WEBVTT

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Summer, nineteen seventy-four.

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In the North Pacific,
a ship with a giant derrick

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holds position over water
more than five kilometres deep.

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Soviet ships have been watching.

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Below the deck, a string of steel pipe reaches
into the darkness.

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The world thinks Howard Hughes is mining the
ocean floor.

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In secret, this ship is working for the CIA.

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And the thing it wants to bring home is a Soviet
submarine.

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This is the Hughes Glomar Explorer.

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To pull off its mission, the crew has to solve a
problem every driller understands.

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Once you pick up the load, can you keep it?

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First they have to reach the wreck.

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Then lift it.

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Then bring it through the bottom
of their own ship,

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with the ocean moving everything around them.

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Go back to March, nineteen sixty-eight.

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The Soviet submarine K-129 disappears in the
Pacific.

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It is a diesel-powered boat carrying
nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

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Its crew is lost.

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The Soviet search fails, but the United States
locates the wreck.

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For American intelligence, it is an
extraordinary opportunity.

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Machinery, weapons technology and documents
might reveal things that could never be

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learned from a photograph of a ship in port.

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The plan is to recover a major portion of the
wreck.

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There is no existing salvage ship ready to do
the job.

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A purpose-built vessel, a huge underwater
capture machine, and years of engineering

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will be needed.

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Yet building an enormous ship is hard to hide.

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So the cover story has to explain the ship, the
equipment, and why it will spend weeks

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almost stationary in the middle of the ocean.

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Geology supplies the cover.

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Manganese nodules lie across parts of the deep
ocean floor.

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These concretions grow slowly as minerals
accumulate around a small nucleus,

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concentrating metals including manganese,
nickel, copper and cobalt.

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They are real deposits with real commercial
interest.

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Howard Hughes lends his name to a supposed
mining venture.

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An unusual ship pursuing unusual mineral wealth
sounds plausible.

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The public can look straight at the derrick and
still misunderstand its purpose.

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The answer beneath that derrick is a giant
mechanical claw.

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It has to reach the wreck, take hold, and lift
what remains of a submarine through

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kilometres of water.

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The ship is built around a large opening in its
hull, a centre well.

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The load will come up inside the vessel,
screened from anyone watching outside.

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A secret recovery needs a secret entrance.

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First, the claw itself has to reach the ship
unseen.

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It travels inside a roofed barge.

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The barge is deliberately submerged, and Glomar
moves above it.

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The cover opens.

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Docking legs reach down and lift the capture
vehicle into the centre well.

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Before this ship can secretly
recover a submarine,

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it has to secretly load its own machinery.

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This is where the oilfield enters the story.

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The engineers adapt familiar offshore ideas to
an unfamiliar load.

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Special heavy-lift pipe is handled in sixty-foot
doubles.

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Hydraulic lifting cylinders take the weight as
the string is raised or lowered.

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Seawater pumped through the pipe operates the
claw.

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The string is both a structural connection and
part of the hydraulic system.

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Now picture that load hanging from a ship in a
swell.

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The ship rolls, pitches, and rises and falls.

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If those movements are transmitted directly into
the suspended machinery, the forces

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change with every wave.

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A gimbaled platform allows rotation between the
vessel and its lifting equipment.

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Heave compensation manages the vertical
movement.

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The whole arrangement has to keep an enormous
suspended system under control while the

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surface refuses to stay still.

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The ship also has to hold its position.

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Thrusters respond to its positioning system,

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working to keep the vessel
over the operation below.

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A long pipe string does not make this a rigid
tower from ship to seabed.

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There are moving bodies at both ends, with a
very long connection between them.

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Station keeping, compensation and lifting have
to work together.

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Then, during integrated tests off Catalina, the
project runs into a wonderfully

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familiar oilfield problem.

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The pipe joints will not break out.

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Zinc-coated threads, red-lead lubricant and
seawater have produced galvanic corrosion.

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The joints seize.

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The crew needs a giant hydraulic wrench, a
different lubricant, and a painstaking

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clean-up of the threads.

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A machine built to recover a submarine

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first has to recover the ability
to unscrew its own pipe.

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By May, nineteen seventy-four, the mission
proposal reports that system tests and crew

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training are complete.

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The weather window is limited,

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and the schedule has already squeezed
the testing programme.

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This is a decision under uncertainty.

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The equipment has been tested.

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The full recovery, at the real depth, on the
real wreck, still lies ahead.

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Glomar arrives over the site on July fourth.

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The next weeks bring another complication:
Soviet vessels observe the operation.

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The declassified history records a precaution
against an unwanted helicopter landing.

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Crates are stacked across the landing deck.

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The crew keeps working.

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All that machinery has to continue looking like
a mining operation, even with curious

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ships close enough to watch.

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During the mission, wires in the
heave-compensator position instruments fail.

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The engineering account records the temporary
answer: men with yardsticks and

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welding-rod pointers, reading positions over
headset phones while repairs are made.

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Think about that contrast in scale.

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Thousands of tonnes of specialised machinery
depend, for a time, on people watching a

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ruler and passing the numbers along.

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On August first, the wreck is lifted from the
seabed.

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This is the moment the entire project has been
working towards.

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The claw has reached its target.

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The lifting system is carrying the load.

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Now the crew has to reverse the journey,
bringing the capture vehicle up as the long

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pipe string is taken apart above it.

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During the ascent, a large part of the target

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breaks away and falls back to the ocean floor.

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After years of preparation, the load is being
lost on the way up.

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Some of the wreck remains held.

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The crew continues with what is left.

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But getting that portion off the bottom is only
the first part of bringing it home.

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Even the portion that remains still has to enter
the ship.

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At the surface, waves can move the suspended
capture vehicle differently from the

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vessel above it.

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Docking legs guide and support that transition
into the centre well.

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That final few metres is its own engineering
problem: bringing a massive moving load

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into a confined opening without losing control.

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On August eighth, the recovered portion is
secured inside Glomar.

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Recovery operations finish the next day, and the
ship leaves the site.

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It has achieved something extraordinary,

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but it has not recovered
everything it went down for.

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Then the story changes scale again.

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Among what comes up are the remains of six
Soviet sailors.

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On September fourth, nineteen seventy-four, the
sailors are buried at sea in a

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ceremony aboard the American ship.

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A recording survives.

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These are people who died aboard their submarine
years earlier, now being honoured by

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the crew of the ship sent to recover its
secrets.

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[Original recording, 4 Sep 1974]
Today we honor these six men, their shipmates,

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and all men who give their lives
in patriotic service.

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What secrets came up with the wreck?

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The public record still leaves part of that
answer behind redactions.

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But the secret memorandum sent to President Ford
says the intelligence from the

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recovered section was significant.

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Enough, at first, to justify planning another
attempt.

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The people making that decision

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believed there was still something
worth going back for.

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A return mission is prepared.

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Then the cover collapses through events far from
the recovery site.

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Back in June, nineteen seventy-four, before the
sea operation, burglars had broken

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into Howard Hughes's company.

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The investigation becomes entangled with the
secret project.

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Reporters pursue the connections.

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The Los Angeles Times publishes an account in
February, nineteen seventy-five.

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In March, Jack Anderson's broadcast exposes the
operation nationally.

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The next obstacle cannot be fixed with a bigger
wrench.

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The June memorandum to Ford says

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a Soviet tug has been watching the site
since March twenty-eighth.

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It warns that even another vessel bumping Glomar

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could damage or disable the recovery system.

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A second attempt would carry a serious risk of
confrontation.

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Ford approves termination on June sixteenth.

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The ship's name becomes attached
to a famous official response:

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neither confirm nor deny.

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This affair gives the Glomar response its name.

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The mission ends.

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The machinery, however, has another life ahead
of it.

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For a time, Glomar even works on genuine
manganese-nodule tests.

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Later comes a long period in reserve.

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Then an offshore drilling contractor sees
something useful in the old ship.

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A major conversion gives it the equipment for a
different job.

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Upgraded in nineteen ninety-eight, the vessel
becomes a working deepwater drillship.

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This is a real commercial career.

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Transocean's records place the renamed GSF
Explorer in its drilling fleet, with work

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off Angola and a contract for exploration wells
in Indonesia.

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Its listed drilling water-depth capability is
seven thousand eight hundred feet.

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That rating describes its later drilling
configuration.

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It is a different operation from the original
salvage lift through roughly five

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kilometres of water.

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In twenty fifteen, the ship is retired and sold
for scrap.

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An extraordinary hull reaches the end of its
working life.

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But one piece of this story has escaped that
ending.

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To install Glomar's enormous gimbal platform
during construction, the shipyard used a

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floating crane called Sun Eight Hundred.

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Keep that crane in view.

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Jump to Baltimore, twenty twenty-four.

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After the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapses, a
large floating crane helps remove

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wreckage from the water.

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Its name is Chesapeake One Thousand.

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It is the same crane, rebuilt and renamed, that
helped assemble the CIA's secret

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recovery ship more than fifty years earlier.

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Glomar's story begins with a question: can you
keep the load once you pick it up?

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In nineteen seventy-four, the answer was only
partly.

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The ship went on to drill offshore wells.

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The crane that helped build it eventually lifted
wreckage in Baltimore.

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A ship can be scrapped.

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A secret can be exposed.

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A good piece of engineering can keep working
long after both.