Free Republic

Military officials and experts believe that if a North Korean torpedo was involved in the sinking of the South Korean Navy corvette Cheonan, it was probably launched from a 325-ton Shark-class submarine. The sub ranks between a full-blown submarine and a mini-sub in terms of size. South Korean military intelligence are reportedly focusing on the fact that one or two Shark-class submarines from a submarine base in Cape Bipagot, South Hwanghae Province are unaccounted for during the time of the Cheonan's sinking. The Bipagot submarine base is around 80 km from Baeknyeong Island. Shark-class submarines can travel at speeds of...

HE remembers the women sunbathing naked on the deck of a passing yacht. He remembers, too, the lurking menace of a Russian intelligence-gathering trawler, watching from afar as one of the most audacious American coups of the cold war unfolded on the ocean floor, 16,500ft beneath the Pacific surface. David Sharp recalls every detail of the 1974 mission known as Project Azorian, one of the most ambitious, expensive and politically volatile clandestine operations launched by the CIA. As one of the CIA’s agents in charge of recovering a sunken Soviet submarine and its cargo of nuclear-tipped missiles, Sharp spent 63...

Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN) Chief Admiral Abdul Aziz Jaafar has confirmed that the nation's first submarine, KD Tunku Abdul Rahman, was experiencing a mechanical fault which prevented it from submerging. He said the fault was detected on Jan 17, following maintenance works conducted at the RMN base in Teluk Sepanggar, Sabah. "The damage involves a part that channels water pressure movement which caused the submarine's failure to launch underwater," he told reporters after a ceremony where appointment letters were presented to members of the National Service Training Council here Thursday. Abdul Aziz was commenting on a local English daily on...

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the first time has revealed details about an ultra-secret Cold War-era project to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the depths of the Pacific Ocean in 1974. The high-risk salvage operation, code-named ‘Project Azorian’, had been shrouded in secrecy for decades but the spy agency broke its silence in newly-declassified documents published yesterday by an independent watchdog, the National Security Archive. The documents, drawn from a 50-page article written for an in-house CIA journal, recount the daring bid approved by then-president Richard Nixon to raise the submarine using a specially-designed ship, the Glomar Explorer....