With global oil prices falling to $40 a barrel in the wake of oil sands fracking and Iran coming back online, TransOcean is scrapping some 20 of their older deepwater oil drilling ships. One of these, the MV Glomar Explorer, is kinda famous.
On March 1, 1968, a Soviet Golf-II ballistic missile sub (basically a Zulu-class diesel attack sub modified to carry three Scud missiles), the K-129 (pennant 722), carrying three advanced SS-N-4 R-21 Sark nukes, sailed from Petropavlovsk to take up its peacetime patrol station 1,600 miles northeast of Hawaii.
Well something went bad fast and K-129 went down with all hands sometime around March 8th or so. The Navy’s SOSUS underwater sonar system got close enough to the wreck for government work and, after the Soviet effort to find their lost boat died down (reported by USS Barb, SSN-596, who was reportedly trailing K-129) , the USN pinpointed the wreck with deep diving research submarines and forwarded the info to Langley.
That’s when the CIA decided they wanted a ship that could lift a 1,750-ton submarine off the seafloor from a depth of 16,500 feet– 3 miles– back to the surface.
So they called Howard Hughes and opened the pocketbook (she cost over $1.6 billion in today’s money) for an immense custom built deepwater salvage ship, the 50,500-ton, 619-foot long GSF Hughes Glomar Explorer. In all, she was a big girl, the size of a WWII aircraft carrier and is today capable of reaching down to 30,000 feet to conduct exploratory oil field drilling and mining.
But back in 1973 her mission was veiled in secrecy. Operated by the Suma Corporation under the cover of harvesting manganese nodules from the ocean floor, she was semi-secretly added to the Navy as USNS Glomar Explorer (AG-193) in July and soon headed out to literally pick up K-129 and bring it home as part of a secret operation named Project Azorian.
The story of the salvage was tense (detailed here in this really interesting 50-page redacted intelligence brief) , with two different Soviet naval auxiliaries approaching danger close.
The first the 459-foot missile range instrumentation ship Chazhma, approached and hung around for a couple days, with her helicopter buzzing the ship several times taking pictures while sending a series of signals asking just WTF Glomar Explorer was up to.
The second, SB-10, a 155-foot submarine support ship/salvage tug, remained on station for 13 days and 16 hours, closing to within 75 yards at times and having to be repeatedly warned off.
Unarmed and capable of just 10 knots when wide open, the Hughes ship was a sitting duck.
In the end, Glomar Explorer picked up a 145-foot section of the sub with its giant central claw and brought it back to the states.
While the intelligence community hasn’t really broke down the contents of the section– which was reportedly radioactive– it was thought to include a couple of nuclear-tipped torpedoes but no missiles or code books in the 24 vans of material removed from the wreckage.
What is known is that it contained the bodies of six lost Soviet Red Banner Fleet sailors, who were buried at sea with full military honors in Sept. 1974 as seen in the CIA video below.
DCI Robert Gates presented a film of the burial ceremony to Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1992.
However, before Glomar Explorer could sail back and pick up the rest of the stricken sub, a Feb. 1975 leak in the LA Times relating the involvement of Hughes, CIA and the operation itself (incorrectly termed Project Jennifer) blew the cover on the whole op, ending it (as far as we know).
Glomar Explorer was soon shuffled over to the National Defense Reserve Fleet, Suisun Bay, Benecia, California where she sat until 5 November 1996, when she was leased out for $1 million per year to a string of oil companies, the last of which is TransOcean, who purchased the ship from the Navy for $15 million in 2010.
Currently under the flag of Vanuatu, she is set to be scrapped in coming months.
