Around 1960, the Soviet Union toured several countries with exhibits of their industrial and technological accomplishments. One of the items on display was the upper stage of a Luna vehicle with windows cut out to show the payload inside. At first, the CIA suspected the vehicle was just a model. But they wanted to be sure.

The story is laid out in a CIA document from 1967 that was only declassified in 1994. Even then, the document has a lot of redactions in it. The paper is sparse on how they managed it, but when the exhibit closed — somehow — a group of intelligence operatives wound up inside the exhibition hall alone for 24 hours.

What they found was surprising. While the engine and most of the avionics were gone, the vehicle was the real article. They took measurements and photos, hoping that analysis would reveal more about the vehicle’s performance characteristics.

Here’s where you start getting into the redacted material. The team was able to get something from the probe — probably machine tooling marks — but there wasn’t enough detail to identify where and how they were made. They decided to get a team specializing in this kind of analysis to examine it more closely.

Between the Lines

If you see a picture of a basketball player making a slam dunk and the ball is cut out of the picture, you can probably still guess it is a basketball. In this case, it is obvious from context that the CIA wanted to know the facility that built the capsule. Why? I’ll leave that to your imagination. Charitably, maybe they wanted to break in there, too. Charitably.

The other interesting implication (that could be wrong) is that the CIA apparently had lots of information about tool markings at various Soviet facilities and a well-developed technology for matching those to specific articles. You have to wonder how they would come by this data. There is a reference to a Joint Factory Markings Center so this isn’t some lone expert, but — apparently — a standing group of people studying factory markings.

Planning

The exhibition moved from town to town on trucks. Again, there are no details about methods, but the CIA intercepted a shipping manifest and found a crate about the size of the probe. Quoting experience, the team wanted to examine the probe either before the show or after. However, by this time the Soviets had a 24-hour guard on the exhibits, so this was not to be.

The four men on the team arrived and bought local clothes. They worked with the local CIA Station to get pictures of the crate and realized that they’d have to enter the 20 foot long and 14-foot high crate via the roof. They bought ladders, ropes, and an assortment of other tools. The CIA then waited for the exhibit to go on the move.

The Operation

It is interesting to read a simple sentence like “it was arranged to make the Lunik the last truckload of the day…” You have to wonder what the method was to accomplish that. When the truck left, a CIA car was in front of it and behind it. When they were sure the truck had no escorts, it was stopped and the driver was replaced. The original driver was kept in a hotel room overnight — another interesting untold part of the story.

The CIA rented a nearby salvage yard with a ten-foot-high fence surrounding it. Once the truck was there, radio cars patrolled the area to make sure no one would disturb the work. They also had surveillance on the Soviet waiting at the train station to load the crates. He didn’t seem alarmed by the missing crate, ate dinner, and returned to his hotel room.

Finally, the CIA officers allowed the factory marking team to enter the salvage yard. They had to remove part of the roof. They were worried about leaving traces of their break-in, but the crate had been opened so many times that this wasn’t going to be a problem after all.

Dropping ladders in the crate, the team split into two parts. The team at the front removed a window, squeezed inside barefoot, and took pictures. This is pre cell phone cameras, remember, so they sent a roll of film back with one of the radio cars to make sure the pictures came out alright.

The tail section team had to remove 130 metric bolts to gain access to the insides of the engine compartment. There was no engine, but the mounts and tanks would tell them something.

A Stamp

To get access to the payload, they had to cut some wire that had a Soviet seal on them. The wires were cut and given to one of the patrol cars who returned it to the Station so that it could be duplicated immediately. At the end of the evening, an exact copy arrived and the team reassembled the probe. They left at 4 AM. By 5 AM, a driver took the truck away and then turned it back over to the original driver.

You have to wonder why the original driver didn’t report anything. Your imagination runs wild at what must have happened in the hotel room he was kept in overnight. When the railway station Soviet showed up in the morning, the truck was waiting. He didn’t seem surprised and had it loaded onto a train. As far as anyone could tell, the Soviets never knew about this operation.

More Reading and Thoughts

If you want to read the original account by [Sydney Finer] (and, no, we don’t know if that’s his real name) you can find the original CIA document online. Another good read that is related is the paper “Intelligence for the Space Race” issued in 1961 and declassified in 1994 or 1995.

By the way, the Luna probes had other notable firsts. Luna 1 was the first spacecraft to orbit the sun (it missed). Luna 2 was the first manmade object on the moon (see video below).

Luna 3 took the first photos of the dark side of the moon (see video below). Luna 9 was the first spacecraft to soft land on another planetary body and returned the first close up shots (in stereo) of the moon. The Luna 16 was the first robotic mission to return lunar soil samples in 1970. Along with Luna 20 and 24, they returned about 2/3 of a pound of lunar material to earth.

You can only wonder what the CIA wanted to do with this information. I know that some of the data helped in tracking future flights. You also have to wonder how often the Soviets examined US space hardware.

As a side note, the CIA just released some previously classified material about Sputnik. Some of it is pretty dry, but there are a few interesting tidbits about the evaluation of the threat from the Sputnik program.

A syringe piston serves as a substrate for the cells, and each cell is just a screw with paper wrapped around it and then 35 turns of copper wire on top of that. The battery is soaked in salt water, although we suspect vinegar or lemon juice would work even better. Heating the electrolyte is also a good idea.

The theory is pretty simple: The salt dissolves into positively charged sodium ions and negatively charged chlorine atoms to form the electrolyte. The cathode loses electrons into the solution, leaving it positive. The other electrode — the anode — collects electrons, so it has a net negative charge. The difference between the charge on the two electrodes creates a potential difference. When you close the circuit, electrons flow from the anode back to the cathode, causing an electrical current.

If you’d rather make the penny version of this, it’s been easier in the US since 1982 when pennies became copper-covered zinc. Grinding the copper off one side of each penny allows them to act as both electrodes. Old pennies don’t have a zinc core, so to use those you’d need another metal like tin foil.

If you want something more impressive looking, try a cola can battery. If these aren’t exciting enough for you, consider a nuclear battery.

With his latest mod, [PoppaFixIt] has attempted to bridge the gap between toy and model by sticking a considerably overpowered battery into a $10 RC truck from Amazon. He reports greatly improved performance from his hacked together truck, but anyone looking to replicate his work should understand the risks before attempting to hack up their own version.

The principle is pretty simple; the truck is designed to run on two AA batteries, providing 3 volts. But by swapping the AAs out for a 3.7 volt 1S LiPo of the type that’s used in small airplanes and quadcopters, you can get an instant boost in power. As a happy side effect, the LiPo batteries are also rechargeable and fairly cheap, so you won’t have to keep burning through alkaline AAs.

The mod itself is a basic job that only requires a few bucks in parts, and for which [PoppaFixIt] has helpfully provided Amazon links. Essentially you just crack open the truck, solder a JST connector pigtail to the positive and negative traces on the PCB, and then pop a hole in the roof to run the new battery wires out.

Right about now the RC purists are probably screaming obscenities at their displays, and not without reason. As fun as these supercharged little trucks are to drive, there are a number of real issues here which need to be mentioned.

First, while the motor will probably be alright with a bit higher voltage running through them, the gears won’t be liking it one bit. In fact, [PoppaFixIt] even mentions they shredded a few gears when they tried to take one off-road. The second issue is that since these vehicles were not designed with LiPo batteries in mind, there’s no low voltage cutoff to prevent over discharge. If you aren’t careful, a setup like this will cook those cute little batteries in short order. But hey, at least it’s all cheap.

If you are more interested in control than power, you may want to check out the previous hacks we’ve featured. Seems like these little RC trucks are the platform of choice for hackers who want to get stuff moving on the cheap.

We started to say something about a modem in the cloud, but that wouldn’t really be accurate. The modem uses the HTML 5 audio API, so it really runs in the browser. We would have been really surprised if [Martin] had cooked up a modem able to interact with a real modem, but as you might expect, the browser modem only communicates with other instances of itself. If you want a brief introduction to HTML 5 audio, you might enjoy the video below.

Still, the work is impressive and if you look at the code on GitHub, it isn’t as complicated as you’d expect. You can also check out a live demo. The tones reminded us of some of the multitone encodings that ham radio operators use, such as MFSK.

Although this might not be of great practical value for most people, it did make us think. A secure air-gapped computer with a speaker could broadcast out data using something like this with no more than a web page exploit. We wonder if you could shift the tones up high enough that most people couldn’t hear it? If you want to pull off a similar trick with an Arduino on one side, you can.

We covered how modem technology drove the modern phone landscape way back when. Of course, these days, a modem is more likely to connect to the Internet than the phone lines.

The whole security system is handled by three subsystems for target acquisition, photo documentation, and communications. The first subsystem is centered around an ESPino which utilizes a PIR sensor to detect motion. It then turns on a windscreen washer pump and uses pan and tilt servos to squirt water in a pattern toward the victim.

The target acquisition hardware also sends a message to the second subsystem, an ArduCAM ESP8266 UNO board. It takes a burst of photos using an ArduCAM Mini Camera mounted beside the squirter outlet. The UNO can also serve up a webpage with a collection of the photos.

The final subsystem is an iPhone app which talks to both the ESPino and the UNO board. It can remotely control the squirter and provide a video feed of what the camera sees.

One detail of the build we really enjoyed is the vacuum relief valve he fabricated himself. It prevents siphoning through the pump when it’s not on. Don’t miss a demo of the squirter in action after the break.

Automatic soaking seems to be a thing here on Hackaday. [Ashish]’s motion sensing water gun not only soaks his officemates but also tweets photos of its exploits. And [Austin Shaf] keeps his soaker hidden and triggers it remotely via wireless.

It was proven back in 2011 that honey bees will make more pessimistic decisions after being shaken in a way that simulates an attack by varroa destructor mites. The bees were trained to associate a reward of sugar-water with a particular odor and to associate foul-tasting punishment water with another odor—that of formic acid, a common treatment against varroa mites. When a third stimulus created by mixing the two odors was presented, the experimenters found that the aggravated bees were more likely to expect the bad odor. Sure enough, they kept their tongues in their mouths when they smelled the third odor. All the bees that weren’t shaken looked forward to sucking down a bit of sugar-water.

So, how does one judge a honey bee’s response? Whenever their antennae come in contact with something appetizing, they stick out their proboscis involuntarily to have a taste. This is called proboscis extension reflex (PER), and it’s the ingrained, day-one behavior that leads them to suck the nectar out of flower blossoms and regurgitate it to make honey.

[LJohann] is a behavioral biologist who wanted to test the effects of varroa mite treatment on bee-havior by itself, without agitating the bees. He built a testing apparatus to pump odors toward bees and judge their response which is shown in a few brief demo videos after the break. This device enables [LJohann] to restrain a bee, tantalize its antennae with sucrose, and pump a stimulus odor at its face on the cue of an LED and piezo buzzer. A fan mounted behind the bee helps clear the air of the previous scents. We especially like the use of a servo to swing the tube in and out of the bee’s face between tests.

[LJohann] and his colleagues concluded that the varroa mite treatment by itself does not make the bees pessimistic. This is great news for concerned apiarists who might be skeptical about using formic acid in the fight against the honey bee’s worst predator. Check out the brief demo videos after the break.

Hackaday has long been abuzz about bees whether they produce honey or not. We’ve covered many kinds of sweet projects like intelligent hives, remote hive weight monitoring, and man-made bee nest alternatives.

This hack is much more useful as a case study than a brick is, however, and [tomwimmenhove]’s work points out some bad design on the manufacturer’s side and as such can help you to avoid these kind of mistakes. The problem of predictable keys got great treatment in the comments of our post about an encryption scheme for devices low in power and memory, for instance.

Those of you interested in digital signal processing may also want to take a look at his code, where he implements filtering, demodulation and decoding of the key fob’s signal. The transmission side is handled by rpitx and attacks against unencrypted communications with this kind of setup have been shown here before. There’s a lot going on here that’s much more interesting than stealing cars.

[Via Bleeping Computer]