The U.S. Coast Guard has found more debris and evidence from the Titan submersible that went missing and imploded in June, according to a statement from the service released Tuesday.
The Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigations, working with marine safety engineers, recovered the material on Oct. 4 in a follow-up operation to the initial recovery mission in June, the statement said.
“The recovered evidence was successfully transferred to a U.S. port for cataloging and analysis,” the statement read. “Additional presumed human remains were carefully recovered from within Titan’s debris and transported for analysis by U.S. medical professionals.”
The submersible was carrying four passengers who had paid $250,000 to go on a deep-sea expedition led by the private company OceanGate to see the wreckage of the Titanic in June. The fifth person aboard was OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was piloting the vessel.
On June 18, the 21-foot submersible went missing about 300 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, prompting an intensive search. The Coast Guard, with the help of other groups and international teams, used planes, ships and remotely operated vehicles to try to locate the craft.
After a frantic search that lasted days, the Coast Guard announced that an ROV had identified a debris field in the search area and five major pieces of debris that appeared to be from the submersible were found.
The Coast Guard and OceanGate said the passengers were believed to have died when the submersible imploded hours after its launch. Later in June, the Coast Guard confirmed that it had recovered debris and evidence presumed to be the human remains of the Titan’s five occupants, which was sent for formal analysis and testing by medical professionals.
“The MBI is coordinating with [the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board] and other international investigative agencies to schedule a joint evidence review of recovered Titan debris,” read Tuesday’s statement from the Coast Guard. “This review session will help determine the next steps for necessary forensic testing.”
For nearly a decade, US Coast Guard leaders have concealed a critical report that exposed racism, hazing, discrimination and sexual assault across the agency.
The 2015 “Culture of Respect” study, a copy of which was obtained by CNN, documented how employees complained of a “boys will be boys” and “I got through it so can you” culture. Many said they feared they would be ostracized and retaliated against for reporting abuse and that those who did come forward often had their complaints dismissed by supervisors.
Some of the report’s core findings mirrored those of another secret investigation into rapes and sexual assaults at the Coast Guard’s academy. The existence of that probe, which was dubbed Operation Fouled Anchor and completed in 2019, was revealed by CNN earlier this year. That investigation found that serious misconduct had been ignored and, at times, covered up by high-ranking officials, allowing alleged offenders to rise within the ranks of the Coast Guard and other military branches.
Following CNN’s stories on the Fouled Anchor investigation and subsequent Congressional outrage, the Coast Guard’s commandant, Linda Fagan, apologized to cadets and the workforce, and acknowledged that the Coast Guard needed to be more transparent to service members, Congress and the public about such matters.
“Trust and respect thrive in transparency but are shattered by silence,” she wrote.
But under her watch, the Coast Guard continued to keep the report hidden from the public even though she had been asked to release it long before the Fouled Anchor controversy unfolded this summer. And although the Culture of Respect study is more than eight years old, more than a dozen current and recent Coast Guard employees and academy cadets told CNN many of the problems that were identified continue to plague the agency.
In response to questions from CNN this week, a spokesman for Fagan said the commandant plans to make the report public next week as part of her “commitment to transparency,” alongside the findings from a 90-day internal study of sexual assault and harassment within the agency, prompted by the Fouled Anchor reporting.
Coast Guard officials further said in a statement that the Culture of Respect report was not originally intended to be released widely to the workforce, but rather was to be used by senior leaders to inform policy decisions. Officials, however, did not explain why Fagan had not found a way to release the report sooner, particularly since alleged victims or perpetrators were not named in the report.
The document has long been shrouded in secrecy. The copy of the report obtained by CNN states that it was to be stored in “a locked container or area offering sufficient protection against theft, compromise, inadvertent access and unauthorized disclosure.” It was to be distributed only to people on a “need to know basis” and should not be released to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, the report stated.
The study, which was conducted internally and included interviews from nearly 300 people from across the organization, highlighted concerns that “blatant sexual harassment of women” and hazing were regularly accepted as just part of the culture. Those accused of discrimination, assault and other misconduct, were allowed to “escape accountability and instead resign, retire, or transfer,” the report found, with some offenders getting rehired by the Coast Guard in civil service positions even after being forced to retire or otherwise leave military service. “We are allowing potentially dangerous members back into society with no punishment,” stated one employee. Others said leaders brushed serious problems ‘under the rug,” and that “senior leaders care about themselves and their careers” instead of “the folks that work for them.”
Authors of the report also noted a common concern among victims of misconduct, who said they believed coming forward would mean putting their careers on the line with little hope of their alleged perpetrators facing serious consequences. “Victims are ostracized, there is a stigma,” one person told interviewers. “No one believes them, no one helps them.”
Even seeking mental health treatment could prove risky, they said, with one interviewee bringing up how the Coast Guard could “involuntarily discharge” employees diagnosed with a mental health condition in the wake of an assault or other traumatic experience on the job.
Examples cited in the report reveal a culture in which service members faced pervasive assault, harassment, sexism, racism and other discrimination. In one case, multiple witnesses saw a supervisor striking a subordinate but nobody came forward to report it because of fear of retaliation.
Improving the Coast Guard’s culture would in some cases require “fundamentally different approaches,” the report concluded. The Coast Guard said this week it had enacted or partially enacted 60 of 129 recommendations, including additional training and additional support services for victims. Nine more are in the works, according to the Coast Guard’s statement agency, and the it “found better ways to achieve the desired result” for 20 others.
The original report had also recommended that a new review be conducted every four years, but that did not happen. The Coast Guard said other studies of the workforce culture have been conducted instead.
Recent government data and records, meanwhile, show that dangerous and discriminatory behavior is still rarely punished at the agency.
Almost half of female service members who reported a case of sexual harassment said the person they complained to took no action, according to a 2021 military survey. Nearly a third said they were punished for bringing up the harassment. Meanwhile, the vast majority of women who allegedly experienced “unwanted sexual contact” said they chose not to report it, often citing concerns about negative consequences or that the process wouldn’t be fair and that nothing would end up coming of their allegations.
Instead, records show how employees found to have committed serious wrongdoing have escaped court martial proceedings or military discharge. As a result, alleged perpetrators avoided criminal records and their retirement benefits were not affected.
A cadet at the Coast Guard Academy accused of sexual assault by two different classmates in the 2019-20 school year, for example, was kicked out of the academy but allowed to enlist in the Coast Guard to pay back the cost of the schooling he had received. Around the same time, a lieutenant commander was allowed to resign in lieu of going to trial for military crimes including sexual assault and drunk and disorderly conduct. Even when another officer was found guilty at a court martial of abusing his seniority to “obtain sexual favors with a subordinate,” he received only a letter of reprimand.
The Coast Guard did not comment on concerns that problems remain at the agency, or the statistics or examples cited by CNN.
The limited access to the Culture of Respect has been a topic of contention for years within the workforce and even Congress.
Fagan was asked about the report last year by Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman in a list of questions submitted as part of Congressional testimony. She criticized the agency for not releasing it publicly, saying this was “limiting the workforce and the public’s visibility into the problems that were identified and the recommended solutions.”
Watson Coleman also pushed Fagan, who took the helm of the Coast Guard in June of 2022, to commit to completing a new study and releasing it to the public this time, but Fagan did not directly answer the question – instead citing other recent studies.
More recently, Fagan was asked about releasing the report while attending a faculty meeting at the Coast Guard Academy. She was there following the Fouled Anchor debacle, promising more transparency when a captain who taught at the school called upon her to release the Culture of Respect report, according to multiple people who attended the meeting.
Retired Coast Guard Commander Kimberly Young-McLear, who is a Black lesbian woman, has been perhaps the most vocal in requesting that the report be released.
Her efforts to get the report disseminated stem from her own complaints about “severe and pervasive bullying, harassing, and discriminating behavior” based on her race, gender, sexual orientation and advocacy for equal opportunity in the Coast Guard.
After filing a whistleblower complaint in 2017, the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General found that she had indeed faced unlawful retaliation. Yet to this day, none of the accused service members from her case have faced any consequences. Young-McLear said she has never received a written apology from Coast Guard leaders despite requests from Congress, and that the years of harassment and lack of accountability have taken a significant mental toll on her.
She said she learned about the existence of the Culture of Respect report while she worked at the Coast Guard’s academy and that she was able to read it when she attended a small summit discussing its findings in 2019. She was outraged when she saw that it exposed the same issues she had reported.
“Had the Coast Guard actually taken the 2015 Culture of Respect report results seriously… then perhaps the years of bullying, harassment, intimidation, and retaliation I endured could have been prevented altogether,” Young-McLear said in Congressional testimony at 2021 hearing on diversity and accountability within the Coast Guard, questioning why the report still hadn’t been made public.
In the last four years, Young-McLear said she has asked for the report to be released more than two dozen times, to various admirals and to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Coast Guard. A handful of other academy employees have made similar pleas at faculty meetings with the school’s superintendent, she said. “We’ve been saying it until we’ve been blue in the face.”
The Coast Guard’s secrecy and inaction, she says, speak to the very same issues the Culture of Respect report and other examinations have repeatedly raised and show that the agency has failed to hold itself to task in the same way perpetrators have been let off the hook.
“If we don’t hold individuals and institutions accountable,” said Young-McLear, “it is providing a safe haven for abusers and allowing them to rise through the ranks.”
Do you have information or a story to share about the Coast Guard past or present? Email melanie.hicken@cnn.com and Blake.Ellis@cnn.com.
The US Coast Guard, rocked by allegations that its leaders for years concealed damning information about sexual assaults and other serious misconduct, released a highly critical report Wednesday acknowledging it had “failed to keep our people safe,” while vowing to make reforms that would better protect them.
After spending 90 days speaking with hundreds of service members, reading through more than 170 written comments and “sifting through a mountain of data,” an internal review team said it had heard a resounding message from the workforce that “these failures and lack of accountability are entirely unacceptable” and that leaders “must do something about it.”
“Too many Coast Guard members are not experiencing the safe, empowering workplace they expect and deserve (and) trust in Coast Guard leadership is eroding,” the authors wrote in the roughly 100-page report, noting that they had heard from victims of sexual assault and harassment stretching from the 1960s to the current day who “expressed deep rooted feelings of pain and a loss of trust in the organization.”
The scathing internal review was launched after CNN exposed a secret criminal investigation, dubbed Operation Fouled Anchor, which found that serious misconduct had been ignored and, at times, covered up by high-ranking officials. It wasn’t until CNN started asking questions about Fouled Anchor this spring that Coast Guard leaders rushed to officially brief Congress on the scandal — leading to outrage on both sides of the aisle, multiple government investigations and proposed legislation.
CNN’s coverage of Fouled Anchor and subsequent reporting revealing that Coast Guard leaders declined to prosecute a retired officer for sexual misconduct “have led people to experience feelings ranging from disappointment to outrage,” the report said.
“For so many victims, there are even deeper levels of broken trust: in leaders who failed them in preventing and responding to sexual violence; in a military justice system with antiquated legal definitions of rape; in non-existent support programs for those impacted prior to 2000,” it stated. While the report outlined a number of changes made in the last two decades, it also acknowledged that reforms to date have not been enough to prevent assaults and properly support victims.
The review did not seek to hold past perpetrators or officials involved with the Fouled Anchor cover-up accountable, saying multiple government investigations launched by Congress remained ongoing.
Instead, it looked to the future and focused on preventing future assaults and other misconduct, describing the report as a “road map aimed at improving” the agency’s culture.
Along with the report’s findings, the Coast Guard announced a series of actions directed by the agency’s leader, Commandant Linda Fagan, through recommended changes to everything from training and victim support services to strengthening processes for holding perpetrators accountable.
“This report acknowledges the Coast Guard’s failures and uses them to inform a way ahead, rebuild trust, and set the baseline for organizational growth,” the document states, noting that many of the actions require additional funding and authority to implement.
Among the reforms are the creation of a mentorship program for victims to help them navigate the aftermath of a sexual assault, the development of a “safe to report” policy so that victims are not penalized for collateral minor misconduct (such as alcohol use at the time of an incident), more secure locks on Coast Guard Academy bedrooms and improved oversight of the school and its cadets – including a new chain of command for the academy head.
Fagan also directed officials to better keep tabs on the academy’s hallmark “Swab Summer” training program, which is run by upperclassmen at the academy, and to consider strengthening policies that allow the agency to reduce pension payments for those found to have committed misconduct.
The report was the Coast Guard’s most expansive response to the growing criticism of its handling of misconduct. And while it was being released publicly, and members of Congress had been briefed on its contents earlier, the report was specifically addressed to “U.S. Coast Guard workforce, past and present.”
“You made it clear that you want and expect our Service to confront this issue and make it better. You want our Service to deliver meaningful change,” the report stated. “Whether you’re a member who has a story to share — or the shipmate standing beside them — this is our time. Let’s get it right.”
While the Coast Guard is focused on the future, members of Congress are still determined to get answers about past failures as well.
“This new report still does not hold anyone accountable for past failures—particularly those at the Coast Guard Academy,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, where the Coast Guard Academy is located. Murphy and other lawmakers have continued to slam the agency for its failure to be transparent about sexual assault and other misconduct. “It does lay out a modest plan to improve oversight, training, and support for survivors, but a report is nothing more than paper until concrete steps are taken.”
Democratic Senators Maria Cantwell and Richard Blumenthal also criticized how, despite calling this effort an “accountability” review, the Coast Guard still failed to hold anyone to task for the mishandling of sexual assault cases. Cantwell reiterated the importance of an independent investigation, saying she is looking forward to seeing the results of the probe currently being conducted by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General.
Earlier this year, CNN reported how former Commandant Karl Schultz and his second-in-command, Vice Commandant Charles Ray, failed to act on plans to share the findings of Fouled Anchor with Congress and the public. Ray resigned from his position at a Coast Guard Academy leadership institute soon after, but no other current or former Coast Guard officials have publicly faced any consequences.
“Current Coast Guard personnel are being told to trust their leadership, but their leaders aren’t holding predecessors accountable,” K. Denise Rucker Krepp, a former Coast Guard officer and former chief counsel of the Maritime Administration wrote in a recent letter to Congress, describing how she had attended a “community healing” event sponsored by the Coast Guard Academy Alumni Association last month.
“Before my first cup of coffee I learned about a woman who was raped shortly after joining the service. She never told her parents about the crime,” she wrote. “While washing my hands in the bathroom, another woman shared that she was raped while attending the Coast Guard Academy in the late 1990s. Another woman shared that she was gang-raped by three students at the school and had spent two-thirds of her life on medication because of the crimes that occurred almost 40 years ago.”
Next week, more survivors of sexual assault and harassment at the Coast Guard Academy are slated to share their experiences publicly in a Congressional hearing. The hearing, announced just yesterday, is part of an ongoing Senate probe launched in reaction to the Fouled Anchor cover-up.
Do you have information or a story to share about the Coast Guard past or present? Email melanie.hicken@cnn.com and Blake.Ellis@cnn.com.
Jonathan Small is editor-in-chief of Green Entrepreneur, a vertical from Entrepreneur Media focused on the intersection of sustainability and business. He is also an award-winning journalist, producer, and podcast host of the upcoming True Crime series, Dirty Money, and Write About Now podcasts. Jonathan is the founder of Strike Fire Productions, a premium podcast production company. He had held editing positions at Glamour, Stuff, Fitness, and Twist Magazines. His stories have appeared in The New York Times,TV Guide, Cosmo, Details, and Good Housekeeping. Previously, Jonathan served as VP of Content for the GSN (the Game Show Network), where he produced original digital video series.
As rescuers frantically search a swath of the Atlantic Ocean the size of Connecticut for the missing OceanGate submarine, a Canadian plane with sonar capabilities “detected underwater noises in the search area,” the US Coast Guard announced via Twitter.
Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area. As a result, ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue. 1/2
The Coast Guard provided no further information about the detected sounds or how they were picked up.
Earlier today, Richard Garriott de Cayeux, president of the Explorers Club, tweeted: “We understand that likely signs of life have been detected at the site. “We await hopefully good news.”
Message from President Richard Garriott Regarding the Ongoing Titanic Search and Rescue Mission pic.twitter.com/ec7YX5VQCY
Aircraft from the U.S. and Canada have been scanning the surface for the submarine while sonar buoys have been pinging the bottom of the ocean.
The Titan submersible carrying five high-profile tourists began its journey to the Titanic wreckage on Sunday morning. But it lost contact with a chartered Canadian research vessel about an hour and 45 minutes into the dive. International rescue teams are racing to locate the vessel before the air runs out.
The US Coast Guard is assisting Mexican navy crews in the search for three American sailors, last heard from on April 4 near Mazatlán, Mexico, according to a Coast Guard news release.
Kerry O’Brien, Frank O’Brien and William Gross are all “experienced sailors,” according to a joint statement from their families. They were aboard the Ocean Bound, a 44-foot La Fitte sailing vessel, when they left the Mexican city of Mazatlán en route to San Diego, the Coast Guard said.
“The sailors planned to stop in Cabo San Lucas on April 6 for provisions and to report in before continuing on to San Diego,” the news release said.
“However, there was no record of them arriving in Cabo San Lucas or a report in of their location.”
Rescue coordinators have contacted marinas throughout Baja, Mexico, but there have been no sightings of the vessel, the news release said.
“Urgent marine information broadcasts have been issued over VHF radio requesting all mariners to keep a lookout for the missing persons and vessel,” the Coast Guard said.
Coast Guard officials urge anyone with information on the sailors or the sailing vessel to call the Coast Guard search and rescue coordination center at 510-437-3701.
Cmdr. Greg Higgins, search mission coordinator for the US Coast Guard, said the weather was less than ideal when the trio set out.
“When they began their voyage we know that the conditions were not optimal for that type of trip, though certainly, there were sailing vessels out there during that time. Winds potentially over 30 knots and seas 15 to 20, maybe more, feet at the time of their voyage,” Higgins told CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield Saturday.
“It’s a long trip for even in good conditions, from Mazatlán to Cabo. That’s two days, and certainly on to San Diego, which was their eventual destination. And since then it has improved marginally,” he added.
Higgins said he hopes to gather information from witnesses who might have seen the sailors who went missing.
“The Mexican Navy, now based in La Paz, Mexico, has the lead for search efforts, so there are numerous Mexican naval search and rescue assets that are working the case,” Higgins said. “For our portion, to support the excellent partnership that we have with Mexico and the Mexican Navy.
“We’ve conducted search planning, so we’re using computer search tools to identify where the vessel may be based on environmental conditions, winds, and currents, where it may have drifted if they became distressed, as well as Coast Guard aircraft, searching with the permission of Mexico, and Coast Guard cutters searching as well,” Higgins said.
The three Americans “are all experienced sailors,” according to a joint statement from their families.
“Bill has over 50 years of sailing experience and is an extremely talented coastal cruiser. Kerry and Frank have 20 years sailing together and both hold captains licenses with the US Coast Guard,” according to the statement.
Ocean Bound, described as “a sturdy older vessel,” departed Mazatlán on April 4 at about 9:30 a.m. local time. It headed “across the Sea of Cortez, a short stop had been planned in Cabo San Lucas and then to sail up the coast of Baja to San Diego,” the statement said. When they didn’t check in by the weekend, the Coast Guard was notified.
“Cell phone pings on 4/4/2023 show off the coast of Mazatlan as calls to marinas in Cabo San Lucas,” according to the families.
Their families presume they were trying to make slip reservations at the marina. But, because all the calls made were so short, it’s believed the attempts to reach someone were unsuccessful, said the statement. That calls are the last known contact with the Ocean Bound.
According to family, the Coast Guard “has a current ‘travel projection’ if Ocean Bound simply lost radio contact and continued her journey to San Diego at just North or South of Turtle Bay (Bahia Tortugas) on the Baja Peninsula and is focused on searching there, in addition to long aircraft sweeps along the Baja Peninsula.”
The parameters are reassessed each night to redefine the search the next day, according to the statement.
“The sailing community has hundreds of additional vessels looking for our family members,” said the joint statement.
The families thanked the Mexican Navy and US Coast Guard for their search and rescue operations.
“They have communicated all of their efforts with kindness and compassion more than once a day,” said the statement.
The US Coast Guard says it is tracking a suspected Russian spy ship off the coast of Hawaii in international waters as heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow remain over Russian’s war in Ukraine.
“In recent weeks, the U.S. Coast Guard has continued to monitor a Russian vessel, believed to be an intelligence gathering ship, off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands,” the USCG said in a news release.
The Coast Guard noted the situation is not unusual but that it is tracking it closely. “While foreign military vessels may transit freely through the U.S. economic exclusive zone (EEZ), as per customary international laws, foreign-flagged military vessels have often been observed operating and loitering within Coast Guard District Fourteen’s area of response,” the release stated.
This is not the first time suspected Russia spy ships have sailed off the coast of the United States. In 2019, a Russian spy ship off the southeastern coast of the United States was observed operating in what two US officials told CNN was an “unsafe manner.”
Watch: Russian spy ship sails recklessly off US (December 2019)
The actions of the Viktor Leonov, a Russian surveillance ship sailing off the coast of South Carolina and Florida, were determined to be unsafe because it was not using running lights in low visibility weather and was not responding to commercial vessels’ attempts to communicate to avoid potential accidents.
The USCG said in the release that it “continues to coordinate with Department of Defense partners, providing updates to foreign vessel movements and activities and to appropriately meet presence with presence to encourage international maritime norms.”
Military: Russian spy ship moving toward US (2018)
