Original subtitles

In a Cold War,

there are no rolling tanks

or droves of soldiers marching towards the enemy.

Instead, spies are the weapon of choice.

But the battleground is just as dangerous.

Because it's not that you're going to be detected.

You're going to be betrayed by somebody you might not even know.

People are put to death for espionage.

After years of rising tensions between the world's two superpowers,

political posturing and fears of an impending attack

threatened to turn the Cold War hot.

It's a really bold move on behalf of Khrushchev,

and Kennedy was young, and he had a lot to prove.

The presence of these clearly offensive weapons

of sudden mass destruction

constitutes an explicit threat

to the peace and security of all the Americans.

It suddenly escalates very quickly,

where the two sides are threatening one another.

The balance between peace and war really here came down to minutes.

In this deadly game of chicken,

the very fate of the world is at stake.

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.

On August 12th, 1960,

a Russian man approaches two young American students

strolling back to their hotel in Moscow.

He had this intelligence

that he thought was important to share with the West.

But he couldn't just walk into a United States embassy

to share this information.

He needed to make contact in a different way.

Intrigued, one of the Americans accepts an envelope from the man.

So he said, "Please pass this on to Intelligence."

And that was a huge risk

because, you know, the students could have done anything with that.

The student brings the letter to the US Embassy.

Then it makes its way to the CIA.

One of the things about the Cold War

is it's always about maintaining control in a very chaotic situation.

The dynamics are changing so quickly, science is changing so quickly,

and, basically, the whole situation is very uncontrollable.

In the aftermath of the race to gain atomic power,

the need to crack into the nuclear secrets of their enemies

continues to push the US and the USSR

to great technological advancements.

Each side needs to know what the other is up to.

But the focus has changed.

At the beginning of the Cold War,

the Soviet Union developed atomic weapons relatively quickly.

What changes as the Cold War goes on is how many weapons each side has

and how they will be used and when they'd be used,

in case of a crisis.

Each opponent deploys highly skilled spies to rub elbows with the elite

and try to turn engineers, agents, and politicians over to their side.

Who can be trusted and who has turned.

Following their combined victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two,

the relationship between the Allied forces and the Soviet Union

begins to change.

At the close of the Second World War,

the allyship between the two nations is really disintegrating.

But signs of this rift were present even prior to the summer of 1945.

The US had long been concerned over Soviet communism

and the tyrannical rule of Joseph Stalin.

What the Soviets were fundamentally opposed to the capitalist values

that ran rampant in the democratic West.

Once their mutual enemy had been neutralised,

the need to keep up the illusion of trust was gone.

The USSR and the US became enthralled in a spy versus spy game

of cat and mouse.

Throughout the Cold War,

the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU,

has assigned agents

to collect information on American life and its military assets.

The US does the same,

but has a far more difficult time than its adversary.

In the relatively free cities of the West,

it's possible for Soviet intelligence officials to surveil Americans

and to look for patterns in their life

that would make them especially vulnerable to recruitment.

The same is not true of the Soviet Union.

They relied far more on Soviet officers coming to them.

The mysterious letter was from Oleg Penkovsky,

a senior GRU officer

able to walk right into rooms where Soviet military files are kept

and privy to conversations about clandestine plans.

The letter reads:

"I have at my disposal very important materials

"on many subjects of exceptionally great interest and importance

"to your government.

"I wish to pass these materials to you."

To prove his intentions, the package also contains

the identities of 60 high-ranking strategic intelligence officers

posted worldwide.

What would lead such a high-level officer to not simply defect,

but to risk it all as a double agent?

The danger to those individuals was very real.

Somebody who would be caught spying against their own nation

certainly risks potential life imprisonment or death.

Penkovsky started to distrust the Soviet leadership.

There are suggestions that he was personally disappointed

by being passed over for promotion, which became his motivator.

But I think it's safer to say

that he lost faith in the Soviet system.

Penkovsky believes his people deserve better than leaders

like Nikita Khrushchev, who have led them into famine and oppression.

To Penkovsky,

betraying his government is a way to save his country.

Most of the secrets held on both sides

concern the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

At the moment that the Russians detonate their first atomic bomb,

Americans right away go,

"Well, now we'll build a hydrogen bomb."

It just goes like that.

Ping pong.

By the early 1960s,

the US and the USSR have each built a sizeable arsenal

of short, medium and intermediate range nuclear weapons,

and both sides have successfully launched long-range ICBMs.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles can go thousands of kilometres,

so they actually are launched from Earth.

They spend most of their time in outer space

before they come down into their target.

And to launch an ICBM from Russia to the United States

can be 20 minutes.

By the early 1960s,

the US is leading the USSR in missile production.

But this is not a well-known fact among average Americans.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev

uses this lack of knowledge to his advantage.

Khrushchev used this incredible sense of bluster he had

in which he would challenge the United States,

making it sound like the Soviet Union had this enormous,

maybe even overwhelming superiority of nuclear weapons.

He told the world that they were churning out missiles like sausages,

which is ridiculous.

But that was his quote.

In actuality, the American ICBM arsenal

outnumbered that of the Soviets by over 4 to 1.

But Khrushchev's ploy seems to be having the desired effect

on the American population.

What evolves in the US psychology

is this idea that we have a missile gap

and that we're trailing the Russians.

This method of using propaganda to distract and confuse the enemy

is employed continually during the Cold War.

These are all tactics that governments use

to present themselves as having credible means of retaliation,

should some sort of aggression come their way.

Americans may have suspected some misinformation and disinformation,

but the risk of calling that bluff would mean terrible consequences

should they have been wrong.

One who has mastered this strategy is Nikita Khrushchev.

He had emerged victorious in the political power struggle

following the death of Joseph Stalin,

and started to make some changes.

After Stalin's death in 1953,

the Soviet Union went through a period of de-Stalinisation.

Once a Stalin loyalist,

Khrushchev gives his famous secret speech in 1956,

criticising the former leader's harsh rule

and initiating the process

of making Soviet society less repressive.

Still, the Premier is determined

to maintain the USSR's appearance of strength

and will not let the West put them in a vulnerable position.

The United States was becoming more advanced than the Soviet Union

in terms of nuclear weapons, in terms of science and technology,

in terms of power.

And Khrushchev wanted to push the Soviet Union forward.

The key to the success of Khrushchev's propaganda

is that Soviet secrets are kept under wraps,

but double agents like Oleg Penkovsky are hard at work unwrapping them.

He has to enter offices where this information is available,

take pictures of it, and then get that film,

these pictures of this sensitive intelligence

to someone else so that it can leave Moscow.

The Americans felt that he was a little too hot to handle,

so they ended up going through the British channels.

MI6 recruits this British man, Greville Wynne,

who's travelling frequently to Russia doing business.

He's a known entity to the Russians.

They're assuming that he will be occasionally surveyed.

He was a civilian who had no experience in the intelligence world

and actually had a fair amount to lose.

Wynne had already been recruited for another mission to penetrate

the Soviet State Committee for Science and Technology,

a cover organisation for KGB and GRU agents

spying on Western technology.

Penkovsky was a member of this committee.

That gave a good excuse for lots of interactions

that would normally give rise to suspicions from the KGB.

Penkovsky is the specialist on the Soviet Rocket Forces.

He uses his position to photograph thousands of top secret documents

with a miniature camera.

Many of these are missile schematics and plans.

What's their operational range?

How long will they take to hit their targets?

What kind of fuel systems do they have?

All really vital information

that allows the Americans to prepare a defence.

The information that Penkovsky provided eventually confirms

that they're overestimating Russian missile strength.

Khrushchev famously claims his missiles are so advanced

they can, quote, "Hit a fly in space."

When, according to Pankowski in his reports, they, quote,

"Couldn't hit a bull in the backside with a balalaika."

While they only have a handful of ICBMs,

the Soviet Union does have

hundreds of medium and intermediate range missiles.

The US also has an impressive arsenal of these missiles,

and they have one distinct advantage.

The Soviet Union is still very isolationist,

so its missiles are within the Soviet Union

or within the Eastern Bloc.

The Soviet missiles basically could not reach the United States,

with the exception of Alaska.

But the American missiles were in places like Turkey,

right on the border of the Soviet Union.

In 1961,

the US installs their PGM 19 Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey.

Jupiter missiles are not ICBMs.

They are shorter-range missiles

that can be fired from a neighbouring country.

And because Turkey is so close,

they are capable of hitting lots of targets within the Soviet Union.

While it would take a Soviet ICBM 20 minutes to reach Washington,

American missiles are now a mere 10-minute flight to Moscow.

The Soviets feel that the Americans

have come into their sphere of influence with nuclear weapons,

and that for them is like an affront.

Still unaware that there is a leak in their seemingly airtight system,

the Soviets realised

they must move their missiles within range of the US.

But where?

A couple of years earlier, there was a revolution in Cuba,

which is one of the closest countries to the United States.

This is only the beginning.

The last battle will be fought in the capital.

You can be sure.

Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean,

located less than 150km from the US.

From 1953 to 1959, revolutionary Fidel Castro led a guerrilla army

in overthrowing the country's US backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

When Castro comes to power,

initially, he reaches out to the Americans,

but they mistrust him.

The Americans viewed nationalist revolutions at the time

as potentially communist ones,

and really, they refused to support him

and actually started tightening trade screws

when it comes to the sugar, which is a major export for Cuba.

And so he turns to the Soviet Union.

And it's at that point

then he declares his support for communism.

The US comes up with a plan to quash the new regime

before it gains more traction.

Kennedy, becoming President in January of 1961,

was new and inexperienced.

He was young and he had a lot to prove.

President Kennedy approves a plan to use a group of Cuban exiles,

trained and financed by the CIA,

to invade Cuba through the Bay of Pigs.

The hope was that this would inspire the local population

to rise up and overthrow Castro.

And the whole thing just gets botched.

The exiles execute this plan on April 17th, 1961,

but the mission is swiftly crushed by the Cuban military.

I think the greatest underestimation that the Americans made here

was assuming that Castro did not have local support,

that the Cubans were just waiting for the Americans

to come and liberate them.

And that was not the case.

The failure leaves a stain on the Kennedy administration.

America has been growing as a superpower,

and its dominance within international relations

may be starting to kind of rub people the wrong way.

So, many other countries are kind of rooting for the underdog.

Hayamos hecho un revolucion socialista en la propia.

Castro after the Bay of Pigs is absolutely convinced

that the United States is going to try a second invasion,

and this time it's going to be overt.

So the Cubans and Castro now

very much are looking for an ally to protect them.

The Soviets are very much looking for an ally

to help give them an edge against the United States.

Talks between the Soviet Union and Cuba

are promising for both sides.

Castro makes a request for Soviet weapons and soldiers

to boost their defences,

but Khrushchev ups the ante.

Unilaterally, without consulting the Politburo,

he agrees to deploy ballistic missiles in Cuba.

Khrushchev proposes to install

R-12 medium range and R-14 intermediate range

ballistic missiles in Cuba.

The range of those may sound like intermediate is not far,

but they could go as far as Hudson Bay,

so it could cover almost all of continental United States.

And this would really make the balance of power much more equal

in the Soviet eyes.

If the US learns that missiles are being transported

so close to their shores,

it could be seen as an act of aggression

and trigger a response before the Soviets are ready.

But with the US carefully monitoring shipments entering Cuba,

how can Khrushchev get such massive warheads

into the country undetected?

The way that the Soviets devised their plan

was to keep everybody involved in the operation

completely in the dark.

In 1962, the Soviet Union begins Operation Anadyr.

The plan is to deliver the missiles

and a division of mechanised infantry to Cuba via ship,

under the guise of sending agricultural assistance.

The codename Anadyr, the name of a city in Russia's far north,

is chosen to confuse American intelligence.

Even the participants did not know exactly where they were going.

They were issuing winter gear to people going to Cuba

to try to make them believe

that they're going into some northern climate.

Only a handful of senior Soviet officers are made aware

of what's really happening,

as 85 ships depart from eight Soviet ports.

The first ship bound for Cuba

reaches the island on July 10th, 1962.

There's a lot of traffic between the Soviet Union and Cuba.

They're now trading partners, so that's by itself not unusual.

To maintain the illusion of providing agricultural aid,

Soviet soldiers are dressed to look like farm workers.

The missiles themselves are disguised

as agricultural equipment.

The success of Operation Anadyr

is unwittingly aided by the Americans themselves.

A pause in U-2 surveillance flights over Cuba

comes just as the Soviet missiles are being set up.

So the United States had been flying regular U-2 flights over Cuba

to monitor developments,

but some U-2 flights on the other side of the world

had had some problems,

and the United States had decided

it was time to pause U-2 flights over Cuba.

And this is going to allow time for the Soviets to move farther ahead

with their project on the island.

Oleg Penkovsky will help to supplement this photo gap

with information he gleans from behind the Iron Curtain.

Penkovsky was a very prolific spy.

He provided thousands of documents,

including key blueprints and photos that he'd taken.

So this intelligence was extremely valuable to the West.

When Greville Wynne is not able to meet with Penkovsky,

the information is instead passed on through Operation Distant.

This involves a secret meeting in a Moscow park with Janet Chisholm,

the wife of a British intelligence officer.

Penkovsky approaches Chisholm, who pushes her child in a stroller

and gives her a small box of candy for the kids.

The candy is in fact rolls of film or secret documents.

So to anyone watching,

it looks like he has just encountered a baby in a park,

when really what he's done is pass on intelligence

of an extremely classified and important nature.

Even without overflight photos,

the US is growing suspicious of the Soviet-Cuban relationship.

U-2 flights over Cuba resume in mid-October.

The U-2 is proven to be a massively important part

of the US's intelligence gathering operations.

Its impressive photo reconnaissance abilities

allow the US to survey foreign countries

that American spies can't penetrate.

The CIA selects two pilots,

Major Rudolf Anderson Jr and Major Richard S Heyser,

to perform a series of covert reconnaissance flights over Cuba.

The U-2s are outfitted with the Hikone model 73 B camera,

capable of identifying objects less than a metre long

from a height of 18km.

And it's the photos taken by the U-2 that reveal that the Soviets

are building something very important in Cuba.

On October 14th, Heyser and Anderson returned from a mission

with pictures of unknown facilities under construction.

The next day,

the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Centre

reviews the U-2 photographs

and identifies what they interpret as medium range

ballistic missile sites near San Cristobal.

But it would take one more piece of intelligence to be certain.

It's Penkovsky's information that helps tie this all together.

Penkovsky had provided information

about how the Soviet Union built its missile sites.

One of the pieces of information

was the pattern of where you have your refuellers,

or you have your launchers, where you put the missiles.

And it was a basic standard military formation.

Penkovsky's intel confirms

what had been shown in the U-2 photos.

This is exactly what the US had feared.

The Americans are used to having Moscow within their sights.

They're not used to having Washington within the Soviet sights.

It is, to the Americans' perspective, a declaration of war.

President Kennedy is debriefed on the situation in Cuba

on October 16th,

and immediately sets up a group of advisers,

the Executive Committee of the National Security Council,

or ExComm.

President Kennedy formed ExComm

in order to look at all the range of options,

from negotiations at the United Nations

to actually warfare.

The committee consists of JFK and 12 other men,

including Vice President Lyndon Johnson,

Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara,

CIA Director John McCone,

and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

The President and his advisers

will be wrestling with the stakes of Soviet nuclear weapons

being right off the coast of the United States.

As the Soviets are gearing up their missile sites,

double agent Penkovsky continues to use his position within the GRU

to gather information on their operations in Cuba.

The Russians aren't going to do you the courtesy

of packaging missiles with 'missile' written on it.

And that's where really technical information

about what Russian missiles look like becomes instrumental.

Penkovsky provides US photographic analysts

with hundreds of photographs relating to Soviet missiles,

including images taken at Soviet May Day parades

and top-secret field manuals.

When they put all this together,

then the Kennedy administration now begins to understand

the scope and the urgency of this threat.

The team comes across a manual

for the Soviets' R-12 medium range ballistic missile.

They realise this is the same missile seen in the U-2 photos,

meaning the Soviets had missiles on Cuban soil

that could strike the United States

anywhere between Dallas and Washington.

And also, they could tell that those missile sites

weren't quite ready.

And so that information gave President Kennedy

a sense of how much time he had to resolve that crisis.

On October 18th,

Kennedy meets with Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin

and Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister Andrei Gromyko.

Neither the Soviets nor Kennedy mention the missiles in Cuba.

Instead, Gromyko insists

that any Soviet military assistance to Havana

is only for the defensive capabilities of Cuba.

The President is left to wonder if the missiles they have spotted

are not yet operational,

and therefore not effective as a deterrent, or worse,

could a surprise attack be on the horizon?

Good evening, my fellow citizens.

This government...

On the evening of October 22nd, Kennedy delivers a televised speech

notifying the American people

about the presence of missiles in Cuba.

..on the island of Cuba.

It shall be the policy of this nation

to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba

against any nation in the Western Hemisphere

as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States,

requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

During the speech, Kennedy also announces a blockade of Cuba,

calling it a quarantine to avoid implying a state of war.

All ships of any kind bound for Cuba,

from whatever nation or port,

where they're found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons,

be turned back.

As the blockade comes into effect,

Soviet submarines head toward the quarantine line.

Any closer and they could spark an international conflict.

It's unclear as to what's going to happen.

Will Russian ships force their way through?

Will the American ships then fire?

Our resolution will call for the prompt...

In his speech,

Kennedy demands the Soviets

withdraw the missiles already in Cuba.

On October 24th, Khrushchev responds.

He reiterates the claim

that the missiles are intended for defensive purposes only,

and rejects Kennedy's demand to remove them.

While your intelligence can tell you about military capabilities,

it can't tell you about intentions.

For the Americans,

they view these weapons as offensive weapons,

whereas Cuba views this as defensive

to protect them against the United States.

Just the same as Russia views the missiles in Turkey as offensive

and the United States views them as defensive.

Khrushchev calls the blockade an act of aggression,

and informs Kennedy

that he has instructed Soviet ships to ignore it.

However, most Soviet ships turn around and head back to Europe.

The few that do challenge the blockade

are found to be carrying no restricted cargo.

This crisis is not only about the United States

and the Soviet Union.

Of course, it's happening in Cuba.

With the Soviets and the US deadlocked,

Fidel Castro tells Khrushchev

that if the Americans invade Cuban soil,

there will be no choice but to respond

by launching the first nuclear strike.

Khrushchev got quite worried.

He knew that the only reason you have nuclear weapons

is to threaten.

You can't actually use them.

On October 26th, Khrushchev proposes a deal to remove Soviet missiles

in exchange for a promise that the US will not invade Cuba.

But the next day, Washington receives a new demand.

And what is Khrushchev essentially requesting?

Pull the missiles out of Turkey.

President Kennedy and ExComm

are debating how to respond to these new terms

when they receive unsettling news.

Just as this crisis seems to be moving toward resolution,

the United States gets news that one of its U-2 aeroplanes,

captained by a Major Rudolf Anderson

has actually been shot down over Cuba.

Tensions are at an all-time high.

The US could respond with military force,

unravelling the progress they've made

and pushing both countries closer to war,

or choose to move forward with an agreement.

Kennedy realises that it's not a purposeful provocation.

It's actually a decision made by the commanders in Cuba.

And so the Americans agree to move past this

and move towards a resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

13 days after the stand-off began,

possibly the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war,

an agreement is reached.

On October 28th, 1962, Khrushchev issues a public statement

that the Soviet missiles will be dismantled and removed

in exchange for an American pledge to stay out of Cuba.

But a secret side deal was not disclosed to the public.

The previous night,

Robert Kennedy had met secretly with the Soviet Ambassador

and made an agreement

to remove the American missiles from Turkey.

It was very important for the United States

not to look like they were removing the missiles from Turkey

as a result of the Russians removing the missiles from Cuba.

This was all about the bad Russians.

So misinformation, disinformation continues

so that even military actions

of withdrawing missiles from Turkey or from Cuba

must be narrated or presented in a certain way to uphold, you know,

whatever dominant story that the countries have.

While the world looked favourably on the actions of Kennedy,

Khrushchev's reputation did not fare well.

This was an overreach by Khrushchev, and he paid.

He was removed from power.

But it would be Cuba that loses the most.

In their eyes, they now looked as if

both the United States and the Soviet Union

had abandoned them,

and so they were now essentially left on their own.

As both nations breathed a sigh of relief,

the same could not be said for the spies

who helped the US survive the crisis.

Of course, the Russians are onto them.

On October 29th, 1962,

Greville Wynne travels to Soviet-occupied Budapest.

He was advised not to go, yet went anyway,

at the peak of this tension between the US and the Soviet Union,

and obviously results in his pick up and arrest by Soviet authorities.

Wynne will be imprisoned and then exchanged,

but for Penkovsky, it's the end of the road.

Penkovsky had been apprehended days earlier at the height of the crisis.

Once the Soviets realised

classified information had been leaked to the West.

Russian intelligence officers raided his apartment

and discovered a Minox camera

that had been used to photograph secret documents.

The Soviet Union makes an example of Penkovsky.

He goes through a show trial where his crimes are made public,

and he's then executed as a symbol of what will happen to others

who betray the USSR.

But how did the Soviets know Penkovsky and Wynne were responsible?

The Soviet Union had its own double agents working in the United States.

Among them are William Whalen,

an aide to the Pentagon's top military commanders,

and Jack Dunlap, a National Security Agency employee.

Both are secretly working for the KGB

and had alerted the Soviets about Penkovsky

before the Cuban Missile Crisis began.

So you have one double agent

being betrayed by another double agent working for another side.

It just shows how messy this type of intelligence world really is.

With double agents working in the East and the West,

it becomes difficult to know who to trust.

It's a challenge.

There's just this inherent disbelief

that an intelligence officer who signed up to serve their nation

would so willingly cross over

and provide information to the other side.

And so you have to go through this process

of vetting their motivations, evaluating their psychology,

as well as the information that they're providing

to determine is this real,

or is this something that's being done against me?

The motivations of defectors and double agents

aren't always clear.

We talk about the classic motivations

of money, ideology, coercion, and ego,

but it's way more complex than that.

And the case officer's job is to kind of understand

those motivations and figure out how to leverage them.

Some of the best volunteers that have come through,

folks like Penkovsky, have been driven by ideology.

Ideology would also be the chief motivator of another double agent.

One of the important sources for information

about Soviet spies operating in the United States

was another Soviet GRU officer named Dmitri Polyakov.

After serving in World War Two,

Polyakov is recruited by the GRU and quickly rises through the ranks.

He claims to be fiercely loyal to the USSR,

but has become disgusted by the corruption of Soviet leaders.

Polyakov spent a number of years in the 1950s and '60s

assigned to the Soviet military delegation

at the United Nations in New York City.

While he was in the United States,

he contacted the FBI to let them know he had information for them.

In November of 1961, at midnight in down-town Manhattan,

Polyakov meets with FBI agent John Mabey.

He offers his services as an informant.

To prove himself, Mabey asks Polyakov

to give up the names of six Soviet cryptographers

in the GRU's Washington headquarters.

Polyakov agrees.

Polyakov begins his work with the FBI

under Operation Courtship,

a mission to identify Soviet spies working within the US.

He's given the codename Top Hat.

Through covert meetings in New York's safe houses,

he offers valuable information.

Yeah. Polyakov gives up names, which is important, right?

That's currency if you're a double agent.

Late in 1962, Polyakov is called back to GRU headquarters in Moscow,

giving him access to even more valuable intel.

Polyakov reveals the names of American military officers

who were paid by the GRU and KGB to provide classified information,

including one of Oleg Penkovsky's betrayers, Sergeant Jack Dunlap.

One of the people that Polyakov identifies

is a man named Frank Bossard,

who's a British individual working at the Ministry of Aviation

on long-range guided missiles.

In 1961, Soviet agents have been keeping an eye on Bossard

and realise he has access to top secret documents.

They also learn that he has problems.

If you're trying to recruit spies,

or you're trying to turn people into double agents,

you go after vulnerabilities.

Does the person have money problems?

Do they have addiction problems?

Do they have any kind of family problems?

Anything that can provide you with an access point.

Bossard has both a drinking problem and financial issues.

The Soviets use this to their advantage

and approach him with an offer.

British documents for cash.

At this stage of the Cold War, we're a long way from the volunteers

and those who believed in Communist and Soviet ideals,

who worked with the Soviet Union

because they believed in the Soviet Union.

Instead, what we see now are people who spy for the Soviet Union

because they need money.

Bossard photographs classified documents,

mostly involving missile and radar systems,

and passes them to the Soviets.

For every packet of photographs, he receives ��2,000.

He's instructed to listen to Radio Moscow

on certain days each month at an appointed time

when one of five popular Russian songs would be played.

Those would be signals to him

to go and collect certain documents from his office.

He'd take those documents to a hotel and he'd photograph them there.

Bossard is given nine dead drops around London.

Spy is going to leave the information in a hollow brick

or in a pipe in some park.

They leave a signal somewhere else that they've loaded the drop.

Then an intelligence operative will go stroll over to that location

and pick it up.

Bossard catches the attention of MI5

when he begins going on spending binges.

Suspicions are confirmed when double agent Polyakov provides the FBI

with copies of stolen British defence documents

that were given to the Soviets by Bossard.

After weeks of surveillance,

Bossard is confronted by MI5 on March 12th, 1965,

in the Ivanhoe Hotel in London.

The authorities were able to catch Bossard red handed in his hotel room

with all of the documents and his camera, and he was arrested.

Polyakov's information about Bossard impresses the CIA,

who begin to use him as an asset in 1965.

They give him a new code name, Bourbon.

After tours working in Burma and India,

Polyakov again returns to Moscow in the mid '70s,

where he continues to spy.

But spying in Moscow was exceptionally difficult.

Everyone was watched, everyone was monitored.

And so he needed a new way of transmitting information

that wasn't as obvious as a dead drop or meeting with someone

to pass information.

One of the ways that the CIA attempted to mitigate the danger

of physical contact was through radio contact.

That, though, has problems.

Radio contacts can be intercepted.

To solve this problem,

CIA technicians give him a special hand-held device

known as a burst transmitter.

You could enter the keystrokes into kind of a memory system,

then would very quickly transmit those keystrokes in a burst,

and out it goes.

You have to be relatively close to the receiver.

In this case, the US Embassy in Moscow would do nicely.

So he would pass by a building and essentially send off the signal.

The signal would be then received by someone who's in the building,

who has the technology to receive it.

That kind of message,

what would maybe take you a minute to transmit

if you manually typed it in very quickly,

goes out in two seconds.

So it's much harder for the Soviets to catch the content of the message.

But even more important, the location of the transmitter.

Polyakov retires from the GRU in 1980,

bringing about the end of his relationship with the CIA.

But in 1984, US agents monitoring the Soviet press

find an alarming piece in a Russian magazine

that Polyakov had occasionally contributed to.

It includes a recipe for coot,

a small water bird common in Eastern Europe.

This was Polyakov's signal that he was in trouble,

so this signal is very alarming to the Americans.

The recipe is the last the Americans will hear from Polyakov.

Rumours would pop up from time to time,

but his fate would remain a mystery for years.

The answer would come in 1994,

with the arrest of one of the most prolific Soviet moles

in American history.

Aldrich Ames is in life in prison without possibility of parole.

Ames is assigned to the Soviet and East European Division

at CIA headquarters.

There he secretly volunteers to assist KGB officers

at the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC, becoming a double agent.

Shortly thereafter, the KGB paid him $50,000.

Ames started buying Italian suits,

and bought a Jaguar that was half a year's salary.

Ames 100% should have known better,

but he also thought he was smarter than everybody else.

As of 1994,

the CIA believes they've found the man who exposed Polyakov.

Double agent giving up double agent. That's how it works.

It's tragic, but it is predictable.

But several years later, another discovery is made.

It seems like not one, but two Americans

actually helped give up Polyakov.

Aldrich Ames passed information, and so too did Robert Hanssen.

Hanssen was working for the FBI and involved in counter intelligence,

so he also had access to very top secret information

in terms of sources that were working for the Americans.

In 1985, he decides to start selling secrets to the Soviets

as a double agent.

On February 18th, 2001,

Hanssen is arrested and charged with committing espionage.

Hanssen had been paid more than $1.4 million over 16 years

to provide highly classified national security information

to the Soviet Union and Russia.

Part of this intel

included information on Polyakov's activities.

So you couldn't ask for a deadlier combination

of someone working in CIA and working in FBI

who are giving up American assets.

After being exposed by Ames and Hanssen,

Polyakov was arrested by the KGB in 1986.

The circumstances are unclear,

but it's almost certain that he was executed.

Polyakov's information is really big.

I mean, he gives a lot of stuff up about espionage,

but I would argue that the most important thing he gave

had nothing to do with espionage in a conventional sense.

In the 1960s, Polyakov gives intel to the United States

that the relationship between China and the Soviet Union is changing,

and that there is a rift.

In the early Cold War,

the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China

had been allies with the Soviet Union,

posing as sort of the senior brother of communism

and China following along beside.

China and the USSR had begun to veer in different directions

following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953.

Khrushchev speaking against Stalin

in an effort to move the Soviet Union into the future,

had caused a backlash.

Part of this backlash came from Chairman Mao,

who did not agree with criticising Stalin.

A series of unfulfilled promises, like Khrushchev's decision to cancel

the delivery of an atomic bomb prototype to China,

drive the two countries even further apart.

In the late 1960s,

US President Richard Nixon

and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger

are looking for a way to exploit this dynamic.

The United States sees this as a potential

of developing some sort of connection with China

in an effort to weaken the Soviet Union.

When the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949,

the US refused to recognise Mao's government.

But in 1972, Nixon moves to reopen relations.

Nixon was known to be very anti-communist,

but he was able to do something quite bold,

and that is to meet with Chairman Mao

and then recognise the People's Republic of China.

By 1979, the US and China

had established full diplomatic relations.

But China's relationship with the USSR would not be repaired

until the late 1980s.

And since that time,

China has gradually strengthened its ties with the USSR's successor,

the Russian Federation.

They have a number of agreements together,

and run military exercises together.

They're certainly working together on the world stage.

What we've seen over the last 20 or 30 years

is this fundamental reorientation.

Russia remains quite powerful in a lot of ways,

but has diminished somewhat, and China has taken that place.

The American government claims

that multiple Chinese cyber attacks have targeted the US.

In response, President Joe Biden

introduced a national security strategy

depicting China as a long-time threat to the security of the country.

Because we're so connected through electronic means,

it's easy to attack the critical infrastructure of another country.

You could have another mutually assured destruction strategy

where if you decide to go after our infrastructure,

we'll go after your infrastructure.

In the last decade alone,

the US has brought several high-profile cases

against Chinese espionage operations,

who are attempting to gather troves of American data,

including the personal information of US government employees

and trade secrets of American private sector companies.

And in 2020, Chinese hackers Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi,

allegedly working on behalf of China's Ministry of State Security,

were charged by the US Department of Justice

with stealing terabytes of data

from hundreds of companies around the world.

China is getting more and more powerful,

the United States getting less and less powerful.

So we could be witnessing a fundamental change

in the orientation of global politics and therefore of history.

Has a 21st century Cold War, this time with China,

already begun?