The Bell that Tolls for the K-129

by Brian Dunning
December 2, 2025

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In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the two superpowers formed the United States-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIA Affairs to cooperatively determine the fates of personnel missing from both sides, from World War II through the Cold War. The co-chairman of the American delegation was Mac Toon, formerly an ambassador to the Soviet Union, and he was in Moscow on August 30, 1993. It was a minor meeting; there was not even any press coverage. We don't even know what Russian officials he met with. All we do know is that Toon presented to the Russians a very special item: it was the ship's bell from the Soviet submarine K-129 — a submarine famous for having sunk in 1968 and been partially recovered by the CIA in 1974. It turns out that this bell may hold the answers to all the questions that remain about this most incredible episode from the Cold War.

Here's a quick overview of the story. In 1968, the Soviet diesel-electric submarine K-129 sank in the North Pacific between Midway and the Aleutian Islands. Although they had only the vaguest idea of where to look, the Soviet Navy tried to find it; but it was the Americans who did — thanks largely to their AFTAC network of seafloor hydrophones that had picked up the sounds of two explosions aboard the sub, six minutes apart. The K-129's wreck was at 16,000 feet (almost 5,000 meters); far too deep for any Navy submarines to reach. The American sub USS Halibut spent weeks towing a camera and sonar array over the wreck and taking thousands of photographs, allowing the CIA to build a detailed model of the entire site. The K-129 was split into two halves right at the middle of the sail (often called the conning tower). Normally that sail housed three vertical launch tubes containing nuclear missiles; two were gone, but the third was intact. And the Americans wanted it — bad. They also wanted the encryption gear from the control room and the two nuclear torpedoes known to be in its forward torpedo room.

From their examination of the site and the recorded audio, the US Navy and the CIA determined that the K-129 had been destroyed when the R-21 rocket motors on two of its three nuclear missiles malfunctioned and fired while still in their tubes, six minutes apart, burning for about 95 seconds each — and completely destroying the submarine from within.

So the CIA initiated a plan called Project Azorian to recover that whole front half of the K-129 intact: 136 feet long (41 meters) and weighing 1,750 tons. They designed a ship around a huge internal cargo hold large enough to hold that entire forward section, with giant full-length doors that opened up the entire middle half of the ship to the sea below. As a cover story, they called their recovery ship a seafloor mining vessel, following the example of an existing ocean drilling ship, the Glomar Challenger, built by Global Marine. This new ship was to be called the Hughes Glomar Explorer, as the cover story had it being nominally owned by one of Howard Hughes's companies. Six years after the K-129's sinking, the Glomar Explorer was on site and lowered a gigantic capture mechanism named Clementine onto the K-129's forward half. Clementine was substantially larger and heavier than the submarine section it was designed to recover. Guided by television cameras, Clementine was positioned and slipped its massive claws under the sub, and gently raised it — a three-mile journey upward through the deep waters.

And somewhere around halfway along that upward journey, everything went wrong. A number of Clementine's steel claws fractured and sheared away, causing three quarters of their prize to fall, irretrievably, back to the ocean floor — and this time in countless thousands of pieces. All the CIA was able to come away with was a 38-foot (12-meter) section of the bow — an incomplete haul at best, and missing nearly everything they had hoped to retrieve. It was impossible to try again because of the catastrophic damage to Clementine and because opening the cargo hold's doors again would drop the section they did retrieve.

Now, as you can easily imagine, that there are all kinds of conspiracy theories about the whole event, for example:

• The US actually retrieved far more of the K-129 than they claim, perhaps even all of it;
  
  
• Various alternative histories about what caused the sinking, or even whether it sank at all; including that it collided with the USS Swordfish and that the Soviets sank the USS Thresher two months later in retaliation;
  
  
• A burglary at one of Howard Hughes's offices after the recovery indicates that all kinds of valuable intelligence was recovered and stolen from Hughes;

And so on and so on. There are answers to all of these; known mainly from two sources: heavy investigative journalism from a number of reporters that revealed the entire project, and also a 2010 document release from the CIA which largely declassified the entire operation.

But of these various conspiracy theories (and the many others that are out there), only one presents a genuine mystery. For that, we're going to go back to the ship's bell that Mac Toon brought to Moscow in 1993. It is an ordinary, unassuming, ship's bronze bell, with a patina of wear, and struck with the designation K-129 on its side. For this bell, by all accounts and in accordance with all the evidence we have, should still be at the bottom of the sea, irretrievably lost beneath a hopeless tangle of wreckage. The ship's bell on a Soviet submarine was mounted on the sail — sometimes on the exterior of the sub, sometimes just inside in or near the control room. So if the CIA only recovered the foremost 38 feet of the sub, there's no way they could have gotten it.

And yet the Americans did have it — and had kept it, for nineteen years. After Mac Toon returned it to the Russians, it virtually solidified the popular Russian belief that the Americans did in fact retrieve the entire sub, or at least a lot more of it than they claimed. And this is a conspiracy theory that's very easy to believe: Of course the CIA is going to lie about how much intelligence they gathered from the Russians. The general belief in Russia, even today, is that the Americans recovered the entire forward section intact.

The bell was not the first item that was eventually given back to the Russians. A year earlier, CIA director Robert Gates personally gave to Russian President Boris Yeltsin the film footage of an at-sea burial ceremony for the bodies of six Soviet sailors who had been recovered from that small 38-foot section, along with a Soviet flag used in the ceremony. When the Glomar Explorer secured the small remaining section in its hold, the CIA went through it very carefully, cataloging everything they found, which included the bodies of six men, who were then buried at sea. The recovered items also included the crushed remains of the two torpedoes with nuclear warheads, as well as fragments of manuals for the torpedoes. A single photograph of an unidentified sailor was also turned over sometime after the bell.

The film shows the wrapped bodies being loaded into a large steel box, as they were radioactive from contamination by the nuclear torpedoes. That's consistent with the forward torpedo room — most of it anyway — being part of the recovered 38-foot section. But it's not consistent with the bell being recovered, which was much farther back in the sub. So what are some possible ways the CIA could have obtained the bell?

1. The Americans did recover the entire sub intact. This is impossible. The entire sub was 324 feet long (99 meters), and the Glomar Explorer's cargo hold was only 199 feet long. The ship was used commercially by multiple operators in later years, so we know this for a fact.
   
   
2. The Americans recovered the entire front section. This is possible but vanishingly unlikely, for the following reasons:
   
   
   1. The breakage of Clementine's arms are well documented from Clementine's own video cameras.
      
      
   2. Photographs of Clementine clearly show the broken and missing claws that were lost, making it clear that it would have been unable to hold anything except up at the very front end.
      
      
   3. Clementine and its huge floating hangar were brought back to Redwood City, CA for repairs in preparation for a second attempt to collect the rest of the forward section in a declassified program called Project Matador. It was canceled amid intense interest from the press and all kinds of leaks.
      
      
   4. These investigative journalists, including syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, Seymour Hersh from the New York Times, and Jerry Cohen and William Farr from the Los Angeles Times, interviewed many of the Glomar Explorer's former crew (who were Global Marine sailors, not CIA) and collected extensive evidence of the damage to Clementine, only the forward 38 feet being in the hold, and many of the sailors having been recruited to return for Project Matador, to get the rest of the K-129.
      
      
3. The CIA could have returned later to the wreck and retrieved the bell. This is hard to swallow for many reasons. The Glomar Explorer was surrounded by Soviet spy ships during the whole recovery, so the Soviets knew exactly where the wreck was — they just lacked the technology to go down there themselves. That spot on the ocean was under constant Soviet satellite surveillance ever since, so any further attempts would have been known. In addition, adequate ROV technology at that depth did not exist prior to Mac Toon delivering the bell to the Russians. As far as crewed submersibles go, DSV Alvin was not yet able to go that deep; the French Trieste II was, but required a substantial support fleet on the ocean surface.

It seems that every possible way the bell could have been retrieved by the Americans falls apart under scrutiny. The most authoritative English language book on the subject is Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129 by Norman Polmar, an expert and experienced professional in defense, DARPA, the Navy's Deep Submergence Systems Project and much more, and who has written some 50 books on naval intelligence, importantly including Jane's Fighting Ships during the decade of the K-129's loss and recovery. His co-author was Michael White, a researcher and documentarian who has produced several films on the case. The book was first published in 2010 following the CIA's document release. How did Polmar and White suggest that the bell got into American hands? They gave this entire huge question only this single brief mention:

One of the items removed from the submarine... was the submarine’s bell. It had apparently been removed from the sail structure and stowed in the bow compartment when the K-129 went to sea.

Which sounds, of course, much too convenient and random; why would they have taken down the bell and stowed it way up in the front of the torpedo room? They wouldn't. Consequently the explanation has received little acceptance.

However, this considers only the English language literature. What do we learn when we ask former Soviet and Russian submariners? After recruiting native Russian speakers to assist, it turns out this whole mystery does indeed have a simple solution.

The first problem encountered was that nearly everything published (in print or online) about the very obscure subject of ship's bells being moved on submarines is dominated by K-129 conspiracy theories. The challenge was to find unadulterated sources. We found nothing in Russian books on the subject, and even went through some submarine manuals but found no mention of bells or bell handling procedures. The most fruitful source turned out to be a forum frequented by retired Soviet and Russian sailors, in particular, one thread discussing this exact subject. Many forum members posted photographs of their submarine's bell. Some are mounted on the exterior of the sub, near the entrance where sailors would board; some are mounted in the interior of the sub. It seems to be entirely the personal preference of the boat's boatswain; even the choice whether to have a bell on the boat at all — some saying they'd served on submarines for years but never saw a bell. One sailor said:

Our bell was usually hidden by the boatswain, but at division headquarters, it hangs at the entrance from some ship.

Another detailed where their bell was mounted:

In the conning tower fence, on the port side near the ladders. The bell is personalized, engraved with "K-18"; "K-44" and the like. It's removed before diving.

And obviously a bell on the exterior of a submarine would need to be removed before diving! Where was it taken from there? Did Soviet subs have a special bell storage compartment? No. This was all the boatswain's personal choice and responsibility. If one found a storage spot he liked up in the forward torpedo room — or anywhere else he preferred — that's where it would have gone.

And so, a seeming headscratcher of a mystery turns out to have the most obvious solution: the one the authors of Project Azorian gave us, and which we dismissed as sounding made-up.

It was soon after the return of the bell to the Russians that they finally (after a quarter of a century) announced the names of those who had been lost on the K-129. 98 souls had been on board; of the six who had been recovered, three were identified.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning