When the AN-2 pilot was forced to slow down, Woods fired an AK-47 rifle from his UH-1D helicopter at Colt’s cockpit, causing it to spin out of control and crash
The amazing tale of the first CIA air-to-air triumph.
Radar was installed in a remote mountain inside fictitiously neutral Laos near the northern Laos-North Vietnam border in the middle of 1967 as Operation Rolling Thunder was underway because the poor weather over North Vietnam made it impossible to locate and strike the designated targets.
It was determined that the site was easily defendable because it could only be reached by aircraft or a difficult trail twisting up the nearly vertical mountainside. The fighter bomber crews called this radar station Channel 97 (the radar frequency)., although it was known as Lima (L for Laos) Site 85.
As described by USAF Col. (Ret.) Lawrence E. Pence in his article “Air Story” out of Vietnam “the Channel 97 radar system was an old SAC precision bomb scoring radar that could locate an aircraft within a few meters at a hundred miles. In this application, the strike force would fly out from Lima Site 85 at a given distance on a given radial, and the site operators would tell the strike leader precisely when to release his bomb load. It was surprisingly accurate, and allowed the strikes to be run at night or in bad weather.”
For many years, the same mountain served as a staging area for Hmong insurgents under the control of the CIA, while Air America, a CIA-owned company, supplied aircraft support for the facility, the technicians, and the security personnel.
Due to the extensive damage that bombers employing Lima Facility 85 as their navigational aid were creating when they attacked North Vietnamese sites, the latter decided to demolish this radar site on January 12, 1968. The North Vietnamese Air Force (NVNAF) was given the assignment to assault the radar, and they did it by using three Antonov AN-2 Colt biplanes as strike bombers.
According to Pence “The NVNAF armed the AN-2s with a 12 shot 57mm folding fin aerial rocket pod under each lower wing, and 20 250mm mortar rounds with aerial bomb fuses set in vertical tubes let into the floor of the aircraft cargo bay.” Through holes drilled in the cargo bay floor, these were dropped. These apertures were covered by straightforward hinged bomb-bay doors, which the pilot could open to discharge his bomb load.
Two AN-2s served as the assault planes in this unconventional strike package, while a third Colt served as the strike’s hit director and chase plane. A Thai mercenary shot down the first AN-2 that tried to strike the Air America infrastructure with his AK-47. The second Colt turned homeward and headed toward the north after the first one crashed, but the unarmed Air America UH-1D Huey helicopter stationed at the radar site stopped it.
According to the CIA website, the AN-2 was reached by helicopter, which was piloted by Capt. Ted Moore with Glenn Woods serving as a crewman, a few miles inside North Vietnam without being seen by the Colt pilot. Moore then flew over the AN-2, and the helicopter’s downwash caused the upper wing of the aircraft to crash. When the biplane’s pilot was forced to slow down, Woods fired an AK-47 rifle into Colt’s cockpit, causing it to spin out of control and crash.
This battle saw the CIA’s first air-to-air triumph and the lone helicopter kill against a biplane.
Instead, two months later, North Vietnamese troops demolished Lima Site 85.
Photo by Keith Woodcock via CIA website, U.S. Air Force, and Julian Herzog (Website) via Wikipedia