The floating crane tasked with hauling shattered steel from last week’s fatal bridge collapse in Baltimore played a much different role in the Cold War.
The crane, The Chesapeake 1000, nicknamed Chessy, has taken many roles over the decades but it’s most notable operation until last week was a secret mission to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine.
What happened?
Documents in the CIA online library show the story began in 1968 when K-129, a Soviet Golf II-class submarine carrying three nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, was lost in the Pacific Ocean north-west of Hawaii.
The submarine left Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to take up its peacetime patrol station in the Pacific Ocean north-east of Hawaii.
After the Soviets abandoned their extensive search efforts, the US located the submarine about 2,896 kilometres north-west of Hawaii on the ocean floor 5,029 metres below.
The US recognised the immense value of the intelligence that could be gained on Soviet strategic capabilities if the vessel was retrieved.
“It’s considered one of the most expensive intelligence operations of all time,” said M. Todd Bennett, a history professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, who wrote a 2022 book on the mission.
“And not only that, it’s certainly one of the most inventive or daring intelligence operations in US history.”
It was a daunting task for the CIA, which needed to figure out how it would lift a 1,750 tonne and 40-metre-long portion of the wrecked submarine from an ocean abyss 4 kilometres below.
But the biggest challenge was that it had to be done in total secrecy.
The mission was called Project Azorian.
Project Azorian
In 1970, after careful study, a team of CIA engineers and contractors determined that the only technically feasible approach was to use a large mechanical claw to grasp the hull and a heavy-duty hydraulic system mounted on a surface ship to lift it.
The specialised ship was called the Hughes Glomar Explorer, named after the billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes.
The CIA wrote on its website that the ship “could conduct the entire recovery under water, away from the view of other ships, aircraft or spy satellites.”
To save time, a Philadelphia-area shipyard built the vessel’s heavy parts on the ground.
The floating crane, then known as The Sun 800, was needed to lift those assembled pieces into the new ship.
“The Sun 800 was built specifically to help us on the construction of the Hughes Glomar Explorer,” said Gene Schorsch, who was then chief of hull design for Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co.
Constructed during the next four years, the ship included a derrick similar to an oil-drilling rig, a pipe-transfer crane, two tall docking legs, a huge claw-like capture vehicle, a centre docking well (called the “moon pool”) large enough to contain the hoisted portion of the sub, and doors to open and close the well’s floor.
To preserve the mission’s secrecy, the capture vehicle was built under roof and loaded into the ship from a barge submerged underneath.
“While maintaining its position in the ocean currents, the ship had to lower the (claw) by adding 60-foot sections of supporting steel pipe, one at a time,” the CIA wrote.
Another piece of machinery assembled for the ship was a special platform.
It was used to keep the claw system steady — and on target — in the ocean currents.
“You want the ship to be able to roll or pitch without affecting that pipe,” Schorsch said.
In 1974, during the mission, the claw grasped the submarine section.
But about a third of the way up it broke, allowing part of the sub’s hull to fall away.
Former CIA Director William Colby later wrote that the most valuable aspects of the sub were lost.
The salvage, however, included the bodies of six Soviet sailors, who were given a formal military burial at sea.
A second mission was planned.
A billionaire cover story
To keep the true purpose of the vessel secret, the CIA hatched a cover story for the ship: a commercial deep-sea mining vessel owned by Hughes.
But journalists broke the story in 1975, led by Seymour Hersh, then writing for The New York Times, and columnist Jack Anderson.
News reports indicated that some manuals may have been recovered, while some of the hull pieces helped the US to refine its estimates of Soviet naval capabilities, Bennett said.
Anderson’s sources told him Project Azorian was too expensive and sapped resources from other intelligence programs, Bennett said.
The submarine also was diesel-powered and generations behind the Soviet’s nuclear-powered subs.
“Anderson’s sources — and Anderson — argued that it was really a museum piece, a relic,” Bennett said.
American media outlets were heavily criticised for reporting on the project, which had a “chilling effect” as news outlets became less willing to disclose intelligence secrets, Bennett said.
A partial success
Although the second mission never happened, Professor Bennett said the mission itself was a partial success.
“Sadly the ship itself no longer exists — it was scrapped years ago,” Bennett said.
“But it was a significant piece of hardware. And this was a really important mission in US intelligence history, in part because it was one of the first major underwater operations that we were aware of.”
Meanwhile, the crane that helped build the Hughes Glomar Explorer is now often touted as one of the largest of its kind on the US east coast.
Engineering News-Record, a magazine that covers the construction industry, wrote in 2017 that Donjon Marine Co. Incorporated, bought the Sun 800 in 1993.
The salvage company increased the capacity to 1,000 tons and renamed it the Chesapeake 1000 to reflect what it can haul.
Since then, it’s helped to construct bridges and buildings. But few projects have been as urgent as the one in Baltimore.
Officials are scrambling to clear shipping channels for one of the east coast’s busiest ports and to erect a new Francis Scott Key Bridge.
“To go out there and see it up close, you realise just how daunting a task this is,” Maryland Governor Wes Moore said on Friday after the Chesapeake 1000 arrived at the collapsed span.
“You realise how difficult the work is ahead of us.”
It is unclear how long it will take to recover bodies and pieces of the bridge due to the nature of debris in the water.
This week, Governor Wes Moore said he couldn’t give a clear timeline for when the remaining four bodies of construction workers who fell with the collapse of the bridge would be recovered from the water.
The cargo ship that collapsed the bridge is still in the Petapsco river with crews on board.