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The space race between the United States and the former Soviet Union was in full acceleration mode in the late 1950s and progressed into the 1960s. The struggle between these two countries gave extra momentum to space. NASAThe determination to fulfill President John Kennedy’s declaration to put a man on the Moon.
Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were a superpower rivalry fueled by differences in political ideology and economic interests, with both countries attempting to impress the world by showcasing their technological and military capabilities.
The Soviet Union was planning to crash a ship moon – and at the same time to achieve a political punch by sending metallic pennants bearing the USSR’s coat of arms to the lunar surface. On September 13, 1959, the Soviet Union achieved this goal with Luna 2.
Techniques and technologies
To understand how the Soviet Union produced the vehicles sent to the Moon, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carried out a secret espionage operation at a Soviet exhibition in 1959.
A CIA action team dismantled the “Lunik 2” exhibit in an attempt to document what techniques and technologies the Soviet Union was using.
Years later, this covert action was detailed by the CIA and announced as a covert espionage operation conducted without the knowledge of the Soviet Union.
CIA’s extraordinary overnight heist also included Soviet top brass space Equipment carried at an exhibition to promote Soviet industrial and economic achievements.
Relating to: The CIA knows a lot about other nations’ space programs. You can find out too with the new ‘World Facts’ update
Unlimited access
According to a post on the CIA’s “electronic reading room” site:
“A team of CIA officers had unrestricted access to the display 24 hours a day, and it turned out that this was not a replica but a fully functional system similar to Lunik 2.”
The post states that the team took the vehicle apart and “took photos of all the parts before putting everything back together, thus gaining invaluable information about the vehicle’s design and capabilities.”
The post ends: “And the Soviets didn’t know about it. Like it was from a movie script? It really happened.”
Cleaned up version
The “Lunik Kidnapping” was documented in a “sanitized” CIA historical review that was declassified and released to the public in 1995. It was written by the CIA’s Sydney W. “Wes” Finer and published in the winter 1967 edition of the agency’s Studies in Intelligence journal.
It was eagle-eyed space historian Dwayne Day who first published the CIA’s mission-impossible story in the mid-1990s, when it was published in Quest, an informative journal of space flight history.
“I was the one who found the declassified document in the National Archives. It was in paper form. [The] “The document started appearing online a decade or more later,” Day told Space.com. “Keep in mind that ‘Lunik’ is not a Russian word. It was an American slang term for the Russian moon missions, not what the Russians called them.”
Factory markings
More recently, in June 2020, founder John Greenewald, Black Casean archive of more than two million pages obtained from the government under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), released the document in an unrefined form, with the subheading: “Retrieving factory markings from inside Soviet high-end spacecraft.”
These markings were later analyzed and detailed in a “Marking Center Summary” that revealed the probable identity of the manufacturer of the Lunik stage and the fact that it was the fifth made. Also detailed were the identity of the three electrical manufacturers who supplied the components, and possibly even the part numbering system used for other Soviet space hardware.
Humpty Dumpty
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The CIA Lunik intrigue was not without its comical aspects.
Like Humpty Dumpty, trying to put everything back together and then closing the chest was one of many ominous, high-risk, yet hilarious outcomes.
“The first job, securing the sphere back into its basket, was the most delicate and difficult. time “It consumes part of an entire night’s work,” the document notes. Indeed, the way the nose and engine compartments were designed prevented visual guidance for easily reassembling the space hardware.
“We spent nearly an hour on this, with one man in the cramped nose section trying to get the sphere into just the right position and one man in the engine compartment trying to get his hands on the teeth on a rod he couldn’t see,” the document notes. “After several futile attempts and many anxious moments, the connection was finally made and we all breathed a sigh of relief.”
The document obtained from the FOIA states that Lunik’s kidnapping was “an example of good cooperation in a business between covert operators and essentially open collectors.”
To learn more about this insider operation, you can read the CIA’s historical review here.