A North Pole Mission the Night Before Christmas

Saturday, December 31st, 2022

From 80,000 feet, SR-71 Blackbird could survey 100,000 square miles of Earth’s surface per hour. On the Night Before Christmas, in 1969, Richard “Butch” Sheffield flew a North Pole night mission:

Late In 1969, shortly after I was crewed with Bob Spencer, we were tasked to fly a night mission to the North Pole. Night missions were very rare in those days because of St. Martins crash (summer of 1967) at night when navigation system failed. We were one of the most experienced SR crews and we were told that the Russians were doing something with our submarines at night at a station they had built on the ice near the North Pole.

It was believed that our Side Looking, High Resolution Radar System could gain valuable intelligence by spying on the unsuspecting Russians in the middle of the night. I found out a few years ago what the Russians were doing, setting up acoustic sensors so they could track our submarines under the ice cape.

We launched from Beale at night, flew north to Alaska and refueled over the central part on a Northern heading. Once we were full of fuel, we lit the afterburners and climbed to about seventy five-thousand feet heading north to the ice station. The tanker was briefed to continue to fly north in case we lost an engine. There was no place to land and our emergency procedure was to turn around 180 degrees and do a head on rendezvous with the tanker on one engine.

As we departed Alaska heading North with the after burners blazing, I looked out the window at the barren land and ice. I could see well because of star light. We had no moon that night. The thought came to my mind, “this is really risky business,” and if anything goes wrong they will never find us. Nothing went wrong, I turned on the Side Looking Radar (SLR), looked at the location and took the images. Returned to Alaska and refueled from the tanker and returned to Beale.

[…]

The CIA found out that the station was not manned during the worst part of winter. When not manned, the CIA landed a few people by parachute to find out what was going on at the station. They found everything to include code books. The men were recovered by being snatched up into a low flying aircraft.

Comments

  1. Bob Sykes says:

    “The men were recovered by being snatched up into a low flying aircraft.”

    You set up two poles something like 30 ft apart, and string an elastic line between them that is hooked up to a harness you are wearing. The slow-moving (100 knots?) transport aircraft tries to snag the line between the post, and reel you in.

  2. Adar says:

    Those icy islands would be beyond the ordinary 12 mile limit is recognized by international law so American civilian CIA personnel arriving there would not have been in violation of sovereign Soviet territory it would legally be allowed to be there

    They should not have remove the listening devices they should have put false listening devices there and send out deception signals to deceive the Soviet

  3. Gavin Longmuir says:

    “Those icy islands would be beyond the ordinary 12 mile limit is recognized by international law …”

    So Hawaii and American Samoa are not US territory, being far beyond 12 miles from the Continental US??

  4. Altitude Zero says:

    Hawaii and American Samoa are US territory. The North Pole was not Soviet territory. Besides, it’s not like we or the Soviets got our knickers in a twist about territorial integrity back in 1969, if you could get away with it. It was a much more masculine world back then, on both our side and theirs.

  5. Natureboi says:

    Sounds like the Soviets got to spend Christmas at home fucking their girlfriends while the Americans did some gay BS in the Arctic that must have been really important considering the Cold War lasted several more decades.

  6. Jim says:

    Natureboi: “Sounds like the Soviets got to spend Christmas at home fucking their girlfriends while the Americans did some gay B.S. in the Arctic that must have been really important considering the Cold War lasted several more decades.”

    https://i.ibb.co/Hg1vD0C/lmao.gif

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