
Please sit on the story. Please sit on the story,
and behind hersh's back or right from under him. The
story ended up breaking in the most bizarre, suspicious way
it possibly could have. Yeah. Well, and even before that,
a very famous term came about because of this. That
was a Rolling Stone writer named Harriet and Philippi, and
(38:17):
she flat out asked the CIA to reveal its existence.
And that's where the phrase we can neither confirm nor
deny its existence came into play, which is now known
as the Glomar response. You've ever heard that? That's where
it comes from, which is a great little cherry on top.
I think I think so too. Even though this isn't
the end, No it's not. It gets even weirder to
(38:37):
tell you the truth. So um, Harriet and Philippe was
asking about Project is Orian because there is a cryptic, weird,
little short news blurb in the Los Angeles Times that
was basically about some gossip and rumor that was circulating
at the l A p D and among cops in
l A. There was a rumor that the Hughes Corporation
(39:00):
and had cooperated and carried out a project to retrieve
a lost Soviet sub with the CIA. Weren't any other
details about that, they said, it was in the Atlantic Ocean.
There were a lot of problems with this story, but
for the first time ever it started to see the
light of day. And the whole reason that that was
in there, Chuck, was just the weirdest thing. That's that
(39:24):
I think the weirdest part of this story and the
most suspicious. Yeah, the fact that all this came together
in this way is pretty remarkable. So the Hues, some
corporation that we talked about, they were broken into. Their
HQ was broken into in Los Angeles. They got cash,
they got boxes of documents, including a memo describing this
(39:47):
secret project to the CIA, and no one knew for
sure whether or not they had this document or not.
The thieves yes, until a few months later there was
this uh, I guess sort of deep throughout intermediary person
that called up and said, hey, we have possession of
a lot of these stolen papers. They didn't say we
(40:08):
have the CIA document about Project has Orium, but they
say we've got boxes full of stuff, we got binders
full of women, right, and we'll take a half million
bucks to return this to you, right. And So there's
a couple of points that that need to be mentioned.
This is the fourth or fifth breaking of a Hughes
office in like the last four or five months, and
(40:29):
what they think. They think the Vegas mob and the St.
Louis mob was involved, but they don't know who they
were working for. Were they working for the government, were
they working for Howard Hughes, um? Who are they working for?
But they were very clearly after some specific papers. They
think what they were after was definitive evidence that Howard
Hughes owned a number of high level politicians in the
(40:51):
United States and that they actually found it. There was
a Senate report that was repressed at the last minute.
So they do think that that they found evidence of
just high high corruption UM, but that they didn't know
that they had this UM, this CIA document in their
possession until the CIA accidentally tipped them off. Yeah, So
(41:13):
the CIA tells the FBI about this police report that
the the l A cops supposedly have UH and this
being offered up for sale and for money and it
might have this project is orient information. The FBI then
tells the l A Police about this because they didn't
know They didn't know about this memo. They just knew
that they had this boxville they were being offered to
(41:36):
exchange this box full of documents for a lot of cash.
They didn't know what was inside of it. Apparently people
I had it didn't know what was inside of it.
So the l A Police told this dude who tried
to broker the deal and the CIA. That's how the
CIA found out about it, right this, I think the
CIA was surveilling the l A p D. I probably
as a matter of course, and found out about the
(41:58):
l A p D being contact did right like you said,
the CIA contexts the FBI. The FBI context the l
A p D, and the l A p D says
to the intermediary, Hey, do you happen to have a
document that shows the Hughes Corporation trying to receive retrieve
the Soviet sub for the A thumbed through the boxes
and let me know if you see the word Azorian
(42:19):
And the intermediary says um b r b yes, And
the next thing you know, the LA Times is starting
to report on it. Yeah. February seven, l A Times
article US reported after russ sub short for Russian. I
guess they just had a you wanted that big font.
They couldn't get it get Russian in there. So, according
(42:43):
to reports circulating among local law enforcement officers, Howard Hughes,
it contracted with the CIA to raise a sunken Russian
nuclear submarine from the Atlantic Ocean. Not true. Um, it
was a specific and again just a lot of holes
in this. However, it is now out there. So there's
a dude named Jack Anderson, I believe, who had a
(43:05):
nationally syndicated radio show, and he was the first to
really mention this thing, and he said he was going
to get to the bottom of it and reveal some
more stuff about it. And by this time, once he
did that, all of the reporters who were sitting on
stories about it, all bets were off, including Seymour Hirsh
And so mysteriously, the day after Jack Anderson mentions it,
(43:25):
there's front page in depth stories about Project is Orient,
which they incorrectly called Project Jennifer Um on newspapers around
the country, and that the cat was out of the bag.
As they say, I'm Jack Anderson and that's the last word.
That's good stuff. Sounds like that's kind of show, he
would add. Yeah, Yeah, he's got his fedora with scoop
(43:48):
like in in the bill. Yeah, I'm kind of curious
about why project or why Jennifer was the name of
the compartment. So this I okay, so it comes like
some sexist thing to me if you ask me, I
think it was just maybe like a hurricane, like they
just that was up for usage. But the compartment, it's
(44:09):
it's kind of like all communications, all memos, all everything
that has to do with this project goes into this compartment.
And somebody thought the compartment named Jennifer was the name
of the project. So they mess up, but they got
just about everything else right. And so by the time
that this story comes out, the US is like, well,
(44:32):
it's the Soviets are about to unleash hell on Earth diplomatically,
maybe militarily. This is gonna be really bad. And the
US braced itself for a response and out of Moscow crickets. Yeah,
and for very good reasons, all of which kind of
tie back to embarrassment. Uh. Three things. Mainly, they would
(44:53):
have to admit that they lost a sub which would
be embarrassing. They would have to admit that they couldn't
find it and the U S could find it super embarrassing.
And then they had to admit that we we were
following them out there in the ocean and saw them
doing something. But we turned around and went home. We
(45:13):
went beep beep, So you super triple embarrassment. So they said,
yet we're not doing it, and that I just I
think it's interesting. I've seen a bunch of stories lately
about the Cold War where like where we knew something
that the Soviets knew, but no one could admit it
out loud. So there was a lot of sitting back
and like, all right, are they going to say something?
(45:34):
Are they going to say something? All right, they're not
saying anything. So despite that, despite this, this this uh
assessment that the Soviets weren't going to publicly acknowledge this,
and the United States certainly didn't publicly acknowledge it either.
Um despite that, it was clear that the Soviets also
weren't going to be like, sure, go ahead, try to
(45:54):
get the rest of the sub. They were worried that
if they did go back out, the Soviets would maybe
sink whatever ship tried to go out there. The Soviets
had a military presence and naval presence around the site
the whole time from that moment on. Once the story
broke and they said, that's it. It's it's done. So
for all we know, they went back and managed to
(46:16):
sneak it out from under the Soviets. For all we know,
this never happened, and that all of this is actually
a cover story for that break in of the Hughes Corporation.
That's what I think. Or for all we know, this
is all gospel truth. I mean, maybe it's sitting next
to a spaceship in area deep within the earth in
a bunker very well could be chucked. Don't be so
(46:36):
naive in the end, and today's money, it costs about
three billion bucks. And here's the kind of fun ending
is that Glomar explorer. Remember the barge. Uh, it was
eventually retrofitted to be a regular deep sea drilling barge.
The whole the whole ship. Oh I thought just the
barge was. No, the whole ship was. So it was
(46:56):
finally sold only eight years ago to a private company
for fifteen million bucks. Yeah, I think for scrap. Oh
the secrets they're in, I know, can you believe it?
But they actually finally did do deep sea mining and
then get this, Howard Hughes got a free deep sea
mining ship out of it because the government paid him
(47:16):
to build that guy. That guy, Well, if you want
to know more about projects orian Um, you should probably
go back in time and join the CIA. Uh. And
since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Oh
and shout out to the great I O nine article. Uh,
that time the CIA and Howard Hughes tried to steal
a Soviet submarine by Mark Strauss. That was a great source.
(47:37):
So too with Seymour Hersh's New York Times article on
the whole thing where he mistakenly calls it Project Janitor Law.
And there are a bunch of other sources too. Then
we'll go ahead and shout out pinto madness again. Why not?
Because why not? All right, listener mail, Yeah, I'm gonna
call this uh really great thing that you should think
(47:58):
about throwing a few bucks to. Hey, guys, want to
preface this by saying I'm not looking for a shout out.
It's always good way to get a shout out. I
run a charity Tribua night every year in honor my
late wife that passed away from brain cancer a few
days after we got married in the hospital. Uh. The events, uh,
the event benefits grace giving a five oh, one C
(48:20):
three we started for brain cancer research donations, mainly for
our Tribue event. We created the event three years ago
and now in year three, we sold out our event
and roughly three minutes. It's awesome with a hundred and
seventy people in the waitlist. So I just want to
publicize this event. Um, that's me talking, Chuck. I should
(48:40):
do it in voices. That way people would know, do
this guy's voice like really high pitched. Now, I'm not
going to do that to Mike. Uh, Mike's a really
good guy. We've been emailing back and forth. So it
is April fourteenth this year in Chicago, and tickets can
you even get tickets to this thing? Well? I think
it's sold out, but I did say donate. Huh yeah,
(49:01):
I did say, can people at least donate because this
is such a great thing, and even if you've got
like five dollars, it's Uh. What this family has been
through and what they're doing now is pretty amazing. So
I want to say thanks for helping me out these
last few years. I love the podcast, really enjoyed the
PR Live show that you put out. By the way,
and by the way, my roommate roommate is Emmett Cleary,
(49:22):
the football player who wrote in about c t Oh wow,
remember that man alive? So wait, these two roommates have
both made Stuff you Should Know listener mails. Yeah, that's
really something about that's some sort of trifecta. So if
you have it in your heart to throw a few
bucks toward Grace Giving, uh, we couldn't encourage you to do,
so you can go to Facebook dot com slash Grace
(49:44):
Giving four or just go, you know, google that stuff
on the internet. And that's from Grace and Mike. Thanks
a lot, guys. Is very fits. I think what you're
doing a fantastic Yeah, keep it going there in Chicago. Uh.
And if you want to let us know about something
great that we would want to publicize, you can get
(50:04):
in touch with us via Twitter at s Y s
K podcast. I'm at joshuam Clark, Chuck's at movie crush Um.
We're on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know
and choke us on Facebook dot com slash Charles W.
Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email. The Stuff
podcast how Stuff Works dot com and has always joined
us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should
Know dot com for more on this and thousands of
(50:31):
other topics. Is it How Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's our ghost
podcaster producer who's invisible, the ghost of Jerry's past, actually
(00:26):
the ghost of Jerry's present. Jerry's not dead, everybody, No,
that just sounded weird. We're keeping Jerry around. Yes, she
just out this week. Yeah, there you go. Um, So
it's just us, Chuck, just a couple of boys batching it,
just some good old boys, never meaning no harm. No,
(00:46):
something something bit in trouble with the loss. It's the
day we were born. I don't think there's something something
before then? Is there m something something, something been in trouble. Yeah,
right now, I don't know. Well, go well, we'll look
it up. You know. It's funny. There's a great and
we might have talked about this years ago, but there's
a great website called Atlanta time Machine where you can
(01:08):
go back and look at old pictures of Atlanta and
compare him to new pictures and all that stuff. And
they have some movie specific pictures now, and they have
the Dukes of Hazard Pilot shoot photos which was. They
eventually moved it out in the country, but like most
of the dukes of Hazard Pilot, all those car chases
were in like midtown Atlanta. Isn't that crazy? But it
(01:30):
was the original Bowen Luke. Wow, who was the Who's
saying the theme song? Is it walk Tosh? Whale Jennings?
Wasn't he the narrator? It was Whale Jennings. What was
that first thing he said? Walk Tosh? What does that mean?
That's his nickname? Really, walk Tosh Whale Jennings. You never
heard that? Well it is? I love Whale Jennings. Yeah,
(01:51):
he's great. Apparently he and Johnny Cash were um roommates
and highwaymen back well way back in the day. Yeah,
both of them were on drugs, but they didn't other
people didn't know that. So they both used to like
be on drugs but not tell each other about it.
And um, I guess it came out later that they
(02:13):
they were like, you're on drugs, said so was I.
It's like I used to keep on drugs in the
air conditioner and Johnny Cash is like, that's why the
air conditioner never worked and why and Jones was like,
I used to keep minding the TV and Johnny Cash
is whoever? Yeah, their TV never worked in the a
C never worked because that's where they stashed their drugs
without the other one knowing it. Why what are the
drugs due to the TV and the air conditioner? I
(02:34):
got them pretty wasted? What a weird start. Yeah, it
is a little weird start, especially because what we're talking
about has nothing to do with drugs, Johnny Cash or
Waylon Jennings or air conditioners. TV really has to do
with the CIA, submarines, the USSR, and Howard Hughes, among
(03:00):
other things. Been hitting a kissinger? Are you kissing him?
His interesting? He's still alive too. Maybe you'll hear this.
I've never seen you hiss before. I know. It's kind
of threatening, is it, Yeah, because I do have like
really sharp key nine. Yeah, you should. You should totally
(03:20):
hiss more often. I should, and I should chart him
these things. I should file them down. Oh people do that,
I know, but surely that has to hurt, right to
file them down? Yeah, how does it not? Don't you
have nerd? No, they don't hit the nerves, They just
I guess you're right. Yeah, I might do that in
the meantime, let's talk about something. Well, let's let's go
(03:41):
back to the beginning. Okay, it's I'm not exactly sure, Wayne,
because look, the first part of my page ripped. Does
it say when in night it does? You want to guess?
I feel like I'm holding the keys May March. It
was pre summer of barely. Oh yeah, everybody's just getting started.
(04:03):
Is the summer of four play? Everyone's getting looped up? Right?
It so? Um March of in the northwestern Pacific, as
far as the United States is concerned, um, which should
be between say Hawaii and some far out islands in
Alaska and whatever else is out there. There's not a
(04:26):
lot out there. Apparently Hawaii is the most remote island
chain in the world. Did you know that there's no
island chain that's further away from other land than Hawaii,
even like when you look at the globe, those teeny
tiny islands. From what I understand, so say Hawaiians at
least anyway, basically out in the middle of nowhere in
(04:48):
the northwest Pacific, there's a Soviet sub It was a
Gulf to go O l F two Soviet submarine. They
called it the Cabriola for a little while. But but
that's those were the subs with the rag top. Yeah,
those didn't work out. Um, the the this golf to
sub was called the K one. Surely it had an
(05:09):
actual name, right, No, I think they called him the
K whatever. All right, Well, the K one twenty nine
was on a routine patrol mission. These are the Soviets state.
They weren't glib about you know what's called this one,
the Hannah Montana exactly right, so that it was just
the Kine all business, which actually is kind of reassuring.
(05:31):
Because it was a nuclear submarine. Um, it had not
only a nuclear missile, like a nuclear missis you could
come up to the surface and shoot on to say,
the United States, it also had nuclear torpedoes, which I
had no idea where a thing a nuclear torpedo. It's
kind of overkilled them to think. No, not if you're
(05:52):
underwater and you want to shoot a nuclear bomb at somebody, Well, okay,
then that really fits the bill. Well, it turns out
that some of these nuclear tip torpedoes detonated, and there
wasn't a full nuclear detonation obviously obvious, but it was
enough to blow a hole in the submarine. And I
think kickoffs some other detonations in some of the other
(06:15):
nuclear torpedoes and the upshot. All this was that the
entire person crew and the Soviet submarine in the middle
of the Cold War sunk about six hundred miles or
fift hundred miles north west of Hawaii. Uh and hit
the bottom at sixteen thousand feet more than three miles down. Yes,
(06:38):
and so kicks off the story of Project as Orient
and the Glomar Explorer. Uh So, what happens, of course,
is the Soviets go looking for this thing. Uh. They
spend a couple of months pretty massive search, couldn't find it.
The US is kind of laughing and saying, they haven't
(06:59):
found their own sub yet. Maybe we should go out
there and take a look, because we could probably get
some intel, maybe salvage of nuclear warhead for ourselves, spray
paint a smiley face that says, uh, something like right
back at you, that's a good one, and then throw
it their way. Uh. In In nineteen August of nineteen
(07:20):
sixty eight, just you know, quite a few months later,
they actually found it. The United States of America located
this thing. Yeah, so they they this is the official story.
Here's the thing that I figured up from researching this story.
You can also go ahead and assume that all of
this is fabricated and that there's actually other stuff that
was actually going on. Yeah, this is the story that's
(07:40):
been handed like this. This actually maybe the story that
like covers up an assassination in um Brazil or something
like that. That could be the whole reason this story exists,
because we're talking about a covert operation in the sixties
and seventies by the c I. A okay, so just
take everything with the an assault. But the story is
(08:01):
it was reported, and as far as the CIA has
ever admitted, was that the Air Force and the Navy
both had listening devices throughout the Pacific, and somebody at
some point said, well, wait a minute, why don't we
get these two together and see if there's any data,
any sounds that were picked up from the sub exploding,
and see if we can pinpoint it basically triangulate with
(08:23):
only two data points, which is I guess straight line right, Yeah, yeah,
that that is what it would be called. But supposedly
they did it, and they found where the sub was,
and like you said, the US was laughing because they
were watching the Soviets look in all the wrong places.
And then after a couple of months, the Soviets called
off this the search. And it was quite obvious to
(08:46):
the to the Americans that the Soviets had no idea
where the sub was, which made us think, maybe we
should check this thing out, maybe we can go get it.
So we have two choices. We can call them and
let them know where it is, or we can go
get it ourselves. And this is the height of the
Cold War. Yeah, so they weren't about to go with
choice one. No, so option to came upon the table,
(09:08):
and we got our own sub called the Halibu, so
we had fun names. The Halibu dropped a camera down
there on a sled and took a bunch of pictures
of this thing. Verified it's down there. It's intact. We
don't know for sure if we can go get it,
but we should try because if we can get this thing,
not only do we have potentially uh information on how
(09:32):
these warheads are being built by them, but we might
also be able to bust their codes with this cryptographic
equipment they have down there. And so let's launch a project.
And we love naming things, so let's name it Project
as Orian. Yeah, I guess that's the name of a
person from the Zores. Maybe maybe no idea where they'd
(09:52):
come up with these names, God love them, who knows,
But um, project as Orian was the name of this.
This this idea to go see if we can get
this sub right. Yeah, which means, of course we're not
gonna go out there next week and start looking like
there's a long process that has to be undertaken before
we can even figure out if we can do this right.
So they actually did get together like a working group,
(10:15):
a top secret working group of engineers and uh nautical
engineers and any kind of engineer you can think of,
and said, how would you do this? There's a submarine,
a hundred ton submarine three feet long. That's that's a
thing in and of itself. It's a big sub like
(10:37):
that would be hard to pick up off land, sure,
but it's not on land. It's underwater. It's sixteen thousand,
five hundred ft under the surface of the Pacific Ocean
in the middle of nowhere about is in the middle
of nowhere as you can get And um, how could
we do this? How can we possibly pick this up?
(10:58):
And wait, wait, wait, before you answer you, and and years.
The Soviets can have no idea what we're doing, because
they will probably think any ship that they thought was
going after this. I love this stuff more than most
stuff in the world. Like when there's this incredibly challenging,
almost insurmatical, insurmountable task and people get a lot of
(11:20):
smart people together and say, let's start brainstorming and how
if this is even possible. I just think it's really
cool that. And I bet these people, the engineers are like,
oh my god, this is a dream to come up
and try and solve this problem. Plus the CIA said
that they are holding my family hostage. I better get
to work. So they decided, here's what the only way
(11:42):
we can try this is by doing this. It's gonna
involve three large vessels. One is a recovery ship that
basically has a chamber with the bottom that could open
and close like that ship in the Abyss. Yeah, a
moon pool. In fact that James Cameron totally glow marred
this totally for his own needs. Uh, it would have
(12:05):
a docking legs system that basically turned it into an
underwater on the ocean floor platform that I did not get.
I think just basically it goes down there instead of
like hovering in place, turns into a a building. But
I don't understand. I didn't understand how, But yes, that's
that is the understanding. Well, I had four legs, but
(12:25):
that's crazy. That means they had four three mile long legs.
That doesn't make much sense, that does you know what
I mean? I need to see a picture. I've seen
pictures of it. I still don't know what really with
the legs. Yeah, well I don't know then. So but
that's that's one. That's the ship that they sail out
there to undertake the whole mission, right, Yeah, there's two
(12:47):
others that they have to come up with. Two. That's right,
captured vehicle. So that had a grab right on it. Yeah,
like one of those banana clips that girls used to
wear in the nineties. Yeah, but for tons submarine. Yes,
And it wasn't just like, hey, use a little grabber
like that banana clip. It had. It was specifically designed
(13:09):
to attach to the submarine. It was the one the
one thing it was designed to do. That's correct. So
that's that's step two. If you have one of these
things and you're loading it onto a massive ship, I
think a seven hundred foot ship is what they came
up with. Foot long ship many many meters long, so
(13:30):
many meters um. Somebody's gonna say, what is that? Well,
the Soviets would yes, because they're flying over the US
with their spy satellites ever since Sputnik got up there,
so they're gonna want to know what that is. The
Soviet analysts are going to point this out. So if
you have this big long ship that sticks out like
a sore thumb, because what are you doing with that thing?
(13:52):
What are you also doing with this big grabber? How
do you get around the grabber part at least chuck?
Uh oh, the grabber. Yeah, we must be talking about
the barge. So this is pretty amazing. This thing had
a retractable sunroof basically, uh. And it was the whole
reason this thing was here was to hide everything right right,
(14:14):
So it was they built the grabber vehicle, the vehicle
number two, inside the barge. But like you said, the
barge had a sunroof. The thing about the barge was
it was also designed to be submersible. So what they
did was they built a barge that they built the
grabber inside of floated the barge out to this huge
(14:36):
six eighteen foot ship, Ship number one, submerged it underneath
the ship, opened up the sunroof on the barge, opened
up the moon pool on the big ship, and raised
the grabber vehicle into the six eighteen foot ship, so
that the Soviets never even knew the grabber vehicle existed.
(14:59):
They never saw it. It just didn't exist. And they
had to build all this stuff from scratch. It wasn't
just like they had a grabber laying around that fit
a Soviet sub precisely, or this barge that could become
invisible Bible accounts and and they so this was basically
this is what this this working group came up with,
(15:20):
like these are the things you need to do this? Yes,
And the CIA said, who can we possibly get? Who
in the world, Well, Howard Hughes, Yes, Mr Howard Hughes
specifically the Suma or Summa Corporation, and that was a
part of the Hughes Tool Company. And they said, go
(15:42):
build this thing at thirty six thousand tons six eighteen
feet like you said. And they called it the Hughes
Glomar Explorer because Global Marine was the company that operated it.
And that's just an abbreviation of global marine. I did
not know until a couple of days ago. Yeah, it's
sort of a disappointing end to what glomar meant. Yeah,
(16:02):
because it sounds kind of like space ag. It definitely does, like, Wow,
look at the healthy glow from radiation exposure on that thing, glomar.
Glomar has got a great glow. And here's the other
cool thing. Because this would, I mean, there would still
be a big beheam of ship out there in the
ocean in the Pacific, and the Russians would wonder what
(16:23):
was going on. So they said, here's the deal. There
are actually it happened to sink in an area of
the Pacific where there are a lot of manganese, really
valuable manganese nodules underwater. So we'll just concoct the story
that said, Howard Hughes built this thing. You know how
crazy he is uh to go out there and try
and mind the ocean's depths to get even richer. And
(16:47):
people actually bought that, right, the press even bought it.
They went to the trouble of of saying this is
actually really good cover story because there was manganese deposits
in the area it checked out. There was the idea
of deep sea mining was very new, so there wasn't
There was the idea that this would be a good idea,
(17:07):
but no one had tried to undertake it yet, so
the Soviets couldn't have been like, uh, that's not a
deep sea mining ship. No one knew it a deep
sea mining ship looked like yet. Plus it was very
exactly right. He was extremely wealthy, so he had the
kind of money to just undertake deep sea mining and
be the first one. But he also operated in strict secrecy,
(17:29):
and the press used to watch his operations and projects
from the outside and just make guesses about it and
and and create rumors. But it didn't matter because it
was all just conjecture and rumors. Right, So, um, it
was a perfect cover story. And then add on to
the top that Hughes was already in bed with the
US government in a number of ways, but including making
(17:51):
spy satellites in highly classified, top secret projects. It was
they couldn't have come up with a better person to
helm the actual carrying out of this of the project.
Should we take a break, Yeah, m all right, So
(18:37):
this this took a while. Um it was like years
had passed between the sub sinking and then actually saying
all right, I think we have a plan to do
this and we can get this done. And by the
time that came around, they said, wait a minute, like,
should we even should we go take another look at
this thing still intact? Should we bother? Is this still relevant?
(18:57):
Is it an asset or is it just some rusty, old,
you know, hunk a metal at the bottom of the ocean. Yeah.
Is it basically like a museum thing now? Yeah, So
they said, and we're not into Russian museums, let's be honest.
So they did form another committee, were great at that,
and they did take another look and they said, you
know what, let's go down there, guys, because even though
(19:20):
these missiles, the S S N five missiles are no
longer like their big threat, they do have the S
S IN eight. Maybe we could glean some technology and
and how these things operate, and there's still that cryptographic
equipment down there, which would be a good asset for
our intelligence. So they said, okay, let's do it. Come on, guys,
(19:41):
let's do it. There was another thing too, there's this
great um I O nine article on this this very
Project um and the author found some uh publication of
of memos about Project is orient and one of the
things was that they were saying, like, yes, it's still
(20:01):
worth it intelligence wise and everything, but more to the point,
we're locked in the punch here, like the US can't
afford to seem wishy washy to its contractors. That's so
we need to do this regardless. Yeah, that's kind of
nutty when you think about it. That the the risk
of pissing off Howard Hughes, I guess was too great.
(20:23):
And I mean it sort of makes sense in a
way because if he was a big time contractor for them, yeah,
that relationship going. But yeah, there's not that many top
secret contractors that you know you can't trust, and yeah,
you don't want to take them off, right. Very interesting though,
are we saying piste off now? Is that a thing?
I guess it made an appearance in the last episode two.
(20:43):
Did I say that? Just no, no, no. The the
the listener, male guy Peter Oh about vaping. Yeah, he said,
I'm piste off. If you can't if you can't tell, well,
I'm not sure, but I appreciate you drawing attention to well,
I guess we'll find out if Jerry bleeps all this
out or if we get booted out of the sixth
grade classes around the world. Yeah, kids, what you should
(21:03):
say is ticked off, and you really shouldn't say that.
You should say that. I'm going to use my words
and let you know that what you just said bothered me.
Oh is that what you're supposed to say? Yeah? Okay,
speak like an adult. So how adult speak? I say,
piste off. Um. Here's the other side note, and this
will come into play later, is that there was another
(21:24):
memo that said, you know what, there are bodies down there,
and according to the Geneva Convention, there's a proper way
that you handle even in quote unquote enemies remains, and
we're gonna abide by that, and we're gonna take all
the stuff we need to make sure that we can
do that in a respectful way. Uh, because this will
(21:44):
eventually probably come out and at least maybe that will
be a slight goodwill gesture to the Russians that say, hey,
we were very respectful of your dead seamen. So they
outfitted the huge Glomar Explorer Blorer Explorer, the h g
E with UM I think a capacity to handle one bodies,
(22:06):
which is kind of funny. If you were a sailor
engineer on the huge Glomar Explorer might have made you
a little nervous, considering there were ninety eight sailors on
the sub that you were going to get two more
dead guys. I don't think that was by accident either.
They didn't just round up to a nice even hundred
(22:27):
could ever coolers they I'm sure they're like, yeah, two
people will probably die on this mission, that's right. So um,
there's there's another memo from I think the V four
June three, and UM. It basically said, hey, all this
stuff's ready. The ship's ready, the UM grabb her claws,
(22:48):
vehicles ready, the barge is even ready. Everything's ready. Let's
do this. So are we gonna do it or not?
They estimated at chance of UM success, which they were
like threw the moon over the moon about. Yeah, they
were over the moon pool about this, which is interesting,
but I guess when it's something something that tough to accomplish,
(23:11):
UM and that innovative and and bleeding edge apparently wasn't
too bad, No, not at all. So and that was
like of a success, chance of ercent success. Yeah, okay,
so well, oh yeah, sure, so they the project has
(23:32):
approved June five, and just a few days later on
June the ship departed the Hughes Glomar explored departed I
believe the port of Los Angeles. Yeah. And another wrinkle
that will come up a little bit later is because
this was so covert, they couldn't surrounded by battleships or
(23:53):
have F sixteen. Well they probably don't have X. I
don't know when the sixteen came about. I think maybe
like the sixties or something. I'm sorry to all the aviators,
I'm sure we're way off. But whatever fighter jets they
had at the time, um, they they couldn't draw attention
to themselves by being protected like that. It would be
(24:14):
really weird if there was a naval or air force
escort for a Manganese ship. Right. Yeah, this is a
pretty uh I want to read this. So this is
pretty great. This quote from the CIA to kind of
just drive at home of what a task was before them.
Someone in the CIA said this, imagine standing atop the
(24:35):
Empire State Building with an eight foot wide grappling hook
on a one 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. And on top of that,
the job has to be done without anyone noticing. And
that essentially describes what happened there. That's what they were
(24:56):
doing when they when they shipped out. That was the
task ahead of them, right, yes, and add to this
that it keeps getting worse. Well, yeah, but the Soviets,
we're still surveilling everything. Right, So remember like they couldn't
have a U. S. Navy escort of the deep sea
mining ship. That just looked really weird. But that's not
(25:17):
to say the Soviets didn't send their navy out to
see what was up. So for the first two weeks
after the huge Glomar explorer made made it to its
its destination and started working, there were Soviet ships surveilling
them basically twenty four hours a day for the first
fourteen days. So these guys are actually undertaking raising a
(25:40):
Soviet sub within sight of Soviet naval ships watching them,
and the Soviet they were really nervous at this point.
They didn't know if the Soviet navy was going to
try to board the Glomar Explorer just to be like,
what are you guys doing. You're making us nervous, And
apparently the CIA, one of the CIA offers on board,
like we need to stack some crates on our helicopter
(26:02):
landing pad to prevent them from landing UM. And there
was a I don't know exactly what alert status it
was on, but maybe high alert, which was there's a
chance of soviets are gonna board, there's sensitive materials on board.
The team that's in charge of destroying those sensitive materials.
You guys are on alert. The people charged with defending
(26:24):
the team. You guys are on alert, but we're not
gonna give you guns yet because we haven't reached that.
This is the tension. What were they supposed to do
like karate? I think karate chop. It was like you
can karate, um, but don't shoot them. They're probably gonna
shoot you, but just deflect the bullets with your karate chops.
So they're out on the ocean. UM. It's very complicated mission,
(26:48):
to say the least. So you've got your ocean currents
at work. You have to maintain your position through those.
That's hard enough. Then you had to lower this capture
vehicle by doing this, adding sixty ft pieces of steel pipe,
one at a time, connecting to each other sixty ft
at a time, three miles down right to lower that
(27:10):
recovery vehicle down to the sub and then when it
gets down there, it has to be just in the
right position. Two straddle over that submarine and get that
grabb her out, attach it to the hull, and then
reverse that whole process by now towing a freaking submarine
by taking one sixty ft length pipe off at a
(27:32):
time until you're raising the sub like that. You know
what I need to see to understand this fully is
remember the beginning of Titanic when James Cameron did that
terrible obvious recreation of what happened to sink the Titanic.
Was at the very beginning when Bill Paxton was in
modern days and they're out searching for the Jewel of
(27:52):
the Sea, and he says, well, that guy with the beard,
you know, the nerd, fat bearded guy that's in every movie,
to explain what's going on, And he said, here's how
the Titanic sunk. And it did a little recreation on
the screen and showed exactly how it happened, just so
everyone would know. That's what I need to see. I
(28:12):
need a chubby bearded guy to explain to me visually
that's not me or page. You want to be up
and you want to be inception. Yeah, no, I know
what you mean. The problem is that there are so
many holes in this story. I need a picture book.
But everybody's everybody accepts that there's holes in the story
(28:33):
because it's a covert CIA operation. Yeah, that is just
will probably never fully be explained. Although there have been
interviews with people who are on this ship. They could
probably tell you, we'll look him up after this. Yeah.
And at the very end of that whole process of
bringing this thing up, then it's not like they get
it up kind of close enough to the ship and
they're like, all right, it's thirty ft below us, we'll
(28:54):
just glide in from here. Then they had to suck
it on board and it in the docking well successfully. Yes.
I could you imagine getting it to where it's right
below them and then it breaks free. I'd be so nervous.
And that's kind of almost what happened. That's close to
what happened. So remember the Soviet navy is circling them,
and they're lowering this claw down to the sub. But
(29:17):
also like, we're not doing anything over here, just right.
So um, they reached the sub and start doing the
submersible claw thing, and um at that time the Soviet
Navy two's three times, so like pee pee peep, see
you later, and they laughed for good. And so the
(29:37):
the Glomar explorer starts raising the sub. They get it.
I have no idea how they know they've gotten it,
but they've got the sub. I don't know how they
directed this thing over the sub. I don't understand either.
I'm totally with you, But as far as the story
is concerned, the claw got the sub and they started
raising it, and they got it over the course of
(29:58):
a few days of my file up, and then all
of a sudden, an extremely incredible accomplishment. I know, imagine
trying to sleep while this thing is like slowly being Yeah,
you would not, you'd not be able to. But there
was an engineer who was on the ship who later
recounted in an interview that there was something that felt
(30:18):
like about a ten second long earthquake on the ship.
And he said, you knew something bad had happened. Yeah,
and this was right after he said it's going great, everybody.
We can't lose now that first mile is the trickiest. Yeah. So,
I mean, I guess was it an earthquake? No, it
was the sub breaking up in the subversible claw. Oh okay,
(30:39):
I thought that caused it to break up. No, he
said it felt like an earthquake. That's how big of
a an energetic release it was. So the sub breaks apart.
I guess it had been down there so long that
it uh, it just wasn't you know, it wasn't viable
as a single solid piece of anymore. Here's what I
(31:01):
think happened, based on some other stuff, like later memos.
They said that they needed to redesign the claw so
that it wasn't as britty. Yeah, the banana clip, so
that it wasn't as brittle, and um that it was. Well,
so it wasn't as brittle. I think the claw broke
up and and some of the sub was able to
(31:22):
fall out. Some remained in it's held into the grabber,
but most of the sub this is a three ft
sub um about two hundred and sixty feet of it
broke off and fell back a mile down to the
ocean floor. So I thought you meant that the grabber
should have had like, did anybody think to put felt
(31:43):
on this grab right or rubber tips on the end
of the clause? No they didn't, I know. So the
the most of the sub, including all the stuff the
CIA was after, the the the code books, the con
tower that we had, the galley, right, they ate, well, like,
I guess that's okay, I love borished, so that it
(32:04):
is a silver lining. Yeah, they only got what of
this thing? Yeah, so which which it was the four
of the sub. The four of the sub stayed in
the grabber claw and they were able to bring it
the rest of the way up and salvage it, which
included the nuclear torpedoes. Unfortunately for the CIA and everybody aboard. Um,
the nuclear torpedoes were of course something that had detonated,
(32:26):
so they all suffered from some plutonium exposure as well. Yeah,
so it was it was their exposure was consistent with
the fact that there was in fact nuclear materials, right, Yeah,
that they had been exposed to these nuclear torpedoes, not
that they didn't get their hands on the nuclear missile
they were after. Basically, none of the prize that they
were looking for they got their hands on. But one
(32:47):
thing they did find on their hands all of a
sudden were the bodies of six Soviet submariners for submarners.
How do you say it? I think submarner okay, but
we'll get taken to task and told the way. Well,
we said both so can't get it wrong when you
say it both ways. So like we said, they could
hold a hundred bodies, so they could certainly hold six.
(33:08):
And then I guess ninety four other guys on board
worried I would guess, so uh, and they did. They
they had copies of Soviet burial manuals American burial manuals.
They had the ceremony. Did you watch the video of this?
I did, well, some of it they conduct They've filmed
it in color, and I love how is it you
(33:30):
who wrote this point? I love how you put it.
The bizarre and inexplicably futuristic video. Yeah, it looks weird.
It looks like it does look like a George Orwellian
like transmission from the future. But if the future was
in the nineteen eighties and it was being written in
the nineteen twenties, right, and the reason why I put
my finger on it. Finally, it's men wearing matching coveralls
(33:55):
in hard hats, disposing of bodies, and the video quality
is just weird, just perfectly weird. Yeah, just go check
it out. I guess, um C I a project Orian
Burial at Sea. I think would probably bring it up
on YouTube. And eventually this film was turned over two
Boris yeltson Somebody Still Loves You Boris yelts By CI
(34:18):
director Robert Gates. At that time, Um, did we take
another break? Yeah, I think we're alright, alright, we're gonna
wrap up this whole message just a minute. So they
(34:58):
found it. Once they got part of it, should they
go again? That was the big question, right, Um, And
there was a lot of discussion that the CIA, for
its part, was like, I don't know if there's anything
left to that subs the seventies now, right, we lucked
out that it was intact to begin with. After a
series of explosions. We're pretty sure that the stuff that
(35:22):
fell a mile back down to the sea floor probably
broke up. I'm suspicious of that, but that was the
CIA's position, regardless. Kissinger and Um. The rest of the
Nixon administration were like, how can we do this again?
The thing is right around the same time Nixon resigned,
and all of a sudden, everybody who had been high
(35:45):
flying and freewheeling and overthrowing governments and all that were
suddenly like, nothing, we're not doing anything. There's no operations
going on whatsoever. So the idea of UM a second
project being undertaken was pretty doubtful for a number of reasons. Yeah,
And one of the other big reasons was that this
whole cryptographic equipment and the codes probably weren't even relevant
(36:08):
by that point, and so they didn't think I mean,
they were basically like, there's so little upside to this
at this point, they Kissinger. I think he even finally relented, right, Yeah,
I think so. It is not the word it UM.
What I found was interesting was that, and later interview
by an admiral said, even if you found the code
(36:28):
books and you found the communications equipment and figured out
the UM arrangement of like the burst transmitters and circuits
and all that stuff, all you'd be able to do
is break the codes for a twenty four hour period.
But that would have been the case no matter if
they've gotten the whole suburb at any point, so that
(36:50):
it was already years later when they first went down, right,
So I guess they you probably would would still be
a pretty big treasure trove intelligence wise, to just get
a one day snapshot of Soviet submarine operations, that'd probably
be worth it. But maybe it was more about those
warheads though. I think that was definitely part of it too.
But they they said, there's probably not a good chance
(37:13):
we're going to do this. The The other the other
problem was this, by this time, UH journalists named Seymour Hirsch,
who's written some of the most um the some of
the deepest expose s on the US government ever written,
wrote about the Myli massacre. Um he's he wrote, Um
(37:33):
he didn't write or he wrote a few stories on
the Frank Olsen case that Wormwood was based on. UM.
Seymour Hurst was in that towards the end. Um he's written,
He's written a bunch of stuff. He had this story
down cold, He had everything for well over a year
before it finally broke, and the CIA director went to
(37:55):
Hurst and said, don't please don't say anything about this.
Please sit on the story. Please sit on the story,
and behind hersh's back or right from under him. The
story ended up breaking in the most bizarre, suspicious way
it possibly could have. Yeah. Well, and even before that,
a very famous term came about because of this. That
was a Rolling Stone writer named Harriet and Philippi, and
(38:17):
she flat out asked the CIA to reveal its existence.
And that's where the phrase we can neither confirm nor
deny its existence came into play, which is now known
as the Glomar response. You've ever heard that? That's where
it comes from, which is a great little cherry on top.
I think I think so too. Even though this isn't
the end, No it's not. It gets even weirder to
(38:37):
tell you the truth. So um, Harriet and Philippe was
asking about Project is Orian because there is a cryptic, weird,
little short news blurb in the Los Angeles Times that
was basically about some gossip and rumor that was circulating
at the l A p D and among cops in
l A. There was a rumor that the Hughes Corporation
(39:00):
and had cooperated and carried out a project to retrieve
a lost Soviet sub with the CIA. Weren't any other
details about that, they said, it was in the Atlantic Ocean.
There were a lot of problems with this story, but
for the first time ever it started to see the
light of day. And the whole reason that that was
in there, Chuck, was just the weirdest thing. That's that
(39:24):
I think the weirdest part of this story and the
most suspicious. Yeah, the fact that all this came together
in this way is pretty remarkable. So the Hues, some
corporation that we talked about, they were broken into. Their
HQ was broken into in Los Angeles. They got cash,
they got boxes of documents, including a memo describing this
(39:47):
secret project to the CIA, and no one knew for
sure whether or not they had this document or not.
The thieves yes, until a few months later there was
this uh, I guess sort of deep throughout intermediary person
that called up and said, hey, we have possession of
a lot of these stolen papers. They didn't say we
(40:08):
have the CIA document about Project has Orium, but they
say we've got boxes full of stuff, we got binders
full of women, right, and we'll take a half million
bucks to return this to you, right. And So there's
a couple of points that that need to be mentioned.
This is the fourth or fifth breaking of a Hughes
office in like the last four or five months, and
(40:29):
what they think. They think the Vegas mob and the St.
Louis mob was involved, but they don't know who they
were working for. Were they working for the government, were
they working for Howard Hughes, um? Who are they working for?
But they were very clearly after some specific papers. They
think what they were after was definitive evidence that Howard
Hughes owned a number of high level politicians in the
(40:51):
United States and that they actually found it. There was
a Senate report that was repressed at the last minute.
So they do think that that they found evidence of
just high high corruption UM, but that they didn't know
that they had this UM, this CIA document in their
possession until the CIA accidentally tipped them off. Yeah, So
(41:13):
the CIA tells the FBI about this police report that
the the l A cops supposedly have UH and this
being offered up for sale and for money and it
might have this project is orient information. The FBI then
tells the l A Police about this because they didn't
know They didn't know about this memo. They just knew
that they had this boxville they were being offered to
(41:36):
exchange this box full of documents for a lot of cash.
They didn't know what was inside of it. Apparently people
I had it didn't know what was inside of it.
So the l A Police told this dude who tried
to broker the deal and the CIA. That's how the
CIA found out about it, right this, I think the
CIA was surveilling the l A p D. I probably
as a matter of course, and found out about the
(41:58):
l A p D being contact did right like you said,
the CIA contexts the FBI. The FBI context the l
A p D, and the l A p D says
to the intermediary, Hey, do you happen to have a
document that shows the Hughes Corporation trying to receive retrieve
the Soviet sub for the A thumbed through the boxes
and let me know if you see the word Azorian
(42:19):
And the intermediary says um b r b yes, And
the next thing you know, the LA Times is starting
to report on it. Yeah. February seven, l A Times
article US reported after russ sub short for Russian. I
guess they just had a you wanted that big font.
They couldn't get it get Russian in there. So, according
(42:43):
to reports circulating among local law enforcement officers, Howard Hughes,
it contracted with the CIA to raise a sunken Russian
nuclear submarine from the Atlantic Ocean. Not true. Um, it
was a specific and again just a lot of holes
in this. However, it is now out there. So there's
a dude named Jack Anderson, I believe, who had a
(43:05):
nationally syndicated radio show, and he was the first to
really mention this thing, and he said he was going
to get to the bottom of it and reveal some
more stuff about it. And by this time, once he
did that, all of the reporters who were sitting on
stories about it, all bets were off, including Seymour Hirsh
And so mysteriously, the day after Jack Anderson mentions it,
(43:25):
there's front page in depth stories about Project is Orient,
which they incorrectly called Project Jennifer Um on newspapers around
the country, and that the cat was out of the bag.
As they say, I'm Jack Anderson and that's the last word.
That's good stuff. Sounds like that's kind of show, he
would add. Yeah, Yeah, he's got his fedora with scoop
(43:48):
like in in the bill. Yeah, I'm kind of curious
about why project or why Jennifer was the name of
the compartment. So this I okay, so it comes like
some sexist thing to me if you ask me, I
think it was just maybe like a hurricane, like they
just that was up for usage. But the compartment, it's
(44:09):
it's kind of like all communications, all memos, all everything
that has to do with this project goes into this compartment.
And somebody thought the compartment named Jennifer was the name
of the project. So they mess up, but they got
just about everything else right. And so by the time
that this story comes out, the US is like, well,
(44:32):
it's the Soviets are about to unleash hell on Earth diplomatically,
maybe militarily. This is gonna be really bad. And the
US braced itself for a response and out of Moscow crickets. Yeah,
and for very good reasons, all of which kind of
tie back to embarrassment. Uh. Three things. Mainly, they would
(44:53):
have to admit that they lost a sub which would
be embarrassing. They would have to admit that they couldn't
find it and the U S could find it super embarrassing.
And then they had to admit that we we were
following them out there in the ocean and saw them
doing something. But we turned around and went home. We
(45:13):
went beep beep, So you super triple embarrassment. So they said,
yet we're not doing it, and that I just I
think it's interesting. I've seen a bunch of stories lately
about the Cold War where like where we knew something
that the Soviets knew, but no one could admit it
out loud. So there was a lot of sitting back
and like, all right, are they going to say something?
(45:34):
Are they going to say something? All right, they're not
saying anything. So despite that, despite this, this this uh
assessment that the Soviets weren't going to publicly acknowledge this,
and the United States certainly didn't publicly acknowledge it either.
Um despite that, it was clear that the Soviets also
weren't going to be like, sure, go ahead, try to
(45:54):
get the rest of the sub. They were worried that
if they did go back out, the Soviets would maybe
sink whatever ship tried to go out there. The Soviets
had a military presence and naval presence around the site
the whole time from that moment on. Once the story
broke and they said, that's it. It's it's done. So
for all we know, they went back and managed to
(46:16):
sneak it out from under the Soviets. For all we know,
this never happened, and that all of this is actually
a cover story for that break in of the Hughes Corporation.
That's what I think. Or for all we know, this
is all gospel truth. I mean, maybe it's sitting next
to a spaceship in area deep within the earth in
a bunker very well could be chucked. Don't be so
(46:36):
naive in the end, and today's money, it costs about
three billion bucks. And here's the kind of fun ending
is that Glomar explorer. Remember the barge. Uh, it was
eventually retrofitted to be a regular deep sea drilling barge.
The whole the whole ship. Oh I thought just the
barge was. No, the whole ship was. So it was
(46:56):
finally sold only eight years ago to a private company
for fifteen million bucks. Yeah, I think for scrap. Oh
the secrets they're in, I know, can you believe it?
But they actually finally did do deep sea mining and
then get this, Howard Hughes got a free deep sea
mining ship out of it because the government paid him
(47:16):
to build that guy. That guy, Well, if you want
to know more about projects orian Um, you should probably
go back in time and join the CIA. Uh. And
since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Oh
and shout out to the great I O nine article. Uh,
that time the CIA and Howard Hughes tried to steal
a Soviet submarine by Mark Strauss. That was a great source.
(47:37):
So too with Seymour Hersh's New York Times article on
the whole thing where he mistakenly calls it Project Janitor Law.
And there are a bunch of other sources too. Then
we'll go ahead and shout out pinto madness again. Why not?
Because why not? All right, listener mail, Yeah, I'm gonna
call this uh really great thing that you should think
(47:58):
about throwing a few bucks to. Hey, guys, want to
preface this by saying I'm not looking for a shout out.
It's always good way to get a shout out. I
run a charity Tribua night every year in honor my
late wife that passed away from brain cancer a few
days after we got married in the hospital. Uh. The events, uh,
the event benefits grace giving a five oh, one C
(48:20):
three we started for brain cancer research donations, mainly for
our Tribue event. We created the event three years ago
and now in year three, we sold out our event
and roughly three minutes. It's awesome with a hundred and
seventy people in the waitlist. So I just want to
publicize this event. Um, that's me talking, Chuck. I should
(48:40):
do it in voices. That way people would know, do
this guy's voice like really high pitched. Now, I'm not
going to do that to Mike. Uh, Mike's a really
good guy. We've been emailing back and forth. So it
is April fourteenth this year in Chicago, and tickets can
you even get tickets to this thing? Well? I think
it's sold out, but I did say donate. Huh yeah,
(49:01):
I did say, can people at least donate because this
is such a great thing, and even if you've got
like five dollars, it's Uh. What this family has been
through and what they're doing now is pretty amazing. So
I want to say thanks for helping me out these
last few years. I love the podcast, really enjoyed the
PR Live show that you put out. By the way,
and by the way, my roommate roommate is Emmett Cleary,
(49:22):
the football player who wrote in about c t Oh wow,
remember that man alive? So wait, these two roommates have
both made Stuff you Should Know listener mails. Yeah, that's
really something about that's some sort of trifecta. So if
you have it in your heart to throw a few
bucks toward Grace Giving, uh, we couldn't encourage you to do,
so you can go to Facebook dot com slash Grace
(49:44):
Giving four or just go, you know, google that stuff
on the internet. And that's from Grace and Mike. Thanks
a lot, guys. Is very fits. I think what you're
doing a fantastic Yeah, keep it going there in Chicago. Uh.
And if you want to let us know about something
great that we would want to publicize, you can get
(50:04):
in touch with us via Twitter at s Y s
K podcast. I'm at joshuam Clark, Chuck's at movie crush Um.
We're on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know
and choke us on Facebook dot com slash Charles W.
Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email. The Stuff
podcast how Stuff Works dot com and has always joined
us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should
Know dot com for more on this and thousands of
(50:31):
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