Operation Chaos was a covert CIA "Black Ops" operation that occurred on 7 March 1981 when a team of Special Activities Division (SAD) operatives was dispatched to intercept the ex-CIA defector Robert Aldrich and his undercover Spetsnaz escort as they traveled in a convoy south from Colorado towards the United States-Mexico border. The convoy was intercepted by UH-1 Iroquois helicopters at a rest stop at the New Mexico state line, and CIA operatives were inserted to kill Aldrich, resulting in a shootout.
Robert Aldrich had worked for the CIA in the Eastern Bloc during the 1960s and 1970s, but, frustrated after being passed over for promotion on several occasions, he was recruited by KGB spymaster Perseus to assemble a spy ring inside US borders. By 1981, Aldrich went rogue and hid out in Colorado, where he was protected by a detail of 60 undercover Spetsnaz GRU operatives dispatched by Perseus. The CIA acquired an encrypted floppy disk from one of his agents, as well as a numbers station broadcast reel found in East Berlin, a coded message obtained from Qasim Javadi, and the front page of a newspaper found at the Soviet base in Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, and they used the numbers broadcast for the Madison, Wisconsin sleeper cell (whose numbers code matched a code derived from red-highlighted letters on the newspaper) for the floppy disk's code and the name of the Memphis, Tennessee sleeper cell (taken from the results of an algebraic equation on Javadi's message) to crack the floppy disk and decrypt it. With the floppy disk decrypted, the CIA was not only able to locate Aldrich, but his cell members as well.
It was then that the West Berlin CIA station sent orders for operatives Frank Woods and Alex Mason to lead an operation to kill Aldrich. Aldrich made plans to move south across Colorado and into northern New Mexico, where the CIA planned to intercept his convoy. Two UH-1 Iroquois helicopters located the convoy before the helicopters landed on the highway, forcing the Spetsnaz vehicles to halt. The CIA agents proceeded to open fire on the convoy's occupants, initiating several minutes of heavy fighting during which the CIA agents made their way up the highway, through a gas station, and up a hill towards the motel where Aldrich fled. Taking down Spetsnaz bodyguards every step of the way, the CIA operatives cornered Aldrich in a second-floor bathroom, where Mason shot him dead and photographed his body for verification. As the CIA agents prepared for exfiltration, a Soviet RPG round struck and destroyed the support helicopter Phoenix 2-1, while two trucks carrying more Spetsnaz soldiers arrived. Woods and Mason destroyed these trucks with machine-gun fire and fought their way past several more truckloads of Spetsnaz operatives as the helicopter Phoenix 2-4 moved in to exfiltrate them. The two men were able to escape aboard the helicopter, and any surviving Spetsnaz operatives were soon withdrawn from the United States due to the failure of their mission. The decrypted floppy disk helped the CIA to crack down on the sleeper agents positioned in major cities across the country, wiping out the Perseus spyring in America.