I have a question. Why would the CIA build an enormous ship, hire Howard Hughes, pretend to mine rocks from the bottom of the Pacific, and then lower a gigantic claw three miles underwater? [question-en] No, seriously. If your answer is “to mine rocks,” I have follow-up questions about the rocks, the ship, Howard Hughes, the claw, and frankly the entire afternoon.
Because the ship was not really a mining ship. It was built to grab a Soviet submarine from the ocean floor. And the strange part is not that the CIA did this. The strange part is that, for a while, almost everybody involved behaved as if the cover story was perfectly normal.
A billionaire builds a giant vessel. The vessel goes into the Pacific. Soviet ships watch it. American officials refuse to discuss it. Then somebody steals a document, the newspapers start asking questions, and the whole operation becomes the origin story for the phrase “we can neither confirm nor deny.”
This is Project AZORIAN. The government really did it. The conspiracy is what people added afterward.
And before we get into it, one warning: this is exactly the kind of story that makes me overconfident. You see a ship, a submarine, a secret document and a government refusing to answer, and your brain starts connecting dots like it gets paid by the line.
I know this because I once spent six months investigating a municipal corruption scheme that turned out to be an accounting error. Six months. A lot of phone calls. A very impressive folder. The culprit was arithmetic.
So today, we are going to separate the incredible things that are documented from the incredible things people merely repeated until they sounded documented.
In this episode:
• A Soviet submarine disappears, and Washington decides to go fishing
• Howard Hughes builds a mining ship that is not really a mining ship
• The recovery works, until the submarine breaks apart
• A stolen document blows the cover story, and the CIA invents a phrase
• The receipts: what the documents establish, and what they do not
