The CIA Mission to Haul a Submarine

To retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine, the CIA secretly commissioned a massive ship disguised as a commercial mining vessel. This daring operation plucked the vessel from the ocean floor three miles deep.

During the Cold War, the U.S. spent 800 million dollars to build the Hughes Glomar Explorer for this precise mission. They claimed the ship was searching for manganese nodules on the seafloor to cover their true intent. While they successfully recovered a portion of the submarine, the project remains one of the most ambitious engineering feats in history. It proves that sometimes the most effective way to spy is to build a fake industrial empire.