Operation Washtub: Alaska's Secret Stay-Behind Agents

The Story

In the years after World War II, Alaska was a lightly defended U.S. territory just across the Bering Strait from the Soviet Union. U.S. officials worried that it could be invaded. According to FBI memos described by the Associated Press, 'the most likely targets were thought to be Nome, Fairbanks, Anchorage and Seward.'

The answer was a secret program. FBI and Air Force records released in 2014 carry the title 'Proposed Plan for Intelligence Coverage in Alaska in the Event of an Invasion (Stay-Behind Agent Program).' One letter in the file records that 'the classified code word "washtub"' had been assigned to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. The AP reported that the OSI was then headed by Joseph F. Carroll, a former FBI official and a protégé of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

'If a crisis arose we would be in the midst of another `Pearl Harbor' and get part of the blame,' Hoover wrote, according to the AP. 'Get out at once.'

The idea, as the AP described it, was to recruit 'fishermen, bush pilots, trappers and other private citizens' who would stay behind if the enemy came. They would hide, go to 'survival caches of food, cold-weather gear, message-coding material and radios,' and report what they saw. The AP said a second phase aimed to build a pool of civilians who could secretly help downed military air crews escape capture, an 'evasion and escape' plan coordinated with the CIA.

The FBI did not stay in for long. According to the AP, Hoover pulled out in September 1951, just as the first trained agents were to be placed. In the margin of a September 6, 1951 memo he wrote: 'If a crisis arose we would be in the midst of another `Pearl Harbor' and get part of the blame.' He added: 'Get out at once.' An Air Force letter in the released file confirms the bureau's 'withdrawal' from 'further participation in the Stay-behind Agent Program in Alaska,' and says both phases of the program were handed to the Alaskan Air Command.

The Air Force carried on. According to the AP, the OSI's official historian, Deborah Kidwell, said the program ran from 1951 to 1959; she wrote in an OSI magazine that 'OSI trained 89 SBA (stay-behind agents), and the survival caches served peacetime purposes for many years to come.'

The invasion never came, and the agents were never called on. The program stayed secret for more than half a century, until a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2010 brought the records out in 2014.