Original subtitles

Throughout time, governments and the people who work

for them have done strange and even terrible things

in the name of national interest,

including launching missions so extreme,

they seem to defy belief

like trying to extract a 1,750-ton Soviet submarine

from the ocean floor using a giant claw, in secret.

No one has ever attempted such an audacious

salvage operation like this before.

Or sending paratroopers on a secret mission

strapped to a nuclear bomb.

Set off a nuclear bomb and run.

That sounds insane.

And even stealing Soviet secrets

400 feet below the waves.

If the men are caught, they are under orders

to blow up everyone on board.

They cannot be taken alive.

Now it's time to bring these extreme secret missions

to light.

It's the late 1960s, and the cold war is raging.

A Soviet nuclear sub has sunk 1,500 miles from Hawaii,

and a race is on to find it.

Can the us locate the sub and recover its secrets

before the enemy does?

That's the impossible mission assigned to one American team.

On march 1, 1968, Soviet sub k-129

disappears from Soviet radar deep in the pacific,

with 98 men aboard,

a prize hidden at the bottom of the ocean.

The Russians are frantically searching for it.

So is the us.

K-129 could be the holy grail of intelligence.

Think about what we would have access to

their code books, their code-breaking machines,

guidance systems.

We would even get our eyes on their nuclear missiles.

This is completely worth the effort and the cost.

To locate it, the Navy checks their acoustic data

for any sign of the sub.

If a submarine sinks, it'll make a distinctive noise.

So when k-129 sunk,

they were able to locate where the sub might have gone down.

So the us Navy sends out their best reconnaissance sub,

the USS Halibut.

After more than 11 weeks of painstakingly searching,

Halibut's camera finally captures the submarine.

It's 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii

and 16,500 feet deep.

But retrieving the sub seems like an impossible task.

The vessel lies three miles deep underwater

in a totally black environment.

To figure out if they could pull off the impossible,

the CIA put their head of science and technology,

John parangosky, in charge.

He comes up with the suggestion

to raise k-129 to the surface using a giant metal claw,

like the one you'd find in an arcade game,

but attached to a ship.

No one has ever attempted such an audacious

salvage operation like this before.

And what makes this even more challenging?

It all needs to happen without the Soviets knowing.

Despite the odds, the CIA and the Navy

decide to go for it.

On July 1, 1969, the covert mission is launched.

It's codenamed project azorian,

and the first step is designing the claw.

The claw design needs to be 179 feet by 31 feet.

No one has ever built one big enough

to lift a 1,750-ton submarine from the ocean floor.

Creating the claw is the easy part.

To use it, the us needs to anchor a huge ship

for a month-long salvage operation

that's sure to gain Soviet attention.

So the CIA needs a cover story.

They come up with an interesting idea.

If the mission is masked as a privately-owned

business venture,

no one should suspect that the government is involved.

So they enlist the help of the celebrity industrialist

of his day, Howard Hughes.

It made such a good cover story because everybody knew

that Howard Hughes was kind of half nuts.

And he agrees to build this ship.

They set up this fake press release.

They announce that they were going to mine magnesium nodules

from the bottom of the ocean floor

from a ship called the glomar explorer.

Six years after the us found k-129,

it's finally go time.

The glomar arrives at the mission site.

They're ready to go. They're gung-ho.

But just as they're about to deploy,

here comes a Soviet ship.

Once the Soviet ship arrives,

the glomar crew is very concerned

that this operation is about to go up in smoke.

A helicopter takes off from the Russian ship

and starts circling around.

And the glomar's crew are on tenterhooks.

The CIA has invested hundreds of millions of dollars here,

more than a billion in today's money.

Is this the end of the mission?

The captain of the glomar explorer

radios the captain of the Russian ship.

He explains to him, we are a mining operation.

We're Howard Hughes's corporation.

Well, fortunately, a few hours go by, the Soviet ship leaves.

Once the Soviet ship leaves the area,

they lower the claw into the water,

unwind three miles of cable.

It descends to the bottom,

connects to the Soviet vessel,

and then they begin to lift it up

from the bottom of the ocean.

You don't want to pull it up too fast,

because if you try to raise it up too quickly,

it might break apart.

It's already a damaged vehicle,

and it might fall back to the ocean floor,

and then you're left with nothing.

It was very nerve-wracking

as they tried to pull this thing up.

They were about 2/3 of the way up,

and then the k-129 fell apart.

About 2/3 of it broke off and fell back to the ocean floor.

It takes eight days to haul the remaining section

of the k-129 back to the ship's hull.

But before they even have a chance

to analyze the wreckage, the secret spills out.

Both the "la times" and "New York times"

break the story of this top secret mission.

The papers' front pages are covered with pictures

of Hughes's glomar explorer, detailing rumors

of a Soviet sub recovery

and the Howard Hughes-CIA connection.

So it turns out that Howard Hughes's office

was burglarized.

The burglars find this memo about the glomar explorer.

They sell it to the "la times" that publishes it.

This is the CIA's worst nightmare.

Neither the us government nor the CIA

comment on the matter until 1992.

Only then is the mission publicly acknowledged

for the first time, when the CIA

hand delivers a video to the Russian president,

Boris yeltsin.

After the collapse of the Soviet union,

as a show of goodwill,

the American government presents a video

to yeltsin of the burial at sea

of the Soviet sailors whose remains were found.

It made international news around the world.

Whatever secrets project azorian unearthed

remain a mystery to this day.

That mission was obviously daring.

But consider something even more extreme

elite us paratroopers assigned to jump into darkness

carrying small nuclear bombs.

In 1970, a top secret us army mission is underway.

Two members of an elite special ops unit

leap out of the cargo bay of a us army transport aircraft

into the black of night.

The team parachutes down to their drop zone.

And they are about to deploy one of america's

most dangerous weapons in an operational environment

for the first time in history.

They always went in two-man teams.

So if you can imagine jumping out of an airplane,

hurtling towards earth with a bomb strapped to your back.

It was a huge challenge.

But this is no ordinary bomb.

It's an entirely new portable nuclear weapon.

And it can only be detonated by hand.

Once on the ground, the men have to carry the nuke

on their back for two days,

constantly dodging enemy patrols

and navigating rugged terrain.

The drawback of this operational setup

is that the detonation code is split between two people.

And so the bomb must be jointly armed to prevent it

being detonated, maliciously or accidentally.

The problem is, if either of these soldiers don't make it,

it's mission failure.

Seems entirely insane, right?

Set off a nuclear bomb and run.

Why would anyone do that?

Because, thankfully, the bomb doesn't explode.

And this daring mission

wasn't carried out in enemy territory.

It was actually a training run

taking place in the mountains of New Hampshire,

part of an audition

to join one of the most classified army units

to ever exist... the green light team.

The idea of the green light team

comes about because it's thought

that the Soviets possess more tactical nuclear weapons

than we do.

So the solution is to just hand-carry nuclear weapons.

Brilliant, right?

It also means that there's no signal in space

for the enemy to pick up on.

So in many ways, it's clever,

it's clean, it's sophisticated.

It has to be delivered right on the target

and delivered by hand.

So they needed to recruit commando types.

These elite soldiers are handpicked

from the green berets, the us Navy seals,

and the marines, all of whom

are no strangers to covert missions behind enemy lines.

But in this case, it's only when the green light teams

begin training that they realize their missions

will be different from previous ones.

It's believed that there was an obligation

to stay with the weapon and protect it until it triggers

its initiating sequence,

ensuring that the mission is being completed.

But in so doing, they've also turned this

into a suicide mission.

That would then leave no time for the men to escape

the blast radius.

Inside the world of intelligence

and special operations, we have a joke.

We call ourselves "too dumb to quit."

Because when we're given an assignment,

no matter how crazy or suicidal it sounds,

it's also exciting.

For a quarter century, these incredible special ops teams

and how they operate stays a secret.

It comes to public knowledge, in 1984,

when journalists discovered details

of the plan inside of a scientific journal.

The article describes that there are

bomb-carrying teams on standby

in case they're called upon by NATO.

But thankfully, that never happens.

The green light teams are maintained at high alert.

And yet, they're never used in combat.

Cold war Berlin is a divided city of secrets.

To gain crucial intelligence,

governments are willing to green light

what seem like impossible missions.

Berlin, during this time, you've got British,

American, and Soviet spies all flocking to the city

to try to get their hands on any sort of information

that can give their country just a little bit of an edge.

Berlin had become a vast network

of underground communication channels

with various agencies, various intelligence groups

trading information.

It's a vast network. It's amazing.

In 1954, the us and britain decide to collaborate

on an audacious plan.

The CIA, with MI6, want to build a tunnel

to tap into phone lines so that we could listen

to what the east Germans were talking about.

This is a high-risk operation.

East and west are butting heads.

The Soviets want the Americans out of Berlin.

If they discover this tunnel,

that will be their excuse to kick them out.

They need to build the tunnel without being detected.

But to add to the challenge, the CIA and MI6 operatives

are constantly being monitored by enemy watchtowers

and armed guards.

The area that they select to do this

is just 1,500 feet away from east Berlin.

But on the east Berlin side,

where the phone lines are located,

there are prying eyes and military patrols.

So they're going to need a cover story

if they're going to get away with it.

So they come up with a plan to build

a two-story structure over where the tunnel will begin.

It provides a cover for unloading equipment,

and then also removing the dirt

that's going to be pulled out of the tunnel itself.

And this two-story structure will then be disguised

as a facility associated

with one of the airfields in the city.

They had to spend seven months laying the groundwork

for this building.

Once that was done, they began advancing the tunnel

toward the east German side of the border.

It took three teams working around the clock in shifts,

backbreaking work.

The tunnel operation was very dangerous.

German patrols are going back and forth.

In order to prevent the discovery of the tunnel,

the Americans have a lookout

that signals the people doing the tunnel

to stop work when the German guards get too close.

They move 3,000 tons of soil

and then replace it with 125 tons of steel

to reinforce the walls of the tunnel.

Six months later, that 1,400-foot tunnel

is ready to go.

And it's installed with these teleprinters

that are attached to switchboards

that record and print communication.

It's a pretty remarkable achievement.

This wiretap discovers some very interesting things

about the establishment of the east German army

and the training of that army.

It also reveals some controversies between

the border police and the army.

At the time, the CIA and MI6 believe

this tunnel will provide a continuous flow

of intelligence for years.

But mother nature has other ideas.

11 months and 11 days after the completion

of the tunnel, a freak rain event

strikes the city of Berlin.

And as a result of very heavy rainfall,

the phone lines go out.

A crew is sent to repair the phone lines.

And what did they find?

They found a tap on their lines.

And that wouldn't take any time at all

for them to figure out

that it was the allies underground,

listening to their intelligence operations.

The following day, Soviets called

a press conference, revealing the tunnel to the world.

They hoped that the exposure will both embarrass the west

and deter them from carrying out any future operations.

After the Soviets hold their press conference

to reveal the discovery of the tunnel,

other western nations are not downtrodden at the discovery.

They're impressed by the technology.

They're impressed that we were capable

of something quite so bold.

The west's clandestine mission is blown.

But the operation remains one of the CIA's

most celebrated successes of the '50s.

While the CIA declassifies a report

on the top secret mission in 2007,

it has never fully disclosed the intelligence gathered.

The rest within the vaults remains top secret.

Sometimes the hardest part of a mission

isn't gathering intelligence, but getting out with it alive.

In 1961, that challenge inspires the use

of an unusual invention.

This us Navy pilot is flying over a remote section

of arctic pack ice.

And he looks down on an ice floe,

and he sees an abandoned Soviet research station.

This is an exciting opportunity,

because if the Russians have left intelligence behind,

it could be a huge win for the us.

The only way to find out is to send in a covert team.

There's just one problem.

The research station is over 600 miles

from the nearest us air base.

Dropping operatives in won't be easy.

But getting them out seems impossible.

Enter a guy called Robert fulton.

The CIA has been developing a piece of kit

called the sky hook system.

But the tech's top secret,

and it's still in development by its inventor, Robert fulton.

Robert fulton was an eccentric inventor

and aviation enthusiast

who invented all sorts of different things.

But he also got obsessed with the notion

that if he crashed into a really remote,

austere location,

how could he potentially get extracted out of there?

If you could imagine James Bond meets wwf wrestling,

that's what the sky hook was.

It sounds exciting, and it sounds sexy,

but in reality it was ugly, and it was violent,

and it was sloppy.

The device is incredibly complicated.

The agent on the ground has a suit

and a harness that connects to a giant balloon

that's sent up into the air.

And the idea is, an airplane flying over 100 miles an hour

will swoop in, intercept the line, and yank the guy

right off the ground.

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

It is a scary, terrifying experience

because you are going from a sitting position

to flying through the air at 140 miles an hour

almost instantaneously,

captured by an airplane over a balloon hook in the sky.

It is absolute insanity.

Despite extensive testing, the fulton device

hasn't been deployed in a live mission until now.

So considering that they want a small team

to land on a ice floe

that's actually floating in the arctic ocean,

conduct their mission, and then get out of there,

the fulton extraction system becomes kind of the only way

to get out there and back.

The covert mission is made up of a small specialized team,

and two elite operatives are chosen for deployment.

Military intelligence officers,

major James Smith and lieutenant Leonard leschack,

parachute 1,200 feet down to the abandoned

Soviet research station.

The two agents that have dropped in

spend 72 hours on the ground

at this abandoned Soviet research station.

And during that time, they recover documents,

they recover equipment,

they recover 150 pounds of material

that will be useful

to the central intelligence agency.

And they call back to headquarters

that they're ready to be extracted.

But now some inclement weather is moving in,

and it becomes kind of sketchy whether or not

they're going to be able to get out of there.

The team get their balloons up in the air,

but the winds are batting them around.

And so they're having to dig their heels into the ice

so that they don't get dragged across.

The aircraft finally comes in, and it picks up leschack.

As he's picked up, he's flipped to face

the 140-mile-an-hour wind.

He can barely breathe.

It's a fight for survival.

But both of the American officers

are successfully extracted

for what is one of the most Hollywood missions ever.

The mission, codenamed project cold feet,

is only revealed decades later

when the Navy publishes a book in 1996.

The big news... it's a huge success.

The team recover 83 documents

and 21 pieces of equipment

relating to the Soviet arctic activities.

The single most important piece of intelligence

that was gathered from this operation

was that we now understood how the Soviets

were tracking our subs under the ice throughout the arctic.

That allowed us to devise new ways of obfuscating

or silencing our engines so that the Soviets

wouldn't be able to track our next generation of submarines.

The sky hook system is considered so useful

that it's used during dangerous mountain rescue

missions up until 1996.

But whether it was used again in covert missions,

well, that's classified.

When an undercover spy in Russia is compromised,

the chances of his survival look slim.

That is, until a real-life miss Moneypenny

is given the mission to extract him.

The Soviet union doesn't end with a bang.

It ends with a slow collapse.

Their secret services are depleted.

Secrets are sold to the highest bidder.

And there are suspicions that a mole

has infiltrated the ranks of the kgb itself.

And it turns out that those suspicions are correct.

It's early evening in Moscow,

and there's a gentleman walking down the street,

just an ordinary guy carrying a safe way bag.

Neither the bag nor the man holding it are ordinary.

Meet kgb double agent Oleg gordievsky.

The safe way bag is a signal to his British handler

that he is in some trouble.

The fact that it's a plastic bag

from a British grocery store

is basically telling his handler

that he has been completely compromised,

and he needs to get out and needs to get out quickly.

He'd been a British spy for almost a decade.

He'd been recruited in Denmark,

and he had provided valuable information.

But now gordievsky was fearful for his life.

Because if you betray the motherland, you pay for it.

So on the other side of the street,

there's a British safehouse keeping an eye out

for the gentleman with the safe way bag,

always anticipating that he might show up someday

with that bag in his hand, with that signal.

The MI6 handler, without talking,

without phone, has to show gordievsky,

I see what you're trying to communicate,

and we are going to enact this plan.

So he takes a harrods bag,

and he walks in the direction of gordievsky

eating a Mars bar so that the two of them

make that contact without talking.

And that agreed-upon code between the MI6 handler

and Oleg gordievsky really starts

this whole exfiltration process.

But the problem the British face

is how do you extract a high-ranking kgb officer

across one of the most heavily policed borders in the world?

That evening, gordievsky goes home.

Something unusual happens.

He takes out from his bookshelf

a book of Shakespeare's sonnets.

He's been instructed, in the event of an emergency,

to dip the pages in water.

The pages, once dipped in water,

will reveal a secret coded message

as to how his escape will transpire.

It's the first stage of one of the most extraordinary

and extreme missions in cold war history,

operation pimlico.

The full details remain a secret for 35 years.

Back home in britain,

we've got his handler, Valerie pettit.

Pettit has developed this escape route

for gordievsky to follow.

It'll take him some 900 miles from Moscow to vyborg,

which is a town near the Finnish border.

So gordievsky usually does an evening jog.

Well, this evening, he doesn't take his usual route.

He blends himself into the crowded streets of Moscow.

Once gordievsky realizes he's lost his kgb trail,

he boards the train.

Meanwhile, back in London,

pettit is organizing and structuring this escape route.

Part of the plan is to put gordievsky

in the back of the diplomatic trunk.

Diplomatic cars are less likely to be searched and stopped.

Therefore, it's a better plan to get him across

the Finnish border.

Over the next three days,

gordievsky is making his way to the rendezvous point at vyborg,

which is about 12 miles from the Russian border

with Finland.

He hitchhikes, he takes trains,

he takes automobiles to get out safely.

Four people arrive in a diplomatic car

at this rendezvous point,

two MI6 agents and their wives, as well as a baby.

Miss pettit knew that they were using

heat-seeking devices

when they were letting those cars go through at the border.

And so she had planned to have an aluminum

heat-blocking blanket prepared.

Gordievsky's wrapped up in this tin foil blanket.

He's put back into the trunk, and the car drives away.

All of this takes eight seconds.

There's no pleasantries that are being exchanged.

So the car pulls up to the border,

and they realized, my god, sniffer dogs.

One of the wives takes the baby

out of the vehicle at the checkpoint

while the vehicle's stopped

and changes its diaper on the trunk,

the trunk in which gordievsky is under.

And the hope was that this would confuse these dogs

and throw them off the scent of gordievsky.

The distraction works,

and the guards just wave the car through.

When they get into Finland, they pull over,

and Valerie pettit is waiting to greet the car.

Back in Russia, authorities charged gordievsky

with treason in his absence.

He's found guilty and sentenced to death.

He will never be able to return to Russia.

His arrival into London is headline news around the world.

But no one will talk about the actual escape.

In fact, pettit keeps the details of her plan secret

for the rest of her life.

Inspiration for the impossible

can come from unlikely places.

In 1970, one man taps into his childhood memories

to access Soviet naval secrets.

For years, James f. Bradley,

the undersea warfare director

for the us office of naval intelligence,

he's been trying to devise a way

of being able to secretly tap

into Soviet communication lines.

The story goes that during childhood vacations,

the family went out boating on the Mississippi river,

and he noticed how sometimes there were signs

that cautioned boaters to stay away from that area

so that they wouldn't drag their anchor

through underwater cables.

He had this thought that somewhere

around Soviet naval bases,

there would be these communication cables

that connected the Soviet high command

to the submarine bases.

He thought, that must exist somewhere.

And then we can tap into it

and intercept their messages.

Bradley proposes a top secret mission

to use a submarine to search the Russian coast

for signs warning of underwater cables.

This seems like a crazy idea

because they'll need to scour about 600,000 square miles

of ocean for something they're not even sure exists.

But nevertheless, Bradley does get the green light.

And in December of 1971,

operation Ivy bells is launched.

To accomplish this impossible mission,

the USS Halibut is once again brought into action

to lead the operation.

Like so many intelligence collection operations,

there's no smoking gun.

There's no proof that there's actually a cable

for them to find in the first place.

But beyond that, you're sending

nuclear submarines well within Soviet territorial waters.

You're putting an American submarine and crew

at risk to find this.

You're talking about a single submarine underwater

for prolonged periods of time in freezing cold waters

that were controlled by Soviets.

This was not an operation for the faint of heart.

Halibut's been at sea for over a month.

And during that time, they had to dodge the Soviet Navy.

It was with fingers crossed that the captain extended

the periscope and then scanned the island

that was in front of him.

And if that was detected, it's game over.

The mission's blown.

They had to find this sign.

And they did.

They found the sign.

So they had an idea of where this cable

might cross into the water.

So they start searching the seabed to try and find it.

They could see, kind of, humps on the seabed

where they thought it might be.

And then they found the cable that they'd been looking for.

It's got to be a moment of jubilation.

But it's also got to be a moment of sheer terror

because you realize that you have stumbled across a secret

that the Soviets want desperately to protect.

But there's one big problem.

The cables lie 400 feet below the surface,

nearly four times deeper than a standard scuba dive.

That's a depth that will push the limits of human survival.

But James Bradley has planned for this.

Even before the Halibut had set sail,

the Navy had been experimenting

with deep sea diving techniques,

one of which is a mixture of helium and oxygen

that allowed divers to go down to very deep depths.

Thanks to this innovation,

Bradley's team can move forward with the mission.

The divers finally leave the compression chamber.

This is the first time that they're doing it

in enemy waters.

So their divers go down to very deep depths.

If the men are caught,

they are under orders to blow up everyone on board.

They cannot be taken alive.

They have to fumble around in the darkness

for about an hour before they find the cable.

They then have to wrestle this 20-foot-long listening device

into position onto the cable.

This is the pre-digital age.

Once this piece of equipment is on the cable,

the magnetic tape that's in it has to start to run.

So what do the divers have to do

before they return to the sub?

They have to hit the record button.

Just a few months later,

naval intelligence receive the first recordings.

And they realize they've struck gold.

One incredible piece of intelligence

that they discovered was that the Russians had a strategy

that in times of war, they would actually retreat

their submarine forces north under the arctic cap.

What that meant is that the United States now could predict

what the Russians would do in the event

of a full-scale conflict against the Americans.

As a result of this operation,

the Americans now know where to intercept the Soviet fleet

in the event of world war III.

This is a very, very dangerous mission.

It's not just a one-time operation.

They do this continuously over a nine-year period.

They have to send divers down.

They have to exchange the tapes.

So each time they do this mission,

it's a life or death scenario.

But then in 1980, satellite images

show this fleet of Soviet warships

over the tap's exact location.

When they finally leave the site,

the USS parche is deployed to check things out.

And the tap is nowhere to be found.

In the end, operation Ivy bells is compromised.

And with that, it brings to an end

one of the most successful maritime surveillance

and signals intelligence recovery operations

ever conducted.

No one questions how the Russians uncovered

the operation until 1985,

when officials learn a national security agency staffer

named Ronald pelton has been selling secrets

to the Soviets.

It was during the pelton trial

that nbc news reveals the details

of this covert, top secret operation to the public.

But much of the intelligence gathered during the operation

remains classified.

But it is believed that the knowledge gained

from the mission became central to the project

of nuclear disarmament in 1979.

It's Europe, 1945.

The allies are slowly marching their way to victory.

But 150,000 enemy troops remain in Norway.

If they escape, they can regroup in Germany.

To stop them, the allies opt for an impossible mission.

It's 1945.

We're nearing the end of world war ii,

and the allies have been successfully fighting their way

through Europe and have liberated

France, Belgium, and Italy.

They're preparing for that final showdown

in Germany itself to rid it of the Nazis once and for all.

But there's still a sizable German force in Norway.

Now, they're trying to escape back home.

But to do so, they need to cross Norway

to reach ports on the coast.

To prevent them reaching Germany,

the allies target one route, the nordland railway line.

If you could prevent them from using the one

and only rail line, you could prevent them

from being a part of the final defense of Germany.

The man tasked with creating a plan is major William Colby.

He was very experienced in the overall landscape

of special operations warfare.

He had planned to hijack a train that would then

allow them to move from point to point,

blowing things up as they retreated toward the south.

And then they would get the heck out of dodge

by covering a distance of about 40 miles

to cross the border into Sweden,

neutral territory where they would be safe.

The plan is certainly ambitious,

and it's named operation rype.

March 24, 1945, operation rype is ready to go.

Colby and his team are secretly parachuted

into Norway's mountains, deep behind enemy lines.

What should have been a relatively

straightforward sabotage mission

soon becomes impossibly difficult.

Right from the start of the mission,

things are going wrong.

To begin with, American planes are

forced to operate at the very edge of their range

and navigate under impossible weather conditions.

And one aircraft accidentally makes its airdrop in Sweden.

This means only 20 of Colby's men

are successfully dropped off on target,

just outside the Norwegian city trondheim.

It's a grueling 72-mile trek just for them to reach

the vantage point overlooking the bridge,

where they're going to hijack the train.

When they get to their location,

they keep watch of the bridge while they wait

for reinforcements to arrive.

But what they don't know is that the reinforcement flight

is not coming because it's crashed into a mountain,

and all 12 on board have instantly died.

So no one's coming to help these guys.

Colby and his men realize that it's a race against time.

They see that there are already Germans

that are evacuating.

And so they're going to lose out on the opportunity

to prevent a larger force from joining the battle

in Germany itself.

Colby opts for a change of plan.

He and his men immediately get back to work,

laying all the explosives they have with them,

180 pounds of tnt, under the bridge.

They move out to a minimum safe distance

and watch the bridge explode

which I'm sure was a pretty good feeling

that they all knew that they had accomplished

their mission at that point.

But their ordeal isn't over yet.

Now they have to get back to safety.

They're ready to move on to the next phase

of the operation, which is exfiltration.

Get out.

They have to cover 40 miles across Norwegian tundra

to reach the safety of the Swedish border.

And they have just blown up a bridge.

So every German in Norway at this point

begins pursuing them.

They're pursued on land,

and they're also pursued in the air.

In freezing conditions,

this team are hiking and skiing

through just super harsh terrain.

And they're reaching the limit

of what they're physically capable of.

Colby and his team are not new to this.

They know exactly what they're up against.

If the Germans find us, we already know

that they're going to kill us.

They realize, we're not going to be able to stop to rest.

And so they brought amphetamines.

They take pills that sort of amp them up.

And it's a good thing that they did

because that journey took them three days to complete,

only because they never stopped to rest.

This was one of the most daring missions of the entire

second world war, carried out by people

who exhibited the greatest possible bravery.

Despite this being the only us military operation

on Norwegian soil during world war ii,

it remained under a cloak of secrecy for decades,

with the men unable to speak about it for many, many years.

In 1973, Colby becomes the director of the CIA.

When he retires three years later,

he publishes his autobiography,

which includes a firsthand account of the operation.

Few people are brave enough to take on extreme missions.

But when they do, the outcome can change the world.

I'm David duchovny.

Thanks for watching "secrets declassified."