Recently declassified CIA files have shed new light on one of the most interesting secret programs from the Cold War
Ramadge Point, Alaska, is one of the nicer points in The Last Frontier. Today a national park, it’s hard to imagine that this quiet new-growth forest was once the site of one of America’s strangest top-secret programs
It’s no secret that during the Cold War, the United States and the U.S.S.R. were competing on a number of technological fronts. The most well-known of these is the space program, and conventional and nuclear weapons programs were new types of brinkmanship that these two global superpowers engaged in. There were the bizarre ones too, such as the LSD soaked MK Ultra program and the New Age First Earth Battalion Program. One area that doesn’t get much attention is Project LAPUTA, the US Government’s Arcology project.
An Arcology is somewhere between a bunker and a city. The basic concept is the “city in a building”- a self-contained and self-reliant community with no outside interference needed, within a single architectural structure. Long believed the domain of science fiction stories, today there are several proposals to build them including Masdar City in Dubai and Arcosanti in central Arizona, but both are still a few years off.
Both of these communities, however, are actually treading old ground. Grounds tread by a Soviet defector that was soon to be one of the greatest unsung architects of the 20th century
Dennis Bayer was born Dmitry Baevski in Vladivostok in1930. The son of a Soviet military official, Bayer was raised in the communist system, studying architecture at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where he was quickly spotted as a prodigy. Bayer worked his way up through the Ministry of Infrastructure, quickly being placed in key project roles on many Russian buildings. By 1960, he was already the youngest chief architect on a major structure, a Military Facility in Gdansk, Poland. By all accounts (mostly through unearthed diary entries and KGB interview transcripts) Bayer was well liked by his peers. A tall yet thin, bespectacled man with a shock of black hair, Bayer was an unassuming yet charismatic individual, and a good team leader. By 1965, however, Bayer had turned.
CIA briefing notes, released in 1996, speak of Operation Follen McKim, outlines the three years of information that Bayer passed to the Americans. Locations of key buildings across much of the USSR. Access diagrams. Detailed blueprints for new and remodeled buildings. For a time, Follen McKim was the chief source of building information for the whole American security establishment.
By the Autumn of 1967, however, Bayer was under increasing pressure. Having married his wife Julia (Yulia) in 1962, Bayer became increasingly concerned with the scrutiny his projects were receiving and the sense of surveillance he was under. Making contact with his handler, CIA agent Charles Hoernfeldt, Bayer announced his desire to leave the Soviet Union.
Charles Hoernfeldt, 96, is a stocky man with white hair and a gleam in his eye. In 1967, he was attached to the American Embassy in Poland as a trade attaché, under constant surveillance by his opposite number.
“I remember us receiving Baevski’s note, outlining his desire to leave the USSR. While we’d get defectors of all stripes, yes sir, we wanted Baevski. He knew stuff that we’d never really got the same perspective on”
Hoernfeldt told Baevski to sit tight until Spring, 1968, so that arrangements could be made.
March 5th, 1968, was the day Hoernfeldt and Bayer made their move. Sneaking the Bayers onto a barge, they were extracted by the CIA through Sweden and Belize before being brought to the United States.
“As defections went, it was pretty smooth,” recalls Hoernfeldt.
Skepticism and Dice 