The

The manganese nodules are naturally formed at the bottom of the ocean these nodules are very rich in a number of minerals

the value was considered very, very high, making the operation appear to be lucrative from a financial point of view. Appear to be lucrative.

The Global War Explorer program was basically designed to validate a cover story.

People in the United States were so anxious and so terrified of the potential of a nuclear war that we could not afford not to do this, nor could we afford for anything to leak out.

Obviously, if it had leaked out, we would not have had a chance.

This is Inside Skunkworks.

Today, we're celebrating International Podcast Day with a spy story, a Cold War spy story, involving CIA cover stories, the Red Fleet,

Lockheed Martin Engineers, and a famous eccentric American billionaire.

In our last episode, you met one of Sea Shadow's program managers, and he's back this week.

My name is Larry Dilger. I spent about 35 years of my career here at Lockheed in the Skunk Works

and spent the majority of the years managing small ADP programs. Most of what I did was classified.

The United States and the Soviet Union are surveilling each other in fear of nuclear war.

The Soviet Navy is strategically divided into four fleets,

the Northern, the Pacific, the Black Sea, and the Baltic fleets.

The Red Fleet submarines were more difficult to track

and therefore utilized to patrol and penetrate remote reaches of the ocean.

The United States implemented intelligence gathering systems to better detect enemy vessels,

one of which was Sonus, an acronym for

sound surveillance system. Sonus was developed to track Soviet submarines by monitoring low-frequency

sound in the layer of water where sound travels slowest.

The Navy and the agencies by using overhead intelligent gathering devices such as satellites,

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