Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny

Throughout time, governments and the people who work

for them have done strange and even terrible things

in the name of national interest,

including launching missions so extreme,

they seem to defy belief

like trying to extract a 1,750-ton Soviet submarine

from the ocean floor using a giant claw, in secret.

No one has ever attempted such an audacious

salvage operation like this before.

Or sending paratroopers on a secret mission

strapped to a nuclear bomb.

Set off a nuclear bomb and run.

That sounds insane.

And even stealing Soviet secrets

400 feet below the waves.

If the men are caught, they are under orders

to blow up everyone on board.

They cannot be taken alive.

Now it's time to bring these extreme secret missions

to light.

It's the late 1960s, and the cold war is raging.

A Soviet nuclear sub has sunk 1,500 miles from Hawaii,

and a race is on to find it.

Can the us locate the sub and recover its secrets

before the enemy does?

That's the impossible mission assigned to one American team.

On march 1, 1968, Soviet sub k-129

disappears from Soviet radar deep in the pacific,

with 98 men aboard,

a prize hidden at the bottom of the ocean.

The Russians are frantically searching for it.

So is the us.

K-129 could be the holy grail of intelligence.

Think about what we would have access to

their code books, their code-breaking machines,

guidance systems.

We would even get our eyes on their nuclear missiles.

This is completely worth the effort and the cost.

To locate it, the Navy checks their acoustic data

for any sign of the sub.

If a submarine sinks, it'll make a distinctive noise.

So when k-129 sunk,

they were able to locate where the sub might have gone down.

So the us Navy sends out their best reconnaissance sub,

the USS Halibut.

After more than 11 weeks of painstakingly searching,

Halibut's camera finally captures the submarine.

It's 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii

and 16,500 feet deep.

But retrieving the sub seems like an impossible task.

The vessel lies three miles deep underwater

in a totally black environment.

To figure out if they could pull off the impossible,

the CIA put their head of science and technology,

John parangosky, in charge.

He comes up with the suggestion

to raise k-129 to the surface using a giant metal claw,

like the one you'd find in an arcade game,

but attached to a ship.

No one has ever attempted such an audacious

salvage operation like this before.

And what makes this even more challenging?

It all needs to happen without the Soviets knowing.

Despite the odds, the CIA and the Navy

decide to go for it.

On July 1, 1969, the covert mission is launched.

It's codenamed project azorian,

and the first step is designing the claw.

The claw design needs to be 179 feet by 31 feet.

No one has ever built one big enough

to lift a 1,750-ton submarine from the ocean floor.

Creating the claw is the easy part.

To use it, the us needs to anchor a huge ship

for a month-long salvage operation

that's sure to gain Soviet attention.

So the CIA needs a cover story.

They come up with an interesting idea.

If the mission is masked as a privately-owned

business venture,

no one should suspect that the government is involved.

So they enlist the help of the celebrity industrialist

of his day, Howard Hughes.

It made such a good cover story because everybody knew

that Howard Hughes was kind of half nuts.

And he agrees to build this ship.

They set up this fake press release.

They announce that they were going to mine magnesium nodules

from the bottom of the ocean floor

from a ship called the glomar explorer.

Six years after the us found k-129,

it's finally go time.

The glomar arrives at the mission site.

They're ready to go. They're gung-ho.

But just as they're about to deploy,

here comes a Soviet ship.

Once the Soviet ship arrives,

the glomar crew is very concerned

that this operation is about to go up in smoke.

A helicopter takes off from the Russian ship

and starts circling around.

And the glomar's crew are on tenterhooks.

The CIA has invested hundreds of millions of dollars here,

more than a billion in today's money.

Is this the end of the mission?

The captain of the glomar explorer

radios the captain of the Russian ship.

He explains to him, we are a mining operation.

We're Howard Hughes's corporation.

Well, fortunately, a few hours go by, the Soviet ship leaves.

Once the Soviet ship leaves the area,

they lower the claw into the water,

unwind three miles of cable.

It descends to the bottom,

connects to the Soviet vessel,

and then they begin to lift it up

from the bottom of the ocean.

You don't want to pull it up too fast,

because if you try to raise it up too quickly,

it might break apart.

It's already a damaged vehicle,

and it might fall back to the ocean floor,

and then you're left with nothing.

It was very nerve-wracking

as they tried to pull this thing up.

They were about 2/3 of the way up,

and then the k-129 fell apart.

About 2/3 of it broke off and fell back to the ocean floor.

It takes eight days to haul the remaining section

of the k-129 back to the ship's hull.

But before they even have a chance

to analyze the wreckage, the secret spills out.

Both the "la times" and "New York times"

break the story of this top secret mission.

The papers' front pages are covered with pictures

of Hughes's glomar explorer, detailing rumors

of a Soviet sub recovery

and the Howard Hughes-CIA connection.

So it turns out that Howard Hughes's office

was burglarized.

The burglars find this memo about the glomar explorer.

They sell it to the "la times" that publishes it.

This is the CIA's worst nightmare.

Neither the us government nor the CIA

comment on the matter until 1992.

Only then is the mission publicly acknowledged

for the first time, when the CIA

hand delivers a video to the Russian president,

Boris yeltsin.

After the collapse of the Soviet union,

as a show of goodwill,

the American government presents a video

to yeltsin of the burial at sea

of the Soviet sailors whose remains were found.

It made international news around the world.

Whatever secrets project azorian unearthed

remain a mystery to this day.

That mission was obviously daring.

But consider something even more extreme

elite us paratroopers assigned to jump into darkness

carrying small nuclear bombs.

In 1970, a top secret us army mission is underway.

Two members of an elite special ops unit

leap out of the cargo bay of a us army transport aircraft

into the black of night.

The team parachutes down to their drop zone.

And they are about to deploy one of america's

most dangerous weapons in an operational environment

for the first time in history.

They always went in two-man teams.

So if you can imagine jumping out of an airplane,

hurtling towards earth with a bomb strapped to your back.

It was a huge challenge.

But this is no ordinary bomb.

It's an entirely new portable nuclear weapon.

And it can only be detonated by hand.

Once on the ground, the men have to carry the nuke

on their back for two days,

constantly dodging enemy patrols

and navigating rugged terrain.

The drawback of this operational setup

is that the detonation code is split between two people.

And so the bomb must be jointly armed to prevent it

being detonated, maliciously or accidentally.

The problem is, if either of these soldiers don't make it,

it's mission failure.

Seems entirely insane, right?

Set off a nuclear bomb and run.

Why would anyone do that?

Because, thankfully, the bomb doesn't explode.

And this daring mission

wasn't carried out in enemy territory.

It was actually a training run

taking place in the mountains of New Hampshire,

part of an audition

to join one of the most classified army units

to ever exist... the green light team.

The idea of the green light team

comes about because it's thought

that the Soviets possess more tactical nuclear weapons

than we do.