ASA Alaska Begins Hearability Tests (1 AUG 1962)

Photo By Erin Thompson | Northern tip of St. Lawrence Island showing the village of Gambell (foreground), where the ASA was stationed in the Bering Sea, with Sevooghak Mountain in the background.  

UNITED STATES

07.28.2023

Courtesy Story

U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence

By Mike E. Bigelow, INSCOM Command Historian

1 AUGUST 1962
On 1 August 1962, Lt. Col. Norman B. Rolle’s Army Security Agency (ASA) Alaska sent out a mobile spectrum search team “to determine hearability of selected targets and to search for new and unusual signals for further exploitation.” For the next seven and a half weeks, the team operated from various sites in western Alaska.

Initially established as the ASA Liaison Detachment, Alaska in mid-1948, Colonel Rolle’s organization was a battalion-sized unit with a far-flung area of operations. It provided signal intelligence and communication security for Army forces in Alaska. From its headquarters in Fort Richardson, it commanded elements at Fort Wainwright as well as on Adak and Shemya Islands. Both islands were in the Aleutians chain and were well over a thousand miles away from headquarters: 1,190 miles for Adak and 1,453 miles for Shemya. Comparatively, Fort Wainwright, 250 miles away, was a hop, skip, and a jump to the north. If the distances did not make Colonel Rolle’s task of command complex enough, his detachments in the Aleutians were on Air Force (Shemya) or Naval (Adak) bases.

To perform ASA Alaska’s mission, Rolle did not have a large organization. In mid-1962, he had just over five hundred soldiers. His largest single unit was the 79th Special Operations Unit at Shemya with almost 180 soldiers; his smallest the Signal Research Unit of fifteen men. He did have a hefty budget of $188,000 (almost $1.9 million in today’s dollars). Moreover, he gained more than $476,000 (about $4.7 million today) in unfunded requirements (UFR). Much of these UFR funds were spent on the hearability tests and its results in August and September 1962.

During August and early September, ASA Alaska’s search team conducted tests on the Seward Peninsula in west central Alaska. The team initially carried out the tests from small, mobile S141/G shelters. The area was mainland Alaska’s closest point to the Soviet Union, only fifty-five miles across the Bering Strait. However, the team had little success at either Kotzebue to the north or Tin City on the south of the peninsula. By mid-September, however, the team moved to Gambell on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. After 25 September, the team achieved promising results, and Colonel Rolle received orders to continue operations as long as weather and logistical conditions permitted. In early November, he established a semi-permanent site in a Jamesway Hut on top of barren Sevooghak Mountain.

This site proved to be the ideal location for intercept of signals coming from the northeastern part of the Soviet Union, especially from the Chutotka Peninsula. “As a result,” the ASA Alaska’s historical report noted, “this special detachment remained at Gambell [for the next nine months] under the designation of Detachment ‘J’ and continued to produce very desirous intelligence for the National Intelligence effort.”

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• Date Taken: 07.28.2023
• Date Posted: 07.28.2023 16:54
• Story ID: 450241
• Location: US