How the KGB Caught America's 'Volkswagen Spy' | Hacker News Reader

How the KGB Caught America's 'Volkswagen Spy'

rferl.org

76 pointsbaybal239 comments

I don't buy this story as written. It's totally unimaginable that a random dude in a Volkswagen (identifiable by everyone as a foreigner) would gather useful intelligence by making outside photos of random buildings; nobody would let a Volkswagen near anything resembling a military object. As Makinen is quoted himself, there is more to the story.

The only weirder story I know of is the one of Mathias Rust (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust) .

A random dude showing up in a car at the border and just being waved through? Vast majority of the ussr population had not even seen a foreigner up close at that point, there was virtually no tourism and what there was, was focused on big cities. The Moscow Youth Featival, that opened the doors to more than a handful of foreigners, had been only 4 years prior. Given the extent to which KGB meticulously followed each and every foreigner setting foot inside the ussr and carefully catered their experience, there is no way this mission was going to succeed as described and no way the people giving this mission would know otherwise. This does not add up.

Well, he did get caught immediately (in less than the 28 hours his trip was to cover) for the reasons you outlined.

Perhaps he was intending to get caught?

According to the docs in the article (a picture with his planned route), he had a visa.

> Given the extent to which KGB meticulously followed each and every foreigner setting foot inside the ussr

And also into all of the satellite states.

This sounds like the drug mule trick where you send an obvious patsy first to get caught and draw all the attention, while you then afterward send the real experienced mule.

If you want some more weird/gutsy stuff involving Cold War intelligence gathering, listen to both 2013 SpyCast episodes with Col. James Cox, who was an attaché working in Moscow during and after the 1991 coup. (This aside from e.g. BRIXMIS etc)

Mathias Rust was an irresponsible buffoon. An idiot with access to a small plane. What's weird about that? The only weird thing I can see is that he didn't get shot down and made it all the way to Moscow, but then, perhaps the Soviets, even in the cold war, weren't as trigger-happy as the western media made us believe?

This 18-year old buffoon and idiot had amazing skill and thoughtfulness to do what he did. To many accidents to write it all off as luck. This article has some of the details: https://taskandpurpose.com/history/soviet-union-mathias-rust...

Not pushing a conspiracy but weird it was indeed.

This is a really weird story. Why would people even do this? It's like a random person asking you to bring a package with you on a flight :)

Sounds like he didn't even get any training. Nor had any specific target. Was it really an intelligence agency that sent him? He was bound to get caught like this. Why would they take such a risk?

I wonder if he was perhaps a decoy for a real intelligence op? It sounds like he kept the KGB quite busy.

This is one of the things intelligence agencies do: find people predisposed to being convinced to do things for them and them and then sending them to achieve things. A “real” spy with lots of experience has a lot more information to extract and is a much more valuable prisoner than an idealistic kid who knows basically nothing and has at least plausible deniability for the recruiting agency. Also conceivably some plans are pretty stupid like in every industry and for every job and the fact that these things are secret means you very rarely get the actual story about what was going on.

Yeah, you read about some of this stuff and they're like "what if we have prostitutes give psychoactive drugs to their clients?" Well, that's a pretty harebrained scheme, but someone signed off on it.

Yes. In 1987 two Danish "tourist" were caught photographing military installations in Poland: https://apnews.com/article/d61c5f558248baf68d0de6377e09c4f1

That was also a stupid plan

I guess the cost to the USA looked like it was practically zero, with the chance that he might luck out and get home with some half-baked intelligence.

Of course, it ended up costing them in diplomatic shenanigans requiring them to give up Soviet prisoners to get the chump back.

Even I find it hard to believe that people would do things like this. One of Le' Carre's novels "Russia house" has the plot where the protagonist co-operates with intelligence agency and in the other novel "Spy who came in from Cold" (one of the protagonist is tricked and unknowingly does the spying). Given his novels mirrored to a great extent how the intelligence agencies worked, probably this was not an uncommon tactic used by intelligence agencies.

Very good points -- the lack of any real training or preparation does raise an eyebrow. However, the lack of any real known involvement with the CIA provides it with cover. The context of the time could make it plausible: the Cold War was intense at the time. Find a young zealot who truly hated communism, and is willing to play spy. The CIA really had nothing to lose or fear, for if he's caught they can claim ignorance, and the PR angle will be that the evil Soviets captured an innocent tourist; if not, he might bring back useful info.

A lot of doubters in this thread, but the linked interview [1] answers most of the questions. Wikipedia corroborate the story with links to New York Time [2]

- USSR had opened up for tourists in cars as long as they stayed on designated highways (not unsimilar to North Korea and their guided tours)

- Makinen had already visited the USSR before being contacted by the CIA

I don't think it is unreasonable to believe a young man would greatly underestimate a risk and do something crazy just because he is patriotic. I do think it is absolutely irresponsible of the CIA to recruit young people like this, and someone in the CIA ought to go to prison for it.

I also think the file on Makinen is absolutely lovely, and I wish the article would link to a full copy of the file.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i7/Chemistry-Spy-Story.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Makinen

I wonder if this was partly an inspiration for https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cycling_Tour The strange/innocuous notes mentioned reminded me of some of the dialog. It probably is completely unrelated though though the Monty Python sketch does seem to have happened much later.

This guy sounds incredibly naive - he was just gonna drive through the USSR taking photos and thought he wasn't gonna get caught?

What about this guy? This guy sounds like he fell for pretty much the same dumb shit - "go to Russia, take some photos for us, it'll all be good kthxbye"

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/15/876966569/american-paul-whela...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Whelan_(security_director...

Yes, I would've myself thought that a CIA recruiter who suddenly comes upon a 22 year old American in Germany out of a sudden, with an offer of money, car, and a ticket to USSR must be a communist spy himself trying to pull off some trickery.

Perhaps he was? I mean, they were on his tail from day one. That alone sounds suspicious. It let the Soviets make the Americans look retarded, and as a bonus the USA had to give up Soviet prisoners to get their dancing monkey back.

In 1961 the KGB would be on any foreigner from day one. No surprise at all. In 1979 I crossed from Poland to Russia by train, and while we were stopped for the axles to be changed to the wider track gauge, I moved from one railroad car to another to hang with my friends. When Russians discovered that one car had a missing passenger and another had an extra one, they checked the entire train and we were delayed good several ours.

Don't you love those axle changes though? Every time I go through one I think.. we could just switch trains.

Nobody underestimates a genius. Everyone underestimates a moron, that is assuming he's not really a moron.

There's value in being underestimated.

There's also the point that he doesn't seem interested in filling in the details about what happened. So, is he just trying to retain some privacy from a dumb mistake, or is he hiding something? IT IS A MYSTERY!

People do the same in North Korea today and don't expect to get caught and are insanely proud of the pictures they took.

You may be surprised how dumb, desperate, and brazen espionage or sabotage attempts can be. Recent example that has been completely memory holed in the West:

MOSCOW, July 12. /TASS/. A US embassy employee stole a railroad sign in Russia’s Tver Region in spring 2021, endangering the lives of train passengers, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova disclosed in her Telegram channel Monday.

"What is not funny is the danger that the US citizen put the lives and health of train passengers in. The Ostashkov hub is a rather busy part of the railroad. A railroad is a high danger area. If the missing sign was not discovered promptly, a tragedy could have happened," she said.

According to Zakharova, this story became known due to police pre-investigation actions. Police officers determined that an unidentified man stole the switch sign and put it in the trunk of a car with red (diplomatic) license plates.

"The very same day, a car with the same license plate was pulled by traffic police in the Tver region for a traffic rules violation. The car was driven by an employee of the American embassy who fit the description," the diplomat said.

She added that the embassy employee retained his diplomatic immunity but had to return to the US.

https://tass.com/politics/1313063

Do people not steal traffic signs on your part of the world? This "sabotage" sounds a lot more like an embassy staffer behaving like the spoiled rich kid they are than an attempt at sabotage. Though given the article one never knows, I suppose.

I continue to be stunned how inept Western HUMINT was in trying to penetrate the USSR. How did they expect this kid to succeed?

I don't think they gave a fuck. I assume they also had plenty of competent intelligence gathering, and as another poster pointed out, this definitely had value in keeping KGB assets busy and distracted, and could be seen as a operation to lull the Soviets into thinking all the American HUMINT was this inept.

Indeed, those who have been caught cannot reasonably be expected to represent the whole set. I believe this is a kind of survivorship bias, where only those who are competent remain in the game while we hear about those who fail. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#/media/File:...

It depends on what your definition of success is. It probably gave insight in how organized the counter intelligence is and what their various response times are.

The cost was low, especially given the possibility that the spy exchange that he took part in after a few months in jail might well have been planned long in advance.

Military and intelligence organizations do this all the time, to constantly keep track of adversaries' response plans. They constantly change and have to be re-evalutated.

I’m a little surprised you could just drive across the border….

Also I wonder what use a random guy with a camera would be as far as intelligence goes?

He might have had a visa. As someone who has driven around Eastern Europe I've talked myself across borders I wasn't permitted to cross. Border guards are humans. If you appear innocuous enough, friendly enough, and perhaps have something nice to share, e.g. cigarettes, you might get through.

I once crossed the border into [redacted] by looking like a spy. I'd tried to cross several times that day but had been turned away. It was only once I returned with a mountain of equipment visible in my vehicle that I impressed the guards enough for them to wave me through. It's a boring job most of the time, I guess.

I once went across the border between Germany and Poland when it was officially closed due to flooding. But I highly doubt that would have happened when the Iron Curtain was still up.

Not sure about the accuracy of this article, but it was a fun read.

Tangential: Early this year I read the book The Spy and the Traitor. It’s about a Soviet KGB man who worked secretly for the west for decades. I won’t spoil it, but one of the greatest stories I’ve read.

Radio Free Asia/Europe is the US equivalent of China's CGTN; state-backed propaganda flimsily dressed up as regular journalism.

Yeah I don't think the KGB were making artistic scrapbooks in their spare time. Whole article is BS

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