The United States government had recruited and trained a large number of Alaskan residents as secret citizen-agents in the early years of Cold War, declassified information of the U.S. Air Force and FBI revealed.

Documents showed that the U.S. military feared that Alaska was going to be invaded and occupied by Russian forces prompting the recruitment of fishermen, trappers, bush pilots and other private citizens across Alaska, as spies who were to feed intelligence to the military in 1950.

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One FBI memo said that the U.S. was expecting an airborne invasion and bombing in Alaska followed by the dropping of paratroopers.According to the documents, the most likely targets were Fairbanks, Seward, Anchorage and Nome.

Edgar J. Hoover, then the head of the FBI, created the highly classified project, code-named Washtub",  and teamed up with the newly established Air Force Office of Special Investigations, headed by Hoover protege and former FBI chief Joseph F. Carroll.

"Washtub" was to have secret citizen -agents hiding in key locations in Alaska to monitor, message code every movement and position of the enemies, and transmit the messages to the military while living off on caches of food, cold weather gear, radios and message-coding instruments.  

Observers said "Washtub" was not the ordinary civilian defense that the U.S established in the later years of the Cold War. This was a massive enlistment of citizens trained to provide secret information to the military as information operatives in U.S. soil.

The documents revealed that the "Washtub" "stay-behind agents" as they were called was never activated to monitor, collect, and transmit wartime information as Russian forces did not invade Alaska.

Federal agents admitted that the secret plan was extremely dangerous, considering that Russian military policies involved eliminating local resistance in the territories they invade and occupy

As part of the plan and to compensate expected casualties in case of an invasion, a reserve pool of agents will wait outside Alaska and will be inserted in the territory through air to replace the civilians. The set up was made to make possible the recruitment of agents who refused to be left behind for a long period of time in case of Russian occupation.

Air Force historian Deborah Kidwell said "Washtub" operated from 1951-1959. She said that although the Soviet Union did not invade Alaska, some 89 stay-behind agents were trained and the survival caches served peacetime purposes for many years to come.

The account of the "Washtub" project is based on the hundreds of pages of military documents declassified by the military and was provided to the Associated Press by the Government Attic, a website containing government documents it has obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

TagsAlaska FBI citizens