(If that's too hard, let the kids ask any questions they want to.) (Olaf, Mickey Mouse, Inspector Gadget, Snow White, etc.) The agents had to ask each other yes/no questions to find out who was in the picture.

The first activity was Interrogation Practice (an easy activity to do while waiting for guest to arrive). We put them through several spy training activities. Once we got the guests to the party, we had to train our potential secret agents. 'They launched them in very large numbers, hoping that a significant number would get through,' Crouch says.If you haven't seen my most recent posts, I've been sharing ideas from my daughter's Spy Birthday Party. The Air Force briefly tried to solve the problems with still more balloons. 'They had big public exhibitions in Moscow of these balloon camera systems that the nefarious Americans were sending over the innocent Soviets.'

'They just shot them out of the sky,' Crouch says. Within a month, Soviet air defenses were taking down balloons left and right. intelligence 'hoped that they could get by without the Soviets noticing,' he says. In addition to being haphazard, the Genetrix balloons weren't very stealthy either, says Tom Crouch.

Also, balloons are really easy to shoot down Genetrix balloons captured images of enormous tracts of Soviet farmland. And once again, the wind was to blame: 'You had no idea where the balloons were going, so it was just hit or miss as to what you would see.' 'It was essentially a disaster,' Schwartz says. government began releasing dozens of high-altitude balloons from airbases in Germany and Turkey.

The culmination of these efforts was a top-secret program called Project Genetrix. 'We were terrified that the Soviet Union was going to unleash a surprise attack and we didn't know what they were really capable of, so any useful information would have been helpful,' he says. The goal, Schwartz says, was to fly over the vast Soviet homeland and collect intelligence on nuclear weapons. A diplomatic spat ensued.Īir and Space/Defense Visual Information Center sent hundreds of spy balloons floating over the Soviet Union.

Spy party ideas spy activities