Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny (2025) s01e03 Episode Script
Extreme Missions
1
Throughout time, governments
and the people who work
for them have done strange
and even terrible things
in the name of national interest,
including launching missions so extreme,
they seem to defy belief
like trying to extract a
1,750-ton Soviet submarine
from the ocean floor
using a giant claw, in secret.
No one has ever
attempted such an audacious
salvage operation like this before.
Or sending paratroopers
on a secret mission
strapped to a nuclear bomb.
Set off a nuclear bomb and run.
That sounds insane.
And even stealing Soviet secrets
400 feet below the waves.
If the men are caught,
they are under orders
to blow up everyone on board.
They cannot be taken alive.
Now it's time to bring these
extreme secret missions
to light.
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It's the late 1960s, and
the cold war is raging.
A Soviet nuclear sub has
sunk 1,500 miles from Hawaii,
and a race is on to find it.
Can the us locate the
sub and recover its secrets
before the enemy does?
That's the impossible mission
assigned to one American team.
On march 1, 1968, Soviet sub k-129
disappears from Soviet
radar deep in the pacific,
with 98 men aboard,
a prize hidden at the
bottom of the ocean.
The Russians are
frantically searching for it.
So is the us.
K-129 could be the
holy grail of intelligence.
Think about what we
would have access to
their code books, their
code-breaking machines,
guidance systems.
We would even get our
eyes on their nuclear missiles.
This is completely worth
the effort and the cost.
To locate it, the Navy
checks their acoustic data
for any sign of the sub.
If a submarine sinks, it'll
make a distinctive noise.
So when k-129 sunk,
they were able to locate where
the sub might have gone down.
So the us Navy sends out
their best reconnaissance sub,
the USS Halibut.
After more than 11 weeks
of painstakingly searching,
Halibut's camera finally
captures the submarine.
It's 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii
and 16,500 feet deep.
But retrieving the sub
seems like an impossible task.
The vessel lies three
miles deep underwater
in a totally black environment.
To figure out if they could
pull off the impossible,
the CIA put their head of
science and technology,
John parangosky, in charge.
He comes up with the suggestion
to raise k-129 to the surface
using a giant metal claw,
like the one you'd
find in an arcade game,
but attached to a ship.
No one has ever
attempted such an audacious
salvage operation like this before.
And what makes this
even more challenging?
It all needs to happen
without the Soviets knowing.
Despite the odds, the CIA and the Navy
decide to go for it.
On July 1, 1969, the
covert mission is launched.
It's codenamed project azorian,
and the first step is designing the claw.
The claw design needs
to be 179 feet by 31 feet.
No one has ever built one big enough
to lift a 1,750-ton submarine
from the ocean floor.
Creating the claw is the easy part.
To use it, the us needs
to anchor a huge ship
for a month-long salvage operation
that's sure to gain Soviet attention.
So the CIA needs a cover story.
They come up with an interesting idea.
If the mission is masked
as a privately-owned
business venture,
no one should suspect that
the government is involved.
So they enlist the help
of the celebrity industrialist
of his day, Howard Hughes.
It made such a good cover
story because everybody knew
that Howard Hughes
was kind of half nuts.
And he agrees to build this ship.
They set up this fake press release.
They announce that they were
going to mine magnesium nodules
from the bottom of the ocean floor
from a ship called the glomar explorer.
Six years after the us found k-129,
it's finally go time.
The glomar arrives at the mission site.
They're ready to go. They're gung-ho.
But just as they're about to deploy,
here comes a Soviet ship.
Once the Soviet ship arrives,
the glomar crew is very concerned
that this operation is
about to go up in smoke.
A helicopter takes off
from the Russian ship
and starts circling around.
And the glomar's crew
are on tenterhooks.
The CIA has invested hundreds
of millions of dollars here,
more than a billion in today's money.
Is this the end of the mission?
The captain of the glomar explorer
radios the captain of the Russian ship.
He explains to him, we
are a mining operation.
We're Howard Hughes's corporation.
Well, fortunately, a few hours
go by, the Soviet ship leaves.
Once the Soviet ship leaves the area,
they lower the claw into the water,
unwind three miles of cable.
It descends to the bottom,
connects to the Soviet vessel,
and then they begin to lift it up
from the bottom of the ocean.
You don't want to pull it up too fast,
because if you try to
raise it up too quickly,
it might break apart.
It's already a damaged vehicle,
and it might fall back to the ocean floor,
and then you're left with nothing.
It was very nerve-wracking
as they tried to pull this thing up.
They were about 2/3 of the way up,
and then the k-129 fell apart.
About 2/3 of it broke off and
fell back to the ocean floor.
It takes eight days to
haul the remaining section
of the k-129 back to the ship's hull.
But before they even have a chance
to analyze the wreckage,
the secret spills out.
Both the "la times" and "New York times"
break the story of this top secret mission.
The papers' front pages
are covered with pictures
of Hughes's glomar
explorer, detailing rumors
of a Soviet sub recovery
and the Howard Hughes-CIA connection.
So it turns out that
Howard Hughes's office
was burglarized.
The burglars find this memo
about the glomar explorer.
They sell it to the "la
times" that publishes it.
This is the CIA's worst nightmare.
Neither the us government nor the CIA
comment on the matter until 1992.
Only then is the mission
publicly acknowledged
for the first time, when the CIA
hand delivers a video
to the Russian president,
Boris yeltsin.
After the collapse of the Soviet union,
as a show of goodwill,
the American government
presents a video
to yeltsin of the burial at sea
of the Soviet sailors
whose remains were found.
It made international
news around the world.
Whatever secrets
project azorian unearthed
remain a mystery to this day.
That mission was obviously daring.
But consider something
even more extreme
elite us paratroopers
assigned to jump into darkness
carrying small nuclear bombs.
In 1970, a top secret us
army mission is underway.
Two members of an elite special ops unit
leap out of the cargo bay of
a us army transport aircraft
into the black of night.
The team parachutes
down to their drop zone.
And they are about to
deploy one of america's
most dangerous weapons
in an operational environment
for the first time in history.
They always went in two-man teams.
So if you can imagine
jumping out of an airplane,
hurtling towards earth with a
bomb strapped to your back.
It was a huge challenge.
But this is no ordinary bomb.
It's an entirely new
portable nuclear weapon.
And it can only be detonated by hand.
Once on the ground, the
men have to carry the nuke
on their back for two days,
constantly dodging enemy patrols
and navigating rugged terrain.
The drawback of this operational setup
is that the detonation code
is split between two people.
And so the bomb must be
jointly armed to prevent it
being detonated,
maliciously or accidentally.
The problem is, if either of
these soldiers don't make it,
it's mission failure.
Seems entirely insane, right?
Set off a nuclear bomb and run.
Why would anyone do that?
Because, thankfully, the
bomb doesn't explode.
And this daring mission
wasn't carried out in enemy territory.
It was actually a training run
taking place in the
mountains of New Hampshire,
part of an audition
to join one of the most
classified army units
to ever exist the green light team.
The idea of the green light team
comes about because it's thought
that the Soviets possess
more tactical nuclear weapons
than we do.
So the solution is to just
hand-carry nuclear weapons.
Brilliant, right?
It also means that
there's no signal in space
for the enemy to pick up on.
So in many ways, it's clever,
it's clean, it's sophisticated.
It has to be delivered right on the target
and delivered by hand.
So they needed to
recruit commando types.
These elite soldiers are handpicked
from the green berets,
the us Navy seals,
and the marines, all of whom
are no strangers to covert
missions behind enemy lines.
But in this case, it's only
when the green light teams
begin training that they
realize their missions
will be different from previous ones.
It's believed that there was an obligation
to stay with the weapon
and protect it until it triggers
its initiating sequence,
ensuring that the mission
is being completed.
But in so doing, they've also turned this
into a suicide mission.
That would then leave no
time for the men to escape
the blast radius.
Inside the world of intelligence
and special operations, we have a joke.
We call ourselves "too dumb to quit."
Because when we're
given an assignment,
no matter how crazy
or suicidal it sounds,
it's also exciting.
For a quarter century, these
incredible special ops teams
and how they operate stays a secret.
It comes to public knowledge, in 1984,
when journalists discovered details
of the plan inside of a scientific journal.
The article describes that there are
bomb-carrying teams on standby
in case they're called upon by NATO.
But thankfully, that never happens.
The green light teams
are maintained at high alert.
And yet, they're never used in combat.
Cold war Berlin is a
divided city of secrets.
To gain crucial intelligence,
governments are willing to green light
what seem like impossible missions.
Berlin, during this
time, you've got British,
American, and Soviet
spies all flocking to the city
to try to get their hands
on any sort of information
that can give their country
just a little bit of an edge.
Berlin had become a vast network
of underground communication channels
with various agencies,
various intelligence groups
trading information.
It's a vast network. It's amazing.
In 1954, the us and
britain decide to collaborate
on an audacious plan.
The CIA, with MI6, want to build a tunnel
to tap into phone lines
so that we could listen
to what the east Germans
were talking about.
This is a high-risk operation.
East and west are butting heads.
The Soviets want the
Americans out of Berlin.
If they discover this tunnel,
that will be their excuse to kick them out.
They need to build the
tunnel without being detected.
But to add to the challenge,
the CIA and MI6 operatives
are constantly being monitored
by enemy watchtowers
and armed guards.
The area that they select to do this
is just 1,500 feet away from east Berlin.
But on the east Berlin side,
where the phone lines are located,
there are prying eyes and military patrols.
So they're going to need a cover story
if they're going to get away with it.
So they come up with a plan to build
a two-story structure over
where the tunnel will begin.
It provides a cover for
unloading equipment,
and then also removing the dirt
that's going to be pulled
out of the tunnel itself.
And this two-story structure
will then be disguised
as a facility associated
with one of the airfields in the city.
They had to spend seven
months laying the groundwork
for this building.
Once that was done, they
began advancing the tunnel
toward the east German
side of the border.
It took three teams working
around the clock in shifts,
backbreaking work.
The tunnel operation
was very dangerous.
German patrols are going back and forth.
In order to prevent the
discovery of the tunnel,
the Americans have a lookout
that signals the people doing the tunnel
to stop work when the
German guards get too close.
They move 3,000 tons of soil
and then replace it with 125 tons of steel
to reinforce the walls of the tunnel.
Six months later, that 1,400-foot tunnel
is ready to go.
And it's installed with these teleprinters
that are attached to switchboards
that record and print communication.
It's a pretty remarkable achievement.
This wiretap discovers
some very interesting things
about the establishment
of the east German army
and the training of that army.
It also reveals some
controversies between
the border police and the army.
At the time, the CIA and MI6 believe
this tunnel will provide a continuous flow
of intelligence for years.
But mother nature has other ideas.
11 months and 11
days after the completion
of the tunnel, a freak rain event
strikes the city of Berlin.
And as a result of very heavy rainfall,
the phone lines go out.
A crew is sent to repair the phone lines.
And what did they find?
They found a tap on their lines.
And that wouldn't take any time at all
for them to figure out
that it was the allies underground,
listening to their intelligence operations.
The following day, Soviets called
a press conference, revealing
the tunnel to the world.
They hoped that the exposure
will both embarrass the west
and deter them from carrying
out any future operations.
After the Soviets hold
their press conference
to reveal the discovery of the tunnel,
other western nations are not
downtrodden at the discovery.
They're impressed by the technology.
They're impressed that we were capable
of something quite so bold.
The west's clandestine mission is blown.
But the operation
remains one of the CIA's
most celebrated successes of the '50s.
While the CIA declassifies a report
on the top secret mission in 2007,
it has never fully disclosed
the intelligence gathered.
The rest within the
vaults remains top secret.
Sometimes the hardest part of a mission
isn't gathering intelligence,
but getting out with it alive.
In 1961, that challenge inspires the use
of an unusual invention.
This us Navy pilot is
flying over a remote section
of arctic pack ice.
And he looks down on an ice floe,
and he sees an abandoned
Soviet research station.
This is an exciting opportunity,
because if the Russians
have left intelligence behind,
it could be a huge win for the us.
The only way to find out
is to send in a covert team.
There's just one problem.
The research station is over 600 miles
from the nearest us air base.
Dropping operatives in won't be easy.
But getting them out seems impossible.
Enter a guy called Robert fulton.
The CIA has been
developing a piece of kit
called the sky hook system.
But the tech's top secret,
and it's still in development
by its inventor, Robert fulton.
Robert fulton was an eccentric inventor
and aviation enthusiast
who invented all sorts of different things.
But he also got obsessed with the notion
that if he crashed into a really remote,
austere location,
how could he potentially
get extracted out of there?
If you could imagine James
Bond meets wwf wrestling,
that's what the sky hook was.
It sounds exciting, and it sounds sexy,
but in reality it was
ugly, and it was violent,
and it was sloppy.
The device is incredibly complicated.
The agent on the ground has a suit
and a harness that
connects to a giant balloon
that's sent up into the air.
And the idea is, an airplane
flying over 100 miles an hour
will swoop in, intercept
the line, and yank the guy
right off the ground.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
It is a scary, terrifying experience
because you are going
from a sitting position
to flying through the
air at 140 miles an hour
almost instantaneously,
captured by an airplane
over a balloon hook in the sky.
It is absolute insanity.
Despite extensive
testing, the fulton device
hasn't been deployed in
a live mission until now.
So considering that
they want a small team
to land on a ice floe
that's actually floating
in the arctic ocean,
conduct their mission,
and then get out of there,
the fulton extraction system
becomes kind of the only way
to get out there and back.
The covert mission is made
up of a small specialized team,
and two elite operatives
are chosen for deployment.
Military intelligence officers,
major James Smith and
lieutenant Leonard leschack,
parachute 1,200 feet
down to the abandoned
Soviet research station.
The two agents that have dropped in
spend 72 hours on the ground
at this abandoned
Soviet research station.
And during that time,
they recover documents,
they recover equipment,
they recover 150 pounds of material
that will be useful
to the central intelligence agency.
And they call back to headquarters
that they're ready to be extracted.
But now some inclement
weather is moving in,
and it becomes kind of
sketchy whether or not
they're going to be
able to get out of there.
The team get their balloons up in the air,
but the winds are batting them around.
And so they're having to
dig their heels into the ice
so that they don't get dragged across.
The aircraft finally comes
in, and it picks up leschack.
As he's picked up, he's flipped to face
the 140-mile-an-hour wind.
He can barely breathe.
It's a fight for survival.
But both of the American officers
are successfully extracted
for what is one of the most
Hollywood missions ever.
The mission, codenamed
project cold feet,
is only revealed decades later
when the Navy publishes a book in 1996.
The big news it's a huge success.
The team recover 83 documents
and 21 pieces of equipment
relating to the Soviet arctic activities.
The single most important
piece of intelligence
that was gathered from this operation
was that we now
understood how the Soviets
were tracking our subs under
the ice throughout the arctic.
That allowed us to devise
new ways of obfuscating
or silencing our engines
so that the Soviets
wouldn't be able to track our
next generation of submarines.
The sky hook system
is considered so useful
that it's used during
dangerous mountain rescue
missions up until 1996.
But whether it was used
again in covert missions,
well, that's classified.
When an undercover spy
in Russia is compromised,
the chances of his survival look slim.
That is, until a real-life miss Moneypenny
is given the mission to extract him.
The Soviet union
doesn't end with a bang.
It ends with a slow collapse.
Their secret services are depleted.
Secrets are sold to the highest bidder.
And there are suspicions that a mole
has infiltrated the
ranks of the kgb itself.
And it turns out that those
suspicions are correct.
It's early evening in Moscow,
and there's a gentleman
walking down the street,
just an ordinary guy
carrying a safe way bag.
Neither the bag nor the
man holding it are ordinary.
Meet kgb double agent Oleg gordievsky.
The safe way bag is a
signal to his British handler
that he is in some trouble.
The fact that it's a plastic bag
from a British grocery store
is basically telling his handler
that he has been
completely compromised,
and he needs to get out
and needs to get out quickly.
He'd been a British
spy for almost a decade.
He'd been recruited in Denmark,
and he had provided
valuable information.
But now gordievsky
was fearful for his life.
Because if you betray the
motherland, you pay for it.
So on the other side of the street,
there's a British safehouse
keeping an eye out
for the gentleman with the safe way bag,
always anticipating that
he might show up someday
with that bag in his
hand, with that signal.
The MI6 handler, without talking,
without phone, has to show gordievsky,
I see what you're trying to communicate,
and we are going to enact this plan.
So he takes a harrods bag,
and he walks in the
direction of gordievsky
eating a Mars bar so that the two of them
make that contact without talking.
And that agreed-upon code
between the MI6 handler
and Oleg gordievsky really starts
this whole exfiltration process.
But the problem the British face
is how do you extract a
high-ranking kgb officer
across one of the most heavily
policed borders in the world?
That evening, gordievsky goes home.
Something unusual happens.
He takes out from his bookshelf
a book of Shakespeare's sonnets.
He's been instructed, in
the event of an emergency,
to dip the pages in water.
The pages, once dipped in water,
will reveal a secret coded message
as to how his escape will transpire.
It's the first stage of one
of the most extraordinary
and extreme missions in cold war history,
operation pimlico.
The full details remain
a secret for 35 years.
Back home in britain,
we've got his handler, Valerie pettit.
Pettit has developed this escape route
for gordievsky to follow.
It'll take him some 900
miles from Moscow to vyborg,
which is a town near the Finnish border.
So gordievsky usually
does an evening jog.
Well, this evening, he
doesn't take his usual route.
He blends himself into the
crowded streets of Moscow.
Once gordievsky realizes
he's lost his kgb trail,
he boards the train.
Meanwhile, back in London,
pettit is organizing and
structuring this escape route.
Part of the plan is to put gordievsky
in the back of the diplomatic trunk.
Diplomatic cars are less likely
to be searched and stopped.
Therefore, it's a better
plan to get him across
the Finnish border.
Over the next three days,
gordievsky is making his way to
the rendezvous point at vyborg,
which is about 12 miles
from the Russian border
with Finland.
He hitchhikes, he takes trains,
he takes automobiles to get out safely.
Four people arrive in a diplomatic car
at this rendezvous point,
two MI6 agents and their
wives, as well as a baby.
Miss pettit knew that they were using
heat-seeking devices
when they were letting those
cars go through at the border.
And so she had planned
to have an aluminum
heat-blocking blanket prepared.
Gordievsky's wrapped
up in this tin foil blanket.
He's put back into the trunk,
and the car drives away.
All of this takes eight seconds.
There's no pleasantries
that are being exchanged.
So the car pulls up to the border,
and they realized, my god, sniffer dogs.
One of the wives takes the baby
out of the vehicle at the checkpoint
while the vehicle's stopped
and changes its diaper on the trunk,
the trunk in which gordievsky is under.
And the hope was that this
would confuse these dogs
and throw them off
the scent of gordievsky.
The distraction works,
and the guards just
wave the car through.
When they get into
Finland, they pull over,
and Valerie pettit is
waiting to greet the car.
Back in Russia, authorities
charged gordievsky
with treason in his absence.
He's found guilty and
sentenced to death.
He will never be able to return to Russia.
His arrival into London is
headline news around the world.
But no one will talk
about the actual escape.
In fact, pettit keeps the
details of her plan secret
for the rest of her life.
Inspiration for the impossible
can come from unlikely places.
In 1970, one man taps
into his childhood memories
to access Soviet naval secrets.
For years, James f. Bradley,
the undersea warfare director
for the us office of naval intelligence,
he's been trying to devise a way
of being able to secretly tap
into Soviet communication lines.
The story goes that
during childhood vacations,
the family went out boating
on the Mississippi river,
and he noticed how
sometimes there were signs
that cautioned boaters to
stay away from that area
so that they wouldn't drag their anchor
through underwater cables.
He had this thought that somewhere
around Soviet naval bases,
there would be these
communication cables
that connected the Soviet high command
to the submarine bases.
He thought, that must exist somewhere.
And then we can tap into it
and intercept their messages.
Bradley proposes a top secret mission
to use a submarine to
search the Russian coast
for signs warning of underwater cables.
This seems like a crazy idea
because they'll need to scour
about 600,000 square miles
of ocean for something
they're not even sure exists.
But nevertheless, Bradley
does get the green light.
And in December of 1971,
operation Ivy bells is launched.
To accomplish this impossible mission,
the USS Halibut is once
again brought into action
to lead the operation.
Like so many intelligence
collection operations,
there's no smoking gun.
There's no proof that
there's actually a cable
for them to find in the first place.
But beyond that, you're sending
nuclear submarines well
within Soviet territorial waters.
You're putting an American
submarine and crew
at risk to find this.
You're talking about a
single submarine underwater
for prolonged periods of
time in freezing cold waters
that were controlled by Soviets.
This was not an operation
for the faint of heart.
Halibut's been at sea for over a month.
And during that time, they
had to dodge the Soviet Navy.
It was with fingers crossed
that the captain extended
the periscope and
then scanned the island
that was in front of him.
And if that was detected, it's game over.
The mission's blown.
They had to find this sign.
And they did.
They found the sign.
So they had an idea of where this cable
might cross into the water.
So they start searching
the seabed to try and find it.
They could see, kind
of, humps on the seabed
where they thought it might be.
And then they found the cable
that they'd been looking for.
It's got to be a moment of jubilation.
But it's also got to be a
moment of sheer terror
because you realize that you
have stumbled across a secret
that the Soviets want
desperately to protect.
But there's one big problem.
The cables lie 400
feet below the surface,
nearly four times deeper
than a standard scuba dive.
That's a depth that will push
the limits of human survival.
But James Bradley has planned for this.
Even before the Halibut had set sail,
the Navy had been experimenting
with deep sea diving techniques,
one of which is a mixture
of helium and oxygen
that allowed divers to go
down to very deep depths.
Thanks to this innovation,
Bradley's team can move
forward with the mission.
The divers finally leave
the compression chamber.
This is the first time
that they're doing it
in enemy waters.
So their divers go down
to very deep depths.
If the men are caught,
they are under orders to
blow up everyone on board.
They cannot be taken alive.
They have to fumble
around in the darkness
for about an hour
before they find the cable.
They then have to wrestle
this 20-foot-long listening device
into position onto the cable.
This is the pre-digital age.
Once this piece of
equipment is on the cable,
the magnetic tape that's
in it has to start to run.
So what do the divers have to do
before they return to the sub?
They have to hit the record button.
Just a few months later,
naval intelligence
receive the first recordings.
And they realize they've struck gold.
One incredible piece of intelligence
that they discovered was that
the Russians had a strategy
that in times of war,
they would actually retreat
their submarine forces
north under the arctic cap.
What that meant is that the
United States now could predict
what the Russians would do in the event
of a full-scale conflict
against the Americans.
As a result of this operation,
the Americans now know
where to intercept the Soviet fleet
in the event of world war III.
This is a very, very dangerous mission.
It's not just a one-time operation.
They do this continuously
over a nine-year period.
They have to send divers down.
They have to exchange the tapes.
So each time they do this mission,
it's a life or death scenario.
But then in 1980, satellite images
show this fleet of Soviet warships
over the tap's exact location.
When they finally leave the site,
the USS parche is
deployed to check things out.
And the tap is nowhere to be found.
In the end, operation
Ivy bells is compromised.
And with that, it brings to an end
one of the most successful
maritime surveillance
and signals intelligence
recovery operations
ever conducted.
No one questions how
the Russians uncovered
the operation until 1985,
when officials learn a
national security agency staffer
named Ronald pelton
has been selling secrets
to the Soviets.
It was during the pelton trial
that nbc news reveals the details
of this covert, top secret
operation to the public.
But much of the intelligence
gathered during the operation
remains classified.
But it is believed that
the knowledge gained
from the mission became
central to the project
of nuclear disarmament in 1979.
It's Europe, 1945.
The allies are slowly
marching their way to victory.
But 150,000 enemy
troops remain in Norway.
If they escape, they
can regroup in Germany.
To stop them, the allies opt
for an impossible mission.
It's 1945.
We're nearing the end of world war ii,
and the allies have been
successfully fighting their way
through Europe and have liberated
France, Belgium, and Italy.
They're preparing for
that final showdown
in Germany itself to rid it
of the Nazis once and for all.
But there's still a sizable
German force in Norway.
Now, they're trying to escape back home.
But to do so, they need to cross Norway
to reach ports on the coast.
To prevent them reaching Germany,
the allies target one route,
the nordland railway line.
If you could prevent
them from using the one
and only rail line, you could prevent them
from being a part of the
final defense of Germany.
The man tasked with creating
a plan is major William Colby.
He was very experienced
in the overall landscape
of special operations warfare.
He had planned to hijack
a train that would then
allow them to move from point to point,
blowing things up as they
retreated toward the south.
And then they would
get the heck out of dodge
by covering a distance of about 40 miles
to cross the border into Sweden,
neutral territory where
they would be safe.
The plan is certainly ambitious,
and it's named operation rype.
March 24, 1945, operation
rype is ready to go.
Colby and his team
are secretly parachuted
into Norway's mountains,
deep behind enemy lines.
What should have been a relatively
straightforward sabotage mission
soon becomes impossibly difficult.
Right from the start of the mission,
things are going wrong.
To begin with, American planes are
forced to operate at the
very edge of their range
and navigate under
impossible weather conditions.
And one aircraft accidentally
makes its airdrop in Sweden.
This means only 20 of Colby's men
are successfully dropped off on target,
just outside the
Norwegian city trondheim.
It's a grueling 72-mile
trek just for them to reach
the vantage point overlooking the bridge,
where they're going to hijack the train.
When they get to their location,
they keep watch of the
bridge while they wait
for reinforcements to arrive.
But what they don't know is
that the reinforcement flight
is not coming because
it's crashed into a mountain,
and all 12 on board have instantly died.
So no one's coming to help these guys.
Colby and his men realize
that it's a race against time.
They see that there are already Germans
that are evacuating.
And so they're going to
lose out on the opportunity
to prevent a larger force
from joining the battle
in Germany itself.
Colby opts for a change of plan.
He and his men
immediately get back to work,
laying all the explosives
they have with them,
180 pounds of tnt, under the bridge.
They move out to a
minimum safe distance
and watch the bridge explode
which I'm sure was a pretty good feeling
that they all knew that
they had accomplished
their mission at that point.
But their ordeal isn't over yet.
Now they have to get back to safety.
They're ready to move
on to the next phase
of the operation, which is exfiltration.
Get out.
They have to cover 40 miles
across Norwegian tundra
to reach the safety
of the Swedish border.
And they have just blown up a bridge.
So every German in Norway at this point
begins pursuing them.
They're pursued on land,
and they're also pursued in the air.
In freezing conditions,
this team are hiking and skiing
through just super harsh terrain.
And they're reaching the limit
of what they're physically capable of.
Colby and his team are not new to this.
They know exactly
what they're up against.
If the Germans find us, we already know
that they're going to kill us.
They realize, we're not
going to be able to stop to rest.
And so they brought amphetamines.
They take pills that sort of amp them up.
And it's a good thing that they did
because that journey took
them three days to complete,
only because they never stopped to rest.
This was one of the most
daring missions of the entire
second world war, carried out by people
who exhibited the
greatest possible bravery.
Despite this being the
only us military operation
on Norwegian soil during world war ii,
it remained under a cloak
of secrecy for decades,
with the men unable to speak
about it for many, many years.
In 1973, Colby becomes
the director of the CIA.
When he retires three years later,
he publishes his autobiography,
which includes a firsthand
account of the operation.
Few people are brave enough
to take on extreme missions.
But when they do, the
outcome can change the world.
I'm David duchovny.
Thanks for watching
"secrets declassified."
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Throughout time, governments
and the people who work
for them have done strange
and even terrible things
in the name of national interest,
including launching missions so extreme,
they seem to defy belief
like trying to extract a
1,750-ton Soviet submarine
from the ocean floor
using a giant claw, in secret.
No one has ever
attempted such an audacious
salvage operation like this before.
Or sending paratroopers
on a secret mission
strapped to a nuclear bomb.
Set off a nuclear bomb and run.
That sounds insane.
And even stealing Soviet secrets
400 feet below the waves.
If the men are caught,
they are under orders
to blow up everyone on board.
They cannot be taken alive.
Now it's time to bring these
extreme secret missions
to light.
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It's the late 1960s, and
the cold war is raging.
A Soviet nuclear sub has
sunk 1,500 miles from Hawaii,
and a race is on to find it.
Can the us locate the
sub and recover its secrets
before the enemy does?
That's the impossible mission
assigned to one American team.
On march 1, 1968, Soviet sub k-129
disappears from Soviet
radar deep in the pacific,
with 98 men aboard,
a prize hidden at the
bottom of the ocean.
The Russians are
frantically searching for it.
So is the us.
K-129 could be the
holy grail of intelligence.
Think about what we
would have access to
their code books, their
code-breaking machines,
guidance systems.
We would even get our
eyes on their nuclear missiles.
This is completely worth
the effort and the cost.
To locate it, the Navy
checks their acoustic data
for any sign of the sub.
If a submarine sinks, it'll
make a distinctive noise.
So when k-129 sunk,
they were able to locate where
the sub might have gone down.
So the us Navy sends out
their best reconnaissance sub,
the USS Halibut.
After more than 11 weeks
of painstakingly searching,
Halibut's camera finally
captures the submarine.
It's 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii
and 16,500 feet deep.
But retrieving the sub
seems like an impossible task.
The vessel lies three
miles deep underwater
in a totally black environment.
To figure out if they could
pull off the impossible,
the CIA put their head of
science and technology,
John parangosky, in charge.
He comes up with the suggestion
to raise k-129 to the surface
using a giant metal claw,
like the one you'd
find in an arcade game,
but attached to a ship.
No one has ever
attempted such an audacious
salvage operation like this before.
And what makes this
even more challenging?
It all needs to happen
without the Soviets knowing.
Despite the odds, the CIA and the Navy
decide to go for it.
On July 1, 1969, the
covert mission is launched.
It's codenamed project azorian,
and the first step is designing the claw.
The claw design needs
to be 179 feet by 31 feet.
No one has ever built one big enough
to lift a 1,750-ton submarine
from the ocean floor.
Creating the claw is the easy part.
To use it, the us needs
to anchor a huge ship
for a month-long salvage operation
that's sure to gain Soviet attention.
So the CIA needs a cover story.
They come up with an interesting idea.
If the mission is masked
as a privately-owned
business venture,
no one should suspect that
the government is involved.
So they enlist the help
of the celebrity industrialist
of his day, Howard Hughes.
It made such a good cover
story because everybody knew
that Howard Hughes
was kind of half nuts.
And he agrees to build this ship.
They set up this fake press release.
They announce that they were
going to mine magnesium nodules
from the bottom of the ocean floor
from a ship called the glomar explorer.
Six years after the us found k-129,
it's finally go time.
The glomar arrives at the mission site.
They're ready to go. They're gung-ho.
But just as they're about to deploy,
here comes a Soviet ship.
Once the Soviet ship arrives,
the glomar crew is very concerned
that this operation is
about to go up in smoke.
A helicopter takes off
from the Russian ship
and starts circling around.
And the glomar's crew
are on tenterhooks.
The CIA has invested hundreds
of millions of dollars here,
more than a billion in today's money.
Is this the end of the mission?
The captain of the glomar explorer
radios the captain of the Russian ship.
He explains to him, we
are a mining operation.
We're Howard Hughes's corporation.
Well, fortunately, a few hours
go by, the Soviet ship leaves.
Once the Soviet ship leaves the area,
they lower the claw into the water,
unwind three miles of cable.
It descends to the bottom,
connects to the Soviet vessel,
and then they begin to lift it up
from the bottom of the ocean.
You don't want to pull it up too fast,
because if you try to
raise it up too quickly,
it might break apart.
It's already a damaged vehicle,
and it might fall back to the ocean floor,
and then you're left with nothing.
It was very nerve-wracking
as they tried to pull this thing up.
They were about 2/3 of the way up,
and then the k-129 fell apart.
About 2/3 of it broke off and
fell back to the ocean floor.
It takes eight days to
haul the remaining section
of the k-129 back to the ship's hull.
But before they even have a chance
to analyze the wreckage,
the secret spills out.
Both the "la times" and "New York times"
break the story of this top secret mission.
The papers' front pages
are covered with pictures
of Hughes's glomar
explorer, detailing rumors
of a Soviet sub recovery
and the Howard Hughes-CIA connection.
So it turns out that
Howard Hughes's office
was burglarized.
The burglars find this memo
about the glomar explorer.
They sell it to the "la
times" that publishes it.
This is the CIA's worst nightmare.
Neither the us government nor the CIA
comment on the matter until 1992.
Only then is the mission
publicly acknowledged
for the first time, when the CIA
hand delivers a video
to the Russian president,
Boris yeltsin.
After the collapse of the Soviet union,
as a show of goodwill,
the American government
presents a video
to yeltsin of the burial at sea
of the Soviet sailors
whose remains were found.
It made international
news around the world.
Whatever secrets
project azorian unearthed
remain a mystery to this day.
That mission was obviously daring.
But consider something
even more extreme
elite us paratroopers
assigned to jump into darkness
carrying small nuclear bombs.
In 1970, a top secret us
army mission is underway.
Two members of an elite special ops unit
leap out of the cargo bay of
a us army transport aircraft
into the black of night.
The team parachutes
down to their drop zone.
And they are about to
deploy one of america's
most dangerous weapons
in an operational environment
for the first time in history.
They always went in two-man teams.
So if you can imagine
jumping out of an airplane,
hurtling towards earth with a
bomb strapped to your back.
It was a huge challenge.
But this is no ordinary bomb.
It's an entirely new
portable nuclear weapon.
And it can only be detonated by hand.
Once on the ground, the
men have to carry the nuke
on their back for two days,
constantly dodging enemy patrols
and navigating rugged terrain.
The drawback of this operational setup
is that the detonation code
is split between two people.
And so the bomb must be
jointly armed to prevent it
being detonated,
maliciously or accidentally.
The problem is, if either of
these soldiers don't make it,
it's mission failure.
Seems entirely insane, right?
Set off a nuclear bomb and run.
Why would anyone do that?
Because, thankfully, the
bomb doesn't explode.
And this daring mission
wasn't carried out in enemy territory.
It was actually a training run
taking place in the
mountains of New Hampshire,
part of an audition
to join one of the most
classified army units
to ever exist the green light team.
The idea of the green light team
comes about because it's thought
that the Soviets possess
more tactical nuclear weapons
than we do.
So the solution is to just
hand-carry nuclear weapons.
Brilliant, right?
It also means that
there's no signal in space
for the enemy to pick up on.
So in many ways, it's clever,
it's clean, it's sophisticated.
It has to be delivered right on the target
and delivered by hand.
So they needed to
recruit commando types.
These elite soldiers are handpicked
from the green berets,
the us Navy seals,
and the marines, all of whom
are no strangers to covert
missions behind enemy lines.
But in this case, it's only
when the green light teams
begin training that they
realize their missions
will be different from previous ones.
It's believed that there was an obligation
to stay with the weapon
and protect it until it triggers
its initiating sequence,
ensuring that the mission
is being completed.
But in so doing, they've also turned this
into a suicide mission.
That would then leave no
time for the men to escape
the blast radius.
Inside the world of intelligence
and special operations, we have a joke.
We call ourselves "too dumb to quit."
Because when we're
given an assignment,
no matter how crazy
or suicidal it sounds,
it's also exciting.
For a quarter century, these
incredible special ops teams
and how they operate stays a secret.
It comes to public knowledge, in 1984,
when journalists discovered details
of the plan inside of a scientific journal.
The article describes that there are
bomb-carrying teams on standby
in case they're called upon by NATO.
But thankfully, that never happens.
The green light teams
are maintained at high alert.
And yet, they're never used in combat.
Cold war Berlin is a
divided city of secrets.
To gain crucial intelligence,
governments are willing to green light
what seem like impossible missions.
Berlin, during this
time, you've got British,
American, and Soviet
spies all flocking to the city
to try to get their hands
on any sort of information
that can give their country
just a little bit of an edge.
Berlin had become a vast network
of underground communication channels
with various agencies,
various intelligence groups
trading information.
It's a vast network. It's amazing.
In 1954, the us and
britain decide to collaborate
on an audacious plan.
The CIA, with MI6, want to build a tunnel
to tap into phone lines
so that we could listen
to what the east Germans
were talking about.
This is a high-risk operation.
East and west are butting heads.
The Soviets want the
Americans out of Berlin.
If they discover this tunnel,
that will be their excuse to kick them out.
They need to build the
tunnel without being detected.
But to add to the challenge,
the CIA and MI6 operatives
are constantly being monitored
by enemy watchtowers
and armed guards.
The area that they select to do this
is just 1,500 feet away from east Berlin.
But on the east Berlin side,
where the phone lines are located,
there are prying eyes and military patrols.
So they're going to need a cover story
if they're going to get away with it.
So they come up with a plan to build
a two-story structure over
where the tunnel will begin.
It provides a cover for
unloading equipment,
and then also removing the dirt
that's going to be pulled
out of the tunnel itself.
And this two-story structure
will then be disguised
as a facility associated
with one of the airfields in the city.
They had to spend seven
months laying the groundwork
for this building.
Once that was done, they
began advancing the tunnel
toward the east German
side of the border.
It took three teams working
around the clock in shifts,
backbreaking work.
The tunnel operation
was very dangerous.
German patrols are going back and forth.
In order to prevent the
discovery of the tunnel,
the Americans have a lookout
that signals the people doing the tunnel
to stop work when the
German guards get too close.
They move 3,000 tons of soil
and then replace it with 125 tons of steel
to reinforce the walls of the tunnel.
Six months later, that 1,400-foot tunnel
is ready to go.
And it's installed with these teleprinters
that are attached to switchboards
that record and print communication.
It's a pretty remarkable achievement.
This wiretap discovers
some very interesting things
about the establishment
of the east German army
and the training of that army.
It also reveals some
controversies between
the border police and the army.
At the time, the CIA and MI6 believe
this tunnel will provide a continuous flow
of intelligence for years.
But mother nature has other ideas.
11 months and 11
days after the completion
of the tunnel, a freak rain event
strikes the city of Berlin.
And as a result of very heavy rainfall,
the phone lines go out.
A crew is sent to repair the phone lines.
And what did they find?
They found a tap on their lines.
And that wouldn't take any time at all
for them to figure out
that it was the allies underground,
listening to their intelligence operations.
The following day, Soviets called
a press conference, revealing
the tunnel to the world.
They hoped that the exposure
will both embarrass the west
and deter them from carrying
out any future operations.
After the Soviets hold
their press conference
to reveal the discovery of the tunnel,
other western nations are not
downtrodden at the discovery.
They're impressed by the technology.
They're impressed that we were capable
of something quite so bold.
The west's clandestine mission is blown.
But the operation
remains one of the CIA's
most celebrated successes of the '50s.
While the CIA declassifies a report
on the top secret mission in 2007,
it has never fully disclosed
the intelligence gathered.
The rest within the
vaults remains top secret.
Sometimes the hardest part of a mission
isn't gathering intelligence,
but getting out with it alive.
In 1961, that challenge inspires the use
of an unusual invention.
This us Navy pilot is
flying over a remote section
of arctic pack ice.
And he looks down on an ice floe,
and he sees an abandoned
Soviet research station.
This is an exciting opportunity,
because if the Russians
have left intelligence behind,
it could be a huge win for the us.
The only way to find out
is to send in a covert team.
There's just one problem.
The research station is over 600 miles
from the nearest us air base.
Dropping operatives in won't be easy.
But getting them out seems impossible.
Enter a guy called Robert fulton.
The CIA has been
developing a piece of kit
called the sky hook system.
But the tech's top secret,
and it's still in development
by its inventor, Robert fulton.
Robert fulton was an eccentric inventor
and aviation enthusiast
who invented all sorts of different things.
But he also got obsessed with the notion
that if he crashed into a really remote,
austere location,
how could he potentially
get extracted out of there?
If you could imagine James
Bond meets wwf wrestling,
that's what the sky hook was.
It sounds exciting, and it sounds sexy,
but in reality it was
ugly, and it was violent,
and it was sloppy.
The device is incredibly complicated.
The agent on the ground has a suit
and a harness that
connects to a giant balloon
that's sent up into the air.
And the idea is, an airplane
flying over 100 miles an hour
will swoop in, intercept
the line, and yank the guy
right off the ground.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
It is a scary, terrifying experience
because you are going
from a sitting position
to flying through the
air at 140 miles an hour
almost instantaneously,
captured by an airplane
over a balloon hook in the sky.
It is absolute insanity.
Despite extensive
testing, the fulton device
hasn't been deployed in
a live mission until now.
So considering that
they want a small team
to land on a ice floe
that's actually floating
in the arctic ocean,
conduct their mission,
and then get out of there,
the fulton extraction system
becomes kind of the only way
to get out there and back.
The covert mission is made
up of a small specialized team,
and two elite operatives
are chosen for deployment.
Military intelligence officers,
major James Smith and
lieutenant Leonard leschack,
parachute 1,200 feet
down to the abandoned
Soviet research station.
The two agents that have dropped in
spend 72 hours on the ground
at this abandoned
Soviet research station.
And during that time,
they recover documents,
they recover equipment,
they recover 150 pounds of material
that will be useful
to the central intelligence agency.
And they call back to headquarters
that they're ready to be extracted.
But now some inclement
weather is moving in,
and it becomes kind of
sketchy whether or not
they're going to be
able to get out of there.
The team get their balloons up in the air,
but the winds are batting them around.
And so they're having to
dig their heels into the ice
so that they don't get dragged across.
The aircraft finally comes
in, and it picks up leschack.
As he's picked up, he's flipped to face
the 140-mile-an-hour wind.
He can barely breathe.
It's a fight for survival.
But both of the American officers
are successfully extracted
for what is one of the most
Hollywood missions ever.
The mission, codenamed
project cold feet,
is only revealed decades later
when the Navy publishes a book in 1996.
The big news it's a huge success.
The team recover 83 documents
and 21 pieces of equipment
relating to the Soviet arctic activities.
The single most important
piece of intelligence
that was gathered from this operation
was that we now
understood how the Soviets
were tracking our subs under
the ice throughout the arctic.
That allowed us to devise
new ways of obfuscating
or silencing our engines
so that the Soviets
wouldn't be able to track our
next generation of submarines.
The sky hook system
is considered so useful
that it's used during
dangerous mountain rescue
missions up until 1996.
But whether it was used
again in covert missions,
well, that's classified.
When an undercover spy
in Russia is compromised,
the chances of his survival look slim.
That is, until a real-life miss Moneypenny
is given the mission to extract him.
The Soviet union
doesn't end with a bang.
It ends with a slow collapse.
Their secret services are depleted.
Secrets are sold to the highest bidder.
And there are suspicions that a mole
has infiltrated the
ranks of the kgb itself.
And it turns out that those
suspicions are correct.
It's early evening in Moscow,
and there's a gentleman
walking down the street,
just an ordinary guy
carrying a safe way bag.
Neither the bag nor the
man holding it are ordinary.
Meet kgb double agent Oleg gordievsky.
The safe way bag is a
signal to his British handler
that he is in some trouble.
The fact that it's a plastic bag
from a British grocery store
is basically telling his handler
that he has been
completely compromised,
and he needs to get out
and needs to get out quickly.
He'd been a British
spy for almost a decade.
He'd been recruited in Denmark,
and he had provided
valuable information.
But now gordievsky
was fearful for his life.
Because if you betray the
motherland, you pay for it.
So on the other side of the street,
there's a British safehouse
keeping an eye out
for the gentleman with the safe way bag,
always anticipating that
he might show up someday
with that bag in his
hand, with that signal.
The MI6 handler, without talking,
without phone, has to show gordievsky,
I see what you're trying to communicate,
and we are going to enact this plan.
So he takes a harrods bag,
and he walks in the
direction of gordievsky
eating a Mars bar so that the two of them
make that contact without talking.
And that agreed-upon code
between the MI6 handler
and Oleg gordievsky really starts
this whole exfiltration process.
But the problem the British face
is how do you extract a
high-ranking kgb officer
across one of the most heavily
policed borders in the world?
That evening, gordievsky goes home.
Something unusual happens.
He takes out from his bookshelf
a book of Shakespeare's sonnets.
He's been instructed, in
the event of an emergency,
to dip the pages in water.
The pages, once dipped in water,
will reveal a secret coded message
as to how his escape will transpire.
It's the first stage of one
of the most extraordinary
and extreme missions in cold war history,
operation pimlico.
The full details remain
a secret for 35 years.
Back home in britain,
we've got his handler, Valerie pettit.
Pettit has developed this escape route
for gordievsky to follow.
It'll take him some 900
miles from Moscow to vyborg,
which is a town near the Finnish border.
So gordievsky usually
does an evening jog.
Well, this evening, he
doesn't take his usual route.
He blends himself into the
crowded streets of Moscow.
Once gordievsky realizes
he's lost his kgb trail,
he boards the train.
Meanwhile, back in London,
pettit is organizing and
structuring this escape route.
Part of the plan is to put gordievsky
in the back of the diplomatic trunk.
Diplomatic cars are less likely
to be searched and stopped.
Therefore, it's a better
plan to get him across
the Finnish border.
Over the next three days,
gordievsky is making his way to
the rendezvous point at vyborg,
which is about 12 miles
from the Russian border
with Finland.
He hitchhikes, he takes trains,
he takes automobiles to get out safely.
Four people arrive in a diplomatic car
at this rendezvous point,
two MI6 agents and their
wives, as well as a baby.
Miss pettit knew that they were using
heat-seeking devices
when they were letting those
cars go through at the border.
And so she had planned
to have an aluminum
heat-blocking blanket prepared.
Gordievsky's wrapped
up in this tin foil blanket.
He's put back into the trunk,
and the car drives away.
All of this takes eight seconds.
There's no pleasantries
that are being exchanged.
So the car pulls up to the border,
and they realized, my god, sniffer dogs.
One of the wives takes the baby
out of the vehicle at the checkpoint
while the vehicle's stopped
and changes its diaper on the trunk,
the trunk in which gordievsky is under.
And the hope was that this
would confuse these dogs
and throw them off
the scent of gordievsky.
The distraction works,
and the guards just
wave the car through.
When they get into
Finland, they pull over,
and Valerie pettit is
waiting to greet the car.
Back in Russia, authorities
charged gordievsky
with treason in his absence.
He's found guilty and
sentenced to death.
He will never be able to return to Russia.
His arrival into London is
headline news around the world.
But no one will talk
about the actual escape.
In fact, pettit keeps the
details of her plan secret
for the rest of her life.
Inspiration for the impossible
can come from unlikely places.
In 1970, one man taps
into his childhood memories
to access Soviet naval secrets.
For years, James f. Bradley,
the undersea warfare director
for the us office of naval intelligence,
he's been trying to devise a way
of being able to secretly tap
into Soviet communication lines.
The story goes that
during childhood vacations,
the family went out boating
on the Mississippi river,
and he noticed how
sometimes there were signs
that cautioned boaters to
stay away from that area
so that they wouldn't drag their anchor
through underwater cables.
He had this thought that somewhere
around Soviet naval bases,
there would be these
communication cables
that connected the Soviet high command
to the submarine bases.
He thought, that must exist somewhere.
And then we can tap into it
and intercept their messages.
Bradley proposes a top secret mission
to use a submarine to
search the Russian coast
for signs warning of underwater cables.
This seems like a crazy idea
because they'll need to scour
about 600,000 square miles
of ocean for something
they're not even sure exists.
But nevertheless, Bradley
does get the green light.
And in December of 1971,
operation Ivy bells is launched.
To accomplish this impossible mission,
the USS Halibut is once
again brought into action
to lead the operation.
Like so many intelligence
collection operations,
there's no smoking gun.
There's no proof that
there's actually a cable
for them to find in the first place.
But beyond that, you're sending
nuclear submarines well
within Soviet territorial waters.
You're putting an American
submarine and crew
at risk to find this.
You're talking about a
single submarine underwater
for prolonged periods of
time in freezing cold waters
that were controlled by Soviets.
This was not an operation
for the faint of heart.
Halibut's been at sea for over a month.
And during that time, they
had to dodge the Soviet Navy.
It was with fingers crossed
that the captain extended
the periscope and
then scanned the island
that was in front of him.
And if that was detected, it's game over.
The mission's blown.
They had to find this sign.
And they did.
They found the sign.
So they had an idea of where this cable
might cross into the water.
So they start searching
the seabed to try and find it.
They could see, kind
of, humps on the seabed
where they thought it might be.
And then they found the cable
that they'd been looking for.
It's got to be a moment of jubilation.
But it's also got to be a
moment of sheer terror
because you realize that you
have stumbled across a secret
that the Soviets want
desperately to protect.
But there's one big problem.
The cables lie 400
feet below the surface,
nearly four times deeper
than a standard scuba dive.
That's a depth that will push
the limits of human survival.
But James Bradley has planned for this.
Even before the Halibut had set sail,
the Navy had been experimenting
with deep sea diving techniques,
one of which is a mixture
of helium and oxygen
that allowed divers to go
down to very deep depths.
Thanks to this innovation,
Bradley's team can move
forward with the mission.
The divers finally leave
the compression chamber.
This is the first time
that they're doing it
in enemy waters.
So their divers go down
to very deep depths.
If the men are caught,
they are under orders to
blow up everyone on board.
They cannot be taken alive.
They have to fumble
around in the darkness
for about an hour
before they find the cable.
They then have to wrestle
this 20-foot-long listening device
into position onto the cable.
This is the pre-digital age.
Once this piece of
equipment is on the cable,
the magnetic tape that's
in it has to start to run.
So what do the divers have to do
before they return to the sub?
They have to hit the record button.
Just a few months later,
naval intelligence
receive the first recordings.
And they realize they've struck gold.
One incredible piece of intelligence
that they discovered was that
the Russians had a strategy
that in times of war,
they would actually retreat
their submarine forces
north under the arctic cap.
What that meant is that the
United States now could predict
what the Russians would do in the event
of a full-scale conflict
against the Americans.
As a result of this operation,
the Americans now know
where to intercept the Soviet fleet
in the event of world war III.
This is a very, very dangerous mission.
It's not just a one-time operation.
They do this continuously
over a nine-year period.
They have to send divers down.
They have to exchange the tapes.
So each time they do this mission,
it's a life or death scenario.
But then in 1980, satellite images
show this fleet of Soviet warships
over the tap's exact location.
When they finally leave the site,
the USS parche is
deployed to check things out.
And the tap is nowhere to be found.
In the end, operation
Ivy bells is compromised.
And with that, it brings to an end
one of the most successful
maritime surveillance
and signals intelligence
recovery operations
ever conducted.
No one questions how
the Russians uncovered
the operation until 1985,
when officials learn a
national security agency staffer
named Ronald pelton
has been selling secrets
to the Soviets.
It was during the pelton trial
that nbc news reveals the details
of this covert, top secret
operation to the public.
But much of the intelligence
gathered during the operation
remains classified.
But it is believed that
the knowledge gained
from the mission became
central to the project
of nuclear disarmament in 1979.
It's Europe, 1945.
The allies are slowly
marching their way to victory.
But 150,000 enemy
troops remain in Norway.
If they escape, they
can regroup in Germany.
To stop them, the allies opt
for an impossible mission.
It's 1945.
We're nearing the end of world war ii,
and the allies have been
successfully fighting their way
through Europe and have liberated
France, Belgium, and Italy.
They're preparing for
that final showdown
in Germany itself to rid it
of the Nazis once and for all.
But there's still a sizable
German force in Norway.
Now, they're trying to escape back home.
But to do so, they need to cross Norway
to reach ports on the coast.
To prevent them reaching Germany,
the allies target one route,
the nordland railway line.
If you could prevent
them from using the one
and only rail line, you could prevent them
from being a part of the
final defense of Germany.
The man tasked with creating
a plan is major William Colby.
He was very experienced
in the overall landscape
of special operations warfare.
He had planned to hijack
a train that would then
allow them to move from point to point,
blowing things up as they
retreated toward the south.
And then they would
get the heck out of dodge
by covering a distance of about 40 miles
to cross the border into Sweden,
neutral territory where
they would be safe.
The plan is certainly ambitious,
and it's named operation rype.
March 24, 1945, operation
rype is ready to go.
Colby and his team
are secretly parachuted
into Norway's mountains,
deep behind enemy lines.
What should have been a relatively
straightforward sabotage mission
soon becomes impossibly difficult.
Right from the start of the mission,
things are going wrong.
To begin with, American planes are
forced to operate at the
very edge of their range
and navigate under
impossible weather conditions.
And one aircraft accidentally
makes its airdrop in Sweden.
This means only 20 of Colby's men
are successfully dropped off on target,
just outside the
Norwegian city trondheim.
It's a grueling 72-mile
trek just for them to reach
the vantage point overlooking the bridge,
where they're going to hijack the train.
When they get to their location,
they keep watch of the
bridge while they wait
for reinforcements to arrive.
But what they don't know is
that the reinforcement flight
is not coming because
it's crashed into a mountain,
and all 12 on board have instantly died.
So no one's coming to help these guys.
Colby and his men realize
that it's a race against time.
They see that there are already Germans
that are evacuating.
And so they're going to
lose out on the opportunity
to prevent a larger force
from joining the battle
in Germany itself.
Colby opts for a change of plan.
He and his men
immediately get back to work,
laying all the explosives
they have with them,
180 pounds of tnt, under the bridge.
They move out to a
minimum safe distance
and watch the bridge explode
which I'm sure was a pretty good feeling
that they all knew that
they had accomplished
their mission at that point.
But their ordeal isn't over yet.
Now they have to get back to safety.
They're ready to move
on to the next phase
of the operation, which is exfiltration.
Get out.
They have to cover 40 miles
across Norwegian tundra
to reach the safety
of the Swedish border.
And they have just blown up a bridge.
So every German in Norway at this point
begins pursuing them.
They're pursued on land,
and they're also pursued in the air.
In freezing conditions,
this team are hiking and skiing
through just super harsh terrain.
And they're reaching the limit
of what they're physically capable of.
Colby and his team are not new to this.
They know exactly
what they're up against.
If the Germans find us, we already know
that they're going to kill us.
They realize, we're not
going to be able to stop to rest.
And so they brought amphetamines.
They take pills that sort of amp them up.
And it's a good thing that they did
because that journey took
them three days to complete,
only because they never stopped to rest.
This was one of the most
daring missions of the entire
second world war, carried out by people
who exhibited the
greatest possible bravery.
Despite this being the
only us military operation
on Norwegian soil during world war ii,
it remained under a cloak
of secrecy for decades,
with the men unable to speak
about it for many, many years.
In 1973, Colby becomes
the director of the CIA.
When he retires three years later,
he publishes his autobiography,
which includes a firsthand
account of the operation.
Few people are brave enough
to take on extreme missions.
But when they do, the
outcome can change the world.
I'm David duchovny.
Thanks for watching
"secrets declassified."
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