#winter soldier program

Part II: The Winter Soldier program

In the clutches of HYDRA

In June of 1943, Sergeant James “Bucky” Barnes gets shipped out to the Italian Front of World War II. In late autumn of that same year, Barnes and a number of Allied troops are captured by HYDRA’s forces to serve as workers in one of their factories on the Italian-Austrian border. The prisoners are forced to make the Tesseract-powered weapons and the bombs that Johann Schmitt/Red Skull intends to use on all of the major capitals of the world.

In a fateful turn of events, Steve Rogers just happens to be on a USO tour in Italy, and learns that many of the 107th were killed or captured by HYDRA. Rogers is pretty much determined to single-handedly rescue who he can; thankfully Howard Stark and Peggy Carter are willing to put themselves at risk to deliver him to HYDRA’s doorstep. After infiltrating the base and freeing the prisoners he finds, Steve asks around for Bucky and is told “There’s an isolation ward in the factory, but no one’s ever come back from it.”

Guess who’s in charge of that ‘ward?’ Doctor Arnim Zola. 

Learn that face well, my friends, because Bucky will never forget him.

In Zola’s lab at the HYDRA factory, Steve finds Buck strapped to a surgical table. Zola was doing some sort of experimentation on the Sergeant. Barnes is rather dazed when Steve first finds him, repeating his serial number, rank and name to himself. 

We will probably never know the exact nature of Zola’s experiments. I surmise with the Red Skull’s order for Zola to increase the factory’s capacity and “use up what strength [the workers] have left,” the spectacled scientist was tinkering with ways to make their slaves more resilient: more stamina if not more strength, the ability to shrug off illnesses brought on by taxing labor and little food. This may explain why Bucky doesn’t seem all that super-human after Zola’s first go at him.

Fast forward through months and months of the Howling Commandos and the Strategic Scientific Reserve (SSR) taking down HYDRA bases, with Barnes always having Steve’s back and keeping the image of Captain America looking squeaky clean and appropriately heroic.

Then, well...tragedy happens involving the train carrying Zola to a HYDRA base and Buck’s thousand-foot fall into an icy ravine.

James Barnes is presumed dead. Cue Steve never getting over it.

From the hijacked train, Zola is taken into SSR custody. After Colonel Phillips has a nice sit-down chat with the HYDRA scientist, Zola appears to cooperate in giving the SSR the intel on Schmitt that they need to foil his master plan. That’s the last we see of a living, in-the-flesh Zola until mid-1946. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s get back to Bucky.

Into Russian hands

Some days or weeks after his fall, Buck is recovered by Russian soldiers. Yes, Russian. We don’t know where exactly in the Alps the train accident occurred, but through a brief flashback, we witness an injured Buck being carried by two of the Red Army. The uniforms in this flashback are consistent with historical winter gear worn by Soviet servicemen.  In World War II, the Russians were fighting with Allied forces and their troops were all over eastern Europe to combat Nazi occupation.

It’s a bit up in the air right now whether Bucky was discovered by accident, or if Zola managed to contact HYDRA operatives within the Red Army to retrieve him. The writers for the Captain America movies, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have said in an interview that there could be HYDRA within the Soviet forces, but that the idea is not ‘gospel’ at the moment.

What is also interesting about this interview is that the writers suggest that amputee-Buck was kept in stasis by the Russians for some time before he was further worked on and transformed into the Winter Soldier.

A doctor of the mind

In Part I of this meta, we met the Russian psychiatrist, Dr. Ivchenko. In gratitude for his liberation from the Soviet Leviathan facility by Agent Carter and her colleagues, Ivchenko agreed to help the SSR with his insights into the Soviet secret organization. Turns out his name is actually Johann Fennhoff, and his ‘liberation’ was actually a clever way to infiltrate the SSR on behalf of Leviathan. (Fennhoff is also known as ‘Dr. Faustus’ in the comic books, for those of you who are curious.)

In the Agent Carter episode ‘SNAFU’ we get a flashback to 1943. In a Russian army camp, surgeons are about to amputate the leg of a wounded Russian soldier, and they have run out of anesthetics. Dr. Fennhoff uses his skills as a hypnotist to distract the young man from his pain while the surgeons begin the procedure. Could Fennhoff been a part of the original Russian team that recovered Bucky and dealt with his missing arm? Who knows? But the parallels are tantalizing.

So why did Fennhoff become one of main antagonists of the SSR? Turns out that in the 1944 Battle of Finnau, the nerve agent ‘Midnight Oil’ (created by Howard Stark) was released on Russian soldiers by the U.S. military. It was supposedly developed to allow the soldiers to fight for days at a time; Midnight Oil instead caused exposed troops to become senselessly violent and attack one another in a mindless rage.  Dr. Fennhoff survived because he wore a gas mask, but his brother wasn’t so lucky. In the events of Agent Carter, Fennhoff takes his revenge on Stark for his brother’s death.

What happened at Finnau drove Fennhoff to align himself with Leviathan. At the time of Barnes’ accident in early 1945, Dr. Fennhoff could have met the injured Howling Commando and ‘helped’ him with the pain of his injury, but that’s not a given.

Dr. Fennhoff’s ability to hypnotize is pretty much a superpower. In about ten or fifteen minutes of psychological manipulation, he demonstrates to us viewers his ability to get classified information from an SSR agent and also implants an order for the same agent to kill himself by walking out into traffic. Fennhoff then controls the SSR NYC Office Chief into putting on what amounts to a suicide vest. So, yeah, the Doc has talent.

The HYDR-iathan collaboration in the Winter Soldier

At the Agent Carter finale, Dr. Johann Fennhoff is apprehended. Because he hypnotizes with his voice, a very uncomfortable looking gag is constructed for him. The Doc is locked up, probably at some federal prison. And that is when Fennhoff meets his cell-mate.

In this scene, Arnim Zola addresses Fennhoff: “I am familiar with your work on matters of the mind, Herr Doktor. It would give me great pleasure to hear your thoughts on this. Perhaps there is another way for us to collaborate. I know things seem bleak. But you are, in fact, a fortunate man. You are in prison, yes. But it is an American prison. And America is a land of opportunity.”

What’s that ‘opportunity’ knocking? Oh, that would be Operation Paperclip, which recruited German and Nazi allied scientists to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s cause. It’s reasonable to estimate that Zola’s work for S.H.I.E.L.D. began soon after it was founded. We don’t have a clear date for Zola’s release from the prison, but likely somewhere around 1947, give or take a few years.

It is clear from Barnes’ flashbacks in Captain America: the Winter Soldier that Arnim Zola was present for the ‘procedure’ that gave Buck his bionic left arm. Fennhoff’s exact contribution to the Winter Soldier program hasn’t been defined (yet), but given his ability to basically hypnotize anyone into doing anything for him, it is safe to assume that he worked on Barnes enough to turn him to the shared causes of Leviathan and HYDRA.

So who exactly does the Winter Soldier report to?

While the comics firmly place the Winter Soldier as a Soviet operative, the MCU has muddied the narrative by introducing him first as someone working for HYDRA’s current leader, Alexander Pierce in the second Captain America film.

It is quite logical that the Asset did HYDRA’s work of ‘reaping war’ via a covert Soviet agenda. By the late 1940s, the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR had now taken root. With S.H.I.E.L.D.’s founders (Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, & Colonel Phillips) being original colleagues of Bucky Barnes, it was wise for Zola to keep the Asset shrouded behind the Iron Curtain.

The Winter Soldier uses Soviet-made weapons and bears the Soviet symbol of a red star on his left shoulder. There are a few other times the red star symbol has shown up in the MCU. One is on ‘Cosmo’, the Soviet space-faring canine, who gets a cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy.

The other is in Agent Carter, on the uniforms of the Russian guards of the facility that also housed the proto-Red Room.

Still plenty of questions

Right now, we have no clear timeline for the Winter Soldier’s ‘chain of custody’ between his Soviet handlers and his non-Soviet HYDRA handlers for a full six decades. Because the MCU takes so much comic canon and distills it down for their narratives, we may never get a clear picture.  There may never be Aleksander Lukin or Vasily Karpov in the MCU, but we do have a ‘stand in’ of sorts for these comic characters in Dr. Johann Fennhoff.

We also have the Kiev File, which Natasha Romanoff retrieved for Steve Rogers and gave him at the end of the second Captain America film. A Russian speaker has translated the text on the file to read: “James Barnes - Military record of maintenance, deployment and experimentation”; opened on March 23, 1945. It would be great to know more of what it reveals.

In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Computer-Zola hinted heavily that Barnes was responsible for Howard and Maria Stark’s death in 1991. This corresponds interestingly with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

With the announcement of the third Captain America film being Civil War and the Russo directors posing the question about whether the Winter Soldier should be treated as the world’s greatest assassin or the longest serving POW in history, maybe we’ll get some answers and further details on those brutal decades when Barnes was treated as little more than a living weapon.

To summarize:

After his fall from Dr. Arnim Zola’s train in early 1945, James “Bucky” Barnes was recovered by Russian soldiers.

It is unknown whether the Russians that found Barnes were also HYDRA operatives or not.

It is likely Barnes was kept in cryostasis for several years before he was turned into the Winter Soldier.

While Zola was in prison, he acquired a new cell-mate in Dr. Johann Fennhoff, a Leviathan-loyal psychologist with a powerful ability to hypnotize and direct people to do whatever he tells them.

Zola is familiar with Fennhoff’s work ‘on the mind’ and proposes collaboration.

Under Operation Paperclip, Zola is released sometime after being cell-mates with Fennhoff.

Zola is present for the procedure(s) that fits Barnes with his metal arm.

Captain America writers have said in an interview that there is a Winter Soldier program connection between Zola of HYDRA and Fennhoff of Leviathan.

End notes:

In Part I of this MCU-centered meta, I reviewed all the details of the Red Room program that will go on to create Natasha Romanoff as the Black Widow. This Part II was about the events that turned the injured and presumed-dead Bucky Barnes into the Winter Soldier.