The year was 1950 and the threat from communism had never seemed greater. North Korea had just invaded its southern neighbour, backed by Moscow, which had only the previously summer exploded its first atomic bomb.
It was, Washington concluded, only a matter of time before the Soviet Union tried to invade the United States. There was only one thing for it: send in the Alaskan fishermen.
Amid fears of a Soviet incursion into its northernmost territory, the US trained fishermen, animal trappers, bush pilots and other civilians in Alaska for a secret spy network, according to newly declassified Air Force and FBI documents.
Codenamed “Washtub”, the highly-classified operation was headed up by FBI director J Edgar Hoover and involved placing the covert citizen-agents in locations across the vast state to spy on potential enemy invaders and report their findings back to the US military. If Alaska was attacked, the operatives were to make their way to survival stations where they would find radios and message-coding equipments along with stocks of food and cold-weather gear.
“The military believes that it would be an airborne invasion involving bombing and the dropping of paratroopers,” one FBI memo said.
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The plans for a rare deployment of US civilians as intelligence operatives on home soil reveals the extent of anxiety in Washington over the prospect of Soviet attack. The details were disclosed in censored records provided to The Associated Press by the Government Attic, a website that obtained the documents through the Freedom of Information Act.
Eighty-nine civilians were trained for the mission according to historians. This included learning how to transmit and translate coded messages, “an almost impossible task for backwoodsmen to master in 15 hours of training,” according to one document.
Although the government looked far and wide for suitable candidates, the indigenous population was ruled out. “Eskimo, Indian and Aleut groups in the Territory should be avoided in view of their propensities to drink to excess and their fundamental indifference to constituted governments and political philosophies,” stated the documents.
Those selected were secretly screened by the FBI for signs of disloyalty and were offered fees of up to $3,000 per year (almost $30,000 in today’s terms), with the amount to be doubled if Alaska was actually invaded.
So dangerous was the operation considered, that a reserve pool of these civilian “stay-behind-agents” were to be placed outside Alaska and deployed as replacements should the first set of operatives be killed by Soviet invaders. “Some agents might not be too enthusiastic about being left behind in enemy-occupied areas for an indefinite period of time,” one document observed.