The space race between the United States and the former Soviet Union was in full swing in the late 1950s, into the 1960s. Bilateral competition has created more opportunities NASAdetermination to carry out President John Kennedy’s man-on-the-moon proclamation.
Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were undoubtedly negative, the most intense competition fueled by differences in political ideologies and economic objectives, with both nations trying to influence the world. by demonstrating their technological and military prowess.
The Soviet Union was determined to destroy the ship month – and at the same time they got a political punch by issuing metal pennants with the coat of arms of the USSR on the moon. On September 13, 1959 the Soviet Union achieved that goal with Luna 2.
Methods and techniques
In order to gain insight into how the Soviet Union built moon-binding devices, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted covert spying on the Soviet Union in 1959.
A CIA task force dismantled the “Lunik 2” display to document the methods and techniques used by the Soviet Union.
Years later, the secret operation was revealed by the CIA and ballyhooed as a covert espionage operation carried out without the Soviet Union’s knowledge.
The extraordinary one-night caper by the CIA involved the highest level of the Soviet Union space hardware that was being passed around as part of a show to promote Soviet industrial and economic achievements.
Related: The CIA knows a lot about other nations’ space programs. You can too with its new ‘World Factbook’ update
Unlimited access
According to the CIA’s “electronic reading room” post:
“A group of CIA officers got a chance to see the display for 24 hours, which turned out not to be a picture but a fully functional system comparable to Lunik 2.”
The team disassembled the car, the post added, “taking pictures of all the parts without taking it out of its box before putting everything back in its place, finding critical intelligence about its design and capabilities.”
Concludes the post: “And the Soviets were none the wiser. Sounds like something out of a movie? It really happened.”
Sanitized version
“The Kidnapping of the Lunik” was written in a “sanitized” CIA historical analysis that was declassified and made public in 1995. It was written by the CIA’s Sydney W. “Wes” Finer and published by the agency in the winter of 1967 issue of “Intelligence Studies.”
It was eagle-eyed space historian Dwayne Day who first published a story in the mid-1990s about the improbable CIA story in Quest, which teaches History of Spaceflight Quarterly.
“I was the one who found the document that was not deleted in the National Archives. It was in paper form. [The] the document didn’t end up online until a decade or more later,” Day told Space.com. “Note that ‘Lunik’ is not a Russian word. This was American slang for Russian moonwalks, not what the Russians called it.”
Factory marks
Recently, in June 2020, John Greenewald, the founder of the organization of Black VaultAn archive of more than two million pages obtained by the government through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), published the document in an unsanitary form, it says, as the subtitle: “Finding factory marks in high point of the Soviet Union. car.”
Those markings were later analyzed and explained in detail in the “Markings Center Brief” which revealed the possibility of identifying the successor to the Lunik platform and that it was the fifth one made. Also eliminated is the identification of three electrical manufacturers that supplied equipment, including a parts-counting system, that was used for some Soviet space equipment.
Humpty Dumpty
The CIA Lunik skullduggery had no comic quality.
Like Humpty Dumpty, trying to put things together, then closing the crate was one of many high, high, but funny results.
“The first task, to keep the orb in its basket, proved more important. time consuming part of the entire night’s work,” the document says. Indeed, the way the nose and engine parts were designed prevented the sight guide from being easily reattached to space equipment.
“We spent about an hour on this, one man in the nose section trying to get the orb in the right position and another in the engine room trying to get the cables on the end. of a stick he can’t see,” the document points out. “After many futile attempts and many anxious moments, the connection was finally made, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.”
In terms of the mission accomplished, Lunik’s kidnapping was “an example of good teamwork between undercover agents and overt collectors,” the document obtained by FOIA says.
For more information on this insider job, read an overview of the history of the CIA here.
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