Original subtitles

- [Rudy] The following program

contains footage of military operations.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Tonight, on The Proof is Out There: Military Mysteries.

Combat ops,

photos of an American fighter shot down over Iraq.

Was the pilot missing in action,

captured, killed, or all of the above?

- Even though he left behind a trail of clues,

no one knows what happened to Michael Scott Speicher.

- [Rudy] Covert ops,

is this a caught-on-camera assassination

by some of history's toughest spies?

- I'm 99% sure that this is the work of Mossad.

- [Rudy] PSYOPs,

behind the photos of the WWII geniuses

who fought the Nazis with balloons and cardboard?

- This is one of the most incredible use of creativity

in the history of warfare.

- [Rudy] And special ops,

unbelievable night footage of this week's secret weapon

in action.

- It's just death raining down from above.

(dramatic music)

- [Rudy] In the modern history of war there are films.

- Shazam!

- [Rudy] Photos, recordings, and documents

that raise questions.

- So everything about this story is one big mystery.

- This particular footage has caused a lot of controversy.

- [Rudy] What's really happening?

- [Joe] There's so little information.

- Nothing like this has been attempted before.

- [Rudy] That's where we come in.

Our mission,

investigate the battlefield's strangest images, sounds,

and more.

- [Tim] This photo blows my mind.

- You can imagine how terrifying it would be.

- [Rudy] We'll analyze each with military experts

and try to come up with answers.

- I'm Ronnie Adkins, former US Army Intelligence Analyst.

- I'm Rudy Reyes, Recon Marine war veteran.

The proof starts now.

(dramatic music)

- Good evening everybody and welcome.

I'm Ronnie, he's Rudy.

- We're wheels up and ready to go and we hope you are too.

- No mystery is more gut-wrenching

than a soldier or pilot going MIA behind enemy lines.

- That was the case with one pilot

in Operation Desert Storm.

The mystery, what really happened

to Lieutenant Commander Scott Speicher?

It's December 1993,

nearly two years after the start of the first Iraq War.

A group of hunters is in the Iraqi desert

using falcons to track down prey,

but they end up locating something much more important.

- The wreckage was in the middle of nowhere

in a country to which we didn't have access,

a country that was our enemy.

- [Rudy] This is a photo of wreckage

from a crashed US Navy F-18 Charlie Hornet.

Take a close look.

Here you can see the canopy that encases the cockpit,

but where is the pilot?

- Nobody knew what happened to him.

- [Rudy] The mystery begins in the very first hours

of Operation Desert Storm on January 17, 1991.

- This was a pretty crazy night.

- [Rudy] Ward Carroll, a former naval aviator,

says a squadron of Hornets launched from the USS Saratoga.

They're the vanguard of a mission,

what's known as an alpha strike,

a large attack by US Navy aircraft.

But something goes wrong.

- Sometime during that strike, there was a flash in the sky.

At first, nobody was sure who it was,

and as they started to return to the ship,

process of elimination,

they realized that it was Scott Speicher.

- [Rudy] Lieutenant Commander Scott Speicher's plane

is shot down by an Iraqi fighter jet.

Mark Sauter, a former US Army Special Forces Officer,

an expert on American POWs,

says Speicher is initially listed as missing in action.

The war ends just six weeks later.

The Iraqis turn over human remains

they say is a downed US pilot.

Speicher is the only missing one,

but the tissue doesn't match.

- Why would the Iraqis send human remains

that were not Speicher's back to us and claim they were?

This was one of the first indications

that there was a game afoot.

- Now, once the Iraqis sent phony remains,

the story gets a whole lot more complicated.

To follow along,

there are a few things that we should get straight.

Ronnie?

- Yeah, so you've probably heard some of these before

but let's make sure.

MIA stands for missing in action.

KIA means killed in action.

Then you've got KIA/BNR,

and that means killed in action, body not recovered.

Now last,

there's this status called missing/captured.

This is also known by a more common term POW,

a prisoner of war.

- And that's important because Scott Speicher's status

would change repeatedly.

(tense music)

In May of 1991,

the Navy determines that no credible evidence

exists to suggest Speicher survived.

His status has changed from missing, or MIA, to KIA/BNR,

killed in action, body not recovered.

But all that changes

with the discovery of the wreckage of Speicher's plane

in 1993.

A key clue?

That cockpit canopy, it isn't near the other debris.

- This indicated to experts

that he had ejected successfully.

He was not blown up in the air, he was not killed immediately.

- Let's assume he was alive when he hit the ground.

Now what?

Right, the plot thickens.

- [Rudy] Two years later,

the Iraqis allow the Red Cross and US officials

to visit the crash site.

According to an unclassified CIA report,

that group suspected evidence had been tampered with.

- They recovered Speicher's flight suit.

It had been cut up.

Nobody really could figure out,

had it been cut off of Michael Speicher

when he was alive or dead?

A number of investigators

believed that Speicher's flight suit

had been planted at the scene.

The mystery only got deeper.

- [Rudy] 90% of F-18 pilots who eject survive,

and there were no human remains found in the wreckage.

- Was he captured?

It's completely believable that he's not dead.

- Dead people don't eject.

These planes are eminently survivable

with a hit on the wing.

It was not the type of catastrophic hit

that one could assume the pilot didn't survive.

- [Rudy] In 1997, it's revealed that several years earlier,

a US spy satellite positioned over the crash site

captured manmade symbols

suggesting Speicher not only survived,

but that he was able to initiate

what's called an E&E plan.

- Pilots, they often come up with a good E&E plan

or an escape and evade plan.

Within that plan, they have certain things

to indicate to those who may be watching

that they are actually trying to make their way to freedom.

- [Rudy] In 1999, another shoe drops.

An Iraqi defector tells investigators

that he drove an American pilot to Baghdad years earlier,

around the time Speicher disappeared.

Then the Pentagon does something that it's never done

in 200 years.

- [Ward] His status was changed from killed in action

to missing in action, first time this has happened.

- [Rudy] Then, in October of 2002,

secretary of the Navy Gordon England writes,

"I am personally convinced the Iraqis seized him

sometime after his plane went down."

Speicher's status is changed yet again.

He is now classified missing/captured, a POW.

- The reason he was reclassified was because we were relentless.

I mean, this was their husband, their dad,

very much a family man.

- [Rudy] The March 2003 invasion of Iraq

brings the area where Michael Speicher went missing

under US control.

A shocking discovery is made within weeks in Baghdad

by our own Kevin Key and his team.

- We were conducting multiple combat operations,

looking for any kind of evidence of weapons of mass destruction,

and also looking for evidence of Michael Scott Speicher.

We were looking throughout the prisons in Downtown Baghdad.

We saw chiseled graffiti, mostly in Arabic.

One thing unique that our team found

was three initials in English

in one of the larger prison cells, MSS,

Michael Scott Speicher.

I find it very peculiar

that amongst all this Arabic graffiti

we have his exact initials, MSS.

- Pilots are taught to do this.

They're taught to put evidence of their survival

where they can.

- [Rudy] Was Speicher held as a POW for years?

Did the Pentagon do enough to bring him home?

Just as it seems this story is about to blow up,

it gets tied up in a bow.

In 2009, Bedouins lead US forces

to a new site.

It is just kilometers

from where Speicher's plane was discovered years earlier.

There, in the desert,

they find bones and skeletal remains.

Dental records conclusively identify the remains

as those of Captain Michael Speicher.

- The locals said that his body was buried

the night of the crash by local Bedouins.

So there's no way to prove exactly if that is in fact true,

but that's the story.

- The mystery continues.

The US government continues to keep information

about Michael Speicher's fate classified.

What are in those classified documents?

I hope one day we see them.

(tense music)

- So the official story

is that Speicher died on the night of the crash.

Rudy, are you buying that?

- In one word, hell no.

In my opinion,

Speicher, highly trained pilot,

was identified as a valuable asset by the Iraqis.

So he was taken and died in captivity.

- Spycraft is built on secrecy.

When a spy mission is successful,

you never know what happened.

- So when experienced spies get caught on camera

allegedly assassinating someone,

the question at hand becomes,

is it a hit job or is it a frame job?

January 19th, 2010, Dubai.

You're looking at security camera footage

from the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel.

Watch as a registered guest,

Palestinian merchant Mahmoud Muhammad,

enters the lobby, gets into the elevator,

then exits and heads to his room.

Look again. (tape rewinding)

It all seems normal.

What's different is the way this guy checked out.

Later that day, housekeeping makes a grim discovery,

the guest is dead in his bed.

- At first glimpse, it looked like natural causes.

This man had died in his sleep.

- [Ronnie] There are no obvious signs of foul play.

Authorities bring his body to the morgue

and look for his next of kin.

But soon, the Islamic militant group Hamas

claims the dead man is one of their leaders,

Commander Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh.

They also insist he was assassinated

and blame the Israeli spy agency, Mossad.

- Mossad is a world-class spy agency

that is known to conduct assassinations

throughout the world.

They are one of the world's best.

They work in secrecy.

- [Ronnie] Since helping murder two Israeli soldiers

in 1989,

Al-Mabhouh had been a top target on Mossad's hit list

and had even survived a previous assassination attempt.

The Dubai police launch an investigation.

The coroner's report is amended to indicate foul play,

but stops short of an exact cause of death.

- Even today,

the final results of the autopsy aren't certain.

There's been a couple different theories

on the assassination.

One that he was electrocuted to death,

one that he was given kind of a paralyzing agent

and then suffocated.

- [Ronnie] Things break wide open

when police review all the CCTV cameras at the hotel

and discover the alleged Mossad hit.

- This is one of the most brazen espionage cases

in modern history,

and it was all captured on camera.

- The Caesarea branch

is the most elite and secretive unit within Mossad.

That's who's trusted with the toughest

and most sensitive missions,

and that's especially true for wet work.

- So clandestine,

they train these operatives separately

from the rest of Mossad.

- So when we analyze the tape of this supposed operation,

we have to ask ourselves, who are we really looking at here?

(tense music)

To the untrained eye,

this looks like regular guests checking into a hotel.

Dressing for tennis, sharing elevators, making a phone call.

But to those trained in spycraft, it shows odd behavior,

like dressing for tennis but never leaving to play.

- But they linger at a lobby of a hotel

for hours and hours and hours,

that did not make sense, that stood out.

- [Ronnie] Or ducking into the bathroom

and emerging in a new disguise.

- It's not normal to walk into a bathroom

and change your wig.

- [Ronnie] Or always following the guy

who turns up dead later.

- You'll see some of these tennis players

stay in the same place for a long period of time

and only get up when Mahmoud walks by.

- [Ronnie] It all makes sense

if they were plotting to kill him.

- We now see the alleged target

being followed by these tennis players,

presumably to identify his exact location

and his exact hotel room.

- [Ronnie] They follow Mahmoud out of the elevator on his floor

and once they know what room he's in,

it's not hard to create a key card to open the door.

Now all they need is a lookout.

- You can see here the lady in the poor wig

is likely notifying the team that he is on his way.

- [Ronnie] And after the target is neutralized,

there's this final sequence,

the entire team leaving the hotel at the same time.

- A signal's been given that now the assassination team

can go ahead and withdraw

and remove themselves from this area of crime.

- [Ronnie] So if the tape does reveal an assassination,

we need to ask, why would elite spies

execute a perfect murder

only to ignore the first rule of spycraft?

- One of the worst things in an intelligence operation

is to be caught on camera.

- [Ronnie] Kevin Key thinks the obvious sloppiness

points to an actual frame job.

- My opinion is that this was an inside job done by Hamas

to make Mossad and Israel look more like criminals.

- [Ronnie] That's known as a false flag operation.

So does the damning tape actually show us expert spycraft

bungled just enough to draw attention for the cameras?

- Knowing what I know about the way that Mossad operates,

I find it very strange

that they would leave such an easy path through time,

point the finger at them as the actual assailant.

- [Ronnie] Preston Stewart finds this idea interesting.

- Is there somebody out there who wanted Mahmoud dead,

also hates Mossad enough to try to frame 'em?

Maybe, maybe that's why it was so sloppy.

- [Ronnie] But he's not convinced.

- I'll say I'm 99% sure that this is the work of Mossad.

There are people in and around the hotel at the time

that fit the description of some methods and procedures

that Mossad has done in the past.

- [Ronnie] Reviewing the Mossad's greatest hits,

you can see a pattern.

April 1973,

a Palestine Liberation Organization operative

killed in a hotel room in Athens, Greece.

June 1980, Paris, France,

an Iraqi nuclear scientist also killed in his hotel room.

And in October, 1995,

an Islamic Jihad member shot in front of his hotel in Malta.

That leads us to a more obvious theory,

that the tape shows the Mossad

not deliberately flaunting their presence,

but simply taking big risks for a big target.

- It's not a movie, it's not Jason Bourne or James Bond.

These are incredibly complex operations

trying to take place in a city with cameras everywhere

and cell phones,

and it's hard, there's going to be mistakes made.

- The word got out that the Mossad will reach out

and get you no matter where you are,

where you feel that you are most secure

even though you're a major terrorist leader.

Was the risk worth it?

Absolutely.

On my book, it was a very successful mission.

(tense music)

- So the simplest answer seems most likely.

Mossad likely executed the hit,

but some of the spycraft was a bit sloppy.

- Look, they only needed the assassination to remain secret

long enough to escape the country, which they did.

So, as far as the Mossad are concerned,

that's mission accomplished.

- You know, over 65,000 American planes were lost during WWII?

That's about 50 a day.

Many of those wrecks are never found though.

- This next incident is about the wreck of a WWII bomber

that was found.

But why was it so far off course

and where was its crew?

We're asking what happened to the Lady Be Good?

November 9, 1958,

a British oil exploration team flying over the Libyan desert

spots something highly unusual,

a large bomber broken into two pieces.

As you can see in these photos from the scene,

it's an American B-24 Liberator.

The wreckage leaves Air Force officials deeply puzzled

for two reasons.

First, they aren't missing any planes.

Second, the B-24 Liberators

were decommissioned 14 years earlier.

The Air Force sends a search team to investigate.

- They spot this airplane almost completely intact,

sort of like a ghost ship.

The electrical system on board the aircraft

was still operational,

the radios would still work,

and there it was off by itself in the desert.

- There was water in canteens.

There were some of the personal effects on board.

They didn't find any of the crew members.

- [Rudy] There was one B-24 that went missing,

the Lady Be Good,

but that was back in 1943 and it was lost over the ocean.

Let's rewind. (tape rewinding)

April 1943, 25 bombers take off from a dusty airstrip

in Soluch, Libya

for a high-altitude strike on a critical target in Italy.

One of those bombers is the Lady Be Good,

whose nine-man crew is fresh outta training

and on their very first mission.

- This was the Allied focus in Europe at the time.

There would've been near continuous bombing runs

over parts of Italy

at least every day from multiple airfields

across North Africa.

- [Rudy] From the start, the mission is beset by problems.

- They take off during a sandstorm

that is interfering with the ability

to see the surroundings.

- [Rudy] The vicious sandstorm forces half the squadron

to turn back

and causes the Lady Be Good

to lose sight of the rest of her team.

- The Lady Be Good continued.

There was cloud cover over Naples

and they weren't able to drop their bombs on target.

They headed back towards Soluch.

- [Rudy] The Lady Be Good radios command,

asking for a bearing.

It's the last time she's ever heard from.

- Okay, Rudy, so we know two things.

This is a super green crew

and this is one of the toughest planes to fly in combat.

- That's right, Ronnie.

In fact, the crew's nicknamed it the flying coffin.

You can see the body rests below the wing,

making it especially deadly to fly over water

because if you ditch it,

the plane could snap in half on impact.

- Okay, it sounds reasonable to believe

that when the Lady Be Good didn't return to base,

the command team assumed it went down in the Mediterranean.

But what caused her to overshoot the base by 400 miles?

(tense music)

- [Rudy] Military historian, Martin K.A. Morgan,

says wind conditions played a major role.

- The navigator on board this aircraft

made a critical mistake

in that he failed to adequately compensate

for a significant tailwind

and that's what led the aircraft, ultimately,

to overfly the airbase and fly deep into the Sahara.

- [Rudy] The Lady Be Good likely ran outta fuel

and the airmen bailed out before she crashed.

- Normally you wouldn't want to try to stay on an aircraft

that's going down,

especially an aircraft like the B-24

which does have a bad history.

- [Rudy] Okay, so that answers the question

about how the plane ended up in the desert,

but what happened to the crew?

In the summer of 1959,

Air Force and Army mortuary teams

searched for the crew's remains.

After combing the desert for six days,

they find nothing.

Finally, 19 miles north of the crash site,

investigators find their first clue,

a pair of fleece flight boots.

They seem to have been left deliberately

as a marker pointing north.

- They leave a trail of items

in hopes that if anyone stumbles upon either the parachutes

or any of the wreckage,

that they at least have shown a path

to the direction they're going.

- What the men didn't know, tragically,

was that they were so far south

that these search parties never stood a chance

of spotting the parachutes that they left.

- [Rudy] In February 1960,

after months of searching, another grim discovery.

Five bodies buried in the sand,

along with diaries

written by Lady Be Good's co-pilot Robert Toner

and engineer Harold Ripslinger.

- Those journals are found

that provide this heart-wrenching account

of what the men were going through as they walked off,

believing that they would walk

to the airfield at Soluch eventually.

- [Rudy] Ripslinger writes,

"We can hardly walk, a few drops of water each.

Can't hold out much longer - pray."

From co-pilot Robert Toner, "Shelly, rest in peace,

more separate, and try to go for help.

Eyes bad, all want to die.

Could make it if we all had water."

The five bodies were Toner and four of the men.

They had likely been covered by sandstorms.

The three final crew members pushed on for help.

Two of their bodies were found,

including Lieutenant Harold Ripslinger

who made it 109 miles from the crash site.

The last body was never located.

- We can still marvel at the fortitude that these men had

to try to survive under impossible circumstances.

(tense music)

- Ronnie, it's a tragic story. - It is.

- But it's also heroic.

They survived far longer than they should have.

Their diaries show how their training really kicked in.

- It did.

Just the fact that they found the discipline

to write in 'em at all is incredible.

- Well, that's what you're taught,

if you're stranded, you need to assign yourself tasks

to keep your mind sharp and maintain hope.

Their story really speaks to the power of the human spirit.

- You know, there's an ancient military maxim,

"Appear weak when you are strong

and strong when you are weak."

- My man knows his Sun Tzu. - Art of War.

- Now keep that quote in mind as you ponder our next mystery.

How did a division of tanks appear out of nowhere

to stymie a Nazi counter attack?

Take a good look at this photo.

Looks like a bunch of tanks

stationed near a country road, right?

But looks can be deceiving.

And what's really going on here

is one of the wildest stories of WWII.

September 1944, France, just three months after D-Day,

Allied forces are advancing swiftly across Western Europe.

George Patton's Third Army

is attacking the fortress city of Metz.

- In September of 1944,

the Germans have of course been pushed out of Normandy

and the Allies are racing across France

as quickly as their supply lines will allow them to do so,

with the hope of being able to basically cross into Germany

and try to end the war before the onset of winter.

- [Ronnie] But Patton's rapid advance

has put his troops far ahead of his supply lines

and reinforcements,

spelling potential disaster.

- And once that happens, his troops become overstretched

and are potentially vulnerable to German counter attacks

to exploit weaknesses in his line.

- [Ronnie] German command sees a mouthwatering opportunity,

but seemingly overnight,

new recon comes in, the 6th Armored Division.

More than 8,000 men with tanks

has appeared out of nowhere to shore up Patton's flank.

That photo we showed you

captures a little bit of what the Germans would've seen.

It spooks them and they turn back.

For decades, the Pentagon refuses to divulge

how the division suddenly appeared like superhumans.

- I'm going out on a limb here.

The disinformation campaigns put on by the Allies

at the end of WWII

may have been the best in military history.

- I'd agree, they had this uncanny ability

to keep the German recon

looking at what they wanted 'em to see,

all while hiding what they needed to keep secret.

- So these tactics were so effective,

they were kept top secret for decades.

So while heroes like General George Patton

got all the credit in the world for winning the war,

these geniuses remained unsung 'til now.

(tense music)

- [Ronnie] The secret of how the 6th Armored Division

appeared out of nowhere is that they didn't.

What the Germans really saw was a different unit,

the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, the Ghost Army.

- The 23rd Special Headquarters Troops unit

was the first multimedia military deception unit

and it was there to basically confuse

and deceive the Germans

about Allied strengths as they advanced towards Germany.

- [Ronnie] These military magicians

could make their small, agile force of 500

look like a fearsome wrecking crew of 8,000.

- Denial and deception operations

are pivotal in warfare and in this operation

that was the key to defeating the Nazis.

- [Ronnie] As you can see in this footage shot by the Army,

the Ghost Army's weapons were visual and sonic deception.

- The people that are actually there are there

to create the illusions of this much larger unit.

- [Ronnie] What kind of soldier was needed to pull this off?

The kind with special skills not typical of combat units.

- The people who did this were artists and designers,

real creative types.

- [Ronnie] The visual deception involved inflatable equipment

that looked like tanks and artillery from a distance.

This model, which is about as deadly as a beach ball,

is an inflatable replica of the legendary Sherman tank.

And this is a dummy Howitzer artillery cannon.

For sonic deception,

they transmitted a division's worth of radio traffic.

- The Ghost Army was able to simulate the radio traffic,

for example, of American divisions.

- [Ronnie] And to sell the hoax, they used sonic trucks

to play the sounds of thousands of men and equipment

for anyone listening.

- You have some of the soldiers

deploying some of the inflatables here,

while some of the images that you'll see

now seem even laughable.

How could this be real?

But you gotta think about,

based on the technologies at the time,

of what the enemy would be able to see from the air,

from an aircraft, or from a distance.

This will look very real to them, and that's what mattered.

- [Ronnie] Seeing is believing,

and what the Germans thought they saw

was more than they could handle,

so they delayed any action

long enough for some real Allied reinforcement to arrive

and replace those inflatable tanks.

The Ghost Army

would pull off almost two dozen similar operations

during the war,

keeping the German command

scratching their race-obsessed, power-mad heads

across the European theater.

- You're trying to confuse the enemy

when you're trying to project

that you have more power than what you really have.

You want them to see you as the 10-foot-tall man

and when, in fact, you are not.

Now they fear what is coming.

You've created a legend.

(tense music)

- After the war,

many in the 23rd's ranks became well known.

Folks like fashion designer, Bill Blass,

sculptor Ellsworth Kelly,

and wildlife artist, Arthur Singer.

- Amazing, Ronnie.

The Ghost Army was able to do its magic again and again.

Quite the sleight of hand.

- Some of the scariest weapons in military history

are biological and chemical agents,

like the mustard gas used on the battlefield in WWI.

- It's even more terrifying

when these weapons kill innocent civilians.

Let's go back 40 years to an incident that left dozens dead

in a town in Siberia.

The question,

what was happening at the secret base known as Compound 19?

You're looking at the graves of the victims.

People whose lives were cut short,

people whose deaths were covered up,

people whose story can only now be told.

It was May 1979.

Several residents in the Cold War city of Sverdlovsk

turn up at hospitals with disturbing symptoms.

- They have fever, they're vomiting,

and they're unsure what's happening.

At first, they think it might be a polio outbreak.

- [Ronnie] Within days, dozens are dead.

Authorities quickly release an explanation to calm the city.

- The Soviet government

initially tried to say that the residents who had died

were killed from eating spoiled meat.

- [Ronnie] Okay, it happens.

In fact, in 2017,

an outbreak of listeria from contaminated deli meat

killed 216 people in South Africa.

But infected meat would kill people in a random pattern.

These deaths occurred following a straight line

that just happened to match the prevailing wind direction.

That means that whatever is killing them is airborne.

That raises the possibility of bioweapons.

But hang on, the Soviets agreed with the US

and other nations

to abandon bioweapons programs in 1972.

Could they still be developing them in secret?

You betcha.

In fact, in 1979, their agency known as Biopreparat

is building the largest biological warfare program

in history,

and the city of Sverdlovsk is actually a secret city

built just for that deadly purpose.

- Sverdlovsk was built specifically

to explore and develop biological weapons.

Even the people that lived there

didn't necessarily know where they were,

they didn't show up on a map.

They were completely hidden.

- You weren't really allowed to tell people where you lived,

you weren't allowed to visit with anybody.

- Once you went to a place like Sverdlovsk,

that was your home likely for the rest of your life.

- I really wonder how bad an accident

at one of these secret cities would have to be

for the Soviets to cop to it as a safety issue.

- The Chernobyl meltdown

could have contaminated the drinking water in Europe

for like, 1,000 years

and they kept that a secret as long as they could.

- And that wasn't even military weaponry,

much less illegal military weaponry.

So I wanna find out,

was this some kind of crazy treatment-resistant superbug?

And what happened to it?

(tense music)

- [Ronnie] The biological weapon

being manufactured at Compound 19

was none other than anthrax.

- Anthrax is an incredibly deadly bacteria,

and as a biological weapon is extremely dangerous.

- [Ronnie] But how did it leak out?

- What went wrong at this facility

was the scientists have to replace the air filters

every so often and what happened was

the scientists took the air filters out,

but they forgot to put them back in.

And then, over the weekend, 10 kilograms of anthrax

was released out through that unfiltered vent.

- And the wind picked them up in just the right way

to deliver these spores to the population.

- [Ronnie] And despite dozens of people

dying from anthrax exposure,

it's actually far from the worst-case scenario.

- They're actually lucky

because if the wind had been blowing

in the opposite direction,

hundreds of thousands of people could have died.

- [Ronnie] Ingesting naturally-occurring anthrax

has a 60% fatality rate,

roughly twice that of smallpox.

Weaponized anthrax has a 90% fatality rate.

- Worst-case scenario, somebody would weaponize anthrax

and modify it so that the vaccine

wouldn't work against it,

or that it could be contagious between people.

Right now, anthrax in its original form

only infects that first person.

- [Ronnie] And the Soviets had an entire secret city

engineering this stuff?

Actually, they had more than 50 cities.

In closed sites across the USSR,

scientists were working to weaponize

the viruses that caused the bubonic plague,

smallpox, Legionnaires' disease,

and even a close cousin to Ebola.

How do we know all this?

Because in 1992, the Russians finally copped to it.

- It isn't until 1992 when the Soviet Union collapses

that Boris Yeltsin comes out and admits

that this was a Soviet military program.

- [Ronnie] To usher in a new era of transparency,

Russia signs a new pact

forbidding bioweapons development.

So whatever happened to the anthrax from Sverdlovsk?

- All of the spores that were in this factory

were destroyed, covered in bleach,

and then they were buried on Resurrection Island

in the Aral Sea.

This was thought to be the safest way to dispose of them.

- [Ronnie] Is the Russian military

living up to its renewed promise to abandon bioweapons?

Maybe not.

In 2006, former KGB agent

and vocal Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko

was poisoned with polonium,

a rare radioactive bioweapon.

Also in the UK in 2018,

Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer

turned double agent for the British,

was poisoned along with his daughter Yulia

with a bioagent.

So the Russian bioweapon program may be alive and well

and still super secret.

(tense music)

In 2016, biologists were able to test tissue

from the victims

and map the genome of the anthrax that killed them.

Good news, it was not re-engineered

into some crazy superbug.

It could be treated if you caught it early enough.

- So it's just your everyday, run-of-the-mill,

super-deadly anthrax.

I guess it's better than the alternative.

- You're not wrong.

- Now it's time for our regular secret weapons feature.

This is where we take a close look

at some of history's game-changing military tech.

- And the footage you're about to see will make you ask,

what is this monster raining hellfire down on the enemy?

- [Rudy] You're looking at footage

from a gun sighting camera over Afghanistan in 2012.

US airmen from Special Operations Command

circle above a Taliban stronghold.

The mission, seek and destroy high-value enemy targets.

The air support platform, an old standby,

the AC-130 gunship.

- The AC-130 is typically used by Special Forces

and is usually operated in close air support

or CAS, known as C-A-S.

- [Rudy] Within minutes of the AC-130's arrival,

we see an enemy vehicle

in the crosshairs of American firepower.

- [Rudy] A direct hit alerts the Taliban.

- [Rudy] Vehicles attempt to speed away from the blast,

but they're too late.

The targeting system effortlessly tracks them

on the move and fires with devastating effect.

- [Rudy] And this gunship can take out more than vehicles,

it can annihilate entire buildings.

- The amount of firepower coming down

and the explosions all around you,

it's gotta be completely overwhelming.

It's just death raining down from above.

- [Rudy] So what do videos like this

reveal about the AC-130 gunship?

- I gotta say it looks a little wack,

but there's a method to this madness.

First, you gotta check out this part.

Those are its guns and as it comes into that bank,

oh man, things are about to get heavy.

- And brother, it may look a little weird,

but this is a 105 mike-mike howitzer,

artillery from the sky!

I'll tell you what,

having one of these bad bears on your side redefines BFF.

- Now to get at how this thing does its thing,

we turn back to our experts.

(tense music)

- [Rudy] This video is revealing because it's so steady.

At first glance, you might think it's from a chopper

or a hovering drone,

but it's actually the AC-130

performing a maneuver called a pylon turn,

which keeps it focused on the target

for an extended period of time.

- It's able to maintain its weapon stability

with the use of gyroscopes,

while the AC-130 is circling and traveling at speed,

they're also able to put rounds on target

with extreme accuracy as well.

- [Rudy] The rounds this gunship can put on target

come from a dizzying array of weapons.

We'll start with the little one, so to speak,

a 25-millimeter Gatling Gun.

Nicknamed the Equalizer,

this five-barreled gun can fire 1,800 rounds a minute.

Moving on and up in caliber, we have a 40 mike-mike cannon.

It serves up as many as 120 rounds a minute.

And before taking to the skies,

this weapon started out life as an anti-aircraft gun.

- While I was in Afghanistan,

the AC-130 was always there

and could aid us in neutralizing targets.

- [Rudy] As we were just showing you,

the 105 rounds out the caliber of ammunition

this deadly machine delivers.

Once upon a war,

this cannon was a terrestrial light towable

field artillery piece.

In the aerial realm,

it can blast out as many as 10 shells a minute.

(explosions booming)

- The blast of what you're seeing

is just a portion of the area that could kill you.

There's shrapnel comes from every one of those rounds

that flies out much, much further

than each one of the visual blasts on the screen.

(gunshots firing)

(tense music)

- Wow, the sheer freakin' power.

A whole different kind of beast.

Swoops in low, hovers, circles like a dragon,

locks in on targets, and bang, bang, bang!

- And it's the precision that gets me.

There's really no enemy on the ground

that can match this thing.

It's impressive.

- But unfortunately, as Afghanistan shows,

sometimes you can show up with the right weaponry,

the right training, and win battle after battle,

but still not win the war.

- That's our show for tonight, thanks for watching.

Remember, keep your powder dry.

- And your head on a swivel, goodnight.

(dramatic music)