How U.S. Intelligence Analysts Were Able To Figure Soviet Air-plane Capabilities With Just Graph Paper And A Calculator

Russian Tu-95 Bear Strategic Bomber. © Sputnik/ Jakutyn

Bill Sweetman, AIR & SPACE MAGAZINE: Spying on the Soviets, With Graph Paper and a Calculator

Figuring out the specs of Cold War Soviet airplanes was educated guesswork, if you had the right tools.

Duuring the cold war, I worked for Flight International in London. Along with my colleague Doug Richardson—every aviation magazine needs a Leica-toting, Scottish, philhellene former-teenage-apprentice-in-a-radar-factory—I was frustrated about our coverage of Soviet technology. One of our competitors was friendly with U.S. Air Force intelligence, another was getting fed snapshots of the latest aircraft from the Military Liaison Missions (MLM)—the Western allies’ legal spies in East Germany—and another employed a chap with a Russian name but a didactic manner that nailed him as Schweizerdeutsch if not German. He seemed to have a source in someone’s intelligence community. And us? We were nowhere.

We found a source who passed us the MLM pictures and plotted over pints in the Rose & Crown. I invested in some graph paper and a Sinclair Cambridge calculator, and we got to work.

WNU Editor: The math, numbers, and data never lie .... how people interpret that data .... well .... that is another story.