Remembering a Cold War triumph

While searching for information about the Fulton Skyhook in connection with my current fiction project, I came across references to Project Coldfeet, a CIA operation during the early 1960's. I found enough information to put together a blog article about it.

The Skyhook had its genesis in World War II experiments to recover downed aviators from behind enemy lines. The early tests used a line stretched between two tall posts, which was snagged by a passing aircraft. The 'passenger', attached to that line, was jerked off the ground and into the air, to be 'reeled in' by an operator in the aircraft. It worked, although it generated strong enough g-forces to traumatize those picked up using it. Here's a video report on how Robert Fulton developed it into the system that was named after him.

A long, detailed CIA article about the early development of the system and Fulton's improved version of it may be read here. A short Popular Mechanics article on the testing of Fulton's system may be found here.

The system was dramatized in two successful movies of the 1960's. One was the James Bond thriller 'Thunderball', where in the final scene Bond and (inevitably) his love interest are rescued by a World War II-vintage B-17 bomber equipped with Skyhook - the same aircraft that was used during Operation Coldfeet, of which more later. You can see a series of stills from the movie depicting the use of Skyhook here, and a (rather poor-quality) video clip of it here.  The other movie was 'The Green Berets', in which a captured North Vietnamese commander is lifted out of hostile territory using a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft equipped with Skyhook. I've included the scene here because it's a good illustration of how Skyhook was operated.

So much for Skyhook - now on to Project Coldfeet.  A CIA article described it some years ago.

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union battled for every advantage, including studying the Arctic for its strategic value. For seven days in May 1962, under Project COLDFEET, the US intelligence community pursued a rare opportunity to collect intelligence firsthand from an abandoned Soviet research station high in the Arctic.

The Soviet drift station – located on a floating ice island – had been hastily evacuated when shifting ice made the base runway unusable. Since the ice was breaking apart – and normal air transport to the island was now impossible – the Soviets felt the remote base and its equipment and research materials would be crushed and thoroughly destroyed in the Arctic Sea. Unfortunately for the Soviets, they were wrong.

Project COLDFEET was truly a joint venture bringing together the resources and expertise of the Office of Naval Research, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency. On May 28, using pilots and a B-17 from CIA proprietary Intermountain Aviation – accompanied by a polar navigator borrowed from Pan American Airlines – two intelligence collectors were successfully dropped by parachute onto the ice.

The B-17 – now rigged with Robert Fulton’s Skyhook – returned on June 2 to recover the team and their take. The Skyhook was a unique airborne pickup device that included a nose yolk and a special winch system.

The key measure of COLDFEET’s success was the unprecedented safe removal of the investigative team and many critical items.

The mission yielded valuable information to the US intelligence community on the Soviet Union’s drift station research activities. The team found evidence of advanced acoustical systems research to detect under-ice US submarines and efforts to develop Arctic anti-submarine warfare techniques.

This small team — incredibly courageous and resourceful — planned and executed a remarkable feat, capitalizing on a rare intelligence opportunity.

That must have been quite hair-raising for the two people dropped onto the ice. You can read more about it here, in the last two-thirds of the article, and at Wikipedia. Recommended reading.

Peter