What are the key takeaways from this Radiolab episode?

Key insights include: **Glomar Response Origin:** CIA lawyer Walt Logan crafted the "neither confirm nor deny" legal formula in approximately 30 minutes in 1975 to address press inquiries about Project Azorian. The phrase threads a legal needle: confirming would expose classified intelligence sources and methods, while denying would constitute an outright lie — both violations of distinct legal obligations.; **FOIA Litigation Strategy:** When government agencies issue a Glomar response to a Freedom of Information Act request, recipients should expect roughly two years of litigation before courts even evaluate whether withholding is justified. The ACLU and similar large organizations counter by scanning public statements from agency officials for any casual mention that acknowledges a program's existence, which courts can use to pierce the denial.; **Glomar Scope Expansion:** Originally designed for CIA national security cases, the Glomar response has since spread to the Department of Commerce, Department of Treasury, Department of Energy, and the Centers for Disease Control. Even individual metadata requests — such as a ProPublica editor asking what call records the NSA held on him — now receive Glomar responses because confirming or denying surveillance outlines the program's contours.

What did Jeff Larson and David Sharp discuss on Radiolab?

Radiolab traces the origin of the "neither confirm nor deny" Glomar response to a 1974 CIA Cold War operation — Project Azorian — that attempted to secretly raise a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine using a claw-mounted ship built under Howard Hughes' cover story of deep-sea manganese mining. Key topics include: **Glomar Response Origin:** CIA lawyer Walt Logan crafted the "neither confirm nor deny" legal formula in approximately 30 minutes in 1975 to address press inquiries about Project Azorian. The phrase threads a legal needle: confirming would expose classified intelligence sources and methods, while denying would constitute an outright lie — both violations of distinct legal obligations.; **FOIA Litigation Strategy:** When government agencies issue a Glomar response to a Freedom of Information Act request, recipients should expect roughly two years of litigation before courts even evaluate whether withholding is justified. The ACLU and similar large organizations counter by scanning public statements from agency officials for any casual mention that acknowledges a program's existence, which courts can use to pierce the denial..

How long is this episode of Radiolab?

This episode is 29 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Radiolab

Neither Confirm Nor Deny

July 17, 2026

29 min episode · 2 min read

Jeff Larson,David Sharp

Episode

29 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Design & UX, Science & Discovery, Economics & Policy

AI-Generated Summary

Published Sep 5, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Glomar Response Origin: CIA lawyer Walt Logan crafted the "neither confirm nor deny" legal formula in approximately 30 minutes in 1975 to address press inquiries about Project Azorian. The phrase threads a legal needle: confirming would expose classified intelligence sources and methods, while denying would constitute an outright lie — both violations of distinct legal obligations.
✓FOIA Litigation Strategy: When government agencies issue a Glomar response to a Freedom of Information Act request, recipients should expect roughly two years of litigation before courts even evaluate whether withholding is justified. The ACLU and similar large organizations counter by scanning public statements from agency officials for any casual mention that acknowledges a program's existence, which courts can use to pierce the denial.
✓Glomar Scope Expansion: Originally designed for CIA national security cases, the Glomar response has since spread to the Department of Commerce, Department of Treasury, Department of Energy, and the Centers for Disease Control. Even individual metadata requests — such as a ProPublica editor asking what call records the NSA held on him — now receive Glomar responses because confirming or denying surveillance outlines the program's contours.
✓Delay as Strategy: Government agencies use Glomar responses as a deliberate time-delay mechanism. By the time multi-year court battles conclude and documents are released, public attention has shifted elsewhere. Historians who eventually unlocked Project Azorian documents succeeded only because they obtained the specific title of an internal CIA newsletter article, making it legally difficult to claim no documents existed.
✓Selective Disclosure Loophole: Agencies simultaneously Glomar FOIA requests while conducting off-the-record background briefings for journalists to correct narratives they find inaccurate. Senior unnamed officials can confirm program details verbally without triggering formal acknowledgment, because attaching no name preserves official deniability — a structural inconsistency that reporters covering drone strikes and counterterrorism regularly encounter.

What It Covers

Radiolab traces the origin of the "neither confirm nor deny" Glomar response to a 1974 CIA Cold War operation — Project Azorian — that attempted to secretly raise a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine using a claw-mounted ship built under Howard Hughes' cover story of deep-sea manganese mining.

Key Questions Answered

•Glomar Response Origin: CIA lawyer Walt Logan crafted the "neither confirm nor deny" legal formula in approximately 30 minutes in 1975 to address press inquiries about Project Azorian. The phrase threads a legal needle: confirming would expose classified intelligence sources and methods, while denying would constitute an outright lie — both violations of distinct legal obligations.
•FOIA Litigation Strategy: When government agencies issue a Glomar response to a Freedom of Information Act request, recipients should expect roughly two years of litigation before courts even evaluate whether withholding is justified. The ACLU and similar large organizations counter by scanning public statements from agency officials for any casual mention that acknowledges a program's existence, which courts can use to pierce the denial.
•Glomar Scope Expansion: Originally designed for CIA national security cases, the Glomar response has since spread to the Department of Commerce, Department of Treasury, Department of Energy, and the Centers for Disease Control. Even individual metadata requests — such as a ProPublica editor asking what call records the NSA held on him — now receive Glomar responses because confirming or denying surveillance outlines the program's contours.
•Delay as Strategy: Government agencies use Glomar responses as a deliberate time-delay mechanism. By the time multi-year court battles conclude and documents are released, public attention has shifted elsewhere. Historians who eventually unlocked Project Azorian documents succeeded only because they obtained the specific title of an internal CIA newsletter article, making it legally difficult to claim no documents existed.
•Selective Disclosure Loophole: Agencies simultaneously Glomar FOIA requests while conducting off-the-record background briefings for journalists to correct narratives they find inaccurate. Senior unnamed officials can confirm program details verbally without triggering formal acknowledgment, because attaching no name preserves official deniability — a structural inconsistency that reporters covering drone strikes and counterterrorism regularly encounter.

Notable Moment

Soviet sailors' families received death certificates listing cause of death as "presumed dead" — a phrase carrying no factual meaning — because the USSR could not acknowledge losing the K-129 submarine. The widow of the second-in-command described living with that document for thirty years, calling it inhumane.

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Episode Transcript

Radiolab is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Here's a helpful fact that you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions, and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, national average twelve month savings of $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary. Hey. This is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser, and I happen to be allergic to peanuts, like even tiny traces of them. And when you have an allergy like this, you just go around every day paranoid that there are peanuts in everything, so you always check the ingredients. And at a certain point during my childhood, there started to be written on the back of basically everything in the grocery store, this phrase may contain peanuts. And that phrase drives me up the wall because it's like, yeah, duh, it may contain peanuts. That's why I'm looking at the ingredient list in the first place. You are not giving me any more information than I had before I read this, and it is your job to give me that information. The story we have for you today is about an equally meaningless phrase that arguably has even higher stakes for democracy as a whole. We made this episode over ten years ago, but the phrase that it's about continues to flourish and be used at the highest levels of the American government, including for cases like Jeffrey Epstein and the war in Iran. I can neither confirm nor deny that you will enjoy it. Wait. Wait. You're listening. Okay. Alright. Okay. Alright. Listening You're Listening Radiolab Radiolab. From WNY seats. Yep. Rewind. Hey. I'm Jad Abumrod. And I'm Robert Krowich. And today on the podcast Hey, Robert. Can Can you scoot back a little bit from the mic? I think I won't worry. We have a cloak and dagger maritime adventure in secrecy and truth from reporter Julia Barton. So, Jeff, maybe first you could start off just by introducing yourself. Yeah. So the story for me begins with this guy. Yeah. My name is, Jeff Larson. I'm the data editor at ProPublica. ProPublica is this investigative journalism outfit, and Jeff does a lot of their Data based reporting. So in any case, it was summer of twenty thirteen. You know that big story about how the NSA had just been monitoring millions of Verizon customers? Mhmm. That just came out. Jeff's watching the story like all of us are, and then the thought occurred to him, jeez, they're monitoring all of these people. Hey. Does that include me? So he goes over to the NSA's website, and he was surprised to find it …

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