Space Race: How the CIA 'Hijacked' a Soviet Lunar Vehicle for 24 Hours to Uncover Its Hidden Secrets
The Cold War put the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union at odds in many areas, including space. Both countries wanted to establish themselves as masters of space exploration, Space reported.
President John Kennedy declared that the USA would put a man on the moon in the 1960s. This announcement escalated the space war to another level.
The Soviet Union was working hard on plans to launch a spacecraft to the moon, Space reported. The Soviet Union succeeded in its efforts on September 13, 1959, with Luna 2.
To understand how the Soviet Union managed to make this landing and learn their secrets, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) launched a spy operation, the same year.
A CIA action team was dispatched whose objective was to dismantle a "Lunik 2" exhibit, Space reported. The exhibit was paraded around the country to promote Soviet industrial and economic achievements.
After dismantling, the spies had to document what technologies and techniques had been applied by the Soviet Union scientists for the success of their space mission.
Lunik 2 was an alternative name given to the original "Luna 2" spacecraft, NASA reported.
Through several machinations by the action team, they were able to get access to the exhibit, Space reported. A posting on the CIA's electronic reading room site read, "A team of CIA officers gained unrestricted access to the display for 24 hours, which turned out not to be a replica but a fully operational system comparable to the Lunik 2."
The posting added, "photographed all the parts without removing it from its crate before putting everything back in its place, gaining invaluable intelligence on its design and capabilities," Space reported.
The whole spy operation was recorded in a "sanitized" CIA historical review. In 1995, the document was opened for public viewing.
The story about the spy operation was first broken by space historian Dwayne Day, who published about it in Quest, the informative History of Spaceflight Quarterly, Space reported.
"I was the one who found the declassified document at the National Archives. It was in paper form. [The] document didn't end up online until a decade or more later," Day shared. "Note that 'Lunik' is not a Russian word. This was an American slang term for Russian lunar missions, not what the Russians called them."
In June 2020, John Greenewald, founder of the Black Vault, an archive of over two million pages obtained from the government by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), made the document available on the Internet, Space reported.
The document had a subhead that read, "Getting factory markings from inside a Soviet upper-stage space vehicle." The markings were later sent for analysis and described in detail within a "Markings Center Brief."
The brief identified a lot of aspects like the producer of the Lunik stage and the fact that it was the fifth one made as well as identified the three electrical producers who supplied components, even the system for numbering parts, conceivably used for other Soviet space hardware, Space reported.
The document specifies how the hardest part of the operation was to put things back together after dismantling, like re-securing the orb in its basket, Space reported.
"We spent almost an hour on this, one man in the cramped nose section trying to get the orb into precisely the right position and one in the engine compartment trying to engage the threads on the end of a rod he couldn't see," the document points out. "After a number of futile attempts and many anxious moments, the connection was finally made, and we all sighed with relief."
The document describes kidnapping the Lunik as an "example of fine cooperation on a job between covert operators and essentially overt collectors," Space reported.