Project Azorian: The CIA's $800 Million Plan to Steal a Sunken Soviet Sub

In 1974, every newspaper in America ran the same story: the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes had built a giant ship to mine manganese from the floor of the Pacific. It was a lie. Hughes never built it. The minerals never mattered. Three miles down, in total darkness, lay a sunken Soviet submarine with nuclear missiles in its tubes and code books in its safe — and the CIA had decided to reach down five kilometers and steal it. This is the story of Project Azorian: the fake mining company, the 618-foot Hughes Glomar Explorer, the destroyer-sized claw named Clementine, and the moment the hull split apart on the way up and the biggest piece fell back into the abyss. It's also where the phrase you've used your whole life — "we can neither confirm nor deny" — was actually born. And it ends somewhere you won't expect: with a quiet act of decency between enemies at the height of the Cold War. The most expensive heist in history happened three miles underwater. Watch how it almost worked — and decide for yourself what the CIA really brought back to the surface. Subscribe:    / @hidden_war_archives   Sources: CIA, "Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer," Studies in Intelligence (internal history, declassified 2010). Reading Room: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docum... National Security Archive, "Project Azorian: The CIA's Declassified History of the Glomar Explorer," ed. Matthew Aid (2010). https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/... Phillippi v. CIA, 546 F.2d 1009 (D.C. Cir. 1976) — the case that established the "Glomar response." Norman Polmar & Michael White, Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129 (Naval Institute Press, 2010). Smithsonian Magazine, "During the Cold War, the CIA Secretly Plucked a Soviet Submarine From the Ocean Floor Using a Giant Claw." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor... Disclaimer: This is a history channel, and Project Azorian is still only partly declassified. Where the public record is incomplete or disputed — especially around exactly what was recovered and why the K-129 was lost — I've tried to say so plainly rather than pretend at certainty, and reasonable historians still disagree on some of it. The real men and women who served are treated here with respect, not as plot points. Some images in this video were created with AI tools and are used for illustration only; they are not archival footage. If a detail matters to you, go read the declassified CIA history and the original reporting for yourself.