FOIAWEAR — LUNIK / Overnight Inspection Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 007

When the Soviet Union began touring its space hardware abroad, CIA officers wanted a closer look. After one exhibition closed, they got into the hall and went over the spacecraft on display — and found it was not a model but the real thing. They recorded its dimensions, and when a shipping manifest later listed an item whose size matched what they had measured, the Agency set up a far more ambitious operation.

Their target travelled in a wooden crate measuring 17 × 8 feet. Working through the night from about 7:30 p.m., a four-man team diverted the truck to a rented salvage yard, climbed ladders on opposite sides of the crate and pried loose its two-inch tongue-in-groove planks, taking care to leave no trace of forced entry. Inside, they pulled back a canvas cover, removed an inspection window in the spacecraft's nose section and squeezed in to photograph its markings. A second team opened the tail section, removing bolts from the base cap to reach the engine compartment and taking couplings away for analysis. Film was run out to a waiting car to confirm the negatives were usable before the team carried on.

Putting it back together was the hard part. Re-seating the payload sphere in its central basket — with its antenna probe aimed at the tip of the cone — took about an hour of failed attempts before the threads finally engaged. They replaced the inspection window, re-bolted the base cap, nailed the crate shut, and a car collected them at 4:00 a.m. An hour later the original driver completed the delivery to the rail station. A Soviet official inspected the arrival and gave it the all-clear.

The Luna programme had begun in 1959; its Luna III returned the first photographs of the far side of the Moon. CIA's hands-on look at the spacecraft helped establish weight, power and payload limits that informed the goals and timelines of the American space effort.

The artwork is an artistic interpretation of the scene: the crate with its top planks pried open, the spacecraft's sphere and antenna probe under a single work lamp. It is not a technical diagram or an accurate record of the crate's contents.

The QR code on the front opens the original CIA article on the operation — "The Kidnapping of the Lunik" by Sydney Wesley Finer, published by the Agency's Center for the Study of Intelligence in Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 11, No. 1: https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-11-no-1/the-kidnapping-of-the-lunik/

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Offered here in Yam and Chalky Mint, sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

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