The CIA’s Super-Secret Submarine Scooper

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2017

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sometimes the only way a spy agency can hide a secret is under the brightest of spotlights. This week, we talk with author Josh Dean about how the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology works and about some of its most audacious projects, including the SR-71 Blackbird.

According to Dean, though, nothing tops the CIA plan to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from 3-miles deep in the Pacific. Even more than 40 years later, the technology used to do it is nearly state of the art, and the cover story seems even more unlikely.

We cover a lot of ground in the podcast, but for even more, check out Dean’s book: The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast.
0:02.0	Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature.
0:05.0	It's up to you how much you give,
0:07.0	and there's no regular commitment.
0:09.0	Just click the link in the show description to support now. Yeah, so once the decision was made to go and steal a submarine, then the question becomes how do you steal a submarine?
0:23.0	No submarine had ever been salvaged from any depth below, I think it's 200 feet.
0:27.5	I mean, something absurd, not absurd, just, it's so complicated to pull it very out. You're talking millions of pounds of steel
0:34.7	through water from something on the surface that's bouncing around. I mean it's just very complicated and this was at 16,700 feet I think so I mean beyond orders of magnitude.
0:45.6	You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the
0:59.0	front lines.
1:00.5	Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields and I'm Matthew Galt. Today we're talking
1:19.3	about the CIA which is famous for some pretty incredible blunders like exploding cigars and evidence of
1:26.3	weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which maybe wasn't there but there are also some
1:31.6	successes and some of those really faded away from people's thoughts.
1:36.0	Today we're talking with Josh Dean.
1:38.0	He's the author of Taking of K-129.
1:42.0	He's going to tell us about this super secret mission that involved thousands of people,
1:46.7	hundreds of millions of dollars, and impossible technical challenges.
1:50.6	So Josh, welcome.
1:52.1	Thanks.
1:53.0	Can you just start off by giving us a super short version of the story?
1:56.0	I mean, what is K-129 to start off with?
	...

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