Originally Posted By: fdcg27
I am aware of the Halibut and the role it might have played.
Another point of confusion to me is how the CIA managed to keep secret the construction of a ship designed and intended to raise a Soviet boat laying under three miles of water.
There was ample Soviet penetration of the CIA during this period, so how was a megabuck project and deployment kept secret?
Had the Soviets known what the ship was really about, they would have stopped it, even if it took as crude a method as running one of their large ships into it.
Oops, sorry!
The really intriguing part of this entire episode is how the CIA managed such a huge project with no leaks at all.
IIRC the vids linked above suggest the secret was NOT kept and that the operation was conducted under Soviet maritime suirveillance.
This was a diesel-electric sub and a pretty old design. Codes and targetng can be changed. Perhaps they figured that they didn't have that much to lose and didn't mind the CIA inflicting a costly failure on themselves.
Alternatively, perhaps they wanted to find out what happened and this was a no-cost-to-them way of finding out.
This does not necessarily imply that the CIA was compromised and would be incapable of keeping the details secret, though it may have been. To take an extreme possibility as an example, under prevailing nuclear stability doctrine, IF the rogue KGB op had any basis in fact and evidence for it was found, it would be in the US/Western/Global interest to give the Soviets the relevent information so they could do some house cleaning.
Similarly,IF the rogue KGB op had any basis in fact, the Soviets would probably already have circumstantial eveidence of it. It MIGHT be percieved as in their interest to share this information with the US, (ie it wasn't us) and, having done so, it weould be in their interest for the US to believe them by obtaining corroborative physical evidence.
These explanations are, not, of course, mutually exclusive.
