Join us for the April AFCEA lunch to hear about how we stole a Russian submarine right out from under their noses. This story of national security, spies, lies, and the CIA is told by Charlie (Chuck) Camby, a naval architect who was there for the entire mission.

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On Tuesday, April 20 hear first-hand about the covert design, funding, building and operation of the Hughes Glomar Explorer, not to mine for manganese nodules, but to lift K-129 off the floor of the Pacific Ocean from 3 miles deep. Charlie (Chuck) Canby, a recent naval architect graduate of the University of Michigan when hired by Global Marine in 1970, was one of the first recruits selected, “to draw some lines of a Glomar Grand Isle-class ship.”  From drawing those first lines, to serving as an ordinary seaman and certified welder on the Glomar from the east coast down around Cape Horn and north up to her new home port of Long Beach, to again serving as the resident naval architect on the Glomar’s actual recovery mission in 1974, Charlie has some stories to tell!

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• February 25, 1968: K-129, a Soviet nuclear ballistic missile submarine with a crew of 98 departs Kamchatka peninsula on a routine patrol.
• March 7, 1968: first missed scheduled communication with K-129
• March 9, 1968: a flotilla of ships and submarines are dispatched to look forK-129
• September 12, 1968: the Soviet Navy states that the sub had been lost while on duty in the Pacific and that all the men on board were “presumed dead”, and by order of the Minister of Defense, K-129 is removed from the register of naval vessels.

What happened next? A great read is “The Taking of K-129, How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History” by Josh Dean, 2017.

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