Unfortunately I can't find it, but if you dig around the CIA FOID documents on their website, you'll find a story about the fake shuttle documents the CIA "allowed" the Soviets to steal. They knew the Soviets were digging around, so they created a honeypot with technical documents that were oh-so slightly changed, but would be non-functional.
Too bad I can't find it, it was an interesting read.
> After a hangar got bombed by cruise/ballistic missiles they would print a 1:1 aerial/satellite picture of the rubble, hang it over the actual rubble and then clean up under the print. It took quite a few weeks for the Russians to understand this ruse.
I'd like to add this scenario actually happened during the Cold War. Soviets were reusing one time pads and the US army decrypted some of the messages, among other things this lead to discovery of Soviet spies targeting the US nuclear weapon program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
"Contrived computer chips found their way into
Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline, and defective plans disrupted the output of chemical plants and a tractor factory."
~ https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
I'm currently reading The Dead Hand, and I think this matches what you're talking about:
> Rather than roll up the Line X officers and expel them, Reagan approved a secret plan to exploit the Farewell dossier for economic warfare against the Soviet Union. The plan was to secretly feed the Line X officers with technology rigged to self-destruct after a certain interval. The idea came from Weiss, who approached Casey, who took it to Reagan. The CIA worked with American industry to alter products to be slipped to the KGB, matching the KGB’s shopping list. “Contrived computer chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline, and defective plans disturbed the output of chemical plants and a tractor factory,” Weiss said. “The Pentagon introduced misleading information pertinent to stealth aircraft, space defense, and tactical aircraft.”
> Oil and gas equipment was at the top of the Soviet wish list, and the Soviets needed sophisticated control systems to automate the valves, compressors and storage facilities for a huge new pipeline to Europe. When the pipeline technology could not be purchased in the United States, the KGB shopped it from a Canadian firm. However, tipped by Vetrov, the CIA rigged the software sold from Canada to go haywire after a while, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to create pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. One day, the system exploded. “The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,” Reed recalled. The blast was starting to trigger worried looks in the U.S. government that day, he recalled, when, at the National Security Council, “Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry.” The explosion had been one of the first fruits of the Reagan confrontation.
How about OSS Sabotage Manual that was declassified. Then you think about all the infrastructure attacks and it looks similar to how the manual describes to do sabotage. KGB sleeper cells still doing their thing? Or American communists dreaming they are fighting facism when in fact they are inviting it in.
That was the CIA's plot, which the Navy vehemently objected to. The Navy said it was farcically complicated, too large of a plot to keep secret and likely to fail. Both proved true. The Navy offered to recover Intel from the Soviet submarine using DSVs and ROVs, low risk operations they could have easily kept secret. But the CIA won this dispute and fumbled the submarine and got putted by the press.
Ah, you beat me to referencing the book! The Soviets discovered one of these Sea of Okhotsk tap pods, and interestingly enough it had printed on it "Property of the United States Government".
On a related note, the Federation of American Scientists maintains a really fascinating archive of unclassified military documents, which includes a lot of this kind of stuff (plus all sorts of other interesting documents). I think their archive tends towards slightly newer documents though. Or maybe I just haven't skimmed it thoroughly enough.
ooh will have to have a look - some of the declassified CIA docs on the U2 and a12 make fascinating reading.
Though I suppose growing up in spook county in the UK made those of us going into tech aware of some of what went before 1/2 of my college course peers where RAE or ARA - though I am sad I never got to go round Cranfield Universitys black museum of tech
Too bad I can't find it, it was an interesting read.
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