- Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129 by Norman Polmar, Michael White
On 4 July 1974, the giant deep-sea mining vessel Hughes Glomar Explorer arrived at a location a few nautical miles from the intersection of 40∞N and 180∞E in the Pacific Ocean to spend the next few weeks ostentatiously engaged in “deep-ocean mining tests.” What was actually taking place 16,400 feet below the surface was the final stage of a six-year top-secret operation by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to recover the sunken nuclear-armed Soviet Golf-class submarine K-129.Code-named “Project Azorian,” the operation required expenditures roughly equal to the cost of the moon landing (around $500 million, the precise cost still undisclosed by the CIA). This carefully researched and well-documented account by Norman Polmar and Michael White in Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129 reconstructs the remarkable technical and political aspects of the Azorian operation, as well as the Cold War ambiance surrounding it. [End Page 236]
The book builds on the tradition of the Cold War submarine espionage genre but prizes factual accuracy and a balanced, comprehensive approach above the typical “thriller” traits. Polmar is a well-known authority and consultant on submarine technologies and operations who has served for several decades in a variety of government and corporate roles and has published extensively as an author, editor, and columnist in the naval, aviation, and intelligence fields. White, a Vienna-based director of commercials, corporate films, and award-winning documentaries with a prior seafaring background in the British merchant marine, brings in a solid document base collected as a result of research undertaken for his 2009 documentary on Project Azorian. Sources for the book include both U.S. and Soviet materials and unique documents such as the Hughes Glomar Explorer logs, (partly) declassified CIA documents, interviews with direct participants in the events, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, reference works, and memoirs.
The authors present a meticulous account of a story commonly characterized with words like “incredible” or “unprecedented” and trailed by inaccuracies and misinformation accumulated over decades of secrecy. The book contains not only a narrative part, which is firmly grounded in sources, calm, and focused, but also some reference data on the two submarines in the story, K-129 and USS Halibut, and the three components of the lifting operation—lift ship, capture vehicle, and the Hughes Mining Barge—neatly broken into eight appendices and complemented by a set of charts, computer-generated images, basic glossary, book list, and index. The plot—which includes a recreation of K-129’s final mission, the subsequent search operations by both sides, the uncertain progress of a highly improbable and risk-laden recovery operation, the CIA’s determination to forge ahead in the face of other agencies’ opposition and international and technical unknowns, the brashly conspicuous cover story and the CIA’s effort to hold to it against the increasingly intrusive media, the extraordinary engineering achievement, and the last-minute loss of K-129’s almost recovered hull section housing the principal bounty, whose promise had propelled the six-year effort—requires little dramatization and is effectively served by the authors’ commitment to drawing on a wide range of sources and being as accurate as possible in representing their material.
Part of the appeal of the Project Azorian story stems from its human dimension. The book is dedicated to “the parents, wives, and children of the Officers and Enlisted Men lost in the submarine K-129.” The book pays a full measure of respect to the 98 men on the K-129 crew as well as to the actions and choices of the former “enemy”—the Soviet Navy and political and intelligence establishment. The book touches on the sensitive subject of the handling of the remains of Soviet sailors that were recovered with the lifted section of the submarine and describes a carefully scripted burial ceremony on board the Glomar Explorer (pp. 130–132). The ceremony...