The CIA discovers a Soviet "ghost station" filled with Cold War secrets and attempts an impossible mission

From the Movies to Reality: The Origins of Operation Coldfeet

In the 2008 blockbuster film The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne asks his engineer, Lucius Fox, how he can board a plane “without it landing.” With a wry smile, Fox replies, “Back in the 1960s, the CIA had a program to extract its agents from hot zones called Skyhook. We might want to look into that.”

This line of dialogue is based on perfectly authentic historical facts. During the Cold War, the U.S. intelligence agency did indeed develop a system capable of extracting individuals or equipment from the ground without ever touching down. The real-life story behind this technology goes far beyond the scope of cinematic fiction.

The year 1961 marked one of the most tense periods of the East-West confrontation, characterized by the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the stormy Vienna Summit, and the standoff between Soviet and American tanks at Checkpoint Charlie. In this climate of extreme vulnerability, even the slightest strategic advantage became a matter of national survival for Washington. It was in May 1961 that a U.S. Navy aircraft, during a routine aeromagnetic survey flight, happened to spot an abandoned Soviet drifting station in the middle of the Arctic ice.

The Mystery of the Soviet Drifting Stations in the Arctic

The United States was already using similar installations on the pack ice to monitor the movements of Soviet submarines. Being able to inspect the equipment and research left behind by the USSR represented an invaluable opportunity. A few days after the American discovery, Moscow publicly confirmed that Station NP9 had been evacuated. A pressure ridge had indeed destroyed the ice runway, preventing any resupply by air. To learn more about this type of scientific facility, you can read a feature on Arctic drifting stations.

Convinced that the polar environment would quickly swallow up their secrets, the Soviets had abandoned the site with complete confidence. According to a CIA historical account, Station NP9 was “too deeply embedded in the pack ice to be reached by an icebreaker, and it was out of range of helicopters.” A conventional evacuation seemed impossible.

Faced with this unprecedented logistical challenge, the U.S. military had to find an innovative way to get men to the station and retrieve them without ever landing a craft on the frozen ground. That’s when the work of an eccentric inventor provided an unexpected solution.

Robert Fulton Jr. and the Invention of the Skyhook System

The son of the president of the Mack Truck Company, Robert Edison Fulton Jr. was born in New York in 1909. Named after Thomas Edison—a close friend of his grandfather—this adventurer had already studied architecture in Vienna, visited Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1923, and traveled through 32 countries on a motorcycle during a 17-month journey. He had also worked for Pan Am as a photographer before inventing the “Gunairstructor” during World War II, a simulator designed to train aircraft gunners. His travels are detailed in a New York Times obituary dedicated to Robert Fulton Jr.

After the war, Fulton drew inspiration from All American Aviation’s postal attachment system to design the Skyhook system in 1958. Its principle relies on a harness connected to a 150-meter braided nylon rope. During recovery, a helium-filled balloon lifts the cable into the air, where it is captured by metal hooks attached to the nose of an airplane flying at approximately 145 km/h.

Tested first on dummies, then on a pig that “arrived on board unharmed but disoriented,” the device was tested on humans in the summer of 1958. The test subjects reported that the jolt was gentler than a parachute opening, comparing the sensation to “a kick in the butt.” Captain John Cadwalader then proposed using this invention for the operation dubbed Project Coldfeet.

Extreme Infiltration: The Secret Assault on NP8 Station

The operation required approval from the Navy, in collaboration with the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Office of Naval Research. Fearing a deadly failure—especially since one of the selected men, Antarctic geophysicist and Lieutenant Leonard A. LeSchack, had no experience with skydiving and had to undergo crash training—command was slow to give its approval. By the time authorization finally arrived, NP9 had drifted too far away. But in March 1962, the discovery of another station abandoned by the Soviets, NP8, revived the project just 600 miles from the Canadian base at Resolute Bay.

On May 28, 1962, after a failed attempt on May 26 due to poor visibility, a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber belonging to Intermountain Aviation (a CIA front company) took off with Lieutenant LeSchack and Commander James Smith, a paratrooper and expert Russian linguist. The two men were successfully dropped onto the ice floe for an exploration mission limited to 72 hours.

Once on the ground, the two specialists collected approximately 68 kilograms of strategically important material, including developed film, documents, and equipment samples. While the recovery, originally scheduled for May 31, was postponed due to storms, the extraction finally took place on June 2 under extreme conditions, with 30-knot winds and poor visibility that gave the ice a grayish hue.

Cold War Revelations and the Legacy of Extraordinary Technology

Despite gusts of wind that threatened to blow away the bags of precious documents, the retrieval operation using the Skyhook was a complete success. Analysis of the recovered items revealed that the USSR had a considerable lead in oceanographic research and anti-submarine warfare technologies in polar environments. Captain Cadwalader noted at the time that these discoveries attested to “extensive experience in this field and the great importance their government attaches to it.”

The Skyhook system, later renamed STAR (Surface-to-Air Recovery), continued to be used for the exfiltration of agents until a fatal accident occurred in 1982 during the Flintlock exercises, as indicated by archival documents from the Ronald Reagan Library. The technology remained in use for equipment recovery until the mid-1990s, before being replaced by long-range helicopters equipped for in-flight refueling.

Beyond the military sphere, the Skyhook made its mark on popular culture, appearing as early as 1965 in the James Bond film Thunderball, and then in 1968 in The Green Berets. Robert E. Fulton Jr. passed away in 2004 at the age of 95. His invention continues to inspire spy stories, bridging the gap between real-life Cold War exploits and modern fiction.

Source: popularmechanics.com

The CIA discovers a Soviet "ghost station" filled with Cold War secrets and attempts an impossible mission