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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!

(:-)

That's very cool!

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:

"...DUSSELDORF, West Ger many, Oct. 9 (UPI)— A West German court convicted three men today of stealing an American Sidewinder missile from an air base in 1967, ship ping to to Moscow as regular airfreight for 483.88 and re ceiving $81,000 from the Soviet Union.

Manfred Ramminger, an architect who organized the theft, was sentenced to four years in prison. One accomplice, Josef Linowski, a locksmith, was also sentenced to four years, and another, Wolf‐Diethard Knoppe, a former mein ber of the West German Air Force, was sentenced to three years and three months.

The chief judge, Fritz Weber, said that although the three were found guilty of treason espionage and grand larceny, they did not betray state se crets in delivering the missile and navigation devices to the Soviet Union.

He said that another factor mitigating the sentence was that the equipment was not closely enough guarded by the West German Army, considering its worth. The prosecutor had demanded sentences of five to five and half years..."

Wow. Really? Lesser sentences because the missile was not closely enough guarded???? Sounds like the 9th Circuit Court to me.

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)