Bob Reeve, the Cold War airman of Alaska 

Located at the confluence of the icy southern Arctic Ocean and Pacific Ocean, the Bering Strait is all that separates the United States from Russia. Between the easternmost point Cape Dezhnev in Russia and Cape Prince of Wales in Alaska, all that divides these huge continents is a mere 55 miles of near frozen water. South of the Arctic circle, the Bering Strait sits in a circle of latitude referred to as the 60th parallel north. It is the lowest latitude where you can observe the midnight sun – a natural phenomenon where the sun remains visible at midnight. Other than that, not a lot happens here.

But during the Cold War, the part of the international date-line that runs equidistant between these two vast superpowers was known as the “ice curtain”. The ice curtain started to thaw in the 1950s, when the stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States began to heat up. The destruction unleashed on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American-made atomic bombs led to the immediate surrender of Japan in World War Two. It was a precedent that was to set in motion a nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the US. 

Historically, Russia has had a long relationship with Alaska. Between 1799 and 1867, Alaska was a Russian colony, known as Russian America. As early as 1743, fur-traders from the Russian Empire began to land in the region, where they established hunting and trading posts. By 1774, the first Russian settlement appeared in Unalaska. But, in part due to the difficulty in maintaining an area over half a million square miles, Tsar Alexander II sold Alaska to the US for $7.2 million dollars.

After a series of political and administrative changes, Alaska became a territory in 1912 and by 1959 it became the 49th state to be incorporated into the United States.

Just a few years earlier, these two world superpowers were allies in World War Two. Alaska was seen as strategically important for the US as it was crucial terrain that could be used to support America’s Soviet allies. During World War Two, pre-state-hood, defence expenditures in the region totalled in excess of $1billion.

Post-World War Two, however, the alliance between the Soviet Union and the US quickly dissipated and turned into a protracted ideological war between authoritarian, centrally-planned communism and democratic free-market capitalism. Both countries saw their political vision as a threat to each other. The Cold War was reinforced with the legitimate threat of potential nuclear annihilation. The US started testing nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946. Then, just a few years later, the Soviet’s tested an atomic bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan.

Knowing that the Soviet Union knew the territory of Alaska well, military strategists, fuelled by McCarthyite paranoia, were concerned that this isolated remote part of the world could become a potential point of invasion. The Soviet threat, according to experts, would come from Northern polar regions – placing Alaska directly in the frontline of the Cold War. This posed a serious problem for both the military and the FBI – if Alaska was invaded, who could stop them?

In now unclassified documents, it emerges that the FBI chief J Edgar Hoover and the founding director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, Joseph F Carroll, formed the Office of Special Investigations. The Alaskan project – Operation Washtub – existed between 1951-59. It involved recruiting and training local Alaskans in intelligence gathering, should the Soviet Union invade and then occupy Alaska. The exact number of recruits is not known, although in 1977 a report by Captain Kurt K Kunze stated that 89 men were sought who were accustomed and acclimatised to the harsh long winters meted out by Alaska’s cold climate. These “agents”, as they were to become known, were fishermen, trappers and miners — regular guys. They were positioned around towns and villages deemed strategically important, such as Anchorage, Fairbanks and Kodiak.

Little is known about many of the recruits. Background check requests submitted to the FBI help shed some light. The names of the recruits are redacted. But the documents revealed the jobs held by some of the individuals. One that was listed held the role of general manager of Reeve Aleutian Airways. The only person with that role was a man called Robert Campbell Reeve.

Born in 1902 in Waunakee, Wisconsin, Reeve was fascinated with aircraft from a young age. Aged 8 he read about the daring exploits of the Wright brothers and his love for aviation started. According to Stan Cohen, author of the book Flying Beats Work: The Story of Reeve Aleutian Airways’, Reeve saw his first plane in 1917 in Indiana. Two years later he took his first plane ride. After a short period of time in the army, he was discharged in 1919. Bob – as he was known to his friends – then spent the next few years working on merchant ships in China and the USSR.

After heeding his father’s pleas to finish school, he returned to the US and entered the University of Wisconsin in the autumn of 1922. But the picture of the maverick aviator Carl Ben Eielson that hung on a wall of the university fraternity house occupied his every waking thought. He skipped classes, deciding his time would be better spent at the local airfield in Madison. This led him to being expelled a few months short of graduation. He went to Florida and in exchange for manual labour he received his first flying lessons. In 1926, when the Air Commerce Act came into law, he became one of the country’s first certified aircraft mechanics. He also qualified for his commercial pilot’s license.

A few years later he became a pilot for Pan American-Grace Airways and was flying airmail from Lima to Santiago Chile, the longest aviation route in the world at the time – 1,900 miles.  Due to these long-haul flights, he clocked up 1,500 hours of flying experience. On night flights he used nothing but a compass and never flew above an altitude of 100 feet.  This is where he learnt about bush flying and how to avoid coastal fog – something which would later come to serve him well in Alaska.

It was in South America he started to hear about opportunities opening up for a new life in Alaska. When he was thirty and with just $2 to his name, he stowed away on a boat and arrived in Valdez, Alaska in 1932.

Reeve was considered to be an exceptional bush pilot. Once in Alaska, he was soon nicknamed “the glacier pilot”. He earned the sobriquet due to the many death-defying landings he would perform on the glaciers or ice fields of Alaska. He made a lot of his now celebrated landings in a Fairchild 51 – his preferred plane – the first of which he bought in 1932 for $3,500. Glacial landings are extremely dangerous. The plane could land on a frozen lake but easily crash through the ice, freezing you instantly. Or you could just as easily miss your landing spot, slide over the edge of a mountain and plunge to your death. A colleague once said of him “I thought Reeve was 90 per cent pilot and 10 per cent nuts, but now I know he’s 10 per cent pilot and 90 per cent nuts!” One story of Reeve recounted a foggy flight when he had to land on a frozen lake with a family and infant in tow. Reeve managed to keep the entire family alive overnight as the temperature plummeted. 

Due to his many daring exploits, he began to make the headlines in local newspapers. It was then when he started to receive fan-mail. One letter came from a woman who grew up a few miles away from Reeve’s native Wisconsin town. The woman was called Janice and after a brief exchange of letters, she flew to Alaska in 1935. They married the following year.

When the US entered the Second World War, Reeve was the only civilian pilot in Alaska to be contracted by the military to fly in a combat zone, delivering equipment to the new airfields that were built as part of General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s plan for Alaskan defence. It is, in part, due to his legendary daring missions and exceptional flying skills that, after the war, Reeve was apparently recruited by the FBI.

As part of Operation Washtub, Reeve and the other recruits were flown to Seattle to undergo hours of in-depth military training. In the event of capture and to avoid compromising the identity of other men, the agents were trained separately. Training involved close combat fighting, map reading, scouting, arctic survival training and clandestine photography. They were then armed. Heavily. Rifles, small calibre pistols equipped with silencer, explosives and garrotting wire. The agent’s primary responsibility was to be on the lookout for any American pilot unlucky enough to be shot down and rescue them – as getting lost in this vast desolate territory was likely to lead to capture or hypothermia.

Due to Alaska’s vast size, the military built supply caches and stocked them full of survival equipment, including skis, snowshoes and sleeping bags, so the agents could stay in the wilderness for long periods of time in order to gather intelligence.

Operation Washtub was disbanded in 1959, partly due to the financial cost of retaining the agents. Each one received $3,000 dollars a year, equivalent to $30,000 today.

For the rest of his life, until his death in 1980, Reeve never stopped flying. Over a 50-year career, he amassed 14,000 hours of airtime. “He never retired, never turned loose of the reigns.[sic] It just wasn’t in him,” Reeve’s son Richard said of him.

After almost 70 years, Reeve Aleutian Airways closed in 2001.

Due to his contribution to aviation, Robert Reeve was inducted into the Alaska Aviation Hall of fame in 2005.

Although never explicitly admitting to being part of the Operation, when he was asked if Alaskans were afraid of the Russians crossing the Bering Strait he gave a straight answer to his biographer Beth Day. “Hell no”, he said. “If we don’t knock ‘em down like pigeons before they get across the Alaskan Range, we Alaskans, each with a half-dozen guns and ammunition, will just kick their teeth out.”

Bob Reeve – an Alaskan legend.

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