Alaskan fishermen were U.S. ‘agents’
Fearing Soviet invasion, FBI trained, equipped residents to work as spies
The U.S. security services recruited Alaskan fishermen, trappers and bush pilots as “stay-behind agents” to form a secret American resistance network if the Soviet Union staged a widely feared air invasion, according to newly declassified documents.
Project “Washtub” was launched by the FBI and U.S. air force intelligence during the chilliest years of the Cold War in the early 1950s when war between Moscow and Washington often seemed imminent. “The military believes that it would be an airborne invasion involving bombing and the dropping of paratroopers,” one FBI memo said.
The mission of the citizen-agents in Alaska, which was then still only a U.S. territory, would have been to slip into hiding in the remote wilderness and transmit intelligence about enemy movements to the American military. The operatives would have made their way to survival caches of food, cold-weather gear, message-coding material and radios, according to documents.
A second pool of civilian agents was trained to arrange the evacuation of U.S. military crews shot down or crashed over Soviet-held territory.
As Soviet military doctrine called for the “elimination” of local resistance in occupied territory, U.S. officials considered the assignment so dangerous that they also recruited a reserve cadre of agents outside Alaska to be dropped in later by air if needed.
Deborah Kidwell, official historian of the air force Office of Special Investigations (OSI), said the “Washtub” plans were in place from 1951 to 1959, the year that Alaska became a U.S. state.
“While war with the Soviet Union did not come to Alaska, OSI trained 89 SBA (stay-behind agents), and the survival caches served peacetime purposes for many years to come,” she wrote in an OSI magazine.
The plan never needed to be enacted, of course, as Moscow did not invade Alaska, but the incredible detail indicated how strongly Washington feared a Soviet incursion.
The plans were drafted in 1950 as Soviet-backed North Korean forces invaded the South in an operation that some U.S. officials believed was intended as distraction from a Soviet invasion of western Europe. Pentagon planners feared that Moscow would open another front by attacking Alaska, a territory closer to Russia than mainland America.