Azorian: The Raising of the K-129, currently streaming on Amazon Prime, is a rare story about an engineering challenge (grabbing a sunken Soviet submarine off the seafloor) and I recommend it. The movie is also interesting due to the huge number of Americans who were able to keep a big secret (compare to today when people aren’t even able to have sex without leaving a large, um, footprint on social media and/or in the New York Times!).
4 thoughts on “Azorian on Amazon Prime”
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If you like this then you should read Red Star Rogue by Kenneth Sewell. It is an investigative account of why K-129 sank and how it was recovered. The story is that Yuri Andropov and some Kremlin hardliners secretly placed a KGB team on the sub. These agents worked/forced the crew to travel to a location and launch a nuclear missile towards Pearl Harbor. The intention was to implicate China in an attack against the United States. The mission failed when the missile’s internal safeguards were not properly disengaged and the missile blew up inside the launch tube sinking K-129.
The book then goes into the details of the attempt to find and raise the sub. Unlike every other book I’ve read on the subject this book claims that they successfully raised the entire sub and returned it to the US to study.
The book seems fairly credible and is a good read.
Most of our generation saw similar documentaries 20 years ago, for a lot less money, on basic cable. Today, the story would have involved Elon Musk & the Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle. The XLUUV could have a giant payload bay, submerged near LA, & scooped up a submarine half a world away, undetected.
Recently finished Josh Dean’s book on the same topic “The Taking of the K-129”. An easy quick read – my takeaway is a lot of the CIA operations in the 50s and 60s involved administrative and engineering work in a much larger proportion than a naive interpretation of the term “intelligence” would lead one to believe.
My sense after reading the book lines up with commenter LF’s statement that the whole sub may have actually been recovered.
Talk about men with the right stuff — doing your duty, getting the job done and then in the evening surf and turf — rib eye or T-bone and lobster or shrimp i think the guy said. These men both chronologically and in terms of world view were a lot closer to the WW 2 generation than they are to today’s man. Wonder if in the US there are men like this still around, besides the military?