Spycraft - Melton [172]
The most successful operations were ones in which an agent carried a beacon into an enemy camp with the time delay. Walking sticks were common throughout the region and were large enough to conceal beacons and batteries. “We devised the means for a timer to switch on so that the asset could depart the area before the signal came on,” said Parr. “The Air Force then did ‘mini-arc light’ strikes with Phantom jets coming in wingtip to wingtip at dawn flying directly in on one of our signals.”
Exfiltration of downed pilots and imprisoned soldiers from behind enemy lines was a CIA and military priority throughout the Vietnam War. The captured and missing would not be forgotten or abandoned. In 1958, when CIA pilot Allen Pope was a prisoner in Indonesia, the Agency came up with an audacious plan for his rescue.32
During a covert action in Indonesia in the late 1950s, Civil Air Transport pilot Allen Pope was shot down while delivering supplies. TSS worked on two plans to rescue Pope from a low-security jungle jail. One plan involved using the Skyhook air-ground extraction device, another a collapsible rubber aircraft. While the equipment functioned as designed, neither plan proved operationally practical and Pope was eventually rescued by other means.
Intelligence determined Pope was being held in a remote jungle region of Indonesia under house arrest. Although he had relative freedom of movement in the general area, there was little chance for him to survive an escape through the jungle. TSS hit upon the idea of a portable inflatable aircraft. With the help of the Goodyear Company, TSS designed a small rubber plane that could be bundled and airdropped into a jungle clearing.33 All Pope would need to do was add water to special pellets inside the bundle and a chemical reaction would produce enough gas to inflate the plane. “We tested it and it worked out pretty good. But we got ready to run it to him and somebody, politics I suppose, canceled the operation,” recalled Jameson. “As clever as it was, I don’t believe the aircraft was ever used operationally.”
The CIA eventually used a submarine to insert two of its paramilitary officers on the Indonesian coast. They went into the jungle, located Pope, and walked him out to safety, and the rubber airplane faded into Agency lore. “We put it in a warehouse where it stayed for years,” Jameson recalled. “One day there was some operation and I said, ‘I think we can solve this with that rubber airplane.’ But when we went to the warehouse, we found the rubber was all dried up and cracked. Nobody had maintained it. So we threw it away.”
Another extraction device considered for Pope was the Skyhook, an invention of Robert E. Fulton, who envisioned that an airplane outfitted with a hook dangling beneath it could safely snatch a suitably harnessed individual from the ground. Fulton’s inspiration, the “All American System,” traced its origins to a mail recovery technique from the 1920s in which pilots snagged mail pouches suspended between two poles and winched them into the airplane.
An attempt by the U.S. military during World War II to modify the technique was only partially successful. In July 1943 tests by the Army Air Force, instrumented containers were extracted from the ground by aircraft, which recorded accelerations following the pickup in excess of 17 gs, far more than the human body could tolerate. Changes in the pickup line and modifications in the parachute harness eventually brought this down to a more acceptable 7 gs. The first live test, with a sheep, failed when the harness twisted and strangled the animal. During subsequent tests, the sheep survived. Lieutenant Alex Doster, a paratrooper, volunteered for the first human pickup. On September 5, 1943, after a Stinson engaged the transfer rope at 125 mph, Doster was yanked vertically off the ground, and soared behind the aircraft.34