Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  One brilliant idea came to him as he was flying in his private plane over the Rockies. He looked down at the rugged, snow-covered mountains and wondered how anyone could rescue him if he happened to crash and survived the impact. His idea is the sky hook, and this is the way it works:

  A rescue plane drops a small package to a person on the ground or in the water. The person may be the survivor of a wreck, an espionage agent, or a frogman who has just completed a mission. In the package, the man on the ground finds a pair of coveralls with a built-in parachute harness, a balloon, a helium canister for filling the balloon, a long nylon rope, and a battery pack.

  The man dons the coveralls, blows up the balloon, and sends it aloft with one end of the nylon line. He fastens the other end of the line to his harness and then attaches a wire from the battery pack, which fits into a pocket on the leg of his coveralls, to a wire running up the nylon line and connected to a series of tiny strobe lights.

  On the nose of the recovery plane is a large V-shaped device. The pilot, attracted by the flashing strobe lights, aims for the line just below the balloon, and flies so the line is caught by the device on the front of the plane. The line is then pulled up by a winch in the belly of the plane.

  As the line is captured by the plane, the man is lifted from the ground. Fulton calculated that the man’s first motion would be quite gentle and almost straight up, even though the plane is traveling forward at 120 to 150 knots. Only after the man has risen well above trees and other obstacles does he begin to move forward at the same speed as the plane. The winch then lifts him up into the plane.

  Fulton lives in the rolling hills near Newtown, Connecticut. He calls his place Flying Ridge, and it has its own small grass landing strip, where he keeps the two planes he uses for most of his travels. Near his home he has established a small factory that provides sky hook equipment for the military and for intelligence agencies. How often, and under what circumstances, his device has been used, even he does not know.

  Once, he received an urgent call from a contact at the Central Intelligence Agency, who wanted to know if his device could be used at high altitude. Because the air is thinner the higher one goes from sea level, the speed at which a person is whisked into the air would increase. Fulton quickly set up a series of experiments and determined that such a pickup was perfectly feasible. Only much later did he learn the reason for the sudden concern about a high-altitude pickup: Tibet was being overrun by China, and thought was being given to ways that the Dalai Lama might be rescued. One idea under consideration was to use the sky hook to whisk him off a Tibetan mountaintop. As it turned out, he managed to escape by more prosaic means.

  On another occasion, during the early testing of the sky hook, Fulton was asked to try to rescue a scientist who had fallen seriously ill while working on a floating ice island in the North Atlantic. He agreed, but the sick man refused to be picked up, and a few days later, he died. The man’s family wanted his body recovered, so Fulton arranged to use the sky hook for the purpose. Flying in a converted B-17 bomber, Fulton and his crew found the ice island covered with fog, but they dropped the harness and balloon and radioed instructions to those on the ground.

  As the pilot came around again, he saw the balloon floating just above the the fog bank, and he aimed for it. Since he men down below couldn’t see the plane, they lay on the ground to avoid being struck. As they watched, the dead man rose slowly from the ground and then disappeared up into the clouds. A few minutes later, the sound of the plane could be heard overhead again. And then, just at the point where the dead man had risen, a case of vodka, suspended from a parachute, descended to the ground.

  To the UDT men—and later to the SEALs—the sky hook looked like an ideal addition to their bag of tricks to be used in commando operations. In the next few years, more than a hundred pickups were made by the sky hook, many of them involving UDT men or SEALs. The young sailors, having learned to jump from an airplane, clamored for the reverse thrill: the distinction of being snatched from the earth up into a plane. It was a fast and thrilling ride. And it could be dangerous.

  On 24 June 1964, the navy scheduled a demonstration of the sky hook near Little Creek. Two pickups were planned, one from the beach and one from a rubber boat floating just offshore in the Chesapeake Bay. Charged with arranging for the test was a young SEAL officer, Lt. (jg) Irve C. (“Chuck”) LeMoyne. Scheduled for the pickup were a veteran petty officer who had already had a ride on the sky hook and LeMoyne himself.

  LeMoyne recalls a crowd of sailors lining the dunes, shouting at him, “Hey, Mr. LeMoyne. Me next! I want on that!” Almost at the last minute, LeMoyne decided his plan wasn’t really fair. The enlisted man had already been picked up, and LeMoyne figured that he, as air operations officer of the team, would have plenty of chances in the future. He gave the cherished assignment to two other SEALs.

  As the jealous sailors watched from the dunes, the first volunteer donned his coveralls, inflated the balloon, and was whisked into the sky by a twin-engined RC-45J aircraft. It was a flawless performance.

  Then Photographer’s Mate Third Class James Earl Fox prepared for his pickup from a rubber boat. The plane roared overhead once more, and Fox floated off into the sky at the end of the nylon line. LeMoyne observed the pickup from a boat. A photographer in a chase plane flew nearby recording the entire pickup. Another photographer peered down through the belly of the plane, capturing the scene as the winch pulled Fox up inside the plane.

  Suddenly there was a loud pop, the line parted, and Fox fell away toward the surface of the bay, some seven hundred feet below. A nearby fishing boat sped to the scene and pulled the sailor from the water. He was probably already dead. Despite mouth-to-mouth and mechanical resuscitation and heart massage, he could not be revived.

  Fulton, deeply concerned, hurried down to examine the sky hook to determine what had gone wrong. He found that the winch had not been turned off as Fox came into the plane but had continued to turn until it snapped the nylon line. He recommended insertion of a device to prevent that from happening in the future and improved training of the air crewmen operating the system.

  Despite the accident, training with the Fulton system continued. Maynard Weyers, who was then a lieutenant, has a vivid recollection of a night pickup off the coast of Coronado, California, on 20 October 1965. Two two-man teams of SEALs swam ashore, carried out a simulated attack near the roadway that runs along the shore south of the amphibious base at Coronado, and then swam out to rubber boats dropped from a circling plane. There, they went through the familiar ritual of donning the coveralls with the built-in harness and sending the balloons aloft.

  As they bobbed in the choppy waves, Weyers could see the other team sitting in their little boat. Suddenly they disappeared, wafted aloft by the sky hook. And then Weyers noticed smoke coming from the nylon line. He called over to Fulton, who was in another boat nearby. Although the inventor assured them the line was okay, Weyers and his partner insisted on a new one.

  Weyers, who was to be the top man in the two-man pickup, sat in the front of the boat, which was bouncing in a strong wind. Just as the plane approached, he fell into the water. As he struggled to climb back in, the line went taut and he zoomed up into the night. The shock of the pickup tore the battery out of his coveralls, and he grasped it to keep it from falling on Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Jerome D. Cozart, his partner, who was hanging below him.

  Weyers reached up and felt the nylon line connecting them to the plane. With the weight of the two men, it was stretched so tight it felt no thicker than a thread.

  Because the plane had only enough power to reel the men in slowly, it took twenty-one minutes before they were finally helped up into the cabin of the plane. The pilot thoughtfully flew up and down the coast near San Diego so his dangling passengers could enjoy the lights along the shore.

  Shortly afterward the navy decided, wisely, that there was little to be gained by having SEALs practice being whisked into
the air by sky hook. As LeMoyne explains, it took no skill to be picked up. And the air crews, who needed practice to become adept at their end of the operation, could pick up dummies just as well as live men.

  Whether, and under what circumstances, the SEALs or others have used the sky hook in actual operations is a closely guarded secret. But it is no secret that the air force has a fleet of planes specially equipped with the sky hook system and that Fulton’s little factory continues to produce the packages that are dropped to the person to be picked up. Experiments have also been conducted with an advanced version of the sky hook capable of picking up as many as six men at a time.

  Fulton and Fane first met in the early 1950s, when Fulton was working on his sky hook at El Centro, California. A friend told Fulton he ought to look up Fane, who was then at Coronado. “He doesn’t have any money, but he has a lot of interesting problems,” the friend said.

  A few days later, Fulton hopped in his plane for the short flight over to Coronado. He found Fane in an office with pictures on the walls of the original steamboat built by Fulton’s ancestor. Fulton soon realized that Fane knew more about the earlier Fulton than he did. The feisty Scot sailor and the erudite inventor hit it off immediately, and Fulton set to work at once on one of Fane’s most serious problems.

  The problem was how to recover a group of swimmers quickly after they had finished a beach surveillance mission. The UDT units were still using the system developed during World War II in which a swimmer thrusts his arm through a loop held out to him as the recovery boat speeds past. The system was slow, and it permitted the recovery of only one man at a time. If the pickup failed, the boat would have to turn around and run the gauntlet of enemy fire once more.

  Fulton’s inventive mind quickly came up with a maritime version of his sky hook. As he sketched out the system to Fane, the swimmers would gather in two clusters. As the recovery boat sped past, the crew would drop a rubber sled close to each group of men, with a line connecting the two sleds. Then the boat would make a fast turn and aim for the middle of the line between the two sleds. A snare on the front of the boat would capture the line and lead it up over the bow to a winch, which would then reel the two sleds, with their loads of swimmers, onto a platform at the stern of the boat.

  Fulton tested the system first with his own sons in Long Island Sound and then worked with the navy to perfect it in tests in the Virgin Islands, where the teams went for winter training, and in Puget Sound. The navy was so enthusiastic about the system that special boats were built, designed to be carried as part of the gear that accompanied the teams as they traveled with the fleet. But there were others in the navy who resented these special teams with all their special equipment.

  Just before they were ready to deploy, the sea sled boats were assigned to other navy units, and the teams were told to keep on using the old rope sling method of recovery, which is still in use today. No one ever gave Fulton a sound explanation of what had happened, but the result, as he puts it, was that “the whole thing went down the drain.” Such is the lack of institutional memory in the SEAL community that few of today’s SEALs have ever even heard of the Fulton sea sled system, which, if it had survived the navy’s trial by bureaucracy, might have made their lives a good deal easier.

  The enthusiasm for experimentation in the period after World War II led those involved in naval special warfare up some strange pathways. At the end of the war, Phil Bucklew had returned to civilian life as an assistant football coach at Columbia University. But he was back in the navy in the early fifties, adding his energy to the free-flowing experimentation that would later give shape to the SEALs.

  In June 1951 he set up shop in an old brig at the East Coast amphibious base at Little Creek as commander of a top secret outfit, separate from the Underwater Demolition Teams, known as Beach Jumper Unit II. Over the next few years, they built up a squadron of a dozen boats, with 30 officers and 220 enlisted men. The boats bulged with the latest high-tech electronics of that era.

  “We had distributed among our twelve-boat squadron the electronics equivalent of a cruiser and worked it into a team effort by which we did intercept, monitoring and jamming,” Bucklew recalls.

  Using their electronic equipment and a twenty-foot balloon carrying radar reflectors—they called it a kytoon—they could simulate an entire fleet If that wasn’t enough to confuse the enemy, they would set off explosions, as many as fifty at a time, to create the sound of a massive barrage by naval guns.

  This was a large step beyond what the men of the UDTs had done inadvertently in World War II, when the approach of their flotilla of small boats sometimes caused the Japanese to react as though a full-scale invasion were underway, thus revealing their hidden gun positions.

  Many of the electronic surveillance techniques developed by the Beach Jumpers were later transferred to a fleet of slow-moving converted merchant ships. These cruised the waters off the coasts of potential foes, listening to their communications and plotting the locations and frequencies of radar installations. They continued operating until 1968, when the North Koreans seized one of the ships, the USS Pueblo, and her eighty-three-man crew as she was going about her electronic snooping off the Korean coast.

  The North Koreans held the ship and its crew for almost a year. A proposed rescue attempt by the SEALs was rejected as too risky.

  Bucklew’s Beach Jumpers and the UDT men also carried out another mission familiar to today’s SEALs: simulated attacks on U.S. Navy ships to teach the crews how to defend themselves against combat swimmers. The swimmers are still amazed at how quickly the sailors aboard ship forget the very real threat from this source. They worry about the enemy’s big guns and airplanes and forget the lone man in the water with a limpet mine.

  John Raynolds served a tour of duty in the UDT in the early fifties and is now the chief executive officer of Outward Bound, an organization that teaches people to expand their capabilities by putting them into unfamiliar situations in the wilderness or in big cities. He still recalls with a glow of satisfaction the night he was one of a group of swimmers attacking ships in San Diego harbor with smoke bombs.

  “I had a great success one time because I sank the Bon Homme Richard, one of our great carriers,” Raynolds says. “They got most of the other swimmers. They dropped concussion firecrackers in, and the swimmers were supposed to surface. I swam in from a different direction and managed to get a smoke bomb on the Bon Homme Richard. The captain was livid—sunk by one man swimming in.”

  The water—on the surface or just under it—was the milieu of the Underwater Demolition Teams during World War II and in the years immediately afterward. But they soon began looking up toward the skies. This was the beginning of the expansion that was to result in the air operations at which the SEALs later became so skilled.

  During the Korean War, Raynolds was assigned to UDT Five in Japan. Also there was William H. (“Bill”) Hamilton, Jr., a 1949 graduate of the Naval Academy who had become a protégé of Fane. While waiting for assignments in the war zone, the frogmen began to talk among themselves about how they might expand their horizons if they could use helicopters to drop swimmers in the sea and recover them again.

  As early as 1947, Fane had carried out experiments with the helicopters of that era and had demonstrated that it was possible to insert and recover swimmers from a hovering chopper. But by the time of the Korean War those early experiments had been forgotten by most of those involved in UDT operations.

  Before joining the UDTs, Hamilton had served as a carrier aviator and had a number of friends in the aviation community. He slipped over to the nearby Atsugi airfield and asked the marine helicopter pilots if they would mind dropping some frogmen into the ocean and trying to pick them up again. Raynolds explains how they did it:

  We wanted to determine how fast the helicopter could fly and still have the swimmer enter the water in workable condition. We kept increasing the speed. People would skip like a stone across the water. That was
a little too fast. In the first group of tests, we had all our gear on: swim fins, masks, knives, explosives. When we hit the water, naturally it tore everything off. So we made a pack of equipment, with a flotation bladder. The guy had a knife on his leg, that was about it. He’d go in holding his nose and his ass. We’d drop equipment at the same time in a flotation device.

  We spent a lot of time developing that technique. How high should the helicopter be? How fast should it go so the swimmer hit the water in a reasonable fashion? What kind of angles should the person take? Most of the momentum was forward rather than down. We were flying about twenty feet at twenty-five to thirty knots. We developed a pretty good technique for getting a person into the water.

  Then we had this idea of picking them up. We were already trained in boat pickup. The swimmer puts his arm up, the guy catches him with the rubber loop, flips him into the boat like a fish. Well, we figured we’d get a rubber loop on a ladder. We’ll attach the ladder with bungee springs to the helicopter so it has some spring in it. The chopper will come along dragging this loop. The guy will do his thing, climb up the ladder into the helicopter.

  It was a disaster. Just as he was going to get the loop, it would hit a wave and bounce over him. Or he’d get the loop and he’d get about halfway up the ladder and the next man would hit the loop and it would fire the fellow who was on the ladder right off, like a bow and arrow. We tried for a long time to find ways to make it work. We never really did get a way that would work except having the ladder just hang there and have the guy climb up.

  That was the first concept of UDT getting airborne. We were also talking with the Korean air force about getting our people jump training. And some of our people did jump out of Korean airplanes, mostly because they wanted to get the little Korean wings. Then somebody broke a leg, and we weren’t allowed to do it any more. That dropping people from helicopters was the genesis of what became the SEAL teams.

  Later the SEALs improved on the methods of dropping men into the water, or onto land, from a helicopter. One technique involves letting down several thick nylon ropes from a hovering helicopter. Wearing heavy welder’s gloves, the SEALs grasp the ropes with their hands and slide quickly to the surface. This is a distinct improvement on an earlier method, borrowed from mountain climbers, in which the rope is cinched around the man’s body and he rappels down it to the surface. Using only their hands to control the speed of descent, a squad of SEALs can drop to the surface from thirty-five or forty feet in a few seconds.