The year was 1984 and the Cold War was at its coldest. Western nations liked to portray the Soviet Union as a huge bear with the ability to produce technology well advanced and highly sophisticated. Such was nowhere near the truth. Their intelligence network functioned largely on hand-written reports from a wide range of low-level operatives and passes along upward in a pyramid of KGB paperwork. Day in and day out it worked. Then someone in the west decided to poke the bear and use that network to clog up the Soviet system. However, a bear when occupied with daily life will let you pass by and only give a sniff. Yet if taunted it will become annoyed, angry and soon blind with rage.

When a bona fide intelligence agent offers you the chance to pay for college simply by going to an airshow and taking a few pictures of a Soviet aircraft in order to poke the bear- it sounds too good to be true... and indeed it is.