Original subtitles

Shadowy assassins who vanish into the crowd.

Double agents who sell their own country's secrets.

And coded messages hiding in plain sight.

Throughout history, spies have played a unique role in shaping world events.

And these secret agents work at the behest of an organization, a government,

perhaps even a single leader.

Their covert orders could range from simply collecting information or

as deadly serious as assassinating an enemy.

Secrecy is critical to a spy's success. So how do these masters of deception

fulfill their assignments without getting caught?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

The CIA, MI6, and MSS.

These are the foreign intelligence services for some of the most powerful

countries in the world.

These agencies and hundreds of others engage in clandestine operations to

aid and protect their countries.

For many, their mission is to gather the most closely guarded secrets of their

enemies. And their secret weapon are often...

Spies. Spies are utilized by states to collect intelligence that is necessary

advance policymaking.

From figuring out whether an adversary has nuclear weapons to figuring out

whether a leader of a foreign state is about to die.

We have intelligence agencies that specialize in visual intelligence. They

satellite imagery.

We have intelligence agencies that specialize in the interception of

communication.

But there are spies that more commonly comes to mind, which is the people at

front line, the individuals who are willing to put their lives at risk to

information.

At the end of the day, it's a life of mystery and intrigue because the spy

is kind of its own domain. It remains this kind of puzzle or mystery that most

people will not have exposure to beyond those few moments we read about in the

newspaper.

Hollywood movies and books and TV have made it seem like spies are some kind of

superhero. That is nothing like real espionage. The purpose of espionage is

be so secret that nobody even knows you're there.

True professional espionage is in and out without anyone ever even knowing it

happened. That makes your average spy much more like an average person.

And what's required of a spy changes from day to day.

One day we're hunting terrorists.

Sometime later, we're exchanging information in secret.

Someday we're fighting a war on drugs.

Some days we're fighting a war on misinformation.

It's an incredible web of information and impact that the average person is

aware of.

How can we ever hope to understand the mysterious world of espionage?

if it remains completely hidden from us?

Well, every so often, information does come to light that illustrates how a

single spy can change the course of history.

Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1943.

A massive scientific complex is established in secret for the research

development of a truly devastating weapon.

This laboratory becomes ground zero for the most consequential, top -secret

military program ever devised.

It's called the Manhattan Project.

The Manhattan Project was this top -secret, federally funded, $2 billion

to explore whether it was possible to develop an atomic weapon in

the midst of World War II.

And they built this secret city in Los Alamos, gathering together chemists and

engineers and physicists and other scientists into one spot so that these

scientists can collaborate and fully converse inside this secret city to

this weapon.

As history shows, these scientists would prove successful in creating the atomic

bomb.

But little did they know at the time, There was a spy among them, sharing the

program's most intimate secrets.

His codename was Rest, but his identity has since been revealed to be a German

physicist named Klaus Fuchs.

Klaus came from Germany, and because of his prior background as a physicist, he

quickly got a job within the Manhattan program in Los Alamos.

And unknown to the people there, Fuchs began to share information with the

Soviets about the program.

The U .S. counterintelligence program that involved decrypting Soviet

communications revealed the scope of the information that Fuchs collected and

shared with the Soviets.

In his particular role as a lead scientist within the program and access

development of the bomb, He was able to share pretty detailed technical

information about the science that goes into the generation and enrichment of

plutonium, which served a huge deal in advancing the Russians' capacities in

those spaces.

And he collected intelligence and shared intelligence for about seven years

until it was revealed.

The greatest find in the history of espionage...

is the theft of the atomic secret.

Klaus Fuchs pretty much shared the recipe with the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was able to get a nuclear weapon roughly five years before

could have done it on their own.

The moment they had the nuke, they were a world power.

If one spy can alter the course of atomic history, how else has espionage

our world?

Has secret intelligence informed nearly every major event in human history?

You have to assume that you only know about 5 % of all espionage operations.

Every negotiation, every diplomatic agreement, every transition of power

one president to another president. For 167 countries all over the world over

the course of decades, intelligence had a role to play in every one of those.

So now when you start to ask yourself about how the Soviet Union fell and you

start to ask yourself about how the end of Afghanistan happened and the winning

of Gulf War II and the taking down of Saddam Hussein, you start to see these

major instances in history where intelligence worked or failed.

So when you try to consider the impact that espionage has had over the long

-term history of the world, You have to remember that 95 % of what they've done,

nobody knows about, except for need -to -know secret circles.

It's really pretty chilling if you think about the effect that just a single spy

or intelligence source can have on world events.

And the irony is that we often don't know what that impact is until many

or even decades later, or sometimes ever at all.

Even historians looking back on historical events or geopolitical

may never have access to the behind -the -scenes intrigue and espionage

that took place or the machinations of various intelligence organizations.

But for sure, spies really can change the course of history.

Washington, D .C., 2025.

The International Spy Museum.

This sleek, modern building houses over 7 ,000 unique artifacts from the history

of espionage.

Among them are ingenious devices created to hide things, record secret

conversations, and some are even meant to kill.

The International Spy Museum houses the world's largest collection of

intelligence and espionage -related artefacts.

We have all kinds of ingenious devices to do all different types of stuff. So a

lot of the gadgets that we see are there to try to help to be a more effective

agent, to recruit spies better, to steal secrets better.

And we've got a fantastic James Bond collection.

Some of the James Bond movies have actually influenced the development of

gadgets in the CIA.

CIA directors come out of the movie theatre and say, guys, do we have

like this? And if we don't, can someone get on it? So we know that there's a two

-way interaction between the gadgets in fiction and in reality.

When you look at spy gadgets, a lot of them are weapons of one thing or

but you're always trying to come up with new gadgets.

So the KGB came up with a lipstick gun, which was a little 4 .5 millimeter

bullet that could be fired from a lipstick tube.

The CIA had an ice gun, which fired a super cool needle of ice, preferably

through your opponent's heart. That was all around 1960.

And then there are famous exploding cigars, which they were going to blow

Fidel Castro's head.

But to the extent that secret weapons, spy weapons programs exist, they're

secret, which is why you don't know about them, because you're not supposed

Over the years, some spy gadgets have either been declassified or leaked to

public.

However, what's less clear is whether any of these fantastical and frankly

bizarre devices

were ever successfully put to use.

But there is a curious instrument of death that many believe was responsible

one of the most infamous and unsolved assassinations of the 20th century, the

1978 murder of British journalist Georgi Markov.

Markov was a dissident in Bulgaria, and he was loud.

And he had to flee. He wound up in the United Kingdom.

And he got employed by the BBC and Radio Free Europe,

which we absolutely hated because it was Western propaganda directed to the

East. And he got louder and louder. And the Bulgarians, I think it was the

president, he wanted to get rid of this guy.

On September 7th, 1978, at around 1 .30 p .m., Markov is about to catch a bus

on the Waterloo Bridge in London when something very strange happens.

Yogi Markov bumps into somebody at a bus stop, and this individual is carrying

an umbrella, and Yogi Markov feels some pain in his leg.

And the individual concerned mutters an apology and climbs into a taxi.

And Markov, from that moment onwards, becomes ill. He goes to hospital later

that night, and a few days later, he succumbs to a very severe

infection.

Doctors who examined his body found red swelling on the back of his thigh.

And in a microscopic examination of the flesh from the wound site, they

discovered a tiny, tiny, less than two millimeter size little ball,

mostly made out of platinum, which had holes drilled in it as a means

to administer a poison.

The poison, which has never been officially identified, was most likely

which is a highly toxic substance, which is refined from castor beans.

How was this deadly platinum ball implanted into Georgie Markov?

Answers were not easy to come by, but then investigators remembered one

seemingly minor detail that may provide all the answers.

Oh, that umbrella.

What was that all about?

And later we learned that one of the things that both the KGB and the

had come up with was an umbrella gun.

They had a whole lab working on this.

And there was a little tiny capsule that was in the tip of the umbrella which

had a needle on it.

And you just poked somebody and then walked away.

How do you kill somebody in plain daylight, in public, without anybody

about it? And the answer is that you find a way to create some sort of device

like an umbrella.

that blends in every day but can still deliver a lethal dose when you need it

to.

This is exactly what makes spy agencies and spy tech something of interest and

renown, because there's a great deal of effort, a great deal of investment

that's put into making a clandestine weapon.

The umbrella suspected of killing Georgie Marka was never recovered, so

investigators had no way to definitively confirm such a device was responsible

for his murder.

But as far as the identity of the mysterious assassin who bumped into

well, that's another mystery.

When it comes to assassinating people, we know that the KGB did quite a bit of

that, and we know that the Russian intelligence does it now, too.

There's an arsenal of weapons, and Markov was a very loud dissident, so he

an enemy of the revolution, and he had to be killed.

But the man who was seen to stick that umbrella into Markov's leg, I think he

got away with this.

What history says about the assassination of Georgi Markov is a

to who was Jack the Ripper, who killed JFK, what's the final definitive story.

Hopefully we'll know one day. Maybe we never will.

Today a replica of the notorious umbrella hangs in the International Spa

Museum's collection.

And while it can never be proven that a similar device was used to poison

Georgie Markov, one thing is certain.

The deadly tools of spycraft could be made to look like anything.

And you wouldn't know it until it's too late.

In terms of what could be future spy weapons, secret spy gadgets they could

up with, well, one of them is tiny, tiny drones.

They can fly inside you, perhaps, administer poisons, carry tiny cameras.

The use of frequency weapons might be something else.

Essentially some sort of energy beam which is being directed at people,

affecting the brain in some way.

which would create feelings of disorientation. And if it managed to

discombobulate the right targets, it could interfere with their ability to

perform their duties.

So energy weapons could be useful in the world of spies.

But yes, there's a secret war. You'll always try to be one step ahead of your

opponent by coming up with something that they hadn't thought of yet.

And it can be someone passing you by with an umbrella.

Was the assassination of Georgi Markov the work of Soviet intelligence?

Like the top secret nature of espionage itself, there's a lot we may never know.

But there is one spy mystery that has intelligence officers worried even now.

It involves a foreign asset who infiltrated the American government

stealing national secrets.

Washington, D .C., 1947.

President Harry Truman establishes the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the wake of World War II and with the rise of atomic weaponry, a new covert

war is about to begin between the United States and the Soviet Union.

This unprecedented era of espionage from 1947 to 1991

as the Cold War.

At the start of the Cold War, as we know it in the 1950s, the U .S. realized

that it needed to advance its internal security measures.

This is why Truman would ultimately generate a presidential executive order

confidential materials, which still to this day is the way by which we set

different degrees of confidentiality around secret documents here in the

States.

During the Cold War, both the CIA and the Soviet Union's KGB employed spies to

steal each other's national secrets.

And while any civilian could be recruited to spy on their home country

other side, even more valuable were those already working in the

community. These turncoats are known as double agents.

To be a double agent, for example, I'm an agent. I'm working with the CIA over

here, but also working with the KGB over here.

I'm a double agent in the middle.

But it's quite often used in shorthand to refer to anybody who works in this

world who also works for the other side.

There will be a closed universe of individuals in the know about particular

secrets, and you need to penetrate those kinds of closed networks.

And so the best way to do that is by turning a double agent, a person, into

information sharer.

The U .S. intelligence community is made up of 18 different agencies and

organizations.

So we have to wonder, are there double agents among them sharing our most

closely guarded secrets with our enemies?

Remarkably, the answer is yes.

and many consider the most damaging double agent ever discovered, was a 31

veteran of the CIA named Aldrich Ames.

Aldrich Ames was a counterintelligence officer in the Directorate of

and he was a senior individual who, in 1985, as a result of a bad divorce, was

short of money, and he sold out to the Soviets.

He just simply went to the embassy.

asked to speak to a KGB officer, and then sold information through letters,

which was highly classified operations and a large number of identities

who were people who had worked either for the FBI or the CIA in the

Soviet embassy in Washington, D .C.

There were suspicions that there was a spy within the CIA.

Because in the 1980s, many of our Russian sources in Russia

started kind of dropping like flies.

And this set off alarm bells at the CIA.

And so an investigation was launched.

But bizarrely, it took many, many years to realize that it was Aldrich Ames.

Even though Aldrich Ames displayed many of the characteristics of...

What would be a viable target for recruitment?

He had a known problem with alcohol.

He had married a Colombian woman who had very expensive taste.

He bought a house in Virginia with cash for $540 ,000.

He bought a Jaguar.

He started to dress really well. He got new teeth.

And all of these.

are pretty obvious indicators that someone is working for a foreign

service because he couldn't afford all that on his CIA salary.

Aldrich Ames is one of the most famous CIA compromises of all time. He went

many, many years clandestinely acquiring and giving information to the Russians

until his ultimate arrest in the 1990s.

It's very difficult to be able to quantify the amount of damage that

Ames did.

We know that CIA spies were systematically killed, and even to this

always training new recruits to understand Aldrich Ames to make sure

don't have another instance like that happen again.

Aldrich Ames was sentenced to life in prison, and his wife Rosario got five

years for aiding her husband in his crimes against the United States.

But Ames was not the only double agent discovered inside.

an American intelligence agency.

In 2001, an FBI agent named Robert Hansen was arrested for selling

highly classified information to Russia for over 20 years.

And it begs an urgent question.

How many more double agents might be operating within the American

community right now that have never been caught?

It is very likely that there is a Russian double agent within the U .S.

government today.

In the same way, it is very likely that there is a double agent working for the

Chinese government or the Iranian government or the North Korean

The United States has many enemies around the world and those enemies are

interested in gathering intimate information about U .S. doings.

It's very uncomfortable to admit But one thing that CIA officers are taught

right out of the gate is that you must always assume at any given time that the

CIA and the FBI are penetrated by a foreign intelligence service.

We have to assume that. If we're lucky, there's only one.

Probability -wise, there is more than one.

Could there really be a foreign spy deeply embedded in a U .S. intelligence

agency?

Unraveling this mystery is truly a matter of national security because...

Gaining secret information on an enemy can quickly shift the balance of global

power. Such was the case in World War II when Allied forces were convinced that

a German double agent was leaking D -Day plans to the Nazis, one letter at a

time.

France, 1942.

As World War II raged across Europe,

The Allied forces spent five months planning a top -secret invasion to

the French coastal town of Dieppe.

But on August 19, as the Allies began their surprise assault, it seemed that

somehow the Germans knew they were coming.

The attack on Dieppe was a disaster for the Allies.

Something like half of the 6 ,000 troops who land are either killed or taken

prisoner. And so the concern was that classified information was being sent

to the Axis powers, to the Nazis, and that using codebreakers or spies,

the attack had been foiled, had been discovered by the Axis powers.

The Allies are repelled by the Nazis, and the mission is a failure.

And then people wanted to know why.

The defeat was so stunning that British intelligence, MI5, started looking for

reasons.

How did the Nazis know the invasion was happening? So it was suspected that

there could be a spy sending messages to the Nazis to alert them of upcoming

attacks.

After the failed DF invasion, British intelligence launched an investigation

to find a potential Nazi spy in their midst.

And in the process, they noticed something rather peculiar.

Just two days before the surprise invasion on Dieppe, in the British

the Daily Telegraph, a curious clue appeared in that day's crossword puzzle.

Around August 18th, 1942, something very strange happened in the Telegraph's

crossword.

The crossword puzzle clue was a French port. The answer was Dieppe.

The big question was, was the word Dieppe in the crossword puzzle innocent,

was it a warning to the Nazis, alerting them that an attack was imminent?

Is it possible that the Dieppe attack failed because of that crossword puzzle

answer?

Was a spy sending top -secret Allied intelligence to the Nazis through

puzzles?

After interrogating the creator of the crossword, mild -mannered schoolteacher

named Leonard Dahl, British intelligence concluded that the puzzle's use of the

word Dieppe was nothing more than a remarkable coincidence.

It seemed the case was closed until two years later, when code words started to

appear in the newspaper's puzzle again.

In 1944, the Allies were planning the D -Day invasion amidst a huge blanket of

secrecy. And once again, the Daily Telegraph crossword starts spitting

out information that should not be in the public domain.

About three weeks before the invasion, in the Daily Telegraph, in the crossword

puzzle, the code word Utah appears.

Then a few days later, the code word Omaha appears.

These are the two beaches where the American forces will land.

Then the next puzzle, the code word Overlord appears.

That's the name of the entire mission.

This is becoming terrifying.

Then the word Neptune appears.

That's the code word for the British warships for D -Day.

And then the word Mulberry appears.

That's the code word for the portable docks that were built across the

When these code words started appearing, it was too much of a coincidence.

MI5, we're going to get to the bottom of it, especially after DF.

Once again, their search eventually led them to the author of the puzzle,

Leonard Daw.

Is this the Nazi spy?

And finally it was determined that as a reward for some of the boys at the boys'

school, he would let them pick the word to put in the crossword.

And there just happened to be a lot of Allied soldiers stationed nearby.

The kids hear these weird words, Omaha, Utah, and they say, let's put those in

the puzzle, not realizing they're about to give away the biggest invasion in

history.

Could the appearance of secret code names in British crossword puzzles have

simply an extraordinary coincidence?

Or was it a clever spycraft tool? We may never know for sure.

Like in the case of another workplace 70 years after World War II that some

believed was intended to have deadly consequences.

In 2012, in Venezuela, there was speculation that a

crossword puzzle in the daily paper, contains coded messages that were meant

to signal a threat against the brother of President Hugo Chavez.

There was asafin, which means to kill.

There was rafagas, which means burst of machine gun fire.

And there was also the first name of Chavez's brother.

And so all of this led to the...

conspiracy theory or conspiracy thought that this must mean that an

assassination attempt was on the horizon of Chavez's brother.

The government essentially accused the newspaper and the designer of this

crossword puzzle of a plot and of transmitting this coded threat.

Whether or not this actually was an indication of an imminent threat against

Chavez's brother.

I don't know.

No attempt on Adan Chavez's life was made or at least publicly acknowledged.

If spies really do send secret messages via crossword puzzles, it's still a

matter of speculation and perhaps an ingenious method to share confidential

information in plain sight.

There are aspects of that that certainly match typical tradecraft.

So it's not preposterous to think, that a crossword puzzle could be used to

deliver a coded message.

In fact, that's a very brilliant way that you might convey a coded message to

spy.

Sending covert messages through newspaper crossword puzzles is truly a

way to share secret information.

But there was also a simpler tool spies used during the Second World War to

communicate in code over vast distances all you needed.

was a radio.

Chicago, Illinois, October 1978.

With $10 ,000 in his pocket, 29 -year -old Soviet spy Albrecht Dietrich

in the United States.

Using a stolen birth certificate, he adopts the alias Jack Barsky and begins

10 -year mission to spy on Americans as a sleeper agent for the KGB.

A sleeper agent is somebody who establishes himself in enemy territory

integrates in society and then waits for the day when it's time to spring into

action. My mission in the United States focused on me getting close to people

who make foreign policy decisions and or influence foreign policy.

This is towards the end of the Cold War.

where there was a spy war going on between the CIA and the KGB, and the

were very high.

After relocating to New York City, Barsky married and began a family.

He also took a job at an insurance company to maintain his cover, working

computer programmer.

I had access to lots and lots of data, and some of the data would have been

important for the KGB.

But there was never a meeting between me and another KGB agent on the territory

of the United States. I got my instructions and answers to questions

shortwave radio.

Every Thursday at 9 .15, I had to turn on my shortwave radio, dial my

listen to the call signal, Morse code, only digits, no letters, and then start

writing down the numbers.

And there you have your message.

For nearly 10 years, Varsky's primary tool for communicating with the KGB was

through a kind of shortwave radio broadcast known as a numbers station.

Numbers stations are essentially pirate radio stations. You need to register a

radio station. Numbers stations are not registered.

They were discovered almost accidentally during the Cold War.

You had ham radio operators bouncing around different frequencies, talking to

each other all over the world.

And then they would hit upon a certain channel, and suddenly you hear a robotic

voice repeating numbers.

Or you hear some kind of music

or flute or buzzing sound.

It feels like you're eavesdropping on something secret, but you don't know

they're saying.

Number stations can transmit signals to sources globally, and they

can do so undetected.

Because to anyone else, it might just sound like buzzing or like a series of

noises.

But what they're transmitting are coded signals to a source in place or a spy.

So even though they're very low -tech, they're very effective

because they're able to exist and to

communicate under the radar.

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union regularly

employed number stations to communicate with their agents in the field.

But if anyone with a radio can tune in to hear the broadcast, How are these

coded spy messages kept secret?

Well, according to experts, it's an unbreakable method of encryption.

A simple piece of paper known as a one -time pad.

The one -time pad has little numbers on him, and there's two identical versions.

One is for the encoding of a message, and the other one is for the decoding.

Nice. So you would hear something like 9, 7, 6, 4, and

then you could use the decoder to decrypt your message.

A one -time pad is a sheet of paper with banks of numbers.

You use this, and someone else that you're trying to communicate with uses

same pad.

The two of you can then communicate, but it's called a one -time pad because

after you've used it, you then destroy it.

assuming that you destroy it, you can then go on to use the next one -time

and if you keep using it, sticking to the protocol is uncrackable.

If number stations have proven so effective in the past, the real question

are spies still sending and receiving coded messages through them today?

Even today, you can flip through the different channels and you can hear

over the radio that don't make any sense.

Whether they're verses being read or whether they're words being said

nonsensically or whether they're numbers that are shouted out to the blindness

of space.

So it's very possible somewhere in there there's a spy message that's sent for a

very specific person at a very specific time in a very specific way.

One, three.

If spies are still receiving messages via number stations today, we'll

never know.

But what many experts believe may be even more concerning when it comes to

national security aren't relics from the past, but the technologies of today.

Wright -Pattison Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, March 1998.

While doing routine computer maintenance, the defense contractor

that Russian spies hacked into the base's network to access top -secret

intelligence from the Pentagon, NASA, and other U .S. agencies.

It is the first major cyber espionage operation that we know of in modern

history.

One of the big advancements in espionage... Something known as the

the spy who lives behind a digital wall of some sort.

They can steal information. They can sell information. They can live and hide

the dark web.

This is a whole new development, and with that development, there's new

opportunities and there's new risks.

We have new technology that cyber spies can use to meet in cyberspace.

You can meet with them on video game platforms. You can meet with them in

rooms. You can meet with them using commercially encrypted technology that

and I carry on our phone, which makes everything that much more difficult to

track, not just for the FBI or for the Internal Investigation Agency, but for

anyone to see anywhere.

Advancing technology has empowered cyber spies to not only hack government

secrets, but also exchange that information in complete anonymity.

But some cyber spies are not interested in stealing information, but rather to

influence the very beliefs of their adversaries.

There's a place called the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg,

where there's a couple hundred nerds that produce these artificial personas,

then they go on social media and befriend real people.

And they search out groups that are ideologically oriented.

There could be, particularly in politics, there could be the right wing

could be left. And what they're after is to create confusion in enemy

territory.

I can give you an example.

When you're talking about election interference...

They planted misinformation.

What they do is raising doubts about the American system.

These cyber spies are extremely dangerous.

According to America's cyber defense agency, CISA, during the 2024 U .S.

presidential election, foreign adversaries conducted influence

intended to undermine the integrity of U .S. election.

And while we can't say for sure how espionage will continue to evolve, we

that as long as there are secrets, there will be spies.

The future of secrets is in many ways what will shape the future of espionage.

But that doesn't mean that the history of espionage is any less useful than it

was in the past.

It's the foundation, it's the bedrock on which everything else is built. And no

matter where our future takes us, we know that those building blocks of

espionage, those core fundamentals, will always be present and always be there.

There will always be people meeting with people in dark corners to share secrets

that nobody knows about.

In the world of spycraft, everything is unexplained.

And your job as an intelligence officer is to try to gather that information.

that will help explain it.

The anomaly of spycraft is that you're charged with seeking out the

truth. And the reality is you can never be 100 % sure

that you've gotten to the truth.

You may never have the answers.

While it appears that the digital age may be changing the art of spycraft,

pretty safe to say that as long as there are secrets worth stealing, there will

be spies hard at work.

And although we are intrigued by the elusive double agents at the CIA, or

the assassin who killed with the probe of an umbrella, it's likely that most

tales of espionage and the covert agents who operate undetected will stay

top secret and remain.

Unexplained.