in 1962, the CIA found a Russian ice drift station used to monitor US submarines, and to develope advanced Arctic anti-submarine warfare technology, (thank you George! ) ( A true story about a B 17, submarines, and an adventurer)

The Russian drift station had been abandoned when the ice runway the Soviets had been using to receive restocks of supplies, had been demolished by a pressure ridge, making it impossible for any more incoming flights to reach the station. 

The Soviets were forced to abandon their station, confident that, with no way on or off the drift station, all their secrets would eventually be consumed by the Arctic.

The U.S. employed similar ice stations to keep tabs on Soviet submarine movement, and being able to see how the Soviets equipped their own drift stations—including the tech they employed and any research they left behind—would be invaluable intelligence.

On May 28, 1962, a B-17 took off from Resolute Bay, a Royal Canadian Air Force base, carrying a paratrooper and Russian language expert from the Air Force.

 A first attempt two days earlier had failed when the crew couldn’t locate the station, but this time, they found a different and newer drift station, and the two men parachuted down onto the ice. Once Major Smith radioed a positive report, the B-17 returned to base, where crews affixed the equipment needed for Fulton’s Skyhook to—hopefully—retrieve the men. LeSchack and Smith had 72 hours to search the drift station.

Robert Fulton, son of the president of the Mack Truck Company, had already lived quite a life before he came to the attention of the CIA. Born in New York in 1909, Fulton had studied architecture in Vienna, visited King Tut’s tomb in 1923, spent 17 months on a “motorcycle adventure” across 32 countries, (wrote the book One Man Caravan that I posted about in 2011 https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/search?q=robert+Fulton)   and turned a fascination with photography into a job with Pan Am “taking pictures for the development of the trans-Pacific air route.”

In 1958, he introduced the Fulton aerial retrieval system, otherwise known as Skyhook. The system utilized a harness that was attached to a 500-foot braided nylon line. When it was time for pickup, a portable helium bottle would inflate a balloon, which lifted the line to a height where it could be easily hooked by the pickup plane’s angled steel “horns.”

It was used in the 2008 blockbuster The Dark Knight, after Bruce Wayne asks his engineer Lucius Fox about a way to get aboard an airplane “without it landing.” With a smirk, Fox tells him, “The CIA had a program back in the ’60s for getting their people out of hotspots called Skyhook. We could look into that.”

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a73274458/batmans-skyhook-cia-mission/