Gone fishing: Secret hunt for a sunken Soviet sub

AP/Yahoo ^ | 2-14-10 | CALVIN WOODWARD

[mylife]

Agreed.

[Reagan is King]

Typical AP bias. It’s fine to the liberals to blow billions after billions down the social welfare sinkhole to pay people not to work. But to spend a small fraction of that money on trying to gather information from our enemies that might protect America is out of the question to a liberal. I’d be disappointed in my government if they didn’t try to do projects like this. Money well spent.

[pepsi_junkie]

If your point is that I am dismissing this page in history because I use the word disappointment, well, I disagree. If the stated intent of the mission was to recover the safe with the nuclear codes and protocols, and we didn’t get that safe, it was a disappointment. Did I say “failure”? Of course, not, it was a tremendous achievement, who could have ever believed we could pull such a thing off and see any success whatsoever? And yet we did! Amazing! But really, at what point is it not disappointing when you don’t achieve your primary objectives, no matter how impressive your attempt?

[pepsi_junkie]

I'll ammend that to say "unless we really did get the whole sub. Then it was an unprecedented success, a coup in fact!"

But since nobody will ever officially admit that we did get the whole thing, as outsiders looking in all that can be said is it's still amazing but officially a disappointment.

I'd like to think we got the whole boat though. That would be so cool, imagine walking the passageways of a soviet ghost sub at the height of the cold war!

[DrC]

“I thought the story was that half the sub went back down”

I’m not sure we’ll ever know:
“It is possible that the entire submarine was recovered and the story about only the bow being recovered was futher “cover”.”
http://w3.the-kgb.com/dante/military/mission.html

[Balding_Eagle]

They left the most interesting, and disturbing part of the story out.

K129 was a rogue Soviet sub, which blew up in 1968 a fraction of a second before the launch of a nuclear missle against Pearl Harbor.

That part of the story is recounted in RED STAR ROGUE, ‘the untold story of a soviet submarine’s nuclear strike attempt on the US’. by Kenneth Sewell and Clint Richmond. I have the books on CD on my desk. 9 disks. A very scary account of what happened in 1968 on K129, based on the evidence uncovered when it was brought to the surface.

[Balding_Eagle]

You may be interested in my post #26

[SandRat]

Story of the K-129

Early in 1968 a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine sank in the waters off Hawaii, hundreds of miles closer to American shores than it should have been. Compelling evidence, assembled here for the first time, strongly suggests that the sub, K-129, sank while attempting to fire a nuclear missile, most likely at the naval base at Pearl Harbor.

We now know that the Russian's had lost track of the sub; it had become a rogue. While the Soviets searched in vain for the boat, U.S. intelligence was quickly able to pinpoint the site of the disaster. The new Nixon administration launched a clandestine, half-billion-dollar project to recover the sunken K-129. Contrary to years of deliberately misleading reports, the recovery operation was a great success. With the recovery of the submarine, it became clear that the rogue was attempting to mimic a Chinese sub, almost certainly with the intention of provoking a war between the U.S. and China. This was a carefully planned operation that, had it succeeded, would have had devastating consequences. During the successful recovery effort of K-129, the U.S. forged new relationships with the USSR and China. Could the information gleaned from the sunken submarine have been a decisive factor shaping the new policies of détente between the Americans and the Soviets, and opening China to the West? And who in the USSR could have planned such a bold and potentially catastrophic operation?

"Red Star Rogue" reads like something straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, but it is all true! Today our greatest fear is that terrorists may someday acquire a nuclear weapon and use it against us. In fact, they have already tried.

[UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide]

By June 1974, after extensive preparations, the Hughes Glomar Explorer and the submersible barge were ready. By now Howard Hughes was a madman in failing health, and President Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace. The Cold War raged on.

Since Nixon did not resign until August, you have to wonder what else the story gets wrong.

[Molon Labbie]

There is also some info that the USS Scorpion was sunk as reprisal for the loss of the K-129, which Russian Navy brass thought was rammed by the USS Swordfish.

[Star Traveler]

Yes, that was very interesting... thanks...