Original subtitles

In the midst of World War Two,

word circulates among the Allies

that the Nazis are developing a new type of weapon, an atomic weapon,

one that could change the very outcome of the war.

This revelation threatens the fragile allied nations,

as governments become tight-lipped about their own clandestine projects

to develop this new weapon.

Having control over this technology

would push a country to the top of the world,

basically make them a superpower.

A world already out of control is thrust into a Cold War.

This is a real military race to create a bomb.

So all hands on deck.

To gain an advantage in the atomic race,

a new generation of spies is born,

more cunning, dangerous, and far better equipped

than ever before.

It was a species of espionage that no-one had been aware of.

As Soviet spies infiltrate government laboratories,

the risks are higher than ever.

You don't know even who among your own people

are working for the other side.

People were governed by fear.

How long can the Allies protect their most top-secret project?

How can they begin to identify the spies living among them?

Who will win the race to crack the atomic code?

After World War Two,

emerging superpowers stand on the brink of utter destruction

while spies work to control entire nations in the shadows.

As the Cold War deepens,

paranoia persists in a world of double agents,

sleeper cells, and covert networks.

Trust is impossible, and threats are everywhere.

It's often hard to exactly date when the Cold War begins

because there is no declaration of war.

It just becomes that.

Soviet spies once embarked on covert missions

to infiltrate every corner of the world.

During the Second World War and the First World War,

there are very clear battlefields.

And in the Cold War, that becomes less defined.

Even who the enemy is becomes less defined.

In the years that follow,

clandestine missions would be launched that could and would

change the course of global politics and science.

What begins to occur in the Cold War

is we get a kind of espionage industry

that already has been triggered by the Second World War.

The cloak and dagger era has begun.

Whether all parties are aware or not,

dignitaries will work as double agents,

scientists will smuggle deadly formulas to their enemies,

and propaganda and paranoia will turn neighbours on neighbours

and tear families apart.

There has been this ally-ship formed

for the sake of defeating Nazi Germany,

but the question is how long is that going to last?

News that German chemists Fritz Strassmann and Otto Hahn

have unexpectedly discovered the secrets to nuclear fission

reaches the US.

There was enormous interest in atomic fission,

but it was never quite certain whether this could really be realised

into something real, something useful.

As this piece of intel starts to spread,

some of the world's most powerful nations

begin to think of what such a weapon could mean.

Although the bomb hadn't yet been created,

there was a strong understanding of what nuclear fission meant

and what type of weapon the science could create.

After years of war in Europe,

the prospect of the Germans having control of this weapon

was terrifying to the Allies.

This is about more than just technology.

The outcome will undoubtedly tip the scales of power

in one direction or another.

It's a race. That's the key word.

This isn't an academic enterprise.

This is a physical, real military race to create a bomb.

So all hands on deck.

Having control over this technology and over this military device

would push a country to the top of the world,

basically make them a superpower.

In 1941, scientists

from the UK Military Application of Uranium Detonation,

or MAUD Committee,

determined that a nuclear bomb is feasible

and could be created before the war is over.

As a response, they begin work on their own super weapon -

codename Tube Alloys.

Across the pond, the US develops their own effort,

dubbed the Manhattan Project.

The clandestine project moves

from Manhattan to Oak Ridge, Tennessee,

Hanford, Washington,

and Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The scientists were gathered from allied countries,

including Canada, the UK, and recent emigres from Europe.

Of course, Oppenheimer became one of the main scientists

who led the scientific team in the Manhattan Project,

and they were concentrated in a place.

Now, you had to have very tight security,

so they chose Los Alamos in New Mexico

to be able to get the scientists together,

and they wouldn't have a lot of freedoms.

At this point,

the United States have the upper hand in terms of resources,

in terms of space.

They also weren't a nation that had battlefields

in the same way that the United Kingdom did.

And so they are moving forward with this project

faster than the British are.

Out of growing concern,

Russian physicist Georgii Flyorov sends a letter to Stalin

warning him that the allies are developing a super weapon,

urging him to do the same.

But this information wasn't willingly shared,

it was discovered.

This creates a lot of distrust between the Allied nations,

pushing forward secretive and separate nuclear programs.

The Soviets are growing concerned about what this could mean

in the long run.

At this point, they're working with the US and the UK

in the fight against the Germans,

but that doesn't mean

they're willing to let the West get the upper hand.

If some kind of world-altering super weapon is to be built,

the Soviets want to be the ones to do it.

At the very least, they won't be caught unprepared.

Nations want to gain control of the bomb.

It's that power.

Associated with that power is also the fear that another country

is going to get that power,

and what that's going to mean for them.

In September of 1945,

a man from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa

pleads with Canadian authorities and the media for help,

claiming to be a Soviet spy.

His name was Igor Gouzenko.

Who is this man and can he be trusted?

There's a lot of debate as to when the Cold War began.

But many people point to Igor Gouzenko's defection in Ottawa

as the moment that Canada's Cold War really begins.

In 1943, in the midst of World War Two,

Igor Gouzenko is sent to Ottawa

under the guise of the Soviet Embassy,

while both countries are considered political allies.

Igor Gouzenko was a cipher clerk,

which means that he was in charge of encoding information

and sending it back to the Soviet Union.

He was working out of the Russian Embassy.

His job as a cipher clerk literally was to take transmissions

and send them back and forth,

and he's also been accused

of making a mistake in some of his work.

And mistakes are not really tolerated very well

by Stalin's government.

Over time, Gouzenko begins to understand his true role,

learning that the GRU,

and another secret intelligence organisation,

the NKVD, People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs,

are using the embassy as a dark headquarters

from which to spy on their allies.

Gouzenko was an officer in the GRU,

which is Russian military intelligence,

Soviet military intelligence, based in the Defence Department.

Most espionage is operated by professionals

out of an embassy under diplomatic cover,

and so if they're ever caught, they have diplomatic immunity.

The big surprise after the Second World War

is how much spying the Allies had been doing against each other

during the war,

and this is especially true of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union had spies throughout its allied countries,

many who had been there working for the Soviet Union

even before the Second World War,

and they continued to gather intelligence

during the Second World War.

His position makes him privy to intricate knowledge

of Soviet agents active in numerous Canadian government offices,

including the House of Commons,

National Defence and External Affairs.

He also became aware

of Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project.

Secrecy was paramount to keep full control over the nuclear secrets.

With the US President Franklin D Roosevelt initially hesitant

to share the Manhattan Project progress with British teams,

the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, turns to Canada,

hoping Prime Minister Mackenzie King would be more receptive.

Canada has uranium,

and uranium is essential to building the atomic bomb,

and uranium is also incredibly scarce.

So that Canada has this resource makes it invaluable

to both the United States and Britain at this time.

And more important than just the uranium itself.

Canada was in a relatively safe position to supply this uranium,

either to the United Kingdom or especially to the United States.

But on top of that, Canada's geography really mattered.

It was far away from the war in Europe.

It was a safe home for British scientists

to work on an atomic project,

as a number of British scientists and also French scientists

came to Montreal

and worked with scientists from the government of Canada

to create the Montreal Laboratory

to continue work into atomic science.

Well, there weren't that many nuclear scientists in the world

at the time,

so any place that had people who were gathering

to study nuclear chemistry was key.

In the race to create one of the most powerful weapons

the world has ever seen,

the US and UK realised collaboration can push them ahead of the rest.

In 1943, Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt

arrived in Quebec to discuss a top-secret deal,

merging projects to advance their nuclear efforts.

While made on Canadian soil,

Prime Minister Mackenzie King is not privy to the full deal.

There's a very uneasy relationship between these states.

They distrust each other.

They disagree on major strategy during the war.

This is a moment in a very tenuous relationship within the Allies

of cohesion and agreement.

The Quebec Agreement,

even though it involved leaders of three different countries,

it was very much an agreement between two countries,

and that was the United States and Britain.

The agreement was that together,

these nations, with Canada's resources,

would work together to create a nuclear bomb.

Early September 1944,

Gouzenko is informed that he's being recalled to Moscow.

Stalin's rule over Russia was incredibly brutal.

He disappeared thousands of people.

He executed people who were considered opponents.

You know, there's a tradition in Soviet intelligence

that you get a promotion and you're called back.

And as soon as you arrive home, you're shot.

And so Gouzenko had a number of penalties entered into his record

by the Soviet security officer at the Embassy

for leaving documents out on his desk unlocked.

And so as he's getting these penalties,

he's now also being told he's being returned back to Moscow,

and there's probably a promotion waiting for him there.

Not a good sign.

Armed with 109 stolen documents,

Gouzenko lifts the veil on a 20-person spy ring in Ottawa.

This is politically explosive.

How could the government have been so naive

to allow these Soviet intelligence officers into Canada

to build these spy rings?

Would it embarrass Canada with its allies,

with the British and the Americans,

sort of revealing that Canadian security had been weak?

And what would the Canadian public think?

It was a total shock

that revealed problems in all of the allied countries.

Weaknesses in all of those states.

It seemed like everything was going wrong at once.

And the government did not know how to deal with it.

For a country that was supposed to be an ally,

the Soviet Union was doing very nefarious things.

It was a wake-up call to the West.

Prime Minister Mackenzie King

is worried about the fallout of this information

and keeps Gouzenko a secret, for now.

If they're spying on Canada,

it means that they're spying ten times more

on the United States and Great Britain.

So this isn't just a Canadian affair.

It is exactly as Mackenzie King wrote,

it was a "species of espionage" that no-one had been aware of.

But it's something that the Soviet Union had been doing

because of its internationalist ideology and agenda.

It was recruiting people from all classes,

from all countries, all nations,

in the way, certainly, Western operatives could not.

The documents Gouzenko presents to the Canadian government reveal

the Soviet Embassy was a home to several spies

connected to agents in Montreal,

the United States and the United Kingdom,

that had been providing Moscow with classified information

ranging from ciphers to atomic research.

One of the most important names in these documents is Alan Nunn May,

one of the first Soviet spies of the Cold War era.

So what he's working on is going to be elemental

to the building of the first atomic bomb,

and he's the lead scientist on it.

And so he's privy to

a whole host of really detailed scientific information

about the actual building of a bomb.

So you're talking about high sciences now.

And so the espionage itself now is getting technological.

The information is being gathered.

We're talking about highly educated scientists

with top-secret clearance working on something

that they are not even sure is going to be working as well.

But who was May?

And just how vital was he to the Soviets?

Flashback to 1940.

Alan Nunn May, a British physicist,

is working at Cambridge University on Tube Alloys

when he comes across a confidential US report

that he discreetly passes on to the Soviet Union.

Russian spies like Nunn

are recruited from a generation of anti-Nazis from the 1930s.

They never had a sense

that they were betraying their own country.

They thought they were fighting Nazism.

You would call these types of individuals essentially co-optees.

Someone who had been co-opted to work for an adversary

rather than a traditional spy that's trained by another country.

In a way, it's May who tips the first domino,

causing a chain reaction.

This report proves that the US knew something that the Soviets didn't.

The fact that you could have a British scientist

sharing British secrets with the Soviet Union

raises doubt as to who else could be doing this.

Who else could be spying for the Soviet Union?

While working at the Montreal lab, May works under the code name Alec

to gather vital technical information and uranium samples

that he passes on to the GRU or the Soviet military intelligence.

What he's capable of doing

is to get very small samples of uranium isotopes,

and then give it to a courier

that is designated by a Soviet attache,

somebody who's running the intelligence agency.

It's a dangerous enterprise.

May smuggles isotopes of uranium 233 and 235,

along with technical information on atomic reactors

out of the Montreal lab.

The information that would be gained at this point in the program

would have been a very big deal for the Soviet Union,

who was in a very early part of their development

of a nuclear bomb.

Thanks to the new collaboration between the US and the UK,

May is also privy to information about the Manhattan Project,

including information on the top secret Trinity test,

and the nuclear materials being used at the Oak and Hartford sites.

Through him, the Soviet scientists

have a finger on the pulse of the West's nuclear progress.

More importantly,

they now have their hands on two potential elements

that could unlock the formula for their own nuclear reactors.

All this while the US and UK are operating under the assumption

that the Quebec Agreement

has created an airtight seal on their nuclear secrets.

The revelation of the atomic spies is going to create a major rift

between the United States and the United Kingdom,

and it's actually going to separate their atomic weapons programs.

May becomes the first person to be convicted

for supplying atomic research secrets to the Soviet Union.

He maintains he never committed treason,

and the Soviets were allies against Japan and Germany.

In the 1960s, a masked Gouzenko appears on the CBC

with lasting effects.

Interestingly, Gouzenko becomes a household name,

but his face does not.

So he's trying to give the general public a sense, an awareness,

of what the Soviets were doing.

He's trying to give them a better understanding of spying,

how this activity works,

how people might be blackmailed into the activity.

This is something that's really the stuff of novels.

Suspicion and paranoia of communist spies

and distrust between the Soviet Union and the West

help ignite the Cold War, politically and publicly.

You don't know even who among your own people

are working for the other side.

With that kind of level of distrust, the Western powers realise

that they can't even be sure of themselves.

And that is actually something

that Stalin also wanted to create too,

because that would make the West less powerful.

In 1945, the US prepares to detonate their first nuclear bomb

in Los Alamos.

If successful, it would trigger the start of the Atomic Age.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

And all.

This was absolutely an unprecedented explosion.

The light that was emitted

was something that had never occurred on Earth before

from a manufactured object.

It is overpowering.

Even people who knew what to expect were surprised,

and even people who were really excited about it

were terrified about what it could mean.

Oppenheimer saw this awesome and awful destructive capability

and used that opportunity to think about what this meant for humanity.

And then he took a quote from the Bhagavad Gita which said,

"Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds."

Right. The nuclear genie had gotten out of the bottle,

and there was no way to put it back again.

Tensions rise,

the USSR feels the urgency to have their own nuclear weapons

and the Soviet trust shifts.

The Trinity test marks a major milestone not only for the US,

but for humankind.

In the Atomic Age,

nuclear power becomes a source of energy for entire cities

with the capacity to destroy them.

In some senses,

it was like they had reached the end point of science.

Man had harnessed the power of the sun.

There was no doubt in anyone's mind

that they'd unleashed a new force in the world,

and many of the scientists certainly wondered

what that meant for the future of humanity

now that this power was available to governments.

NEWSREEL: No matter where we live,

we must be ready all the time for the atomic bomb.

Following the success of the Trinity test,

President Harry S Truman makes the call.

The US will use its nuclear weapons on Japan.

After the Trinity test,

the Americans wanted to test this weapon

on a population, on a city,

to see how it worked.

We shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.

August 6th, 1945.

The Americans dropped a bomb

similar to the one used at the Trinity test site,

nicknamed Little Boy, on Hiroshima,

and three days later,

they dropped another bomb nicknamed Fat Man on Nagasaki.

The actual devastation,

never mind from the initial wave of destruction

that would essentially kill everybody instantly,

who was near that shock wave.

But even what things look like on the ground, just around you,

you were in an instant apocalypse.

The radiation fallout

is what separates nuclear weapons from conventional weapons.

So the immediate damage from these bombs

was shocking for people around the world watching,

and the utter devastation of both of these cities

at the hands of the Americans

changes the understanding of what is the battlefield in this new war.

Even with World War Two officially coming to an end,

tensions were rising.

When the bomb goes off, Stalin's reaction changes.

There was something about seeing the actual effects of the bomb

that caused him to realise just how powerful it was,

and how powerful the United States had become.

That helped ignite a lot of the Soviet efforts.

The West appears to have the advantage,

but the East is armed with a new motivation,

and a new strategy.

Spying wasn't new in a military context,

but in the Cold War, spying became something new,

and the fear of spying took hold of citizens

in both the Soviet Union and the United States.

A shift in the strategy within the MGB

ushers in a new era of espionage,

one utilising illegals to spy on other countries.

The former technique of using legal spies

involved sending Soviet informants abroad

under some kind of diplomatic or other official cover.

This new generation of illegals would not have the same luxury.

Agents are now being specially trained to talk, think and act

like the citizens from the country they're being sent to.

The scariest kind of spy, or the scariest kind of espionage,

is the one that is sown from within a particular country.

Or you have someone who takes on a completely different identity

and is infiltrated into the adversary's nation.

They're posing as maybe a businessman or a school teacher.

They're learning the language of their adversary.

They're adopting false identities of the target country.

And in American nomenclature, they're known as NOCs and OC.

Non-official cover.

And so they're kind of what we imagine

the James Bond kind of operative.

That requires significant training and things like languages.

Obviously, you don't want to show up with a big, heavy accent

in a foreign location.

You'd have a resume that, you know,

answers all the questions of what you've done since birth,

who your parents were.

Those are really developed spies.

So, you did have to essentially live a fake life, with a fake family.

But fake, but also real.

From the moment they touched down on foreign soil,

these illegals are to adopt fake identities,

taking on the name of real people who had died.

Tombstoning was a technique that, until very recently,

was used where you would try to find a tombstone of a child,

that more or less is equivalent to your birth date.

You then get that child's birth certificate,

and on the birth certificate, there's no entry of a death.

With that birth certificate, you get a driver's license.

With that driver's license, birth certificate, you get a passport,

and away you go.

Detailed biographies are created, complete with birth certificates,

while the churches are paid off to erase death records.

Illegals take on normal jobs, live in suburbs,

and operate without the protection of diplomatic immunity.

The illegals are the ones

who are doing the most dangerous work,

because if they're captured, and they're exposed,

they face perhaps even the death penalty for spying.

This added layer of danger

forces them to perhaps become better than any of the spies

that came before.

The greatest asset illegal spies had in smuggling information

out of top secret establishments like Los Alamos

are a group called the Volunteers,

a handful of American-born men and women

who voluntarily supported and aided the Soviets,

becoming spies in their own right.

Some of these members are hand-picked by Soviet spies

after being identified for their communist-leaning ideologies.

It wasn't so much

that they were working against their own government,

but they believed the world would be a better place

and a safer place

if the Soviet Union had access to the same information

that the United States and the United Kingdom did.

So for many of these people, there was a certain naivete,

but a certain idealism, that they could build a better world

by sharing this information with the Soviet Union.

Volunteers operate with code names.

Today, some have been identified while others are still unknown.

The volunteer network carries out cloak and dagger operations

to gather intel straight from the source,

smuggling them out of high-security facilities

or manipulating those with knowledge to spill their secrets.

It's believed all the information

is being passed to illegals operating out of New York.

Some of the earliest pieces of information about the atomic bomb

to come out of the volunteer network comes from brother in laws

Julius Rosenberg and David Greenglass.

The Rosenbergs actually were detected, you could say,

really because of Alan Nunn May.

Because once he starts to reveal his network,

and how that starts to unravel,

people that are connected to the Rosenbergs.

In 1943, Rosenberg and Greenglass worked on the Manhattan Project

and compiled notes from conversations with fellow workers

about aspects of atomic research.

It's alleged David Greenglass' wife, Ruth Greenglass,

and his sister, Ethel Rosenberg,

assisted the men in the dictation of their notes.

They delivered the first public revelation

of the implosion bomb design.

But the sketch was rough

and missing important details needed by the Soviets.

American physicist Theodore 'Ted' Hall

would be the man to get it for them in the 1940s.

Hall is working on the Manhattan Project

when he grows concerned

about the consequences of an American monopoly

of atomic weapons after the war.

His fears led him straight to the Soviet Union.

Theodore Hall was a very young man.

He was 19

when he's brought in as a superstar undergraduate student,

an A plus recommended by a prof at Harvard

to go and to work on this project.

It shows you, in part, the desperation of the project,

that he's not yet fully a scientist, but they bring him in.

And at Los Alamos, he's privy, of course,

to a lot of really important secrets about the development of the bomb.

For the Soviets, having an American-born physicist

that has access to nuclear technology,

it's a huge win.

For the Americans, it's a disaster.

In October 1944, Hall shares his first piece of information

with the Soviets.

He hands over a report on the work being done at Los Alamos,

along with the names of all the scientists working there.

With this information,

Soviet spies know exactly who to target for information

and who to try and flip.

This puts the information they possess and their lives at risk.

Hall enters an arrangement with the Soviets

along with his friend and college room-mate, Saville Sax,

who becomes his courier.

The courier would be the one who actually assumes a lot of risk

in this particular arrangement,

because they're trying to pass secrets and intelligence

from one individual, the source, back to the handler.

Hall and Sax worked together to pass on handwritten notes

that outline the basic science behind the atomic bomb.

These notes outline something called the implosion principle,

designed for nuclear explosions.

Russian scientists were lagging behind,

but these notes gave them the advantage they needed

to catch up.

Armed with top-secret intel, and fuelled by animosity,

the Soviet threat was growing by the day.

Could this all have been stopped, or at least delayed,

had Hall not been so convinced that it was his responsibility

to stop the US from controlling nuclear power?

By the spring of 1945?

Sax returns to finish his schooling at Harvard,

and is replaced by the far more professional Lona Cohen,

who, along with her husband,

are highly skilled in the art of espionage,

playing integral roles to the Volunteer program.

Lona enters the picture at a time

when security at Los Alamos is at its highest,

yet she still manages to evade suspicion.

In 1945, Lona is carrying smuggled documents

containing secrets to the Manhattan Project.

How does Lona manage to evade questioning and capture

when she comes face to face with American agents?

Smartly, as a police officer is checking people and her included,

she stuffs the information in the bottom of a Kleenex box,

which is smart

because a lot of people wouldn't necessarily look there.

And then, of course, has a cough or a sneeze

to sort of catch the police officer off guard.

Lona holds in her hands a complete diagram of the first atomic bomb.

This gives the Soviets the final piece of the puzzle.

They now have the formula, the ingredients and the blueprint

to build their very own super weapon.

The stakes couldn't be higher.

The worst part is,

the world has no idea what a major step forward

the Soviets are about to take.

In August 1949, much sooner than anyone expected,

Soviet physicist Igor Kurchatov

led the Soviet bomb program to success

with the test of first lightning

at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.

That must have been a very scary moment for the Americans as well,

to know that now there is a competitor.

It was a shocker

when weather planes began to detect those radiation traces,

that there was an actual detonation that took place.

And the Russians have a bomb.

Undoubtedly, such an advancement was made

thanks to stolen intelligence.

The West needs to move quickly and catch and cut off Soviet spies.

Now you have a bipolar world.

You have two nuclear arms.

With the push of a button,

hundreds of thousands of people could be killed

and entire cities obliterated.

The West's worst fears have been realised.

In 1943, the US and UK joined forces on a decoding project

to decipher telegraph cables being sent to Moscow.

The Venona Project was a project

where they intercepted Soviet intelligence communications

going through diplomatic channels in the US,

reporting on various agents.

Venona was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the United States

in terms of espionage.

And it was tasked with

decrypting encrypted information from the Soviets.

If they can figure out the key to these one-time codes,

they can intercept and interrupt

the Soviets' vital lines of communication.

These were incredibly important messages,

but they were theoretically unbreakable.

No-one should be able to read them.

In October 1943,

a major mistake by the Soviets leads to accidental repetitions

within their supposed one-time codes.

It was a breakthrough for cryptologists,

giving them what they needed to begin cracking the code.

We only know about failures in intelligence.

The successes remain secret forever.

The Venona Project slowly reveals the code names of many spies,

names that are eventually linked to some of the key players

in Soviet spy rings,

including Theodore Hall and Saville Sax.

As bits of these messages are deciphered and they're read,

those reading the messages start to notice

that the names in these messages aren't truly the names of people,

but their code names.

Names like 'Homer', which stand for something,

but it's not quite clear what.

In the summer of 1950,

a Soviet diplomat tips off Lona Cohen that her cover may be blown.

Lona, along with her husband and fellow spy Maurice Cohen,

flee to Moscow,

only to resurface in London years later,

continuing their espionage abroad.

While Venona works in the shadows

to uncover Soviet spies through coded cables,

the political climate is heating up,

and another far more public spy hunt is underway.

What we are here to do is to gather information

with respect to the general operation of the Communist conspiracy,

wherever it may lead.

The House of Un-American Activities Committee

begins a push to catch Soviet spies

by casting a wide net in the American public.

Anyone seen as being contrarian could be a threat.

In this very dirty war,

you have to get yourself a little bit dirty.

So at times, they had to arrest people without due process.

Interrogate American citizens in order to expose any spy rings,

even when the people were completely innocent.

If you think I'll cooperate with you in any way,

you are insane.

The growing fear that anyone could be a Soviet spy,

masking as a neighbour or co-worker, seeds doubt and paranoia.

There is a lot of power in that chaos that's created

when it's uncertain as to who is an ally and who is an enemy,

who is a spy, who is not a spy.

And in many ways, that works for the Soviet Union.

Even if secrets are not being passed,

there is that paranoia and a lack of trust,

a lack of cohesion that exists within a nation.

The paranoia and confusion during the time

that may have been formerly directed at the enemy

are now turned

towards our own home country and our own home state.

Venona confirms Julius Rosenberg is a Soviet spy.

However, it also reveals his wife Ethel

may not be as involved as once thought.

At the height of the HUAC's power, the Rosenbergs are arrested.

However, this works against the American government.

Many are growing frustrated by the Red Fear

and how it has started to impact regular citizens.

The execution of Ethel, in particular,

is not well received by the public.

It represents yet another innocent person prosecuted unfairly.

What did she do exactly?

At worst, she typed up notes.

Did that warrant a death penalty?

Did that warrant orphaning two children?

For the House of Un-American Activities to not even communicate

or produce the evidence against this family,

I'm shocked that the execution even happened.

The days following the execution of the Rosenbergs

sent waves of both fear and anger across the nation.

A series of strange events reveals a loose thread

in the once tightly-woven New York spy ring

that threatens to unravel it even further.

On June 22nd, 1953, during a routine paper delivery in Brooklyn,

an odd discovery is made that tips off the FBI.

The newspaper boy brings the nickel home.

It pops open by accident and "Oh, my God, what is this?"

There's a little piece of film inside.

A hollow nickel splits open,

revealing a photograph with a coded message.

They take it to the cops.

The cops take it to the FBI.

For years, the FBI are left wondering what it all means

and for whom it was intended.

They never figured out what it was, who it was for,

until you had an actual defection.

In 1957, the United States Embassy in Paris received a phone call

by a KGB agent named Reino Hayhanen.

His desire to defect motivates him to cooperate with the authorities

to expose his connections

though KGB identities are not easily revealed, even for allies.

To defect as a spy, it's important not to show up empty handed

in return for safe and fair treatment as a defector.

Hayhanen willingly describes

the work he had been doing for the US for years,

explaining that he and other Soviet spies

would pass information to each other

through special objects given to them by their colleagues.

These are everyday items like pens, batteries, and coins, like nickels,

that would be hollowed out

and filled with tiny pieces of paper that contain coded messages.

The FBI link his testimony to the hollow nickel

found back in 1953.

Hayhanen reveals that this was an early message from the KGB,

welcoming him to the US,

and instructing him on getting set up.

The FBI look into codename Mark,

Hayhanen's last courier before defecting.

They purse his alias, Emil R Goldfus,

tracking him to an artist's studio in Brooklyn.

But again, it's this old idea of hide in plain sight.

You hide undercover as a pretty well-known local artist

in an artist's lair, amongst multiple identities.

Upon his arrest, Goldfus gives the name Rudolf Abel.

It's a name that he doesn't even use.

Rudolf Abel is the name of a friend of his back in the Soviet Union,

who had recently died.

When he's arrested, he identifies himself as Rudolf Abel,

so that it's announced in the newspapers

that Rudolf Abel was arrested,

and that signals his people back home

that he had been compromised and arrested

because they know that Rudolf Abel is dead.

Abel is revealed to be

one of the many aliases used by William Fisher.

Did you ever wonder about him, what his occupation was or anything?

Well, I thought he wasn't honest.

He wasn't too talkative, the man,

only, if he walked into my shop, he'd sit down and talk to me.

The FBI search his hotel room and artist studio,

uncovering a treasure trove of spy equipment,

short-wave radios, cipher pads,

cameras and film for producing microdots.

A hollow shaving brush and cuff links and other espionage equipment

prove, without a shadow of a doubt,

that Goldfus Abel Fisher was a Soviet spy.

For spies whose identities have been revealed,

some like Hayhanen become turncoats,

working to give up their former allies.

Others, like the Rosenbergs, are executed.

But some, like Abel, proved to be more valuable alive than dead,

used as pawns in a bigger political game.

Abel is ultimately returned to the Soviet Union

in a strategic spy exchange.

Upon his arrival, he is publicly recognised for his achievements

in helping the volunteer network obtain information

on the US atomic bomb.

He is supposed to be there coordinating other spies

in the New York area,

which we to this day don't know exactly

what Rudolf Abel was doing actually, in New York.

he never spoke a word.

He remained a tight-lipped professional intelligence officer

and the hero in the Soviet Union.

In 1966, Fisher receives the acclaimed Order of Lenin,

the highest civilian decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union.

Rudolf Abel died in Moscow in 1971

and was laid to rest at the city's Donskoye Monastery.

His tombstone bears his birth name, William Fisher,

the identity that was never exposed during his captivity

as one of the most notorious spies of the Cold War.

People right to the very end, and including his funeral, were duped.

I mean, they knew him by different names, you know,

throughout his life.

And that does speak to

the methodical nature of Russian intelligence.

Not all spies were caught during the Cold War.

Some still operate under the radar.

After the Soviet Union collapses in 1992,

a man named Vasili Mitrokhin

knocks on the door of the UK Embassy in Latvia.

The documents he carries

are just a taste of what he's accumulated

over the years.

He's a goldmine.

He has all the knowledge of spies.

He knows who they were, what they were, what they did,

where they went.

And that's amassed in the archives.

From 1972 to 1984, Mitrokhin works as a senior archivist

in the KGB's Foreign Intelligence Archive,

giving him unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of files

from a global network of spies.

His growing disillusion with the oppressive Soviet regime

leads to the largest leak of classified KGB files in history.

How did he smuggle these documents and what could they expose?

Mitrokhin's archives reveal all sorts of things,

including disinformation operations that are so important,

elected politicians who might have support from the Soviet Union,

all kinds of scary stuff

that sometimes you can't identify the actual individual

being referred to.

While most of these plans have already expired,

these documents offer an unprecedented and invaluable look

at the scale of Soviet espionage around the world.

It's hard to believe that after all this,

these deeply ingrained spy rings could have been shut down

even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Mitrokhin Archives reveals

a decade-long plan to disrupt the US power supply,

known as Operation Cedar,

that thankfully never comes to fruition.

Cedar includes a lot of places of vulnerability.

The Soviets thought, "Well, if we could stash weapons there,

"or we could stash dirty bombs, chemical biological agents,

"and then utilise them",

that's an asset behind enemy lines, right?

Ugly business, of course. Right?

Operation Cedar is a detailed plan

that involves the sabotage and destruction of a major port

and disruption of the power supply across New York.

It could also destroy oil refineries across Canada

from British Columbia to Montreal.

Imagining the repercussions of such a mission is utterly mind blowing.

It's easy to see how quickly the loss of power for a few days

in a major city can start to contribute to instability.

Many of these plans rely on the use of sleeper agents,

spies placed in a country

who can be activated at any given moment.

A sleeper agent is somebody

who is used to infiltrate a adversary nation

and essentially just exists there,

staying in touch with the Home Office.

But they're not used regularly.

There is this reduced ability to identify your enemy.

The threat of such agents assuming regular lives has not passed.

In fact, it is very much alive.

Sleeper agents absolutely still exist today.

I mean, they're still used by foreign states

to carry out some type of activity

that the state may want them to engage in.

From about 2000 to 2010, the FBI carries out Operation Ghost Stories

after learning multiple sets of Russian spies

were living in the United States under false identities.

This becomes one of the largest counter-intelligence investigations

in American history.

Hostile intelligence officers are carefully evaluating

the strengths and weaknesses of their American contacts.

They may then try to exploit weaknesses

like taking advantage of a certain character flaw.

FBI agents bugged the spies' homes and followed their travels.

They managed to record several exchanges

where spies passed on large amounts of cash

to finance their operations.

Ultimately, ten individuals were arrested and convicted.

Some had been in place for nearly 20 years.

So it brought back all of these sentiments that, you know,

the Cold War ain't over, frankly.

In 2022, a couple living in Hawaii is arrested and put on trial

and accused of being Russian spies after years of FBI surveillance.

If you understand a nation's culture,

like thoroughly understand their culture,

you understand a lot of its weaknesses.

You understand how to manipulate public opinion.

That's what all authoritarian regimes do.

They look for a little nerve in the public psyche,

and they... they expose it.

While the Mitrokhin Archive may have exposed plans

from beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union,

it's clear that the era of cloak and dagger espionage

has not yet passed.

In the modern day, these individuals may use various tactics

such as cyber espionage, political manipulation,

and other covert activities to achieve their objectives.

You begin to see the use of technology

to gather information to spy with.

From satellites to microphone devices,

everything is beginning to accelerate

into the world we're now so familiar with.

It's much more difficult to identify

who is actually spying for a foreign state than it used to be.

The number of threats have gone exponentially up.

These countries spend vast sums of money

on advanced broadcast and digital media capabilities,

targeted campaigns, funding of foreign political movements,

and other efforts to influence key audiences and populations.

Access to information is so liberal now, more than ever,

it is both freeing and terrifying to take into consideration

what modern spies could accomplish today.

We're able to destroy our world many times over today,

and that's all a legacy

of the weapons built up as part of the Cold War.