Original subtitles

[dramatic soundtrack playing]

[narrator] In the secretive world of espionage,

spies work with the latest cutting-edge technology and devices

to gain the upper hand on the enemy.

When a spy's mission is to collect information by planting bugs,

secretly snapping a photo,

or stealing documents…

they turn to their tech ops to create the perfect device.

[man] If I had to describe the term "spycraft,"

I think it would run the gamut from, you know, tiny bugs

that we would plant to eavesdrop,

all the way up to the SR-71 Blackbird, the U-2, satellites.

So, from the miniature up to the massive.

Miniaturized collection platforms are a reality.

You can fly it into a room.

You can perch it on a windowsill.

It can sit and it can collect audio and video and transmit it back.

[narrator] The only limitation in creating gadgets for espionage

is the scope of the imagination.

[theme music playing]

[narrator] One of the most important goals in espionage

is to acquire sensitive intelligence about a foreign entity

through clandestine collection.

To succeed,

spies must employ the most innovative cutting-edge technology,

including powerful drones,

cyber attacks, hidden cameras,

lasers, audio surveillance,

and the latest in biometric scanning capabilities.

For spies to operate,

they must not only collect information

but have the ability to pass it along to their handlers

to be analyzed and used.

[narrator] Keith Melton is an internationally recognized author,

historian and expert on clandestine devices and technology.

He's also an avid protector

of the largest collection of espionage artifacts in the world.

For spies, the objective of an operation is usually

to steal your adversary's information without them ever knowing it's missing.

And we call that clandestine collection.

[narrator] Getting away with it without anyone finding out what you've done

is the biggest challenge for a spy.

Sixty-one-year-old Kevin Mallory, a former CIA case officer,

is contacted on LinkedIn by a man named Michael Yang

he believes is an employee of a Chinese think tank.

Mallory soon learns he's dealing with a Chinese intelligence officer.

They offer him money in exchange for information.

[Melton] He was desperately short of money.

He decides to sell out to China,

takes a trip over there,

and they give him a cell phone they tell him is secure

and he can use and send, communicate back and forth,

and it's unbreakable.

[narrator] Mallory's phone has been modified with software

to allow for secure communication

and the clandestine collection and transmission of secret documents.

In April 2017, surveillance videos capture Mallory

walk into a FedEx office in Virginia,

with a stack of classified documents he has scanned onto an SD card

and plugs it into his cell phone.

He then travels to Shanghai with the phone,

but when he returns, he suspects he's been made,

and comes up with a cover story for the CIA.

He gets a little nervous and goes into the CIA and says,

"I wanna alert you. I think they're trying to recruit me.

In fact, on my last trip,

they gave me this phone to communicate securely.

I know it's unbreakable but I want you to be aware of this.

We can probably play a game against them."

So, the fact that they're asking this kind of stuff

tells me either they want to be recognized or somehow they have a straighter--

that they're probably in the intel service.

[narrator] Mallory is confident all his covert communication with Michael Yang

has automatically been deleted

and voluntarily hands over his cell phone

to the FBI computer forensic examiner.

They did a hard reboot on it.

It opened up in an unsecure mode,

and while they're sitting with him,

they're reading all the messages he's sending back and forth.

And it showed he was not only accepting the tasking,

but he'd been communicating openly with the Chinese,

and he was caught red-handed.

[tense music playing]

[narrator] Messages between Mallory and Yang

indicate that he's been paid $25,000

for the delivery of several confidential documents.

Mallory is convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison

for spying for China.

Kevin Mallory's case reaffirms that a spy is only as good as his or her spyware,

and in Mallory's case, it was a total fail.

The recruitment of insider spies

is one tactic being used to collect information by China.

Another is the relentless use of cyber espionage.

Michele Van Cleave was appointed by President George W. Bush

to serve as the first statutory head of U.S. counterintelligence.

We've seen recently, uh,

Chinese penetrations into the U.S. government,

which has given them very specialized kinds of insights

about the operations that we may be conducting against them.

[narrator] One of the most devastating and damaging cyber attacks

was conducted by China and targeted the Office of Personnel Management,

the OPM, in 2015.

[man] The OPM breach was basically, Chinese hacking group,

uh, basically stole credentials from a laptop of an OPM contractor,

who went out and did background investigations.

[narrator] Robert Bigman was the former chief information security officer,

or CISO, responsible for all cyber security policy

and defense monitoring at the CIA for the last 15 years.

They basically were able to deploy some malware on that laptop.

They stole the credentials. His user ID, his password.

They were then able to log into the OPM network as him,

and since OPM didn't have

very sophisticated cyber technology at the time,

uh, they didn't detect it, and they were able to get in

and basically move laterally across the network

into various databases, and, as we like to say,

just basically raped the network

and just take out whatever they were looking for,

uh, and steal it and exfiltrate it up to China.

[Van Cleave] So now, having acquired these records,

the Chinese have highly developed insights

into some 22 million people whose names and faces

and personal information were contained in these OPM records,

because this is where anyone who's ever held a clearance in the U.S. government

has their files.

And so if you are… you are the Chinese intelligence services

and your job, like any intelligence service,

is to spot and assess…

individuals who might be of value to you,

with these OPM files,

you now have a roster that's done a great deal of the work

that would otherwise be very difficult to do one at a time.

[narrator] If you're a spy collecting secret information,

the Internet can be a goldmine,

especially if you're trying to infiltrate a server

with an antiquated security system.

[typing keys]

[Melton] Edward Snowden, very smart young man.

He worked at times for the University of Maryland,

which operated a facility

for the National Security Agency.

He later worked for CIA.

And he later worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency,

as a systems administrator in Hawaii,

which gave him a great deal of latitude

and freedom in operating the system,

because he was guarding the chicken coop.

He was the one that was guarding this system,

and he in turn was collecting information from that system.

[narrator] Snowden allegedly copied

over a million highly confidential and sensitive documents

onto thumb drives and smuggled them out of the NSA,

and then, he leaked them.

In 2013, he created a false story

that he had needed treatment for epilepsy,

and he traveled to Hong Kong.

He had a meeting with several reporters.

He claims he passed all of his thumb drives to them.

We now know that he was also meeting secretly

with representatives of the Russian government.

He has claimed that he took no hard drives with him.

No thumb drives.

Uh, that's not believable.

It's been later claimed and asserted

that the Russians and Chinese

declassified at least one million of the documents on the drives.

If you printed out all of the files that were on the thumb drives,

it would be a stack of information printed on 8½ by 11 paper,

it would be about four miles tall.

So it's a volume of information that is staggering.

It's literally the who's who and what's what

of every technical collection system

that the U.S. government was using.

[narrator] The capacity for an agent to rapidly collect

and move secret information via the Internet

is a valuable tool for espionage,

but the ability to carry vast amounts of intelligence information

in a device that can fit in your back pocket

is a game changer.

[Melton] Because a cell phone with an incredible algorithm

or encryption protocol on it looks just like the one in your pocket.

And that's what makes it so devilishly effective.

[narrator] Yet a cell phone can also increase the risk to an agent.

One of the first things many of us do when we land at an airport

is immediately turn on our phone.

But depending on where you land and what you're planning on doing there,

you may want to think twice.

Intelligence services use a technique

called "the man in the middle" attack.

And what they create is a small little mini tower

that may exist in the executive lounge of the airport.

It may exist in the concourse.

There may be several of them as soon as you're off the plane.

And once you turn your phone on,

rather than contact the closest major tower,

it reaches out to this little mini tower

that's controlled by an intelligence service.

It, in turn, contacts the major cell tower,

but because it's in the middle,

it can download everything on your phone

and it can put a virus on your phone in exchange,

and you will never, ever be aware of it.

And there are multiple cities in the world

in which that happens on a regular basis.

[narrator] For a spy caught in a "man in the middle" attack,

the results can be devastating.

He's working for us,

but he's using a device that's been compromised by the bad guys,

it's not going to take too long before, you know, they identify him

and either compromise him

or use him to send us false information.

[narrator] Although cell phones have vulnerabilities,

they're a vital clandestine collection device,

especially in their ability to quickly snap a photograph.

But long before the invention of the cell phone,

spies and their intelligence agencies had to come up with other creative means

to photograph secret information.

[atmospheric music playing]

Photography was so vital to espionage during the Cold War,

the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB,

established what they called "The Eleventh Laboratory,"

for the single purpose of creating a new generation

of small, easily-concealed cameras that could be smuggled into the workplace.

Document cameras were created that gave them the opportunity.

No one watching, they could quickly take out a fountain pen

and make a copy of a document.

They could take out a cigarette lighter, perhaps, and make a copy.

[narrator] Collecting secrets and effectively delivering them

to the intelligence agency is one of the biggest challenges for spies.

But imagine trying to do that as a spy working behind the Iron Curtain.

Benjamin Fischer was a former chief historian for the CIA.

[Fischer] You cannot meet agents behind the Iron Curtain

because the surveillance is so excessive.

You can't rent hotel rooms.

You can't buy an apartment, use it as a safe house.

All of these opportunities that we had in this case don't exist,

never existed behind the Iron Curtain.

[narrator] Gaining access and information from the Soviets was nearly impossible,

but in 1960, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency got lucky

when they were approached by Colonel Oleg Penkovsky.

PASSPORT

Colonel Oleg Penkovsky was a member of the, uh, GRU.

The GRU is military intelligence service.

In other words, the military counterpart to the KGB.

Penkovsky volunteered to spy.

It was a joint operation between the CIA and British intelligence.

Uh, the CIA and the British put together a four-man team,

two Americans, two British case officers.

Uh, we had… it was an exceptional operation

in that Penkovsky was allowed to travel to the West

on three separate occasions, and this provided an opportunity

to sit in a hotel room and debrief him at length.

[clicks]

[narrator] Code named "Hero,"

Penkovsky spied for both the CIA and British intelligence.

He was given subminiature document copy cameras,

like the German-made Minox.

The Minox had been around since World War II,

but by the time Penkovsky got his hands on one,

it had been updated and outfitted with a special lens

that could focus up to eight inches away from a document.

[Fischer] He provided about

10,000 frames of photographs of Soviet military documents.

He told us what the Soviet war plans were.

He had seen them, he helped draft them.

This helped make sense of what we were seeing and hearing

through our technical collection operations.

It was an almost perfect symmetry.

Penkovsky is without exception, and by universal consensus,

the best agent that the West had during the entire Cold War.

[narrator] Eventually, the Soviets caught on

and Penkovsky was arrested

and was executed in 1962.

With the death of their most successful spy,

the CIA realized they needed to develop more specialized espionage equipment

for their agents working in the Soviet Union,

and put the task on the CIA's Office of Technical Service.

The OTS was responsible for developing cutting-edge technologies

for CIA officers and agents in the field.

One of them was Polish General Staff Officer Ryszard Kukliński.

Kukliński was a man who was both disillusioned

with the Communist system in Poland,

and wanted to help the West.

So the CIA virtually used

every bit of their technology, everything they had, to keep him working.

They would have sent him a covert communication device

that enabled him to somehow send messages

similar to a, a early form of a digital pager.

He could covert-- Send covert messages secretly.

[narrator] The OTS also armed him

with one of their most effective spy cameras.

[Melton] It was called the Tropel.

And the camera module was designed

to be concealed in multiple applications.

It could be hidden in a fountain pen.

It could be concealed in a Bic-style cigarette lighter.

They even made one version that was designed to be concealed

inside a Seiko digital wristwatch.

It would be an active concealment.

But it may only work 10 or 20 times,

but each time he depressed it,

it's gonna secretly be taking a picture.

[tense music playing]

[narrator] Kukliński provided the CIA with over 40,000 secret documents

in an amazing ten years of spying for the United States.

Ultimately, Polish intelligence became suspicious,

but before they could get their hands on him,

he and his family were safely extradited to the United States.

Today, high-def cameras can be concealed in almost any device

to photograph, record, or live-stream intelligence

from the ocean to the sky.

Having an aerial view of the enemy is valuable for espionage.

Creative devices were invented to gain this perspective

as early as the American Civil War.

We saw an early daguerreotype camera

taken up on a balloon

and used to photograph an enemy battle space.

[brash string music playing]

[whirring]

The ability to see from an altitude of a bird

is something that people had wished for for centuries.

Now we see that that technology has new applications

when we have balloons that can remain in place

over a fixed position for weeks and even months

and serve as aerial platforms.

[beeping]

[narrator] Modern spy balloons are deployed to conflict zones

and to American southern U.S. borders to search for drug smugglers

and illegal immigrants.

The U.S. military is currently conducting wide-area surveillance tests

using experimental high-altitude balloons

that travel up to 65,000 feet

and provide a persistent surveillance system.

[whirring]

They're sometimes referred to as "Combat TiVo"…

because when an event occurs,

it has the capability to rewind the tape to see exactly what happened,

and more importantly, who was involved.

[whirring]

Some vital clandestine collection is beyond the reach of human senses,

which is why scientists and engineers came up with a way

to direct espionage from outer space,

using reconnaissance or spy satellites that use signal intelligence

to pick up electronic signals by foreign targets.

Satellites were, of course, the next great evolution.

And when the Corona satellite went up in the early 1960s,

on its first pass over the Soviet Union,

it took more imagery than all of the other pictures

that had ever been taken from the air of the Soviet Union,

in terms of square miles.

Satellites…

are one of the most effective collection tools in the world.

Their limitation is that they are very difficult to maneuver.

And to maneuver a satellite and position it takes time,

and it may not be in time, depending on an operation.

[narrator] To counter the limitations of satellites,

a more effective and formidable device was invented.

The drone.

That we find is, if you can put similar platforms on a drone,

that drone may stay aloft for 26 hours, 30 hours, maybe even longer,

and you can position a drone above a site

and keep it in place and have active communications.

You can look through clouds. You can have your infrared.

You can detect people, even if they're inside tents,

because of the heat signature.

And so the future is no longer satellites.

It's putting it in these mobile platforms that you can launch

that are far less expensive, and you can put them almost everywhere that you need.

[narrator] DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,

is at the forefront in developing emerging technologies

like drones, to be used by the military.

[accelerated whirring]

[Melton] DARPA creates systems that,

the smallest would be the size of your small fingernail.

It would look like a large horsefly.

It's maneuverable.

It's essentially a mobile collection platform.

It can have a television camera.

You can fly it into a room, you can perch it on a windowsill.

It can sit and it can collect audio and video and transmit it back.

[narrator] Along with the capture of imagery,

the ability to pick up clear audio of what your adversaries are saying

is also a critical resource for espionage.

[suspenseful music playing]

Ray Parrack was a former engineer

for the Office of Technical Service at the CIA

and was responsible for picking up secret conversations through the static.

[Parrack] My specific area was building audio surveillance equipment.

The radio bugs that were put into people's apartments and condos

and residences to hear what they were saying.

These were devices that had radio transmitters

that would transmit the voice out from a room,

so we actually had some transistors from the early Bell Labs work

that went into some of our radio microphones.

[narrator] During the Cold War,

if you needed to listen to a conversation on the other side of the wall,

you used to have to drill holes and run audio cables through it.

But today it can be as easy a process

as changing a light bulb.

And that light bulb is a collector.

When voice is collected,

it modifies the frequency by which the fluorescent bulb pulses.

And that light at night can be detected

from a great distance away

by a very sophisticated telephoto lens

and can be run into a system.

-[agent] …be careful to keep my tracks… -[handler] Of course.

[agent] …clean, and no fingerprints, just like these documents.

No fingerprints.

I can't afford to lose my…

And you can recover the speech,

even if the drapes in the room are closed.

Because they've used night vision,

there's enough leakage around the corners of the drape,

they can still pick up everything you're saying.

That is one of the most difficult systems in the world to prevent.

[narrator] Another breakthrough in espionage

occurred in the early '60s with the advent of laser technology.

Today, lasers have increased in power and scale

and have applications for clandestine collection.

[Melton] Laser collection systems are scary in their capability.

Almost line of sight, infrared.

You have the ability to focus it on a window pane

and collect from any sound vibration in a room.

You can focus it inside the room on a Styrofoam cup on someone's desk.

You could photograph.

You could focus it on their eyeglass frame and pick up audio.

[narrator] The long-range laser microphone

is a highly sophisticated surveillance apparatus

that utilizes an invisible infrared laser beam

to eavesdrop on an exterior window of a targeted room

with a range of over 1,500 feet.

Acoustic soundwaves, like human speech,

cause minute vibrations that can be modulated by an invisible laser beam

aimed at the target.

This modulated laser light can be picked up by a special receiver

and demodulated to recover the speech.

[indistinct crowd noises, conversations]

[narrator] Advanced technology,

specifically in the development of biometrics,

has made it easier to catch the bad guy.

But on the flip side, it's made an art

of being a covert operative more difficult and dangerous.

A facial recognition system uses biometrics

to map facial features for a photograph or video

and compares the information with a database of known faces to match.

[beeping]

Facial recognition software reads the geometry of your face.

Key factors include the distance between your eyes

and the distance from forehead to chin.

The software identifies facial landmarks.

One system identifies 68 of them that are key to distinguishing your face.

The result, your facial signature.

Today, authorities in China are using facial recognition technology

to spot suspects with the use of high-tech glasses

that can verify a person's identity within minutes.

The glasses are installed with a camera attachment

which can snap a photograph from up to 17 feet away.

The photo can then be run through a database

allowing officers to gain information on the target's name, ethnicity.

It can also detail information on the hotel someone is staying at,

Internet history, or criminal background.

The use of facial scanners and similar technologies are widespread,

not only in China but at airports, concerts, by mobile phone makers,

in college classrooms and on social media.

Fatih Comlekoglu is the CTO of cyber security company Appguard Inc.

and is an expert on preventative defense,

and what many in the field call "zero trust space."

If the application is exploited,

it is even worse, because it is you using that thing.

On behalf of you, they are able to post messages,

they are able to say some things that you did not actually say.

[narrator] The creation of facial recognition

combined with fingerprinting software

may actually make it much harder to defend yourself against hackers.

They still pose risks

in identifying, correctly identifying, the user.

At the same time, the information they capture

can be used by adversaries

in a way that's spoofing your identity.

Your information can be captured and reused by other parties,

or the system can be fooled into pretending to be you.

[narrator] Even seemingly benign applications

can have serious implications.

Hamlet Yousef is a managing partner at Irongate Capital Advisors

and invests in defense-related technologies.

Anyone who's downloaded the recent OS for Apple or has an Android

has seen a feature where, when I'm talking to you on my phone,

you see like a chicken or a dog or an animated figure.

Well, it's not gonna take that much time to modify that device

or modify that image, so instead of it being a cartoon character,

it is a human being, or looks like a human being, but it's really not you.

The impact that's gonna have on anonymity,

on denial and deception, is gonna be massive.

[narrator] In the world of espionage,

collecting information is only half of the battle.

The other half is counterintelligence

and protecting the information we already have.

[Yousef] Cybersecurity is going to be a critical area of focus

here in the 21st century.

Uh, what you're seeing is, not only are governments worried about this,

but more important, businesses are starting to be worried as well,

because if you spent billions of dollars in developing a certain product,

all the research dollars, all the development, all the testing,

uh, but if one of your competitors gets access to your secret sauce

or access to your plans and is able to beat you to market

with reverse-engineered or better product for a fraction of the cost,

uh, that's a massive impact in terms of GDP.

A massive impact on the bottom line.

[Van Cleave] You can lock all the doors and batten down all of the windows.

You are still going to find a determined adversary…

finding ways to break through that security

to get to the things that they need.

[Melton] At the heart of every operation,

you want to collect information in a way

that your adversary doesn't know it's missing.

Regardless of the technology you used

and regardless of where the information was hidden,

because information that they don't know is missing,

is exploitable and far more valuable.

Clandestine collection will always be at the heart of espionage.

They always describe the espionage as a chess match, right?

You move, we countermove, you move, we countermove.

It's the same thing with electronics.

We need to appreciate the extent to which we're vulnerable,

but also look for ways that we can defeat that.

[Melton] Intelligence services are always on a near-wartime footing.

The services themselves are always fighting.

You're fighting either to steal secrets

or you're fighting to protect the secrets that you have, so,

there's never a moment you can relax.

[atmospheric music playing]