On March 18 1975, CIA’s highly-classified 1974 mission known as Project AZORIAN was exposed through a nationally broadcast syndicated report. In one of the Agency’s largest and most expensive ventures to that date, CIA worked with the U.S. Navy and billionaire Howard Hughes in dispatching the Glomar Explorer salvage vessel to raise a portion of a sunken Soviet nuclear ballistic submarine from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

Although Project AZORIAN did not meet its full intelligence objectives, CIA considered the operation to be one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War. Intelligence collected from the operation provided a significant contribution to the U.S.’s broader understanding of Soviet strategic capabilities. Project AZORIAN remains an engineering marvel which had advanced state of the art in deep-ocean mining and heavy-lift technologies.

Learn more:

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-exposing-of-project-azorian/