The End of the Line for The Glomar Explorer

From Ace of Spades HQ:

The Glomar Explorer was a giant ship built by the CIA for one purpose: to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the ocean floor. It was later turned into a drillship. With falling oil prices, however, it looks like it's finally going to be scrapped. From Dri's link in the sidebar:

The ship’s origin story began in March 1968, when a Soviet Golf II class ballistic missile nuclear submarine, the K-129, sank in the Pacific Ocean. This was at the height of a high-risk cat-and-mouse game between the USA and the USSR. After the Soviet Navy failed to pinpoint the location of the wreckage, the US Navy found it. So the CIA decided to raise it off the seabed.

The cover story was at least as interesting as the the mission itself.

From about 1970-74, the CIA managed to convince the world that billionaire inventor Howard Hughes had decided to invest millions to mine “manganese nodules,” balls of heavy metals that lie on the ocean floor. Via fake press releases, events, technical specs and front companies, the CIA convinced the world that Hughes was leading a new ocean-mining rush.

This cover story was so good, in fact, there was a public outcry over deep sea mining. ............ Environmentalist progs were up in arms about how ocean life would be adversely affected.
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The fact that these environmental progs wasted so much time and effort reacting to a CIA cover story--and that Howard Hughes' very public effort to mine the ocean floor was total bullshit--makes it all satisfyingly laughable.

The point is, a CIA cover story that makes it into your Weekly Reader and your Saturday morning cartoons is one heck of a cover story. I'd love to see a movie treatment of this, the Argo version.

It was done during a time when covert agencies weren't risk adverse and run by lawyers. It was a daring venture that most retired spooks will reminisce about as the 'good old days'!