posted 09-20-2014 12:34 PM               

Wrestling with the huge steering wheel, a CIA agent carefully backed the large flatbed truck through an entrance in the 10-foot wooden fence surrounding a salvage yard. As the truck rumbled to a stop, he and other covert intelligence operatives moved quickly under cover of night, pushing the gate closed, barely clearing the front bumper. They then all rushed to the back of the truck, hopped inside and delicately pried open the giant wooden crate it carried, being careful to leave no marks.

And with that, the first stage of their until now secret mission was complete: American intelligence had stolen — or, more accurately, borrowed — one of the Soviet Union's most important technologies, a Lunik space vehicle, which was a key component in its race with the United States to be the first to reach the moon.

The "kidnapping" of that missile, done without the Soviets ever knowing about it, is one of many wild and sometimes weird secret operations and schemes exposed for the first time in a series of recently declassified government documents concerning the so-called Space Race, which was feared to be important for military reasons but known to be propaganda that could swell national pride.

posted 09-20-2014 01:32 PM               

...exposed for the first time in a series of recently declassified government documents

In a mocking article that trumpets how "America bungled many legs of the space race in the early 1960s with bad planning, hare-brained schemes and inept spying," it would have been nice to avoid the bad research, hare-brained technical errors, and inept editing and fact-checking of the 'Newsweek' staff responsible for this really pitiable essay. The biggest howler is that these stories 'have never been reported before', which merely illustrates the staff's cultural isolation and inability to efficiently use Internet search engines. The only 'original' aspects of the material are the fantasy elements apparently added from the author's imagination to the long-released Lunik 'kidnapping' story, such as the presence of Soviet guards, or the use of its results in the NASA lunar program. Sad.