Spies and Propaganda

[GlennM]

Teddy has done her work and she likes to provide facts. She does not post as much as we would like because there have been numerous trolls who like to throw rocks at her ideas. Elsewhere in the forum there was a pretty good scenario of Zolo being a hit man. These things all seem plausible from the vantage point of a chair in a warm room.

I believe that after the hikers plowed snow for a day, Igor convinced them that taking the high pass was preferable to threading their way through the trees to make camp in the next valley's forest. Instead of following the water course, they would just keep to the high ground to round Ortoten.This is why their final camp site looks authentic, not a prop.

They not only were not equal to the environmental challenges, they were also led by a non military person. Zolo would have been a better choice as tactician,  but he was surely consulted.

Recall that they did not last three days away from civilization.

[Partorg]

What reason on earth would the US have to kill a couple of students and recent grads?

1.  Not «earth the USA», but a specific group of CIA who have been dropped into a hostile country on an intelligence mission.
2. They  killed to avoid arrest because at some point they thought they were facing a KGB group disguised as tourists and sent to capture them

How to build a nuke?  Nope… The US figured that out first remember?
What methods and ingredients were used to enrich uranium?  Nope… every time Russia set off a nuke the radioisotope signature was sniffed out of the air.
How many bombers the USSR had? Nope… U2 spy plane provided the numbers.
How many ICBMs the USSR had and where they were?  Nope, again the U2.

For a professional military man (even a former one), it is inexcusable to have such naive ideas about the tasks of strategic intelligence and subjects that may interest her.   
"Blackbird" and U2 are good mechanisms, but from a height of 60,000 feet, not everything can be seen that one would like to see on the territory of a potential enemy in a future war in order to correctly assess its military and scientific and technical potential. There are many things that need microscopes, mass spectrometers and microphones to study, not telescopes. Therefore, both sides had to resort to the good old agent methods, and here the USSR was in a winning position, since its agents in Western countries could operate almost unhindered, while all foreigners who legally entered the USSR were restricted in freedom of movement, were under the supervision of the KGB counterintelligence services and therefore the effectiveness of using them to obtain intelligence data it was extremely low.
For the same reasons, recruitment agents of local residents was also difficult.
As a result, in the 50s, the West had not only (and not so much) to recruit its agents in the USSR, but to move them across the border secretly, as part of a CIA program called AERODYNAMIC. They were hired exclusively from among the former citizens of the USSR. They were trained in special schools on the territory of Germany and were transferred across the border mainly by air, followed by parachuting.
Only the CIA knows how many them were abandoned at that time. According to Russian open sources, 33 such agents were caught during the KGB counter-operation called "ZVENO" from 1950 to 1959. 18 died during arrest - in shootings or as a result of suicide, and some survivors of the KGB were persuaded to cooperate and then used them in radio games with the CIA. Version A. Rakitin suggests that during one of these radio games, in the KGB matured an operation plan to introduce its agents into the CIA information field in order to supply CIA analysts with false, disorienting data through them and to some extent control the actions of the CIA. inside the USSR
The version did not appear during the Cold War, but 2012, and it does not contain any anti-American propaganda. It is a dry, dispassionate story about one of the episodes of the confrontation between US intelligence and Soviet counterintelligence, that's all. Despite the fact that some of its small details do not look very plausible, in general, the version is logical and does not contradict either common sense or the realities of that time. Theoretically, it could be. But practically, as Anna Russian rightly noted, the version is too complex and literary to materialize in real life. Everything that happens in reality, as a rule, has a banal and primitive basis and we see mystery where we us lack either the knowledge to correctly explain the available facts, or the IQ to see all the cause-and-effect relationships and draw the right conclusions from all this.

What methods and ingredients were used to enrich uranium?  Nope… every time Russia set off a nuke the radioisotope signature was sniffed out of the air.

The radioisotope signature present in the air after nuclear explosions does not allow us to judge the methods of uranium enrichment. That is why the United States did not know until the beginning of the 1970s that in the USSR as early as 1957 to create industrial lines for enriching uranium by the gas centrifuge method, which requires 54.6 times less energy than method gas diffusion used in the United States

[eurocentric]

I'm glad the US eventually shot down that Chinese spy balloon. All these years later, long after the development of groundbreaking high altitude spy planes, and something as old-fashioned as that got everyone in a flap.

[GlennM]

We just wanted to demonstrate to all of our allies who are also being electronically monitored by similar Chinese balloons how to do it. ;)