The Trabzon Airfield raid occurred on 13 January 1981 when a team of American CIA "Black Ops" operatives led by Russell Adler ambushed a meeting of Iranian and Soviet members of the "Perseus" spy ring at the Trabzon Airfield in Turkey.
In January 1983, East Berlin-based Russian Mafia boss Anton Volkov discovered an American nuclear bomb hidden under Berlin as part of Operation Greenlight, and he reported this discovery to the Soviet spymaster "Perseus", the head of the eponymous spy ring. Perseus, who feared that the Soviet leadership was doing nothing to stop American power from slowly consuming the Soviet Union, planned to reverse-engineer the bomb's codes to unlock the arsenals of Greenlight nuclear bombs hidden in capital cities across Europe, after which he would detonate them and blame the United States for Europe's devastation. At the same time, the Iranian terrorist Arash Kadivar planned to smuggle weapons from Turkey to Volkov via the Ukrainian SSR, with two Russian agents accompanying him. They were to depart the Trabzon Airfield on the night of 13 January 1981.
The day before that flight, however, the CIA captured Kadivar's lieutenant Qasim Javadi in a raid in Amsterdam for unrelated reasons; Kadivar and Javadi were wanted by the US government for their roles in the Iran hostage crisis. Javadi revealed to the CIA team that Kadivar was planning to fly out of Trabzon Airfield the next day, so a CIA team headed to intercept Kadivar before he could fly off to Duga and then his next destination, the Solovetsky Islands.
On the night of 13 January, Kadivar loaded the weapons shipment onto his plane, but he shot the two Russian agents, as he had become jealous of one of them due to Perseus favoring him over Kadivar. The CIA agents Russell Adler, Frank Woods, and Alex Mason observed this from afar before Adler had Mason identify Kadivar and shoot him with a sniper rifle. The bullet struck Arash's associate instead of the terror leader, forcing the Americans to shoot their way past Arash's bodyguards, commandeer a pickup truck on the runway, and pursue Arash as he attempted to take off on the cargo plane. Several truckloads of terrorists were killed when Mason shot their vehicles with a machine-gun, and Adler had Mason deploy an explosive RC-XD car on the ground, using it to get under the plane's landing gear and blow it up. The plane was destroyed, and the Americans captured Arash and confronted him over the hostage crisis. Arash revealed that Perseus was still alive (the Americans thought him killed in action during the Vietnam War) and that his plan was already underway, and that the hostage crisis was a simple distraction. Adler then executed Arash and had his team sweep the tarmac for survivors. One of the Russians whom Kadivar had attempted to execute was found alive, and Adler - seeking to find Perseus' location through any means necessary - proceeded to utilize MK Ultra brainwashing techniques to make the operative believe that he had fought alongside Adler in the Vietnam War; Adler named the brainwashed operative "Bell" and created a false service record to back up the story. Adler also acquired a dossier from Bell naming Volkov as the intended recipient of Soviet weaponry, connecting him to Perseus, and resulting in a raid on Volkov's East Berlin hideout in which Bell took part.