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Years before this operation, we were stealing Soviet technology. It was 1959, two years after the USSR had launched Sputnik. The USSR was showing off its achie

Years before this operation, we were stealing Soviet technology. 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%20THE%20LUNI%5B15732838%5D.pdf https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/THE%20KIDNAPING%20OF%20... [2] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/lunik-loan-space-age-spy-story https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/lunik-loan-space-...

dralley 2y ago
This was obviously a very bidirectional strategy. For example, that time the Soviets stole a sidewinder missile from a German air force base: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icXn0gzaQNk&t=30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icXn0gzaQNk&t=30s
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah or the Buran. Their excuse at the time was there was only one way to build a shuttle but I don't buy that. Even the windows were in the same place. And they didn't have to spy for it because the shuttle was public. 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 :)
  - riehwvfbk 2y ago
    The Buran has a lot of innovation inside that exterior shell though. Its flight was fully autonomous, for example.
    - pinewurst 2y ago
      Implemented on their on-board cluster of PDP-11skis. Really.
      - riehwvfbk 2y ago
        There was also an entire programming language developed specifically for the Buran, and it was visual: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      I've heard a few different accounts of both the US Space Shuttle and Soviet Buran's design decisions here. 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 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/20100033420.pdf 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.
pinewurst 2y ago
Wanting to assess Soviet technology isn’t the same as wanting it to copy.
- riehwvfbk 2y ago
  Of course, "that's different", as always. The CIA has some seriously hyperactive idle curiosity.
  - Cupertino95014 2y ago
    Now do the KGB.
    - riehwvfbk 2y ago
      DEC already did it better back in the day: https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html 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.
      - vaxman 2y ago
        awesome
  - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    Isn't it funny how American HN gets all touchy when we talk about their sins, illediatly telling you the others do bad things as well.
    - signatoremo 2y ago
      Aren’t you a little bit touchy yourself? During the Cold War espionage is the core mission of any intelligence agency. Anything can be acquired - bought or stolen, would be acquired. That wasn’t bad or a sin. That was the reality. Whether they became products is another matter. 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
theamk 2y ago
Note that this story was not about technological design - but rater about about "identifying plants which manufactured them", and the operation was done by "factory markings team" and not some EE engineers. 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.
Mr_Minderbinder 2y ago
I think it is high time we stop calling it “stealing”, and you should too if you reject the notion that copying or making derivative works is stealing, in favour of an alternate phrase in the same way that “unauthorised copying” is preferred to a loaded term like “piracy”. Personally I have been calling it “unauthorised knowledge transfer” or “unauthorised technology transfer”.
vaxman 2y ago
Bottom line is that there was mutual respect between engineers on both sides but I can tell you that our guys didn't have as much respect for their work products --not because of who they were (though their language was a constant source of amusement) but because they didn't have the economic power to build what was needed the way Science tells us it needed to be done. [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>
xenadu02 2y ago
The west almost never stole/copied Soviet technology because there wasn't anything of value to copy. That only got more and more true as time went on. We sure were worried that they might come up with something though... the funny stories are where we believed their propaganda resulting an an ironic self-own when the west delivered tech able to beat the fake tech of the Soviets.

dralley 2y ago

This was obviously a very bidirectional strategy. For example, that time the Soviets stole a sidewinder missile from a German air force base: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icXn0gzaQNk&t=30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icXn0gzaQNk&t=30s

wkat4242 2y ago
Yeah or the Buran. Their excuse at the time was there was only one way to build a shuttle but I don't buy that. Even the windows were in the same place. And they didn't have to spy for it because the shuttle was public. 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 :)
- riehwvfbk 2y ago
  The Buran has a lot of innovation inside that exterior shell though. Its flight was fully autonomous, for example.
  - pinewurst 2y ago
    Implemented on their on-board cluster of PDP-11skis. Really.
    - riehwvfbk 2y ago
      There was also an entire programming language developed specifically for the Buran, and it was visual: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    I've heard a few different accounts of both the US Space Shuttle and Soviet Buran's design decisions here. 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 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/20100033420.pdf 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.

pinewurst 2y ago

Wanting to assess Soviet technology isn’t the same as wanting it to copy.

riehwvfbk 2y ago
Of course, "that's different", as always. The CIA has some seriously hyperactive idle curiosity.
- Cupertino95014 2y ago
  Now do the KGB.
  - riehwvfbk 2y ago
    DEC already did it better back in the day: https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html 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.
    - vaxman 2y ago
      awesome
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  Isn't it funny how American HN gets all touchy when we talk about their sins, illediatly telling you the others do bad things as well.
  - signatoremo 2y ago
    Aren’t you a little bit touchy yourself? During the Cold War espionage is the core mission of any intelligence agency. Anything can be acquired - bought or stolen, would be acquired. That wasn’t bad or a sin. That was the reality. Whether they became products is another matter. 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

theamk 2y ago

Note that this story was not about technological design - but rater about about "identifying plants which manufactured them", and the operation was done by "factory markings team" and not some EE engineers. 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.

Mr_Minderbinder 2y ago

I think it is high time we stop calling it “stealing”, and you should too if you reject the notion that copying or making derivative works is stealing, in favour of an alternate phrase in the same way that “unauthorised copying” is preferred to a loaded term like “piracy”. Personally I have been calling it “unauthorised knowledge transfer” or “unauthorised technology transfer”.

vaxman 2y ago

Bottom line is that there was mutual respect between engineers on both sides but I can tell you that our guys didn't have as much respect for their work products --not because of who they were (though their language was a constant source of amusement) but because they didn't have the economic power to build what was needed the way Science tells us it needed to be done. [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>

xenadu02 2y ago

The west almost never stole/copied Soviet technology because there wasn't anything of value to copy. That only got more and more true as time went on. We sure were worried that they might come up with something though... the funny stories are where we believed their propaganda resulting an an ironic self-own when the west delivered tech able to beat the fake tech of the Soviets.