Glomar Explorer and the Jennifer Project

One of the Cold War's most audacious covert operations began right here at the Philadelphia waterfront. In the early nineteen seventies the CIA commissioned a ship called the Glomar Explorer, built at the Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Chester, Pennsylvania. Its secret mission, code-named the Jennifer Project, was to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from three miles beneath the Pacific Ocean.

In the summer of nineteen seventy-four the ship's enormous mechanical claw lifted portions of the wreck. Six Soviet submariners were recovered and given a burial at sea. The operation remained classified for years, and when it leaked the CIA famously neither confirmed nor denied it, a response that entered the language as the Glomar response.