When a Soviet ballistic missile submarine sank in the Pacific in 1968, the U.S. Navy used a classified hydrophone network to pinpoint the wreck to a five-mile radius while the Soviets searched in vain. This episode unpacks Project Azorian, the audacious CIA mission to secretly raise the K-129 from three miles down, an operation that cost roughly 3.9 billion dollars in today’s money and remains one of the most complex covert engineering feats ever attempted.

We explore the SOSUS deep sound channel that located the sub, the staggering machinery of the Hughes Glomar Explorer with its giant claw, pipe string, and moon pool, and the brilliant fake deep-sea mining cover story built around reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. We follow the tense salvage as Soviet ships watched, the catastrophic failure of brittle maraging steel claws, the respectful burial of recovered Soviet sailors, and the birth of the famous neither confirm nor deny Glomar response.

• How the SOSUS network and the deep sound channel pinpointed the wreck
• Why the Howard Hughes mining cover story was perfect camouflage
• The engineering of dynamic positioning and the giant capture vehicle
• The material failure that sent the prized section back to the seafloor
• The FOIA case that created the legal Glomar response still used today