Original subtitles

Throughout time, governments

and the people who work for them

have done strange and even terrible things

in the name of national interest.

Tonight, real-life spy gadgets.

A giant toy saves a double agent

the life of one of CIA's most valuable assets

rests in the hands of a pop-up doll.

A secret message inside a nickel

brings down a Soviet spymaster

this tiny coin was the key to everything.

And an alien invasion of balloons.

Alien spacecraft are as good a cover as any.

Sometimes spies need the right tech for the job.

Now it's time to bring these strange innovations to life.

It's 1953, and a young kid named Jimmy bozart

finds an unusual nickel.

It turns out to contain secret messages

from enemy agents operating a spy ring on us soil.

So Jimmy bozart is a paperboy in New York City.

He's doing his paper route.

He gets some nickels as tips from different apartments

as he delivers the paper.

He's counting his change.

One of the nickels opens up.

It's no normal nickel.

It's hollowed out in the middle,

almost like two lids of a jar.

And inside the nickel is a thin piece of photo paper.

And on that paper is a strange pattern

that he doesn't understand.

Jimmy can't figure out what the patterns mean,

so he passes the coin and its contents

onto a local detective.

And the police look at it,

and they also don't know what to make of it,

so they take it to the FBI.

The FBI analyze it through a microfiche machine.

They have their best scientists trying to decode this message,

but they can never break it.

The strange nickel and its message

remain a mystery for four years.

Then in may 1957, the feds catch a lucky break.

The American government gets a phone call

from a guy named hayhanen.

Reino hayhanen is a Soviet handler

that's operating a ring of sources

inside the United States.

He says he's fearful that he's gonna be executed

because he has stolen some of his boss's money.

So he's now defecting to america.

A spy who steals from his bosses

doesn't sound like the most reliable source,

so the FBI want to verify hayhanen's story.

They needed to check his credibility.

So they went to his house, and they found all kinds

of materials that are very difficult to explain

if you're not a spy.

And they also found a nickel

that matched Jimmy bozart's nickel.

When the FBI asks hayhanen about Jimmy's nickel,

he knows all about it.

How?

Because the nickel that Jimmy found

was originally meant for hayhanen.

He picked it up in a dead drop.

But instead of opening it immediately

and decoding the message, hayhanen makes a mistake.

When hayhanen picked up the coin,

he put it in his pocket with other coins.

And then he lost track of which coin

was actually carrying the message.

So he accidentally spent the coin somewhere.

Now hayhanen finally reveals the secret

to cracking the code.

The mysterious message

is simply a welcome note to hayhanen

upon his arrival in New York.

All of this mystery, all of this effort,

all of this concern over a message

that was nothing more than a greeting card

between two Russian agents.

The FBI knows what the nickel is

and what the message inside says.

But who sent it?

Hayhanen leads the feds to a photographic studio

in Brooklyn he claims is run by his spy handler.

The FBI raids this spy's apartment

at this photography studio.

And they discovered hollowed pencils,

hollowed nickels, and some other spy gizmos and gadgets.

This Soviet spy is captured.

He tells the FBI, under interrogation,

that his real name is Rudolf Abel.

He is a colonel in the kgb.

Using the spy tech as evidence,

the FBI charges Rudolf Abel with conspiracy and espionage

in August 1957.

The trial reveals Abel has run a network of kgb agents

across the us for eight years,

stealing military and nuclear secrets

and sending them back to mother Russia.

He becomes the highest ranking Russian

ever to be convicted in the us.

So as a result of this famous spy case,

Rudolf Abel gets sentenced to 30 years,

Jimmy bozart gets a commendation from the New York

police department,

and hayhanen goes into witness protection.

It is amazing that without Jimmy bozart's nickel,

none of this would have happened.

Like Jimmy's nickel, not all spy tech is high-end.

In 1982, when the CIA's top man in Moscow goes missing,

the agency turns to a gag toy to track him down.

In 1982, Moscow is the center

of all espionage activity in the world.

And inside Moscow we had one of our best assets,

someone that we called the billion dollar spy.

The billion dollar spy is Adolf tolkachev,

a senior Russian electronics engineer who, since 1977,

has been a one-man data mine for the CIA.

His specialty was in avionics and aviation,

working on cruise missiles, working on airplanes.

He had been giving the us secrets

that had resulted in billions of dollars

worth of saved research.

Suddenly, america's billion dollar spy falls silent.

By December 1982, the last five

scheduled meetings with tolkachev have been aborted.

He was missing meetings.

So we get really, really concerned.

Maybe he's sick.

Maybe he has a security problem.

Charged with tracking him down

is his CIA handler, the operative bill plunkert.

But locating a double agent in Moscow is anything but easy.

There is no way to overstate how difficult

an operating environment Moscow really is.

Bill knows he's being watched 24/7 at all times.

Wherever you were, you had surveillance in Moscow.

No matter what you did, if you were walking, they were there.

If you were driving, they were there.

If plunkert is going to have any chance

of meeting tolkachev,

he needs to figure out a way to lose the kgb agents

looking over his shoulder.

The CIA's top engineers come up with a surprising solution,

inspired by a kid's toy, a super-sized Jack-in-the-box.

The idea behind the Jack-in-the-box invention

was that an operative could leave a car

that another operative was driving,

meaning without the surveillance team

realizing anybody had ever left the car at all.

When a trailing kgb car is momentarily out of sight,

the operative can put on a disguise

and slip out of the car and disappear.

And then the Jack-in-the-box pops up to make it look like

they're still in the seat.

From the position of the surveillance,

it would still look like there were two people

driving in the car.

Bill will be the first ever CIA officer

to field test this piece of spy tech.

Failure could lead kgb agents

straight to the CIA's greatest asset.

Success hinges on getting the Jack-in-the-box

into the car without the kgb seeing it.

To do that, bill plunkert organizes a cover story.

Before plunkert's next scheduled meeting

with tolkachev, the CIA Moscow office

deliberately discusses a fictional birthday party

on phone lines bugged by the kgb.

On the big day, plunkert and his associates

walk out of the us embassy, plunkert carrying a big cake.

They get into their car and they drive off.

And as they do, they are fully aware

that the kgb is tailing them.

That's not a problem. They have a plan.

When his car swings around the corner,

plunkert leaps out.

Right away, his companion takes the cake

and lays it on top of the vacated seat.

With a sudden crack, the false top of the cake

flings open and the Jack-in-the-box passenger

snaps into position.

So by the time the kgb rounds the corner,

they see a vehicle filled with Americans

with the exact same headcount.

They have no reason to suspect that plunkert

is actually the old man that they're driving right by.

The Jack-in-the-box gives plunkert just enough time

to track down the CIA's greatest informant.

Bill plunkert meets with tolkachev.

They exchange packages.

And tolkachev was able to give the CIA

new information that proved invaluable

to the defense department.

The full story of the Jack-in-the-box

finally comes to light in 2008,

in a CIA-sanctioned book.

The trick becomes a key part

of the CIA's field operation toolkit.

During the cold war, both superpowers

looked for innovative ways to spy on each other.

But when Soviet missiles bring down america's

spy plane program,

the us responds by taking its cameras to new heights.

In 1949, the Russians tested their first a-bomb.

So the Americans need to see what else they could be up to.

Aerial surveillance seems to be the only answer.

But the Soviets warn that they will shoot down

any NATO aircraft that enters Russian airspace.

In 1960, this threat becomes a reality

when an American u-2 is shot down

and its pilot put on trial for espionage.

Us intelligence agencies race to find a new, safer way

to get an eye in the sky.

So they decide to send a new camera even higher,

where they're certain no Soviet missile

could ever reach.

The Americans come up with a pretty bold idea.

What if the overflights happen from space

using a satellite-mounted camera?

I mean, that way, no pilots risk capture.

You have no chance of being shot down

and there are no violations of airspace.

The audacious mission is given to the newly formed

national reconnaissance office,

who begin work on a series of top-secret spy satellites.

In 1971, this results in the kh-9 hexagon,

a brand new, photographic, reconnaissance satellite.

And it's as large as a school bus.

The technology in the kh satellite is groundbreaking.

It has the primary panoramic camera and a mapping camera.

And what that gives you is pinpoint locations

on the ground.

This can capture objects 2 to 3 feet wide

from a hundred miles in space.

It's a cutting-edge space camera

to snoop on their rivals.

But what good is a camera

if you can't get the picture back home?

Engineers at the reconnaissance office

need to transport the camera's photographic film

from outer space, 95 miles down to earth,

to be developed.

They devise an ingenious solution.

Once the photos are taken in space,

the exposed film is stored in four detachable buckets.

Over a period of weeks, these are ejected into space

to carefully drop back to earth,

toward the pacific ocean.

Collecting these buckets falls to the us air force,

who must play a game of catch over the entire pacific ocean.

Air force pilots are tasked with picking up these packages,

falling out of the sky, before they hit the water.

Nothing like it has been attempted before.

It's a sight to behold.

Pilots had to fly around and just keep an eye out

for the parachute that would be dropping the film canister

slowly toward the ocean.

Once they saw it, their mission was to fly over top of it

and snag the parachute with a hook hanging under their plane.

You're dropping a 1,500-pound metal canister

from earth's orbit,

and then calculating its re-entry point

with pinpoint precision.

It's an extraordinary airborne mission.

But when the pictures come in, they're worth all the effort.

When the first batch of film is developed

from the kh-9 satellite, one of the officers exclaims,

they never thought it would be so good.

The imagery gathered from this bucket

covered 2/3 of all of the Soviet missile bases.

Hexagon is one of the most effective programs

of the cold war.

Over 15 years, 19 hexagon satellites image

over 877 million square miles of earth.

Film canisters dropped from the sky proved to be

a great way to spy, but it's far from perfect,

as the us finds out in 1971

when pilots lose one after a malfunction.

The answer could be another incredible piece of technology.

July 10, 1971.

The recovery team realize they have a problem

with one of the canisters.

The parachute failed.

And it smashes into the ocean, going 400 feet per second.

So suddenly, there's this canister

just full of top-secret information

stuck at the bottom of the ocean.

This film is critically important

because it reveals just how high resolution

our early generation spy satellites were

at a critical time in the cold war.

We just can't take the risk of allowing this material

to fall into Soviet hands.

The us government decide to launch

an unprecedented deep-sea rescue mission.

This lost film canister is 5 by 7 feet,

and it's buried under 16,000 feet of water.

That depth is equivalent to 10 times the height

of the empire state building.

In order to rescue this pod, the Americans have to turn

to another cutting-edge technology,

a submersible named trieste ii.

For this mission, trieste ii is armed with

a custom-built articulating claw arm

that can retrieve the canister.

And its nearly 4-inch-thick steel hull

can carry a three-man crew to the sea floor.

But it's never gone this deep.

Even so, the Navy sail the trieste

to where they think the canister splashed down.

Using the bucket's trajectory and the wind speeds,

they're able to narrow down the search region

to a location 350 miles north of Hawaii.

It's a strip about a mile and a half wide

and eight miles long.

Starboard ahead one third. Come left 30 degrees.

However, trieste ii still has a vast area to scour

on the pitch-black sea floor.

Starboard ahead one third.

Coming left 30 degrees.

The trieste ii is effectively looking

for a needle in a haystack.

The trieste launches two unsuccessful dives.

These are incredibly challenging and dangerous.

And there is a question of how many more dives

are even possible.

Finding the small film bucket on the pacific floor

starts to look like an impossible task.

Nearly a year after the bucket is lost,

the trieste ii makes its third dive.

It's basically do or die time.

Roger.

We passed a large rock.

After descending over the course of two hours,

trieste ii reaches the sea floor and begins searching.

Three and a half hours later, they don't have anything.

And then, within minutes of having to begin

their long, arduous ascent back to the surface,

they spot it.

Against all odds, they've found the canister.

Using the trieste's articulating claw arm,

they reach out, grab it, recover it,

and then begin their return to the surface.

The crew of trieste ii are ultimately commended

for having completed the deepest navigation search

and recovery mission in the world.

The trieste recovers the photos of critical

intelligence from the sea floor.

But more importantly, thanks to the trieste ii,

the incredible power of the us spy satellites

remains top secret.

And the rescue operation will remain secret

until the CIA declassify the astonishing details in 2012.

The spy tech you see in the movies

and the rescue operation will remain secret

is often inspired by real life events.

But in the '70s, when the CIA in Moscow needs

the ultimate disguise to tap into a trove of Soviet secrets,

the agency goes Hollywood.

In the late 1970s, the CIA is actively monitoring

what's happening in Moscow through satellite.

And they identify a suspicious trench

that's being dug between the ministry of defense

and the nuclear weapons research institute.

They realize they're laying communication cables.

So this was a golden opportunity for the CIA.

If you could tap into the line that's being created

between these two locations,

then that is an information line that's carrying

some really valuable secrets.

Closer inspection of the route

reveals a series of manholes.

Maybe they could enter and hack into this stream

of classified information.

Identifying a secret cable is one thing,

but getting inside a manhole undetected to tap it

is another thing entirely.

Moscow is a very difficult place to operate.

It's one of the most heavily-surveilled locations

on the planet.

CIA agents know they are probably being followed

24 hours a day.

From the moment you set foot, as an American,

inside of Russia, you are target number one,

enemy number one.

To avoid kgb scrutiny,

the CIA needs a creative solution.

They turn to legendary CIA master

of disguise, Tony Mendez.

My husband, Tony Mendez,

had been at the CIA for a while.

Best-known for the argo operation.

He smuggled six American civilians out of Tehran

at the height of the Iranian revolution.

Tony wonders if CIA operatives could lose

their kgb tails by totally altering their appearances

in the blink of an eye.

Tony Mendez was really a revolutionary.

He devised a suit, a quick-change suit.

A simple pull of a velcro tab releases the new outfit.

It's really clever.

He also sews some vital tools into the disguise.

But a change of clothes alone won't be enough

to give the kgb the slip.

Tony wants to make agents impossible to recognize.

Tony knew that out in Moscow, they were very aware

of what our faces looked like.

They had photographs of everyone that came in

and was working for the embassy.

You can change your clothes very, very easily.

But you really can't change your facial features.

For that, Tony needs a cutting-edge spy mask,

and turns to the unlikeliest of places

to someone he thinks can help.

Tony Mendez's background was in Hollywood.

He had quite a network.

So Tony pays a visit to master mask maker John chambers.

John chambers was a makeup artist out in Hollywood.

He won an Oscar for the "planet of the apes" masks.

It soon becomes clear, John's award-winning masks

need two big changes if they're gonna work for spies.

These masks that were used in "planet of the apes"

would take three hours to apply.

Well, in a life or death situation,

when you're doing a CIA operation,

you don't have three hours.

Also, at this point in time, facial masks didn't move

and they were very easy to tell that they were fake.

So Tony has to develop a mask that can be taken on

and off very quickly.

The mask also has to stand up to kgb scrutiny.

After months of work, the disguise is ready.

The mask can be put on in a flash

and molds to the face perfectly.

You can pop them on,

and they fit in a almost vacuum-sealed kind of way

to people's faces so that they moved.

So you were having masks that showed smiles,

that showed laughs,

that showed a little bit more emotions,

and it became a more believable disguise.

Those masks could radically change the way you looked.

Now the CIA needs to find someone

to wear their new spy mask

and tap into the Russians' nuclear communications.

They pick a 38-year-old CIA officer, Jim Olson.

Jim Olson thinks is a joke, because how on earth

am I gonna get a mask on and off in three seconds,

get into a manhole cover, tap into wires,

and then get out undetected?

He soon discovers they're deadly serious.

Olson accepts the mission and travels to Moscow.

To lose his ever-present kgb tail,

he will need the perfect cover scenario.

Olson's mission begins in 1979 with a picnic.

He and his wife know that they are under constant

kgb surveillance.

They took some sandwiches, some wine, a little blanket.

And then Jim, dressed like an American diplomat,

decided to take a little stroll into the trees.

Jim steps around the back of a bush.

He knows he only has a few seconds

to transform into his disguise.

He put on this mask.

He emerges from the park

this older, not so well-off man.

Once Olson emerges, he makes sure

that he has no agents surveilling him.

And when he realizes that he doesn't,

he knows that it's safe to go to this manhole.

Jim Olson slips underground and photographs

the communications cable, allowing a second team

to develop a tech to hack it.

Sure enough, they also use Tony's disguise

to get into the hole to lay down their tap.

For six years, the CIA is able to collect

defense information, nuclear secrets

from the Russian government.

It is not until a defector lets the kgb know

what the CIA is doing,

that the lines are eventually cut.

Details of this quick change mission

don't come out for another 40 years,

when Tony Mendez makes a dying request

to share his story with the world.

The CIA give the green light.

And to this day, Tony's disguise technology

is still used by agents in need of a quick change.

Intelligence services are often willing

to recruit dubious agents.

But in 1967, the CIA takes that a step too far,

when it enlists a four-legged spy

with an embedded listening device.

The mission is called acoustic kitty.

It's the '60s,

and kgb agents working in Washington know

that their offices are often bugged,

and the CIA suspect that they're conducting

their top meetings outside.

So the CIA turn to biotechnology.

In 1961, the R&D department

of the central intelligence agency wants to utilize cats

as an intelligence-gathering mechanism

to deploy them against our Soviet adversaries.

Household companion animals have been militarized

at various points in our history.

Dogs have certainly been that.

Cats have, too.

The idea is that nobody really pays attention to cats.

They're essentially unnoticed.

What they want to do is have the cat

wander through sensitive areas,

where it will just collect intelligence as it goes.

Unfortunately for the cat,

turning it into an intelligence collector

involves surgery.

It has a power pack implanted in its abdomen,

a microphone in its ear canal,

and a 3/4-inch transmitter at the base of the skull

with wires running to its ears and tail,

which acts as an antenna.

Basically, you end up getting half cat, half cyborg.

In Washington in 1967,

the CIA's cyborg cat gets its first deployment,

to discover if it really is the future of spying.

On that day in 1967,

two CIA operatives arrive at the rendezvous point

of their kgb targets,

carrying with them the result of six years of R&D

and a reported $15 million of investment.

This is the first example of cats being used

to carry out an espionage operation.

The cat is released from the CIA Van.

The cat starts moving toward its target.

But after walking a short distance,

it suddenly veers off course and is squashed by a taxi.

It couldn't have gone more wrong.

It's only discovered in 2001,

when the CIA declassify a series

of heavily-redacted documents.

Among them, one details the plans for a cat project.

Believe it or not, there's a memo that emerges from the CIA

entitled, views on trained cats,

that lays out why this is not actually a practical solution

to collect intelligence from the Soviets.

The CIA learns the hard way that cats may not

have what it takes to be spies.

It doesn't stop the agency's hunt for animal agents.

Their next recruits don't live on land,

but have brains larger than humans.

In the 1960s, as the newly-released film "flipper"

explodes in popularity,

the public has no idea that america is looking

to the real-life flippers to give them an edge

in the escalating cold war.

The clandestine dolphin project,

known as oxygas, only surfaces in 2019.

The CIA wanted to use their dolphins

to conduct surveillance of enemy harbors.

Initially to the CIA, the dolphins provide

very promising results.

But by the late 1960s, the CIA is plowing

the modern equivalent of $50 million a year

into the project.

And they're just not seeing enough

spying potential to justify their huge investment,

so they pull funding.

While the CIA dolphin's project fails

to make the grade, the us Navy also has

their own dolphin-training program.

Well, you see, whatever the dolphin lacks in size,

it makes up in brains.

The department of defense makes a movie

titled, "the dolphins that joined the Navy."

And it's all about how we are experiencing

great success at bringing these dolphins into Navy service.

Whereas the CIA was asking the dolphin to do something

that it really wasn't good at,

the Navy only asked the dolphin

to do things that it was naturally great at.

Echolocation and performing tasks

to receive an immediate reward,

dolphins are terrific at that.

The program continues for decades.

The Navy takes advantage of dolphins' incredible

natural sonar to find mines.

Emitting clicks from its head, a dolphin can detect

a tennis-ball-sized mine from two football fields away,

even when they're buried under sand.

The dolphin training program has its finest hour

in Iraq in 2003.

Operation Iraqi freedom is underway.

Iraq doesn't have a lot of coastline.

And the only way to essentially transport

heavy military equipment is over water.

The port at umm qasr, which is Iraq's only deep-sea port,

suddenly became very important.

The Navy needed to clear the port of umm qasr.

It had been mined heavily,

and now the Navy needed this port

for the delivery of supplies.

The Navy decides that now is the time.

They will take a team of dolphins trained

at the marine mammal research facility in San Diego

and send them in.

This crack team of eight dolphins

zipped through the water hunting for enemy mines.

They're trained to alert their handlers when they find one,

but also to Mark it with an acoustic transponder.

This allows divers to disarm it later on.

That job would have taken an enormous amount of time

were it not for the dolphins.

The dolphins cut the job in half.

They very successfully cleared the port

of about a hundred mines.

Everybody loves dolphins.

It's the logo of the submarine force.

In a remote desert location,

a team of military engineers

are testing a piece of advanced spy tech.

This highly-classified tech program

will accidentally inspire a long-running mystery.

This is a very technologically advanced program.

So secret that the individuals working on it

don't know what they're working on.

Nearly everyone on this program are told

that they're working on meteorological equipment.

Even the code name, mogul, is classified.

Project mogul is being built to keep the us in the lead

of the nuclear arms race.

As far as the Americans know,

the Soviets don't have the technology

to build the atomic bomb.

But they also know that it's only a matter of time

before they do.

The Soviet union is filled with these vast wildernesses.

The Americans are concerned that they're gonna be able

to test these weapons in total secrecy.

This is in an age where

we can't get over the Soviet union undetected.

So they have to come up with an idea

on how to monitor the Soviets as they test nuclear weapons.

The answer comes from a renowned us geophysicist

and oceanographer, who claims he can make tech

that can listen for the Soviet tests.

Dr. W. Maurice ewing is convinced sound channels exist

at high altitudes, which could be used

to detect nuclear explosions.

His idea gets the attention of us air force officials,

who authorize a top-secret research effort

called project mogul.

The concept is simple, to place microphones

eight and a half miles in the air

in the aerial sound channel

to listen for nuclear detonations.

The idea may be simple, but the execution is not.

The Americans have to figure out how to get these

microphones up to altitude, 70,000, 100,000 feet,

and stay up there for a very long time.

Dr. Ewing thinks the answer is to float them

using helium balloons.

Helium balloons don't make any sound.

They can stay aloft for days at a time.

And they don't need any fuel or a crew.

They're basically the perfect autonomous vehicle.

In 1947, the mogul team head into the desert

to begin the secret testing of these balloons

and the cutting-edge audio spy tech they will carry.

The payload equipment, sound monitors,

ballast, and batteries, they all hung below.

This stretches up to 600 feet from tip to tail,

which is twice as tall as the statue of Liberty.

Rising to 45,000 feet, balloons can withstand

temperature fluctuations of up to 160 degrees fahrenheit

and winds of over 30 miles per hour.

It takes just one accident

for this top-secret program

to ignite an enduring mystery.

There's one problem.

These balloons cannot always be controlled.

They don't always go where you want them to.

And sometimes they crash.

In June 1947, a rancher stumbles upon strange,

mangled, high-tech metallic debris.

The rancher brings a sample of the wreckage

to a nearby army airfield.

When the airfield public affairs officer

releases a statement about the debris,

he has no idea about the air force's mogul program.

He says there is a flying disk among the debris

now being analyzed at a nearby airfield.

It is called roswell.

Headlines around the world appear,

"ufo, roswell, new Mexico."

The air force is thrilled.

It needs a cover for these balloons,

and alien spacecraft are as good a cover as any.

As a result, roswell, new Mexico,

has become synonymous with ufos, and still is today.

No one connects the dots for nearly five decades.

The truth is only revealed in 1995,

when an investigation into the roswell ufo incident

makes the link to the top-secret balloon program.

For the military, the alien invasion cover story

is a huge success, but the project is not.

Mogul's use of balloons to detect a-bombs

proves a failure.

In the new millennium,

British agents face an old problem

how to communicate with Russian assets in Moscow.

They devise a new piece of spy tech,

placing it in something so dull no one would look at it twice.

In the mid-2000s, the British were still running assets

in Russia to keep tabs on military,

nuclear, and geopolitical developments out there.

The problem is they're living in a city covered in cctv.

Moscow now is a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week cctv city.

And so the British secret service

need to figure out a more covert way to communicate.

If anything goes wrong, it could put their Russian assets

in mortal danger.

The answer is a simple but brilliantly effective

piece of spy tech that can hide in plain sight

a fake, hollowed-out rock.

The spy rock is designed to be

a modern upgrade of the classic espionage technique,

the dead letter drop.

The dead letter drop was always a tool

that spies could use to keep themselves safe.

It allowed one officer to drop a letter in a secret place

and another officer to pick it up at a different time,

essentially separating the two officers.

With the spy rock, it completely changed the game.

Costing several million dollars to develop,

with a state of the art radio transmitter receiver,

which has a range of up to 65 feet.

It's also got a battery lifespan of up to three months

and is strong enough to withstand a fall

from a building nine stories high.

It's the dead letter drop of the digital age.

The way it works is an agent for the British

will walk past the rock and remotely upload data

to the device within it, and then disappear

into the streets of Moscow.

Later on, that agent's handler will

download the data remotely.

Meaning, they never have to leave

incriminating material that could be found by the Russians.

So the program is rolled out and it's a success.

Information is exchanged.

The secrecy of the program is maintained,

until disaster strikes.

In January 2006, the Russian state TV

broadcasts a news report

that the British secret service have been dreading.

There's a report showing a video of a man in Moscow.

He walks down a street, slows,

and glances down at a rock before walking away.

A while later, another man walks by and picks it up.

The Russians were actively surveilling

people of interest.

And what they found was a pattern

where these individuals would behave a certain way

around a rock on the streets.

So the Russians put a hidden camera

to observe anyone walking past.

And that's how they discovered the evidence

that the rock was, in fact, a technical dead drop.

They are identified as British embassy staff.

And this video is pointed to as evidence of espionage.

Britain's ambassador in Moscow denies any wrongdoing.

This severely challenges diplomatic relations

between Russia and the UK.

But in an unexpected twist,

putin doesn't kick the guilty agents out of Russia.

Putin makes a public joke that he doesn't want

to expel them, because if he did,

the British might send smarter,

more capable officers in their place.

The British government maintains its innocence

until 2012.

In a TV interview with the BBC,

a former government chief of staff admits

the spy rock allegations.

The spy rock was embarrassing.

They... i mean, they had us bang to rights.

Clearly, they'd known about it for some time

and had been saving it up for a political purpose.

Despite Russia's public outrage at the spy rock,

it seems that, at least, some of its spies

were impressed with the British ingenuity.

In 2021, despite its outrage at the spy rock incident,

Russia unveils its own version of the same technology.

It's revealed to the world just months

before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Opening files on the secret world of spy tech

reveals that cutting-edge innovation is always

a crucial part of intelligence gathering,

one that can be the key to success.

I'm David duchovny.

Thanks for watching "secrets declassified."