Every other year from 1955 she sailed to the Mediterranean for duty with the 6th Fleet, joining in North Atlantic Treaty Organisation exercises and visiting European ports.

In the spring of 1956, she conducted joint exercises with ships of the Royal Canadian Navy, and through that summer experimented with controllable pitch propellers and mine-countermeasures equipment at Charleston and Port Everglades, Florida.

In August 1987 Fearless was towed by Grapple (ARS-53) to the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Earnest Will, arriving in mid-September.

Full scale mine countermeasures operations began in November of that year.

She was sold by the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service for scrapping, 1 December 1992 to Seawitch Salvage, Baltimore, Maryland for $6,000.