Exactly what out of this story helped us? The intrigue is interesting, but it doesn't live up to the hype of the headline. This event happened in 1967? Even if they found some amazing advantage in the Soviet hardware, would it have been in production in time for the first moon landing?
I suspect this is what a lot of CIA operations involve. A whole lot of planning and deft technical execution but in the end little clear benefit. Still they 'need' to do it in case the 'bad guys' win. And of course, 'Everyone is doing it'
And I'll bet it made a fun story for the director of the CIA to tell at cocktail parties.
Even if the impact on a near-term undertaking is limited, the understanding of comparative capabilities are huge for program management decisions for future iterations.
For example had they realized that the LM the Soviets were building was incapable of working, that could impact the program in huge ways including changing how funding for the US program was structured, rule out or confirm a configuration as viable, speed up development in other critical areas etc...
I think that they would have figured that the Soviets changed something between the production and displayed item. You can't categorically say that it couldn't work. AFAICT, Intel work is rarely that certain.
I think the document referred to in the article [1] is from 1967, and refers to events "a number of years ago" maybe placing the operation in the late 50's / early 60's - remember, the US was stunned by the Soviet achievement of putting the first man in space and was generally trailing in the space race around that time.
As to the benefits, it seems they're still classified, whatever they are. The document [1] describes, for example, "revelation of the system XXXXXXXXXX that was used here and conceivably for other Soviet space hardware" as a "positive intelligence result" of the operation.
I do wonder how much sabotage happened in the space race... while I'm sure there were lots of attempts to get the other side's tech goodies, I like to imagine no actual sabotage was involved. Rockets are plenty dangerous on their own.
