Spycraft - Melton [173]
Later Fulton began experiments that would lead to the Skyhook in 1950 by devising a harness that could hold either a person or cargo attached to 500 feet of braided nylon rope. The rope was lifted into the air by a large balloon filled from a small bottle of helium. Once airborne, the rope could be snatched by an aircraft equipped with two steel horns that automatically locked it into place and released the balloon. As the line was pulled tight, it would glide past the side door of the fuselage. Crewmen, standing in an open hatch, could then attach the line to a winch—as the front lock was released—and pull in the rescued pilot or agent to safety.
Over the next few years, Fulton refined the system. Using a Navy P2V for the pickups, he gradually increased the weight of the pickup until the line began to break. A braided nylon line with test strength of 4,000 pounds solved the problem, but early experiments met with mixed results. In one instance, a test pig was picked up successfully. Flown through the air at 125 mph, the pig arrived inside the plane unharmed, but expressed displeasure with the experience by attacking crewmembers.35 Human volunteers testing the system returned to the aircraft in considerably better spirits and John Wayne brought the device public fame in the movie The Green Berets.
The Skyhook became a favorite among Special Forces as a test of courage. One Special Forces officer, a parachute rigger who had made more than 5,000 jumps, was said to enjoy “flying” alongside the aircraft Superman-style for extended periods, before being reeled in. In one instance, now legendary among the Special Forces, the pilot of a plane about to pick up a high-ranking officer testing the system slowed his airspeed in an attempt to give the officer a gentler ride, but only succeeded in bouncing him along the ground, breaking numerous bones.36
An intelligence requirement for Skyhook came in 1961 after the Soviets were forced to abandon a suspected submarine-monitoring station in the Arctic Ocean because the facility’s ice runway was collapsing. In one of the Skyhook’s few operational deployments, two officers, from the Navy and Air Force, were selected for the mission appropriately code-named Operation Cold Feet. They would be dropped by parachute, spend seventy-two hours at the station, floating in the Arctic, assessing and collecting items of intelligence value. Skyhook would then pluck them from the ice along with photographs, papers, and whatever else they discovered on the abandoned facility.
The officers landed as planned on the ice and collected a hundred pounds of intelligence materials from the station. With the collection mission completed, the first intelligence officer picked up by Skyhook was dragged 300 feet by wind blowing the balloon before the plane hooked onto it. When the second investigator inflated the pickup balloon, he held on tightly to a piece of equipment on the ground to avoid being dragged. Eventually both men were safely “Skyhooked” into the airplane, bringing information that confirmed the facility was a submarine monitoring station.
Every day Brian Lipton arrived at 0800 hours for work at the Agency and departed at 1700 hours or earlier if he had a late-afternoon softball game. Lipton, a member of Gottlieb’s cadre of university-trained chemists hired in the mid-1960s, seemed like a good fit with TSD. He shouldered a heavy workload, was amiable, and always put in a full day’s work. Few of his colleagues suspected Lipton led a double life inside his primary CIA cover. At night after the parking lot and the offices of TSD’s South Building headquarters emptied, Lipton returned to his office alone. There, behind a locked door, he worked on one of the most closely held projects of the Vietnam War era—creating covert-communication systems for U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam.
For the POWs who were isolated, inundated with propaganda, and subjected to continuous physical and psychological torture, these covert communications were often their only link to the outside.