Two stories about how the CIA revealed the USSR's nuclear secrets using jackal photographs
❯ Such different espionage
Hello everyone on the Cold War fronts. It is probably no secret that when the US and USSR entered the Cold War they had a completely disproportionate level of knowledge about each other.
On the one hand, we have a free democratic society, with freedom of speech, press, movement, pluralism of opinions and other nonsense that will be gradually limited only with the beginning of the confrontation. In the current situation, Soviet intelligence in the USA had simply hothouse conditions, and it felt more like a child left unattended in a candy store.
On the other hand, we have…
…a country-black box, in which several holes were drilled, and by peeping into them, the Americans tried to understand what color the cat was sitting inside, and whether it was a cat at all.
Besides the fact that the USSR was a closed country, where even just entering was already a non-trivial task, the problem was that before the Second World War the USA did not conduct any systematic intelligence activities against the Soviet Union. During the war, for obvious reasons, there was no proper espionage either, and after, suddenly, the USA was faced with the fact that the usual approaches do not work.
The entire American residency was closely monitored by counterintelligence, was limited in its movements around the country and opportunities to communicate with residents. The citizens of the USSR themselves, thanks to propaganda and the recent war, had a justified fear of foreigners: fear of the NKVD/KGB, and patriotism after the victory in the war also made itself felt. Because of this, recruiting a person, especially a high-ranking one, became almost impossible, although such attempts were made. And the most common motive for betrayal – money – in the country of the Soviets, due to the peculiarities of the economic system, was practically meaningless.
The level of CIA knowledge about the USSR in the late 1940s and early 1950s can be described as follows: we know something, but this knowledge is only islands in the sea of uncertainty. How to get out of this situation? To rely on alternative methods of extracting information.
The main sources of information were the following:
Interviews of prisoners of war returned to Germany by the USSR – the Soviet authorities used them for construction work, so they could provide valuable information about the infrastructure.
The documents about the USSR taken out of Germany are huge amounts of data collected by the Reich during the war, but they are rapidly becoming outdated and often incomplete.
Technical reconnaissance (wiretapping/photo reconnaissance) – the famous tunnel under the Berlin Wall, as an example.
Information from open sources – printed press and literature. The US Embassy in the USSR was tasked with obtaining all possible press and technical literature. Even despite the activities of Soviet censorship, it sometimes contained more information than the CIA obtained through agents.
Seriously, the CIA compiled almost weekly summaries of what was written in Soviet newspapers about the country's policies, its changes and reshuffles at the top. Sometimes this was the only relatively reliable information about the USSR's domestic policies.
Naturally, specialists were needed to process huge amounts of information, so analytical departments were created in the CIA from the very beginning of the organization.
Many groups of CIA analysts worked on their own issues: Soviet weapons, infrastructure, nuclear facilities… Their work was colossal, but for field agents these people were never real spies, despite their undoubted successes in obtaining secret information. Today we will talk about two such successes, which have entered the CIA textbooks.
❯ Looking for a Needle in a Haystack
One of the main objects of interest for the CIA in the 50s was, of course, the Soviet atomic program. The Americans were primarily interested in how much the USSR was capable of producing. However, since it was not possible to penetrate the Soviet atomic program, in order to obtain at least some data, they had to resort to indirect methods.
One of the teams of analysts was aimed at assessing the productivity of the nuclear complex in the Urals – in Kyshtym, Novouralsk and Lesnoy, the existence of which was known thanks to photo reconnaissance data. The methodology proposed by the analysts was simple: take the energy consumption of the plants, divide by the costs of uranium enrichment plants for the production of 1 kilogram of fuel (assuming that they are identical to the Soviet ones), and you get how many kg of military uranium the plant produces per year:
Productivity (kg per year) = power consumption (kWh per year) / cost of producing 1 kg of uranium (kWh)
The method is simple, but there is a nuance – the Americans did not know the energy consumption of enterprises. The team of analysts proposed to calculate it by assessing the technical and economic indicators of the energy system. But there was a nuance here too – firstly, the management did not believe in the method itself, and secondly, the Americans did not have an up-to-date diagram of the energy system. Today, you can download such a diagram with a couple of clicks, but in the 50s, the mere fact of having it could raise questions from the intelligence services. And so in September 1957, the CIA was incredibly lucky.
In issue 29 of the Ogonyok magazine for 1958, an article was published about the successes in the development of the Urals, where one of the illustrations was the control panel of Uralenergo with a network diagram on it. Yes, the photo is jackal, and the censorship also worked and removed all the inscriptions. But this was more than all the CIA information on the Urals energy system up to that point!
There were, however, a couple of problems that spoiled everything. Firstly, it was completely unclear what was actually depicted on the diagram – in Soviet sources, Uralenergo was sometimes referred to as the local power grid of Sverdlovsk, sometimes as the entire power system of the Urals. Secondly, the photo was quite clunky, so it was impossible to make out exactly what was depicted on the plates, and the purpose of the elements on them had to be guessed. Finally, it is easy to notice that the diagram has a horizontal orientation, and the power system of the Urals is vertical.
Therefore, without a reference point, it is absolutely unclear where the north and south are on the diagram. And without this, it was absolutely unreadable. In fact, the analysts began searching for a reference point, although no one believed in success.
It was assumed that the large bars with a large number of elements are power plants. Which is logical, since power plants usually have a large number of generators, so the branches with a circle at the end are probably them (an unobvious point – these could also be transformers, the connection to which of lower voltage lines was simply not shown, but this version was discarded as a dead end).
The power plants are unique in many ways – both in the number of generators and in the grid connection schemes, so the analysts took on the task of searching for recognizable power plants on the scheme. But they didn’t have much information.
From the data collected by the Germans during the war, as well as fragmentary information from foreign commissions that visited power plants in the region and information from technical literature, it was possible to assemble more or less accurate profiles of several large power plants. The Kama State District Power Plant, which had no less than 12 generators, stood out among others. On the diagram, such a station should have been a long plate so that it could accommodate the conventional symbols of all the generators. And such a plate was in the lower left corner.
Unfortunately, part of the control panel blocked it, but it was obvious that there were many generators there: since only 1/3 or 1/4 of this plate had 4 of them. Now we have a reference point and an understanding that the south is on the left. Further, according to the data from the German plan, as well as from Soviet sources, the Kama GRES has an electrical connection through the Yuzhnaya substation with the Yuzhno-Uralskaya GRES, and to the south – on the right side of the photo – there is a large plate with a suitable number of generators.
That's it, now we have 2 points, and from them we can check the connections according to the old German scheme. When it became clear that the old objects fit perfectly into the scheme, the hypothesis was confirmed – the starting point was chosen correctly. Then it remains to fill in the gaps, since many new objects have been built in the energy system since 1945. But, oddly enough, this was the most difficult part of the work.
To fill the gaps in the diagram, we had to sift through a lot of literature. Key sources for further deciphering:
Magazine “Electric Stations” No. 12 for 1948 with a presentation of the plan for the electrification of the Urals.
A book in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Ural energy system, “Ural Energy for 40 Years,” containing a diagram of the Ural energy system for 1945 and stories about the construction of power transmission lines.
Photos from balloons and reconnaissance aircraft.
A total of 103 articles from Soviet newspapers and technical journals, 4 reports from various delegations, 11 reports from prisoners of war who returned from the USSR, and about 25 photographs of the area.
Literally, bit by bit, the data was collected on which lines were built between which objects and which new substations were put into operation. The entire upper left corner of the diagram was terra incognita, since it was possible to establish what objects were there only by comparing a photo from one of the reconnaissance probes and information from the book “Energy of the Urals for 40 Years”. Moreover, the Americans encountered purely Soviet secrecy – one of the substations, through which the line to the plant went, was in reality a “mailbox” – i.e. classified, but in the literature for convenience it was given its own name, similar to the name of another substation, and even geographically shifted by 20 km and associated with another object. Only an analysis of the photo reconnaissance data helped to figure out which of the sources was lying.
As a result, having spent more than 8 months, analysts were able not only to restore the diagram, but also to estimate the power consumed by the South Urals nuclear complex by voltage class and number of lines (lines of different voltage classes can transmit different power).
What is characteristic is that the figures obtained by the CIA differed from the real ones by 10-15%, which, given the conditions of the task, can be considered a phenomenal result.
❯ Jackal “screenshots” against the CIA
The second story happened in 1958. Unfortunately, the story was declassified, but the photos were not, because they were “too jackalish and uninformative.” Which, given the rest of the story, looks like sophisticated trolling.
During a conference in Geneva on the peaceful use of the atom, the Soviet delegation decided to surprise those present and showed a film about the construction of a new nuclear power plant somewhere in Siberia. CIA agents, who were naturally present at the conference, watched the film and were stunned by what they saw, since it was obvious that the Soviets were showing the construction of a brand new reactor for producing weapons-grade plutonium, information about the construction of which had recently been provided by photographic reconnaissance.
The CIA-hired nuclear scientists, having watched the film, confirmed that it could be a dual-purpose reactor, and the “Soviets” were being disingenuous when they said that its primary purpose was to generate electricity. It is not surprising, however, that Soviet scientists were doing anything at such a conference. For the USSR of that time, participation in such events was a matter of prestige – it was necessary to show that socialist science was not just a competitor to capitalist science, but superior to it. Therefore, the Soviet side, paranoidly hiding all objects of the atomic project, brought a film about a secret military reactor to the exhibition. It was truly an advanced development, of which one could be proud.
But that wasn’t the only reason scientists went. The other side was, of course, intelligence. Intelligence and scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain operated in a similar way – eliciting as much information as possible at conferences and exhibitions that the other side was willing to reveal: a kind of ping-pong of bits of truth, where one side would give out a little data, waiting for the other side to do the same.
Naturally, the scientists did not disclose key details, moreover, all the materials presented at the conference contained as little precise data as possible. For example, the Soviet side disclosed that the new reactor operates on 200 tons of metallic uranium. That the scheme is dual-circuit, the electrical power is 100 MW, and the thermal power is 200-220 MW.
It's not that there's a lot of data, but the main thing is that they don't answer the question about the reactor's plutonium production rate. So the CIA gathered nuclear scientists, equipped them with portable cameras and sent them to watch a film about the reactor so that they would take photos of the frames and notes on the design. I don't think there's any need to talk about the quality of the photos taken in the dark cinema hall.
In general, after viewing and analyzing the recordings, it turned out that the “advice” if they lied, then only about the thermal power, and even then insignificantly. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get more out of the film. At first glance.
To understand the reactor's true parameters, its dimensions had to be assessed. Over the next few months, CIA analysts systematized photos and text materials in order to conduct a thorough analysis of all available information. Studying a photo of the reactor control panel, analysts counted 2,100 fuel rods, 20 control rods, and 20 safety rods. Each of them was inserted into a graphite block, but the dimensions of neither the rods nor the blocks were clear.
In order to estimate the exact parameters of the reactor, it was necessary to understand its dimensions, but not a single photo showed a single fuel element next to objects with pre-determined dimensions. Except for one photo, where a fuel rod was suspended next to a metal beam near the windows.
In the photo of the reactor room you can see those same windows. Having caught on to this information, the Americans began to look for photos of the reactor building from the outside – fortunately, they were published in the open press – pride for the country (and the building is beautiful – not like modern ones).
It is clear that the reactor hall has windows on the front and side, and judging by the photo, the distance between the windows on different sides is different. In order to understand which windows the rod was photographed opposite, it was necessary to study the position of the shadows in the blurry black and white photos – their unevenness made it clear that they were not cast by artificial lighting. Hence the conclusion – these are shadows from the sun. The building had windows on all sides, and the time of the shooting is unknown, so this information alone was useless. Photos from a U2 reconnaissance aircraft came to the rescue – they showed that on the eastern side of the building there was a massive tower that was supposed to block the light, so the sun could only shine from the western side, and the rod was located along the northern wall.
Next, using the same photographs, estimates of the building's size were obtained, and by applying them to a photograph of its exterior, it was possible to estimate the distance between the windows – it was in line with the typical solutions of Soviet industrial architects, so the estimate was accepted as reliable.
After which the most difficult part began – it was necessary, using projective geometry, to estimate, based on the available measurements, the distances between the windows, the linear dimensions of the fuel rods and the reactor.
Such work was carried out by a special department of the CIA, which had the most modern computers at its disposal, capable of accelerating calculations. The general principle of projective geometry was based on the principle of perspective and the distortion of linear dimensions due to it.
Using the obtained reliable size, the measurement department was able to estimate the overall geometric dimensions of the room itself, the length of the fuel rod elements and graphite blocks.
There was very little left to do – to estimate the diameter of the assemblies themselves based on the mass of uranium in the reactor and the length of the fuel assemblies. And based on the available data, it was possible to reconstruct the exact thermal and energy capacity.
Then it was a small matter – the missing elements of the design were restored using the available Soviet equipment catalogs (for example, the efficiency of the pumps was assessed). As a result, CIA analysts were able to confirm the data that the Soviet side had given and provide most of the data that the Soviet side would have passionately wanted to hide.
And all this long before the era of computer analysis of data arrays – only human intelligence and ingenuity.
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