The
Glomar Explorer was a large salvage vessel built by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for its covert "
Project Azorian"—an attempted salvaging of a sunken Soviet
submarine. In February 1975, aware of the pending publication of a story in the
Los Angeles Times, the CIA sought to stop the story's publication. Journalist
Harriet Ann Phillippirequested that the CIA provide disclosure of both the Glomar project and its attempts to
censor the story, to which the CIA chose to "neither confirm nor deny" both the project's existence and its attempts to keep the story unpublished. This claim stood, and Phillippi's FOIA request was rejected, though when the
Ford administration was replaced by the
Carter administration in 1977 after the
1976 presidential election, the government position on the particular case was softened and both of Phillippi's claims were confirmed.
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The "Glomar response" precedent still stood, and has since had bearing in FOIA cases such as in the 2004 lawsuit
American Civil Liberties Union v. Department of Defense, wherein Federal Judge
Alvin Hellerstein rejected the
Department of Defense and CIA's use of the Glomar response in refusing to release documents and photos depicting
abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.
"Glomar" is the
syllabic abbreviation of
Global Marine, the company commissioned by the CIA to build the Glomar Explorer.
The original text of the Glomar response was written by Walt Logan (
pseudonym), who was at that time an Associate General Counsel at the CIA. So as not to divulge to the
Soviet Union either what the CIA knew or did not know, the response read: "We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified, and could not be disclosed."
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