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Comment by 4WIW | Hacker News Reader

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) .

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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.

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