SIXTY-FIVE YEARS AGO THIS MORNING, BERLIN WOKE UP TO BARBED WIRE.
You know that feeling when you've been meaning to leave a party for months, and one night you finally decide you'll do it next weekend, and then somebody welds the door shut? Roughly four million East Germans knew that feeling on the morning of August 13, 1961, which is precisely why the door got welded. More on that below, along with the fall TV slate, a new Gabriel Allon, and a wooden eagle that betrayed its country for seven years without using a single battery.
But first: the claw.
THE FILE: The Time the CIA Stole a Submarine With a Giant Claw
In March 1968, a Soviet Golf II–class submarine called K-129 sank 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii and settled 16,500 feet below the surface of the Pacific. That's more than three miles down. For reference, the deepest submarine salvage anyone had pulled off before this was 245 feet, which means the standing world record was about to be broken by a factor of sixty-seven, in secret, by a government agency. I appreciate a healthy relationship with one's own limitations.
The Soviets looked for their boat for months and went home empty. The Americans knew where it was. And on that boat were three nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, plus code materials — the kind of intelligence haul that makes an analyst's hands shake. One small problem: it was three miles underwater, and "we'd like our enemy's submarine, please" is not a request you can route through normal channels.
So the CIA did the reasonable thing. It built a 600-foot ship around a giant mechanical claw.
The claw — officially the "Capture Vehicle," unofficially Clementine, because even secret programs need a girl to sing about — measured 179 feet by 31 feet and was designed to descend three miles on a pipe string, grab a submarine, and haul it up into a hidden cavern in the ship's belly called the moon pool. The ship was the Hughes Glomar Explorer, and the Hughes part is where this becomes art.
Because you cannot park a one-of-a-kind salvage vessel over a Soviet submarine for weeks without somebody asking questions, the Agency needed a cover story, and it needed a man whose name would make any question sound stupid. Enter Howard Hughes — billionaire, aviator, recluse, exactly the sort of person who might plausibly spend a fortune to mine manganese nodules off the ocean floor. Was deep-sea nodule mining a real industry? No. Did everyone nod along, including trade journals that began covering the exciting future of seabed mining? Yes. The cover story was so good it accidentally launched genuine commercial interest in an imaginary business, which may be the only time in history a lie created an economic sector out of sheer politeness.
In the summer of 1974, the Glomar Explorer parked over the wreck, and between August 1 and August 8 — fifty-two years ago this week, because The Dangle believes in anniversaries — Clementine went down, gripped the hull, and started the long haul up.
Then, about halfway home, several of the claw's fingers failed, and the submarine broke apart. Roughly ninety percent of the prize plunged back to the seafloor, taking the missile with it. What made it into the moon pool was a 38-foot forward section — the torpedo room. According to a later Russian expert assessment, the take included at least two nuclear-armed torpedoes. The CIA's own museum will tell you, with what I can only describe as a straight face, that much of what was recovered is still classified.
What did all this cost? Here The Dangle practices what the intelligence community preaches: the honest answer is nobody outside the vault knows. The figure is still redacted from the declassified history. The National Security Archive cites later estimates of as much as $500 million in 1974 dollars; you'll see $800 million thrown around in popular accounts, but that number has never been traced to a primary source, and Smithsonian calls the price tag "ultimately unknowable." Somewhere between "staggering" and "we'd rather not say." Budget season at Langley must have been something to see.
Two codas, one somber and one immortal. The somber one: six Soviet submariners were found in the recovered section, and the crew gave them a formal military burial at sea, on film. In 1992, DCI Robert Gates handed that film to Boris Yeltsin. Whatever else this business is, the people in it occasionally remember they're human. The gesture costs nothing and means everything, which makes it the single best-value line item in the entire program.
The immortal one: when the press blew the operation open in early 1975, a journalist named Harriet Ann Phillippi filed a FOIA request, and the CIA responded with a phrase lawyers have cherished ever since: it could "neither confirm nor deny" any connection to the Glomar Explorer. She sued. The courts blessed it. And now every non-answer you've ever received from a government agency is officially called a Glomar response — there is a verb, to glomarize — all because the CIA once tried to steal a submarine with a claw and got caught.
The operation lost ninety percent of the submarine and produced one hundred percent of the world's most durable evasion. In this business, that's called a partial success. I've had weeks like that myself.
RELEASE RADAR
What's dropping, verbatim from the trade press — dates and platforms checked so you don't have to.
Books. Daniel Silva's Ransom (Gabriel Allon #26, out July 14) has Allon pulled back in when a billionaire's wife vanishes on holiday. Don Bentley's Double Tap (Mitch Rapp #25, September 15) sends young Rapp deep-cover after a kidnapped Pakistani chemical-weapons scientist. David McCloskey's Iran–Israel novel The Persian just hit UK paperback — beach-bag season is not over. And for pure fun, reviewers keep pointing at Jason M. Hough's Throw Away the Key (July 14).
Streaming. Slow Horses Season 6 lands September 16 on Apple TV+ — five weeks until Lamb. Lioness Season 3 is airing now on Paramount+ (episode 3 this Sunday). The Agency Season 2 with Michael Fassbender is mid-rollout. Black Doves Season 2 returns to Netflix this winter, and Tom Hiddleston says The Night Manager Season 3 is in active development.
Film. Liam Neeson leads The Fix (September 11, limited theatrical) — disgraced ex-CIA operators, redemption run, Tehran.
Podcasts. The Rest Is Classified is mid-series on whether Five Eyes survives the decade, with a bonus episode from a former GCHQ chief on AI.
The big fish. Bond 26 casting has reportedly moved to the next round of screen tests this month under Denis Villeneuve. Somewhere out there a young actor's life is about to turn plaid. We are watching.
THIS WEEK IN THE SHADOWS
August 13, 1961 — sixty-five years ago today. At midnight, East German police and soldiers began stringing barbed wire around West Berlin; the concrete came days later. Germans call it Barbed Wire Sunday. By that summer the GDR had hemorrhaged roughly four million citizens westward — about a sixth of the country had already voted with its feet, so the government abolished feet. The wall stood twenty-eight years, and the divided city it created became the undisputed spy capital of the world: the Berlin Tunnel wiretap ran underneath it, and in February 1962 the Abel-for-Powers exchange walked across the Glienicke Bridge and gave us the phrase "Bridge of Spies." Every checkpoint novel you love was born this week, sixty-five years ago.
THE BUG REPORT: The Eagle That Needed No Batteries
In August 1945, Soviet schoolchildren presented U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman with a hand-carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States — a gesture of friendship between wartime allies, and I want you to hold that sentence in your mind while I ruin it. Inside the eagle sat a device designed by Léon Theremin — yes, the theremin guy, then working from a Soviet prison lab — that contained no battery, no wires, and no power source of any kind. It was a passive resonant cavity: dead as driftwood until the Soviets aimed a radio beam at the building, at which point it woke up and re-broadcast every word in the room. A microphone the enemy could turn on at will, from across the street, in 1945.
The eagle hung in the ambassador's study at Spaso House for roughly seven years before a technical-security officer named Joseph Bezjian traced a suspicious signal to it in 1952. Washington then sat on the discovery for eight more years, until the Soviets made noise about the U-2 shootdown — at which point Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge produced the bugged eagle at the UN Security Council like a magician's reveal. Everyone spies. Some of us just have better woodworking.
Technicians called it "The Thing." Your contactless credit card and every RFID tag in your luggage are its direct descendants. You're welcome, and also, I'm sorry.
DEBRIEF
That's Issue 001. If you learned something, forward this to a fellow fan — The Dangle grows by word of mouth, which is the only recruitment method which doesn't decimate my kids' college fund.
And yes: this newsletter is free, and my books are not, and the universe demands balance. If a giant claw, a fake mining company, and a treacherous wooden eagle are your idea of a good time, the fiction runs even faster — the Lars Emmerich catalog lives here.
So... and I'm sure this wasn't lost on you... The Dangle truly lives up to its name.
Balance.
It's obvious to me that writing this for you is the greatest moment of my life. See you Thursday.
— Lars
Every claim above carries its source inline — that's house policy, not decoration. Where the record is disputed (looking at you, Azorian budget), we say so instead of smoothing it over. The Dangle's legal department, which does not exist, insists.