Neither Confirm nor Deny: How the Glomar Mission Shielded the CIA from Transparency

by M. Todd Bennett

Overview

Winner, 2024 Book Award, Society for History in the Federal Government

In 1974, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, ostensibly an advanced deep-sea mining vessel owned by reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, lowered a claw-like contraption to the floor of the Pacific Ocean. This high-tech venture was only a cover story for an even more improbable scheme: a CIA mission to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine. Like a Jules Verne novel with an Ian Fleming twist, the saga of the Glomar Explorer features underwater espionage, impossible gadgetry, and high-stakes international drama. It also marks a key moment in the history of transparency—and not just for what became known as the Glomar response: “We can neither confirm nor deny. . . . ”

M. Todd Bennett plumbs the depths of government secrecy in this new account of the Glomar mission and its consequences. Trawling through recently declassified documents, he explores the logistics, media fallout, and geopolitical significance of one of the most ambitious operations in intelligence history. Glomar, Bennett argues, played a pivotal but underappreciated role in helping the CIA ward off oversight amid a push for transparency and accountability. He reframes the operation’s history to offer an alternative perspective on the 1970s, a decade known for expansive openness, as well as the persistent tension between the demands of democracy and the need for secrecy in foreign policy. Combining keen historical analysis and gripping storytelling, Neither Confirm nor Deny brings to the surface fresh insights into the history of the security state, the politics of intelligence, and the CIA’s relationship with the media and the public.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231193467
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	01/03/2023
Series:	Global America
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

M. Todd Bennett is associate professor of history at East Carolina University. He is the author of One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (2012). Bennett was formerly a historian at the U.S. Department of State; there, he edited the Foreign Relations of the United States volume that includes declassified records documenting the Glomar incident.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Old Lines
2. The Hughes Connection
3. The Rules of the Game
4. Inside Job
5. Fish or Cut Bait?
6. Colby’s Dike
7. Neither Confirm nor Deny
8. Shivering from Overexposure
9. Hold the Line
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

From the murky depths of the 1970s, this riveting book surfaces not only a Soviet sub and its CIA salvagers but also a new reckoning with an era known for investigative transparency. Glomar’s legacy instead was to anchor the media, politicians, and all Americans to a barnacled ship of state secrecy.

Katherine A. S. Sibley

Neither Confirm nor Deny is an extraordinary account of one of the most important moments in the history of the CIA, the Glomar Explorer Mission. Likely to become a classic in the field of the history of intelligence, Neither Confirm nor Deny vividly underlines the continuing tensions that exist between democratic transparency and the American national security state.

Thomas A. Schwartz

This is intelligence history as it should be written: packed with new archival findings and thrillingly narrated yet also deeply engaged with the latest scholarship in the wider fields of U.S. history and America in the world. A must-read for academic historians and espionage buffs alike.

Hugh Wilford

A noteworthy achievement and serves as a valuable contribution to the literature, placing the Glomar mission within its necessary context. It serves as an effective entry to the ongoing efforts to fill in the missing dimension of intelligence to diplomatic history.

Diplomatic History

Bennett shows why the story of the Glomar Explorer is not only filled with exciting characters and twists, it’s also a key moment in the history of the U.S. government’s refusal to disclose information to the voters.

Kathryn Olmsted

★ 12/01/2022

Bennett (One World, Big Screen), a former State Department historian, delves deep into Project Azorian, the CIA's high-stakes mission to raise a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank in the Pacific Ocean in 1968. Using declassified documents, Bennett takes readers through the project's development process, one that was aided by loose Congressional oversight and the agency's sense of boundless confidence in its ingenuity. The author illustrates how questions about the intelligence value of the sunken sub and the ballooning cost of the project were insufficient to halt the development of the Glomar Explorer, the massive capture ship that the CIA hid in plain sight as a deep-sea mining vessel. As Bennett describes the CIA's partnership with Howard Hughes, whose company acted as a front for the project, the narrative begins to read like a fictional thriller, abounding with twists and turns that connect Project Azorian not only to Hughes's murky business dealings but to rogue CIA operations in Cuba and the Watergate investigation. In the process, Bennett explores timely questions about the balance between secrecy and transparency and the role of the press in both. VERDICT Comprehensive research makes this book as engaging as any espionage novel. An essential read.—Sara Shreve

Library Journal