Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: Shadowy assassins

who vanish into the crowd.

Double agents who sell their own country's secrets.

And coded messages hiding in plain sight.

Throughout history, spies have played

a unique role in shaping world events.

And these secret agents work at the behest of an organization,

a government or perhaps even a single leader.

Their covert orders could range from

simply collecting information

or something as deadly serious

as assassinating an enemy.

Secrecy is critical to a spy's success,

so how do these masters of deception fulfill

their assignments without getting caught?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

The CIA, MI6

and MSS.

These are the foreign intelligence services

for some of the most powerful countries in the world.

These agencies, and hundreds of others,

engage in clandestine operations

to aid and protect their countries.

For many, their mission is to gather

the most closely guarded secrets of their enemies,

and their secret weapons are often...

spies.

ASAF LUBIN: Spies are

utilized by states to collect

intelligence that is necessary to advance policymaking.

From figuring out whether an adversary

has nuclear weapons, to figuring out whether

a leader of a foreign state is about to die.

We have intelligence agencies that specialize in

visual intelligence, say satellite imagery.

We have intelligence agencies that specialize in

the interception of communications.

But there are spies that more commonly

come to mind, which is

the people at the front line, the individuals

willing to put their lives at risk to share information.

At the end of the day, it's a life of mystery and intrigue

because the spy world is kind of its own domain.

It remains this kind of puzzle or mystery

that most people will not have exposure to

beyond those few moments we read about in the newspaper.

ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: Hollywood movies and books and TV

have made it seem like spies are some kind of superhero.

That is nothing like real espionage.

The purpose of espionage

is to be so secret

that nobody even knows you're there.

True professional espionage

is in and out without anyone ever even knowing it happened.

That makes your average spy

much more like an average person.

And what's required of a spy changes from day to day.

One day, we're hunting terrorists.

Sometime later, we're exchanging information in secret.

Some days, we're fighting a war on drugs.

Some days, we're fighting a war on misinformation.

It's an incredible

web of information and impact

that the average person is not aware of.

SHATNER: How can we ever hope

to understand the mysterious world of espionage

if it remains completely hidden from us?

Well, every so often, information does come to light

that illustrates how a single spy

can change the course of history.

A massive scientific complex is established in secret

for the research and development of a truly devastating weapon.

This laboratory becomes ground zero

for the most consequential

top secret military program ever devised.

It's called the Manhattan Project.

KAI BIRD: The Manhattan Project was this top secret,

federally funded $2 billion program

to explore whether it was possible to develop

an atomic weapon

in the midst of World War II.

And they built this secret city in Los Alamos,

gathering together chemists and engineers

and physicists and other scientists

into one spot so that these scientists can collaborate

and fully converse inside the secret city

to build this weapon.

SHATNER: As history shows, these scientists

would prove successful in creating the atomic bomb.

But little did they know at the time

there was a spy among them,

sharing the program's most intimate secrets.

His codename was "Rest,"

but his identity has since been revealed

to be a German physicist named Klaus Fuchs.

LUBIN: Klaus came from Germany,

and because of his... his prior background as a physicist,

he quickly got a job

within the Manhattan Program in Los Alamos.

And, unknown to the people there,

Fuchs began to share information

with the Soviets about the program.

A U.S. counterintelligence program

that involved decrypting Soviet communications

revealed the scope of the information

that Fuchs collected and shared with the Soviets.

In his particular role

as a lead scientist within the program and access

to the development of the bomb,

he was able to share

pretty detailed technical information about

the science that goes into

the generation and enrichment of plutonium,

which served a huge deal in advancing

the Russians' capacities in those spaces.

And he collected intelligence and shared intelligence

for about seven years, until he was revealed.

The greatest find in the history of espionage

is the theft of the atomic secret.

Klaus Fuchs pretty much shared the recipe

with the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was able to get a nuclear weapon

roughly five years before they could have

done it on their own.

The moment they had the nuke, they were a world power.

SHATNER: If one spy can alter the course of atomic history,

how else has espionage shaped our world?

Has secret intelligence informed nearly every

major event in human history?

BUSTAMANTE: You have to assume

that you only know about five percent

of all espionage operations.

Every negotiation, every diplomatic agreement,

every transition of power from one president

to another president, for 167 countries,

all over the world, over the course of decades,

intelligence had a role to play in every one of those.

So now, when you start to ask yourself

about how the Soviet Union fell,

and you start to ask yourself about

how the end of Afghanistan happened,

and the winning of Gulf War II,

and the taking down of Saddam Hussein,

you start to see these major instances in history

where intelligence worked or failed.

So, when you try to consider

the impact that espionage has had

over the long-term history of the world,

you have to remember that 95% of what they've done,

nobody knows about

except for "need to know" secret circles.

LINDSAY MORAN: It's really pretty chilling if you think about the effect

that just a single spy or intelligence source

can have on world events.

And the irony is that

we often don't know

what that impact is until many years

or even decades later, or sometimes, ever at all.

Even historians looking back

on historical events or geopolitical movements,

may never have access

to the behind-the-scenes intrigue and espionage

that took place, or the machinations

of various intelligence organizations.

But for sure, spies really can change the course of history.

SHATNER: This sleek, modern building

houses over 7,000 unique artifacts

from the history of espionage.

And among them are ingenious devices

created to hide things,

record secret conversations,

and some are even meant to kill.

The International Spy Museum

houses the world's largest collection

of intelligence and espionage-related artifacts.

We have all kinds of ingenious devices

to do all type of different types of stuff.

So, a lot of the gadgets that we see

are there to try to help

to be a more effective agent,

to recruit spies better, to steal secrets better.

And we've got a fantastic

James Bond collection.

Some of the James Bond movies

have actually influenced the development

of gadgets in the CIA.

CIA directors come out of the movie theater

and say, "Guys, do we have anything like this?

And if we don't, can someone get on it?"

So we know that there's a two-way interaction between

the gadgets in fiction and in reality.

When you look at spy gadgets, a lot of them

are weapons of one thing or another.

They're always trying to come up with new gadgets.

So, the KGB came up with a lipstick gun,

which was a little 4.5 millimeter bullet

that could be fired from a lipstick tube.

The CIA had an ice gun,

which fired a super-cool needle of ice,

preferably through your opponent's heart.

That was all around 1960.

And then, there are famous exploding cigars,

with which they were going to blow off Fidel Castro's head.

But to the extent that secret weapons,

spy weapons programs exist,

they're secret, which is why you don't know about them,

because you're not supposed to.

SHATNER: Over the years, some spy gadgets

have either been declassified

or leaked to the public.

However, what's less clear

is whether any of these fantastical

and frankly bizarre devices

were ever successfully put to use.

But there is a curious instrument of death

that many believe was responsible

for one of the most infamous and unsolved

assassinations of the 20th century:

The 1978 murder

of British journalist Georgi Markov.

JACK BARSKY: Markov was a dissident

in Bulgaria, and he was loud.

And, uh, he... he had to flee.

He wound up in the United Kingdom,

and he got employed by, uh, the BBC

and Radio Free Europe,

which we absolutely hated because it was

Western propaganda directed to the East.

And he got louder and louder,

and, uh, the Bulgarians,

I think it was the president,

he wanted to get rid of this guy.

SHATNER: On September 7, 1978,

at around 1:30 p.m.,

Markov was about to catch a bus

on the Waterloo Bridge in London,

when something very strange happens.

NIGEL WEST: Georgi Markov bumps into somebody

at a bus stop,

and this individual

is carrying an umbrella.

And Georgi Markov feels

some pain in his leg.

And the individual concerned

mutters an apology and climbs into a taxi.

And Markov, from that moment onwards,

becomes ill.

He goes to hospital later that night,

and a few days later,

he succumbs to a very severe infection.

SPENCE: Doctors who've examined his body

found red swelling on the back of his thigh

and, in a microscopic examination

of the flesh from the wound site,

they discovered a tiny,

tiny, less than two-millimeter size little ball,

mostly made out of platinum,

which had holes drilled in it

as a means to administer a poison.

The poison, which has never been officially identified,

was most likely ricin,

which is a highly toxic substance,

which is refined from castor beans.

SHATNER: How was this deadly platinum ball

implanted into Georgi Markov?

Answers were not easy to come by, but then,

investigators remembered one seemingly minor detail

that may provide all the answers.

SPENCE: They thought, "Ah, that umbrella.

Eh, what was that all about?"

And later, we learn that one of the things that both

the KGB and the Bulgarians had come up with

was an umbrella gun.

They had a whole lab working on this.

And there was a little tiny capsule,

it was in the tip of the umbrella,

which had a needle on it,

and you'd just poke somebody and then walked away.

BUSTAMANTE: How do you kill somebody in plain daylight,

in public, without anybody knowing about it?

And the answer is that you find a way

to create some sort of device, like an umbrella,

that blends in every day,

but can still deliver a lethal dose when you need it to.

-(umbrella clicks) -(man grunts)

This is exactly what makes

spy agencies and spy tech

something of interest and renown,

because there's a great deal of effort,

a great deal of investment

that's put into making a clandestine weapon.

SHATNER: The umbrella suspected of killing Georgi Markov

was never recovered, so investigators

had no way to definitively confirm

such a device was responsible for his murder.

But as far as the identity of the mysterious assassin

who bumped into Markov,

well... that's another mystery.

BARSKY: When it comes to assassinating people,

we know that the KGB did quite a... quite a bit of that,

and we know that the Russian intelligence does it now, too.

There's an arsenal of weapons.

And Markov was a very loud dissident.

So, he was an enemy of the revolution,

and he had to be killed.

But the man who was seen

to stick that umbrella into Markov's leg,

I think he got away with this.

ANDREW HAMMOND: What history says about the assassination of Georgi Markov

is a little similar to "Who was Jack the Ripper?"

"Who killed JFK?"

What's the final definitive story?

Hopefully, we'll know one day, maybe we never will.

SHATNER: Today, a replica of the notorious umbrella

hangs in the International Spy Museum's collection.

And while it can never be proven that a similar device

was used to poison Georgi Markov,

one thing is certain:

The deadly tools of spy craft

could be made to look like anything,

and you wouldn't know it

until it's too late.

SPENCE: In terms of

what could be future spy weapons,

secret spy gadgets they could come up with,

well, one of them is tiny, tiny drones

that could fly inside you, perhaps,

administer poisons, carry tiny cameras.

The use of frequency weapons might be something else.

Essentially, some sort of energy beam

which is being directed at people,

affecting the brain in some way,

which would create feelings of disorientation,

and if it managed to

discombobulate the right targets,

it could interfere with

their ability to perform their duties.

So, energy weapons could be useful

in the world of spies.

But yes, there's a secret war to always try

to be one step ahead of your opponent

by coming up with something that they hadn't thought of... yet.

And it can be someone passing you by with an umbrella.

Was the assassination of Georgi Markov

the work of Soviet intelligence?

Like the top secret nature of espionage itself,

there's a lot we may never know.

But there is one spy mystery

that has intelligence officers worried, even now.

It involves a foreign asset

who infiltrated the American government

intent on stealing national secrets.

SHATNER: President Harry Truman

establishes the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the wake of World War II,

and with the rise of atomic weaponry,

a new covert war is about to begin

between the United States and the Soviet Union.

This unprecedented era of espionage

from 1947 to 1991 is known

as the Cold War.

LUBIN: At the start of the Cold War as we know it in the 1950s,

the U.S. realized that it needed to advance

its internal security measures.

This is why Truman

would ultimately generate a presidential executive order

on confidential materials,

which still, to this day, is the way by which

we set different degrees of confidentiality

around secret documents here in the United States.

SHATNER: During the Cold War, both the CIA

and the Soviet Union's KGB

employed spies to steal each other's

national secrets.

And while any civilian could be recruited

to spy on their home country for the other side,

even more valuable were those already working

in the intelligence community.

These turncoats are known as...

double agents.

HAMMOND: To be a double agent,

for example, I'm an agent.

I'm working with the CIA over here.

But I'm also working with the KGB over here.

I'm a double agent in the middle.

But it's quite often used in shorthand to refer

to anybody who works in this world

who also works for the other side.

LUBIN: There will be a closed universe of individuals in the know

about particular secrets,

and you need to penetrate those kinds of closed networks.

And so, the best way to do that is by

turning a double agent,

a person, into an information sharer.

SHATNER: The U.S. intelligence community

is made up of 18 different agencies and organizations.

So, we have to wonder,

are there double agents among them,

sharing our most closely guarded secrets

with our enemies?

Remarkably, the answer is yes.

And many consider the most damaging double agent ever

discovered was a 31-year veteran of the CIA

named Aldrich Ames.

WEST: Aldrich Ames was a counterintelligence officer

in the directorate

of operations.

And he was a senior individual

who in 1985,

as a result of a bad divorce,

was short of money,

and he sold out to the Soviets.

He just simply went to the embassy,

asked to speak to a KGB officer,

and then sold information through letters,

which was highly classified operations,

and a large number of identities

who were people who had worked either for the FBI or the CIA

in the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C.

MORAN: There were suspicions

that there was a spy within the CIA

because in the 1980s,

many of our Russian sources

in Russia

started kind of dropping like flies.

And this set off alarm bells at the CIA.

And so an investigation was launched.

But, bizarrely, it took many, many years to realize

that it was Aldrich Ames,

even though Aldrich Ames displayed

many of the characteristics

of what would be a viable target for recruitment.

He had a known problem with alcohol.

He had married a Colombian woman who had very expensive tastes.

He bought a house in Virginia with cash

for $540,000.

He bought a Jaguar.

He started to dress really well.

He got new teeth.

And all of these are pretty obvious indicators

that someone is working for a foreign intelligence service

because he couldn't afford all that on his CIA salary.

Aldrich Ames is one of the most famous

CIA compromises of all times.

He went many, many years clandestinely acquiring

and giving information to the Russians

until his ultimate arrest in the 1990s.

It's very difficult to be able to quantify

the amount of damage that Aldrich Ames did.

We know that CIA spies were systematically killed.

And even to this day,

CIA is always training new recruits

to understand Aldrich Ames

to make sure that they don't have

another instance like that happen again.

SHATNER: Aldrich Ames was sentenced to life in prison.

And his wife, Rosario, got five years for aiding

her husband in his crimes against the United States.

But Ames was not the only double agent discovered inside

an American intelligence agency.

In 2001,

an FBI agent named Robert Hanssen was arrested

for selling highly classified information

to Russia for over 20 years.

And it begs an urgent question:

How many more double agents might be operating

within the American intelligence community

right now that have never been caught?

LUBIN: It is very likely that there is a Russian double agent

within the U.S. government today.

In the same way, it is very likely

that there is a double agent

working for the Chinese government

or the Iranian government or the North Korean government.

The United States has many enemies around the world,

and those enemies are interested in gathering

intimate information about U.S. doings.

BUSTAMANTE: It's very uncomfortable to admit,

but one thing that CIA officers are taught

right out of the gates

is that you must always assume at any given time

that the CIA and the FBI are

penetrated by a foreign intelligence service.

We have to assume that.

If we're lucky, there's only one.

Probability-wise, there is more than one.

Could there really be a foreign spy

deeply embedded in a U.S. intelligence agency?

Unraveling this mystery is truly a matter of national security

because gaining secret information on an enemy

can quickly shift the balance of global power.

Such was the case in World War II,

when Allied forces were convinced

that a German double agent was leaking

D-Day plans to the Nazis,

one letter at a time.

SHATNER: As World War II rages across Europe,

the Allied forces spent five months

planning a top secret invasion

to recapture the French coastal town of Dieppe.

But on August 19th,

as the Allies began their surprise assault...

...it seems that somehow

the Germans knew they were coming.

McMAHON: The attack on Dieppe was a disaster for the Allies.

Something like half of the 6,000 troops

who land are either killed

or taken prisoner.

And so the concern was

that classified information was being sent

to the Axis powers, to the Nazis.

And that using code breakers

or spies,

the attack had been foiled,

had been discovered by the Axis powers.

GENTILE: The Allies are repelled by the Nazis

and the mission is a failure.

And then people wanted to know why.

The defeat was so stunning

that British intelligence MI5 started looking for reasons.

How did the Nazis know the invasion was happening?

So it was suspected that there could be a spy

sending messages to the Nazis

to alert them of upcoming attacks.

SHATNER: After the failed Dieppe invasion,

British intelligence launched an investigation

to find a potential Nazi spy in their midst.

And in the process, they noticed something rather peculiar.

Just two days before the surprise invasion on Dieppe,

in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph

a curious clue appeared in that day's crossword puzzle.

Around August 18, 1942, something very strange happened

in the Telegraph's crossword.

The crossword puzzle clue was "A French port."

The answer was Dieppe.

The big question was,

was the word Dieppe in the crossword puzzle innocent?

Or was it a warning to the Nazis

alerting them that an attack was imminent?

Is it possible that the Dieppe attack failed

because of that crossword puzzle answer?

SHATNER: Was a spy sending top secret Allied intelligence

to the Nazis

through crossword puzzles?

After interrogating the creator of the crossword,

a mild-mannered school teacher named Leonard Dawe,

British intelligence concluded

that the puzzle's use of the word "Dieppe..."

...was nothing more than a "remarkable coincidence."

It seemed the case was closed until two years later,

when code words started

to appear in the newspaper's puzzle again.

McMAHON: In 1944, the Allies were planning the D-Day invasion

amidst a huge blanket of secrecy.

And once again... (chuckles)

the Daily Telegraph crossword

starts spitting out

information that should not be in the public domain.

GENTILE: About three weeks before the invasion,

in the Daily Telegraph, in the crossword puzzle,

the code word "Utah" appears.

Then a few days later, the code word "Omaha" appears.

These are the two beaches where the American forces will land.

Then the next puzzle,

the code word "Overlord" appears.

That's the name of the entire mission.

This is becoming terrifying.

Then the word "Neptune" appears.

That's the code word for the British warships for D-Day.

And then the word "Mulberry" appears.

That's the code word for the portable docks

that were built across the channel.

When these code words started appearing,

it-it was too much of a coincidence.

MI5 were gonna get to the bottom of it.

Especially after Dieppe.

Once again, their search eventually led them

to the author of the puzzle, Leonard Dawe.

Is this the Nazi spy?

And finally, it was determined

that as a reward to some of the boys

at the boys' school, he would let them pick the word

to put in the crossword.

And there just happened to be

a lot of Allied soldiers stationed nearby.

The kids hear these weird words--

Omaha, Utah--

and they say, "Let's put those in the puzzle."

Not realizing

they're about to give away the biggest invasion in history.

SHATNER: Could the appearance of secret code names

in British crossword puzzles

have been simply an extraordinary coincidence,

or was it a clever spy craft tool?

We may never know for sure.

Like in the case of another wordplay

70 years after World War II

that some believed was intended

to have deadly consequences.

MORAN: In 2012, in Venezuela,

there was speculation

that a crossword puzzle

in the daily paper contained coded messages

that were meant to signal a threat

against the brother of President Hugo Chávez.

There was "Asesinen," which means "to kill."

There was "Ráfagas," which means "Burst of machine gun fire,"

and there was also the first name of Chávez's brother.

And so all of this led to the conspiracy theory

or conspiracy thought

that this must mean that an assassination attempt

was on the horizon of Chávez's brother.

The government essentially accused the newspaper

and the designer of this crossword puzzle

of a plot and of transmitting this coded threat.

Whether or not this actually was

an indication of an imminent threat

against Chávez's brother, I don't know.

SHATNER: No attempt on Adán Chávez's life was made,

or at least publicly acknowledged.

If spies really do send secret messages

via crossword puzzles, it's still a matter of speculation

and perhaps an ingenious method

to share confidential information in plain sight.

There are aspects of that

that certainly match typical trade craft.

So it's not preposterous to think

that a crossword puzzle could be used to deliver a coded message.

In fact, that's a very

brilliant way that you might convey

a coded message to a spy.

Sending covert messages through newspaper crossword puzzles is

truly a clever way to share secret information.

But there was also a simpler tool spies used

during the Second World War to communicate in code

over vast distances.

All you needed was a radio.

SHATNER: With $10,000 in his pocket,

29-year-old Soviet spy Albrecht Dittrich arrives

in the United States.

Using a stolen birth certificate,

he adopts the alias Jack Barsky and begins a ten-year mission

to spy on Americans as a sleeper agent for the KGB.

JACK BARSKY: A sleeper agent is somebody

who, uh, establishes himself in enemy territory

and integrates in society and then waits for the day

when it's time to spring into action.

My mission in the United States focused

on me getting close to people

who make foreign policy decisions

and/or influence foreign policy.

This is towards the end of the Cold War

where there was a spy war going on

between the CIA and the KGB.

And the tensions were very high.

SHATNER: After relocating to New York City,

Barsky married and began a family.

He also took a job at an insurance company

to maintain his cover

working as a computer programmer.

BARSKY: I had access to lots and lots of data.

And some of the data would've been very important for the KGB.

But there was never a meeting between me

and another KGB agent on the territory of the United States.

I got my instructions and answers to questions

through shortwave radio.

Every Thursday at 9:15,

I had to turn on my shortwave radio,

dial my frequency, listen to the call signal,

Morse code, only digits, no letters

and then start writing down the numbers.

And there you have your message.

SHATNER: For nearly ten years,

Barsky's primary tool for communicating with the KGB

was through a kind of shortwave radio broadcast

known as a numbers station.

Number stations are essentially pirate radio stations.

You need to register a radio station.

Number stations are not registered.

(radio static)

They were discovered almost accidentally

during the Cold War.

You had ham radio operators

bouncing around different frequencies,

talking to each other all over the world.

And then, they would hit upon a certain channel

and suddenly you hear

a robotic voice repeating numbers.

(female voice speaking foreign language)

GENTILE: ...or you hear

some kind of music or flute or buzzing sounds.

(beeping, buzzing)

It feels like you're eavesdropping

on something secret,

but you don't know what they're saying.

MORAN: Number stations can transmit signals

to sources globally, and they can do so undetected,

because to anyone else,

it might just sound like buzzing

or like a series of noises.

(buzzing)

But what they're transmitting are coded signals

to a source in place, or a spy.

So even though they're very low tech,

they're very effective...

(indistinct radio chatter)

MORAN: ...because they're able

to exist and to communicate

under the radar.

(indistinct radio chatter)

SHATNER: During the Cold War, both the United States

and the Soviet Union regularly employed number stations

to communicate with their agents in the field.

But if anyone with a radio can tune in to hear the broadcast,

how are these coded spy messages kept secret?

Well, according to experts,

it's an unbreakable method of encryption.

A simple piece of paper known as...

a one-time pad.

A one-time pad has little numbers on them.

And there's two identical versions.

One is for the encoding of a message,

and the other one is for the decoding.

(indistinct radio chatter)

So you would hear something

like "Nine, seven, six, four,"

and then you could use the decoder

to decrypt your message.

HAMMOND: A one-time pad is a sheet of paper with banks of numbers.

You use this and someone else

that you're trying to communicate with

uses that same pad.

The two of you can then communicate,

but it's called a one-time pad

because after you've used it, you then destroy it.

Assuming that you destroy it,

you can then go on to use the next one-time pad.

And if you keep using it, sticking to the protocol,

it's uncrackable.

SHATNER: If number stations have proven so effective in the past,

the real question is, are spies still sending

and receiving coded messages through them today?

(voice warbling)

BUSTAMANTE: Even today,

you can flip through the different channels

and you can hear things over the radio

that don't make any sense.

Whether they're verses being read

or whether they're words being said nonsensically

or whether they're numbers

that are shouted out to the blindness of space.

(indistinct radio chatter)

So it's very possible somewhere in there

there's a spy message that's sent

for a very specific person at a very specific time

in a very specific way.

ROBOTIC FEMALE VOICE: One, three...

SHATNER: If spies are still receiving messages

via number stations today, we'll obviously never know.

But what many experts believe may be even more concerning

when it comes to national security

aren't relics from the past

but the technologies of today.

SHATNER: While doing routine computer maintenance,

a defense contractor finds

evidence that Russian spies hacked into the base's network

to access top secret intelligence

from the Pentagon, NASA, and other U.S. agencies.

It is the first major cyber espionage operation

that we know of in modern history.

BUSTAMANTE: One of the big advancements in espionage is

something known as the cyber spy

or the spy who lives behind

a digital wall of some sort.

They can steal information, they can sell information,

they can live and hide on the dark web.

This is a whole new development, and with that development,

there's new opportunities and there's new risks.

We have new technology that cyber spies can use

to meet in cyberspace.

You can meet with them on video game platforms,

you can meet with them in chat rooms,

you can meet with them using

commercially encrypted technology

that you and I carry on our phone.

Which makes everything that much more difficult to track,

not just for the FBI

or for the internal investigation agency,

but for anyone to see anywhere.

SHATNER: Advancing technology has

empowered cyber spies to not only hack government secrets

but also exchange that information

in complete anonymity.

But some cyber spies are not

interested in stealing information

but rather to influence the very beliefs

of their adversaries.

BARSKY: There's a place called the Internet Research Agency

in St. Petersburg, Russia where

there's a couple of hundred nerds that produce

these artificial personas,

and then they go on social media and befriend real people...

...and they search out groups

that are ideologically oriented.

It could be particularly in politics,

it could be the right wing and it could be left.

And what they're after is

to create confusion in enemy territory.

I can give you an example.

When you're talking about election interference,

they planted misinformation.

What they do is raising doubts about the American system.

These cyber spies are extremely dangerous.

SHATNER: According to America's Cyber Defense Agency CISA,

during the 2024 U.S. presidential election,

foreign adversaries conducted influence operations

intended to undermine the integrity of U.S. elections.

And while we can't say for sure

how espionage will continue to evolve,

we know that as long as there are secrets,

there will be spies.

BUSTAMANTE: The future of secrets is,

in many ways, what will shape the future of espionage.

But that doesn't mean that the history of espionage is

any less useful than it was in the past.

It's the foundation,

it's the bedrock on which everything else is built.

And no matter where our future takes us, we know

that those building blocks of espionage,

those core fundamentals

will always be present and always be there.

There will always be people meeting with people

in dark corners to share secrets that nobody knows about.

In the world of spy craft, everything is unexplained.

And your job as an intelligence officer is

to try to gather that information

that will help explain it.

The anomaly of spy craft is

that you're charged with seeking out the truth.

And the reality is you can never be

100% sure that you've gotten to the truth.

You may never have the answers.

While it appears that the digital age may be

changing the art of spy craft,

it's pretty safe to say

that as long as there are secrets worth stealing,

there will be spies hard at work.

And although we are intrigued

by the elusive double agent at the CIA

or even the assassin who killed with the probe of an umbrella,

it's likely that most tales of espionage

and the covert agents who operate undetected

will stay top secret and remain...

...unexplained.

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