Free Republic

As tensions rose over the weekend between the US and Iran in the Persian Gulf, several vessels were “sabotaged” off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Both Iranian media and the UAE reported the incident, but 24 hours after it happened, much of what occurred was still shrouded in mystery, with allegations of “explosions” and questions about how severe the “sabotage” actually was. The Saudi energy minister confirmed that two of its oil tankers were targeted in a “sabotage attack.” It took place as the tankers were “on their way to the Arabian Gulf” via the Emirate of Fujairah,...

The use of a North Korea midget sub to sink a South Korean corvette three months ago, has forced the United States, and South Korea, to seriously confront the problems involved in finding these small subs in coastal waters. This is a difficult task, because the target is small, silent (moving using battery power) and in a complex underwater landscape, that makes sonar less effective. After the Cold War ended in 1991, the U.S. recognized that these coastal operations would become more common. So, in the 1990s, the U.S. developed the Advanced Deployable System (ADS) for detecting non-nuclear submarines in...

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...

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....

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has disclosed plans for a deep ocean sensor network that could provide a long-range anti-submarine surveillance capability sufficient to protect 'blue water' Carrier Strike Group operations. This new initiative, which envisions a distributed system of sensors and sources on or near the ocean floor, harks back to the SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) deep-water long-range detection capability deployed by the US Navy during the Cold War. It also signals a revival in interest in blue-water anti-submarine warfare (ASW), an area that has largely taken a back seat in the two decades since the...