How a sunken nuclear submarine, a crazy billionaire, and a mechanical claw
gave birth to a phrase that has hounded journalists and lawyers for 40 years
and embodies the tension between the public’s desire for transparency and the
government’s need to keep secrets.
Whether it comes from government spokespeople or celebrity publicists, the
phrase “can neither confirm nor deny” is the perfect non-denial denial. It’s
such a perfect deflection that it seems like it’s been around forever, but
reporter Julia Barton takes us back to the 1970s
and the surprising origin story of what’s now known as a “Glomar Response.”
With help from David Sharp and Walt Logan, we tell the story of a clandestine
CIA operation to lift a sunken Soviet submarine from the ocean floor and the
dilemma they faced when the world found out about it.
In the 40 years since that operation, the Glomar Response has become
boilerplate language from an array of government agencies. With help from
ProPublica editor Jeff Larson and NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston, we explore the
implications of this ultimate information dodge. ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer
explains how it stymies oversight, and we learn that, even 40 years later,
governmental secrecy can be emotionally painful.
After listening to the story ...
After 40 years, many of the details of Project Azorian are only now coming to
light. The US government’s default position has been to keep as much of it
classified as possible. It took three years for retired CIA employee David
Sharp to get permission to publish his
account of Project Azorian. And
FOIA played an indirect role in that, as Cold War historians got the CIA to
release, in redacted form, an internal history of the
mission. After that and a
threat of legal action, Sharp was finally able to publish his manuscript in
2012.
We mentioned conspiracy theories that have swirled around Project Azorian
filling the void where official silence has reigned. One of them is
promulgated in the 2005 book http://www.amazon.com/Red-Star-Rogue-Submarines-
Nuclear/dp/1416527338" target="new">“Red Star Rogue” by Kenneth Sewell and Clint
Richmond. They posit that the K-129 was taken over by rogue
Stalinist KGB agents in order to start a nuclear conflict. But the conflict
was to be between the US and China, as, according to the authors, the sub had
powers to disguise its sonic signature as a Chinese Navy vessel.
This book is the basis of the 2013 drama
“Phantom,” which features Ed Harris
and David Duchovny as Soviet military officers who sip vodka in a very un-
Russian way.
Russian Naval historians, like Nikolai
Cherkashin, are not only insulted by this take on
the cause of the K-129’s demise, they say the true cause is much easier to
pinpoint: They say an American vessel, possibly the USS Swordfish, collided
with the Soviet
submarine.
Despite the fact that the US government has turned over many documents about
Project Azorian and what it found to the Russian government, many in the
Russian Navy stand by their theory that it was far too easy for the US to
locate the K-129 on the bottom of the Pacific, given the technology of the
time. According to these theories, Project Azorian was nothing more than an
elaborate cover-up disguised as... an elaborate cover-up. We can neither
confirm nor deny that we exactly understand how that would have worked in
practice or execution.
But for our money, there’s probably no stranger and more telling document from
this time than a video of the funeral at sea for Soviet
sailors ostensibly
recovered by the US during Project Azorian. Audio of the service starts at
1:25 in this post. Eulogies and rites are performed in both English and
Russian (albeit with an American accent).
It’s one of the more solemn moments of the Cold War, and one that the Glomar
Response helped keep a secret for a very long time.
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