In the 1970s the CIA wanted to build a massive ship with a large retractable claw to covertly retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine. To maintain secrecy, it asked billionaire Howard Hughes to front the project as the ship would appear to be one of his eccentric whims, ostensibly used to collect minerals from the ocean floor. When journalists caught wind of the scheme and requested documents using the Freedom of Information Act, the agency said they could “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of the documents. That is now known as the Glomar response, named after the ship Hughes built.