Reportajes

Project Azorian
The CIA's Declassified History of the Glomar Explorer 
Posted - February 12, 2010
Edited by Matthew Aid with William Burr and Thomas Blanton

For the first time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified substantive information on one of its most secret and sensitive schemes, "Project Azorian," the Agency codename for its ambitious plan to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in order to retrieve its secrets. Today the National Security Archive publishes "Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer," a "Secret" 50-page article from the fall 1985 edition of the Agency's in-house journal Studies in Intelligence. 

Written by a participant in the operation whose identity remains classified, the article discusses the conception and planning of the retrieval effort and the creation of a special ship Glomar Explorer, which raised portions of the submarine in August 1974. The National Security Archive submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the CIA for the document on December 12, 2007.