Original subtitles

Tonight on "Secrets Declassified,"

the top secret bases that governments disguised

and then denied for decades,

from the government doomsday bunker

hidden beneath a luxury resort...

If a bomb drops on the golf course,

anyone behind the blast doors would be okay.

To the U.S. Army's nuclear launch site

built inside a glacier.

They put a nuclear reactor in one of the most brutal

and difficult environments on Earth.

And Stalin hollows out a mountain to conceal

a fleet of Soviet subs.

It even has a secret gate

so that subs can get in and out.

It's something out of a Bond film.

These are some of the hidden bases

built by governments throughout history.

It's time to bring them to light.

In West Virginia, there's a luxury hotel

for the rich and famous that boasts over 700 guest rooms,

exclusive restaurants, an 18-hole golf course,

and a secret underground bunker primed for Armageddon.

Nuclear anxiety is peaking in the 1950s,

and the U.S. president is concerned

about the safety of the government

in the case of nuclear attack.

Top of Eisenhower's list of people

who need to survive Armageddon?

Members of Congress.

This means finding a location for a bunker that can house

1,000 government officials and is discreet enough

to keep it hidden from the public.

The answer? A five-star hotel.

The Greenbrier is a luxury resort

in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

This place is a slice of old-school luxury,

where the rich and powerful come to do business and relax.

You can find presidents or celebrities

sipping drinks at the bar.

It sounds like the perfect place

to see out World War III.

It's far enough from Washington D.C.

that hopefully it could escape the effects

of a direct nuclear attack on the capital city,

but also close enough that people would be able

to escape to it in time.

It's shielded by mountains

for extra protection.

Perhaps what swings it-- literally--

is the hotel's golfing facilities.

Eisenhower is a regular on the Greenbrier course.

The government discreetly

approaches the hotel for their assistance,

and the management at the Greenbrier

are happy to oblige.

The only problem is keeping it a secret.

An immense construction project

on the grounds of the Greenbrier

is sure to get the VIP guests gossiping.

So the bunker needs a cover story.

The Greenbrier gets a brand-new extension,

the West Virginia Wing.

Underneath, a vast doomsday bunker

unlike any other begins to take shape.

The bunker underneath

the Greenbrier Hotel

hosts 153 rooms spread out over 112,000 square feet.

There are two chambers

for the House and the Senate,

and there's this vast hall

for joint sessions.

It's essentially a giant underground capital

for the government to continue functioning

in the event of a nuclear war.

Beyond these chambers are the facilities you'd expect

in a top-of-the-range government survival bunker--

high pressure shower to rinse off nuclear fallout,

over 1,000 beds for congressmen and women,

a hospital, a cafeteria, and a small arsenal of handguns.

Perhaps the most impressive features

are two enormous blast doors to seal Congress inside.

Each door is 19 inches thick, weighs 28 tons,

and they're strong enough to withstand a nuclear blast

from only 2,000 feet away.

If a bomb drops on the eighth hole of the golf course,

anyone behind the blast doors will be okay.

And these doors are hidden behind a false wall

in the exhibition hall, just inches away

from where guests are mingling.

For 30 years, the false wall stands firm

and the bunker remains hidden from view, until 1992,

when rumors finally begin to leak out.

Ted Gup is an investigative reporter

for "The Washington Post," and an anonymous source

tips him off that the Greenbrier Resort

might not be all that it seems.

Gup speaks to former employees

who confirm that something mysterious is lurking

beneath the West Virginia Wing.

But for a genuine scoop, Gup needs hard evidence.

So he decides to go stay at the Greenbrier himself

to see if he can get that final bit of proof.

When Gup meets the manager,

he goes straight to the point.

He asks, is there a government nuclear

fallout shelter under the hotel?

Well, the manager immediately denies this.

Gup doesn't get the answers he's hoping for,

but he's determined not to leave the Greenbrier

without his story.

Gup visits the office of a maintenance company

called Forsythe Associates, who are supposedly

in charge of maintaining the Greenbrier TVs.

When he gets to the offices, he sees something strange.

He sees a wall covered with books

on nuclear war and Armageddon.

You don't need that if you're building TV antennas.

When he digs deeper, he finds out

that many of the people who work at Forsythe Associates

are former U.S. military cryptographers

and radio specialists.

Turns out Forsythe Associates is just a front company.

Their real job is maintaining the communications

for the bunker.

"The Washington Post"

runs Gup's story on May 31, 1992.

And the Greenbrier's secret is finally unearthed.

Within days, the government goes public

about the Greenbrier bunker

and announces its deactivation.

Today, the bunker is a tourist attraction.

For about $50, you can go tour the halls

where the American government might have

been reborn after Armageddon.

In the event of an attack,

it's not just Congress who needs protecting,

but the president and the vice president too.

On 9/11, U.S. leaders are rushed to a secret bunker

beneath the White House.

The only problem is, it's been hidden away so long,

it's 50 years out of date.

In 1950, the White House is undergoing a massive expansion.

President Truman is overseeing renovations of the East Wing.

Truman decides that in the atomic age,

the White House needs a nuke-proof

emergency shelter, one to be used in the event

of a Soviet attack on D.C.

The $11 million investment under the East Wing

is called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center.

The P-E-O-C, or PEOC, is an underground bunker

meant to protect the president and key personnel,

meant to ensure continuity of government,

and also meant to act as a command and control center

in a time of crisis.

It's accessible from an elevator in the East Wing.

Behind these heavy steel doors,

there's a shower room

for washing off any nuclear fallout.

This then leads to a number of rooms, including a food store,

living quarters for the president and the first lady,

and most importantly, the communications center,

which has direct telephone lines to the Pentagon.

Truman's PEOC is a cutting-edge hideaway,

ready and waiting for a threat to the White House.

But the threat never comes,

and for 50 years, it lies dormant.

Until 2001.

Oh, my God, oh, my God.

When the Twin Towers are hit

and the United States is under attack,

President Bush is in Florida.

But the first lady, Laura Bush, is in D.C.

Laura Bush was at the Congress.

She was at the Capitol.

The Secret Service, they sent her to the PEOC.

The secret bunker is called on

for the very first time.

Bush had never been to the PEOC before.

She describes walking through a tunnel,

going through these metal doors into the secure facility.

Who was there but Vice President Cheney

and Mrs. Cheney.

President Bush is in the air flying back to Washington,

so the vice president is running things

from underground.

The PEOC is suddenly the most

important room on Earth.

Immediately, things start going wrong.

Cheney can't get through to key personnel.

And there's another problem.

The TV screens can play live news programming,

but then they can't hear the internal

video teleconferencing.

It's not just the communications

that are failing.

There is an air problem.

The room is sealed, it's crowded,

and carbon dioxide levels are rising.

With CO2 levels rising,

the evacuated staff start to feel the pressure.

The vice president has to choose.

He can either stay in the safety

of this subterranean bomb-proof shelter,

or he can go upstairs into the unfolding chaos

and take control.

Cheney is instructed to stay underground,

so he's in the failing operations center

for the whole day.

The Bushes were asked by the Secret Service

if they wanted to spend the night there.

Neither one wanted to.

It was a pretty crammed and not terribly inviting place to be.

The PEOC turns out to be a Cold War relic

no longer fit for its purpose.

The details of what happened down there are kept hidden

for nearly a decade.

In 2010, Laura Bush publishes her memoir

in which she reveals her experience

in the outdated bunker.

Just months later, diggers start pulling up

the White House lawn.

In the wake of the PEOC's failings,

a massive renovation project takes place underground.

A new and improved 21st century operations center

is installed five stories below the White House,

so hopefully, something like this never happens again.

The Cold War gave rise to an abundance of hidden bases,

outposts carved into some of the most

extreme environments on Earth.

But one U.S. operation beneath Greenland's ice hides something

far more dangerous: a nuclear launch site

buried for nearly three decades.

It's 1956, and the U.S. Department of Defense

releases a documentary about this groundbreaking

polar research station in Greenland,

800 miles south of the North Pole.

The United States Army

has established an unprecedented nuclear-powered

Arctic Research Center.

In the Arctic, you have to contend

with sometimes minus-20 to minus-40 conditions.

It's just an incredibly difficult

environment to operate in.

An army colonel named John Kerkering

is tasked with constructing a polar city.

It's housed in huge, covered tunnels

with dormitories, a hospital,

even a chapel and a barber shop.

The documentary presents the polar

research station as being well ahead of its time,

primarily because of the fact that

it is powered entirely by the world's first

portable nuclear reactor.

The name of the base is Camp Century.

It's an ambitious project.

They put a nuclear reactor in one of the most

brutal and difficult environments on Earth.

As wild as that is, that's not even

the craziest thing about this.

Although only a few people know it,

Camp Century is just a cover story.

The real plan here is to construct

an immense nuclear launch site deep under the snow.

Its name: Project Iceworm.

When Project Iceworm was envisioned,

there were a lot of legitimate fears

that we were on the precipice of nuclear war.

In the 1950s, the threat of nuclear war

couldn't be more serious.

Iceworm will give the West an opportunity to survive it all.

Their idea is to have hundreds of nuclear warheads

all prepped, all ready to go in the tunnels under the ice.

A full-on nuclear arsenal.

If the Russians initiated

a nuclear first strike on America,

there would be the secondary base in Greenland

that could fire retaliatory counterattacks into Russia.

The Camp Century cover story is so convincing

it fools the Russians.

They did actually do experiments there and work

on science, but it was basically

a test bed to see what else we could do under the Arctic ice.

In the end, the real challenge

to the success of Project Iceworm

doesn't come from being discovered,

but from the landscape itself.

The Greenland ice cap is so dynamic,

you just can't maintain a permanent structure

underneath the ice.

The base was being sandwiched

between the ice walls as they constricted,

because every year, the ice moves another 6 feet.

You've got 600 nuclear warheads

and a nuclear reactor.

You cannot put them in shifting ice.

And so Camp Century is abandoned in 1967.

They end up pulling the plug on the entire thing,

and they just walk away.

I think the line is, we'll just open the door

and let it snow.

And they thought it would be permanently entombed

in this ice and be safe in that way.

Although the nuclear reactor at Camp Century was removed,

the material that was left behind

is still dangerous to the environment.

The truth stays buried until 1996,

when newly declassified documents reveal

the shocking truth about Camp Century,

that this Arctic research base was no mere science lab

but a front for a nuclear launch site

hidden beneath the ice.

The same decade that the U.S. uses the Arctic to hide nukes,

they conceal their newest spy station

not on Earth but in space.

The U.S. develop and test a two-man operated

scientific research station.

A program designed to evaluate

man's performance in space over extended periods of time.

It's designed to remain in orbit

150 miles above the Earth's surface.

It's 60 feet long with a laboratory and a living space.

The design team comes up

with incredible innovations.

They develop the next generation

of flexible spacesuits.

The laboratory simulator becomes part

of NASA's future projects, as does the MOL's

waste generation system.

The individuals who trained on the MOL

later went on to be pioneers

who manned some of the early space shuttle missions.

The project's greatest technical

breakthrough is its own giant camera.

The camera is the size of a car.

It uses an external mirror that is as tall as a man.

It is described as the perfect tool

for conducting scientific studies of Earth.

Things like tracking tectonic plates

or air pollution or studying the polar caps.

All to benefit humankind.

The benefits seem endless.

In November 1966, the first prototype

is ready for test launch.

Launch commit lights are green.

T minus 10 seconds.

The MOL enters orbit and remains in contact

with the Earth for 30 days.

It's a huge success.

But behind all the excitement

hides a stunning secret.

In 2015, the military declassifies documents

that expose the science project

as an elaborate cover story.

It's really a hidden base

designed to spy on the Russians.

Since 1960, the American military

has been monitoring Russia's nuclear capabilities

from surveillance satellites.

Photographs from space

of value to strategic intelligence

completely revolutionize the intelligence process.

After the cameras take the pictures,

the film needs to be processed back on Earth.

By that point, it could be too late to react.

What good is intel on an enemy attack

if it arrives too late to respond?

One solution is a spy camera operated by astronauts.

The crew on the MOL could actually

direct the camera at exactly what they

wanted to take a picture of.

They can report what they are looking at,

and then the crew back on Earth knows exactly

what photos they'll be getting.

From its orbit between 150 to 170 miles,

it can resolve places and objects 9,000 feet across.

That's easily big enough to get detail

from military installations and other really important sites

that the United States is trying to spy on.

The camera works,

but the price of this hidden space base?

A whopping $13 billion.

It was too expensive, and the evolution of technology

was making modern day satellites better equipped

to carry out the same operation

that the MOL was supposed to carry out.

The MOL is mothballed after just one flight,

but there's one more twist to this tale.

The cover story that the MOL will make discoveries

for the benefit of the planet ultimately comes true.

Technology from the MOL would be used in Skylab,

America's first space station.

Launched in May 1973, it proves humans can live

in space for weeks at a time.

In World War II, the U.S. military needs

to disguise a crucial 26-acre aircraft plant

from Japanese bombers.

So they turn to an amateur magician

and ask him to make the entire factory disappear.

When the Japanese bomb the U.S. fleet

at Pearl Harbor, the United States

immediately declares war against Japan.

But the United States is not particularly

well-prepared for a war with Japan,

and in February of 1942, about two months

after the Pearl Harbor attack, a Japanese submarine

surfaces off the coast of California

and shells an oil field.

And this really ramps up American fears

of the possibility of a Japanese attack

on the West Coast.

What the U.S. is really concerned with

is the vulnerability of our aircraft

and shipbuilding plants on the West Coast.

If the Japanese bombers were to strike there,

they could destroy this nascent industry

and just flatten it before it ever gets off the ground.

An attack on these factories

could totally cripple America's war effort.

One location in particular

keeps U.S. generals awake at night:

Boeing's vast Plant 2 aircraft factory.

Boeing's Plant 2 is a state-of-the-art

million square foot aircraft facility

in Seattle, Washington.

It employs over 30,000 workers who churn out

over 300 B-17 bombers a month.

To protect Plant 2, the U.S. military

turns to engineer Colonel John Ohmer Jr.

He's the perfect guy for this job.

Number one, he's an expert in camouflage.

And number two, as a hobby, he is a magician.

So who better to make an entire factory disappear?

If Ohmer can disguise Plant 2

to make it vanish,

it will be the greatest magic trick of his life.

But hiding a sprawling mega factory

will take far more than a few rolls of camo netting.

Ohmer must think bigger.

Ohmer decides to build an entire fake town

on the roof of the factory, a whole 3D model neighborhood

perched right on top of Plant 2.

Ohmer wants to make the entire Boeing

production plant disappear when viewed from above.

To any Japanese pilot, this giant aircraft facility

will look like just another residential suburb.

Ohmer's plan gets approved,

but given the possibility of a Japanese attack,

there's no time to lose.

For help, he turns to Hollywood.

The film business is filled with set designers, stagehands,

carpenters, and decorators who have made

their entire careers building fake worlds

on tight schedules.

Ohmer realizes that they're the perfect collaborators.

Ohmer recruits John Stewart Detlie,

an Oscar-nominated art director in Hollywood who's also married

to the star Veronica Lake, and puts him in charge

of the project up in Seattle.

Together, they assemble a Hollywood dream team

of 13 architects, 8 commercial artists,

7 landscape architects, 5 engineers,

and 1 soil management expert.

Nothing is overlooked.

They get to work on construction.

First, they stretch 26 acres of netting across the roof

of the plant 50 feet off the ground,

creating an elevated blank canvas.

On top of this, they begin to construct their fake town.

Next, the team has a brainwave.

From the air, it's impossible to tell how tall a building is.

And since they're running a race against time,

they decide to cut some corners.

They can build them a third of the height

using plywood and canvas.

Ohmer's attention to detail is incredible.

He actually gets Hollywood set designers

to create a special paint that won't absorb heat from the sun

and give away the fact that the fiberglass trees

are not authentic organic vegetative material.

Soon, a strange miniature town appears,

53 houses, a dozen garages, greenhouses,

a service station, even a corner store.

Then it's brought to life.

Detlie and his people put in fake trees

made out of fiberglass.

And for the foliage on the trees,

they use chicken feathers painted in appropriate greens.

Now all this Hollywood production needs

to make it sing is a cast.

Boeing employees are encouraged

to spend their breaks on the rooftop,

moving cars, straightening laundry,

or just lounging on fake porches.

The total cost of the subterfuge is $3 million.

Now, at the time, that's ten times the price

of making a major Hollywood movie.

By spring 1943, it's finished.

Now Ohmer's grand disguise needs to be put to the test

by top brass back in Washington.

They send cameras up in open cockpit planes.

They look down, capture images,

and what they find is startling.

The town works.

This giant factory with thousands of workers

has completely disappeared.

Japan's bombers never make it

to the U.S. mainland,

and Ohmer's illusion is never truly tested.

But the entire operation is kept secret from the public

until the end of the war.

It's only as the Americans are closing in

on the Japanese homeland in late July of 1945

that they feel confident enough to tell the public.

On July 23rd, three weeks before V-J Day,

"The Seattle Daily Times" unveils the fake town

to their astonished readers,

dubbing it the "Boeing Wonderland."

In the 1950s, the CIA creates an entire country.

It's on a 9,000-acre site in West Virginia,

and its secret purpose is to train the next generation

of super spies.

At the dawn of the Cold War,

the CIA realizes that this is a conflict

that's not going to be fought by traditional soldiers

with bullets and bombs, but by covert agents

stealing secrets from under the enemy's nose.

But when it comes to training spies, though,

the Americans are on their back foot

compared to their rivals at the KGB.

The KGB has a decades-old infrastructure

for training spies, and CIA is relatively new to the game.

So they realize that if they're going to keep up

with their KGB counterparts, they have to step up big.

The spy craft skills that could save your life

and maybe even your country

isn't something that's taught in any college or university.

The CIA brass realizes that their agents need training

to prepare them for the real world,

what they're gonna face out there in the field.

So in secret, they set up a new espionage university.

The first step is finding

the right place for a campus.

They need a very large place, someplace secluded,

someplace cut-off, but someplace large enough

with infrastructure enough to simulate the activities

of a normal city.

They find it at a former naval base

called Camp Peary.

It stretches for 9,000 acres,

more than half the size of Manhattan.

To the outside world, Camp Peary

remains a regular naval base.

But behind its fences, the site is transformed

into an elite proving ground for spies.

It's described as a regular naval training center,

designed not to invite a second look.

But trainees refer to it as the Farm,

and generations of spies are secretly schooled there,

right up to the present day.

Training begins when students leave

CIA headquarters in Langley on a blacked-out bus.

The men and women chosen for this are among the most elite.

They've gone through rigorous testing, psychological testing,

physical testing to prove that they are

truly the best of the best.

When a CIA trainee arrives at the Farm,

they leave their real identity at the door.

They're given a new cover story that they must maintain

throughout the training.

They are leaving the real world

to go into a fake world, a fake microstate

that simulates life in a foreign country.

And it's in this simulated country

that their undercover training begins.

The whole location of the Farm is one giant set.

There's a town square, a shady downtown neighborhood,

suburbs, and then the countryside.

Everyone on the site, from visiting diplomats

to the local café owner,

is a veteran CIA operative playing a role.

There's even a cable news channel

reporting on the region's fictional politics.

The Farm really is Disney World for adults.

In this college, lessons

aren't learned in the classroom

but on the streets of its fake town.

The foundation of undercover work

is being able to recruit and handle

foreign intelligence sources.

You're looking for people who have access to secrets.

The whole time, they're playing cat and mouse

with their rivals and enemies, other students and operatives

who are trying to catch them out.

Outfoxing the enemy calls for

some of the more advanced maneuvers

that a wannabe James Bond must learn.

They train how to flip a car during a car chase

and had to get in a firefight and not shoot

unarmed, innocent civilians,

how to parachute out of aircraft

and survive in the woods on no food.

You learn all the kind of things

that you would see in a spy movie.

New recruits are pushed

to the edge of their wits.

After six months of intense blood, sweat, tears, stress,

strain, anxiety, the siren blares out and signals

that the simulation is over, and any trainees that are left

have made the cut.

The government has never officially admitted

the Farm exists, and graduates rarely

go on the record about this hidden base--

until 2019.

Former CIA intelligence officer Amaryllis Fox

actually wrote about all of her experiences

at the Farm in her book, "Life Undercover."

The Farm is truly a journey

that's inspiring and pleasurable

more than it is something that's scary and terrifying.

The scary and terrifying part is

when you have to use those skills in the real world.

It's the Cold War, and underground nuke-proof

bunkers are all the rage. Every world leader has one.

For Stalin, though, protecting his government is not enough.

He wants a shelter big enough to hide his submarines.

By 1953, Stalin is growing incredibly concerned

by America's increasing nuclear arsenal,

and he fears that a single strike could knock out

a large part of his military.

In particular, his submarines.

At this time, the Soviet submarine fleet

is the largest in the world, boasting over 300 vessels.

And each one of these submarines

is worth over $10 million.

Stalin wants his billion dollar fleet

hidden away from prying eyes and safe from falling bombs.

Stalin orders something that has never been

attempted before, a nuclear-proof

underground stronghold with a secret gate to let subs

pass into and from the ocean in total secrecy.

To find a location for his super base,

Stalin turns to one of the few people he trusts,

Lavrentiy Beria.

Lavrentiy Beria is the head of the Soviet KGB.

He's in a position of great authority and power,

and a confidant of Stalin's.

Stalin turns to Beria to identify a place

for a reinforced submarine base that can survive

a thermonuclear attack.

Beria and his team spend months

scouring the coastlines, looking for an ideal location

that will afford maximum security

and natural protection.

They find a remote bay on the Black Sea called Balaklava.

Balaklava is home to a twisting inlet

around 200 meters deep.

It's sheltered from storms, with a narrow entrance

that's impossible to spot from the open sea.

It's also just 9 miles from the Soviet naval port

at Sevastopol, which houses Stalin's Black Sea fleet.

It's perfect.

Now Stalin's team must dig out

one of the world's biggest nuclear bunkers

without anyone realizing.

It's gonna take years to build.

And it's happening right around the corner

from a regular old fishing town.

So keeping it secret is gonna be a huge challenge.

The Soviets immediately declare Balaklava is closed

and effectively remove it from the map.

Then they secretly bus in workers

to start building the facility.

During the night, materials are brought in,

and during the night, debris that is being created

as they tunnel out a mountain is taken out.

Meanwhile, any entrances and ventilation shafts

are covered with netting.

This will protect the Soviets from any fly-over surveillance

that might see what's going on.

It takes eight years to extract

nearly 120,000 tons of rock from the mountain,

carving out a Cold War marvel in the process.

The finished base can hide ten submarines,

including seven in one central channel that's 500 meters long.

It also includes a dry dock, missile storage,

command rooms, and a power and filtration system,

all of it under 130 meters of rock

with 4.5-meter thick concrete walls.

It's designed to withstand a direct nuclear bomb strike

of up to 100 kilotons.

That's six to seven times that of the Hiroshima bomb.

It can be completely sealed

with a set of colossal underwater gates

made from 150 tons of solid steel.

They are 7 meters high, 10 meters wide,

and provide the final line of defense,

guaranteeing protection for the submarines inside.

The most secure room in the heart of the complex

is where the nuclear warheads are stored.

The base isn't just designed to withstand an atomic blast;

it's fully prepared for retaliation.

In the event of a nuclear war,

3,000 people can hide in here for up to 30 days.

This place is virtually indestructible.

Basically, it's something out of a Bond film.

Despite extreme efforts to avoid detection,

rumors about the Balaklava base start to leak out.

The area around Sevastopol is photographed.

The area of Balaklava is photographed.

U.S. spies piece together

small fragments of intel,

but the base is so effectively hidden

that its full nature remains shrouded in mystery.

Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union

is this secret site deactivated.

In 2003, this Cold War labyrinth

is open to the public as a museum.

For several years, its tunnels echo

with the footsteps of tourists rather than military officers.

But after Putin's invasion of Ukraine,

the base is back in the conversation.

And the rumors are, it's being reactivated.

America's first president had a Virginia estate

famously known as Mount Vernon.

Part of it is now a popular tourist spot named Fort Hunt.

But back in World War II, it served a much darker purpose

that was hidden from the public for decades.

The national park at Fort Hunt

has a direct link to America's founding father,

and was also a Confederate stronghold in the Civil War.

One day, a curious tourist is walking around the site

and asked one of the park rangers

what happened here during the Second World War.

And the park ranger was caught off-guard by this question

and said, well, I'm not sure, but I'm gonna have

to look into the matter.

The park service manages to track down the men

with the answers: veterans who had been sworn

to secrecy their whole lives.

But 60 years after the end of the war,

they shared the truth about Fort Hunt.

It was a prison codenamed after its address,

PO Box 1142.

The prisoners of war that are being incarcerated

at PO Box 1142 were high-ranking German officers

captured off of the battlefields of Europe

and North Africa who could provide

very useful intelligence information.

That Nazi prisoners are secretly brought to the U.S.

is surprising enough.

But what's more, the interrogations

at this black site are the opposite of what you'd expect.

They did the most primal thing

that we need as human beings. They allowed them to feel safe.

You inspire someone to share the truth

before they have an opportunity to lie.

And what they did to do that is, they treated them well.

These Germans are treated to luxury--

fine clothes, cocktails, trips to the swimming pool

and movies because the whole site is rigged

with hidden microphones.

The bugs are placed in the bedrooms, the mess hall,

even the trees.

Comfort rises, shields come down, mouths open up.

This was a bold move.

Counterintuitive interrogation is not new,

but there are few examples of it

being done in quite this way.

There's such secrecy behind this camp

because there would have been a complete public outcry

if the public knew how well we were treating Nazis.

The predominantly Jewish American interrogators

are refugees chosen for their fluency in German.

In this way, vital intelligence

is secretly extracted from the Nazis.

The most astonishing is the name of a location

that changes the course of the war for one ally--

Britain.

The United Kingdom had survived

the Battle of Britain and the blitz.

And then word starts to emerge that

something worse is coming:

The V1 rocket, also known as the "buzz bomb."

Then, incredibly, there's a breakthrough at PO Box 1142.

In the summer of 1943, during a chat

between two German naval officers in the room,

one of them lets slip that

when the work at Peenemuende prevails,

Germany will be victorious.

When Allied photo reconnaissance aircraft

then fly down and photograph Peenemuende,

they hit the jackpot.

The island is home to the secret rocket factory

where the V1 is being built.

The Allies immediately hit it with everything they've got.

596 Lancasters hit Peenemuende in one night

and absolutely destroyed the entire complex.

Forced the enemy to move all assembly underground.

And that's not how you win a war.

This one piece of intelligence

secretly obtained from two chatting Nazis at PO Box 1142

delays the Nazi plans.

This intelligence literally saved

hundreds of thousands of lives.

As they always say, loose lips sink ships.

When the war ends, PO Box 1142 is decommissioned.

Every reference to its mission is classified,

and its interrogators are sworn to secrecy.

Fort Hunt then kind of packs everything up,

and this chapter of its history is largely forgotten,

and the U.S. government kind of wants it to be forgotten.

And that's because the operation

that was carried out there was something that violated

our obligations in the treatment of prisoners of war.

We were not permitted to eavesdrop.

However controversial the tactics were,

they are now part of the history

that tourists come to enjoy at Fort Hunt.

From deep space bases to buried bunkers,

governments have long disguised secret sites across the Earth.

But no matter how hidden a black site is,

it will always be unearthed in the end.