In the early 70s of the last century, the Americans carried out a secret operation to raise the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 …
And it all began on February 24, 1968, when a diesel submarine K-129 with three ballistic missiles and two more nuclear torpedoes on board went on military patrol from the base in Kamchatka. On March 8, K-129 did not report on the passage of the next checkpoint …
An alarm was announced in the fleet. Dozens of ships went to sea. Aviation was raised into the air. Soviet submarines went out in search of groups and, disregarding all considerations of secrecy, "thrashed" along the ocean floor with active sending of sonars. But … as subsequent events showed, they were looking in the wrong place. The exact place of the death of the ship and 98 crew members, the Soviet command then failed to find.
According to intelligence reports, three days after the loss of the signal from the K-129, the American submarine "Suordfish" ("Swordfish") arrived at the Yokosuka naval base (Japan) with a crumpled front part of the conning tower. During the night, in conditions of increased security measures, the Americans made cosmetic repairs to the vessel, after which the submarine left the Japanese port and made the transition to Pearl Harbor. This suggested that a collision occurred between the Soviet and American submarines, after which the K-129 sank, about 750 miles northwest of Hawaii at a depth of more than five kilometers.
Is the Suordfish guilty of the death of the Soviet missile carrier? There is no conclusive evidence of this. The commander of the American submarine, John Rigsby, himself claimed that the damage to the hull was obtained as a result of a collision with a floating ice floe …
Be that as it may, the Americans finally figured out that the Soviets had lost the boat and did not know where to look for it. The time has come for the US Navy intelligence analysts to prove themselves. The material for research was "thrown" by the radio interception service, whose stations were located along the Pacific coast of the United States and in Alaska. It turned out that the Soviet missile carriers on their way to combat duty acted quite stereotyped: the first control radiogram was transmitted by them near the coast of Kamchatka, the second - when crossing the 180-degree meridian (date change line) and, finally, the third - about arrival in the area.
In the case of the K-129, the first message was transmitted, but the second was never received. Thus, the search area could be safely limited by a corridor along the route of deployment of Soviet submarines to the position and the 180th meridian. But this “accuracy” was not enough: many thousands of kilometers of the ocean floor fell into the “pipe”. Now it is the turn of the hydroacoustic detection systems - "SOSUS". All records of her sensors in the area of possible finding were carefully studied, but no signs of an explosion were found. The hydrophones also did not record the usual sounds accompanying the death of the submarine at maximum depth.
Only in one place was a weak signal of unknown origin recorded. It turned out that the K-129 was completely flooded with water before falling to the ocean floor. This means that the submarine is now at rest in complete integrity, which only increases its value (if found, of course!).
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To test this assumption, it was decided to flood a diesel submarine from the Second World War with the engines running, providing preliminary free access of water to the inside of a solid hull. All sounds were recorded by the SOSUS hydrophones, and lo and behold! - the signals coincided with the previously received "suspicious" noise in the search area. Now all that remained was to find the grave of K-129.
To do this, they used the Hallibat, a specially converted spy submarine equipped with an autonomous reconnaissance apparatus - the so-called. "Rybkoy". Equipped with hydroacoustic search equipment and cameras, Rybka, controlled from the Hallibat, surveyed the vastness of the ocean floor.
The search began in late July 1968. Almost a month has passed - and here is good luck: before the eyes of the American submariners, at the bottom, under more than 5,000 meters of water, lay a whole Soviet missile submarine. K-129 found!
After receiving complete information about the place of the death of the Soviet submarine, the idea arose in the United States to raise the sunken ship. But how?
At the time, the Americans knew very little about Soviet missiles. And then there was an opportunity to study the SS-N-5 ballistic missile, and the whole - from the images delivered by Hallibat, experts determined that at least two of the three missile silos remained intact.
Previously, the Americans have repeatedly raised fragments of Soviet ballistic missiles and even practical warheads from the ocean floor. And suddenly - such a gift of fate. This alone was of immense value. In addition, codes, ciphers, documents were of great interest. Although all codes and ciphers after the death of K-129 had to be replaced, it was possible to study the logic of the formation of codes of a potential enemy.
These and other considerations were presented in a report by Deputy Secretary of Defense David Pechard, presented to the President of the United States in November 1968. The arguments presented in the report proved the necessity of raising the Soviet submarine. However, the opinions of the special services were divided regarding the methods.
Naval intelligence proposed to carefully "cut" the K-129 hull right at depth with the help of directed explosions. Further, according to the plan, it was necessary to operate underwater vehicles - autonomous and remotely controlled. The CIA “Knights of the Cloak and Dagger” insisted on lifting the boat entirely. It is difficult to say what was the reason for choosing such an expensive and incomparably more risky way to raise the boat - a purely American craving for everything grandiose and "very-very" or (more likely) a powerful government lobby, but the CIA option was chosen.
For its implementation, it was necessary to design and build a special vessel and train a highly professional and trained crew. The entire operation had to be carried out secretly, without attracting anyone's attention. All that remained was to find the money and start an operation called Jennifer. To begin with, $ 200 million was allocated. The CIA signed a contract with the Hughes Tool company, which was headed by billionaire and adventurer Howard Hughes. During World War II, Hughes' company was already working on various secret projects on behalf of the Pentagon.
To lift the submarine's hull from fantastic depths, the technical executors of Operation Jennifer constructed the Hughes Glomar Explorer special vessel. Individual ship designs were manufactured by different shipyards and factories in different parts of the country, both on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Hughes Glomar Explorer was a rectangular floating platform with a displacement of over 36 thousand tons. The vessel was equipped with a heavy-duty lifting device placed on a stabilized portal.
Upon completion of construction, the vessel moved to Redwood City, California, where a pontoon barge was added to it to transport lifting erection structures with huge 50-meter claws. With their help, the sunken Soviet submarine was to be torn from the ocean floor and raised to the surface.
On July 4, 1974, the ship Hughes Glomar Explorer and the pontoon barge HMV-1, delivered to the same place, intended for the transportation of assembly structures and giant grabs, arrived at the designated point with 80 days of stores. The operation itself began when the vessel was stabilized, the weather forecast was favorable and all systems were checked. НМВ-1 was sunk and brought under the Glomar Explorer hull. Then nine-meter pipes began to go into the ocean waters, which were automatically screwed at a depth. The control was carried out by underwater television cameras. A total of 600 pipes were used, each weighing the size of a double-decker bus.
After 48 hours, the grab was right above the sub's hull, grabbed it with giant pincers, and fixed it. The ascent began. And here the unexpected happened! The hidden destruction of the boat's hull played a role. Before the eyes of the Americans, the submarine split, and about three-quarters of its hull, along with the bodies of most of the dead and ballistic missiles, began to plunge into the black ocean abyss. Suddenly a missile with a nuclear charge slipped out of the mine and slowly sank to the bottom. Everyone froze in horror as they imagined the consequences. But the explosion, fortunately, did not happen.
The bow of the submarine ended up in the huge hold of the Hughes Glomar Explorer. The American ship weighed anchor and headed for the shores of the United States. After pumping water out of a huge internal hangar, experts rushed to research the trophy. The first thing that struck the Americans was the poor quality of the steel from which the boat's hull was made. According to US Navy engineers, even its thickness was not the same in all places. It turned out to be almost impossible to get inside the boat: everything there was distorted and squeezed by the explosion and the cyclopean pressure of water. But the Americans managed to extract torpedoes with a nuclear warhead.
Having solved the problem only partially, the CIA stopped before the most important stage - the need to lift and the aft part of the K-129. But in 1975, all the details of the covert operation became the property of the media. The sensation was picked up by all the leading agencies and newspapers with unimaginable speed. Because of this, the CIA had to abandon the subsequent stages of the rise of the Soviet submarine.
Shortly after the scandal with Operation Jennifer, the main participants left the stage. President Nixon retired in connection with the Watergate affair, CIA Director Colby was fired, and billionaire Hughes died of the flu. Nevertheless, Operation Jennifer was one of the most risky and fantastical technological projects of the 20th century, and the creation of the Hughes Glomar Explorer was a brilliant technical achievement of US scientists and engineers.
In October 1992, CIA Director Robert Gates, who was on a visit to Moscow, gave the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin a videotape showing the burial procedure of Soviet sailors removed from the bow compartments of the K-129.
Eternal memory to those who died at sea!