Posted on 01/31/2019 3:45:29 AM PST by vannrox
cool story, thanks.
Back in the early 1950’s when I was about 7 years old, my dad took me to his engineering lab one evening. There was a ‘rocket’ resting horizontally on two pipe stands.
It looked about 12 feet long and 6 or 8 inches in diameter. It had a big goldfish bowl lens on the nose. Dad lit a cigarette then told me to go the back of the missle and watch the tail fins. As he waved his cigarette, the fins followed his motion!
Honest! I never told the Russians anything!
(:-)
I read this: "...Exploiting thick fog and careless guards, Manfred Ramminger – a KGB-agent in West Germany – entered Neuburg air base during the evening of Oct. 22, 1967. Together with his Polish driver Josef Linowski and German F-104 Starfighter pilot Wolf-Diethard Knoppe, he stole an operational AIM-9 from the local ammunition depot and transported it down the entire runway on a wheelbarrow to his Mercedes sedan, parked outside the base. The 2.9-meter-long missile proved unwieldy. Ramminger broke the rear window and covered the protruding part with a carpet. In order not to attract attention of the police, he then marked the protrusion with a piece of red cloth, as required by law..."
and thought "The Soviets were evil, but they definitely get points for brazen chutzpah..."
I was curious and looked this up, and found this NYT article about it:
Wow. Really? Lesser sentences because the missile was not closely enough guarded???? Sounds like the 9th Circuit Court to me.
Since it wasn’t well guarded they didn’t steal-steal </Whoopie Goldburg> it, and there was no criminal intent, no reasonable prosecutor would would bring such a case </James Comey>
My father once explained to me why the military was so hard on soldiers and sailors (expecially sailors in a shipboard environment) who failed to secure their belongings and gear...it was that it provided temptation to weak men, and therefore contributed to crime.
That made sense to me, and I heard the same thing when I joined the Navy myself.
But letting the people who stole off simply because something wasn’t secured correctly? Hell no!
</sarchasm>
LOL, I know...I got that!
Delete the “h” in my previous...
If they’d just gotten the Ruskies to make a donation to the DNC they could have gotten the technology much easier.
It is also possible for someone to allow another to steal something. Say you are a store clerk, your buddy could go to a complete stranger’s store and shoplift facing the risk of getting caught, arrested, and jailed or you could shoplift a your buddy’s store with no risk so long as he agrees.
I beleive this is what the Clinton’s did with the Chicoms.
Saw exactly this same demo on a Sidewinder hanging on an F-4D in a hanger at MCAS Beaufort back in the early 70’s.
Neat!
They wouldn’t let us smoke on the flight line. :(
That is cool! I had an aunt and uncle who worked in the Pentagon for the DoD and visited them for a week the summer I graduated high school.
The first day they took me to work with them and introduced me around in their office where there were walls of filing cabinets marked Top Secret and each one had a combo lock like a safe. What caught my attention was that about 1/3 of the cabinets were open with the file tabs readily visible. “Alpha XXy 4433 project”, ABC Nutmeg Stank project, etc. etc. (not the real file names but similar)
The judge should have been investigated to see which side he was working for. And the pilot should have been tried by a court martial and executed.
On an F8U-2N Crusader, same venue...
Glad I'm old...
Lots of classic espionage stories out of Germany during the Cold War. I remember reading about an effort to track Russian Military Liaison Mission (MLM) teams, which were allowed to travel around West Germany and “observe” NATO facilities and exercises. Under the treaty that established Russian teams in the west (and US/British/French teams out of West Berlin, into the GDR), there were supposed to be limits on travel and what the “observers” could monitor. Naturally, the Russians ignored most of the rules, so tracking them was a matter of importance.
As I recall, the CIA learned that Russia planned to buy 3-4 Opel sedans for use by MLM personnel. We identified the vehicles intended for delivery to the Russians. Over a weekend, with the cars still on the assembly line, operatives broke into the plant and inserted tracking devices into the vehicles.
The devices were well concealed, so the Russians did not find them after taking delivery of the Opels. For months, they were frustrated because their MLM teams were never able to shake their western “tails,” and when one monitoring team dropped off, another was usually in place to maintain surveillance. The Russians eventually found one of the devices and promptly replaced all of the vehicles.
Boy, I didn’t think of that but right you are.
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