AI Summary
5 min readIn 2013, ProPublica data editor Jeff Larson filed a routine request with the National Security Agency. He wanted to know what metadata the agency had collected on his phone calls—who he called, when, how often. The NSA’s website offered a simple online form for exactly this kind of Privacy Act request, so Larson filled it out and hit submit, expecting nothing to happen. Ten or twelve days later, a manila envelope arrived at his home. His wife called in a panic. Inside was a letter that read: “We cannot acknowledge the existence or non-existence of such metadata or call detail records pertaining to the telephone numbers you provided.”
Larson had just been Glomarred.
The Claw, the Sub, and the Cover Story
The word “Glomar” comes from the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a massive ship built in the early 1970s for a top-secret CIA mission called Project Azorian. The goal was audacious: recover a Soviet nuclear submarine, the K-129, that had sunk three miles to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in March 1968. The Soviets had searched for it and failed. The Americans found it. And the CIA wanted inside—for the code books, the cryptographic equipment, and especially the nuclear missiles still onboard.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Advertisements** - WNYC sponsor messages for Children's Aid, NY Hall of Science, and Progressive Insurance.
- 2 (01:26) **The Problem Phrase** - Latif Nasser introduces the episode by complaining about the vague "may contain peanuts" label, then connects it to the equally meaningless and higher-stakes government phrase "neither confirm nor deny."
- 3 (02:35) **The Request That Started It All** - Reporter Julia Barton begins the story with ProPublica data editor Jeff Larson, who filed a privacy act request with the NSA for his own phone metadata.
- 4 (05:37) **Introducing the "Glomar" Response** - A colleague tells Larson this is a "Glomar response," a term whose origin leads to a bizarre Cold War mission.
- 5 (06:24) **Project Azorian: The Secret Mission** - David Sharp, a former CIA officer, recounts the 1968 sinking of a Soviet nuclear submarine (K-129) and the US plan to steal it.
- 6 (13:16) **The CIA's Dilemma** - After the failed mission, journalists started asking questions, forcing the CIA to craft a response that was truthful but revealed nothing.
- 7 (15:22) **Walt Logan's Solution** - CIA lawyer Walt Logan explains the bind: admitting success would be lying, admitting failure would help the Soviets, and lying was impossible in the post-Watergate era of a strengthened Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
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Show Notes
In an episode we first ran back in 2019, we explore how a sunken nuclear submarine, a crazy billionaire, and a mechanical claw gave birth to a phrase that has hounded journalists and lawyers for 40 years and embodies the tension between the public’s desire for transparency and the government’s need to keep secrets.
Whether it comes from government spokespeople or celebrity publicists, the phrase “can neither confirm nor deny” is the perfect non-denial denial. It’s such a perfect deflection that it seems like it’s been around forever, but reporter Julia Barton takes us back to the 1970s and the surprising origin story of what’s now known as a “Glomar Response.” With help from David Sharp and Walt Logan, we tell the story of a clandestine CIA operation to lift a sunken Soviet submarine from the ocean floor and the dilemma they faced when the world found out about it. It’s an episode we first released in 2014, but given some things in the news recently, it resonated with us again.
In the 40 years since that operation, the Glomar Response has become boilerplate language from an array of government agencies. With help from ProPublica editor Jeff Larson and NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston, we explore the implications of this ultimate information dodge. ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer explains how it stymies oversight, and we learn that, even 40 years later, governmental secrecy can be emotionally painful.
More information about Glomar:
After 40 years, many of the details of Project Azorian are only now coming to light. The US government’s default position has been to keep as much of it classified as possible. It took three years for retired CIA employee David Sharp to get permission to publish his account of Project Azorian. And FOIA played an indirect role in that, as Cold War historians got the CIA to release, in redacted form, an internal history of the mission. After that and a threat of legal action, Sharp was finally able to publish his manuscript in 2012.
We mentioned conspiracy theories that have swirled around Project Azorian filling the void where official silence has reigned. One of them is promulgated in the 2005 book “Red Star Rogue” by Kenneth Sewell and Clint Richmond. They posit that the K-129 was taken over by rogue Stalinist KGB agents in order to start a nuclear conflict. But the conflict was to be between the US and China, as, according to the authors, the sub had powers to disguise its sonic signature as a Chinese Navy vessel.
This book is the basis of the 2013 drama More from this podcast