Project Azorian, 1970s (C011/8409) Hoodie

Project Azorian. Artwork showing the secret US operation carried out by the CIA to recover a sunken Soviet submarine in the 1970s. The Soviets had failed to find the submarine, which had sunk in 1968. The US then located it at a depth of nearly 5 kilometres in the north-western Pacific Ocean. The surface ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer (HGE), is using a metal claw (called Clementine, yellow) to attempt to raise the Soviet submarine K-129 from the seabed into the berth underneath the ship. This was attempted in the period 1972 to 1975, but the claw failed and only the forward part of the submarine was recovered.