In a country blighted by poverty, he grew up in relative comfort because his father, and the rest of the men in his family, made careers in the mining industry. “It’s really difficult but we showed it could be done,” says Sharp.Ī burly figure with a kindly face, Kewa is from a village in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea. But in fact it proved that with clever engineering and a lavish budget it was possible – just - to operate in the otherworldly depths. This might have derailed the very notion of deep sea mining for good. Share prices tumbled amid a wave of recriminations. A year later, the sensational details became public and plans to recover the remaining section were abandoned.Īs Sharp puts it, the revelation that the deep sea mining project was fake was “a sudden shock” to other mining companies and also to diplomats at the UN who were right in the middle of negotiating future rights to ocean minerals. The CIA official history asserts that the operation was one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War, but it had cost vast sums and questions immediately arose about its value. But the missiles and code books were never found. The bodies of six Soviet submariners were recovered and were later given a formal burial at sea. At some point on the way up, the immense strain became too much, part of a claw snapped off and most of the sub slipped back to the seabed. The reclusive billionaire inventor Howard Hughes was perfect for the role.Īmazingly, the giant steel claws successfully seized the sub. There had to be a frontman - someone rich and eccentric enough to be plausible. These potato-sized rocks lie scattered in the abyss, the great plains of the deep ocean. The spies needed to create a smokescreen so they pretended to be exploring the possibility of deep sea mining.Ī PR campaign conveyed a determined effort to find manganese nodules. But there was another challenge as well - it had to be done without the Russians knowing. So the CIA hatched an audacious plan, Project Azorian, to retrieve the submarine. The weapons and top-secret code books were surely beyond reach.īut in the struggle for military advantage, the sub represented the crown jewels – a chance to explore Moscow’s nuclear missiles and to break into its naval communications. It was lying three miles down, deeper than any previous salvage operation. The Russians failed to find their sub despite a massive search, but an American network of underwater listening posts had detected the noise of an explosion that eventually led US teams to the wreck. Six years earlier, the K-129 had sunk 1,500 miles north-west of Hawaii while carrying ballistic nuclear missiles. The real target of the crew on board this giant ship was a lost Soviet submarine.
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