Vínnytsia: The Soviet Spy Town Built to Infiltrate Agents into the U.S.

The Cold War gave rise to all kinds of incredible stories and wild projects. From atomic planes and Kodak films to red telephones and nuclear bazookas, the two superpowers did everything in their power to gain an edge. That included deploying special agents in 'enemy territory,' and one of the most striking cases is Vínnytsia. Today a Ukrainian city, but in the late 1950s it was under Soviet control, and authorities are believed to have built a full-scale replica of an American town there to train spies…

In April 1959, with barely nine months of existence, NASA presented its first official team of astronauts, the famous Mercury Seven. Grace Hopper and her colleagues began planting the first seeds of COBOL, Emma Thompson and Sean Bean were born just two days apart, and Chevrolet revealed the fabulous Corvette Stingray. At the same time, a rather curious story appeared in the Milwaukee Journal on the 13th. A Swedish major named Per Lindgren wrote in the military newspaper Contact with the Armed Forces about "a town within a town" in the Soviet Union that apparently... had nothing Soviet at all.

Vínnytsia: "Dreaded Counterespionage Operatives"

Identified as 'Winniza,' the German version of Vínnytsia, the town was actually a special training camp for Russian spies who would later be infiltrated into American territory. Major Lindgren shared some technical details: heavily guarded, no one graduated until fully absorbing the American lifestyle, and with students (about 1,000 Russian university students) living there for more than a decade in extreme cases before getting their chance. Cars, bars, shops, baseball, poker, Hollywood... the classes were a constant bombardment of Western culture, with camouflaged instructors immediately correcting every detected error. Lindgren never revealed his sources, but merely said that allied counterespionage teams already knew about Vínnytsia, and the school for "female spies" located in Saxony.

At least three more media outlets talked about Vínnytsia: Daytona Beach Morning Journal, Time magazine, and NBC. Even the CIA created a kind of documentary called "Spy Town" in 1960, whose only available version is cut and incomplete. Now the big question is whether the spy town actually existed, was pure propaganda, or was a figment of Lindgren's imagination. Apparently he was an expert with a good reputation and very reliable, but it is striking that reports about Vínnytsia "freeze" in 1960, with no new data after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One thing is certain: American cinema loved the story and turned it into a fairly bad movie with John Travolta.

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