It’s a plot straight from a Tom Clancy novel — except it’s real.
In 1974, the CIA embarked on an outlandish, secret $350 million project to salvage a sunken Soviet ballistic missile submarine from three miles below the North Pacific. Under the cover of an undersea mining operation sponsored by the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, some of the country’s best and brightest were given the task of figuring out how to raise millions of pounds of steel from a nearly unreachable depth.
The result was one of the greatest feats of American engineering since the 1969 moon landing.
Tonight from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. at Arlington Central Library, author and historian Norman Polmar will discuss recently-revealed details about the audacious effort, told in part through interviews with the men who made it happen.
Here’s a trailer for a documentary produced by the co-author of Polmar’s book, “Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129.”