There have been some great thefts in history.
Thieves, infiltrators, and spies have stolen precious jewels, great works of art, and national
secrets.
But how do you steal one of the biggest pieces of machinery ever invented, and one of a country’s
most highly guarded secrets?
A group of Soviet spies figured out just that, and upended the global space race - by stealing
the United States’ space shuttle.
It was 1974, and the Cold War was raging.
The Soviets had struck first in the Space Race, launching the satellite Sputnik into
space.
Then the US struck second, and third, and fourth with one amazing feat after another.
The race to the moon was over, and the Americans had planted their flag on the ultimate prize.
They had landed four times on the moon since, with the Apollo program getting more advanced
with every launch.
The Soviets, meanwhile, were still stuck orbiting the earth and were concentrating on building
space stations.
The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was not happy.
Brezhnev was one of the Soviet Union’s longest-serving leaders, and was a more pragmatic leader than
his predecessor, the infamous Nikita Khrushchev.
No banging his shoe on the table for Brezhnev - he wanted to be remembered for his accomplishments,
and he would not let the US win the Space Race so easily.
He gathered his top advisors for a secret meeting at the Kremlin, led by Military-Industrial
Commission head Vladimir Smirnov.
Smirnov’s budget depended on making Brezhnev think that the US was just around the corner,
so he did what any good advisor would do - he exaggerated the threat to get that money.
“The Americans are working on a winged space vehicle!
Such a vehicle is like an aircraft.
It is capable of changing its orbit and could appear over Moscow at any time, possibly with
dangerous cargo!”
This was the Space Shuttle, still in development in America as a replacement for the Apollo
program.
Soviet spies had been watching the US space program for decades, but this new development
had Brezhnev in a panic.
He quickly authorized Smirnov to find the money and develop a program to catch the Americans
- one way or another.
Smirnov also had the backing of the Soviet military leader, Marshal Dmitry Ustinov.
One of the old guard, he was still deeply invested in defeating the United States, and
he was intrigued by the idea of a space bomber - even as relationships between the Soviets
and United States were warming.
A treaty banning nuclear weapons in space was under discussion, but the Soviets were
not ready to disarm first.
If there’s one thing governments are known for, it’s operating quickly and without
red tape that delays things.
So it was almost two years before the project was authorized in February 1976, and they
appointed Colonel General Alexander Maksimov to lead shuttle development.
There was just one problem - the Soviets had no idea how to build a space shuttle, as they
only had second-hand reports of American development.
Many divisions of the military and development sectors competed to create the design for
the Soviet space shuttle, but none met with the approval of their bosses.
A 1960s space plane design called the “Spiral” was revived and retooled, but rejected because
it didn’t resemble what the Americans were doing.
The problem was clear - no design by Russian scientists would be acceptable, because the
leadership didn’t want their own design.
They wanted the American’s shuttle.
The Soviets were falling further behind in the space race, having abandoned their manned
lunar landing program.
They had top scientists working around the clock, but the leadership in the Military-Industrial
Complex knew they needed something that would let them catch up quickly.
They turned to their spymasters, who had been watching the Americans’ effort for years.
It’s impossible to know how many Soviet spies were operating around the world, including
in the United States.
The Soviets were excellent at placing agents under deep cover, giving them elaborate cover
identities that would let them infiltrate the highest levels of American security.
But they didn’t need to - the Americans had never classified their space program!
Unlike the Soviets, they proudly shared major details of their space program with the world.
The blueprints were available, but the challenge would be to get the technology to the Russian
scientists.
The Soviets had a big advantage in their collection of data on the US Space Shuttle program, and
that was the massive internet database.
In what may be the first case of internet spying, the Soviets took their technology
acquisition efforts digital and spent the mid-1970s to the early 1980s combing over
the databases at every engineering school that contributed to the space shuttle.
That included top American Universities including MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and Princeton.
Like a massive jigsaw puzzle, the Russian scientists combined data from hundreds of
sources into a blueprint for their own space shuttle - which they nicknamed the Buran program,
meaning Blizzard in Russian.
Now that the Soviets had information on the US space shuttle, including the design, propulsion
systems, and flight computers, they could fast-track development to catch up to the
US’ model.
The space race was back on, and they continued acquiring documents - but their mission became
much harder with the arrival of a new US President.
Ronald Reagan was an anti-Soviet hardliner, and he immediately banned the Soviets from
making purchases of space shuttle documents through official channels.
The Soviet Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Moscow was suddenly cut off from its most
lucrative source of information - just as the United States launched the Space Shuttle
Columbia in 1981, scoring yet another victory over the Soviets in the space Race.
But the Soviets already had many of the almost 3,500 publicly accessible documents on the
Space Shuttle program in their possession, and that had let them cut years off their
development.
As the Buran took shape in Soviet rocket labs, it was unmistakable - it would be a carbon
copy of the Columbia’s structure.
They had saved billions, and eliminated the need for hundreds of hours of tests because
they were using already-tested blueprints.
But as the Soviet shuttle program ramped up, the US would not let this go unanswered, and
the US government was about to strike back with one of the greatest counter-intelligence
operations of the Cold War.
The CIA’s own spies had gotten wind of the Soviets’ intelligence efforts, and they
were ready to strike back.
The US government weaponized the Soviets’ own program against them.
They knew that the Soviets had their spies in the United States funneling them information
on the shuttle program even after the Reagan administration had cut off their direct supply.
Because the documents weren’t classified, the government couldn’t arrest the suppliers.
But they could give them faulty information that would sabotage the Soviet program.
The government authorized new construction of shuttle material - based on rejected NASA
designs that didn’t meet durability standards.
Those specs were taken from the garbage pail and uploaded as official NASA documents.
The US and NATO were in contact with Vladimir Vetrov, a high-ranking KGB spy who had been
supplying France and NATO with information on the Soviet space program for years.
Through Vetrov, dubbed “Codename Farewell” by his spymasters, the Soviets got outdated
material on the final steps of shuttle construction.
They used defective tiles to fill in the gaps on their shuttle, damaging its integrity when
dealing with the intense heat of the atmosphere.
The operation ended abruptly when the Soviets uncovered Vetrov’s spy work through a letter
he sent to his family.
The KGB intercepted it, dragged Vetrov back to Moscow, and got a confession out of him.
News of his execution didn’t reach France until 1985, one of many victims of the Soviet
intelligence apparatus.
But Vetrov had a far bigger reach than most executed spies, putting a critical stumbling
block in the path of the Soviets’ space shuttle program and helping to expose hundreds
of Soviet spies around the world who were recalled by Russia.
The US government would now lock down their shuttle information, preventing the Russians
from perfecting their design.
They had the shuttle design, but they didn’t have the people who built it and their expertise,
meaning they were flying blind as they entered the final stretch.
As the US launched more space shuttles, a new threat emerged - pieces of the space shuttle
would be jettisoned as the machine launched, and they made invaluable intelligence finds
for Soviet spies.
With many landing in the water, it would become a race to the parts between US and Soviet
ships.
According to international law, when a piece of scrap landed in the water, it was first
come, first served, so the United States had no choice but to get there first to retrieve
the boosters.
The Soviets never managed to steal a piece of a US shuttle, but their spies were always
snooping around to get data on the launches.
The Soviets had many satellites in space, and they repositioned them to get the best
possible view of US launches.
Like vultures circling overhead, anyone watching the trajectory of Soviet satellites would
see them hovering hungrily overhead.
The Soviets continued to fear the military implications of the US shuttle, but they couldn’t
figure out those details or apply them to their own shuttle.
That was because the US shuttle was never a military vessel and not designed for warfare.
The Soviets had been talked into a massive military investment by Vladimir Smirnov, but
they were chasing a phantom threat that never existed.
By the time 1985 rolled around, the Cold War was beginning to wane thanks to the rise of
a new Soviet leader - Mikhail Gorbachev.
A former Soviet bureaucrat who grew up as a peasant farmer, he instituted the policies
of Perestroika and Glasnost, which liberalized the Soviet economy and worked towards improved
foreign relations with capitalist countries, including the United States.
Kruschev withdrew the Soviet military from Afghanistan, and met with Ronald Reagan to
cut down on nuclear weapons.
The space race and military competition with the United States decreased, but the Soviet
space shuttle program raced toward the finishing line.
The biggest challenge the Soviets faced was a rapidly approaching money crunch, as military
funding was decreasing and they were running out of time and money.
The Soviets did test short-range launches of the Buran shuttle, but they were full of
mishaps.
The shuttle would be dropped from a Soviet bomber at night, but it ran off the runway
and crashed in the mud!
US spy satellites captured their first images of the Soviet shuttle, and were able to spot
all the similarities - and all the areas where their intelligence efforts had kept the Soviets
from getting all the details right.
The Soviets moved their shuttle facilities to Baikonur, the site where their moon landing
program had been developed, as the launch date approached.
It was March 1988, and US intelligence reports indicated that a launch was near.
The United States was rebounding from its own shuttle disaster, having lost the Challenger
two years earlier, and launched the Discovery shuttle in September.
But the Soviets attempted to jump in front of that moment by unveiling the Buran, showing
the finished shuttle on its launch pad.
Response from the world was muted - the Cold War was almost over, and if you’ve seen
one space shuttle, another just isn’t as exciting.
But many in America were shocked as they realized just how much of the US space shuttle had
been stolen.
A carbon copy of one of their proudest inventions was standing on a Soviet launch pad.
It was only a few weeks later when the Soviets finally launched Buran, but their program
hadn’t caught up to the Americans.
Their life support systems weren’t completed, so the shuttles were launched unmanned.
While it was a successful launch, information was limited because the Soviets had highly
classified all details of the launch.
Wouldn’t want to give away the information on the shuttle they stole, after all.
NASA quickly began studies based on the intelligence they had gathered, and found many similarities.
But while the Buran was a capable space shuttle, its exterior wasn’t nearly as strong and
wouldn’t be able to survive extended missions.
The Soviets had successfully stolen the US space shuttle design, but there was one thing
they couldn’t account for - the slow collapse of the Soviet Union.
Funding for the shuttle dried up, future launches were cancelled and construction on the sister
ships was shut down.
The Buran ended its life stationed in the hangar at Baikonur, a monument to Soviet ambition,
until the ceiling collapsed in 2002, taking the Soviet shuttle with it.
The Cold War was a distant memory, and thanks to a structural failure in the hangar, so
is the Buran.
The Russians stole the space shuttle designs through a complex spy operation, but it’s
going to be much easier for us to steal some more of your time!
For more about the Cold War, check out “50 Insane Cold War Facts That Will Shock You”,
and watch “Why No Weapons in Space?” for more on why the Space Race never turned hot.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
See you next time!