A few years ago I came across this article on the CIA's website https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/96unclass/farewell.htm
It is a fascinating read about the Soviets interest in stealing western tech, and how US intelligence sabotaged them by giving the Soviet spies faulty plans.
In the section "A Deception Operation" there is a single fascinating line "The Soviet Space Shuttle was a rejected NASA design". The source is an unspecified "Conversation with James Fletcher, Administrator, NASA".
I cannot find the conversation online. It is common wisdom that Buran was based on stolen plans, but I can't find it anywhere else that the plans were fed to them. It is possible that the information was placed in a poor context, but it clearly implies that this was a calculated US action.
Can anyone help me find out more about this? It's been bothering me for years!
It's hard to pin down the veracity of the specific claim about the Buran programme, but it's true that in the 1980s Western intelligence services seriously compromised the Soviets' ability to collect scientific, technological and industrial (collectively known as S&T) intelligence in the 1980s.
In 1980, the French domestic intelligence service DST recruited Vladimir Vetrov, an "ardent francophile" and a lieutenant-colonel in the KGB's Directorate T, responsible for S&T collection. In his relatively short tenure as a French agent (codename FAREWELL) that Vetrov provided the DST with more than 4,000 documents relating to Soviet S&T collection, including the names of several hundred KGB officers in postings around the world.
In February 1982, Vetrov was arrested and imprisoned after stabbing two people — apparently in the midst of a nervous breakdown and out of fear that his espionage had been discovered. In August 1983, a year or so after he was jailed for the stabbings, a KGB investigation concluded that he had been spying for the West. In January 1985, he was executed.
But despite the fact that Vetrov's career as a double agent lasted little more than a year, it had far-reaching ramifications for Soviet S&T collection. In July 1981, French president François Mitterand handed Ronald Reagan a copy of the FAREWELL dossier, giving American intelligence remarkable insight into the nature and techniques of Soviet S&T operations; in April 1983, Mitterand expelled 47 Soviet intelligence officers from France.
In the US, the CIA and FBI (which is responsible for counterintelligence) launched a joint operation to identify Soviet S&T agents within the US — and to carry out a sort of combined disinformation and sabotage campaign. According to Tim Weiner's history of the CIA:
America struck back. "It was a brilliant plan," said Richard V. Allen, Reagan's first national security adviser, whose staffers devised it. "We started in motion feeding the Soviets bad technology, bad computer technology, bad oil drilling technology. We fed them a whole lot, let them steal stuff that they were happy to get." Posing as traitorous employees of the American military-industrial complex, FBI officers sent a procession of technological Trojan horses to Soviet spies. These time bombs included computer chips for weapons systems, a blueprint for a space shuttle, engineering designs for chemical plants, and state-of-the-art turbines.
The Soviets were tying to build a natural-gas pipeline from Siberia into Eastern Europe. They needed computers to control its pressure gauges and valves. They sought the software on the open marketing in the United States. Washington rejected the request but subtly pointed to a certain Canadian company that might have what Moscow wanted. The Soviets sent a Line X officer to steal the software. The CIA and the Canadians conspired to let them have it. For a few months, the software ran swimmingly. Then it slowly sent the pressure in the pipeline soaring. The explosion in the wilds of Siberia cost Moscow millions it could ill afford to spare.
Eric Raynaud and Sergei Kostin, two journalists who have written the most complete account of Vetrov's life and death, refer to the space shuttle as a Soviet clone of American technology, but don't discuss whether it was part of the US disinformation operation:
Incompetence, favoritism, lack of vision — Directorate T seemed to be a collection of everything [Vetrov] despised the most within the KGB. The Buran spacecraft is a revealing illustration of this. Before questioning its utility, simply out of mimicry or out of fear of falling behind in the arms race, the Soviets launched their own space shuttle program, based on designs stolen from Western technology. This shuttle completed only one experimental spaceflight. When asked after the Cold War why they made that spacecraft, a few engineers answered that they had no idea why, it was just about copying the Americans.
There seems to be some uncertainty about Buran and American intelligence's role in sabotaging it. As the Studies in Intelligence link in your original post demonstrates, the CIA are pretty keen to take credit for Buran's failure as part of the FAREWELL deception. But other sources seem to suggest that while Buran was essentially a clone, the programme began before Vetrov's recruitment (and so it could well have been based on intelligence about the US shuttle programme gathered without the FBI's knowledge) and that its failure isn't specifically attributable to US counterintelligence activities.
Some good sources for more Vetrov and the FAREWELL operation: