Original subtitles

[pensive dramatic music]

[Dan narrating on screen text]

[intriguing dramatic music]

- What if I told you there was a weapon

that could kill instantly without a trace.

- Bohdan springs on him, pulls out the gun,

releases one of the fastest acting poisons known to man

into Rebet's face.

- He falls to the floor,

and Bohdan doesn't even look back.

- [Dan] How about stopping the enemy in its tracks

with the world's first bio weapon.

- The Roman soldiers are falling off the walls

in stinging pain,

wondering what the hell is happening to them.

- When they come to,

they realize they're covered in scorpions.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Dan] How about a spy escape kit so discreet,

it has to be hidden where the sun don't shine.

[dramatic thud]

- It has to be strong and splinter-proof

because it's going up a butt.

- And most importantly, you have to be able to retrieve it.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Dan] These are the secret weapons so outrageous,

so deviously clever, they are truly unbelievable.

[cinematic dramatic music]

During the Cold War,

assassinations are just part of the job;

and when the KGB needs to kill without leaving evidence,

they don't send a sniper or a bomb,

they send something a little more unassuming.

[intriguing dramatic music] [door knocking]

- It's 1957,

and in East Berlin, there is a KGB agent

by the name of Bohdan Stashynsky,

and he is tasked with eliminating

a particular Ukrainian dissident by the name of Lev Rebet.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- Bohdan isn't a hardened assassin;

up until now, most of his work has been pretty dull,

he's doing surveillance,

he's writing down license plate numbers of West German cars,

and now he's being asked to do a murder.

- [Dan] Bohdan didn't sign up to kill anyone,

then again, he didn't exactly sign up for the KGB either.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Adam] Seven years before in 1950,

Bohdan is a simple 19-year-old math student

at a university in Lviv,

and he's taking a train back to his family's farm,

and then suddenly out of nowhere,

two Soviet transport police grab him and arrest him

under the pretense of him not having a ticket.

- [Martin] He's detained and

ultimately turned over to the KGB.

They accuse him and his family

of collaborating with local guerrilla units.

He's told that unless he works with the KGB,

his entire family, including his four sisters,

will be sent off to the Gulag in Siberia.

Within months, he is shipped off for training,

and within two years, he's in East Berlin where

he's a KGB informant involved in espionage operations.

[ominous dramatic music]

- [Dan] Moving from spying to killing is a radical shift,

one that requires a weapon

unlike any he's ever seen before:

a cyanide gun.

[mechanism clacking] [intriguing dramatic music]

- [Martin] Cyanide is one of the

fastest acting poisons known to man.

[intriguing dramatic music]

The gun itself consists of six-inch tubes,

there are spring-loaded levers;

and when they're squeezed,

it will shoot out a mist of the poison to the target.

- [Jenny] Under really tight KGB supervision,

Bohdan practices

with like a safety version of the cyanide gun

that's filled with water.

Once he's got the mechanics down,

it's time to try the gun for real.

- [Adam] The first subject is not a human, but rather a dog.

[mechanism clacking] [air hissing]

And unfortunately it works incredibly well:

[finger snapping] the dog drops dead.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Martin] On the day of the assassination,

Bohdan waits in the stairwell of Lev Rebet's office

in Munich.

As Rebet enters the stairwell,

[tense ominous dramatic music]

Bohdan springs on him,

pulls out the gun,

[mechanism clacking] [air hissing]

releases cyanide into Rebet's face.

[body thudding]

- [Adam] He falls to the floor,

and Bohdan doesn't even look back.

He goes through the door across the canal,

and calmly tosses the gun into the water.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Jenny] The next morning,

Lev Rebet is found dead by a cleaning lady

on the stairs outside of his office.

A coroner declares that the cause of death

is cardiac arrest.

- [Dan] Mission complete;

but the KGB isn't done with Bohdan yet.

[pensive dramatic music]

- [Adam] Two years later, Bohdan is given another target,

a Ukrainian exile by the name of Stepan Bandera.

Bohdan Stashynsky tracks down Stepan,

and using the exact same MO,

he goes to the stairwell where he lies in wait.

[tense dramatic music]

Stepan enters his residence,

Bohdan levels the cyanide gun at his face,

[tense dramatic music]

[mechanism clacking] [air hissing]

and shoots off a cloud of poison gas.

[body thudding]

- [Martin] Bandera collapses after exposure to the poison;

and just like before,

Bohdan disappears into the cityscape,

ditches the gun in a canal.

- [Jenny] An autopsy later reveals traces of cyanide,

but they decide that they think that's from suicide,

because there were rumors floating around

Stepan was having affairs,

and his life was kind of going to hell at the time.

So, that's it, another clean hit.

- [Dan] Back in Moscow, the KGB celebrates him as a hero,

but Bohdan is riddled with guilt.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Adam] A few weeks later,

Bohdan is in a movie theater

and they would often have newsreels,

and one of the newsreels that Bohdan happens to watch

is Stepan Bandera's funeral.

[pensive dramatic music]

- [Martin] He starts to feel his conscience gnawing at him.

He spends the next two years trying to live with that guilt.

[intriguing dramatic music]

Bohdan eventually defects to West Berlin

and surrenders to authorities

telling them that he is an assassin

of two Ukrainian anti-communist emigres in Munich.

- [Jenny] First the American and West German agents

don't believe him.

These are closed cases,

one was cardiac arrest, one was suicide.

Then Bohdan tells them about the weapon he used:

the cyanide gun.

[tense dramatic music]

[mechanism clacking] [air hissing]

It makes all of the puzzle pieces come together,

and they immediately arrest him.

- [Adam] Bohdan serves eight years in prison,

and upon his release, he disappears

into protective custody,

escaping assassination and punishment

by one of the world's most sinister spy organizations.

- [Dan] Eight years later, another top secret organization

takes killing without a trace to a whole other level.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Martin] Anyone who's watched a "Vietnam" movie

knows that the way that the United States

fought that conflict

was by conducting search and destroy missions,

patrols on foot,

searching areas where the enemy was reported

to be operational.

- These soldiers learned to stay on high alert constantly,

as they'd come across booby trap, snipers,

and every so often,

they'll stumble on Vietcong caches of weapons

and ammunition.

- [Martin] They're typically finding hand grenades, mortars,

AK-47-type Kalashnikov rifles

and piles and piles of ammunition and crates;

and they can't do anything about it,

they damn sure can't haul it all out of there,

it's too heavy,

and the noise you create by blowing it up

is going to attract a lot of attention.

And so, what can you do?

[dramatic thud] [fire crackling]

- [Dan] For help, the US military

turns to a CIA legend, Colonel John Singlaub.

- [Riccoh] Colonel Singlaub

commands the Studies and Observations Group,

a covert unit so secret,

he basically has a blank check in the jungles of Vietnam,

Marine Recon, Green Berets, Navy Seals, CIA operatives,

all at his disposal.

- So Colonel Singlaub comes up with a brilliant plan.

He's gonna take AK-47 rounds

that are recovered from the jungle,

and replace the gunpowder inside with high explosives.

An AK-47 round at that time generates about 40,000 PSI.

[firearm banging]

But when that is replaced with high explosive rounds,

they generate six times the pressure.

[mechanism clacking]

- [Martin] And when you pull the trigger on it,

it's gonna blow up in your face like a hand grenade,

[explosion booming]

causing serious injury to the operator,

potentially even killing him.

- The brilliance of the plan

is these soldiers are sneaking in to these weapons crates

and just replacing a few of the bullets, not all of them.

- [Martin] If the enemy is suddenly seeing

everyone's weapons are exploding,

the enemy will suspect the ammunition.

But if it happens rarely,

what the enemy will suspect instead

is that the weapon itself is of poor construction.

That's what we want them to believe.

- [Rutledge] The broader aim of this operation

is really the enemy doubting their weapons

from China and the Soviet Union that they've received.

Now suddenly, it's causing hesitation;

and in war, hesitation is deadly.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Dan] The operation is code-named Eldest Son,

and soon, US troops begin seeing exactly

what these sabotaged bullets can do.

[tense martial dramatic music]

- [Riccoh] In the Northern province,

101st Airborne Division paratroopers

send word of a dead communist soldier

grasping his exploded rifle.

They also receive a photo of a dead enemy soldier

with the bolt blown out of the back of his AK-47,

and his eye socket, more or less, blown through.

Because of the success,

they also start doing this with mortar rounds,

replacing the round with a much higher explosive.

[intriguing dramatic music] [text whirring]

- [Martin] On July 3rd, 1968,

US soldiers find evidence of Eldest Son

in the form of a North Vietnamese mortar team

dead around what's left of the weapon.

And what obviously happened

is that one of the operators

took out an 82-millimeter mortar round,

introduced it to the tube,

and instead of popping and being thrown out of the tube,

[explosion booming] kaboom.

- [Riccoh] Over the life of Project Eldest Son,

US operatives sabotage 4,000 rifle rounds

and over 820 82-millimeter mortar shells.

- [Martin] This is not just operational warfare,

this is psychological warfare.

They're going to doubt

every type of ammunition and weapon system

that they're using coming from China, from the Soviet Union,

from other Soviet states like Hungary or Czechoslovakia.

[cannon booming] [tense dramatic music]

Singlaub and SOG understand from the start,

the enemy will ultimately figure out what we're doing.

And then eventually "The New York Times" reports on it

and word gets out,

and then the operation is suspended altogether in 1969;

after having succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination.

[dramatic thud]

- [Dan] Project Eldest Son proves one thing beyond doubt:

sometimes the most powerful weapon isn't firepower,

it's fear.

- In the late second century,

Romans are carving a bloody path through Mesopotamia,

seizing strongholds and toppling kingdoms as they go.

But one city stands its ground

armed with a weapon built to bite back.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- Roman Emperor Septimius Severus is no ordinary emperor.

He's a ruthless military commander

that has clawed his way to power

through the use of things like civil war

and brutal invasion.

And in 198 AD, Severus has his eyes on the Silk Road,

which is this trading route

that connects China with the Mediterranean world.

[intriguing cinematic music]

And so Severus thinks to himself,

"I'm gonna go onto the Silk Road

and I'm gonna capture all of these smaller towns that exist

because to control trade is to control the world."

- So Severus and 50,000 Roman soldiers

are marching straight through Mesopotamia,

and they're killing every man in their path.

- [Dan] But one city along the way

isn't exactly putting out the welcome mat:

Hatra.

- Hatra isn't just another stop on the trade route,

it's rich, well-defended,

and protected by massive 40-foot walls.

- [Dan] These walls however don't deter Severus

from attempting to invade the city.

- These Roman warriors charged the walled city

in full armor, shields, short swords drawn, ready to kill.

Hatra's archers rain down arrows from the top of the walls;

but with 50,000 men,

this is barely slowing the Romans down.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Dan] As the Romans close in and the ladders go up,

Hatra unleashes a defense

that sends the assault into chaos.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Don] Out of nowhere,

the Roman soldiers are getting hit from above

with something they've never seen or felt before in combat.

They're falling off the walls in stinging pain,

wondering what the hell is happening to them.

- [Jason] Those that survive the fall from the ladders,

they're lying on the ground.

When they come to,

they realize they're covered in scorpions.

[tense dramatic music] [soldier shrieking]

- [Dan] This isn't random.

The scorpions are a secret weapon

the people of Hatra have been stockpiling for days.

- [Don] After the townspeople collect all these scorpions,

they put them into these terracotta clay pots

and seal them, creating,

what are essentially, scorpion bombs.

[tense ominous music]

- [Sami] Because these pots are now shattering,

these scorpions are in survival mode,

and they just immediately start stinging

at any sort of exposed skin that they happen to come across.

[solider shrieking] [tense ominous music]

- [Dan] Turns out this weapon

is as effective as it is unexpected.

[tense ominous dramatic music]

- The venom can lead to difficulty breathing,

shaking, seizures, and sometimes death.

- [Jason] Think about the psychological impact here.

If I'm a Roman soldier getting stung by scorpions,

it's gonna take a lot for me to get back in the fight

and climb up that ladder again.

- [Dan] Astonishingly,

Hatra holds off the siege for 20 days

thanks in part to the help of thousands of scorpions.

- [Don] Eventually, Severus retreats.

Think about this,

one of the greatest empires in history,

the most feared military on the planet,

driven back by a city armed with jars of scorpions.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Dan] 2,000 years later, another aerial assault

has a different enemy running for cover.

[pensive dramatic music]

- It's 1944

and the Allies are deep in a game of misdirection

against the Germans.

The Germans know that an Allied invasion is coming,

they just don't know where.

[pensive dramatic music continues]

The Allies are pulling out all the stops

to throw off the Germans from the real landing target

in Normandy.

- Things like creating radio chatter

that is giving out false information,

inflatable tanks that lead to the belief

that there are troops amassing in places where they aren't,

basically anything to throw the Germans

off of the trail of the real plan.

- [Dan] Many of the allied deception tactics for D-Day

are carefully planned,

but there's one that just happens to fall into place.

- [Jason] One day, the Royal Air Force

is out on the English Channel and they're testing parachutes

as well as different jump formations.

They aren't running these tests using live humans,

instead they're using burlap sacks,

which are stuffed with straw and sand

and are about three-feet tall.

- [Martin] And one observer on the ground

notices that these burlap bags

as they're descending through the air column,

look like real people under those parachutes,

not dummies at all.

That's where this all begins.

- [Jonathan] The RAFs start to think,

"What if we could use these as a distraction on D-Day?

We could drop them in northern France

miles away from the actual landing site."

- [Dan] It's a bold plan, and the British go all in,

even giving their dummies a name.

- [Martin] There's a lot riding on the success of these dummies,

and because it's a British design,

they give them a British countrymen's name,

Rupert.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Jason] In the wee hours before the invasion of Normandy,

450 Rupert para-dummies are released

25-miles from Omaha Beach,

where over 18,000 actual paratroopers

are about to be dropped.

- [Jonathan] What really sells the illusion

of a full blown airborne assault

is that each dummy is fitted with a loudspeaker

that plays machine gunfire sounds,

shouted orders, and marching.

- [Holly] This seemingly bizarre scheme

actually works like a charm.

When these dummies start dropping,

Germans go to their flight positions

and just start firing at them.

So not only are they wasting their attention

to something fake,

they're also just burning through their ammunition.

[bullets sputtering]

And there is this other really stroke of genius detail

about their design.

- [Martin] The dummies are equipped with explosives,

[explosion booming]

so that when they reach the ground, they explode.

This is done for two reasons.

Number one, an explosion will convince the enemy

that there's something happening.

And then reason number two,

there will be no evidence that Rupert wasn't real.

[explosion booming]

- [Dan] The ruse pays off

and sends German troops scrambling

in the wrong direction.

- [Martin] The German 84th Corps Reserve,

which consists of two infantry companies,

all night long, it's running off 25-miles

toward a field full of dummies,

made out of burlap bags,

instead of actual Allied soldiers coming ashore

at dawn on June 6th.

This is a brilliant use of deception

and sending the enemy strength to an area

where it cannot threaten us.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Dan] Rupert may have been stuffed with straw,

but he helped carry the weight of D-Day on his shoulders.

- The best spy tools don't rely on technology alone,

they rely on placement;

and this one was positioned perfectly

to remain far from suspicious eyes.

[intriguing orchestral music]

- [Riccoh] In the 1960s,

in places like East Berlin and Warsaw,

The CIA's mission is to steal secrets,

run operations, and never ever get caught.

- At the time, any secret agent

operating in the Eastern block face a real danger

because they can get picked up for anything,

even just a suspicion of being associated

with Western intelligence.

- [Dr. Oluseyi] If you get caught,

you get thrown into an

adversarial nation's prison system,

and that's not good.

This leads the CIA to think about how to develop a weapon

that these operatives could use to escape if they're caught;

but the thing is,

it needs to go undetected

if they're subject to a strip search.

- [Dan] This situation requires

perhaps the most secret of secret weapons.

- The CIA develops a kit with a lock pick, tiny saw blade,

drill bits, and even a small knife,

but the real genius is in the capsule that holds it.

[metal clinking] [intriguing dramatic music]

- It has to be strong, fully-sealed, and splinter-proof

because it's going up a butt.

[dramatic thud]

- [Dan] Its official name is the CIA rectal kit.

Uncomfortable?

Maybe, but so is prison.

[zipper zipping]

- [Riccoh] They built it from durable, non-corrosive metal

to make sure nothing pokes through,

and most importantly, you have to be able to retrieve it.

- [Dan] One of the few surviving examples

can now be seen at the International Spy Museum

in Washington, DC.

- [Dr. Oluseyi] There are no Soviet records

of one ever being found on a CIA agent,

or ever being used for any escape or attack,

but we know that they were distributed to operatives.

[intriguing dramatic music]

This means either one of two things:

either this kit was never discovered,

or no one ever wanted to write this thing up,

and this could be one of the reasons why today

full cavity searches are standard

in situations like these.

[dramatic thud]

- [Dan] Some secret weapons are meant to stay hidden,

others, like this next one, are meant to be noticed.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Holly] The arms race before and during World War II

leads to a vast array of new weaponry.

[dramatic thud]

Everyone knows about the V-2 rocket,

but what a lot of people don't know is that

the Japanese are developing their own secret weapon.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Troy] Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto,

the future mastermind behind Pearl Harbor,

believes that Japan needs a new weapon

that can strike from far behind enemy lines

without warning.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Rutledge] In 1934,

Admiral Yamamoto reads "The New York Times"

and sees that Nikola Tesla

announces that he's gonna build a weapon

that fires tiny electrically-charged particles

in a focused beam.

- The official name is Teleforce,

and Tesla claims this could destroy 10,000 planes

at over 250-miles away.

He also says that it could cause armies of millions

to drop dead in their tracks.

[dramatic thud]

- [Dan] While the US government shrugs off Tesla's Death Ray,

Admiral Yamamoto thinks it's got potential.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Holly] The Japanese government

allocates 2 million yen to this project,

that's roughly equivalent to $11 million today.

- [Martin] They also employ the services of Yoji Ito,

an Engineer

at the Japanese Naval Technologies Research Institute,

and he will be the man designing and developing

the Death Ray.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Holly] Yoji Ito and his team of 30 scientists

realized pretty quickly

that Tesla's concept is not workable.

It would require multiple power plants

just to power this thing for only a brief period of time.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Dr. Tyler] But they come up with an idea;

what if instead of using electric particles,

they use microwaves?

- [Rutledge] They decide to call this

the Ku-Go Death Ray project.

- [Dan] The Death Ray prototype

features a 31-inch magnetron and dipole antenna

using 30 kilowatts of energy

to send microwaves to its target.

- [Troy] So the Japanese have the power,

and they have the beam,

but the question is, will this thing work?

In one of the tests, they point the Death Ray

at an unprotected car engine,

[tense dramatic music]

and it melts.

- [Dan] Sure, it's not the 10,000 destroyed planes

Tesla promised,

but all Death Rays have to start somewhere.

- [Rutledge] And then they try another one

where they actually close the hood on the engine,

[beam whirring] [dramatic thud]

and it's unsuccessful,

which means it would be very difficult

to melt an airplane engine,

if the engine's not sitting 30-feet in front of it

on a bare shelf.

- [Dan] The Death Ray may not be strong enough

to penetrate the car's hood,

but what about something softer?

- [Holly] They point this Death Ray at a rabbit

from a distance of 40 yards.

[beam whirring]

- [Rutledge] And it does not immediately do anything,

it takes a while, about 10 minutes,

before it kills the rabbit.

That's not great.

So again,

it seems like the Death Ray isn't working that well.

- [Dan] Instead of giving up,

Ito's team pushes forward,

scaling up the power and the range.

- [Dr. Tyler] What they try to do is start testing

a much more powerful ray that instead uses 200-kilowatts.

- [Holly] That is more than 500% more powerful than the last one,

and the goal with this is to kill a rabbit

at a hundred kilometer distance, it's about 62 miles.

- [Dan] While Ito and his team

scramble to finish their doomsday weapon,

[explosion booming]

Robert Oppenheimer and the US finish theirs first.

[intriguing dramatic music] [crowd applauding]

- [Troy] In 1945, the war ends,

and the Ku-Go project is shut down.

It becomes simply one of the strangest weapons of the war

that never got a chance to fire.

[intriguing dramatic music continues]

- [Dan] Bad news for the Japanese,

but good news for the bunny population.

- Long before Rome conquered the world,

it was struggling to protect itself;

and during one desperate siege,

help arrived from somewhere no one anticipates.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Don] We're in Rome, 390 BCE,

centuries before they're even an empire.

Rome is just a scrappy, unproven city

of maybe 30,000 people.

At this point, the Romans aren't conquering the world,

they're trying to survive it.

- [Sami] The real power on the scene is this warrior tribe

from the northern part of Italy called the Senones

that are led by a man named Brennus.

- [Dan] The Senones have been on a relentless war path,

torching cities, slaughtering men,

and leaving charred ruins in their wake.

Now their sights are set on Rome.

- [Don] On Capitoline Hill,

Rome's final defenders are holed up in a garrison

near the temple of Juno, protected by a cliff.

- [Sami] They're also joined by a flock of sacred geese.

Now the reason that these geese are sacred

is because they belong to the temple of Juno,

which is the goddess of marriage and protector of the state.

And these geese essentially fall

under her divine protection.

- [Dan] Unfortunately, Brennus and the Senones

have surrounded the temple,

cutting off food, water, and hope,

driving the Romans to the brink of desperation.

- [Riccoh] The Romans are starving,

and in a dire moment,

they're even considering sacrificing

some of the sacred geese to eat.

[ominous dramatic music]

- [Jason] But as tired and hungry as they are,

everyone knows it would be a sacrilege to kill them;

even the dogs know the rule.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Sami] Brennus gathers up some of his best fighters.

He starts sending them up the side of the cliff

to launch a sneak attack

on the tired, starving Roman soldiers.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Emily] As the Senones get to the top of the cliff,

these Roman soldiers are sleeping, the dogs are sleeping,

but they didn't count on one thing.

[Geese honking]

- Sacred geese.

[tense dramatic music]

These birds are very sensitive to sound,

they start honking and violently flapping their wings

to the point that these Roman soldiers wake up.

- [Riccoh] This foils Brennus' plan for a surprise attack

on the Roman fighters.

As the Senones try to climb up the cliff,

the Romans take 'em out one by one.

- [Dan] The sacred geese watch on

as the Romans successfully stand their ground.

- [Sami] Eventually the Senones retreat down the hill,

and though Rome is badly bruised,

it is safe for the time being.

If these geese had not honked,

it is very possible that the Roman Empire that we know today

would be the Senones Empire.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Dan] Forget feathers and flapping,

sometimes history's stealthiest weapons don't honk,

they float.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Rutledge] Now it's 1939,

it's still very early in the war,

and barrage balloons are already in use in the Royal Navy.

They are these huge zeppelin-shaped hot air balloons

that are tethered to warships

with 5,000-foot long steel cables.

The idea being if a plane flies anywhere near it,

it'll get caught hitting the cables,

and down goes the plane.

Pretty brilliant.

- [Dan] But a freak accident proves these balloons

can do a lot more damage than just tangle up a few planes.

- [Martin] In September, 1940,

a vicious storm hits the North Sea,

barrage balloons are battered back and forth,

some of them break their suspension cables and drift.

- [Dan] As luck would have it, they drift over enemy territory

in Nazi-controlled Denmark and Sweden.

- [Martin] Their suspension cables

get dragged across power lines,

knocking out electricity for days,

and causing untold damage to infrastructure.

- [Rutledge] To the Brits, this is brilliant.

They've got these barrage balloons,

they've got plenty of hydrogen, and that's cheap,

so I think we've got our new weapon.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Dr. Tyler] They've got a lot of enthusiasm,

they go to Winston Churchill,

and they're like, "Hey, this unplanned test,

it worked with no explosives, no troops,

and almost no cost."

They run a few more tests, this time, on purpose,

and they realize that each balloon

has somewhere between a 10 and 75% chance

of shorting a high-power voltage line.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Dan] It must be enough for Churchill,

because on March 20th, 1942,

the project becomes official,

and Operation Outward takes off.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Don] Normally when you see balloons, you think celebration;

but in this case, they are bringing utter destruction.

Half of the Operation Outward balloons

carry conductive steel cables

meant to short out German power lines,

but the rest, they're fitted with small explosives.

Dangling from the balloons

are either white phosphorus grenades or incendiary jelly.

- [Martin] Outward also acts as an effective diversion

because the Germans have to dispatch fighter aircraft

to intercept the balloons,

and they have to send ground units to go and collect them

once they've reached the ground.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Rutledge] The most dramatic result

comes when a balloon strikes a generator

at a power station in Leipzig, Germany,

which takes out 250-megawatts of power

dealing a major blow to the German power grid.

- [Don] The final launch of Operation Outward

takes place on September 4th, 1944,

capping off a campaign

that saw over 100,000 balloons

released toward Nazi-occupied Europe.

Due to wartime secrecy restrictions,

newspapers are forbidden from reporting on the operation,

leaving the public completely unaware of the balloons

silently drifting through the skies,

fighting on their behalf.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Dan] In all, Operation Outward

costs the German $75 million in damages,

not bad for a balloon

that's a measly hundred bucks to launch.

- Bombs and bullets work on the battlefield,

but what about when you need to get close to the enemy

to find out their secrets?

When destruction won't do,

one secret agent becomes a weapon of mass seduction.

- [Holly] Betty Pack is an expat MI6 agent,

and Betty becomes a master at this move

that's known as honey trapping,

and that means she uses her seductive wiles

to gather information.

- [Adam] Betty Pack is actually not her real name,

[camera shutter snapping]

her given name is Amy Elizabeth Thorpe,

and she was born in 1910.

Her dad is a man by the name of Colonel George Thorpe,

he's a very highly decorated, deeply respected Marine.

Because of the nature of her family,

she spends a lot of her youth abroad

moving from country to country

and learning the very valuable skillset

of blending in with the upper echelon of society.

- [Negin] But at 19, she finds herself in a bit of a pickle,

because she's pregnant;

and the real tough part is,

she doesn't know who the father is.

This kind of thing could ruin a gal at that time,

it is like social suicide.

So she has to be creative.

- [Dan] To avoid this disaster,

Betty uses the most powerful tool she has,

charm,

and sets her sights on a British diplomat, Arthur Pack.

- [Holly] A couple months into their relationship,

Betty convinces Arthur that the baby is his;

and, voila, she marries a diplomat.

- [Dan] It's the first time

Betty turns intimacy into leverage,

and it won't be the last.

- [Negin] After the baby's born,

they end up giving it up for adoption,

but, nevertheless, she follows him on assignment

and she's playing the role of a diplomat's wife

and really learning how the world of geo-diplomacy works.

- [David] In 1938, her husband, Arthur,

gets assigned to a diplomatic post in Warsaw,

where she soon gets into an affair with a Polish diplomat

named Edward Kulakowski.

It doesn't take long before this Polish diplomat

reveals to her that Poland is secretly cooperating

with Nazi Germany.

- [Martin] Armed with this information,

she passes the intel onto John Shelley

at the British Embassy.

- [Holly] And through Shelley,

she is actually brought into MI6,

because they realize they have a really valuable asset

on their hands in Betty.

- [Dan] Betty's first official assignment

is to seduce Count Michal Lubienski,

chief aide to Poland's Foreign Minister, Joseph Beck.

- [Adam] During Betty's tender moments with the Count,

she surreptitiously copies different reports and documents

that are in his attache case.

[intriguing dramatic music]

Polish code-breaking methodology,

a reconstructed enigma machine,

and all of this information

will eventually allow famous British inventor, Alan Turing,

to create the German code-deciphering machine

that ultimately help turn the tide of the war

in the favor of the Allies.

- [Dan] But their success in Europe comes at a cost.

In 1941, Betty leaves her marriage behind

and heads to Washington, DC,

where a more audacious target awaits.

- [Holly] Betty sets her sights on Charles Brousse,

who is a Vichy French diplomat.

At this time, the Vichy regime

is secretly collaborating with the Nazis.

Her goal is to get her hands on secret naval codes

that are being held in the embassy's safe.

- [Adam] Even though Brousse is a married man,

Betty manages to seduce him.

- [Dan] But the mission isn't complete

until she gets her hands on those naval codes.

So Betty convinces Brousse

to sneak her along with a safe cracker

into the French Embassy.

- [Holly] This is an extremely dangerous operation.

And while the safe cracker is doing his job,

a security guard approaches,

and Betty thinks incredibly fast,

she tells Charles to get undressed, she does the same,

and they start to make out.

Betty's little ruse works perfectly,

the safe cracker is undisturbed,

they get those naval codes and cipher materials,

and they never alert the enemy in the process.

- [David] This becomes Betty's greatest act of espionage

because with the secrets that were in that safe,

US military intelligence is able to anticipate movements

of the French Vichy fleet

that enables them to then take North Africa,

which is the first step to the defeat of Nazi Germany.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Dan] Betty and Charles did eventually get married,

proof that sometimes spying on someone

really is the fastest way to their heart.

- When it comes to concealed weapons,

sometimes it's not the size that matters,

but how quickly you can whip it out.

[pensive dramatic music]

- [Jonathan] It's the end of World War I

and a German soldier named Louis Marquis

is captured by the Russians and taken to a prison camp.

But he's more than just a soldier,

he's an inventor and an engineer as well.

- [Riccoh] Conditions in this prison camp are harsh

and Marquis becomes obsessed with one idea:

a concealed weapon,

small enough to hide, fast enough to use,

deadly enough to matter.

- [Jonathan] Marquis spends years planning out this idea,

and when he is finally released from prison,

he patents his design.

- [Dan] It looks like a simple belt buckle,

but inside, it packs a punch.

- [Riccoh] A lever releases a spring-loaded buckle,

which flips down to reveal the barrel.

Each of the two or four rounds

has its own individual trigger mechanism ready to fire.

- [Dan] Meanwhile, Nazi intelligence

is on the hunt for covert weapons,

and Marquis' design catches their attention.

- [Jason] By 1944, two versions exist,

a four-barrel.22 caliber, and a two-barrel.32 caliber,

both concealed inside of the Nazi belt buckle.

- [Jonathan] The idea is for a weapon of last resort.

Say you are a high ranking SS officer,

and you're captured,

and you have one chance to make it out.

[belt mechanism clacking] The belt lock pistol

is that chance.

[bullets sputtering]

- [Riccoh] We don't know if SS soldiers

ever used one of these belt guns to get out of a jam,

but to aim this thing,

you're gonna have to use some of your pelvic hip gyration,

or pelvic thrust, to be on target.

[tense dramatic music]

- [Dan] That is one escape plan

you really don't want to backfire.

The belt pistol was designed to catch its target off guard.

Another device decided

it was better to catch the target outright.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Dr. Oluseyi] Say you're a London police officer in 1969,

a burglar has just robbed a bank,

and now they're making a run for it.

Your challenge is to stop them,

but in a non-lethal way,

without hurting or killing a person.

What do you do?

- [Dan] A British inventor named Colin Brown

has a strange solution: the net a thief.

[device banging]

- [Jenny] Out of this apparatus shoots a giant net

that has four weights on the four corners of it,

and ensnares the burglar.

- [Dr. Oluseyi] Besides being non-lethal,

what makes this such a great secret weapon

is the fact that the bad guys just don't expect

to get shot with a net like in a cartoon,

but this is real-life.

- [Jason] Brown makes this video to win over law enforcement,

but nobody in the UK picks up on the idea,

perhaps it's too bulky.

[device banging]

[intriguing orchestral music]

- [Paul] While British police never end up using it,

the device does come in handy later in the 1970s

as a way to capture stray dogs and wildlife.

- [Dr. Oluseyi] Cut to the modern version,

and now it's much more compact,

it looks like a large flashlight,

and inside, there's compressed gas or an explosive

which launches the weighted net 40-feet in two seconds.

- [Jason] Net guns are also used in the fight against drones,

which are sometimes found flying in unauthorized airspace.

Quadcopters can be a security threat

when they're flying close to sensitive sites

like airports or government installations.

Plus, a lot of these drones aren't just used by hobbyists,

they're used for criminal activity,

illegal surveillance, espionage, bombs.

[explosion booming] [intriguing dramatic music]

- [Jenny] So let's say you've got a drone

somewhere it's not supposed to be,

a sporting event, an airport, a secret celebrity wedding,

just shoot that thing up in the air,

it ensnares the drone in a net, takes it down,

[device banging]

boom, problem solved.

[intriguing dramatic music]

- [Dan] Reigning scorpions on the enemy,

sabotaging ammo, and seducing your way to intel,

these are the super secret weapons so outlandish,

they are truly unbelievable.

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