In May 1961, a U.S. Navy aircraft was flying a routine submarine patrol over the Arctic Ocean when it spotted something unusual on the pack ice below: a small cluster of plywood buildings. This was the remains of the Soviet drifting ice station NP-9, hastily abandoned when an ice ridge began destroying the station’s runway. This discovery immediately piqued the interest of U.S. Naval Intelligence, who recognized the abandoned station as a potential intelligence bonanza. But how to get to it? Floating nearly 1,000 kilometres from the nearest American military base at Thule, Greenland, NP-9 was beyond the range of any helicopter and could not be reached by icebreakers before the ice beneath it broke up and melted. Fixed wing aircraft could reach the station and drop men by parachute, but then there was the matter of recovering them afterward. Thankfully, the Navy had a trick up its sleeve, a gadget so outlandish it looked like something straight out of a James Bond movie – and indeed would later be featured in one: the Fulton Surface-to-Air Recovery System. This is the story of Project COLDFEET, one of the most badass intelligence missions of the Cold War.

The Soviets were the first to establish long-term research stations on floating pack ice, starting with Severny Polyus or North Pole 1 in 1937. Manned by crews of civilian scientists, these stations carried out a variety of research on ice dynamics, oceanography, meteorology, geophysics, and marine biology. But in the Cold War era, U.S. Office of Naval Research or ONR began to suspect that these stations also carried acoustic equipment for tracking American nuclear submarines beneath the ice. Until 1961, however, there was no proof to back up these suspicion.

What became known as Project COLDFEET was spearheaded by U.S. Navy Lieutenant Leonard LeSchack, one of the Navy’s foremost experts on Arctic operations who had helped set up submarine tracking equipment on Ice Island T-3. The abandonment of NP-9, he realized, was a golden opportunity to learn more about Soviet submarine tracking capabilities and arctic research in general. As he later recalled:

“I realized that if we kept track of Soviet stations, particularly the ones around Canada, then we could tell when they broke up… And we know from our own experience that these stations that have been lived on for months and months, can’t be abandoned all that quickly. And a lot of the things that were there, were likely to be left there.”

LeSchack’s idea to investigate the abandoned station soon came to the attention of Navy Captain John Cadwalader, who saw the mission as a perfect opportunity to try out one of the Navy’s newest gadgets: the Fulton Surface-to-Air Recovery System, better known as the “Skyhook.”

The Skyhook was the brainchild of American inventor Robert Edison Fulton Jr. Born on April 15, 1909 in New York City, Fulton grew up immersed in the world of mechanics, his father being the president of the Mack Trucks. As a result of this connection, Fulton had a privileged upbringing, being among the few in the 1920s able to regularly travel the world by air. Originally intending to be an architect, Fulton graduated from Harvard in 1931 and spent a further two years studying at the University of Vienna. Then, in 1932, he embarked on an epic 17-month motorcycle trip from London to Tokyo, covering 64,000 kilometres and crossing 32 countries. This odyssey would form the basis for a book and documentary film titled One Man Caravan.

On returning to the United States, he joined Pan American Airways as a photographer and helped plan out the trans-Pacific route for the airline’s Clipper flying boats. Then, on the outbreak of the Second World War, Fulton turned his mechanical interests to the development of a device that used projected film strips to train aerial gunners. He brought his design to Commander Luis de Florez, head of the Engineering Division of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, who immediately saw the potential and ordered 500 units. Not only was the Fulton Gunnery Trainer was one of the most widely-used simulators of the war, but Fulton’s connection to de Florez was to pay large dividends later – and for more on another ingenious training device from this period, please check out our previous video The Steampunk Flight Simulator That Helped Win World War II.

After the war, Fulton turned his attention to an even more ambitious project: the Airphibian, a flying car design he hoped would eventually be found in every garage. The car, more properly termed a roadable aircraft, comprised a streamlined aluminium cabin with four pylon-mounted wheels, and engine, and a propeller which could be fitted with a combined wing-tail unit to convert it into a working light aircraft. The Airphibian first flew in 1946, and while it showed great promise, Fulton soon ran out of money and was forced to sell the manufacturing rights to keep the project going. Unfortunately, the new owners decided not to pursue the idea, and the venture folded.

It is at this point, in the early 1950s, that Fulton began tackling a problem that had been plaguing the military for years: how to recover downed airmen, secret agents, and other personnel from enemy territory that couldn’t be reached by helicopter? Fulton’s solution was based on an older design called the All-American System, developed by All American Aviation in the 1920s to pick up air mail in remote areas without proper runways. In this system, a mailbag was tied to a long line strung between two steel poles set 54 apart. An aircraft trailing a grappling hook would then fly low and snatch the line, then winch the mailbag aboard. In July 1943, the U.S. Army attempted to adapt the system to recover downed airmen and secret agents. Initial experiments using instrumented, weighted containers were less than promising, producing 17 G accelerations that would kill most human beings. However, modifications to the recovery line and harness reduced this to a more reasonable 7 Gs, and the Army moved on to live testing with sheep. While the first sheep got tangled up in the line and was strangled, other sheep fared better, and on September 5, 1943, army paratrooper Lieutenant Alex Doster became the first human to be “snatched” using the All-American system, the pickup taking place at 200 kilometres per hour and taking only 3 minutes from start to finish. The system was soon refined into a compact kit with telescoping poles that could be easily airdropped to and set up by personnel in the field. But while the U.S. military never used the All-American System to pick up people, it did use a variation to recover combat gliders in Europe and Burma.

Robert Fulton saw much room for improvement in the All-American Design, and set about creating his own version. Instead of being slung between two poles, in Fulton’s system the recovery line was held aloft by a helium balloon, which was much easier for a lone airman or agent to deploy. The recovery aircraft was fitted with a set of angled “horns” projecting from its nose, which would “snatch” the line and lift the airman into the air. The crew aboard the aircraft would then use a hook at the end of a long pole to catch the line, connect it to an onboard winch, and winch the airman aboard. The trickiest part of the system to design was a mechanism at the base of the “horns” that would latch onto the recovery line and cut the balloon free; without this, the drag on the balloon would rapidly pull the airman into the aircraft, potentially injuring or even killing him.

Fulton filmed preliminary experiments using a weather balloon and weighted containers, and sent the resulting footage to his old friend Luis de Florez – now an Admiral and the Director of Technical Research at the CIA. De Florez referred Fulton to the Office of Naval Research or ONR, who set up a special research unit at El Centro, California. Using a Lockheed P2V Neptune patrol aircraft fitted with two 30-foot, 70-degree pickup horns, Fulton and his colleagues perfected the recovery system and condensed it into a compact, air-droppable kit containing a harness, recovery line, dart-shaped balloon, and a pair of helium tanks. The first live pickups conducted with pigs were successful, though the first test subject spun wildly at the end of the recovery line and arrived aboard the aircraft completely discombobulated. It quickly recovered, whereupon it proceeded to attack the crew – and really, who can blame it? The first human pickup using the perfected Fulton Surface-to-Air Recovery System – AKA the “Skyhook” – took place on August 12, 1958, with U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Levi Woods volunteering to be recovered. Woods described the experience as a “kick in the pants” but less surprisingly less violent than a regular parachute opening.

The first operational use of the Skyhook took place in August 1960, conducted by Edward A Rogers, commander of the Naval Air Development Unit, and Dr. Max Brewer, head of the Navy Arctic Research Laboratory. The pair flew the Fulton-equipped P2V to Point Barrow, Alaska, where they used the system to recover mail from Floating Ice Island T-3 and mastodon tusks, indigenous artifacts, and geological samples from a research camp near Peters Lake. The climax of the test came when Rogers and Brewer dropped a Fulton kit near the icebreaker USS Burton Sound, whose crew recovered the package and used it to effect a successful manned pickup. These tests confirmed that the Skyhook was reliable and ready for action – and for more on a bizarre incident that took place on Ice Island T-3, please check out our previous video A Total Legal Clusterf$$k: Murder on Ice.

Preliminary planning for Project COLDFEET was authorized by Rear Admiral L.D. Coates, Chief of Naval Research. The mission was scheduled for September 1961, when weather and light conditions would be favourable and NP-9 would be within 970 kilometres of the U.S. Air Force Base in Thule, Greenland. The men selected to investigate the drift station were Lieutenant LeSchack and Air Force Major James Smith, who was not only an experienced parachutist and a Russian linguist but had also served aboard the American drift stations Alpha and Charlie. Not being jump-qualified, Leschack quickly completed a parachuting course at Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey before he and Smith trained on the Fulton system at the Naval Test Center in Patuxent River, Maryland.

But just as all the elements of the mission were coming together, unexpected complications cropped up. Final authorization from Naval Command took longer than expected, while cold-weather tests of the Fulton system revealed technical issues which had to be corrected. By the time everything was ready, NP-9 had drifted out of range and the mission had to be scrubbed.

Thankfully, the team was soon granted another chance, for in March 1962 a naval patrol spotted another Russian drift station – NP-8 – abandoned on the ice. Not only was the station a more advanced model than NP-9, but it was also more accessible, lying less than 1000 kilometres from the Canadian Armed Forces Base at Resolute Bay, Northwest Territories – today Nunavut. After obtaining permission from the Canadian Government, in Mid-April the Fulton-equipped P2V and a Lockheed C-130 Hercules support aircraft flew to Resolute Bay via Fort Churchill, Manitoba. The team had hoped that the latest Hydrographic Office ice survey would confirm the location of NP-8, but bad weather prevented a sighting. But as the last sighting was only a month old, the team was confident they could easily locate their target. Soon after arriving at Resolute Bay, the C-130 support aircraft flew to NP-8’s last known permission and began a box search in 10-mile increments. But while the crew succeeded in spotting the American drift station Charlie, NP-8 was nowhere to be found. Four more searches were conducted over the following days before the worsening weather once again forced the mission to be abandoned. To add insult to injury, no sooner had the team returned to the United States, a Hydrographic Office patrol spotted NP-8 far east of its predicted position. But by this time, Navy funding for Project COLDFEET had run out.

Undeterred, Captain Cadwalader approached another government department likely to be interested in NP-8: the CIA. As luck would have it, Robert Fulton had worked with Intermountain Aviation, a CIA subsidiary based in Marana, Arizona, to equip a Boeing B1-7 Flying Fortress with an aerial recovery system. The CIA agreed to provide the B-17, a Curtiss C-46 Commando support aircraft, and $30,000 in funding to complete Project COLDFEET, and over the next six months, Intermountain Aviation pilots Connie Seigrist and Douglas Price flew dozens of practice pickups to thoroughly familiarize themselves with the Fulton system. Finally, in May 1962, Seigrist and Price, along with LeSchack, Smith, and Pan American Airways navigator William Jordan, flew to Point Barrow, Alaska, which was chosen in place of Resolute Bay to avoid waiting for permission from the Canadian Government. The team arrived on May 26, and the following day the support aircraft took off in search of NP-8. Unfortunately, a thick fog had rolled in, and despite searching for 13 hours the aircraft returned to Port Barrow empty-handed.

When the next day’s search also proved fruitless, the team called in a Navy P2V from Patrol Squadron One at Kodiak, Alaska, which on May 28 used its superior navigation equipment to finally locate the Soviet station. The B-17 took off and rendezvoused at the site, and after dropping streamers to check the wind, LeSchack and Smith jumped through the aircraft’s “Joe Hole” and parachuted onto the ice. After the pair radioed that they had landed safely, the B-17 returned to Point Barrow where Intermountain mechanics began fitting the aircraft with the Fulton pickup booms. For the next 72 hours, LeSchack and Smith would be on their own.

As LeSchack had predicted, the Soviets had abandoned the station in great haste, leaving behind everything from 16mm movie reels to scientific notebooks to food frozen in great skillets. He and Smith even discovered a poster in the mess hall requesting that anyone finding the station contact the Arctic and Antarctic Institute in Leningrad. Over the next three days the pair collected 83 documents and 21 pieces of scientific equipment weighing 70 kilograms, which they loaded into a duffel bag for pickup.

Meanwhile, pilots Seigrist and Price performed a practice pickup to test their aircraft’s newly-installed equipment. The recovery mission was originally scheduled for May 31, but poor weather delayed the team by a day. Finally, on June 1, Seigrist and Price, along with Captain Cadwalader, Robert Fulton, Intermountain Aviation head Thorsrud, jump master Miles Johnson, winch operator Jerrold Daniels, nose trigger operator Randolph Scott, tail position operator Robert Nichol took off in the B-17 and headed for NP-8. Once again, however, the weather intervened; the wind had picked up to nearly 30 knots, just at the edge of the Fulton system’s operational envelope. Worse still, the blowing snow caused the horizon to disappear, as Seigrist later recalled:

“I was instantly in a situation what could be imagined as flying in a void.”

Nonetheless, the team pressed on. LeSchack and Smith deployed the first balloon and tied it to their duffel bag of captured documents and equipment, which was successfully recovered by the B-17. But when it came time for LeSchack to deploy his own balloon, he had to be restrained by Smith to prevent him from being blown away. In a brief moment of terror, LeSchack was torn free from Smith’s grasp and dragged along the ice before being stopped by an ice block. A moment later, the B-17 caught the recovery line and LeSchack was snatched up into the air. Facing into the wind at 240 kilometres per hour, he found himself unable to breathe, and had to use his arms to roll onto his back. It took six and a half gruelling minutes to winch him aboard the B-17.

Meanwhile, Smith deployed his balloon and held onto a Russian snow tractor to prevent himself from blowing away. But his grip failed and he too was dragged along the ice before catching a crack with his heels. When the B-17 finally caught the recovery line, it was travelling in the opposite direction, resulting in a violent and disorienting recovery. Though slightly traumatized when winched aboard, the two men soon recovered, as LeSchack later recalled:

“We celebrated with a bottle of Vat 69 scotch provided us by the CIA air boss who was onboard, and then Jim and I promptly fell asleep. Less than six hours later we landed in Barrow, Alaska.”

Despite numerous delays and several hair-raising moments, Project COLDFEET was a resounding success, revealing key information about Soviet Arctic research and submarine tracking capabilities. The mission also proved the utility and safety of the Fulton Skyhook, though officially it remains the only time the system has been used operationally. Any subsequent deployments remain shrouded in official secrecy. Unsurprisingly, however, the exotic dramatic nature of the Fulton system endeared it to Hollywood movie producers, with the same B-17 which participated in Project COLDFEET making an appearance at the end of the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball. The Fulton system also makes an appearance in 2008’s The Dark Knight, in which it is used by Batman to exfiltrate mob banker Lao from Hong Kong. That this outlandish device was real and not the product of some screenwriter’s fevered imagination proved that sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.

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