A Project Called Azorian: Doing the Impossible

More than fifty years ago in March 1968 the US Navy observed a massive Soviet naval and air search in the North Pacific Ocean. The USN monitored the search over the next few months and concluded the Russians lost a submarine and were unable to find her. Using acoustic records from listening stations in the Pacific, the Navy discovered an explosive event that occurred just before and in the same area where the Soviet’s were looking. The Navy deployed a specially equipped spy submarine to secretly search the seabed where the event occurred and found and photographed the wreckage of the Russian submarine K-129 that rested on the seafloor of the North Pacific Ocean (Figure 1).

The K-129 was a diesel electric Golf II-class Soviet submarine armed with nuclear tipped ballistic missiles. The large intact portion of her wreckage included one ballistic missile with its warhead, the submarine’s sail where top-secret code equipment and documents would be found, and her bow section with nuclear torpedoes. It would be an amazing intelligence coup if the US could secretly recover the submarine. The problem was that it lay on the bottom of the North Pacific Ocean at a depth of sixteen thousand feet.