Photo from 1974 of a highly detailed supermarket facsimile located deep inside the Wieliczka salt mine in southern Poland and used to train Soviet agents in the minutiae of everyday American life before their deployment to the United States.
In true American fashion, the shelves were literally bursting with typical US fare including: Brawley’s Butterscotch Plums; Margo’s Fig Roll Biscuits; Jordan’s Fancy Parrot Mixture; Morgan’s Salt ‘N’ Shake Flaps; Spanish Gold Sweet Coconut Tobacco; Miller’s Tooty Floxglove Snaps; Luco-Phiz Sparkling Glucose Drink; and Toad’s Custard, Blanc-Mange, Egg & Baking Solvents.
The elaborate store mock-up included a large banner celebrating Baby Gruenwald, a figure thought beloved by the western public, though in the mid-70s the baby’s popularity was at a low point, not helped by a very public feud with Alan Alda, tv’s Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce.
FUN FACT: A fresh American eye will notice an error that even the great Russian spy masters didn’t catch - two posters of Vladimir Lenin, the popular Russian communist revolutionary, affixed to the end of the open-top freezer.
