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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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