Operation Washtub

In January 1950 Alaska was a lightly defended American territory a few dozen miles from Soviet soil across the Bering Strait. The military's planners did not think they could stop a determined landing. One FBI memo summarized the expected threat as an airborne invasion with bombing and paratroopers, aimed most likely at Nome, Fairbanks, Anchorage and Seward³. Operation Washtub was their answer: a network of ordinary Alaskans who would stay put if the Soviets came, hide, and report what they saw.

A plan born at Fort Richardson

Reamer, working from the declassified files, dates the scheme to a meeting on 27 January 1950 in the Fort Richardson office of Navy Captain Minor Heine, director of intelligence for the Alaskan Command. Heine proposed placing private citizens around the territory as "stay behind agents," dormant unless Alaska was occupied, who would also keep open escape routes for stranded American airmen. The proposal went to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in March 1950 and became a working plan that summer, while the Korean War made a wider Soviet move look plausible^4,3.

The Air Force gave the code word WASHTUB to its new Office of Special Investigations (OSI), headed by Major General Joseph F. Carroll, a former FBI official^1,3. The FBI called the project STAGE, and an official OSI history lists still more names: Corpuscle, Stigmatic and Catboat³. It had two halves. The first was the stay-behind agents. The second was a pool of civilians who would quietly arrange the escape of downed air crews, a part coordinated with the CIA³.

Choosing the agents

The planning papers wanted people who lived locally, moved around for a living and would not be obvious internees: fishermen, bush pilots, trappers, prospectors, a postmaster, a hotel manager^3,4. The FBI's Anchorage office asked trusted contacts, including federal judges and a local physician, for names, then quietly ran background checks on every candidate^3,4.

The planners also wrote down whom they would not trust. The released Air Force file states that "the selection of agents from the Eskimo, Indian, and Aleut groups in the Territory should be avoided," citing supposed drinking and political indifference¹. Alaska Natives, many of whom had served in the Alaska Territorial Guard, were shut out on those grounds⁴.

Recruits were offered retainers of up to $3,000 a year, to be doubled once an invasion began, though the records do not show what was actually paid^3,4. Planners also proposed a reserve pool of agents held outside Alaska and flown in later, noting dryly in the file that some recruits "might not be too enthusiastic" about being left behind in occupied territory for an indefinite time^1,3.

Training at first took place in Washington and covered codes, radio, cover stories and survival. One document judged that mastering the codes in 15 hours of instruction was "an almost impossible task for backwoodsmen." The Air Force laid caches of food, fuel, radios, clothing and coding material for the agents to retreat to^3,4.

Hoover gets out

The FBI's senior officials had doubted the plan from the start, and the Bureau was slow to produce candidates. By early September 1951, Reamer found, it had identified 69 possible agents and only 18 had reported for training⁴. On a memo dated 6 September 1951, J. Edgar Hoover wrote in the margin that in a crisis the Bureau "would be in the midst of another 'Pearl Harbor' and get part of the blame," and ordered: "Get out at once"³. FBI letters of 8 and 17 September 1951 to General Carroll announced the Bureau's withdrawal from the stay-behind program, leaving OSI in sole charge, though the FBI kept running background checks^1,4.

The Bureau was pulled back in once. In October 1954 an Anchorage woman handed agents a misaddressed letter containing a coded message. FBI codebreakers never broke it, but the scare ended when the Bureau concluded it was a practice message sent in error by one of the Washtub agents³.

How it ended

According to Deborah Kidwell, the OSI's official historian, Washtub ran from 1951 to 1959, and OSI trained 89 stay-behind agents. "The survival caches served peacetime purposes for many years to come," she wrote³. Reamer describes the program as wound down in 1959 as too costly for its uncertain value, with the caches later repurposed or looted⁴.

How it came out

Almost everything known comes from FOIA. A request filed in February 2010 produced an Air Force release on 4 August 2014 of FBI-originated papers, heavily redacted, which Government Attic posted on 1 September 2014¹. The Associated Press built its account on those records, and the FBI has since published its own files on the "Stay-Behind Special Agent Program in Alaska" in its online Vault^3,2. Most agents' names remain blacked out³.

The program was a domestic cousin of the European stay-behind networks such as Gladio, with one difference: its agents were to report from American soil. It should not be confused with the CIA's unrelated 1954 Operation WASHTUB in Nicaragua, a plan to plant a fake Soviet arms cache before the PBSUCCESS coup in Guatemala⁶.

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OPERATION · 1956 28 November 1956 – November 1990 Operation Gladio Italy's secret stay-behind network, set up with the CIA in 1956 to fight a Soviet occupation, was revealed by Prime Minister Andreotti in 1990. Its alleged links to terrorism are still disputed. United States · 1908 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) The US Justice Department's investigative service, founded in 1908: chief hunter of foreign spies at home from the 1930s, and under J. Edgar Hoover the author of secret domestic programs exposed in the 1970s. 1895–1972 J. Edgar Hoover Director of the Bureau of Investigation and then the FBI for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972. He built a modern police agency and a secret domestic intelligence apparatus that the Senate later condemned. 12 August 1953 – 27 June 1954 Operation PBSuccess The CIA's 1953–54 campaign of propaganda, pressure and a small proxy invasion that forced Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Árbenz to resign on 27 June 1954. United States · 1947 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The US civilian intelligence service, created by the National Security Act of 1947 to coordinate foreign intelligence, which within a year also became Washington's instrument for covert action.