Word: ferreted
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...were beginning a mission that was vital to U.S. security. Their bomb bays were crammed not with high explosives but with delicate electronic gear designed to measure the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet radar defenses. Theirs was a flight far different from that of Francis Powers. Theirs was a "ferret mission" of a sort that has been carried out for years by U.S. ships and planes patrolling the long coastline of the Russian heartland. The Navy bomber shot down over the Baltic in the spring of 1950 was on a ferret mission. So was the Air Force C-130 transport...
...author, an English-born Welshman, writes well of two boys poaching rabbits with a ferret and a terrier, of women clacking 18 to the dozen after church, of the deaths of children and grandmothers in the choking mines. He also gives a good picture of a night raid on a tollgate, but does not trouble himself to explain the social chaos that led to the building of the gates...
Amid deepest secrecy, U.S. and Allied planes and ships have long prowled the air and sea approaches to the Soviet fortress. Such so-called "ferret" fights probe the Russian radar fences in the Pacific, in the Middle East and in the Arctic north. The Russians, for their part, send a weekly fight of radar-snooping planes along Japan's northeast coasts with such unfailing regularity that it is known as the "Tokyo Express." Three months ago, the Soviet trawler Vega made a much-photographed nuisance of herself oT the U.S. Atlantic Coast-taking bearings on U.S. coastal radars, barging...
Last Call. But the ferret flight that left from the U.S. base in the English town of Brize Norton on July 1 was destined to become a brief but acrimonious international incident. The plane was an RB-47, the reconnaissance version of the Air Force's workhorse medium jet bomber. It was scheduled to fly the routine ferret run off the Soviet Arctic coast, a triangular course (see map) around the Barents Sea plotted to keep the ferret plane at least 75 miles away from Soviet territory. At 3:03 p.m., upon reaching the appointed spot about 300 miles...
...plane and shot it down. For the Russians, the kill presented no problem. It was broad daylight. The weather was clear. The plane presumably was flying at its assigned altitude of 12,000 ft., within easy reach of the most obsolete fighter, and on the course other U.S. ferret planes had regularly flown before. But the Russians must have planned carefully. U.S. monitors listening in on Soviet command channels heard no messages transmitted between Russian bases and the plane...