Original subtitles

[beeping]

[dramatic music]

[Duchovny] Tonight on "Secrets Declassified,"

Black ops, secret missions so daring and dangerous,

they were hidden for decades.

Sabotage leaves a New York City icon scarred.

[explosion booming]

- The blast was so powerful that it leaves its mark

on the Statue of Liberty.

- Ukraine mounts a modern-day Trojan horse attack.

- It's the single worst day for Russian air power

since World War II.

- And the Allies cook up a daring black op

inside a Nazi munitions factory.

- He is all alone with a pile of baguette bombs.

♪ ♪

- These are the astonishing

and sometimes terrible missions done by governments

and the people who work for them.

It's time to bring them to light.

♪ ♪

World War II created no shortage

of allied heroes, people who did

unbelievable things to help defeat the Nazis.

But one U.S. officer's black op is so extraordinary,

the government kept it secret for over 60 years.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

[Sami] At the height of World War II,

the Brenner Pass is

a vital supply route for Europe.

It's a 77-mile-long railway line

that carves through the Italian Alps.

♪ ♪

- Over 24,000 tons of material per day

comes across Brenner Pass.

Absolutely critical for maintaining

a German force presence in Italy.

♪ ♪

- The Allies try again and again

to bomb key railway bridges and tunnels

to shut down the pass.

♪ ♪

But every time they get close,

their planes face a torrent of anti-aircraft fire,

making this an incredibly costly mission.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] The enemy trains thunder on

until one man proposes a different solution.

- Roderick "Steve" Hall is a U.S. Army officer

in the 270th Engineer Combat Battalion.

- He has a unique knowledge of the Brenner Pass

that no one else in American uniform does.

Hall spent the 1930s exploring the Italian Alps,

skiing ravines, climbing glaciers,

and mapping out trails that even locals didn't know about.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Hall believes his unique knowledge

of the Brenner could help the Allies.

- Hall writes to the OSS,

who are the predecessor of the CIA,

and makes a bold pitch.

He will parachute in and take out the bridges

that keep the German supplied in Italy.

- The OSS is initially reluctant to accept

because they have no means of extracting him.

He then offers the checkmate of all,

which is that, well, if you drop me in,

you don't have to extract me.

I can live in hiding

until the war is over.

- It's this promise that convinces the OSS

to back his plan.

[Duchovny] The mission is codenamed Operation Mercury.

And his first target under the Brenner Pass,

a key railway bridge near Tolmezzo.

[suspenseful music]

Things get off to a rocky start.

- On August 2, 1944, Hall and his team

board a Halifax bomber bound for northern Italy.

Due to the heavily defended

airspace around Brenner Pass,

the plane is only able

to get within 85 miles

of the target bridge.

[O'Keefe] Hall and his men have to cross

one of the most rugged, heavily patrolled terrains

in Western Europe on foot

with limited supplies and no room for error.

[Duchovny] Hall's bad luck doesn't end there.

- When Hall jumps, his parachute lines get twisted,

sending him into a death roll.

[dramatic music]

He fights to untangle them.

And at the last second, they snap free.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Hall survives and finds his comrades.

♪ ♪

Stranded deep in Northern Italy

with no way back, they push forward on foot.

♪ ♪

After a brutal trek of nearly 100 miles,

Hall and his team finally reach their first target.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

- Hall scouts the bridge for weak points.

And the team packs in 150 pounds of dynamite,

plus 25 pounds of plastique,

wiring it all to the load-bearing columns

for maximum devastation.

- At 1:30 a.m., Hall triggers the explosion.

[explosion booming]

Stone, steel, and wood go flying in every direction.

And Hall and his team disappear into the night.

♪ ♪

- In a matter of seconds,

a vital German supply route is wiped out.

But Hall isn't finished.

There are more bridges on the list.

And after that blast, he's now got

every Nazi in the area on his tail.

[tense music]

- German troops begin hunting them.

♪ ♪

They're burning villages

trying to find this team.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Hall stays one step ahead,

relentless in his mission.

Over six months, the team destroyed five more bridges

and cut off three Nazi supply routes.

♪ ♪

Now another threat closes in--

the deadly Alpine winter.

- By January 1945, Hall has been

living outdoors for months.

Temperatures are regularly dropping below freezing,

and Hall now has frostbite on his feet.

- His comrades are telling him that

he needs to rest, he needs to recover

from his exhaustion.

But he just won't stop.

[Duchovny] Hall straps on his skis

and heads off to the next target.

[solemn music]

This time, he doesn't return.

- He's captured, tortured during interrogation,

and dies in captivity.

[tense music]

[Duchovny] For over 60 years,

Hall's remarkable story stays buried.

Then in 2008, OSS historian Patrick K. O'Donnell

unearths it from a cache of newly declassified files.

♪ ♪

He hunts down Hall's surviving comrades

and, piece by piece, rebuilds the story

of Roderick "Steve" Hall,

an unknown hero whose valor and sacrifice

is finally revealed.

Some black ops go boom.

Others barely make a sound.

To help end the Vietnam War, the CIA greenlights a mission

to wiretap a military hotline using a helicopter so quiet,

the enemy never hears it coming.

[explosions booming]

[tense music]

- It's 1971, and the Vietnam War has been going on

full-tilt for six years.

The American public is now putting pressure

on the government to end the war,

and troops are actually starting to come home.

[Sami] Peace talks are underway.

But President Nixon finds himself

in the middle of a diplomatic deadlock

that is just so absurd that-- and this is no joke--

after 10 weeks, the only thing negotiators have agreed on

is the shape of the conference table.

[Martin] Henry Kissinger is Richard Nixon's

national security advisor.

Kissinger feels a concern that the North Vietnamese

are not negotiating in good faith.

He turns to the CIA in the interests of

developing a more accurate intelligence picture.

[dramatic music]

[Sami] The CIA has learned

that about 15 miles from the city

of Vinh, a single phone line carries

the North Vietnamese military's most senior communications.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Laying a tap on this line could hand Nixon

Hanoi's playbook in real time.

♪ ♪

But there's a catch.

- The phone line runs about 150 miles into enemy territory.

Reaching it means flying a helicopter

deep behind enemy lines.

And this is further

than any covert flight of the war.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Very little about a helicopter is stealthy.

- A conventional helicopter can be heard for several miles.

Using one will blow the mission's cover

and also get the team shot down.

Somehow, the team need to source a helicopter

that the enemy won't hear coming.

[tense music]

- Enter the Quiet One, a stealth helicopter

in the works at the Pentagon's top research lab.

[suspenseful music]

- Instead of four rotor blades, it runs five.

It cuts down on the thump

that these rotor blades tend to make.

They also use oversized mufflers,

which soften the entire exhaust signature.

[Duchovny] At 400 feet, it registers just 71 decibels,

earning its title

as the world's quietest helicopter.

♪ ♪

But quiet isn't the same as combat-ready.

- Landing in North Vietnam would be catastrophic.

So the Quiet One needs to make a 300-mile

round trip without stopping.

- The CIA modifies it with a 500 horsepower engine,

twice the standard,

so it can fly long haul without refueling.

- They also give the air crew

forward-looking infrared screens,

allowing these crews to fly in complete darkness.

- To top it off, the whole chopper is coated

head to toe in experimental radar-absorbing black paint.

- By October of 1971, two prototypes are ready

and shipped to a secret air base in Taiwan.

[dramatic music]

[Duchovny] Now Kissinger just needs

the right team for this black op.

- The CIA wants to keep this mission deniable

for the U.S. government.

So they sent in two American helicopter pilots

to train the Taiwanese on how to fly the stealth helicopter.

♪ ♪

[Hakeem] Training turns out to be a disaster.

The Taiwanese pilots are told to push the aircraft

beyond what they're capable of.

One of the helicopters crashes and is damaged beyond repair.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Down to their last Quiet One,

the CIA upends its original plan.

- By late 1972, the CIA has no choice.

The U.S. pilots will have to fly the mission themselves.

♪ ♪

So on December 6th, they give the green light

for the most covert flight of the entire Vietnam War.

[Martin] The aircraft delivers the team to the bluff.

The team scramble off of it.

The aircraft then quietly returned to the air.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Placing the wiretap should be the easy part.

But there's a problem.

- The telegraph poles are not made of wood

like they expected, but they're of concrete.

The special climbing gear they bought won't bite.

♪ ♪

- The commandos muscle their way up the pole

by hand, which wastes precious time.

♪ ♪

[Martin] Undeterred, they reach that spot,

install the wiretap, scramble back down.

♪ ♪

[Sami] The Quiet One descends in silence,

the commandos climb back aboard,

and they head for base.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] A few weeks later, the Vietnam War

comes to an end when the Paris Peace Accords are signed.

[Hakeem] Many believe that the intercept by the Quiet One

gave Kissinger the leverage that

he needed to close the deal.

[Duchovny] While Kissinger takes the spotlight,

the Quiet One disappears into CIA silence,

and its black ops mission is buried.

♪ ♪

Then in 1982, historians

Ken Conboy and James Morrison

start to piece together the truth

through hundreds of interviews with those involved.

♪ ♪

Over a decade later,

they reveal the full story to the world.

♪ ♪

- In the lead up to D-Day, the Allies are scrambling

to knock out a Nazi armament factory in France.

That's when they mix together

the perfect recipe for victory--

3 cups flour, 2 cups water,

and 40 pounds of plastic explosive.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

[Hakeem] It's April of 1944,

and D-Day is just weeks away.

The Allied Commanders are working overtime

to weaken the German defenses that they're going to face

when they invade Normandy.

- An important target is the National Munitions Factory

that's located in Saint-Médard-en-Jalle,

just outside of Bordeaux.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] The Allies drop 268 tons of bombs

in an attempt to raze it to the ground.

But it's back up within days.

- Knocking out a factory is not as simple

as it seems from the air.

[Sami] So Britain's wartime sabotage unit,

the SOE, devise a black op--

send someone behind enemy lines to blow it sky high.

[Duchovny] It's a black op at its boldest,

high reward and high risk,

which is why Britain calls on an unlikely recruit,

a 20-year-old French Aristocrat.

[Hakeem] Robert de La Rochefoucauld

is a young count from one of France's

oldest noble families.

He flees to Britain once his father

is imprisoned by the Germans.

While in Britain, he learns of a new covert unit

known as the SOE,

or the Special Operations Executive.

They were formed by Churchill for the purpose

of carrying out sabotage missions in occupied Europe.

[Sami] Robert arrives in Britain

at the perfect time for the SOE.

Their operatives on the continent

keep getting caught, because they're given away

by their schoolboy French.

So they're looking to recruit eager French exiles

to carry out sabotage missions.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Rochefoucauld is the perfect fit--

gung-ho, willing, French,

and desperate to avenge his family.

♪ ♪

He's given the mission to take out

the munitions factory at Saint-Médard-en-Jalle.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

[Hakeem] On May 7, 1944,

Rochefoucauld and another SOE agent

head to southwestern France in two Halifax bombers

loaded with weapons, ammunition, and explosives.

[Sami] The two men parachute into the countryside,

where they link up with the local resistance

and begin plotting how to take down the Saint-Medard plant.

[Duchovny] Early surveillance reveals

the scale of the challenge.

- The place is crawling with guards who run regular patrols,

and they stop the workers at random

to make sure that none of them are smuggling in explosives.

[Duchovny] Then the team spots a way

for a native Frenchman like Robert to just walk right in.

[Martin] Rochefoucauld observes that

the workforce in the factory,

they're French civilians,

and what that means is that he has an opportunity now

to blend in.

He can pass for French because he is French.

[Sami] To convince the guards at the gate,

Robert has to look like a real employee.

So the team scour the workers and eventually find

a close match, who,

desperate to stop the Nazis, hands over his ID.

It's a major risk for both men, to be sure,

because being caught would almost certainly mean death.

- Getting Robert inside is one thing.

40 pounds of explosives is a much bigger problem.

So the team looks for a cover no guard would question.

[tense music]

- They noticed that most workers

coming to the plant each morning--

carrying a baguette.

[Martin] It might be possible to smuggle

small amounts of plastic explosive inside baguettes.

[Duchovny] In France, nothing raises less suspicion

than the humble baguette.

But how can you engineer it into the perfect secret bomb?

[Sami] Robert needs a baguette with the right structure

for concealing explosives.

So it's not as simple as just popping

over to the local bakery.

Any ordinary baguette

might be too dense to hollow out,

too brittle to hold a charge,

or too dry to seal up convincingly.

- The team starts baking.

They shape dough around the cavity,

make it firm but make it pliable,

and then load it with plastic explosives

and seal it with a flour and water paste.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] It's black ops by baking.

♪ ♪

Now it just needs to fool the guards.

[dramatic music]

[Hakeem] Robert starts out with a small amount

of plastic explosives,

which he smuggles past the guards,

knowing that if anything looks out of place,

the entire operation is over.

♪ ♪

[Sami] He slips away just long enough

to plant the explosives at critical points

around the factory, including fuel tanks

and munition stores.

[Paul] Once one artillery shell gets detonated,

it has enough explosive power to detonate

all of the shells around it.

[Duchovny] To trigger this chain reaction,

Robert needs to plant

a network of hidden explosives.

This means returning to the factory every day

for an entire week.

[Sami] Each baguette can only hold

a limited amount of explosives.

So Robert repeats the mission

over and over again.

And each visit carries the very real risk

of being caught.

By the end of the week, he's planted

eight baguette bombs in total,

enough to blow the factory to pieces.

[whistle blows]

[Martin] It's May 20, 1944.

As thousands of workers begin to exit the factory,

Rochefoucauld hides under a piece of machinery.

[suspenseful music]

[Hakeem] Robert moves quickly,

and he begins attaching timers to the bombs.

But he knows that this is incredibly dangerous,

because these devices don't always work as predicted,

and they sometimes set off the bombs early.

[ticking]

- By 7:30, the last charge is armed,

leaving Robert less than 10 minutes to escape.

- Robert finds himself trapped inside the factory grounds

by an 18-foot wall,

but the resistance throws him a ladder.

He climbs up over the wall and disappears into the night.

♪ ♪

[ticking]

[Duchovny] At 8:00...

[explosion booming]

The explosions begin...

[explosions booming]

Stripping the Germans of crucial munitions

in the run up to D-Day.

♪ ♪

- The secret mission remains secret

for decades after the war.

It's not until 2017,

when a journalist named Paul Kix publishes a book

that describes the baguette bomb incident.

[Duchovny] The full story is finally revealed,

how a young Frenchman pulled off

one of World War II's boldest black ops

with nothing more than nerve, ingenuity,

and a handful of baguettes.

♪ ♪

- The Trojan horse is the original black op.

Back then, it was a wooden decoy

hiding elite Greek warriors.

Today, that kind of mission comes with something

just as deadly--

GPS and a swarm of killer drones.

[booming]

- It's December of 2023, and Russia's ground invasion

into Ukraine has come to a bloody stalemate.

But in the skies, it's a different story.

Russia's Tu-95s and Tu-22M3 bomber planes

are raining missiles on Ukrainian cities

night after night,

terrifying the civilian population.

[dramatic music]

[Jesse] These Cold War bombers are almost impossible

for the Ukrainian air defenses to stop.

They're actually operating inside Russian territory

and firing long-range missiles into Ukraine.

[somber music]

[Duchovny] To protect its citizens and infrastructure,

Ukraine needs these planes destroyed.

♪ ♪

So its security service, the SBU,

hatches an extraordinary plan to wipe out the whole fleet.

Its name, Operation Spiderweb.

- Ukraine's plan is simple but bold--

destroy Russia's bombers-- not in the air,

but on the ground at their air bases.

The planes are parked in neat rows on the tarmac.

They're minimally defended.

They are sitting ducks out there.

- The problem is, these bombers are

thousands of miles inside Russian territory.

So Ukraine has to find a way

to get to them and destroy them,

all undetected.

[Duchovny] To do this, Ukraine plays to its strength.

Instead of using soldiers or missiles

to strike these planes, it's going to use drones.

- Since the start of the war,

the SBU has been turning $500 drones--

you know, the ones that you might buy in a store--

into lethal weapons.

[explosions booming]

So now they're planning to take this idea to a whole new level

using a swarm of drones laden with explosives

to attack the Russian bombers.

[Hakeem] The problem is that regular store-bought drones

only work reliably over very short distances.

If the SBU attempts to operate them

from thousands of miles away inside of Ukraine,

the battery would die,

the signals would be lost, and they would crash.

[Jesse] The SBU doesn't want to send its own operatives

thousands of miles into enemy territory

to pilot the drones, because if they're caught,

they will be executed.

- That's when Operation Spider Web spins a new threat.

If pilots are a problem,

why not build a drone that doesn't need one?

♪ ♪

[Sasha] Ukraine's AI industry is

one of the most advanced in the world.

So the SBU turns to its top engineers

to develop a drone that can fly without a remote signal.

[dramatic music]

[Duchovny] By early 2025, they've cracked it--

an AI drone that can fly itself

without needing a human operator.

But to hit its target, this smart drone has to learn

to recognize a Russian bomber.

♪ ♪

[Sami] The breakthrough comes when the SBU finds

old Soviet bombers in a museum near central Ukraine

they can use to train the AI

without ever setting foot in Russia.

They photograph every panel, every rivet,

and every weak spot on the planes.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Hundreds of these photos

are fed into the AI's database...

♪ ♪

Teaching the drones to recognize

the bombers from every angle.

♪ ♪

Now the SBU has a fleet of killer

smart drones ready to fly.

But it still needs to get them into Russian territory.

- To pull this mission off, the SBU needs

to get nearly 120 drones, each carrying

roughly 1.6 kilos of explosive,

and they have to smuggle them into Russia.

[tense music]

[Sami] The drones are broken down into parts

and smuggled into Russia by Ukrainian sleeper agents.

- Here's where the real ingenuity comes in.

The drones are disguised in wooden sheds,

but not just any wooden sheds.

They're robotic.

They have remote-controlled roofs,

specially engineered by Ukrainian operatives

in a top-secret warehouse.

[Duchovny] With the push of a button,

the roof can slide back,

releasing the deadly swarm.

In an instant, this classified mission

would be revealed to the enemy and the entire world.

♪ ♪

[Jesse] It's May 31, 2025, and the Ukrainian agents

hire four unsuspecting Russian truck drivers

to deliver what they think are ordinary wooden sheds

to different parts of the country.

- The SBU tracks the trucks with GPS.

And when the drivers get close to the Russian air bases,

suddenly, the drivers get these calls

telling them to stop.

- Seconds later, the retractable roofs

of the sheds open, and the AI-guided drones

take off into the air and lock onto their targets,

the bombers.

[explosion booming]

[Duchovny] That's when all hell breaks loose.

Bystanders filming have no idea

they're witnessing a coordinated attack.

[Sasha] This extraordinary drone footage

beams back into Ukraine,

and suddenly, social media goes wild,

with videos of truck drivers

trying to catch these drones

and black smoke billowing from Russian air bases.

[Duchovny] The cat's out of the bag.

♪ ♪

Operation Spiderweb is seen by millions on social media

everywhere, a daring mission declassified in real time.

[Hakeem] More than a third of Russia's bomber fleet

is damaged or destroyed.

This cost the Russians $7 billion or more.

It's clearly the worst day for Russian aviation

since World War II.

♪ ♪

- For generations, the Statue of Liberty

has stood as a symbol of hope and freedom.

But few know that, to this day,

Lady Liberty bears battle wounds

from one of the most devastating black ops

ever pulled off on U.S. soil.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

- It's 1915, and World War I is raging in Europe.

The U.S. is officially neutral.

But in reality, a British naval blockade

is cutting Germany off from American factories.

They keep churning out weapons,

but the only ships leaving U.S. ports

are bound for Britain and France.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] To even the field, Berlin turns to sabotage.

♪ ♪

- The Germans decide that, since they can't buy U.S. arms,

they're going to destroy them.

But this is a risky plan, because if they're caught,

this could cause the U.S. to declare war.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Berlin needs saboteurs on the ground.

So it sends two agents to New York,

Kurt Jahnke and Lothar Witzke.

- Their first job is to identify a target.

And there is one standout option--

Black Tom Island in Jersey City.

It's one of the largest munitions depots in the world.

- The explosives are already in place.

The fuse just needs to be lit,

and a critical weapon stockpile will be wiped out.

The only problem?

Pulling this off in the city that never sleeps.

[tense music]

[Martin] Black Tom sits opposite Manhattan,

just a stone's throw from crowded piers

and the Statue of Liberty.

♪ ♪

It's also lit day and night, and it has guards on patrol.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] So the saboteurs wait in the shadows,

until luck finally intervenes.

♪ ♪

[Sami] In July of 1916,

a dock strike erupts in Jersey City.

So security is stretched thin,

which means that Black Tom is back in play.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] On the night of July 29th,

the German spies finally make their move.

What happens next doesn't become public

for over two decades.

[Paul] Jahnke and Witzke head out on their mission.

They sneak across the harbor out to Black Tom Island.

And when they get there, they realize that

this is quite a labyrinth of railcars

packed with highly explosive munitions.

[Sami] It's summer,

and the air is just filled with mosquitoes.

So guards huddle around smoking oil pots

to fight them off.

It's the perfect distraction.

[Hakeem] Jahnke and Witzke move

silently through the site,

lighting small fires as they go.

The plan is simple but devastating,

and that is to light enough points

to set off a chain reaction

that would tear through the entire depot.

♪ ♪

[Paul] At midnight, they're actually able

to climb back aboard their rowboat

and slip away undetected.

♪ ♪

[dramatic music]

- At 2:08 a.m...

[explosions booming]

Black Tom erupts.

[explosions booming]

♪ ♪

The blast sends a shock wave racing

at 24,000 feet per second.

[Paul] Buildings suffered devastating damage

all along the harbor,

windows are blown out miles away,

and the explosion registers a 5.0 on the Richter scale.

[Duchovny] No one knows who's behind it.

The case stays unsolved for years,

until investigators catch an unexpected break.

[suspenseful music]

- In the 1930s, multiple German intelligence agents

are captured by the United States.

And in an effort to gain leniency for themselves,

they actually reveal the story

of the covert assault on Black Tom Island.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] Despite this, the German saboteurs

are never punished by the U.S. government

or at home.

And Lady Liberty, well, she still bears the scars.

[Sami] The blast was so powerful

that it mangled the Statue of Liberty's arm.

And it did it so badly that the torch

that the statue's arm is holding

has remained off limits to tourists ever since.

- In most spy stories, the bug is hidden in a lamp

or a phone, maybe a potted plant.

In this one, the bug is the entire building.

[tense music]

♪ ♪

[Hakeem] In the 1970s,

the Cold War tensions are beginning to ease up a bit.

And so, as a gesture of goodwill and cooperation,

the United States and the Soviet Union agree

that the U.S. can rebuild its outdated Moscow embassy.

♪ ♪

[Sami] It's the largest construction project

the U.S. has ever attempted overseas,

an 8-story complex spread across 10 acres

and boasting everything from an auditorium

and classrooms to a garage, gym,

apartments, and 11 townhouses.

[Duchovny] Washington sees an opportunity

to project power in the heart of the Soviet Union.

But the Kremlin sees an opportunity

to spy on its biggest rival in their own backyard.

- Any project this big is chaos.

And chaos means opportunity for the KGB.

They see it as the perfect chance

to bug the U.S. embassy

and turn it into a giant eavesdropping device.

[Duchovny] So the KGB plants covert workers on the job.

But how do you bug an embassy in a way

that's impossible for the U.S. to detect?

[tense music]

[Jesse] The Soviets build a full-scale mockup

of the U.S. embassy in a classified site

outside of Moscow.

[Duchovny] Here, they rehearse the entire operation,

every bug perfected in private.

This is where their bugging transforms.

- The Soviets decide that they're not going to plant

their surveillance devices in the normal places,

like in lamps and phones and picture frames and such.

Instead, they're going to build it

into the very structure of the building--

inside the beams, inside the bricks.

Consider it architectural sabotage.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] The result is that the Soviets

can hear you wherever you are.

[Mark] It may be the walls listening to you.

It might be the floor listening to you.

It might be the door frame listening to you.

Or perhaps it's all of the above.

There's no private, safe space in the U.S. embassy.

[Sami] Once they've perfected the operation,

the replica is dismantled piece by piece.

Bugged door frames, pillars,

even entire sections of hallway

are packed up and shipped to Moscow,

ready to be slotted into the real embassy.

[Duchovny] November 22, 1979, construction begins.

- Ideally, this process will be closely supervised.

But in practice, there's only, like,

20 or 30 Naval personnel who are there

observing what's going on.

- As construction progresses, the U.S. runs inspections.

They find nothing.

Then in 1980, for the Soviets, at least,

disaster strikes.

♪ ♪

[Hakeem] In 1980, a KGB major

named Victor Sheymov

defects to the United States.

He brings with him a wealth of intelligence

about Soviet surveillance ops,

including the bugging of the U.S. embassy.

[Sami] Sheymov warns the CIA that the Soviets are embedding

sophisticated, nearly undetectable bugs

during construction.

He actually gives them a chilling message.

He tells them,

"You won't have a single secret

in the building."

[Duchovny] A KGB major is warning that

their brand-new embassy is wired from top to bottom.

The CIA hears them out and then does nothing,

convinced their inspections have it covered.

♪ ♪

[Sami] The U.S. is so sure of

their own counter-surveillance technology

that they think they'll spot any bug

the Soviets try to slip past them.

[Duchovny] Construction in Moscow

continues for another five years.

And by 1985, the embassy is 2/3 complete.

The U.S. continues with routine inspections.

But with time comes better technology,

and suddenly, something shows up.

[dramatic music]

- U.S. security teams notice radio waves

emanating out of the U.S. embassy.

And they're not quite sure what this is,

but it doesn't look good.

And what they discover is

a remarkably sophisticated bugging system.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] The U.S. finally realizes

it's been duped by its Soviet builders.

And the real kicker-- it paid them $55 million

for the privilege.

For years, the embassy is frozen in limbo,

and inspections drag on.

♪ ♪

Then in 1990, Victor Sheymov goes public

with one of the Cold War's biggest "I told you so's."

[Reporter] You worked in signals intelligence.

Can you tell us a little bit about those operations?

[tense music]

[Duchovny] Sheymov tells "The Washington Post"

the CIA had been warned 10 years earlier

but did nothing.

And more expense lies ahead.

- Congress approves $240 million

to strip the building to its skeleton

and rebuild it,

but this time with secured American labor.

Steel is melted, walls are torn down,

and the Soviet spy maze is dismantled piece by piece.

[dramatic music]

[Duchovny] By 2000, 21 years after work first began,

the new embassy finally opens--

bug-free, as far as we can tell.

♪ ♪

- The Cold War's biggest booby trap

isn't hidden in a suitcase or a duffel bag.

It's buried in a few lines of stolen software.

And when it goes off, it triggers

a devastating explosion.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

- In the 1980s, the U.S. is the world leader in technology.

From advanced computers to cutting-edge software,

no other nation comes close.

[Hakeem] The Soviets have been struggling

for years to keep up with United States

technology developments.

And the solution that they come up with is espionage.

They're stealing Western tech on a scale that is massive.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] This dependence on stolen tech

has left them lagging behind,

and now the Soviets are missing some key software

to build a major gas pipeline.

[Hakeem] The new pipeline is desperately needed,

because falling oil prices

has wiped out the Soviets' main source of income.

So they really need to develop new sources of revenue.

[Mark] The Soviet economy is very reliant on oil and gas.

But prices have been dropping

over their very high levels from the 1970s.

And at the same time, the Soviets are running out

of new sources of oil and gas.

So they're looking for, like, where can we find more?

Where is their natural gas that we haven't tapped yet?

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] The Soviets decide to build a 3,000-mile-long

pipeline to bring natural gas

from Siberia to Czechoslovakia.

♪ ♪

[Mark] The export of this gas

is extraordinarily important to Moscow.

It may be worth upwards of $30 billion to them.

And that's U.S. dollars.

That's hard currency.

♪ ♪

[Hakeem] The Soviets need special software

to run the pipeline's pumping stations.

Without it, the system fails.

And of course, it's technology that they don't have.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] So naturally, they look to the U.S.

and a plan to steal it.

What they don't realize is that this mission

has been leaked to the White House.

[Andrew] Newly-elected President Ronald Reagan

is handed a intelligence report

that's coming from a recent Soviet defector.

The report is 4,000 pages long,

and it starts to detail this Soviet operation

targeting U.S. technology.

♪ ♪

- Known as the Farewell Dossier,

the report even includes a list of U.S. technologies

the Soviets still need,

including the gas pipeline software.

Reagan's first instinct

is to expose the whole operation,

but one advisor sees an opportunity.

♪ ♪

[Jesse] Gus Weiss is

a national security advisor.

He's worked with four presidents

as well as the CIA and NASA.

And his specialty is strategic deception.

Instead of shutting down the flow of stolen secrets,

what if the U.S. turned the tables on the Soviets

and fed them doctored software that could wreak havoc?

[Duchovny] It's the perfect booby trap.

One stolen program could sabotage

the entire gas pipeline.

So Reagan uses the Farewell Dossier

to set the plan in motion.

- The dossier reveals that the Soviets

planned to steal the software

from a single company in Canada.

- With help from Canadian intelligence,

the U.S. is able to plant bugs in the pipeline software

before the Soviets steal it.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] The Soviets install the code,

unaware it's been doctored.

[suspenseful music]

- Over time, it slowly corrupts the pressure controls

of the pipeline, causing havoc.

[Duchovny] What happens next is still fiercely debated.

♪ ♪

[explosion booming]

[dramatic music]

- In June of 1982, a section of the Siberian pipeline

explodes in a massive ball of flames.

[explosion booming]

Millions of dollars' worth of Soviet infrastructure

is destroyed in an instant.

♪ ♪

[Duchovny] The truth stays hidden

for more than a decade...

[solemn music]

Until 2004, when former U.S. Air Force Secretary

Thomas C. Reed makes

an explosive claim in his memoir.

Reed alleges the CIA weaponized

stolen Soviet software, lines of code,

the stuff of spreadsheets and keyboards,

triggering a fireball visible from space.

♪ ♪

From baguette bombs

to drones hidden in backyard sheds,

black ops evolve with every era.

But even the darkest missions ultimately get revealed.