The Murky Depths of Ocean Mining

The entire ocean mining industry that promises investors untold riches had its birth in a CIA covert operation at the height of the Cold War.

Starting off as OPERATION AZORIAN, the idea to build a huge ship to lift a Soviet submarine – filled with nuclear and code secrets – off the ocean floor in the middle of the Pacific was a project Naval Intelligence brought to what was known in 1968 as the “Forty Committee.” This group approved or disapproved high-risk intelligence operations. The Forty Committee had a long history of approving some infamous intelligence operations. It concluded the project of trying to recover the K-129, a diesel-powered Soviet sub, was too high risk for just the Navy. The CIA was brought into the operation under the codenames OPERATION DESKTOP and JENNIFER.

The United States had a serious challenge with the operation. The Soviets had informally asked the United States for help in locating the sunken sub when it first disappeared. Our undersea SOSUS system had actually recorded the explosions and hull collapse of the sub in real time. We knew exactly where the K-129 was and how deep the sub had gone down. We told the Soviets that we would assist them in trying to find the sub, but, in the part of the Pacific where the tragedy took place, actually recovering the wreckage would be almost impossible.

Under the leadership of William Colby, the CIA partnered with the legendary Howard Hughes to have Hughes design and engineer at Hughes Tool Company the giant ship with a “moon pool” hidden at its center to hide a giant undersea crane and claw to lift the sub to the surface. Colby’s team developed the cover story that the Hughes Glomar Explorer was a new kind of undersea mining vessel. While the ship was being constructed, the Navy and CIA sent in teams that took thousands of remote photographs of the wreckage site.

The CIA insisted on working with Hughes through his Summa Corporation located in Hollywood, California. Hughes kept the classified paperwork of the operation at this office. A mysterious and still unsolved break-in took place where key documents detailing the massive expenditures of money on the Glomar project were compromised.

Two seemingly unrelated CIA operations were involved in the compromise of the Hughes Glomar Explorer operation. John Paisley, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Strategic Research (and a suspected Soviet agent) was running the infamous “plumbers unit” that was conducting a number of CIA-sanctioned illegal break-ins. FBI agents suspected it was Paisley’s team that did the Summa Corporation break-in. Why would a CIA team break into a contractor’s office? According to the FBI official who investigated the case, the Agency had become convinced Hughes was cheating it out of millions of dollars in overcharges on the Glomar project. The FBI believed it was Colby who ordered the break-in. Colby denied it.

By 1974 the ship was ready and in place for the recovery attempt. It was Colby himself who may have compromised the operation. He suggested that there probably would be bodies of Soviet sailors found on the ship, and “we needed to document that these crew members were treated with respect.” Colby contacted the CIA’s Soviet Division for advice, and they came up with the idea of tasking a high-ranking defector, Nicholas Shadrin, who had been a Soviet naval officer, to advise them on the appropriate funeral service for any bodies recovered.

Nicholas Shadrin was, in reality, Captain Nikolay Fedororvich Artamonov, who had defected to the West in 1959 on a small boat to Sweden with his lover, a Polish dentist named Ewa Gora. Shadrin told the local CIA Station Chief, Paul Garbler, in Sweden that he defected because of his love for Gora whom he had met while serving in Gdansk, Poland. Artamonov told Garbler he was married in the Soviet Union to the daughter of Sergei Gorshkov, the head of the Soviet Navy. On the surface, the defection of the imperial-looking Artamonov was a huge coup for the CIA. But to several counterintelligence officers, he was too good to be true. Officers from the CIA’s Soviet Division cut the counterintelligence officers out of the process and rushed Artamonov to the United States.

By the time Shadrin was brought into the Hughes Glomar Explorer operation through one of his new U.S. Naval Intelligence pals, he was already well connected at the top of the U.S. Navy. Admiral Rufus Taylor had personally vouched for Shadrin. His best friend at the Office of Naval Intelligence was Tom Dwyer. Dwyer was a key player in the Glomar project. Had CIA officers not rushed Shadrin’s security clearance, they might have realized his defection made no sense. To compound the intelligence failure, another key Soviet agent, who the FBI thought they had turned, codenamed KITTY HAWK, was given permission to make contact with Shadrin. So in the middle of the most important Naval Intelligence operation in history, a Soviet citizen and high-ranking naval officer was given full access to its secrets.

Shadrin told his colleagues that the CIA was wasting money trying to recover the sub – “that all they would get should they bring it up was old technology and nothing of value.” Shadrin’s information was used to assist in the critical design of the claw and other elements of the Glomar operation.

Shadrin’s main task was to make certain a proper Soviet burial service was conducted if any bodies were recovered. Shadrin was flown to Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego before being transported to the Glomar Explorer for the recovery attempt.

In the spring of 1974, 750 miles west of Hawaii, the claw contraption was lowered over the Soviet submarine and made a seemingly successful grab. But at 5,000 feet, the K-129 sub broke into several pieces when the claw contraption failed. Had Shadrin deliberately fed the Navy wrong information about the weight of the sub or did Hughes simply build an inferior lift device?

What ended up in the Hughes Glomar Explorer’s moon pool was about a third of the sub. Two nuclear torpedoes and codebooks and instruction manuals (for the sea-launched ballistic missiles that were lost to the sea) were successfully recovered. Attached to the exterior of the sub were manganese nodules from the ocean floor. Also in the wreckage were the bodies of six Soviet sailors. Shadrin helped conduct the service that Colby ordered filmed so that at some point it could be given to the Soviets.

When CIA officials proposed a second operation to recover the ballistic missiles, Colby said no. “By then the operation was compromised and there would be no point,” he said. (Colby died in 1996 under mysterious circumstances.)

In December 1975, Shadrin told his FBI handlers that Soviet intelligence officers had asked for another meeting with him in Vienna, Austria. Five days before Christmas, Shadrin left Ewa at the Bristol Hotel and went to a meeting with his Soviet handlers on the steps of the Votivkirche where his son escorted him back home to mother Russia.