Free Republic

One unforeseen blessing of the collapse of the Soviet Union has been the easing of security restrictions in former Iron Curtain nations. Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Western journalists have been able to access to classified documents that would have gotten them shot a few years before. That's a scary thought - but not nearly as chilling as some of the secrets they've uncovered. In "Red Star Rogue," author Kenneth Sewell takes us inside the once top-secret Soviet nuclear navy to reveal the explosive facts about one of best-kept secrets of the Cold War, the sinking of Soviet...

A secret chapter in American naval research could soon reach an ignoble close when a rusty barge and its once-classified contents leave Suisun Bay for the scrap heap. Slipping through the sea like a black mirage on catamaran legs, the 164-foot Sea Shadow looks like something Darth Vader might fly. It is the world's only ship built to be invisible, assembled secretly in Redwood City in 1985 by the U.S. Navy and contractor Lockheed Martin at an estimated cost of $50 million. Sea Shadow's purpose was to test radar-cloaking technology and other naval engineering innovations. Many of its breakthroughs can...

In the world of intelligence, the most successful deception operation is one in which the physical activity required is carried out in full public view, but the true nature of the operation is shrouded in secrecy. Project Azorian, the 1974 recovery of a sunken Soviet submarine resting 16,300 feet below the surface of the North Pacific, was a singular success for the CIA and the U.S. Navy - despite last-minute media leaks that proved to be of no consequence,

HE remembers the women sunbathing naked on the deck of a passing yacht. He remembers, too, the lurking menace of a Russian intelligence-gathering trawler, watching from afar as one of the most audacious American coups of the cold war unfolded on the ocean floor, 16,500ft beneath the Pacific surface. David Sharp recalls every detail of the 1974 mission known as Project Azorian, one of the most ambitious, expensive and politically volatile clandestine operations launched by the CIA. As one of the CIA’s agents in charge of recovering a sunken Soviet submarine and its cargo of nuclear-tipped missiles, Sharp spent 63...

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the first time has revealed details about an ultra-secret Cold War-era project to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the depths of the Pacific Ocean in 1974. The high-risk salvage operation, code-named ‘Project Azorian’, had been shrouded in secrecy for decades but the spy agency broke its silence in newly-declassified documents published yesterday by an independent watchdog, the National Security Archive. The documents, drawn from a 50-page article written for an in-house CIA journal, recount the daring bid approved by then-president Richard Nixon to raise the submarine using a specially-designed ship, the Glomar Explorer....

CURTIS Crooke's connection with the Glomar Explorer began back in 1969, when two men from the Central Intelligence Agency showed up at his office uninvited. "They walked in my door and closed it, and my office door was never shut," said Crooke, now 78 and retired in Carmel, Calif. "They wanted to know if my company could build something to lift something so many tons and in about 15 to 20,000 feet of water." Crooke, then the vice president of engineering for Houston-based Global Marine, wasn't told what the CIA wanted to do with this special ship. But he had...