The Untold Story of How US Spies Sabotaged Soviet Technology
politico.com
politico.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s
(based on the first-person account book 'Deckname Saale' by Gerhardt Ronneberger)
It was 1959, two years after the USSR had launched Sputnik. The USSR was showing off its achievements to other countries. Most were uninteresting, at least to the US government (in a country with electricity, stealing models of power stations would've done little good), but one was quite interesting: the Lunik spacecraft. It had to be a model, the CIA figured. After all, the Soviets had to have known Americans would've looked at that and tried to steal it, or at least figure out how it was made. Models were safer. But American agents figured it wouldn't hurt to look, and they found that it was a real one, albeit with some critical parts, like the engine, removed.
But you can't just saunter in during the exhibition and steal it, for fairly obvious reasons. The key was that it was a traveling exhibition, and as it was being transported, via some maneuvering and some possible/probable kidnapping of truck drivers (Sydney W. Finer notes the truck driver was "escorted to a hotel room and kept there for the night" on page 36 of his article[1] on it), the CIA managed to gain access to it.
After getting the all-clear to start, and, at one point, being scared witless by a possible ambush (it was people lighting the lamps, as was regularly scheduled), they opened the box carefully and began taking photographs of it. They took photographs or made drawings of everything, taking small amounts of things for study. Then they put it all back together and, eventually, gave it back to the original driver. They did their job hiding it well. In 1967, according to Finer's article (final page), there was "no indication the Soviets ever discovered that the Lunik was borrowed for a night."
The CIA has now declassified some documents on it[2], referring to it, somewhat euphemistically, as a 'loan' or 'borrowing' rather than 'theft'.
[1]https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/THE%20KIDNAPING%20OF%20...
[2] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/lunik-loan-space-...
They did make some adjustments like actively cooled tiles. But they had the smarts to stop the program before it turned into a money sink.
After all, the Shuttle's original goals were never reached. The launch cost was supposed to go down immensely and the cadence to once a week. In the end the shuttle wasn't so much reusable as it was refurbishable.
It did give us the ISS though by making orbital construction possible as it was basically a big space campervan/truck combo :)
I've heard but cannot find a reference for the Space Shuttle being able to land autonomously except for the landing-gear release switch, which had to be manually toggled. This StackExchange thread has a similar observation (also without citation): <https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/23992>
That may simply be an urban (or LEO) ledgend...
(Up-thread there's discussion of issues with the US craft's somewhat uneven experience in attempting to automate other parts of the landing sequence.)
There's a Nasa report on automated modes of the Shuttle as well, which notes that "converting the Shuttle fleet to an autonomous system will be challenging and expensive", here: <https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20100033420/downloads/20...> (PDF)
I also recall rationales offered for Buran's fully-automated operation being both that the Soviets had lower trust in their astronauts' ability and/or trustworthiness, and that fully-automating the craft enabled non-crewed test flights during project development. Again, no sources, and don't take me as any authority on this point.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20070019347/downloads/20...
But it was still worth seeing if the damaged orbiter could re-enter and land, so they developed the cable (stored at the ISS) and software to allow an unmanned orbiter to allow that. Obviously was never used.
Saving expensive main engines? Not on the orbiter, but on separate rocket, in subsequent plans. Solid fuel boosters? Too risky, better use the world's most powerful liquid fuel engines. Carcinogenic onboard propellants for RCS? Use cryogenics instead, and make sure they're preserved well for a month of flight. A few improvements here and there, and while externally Buran is quite similar to Shuttle, the whole launching stack is already less so, and the list of different details is not that short.
Next one would be Concordsky.
I'm not even saying it's bad. This thing happens in IT all the time. Nobody reinvents the wheel. Look at Apple vs Samsung or the likeness between desktop GUIs.
I think it was more pride that promoted them to make excuses. After all these are huge prestige projects.
The Concordski too yeah. The drooping nose was a curious design decision in both (quite a few drawbacks to this, since an actuated mechanism so far from the centre of gravity will cost a lot of payload). They could have gone with something like a periscope instead (like what's on the Soyuz)
I don't buy the "there's only one way to design this" angle especially since both camps had completely separate parts and manufacturing chains with their own strengths and weaknesses.
but..did they? Or did the oil prices crash taking USSR and its space program with them?
Buran is not a copy of the Space Shuttle. I mean, the most important element of the shuttle, its reusable engines, is not even present on Buran.
From a military perspective there was at one point a plan to use the Shuttle for overhead imagery with film cameras. Launch from California into a polar orbit, make a single photo reconnaissance pass over the USSR, and land immediately back at the launch site for film processing. But advances in spy satellites eliminated the need for that mission.
Too bad the message is in horribly garbled Russian. You'd need to have read this story in English to understand what it's trying to say.
The US was well ahead of the Soviets on technology advancement. That was indisputable. So KGB had to work harder than CIA on this front. Doesn’t mean the concept is foreign to CIA
There was no innovative electronic design in there; it's the questions like, "where is it made?" and "how many of those can USSR make" that were much more interesting.
[On our side, we started selling $200 hammers and $50 nails to the US government to syphon off money into the Defense sector to build it and build it right. The Soviets knew and they did their best to compete, stripping their country bare to come up with the assets needed to try. While we were depriving unproductive people typically living in government housing projects, they were depriving highly productive people operating their economy. But one can only get away with $200 hammer sales for so long..TV news and others were starting to shove their noses in to try and help the unproductive people who were becoming increasingly important VOTERS. By then, an A-List Hollywood actor was somehow in charge in the White House and they came up with a brilliant TV presentation guaranteed to gain the support of the entire US population to hand over cash by the fistful rather than disguised as $200 hammers..."Star Wars!" By "going public" like that, US Defense spending could increase 1000x and the Soviet generals knew there was no way to compete, so they overthrew their government and made nice to avoid defeat. Of course, they should have shot Putin(1) in the face, but whatever.]
(1) - That Putin dude is riding a nationalist wave not unlike what Hitler did after Germany lost its self-respect at the end of WWI. Interestingly footnote, before starting WWII, Hitler returned Vladimir Lenin to Russia to destabilize it with his Communist bullshitsky. Now Russia has hypersonic weapons and has partnered with China and possibly Iran, India and Pakistan for financing and manufacturing capabilities, plus they have AI-indexed databases on every human in the USA including the GenZ engineers at every Defense company, including their ancestry, descendants, psych profiles and in many cases, their genetics.
<soap> We need to get back to where people can disagree with the head of their company or head of their country, but are grateful for the food on their table and when it comes to picking leaders, they pick the strongest and smartest badass available and take any issue they have with their social policies out using other mechanisms (like Congress and the Courts) rather than handing the keys to the World over to weak administrators who are primarily interested in the VOTES of those unproductive peeps that had to get robbed back in the 60s and 70s in order that we all shall remain free and not incinerated like the opening of an 80s Terminator flick.</soap>
Edit: hm, I'm not sure who would be offended by the facts, but HN has a few stories about the bulgarian computer industry and how it was happily humming until 1989.
What strikes me is the dual-edged nature of these operations. While they may have successfully stymied Soviet technological progress, they also pushed the Soviets towards a more cautious and suspicious approach to Western technology, possibly slowing down legitimate collaborations and trust-building that could have benefited both sides.
This raises an interesting question: In today's context, with global supply chains so interwoven, could such large-scale technological sabotage even be feasible? And if so, how would it impact not just national security, but global economic stability?
Moreover, considering the evolution of espionage tactics with the advent of cyber warfare, I wonder if we'll look back in a few decades and see similar stories emerging about current technological conflicts. The stakes and methods have changed, but the underlying strategic goals seem eerily similar.
One day the US President met with the Canadian Prime Minister at the time. The next day the PM scrapped the program, ordered all schematics and documents of the aircraft be destroyed.
The something like 40,000 engineers mostly then got jobs in the US.
Interesting that computing has become so thoroughly integrated and invisible that an aside in the article notes this.
It's also possible he wasn't even Austrian at all, although to be honest, no matter now many details were changed in the story, if any of it was true, they should be able to make a reasonable guess who the actual person was, so I suspect that in any case, they wouldn't leak this as a story until after the person had died.
It's possible he wasn't in the semiconductor business at all, and this entire story was a counterintelligence ruse to cause the adversary to spend resources scrutinizing their chip import pipeline, diverting attention from the real CIA sabotage which was happening elsewhere. Or: for the adversary to distrust, and voluntarily limit their use of, chips which were actually genuine and perfectly fine.
As Sherlock Holmes says in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"; “What one man can invent, another can discover.”
So you're assuming the Austrian actually knows what the US deformed? Why would they tell him?
One way might be by simple black-box behaviour testing of gizmo-x received in the USSR vs. the same done in a legal company in the US/Europe/Japan and then narrowing down the problem.
I will bet my bottom dollar that the same thing is going on even today (w.r.t. the usual suspects like China/Iran/etc.) given how crucial Technology has become to maintaining Economic/Military superiority.
All he could possibly know is "this thing may be sabotaged." I suppose that is some help to the Soviets.
This whole story is based upon the ignorance of the general public in how manufacture and how silicon processes work. It's designed to convince you that "intelligence" agencies are doing _anything_ worthwhile when in reality they're playing childish games and putting third parties lives at risk to do it.
It's so boring and tiring to read crap like this.
I am assuming a mostly neutral apathetic mindset as a baseline. It gives a foundation on which to build positively and cooperatively upon.
They're moral, you're moral: Puppies for everyone! No one 'wins' the Cold War.
They're moral, you're not moral: You get more advanced technology and 'win' the Cold War.
They're not moral, you are: They get more advanced technology and 'win' the Cold War.
They're not moral, you're not moral: You both get more advanced technology, neither side 'wins'.
Stealing is always a better decision. It has nothing to do with 'hate' necessarily; a purely rational robot, programmed with goals of 'win the Cold War, and, if you can, get puppies for everyone' would also be immoral.
Here is an example of a better win-win premise and result:
Sweden and the United States seal a major nuclear energy agreement (6 August 2024)
https://energynews.pro/en/sweden-and-the-united-states-seal-...
> Sweden and the USA sign a memorandum of understanding to intensify collaboration in advanced nuclear technologies, including modular reactors and waste management.
> The main objectives of the agreement include the joint development of advanced nuclear reactors, such as small modular reactors (SMRs), and improved nuclear waste management.
If this can be done with Sweden, then with some extra effort from both sides, it also can be done with Russia. If you then repeat it in a hundred sectors, the equation changes completely.