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A KGB agent shipped a Sidewinder missile by mail to Moscow (2017)
- sohkamyung 8y agoPerhaps the link should be updated to [1] as the primary source, since it was stated at the bottom that: > This first appeared in WarIsBoring [1] https://warisboring.com/the-kgb-shipped-a-sidewinder-missile-by-mail-to-moscow/ https://warisboring.com/the-kgb-shipped-a-sidewinder-missile...
- jstanley 8y ago> Although outnumbered, the Taiwanese pilots achieved a positive kill-to-loss ratio. That's not that impressive, even 1:1000 kills:losses is a positive ratio. I assume they mean a ratio > 1. And: this is a pretty incredible story. If you don't bother reading it all (it's not that long), at least read this bit: > Exploiting thick fog and careless guards, Manfred Ramminger – a KGB-agent in West Germany – entered Neuburg air base during the evening of Oct. 22, 1967. Together with his Polish driver Josef Linowski and German F-104 Starfighter pilot Wolf-Diethard Knoppe, he stole an operational AIM-9 [sidewinder missile] from the local ammunition depot and transported it down the entire runway on a wheelbarrow to his Mercedes sedan, parked outside the base. > The 2.9-meter-long missile proved unwieldy. Ramminger broke the rear window and covered the protruding part with a carpet. In order not to attract attention of the police, he then marked the protrusion with a piece of red cloth, as required by law.
- desdiv 8y agoDifferent fields have different definitions for the same terms. In the context of kill-to-loss ratios, the military defines a positive ratio as > 1.
- close04 8y agoThe use of ratio can be a bit misleading. But in this context positive ratio means positive difference between kills and losses. A 1:1000 ratio for example is mathematically positive but would translate to 1 - 1000 = -999. Negative "ratio".
- ptero 8y agoThis is indeed a great story, which gives again two different views on security. East of the iron curtain everything, even marginally secret, was very carefully controlled, accounted for and losing a single not-too-secret page meant an automatic 10-year labor camp term. West of it, control was much looser and many more secrets leaked out. However, technology was also developed much faster -- you need serious encouragement to convince a good engineer to work under East's penalties and restrictions on personal life if other interesting work is available. East put major resources of the state on stealing technology not by choice -- it had few other options to avoid military tech obsolescence. So leakage and all, West's system worked pretty well. My 2c.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mpweiher 8y agoAt my base in Northern Germany, an officer of the MAD, the aptly abbreviated West German military intelligence agency, waltzed onto the base and all the way into the central weapons store wearing a Colonel's Uniform. An East German Army Colonel's Uniform. Ooopsy.
- willvarfar 8y agoThis base in Northern Germany, was it also in West Germany?
- mpweiher 8y agoYes. This was pre-'89
- bergoid 8y agoI had to look it up. MAD: Militärischer Abschirmdienst (Military Secret Service, Germany) https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/MAD https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/MAD
- detaro 8y agoLiteral translation would by Military Shielding Service
- jstanley 8y agoDoesn't an exercise like that come with a high risk of getting shot?
- mpweiher 8y agoYes and no. I am guessing he intended to surrender immediately when challenged, he just never was. It's a civilised country, so we tend to not have have shoot-first-ask-questions-later policies, at least not while I was pulling guard duty. This is entirely reasonable, as there's not that much damage you can do between being challenged and surrendering (or not as it may be), at least at the fairly mundane mechanised infantry battalion I was stationed at. What are you going to do, steal a tank? Good luck with that! (Go for missiles instead!) I guess things might be a bit tougher at the base where they house the American nukes. If it is, I would presume there to be very obvious signage. I do remember the story of a guard officer trying a bit too hard to test his troops and not surrendering when challenged repeatedly (different base). He was shot in accordance with the rules of engagement. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- alanfranzoni 8y agoI'm happy that 2017 is the date of the article, and not of the event.
- anonymfus 8y agoWell in 2017 KGB agent would ship a missile to Minsk, not Moscow.
- doikor 8y agoIn 2017 KGB does not exist.
- anonymfus 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Security_Committee_of_the_Republic_of_Belarus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Security_Committee_of_th...
- yitchelle 8y agoMaybe not in name, but the intent is definitely alive!
- chupasaurus 8y agoFSS or FSB (translated/native modern name) had changed a little from USSR so I don't know why this thread is existing in the first place.
- quantummkv 8y agoIn 2017 KGB is literally the Russian Government.
- chupasaurus 8y agoI'd say it's one of the branches, alongside with friends and mobsters, but this classification makes the same highly connective graph. disclaimer: russian citizen myself. Greetings from Urals!
- yummybear 8y agoThousands of national security measures foiled by a guy in a mercedes with a wheelbarrow and a postman - impressive.
- itronitron 8y agoit would be interesting to know if and when they noticed it was missing
- dfox 8y agoGiven my experience I would assume that when they noticed it was written off as an inventory tracking error (assuming the thieves haven't left conspiciosly open empty transport case on the site)
- setquk 8y agoI worked on a military site literally after the whole September 11th thing went down and everyone was super paranoid. Had armed police patrols and everything. At lunch we still cut through the same hole in the fence perimeter which had been there for about 4 years. This had been reported and not fixed and saved a good half a mile trip round the perimeter. If anyone got any good at security in these sorts of places they usually ended up doing something else better paid for a living.
- kevin_nisbet 8y agoReminds me of reading one of my dads books in school, about the formation of the SAS during world war 2. It's been a long time since I read it, but it was something along the lines of certain military leaders doubted the ability of the SAS to sneak onto a base and plant bombs on airplanes. So they organized a test, where they would sneak onto one of their own bases and place stickers instead of bombs. The leader of the base was even given advance notice that this as going to happen. The SAS not only managed to sneak onto the base, they managed to place stickers on the planes so thoroughly some planes had 2 or 3 stickers on them, and iirc they were totally undetected. It was a thoroughly interesting read, and they did immense damage to the german army and air force in north africa, sometimes just driving jeeps onto bases and firing second hand machine guns originally for aircraft they managed to mount to their jeeps. After reading that book, and the success they had sneaking onto bases in the middle of a shooting war, even after the opposing army was dedicating themselves to preventing the damage, I wouldn't be surprised if much more equipment, plans, and intelligence hasn't been stolen off bases that we simply don't know about.
- billfruit 8y agoPerhaps the iron curtain, I think was not such a great barrier as portrayed by the Western Media, people could mail things across it, and travel across it wasn't much different from crossing international borders now, I think there was even regular passenger ferry between FRG and USSR. Between East Berlin and west Berlin, there seems to have been much daily movement of people, like people living in West Berlin but working in East Berlin, etc.
- muro 8y agoI grew up living next to the iron curtain, literally <100m away. It was multiple tall fences, guard towers every 100m or so, a road, electric fences, detection mechanisms, barbed wire. To travel across from East to West, you needed a special permit, that was given or held back depending how much "risk" you were (of fleeing, not to the regime). My parents could travel only if they left me there, I stayed with grandparents for 2 weeks. There were regular known cases of people getting killed or jailed trying to cross.
- close04 8y agoThe security tended to get tighter and tighter as time went by and more... "permeations" were discovered. So I expect security around the iron curtain in the '60s was a bit more lax than in the '80s. If the Berlin wall is any example, it was.
- mikeash 8y agoCertainly you could cross if you had permission. One difference is that it was much harder to get that permission, especially for people on the Communist side to get permission to leave. (How many countries have you heard of today where that’s a thing?) Another difference is that the penalty for crossing illegally was often instant death, which tends not to be the case on most international borders today.
- tivert 8y agoThat's false. The guy who wrote this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_No_Evil_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_No_Evil_(book)) spent more than a decade in the Gulag because he was denied permission to emigrate across the Iron Curtain and was a human rights activist agitating for emigration rights.
- altmind 8y ago> Ramminger and his aides were all arrested in late 1968 and jailed for four years. Its surprising how much he got away with. It was a theft, conspiracy, espionage, mailing and customs rules violation. Did he that in US 2019, he would get 30 years min.
- golem14 8y agoA Google search for [Ramminger Knoppe] reveals original sources and an interesting Wikipedia article: https://www.google.com/search?q=ramminger+knoppe https://www.google.com/search?q=ramminger+knoppe https://www.nytimes.com/1970/10/10/archives/3-germans-guilty-of-missile-theft.html https://www.nytimes.com/1970/10/10/archives/3-germans-guilty... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Ramminger https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Ramminger
- parsnips 8y agoThe Soviets spent a lot of time and effort with their premiere intelligence agents to steal a missile invented in an American garage. Amazing.
- equalunique 8y agoA few thoughts: 1) It's amazing how the operation to steal the AIM-9, despite being so high-risk, was accomplished with much ease & simplicity. 2) I am surprised that the KGB agent and his conspirators only received 4 years of prison time for this. This might just be my ignorance of the subject, but isn't stealing a missile and giving it to an enemy more deserving of a stricter sentence? Perhaps a deal was involved related to the intelligence the former KGB agent could provide in exchange for some leniency. 3) Tangential but semi-related: There is an interesting theory by Dimitri Khalezov about the armed Russian Kursk submarine, which sunk in 2000, being the source of a stolen nuclear-capable P-700 Granit anti-ship cruise missile. His theory is that this missile was the projectile which rammed through The Pentagon (but failed to detonate) on 2001 September 11th. Who stole the missile and why is a mystery, but pictures of the impact at The Pentagon and what is known about this missile could support the theory. Allegedly, when the Russians extracted the warheads from their sunken submarine, the extraction team was ordered to fill the warhead containers with a type of foam that would permanently seal them without checking the contents of the containers themselves. In essence, one or more missile containers recovered from the submarine may have actually been empty & verification of the contents was prevented in order to cover up the fact that a nuclear weapon had gone missing.
- umvi 8y ago> 3) Tangential but semi-related So wait... some people think a missile hit the Pentagon instead of an airplane on 9/11? What happened to American Airlines Flight 77, then?
- Larrikin 8y agoThose same people tend to believe the moon landing was faked as well.
- equalunique 8y agoThe moon landing I tend not to care about either way, because the impact of that event didn't result in terrible things for the US (like decades of war in the middle east.)
- dimitar 8y agoHe was most likely a GRU (Soviet military intelligence), not a KGB agent. Still in that era the existence of GRU was not well known. His officer likely wouldn't share too many details.
- ToFab123 8y agoIn Thailand you can ship basically everything by mail. Here is how to ship a motorcycle https://www.tielandtothailand.com/shipping-motorcycle-thailand-mail-post-office/ https://www.tielandtothailand.com/shipping-motorcycle-thaila...