Original subtitles

Tonight on "Secrets Declassified,"

genius spy gadgets designed to give agents

an unbeatable advantage,

from a medical student's invention

that hides spies beneath the waves--

If you can keep spies undetected underwater,

that could change the course of the war.

To Vietnam, where the U.S. military

tracks the enemy's scent with help from an electronic nose--

This must be thousands of men.

This is exactly the confirmation

command has been waiting for.

And the attempt to create a flying soldier

that's straight out of science fiction.

The pilot is literally riding a column of fire.

These are the astonishing gadgets and tech

created by governments

and the people who work for them.

It's time to bring them to light.

In 1943, the world is at war,

and the U.S. is looking for a way for their spies

to move underwater undetected.

The solution isn't born out of a top secret government lab.

It comes from the mind of a medical student

on summer break.

At the start of World War II,

America launches a brand new intelligence agency,

the Office of Strategic Services.

The OSS is the first version of the CIA.

And its job is to find creative ways

to gather intelligence and sabotage Axis forces.

And one of its biggest obsessions

is finding ways to put spies underwater.

If you can keep spies undetected underwater,

you could slip into enemy harbors,

sabotage vessels, and disrupt entire naval operations.

There's just one problem.

At this time, breathing underwater

is anything but stealthy.

There's one device called the Aqualung,

but it releases air bubbles.

This is a problem for covert operations.

You might as well send up a signal flare.

The solution comes from an unlikely source,

a young student at the University of Pennsylvania.

Christian Lambertsen is an undergraduate student,

and he's studying physiology.

He's absolutely fascinated about breathing underwater.

Every summer, Christian Lambertsen

heads down to the New Jersey Coast.

But he's not chilling on the beach.

He's in the water experimenting

with breathing contraptions.

One day, Lambertsen has a breakthrough.

The equipment that helps patients breathe in hospitals

could be modified to help divers breathe underwater

without producing bubbles.

Anesthesia equipment contain

absorbent materials that remove carbon dioxide

from the air that patients breathe

while they're unconscious.

Lambertsen figures he can use similar materials

to remove the carbon dioxide

from the air that a diver exhales.

That way, a diver's air can be rebreathed

rather than being breathed back out into the water

and creating bubbles.

After years of trial and error,

Lambertsen perfects his idea.

Lambertsen builds a prototype.

He calls it the Lambertsen Amphibious Respirator Unit,

LARU for short.

LARU funnels exhaled air

through a canister lined with soda lime

so oxygen can be rebreathed over and over.

It's pretty remarkable.

It's silent, doesn't weigh much,

and, best of all, no bubbles.

So Lambertsen shows this prototype

to his professor, who immediately

understands the possible implications.

He realizes,

this is a potential tool for spies.

Seeing the possibilities,

Lambertsen's professor makes some calls,

and eventually, the OSS hear about this invention.

They ask Lambertsen down to Washington, D.C.

for a demonstration.

He straps it on, drops into the pool and stays under.

No bubbles, no noise,

just smooth movement beneath the water's surface.

Needless to say, the OSS are absolutely

fascinated by what this prototype could do,

so they hire Lambertsen.

A dip in the pool is one thing.

What the OSS really wants to know is whether

this homemade spy gadget can perform

in a real combat mission.

Lambertsen is given the job

of training the very first unit of combat swimmers

for a live test.

The OSS want Lambertsen and his team

to infiltrate a heavily-defended harbor

and plant dummy explosives on a target ship,

and then get out of there undetected.

It has underwater sound detection systems,

patrol boats, and security nets.

This place is locked down.

It's essentially a make-or-break,

high-stakes underwater heist.

They're trailblazers.

This hasn't been done before,

so they're having to invent the tactics and procedures

and the technology at the same time

to enable this kind of operation.

The test mission is given the name

Operation Cincinnati.

The training is absolutely brutal.

The divers have to learn how to operate in freezing cold waters

and in complete darkness.

After a year and a half's training,

Lambertsen's new team are ready.

Under cover of night, the divers slip into the water.

They're armed only with the LARU's

waterproof compasses and dummy explosive charges.

They glide past the patrol boats

and navigate around the underwater nets.

The LARU allows a diver to stay submerged

at a depth of 50 feet for up to 90 minutes.

The Navy's state-of-the-art sound detection equipment

hears nothing.

They reach their target,

plant the charges,

and get away without a sound,

or a single ripple on the surface.

The operation is a stunning success.

The OSS immediately deploys a new unit of combat swimmers

equipped with the LARU on covert missions

all around the globe.

Lambertsen's device opens the ocean

to millions of recreational divers,

but its covert military origins

and its make-or-break test remain buried

in classified files for another 40 years.

In 1995, the CIA declassified the files that

revealed the LARU's origins as a cutting-edge spy gadget.

And we get to learn how a medical student on summer break

invented a device that changed underwater espionage forever.

The LARU gives U.S. agents

the ability to stay hidden underwater.

Our next gadget gives allied agents the ability

to call home from behind enemy lines

by keeping them one step ahead

of the Nazi spy hunters on their tail.

By the summer of 1940,

the Nazis have steamrolled across Europe.

To fight back, Winston Churchill greenlights

the formation of a brand new clandestine force,

the Special Operations Executive, or the SOE.

The SOE has a mission--

to infiltrate Nazi-occupied territory

and just make life hell for the occupiers.

The SOE sends a vast network

of agents behind enemy lines.

But these operatives need to constantly

receive orders and send their intelligence back home.

And that's no easy task.

The best technology to do this is a radio transceiver,

but there's a problem.

The German secret police, the Gestapo,

hunt allied spies throughout occupied France

using detector vans.

They are packed with antennas

that sweep the airwaves for illegal signals

and pinpoint their origin.

They're cleverly disguised to look like

laundry trucks or baker's vans.

Any agent who uses their radio

for too long or from the same place

risks being caught and executed.

In 1942, the average life expectancy

for an allied radio operator in occupied France

is around six weeks.

That's how dangerous this job is.

Desperate to protect its agents,

the SOE orders its engineers to come up with

a new way to phone home.

In 1942, SOE engineers deliver

an ingenious solution, a new type of radio

known as the Type B Mark II.

The spies just call it B2, and it is a masterpiece

of wartime engineering.

The B2 is a cleverly condensed transceiver

with a range of 1,000 miles,

powerful enough to reach all the way back to Britain.

Then they hide it in the perfect place

for an agent who needs to stay on the move.

From the outside,

the B2 looks like an ordinary traveler's leather case.

Hidden inside is just enough room for a layer of clothes.

So if a German soldier stops you and opens the case,

all he sees is luggage.

The ordinary-looking case

also hides a steel frame to protect its secret cargo,

which comes in handy for getting it behind enemy lines.

Many times, these will be delivered to SOE operators

through an airdrop.

They make it tough because it's gotta be able

to withstand some damage.

But the feature of the B2

that will really save lives is its power source.

It has a 6-volt D.C. plug that can connect

to a wall outlet if you're in a building,

or a car battery if you're out in the field.

The B2 even has a built-in dynamo

that you can power with a bicycle.

Spies can transmit from anywhere,

then pack up the equipment and vanish

before the detector vans even know where to look.

The B2 changes the game,

allowing allied operatives to move covertly

behind enemy lines to fight the Nazis.

Then, in the months before D-Day,

it lands in the hands of the SOE's top agent

for its biggest test yet.

Virginia Hall is a formidable

American SOE agent.

She lost a leg in a hunting accident before the war,

so she walks with a prosthetic,

which she has lovingly nicknamed Cuthbert.

Hall's mission is to arm and train resistance fighters,

coordinating attacks on German supply lines

to deliver maximum disruption ahead of D-Day.

Armed with the new B2, Hall gets to work.

She uses her B2 to orchestrate missions

from barns, attics, convents, even brothels.

Hall taps out a coded message coordinating operations,

and then she packs up and disappears

before the German detector vans

can triangulate her hidden location.

Hall disguises herself as an elderly milkmaid

and stays on the move all the time.

Just before D-Day,

she unleashes her most devastating strike.

Hall coordinates the destruction

of four strategic bridges.

Her resistance teams hit all four bridges

and blow them to kingdom come.

German forces are thrown into chaos.

Thousands of troop reinforcements

can't reach the front at Normandy.

It's a crippling blow to the Nazi's defense

against the Allied invasion.

For her work behind enemy lines,

Virginia Hall is recognized and awarded by the British.

And when her final report is declassified in 1991,

it reveals the full scale of the damage

the clandestine B2 radio let her wreak.

Throughout World War II,

the Allies produced about 7,000 of these B2 radios,

the Allies produced about 7,000 of these B2 radios,

and they had a profound effect during the war.

Spies can hide a listening device anywhere--

a bug in a lampshade, a wiretap in a phone.

But in the 1960s, the CIA takes that idea to an extreme,

hiding a cutting-edge gadget at the summit

of one of the world's most dangerous mountains.

In 1964, intelligence arrives that

Communist China has just detonated

its first atomic bomb.

For the White House,

this is a nightmare scenario.

Suddenly, there's a new nuclear power on the board,

and it's arguably more unpredictable

than the Soviet Union.

Some of President Lyndon Johnson's

military advisors consider the threat so severe,

they actually recommend an immediate

pre-emptive nuclear strike against China.

The president demands intelligence

on China's atomic program instead.

The problem is, the CIA have none.

The CIA is in the dark.

China's nuclear test sites are all buried

deep inside the Himalayas.

Those mountains are remote.

They're usually covered in clouds.

And that means that U2 spy planes can't get clean images.

The CIA's solution

is to build a cutting-edge new gadget,

not to photograph the Chinese test sites,

but to listen to them.

The U.S. wanna build something that can listen in

to the radio chatter that is emanating

from the Chinese nuclear test sites.

The problem is, they're in the Himalaya range.

And the range acts like a 20,000-foot stone wall

that is just impenetrable when it comes to radio signals.

For this spy device to detect anything,

it basically has to be placed on top of that wall,

at extreme altitude.

It will have to survive

some of the harshest conditions on Earth.

The highest Himalayan peaks

are 29,000 feet tall.

Temperatures can drop as low as -76 degrees Fahrenheit.

And winds can reach over 100 miles per hour.

So the CIA create one of the toughest bugs ever made.

CIA engineers construct a reinforced box

with hypersensitive radio sensors inside it.

And then whatever it hears, it relays that audio

to a distant CIA listening post.

The big issues they face are

how to power this gadget and how to keep it running

for years without ever recharging

or changing the batteries.

The solution comes from outer space.

The CIA turns to a new type of technology

that was originally designed for deep-space exploration.

It is known as the radioisotope thermoelectric generator,

or RTG, for short.

At its core, there are seven capsules

of highly radioactive plutonium 238.

It generates a ton of heat.

And that heat gets converted into

a steady electrical current.

That can power a device pretty much indefinitely.

This extreme nuclear listening device

is now mission-ready.

But one obstacle remains.

It's 125 pounds, and it needs to be placed

on top of one of the world's highest peaks.

For that, the CIA doesn't need undercover agents but climbers.

To install its spy device,

the CIA recruit a team of elite mountaineers

to haul the contraption into position.

The team can't risk entering Chinese territory,

So they choose a mountain just across the border

in allied India.

It's called Nanda Devi.

It's 25,000 feet tall.

Nearly a dozen climbers have died here over the years.

In October 1965,

the team of 30 climbers begins the treacherous ascent.

It's exhausting, it's dangerous, and it's slow.

But by mid-October, they're finally reaching the peak.

Then disaster strikes.

A blizzard rolls in without warning.

Visibility drops to zero. The temperature plummets.

The team leader realizes they are facing certain death.

So he makes the call. They have to retreat.

But that means the team has to take a huge gamble.

They hide the gadget in a rocky crevice

and get themselves out of danger.

The plan is to return and finish the job

as soon as the weather clears.

Eventually, the following spring,

the weather finally relents.

And the team gets their chance to retrieve

their hidden spy device.

They make the brutal climb a second time,

only to realize that an avalanche

has ripped through the area over the winter.

And that means the gadget, along with its plutonium,

is buried somewhere under thousands of tons of ice.

The CIA has just lost a nuclear device

on one of the highest peaks in the world.

But they still desperately need intelligence

on China's nuclear program, so they build a new one.

And in 1967, the mountaineers

attempt to install it one last time.

This time, they choose a slightly lower peak,

Nanda Kot.

I mean, it's still 22,500 feet,

but the climb is marginally less deadly.

The climbers once again braved the elements.

And after climbing for hours,

they managed to bolt down this new device

and activate its plutonium power source.

The new device starts working immediately.

And it starts intercepting the radio traffic

coming from the test facilities.

And from there, it relays it back to

a CIA listening post in India.

What they learned is a relief to Washington.

China doesn't yet have ballistic missiles

capable of reaching the United States.

The military threat, for the moment,

remains regional, not global.

This operation on the roof of the world

remains one of the CIA's most closely-guarded secrets.

Each climber is sworn to lifelong silence

until 1978, when the expedition leader

speaks to an investigator anonymously.

More than a decade after the mission,

a journalist exposes the story in an article

for "Rolling Stone" magazine.

High up in the Himalayas, a piece of Cold War spy craft

has left a radioactive legacy indefinitely.

Spies use tech to eavesdrop on the enemy,

to secretly photograph them, and even to kill them.

But what about smell them?

When the U.S. needs to find enemy troops

in the Vietnam jungle,

they build a machine to do just that--

hunt soldiers by their scent.

By the mid-1960s, the United States

is struggling to monitor enemy troop movements in Vietnam.

The Viet Cong are masters of hide and seek.

They have tunnels,

spider holes, jungle camouflage.

The enemy has become so masterful

in the use of concealment that there are cases where GIs

are 3 feet away from the enemy

and they don't even know that they're there.

You can't fight an enemy that you can't find.

The thick jungle canopy

makes aerial reconnaissance useless.

So the U.S. needs a new type of technology

to pinpoint the invisible enemy.

Their incredible solution is a device

that will sniff them out, literally.

The natural process of producing sweat

releases ammonia.

A large formation of troops

will consist of men who are releasing

invisible ammonia gas.

If you have the ability to detect that,

you can fix the exact position of the enemy force.

To seek out the enemy's sweat,

the army approaches General Electric.

They're already building chemical detectors

to trace the exhaust fumes of enemy submarines.

Now they're given this new mission.

Technicians at General Electric

come up with a scent sensor they call

the XM-2 manpack personnel detector.

The troops will call it something simpler,

the people sniffer.

The XM-2 is meant to be carried

on a GI's back like a backpack.

It has a tube that attaches to the muzzle

of a soldier's weapon with a probe that sucks in air.

The air passes over hydrochloric acid.

If there's ammonia present, the acid reacts with it.

This will be turned into a beeping sound

in the operator's earphones.

The gadget is basically an alarm bell that tells you,

hey, just so you know, I can smell

that the enemy is pretty close right now.

In August 1965,

200 people sniffers are sent to Vietnam for field testing.

But the jungle is a big leap from the laboratory.

The field results are mixed, at best.

The XM-2 does work sometimes.

But it doesn't have much range, 300 yards at most.

And even worse, if the wind shifts and blows back at you--

You'll get a false positive from your own sweat.

But the U.S. Army doesn't shut down

the people sniffer project.

Instead, they'd double down on the technology.

Only this time, they sent it into the sky.

The army realizes that ammonia

is lighter than air, and it always rises,

so they decide to put the sniffer on a helicopter.

The result is the airborne personnel detector.

They lengthen the probe so it hangs outside the aircraft.

Plus, they put two XM-3s in each aircraft

so they can double their sniff power.

This sniffer bird flies low and fast,

maybe 50 feet over the trees.

When it gets a hit, the operator

radios in the location, then they call in the cavalry.

In the fall of 1967,

this unusual new gadget

suddenly faces a make-or-break test.

U.S. intelligence reports rumors

of an ominous buildup of North Vietnamese troops

near a strategic outpost called Dak To.

Dak To is home to a critical camp

where the CIA trained civilian militias.

The U.S. suspects that a major offensive on Dak To is coming.

They need to confirm whether this force of VC

is really hiding in the jungle.

This crucial mission

is given to the airborne people sniffer.

So the sniffer helicopter is flying

perpendicular to the wind just above the tree tops.

You have an operator.

He detects, at first, a faint beep.

The beep continues to get louder.

The aircraft sweeps back around to the area

where they detected the beep to begin with.

And it gets louder and louder and louder.

And they finally realize, we're on to something here.

It's ammonia. This must be thousands of men.

This is exactly the confirmation command

they've been waiting for.

Thanks to the people sniffer,

the U.S. launches a massive preemptive strike

on Viet Cong positions outside Dak To--

safeguarding their critical base.

But this battle will be the sniffer's high point.

The enemy soon learns how to deceive it.

The North Vietnamese come up with a way to mislead

that flying sniffer by hanging buckets of mud and urine

in the trees to create false positives,

ultimately sending the Americans on wild goose chases

to empty patches of jungle.

Outwitted by buckets of waste,

the people sniffer fades from use.

Its full story remains a secret for decades

until 2000 when a review of the project is declassified,

finally revealing the strange history

of a gadget that used classroom chemistry

to fight jungle warfare.

Super gadgets can give agents superpowers.

In 1953, the U.S. military embraces science fiction

to give its soldiers the one we all want,

the power of flight.

In the early '50s, the U.S. is fighting on

all types of fronts, on all kinds of battlefields.

So the military thinks, what if there was a device

that a soldier could use to jump,

or even fly, over any obstacle they encounter?

The U.S. military asks Bell Aerosystems

to see what they can come up with.

They propose a personal rocket belt,

better known as a jetpack.

The jetpack has been in the public consciousness

ever since "Buck Rogers"

from the space adventure comic strip in the 1920s.

Even German engineers in the final days of World War II

were rumored to be working on one.

But no one's ever been able to get it to work--

not yet.

Bell gives the challenge

of turning human flight into a reality to one man,

Wendell F. Moore.

Moore is the star engineer at Bell Aerosystems

and the visionary mind behind the Bell X-1,

the first ever plane to break the sound barrier.

If anyone can build a jetpack, it's him.

Moore's design is not a jet engine

in the traditional sense.

It's more like a controlled explosion.

Bell's jetpack is powered by concentrated hydrogen peroxide

that's stored in tanks mounted on the frame.

So when the pilot triggers the system,

this triggers a violent chemical reaction,

creating a jet of superheated steam

that can hurl a man into the sky.

To keep from incinerating his own legs,

he has to wear a special heatproof suit.

If this gadget works,

it could revolutionize modern warfare.

But who is brave enough to test it?

Moore insists on

being the first one to try the prototype.

And you can kind of understand why.

It looks super fun.

In February 1961, they start the secret testing,

away from public eyes and tethered for safety

to the ceiling of a hangar.

And it works--kind of.

Steering the jetpack is done with hand levers

that angle the scorching jets of steam.

It's unpredictable.

And it's super loud.

It's about 130 decibels.

That's like jackhammer loud.

It might be loud, but it flies,

and Moore is getting better at controlling it.

Then, disaster strikes.

During one flight, the belt suddenly lurches sideways,

snapping the safety tether.

Moore is thrown 10 feet to the concrete floor,

fracturing his knee.

To keep the project on track,

Moore needs another fearless pilot.

He finds it in Harold "Hal" Graham.

Hal Graham is Moore's protege,

and he's fearless.

For weeks, he endures dozens of jarring,

unforgiving tethered flights just trying to figure out

how to control those bucking rockets.

On April 20, 1961,

he conducts the first official test flight

that's outside and untethered,

in front of an audience of reporters

and military top brass.

Graham straps himself into the jetpack.

And for 13 seconds, he defies gravity.

Graham is achieving pure, unencumbered flight.

He travels 112 feet before touching down smoothly.

It's the first of many test flights,

each one getting more controlled and ambitious.

Bell decides it's time to introduce the jetpack

to the world in a public display.

Basically, Bell wanna show off

their brand new superhero gadget.

Overnight, the jetpack is a global sensation.

But while the world is wowed,

this gadget has a fatal flaw for any top secret mission.

The military looks, and it does not see anything

that would be of use to it on the battlefield.

The user of the rocket pack is only going to have

21 seconds of powered flight.

And that 21 seconds is going to consume

5 gallons of an extremely expensive

and difficult-to-produce fuel.

They also can't solve the sound problem.

With that 130-decibel roar,

any kind of stealth infiltration

is completely out the window.

In terms of this being a useful military technology,

it's a dead end.

After spending the equivalent

of $16 million in today's money,

the dream of the flying soldier is grounded.

The planned military applications

of the jetpack stay locked up for 40 years

until they are revealed in 2009.

William P. Suter, a Rocket Belt pilot,

William P. Suter, a Rocket Belt pilot,

comes clean in a memoir on the project,

and the public finally gets to know about the army's attempt

to have a man fly into war.

Ever received a gift you wish you hadn't?

At the end of World War II, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow

is handed a stunning piece of art from his Soviet hosts.

But hidden inside is a piece of spy tech so ingenious,

no one notices until it's far too late.

In the late 1930s, Stalin's secret service,

the NKVD, is ramping up every kind of espionage

activity that it can.

It wants cutting-edge surveillance technology

to do it.

So they need the very best engineers and inventors.

But at this time, in the USSR,

great inventors are in short supply.

Many of the brightest minds in the Soviet Union

have either been killed in Stalin's pre-war purges,

or they've been locked up in the Gulag system.

To counter the brain drain,

the NKVD trawled the Gulags and select

a very lucky few inventors from across a variety of fields.

They're set up in scientific prisons called sharashkas,

where they're forced to work for the Soviet regime.

One bright mind to be selected

is a pioneer of sound who invented

the world's first electric instrument,

named Leon Theremin.

Theremin is ordered to invent a new spy gadget for the state

or go back to the Gulags.

So he gets to work.

Theremin develops a type of passive listening device

known as a Resonant Cavity Microphone.

It's this tiny metal cylinder with a thin vibrating membrane

inside it, attached to a short antenna.

This is the perfect microphone

for a Soviet spy to eavesdrop on a secret conversation

from a safe distance.

When Soviet agents wanna listen in to what that device

can hear, they beam a high-frequency radio wave

at the device from nearby,

and that makes the membrane inside vibrate.

Any conversation sounds will alter the vibrations

of that membrane so that, when the radio waves

reflect back to the listening station,

they're changed a little bit.

And when you do the math between the frequency

you sent in and the frequency that came back,

you can calculate what the sounds that were made inside.

Even better, because this bug

requires no power source, it's almost untraceable.

As long as the frequency is not being directed at it,

it won't set off the type of device

that you use to search for a bug.

By 1945,

Theremin has perfected his invention.

Now the NKVD needs to place it in the perfect spot.

At the dawn of the Cold War,

one target sits above all others.

The best location for Theremin's bug

is in the U.S. embassy in Moscow.

It's a place that's filled with top secret conversations.

But it's also the most secure place in Moscow.

So they need an inspired plan to get the gadget into place.

They come up with a simple plan.

They're just gonna give it to the U.S. ambassador

as a gift.

They hide Theremin's device in a three-foot replica

of the Great Seal of the United States.

And to make sure the U.S. embassy accepts it,

it's delivered by school children

in a ceremony meant to promote friendship and cooperation.

The U.S. ambassador receives the gift,

unaware that this carved eagle is really a Trojan horse.

The bug winds up on the wall

in the ambassador's personal residence.

For the Soviet spies, this is just as good as the embassy.

And it hangs there for years, a silent witness

to the most secret diplomatic chats

of three consecutive American ambassadors.

Theremin's device is so effective,

its discovery only comes through pure chance.

In 1951, a British radio operator

is monitoring Soviet Air Force chatter.

He stumbles across a stray signal.

He can clearly hear the voice of the visiting

British Air attaché speaking from inside

the ambassador's residence.

It can only be a Soviet bug.

The U.S. security teams launch a frantic

counter-surveillance sweep, and they find nothing.

A year later, it happens again,

but no bug is found.

So embassy security staff set a trap.

The plan is to trick the Soviets into activating

their mysterious bug and keeping it on

long enough to pinpoint its location.

So the ambassador starts reading this dispatch

that sounds exactly like a classified document,

something that would be very interesting

to Soviet eavesdroppers.

And as the ambassador's reading,

this agent is sweeping the room for radio transmissions.

Suddenly, his headphones crackle to life.

It's the ambassador's voice.

The bug is active.

So this agent is probing the walls,

probing the furniture, probing the floorboards.

And as he gets closer to that great seal on the wall,

the signal screams in his ears.

Bingo! He found it.

The CIA never figures out how the Soviets knew

exactly when to turn this bug on.

Was it at random, or was there a mole in the embassy?

Either way, the CIA decides not to let on

that they found the Soviet secret gadget

until the perfect moment.

In 1960, Soviet Premier Khrushchev

calls an emergency session of the UN Security Council.

He is outraged at American spy flights over the Soviet Union

and is demanding accountability.

Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the head of the CIA at the time,

has a response ready.

In front of the entire Security Council,

he pulls out the wooden seal and holds it up.

Then he dramatically pulls it apart,

revealing the device hidden inside.

And here is the--here is the clandestine listening device.

Lodge is essentially saying, you wanna talk about espionage?

Let's talk about this.

The CIA has spent billions on the most

technologically advanced spy planes imaginable.

But in the 1970s, one of their most secret operations

relies on a very different kind of bird,

the pigeon.

In the mid-70s, aerial reconnaissance

has given America a powerful edge in the Cold War spy game.

The U.S. has these incredible spy planes.

They've got the U2, the SR-71.

And those are equipped with cameras

that give us a whole new window on our enemies.

This tech comes with a catch.

They operate tens of thousands of feet in the air.

This is an era before super high resolution photography,

so the pictures just don't get the crucial detail needed.

As a result, the CIA starts looking for other ways

to develop reconnaissance,

particularly photo reconnaissance,

of sensitive sites.

To get a closer look,

the agency turns to a new kind of secret agent,

one with wings and feathers and that was first employed

by British intelligence in World War II.

Back in World War II, the British

parachuted pigeons and containers over occupied Europe

with questionnaires attached to them.

And the idea was to get intelligence

from French civilians who were sympathetic to Britain.

Over a thousand birds made it back with answers,

revealing information on V1 rocket sites

and German ground radar stations.

Now the CIA wonder if the pigeon

could make a comeback.

No one looks twice at a pigeon.

It can get as close as it wants to enemy targets.

If you can attach a tiny camera to it,

you can get surveillance images.

The CIA is thinking, maybe the pigeons

could get granular images of Soviet military sites.

They could find things like details

of vehicles or personnel or other equipment.

Once these spies have snapped their photos,

they're hardwired to always return home.

Homing pigeons are one of those incredible

miracles of nature.

They have the ability to essentially detect

where they are on the Earth and move towards the place

at which they were hatched.

And they do that automatically.

So you can take them anywhere around the planet

and release them.

And if you wait long enough,

they will come back to their birthplace.

So in 1976, the CIA decides

to combine this amazing avian ability

with cutting-edge technology.

The agency's R&D teams miniaturize a camera

so that it weighs about as much as an egg.

It's about 40 grams, and that means a pigeon

can carry it strapped to its chest.

Inside, there's this battery-powered motor

that works the shutter and advances the film.

After several training flights,

October 18, 1976,

the CIA gives the pigeon its first big test.

Can this feathered spy cam do better

than the million-dollar spy planes?

Essentially, they're gonna test these homing pigeons

against a sensitive American site

and see what kind of photographs are the result.

Nine pigeons,

each equipped with a tiny camera,

are released over Maryland.

Their flight path back to their home loft

is plotted to pass directly over Andrews Air Force Base.

It's just the type of facility that the CIA wants to

photograph in enemy territory.

As the pigeons head home,

their cameras start clicking.

The snaps they take remain top secret for over 40 years.

Then, in 2019, a report on this project is declassified,

and the results are surprising.

Declassified report reveals pigeons are

actually surprisingly good photographers.

The level of detail from the pigeon cameras

is stunning, especially compared to

what intelligence is used to getting from their spy planes.

I mean, you can see vehicles, you can see people,

you can see buildings, all with crazy fine detail that

high altitude reconnaissance would definitely miss.

But the report also reveals

not everyone at the CIA was a fan.

Now, a pigeon might have an amazing sense

of direction when it's time to come home,

but there are some drawbacks.

You can't order it to fly over one specific building.

You can't say, go over this missile silo

at a specific time.

Ultimately, the pigeon spy program

is an interesting artifact of the Cold War.

But it's not anything that has substantial success to it,

and the program gets shut down.

From the depths of the ocean to the heights

of the Himalayas, secret gadgets

have changed the rules of the spy game.

And no invention is too strange or too impossible

to be given a shot.