Garfield Thorsrud (February 20, 1928 - November 23, 2014) was a Montana pilot and smoke jumper who was initially contracted by the

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

to fly aircraft for the Tibetan insertion operation, encrypted STBARNUM, in the early 1950s. He was one of the first eight

smokejumper Smokejumpers are specially trained wildland firefighters who provide an initial attack response on remote wildland fires. They are inserted at the site of the fire by parachute. In addition to performing the initial attack on wildfires, they ...

s recruited out of the

University of Montana The University of Montana (UM) is a public research university in Missoula, Montana. UM is a flagship institution of the Montana University System and its second largest campus. UM reported 10,962 undergraduate and graduate students in the fa ...

by the

in Spring 1951.Conboy and Morrison, p. 123. He was subsequently offered a staff position in Special Operating Group and, together with Major (later Brigadier General) Heinie Aderholt—who had been seconded to the Agency from the US Air Force—stood up a separate paramilitary air wing—later formalized as Air Branch. SOG/Air Branch (and Thorsrud) subsequently played a major role in virtually every Agency covert action in the Third World during the cold war and beyond. In 1956, Thorsrud established an air operations base carved out of the jungle in a western pacific location and from there he oversaw air delivery of men and supplies to support President Eisenhower's program to de-stabilize the Sukarno regime in Indonesia. Gar was assigned President and CEO of Intermountain Aviation, a covert aviation maintenance company, based out of Marana Air Park (now Pinal Air Park), near Tucson, AZ about 1960. He recruited a number of former Smokejumpers and other witting "agency" employees, and a larger number of unwitting employees who were not told of their CIA connection. In order to maintain their aviation cover business, Intermountain regularly repaired and maintained the aviation interests of other worldly businesses and persons. Gar contracted with Hugh Heffner in the 1960s to repair and paint the famous jet-black Playboy Bunny DC-9 airplane. Later he cleverly negotiated a deal with the Big-3 auto makers to ship car parts between auto factories across the eastern U.S. in agency C-46 aircraft, allthewhile funneling millions from the auto makers into the covert company's bank accounts. When the Soviets abandoned an arctic weather and listening station in the mid-1960s, after the ice pack it was built on broke adrift, Thorsrud organized the air assets from

Intermountain Aviation Intermountain Airlines, also known as Intermountain Aviation and Intermountain Airways, was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) airline front company. Intermountain performed covert operations for the CIA in Southeast Asia and elsewhere during the ...

for Operation Cold Feet, a remarkable joint CIA-US Navy operation that put 2 officers on the floating ice flow to recover a treasure trove of documents, instruments and equipment abandoned there by the Soviets. Thorsrud then successfully extracted the two officers by means of a "cow catcher" attached to a converted B-17 bomber that snagged a line attached to an inflated balloon and connected to the men by harness. This incredible feat in the arctic slowly leaked out and became the basis for the spy thriller film "Ice Station Zebra." During the early years of China operations, Air Branch assumed control of several private Asian cargo airlines and turned them into CIA proprietary companies. These included

Civil Air Transport Civil Air Transport (CAT) was a Nationalist Chinese airline, later owned by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), that supported United States covert operations throughout East and Southeast Asia. During the Cold War, missions consisted i ...

(CAT), purchased from its founder General Claire Chennault, as well as Air America, and lesser known air proprietaries such as

BirdAir BirdAir was an airline owned by the construction company Bird & Sons, Inc which served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Background Bird & Sons, Inc was a San Francisco heavy construction company operating in Vietnam and Laos that maint ...

, and

Southern Air Transport Southern Air Transport (SAT) (1947–1998), based in Miami, Florida, was a cargo airline best known as a front company for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (1960–1973) and for its crucial role in the Iran-Contra scandal in the m ...

. Gar was in charge of running CIA air operations during the April 1961 invasion of Cochinos Bay, Cuba. Gar was also a great family man; raising three children with his wife Audrey, who continues to live in the Tucson area. Tributes to Gar and Intermountain Aviation hang on the walls of CIA headquarters in Langley, VA. Thorsrud later founded Mountain West Aviation in 1975 which in turn became

Sierra Pacific Airlines Sierra Pacific Airlines is an American charter airline based in Tucson, Arizona, USA. It operates passenger charters and sub-charters for other airlines, as well as for the United States Forest Service, United States Military and the United Sta ...

.Obituary. Retrieved May 20, 2015
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Notes

References

* Conboy, Kenneth J., and James Morrison. ''Feet to the Fire: CIA Covert Operations in Indonesia, 1957-1958''. Naval Institute Press, 1999. , 9781557501936. {{DEFAULTSORT:Thorsrud, Gar 1928 births 2014 deaths American expatriates in China Aviators from Montana People of the Central Intelligence Agency University of Montana alumni