Cliff Sims

Howard Hughes says, sounds good to me, have at it.

So they build this ship, the Glomar Explorer,

They go out, they find the submarine, bottom of the ship opens up, arm goes down, they pull the submarine up, breaks in half, about halfway up when they're pulling it.

So they were able to get some of the ship, some of it was lost forever.

So, you know, did we get good intelligence off of that?

Some say yes, some say no, you know, but there's a lot of, you know, a lot went into that.

Billions of dollars, built this ship, the whole deal.

And people thought, well, whether we got good intelligence out of it or not, no one will ever even know that this happened.

Until one day, I believe it was the LA Times, some through a weird series of events finds out what happened and they contact CIA and they say, did you guys build this ship with an arm to get a Soviet submarine and use Howard Hughes as the cover story?

They got the whole thing.

The first time ever, the CIA said, we can neither confirm nor deny

the Glomar Explorer, the whole thing, that's where the phrase we can neither confirm nor deny came from.

So to this day, if one of those requests would come in, somebody would say, just Glomar them.

Glomar Explorer, in other words, just say you can neither confirm nor deny.

I will say sincerely, sometimes it's yes, sometimes it's no.

I mean, genuinely, and there's a lot of reasons why you would, even if the answer is no, that you would still need to say, I can neither confirm nor deny.

But yes, it's genuinely not a tell one way or the other.

It would be on most things, but if it rose, I mean, it depends on how important of an issue it was.

I mean, there are very often where Director of National Intelligence and I talked about the response to, especially operational things.

If this is an operational issue,