On top of that, the job has to be done without anyone noticing.
It was such a complex system, Wetmore said.
Obviously, a single thread in the whole system was the pipe.
A recreation of the CIA mission in 1974 to retrieve a Soviet sub three miles below the ocean surface.Big Media
If the pipe breaks, its game over.
And there was no back up and no way to retrieve and finish the problem.
We didnt know how much steel was buried underneath the submarine.
Therefore, how do we grab a broken piece of iron, that is broken in several different places?
That was a guess.
Thousands were involved in the program, but great steps were taken to maintain sercrecy.
After years of development and construction, the recovery operation took place in 1974.
The Glomar team did retrieve what remained of the vessel.
A suspected cause of the break has been that a few of the claws grabber arms broke.
In the immediate aftermath, Wetmore said, of course the first thing is, why did that happen?
and [people] start pointing fingers and that wasnt productive.
That ceremony was filmed, and the footage was eventually presented to Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1992.
We were like 95% confident that that operation would have been completely successful.
…We knew exactly what we were going after and how much it weighed.
They were there watching everything we were doing, the whole time we were doing it.
I think that was a testament to, one the cover story and two, the audacity.
The total mission cost $300 million to $400 million, or about $2 billion today.
Thats a hefty price tag, but those involved still believe it was worth it.
Cardwell and Wetmore, who also appear in the episode, joined Wallace on a tour this week.
The exhibit emphasizes how the agency was worked with private industry to carry out missions.
Wetmore noted that the American Society of Mechanical Engineers recognized the mission as a landmark mechanical engineering achievement.
It was not a boondoggle.
It was possible and it worked, he said.
And this would be one hell of a ground truth.
I think we learned stuff just from the metallurgy in the hull.
I disagree with that.
As the CIA Museum notes, the project did lead to what has become an agency standard response.
After the project was exposed, Rolling Stone filed a Freedom of Information Act request for details.
Secrets in an open society are really tricky, Wallace said.
And I think intelligence secrets are a bit analogous to that.
Some of our secrets we want to maintain forever.
Many of our secrets they decay fairly quickly.
And I think this story, Azorian, is one that merits being told.
