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The Cold War was a very interesting thing...
If Ships Could Talk, The "GSF Explorer" Would Spill Some CIA Secrets
In Transocean's most recent fleet status report, the company disclosed that the GSF Explorer, an ultra-deepwater drillship, would be scrapped. The rig will take some unique secrets to the grave, as its history is unlike any other rig in the offshore drilling fleet. While the rig may be gone, it won't soon be forgotten. This is the story of the GSF Explorer - a rig with a penchant for intrigue and a legacy of espionage in the Cold War.
A Cover Story For An Offshore Spy Mission
On June 20, 1974, the massive vessel set sail with a 170-man crew of CIA agents for a region of the Pacific Ocean located northwest of the Hawaiian islands. Its reported mission raised no eyebrows and was greeted with interest only by students, professionals and hobbyists of marine geology: to extract manganese nodules from the ocean floor. But the vessel's real mission was nothing of the kind.
The GSF Explorer was formerly the USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer. Now a deepwater drillship, it was originally built for the CIA Special Activities Division secret operation dubbed "Project Azorian," which involved recovering a sunken Soviet submarine lost in April 1968.
A Project 629A (NATO reporting name Golf-II class) diesel-electric Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129, hull number 722
A Catastrophic Accident Sinks The Soviet Submarine, K-129
On March 1, 1968, a Soviet Golf-II submarine, the K-129, with a cargo of three SS-N-4 Sark nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, sailed from the Petropavlovsk naval base on the Kamchatka Peninsula to its patrol station northeast of Hawaii. It was planned that if the Cold War were to become hot, the K-129 would have fired its three ballistic missiles, which each carried a one-megaton nuclear warhead, at targets along the US west coast.
But something went tragically wrong. In mid-March 1968, the vessel suffered a catastrophic accident 1,560 miles northwest in Hawaii that resulted in the loss of the entire crew.
Recovery site of the K-129 submarine
Over the next six years, the CIA undertook Project Azorian to ascertain the location of the sunken vessel and recover it so as to hopefully gather intelligence therefrom.
This mission culminated on August 8, 1974, when the Hughes Glomar Explorer raised a portion of the K-129 to the surface and transported it to Hawaii for comprehensive examination.
Project Azorian & The Hughes Glomar Explorer
The Hughes Glomar Explorer was built between 1973 and 1974 by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co. for more than $350 million at the direction of Howard Hughes for use by his company, Global Marine Development, one of many of the eccentric movie tycoon's companies that were already contractors on a variety of classified US military aircraft, weapons and satellite contracts. Hughes agreed to lend his name to Project Azorian in order to support the cover story that the vessel was mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor. Global Marine Development Inc., the research and development arm of Global Marine Inc., at the time a pioneer in deepwater offshore drilling operations, was contracted to design, build and operate the vessel for the purpose of clandestinely salvaging the K-129 from the ocean floor.
On June 7, 1974, President Richard Nixon authorized the launching of the "Project Azorian" mission, mandating that the Hughes Glomar Explorer not begin its work until after he had returned from a summit meeting in Moscow scheduled to last from June 27, 1974, to July 3, 1974. The Glomar Explorer arrived at the recovery site northwest of Hawaii on July 4, 1974, the day after Nixon departed Russia. Recovery operations began immediately to attach the pipe-string collars around the K-129.
The recovery operations were significantly complicated by nearly two full weeks of constant surveillance of the ship's work by two Soviet naval vessels. But despite the presence of the Soviet surveillance vessels, recovery work continued.
However, concerned that the Soviets might try to land personnel on the HMS Glomar via helicopter, on July 18, 1974, the CIA mission director on the Glomar Explorer ordered crates to be stacked on the vessel's helicopter deck to prevent the Russians from landing on it.
The Hughes Glomar Explorer commenced lifting the K-129 off the sea floor on August 1, 1974. It took eight days to extract a portion of the remains of the submarine into the massive hold of the Glomar Explorer. The remains that were able to be extracted were finally secured inside the ship on August 8, 1974. The following day, recovery operations were completed and the vessel sailed for Hawaii to offload its new cargo.
Thought was given to conducting a second mission to attempt to retrieve more of the K-129's remains, but concerns over Soviet surveillance prompted US officials to not pursue a second mission. A recently released analysis of Project Azorian published by The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) quotes a memorandum US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sent to President Gerald Ford:
What Did Project Azorian Accomplish?
Project Azorian became public in February 1975, when an article by journalist Seymour Hersh in the New York Times reported that the project was, in the view of senior officials with the US Navy, a failure, as the CIA did not recover any of the K-129's SS-N-4 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.
In 2010, CIA for the first time declassified substantive information on Project Azorian. What did Project Azorian accomplish? Because the CIA provided no answers to this critical question, the predominant school of thought maintains Hersh's contention that the project failed to accomplish its primary goals.
Additionally, Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew's 1998 book Blind Man's Bluff reported that only a 38-foot long forward section of the K-129 was recovered, including the K-129's torpedo compartment and its store of Russian nuclear torpedoes. Sontag and Drew write that 90% of the vessel, including the missile compartment, conning tower, control room, engine room, and radio shack, broke free and fell back to the sea floor, disintegrating on impact. "Back to the ocean floor went the intact [SS-N-4] nuclear missile, the codebooks, decoding machines, the burst transmitters. Everything the CIA most wanted to reclaim," they write. Further, because only small fragments survived the disintegration of the K-129 when it hit the sea floor, the CIA decided not to enact a second try to retrieve what remained.
n June 1993, a panel of Russian experts submitted a report to President Boris Yeltsin, using only information made available to them by Russian intelligence services. The report concluded that the CIA recovered at least two nuclear-armed torpedoes from the part of the submarine that it managed to bring to the surface. The report said the level of plutonium radiation the CIA team on the Hughes Glomar Explorer found was consistent with two nuclear warheads. This conclusion is partially confirmed in the text of the 2010-released CIA article, which said that the crew of the Glomar Explorer had to address plutonium contamination once the vessel was brought to the surface caused by the one-point detonation of the high explosive components of one or more of the K-129's nuclear torpedoes.
Whether Project Azorian was a success or failure will only be able to be conclusively ascertained once the CIA declassifies the remainder of its information regarding the mission.
From The Glomar Explorer To The GSF Explorer
The Hughes Glomar Explorer was turned over to the US Navy for mothballing. In January 1977, the vessel became part of the Navy's Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet. The following year, Ocean Minerals Company consortium of Mountain View, California announced it had leased Hughes Glomar Explorer and began testing a prototype deepsea mining system in the Pacific Ocean in November of 1979.
In 1997, the vessel was relocated to Atlantic Marine's Mobile, Alabama shipyard for modifications that converted her into a dynamically-positioned deepwater drillship, capable of drilling in waters of 7,500 feet and, with some modification, up to 11,500 feet. The conversion cost over $180 million and was completed in 1998.*
The conversion of the vessel from 1996-1998 was marked the beginning of a 30-year lease from the US Navy to Global Marine Drilling at a cost of $1 million per annum. In 2001, Global Marine merged with Santa Fe International Corp to become GlobalSantaFe Corp, which merged with Transocean 2007 and operates the rechristened vessel: GSF Explorer. In 2010, Transocean acquired the vessel in 2010 for $15 million.
In Transocean's most recent fleet status report, the company disclosed that the GSF Explorer, an ultra-deepwater drillship, would be scrapped. The rig will take some unique secrets to the grave, as its history is unlike any other rig in the offshore drilling fleet. While the rig may be gone, it won't soon be forgotten. This is the story of the GSF Explorer - a rig with a penchant for intrigue and a legacy of espionage in the Cold War.
A Cover Story For An Offshore Spy Mission
On June 20, 1974, the massive vessel set sail with a 170-man crew of CIA agents for a region of the Pacific Ocean located northwest of the Hawaiian islands. Its reported mission raised no eyebrows and was greeted with interest only by students, professionals and hobbyists of marine geology: to extract manganese nodules from the ocean floor. But the vessel's real mission was nothing of the kind.
The GSF Explorer was formerly the USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer. Now a deepwater drillship, it was originally built for the CIA Special Activities Division secret operation dubbed "Project Azorian," which involved recovering a sunken Soviet submarine lost in April 1968.
A Project 629A (NATO reporting name Golf-II class) diesel-electric Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129, hull number 722
A Catastrophic Accident Sinks The Soviet Submarine, K-129
On March 1, 1968, a Soviet Golf-II submarine, the K-129, with a cargo of three SS-N-4 Sark nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, sailed from the Petropavlovsk naval base on the Kamchatka Peninsula to its patrol station northeast of Hawaii. It was planned that if the Cold War were to become hot, the K-129 would have fired its three ballistic missiles, which each carried a one-megaton nuclear warhead, at targets along the US west coast.
But something went tragically wrong. In mid-March 1968, the vessel suffered a catastrophic accident 1,560 miles northwest in Hawaii that resulted in the loss of the entire crew.
Recovery site of the K-129 submarine
Over the next six years, the CIA undertook Project Azorian to ascertain the location of the sunken vessel and recover it so as to hopefully gather intelligence therefrom.
This mission culminated on August 8, 1974, when the Hughes Glomar Explorer raised a portion of the K-129 to the surface and transported it to Hawaii for comprehensive examination.
Project Azorian & The Hughes Glomar Explorer
The Hughes Glomar Explorer was built between 1973 and 1974 by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co. for more than $350 million at the direction of Howard Hughes for use by his company, Global Marine Development, one of many of the eccentric movie tycoon's companies that were already contractors on a variety of classified US military aircraft, weapons and satellite contracts. Hughes agreed to lend his name to Project Azorian in order to support the cover story that the vessel was mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor. Global Marine Development Inc., the research and development arm of Global Marine Inc., at the time a pioneer in deepwater offshore drilling operations, was contracted to design, build and operate the vessel for the purpose of clandestinely salvaging the K-129 from the ocean floor.
On June 7, 1974, President Richard Nixon authorized the launching of the "Project Azorian" mission, mandating that the Hughes Glomar Explorer not begin its work until after he had returned from a summit meeting in Moscow scheduled to last from June 27, 1974, to July 3, 1974. The Glomar Explorer arrived at the recovery site northwest of Hawaii on July 4, 1974, the day after Nixon departed Russia. Recovery operations began immediately to attach the pipe-string collars around the K-129.
The recovery operations were significantly complicated by nearly two full weeks of constant surveillance of the ship's work by two Soviet naval vessels. But despite the presence of the Soviet surveillance vessels, recovery work continued.
However, concerned that the Soviets might try to land personnel on the HMS Glomar via helicopter, on July 18, 1974, the CIA mission director on the Glomar Explorer ordered crates to be stacked on the vessel's helicopter deck to prevent the Russians from landing on it.
The Hughes Glomar Explorer commenced lifting the K-129 off the sea floor on August 1, 1974. It took eight days to extract a portion of the remains of the submarine into the massive hold of the Glomar Explorer. The remains that were able to be extracted were finally secured inside the ship on August 8, 1974. The following day, recovery operations were completed and the vessel sailed for Hawaii to offload its new cargo.
Thought was given to conducting a second mission to attempt to retrieve more of the K-129's remains, but concerns over Soviet surveillance prompted US officials to not pursue a second mission. A recently released analysis of Project Azorian published by The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) quotes a memorandum US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sent to President Gerald Ford:
"It is now clear that the Soviets have no intention of allowing us to conduct a second mission without interference. A Soviet ocean-going tug has been on station at the target site since 28 March, and there is every indication that the Soviets intend to maintain a watch there. Our recovery system is vulnerable to damage and incapacitation by the most innocent and frequent occurrences at sea—another boat coming too close or "inadvertently" bumping our ship. The threat of a more aggressive and hostile reaction would also be present, including a direct confrontation with Soviet navy vessels."
Project Azorian became public in February 1975, when an article by journalist Seymour Hersh in the New York Times reported that the project was, in the view of senior officials with the US Navy, a failure, as the CIA did not recover any of the K-129's SS-N-4 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.
In 2010, CIA for the first time declassified substantive information on Project Azorian. What did Project Azorian accomplish? Because the CIA provided no answers to this critical question, the predominant school of thought maintains Hersh's contention that the project failed to accomplish its primary goals.
Additionally, Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew's 1998 book Blind Man's Bluff reported that only a 38-foot long forward section of the K-129 was recovered, including the K-129's torpedo compartment and its store of Russian nuclear torpedoes. Sontag and Drew write that 90% of the vessel, including the missile compartment, conning tower, control room, engine room, and radio shack, broke free and fell back to the sea floor, disintegrating on impact. "Back to the ocean floor went the intact [SS-N-4] nuclear missile, the codebooks, decoding machines, the burst transmitters. Everything the CIA most wanted to reclaim," they write. Further, because only small fragments survived the disintegration of the K-129 when it hit the sea floor, the CIA decided not to enact a second try to retrieve what remained.
n June 1993, a panel of Russian experts submitted a report to President Boris Yeltsin, using only information made available to them by Russian intelligence services. The report concluded that the CIA recovered at least two nuclear-armed torpedoes from the part of the submarine that it managed to bring to the surface. The report said the level of plutonium radiation the CIA team on the Hughes Glomar Explorer found was consistent with two nuclear warheads. This conclusion is partially confirmed in the text of the 2010-released CIA article, which said that the crew of the Glomar Explorer had to address plutonium contamination once the vessel was brought to the surface caused by the one-point detonation of the high explosive components of one or more of the K-129's nuclear torpedoes.
Whether Project Azorian was a success or failure will only be able to be conclusively ascertained once the CIA declassifies the remainder of its information regarding the mission.
From The Glomar Explorer To The GSF Explorer
The Hughes Glomar Explorer was turned over to the US Navy for mothballing. In January 1977, the vessel became part of the Navy's Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet. The following year, Ocean Minerals Company consortium of Mountain View, California announced it had leased Hughes Glomar Explorer and began testing a prototype deepsea mining system in the Pacific Ocean in November of 1979.
In 1997, the vessel was relocated to Atlantic Marine's Mobile, Alabama shipyard for modifications that converted her into a dynamically-positioned deepwater drillship, capable of drilling in waters of 7,500 feet and, with some modification, up to 11,500 feet. The conversion cost over $180 million and was completed in 1998.*
The conversion of the vessel from 1996-1998 was marked the beginning of a 30-year lease from the US Navy to Global Marine Drilling at a cost of $1 million per annum. In 2001, Global Marine merged with Santa Fe International Corp to become GlobalSantaFe Corp, which merged with Transocean 2007 and operates the rechristened vessel: GSF Explorer. In 2010, Transocean acquired the vessel in 2010 for $15 million.
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