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The agency is collaborating with the producer of the series, Big Media, often shedding new light on Cold War-era and more recent operations that involve Argo<\/em>-like risks and secrecy, while certain details still remain classified. <\/p>\n Other episodes delve into the intrigue surrounding the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981, and another in 2001 to sneak a CIA team into Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9\/11. <\/p>\n Following other shows like Spycraft <\/em>and Terrorism Close Calls<\/em>, which also have streamed on Netflix and other outlets, Big Media’s Spy Ops<\/em>, debuting on Friday, comes at a time with growing distrust of the government overall.<\/p>\n Jon Loew, Big Media’s co-founder and chairman, who serves as executive producer of Spy Ops, said, “We are living in a time when it’s difficult to discern fact from fiction, and people are given lots of stories, lots of things to think about our spy agencies, about our government, about our world today,. And I think it is really important to highlight the successful missions of the CIA and other organizations who are working to protect us, and do it in an objective documentary format like ours.” <\/p>\n The Project Azorian episode looks at a mission that left people “in shock and disbelief that something this audacious and advanced could be done all while working below the radar and undercover and having it not be exposed until after the initial mission.”<\/p>\n After the Soviet sub disappeared, the U.S. found the submarine three miles below the ocean surface about 1,800 miles northwest of Hawaii, although the exact details of how it was discovered remain classified. <\/p>\n The basic idea of the operation was to use a large mechanical claw to grab the hull of the sub and lift it via a hydraulic system. It entailed building a ship for the mission, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, with the cover that it was part of the billionaire’s deep sea mining research for manganese nodules.<\/p>\n The CIA describes the project to retrieve the submarine this way: “Imagine standing atop the Empire State Building with an 8-foot-wide grappling hook on a 1-inch-diameter steel rope. Your task is to lower the hook to the street below, snag a compact car full of gold, and lift the car back to the top of the building. On top of that, the job has to be done without anyone noticing.”<\/p>\n The Soviets did not know the location of the sub and, as is shown in the episode, their government officials actually disbelieved the idea that the U.S. would undertake such an expensive and uncertain effort to retrieve it. <\/p>\n Robert Wallace, who served 33 years as an operations officer and senior executive at the CIA, said, “Every intelligence service in the world has as one of its standing requirements to understand as deeply as possible the military capabilities of other countries. The existence of submarines, and particularly nuclear submarines, on both sides and for all parties becomes really a priority requirement.” <\/p>\n Wallace, who appears in the series, said that the nuclear capability of the missiles, and the technical details related to their maintenance and operation, “would have been just golden for their American government to have its hands on.” <\/p>\n Spy Ops<\/em> relied on archival footage, including some of the explorer at sea, as well as recreations and special effects, to depict the operation. <\/p>\n Loew said it was a process of “telling a story where there are elements that are intentionally missing because they’re still classified. So you are taking this fragmented story with bits and pieces of footage, getting most of the story or some of the story by the people [involved], and then having to fill in the blanks and string it along and make it seem like you haven’t missed any of it.”<\/p>\n Among those who were assigned to Project Azorian was Sherman Wetmore, who worked for the offshore drilling company Global Marine, tasked with designing, building and operating the explorer. He was put in charge of a group of engineers responsible for the operations of the heavy lift system, the docking system and the well system. <\/p>\n The capture vehicle was lowered from the explorer by adding, one at a time, 60-foot sections of steel pipe, until it reached the wreckage. Then the jaws of the capture vehicle would essentially grab the wreckage of the submarine and painstakingly lift it back into the hull of the Glomar.<\/p>\n “It was such a complex system,” Wetmore said. “Obviously, a single thread in the whole system was the pipe. If the pipe breaks, it’s game over. And there was no back up and no way to retrieve and finish the problem.”<\/p>\n He added, “From the very start, we were worried from a design standpoint about the weather, and the soil became unknowns. We didn’t know how much steel was buried underneath the submarine. Therefore, how do we grab a broken piece of iron, that is broken in several different places? That was a guess.” <\/p>\n Thousands were involved in the program, but great steps were taken to maintain sercrecy. John Cardwell, who joined the CIA in 1966, became an expert in digital image enhancement, and was critical to providing guidance on what would be optimal conditions for images capturing the submarine. He was assigned to a unit in the Pentagon, where he worked on Azorian and a number of underwater reconnaissance programs. <\/p>\n Cardwell noted that there was so much concern of the project being exposed that John Parangosky, leader on the Glomar program for the CIA, never even visited the ship, “just to ensure that no one of note tainted the mission or the security.” <\/p>\n “It was that kind of intensity of maintaining the cover and maintaining a sense of anonymity as to what you are doing and where you are going,” Cardwell said. <\/p>\n After years of development and construction, the recovery operation took place in 1974. The capture vehicle retrieved the submarine section, but as it was lifted and about halfway up to the ship, about 2\/3 broke apart, and sank back to the floor. The Glomar team did retrieve what remained of the vessel. Much of what was recovered remains classified, with lots of reports through the years on what was retrieved, including a book and NPR report that two nuclear-tipped torpedoes were found.<\/p>\n A suspected cause of the break has been that a few of the claw’s “grabber” arms broke. In the immediate aftermath, Wetmore said, “of course the first thing is, ‘why did that happen?’ and [people] start pointing fingers and that wasn’t productive. We made sure that at least if we had something, we would get it all the way up to prove the engineering worked.” <\/p>\n The bodies of six members of the crew were recovered, and they were given a formal military burial at sea. That ceremony was filmed, and the footage was eventually presented to Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1992.<\/p>\n Plans were afoot for another recovery effort, but the project was in early 1975 exposed when the Los Angeles Times published a report on it. In a strange twist to the story, the previous year there had been a break in at Hughes offices in Los Angeles, with burglars stealing secret documents that tied the billionaire and his company to the operation. Reporters began to pick up on the investigation of the break in and other rumors, but then-CIA director William Colby had for a time gotten some outlets to withhold the story from publication. <\/p>\n Cardwell said, “When the first report came out in the L.A. Times, there were a lot of errors in it, and at the time we thought we might be able to ride the storm because we were well underway to rebuilding a rebuilt capture vehicle under the Matador program to go back and pick up the piece that was dropped. We were like 95% confident that that operation would have been completely successful. …We knew exactly what we were going after and how much it weighed.” He said when legendary D.C. journalist Jack Anderson weighed in with a more accurate story and the Soviets then put a ship on the site, “that was pretty much the death knell of the whole thing as far as I was concerned.” <\/p>\n Wetmore said, “Even if we had tried [again], I think the Russians would have been out there somewhere. They were there watching everything we were doing, the whole time we were doing it. I think that was a testament to, one the cover story and two, the audacity.” <\/p>\n The total mission cost $300 million to $400 million, or about $2 billion today. That’s a hefty price tag, but those involved still believe it was worth it. The CIA Museum in Langley, VA features a section on Project Azorian, including a recently declassified model of the Soviet sub wreckage that was used in the operation’s planning, as well as manganese remnants and a poster-sized copy of the Los Angeles Times story. Cardwell and Wetmore, who also appear in the episode, joined Wallace on a tour this week.<\/p>\n The exhibit emphasizes how the agency was worked with private industry to carry out missions.<\/p>\n Wetmore noted that the American Society of Mechanical Engineers recognized the mission as a “landmark mechanical engineering achievement.” “It was not a boondoggle. It was possible and it worked,” he said.<\/p>\n Wetmore said, “It was explained to me that intelligence and estimating and guessing and analyzing is really a house of cards, and every once in a while you need a ground truth. And this would be one hell of a ground truth. I think we learned stuff just from the metallurgy in the hull.”<\/p>\n Cardwell said, “A lot of people now will say that almost any money spent on something that is risky is a waste of money. I disagree with that. We need organizations such as the CIA and the NSA and the DIA and so forth, to really reach out and go beyond what is conventional wisdom and try to solve important intelligence problems.”<\/p>\n As the CIA Museum notes, the project did lead to what has become an agency standard response. After the project was exposed, Rolling Stone filed a Freedom of Information Act request for details. The agency then came up with the phrase, “we can neither confirm nor deny,” known as the Glomar response.<\/p>\n “Secrets in an open society are really tricky,” Wallace said. “I like to think of them as radioactive, and I think of them as radioactive in the sense that there are some radioactive elements that decay in a few seconds, and there are some radioactive elements that don’t decay for decades. And I think intelligence secrets are a bit analogous to that. Some of our secrets we want to maintain forever. Many of our secrets they decay fairly quickly. And I think this story, Azorian, is one that merits being told.”<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/deadline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/warren-beatty1.jpg\")
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