Norway 2026 A travel chronicle

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A Wartime Return — Operation RYPE

In March 1945 the OSS dropped a team of Norwegian-American soldiers into the mountains above Snåsa. The unit was named RYPE. One of the sergeants on the drop team was Clifford Kyllo of McCanna, North Dakota — Lewis Lorentsen Kyllo's eldest grandchild.

Clifford Gilmer Kyllo was the eldest grandchild of Lewis Lorentsen Kyllo and Christine Tøgesdatter Talla. His father, John Sovrine Kyllo, was Lewis’s eldest son. John married late in life, and Clifford was his only biological child.

Clifford grew up on the family land outside McCanna, North Dakota. His first cousin Mary — who would become Mary Beard, the grandmother of much of the 2026 travel party — grew up on Clarence Kyllo’s farm a few miles away. The two of them were first cousins on the Kyllo side and grew up alongside each other.

Clifford spoke Norwegian. His grandfather Lewis had emigrated from Hegra in 1871, and the language had carried through the household.

In the early 1940s the United States Office of Strategic Services — the wartime intelligence agency that became the Central Intelligence Agency after the war — was recruiting Norwegian-speaking soldiers out of the 99th Infantry Battalion, an Army unit composed mainly of Norwegian-Americans, for behind-the-lines work in occupied Norway. Clifford was among those recruited.

The operation he was assigned to was named RYPE. It was led on the ground by Lieutenant Roger Hall and under the broader command of an OSS officer named William Colby, who later became Director of Central Intelligence.

On the 24th of March 1945, the RYPE unit was parachuted into the mountains above Snåsa, in Nord-Trøndelag, north of Trondheim. Clifford was a sergeant on the drop team. The unit established a base camp at a mountain farm called Gjefsjøen and from there carried out a campaign of railroad sabotage, with the intention of preventing German forces still in northern Norway from being withdrawn south.

RYPE was the only United States military operation conducted on Norwegian soil during the Second World War.

Clifford flew over Hegra during the mission — the parish whose church his grandfather Lewis had been christened in ninety-six years before, and whose churchyard the family will visit in 2026.

After the war Clifford returned to North Dakota and the family land near McCanna. Later he ran the Larimore Insurance Agency for more than twenty years. He died on the 14th of July 1983.

The Gjefsjøen building that served as RYPE’s headquarters was restored between 2018 and 2021 and now stands as a memorial to the operation. Task Force RYPE of the Norwegian Home Guard, based in Trøndelag, has taken the name of the wartime unit.