Because the Americans believe K-129 contains a treasure trove
of Soviet weaponry and intelligence,
as well as evidence suggesting it was firing its missiles when it sank...
..President Nixon orders the sub to be raised.
But the obstacles to doing it are enormous,
and so are the consequences if they get caught.
It's illegal to salvage somebody else's military war material.
You're talking about a situation that could very likely start a nuclear war,
so even if you can figure out how to do it, you have to do it in secret.
And raising a 7-million-pound submarine
from three miles down on the ocean floor, in secret, sounds crazy.
We've never salvaged any submarine below a few hundred feet.
Could we get it?
Most people's reaction would be, like, "No way."
But, because that submarine has nuclear missiles on it,
and we knew from the photographs at least one of those missiles is intact,
plus everything else that you might want on a submarine,
like, "Where are the weak spots? "What kind of steel are they using?
"What's the radio gear like?
"What's their crypto gear like?"
All of these things are valuable.
Because the project requires speed and absolute secrecy,
the President takes it away from the Navy
and hands it to the CIA.
The CIA has the ability to do a lot of things that the military can't.
They can do it more efficiently and do it more quickly.
They have less regulations to go through.
JOSH DEAN: So then they form a hand-picked group of people
taken from the CIA, within its own Special Projects Group,
which is the most secret of the secrets,
and they start spit-balling ideas like, "How do we do it?
"How do we pick up a submarine, in secret?"
The CIA Special Projects Group decides on an audacious strategy.
The CIA launches a dual-layered program.
The engineering piece, which is go and build the ship
and the systems that are going to pick up the submarine,
and then the second company
is going to go out and convince the world that it's a mining ship.
They name the covert operation Project Azorian
and give it a cover story so outlandish no-one doubts it.
It hires Howard Hughes to front the construction of Glomar Explorer,
a mining ship secretly capable of raising K-129.
Part of selling this story was Howard Hughes.
I mean, Howard Hughes was a larger-than-life character.
JOSH DEAN: He's that crazy, eccentric guy.
You know, he built the giant wooden airplane.
He's a patriot. He loves America. He hates the media.
Of course he would build a ship,
take it out into the middle of the ocean, and start mining.
KENNETH SEWELL: Getting him involved brought a lot of credibility.
If anybody could pull this off, it was Hughes.
Basically the CIA is going to send black money to Hughes.
Hughes will then, in the open, hire Global Marine
to build the Glomar Explorer.
In the four years between 1969 and 1973,
Hughes constructs what is hailed as
the most advanced mining vessel in the world.
But the CIA must also come up with a credible cover story for it.
So, they start spit-balling ideas again.
Well, what would explain a ship that's parked out there?
And someone suggests that within the mining industry
people were starting to talk about
these things called manganese nodules,
which were conglomerations of rare Earth minerals
that are in high concentrations on the bottom of the ocean.
And it's the perfect cover story.
Literally, there was a division
which had geologists and oceanographers and PR guys,
and it would go to conferences and give talks
about Howard Hughes and his mining ship.
The lengths the CIA goes to are astounding,
including hiring a Hollywood star, Richard Anderson,
from the Six Million Dollar Man TV series,
to make an industrial video to sell the mining community
on the Glomar's commercial possibilities.
I'm now aboard what is probably
the most technologically advanced seagoing vessel in the world today.
Global Marine has invited you aboard the Glomar Explorer
to show you how this ship can work in a hostile ocean environment
in waters as deep as 18,000 feet.
JOSH DEAN: Well, as far as we know,
this is the biggest CIA covert operation that they've ever run.
I mean, the scale of it is just audacious and epic.
A lot of engineers will tell you
that this ranks alongside, if not surpassing, the moon landing,
in terms of difficulty.
After sailing from Long Beach, California,
the Glomar Explorer arrives over the site of K-129.
On July 11, 1974, it begins work.
The inside of the vessel holds a secret
which has nothing to do with mining -
the moon pool,
a cavernous space with doors opening in its bottom
through which K-129 will be secretly raised into the ship.
300 lengths of steel pipe,
each piece as long as a Greyhound bus,
are adjoined to form the umbilical cord
between the ship and the multi-clawed vehicle nicknamed Clementine.
It will take Clementine two days to reach K-129,
17,000 feet below,
the equivalent of over 14 Empire State Buildings deep.
The water pressure on the ocean floor
is comparable to having 50 Boeing 747s stacked on top of you.
Twice, while the Glomar Explorer is on station,
Soviet ships come right up to it.
Twice. They flew a helicopter over the top. They took pictures.
If the Russians discover the Glomar's real purpose,
they will consider it an act of war.
And if they do, there are no nearby American forces to protect it.
And then they went away, because they were like,
"Hey, that's just Howard Hughes's mining ship."
Then, on August 9, 1974,
the same day Richard Nixon resigns the presidency
because of the Watergate scandal,
they begin raising K-129.
It's like the arcade game
where you drop the thing down and grab the teddy bear,
but this teddy bear's, like, a huge submarine.
The claw goes down, they grab the submarine...
..they begin the lift.
Everyone's like, "Oh, my God.
"I can't believe it. After all this time, it really did work."
And then suddenly, disaster.
About a third of the way up,
one of the fingers on the claw snaps.
Over half the submarine falls down to the ocean floor,
one mile below.
So what you ended up with was the smaller portion
which was not nearly as valuable.
I mean, they really want the missile.
Secondarily, they really want the crypto.
However, what they do find
is a grim reminder of the disaster's human cost.
The retrieved section contains human remains,
including the bodies of numerous Soviet crewmen.
All are highly radioactive.
Then in March 1975,
the CIA's top-secret, billion-dollar, covert operation
becomes anything but secret.
Good evening.
All across the country today Americans were debating
the value of the Glomar Explorer,
the ship Howard Hughes built for the CIA,
a $250 million intelligence-gathering project
to raise from the ocean floor a Russian submarine.
JOSH DEAN: When the program is leaked,
the Soviets are furious, for good reason.
They felt the Americans had no legal right
to raise a foreign submarine in neutral waters.
Especially since it was already clear
that this was a Russian submarine.
Can you imagine just what the reaction would be
if we lost one of our Polaris or Poseidon submarines
and we did not know where and how we had lost it?
JOSH DEAN: They're also embarrassed.
They don't want their people to know that, "We've lost a submarine
"with, like, 100 of your guys on it and we didn't tell you about it."
So, that's the first thing that happened.
And then, "The Americans built a ship,
"went out into the middle of the Pacific,
"and stole it right out from under our noses,
"and we were right there."
Can you imagine the blowback on that?
(SHOUTS IN RUSSIAN)
The Soviets are not going to take this very well.
It's certainly an act of war.
The Hunt for Red October film, based on Tom Clancy's book,
exposes the top-secret world of submarine warfare.
But even Clancy couldn't have imagined the astonishing lengths
some now claim the CIA goes to
in its efforts to deceive the Russians
about what intelligence it retrieves
from their sunken submarine, K-129.
As the Soviets struggle to respond
to having their submarine stolen from under them,
at home, the CIA operation
quickly becomes a lightning rod for criticism
of its extraordinary expense, and seeming failure,
to retrieve the most valuable intelligence from K-129.
A third of the submarine was recovered
that contained the bodies of 70 drowned Russians.
The other two-thirds containing nuclear missiles and code machinery
broke off and fell back into the bottom of the sea.
But did the CIA really fail in its mission?
Shocking new revelations suggest otherwise.
According to Kenneth Sewell and John Craven,
the CIA employs an ingenious ruse to recover the entire submarine,
and to fool the Russians into thinking they haven't.
The Glomar the Soviets had been monitoring
was actually a near-identical decoy-ship
sent by the CIA to the area
where the Soviets believed their sub had sunk.
All along, they'd been watching the wrong ship.
KENNETH SEWELL: They watched it like a hawk.
But it wasn't actually recovering anything.
Sewell believes that, unbeknownst to the Russians,
the real Glomar Explorer had been parked over the wreck of the K-129
discovered by the Halibut crew 400 miles south,
where it recovered the entire sub,
including all its intelligence material.
It fooled everybody, and it also reinforced the con
that we only recovered part of it,
when we actually recovered everything.
If this is the case,
the Americans not only recover the sub and all its intelligence,
they trick the Russians into believing
that they dropped it all back onto the ocean floor.
I mean, the best intelligence you can get
is intelligence that the enemy doesn't know you have.
It was a perfect operation.
For the CIA, the sub is a treasure trove.
Not only do they find the crypto gear and logbooks,
they also find further evidence of what led to the boat sinking.
Captain Kobzar and his first officer's anxiety
about the sinister passengers may not have been misplaced.
Ken Sewell, author and US Navy Nuclear Submariner
makes a bold claim.
The KGB was behind the attack by the K-129.
They knew that money from their economy went to the military
and not to the people.
They knew the Soviet Union was going to collapse.
And they knew the United States was approaching a point
where they would have had first-strike capability.
The ability to take out all the nuclear weapons
of the Soviet Union in a single strike, including the submarines.
Sewell believes a small group atop the KGB,
fearing for the Soviet Union's survival,
had conceived an ingenious but apocalyptic plan
to save their failing state.
They intend to dupe their two biggest enemies,
the Americans and Chinese,
into fighting a catastrophic nuclear war against each other.
The first stage of the plan was to commandeer a Golf II submarine
that was identical to the two submarines
that Russia had sold to the Chinese.
Next, the KGB turns to their secret elite commando force,
called the OSNAZ,
and puts it aboard this submarine, K-129.
The OSNAZ commandos assigned to the K-129
worked for the KGB and the KGB only.
These were highly trained individuals.
They were intelligent, they were ruthless.
They were the ultimate killers.
They are also the mysterious passengers
who had joined K-129's mission at the last minute.
Then, from a specific location on the surface,
they would fire the missile,
destroying the base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu.
This was the exact type of missile that they had sold the Chinese.
Everything would have pointed back to China
as being the perpetrator of this attack,
which would've triggered a massive retaliation by the United States.
MAN: Go, go, go!
Fire!
In the end, Russia takes out both enemies without having to fight.
It was a perfect opportunity to save their Soviet Union.
When you start to look at it in that light,
then this isn't as outrageous as it seems.
But the attack didn't happen.
There was no missile launch.
So what did happen aboard K-129?
The action that takes place on the Red October submarine
had audiences on the edge of their seats.
But over 50 years later,
what can be said for certain
about the action onboard the doomed K-129?
No-one will ever know for sure what happened precisely on the K-129.
There were no survivors.
However, Ken Sewell's version of events
is supported by considerable circumstantial evidence.
It is not, however,
supported by either the Russian or US authorities,
at least not publicly.
We do know that the submarine sailed to its normal patrol box.
And, at the point, the likely scenario is
the KGB officers presented the captain with new orders.
According to Sewell, Captain Kobzar is instructed
to sail through K-129's officially assigned patrol area,
and head 400 miles south towards Hawaii.
I feel there was initially very little resistance to the new orders
from the OSNAZ commandos.
Most people at that time in the Soviet Union
were pretty much wary of the KGB and did what they were told.
Two days later, as the submarine nears its launch point,
the OSNAZ commandos make their move.
They demand its missiles be readied for launching.
There would have been a point, I think, when the OSNAZ commandos
would have had to use force
to make the crew bend to their will.
We know that they found bodies of 40 crewmen in the forward torpedo room,
so that indicates they were probably using it
as kind of like a holding cell.
At this point they start the pre-launch procedure,
fuel the rocket, run the checks, surface the submarine.
The OSNAZ commandos were trained submariners.
They were experts in nuclear weapons.
So these weren't just killers,
they were pretty smart people too.
But even with this training,
the OSNAZ commandos can't launch the missiles by themselves.
The fail-safe systems used on Soviet ballistic missile submarines,
were designed to prevent the same type of rogue captain scenario
that was depicted in the film Hunt for Red October.
In the film, arming the weapons systems requires two keys -
one from the Captain,
and one from an independent political officer
who answers directly to Moscow.
In the case of K-129, however,
it's not the Captain who's gone rogue,
it's the OSNAZ commandos
following the orders of a secretive group atop the KGB.
And instead of keys, there is a three-part code system.
The fail-safe system in Soviet submarines
were specifically designed to prevent a rogue launch.
It was virtually impossible to launch that missile
without the codes from other sources.
There would be three codes to be entered,
two that the KGB would have had.
The captain wouldn't have the codes that were sent by the government.
He wouldn't have the codes that were sent by the Navy.
But he, and he alone,
did have the final part of the code
needed to activate the missile launch system.
I suspect that they would have put a gun to his head,
or start killing crewmen.
He's between a rock and a hard place now.
He puts the codes in, he starts a nuclear war.
He doesn't put them in, they kill all of his crew.
But what the OSNAZ commandos don't realise is,
Captain Kobzar has a third option.
The story of the K-129 does sound like a Clancy movie.
I mean you've got a dedicated submarine crew,
ballistic missile taken over by KGB commandos,
that would have started a war between the United States and China.
But unlike The Hunt for Red October story
of a disenchanted Soviet captain trying to defect to the US,
Sewell's theory paints a more menacing picture.
K-129's Captain, Vladimir Kobzar,
now faces a stark choice -
enter the final part of the code
to launch a nuclear strike on Pearl Harbor,
or refuse to do it and watch his crew be shot, one by one.
He makes his decision.
But the missile doesn't launch.
Kobzar hasn't entered the firing code,
but one that causes the missile to self-destruct
inside the missile silo.
All of a sudden, you have all this energy
blowing the bottom of the submarine out
and send this superheated gas through the adjoining compartments.
If Kobzar was gambling that K-129 would somehow survive the blast,
it is a losing bet.
It would have been just hell on earth.
I mean, you've got men dying of, you know, from impact.
You've got men being burned to death, you've got men drowning.
The only mercy was it was probably pretty fast.
Fatally damaged,
K-129 starts its long journey to the ocean bottom, three miles below.
I personally believe that Captain Kobzar
realised this was an unauthorised launch,
and it was something that was going to result in the death
of hundreds of millions of people.
So he very stoically just put the wrong codes in,
pushed the button and that was it.
(ALARM SOUNDS, MEN SHOUT)
I think he probably was the one key element that stopped a nuclear war.
Captain Vladimir Kobzar
might very well be one of the world's greatest unsung heroes.
But in spite of the news stories about the Americans raising the sub,
including claims that some of the bodies of the Russian sailors
had been found,
the Soviet navy refuses to even acknowledge that the men are lost.
It wasn't a priority for them, the human factor.
It was just, you know, these were sailors,
they went to sea, sometimes bad things happen.
This attitude weighs heavily on all the missing sailor's relatives.
They had to live with that, you know, nagging question of,
"What really happened to our husbands, our sons?"
TRANSLATION: No-one would say anything,
there were no announcements.
We waited, we searched,
we hoped they would find them and rescue them.
Over a year after the disappearance of K-129,
Irina Zhuravina, wife of First Officer Sasha Zhuravin,
is contacted about the fate of her husband.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
TRANSLATION: I found out about my husband, Sasha, in a terrible way.
I received an anonymous phone call
and a female voice said,
"Your husband has died," and hung up.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
TRANSLATION: This was upsetting and unfair,
because everyone was hopeful that whatever had happened to them,
they would somehow still return.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
TRANSLATION: I remember The New York Times article.
The retrieval of the boat was tragic.
But even then, the authorities said,
"Keep your mouth under lock and key."
They maintained that the submarine had returned.
Unfortunately, it was, and still is, a time of continuous lies.
Back in the US, a strange thing happens.
In spite of the press stories,
the CIA also refuses to acknowledge any aspects of it.
So the story leaks.
Why would the CIA then not acknowledge this happened?
Well, it was in the papers. How can you not acknowledge it?
When you keep this under wraps, people are actually happier.
We don't really want to know that we came close to nuclear war.
I mean, it just raises the tension level.
So you can imagine that Kissinger
and his counterpart in the Soviet Union
are having back-channel conversations
where they're just like, "OK, what can we do
"to not go to war over this?"
"OK, you America, don't talk about it publicly.
"Don't rub our noses in it, 'cause this makes us look like chumps.
"So, we're not going to escalate tensions,
"but you're not gonna talk about it,
"and you're not gonna embarrass us."
But there may be yet another reason
why the Americans keep quiet about their many discoveries
regarding the fate of K-129.
They want to exploit
the growing tensions between the Chinese and the Russians.
Kissinger sees an opportunity
to leverage the information he has about K-129's secret mission.
He begins a series of clandestine diplomatic missions to China.
KENNETH SEWELL: I personally believe Kissinger went in there
and, said, "Look, you know,
"the Russians tried to start a war between us.
"We're not really the bad guys here."
The US strategy, according to Ken Sewell,
is to get the Chinese to focus even more of their military spending
on the Russians,
and thus, get the Russians to spend yet more of their dwindling budget
on the Chinese.
KENNETH SEWELL: There's a couple of things came from that.
First off, Mao started further increasing the tensions along the border
to the point where Russia threatened a nuclear strike against China
if they didn't back down.
The other thing is,
it kicked open the door for the United States to go into China.
And next thing you know, we're playing ping pong with them,
we're having cultural exchanges,
and it just changed the whole course of diplomatic relations
between these two countries.
But there may yet be a further reason
for the continued secrecy surrounding K-129.
It harkens back to the disappearance of the American attack submarine,
Scorpion, 10 weeks after K-129's demise.
The Americans believe it may have been sunk by the Soviets
in a tit-for-tat ambush.
It is a situation that threatens to ignite a nuclear war.
In a confusion of motives worthy of The Hunt For Red October,
the Americans suspect the Russians of sinking the USS Scorpion
in the belief that the Americans sunk K-129.
JOSH DEAN: The tit-for-tat thing?
Yeah, I mean, both countries lost a nuclear submarine
in the same year,
and under circumstances that remain mysterious.
The Russians thought they were justified.
It could have very well escalated into a full-blown nuclear conflict.
Now, let's say they do sink the Scorpion in retaliation.
Would we maybe just let that go
because of an accidental collision with a US Navy submarine?
And I can imagine why that would be
one of the most closely-held secrets of the Cold War.
Because what's the one thing that neither side wants to happen?
A war.
A war means everybody loses.
The planet loses.
KENNETH SEWELL: Time and time again when I'm talking to people,
they've said, "You know, the lives of 99 men, tragic as it may be,
"are not worth the risk of a nuclear war."
But the lives of men were lost.
Submariners.
Real people with family and friends grieving for them.
Not so different than the Russians on K-129.
MAN: If one my sons on a submarine was lost at sea
and some other country found him, or found the wreck,
I'd like to know about it, as a parent.
And in the case of three families
of the Russian submarine sailors we identified on K-129,
I wanted them to know where their sons were.
This footage has only recently been declassified,
and the copy seen here is Jim Reeb's unedited original.
A message came in informing the ship
they were going to conduct a burial ceremony
for the Russian sailors that we had recovered.
They said the day before,
"Anybody would like to participate as a pallbearer
"put your name in this jug."
And every crew member on the ship volunteered.
I was directed to be the Russian narrator during that service.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN ON VIDEO)
The Russian sailors are buried at sea in Soviet tradition.
The ritual is filmed,
in hopes that should the Cold War ever come to an end,
there is proof of American respect for the unfortunate dead.
I was honoured immensely that I was going to be a participant.
They were from a different country, a different ideology,
but they were really brother submariners to me.
(CONTINUES SPEAKING RUSSIAN ON VIDEO)
(RUSSIAN MUSIC PLAYS ON VIDEO)
We wanted to be able to show them we treated them with dignity.
(MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
TRANSLATION: When the Americans privately reached out
to the Soviet navy to let them know
they had lifted the submarine and discovered the bodies,
the Soviets responded by saying,
"We didn't lose the sub."
Even though it was obviously a Russian submarine.
We basically refused our dead,
and at that moment the Americans showed humanity.
MAN: (ON VIDEO) Unto almighty God, we commend the souls...
It isn't until after the fall of communism
that the Russian navy finally recognises the sacrifices
of K-129's crewmen and their families.
(IRINA ZHURAVINA SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
TRANSLATION: 30 years of deep silence about our submarine.
And after 30 years,
the whole crew was posthumously awarded the Order of Courage.
Sasha was also awarded a medal of bravery,
and another medal of Peter the Great.
Then, I received a medal for being a sailor's wife.
But all of these honours came too late.
MAN: (ON VIDEO) We commend the souls of these departed Soviet sailors
and we commit their bodies to the sea.
What no-one realises at the time
is that this funeral video will play a part in ending the Cold War.
In October 1992,
24 years after the sinking of K-129,
and just three years after the release of the film
Hunt For Red October,
CIA Director Robert Gates makes an unprecedented trip to Moscow
to extend the hand of peace to the Russians.
He was the first ever CIA director to meet with a Russian president,
Boris Yeltsin.
He gave him the video tape of the burial ceremony
for the Russian sailors that they had recovered.
MAN: (ON VIDEO) Unto almighty God,
we commend the souls of these departed Soviet sailors.
I was told that when Yeltsin viewed the tape, he cried.
He really cried. And, uh...
..he cried, I think, for sorrow for the loss of Soviet sailors,
but also because of the poignancy of the ceremony.
Commence the hoist.
(JAMES REEB TRANSLATES INTO RUSSIAN)
Two superpowers,
each with very different views of what happened onboard K-129,
can agree on one thing...
JAMES REEB: Amen.
..the tragedy of the mission.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
TRANSLATION: In spite of the complex and raw situation
there was never animosity
between the Russian and American submariners.
There was rivalry, yes,
but no animosity.
And this was a great example of that.
The video marks the end of the Cold War
and heralds in a new era of openness and detente.
What it doesn't do is definitively explain what happened onboard K-129.
Even after I've written a book and three other people have written a book,
it's still kind of a mystery and we're still talking about things we don't know the answer to.
While indisputable facts are scarce,
theories about what sunk K-129 abound.
But now, I'm sure we're going to talk about the rogue sub theory
and that Hunt For Red October was inspired by the story
about a Russian ballistic missile submarine
that was launching a missile at Pearl Harbor.
But there's a big problem with it.
It only works if the missile can actually reach Pearl Harbor.
And the range of the SSN 5 was well inside
where the actual wreck was.
So if that's true, then they were really bad at their jobs
because the missile wouldn't have hit it.
To this day, officially,
the Russian navy also doesn't believe that K-129 went rogue.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
TRANSLATION: Our navy's version of what happened
continues to be that K-129 sank
as a result of a collision with the American submarine Swordfish.
The Americans, however,
remain equally adamant this isn't the case.
Balderdash, that's what I say.
There was no evidence at all.
Yes, they ran into some ice floes and pulled in for repairs.
But if K-129 wasn't sunk by Swordfish,
what did sink it?
My personal belief, based on what I've seen,
is that there was some kind of accident
that occurred during a test-firing exercise.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
(ALARM SOUNDS, MEN SHOUT)
But other than not believing the rogue sub theory, like,
I can't totally discount any of the other stuff.
I mean, we're talking about spies.
We're talking about the world's best liars, right?
All this reasoning changes, however,
if the 'world's best liars'
have disguised the actual location of K-129.
A lot of people still believe, you know, a lot of these cover stories.
You have to look at this logically. You have to look at the facts.
You know, we have three pieces of hard evidence
that puts that sub 370 miles from Pearl Harbor.
One, the missile plume...
..that was picked up by the satellite showed it to be there.
And two, the oil slick contained high-grade, highly enriched uranium.
And, finally, three,
the SOSUS tapes found a noise
associated with an explosion on the surface.
But even today,
there is no agreed upon definitive answer
to what happened onboard K-129.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
TRANSLATION: Every submarine accident
has at least four or five versions.
The problem is that there are few direct facts
because most go down with the submarine.
For me, K-129 is more than just a disaster.
It's a mysterious and symbolic phenomenon
at the epicentre of what was happening
between the Soviet and American navies.
And what of Tom Clancy?
How does he get his hands on all that classified information
about Crazy Ivans, torpedo launch systems...
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
..and Russia and American submarine design and battle strategy?
For decades, this information has been known only
to security-cleared operatives.
Even serious journalists investigating K-129
continue to be stonewalled.
The CIA arranged a meeting
between me and the bureaucrat who runs the office
that decides what gets declassified and what doesn't.
And this bureaucrat sat across from me
with like a, just a...flat expression on his face, listening.
And he was just basically like, "Yeah, no.
"You're not gonna get anywhere."
Oh, my God, the bureaucrats who protect secrets
are some of the worst and most humourless people imaginable.
Yet somehow Clancy does get his hands on top-secret material.
But how?
Many believe the answer lies in his ability
to get people to open up to him.
He was so charming in those days.
He really was charming. He was very funny.
He joked around a lot.
He was clearly friends with people in the Navy.
But finding classified material is one thing,
getting away with publishing it is another.
Some now suggest that
Clancy's seeming freedom to divulge state secrets
came from deep within the US intelligence community.
KENNETH SEWELL: The CIA does a number of books.
They're called company books.
When they need to have information released,
they get people like Clancy to write books
under the permission, authorisation, of the agencies.
They basically are kind of part of the team.
I would not classify Tom Clancy as a spy.
Tom Clancy was an asset.
Hunt For Red October was the perfect cover story for the K-129.
Soon, Clancy comes to the attention of the Secretary of the Navy,
John Lehman, during the Reagan years.
Lehman recognises in Clancy
an opportunity to turn the secrets game upside down.
I had always been an advocate
of declassifying a lot more information.
It was a recurring debate that I had my whole tenure.
Obviously, there are some things that should be protected.
But we got to get as much of this
out into the store window as we possibly can
to demonstrate to the Soviets that they were going to lose.
And if they tried to keep up with us that they would bankrupt themselves.
Lehman's revolutionary strategy
quickly becomes the catalyst
for a new kind of anti-Soviet psychological warfare.
To do it, he turns to some unlikely allies.
We worked with Hollywood and TV and print media.
We wanted the Soviets to see the reality
and the morale, the professionalism.
And it was terrific.
And at the top of Lehman's list
is Tom Clancy and his Hunt for Red October.
And Lehman is not alone in his desire to promote it.
President Reagan loved it.
He mentioned it several times, and that helped the sales.
It also does something else.
It helps promote the Navy's new strategy.
And so, President Reagan wanted to meet Tom,
so he had a little lunch in the White House.
And I sat next to Tom,
because I was delighted that we had the Naval Institute publish it.
Popular culture was now being used by the American military
to break the Soviet's resolve.
The advanced technological world
portrayed in The Hunt For Red October,
demoralises the Russians.
They simply don't have the budgets to catch up.
It sucked them into yet another bottomless pit of spending,
which helped to bankrupt them.
That's really what happened. That's how the whole Cold War ended.
Over the course of many more novels,
Clancy becomes a mainstay in the Navy's campaign
to intimidate America's enemies.
After Hunt for Red October,
why would you want to use him for anything else
except to keep writing novels
and publicising and talking about how great the Navy is?
Why would we want to mess him up by asking him to be a spy?
Clancy's revelations about military secrets
help lead to one of the Cold War's biggest naval victories,
all without a shot, torpedo, or ICBM being fired.
Seen in this light, Clancy is more than just a novelist.
More than just an asset.
He's a hero.
He couldn't serve. He couldn't join the Navy because his eyesight was terrible.
So they weren't gonna accept him into any of the armed forces.
Well, if he couldn't be them,
why not make this version of himself that could be one of them?
It was his way of serving.
At a closed-door speech delivered at the National Security Agency,
Clancy tacitly acknowledges
that his books aren't simply written as entertainment,
they also serve another important function.
Let me leave you with a thought. It's deterrence.
It's keeping a war from happening.
If a war happens, somebody screwed up.
Think about it.
We can't deter the Russians if they don't know anything about us.
They got to have something to be afraid of.
We got to expose a certain amount of information to the Russians if deterrence is gonna work.
You can't make everything secret. Thank you.
(APPLAUSE)
Somehow The Hunt for Red October
and its connection to the tragic events
that took place decades earlier on K-129
had combined to play a decisive part in the course of world history.
KENNETH SEWELL: The K-129 mission had a major impact on all of us
and the average person has no clue.
Maybe, you know, a hundred years in the future,
they'll look back and, you know, talk about this.
But I think we're a hell of a lot safer now.
And, uh, I don't think we would've gotten here
unless it was for the K-129 mission.
Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2021