Drillship Built as CIA Spy Ship to Raise Soviet Sub Falls Victim to Oil Crash

By John Miller

ZURICH, Sept 3 (Reuters) – A ship constructed by the CIA for a secret Cold War mission in 1974 to boost a sunken Soviet sub is heading to the scrap yard, a sufferer of the slide in oil costs.

Christened the Hughes Glomar Explorer, after billionaire Howard Hughes was introduced in on the CIA’s deception, the 619-foot vessel ultimately grew to become a part of the fleet of ships utilized by Swiss firm Transocean to drill for oil.

But the oil worth rout means the previous spy ship now referred to as GSF Explorer is only one of 40 such offshore drilling rigs which have been consigned to scrap since final 12 months.

It’s the top of a narrative that started when a Soviet G-II sub referred to as the Okay-129 sank in September 1968 “with all hands, 16,500 feet below the surface of the Pacific”, in response to an official U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) historical past.

The sub sank with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and practically 100 sailors, in response to declassified paperwork at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.

According to the CIA historical past of the mission, referred to as “Project Azorian”, the Soviet Union did not find the sub in an enormous two-month search, however the United States discovered it, 1,500 miles (2,400 km) northwest of Hawaii.

The CIA needed to get its palms on the nuclear missiles, in addition to cryptography gear to interrupt Soviet codes, however wanted a canopy story as a result of any restoration ship would rapidly be noticed by its Cold War foe.

The CIA introduced billionaire Hughes in on the key. Under a meticulously crafted fiction, the ship was constructed for Hughes at Pennsylvania’s Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co, as a result of he wanted it to mine sea-bed manganese nodules.

“If the Russians had become aware of the real purpose of the mission, we’d have had to cancel it, and all the money would go down the drain,” David Sharp, a 50-year CIA veteran from Maryland who was the 1974 mission’s deputy for restoration operations, informed Reuters in an interview.

COVER BLOWN

While the CIA has over time lavished billions on covert planes and spacecraft, Jeffrey T. Richelson, a senior fellow on the National Security Archive, informed Reuters: “They have not built anything so elaborate as the Glomar for such a limited mission”.

Too vast for the Panama Canal, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, additionally named after the corporate Global Marine Inc. that designed it, rounded Cape Horn to succeed in the Pacific.

In August 1974, its big mechanical claw raised a 145-foot part of the Okay-129 Soviet sub.

Sharp, now 81, who printed “The CIA’s Greatest Covert Operation” in 2011 after years of wrangling with the company over labeled materials, acknowledged the audacious mission was not an entire operational success.

The claw failed, he mentioned, and solely the sub’s bow, with the our bodies of six Russian sailors however no missiles or code gear, was delivered to the floor.

The operation’s secrecy was shattered after a June 1974 break-in at Hughes’ Los Angeles headquarters, the place the haul doubtless included a memo linking the mission to the billionaire.

The circle throughout the authorities and regulation enforcement that knew of the venture widened. The Los Angeles Times ran a narrative in February 1975.

“The source of the leak was never identified,” the CIA mentioned. “With Glomar’s cover blown, the White House canceled further recovery operations.”

The Glomar’s mission has a Cold War postscript: In 1992, then-CIA Director Robert Gates gave Russian President Boris Yeltsin a decades-old video of the six sailors’ burial at sea.

A GLOMAR RESPONSE

Converted to a deepwater drill ship in 1997 and renamed the GSF Explorer, the vessel was purchased by Transocean in 2010 and has been deployed by the world’s largest offshore driller from the Gulf of Mexico to Angola.

Its stern has a helicopter touchdown pad and the vessel is topped by a towering 170-foot tall derrick, so it could possibly drill to depths of as much as 30,000 toes.

In its heyday, the ship was employed out for greater than $400,000 a day, may home a crew of 160 and was held regular for drilling in heavy seas by 11 highly effective thrusters.

But with falling oil costs approaching $40 a barrel and demand for exploration from firms corresponding to Royal Dutch Shell and BP plunging, previous ships with out contracts or dealing with hefty upkeep payments are being culled.

Transocean, whose Deepwater Horizon drill rig explosion in 2010 within the Gulf of Mexico brought on the most important offshore environmental catastrophe in U.S. historical past, condemned the GSF Explorer in April.

Altogether, the corporate is scrapping some 20 vessels, shelving deliveries of recent ultra-deepwater drillships, forecasting $2 billion in writedowns and cancelling its interim dividend.

Houston’s Diamond Offshore and London’s Noble Corp have additionally consigned a few dozen ships to scrap since final 12 months.

“We’ve seen the largest number of floaters being scrapped over two consecutive years,” mentioned Rystad Energy analyst Joachim Bjorni in Norway.

But no “floater” destined for the world’s scrap yards is kind of just like the GSF Explorer.

Transocean declined to call the vessel’s purchaser, nor the place it is going to be scrapped, becoming for a ship whose unique identify has turn into synonymous with U.S. authorities secrecy.

After the CIA’s preliminary refusal to acknowledge its “Project Azorian” in 1975 with a “neither confirm or deny” reply, such solutions grew to become know as “Glomar responses”. (Editing by David Clarke)