National Underwater Reconnaissance Office

Origins and Mission

NURO was established in 1969, with Secretary of the Navy John Warner serving as its first director. According to author Jeffrey T. Richelson's The US Intelligence Community, NURO was created "as a means of managing the conduct of submarine intelligence missions and exploitation of their product." Its founding missions included:

• Recovery of sunken submarines (most prominently the Soviet K-129, recovered under Project Azorian via the Hughes Glomar Explorer in 1974)
• Tapping of Soviet underwater communication cables (the IVY BELLS program)
• Ocean floor mapping under a program designated Project Desktop
• Imagery and SIGINT collection from submarines under a program once called the Special Navy Control Program

The CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology was one of NURO's two founding agencies. According to the book Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, "From the day NURO was formed, the CIA took charge," though the Navy regained some operational authority by 1972 when Warner formally assumed the directorship.

Organizational Structure and Secrecy

NURO is described by the Association of Former Intelligence Officers as one of very few examples of "an entire government agency" protected by a Special Access Program — a distinction placing it in the same category as special mission units of the Joint Special Operations Command. The agency appears in declassified documents only in fragmentary form: a 1975 submission to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence lists NURO alongside the NRO in a National Security Decision Memorandum 40; CIA director Richard Helms's tenure is identified as contemporaneous with NURO's founding; and a 1974 National Security Council intelligence directive references NURO operations alongside the NRO.

Author Jeffrey T. Richelson was denied FOIA requests on NURO. The agency's then-current director Bobby Ray Inman was warned in a "pretty hot letter" not to discuss NURO publicly even after his retirement, as "all activities were still classified."

Key Personnel

Known or claimed NURO directors include:

• John Warner — Secretary of the Navy; first director, from NURO's 1969 founding
• Bobby Ray Inman — Director of Naval Intelligence; assumed NURO directorship 13 September 1974; the only person to have publicly admitted serving as NURO's director
• John Lehman — Secretary of the Navy; served as NURO director from approximately 1981 to 1987, per a senior CIA officer who confirmed covert submarine operations in Scandinavian waters under Lehman's direction

Key Assets

NURO has employed several specialized vessels for clandestine undersea operations:

• USS Halibut — Operated clandestine SIGINT and recovery missions, including the initial IVY BELLS cable-tapping operations
• USS Seawolf — Deployed for classified intelligence collection in restricted waters
• USS Parche — Successor to the Halibut for undersea special operations
• Hughes Glomar Explorer — Built by the CIA at an estimated modern cost of $1.68 billion; used to recover the K-129 submarine under Project Azorian; later leased to Lockheed Missiles and Space Company for ostensible "deep-sea mining" operations through Ocean Minerals Company
• NR-1 — The US Navy's first nuclear-powered deep submergence vessel, launched in 1969 coincident with NURO's founding; officially carried out search, object recovery, geological survey, and oceanographic research missions including the publicly acknowledged 1976 recovery of an F-14 lost from a carrier
• USS Jimmy Carter — Modified Seawolf-class submarine with a multi-mission platform section; identified by UAP Gerb as a likely current NURO asset

Role in Alleged UFO and USO Retrieval

Christopher Sharp of Liberation Times named NURO as a participant in undersea craft retrieval programs in a September 2024 article. Sharp's reporting — which he initially redacted and then restored due to threats — described NURO as coordinating with the CIA's Directorate of Operations and Directorate of Science and Technology, the US Navy, SOCOM, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for the retrieval of objects from beneath the oceans.

Bobby Ray Inman characterized NURO's mission as encompassing "imagery of the ocean floors, looking for anything which might be desirable from an intelligence point of view" — language UAP researchers interpret as broad enough to include non-human craft. Inman's separate private disclosures in 1989 — referring NASA mission specialist Bob Echler to CIA DS&T Deputy Director Everett Heinman as the right contact for questions about recovered craft — are treated as connecting the NURO director directly to the CIA DS&T's alleged management of recovered non-human vehicles.

The video also presents an alleged 1973 UFO retrieval in waters between Hawaii and the mainland, attributed to the Glomar Explorer, as a likely NURO operation. The timing of NURO's founding (1969), the creation of the DSRV program under the Deep Submergence Systems Project (DSSP) (1964–1972), and the alleged Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test UFO recovery (1962) are collectively cited as evidence of systematic Navy–CIA infrastructure building for undersea non-human craft retrieval.

Relationship to the Navy Special Program

UAP Gerb argues that NURO is likely subsumed within the Navy Special Program (NSP), an umbrella classification structure for naval clandestine undersea operations that appears in a 1974 National Security Council intelligence directive alongside the NRO. The NSP is described as running parallel to the National Reconnaissance Program under the Executive Committee for the Director of Central Intelligence and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. The overlap in timeframe, mission scope, and personnel (Secretary of the Navy Lehman served as both NURO director and a figure referenced in NSP documents) supports this thesis.

Sources

• US Navy UFO Crash Retrieval & Reverse Engineering Programs
• National Reconnaissance Office - UFO Crash Retrievals, Surveillance, and Legacy Program Gatekeepers
• Jeffrey T. Richelson, The US Intelligence Community
• Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage