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1 {an8}[explosions]

[newscaster 1] So the Russian military is really an overmatch for the Ukrainians.

It will probably quickly dissolve into sort of an insurgency,

like we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[newscaster 2] Sources say officials in the US

fear that Kyiv could fall to Russia within days.

[in Ukrainian] Russia carried out strikes on our military infrastructure

and border guards.

In many Ukrainian cities, explosions were heard.

[helicopter blades whirring]

[reporter, in Russian] They are flying towards the airport, bombing the airport.

You can hear that there is a battle.

{an8}[compelling music playing]

{an8}[V. Rudenko, in Ukrainian] Fastest way to Kyiv was through Hostomel.

{an8}Uh, they opened fire on the airport facilities.

[compelling music continues]

You can see the destroyed, burned Mriya.

Eh, the Russians...

hit it

with an unguided missile.

They flew straight to the runway

and started hitting our air defense units.

[man] One, two, three, four, five, six,

seven, eight.

[helicopter blades whirring]

[Rudenko] They did not expect resistance.

We began shooting down choppers

and to destroy Russian troops.

[man] Yes! Yes!

[man shouting excitedly]

[Sergii Solodchenko] This was the first line of defense of Kyiv.

[indistinct shouting]

{an8}For two days, our boys did not let them land.

[tense music playing]

[Rudenko] The Russians did manage to capture the airport.

But they lost momentum.

After we moved to a safe distance,

we used our artillery to damage the airfield.

That way, we gained time to move the defense forces

to block the enemy from invading Kyiv.

[tense music rising]

[Graff, in English] Had the Russian military been able

to succeed in that moment,

{an8}it would have been able to deliver its most elite forces

{an8}straight to the front lines of Kyiv.

So the ability of the Ukrainian military

to resist that airborne invasion at the Hostomel Airport

is probably the turning point of the entire war.

[indistinct]

[Kyrylo Budanov, in Ukrainian] When they failed to parade into Kyiv, they froze.

{an8}It turned into a full-scale war.

[opening theme music playing]

[music fades]

[loud blast]

[Audra J. Wolfe] In the early years of the Cold War,

{an8}the United States treated nuclear weapons not only as if they were something

{an8}that could be used, but something that could be survived.

[tense music playing]

[broadcaster] Let us face, without panic, the reality of our times,

the fact that atom bombs may someday be dropped on our cities.

And let us prepare for survival.

[Graff] In the 1950s, there was an immense effort given

to perfectly planning how nuclear war would unfold in the United States.

And the federal government launches a whole series

of public education campaigns

to get America ready for nuclear war.

[broadcaster] You are the target of those

who would trample the liberties of free men.

You are in the crosshairs of the bomb sites.

An enemy is...

[Wolfe] The United States was providing messages to its citizens

that were simultaneously terrifying and not terribly coherent.

On the one hand, the message was that the Soviet Union

was this diabolical nation that was hell-bent on American destruction.

That this was an existential threat.

[broadcaster] Today, every state, every city and town,

is within striking range of a determined enemy.

{an8}[Wolfe] On the other hand, it was telling Americans that a nuclear holocaust

{an8}was absolutely survivable.

{an8}Something that you could probably survive by going to a fallout shelter

in the event of a nuclear attack,

or investing in a fallout shelter for your own backyard.

{an8}[Alex Wellerstein] They have a program that starts up in 1950

{an8}called "Civil Defense."

{an8}The idea is, we don't want to be attacked by these weapons, but we might.

{an8}And if we do, yeah, some people are just gonna die straight out,

{an8}but there are gonna be people who are at a distance from that bomb,

where what they do matters.

[broadcaster] First, you duck, and then you cover.

[Wellerstein] Duck and Cover is one of the first big campaigns,

training children to get under their desks if a nuclear bomb is coming.

Not because your desk is magical.

If the bomb incinerates you and your desk, your desk isn't gonna help.

But because there are distances at which doing that

is gonna prevent the ceiling collapsing on you,

and you might survive that way.

[alarm blaring]

[Kathleen Bailey] A siren went off.

We were all told to file into the hallway.

{an8}We had to get down on our hands and knees and put...

{an8}Lace our fingers behind our heads

and keep our heads against the base of the lockers.

We remained there for so long that I got cramped up.

And then the principal came and said, "This is the way you must remain

if there is a nuclear war because your parents will come here

if they can and find you."

That phrase, "if they can,"

stayed with me as a little girl for a very long time.

Nightmares, nightmares, nightmares.

- [loud blast] - [children screaming]

- [explosion in distance] - [screaming]

[Lori Clune] The fear is tremendous.

Children were wearing dog tags to school.

This right here is the metal identification tag

that we are urging every child and teenager in America to wear

as soon as possible.

[Clune] How long did it take those children to realize,

"Wait, this is so that my parents can find my body later"?

{an8}And the idea that it could happen at any moment,

{an8}that we were minutes away at any time

from a potential nuclear blast,

and the damage could be devastating.

[Wellerstein] Nuclear war becomes the backdrop

of almost everything that takes place in America.

There was a real sense that communism was on the march.

That communism was succeeding around the world.

That fear pushes government officials to encourage, "Let's develop more bombs."

"Let's develop bigger bombs."

It encourages Truman, famously, to approve developing the hydrogen bomb.

[tense music playing]

[broadcaster] History turns its most ominous page far out in mid-Pacific,

where in the Enewetak Atoll,

the world's most awesome weapon is readied for detonation.

The Army, Navy, and Air Force work against time,

under the supervision of scientists,

who have labored for years to develop the thermonuclear weapon.

[Graff] The shift from an atomic bomb to thermonuclear bombs

is a move to weapons orders of magnitude larger

than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A thermonuclear device is not just a larger atomic bomb.

It's a fundamentally different process.

An atomic bomb relies on nuclear fission, splitting of atoms,

whereas a hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear device,

relies on nuclear fusion and sort of the combination of atoms.

The first workable thermonuclear device

comes in the closing days of the Truman Administration,

and it's tested in what was known as the "Mike Test."

{an8}We have minutes to go before the first flier's Mike shot of Operation Ivy.

If everything goes according to plan,

we'll soon see the largest explosion ever set off on the face of the Earth.

[announcer] It is now 30 seconds to zero time.

Put on goggles or turn away.

Do not remove goggles or face burst until ten seconds after the first light.

[loud blast echoing]

[Gregg Herken] The Mike Test was a very successful test.

{an8}It was even more powerful than it was expected to be.

{an8}It was ten and a half million tons equivalent of TNT.

[pilot] Two-six, approaching ground zero.

Elugelab is completely gone.

Nothing there but water.

[broadcaster] The outlined island in the center is former Elugelab,

"the zero island."

Sections of the islands on either side have been chopped off.

The crater is roughly a mile in diameter.

In profile, the crater gradually slopes down to a maximum depth

of some 175 feet,

or equivalent to the height of a 17-story building.

Compared to the skyline of New York,

this means that with the Empire State Building as zero point,

the fireball alone would engulf about one-quarter of the island of Manhattan.

[Graff] The event horrified and shocked everyone

who witnessed it or read about it.

{an8}And you have a much more public debate about it,

{an8}including real horror by some of the people

{an8}who had been part of the Manhattan Project.

{an8}For years, Oppenheimer believed that the American people needed to know

that there was a nuclear arms race.

[Oppenheimer] The decision to seek or not to seek

international control of atomic energy,

the decision to try to make or not to make the hydrogen bomb,

these are rooted in complex technical things.

But they touch the very basis of our morality.

It is grave danger for us

that these decisions are taken on the basis of facts held secret.

[Herken] He wanted to inform the American people

of how destructive these weapons were.

[Graff] Albert Einstein himself wrote,

"General annihilation beckons."

[unsettling music playing]

[Tom Z. Collina] These were the kind of weapons that were so destructive

that presidents realized that if we ever got involved in a nuclear war,

{an8}it would be the end of civilization, right?

{an8}There would be nothing left.

[crowd cheering]

{an8}[festive band music playing]

[David Holloway] Eisenhower, after he was elected,

was informed about the first hydrogen bomb test.

{an8}He was just shaken.

[brooding music playing]

[Eisenhower] How far have we come in man's long pilgrimage,

from darkness toward the light?

{an8}Are we nearing the light?

{an8}A day of freedom and of peace for all mankind?

{an8}Or are the shadows of another night closing in upon us?

Science seems ready to confer upon us

as its final gift,

the power to erase human life

from this planet.

[Holloway] The Soviet leaders also were shocked when they read about this test.

{an8}And Lavrentiy Beria,

{an8}who was in charge of the whole police and intelligence apparatus,

pulls together scientists who have already been working on the hydrogen bomb,

and prepares a memo for Stalin saying,

"This will be very expensive, but our enemies are developing it,

so we have to develop it too."

{an8}[tense music playing]

{an8}[Holloway] In 1953, the Soviet Union tested the so-called layer cake design,

{an8}which had a yield of about 400 kilotons.

{an8}This situation then opens things up to a kind of war of nerves.

[broadcaster] 1954, and the US prepared to set off a nuclear explosion

that would dwarf the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

to the category of small firecrackers.

The newest and most powerful atomic weapon yet tested

was to be detonated in the South Pacific in the midst of the Marshall Islands.

[Serhii Plokhy] The Castle Bravo test was done

in the Pacific testing grounds at Bikini Atoll.

{an8}That was the location where one of the first American atomic bombs

were tested back in the late 1940s.

There were people on the other atolls in the Pacific.

So they were completely unaware,

unprepared to deal with the explosion of the hydrogen bombs.

{an8}The Castle Bravo test becomes the scariest moment yet of the nuclear age.

We didn't really understand how thermonuclear bombs worked,

and the scientists and the military leaders

who were present that day were horrified by what they saw

because what they saw was a bomb that went off several times larger

and more powerful than anything that they had imagined.

[dramatic music playing]

[Herken] The Bravo test was meant to be seven megatons,

but it turned out it was 15 megatons.

{an8}[Graff] It turns out to be three times larger

{an8}than anything we had imagined.

{an8}Fifteen megatons of explosive power.

{an8}A four-mile-wide fireball

{an8}that evaporates almost everything in its path.

[rumbling]

[loud blast]

[dramatic music playing]

[music fades]

[seagulls squawking]

[Plokhy] The atolls and islands populated by the natives

were affected by the radiation.

[distant blast]

[Plokhy] Many of them could see the mushroom of that explosion going up.

They were talking about the sun actually coming from the west

instead of coming from the east.

{an8}[Neisen Laukon] I grew up on the island.

{an8}I remember people were really, really sick all the time.

Babies were born, and no shell to the back of their head, you know?

You could see their brain.

[mournful music playing]

[Plokhy] The area around Bikini Atoll,

the so-called security area and zone,

was cleared from all the ships.

Or at least they tried to do that.

But one of the Japanese trailers, Lucky Dragon,

ended up in the area of the explosion.

[distant rumble]

[Terumi Tanaka, in Japanese] The destructive power of the hydrogen bomb

was so powerful that it far exceeded the estimates of Americans who tested it.

{an8}So even though the ship was outside the security zone,

{an8}there was a lot of radioactive fallout.

We called it the death ash.

[device crackling]

[Plokhy, in English] It was an international scandal.

[unsettling music playing]

Japan, the only country hit by nuclear weapons,

becomes one of the first casualties of this new weapon too.

The fisherman's dying wish is,

{an8}"Let me be the last person killed by this awful weapon."

We didn't really know how to use nuclear bombs.

This was a new technology,

and the military needed to learn how to fight with it.

And the way that they learned

was by firing off a lot of nuclear bombs all over the world...

{an8}[wind whistling]

{an8}[Graff]...including domestic nuclear testing

in the desert above Las Vegas.

[blast]

[Graff] This is probably the high watermark

of the nation's public nuclear war planning.

There were documents and plans

showing how every aspect of the US government

could lead a nuclear war-damaged country.

{an8}[somber music playing]

{an8}[Daniel Ellsberg] I arrive at Rand as a consultant,

having gotten out of the Marines.

I was assigned to a study group working on a problem then

of deterring a Russian surprise attack that would disarm us basically,

and let them, in effect, rule the world.

It seemed morally almost obligatory

to try to develop an ability to retaliate in kind.

This was a very smart bunch.

Including my mentor at Rand, Albert Wohlstetter,

and my friend Herman Kahn.

The smartest group of people I ever did associate with.

It turns out, by the way,

intelligence is not a very good guarantee of wisdom.

{an8}Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy

the fear to attack.

[Ellsberg] In the movie Dr. Strangelove,

many of the words are taken from Herman Kahn,

the leader... inventor of the doomsday machine,

on his book on thermonuclear war.

The doomsday machine is terrifying.

[chuckles] It's simple to understand.

And completely credible and convincing.

Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines, Stainesey.

[interviewer] What did you think of Dr. Strangelove when you saw that movie?

See, that was a documentary.

Everything in Dr. Strangelove could have happened.

[clears throat]

Mr. President...

[clicks tongue]

...about, uh, 35 minutes ago,

General Jack Ripper,

the commanding general of, um, Burpelson Air Force Base,

issued an order to the 34 B-52s of his wing,

which were airborne at the time,

as part of a special exercise we were holding called Operation Dropkick.

Now, it appears that the order called for the planes

to attack their targets inside Russia.

[clamoring]

[Turgidson] The planes are fully armed with nuclear weapons

with an average load of, um, 40 megatons each.

[Ellsberg] The notion that only the president had the authority

to launch those weapons was a myth.

- [interviewer] That's not true? So... - It has never been true.

Many other people can launch this.

Not only the Joint Chiefs.

There have always been arrangements for lower-level people,

if they believe that a war is going on,

or if communications are cut off, to launch those weapons.

Then why haven't you radioed the planes countermanding the go code?

Well, I'm afraid we're unable to communicate with any of the aircraft.

[Ellsberg] When Buck Turgidson, the head of the Air Force in the movie,

says to the president,

"The planes are sent off and can't be recalled."

"They might as well go now. They're on their way."

That was an Air Force attitude, pretty much.

I don't think too many people realize that Eisenhower had said

there's to be no planning for limited war with the Soviets.

At Rand, I was given full access to the war plans.

I was one of a handful of civilians who did see these plans,

and they were strange and horrible.

Uh, terrible plans.

They seemed like the worst plans that had ever existed.

Eisenhower felt any fighting with Soviets,

even if it starts small,

is going to escalate very quickly to a larger war.

And under Eisenhower, that meant full-scale nuclear war.

We anticipated a world of peace and cooperation.

The calculated pressures of aggressive communism

have forced us instead to live in a world of turmoil.

[Ellsberg] The plan was to hit every city in Russia and China

with thermonuclear weapons.

H-bombs.

[loud blast]

[foreboding music playing]

[Ellsberg] So I thought that it would put them off-balance

to know how many people altogether would be killed by this.

So I drafted a question, one among many,

to be given to the Joint Chiefs by the Secretary of Defense.

"If you carried out your plans,

how many people would be killed in Russia and China alone?"

I really thought they wouldn't have an answer.

But they did have an answer, and it was top secret.

"For the president's eyes only."

{an8}And it's a graph with, on the horizontal axis, "time" in months,

{an8}and then millions of dead on the vertical axis.

{an8}The line began at 275 million people.

{an8}And it rose, as fallout killed people over the next six months,

{an8}to 325 million people.

{an8}This was Russia and China alone.

{an8}So I sent another question that I'd drafted.

{an8}"How many all together?"

{an8}And that just took them a week to answer, but this time in the form of a table.

{an8}Another hundred million in the satellites of East Europe, Poland,

{an8}and Hungary, Romania.

{an8}In West Europe, another hundred million depending on which way the wind blew.

{an8}And a third hundred million in areas contiguous to the Soviet Union

{an8}like Afghanistan, Japan, and India.

So the total,

in addition to the 325 million in Russia and China,

was 600 million.

A hundred Holocausts.

{an8}[tense music rising]

{an8}Now, the population of the world at that time

{an8}was 3,600,000,000.

{an8}That's one-fifth of the world's population.

It struck me as the most evil and insane plan

that had ever existed in the history of humanity.

[tense music continues]

[Ellsberg] This is institutional insanity.

[music fades]

[inaudible]

[Scott Anderson] When Eisenhower came in, he initiated this policy.

The "New Look" policy.

{an8}"New Look" was, for the first time,

{an8}the Americans reserve the right to use massive retaliation

if it felt that its vital national security interests

were under threat anywhere in the world.

And the Soviets immediately turned around and said the same thing.

So it froze the battlefield, certainly in Europe.

And it opened up the entire rest of the world as the new battlefield,

as the playground of the two powers.

Can't do anything in Europe, so you have to make mischief everywhere else.

{an8}So that's when you see this explosion around the world of covert operations...

{an8}and these massive intelligence and defense conglomerates

{an8}that both the superpowers have.

The amazing thing is that prior to World War II,

the United States never had a permanent foreign intelligence agency at all.

[ominous music playing]

[Tim Weiner] You can trace the roots of the CIA

to a mansion in Berlin in the summer of 1945.

The war in Europe is over. Hitler is dead.

Berlin is in ruins.

{an8}But in a well-pointed mansion in the center of the city are two men.

{an8}One is Allen Dulles,

{an8}and the other is his favorite lieutenant, Richard Helms.

They were both products of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services.

{an8}[Anderson] It was really the British, the MI6,

{an8}who kind of created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services.

So it was very much modeled on the British model.

[Weiner] Allen Dulles, he was into sabotage,

covert operations, paramilitary operations.

He was interested in the more,

shall we say, dangerous aspects of the job.

Helms was uniquely fascinated by espionage.

He believed that the business of intelligence

was gathering intelligence by spying.

[Anderson] Berlin, at that point, the former capital of Nazi Germany,

is rapidly becoming ground zero of certainly what the Soviets

are seeing as the contest with the West.

I was transferred to Berlin because we had in Berlin two stations.

[Anderson] The Soviets probably had hundreds of operatives in Berlin

in late 1945.

Peter Sichel had a few dozen answering to him,

and he had just turned 23 years old.

[Sichel] The Soviets had put enormous resources

into their intelligence services.

And they had continuity

going back to the '20s and '30s,

when they were implanting people

into universities, into society.

[tense music playing]

[Milton Bearden] The way the Soviet Union ran,

there was three legs to that stool.

The party, the army, and the KGB.

There's nothing like that in America.

{an8}[Nina Khrushcheva] Dzerzhinsky, founder of what we now know is the KGB.

Security forces in Russia have always been the second nature to the state.

{an8}Dzerzhinsky just took over that system and created his own security apparatus,

which got more and more repressive when Stalin got into power early on.

[music fades]

[inaudible]

[Weiner] Harry Truman thought there was no need

for a peacetime intelligence service in the United States.

Our problems were over.

But a few of its officers, like Allen Dulles, like Richard Helms,

fought with their allies in the Army, the US Army, to keep it alive.

In 1947,

the National Security Act created,

in a very short six-page order,

the Central Intelligence Agency.

{an8}[Stephen Kinzer] In that act, there's something unique, very important,

that went on to have a shattering impact at the CIA.

In the old system, particularly in Britain,

there was always an absolute firewall

between the people who analyzed situations

and decided what might be done or shouldn't have to be done,

and then on the other side, the covert operatives.

In the National Security Act,

both of these functions were combined into one agency, the CIA.

So it was gonna be the agency that advised the president

on what the world looked like,

and then decided whether a covert action was necessary,

and then carried it out.

That naturally gave the incentive to present the world

as if covert action was necessary everywhere.

[Weiner] By 1949, the CIA's recruiting foreign agents

throughout Germany and beyond,

to conduct paramilitary operations against the nations of Central Europe

where Stalin has installed his puppet governments,

to parachute behind the Iron Curtain and subvert the Soviet state.

{an8}The first of these operations, in the fall of 1949,

{an8}were Ukrainians who had gotten out of Ukraine after Stalin took it over,

found their way to Germany.

{an8}The CIA trains these Ukrainian exiles in Germany for a month or two or three.

"Here's how you jump out of an airplane with a parachute and a gun."

"Hit the ground and roll if you can."

{an8}"Here's how you set up a clandestine radio

{an8}to communicate with us."

{an8}"Here's $50,000 worth of local currency

to buy yourself access."

"And you're to establish a clandestine base

{an8}inside of Soviet-controlled Ukraine,

{an8}and we'll tell you what to do when you get there."

{an8}[Anderson] Peter Sichel's kind of in a supervisory role in all this.

{an8}[Sichel] Ukraine was never totally controlled by the Soviets.

{an8}There was always pockets of resistance.

They created so-called

"Ukrainian resistance cells."

We would supply them with arms, money, whatever.

These operations which the CIA conducted with every fiber of its being

from 1949 to 1953,

were suicide missions.

Uncounted thousands of recruited foreign agents died.

And one reason they were suicide missions

{an8}is that the CIA had been penetrated by a Soviet spy.

{an8}And that spy was the head of British intelligence in Washington,

Kim Philby.

He is the liaison between the British intelligence services

and the CIA.

Philby was read into what the CIA was doing

in its paramilitary missions,

and immediately conveys this information back to Moscow Central,

thus ensuring that the missions would end in disaster.

I was asked to resign from the foreign office

because of an imprudent association.

[reporter] What about these alleged communist associations?

Can you say anything about them?

The last time I spoke to a communist, knowing him to be a communist,

was sometime in 1934.

{an8}[interviewer] So what happened to all the people, the arms, and money

that the United States flew into Ukraine in order to support those groups?

Basically ended up in Soviet hands.

And the people were shot,

or sent to Siberia, or whatever.

[Anderson] Each succeeding operation into Poland, Romania,

they're all disasters.

People just disappear.

[somber music playing]

[Sichel] When it became so obvious that it was a lesson they never learned,

I decided I didn't want to be associated with people

who were so cavalier with human lives.

End of story.

I felt that an agency that had so little regard for human life,

was not for me.

I approved of what they did,

but not where they did it and how they did it.

[Weiner] The CIA was operating so far out of its depths

that you can safely say almost nothing the agency did worked.

Not in gathering intelligence, not in running secret operations,

paramilitary missions.

It was a failure.

But 1953 was a new era for the CIA.

[Kinzer] Under the Truman Administration, the CIA did carry out covert operations,

but always stopped short of overthrowing governments.

When the Eisenhower Administration took office, the gloves came off.

Allen Dulles became director of the CIA,

and his older brother John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State.

{an8}This was the first time two siblings, two brothers,

{an8}controlled the overt and the covert sides of American foreign policy.

The Dulles brothers saw communism

behind every nationalist movement in the world.

America was going to be this beacon of democracy.

We were going to spread democracy around the world.

It didn't matter how corrupt, or how vicious,

or how brutal the regime was.

If you were anti-communist, you were fine by us.

I often joke that if the Dulleses wanted to throw their grandmother under the bus,

they would say they needed to do it to save America

from international communism.

[Kinzer] One factor that shaped the Dulles brothers

was a lifetime of dedication to protecting the interests

of multinational corporations.

What this meant was that they had a deep interest

in preserving the world economic system.

This system was based above all on an understanding

that developed countries that consume resources

need to be able to control the countries where those resources are produced.

{an8}[dramatic music playing]

[Kinzer] The first two targets for the Dulles brothers

as leaders who needed to be overthrown,

were two leaders against whom they already had grudges.

{an8}It was Mosaddegh in Iran and Árbenz in Guatemala.

[Weiner] And this led to two of the CIA's most famous and infamous operations

of the early 1950s,

which was to overthrow the duly elected governments

of Guatemala and Iran.

[broadcaster] The world's largest oil refinery at Abadan, Iran,

becomes the center of a major international crisis,

as Iran's parliament votes unanimously to nationalize her vast oil fields.

[Kinzer] The Iranian government had nationalized its oil resources.

[Anderson] The British had a stranglehold over Iranian oil going back to 1914.

The British are pretty broke at this point.

They go and sit with John Foster Dulles and go,

"Yeah, we think Mosaddegh's a communist."

{an8}[laughs] "And will you help us overthrow him?"

{an8}[Weiner] And the British and the Americans conceived an operation

to get rid of Mosaddegh.

[suspenseful music playing]

[distant call to prayer]

[Weiner] So there were two elements to the CIA's plan,

a chaotic plan that worked.

And one was money for bribing people,

and the other was propaganda.

HORRIFIC SPECTER OF BULLYING AND COMMUNISM HAUNTS IRAN

[Kinzer] They had most of the newspapers in Tehran

printing articles denouncing Mosaddegh.

[indistinct chatter]

[Abrahamian] This type of what is now called fake news

was very much used by the CIA to basically flood the Iranian media.

{an8}[Weiner] Then the CIA hired thugs who posed as members

{an8}of the very small Communist Party of Iran,

{an8}who attacked mullahs, defiled a mosque.

The operation basically failed.

And then at the last minute,

{an8}through a comical and Byzantine series of events,

{an8}there was just enough money, propaganda, and treachery

flowing through the streets of Tehran

to allow a small corps of rebellious officers

who had been paid by the CIA

to roll a tank up to Prime Minister Mosaddegh's house,

{an8}blow a hole in it,

{an8}and convince him it would probably be best if he left office.

[clamoring]

{an8}This opened the way for the reinstallation of a Shah of Iran.

{an8}[broadcaster] Army officers reveal Mosaddegh has surrendered.

His reign as virtual dictator of Iran is ended.

Now crowds shout pro-shah slogans and carry pictures of a troubled ruler

of a troubled nation.

[Weiner] The shah ran a viciously repressive,

but pro-American government.

[Abrahamian] After the coup in Iran,

what you had was a consortium

between Iran and Western oil companies

obeying American companies, a British company, and a French company.

They ran the oil industry.

{an8}If you read the documents,

{an8}there is really no real concern about a serious communist takeover.

But it was a convenient argument to use

in the American public

that they were saving the country from communism.

[enthralling music playing]

{an8}[Anderson] The following year, almost the same thing happens in Guatemala

{an8}with Jacobo Árbenz.

{an8}♪ I'm Chiquita Banana And I've come to say ♪

{an8}♪ Bananas have to ripen In a certain way... ♪

United Fruit has been running Guatemala as a virtual slave plantation for decades.

People are paid virtually nothing, and Árbenz is talking about nationalizing.

[enthralling music continues]

[Kinzer] The government of Jacobo Árbenz had won congressional approval

for a large land reform that required the United Fruit Company

to sell its unused land to the Guatemalan government,

which would then cut up that land

and give it away to starving peasant families.

United Fruit convinces John Foster Dulles that Árbenz is communist.

So again, the Americans back this coup against Árbenz.

[Weiner] This man wasn't a communist.

He proposed to expropriate some fallow land

that United Fruit Company owned,

and to distribute it to peasants.

[Kinzer] The CIA recruited a cashiered colonel named Castillo Armas,

and anointed him as "the liberator."

Then the CIA swept into action.

They saturated Guatemalan airwaves with pre-recorded phony broadcasts.

{an8}[man in Spanish] Listen to us and you will know the reality

{an8}of Guatemala's political moment

{an8}and the irrefutable progress of the great liberation movement.

{an8}[Kinzer, in English] In which, it seemed like

a big civil war was unfolding in Guatemala.

Meanwhile, CIA planes were dropping bombs

that were then coordinated with these radio broadcasts.

- LONG LIVE CASTILLO ARMAS - COMMUNISTS, LEAVE ESQUIPULAS

[Kinzer] There wasn't any real fighting,

but finally it became clear to the generals

that they had to overthrow Árbenz.

That brought Castillo Armas into power,

the liberator that the Americans had anointed.

He went on immediately to ban labor unions,

close Congress...

- [gunfire] - [crowd clamoring]

...impose an oppressive regime,

execute hundreds of people,

and then that led to a holocaust in Guatemala for many years.

Back in Washington, in the White House and the CIA,

this operation was considered a complete success.

Spectacular.

It didn't cost much money.

Only a few hundred people were killed, none of them were Americans.

[Anderson] To my mind, John Foster Dulles is really one of the great villains

of the second half of the 20th century,

from the standpoint of the American standing in the world.

He saw the world as black and white.

You either stood with America, or were against us.

There was no neutrality.

[Allen Dulles] Intelligence is nothing really

other than information and knowledge.

{an8}From the days of Socrates by various methods, and even before that,

{an8}uh, mankind has been seeking knowledge

of everything that influences his own life

or the life of the nation to which he belongs.

But the idea that it is necessarily nefarious,

it's always engaged in overthrowing governments, that's false.

- [typewriter keys clacking] - [phones ringing]

[ominous music playing]

[man on radio speaking indistinctly]

[Bailey] The Cold War was a battle for the mind and hearts of the opponent

and the opponent's people.

{an8}So the Cold War was being fought over thought.

{an8}[Weiner] The early CIA from the late '40s into the '60s

had hundreds of influence operations,

where they purchased the favor

of a newspaper editor in Buenos Aires, or Tokyo, or Berlin.

{an8}There were a handful, some say more than a handful,

of American journalists who were paid by the CIA,

{an8}or cooperated with the CIA free of charge.

So it was nothing for Allen Dulles

to call up the publisher of the New York Times,

{an8}and say, "You have an annoying journalist in Guatemala

who is reporting on a CIA operation to overthrow the government."

"Yank him."

The publisher did.

{an8}[music fades]

[Bailey] Controlling people's thoughts and actions was also integral

to the Soviet Union's effort

to make US policy either do or not do what it wished,

and used what is called "active measures."

The formal structure of the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union

dedicated to disinformation and active measures

was set up in the 1950s.

{an8}That's using disinformation,

using agents of influence,

forgeries, and other tools to manipulate the way people perceived

the factual universe around them.

{an8}We know about the early examples, principally from defectors.

{an8}When Soviets are running some clandestine active measures operation,

like, for instance, planting some major story

in the newspaper in France, West Germany,

United States, elsewhere, Japan,

{an8}that kind of article normally would be written by local prominent journalist,

{an8}who will express as if his own or her own opinion.

{an8}These kinds of things normally won't be traceable back to the Soviet Union.

{an8}[Bailey] The objective was to cause disruption, confusion,

{an8}and to turn each other against each other.

{an8}The Soviet Union tried very hard in its early days

{an8}to use forgeries like government documents that they would make up a story,

{an8}put it on letterhead,

{an8}and slip it to a journalist in hope that it would take off like wildfire,

and sometimes it did.

{an8}ROCKEFELLER GIVES DIRECTIVES FOR US SUPERCOLONIALISM

{an8}[Ladislav Bittman] I would say that the major successes

{an8}were in developing countries where governments didn't have the expertise...

{an8}EISENHOWER PLAYS WITH FIRE AMERICAN PLANES FLY OVER ARAB REPUBLIC

{an8}...to analyze properly these operations.

And, for example, sometimes very cheap forgeries are accepted

{an8}in developing countries as a genuine proof of American conspiracy.

{an8}[festive military band music playing]

{an8}[Plokhy] In the Soviet Union,

{an8}Stalin has complete control over the media.

[crowd cheering]

[Plokhy] It was quite easy to create an atmosphere of the besieged fortress,

of the spies and enemies around us.

[ominous music playing]

It was impermissible, certainly in a classroom,

or a newspaper, anything,

to cast any doubt whatsoever on Stalin.

{an8}Stalin was the uncontested ruler of the Soviet Union until 1953,

{an8}when he died of a stroke.

This is a major turning point of the Cold War.

[reporter] The Kremlin's cold stone walls,

the eerie face of Moscow,

a howling wind and snow adding to the somber picture,

is the description accompanying the announcement

that the most powerful dictator in history has come to the inevitable end.

[Remnick] In March of 1953 when Stalin died, everybody cried.

If you're surrounded by,

and you're growing up in a school and you're worshiping Stalin,

not like George Washington or saying pledge allegiance to the flag,

but in a, in a semi-mystical way,

that he's like the godhead, and that suddenly the godhead is dead,

well, it's of no surprise that you'd cry.

[somber music playing]

[Weiner] After Stalin dies,

{an8}there is a power struggle as to who will succeed him

{an8}that is finally resolved

{an8}with the rise of a new leader named Nikita Khrushchev.

{an8}[Remnick] In the Khrushchev era, there was something called the Thaw.

[Khrushcheva] I was born in Moscow. I was raised in Moscow.

I had a privileged childhood

{an8}being the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev.

He worked as a coal miner in East Ukraine.

In the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917,

he was a very low-level political commissar,

and began kind of rising up in the Communist ranks.

When Stalin dies, Khrushchev came into power.

[reporter] The peasant from Kursk finally emerges as dictator of the Soviet Union.

[Holloway] One of the things that the new leadership does

is introduce amnesty for many people who have been imprisoned.

[Masha Lipman] Khrushchev could not bring back those who had been executed,

{an8}but he released from jail, from labor camps,

those people who had been innocent victims of Stalin's terror.

[Khrushcheva] And Khrushchev kept saying to all those other Stalin flunkies,

"We need to talk about the crimes of Stalin's that we were part of."

{an8}[applause]

{an8}[Khrushcheva] In the last session of the Congress...

{an8}ON THE CULT OF PERSONALITY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

{an8}...Khrushchev delivered what is called the Secret Speech.

It spoke about numbers of people

that got prosecuted during Stalin's years in office,

and how many were imprisoned, and how many went without trial.

It spoke about the secret police.

All the things that people knew some, but they didn't have it in numbers

and never had it in a speech

by the first Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

So it was an amazing moment.

After the speech was delivered, there was an absolute silence in the room.

{an8}[Anne Applebaum] People who had believed

{an8}that the stories of Stalin's excesses were exaggerated,

{an8}people who still believed in the ideals of the Soviet Union

{an8}or the ideals of communism,

many of them had their eyes opened by these revelations.

[Pavel Litvinov] In that speech, he said Stalin was really a criminal.

Stalin was God for me.

{an8}I started to lose faith in God, in Stalin, and in communism.

[Applebaum] It wasn't an admission that the system was fundamentally wrong.

He didn't apologize for everything that was done,

but it did set the Soviet Union on a different course.

[Khrushchev speaking in Russian]

[Naftali] Khrushchev was very human.

[indistinct]

[Naftali] Khrushchev was emotional.

He loved to punctuate sentences with swear words.

Didn't matter who he was talking to.

[Remnick] There's a period in which a generation,

then quite young,

sees the possibility of what would be called liberal reform

in the post-Stalinist era.

They're not dissidents. They're not willing to go to jail.

But they become journalists. They become party officials.

Khrushchev decided to try to introduce some critics permitted in newspapers

in the magazine Novy Mir...

NOVY MIR MAGAZINE

...which was very popular political magazine.

And kind of supported certain de-Stalinization

and liberalization of Russian life.

People under Khrushchev, they started to perform.

There were some concerts of classical music,

which was almost forbidden.

Books were published.

{an8}[Remnick] He allows the publication of a young writer named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,

{an8}One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

[Naftali] But Khrushchev was absolutely a believer

in the possibilities of Marxist-Leninism.

[applause]

[in Russian] You are an advocate of capitalism,

and I am an advocate of communism. So let's compete.

[dreamy music playing]

[Naftali, in English] Central to Khrushchev's worldview,

the Soviet Union was superior ideologically

and inferior militarily.

He believed the only way to make up

for the gap between American power and Soviet power

was to scare Americans about the Soviet Union

and to make them think the Soviet Union was more powerful than it actually was.

[in Russian] We said we had a 50-megaton bomb, that's correct.

[inaudible]

[dramatic music playing]

[Naftali, in English] It's why Khrushchev engages in a disinformation campaign

to exaggerate the number of Soviet missiles

that can reach the United States.

[speaking in Russian]

[Naftali] Khrushchev famously said, "We can produce missiles like sausages."

And the American elite believed the Russians.

[inaudible]

[in Russian] But we're not going to detonate a 100-megaton bomb

because if we detonated that bomb where it's supposed to go,

we might as well break our own windows.

- So, therefore, it's not worth it. - [crowd laughs and applauds]

{an8}[dramatic music continues]

[Graff, in English] The US government begins to move away

from this idea of urban evacuations and fallout shelters,

and into this idea

of evacuating a small number of high-ranking government officials

out into mountain bunkers and airborne command posts,

figuring that most of America will die, but the American government will live.

- [loud blast] - [poignant music playing]

[blast]

[introspective music playing]

[Ellsberg] Since the early '50s, but especially since the mid-'60s,

there have been two doomsday machines in the world,

the US and Soviet, or Russian,

which are each capable of ending most human life on Earth.

A federal judge today ordered the New York Times

{an8}to suspend temporarily publication of a series of reports

{an8}based on a secret Pentagon study of how the United States became involved

{an8}in the Vietnamese War.

{an8}[reporter] Daniel Ellsberg, the man named as the source

of the Pentagon copy that appeared in the New York Times,

turned himself in today to federal authorities.

I can't regret having done what I knew at the time to be what I ought to do,

my duty as a citizen.

[Ellsberg, present day] When I released the Pentagon Papers,

I figured, "Well, I'm gonna go to prison for the rest of my life for this."

"So, why stop at this? Let me..."

"I'll figure on putting out what I think is much more important."

All my nuclear files.

They would, I hoped, lessen the likelihood of nuclear war.

So I copied also, in addition to the Pentagon Papers,

everything in my top secret safe.

My notes on nuclear war plans,

in hopes of raising people's consciousness as to the dangers we are living with.

{an8}The defense budget should be cut more than in half,

{an8}rather than being increased right now,

{an8}but starting with the most dangerous weapons, the ICBMs.

[introspective music playing]

[Ellsberg] I saw a nuclear crisis coming at us.

{an8}I see very little chance now of reducing that.

For the last several years,

I've been focusing on trying to eliminate US land-based ICBMs,

intercontinental ballistic missiles.

These are the hair trigger on a doomsday machine.

I do have to say now, in this point in my life,

the chance of actually affecting things

is lower even than I thought it was.

And yet, can it be worse than risking your life, your freedom,

for a very low chance of saving lives?

And the answer is yes.

Of course it can be worth it.

There are lessons we learned during the Cold War

we have conveniently forgotten,

including how unstable a crisis can become,

and how fast.

And this is what happened in 1962.

[Kornbluh] On October 14th,

the U2 plane took these pictures.

{an8}There was now clear proof that the Russians had secretly placed

{an8}intermediate-range nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba.

The days that followed were the most dangerous days

the world has ever faced then and now.

[tense music builds]

[music fades]

[closing theme music playing]