Drilling advances

To American spymasters of the Cold War era, drill bit plants in the then-Soviet Union were no more than fronts for manufacturing anti-tank weapons. While at once touting the efficiencies of “twin oil-well drilling” and Russian-developed turbodrills, the antecedent U.S. intelligence community largely perceived the oilfield technologies conceived in the USSR as inferior, and “10 years or more behind that employed in the West.”

These tidbits are among the more than 12 million pages of sanitized documents—variously intriguing and amusing—that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) posted on its website in January, making them accessible to anyone with a computer. The roughly 930,000 declassified documents range from everyday spyware (a 1976 recipe for German invisible ink) to UFO investigations to probes with dubious security implications. Why, for example, would the CIA be interested in the fees that North Korean veterinarians charged in 1949, as detailed in CIA-RDP80-00809A000600350595-3? Then, there was the psychic that the CIA purportedly retained for his ability to “see” what was happening anywhere in the world. The oddball scheme was said to have been dropped in 1975 upon the psychic's death, leading then-CIA Director Stansfield Turner, with tongue firmly in cheek, to lament, “we haven't heard from him since.”

Declassified for decades, the now publicly available documents also provide fascinating insight into the CIA's often erratic perceptions of Russian oil and gas technologies, in the years immediately following World War II to the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union. A number of entries dealt with the 1978 U.S. approval of Dresser Industries' plans to build a plant in the Soviet Union, capable of producing 100,000 tungsten carbide bits/year. First seen as a diplomatic carrot, the deal quickly ran afoul of the CIA, which despite Dresser's repeated public pushback, claimed the facility would be used to produce anti-tank weaponry. It all became a moot point when the license was revoked in 1980, due to the U.S.-led embargo to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In a Feb. 8, 1982, memo, then-CIA Deputy Director Robert Gates, who recently served as Secretary of Defense, confirmed that the agency had earlier concluded, “the Dresser technology probably would enhance Soviet capability to produce an improved tungsten-based kinetic-energy penetrator for large anti-tank rounds in the long run.”

Mixed perceptions. Throughout those tense decades, CIA operatives generally described the USSR petroleum sector as severely lacking, compared to the U.S. and its Western allies. Reinforcing that view over the years, a 1984 research report, designated “top secret” at the time, found that “although Soviet drilling productivity is improving, it remains low by world standards. For example, U.S. drilling rigs are two to three times more productive in terms of meters drilled per year than Soviet rigs.”

In contrast, previous agents seemed genuinely impressed that Soviet drillers by 1954 had sunk nearly 984,253 ft of hole with the “twin oil-well method,” since its introduction in Russian oil fields four years earlier. A May 1954 memo concluded that the simultaneous drilling of dual boreholes could reduce “commercial speeds of drilling 10–15%, and that well construction costs could be cut by 6–8%.”

Several documents likewise reflected the CIA's apparent fascination with the emerging turbodrill technology developed by Soviet engineers. In an Aug. 4, 1953, dossier, “Depth of Drilling of Oil Wells in the USSR,” remarks attributed to Deputy USSR Petroleum Minister M. A. Yevseyonko and other sources credited home-grown turbodrills for the widespread drilling of onshore oil wells more than 3.1 mi deep.

In an April 14, 1954, communiqué, CIA analysts attempted to describe the technology: “The principal underlying the working mechanism of the turbo rig is very simple. Instead of having the turning drill bit fixed to the drilling tubes, which are rotated from the ground by a turntable, the drill tubes in the turbo rig are kept in a fixed position so that they cannot turn. At the end of the drilling tubes, a small, powerful, water-propelled turbine is attached. The rotating shaft of the turbine is allegedly attached directly, without clutch or transmission to the drilling bit.”

The 1953 report also provided a glimpse into early exploration efforts in the Caspian Sea: “The drilling of very deep oil wells in connection with offshore operations in the Caspian Sea has also been reported. One brigade (read: rig crew) was stated to have attained depths of 750 and 800 m (2,461–2,625 ft) in two wells, and was still faced with the task of drilling through more than 3,000 m (9,843 ft) of strata.”

Egg on face. Russian turbodrill technology also was linked to what the CIA feared would place its esteemed network of intelligence gatherers in a rather embarrassing predicament. In the mid-1950s, an unidentified Texas oilman, acting through some sort of technical assistance program, managed to buy an undisclosed number of turbodrills, which he described as “far superior to anything being produced in this country.” At the same time, he asked the U.S. for permission to bring over Soviet engineers, “to teach us how to use them.”

A March 19, 1956, missive reinforced the agency's prickly position: “The embarrassment is obvious. Too many Americans have been saying for too long that Soviet Russia is a backward country, technologically inferior to us.”

Incidentally, in case you're interested, the 1949 surgical fees of North Korean vets ranged from 20 to 100 won for operations on large animals, and from 20 to 50 won for medium and small animals. 

About the Authors

Jim Redden

Contributing Editor

Jim Redden is a Houston-based consultant and a journalism graduate of Marshall University, has more than 40 years of experience as a writer, editor and corporate communicator, primarily on the upstream oil and gas industry.