The secret on the ocean floor

In the summer of 1974, a large and highly unusual ship set sail from Long Beach in California.

It was heading for the middle of the Pacific where its owners boasted it would herald a revolutionary new industry beneath the waves.

Equipped with a towering rig and the latest in drilling gear, the vessel was designed to reach down through the deep, dark waters to a source of incredible wealth lying on the ocean floor.

It was billed as the boldest step so far in a long-held dream of opening a new frontier in mining, one that would see valuable metals extracted from the rocks of the seabed.

But amid all the excited public relations, there was one small hitch - the whole expedition was a lie.

This was a Cold War deception on a staggering scale, but one which also left a legacy that has profound implications nearly half a century later.

The real target of the crew on board this giant ship was a lost Soviet submarine. Six years earlier, the K-129 had sunk 1,500 miles north-west of Hawaii while carrying ballistic nuclear missiles.

The Russians failed to find their sub despite a massive search, but an American network of underwater listening posts had detected the noise of an explosion that eventually led US teams to the wreck.

It was lying three miles down, deeper than any previous salvage operation. The weapons and top-secret code books were surely beyond reach.

But in the struggle for military advantage, the sub represented the crown jewels – a chance to explore Moscow’s nuclear missiles and to break into its naval communications.

So the CIA hatched an audacious plan, Project Azorian, to retrieve the submarine. That would have been hard enough. But there was another challenge as well - it had to be done without the Russians knowing.

The spies needed to create a smokescreen so they pretended to be exploring the possibility of deep sea mining.

A PR campaign conveyed a determined effort to find manganese nodules. These potato-sized rocks lie scattered in the abyss, the great plains of the deep ocean.

There had to be a frontman - someone rich and eccentric enough to be plausible. The reclusive billionaire inventor Howard Hughes was perfect for the role.

He agreed to take part and, in his name, a unique ship was designed. Publicly, it was fitted with everything needed to dig up the seabed.

But, covertly, the Hughes Glomar Explorer was also built with ingenious devices straight from a Bond film. The ship’s hull had enormous doors that could swing apart to create a “moon pool”, an underwater opening large enough to accommodate the Soviet sub and keep it hidden.

Tucked away out of sight inside the ship was a “capture vehicle” which had a giant set of claws to straddle the sub and secure it.

It took until 1974, six years after the sinking of the sub, for the CIA to be ready. The cost of the project - $500m - was equivalent then to building a couple of aircraft carriers or launching an Apollo mission to the moon.

No-one had ever attempted anything on this scale in such incredible depths. The sub itself had a weight of nearly 2,000 tonnes but the three miles of thick steel pipe needed to haul it up added even more.

New systems were needed to keep the Glomar Explorer in position as well as to handle the huge load, and everyone on board was nervous. Dave Sharp, one of the few CIA figures happy to talk about the project, tells me it was “really frightening” when heavy seas threatened to tear their unusual vessel apart.

But even more alarming was the suspicion of the Russians. To convince them that Howard Hughes was genuinely interested in nodules, executives were despatched to conferences on ocean mining where they described in detail their plans to harvest the rocks.

“We made ocean mining seem a lot more credible,” Sharp says. “We really misled a lot of people and it’s surprising that the story held together for so long.”

The cover was so good that it prompted US universities to move to start courses in deep sea mining and it also whipped up the share prices of the companies involved. “People thought, ‘if Howard Hughes is into it, we need to be too’,” says Sharp.

“We even collected a few nodules,” he remembers, which was fortunate because Soviet spy ships kept a constant vigil and once even came close enough to overhear the Americans’ conversations.

“When we realised they were right alongside, we started talking about nodules, like ‘here’s a good one’ so it looked like we were checking them.”

Yet another complication arose. The project needed calm weather and that was only likely in summer. But just when it was about to begin in summer 1974, US President Richard Nixon was visiting Moscow for a peace-making summit.

Being caught stealing a Soviet sub would not exactly have helped, so Nixon insisted that the operation could not begin until he had left Russia. That was on 3 July. By then the Hughes Glomar Explorer was in position and the winches whirred into action the next day.

Things did not go smoothly. Sharp recalls that pumps and connections kept breaking. Huge vibrations rocked the ship as the “capture vehicle” was “banging back and forth in the waves”. But on 30 July, he watched as underwater cameras relayed video of the sub as well as “dozens of crawling crab-like crustaceans” and a big white fish that looked like a shark.

Amazingly, the giant steel claws successfully seized the sub. But then disaster struck. At some point on the way up, the immense strain became too much, part of a claw snapped off and most of the sub slipped back to the seabed.

Only the front section made it up. The bodies of six Soviet submariners were recovered and were later given a formal burial at sea. But the missiles and code books were never found.

The CIA official history asserts that the operation was one of the greatest intelligence coups of the Cold War, but it had cost vast sums and questions immediately arose about its value. A year later, the sensational details became public and plans to recover the remaining section were abandoned.

As Sharp puts it, the revelation that the deep sea mining project was fake was “a sudden shock” to other mining companies and also to diplomats at the UN who were right in the middle of negotiating future rights to ocean minerals. Share prices tumbled amid a wave of recriminations.

This might have derailed the very notion of deep sea mining for good. But in fact it proved that with clever engineering and a lavish budget it was possible – just - to operate in the otherworldly depths. “It’s really difficult but we showed it could be done,” says Sharp.

In an air-conditioned cabin in a teeming port in Papua New Guinea, Leslie Kewa reaches for a joystick that will control a machine the size of a house. Nearly half a century after the CIA men pretended to mine the ocean floor, he’s about to do it for real.

A burly figure with a kindly face, Kewa is from a village in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea. In a country blighted by poverty, he grew up in relative comfort because his father, and the rest of the men in his family, made careers in the mining industry. Kewa became a specialist in handling gargantuan devices.

But the one standing nearby is unique, not only because of the destructive power of its whirling steel teeth, and its menacing resemblance to something from a Mad Max film, but also because it’s designed to be used far beyond human reach.

As Kewa’s fingertips send the first commands, and the machine crunches over the ground outside, he admits to feeling a bit scared.

In these first trials, he’s learning to steer by remote control, relying on CCTV to show him where the huge steel tracks are pointing as they inch their way forward. “I’m used to the feel of machinery in my hands so having to trust the equipment and the screens is hard,” he says.

But there’s no other option. The machine will soon be deployed not in the huge pits of an opencast mine on land but in the sunless depths a mile underwater on the ocean floor.

If work starts as planned next year, Kewa will earn himself a place in history as the first person to break rock in the world’s first deep sea mine.

In an air-conditioned cabin in a teeming port in Papua New Guinea, Leslie Kewa reaches for a joystick that will control a machine the size of a house. Nearly half a century after the CIA men pretended to mine the ocean floor, he’s about to do it for real.

A burly figure with a kindly face, Kewa is from a village in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea. In a country blighted by poverty, he grew up in relative comfort because his father, and the rest of the men in his family, made careers in the mining industry. Kewa became a specialist in handling gargantuan devices.

But the one standing nearby is unique, not only because of the destructive power of its whirling steel teeth, and its menacing resemblance to something from a Mad Max film, but also because it’s designed to be used far beyond human reach.

As Kewa’s fingertips send the first commands, and the machine crunches over the ground outside, he admits to feeling a bit scared.

In these first trials, he’s learning to steer by remote control, relying on CCTV to show him where the huge steel tracks are pointing as they inch their way forward. “I’m used to the feel of machinery in my hands so having to trust the equipment and the screens is hard,” he says.

But there’s no other option. The machine will soon be deployed not in the huge pits of an opencast mine on land but in the sunless depths a mile underwater on the ocean floor.

If work starts as planned next year, Kewa will earn himself a place in history as the first person to break rock in the world’s first deep sea mine.

The tuna industry employs thousands in Papua New Guinea. And the villages on New Ireland are famous for the unique practice of “shark calling” - local people lure the creatures to their boats and soothe them before hauling them in.

All this, Mesulam says, could be “grievously harmed” by digging up the ocean floor, and he’s become a leading figure in a campaign group, the Alliance of Solwara Warriors, which is opposing Nautilus Minerals.

The company says that at a mile deep, the mining will be far below the habitats of any important fisheries and will not affect them.

“Where we’ll be operating, it’s cold and dark,” says one senior Nautilus executive. “There are no tuna there, they need entirely different conditions near the surface of the ocean.”

This reassurance has been emphasised in public meetings. And Nautilus has also been investing in community relations, paying for mobile health care and even a new bridge.

For Mesulam this is mere PR. He calls the mine “experimental” - there could be unexpected consequences, and he has the churches and some politicians on his side.

But he’s up against a great force - the incredible and surging demand the world has for key minerals.

The first inkling that the ocean floor might hold a treasure trove of minerals came in the late 19th Century when a Royal Navy ship, HMS Challenger, was sent on a pioneering expedition. Instead of exploring the coasts of new lands, the ship was to investigate the oceans themselves.

The ship’s scientists discovered the existence of underwater mountains in the Atlantic, as well as establishing the presence of life in the deep. But perhaps their most unexpected find came from the seabed.

When the seabed was dredged, the nets brought up teeth from sharks and ear bones from whales but also small rocks. Initially described as “nodular concretions”, and looking a bit like cobblestones, it turned out that vast fields of them were lying on the sand and sediment.

In 1877, in a lecture given in Manchester, one of the expedition’s scientists, John Murray, reported that they were made up of manganese, iron and nickel.

Later expeditions confirmed that these manganese nodules were scattered across the seabed as far apart as the Pacific and Indian Oceans. By the 1950s, with the world’s population booming, researchers turned their attention to these potential resources.

In a book published in 1964, American marine geologist John Mero wrote that the nodules were so plentiful and so rich that even if only 10% of them could be mined, they would keep a world of 20 billion people supplied with key metals for “thousands of years”.

At that time the nodules were inaccessible and the prices for the metals weren’t nearly high enough to justify the effort.
But Mero had planted a germ of an idea.

On 1 November 1967, a UN committee was meeting in New York and the ambassador from the island nation of Malta was invited to speak. Dr Arvid Pardo faced an uphill struggle. He was suggesting that the deep oceans should be reserved for peaceful activities and that the mineral wealth should be shared by all of mankind.

Some delegations were already hostile, but Pardo was well prepared and passionate, even lyrical. The dark oceans, he said, “were the womb of life”. He then quoted John Mero’s research into the “astounding” contents of the billions of nodules lying untouched on the seabed – enough aluminium to last 20,000 years, zirconium for 100,000 years and cobalt for 200,000 years.

Pardo floated a radical suggestion - a slice of any earnings from deep sea mining would have to go to developing nations. This controversial concept was to be haggled over for decades.

One example is a type of hairy crab known as the Hoff. It lives in the Longqi – or Dragon’s Breath - hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean, an area which China is licensed to explore for minerals. Although it’s similar to crabs elsewhere, this particular variant may be unique.

The scaly foot snail is another rare creature only known to live in two spots in the ocean, both of which are licensed for mining.

While these might not be the most iconic symbols of conservation, they may later prove to have a key ecological role or even a medical application. Some deep sea organisms are known to have high levels of substances that may be useful in combating Alzheimers.

So what impact will mining have on marine life? Huge excavators will rumble over the seabed. Either they will tear up hydrothermal vents or they will vacuum up nodules. It will be highly destructive.

Michael Lodge admits that but also argues that the areas affected will be tiny compared with the vastness of the oceans – “much less than half a per cent” – and that big areas have been earmarked as reserves to be left untouched.