The story of the massive crane tasked with clearing the wreckage of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge began with a secret operation in the midst of the Cold War, a billionaire’s cover story and a missing Soviet submarine.
Decades ago, the Chesapeake 1000 crane, which arrived in Baltimore on Friday, was a key part of a Central Intelligence Agency project that aimed to recover Soviet secrets in a period fraught with political tension between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
In 1968, a Soviet sub carrying nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and at least six crew members went off the grid near Hawaii, according to the CIA. The United States found it 1,800 miles northwest of the state, and officials thought it might carry valuable intelligence. But how does one lift a 1,750-ton submarine from 16,500 feet below the surface?
The CIA took the lead and developed an operation that was code-named Project Azorian, ordering the construction of a huge mechanical claw to latch on to the sub and a ship-mounted hydraulic system to lift it.
That’s when the Sun 800, now known as the Chesapeake 1000, was conceived, “to build the ship at the heart of the CIA’s operation,” said Gene Schorsch, who ran the shipyard in the 1970s.
Now, the Chesapeake 1000, described by officials as one of the largest cranes on the Eastern Seaboard, will play a pivotal role in cleanup efforts.
Schorsch, now 95, was the chief of hull design when the crane was built. Despite being involved in its construction and use, he remained in the dark about the CIA’s operation for years, as did the American public.
To build the ship that it hoped would recover the Soviet sub, the CIA of the 1970s needed a cover story.
It turned to billionaire Howard Hughes, an aerospace engineer and film producer known for transforming Las Vegas, who was later played by Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Aviator.”
Publicly, Hughes would appear to be the funder of a multimillion-dollar vessel for deep-sea mining: the Hughes Glomar Explorer. But its primary function would be to salvage Soviet secrets on the sunken submarine in what then-CIA Director William Colby said would have been the biggest intelligence coup in history, according to the New York Times.