The United States routinely conducted recon overflights of the Soviet Union for years, most famously with the U2, but with other types of airplanes as well. I’m sure the Soviets would have gladly returned the favor, but I don’t recall ever hearing or reading about such an overflight occurring. Did the Soviets ever pull off the kind of deep-penetration overflights we were doing before spy satellites made them irrelevant? If not, how did the Soviets gather intellegence on military goings-on inside the U.S.?
One way was with a pair of binoculars.
Here is San Diego, a major US Pacific Fleet base, there are many hotels with a nice view of the harbor. You could sit and watch the ships pull in and out. Almost as easy with Pearl Harbor/Honolulu.
So, you would know that the USS Neverdock left, but of course that agent may not know where it was going. (However, hanging out at the local bars may help pick up some loose lip talk.)
Also, I am sure the Soviets had subs that would tail our ships just like we tailed theirs…
But that, of course, only covers the Navy. Dunno how they would go about counting bombers on the runway at Tinker AFB…
The Russian airline aeroflot runs flights from Montreal to Havana, Cuba. On portions of this flight, they overfly the Norfolk Naval base, Mayport, Florida, and King’s Bay (sub base). Their cameras are clicking away!
Without going into any detail, I can assure you that we knew when any sub approached the U.S., and a bit more too.
Hi!. The OP did mention pre-satellite. Which means in the 50’s and early 60’s. (Not the 80’s when I was a squid.)
Was our SOSUS network as developed then?
In an open society like the US, I imagine that it’s easier to get the information from one’s car with binoculars. Of course, that doesn’t help in the case of the vast empty spaces used for bases out west. That was why so many of those bases are out there. The edge of the base is just too far from the action for some one to do much intel work. But a Soviet spy could probably set up a front company using civilian aircraft. With those he could probably mount some good quality photo-recon gear (bought here in the US!) and fly near those bases to get side shots.
I don’t know how much intel he could get in the paranoid 1950’s, maybe not too much. But certainly every little bit is important.
I have heard that the Russians would “poke” at the NORAD defenses with their Bear bombers. Basically, a Bear would take off in Russia, fly over the Arctic, and start to fly over some unimportant part of Canada in a fairly non-threatening way, and wait until the RCAF would scramble fighters. The RCAF pilots would take up position on the bomber’s wing and at it’s 6 o’clock, and then the crews of the Canadian and Soviet planes would proceed to take picutres of eachother for intel purposes (some variations of the story involve one party or the other holding up playboy centerfolds for the benefit of whoever looked at the pictures later).
Otherwise, yeah, lots of US bases were near populated areas, and could probably be observed to some degree with a pair of binoculars or a camera with zoom lens bought in a camera shop down the street. Before the Pearl Harbor raid, the Japanese had various agents who would go to various tourist look-out spots and use the pay binoculars to watch ships going in and out of the harbor, checking them against the morning edition of the Honolulu Star (which had a daily update of ships coming in or out of port, since that was of local interest).
So pretty much, you use the tools in your toolbox to deal with whatever you’re working with. If you’ve got a sophisticated Torx Driver, that’s great, but sometimes a flathead screwdriver or a roll of duck tape will work fine too if that’s what you’ve got. We had high-altitude recon planes, the Russians had guys with Zorki cameras and Playboys.
I can’t give a timeline, but it was certainly developed enough, by the very early 60’s, to protect all the U.S, states and other sensitive areas. Advances in the sixties were very rapid. Soviet technology helped a lot.
Thanks for the information. I guess the AEROFLOT spying was the closest analog to the U2 overflights the Russians could do, since they didn’t have forward air bases except for Cuba.
The specific thing that piqued my interest was a passage in Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World which implied that some UFO reports were really civilian sightings of secret Soviet recon overflights.
I would still be interested in more stories of successful (or not-so-successful) Soviet espionage, airborne or otherwise.
You might be interested to know that the USA lost 158 recon aircraft during the Cold War:
http://www.rb-29.net/HTML/77ColdWarStory/08.01apndxC.htm
The NSA says that there were at least 40 US recon aircraft shot down between 1945 and 1977:
IIRC, in Day of Infamy, Gordon Prange discusses the Japanese survelliance of Pearl Harbor before the war. It’s been some time since I read the book, but I seem to recall being considerably less than impressed with the work of the Honolulu consulate and its spies in keeping track of the number and types of ships in the harbor. Much later, I read The Sword and Shield, a history of the KGB and its Soviet predecessors, and was again less than impressed with the activities of Soviet spies in the USA (although there were a few notable exceptions, like the Walker code ring.) It leaves me with the general impression that human intelligence gathering is less efficient than it is often perceived to be. Maybe it’s a good thing we’ve become so reliant on satellites, high-altitude overflights, and signals interception.
At the International Spy Museum Made Up Russian KGB Title because I can’t remember:
Big Cheese-with-Some-Iimportant-KGB-Responsibilities-for-Spying-on-the-West Says on film (paraphrased but accurate):
The USSR was so far behind the West technologically right from the 40’s that it relied almost totally on building human Intelligence assets inside the U.S… That was why all the Soviet consulates and embassies seemed riddled with spies - because they were desperate to develop human intelligence. Further, the CIA knew this and was able to take advantage of the KGB mercilessly – fake spies, double agents, leaked fake classified stuff etc. However, Big Cheese was very proud in claiming that by the end of the Cold War the USSR human assets in the West were as good or better than what the West had achieved inside the USSR - an assertaion that the Spy Museum does not challange in the film clip.