Hi Hue,

Thank you for the reply. I think that you put it quite politely for
sending agents behind the Iron Curtain especially in the 1950s was equal
to insanity as most of them were unnecessarily martyred without
providing anything valuable to the West except intentional disinformation.

The case of these two Poles in US service, who were parachuted into
northern Poland on 4/5 Nov. 1952, actually involved a vast offensive
counterintelligence operation cover-named Cezary. Yet in 1948, the Poles
established a fictitious underground structure known as the "V
Directorate of the WiN" clandestine organization, which acted to lure
foreign agents into a trap just like the Soviets were doing in the 1920s
with their infamous Trust operation. Obviously, the structure was almost
entirely staffed by the security people, incl. its mastermind Col.
Henryk Wendrowski, who was later promoted to Polish ambassador to
Denmark and Iceland. [https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Wendrowski]

To make it even more complicated, a key Polish agent, who convinced one
of these two poor Poles in 1951 to defect to the West to join foreign
intelligence, was Yaroslav Hamivka (Ярослав Гамівка), a Ukrainian
militant, who defected to Polish security in 1947, and who was
successfully being used as an asset and agent-provocateur cover-named
Hurricane yet in the late 1970s.
[https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaros%C5%82aw_Hamiwka]

Meanwhile I found a good article by Detlev Vreisleben, DC7KG, and Pete
McCollum, N0TDM, about the clandestine use of the URC-4, which is
available from here:

https://www.wftw.nl/66%20URC-4%20v1%2000.pdf

The text said that indeed the frequency of the modified set was VHF
only, and the beacon was used in conjunction with the ARA-8 VHF DF
fitted in an aircraft.

I wonder if 121.5 MHz was used for the Polish op (ie. Project Rollback
and the Redsox air operation), or a different frequency, as you
suggested, could have been selected. I cannot verify this for I do not
have access to the original documents on the case, which may include a
technical report on the captured radio gear.

I also wonder if the original manufacturer of the URC-4 (ie. Hoffman
Radio Corp.) did modify these sets for clandestine use, or a contractor.
I assume that if the special version of the URC-4 was to be used on a
tripod and with the telescopic counterpoises, it was not feasible to use
it for voice communication with an aircraft.

The a/c that delivered the said Poles in 1952 could have been either a
C-47D, or a C-54A given that the aircraft that parachuted these two poor
men in 1952 took off from Wiesbaden, then flew over Hamburg, Bornholm,
and got into Poland from the north. Perhaps the range of the C-47D
without auxiliary fuel tanks would have been a bit limited for such an
endeavor.

The area of the 4/5 Nov. 1952 airdrop was approximately here:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/54.2029/16.8249

If memory serves, unmarked C-47D and C-54A were used for clandestine
airdrops in Europe in the 1950s, and were extra fitted with the ARA-8
for the purpose.

73,

Jan SP5XZG


W dniu 08.10.2026 o 02:18, Hubert Miller via ARC5 pisze:
> Thank you for this post with very interesting linked videos ! From my
> reading of a previous parachutist case i conclude that trying to
> infiltrate agents into a highly organized, tightly controlled country is
> absolutely futile and ignorant.
> I think the URC-4 uses only one quartz, for the transmitter, so it would
> certainly not be difficult to move it elsewhere in the VHF band. I am
> sure none of my URC-4 manuals discuss any such antenna as in this case.
>
> I am with the western Imperialists in this case, who in the long run,
> turn out to be the less imperialistic.
> -Hue Miller
>


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