Beneath the Pacific’s cold, crushing depths, a Soviet submarine lay silent—its secrets guarded by miles of black water. In the 1970s, the CIA set out to steal those secrets in one of the most audacious covert operations in history: Project Azorian. Disguised as a deep-sea mining mission, the Hughes Glomar Explorer reached for the wreck with a colossal claw, intent on pulling an enemy’s nuclear heart from the ocean floor.

Decades later, the espionage battlefield has shifted to the digital deep. In this episode of Phantom Bytes, we surface the story of the SolarWinds hack, an equally daring act of infiltration, this time against the vast networks that power governments and corporations. From Cold War salvage to 21st-century cyber-espionage, this is a tale of patience, precision, and the phantoms that haunt both sea and cyberspace.