A crane with Cold War CIA origins will help the Baltimore bridge cleanup
The Chesapeake 1000, which can lift 1,000 tons, arrived in Baltimore on Friday. Decades ago, it helped build a ship for a CIA mission to recover Soviet secrets. A crane from the Cold War era that helped lift a Soviet sub from 16,500 feet below the surface is being used to clean up a Baltimore bridge. The CIA developed Project Azorian, code-named Operation Azorian. The Sun 800, now known as the Chesapeake 1000, was conceived to build the ship used to lift the sunken submarine, the Hughes Glomar Explorer. The ship's primary purpose was to salvage Soviet secrets on the sunkened submarine. However, its offices in Los Angeles were robbed before it set sail for its first mission, leading to the theft of documents tying Hughes to the CIA and the Glomer Explorer. Despite this, the operation failed to recover meaningful intelligence. The Glomor Explorer has since been renamed and used for deep-sea oil drilling and exploration.
Published : a month ago by Praveena Somasundaram, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff in Science
In 1968, a Soviet sub carrying nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and at least six crew members went off the grid near Hawaii, according to the CIA. The United States found it 1,800 miles northwest of the state, and officials thought it might carry valuable intelligence. But how does one lift a 1,750-ton submarine from 16,500 feet below the surface?
The CIA took the lead and developed an operation that was code-named Project Azorian, ordering the construction of a huge mechanical claw to latch on to the sub and a ship-mounted hydraulic system to lift it.
That’s when the Sun 800, now known as the Chesapeake 1000, was conceived, “to build the ship at the heart of the CIA’s operation,” said Gene Schorsch, who ran the shipyard in the 1970s.
Schorsch, now 95, was the chief of hull design when the crane was built. Despite being involved in its construction and use, he remained in the dark about the CIA’s operation for years, as did the American public.
Publicly, Hughes would appear to be the funder of a multimillion-dollar vessel for deep-sea mining: the Hughes Glomar Explorer. But its primary function would be to salvage Soviet secrets on the sunken submarine in what then-CIA Director William Colby said would have been the biggest intelligence coup in history, according to the New York Times.
In Schorsch’s telling, the Sun 800, capable of lifting 800 tons at a time, was a key component in building the Glomar Explorer. The pieces for the heavy-duty crane were sent to Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co. in Chester, Pa., from Minnesota and Texas.
In July 1974, after four years of construction, the Glomar Explorer sailed from Long Beach, Calif., to the recovery site near Hawaii. For two months, it attempted to haul up pieces of the wreckage in secrecy. It wasn’t easy.
The submarine broke apart when the Glomar Explorer crew tried to lift it. One-third was salvaged, along with the remains of six Soviet submariners, according to the CIA and New York Times.
The ship returned to shore, and planning soon began for a second recovery effort. But the CIA learned that Hughes’s offices in Los Angeles had been robbed just before the Glomar set sail for its first mission. Documents tying Hughes to the CIA and the Glomar Explorer were among those taken.
The CIA enlisted the FBI and the L.A. Police Department to track down the thieves. By the fall of 1974, news outlets started hearing rumors of the Glomar Explorer’s true purpose, and in February 1975 the L.A. Times published an article connecting Hughes and the FBI. (A former auto salesman was convicted in 1977 of possessing the stolen property and was acquitted of an extortion charge, the New York Times reported.)
The Soviets began monitoring the recovery site in the Pacific a few months after the theft, leading the White House to end additional recovery efforts. Project Azorian failed to recover meaningful intelligence, news outlets reported at the time, though the CIA still hails it as a success. The Glomar Explorer has since been renamed and used for deep-sea oil drilling and exploration, according to the intelligence agency.
Years after Project Azorian, Donjon Marine bought it and renamed it the Chesapeake 1000 because after renovations it could lift 1,000 tons. The Chesapeake 1000 hoisted a 1,000-ton bridge span in 2008, removed a 700-ton ship as part of recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and helped lift an 800,000-pound structure as part of a campus expansion at Rockefeller University in Manhattan in 2016.