March 1968: three miles below the stormy surface of the North
Pacific, a Soviet submarine lay silent as a tomb-its crew dead, its
payload of nuclear missiles, once directed toward strategic targets
in Hawaii, inoperable. No longer a real threat, the sub still
presented an alluring target and it was not long before the CIA
answered its siren call--even at the risk of igniting World War
III.
Project AZORIAN--the monumentally audacious six-year mission to
recover the sub and learn its secrets--has been celebrated within
the CIA as its greatest covert operation and hailed by the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers as the twentieth century's greatest
marine engineering feat. While previous accounts have offered
beguiling glimpses, none have had significant access to CIA
personnel or documents. Now David Sharp, the mission's Director of
Recovery Systems, draws upon his own recollections and personal
records, ship's logs, declassified documents, and conversations
with team members to shine a bright light on this remarkable but
still little understood enterprise.
Sharp reveals how the CIA conceived, organized, and conducted
AZORIAN, including recruiting the legendary Howard Hughes to
provide the "ocean mining" cover story. He takes readers onto and
beneath the high seas to show the problems faced by the crew during
the operation, including potential Soviet intervention and tense
moments when the recovery ship itself was in danger of breaking up.
He also puts a human face on key players like Carl Duckett, the
head of the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate; John
Parangosky, AZORIAN's program manager; John Graham, designer of the
Hughes Glomar Explorer; Curtis Crooke of Global Marine Development,
co-creator of the "grunt lift" recovery concept; and Oscar "Ott"
Schick, manager of the Lockheed-built capture vehicle and
submersible barge.
A mammoth undertaking worthy of the most dramatic and
spell-binding espionage fiction, Project AZORIAN harnessed American
imagination and ingenuity at their highest levels. Featuring dozens
of previously classified photos, Sharp's chronicle of that amazing
operation plunges readers deep into the darkest shadows of the Cold
War to produce the definitive account of an amazing mission.
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