Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny (2025) s01e02 Episode Script
Black Sites
1
- Throughout time,
governments and the people
who work for them have done
strange and even terrible
things in the name
of national interest.
[dramatic music]
Tonight, from
a top secret facility built
to correct a US blind spot--
- The CIA now have eyes
and ears
on the third of the world
that it can't usually reach.
- --to a bio lab testing
deadly toxins on US soil--
- It develops extreme programs
that run from the apocalyptic
to the absurd.
[explosion]
- --and a city constructed
beneath Arctic ice,
made with a sinister purpose.
- This site is
largely forgotten.
And the US government kind of
wants it to be forgotten.
♪
- These places are all
known as black sites.
Now it's time to bring them
out of the shadows.
♪
Every government has them,
and none likes
to admit that they exist.
But sometimes
clandestine bases
do get exposed by tragedy.
♪
- TWA flight 514 is flying
from Indianapolis, Indiana,
to Washington, DC.
Now, as the plane
is getting closer
and closer to its destination
in DC, there's a huge storm.
Just after 11:00 AM, the plane
drops altitude way too quickly,
ends up crashing into
the side of a mountain
on the Virginia border.
All 92 people aboard
the plane die on impact.
- As the rescuers get to
the top of this mountain
and start searching
for survivors,
poring through the wreckage,
they find, puzzlingly,
that they're not
the first people on-site.
- They see cars nearby, in
the middle of the wilderness,
lined up like--
like a parking lot.
And neatly parked cars don't
belong halfway up a mountain.
- It doesn't take
long for journalists
to realize that there's
a whole infrastructure
atop this mountain
that isn't on any map.
♪
- The land actually belongs
to the Department of Defense,
but the DOD just claims that,
oh, it's nothing but
a weather-monitoring station.
There's nothing special
about this area.
♪
- But journalists
keep pushing to figure out
what secrets this
Virginia mountain is hiding.
- And eventually,
in Senate hearings a year
after the crash,
the Pentagon finally
confirms the existence and the
purpose of this black site.
- It's called Mount Weather,
and its true purpose
is surprising.
It's a top secret
doomsday bunker.
- It wasn't always secret.
It started out
as a weather observatory.
Then for a brief period
in the 1920s,
it was President
Calvin Coolidge's summer home.
- The spot doesn't
stay idyllic for long.
In 1949,
the Soviet Union detonates
its first nuclear bomb,
and Mount Weather's mission
becomes far more strategic.
- You have to remember
that this is right after
World War II, which means
the beginning of the Cold War.
And thanks to fears around a
possible Soviet nuclear attack,
President Truman makes plans
in the late '40s to make every
American home, workplace--
basically, everywhere
in the country--survivable.
- You have, like,
the duck-and-cover drills
for the public to help them
survive atomic warfare.
But then separately,
the government
is thinking hard about
how the president survives,
how the government
functions continue.
- They decide to build three
massive nuclear fortresses
to ensure what they
now start to call
the continuity of government.
One of these immense
fortresses is Mount Weather.
♪
- To create this base, they
need to hollow out a mountain
and keep it a secret.
So in 1953,
work begins on the project.
Thousands of tons
of greenstone are excavated
from the interior
of the mountain.
- And it costs
over a billion dollars.
And when it's finished,
it is a 600,000-square-foot
underground city
and has everything ranging
from a hospital to restaurants
to a movie theater.
- The entrance is
protected by a 20-feet,
34-ton blast door
that is 5 feet thick,
and it takes
15 minutes to open.
It's under 2,000 feet
of granite.
So you could fire missiles
at it all day long,
and the people inside
would barely even notice.
- Its construction and its
activities are classified,
and its staff is
sworn to secrecy.
- While the community
of Berryville, Virginia,
helps build it and staff it,
the public at large has no idea
that this facility exists.
♪
- Then in the 1960s,
partly thanks
to the Cuban missile crisis,
Mount Weather is expanded.
- Mount Weather has its own
communications facilities,
its own water treatment plant,
its own fire department,
in fact, even text messaging
and one of the world's
first computers.
That technology begins for the
first time at Mount Weather
as the way for the doomsday
bunkers to communicate
amongst themselves.
- With its cover blown
thanks to the crash
of flight 514,
Mount Weather is
pretty much mothballed.
That all changes on 9/11.
♪
- Government
decides to reactivate
and expand Mount Weather.
The Defense Department never
mentioned it officially
anymore, and the complex's
plans and operations
are all classified
to this day.
- As far as we know,
Mount Weather today
is as active and advanced
a facility as it ever has been.
- It is now believed to sprawl
over 700,000 square feet.
That's the size
of four baseball fields.
So it supposedly can hold
as many as 2,000 lucky people.
♪
- Mount Weather
was built to survive
a Soviet nuclear bomb attack.
Over in Russia, a black site
built to make those bombs
would also be
exposed by tragedy.
This time, a terrible accident
is covered up for a decade.
♪
- It was a fall day
in September 1957,
in a village called Kyshtym
in southern Siberia.
The villages are suddenly
shocked by a vast noise,
and the sky turns
to a completely
different shade of blue.
- When this occurs,
it spreads panic
through the local people.
And even worse,
the government officials
descend upon the village,
and they start killing
livestock, burning crops.
Things are getting
incredibly strange.
- Evacuations begin.
Several hundred villages,
several hundred
thousand people, and they're
all being evacuated.
They're not being informed,
and so they're left
with nothing
but question marks.
- Because it's behind
the iron curtain,
in the West,
we have no idea.
So it's a complete mystery
as to what's going on there.
♪
- In the years that follow,
rumors circulate
that people are
beginning to experience
unexplained illnesses,
pregnant women
are giving birth to children
that have
obvious birth defects,
Kyshtym and the
20,000-square-mile area
around it
being a zone of death,
and that nobody could go there
because the entire area
was contaminated.
♪
- The real story
of this disaster
remains hidden
for another 16 years,
until a top Russian scientist
named Zhores Medvedev defects
to London and tells all.
♪
- Medvedev is a problem as far
as the KGB is concerned.
He's critical
of the government.
He is a troublemaker.
And so as soon
as he leaves Russia,
they cancel his citizenship.
He can't come back.
- When he feels no obligation
to the authority
of the Soviet government,
he begins to speak out.
- For Zhores to come to London
to write whatever he wants
and to get it published,
you know, he became
a truth revealer
and truth teller.
- And one of the things
that he comments about
is this incident
that occurs at Kyshtym
in Siberia in September 1957.
- Medvedev reveals
that the Kyshtym disaster
was caused by an accident
at the top secret
nuclear processing plant
called Mayak,
just 8 miles away.
- The Russians have been
caught flat-footed
by the end
of the Second World War
and the introduction
of nuclear weapons
at the conclusion
of that conflict.
And so the Soviets
are desperately attempting
to build a nuclear arsenal
of their own.
They're desperately trying
to catch up to the West.
- So the Soviets
install a network
of weapons-grade plutonium
processing plants
across the vast country.
Mayak is the most
notorious,
but it's constructed
at breakneck speed
by an unconventional
workforce.
♪
- Mayak's built
by 40,000 prisoners,
all shipped in from gulags,
and it's huge.
We're talking 35 square miles
with an exclusion zone
around it that's three times
bigger than that.
- Mayak has five
nuclear reactors
producing plutonium,
refining it,
and turning it into weapons.
♪
- Even though there's
not a big city nearby,
there are hundreds
of small villages
and settlements like Kyshtym,
places that,
when you combine them,
have tens of thousands
of civilians in them.
♪
- In 1957, disaster strikes.
♪
- The cooling system for
a cistern of radioactive waste
at Mayak fails.
[explosion]
It explodes with the force
of 70 tons of TNT.
- And that explosion
showers the surrounding area
with irradiated material.
This encompasses
an area covering
217 separate settlements,
and over 250,000 people
are forcibly evacuated
without explanation.
- Medvedev's revelations are
central because without him,
we wouldn't know any of this.
♪
- Then 20 years later,
there's a new twist.
♪
Declassified documents show
that the CIA knew all along
and kept it secret.
- US government had learned
of the horrific events
within months
of the explosion at Mayak,
but they kept quiet about it
because they think that news
of the tragedy might
turn public opinion away
from the US's own
fledgling nuclear industry.
♪
- Imagine planning to place
a vast nuclear arsenal
under a polar ice cap
and then pretending
something entirely different.
That's just what the US did
at the height of the Cold War
at a black site in Greenland.
[dramatic music]
♪
- It's 1956, and the
US Department of Defense
releases a documentary
about this groundbreaking
polar research station
in Greenland,
800 miles south
of the North Pole.
- The United States Army
has established
an unprecedented
nuclear-powered
Arctic research center.
- In the Arctic, you have
to contend with sometimes
minus 20
to minus 40 conditions.
It's just
an incredibly difficult
environment to operate in.
- An army colonel
named John Kerkering
is tasked with constructing
a polar city.
It's housed in huge
covered tunnels
with dormitories, a hospital,
even a chapel
and a barbershop.
- The documentary presents
the polar research station
as being well ahead
of its time,
primarily because
of the fact that it
is powered entirely
by the world's first
portable nuclear reactor.
- The name of the base
is Camp Century.
It's an ambitious project.
They put a nuclear reactor
in one of the most brutal
and difficult environments
on Earth.
♪
As wild as that is,
that's not even
the craziest thing about this.
♪
- Although only
a few people know it,
Camp Century
is just a cover story.
♪
The real plan here
is to construct
an immense nuclear launch site
deep under the snow.
Its name:
Project Iceworm.
[explosion]
- When Project Iceworm
was envisioned,
there were a lot
of legitimate fears
that we were on the precipice
of nuclear war.
- In the 1950s,
the threat of nuclear war
couldn't be more serious.
Iceworm will give the West an
opportunity to survive it all.
- Their idea is to have
hundreds of nuclear warheads
all prepped, all ready to go,
in the tunnels under the ice--
a full-on nuclear arsenal.
- If the Russians initiated
a nuclear first strike
on America, there would be
this secondary base
in Greenland that could fire
a retaliatory counterattack
into Russia.
- The Camp Century cover story
is so convincing,
it fools the Russians.
- They did actually
do experiments there
and work on science,
but it was basically
a test bed to see what else we
could do under the Arctic ice.
- In the end,
the real challenge
to the success
of Project Iceworm
doesn't come
from being discovered
but from the landscape itself.
- The Greenland ice cap
is so dynamic,
you just can't maintain
a permanent structure
underneath the ice.
- The base
was being sandwiched
between the ice walls
as they constricted
because every year,
the ice moves another 6 feet.
- You've got
600 nuclear warheads
and a nuclear reactor.
You cannot put them
in shifting ice.
- And so Camp Century
is abandoned in 1967.
- They end up pulling the plug
on the entire thing,
and they just walk away.
- I think the line
they used--
we'll just open the door
and let it snow.
And they thought it would
be kind of permanently
entombed in this ice
and be safe in that way.
♪
- Although the nuclear reactor
at Camp Century was removed,
the material
that was left behind
is still dangerous
to the environment.
♪
- If the story of a top secret
US black site in Greenland
sounds improbable,
consider our next case,
a covert military training
camp hidden in Colorado.
♪
- It's a dark and snowy night
in Colorado,
about 50 kilometers
west of Denver.
You have a military
personnel transport
that's leaving
a secret base,
en route to this small
local airfield.
The bus is moving
under cover of darkness
to keep this mission covert
and its occupants classified.
The bus ends up
skidding and crashing
on the icy Colorado roads,
and the delay
adds hours to the trip.
- When it arrives,
the sun is just coming up,
and the employees
of the airfield
are beginning to arrive
for their workday.
♪
- Armed men suddenly herd them
at gunpoint into a hangar
and swear them to secrecy.
♪
But through a gap
in the hangar door,
some of them witness
an unexpected sight.
They see 15 men
with East Asian features,
wearing camouflage fatigues,
prepare to board a cargo jet
that has blackout windows.
- Foreign personnel
at a Colorado base?
Men in black waving guns
at innocent witnesses?
What is happening here?
- There's a little bit
of initial whispering about it,
and there's some reporting
in the local press,
but then the story
is completely suppressed.
There's no further
reporting about it.
It's not until decades later
that the reality
of what was actually
happening there is revealed.
- According to documents
declassified in 1974,
the airfield employees came
across a secret CIA operation
targeting Communist China.
♪
- In the early 1950s,
the Chinese expand to
and envelop Tibet into
the Greater People's
Republic of China.
- When its spiritual
leader, the Dalai Lama,
is put under house arrest,
Tibetans begin to organize
against Chinese occupation.
- As Chinese domination began,
Tibetans formed
into resistance groups,
and they turned
to the United States.
And the CIA saw
an opportunity to gain
an upper hand against
the People's Republic of China.
♪
- In 1958, the CIA sets up
this base in Colorado to begin
training the Tibetan rebels.
It's much easier
and much more effective
if you can clandestinely
move them to the United States
and give them training here.
- The site in Colorado
is known as Camp Hale.
- Tibet is, of course,
in the high mountains
in the foothills
of the Himalayas,
and so is Camp Hale
in the Colorado Rockies--
similar altitude,
similar mountainous terrain.
And it was
sufficiently remote,
so a couple hundred Tibetans
could filter into this camp
without too many questions
among the local populace.
♪
- In 1959,
the trained Tibetans
are now ready for action.
They parachute
into their homeland
on a top secret mission
to help extract
the Dalai Lama.
♪
- They are taking literally
the spiritual leader of Tibet
and trying to smuggle him
to safety.
The way they do that
is by moving him
through a clandestine
underground railroad
going from home to home,
village to village.
That's a treacherous path not
just because of the terrain,
but also, they have
to sneak past the sentries
and border guards
that are manned
by the Chinese Communists.
- Against the odds,
the rescue succeeds.
Over the next five years,
300 trained Tibetan fighters
take on a series
of daring missions,
from photographing
military sites
to attacking Chinese
government installations.
- Despite the bravery
of the Tibetan resistance,
they are not ultimately
successful, even with US help,
in throwing off
Chinese domination.
- So Camp Hale
is just quietly closed.
Training there quietly ceases.
♪
- Some of the most lethal
weapons ever devised
are chemical and biological.
And the US has
a top secret facility
in Utah to create them.
But when something goes
very wrong there in 1968,
it risks the lives
of thousands of citizens.
The story of this
black site begins
with a declaration of war.
[engines humming]
[explosion]
[dramatic music]
- The US has just been
attacked at Pearl Harbor,
and it's desperate
to find a way to hit back.
It decides to build
a testing ground
to develop the weapons that
will turn the tide of the war.
- The military grabs
over a million square miles
of desert
just 80 miles
from Salt Lake City.
It is one of the most isolated
parts of the US,
nothing there but rattlesnakes
and wild horses.
And they build
one of the most secretive
government facilities
ever devised.
It's called
Dugway Proving Ground.
[explosion]
♪
- Much of Dugway is basically
like being on the moon
or Mars.
Its security comes
from the fact
that it's so far away
from anything
that the effort
it takes to get there
would be noticed long before
you got to the fence.
♪
- The first weapon that
undergoes development at Dugway
is a weapon system
that can be used
to destroy Japanese cities.
♪
- American architect
who actually lived in Japan
is given a team of prisoners
who actually create
an at-scale replica
of Japanese villages
in downtown Tokyo so they can
test the M69 incendiary bomb.
They test over and over again
until they can perfect
the chain reaction
that maximizes
the M69's destruction.
♪
- And then on the night
of March 9 and 10, 1945,
M69 incendiary clusters
that were developed at Dugway
are used for the first time
effectively.
- They hit back
for Pearl Harbor
by firebombing Tokyo.
And it works.
- The firestorm
burned out the entire
Sumida district
of downtown Tokyo
and killed 120,000 people.
The argument could
be made that the M69
incendiary cluster was
a vastly more deadly weapon
than the nuclear weapon.
♪
- Dugway has proved itself
deadly effective.
And so after
World War II ends,
the secret facility
is steadily expanded
and deployed in the Cold War.
♪
- So Dugway was a major part
of the biological
and chemical weapons
programs for the US.
- Dugway starts to develop
what it calls
biological warfare agents
in a range of extreme programs
that run from the apocalyptic
to the absurd.
- They're developing anthrax;
dirty bombs;
radioactive fallout;
odorless, paralyzing gases;
even mutant microbes.
All the most dastardly
things you can imagine
are being created
here at Dugway.
- All attempting to disable
huge amounts of people
and all highly classified.
♪
- So one of the programs
that the US had
was to use insects
as your tools of warfare.
♪
- The idea is to load
biting insects with bacteria
or viruses and then
drop them as disease agents
on a target population.
- Now, the insects
never worked out,
but it really goes to show
what they were willing to do
at Dugway to try
to execute their mission
of being on the cutting edge
of biological warfare.
[explosion]
- But one spring morning
in 1968, disaster strikes,
and the locals awake to a scene
straight out of a horror movie.
♪
- Farmers find their livestock
dead or dying in the fields.
- Some are dying.
Others are paralyzed.
Some are foaming at the mouth.
And it's happening
across the region.
- Immediately,
the finger points
to the secretive facility
nearby.
- It was pretty easy
to connect the dots here.
♪
- In the face of this kind
of evidence,
even the military can't
keep its secret forever.
It takes a year of pressure,
but they finally
admit that Dugway is involved.
♪
- A Pentagon official
explains to the press
that the sheep were killed
by a test gone wrong.
An aircraft malfunctioned,
dropping its load
at the wrong altitude.
320 gallons of VX nerve gas
is spread by the wind
over local ranches.
♪
- VX nerve agent
is a terrifying thing.
A few milliliters in gaseous
form can kill a grown man.
- Imagine what
it would have done
if it got to Salt Lake City,
which is only 80 miles away.
♪
[crowd chanting indistinctly]
- The Dugway sheep incident
comes at a time
of public protest
over US foreign policy.
[crowd chanting indistinctly]
- There was a court
of public opinion
during the era
of the war in Vietnam.
We shouldn't be fighting
in Southeast Asia using napalm
and Agent Orange and all
of these other chemicals
that will eventually
pressure Nixon to disavow
the use of weapons like this.
- In 1969, President Nixon
signs a statement
renouncing US use
of lethal biological weapons
and limiting its use
of chemical weapons.
♪
Despite that,
Dugway continues to operate.
- The fact is,
we have to understand
these horrifying chemicals
and the threat they pose,
and that means there will
always be a black site
just like Dugway
studying them somewhere.
- We all know
the physician's creed:
first, do no harm.
But 87 years ago,
a Russian doctor
is given a mission
in a top secret lab
to achieve exactly
the opposite.
[dramatic music]
♪
- On the outskirts of Moscow
is a nondescript
concrete building,
unremarkable to look at,
ignored by people
that pass by it every day.
And no one knows it
at the time,
but inside is a chemical
and medical laboratory.
♪
The site has had many names,
but now it has come
to be known as Lab X.
♪
- In 1938, Stalin himself
assigns chemist
Grigory Mairanovsky
to take over Lab X
and to come up
with the perfect way
of killing,
to create methods
that are silent,
untraceable, undetectable,
and officially deniable.
♪
- Mairanovsky
develops narcotics
and psychotropic substances.
He tests new poisons
like sodium cyanide,
colchicine, and curare.
- Mairanovsky would need
human test subjects
for this awful research.
But he could just pick up
the phone or fill out a form,
get a hundred gulag prisoners
delivered the next day.
Almost certainly, he worked
on captured Germans as well.
♪
- He's literally using them
as guinea pigs,
injecting them
with chemical solutions
and then timing how long
it takes for them to die.
♪
- Mairanovsky is very quickly
nicknamed by his superiors
the Doctor of Death
and protected behind the walls
of a black site
that does not officially exist.
♪
- For decades, what happens
at Lab X remains a mystery.
But when the USSR
collapses in 1991,
a high-ranking Russian
intelligence officer
named Pavel Sudoplatov
reveals shocking details
about this black site.
♪
- Sudoplatov, sort of
a career secret policeman.
Not just an assassin
and a killer;
he's a boss
of assassins and killers.
Stalin needs
some messy work done,
Sudoplatov is kind of
on the short list
of people you talk to.
He was rumored to have been
part of the team
that set up the assassination
of Leon Trotsky.
- Sudoplatov reveals methods
Mairanovsky devised at Lab X:
cyanide-loaded bullets,
ingested powders,
and injections
at routine medical checkups.
- Stalin had
countless enemies,
but what's incredible is that
over the course of five years,
it's estimated that up
to 100 of his political rivals
were killed by the techniques
that were perfected at Lab X.
- Sudoplatov also reveals
that the success of Lab X
brings about the Doctor
of Death's own downfall.
♪
- In the early 1950s,
Stalin is getting paranoid
about his grip on power.
He actually starts to fear that
Mairanovsky's lethal poisons
are going to be used on him.
So in 1951,
Stalin accuses Mairanovsky,
along with 39
other Jewish doctors,
of planning his assassination.
It becomes known
as the Doctors' Plot,
and he imprisons them all,
which is his MO.
Joseph liked to throw
everybody in jail.
- Mairanovsky
is given a choice.
Confess, and you'll
get 10 years.
You know, don't confess, and we
might just have to shoot you.
- He's nearly beaten to death.
♪
He actually survives 10 years
in a Russian prison
before he's released
by Khrushchev
and flees to the southern part
of Russia, to Dagestan,
to live out the rest
of his life.
♪
- The Doctor of Death
dies in obscurity in 1964,
but his methods live on.
♪
- Russia's regimes
continue to embrace
Lab X's officially deniable
methods of toxic assassination.
- In 1959, Ukrainian politician
Stepan Bandera
is assassinated
with a cyanide bullet.
In 1978, Bulgarian dissident
Georgi Markov
is stabbed with a poisoned
umbrella point.
♪
- That's nothing
compared to Putin.
Since 2000, almost
two dozen of his critics
have died
from apparent poisonings.
- In 2006, you have former
KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko
killed by radioactivity
after being dosed
with polonium-laced green tea.
And then, most famously,
Alexei Navalny,
who was a vocal critic
of Putin's regime
and actually ran
against Putin,
was poisoned
with Novichok in 2020.
- Many experts believe that
even as we read headlines today
about Vladimir Putin killing
his political rivals today,
the actual origins
of the chemical components
that he's using were perfected
in Lab X in the 1950s.
♪
- Black sites aren't only
designed to conceal secrets.
Some are built to steal them,
including one notorious project
in the Australian outback.
[dramatic music]
♪
- It's 1966, and America
is spending millions
to win the Space Race.
- Russia was racing
to put someone on the moon,
and we had to beat them and
assert our dominance in that.
So the American
government partnered
with the Australian
government to build
a space research facility.
- The facility is known
as Pine Gap,
located in the center
of Australia.
And it's staffed by about
400 American employees
and their families.
- But that's not
the real story.
- It's not
a space research facility.
It's a global monitoring
station run by the CIA.
♪
- The site receives data
to assess
Soviet missile capabilities.
♪
- America needs a location
from which to observe
the skies
above the mid-Pacific,
the part of the globe they
can't see from North America.
- The truth, known only
to its workers at the time,
is that Pine Gap will be
a vital overseas spy facility.
- Pine Gap allows them
the ability
to monitor spy satellites
moving
in the Eastern Hemisphere
over Russia and China.
- The CIA now have
eyes and ears
on the third of the world
that it can't usually reach.
- The true power of Pine Gap
is its location,
bang in the middle
of the Australian desert.
- It's over 500 miles
from the coast.
So spy planes and ships
from foreign countries
are unable to intercept
any of the data
that's traveling
to the facility.
- The remoteness of the
location is actually perfect.
♪
- Eventually Pine Gap's
cover story is blown,
not by a journalist
or whistleblower
but by the leader
of Australia's government.
[crowd cheering]
- A new prime minister
is elected,
named Gough Whitlam.
And he learns the truth
of the facility
when he takes on the role.
- Gough Whitlam
comes to office,
and he objects
to the idea of Australia
being host to this nest
of US spies.
- Prime Minister Whitlam
really was on this crusade
to shut this facility down.
♪
- He's the first
Australian leader
to question the US
having such a potentially
powerful facility on his land.
- When the Australian
prime minister goes public,
the White House
is said to be furious.
No way they are
giving up Pine Gap,
and they get the UK's
secret service, MI6, to help.
- Whitlam plans
to flat-out cancel
the agreements made with the US
and close down Pine Gap.
♪
But he's suddenly summoned
by the governor-general,
Sir John Kerr.
♪
- The British governor-general
found this very archaic
British law and used that
as a way to fire
the Australian prime minister.
- Plunging Australia into the
deepest constitutional crisis
in its history.
- But while Whitlam
stays sacked,
Pine Gap stays operational.
- The Whitlam problem
is solved,
and the CIA
continues to use Pine Gap
to monitor half the world.
- Since the end
of the Cold War in 1991,
all the way through
the war on terror in 2001,
the base has been
continually ramped up.
And today
it's as vital as ever
to the US military machine.
- America's first president
had a Virginia estate
famously known as Mount Vernon.
Part of it is now a popular
tourist spot named Fort Hunt.
Back in World War II, it served
a much darker purpose.
[dramatic music]
♪
- The national park
at Fort Hunt
has a direct link
to America's founding father
and was also a Confederate
stronghold in the Civil War.
- One day, a curious tourist
is walking around the site
and asked one
of the park rangers
what happened here during
the Second World War.
And the park ranger was caught
off guard by this question
and said, well, I'm not sure,
but I'm going to have
to look into the matter.
- The Park Service manages
to track down the men
with the answers,
veterans who have been sworn
to secrecy their whole lives.
But 60 years
after the end of the war,
they share the truth
about Fort Hunt.
Its code name was its address,
PO Box 1142.
And during World War II,
it was a black site prison.
♪
- The prisoners of war
that are being incarcerated
at PO Box 1142 were
high-ranking German officers
captured
off of the battlefields
of Europe and North Africa who
could provide very useful
intelligence information.
- That Nazi prisoners
are secretly brought to the US
is surprising enough.
But what's more,
the interrogations
at this black site are the
opposite of what you'd expect.
♪
- They did
the most primal thing
that we need as human beings:
they allowed them to feel safe.
You inspire someone
to share the truth
before they have
an opportunity to lie.
And what they did to do that
is, they treated them well.
- These Germans
are treated to luxury--
fine clothes, cocktails,
trips to the swimming pool,
and movies--
because the whole site is
rigged with hidden microphones.
The bugs are placed
in the bedrooms,
the mess hall,
even the trees.
- Comfort rises,
shields come down,
mouths open up.
- This was a bold move.
Counterintuitive interrogation
is not new,
but there are few
examples of it
being done in quite this way.
- There is such secrecy
behind this camp
because there would have been
a complete public outcry
if the public knew how well
we were treating Nazis.
- The predominantly
Jewish American interrogators
are refugees chosen
for their fluency in German.
In this way,
vital intelligence
is secretly extracted
from the Nazis.
The most astonishing
is the name
of a location that changes
the course of the war
for one ally, Britain.
♪
- The United Kingdom
had survived
the Battle of Britain
and the Blitz.
And then word
starts to emerge
that something worse
is coming:
the V-1 rocket,
also known as the buzz bomb.
[explosion]
- Then, incredibly,
there's a breakthrough
at PO Box 1142.
In the summer of 1943
during a chat between two
German naval officers
in the room,
one of them lets slip
that when the work
at Peenemuende prevails,
Germany will be victorious.
- When allied
photoreconnaissance aircraft
then fly down
and photograph Peenemuende,
they hit the jackpot.
- The island is home
to the secret rocket factory
where the V-1 is being built.
♪
The Allies immediately hit it
with everything they've got.
♪
[explosions]
- 596 Lancasters
hit Peenemuende in one night
and absolutely destroyed
the entire complex,
forced the enemy to move
all assembly underground.
And that's not
how you win a war.
- This one piece
of intelligence,
secretly obtained
from two chatting Nazis
at PO Box 1142,
delays the Nazi plans.
- This intelligence
literally saved
hundreds of thousands
of lives.
As they always say,
loose lips sink ships.
♪
- When the war ends,
PO Box 1142 is decommissioned.
Every reference to its mission
is classified,
and its interrogators
are sworn to secrecy.
- Fort Hunt then kind of
packs everything up,
and this chapter of its
history is largely forgotten.
And the US government kind of
wants it to be forgotten.
And that's because
the operation
that was carried out there
was something that violated
our obligations
in the treatment
of prisoners of war.
We were not permitted
to eavesdrop.
- However controversial
the tactics were,
they are now part
of the history
that tourists come
to enjoy at Fort Hunt.
♪
- Black sites can be
anywhere,
carefully cloaked
to keep people out
and their missions within.
But even though
it can take many years,
somehow their secrets
find a way to the light.
I'm David Duchovny.
Thanks for watching
"Secrets Declassified."
- Throughout time,
governments and the people
who work for them have done
strange and even terrible
things in the name
of national interest.
[dramatic music]
Tonight, from
a top secret facility built
to correct a US blind spot--
- The CIA now have eyes
and ears
on the third of the world
that it can't usually reach.
- --to a bio lab testing
deadly toxins on US soil--
- It develops extreme programs
that run from the apocalyptic
to the absurd.
[explosion]
- --and a city constructed
beneath Arctic ice,
made with a sinister purpose.
- This site is
largely forgotten.
And the US government kind of
wants it to be forgotten.
♪
- These places are all
known as black sites.
Now it's time to bring them
out of the shadows.
♪
Every government has them,
and none likes
to admit that they exist.
But sometimes
clandestine bases
do get exposed by tragedy.
♪
- TWA flight 514 is flying
from Indianapolis, Indiana,
to Washington, DC.
Now, as the plane
is getting closer
and closer to its destination
in DC, there's a huge storm.
Just after 11:00 AM, the plane
drops altitude way too quickly,
ends up crashing into
the side of a mountain
on the Virginia border.
All 92 people aboard
the plane die on impact.
- As the rescuers get to
the top of this mountain
and start searching
for survivors,
poring through the wreckage,
they find, puzzlingly,
that they're not
the first people on-site.
- They see cars nearby, in
the middle of the wilderness,
lined up like--
like a parking lot.
And neatly parked cars don't
belong halfway up a mountain.
- It doesn't take
long for journalists
to realize that there's
a whole infrastructure
atop this mountain
that isn't on any map.
♪
- The land actually belongs
to the Department of Defense,
but the DOD just claims that,
oh, it's nothing but
a weather-monitoring station.
There's nothing special
about this area.
♪
- But journalists
keep pushing to figure out
what secrets this
Virginia mountain is hiding.
- And eventually,
in Senate hearings a year
after the crash,
the Pentagon finally
confirms the existence and the
purpose of this black site.
- It's called Mount Weather,
and its true purpose
is surprising.
It's a top secret
doomsday bunker.
- It wasn't always secret.
It started out
as a weather observatory.
Then for a brief period
in the 1920s,
it was President
Calvin Coolidge's summer home.
- The spot doesn't
stay idyllic for long.
In 1949,
the Soviet Union detonates
its first nuclear bomb,
and Mount Weather's mission
becomes far more strategic.
- You have to remember
that this is right after
World War II, which means
the beginning of the Cold War.
And thanks to fears around a
possible Soviet nuclear attack,
President Truman makes plans
in the late '40s to make every
American home, workplace--
basically, everywhere
in the country--survivable.
- You have, like,
the duck-and-cover drills
for the public to help them
survive atomic warfare.
But then separately,
the government
is thinking hard about
how the president survives,
how the government
functions continue.
- They decide to build three
massive nuclear fortresses
to ensure what they
now start to call
the continuity of government.
One of these immense
fortresses is Mount Weather.
♪
- To create this base, they
need to hollow out a mountain
and keep it a secret.
So in 1953,
work begins on the project.
Thousands of tons
of greenstone are excavated
from the interior
of the mountain.
- And it costs
over a billion dollars.
And when it's finished,
it is a 600,000-square-foot
underground city
and has everything ranging
from a hospital to restaurants
to a movie theater.
- The entrance is
protected by a 20-feet,
34-ton blast door
that is 5 feet thick,
and it takes
15 minutes to open.
It's under 2,000 feet
of granite.
So you could fire missiles
at it all day long,
and the people inside
would barely even notice.
- Its construction and its
activities are classified,
and its staff is
sworn to secrecy.
- While the community
of Berryville, Virginia,
helps build it and staff it,
the public at large has no idea
that this facility exists.
♪
- Then in the 1960s,
partly thanks
to the Cuban missile crisis,
Mount Weather is expanded.
- Mount Weather has its own
communications facilities,
its own water treatment plant,
its own fire department,
in fact, even text messaging
and one of the world's
first computers.
That technology begins for the
first time at Mount Weather
as the way for the doomsday
bunkers to communicate
amongst themselves.
- With its cover blown
thanks to the crash
of flight 514,
Mount Weather is
pretty much mothballed.
That all changes on 9/11.
♪
- Government
decides to reactivate
and expand Mount Weather.
The Defense Department never
mentioned it officially
anymore, and the complex's
plans and operations
are all classified
to this day.
- As far as we know,
Mount Weather today
is as active and advanced
a facility as it ever has been.
- It is now believed to sprawl
over 700,000 square feet.
That's the size
of four baseball fields.
So it supposedly can hold
as many as 2,000 lucky people.
♪
- Mount Weather
was built to survive
a Soviet nuclear bomb attack.
Over in Russia, a black site
built to make those bombs
would also be
exposed by tragedy.
This time, a terrible accident
is covered up for a decade.
♪
- It was a fall day
in September 1957,
in a village called Kyshtym
in southern Siberia.
The villages are suddenly
shocked by a vast noise,
and the sky turns
to a completely
different shade of blue.
- When this occurs,
it spreads panic
through the local people.
And even worse,
the government officials
descend upon the village,
and they start killing
livestock, burning crops.
Things are getting
incredibly strange.
- Evacuations begin.
Several hundred villages,
several hundred
thousand people, and they're
all being evacuated.
They're not being informed,
and so they're left
with nothing
but question marks.
- Because it's behind
the iron curtain,
in the West,
we have no idea.
So it's a complete mystery
as to what's going on there.
♪
- In the years that follow,
rumors circulate
that people are
beginning to experience
unexplained illnesses,
pregnant women
are giving birth to children
that have
obvious birth defects,
Kyshtym and the
20,000-square-mile area
around it
being a zone of death,
and that nobody could go there
because the entire area
was contaminated.
♪
- The real story
of this disaster
remains hidden
for another 16 years,
until a top Russian scientist
named Zhores Medvedev defects
to London and tells all.
♪
- Medvedev is a problem as far
as the KGB is concerned.
He's critical
of the government.
He is a troublemaker.
And so as soon
as he leaves Russia,
they cancel his citizenship.
He can't come back.
- When he feels no obligation
to the authority
of the Soviet government,
he begins to speak out.
- For Zhores to come to London
to write whatever he wants
and to get it published,
you know, he became
a truth revealer
and truth teller.
- And one of the things
that he comments about
is this incident
that occurs at Kyshtym
in Siberia in September 1957.
- Medvedev reveals
that the Kyshtym disaster
was caused by an accident
at the top secret
nuclear processing plant
called Mayak,
just 8 miles away.
- The Russians have been
caught flat-footed
by the end
of the Second World War
and the introduction
of nuclear weapons
at the conclusion
of that conflict.
And so the Soviets
are desperately attempting
to build a nuclear arsenal
of their own.
They're desperately trying
to catch up to the West.
- So the Soviets
install a network
of weapons-grade plutonium
processing plants
across the vast country.
Mayak is the most
notorious,
but it's constructed
at breakneck speed
by an unconventional
workforce.
♪
- Mayak's built
by 40,000 prisoners,
all shipped in from gulags,
and it's huge.
We're talking 35 square miles
with an exclusion zone
around it that's three times
bigger than that.
- Mayak has five
nuclear reactors
producing plutonium,
refining it,
and turning it into weapons.
♪
- Even though there's
not a big city nearby,
there are hundreds
of small villages
and settlements like Kyshtym,
places that,
when you combine them,
have tens of thousands
of civilians in them.
♪
- In 1957, disaster strikes.
♪
- The cooling system for
a cistern of radioactive waste
at Mayak fails.
[explosion]
It explodes with the force
of 70 tons of TNT.
- And that explosion
showers the surrounding area
with irradiated material.
This encompasses
an area covering
217 separate settlements,
and over 250,000 people
are forcibly evacuated
without explanation.
- Medvedev's revelations are
central because without him,
we wouldn't know any of this.
♪
- Then 20 years later,
there's a new twist.
♪
Declassified documents show
that the CIA knew all along
and kept it secret.
- US government had learned
of the horrific events
within months
of the explosion at Mayak,
but they kept quiet about it
because they think that news
of the tragedy might
turn public opinion away
from the US's own
fledgling nuclear industry.
♪
- Imagine planning to place
a vast nuclear arsenal
under a polar ice cap
and then pretending
something entirely different.
That's just what the US did
at the height of the Cold War
at a black site in Greenland.
[dramatic music]
♪
- It's 1956, and the
US Department of Defense
releases a documentary
about this groundbreaking
polar research station
in Greenland,
800 miles south
of the North Pole.
- The United States Army
has established
an unprecedented
nuclear-powered
Arctic research center.
- In the Arctic, you have
to contend with sometimes
minus 20
to minus 40 conditions.
It's just
an incredibly difficult
environment to operate in.
- An army colonel
named John Kerkering
is tasked with constructing
a polar city.
It's housed in huge
covered tunnels
with dormitories, a hospital,
even a chapel
and a barbershop.
- The documentary presents
the polar research station
as being well ahead
of its time,
primarily because
of the fact that it
is powered entirely
by the world's first
portable nuclear reactor.
- The name of the base
is Camp Century.
It's an ambitious project.
They put a nuclear reactor
in one of the most brutal
and difficult environments
on Earth.
♪
As wild as that is,
that's not even
the craziest thing about this.
♪
- Although only
a few people know it,
Camp Century
is just a cover story.
♪
The real plan here
is to construct
an immense nuclear launch site
deep under the snow.
Its name:
Project Iceworm.
[explosion]
- When Project Iceworm
was envisioned,
there were a lot
of legitimate fears
that we were on the precipice
of nuclear war.
- In the 1950s,
the threat of nuclear war
couldn't be more serious.
Iceworm will give the West an
opportunity to survive it all.
- Their idea is to have
hundreds of nuclear warheads
all prepped, all ready to go,
in the tunnels under the ice--
a full-on nuclear arsenal.
- If the Russians initiated
a nuclear first strike
on America, there would be
this secondary base
in Greenland that could fire
a retaliatory counterattack
into Russia.
- The Camp Century cover story
is so convincing,
it fools the Russians.
- They did actually
do experiments there
and work on science,
but it was basically
a test bed to see what else we
could do under the Arctic ice.
- In the end,
the real challenge
to the success
of Project Iceworm
doesn't come
from being discovered
but from the landscape itself.
- The Greenland ice cap
is so dynamic,
you just can't maintain
a permanent structure
underneath the ice.
- The base
was being sandwiched
between the ice walls
as they constricted
because every year,
the ice moves another 6 feet.
- You've got
600 nuclear warheads
and a nuclear reactor.
You cannot put them
in shifting ice.
- And so Camp Century
is abandoned in 1967.
- They end up pulling the plug
on the entire thing,
and they just walk away.
- I think the line
they used--
we'll just open the door
and let it snow.
And they thought it would
be kind of permanently
entombed in this ice
and be safe in that way.
♪
- Although the nuclear reactor
at Camp Century was removed,
the material
that was left behind
is still dangerous
to the environment.
♪
- If the story of a top secret
US black site in Greenland
sounds improbable,
consider our next case,
a covert military training
camp hidden in Colorado.
♪
- It's a dark and snowy night
in Colorado,
about 50 kilometers
west of Denver.
You have a military
personnel transport
that's leaving
a secret base,
en route to this small
local airfield.
The bus is moving
under cover of darkness
to keep this mission covert
and its occupants classified.
The bus ends up
skidding and crashing
on the icy Colorado roads,
and the delay
adds hours to the trip.
- When it arrives,
the sun is just coming up,
and the employees
of the airfield
are beginning to arrive
for their workday.
♪
- Armed men suddenly herd them
at gunpoint into a hangar
and swear them to secrecy.
♪
But through a gap
in the hangar door,
some of them witness
an unexpected sight.
They see 15 men
with East Asian features,
wearing camouflage fatigues,
prepare to board a cargo jet
that has blackout windows.
- Foreign personnel
at a Colorado base?
Men in black waving guns
at innocent witnesses?
What is happening here?
- There's a little bit
of initial whispering about it,
and there's some reporting
in the local press,
but then the story
is completely suppressed.
There's no further
reporting about it.
It's not until decades later
that the reality
of what was actually
happening there is revealed.
- According to documents
declassified in 1974,
the airfield employees came
across a secret CIA operation
targeting Communist China.
♪
- In the early 1950s,
the Chinese expand to
and envelop Tibet into
the Greater People's
Republic of China.
- When its spiritual
leader, the Dalai Lama,
is put under house arrest,
Tibetans begin to organize
against Chinese occupation.
- As Chinese domination began,
Tibetans formed
into resistance groups,
and they turned
to the United States.
And the CIA saw
an opportunity to gain
an upper hand against
the People's Republic of China.
♪
- In 1958, the CIA sets up
this base in Colorado to begin
training the Tibetan rebels.
It's much easier
and much more effective
if you can clandestinely
move them to the United States
and give them training here.
- The site in Colorado
is known as Camp Hale.
- Tibet is, of course,
in the high mountains
in the foothills
of the Himalayas,
and so is Camp Hale
in the Colorado Rockies--
similar altitude,
similar mountainous terrain.
And it was
sufficiently remote,
so a couple hundred Tibetans
could filter into this camp
without too many questions
among the local populace.
♪
- In 1959,
the trained Tibetans
are now ready for action.
They parachute
into their homeland
on a top secret mission
to help extract
the Dalai Lama.
♪
- They are taking literally
the spiritual leader of Tibet
and trying to smuggle him
to safety.
The way they do that
is by moving him
through a clandestine
underground railroad
going from home to home,
village to village.
That's a treacherous path not
just because of the terrain,
but also, they have
to sneak past the sentries
and border guards
that are manned
by the Chinese Communists.
- Against the odds,
the rescue succeeds.
Over the next five years,
300 trained Tibetan fighters
take on a series
of daring missions,
from photographing
military sites
to attacking Chinese
government installations.
- Despite the bravery
of the Tibetan resistance,
they are not ultimately
successful, even with US help,
in throwing off
Chinese domination.
- So Camp Hale
is just quietly closed.
Training there quietly ceases.
♪
- Some of the most lethal
weapons ever devised
are chemical and biological.
And the US has
a top secret facility
in Utah to create them.
But when something goes
very wrong there in 1968,
it risks the lives
of thousands of citizens.
The story of this
black site begins
with a declaration of war.
[engines humming]
[explosion]
[dramatic music]
- The US has just been
attacked at Pearl Harbor,
and it's desperate
to find a way to hit back.
It decides to build
a testing ground
to develop the weapons that
will turn the tide of the war.
- The military grabs
over a million square miles
of desert
just 80 miles
from Salt Lake City.
It is one of the most isolated
parts of the US,
nothing there but rattlesnakes
and wild horses.
And they build
one of the most secretive
government facilities
ever devised.
It's called
Dugway Proving Ground.
[explosion]
♪
- Much of Dugway is basically
like being on the moon
or Mars.
Its security comes
from the fact
that it's so far away
from anything
that the effort
it takes to get there
would be noticed long before
you got to the fence.
♪
- The first weapon that
undergoes development at Dugway
is a weapon system
that can be used
to destroy Japanese cities.
♪
- American architect
who actually lived in Japan
is given a team of prisoners
who actually create
an at-scale replica
of Japanese villages
in downtown Tokyo so they can
test the M69 incendiary bomb.
They test over and over again
until they can perfect
the chain reaction
that maximizes
the M69's destruction.
♪
- And then on the night
of March 9 and 10, 1945,
M69 incendiary clusters
that were developed at Dugway
are used for the first time
effectively.
- They hit back
for Pearl Harbor
by firebombing Tokyo.
And it works.
- The firestorm
burned out the entire
Sumida district
of downtown Tokyo
and killed 120,000 people.
The argument could
be made that the M69
incendiary cluster was
a vastly more deadly weapon
than the nuclear weapon.
♪
- Dugway has proved itself
deadly effective.
And so after
World War II ends,
the secret facility
is steadily expanded
and deployed in the Cold War.
♪
- So Dugway was a major part
of the biological
and chemical weapons
programs for the US.
- Dugway starts to develop
what it calls
biological warfare agents
in a range of extreme programs
that run from the apocalyptic
to the absurd.
- They're developing anthrax;
dirty bombs;
radioactive fallout;
odorless, paralyzing gases;
even mutant microbes.
All the most dastardly
things you can imagine
are being created
here at Dugway.
- All attempting to disable
huge amounts of people
and all highly classified.
♪
- So one of the programs
that the US had
was to use insects
as your tools of warfare.
♪
- The idea is to load
biting insects with bacteria
or viruses and then
drop them as disease agents
on a target population.
- Now, the insects
never worked out,
but it really goes to show
what they were willing to do
at Dugway to try
to execute their mission
of being on the cutting edge
of biological warfare.
[explosion]
- But one spring morning
in 1968, disaster strikes,
and the locals awake to a scene
straight out of a horror movie.
♪
- Farmers find their livestock
dead or dying in the fields.
- Some are dying.
Others are paralyzed.
Some are foaming at the mouth.
And it's happening
across the region.
- Immediately,
the finger points
to the secretive facility
nearby.
- It was pretty easy
to connect the dots here.
♪
- In the face of this kind
of evidence,
even the military can't
keep its secret forever.
It takes a year of pressure,
but they finally
admit that Dugway is involved.
♪
- A Pentagon official
explains to the press
that the sheep were killed
by a test gone wrong.
An aircraft malfunctioned,
dropping its load
at the wrong altitude.
320 gallons of VX nerve gas
is spread by the wind
over local ranches.
♪
- VX nerve agent
is a terrifying thing.
A few milliliters in gaseous
form can kill a grown man.
- Imagine what
it would have done
if it got to Salt Lake City,
which is only 80 miles away.
♪
[crowd chanting indistinctly]
- The Dugway sheep incident
comes at a time
of public protest
over US foreign policy.
[crowd chanting indistinctly]
- There was a court
of public opinion
during the era
of the war in Vietnam.
We shouldn't be fighting
in Southeast Asia using napalm
and Agent Orange and all
of these other chemicals
that will eventually
pressure Nixon to disavow
the use of weapons like this.
- In 1969, President Nixon
signs a statement
renouncing US use
of lethal biological weapons
and limiting its use
of chemical weapons.
♪
Despite that,
Dugway continues to operate.
- The fact is,
we have to understand
these horrifying chemicals
and the threat they pose,
and that means there will
always be a black site
just like Dugway
studying them somewhere.
- We all know
the physician's creed:
first, do no harm.
But 87 years ago,
a Russian doctor
is given a mission
in a top secret lab
to achieve exactly
the opposite.
[dramatic music]
♪
- On the outskirts of Moscow
is a nondescript
concrete building,
unremarkable to look at,
ignored by people
that pass by it every day.
And no one knows it
at the time,
but inside is a chemical
and medical laboratory.
♪
The site has had many names,
but now it has come
to be known as Lab X.
♪
- In 1938, Stalin himself
assigns chemist
Grigory Mairanovsky
to take over Lab X
and to come up
with the perfect way
of killing,
to create methods
that are silent,
untraceable, undetectable,
and officially deniable.
♪
- Mairanovsky
develops narcotics
and psychotropic substances.
He tests new poisons
like sodium cyanide,
colchicine, and curare.
- Mairanovsky would need
human test subjects
for this awful research.
But he could just pick up
the phone or fill out a form,
get a hundred gulag prisoners
delivered the next day.
Almost certainly, he worked
on captured Germans as well.
♪
- He's literally using them
as guinea pigs,
injecting them
with chemical solutions
and then timing how long
it takes for them to die.
♪
- Mairanovsky is very quickly
nicknamed by his superiors
the Doctor of Death
and protected behind the walls
of a black site
that does not officially exist.
♪
- For decades, what happens
at Lab X remains a mystery.
But when the USSR
collapses in 1991,
a high-ranking Russian
intelligence officer
named Pavel Sudoplatov
reveals shocking details
about this black site.
♪
- Sudoplatov, sort of
a career secret policeman.
Not just an assassin
and a killer;
he's a boss
of assassins and killers.
Stalin needs
some messy work done,
Sudoplatov is kind of
on the short list
of people you talk to.
He was rumored to have been
part of the team
that set up the assassination
of Leon Trotsky.
- Sudoplatov reveals methods
Mairanovsky devised at Lab X:
cyanide-loaded bullets,
ingested powders,
and injections
at routine medical checkups.
- Stalin had
countless enemies,
but what's incredible is that
over the course of five years,
it's estimated that up
to 100 of his political rivals
were killed by the techniques
that were perfected at Lab X.
- Sudoplatov also reveals
that the success of Lab X
brings about the Doctor
of Death's own downfall.
♪
- In the early 1950s,
Stalin is getting paranoid
about his grip on power.
He actually starts to fear that
Mairanovsky's lethal poisons
are going to be used on him.
So in 1951,
Stalin accuses Mairanovsky,
along with 39
other Jewish doctors,
of planning his assassination.
It becomes known
as the Doctors' Plot,
and he imprisons them all,
which is his MO.
Joseph liked to throw
everybody in jail.
- Mairanovsky
is given a choice.
Confess, and you'll
get 10 years.
You know, don't confess, and we
might just have to shoot you.
- He's nearly beaten to death.
♪
He actually survives 10 years
in a Russian prison
before he's released
by Khrushchev
and flees to the southern part
of Russia, to Dagestan,
to live out the rest
of his life.
♪
- The Doctor of Death
dies in obscurity in 1964,
but his methods live on.
♪
- Russia's regimes
continue to embrace
Lab X's officially deniable
methods of toxic assassination.
- In 1959, Ukrainian politician
Stepan Bandera
is assassinated
with a cyanide bullet.
In 1978, Bulgarian dissident
Georgi Markov
is stabbed with a poisoned
umbrella point.
♪
- That's nothing
compared to Putin.
Since 2000, almost
two dozen of his critics
have died
from apparent poisonings.
- In 2006, you have former
KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko
killed by radioactivity
after being dosed
with polonium-laced green tea.
And then, most famously,
Alexei Navalny,
who was a vocal critic
of Putin's regime
and actually ran
against Putin,
was poisoned
with Novichok in 2020.
- Many experts believe that
even as we read headlines today
about Vladimir Putin killing
his political rivals today,
the actual origins
of the chemical components
that he's using were perfected
in Lab X in the 1950s.
♪
- Black sites aren't only
designed to conceal secrets.
Some are built to steal them,
including one notorious project
in the Australian outback.
[dramatic music]
♪
- It's 1966, and America
is spending millions
to win the Space Race.
- Russia was racing
to put someone on the moon,
and we had to beat them and
assert our dominance in that.
So the American
government partnered
with the Australian
government to build
a space research facility.
- The facility is known
as Pine Gap,
located in the center
of Australia.
And it's staffed by about
400 American employees
and their families.
- But that's not
the real story.
- It's not
a space research facility.
It's a global monitoring
station run by the CIA.
♪
- The site receives data
to assess
Soviet missile capabilities.
♪
- America needs a location
from which to observe
the skies
above the mid-Pacific,
the part of the globe they
can't see from North America.
- The truth, known only
to its workers at the time,
is that Pine Gap will be
a vital overseas spy facility.
- Pine Gap allows them
the ability
to monitor spy satellites
moving
in the Eastern Hemisphere
over Russia and China.
- The CIA now have
eyes and ears
on the third of the world
that it can't usually reach.
- The true power of Pine Gap
is its location,
bang in the middle
of the Australian desert.
- It's over 500 miles
from the coast.
So spy planes and ships
from foreign countries
are unable to intercept
any of the data
that's traveling
to the facility.
- The remoteness of the
location is actually perfect.
♪
- Eventually Pine Gap's
cover story is blown,
not by a journalist
or whistleblower
but by the leader
of Australia's government.
[crowd cheering]
- A new prime minister
is elected,
named Gough Whitlam.
And he learns the truth
of the facility
when he takes on the role.
- Gough Whitlam
comes to office,
and he objects
to the idea of Australia
being host to this nest
of US spies.
- Prime Minister Whitlam
really was on this crusade
to shut this facility down.
♪
- He's the first
Australian leader
to question the US
having such a potentially
powerful facility on his land.
- When the Australian
prime minister goes public,
the White House
is said to be furious.
No way they are
giving up Pine Gap,
and they get the UK's
secret service, MI6, to help.
- Whitlam plans
to flat-out cancel
the agreements made with the US
and close down Pine Gap.
♪
But he's suddenly summoned
by the governor-general,
Sir John Kerr.
♪
- The British governor-general
found this very archaic
British law and used that
as a way to fire
the Australian prime minister.
- Plunging Australia into the
deepest constitutional crisis
in its history.
- But while Whitlam
stays sacked,
Pine Gap stays operational.
- The Whitlam problem
is solved,
and the CIA
continues to use Pine Gap
to monitor half the world.
- Since the end
of the Cold War in 1991,
all the way through
the war on terror in 2001,
the base has been
continually ramped up.
And today
it's as vital as ever
to the US military machine.
- America's first president
had a Virginia estate
famously known as Mount Vernon.
Part of it is now a popular
tourist spot named Fort Hunt.
Back in World War II, it served
a much darker purpose.
[dramatic music]
♪
- The national park
at Fort Hunt
has a direct link
to America's founding father
and was also a Confederate
stronghold in the Civil War.
- One day, a curious tourist
is walking around the site
and asked one
of the park rangers
what happened here during
the Second World War.
And the park ranger was caught
off guard by this question
and said, well, I'm not sure,
but I'm going to have
to look into the matter.
- The Park Service manages
to track down the men
with the answers,
veterans who have been sworn
to secrecy their whole lives.
But 60 years
after the end of the war,
they share the truth
about Fort Hunt.
Its code name was its address,
PO Box 1142.
And during World War II,
it was a black site prison.
♪
- The prisoners of war
that are being incarcerated
at PO Box 1142 were
high-ranking German officers
captured
off of the battlefields
of Europe and North Africa who
could provide very useful
intelligence information.
- That Nazi prisoners
are secretly brought to the US
is surprising enough.
But what's more,
the interrogations
at this black site are the
opposite of what you'd expect.
♪
- They did
the most primal thing
that we need as human beings:
they allowed them to feel safe.
You inspire someone
to share the truth
before they have
an opportunity to lie.
And what they did to do that
is, they treated them well.
- These Germans
are treated to luxury--
fine clothes, cocktails,
trips to the swimming pool,
and movies--
because the whole site is
rigged with hidden microphones.
The bugs are placed
in the bedrooms,
the mess hall,
even the trees.
- Comfort rises,
shields come down,
mouths open up.
- This was a bold move.
Counterintuitive interrogation
is not new,
but there are few
examples of it
being done in quite this way.
- There is such secrecy
behind this camp
because there would have been
a complete public outcry
if the public knew how well
we were treating Nazis.
- The predominantly
Jewish American interrogators
are refugees chosen
for their fluency in German.
In this way,
vital intelligence
is secretly extracted
from the Nazis.
The most astonishing
is the name
of a location that changes
the course of the war
for one ally, Britain.
♪
- The United Kingdom
had survived
the Battle of Britain
and the Blitz.
And then word
starts to emerge
that something worse
is coming:
the V-1 rocket,
also known as the buzz bomb.
[explosion]
- Then, incredibly,
there's a breakthrough
at PO Box 1142.
In the summer of 1943
during a chat between two
German naval officers
in the room,
one of them lets slip
that when the work
at Peenemuende prevails,
Germany will be victorious.
- When allied
photoreconnaissance aircraft
then fly down
and photograph Peenemuende,
they hit the jackpot.
- The island is home
to the secret rocket factory
where the V-1 is being built.
♪
The Allies immediately hit it
with everything they've got.
♪
[explosions]
- 596 Lancasters
hit Peenemuende in one night
and absolutely destroyed
the entire complex,
forced the enemy to move
all assembly underground.
And that's not
how you win a war.
- This one piece
of intelligence,
secretly obtained
from two chatting Nazis
at PO Box 1142,
delays the Nazi plans.
- This intelligence
literally saved
hundreds of thousands
of lives.
As they always say,
loose lips sink ships.
♪
- When the war ends,
PO Box 1142 is decommissioned.
Every reference to its mission
is classified,
and its interrogators
are sworn to secrecy.
- Fort Hunt then kind of
packs everything up,
and this chapter of its
history is largely forgotten.
And the US government kind of
wants it to be forgotten.
And that's because
the operation
that was carried out there
was something that violated
our obligations
in the treatment
of prisoners of war.
We were not permitted
to eavesdrop.
- However controversial
the tactics were,
they are now part
of the history
that tourists come
to enjoy at Fort Hunt.
♪
- Black sites can be
anywhere,
carefully cloaked
to keep people out
and their missions within.
But even though
it can take many years,
somehow their secrets
find a way to the light.
I'm David Duchovny.
Thanks for watching
"Secrets Declassified."