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The space race between the United States and the former Soviet Union was in full swing in the late 1950s, going into the 1960s. That two-country competition added extra oomph NASAdetermined to fulfill President John Kennedy’s man-on-the-moon proclamation.
Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were extremely wary, a superpower rivalry fueled by differences in political ideology and economic activities, with both nations seeking to influence the world through their technological and military prowess. show.
The Soviet Union was intent on crashing into a craft the moon – and at the same time get a political punch by delivering metallic pennies bearing the coat of arms of the USSR to the surface of the moon. On 13 September 1959 the Soviet Union achieved that goal with Luna 2.
Techniques and technologies
To gain insight into how the Soviet Union built lunar equipment, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted an undercover spying on a Soviet exhibit in 1959.
A CIA action team dismantled the “Lunik 2” exhibit to document the techniques and technologies used by the Soviet Union.
Years later, the CIA detailed that covert action and the quack town as a stealthy espionage operation carried out without the knowledge of the Soviet Union.
The extraordinary overnight caper at the CIA involved the top ranks of the Soviet Union space hardware being passed around as part of an exhibition 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
Unrestricted access
According to a posting on the CIA’s “electronic reading room” site:
“A team of CIA officers gained unrestricted access to the display for 24 hours, which turned out to be not a replica but a fully operational system comparable to the Lunik 2.”
The team disassembled the vehicle, the post says, “Photographing all the parts without removing it from its crate before putting everything back in place, gaining invaluable information on its design and capabilities.”
The post concludes: “And the Soviets were none the wiser. Sound like something from a movie script? It really happened.”
Sanitary version
“The Kidnapping of the Lunik” was documented in a “sanitized” CIA historical review that was declassified and publicly posted in 1995. It was written by the CIA’s Sydney W. “Wes” Finer and published in the winter 1967 issue of agency of “Studies in Information.”
Eagle-eyed space historian Dwayne Day first published a story in the mid-1990s about an improbable story like the CIA’s mission in Quest, an informative Spaceflight Quarterly history.
“I was the one who found the declassified document in the National Archives. It was in paper form. [The] the document didn’t come online until a decade or so later,” Day told Space.com. “Note that ‘Lunik’ is not a Russian word. This was an American slang term for the Russian lunar missions, not what the Russians called them.”
Factory marks
Later, in June 2020, John Greenewald, the founder of the Black Domean archive of more than two million pages obtained from the government with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), published the document in unsanitized form which notes, as a subtitle: “Finding factory marks from inside upper space the Soviet vehicle.”
These markings were later analyzed and detailed in a “Markings Center Brief” which revealed the probable identification of the Lunik stage producer and that it was the fifth one made. Also identified were three electrical producers who supplied components, even the part numbering system, that could be used for other Soviet space hardware.
Humpty Dumpty
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There were no circumstances of comic value in Lunik’s CIA skullduggery.
Like Humpty Dumpty, trying to put things back together, then closing up the crate was one of several high-jinx, high-stakes, but funny results.
“The first job, recovering the orb in its basket, was the most anticipated and time It takes some all-night work,” the document noted. In fact, the way the nose and engine compartments were designed precluded visual guidance for easy assembly of the space hardware.
“We spent almost an hour on this, one man in the cramped nose section trying to get the orb into the exact right position and someone in the engine compartment trying to stick the threads on the end of a rod that he couldn’t see ,” the document points out. “After several futile attempts and many anxious moments, the connection was finally made, and we all sighed with relief.”
As for the mission accomplished, the kidnapping of the Lunik was “an example of the fine cooperation on the job between covert operators and essentially overt collectors,” says the document obtained by the FOIA.
For more on this inside job, read the CIA’s historical overview here.
