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The Taking of K-129 is a narrative history of Project Azorian, the CIA's six-year effort to raise a sunken Soviet ballistic-missile submarine from 16,800 feet of Pacific seafloor. Josh Dean builds it from declassified documents and interviews with engineers and crew, covering the cover story built around Howard Hughes, the purpose-built ship Glomar Explorer, and the Soviet watch that nearly exposed it. It suits readers of Cold War espionage and engineering history; against submarine-hunt books like Blind Man's Bluff it goes deeper on the salvage hardware and the bureaucratic infighting than on combat.
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Readers and reviewers treat it as a well-researched, briskly told account of a genuinely strange operation, praised for making the engineering and the cover story readable. Some find the middle sections heavy with names and technical detail.
This is a nonfiction account of Project Azorian, the CIA's covert effort to recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129. It is a Cold War story of espionage and engineering, and it has been compared to The Hunt for Red October and Argo.
K-129 left its base in Siberia on February 25, 1968, armed with three nuclear ballistic missiles, and then vanished. A small, highly classified American operation found the wreck on the Pacific sea floor at a depth of 16,800 feet, beyond the reach of any existing salvage. The nuclear warheads, battle orders and cryptological machines on board made recovery worth extreme effort.
After the U.S. Navy declared retrieving the sub impossible, the mission went to the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, the division behind the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes. The CIA worked with Global Marine Systems, a maker of deep-sea drilling vessels, and commissioned the most expensive ship ever built. It was presented to the world as belonging to Howard Hughes, for mining rare minerals from the ocean floor.
