Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny 1x2

1. - Throughout time, governments and the people

2. who work for them have done strange and even terrible

3. things in the name of national interest.

4. Tonight, from a top secret facility built

5. to correct a US blind spot—

6. - The CIA now have eyes and ears

7. on the third of the world that it can't usually reach.

8. —to a bio lab testing deadly toxins on US soil—

9. - It develops extreme programs that run from the apocalyptic

10. to the absurd.

11. —and a city constructed beneath Arctic ice,

12. made with a sinister purpose.

13. - This site is largely forgotten.

14. And the US government kind of wants it to be forgotten.

15. - These places are all known as black sites.

16. Now it's time to bring them out of the shadows.

17. Every government has them, and none likes

18. to admit that they exist.

19. But sometimes clandestine bases

20. do get exposed by tragedy.

21. - TWA flight 514 is flying from Indianapolis, Indiana,

22. to Washington, DC.

23. Now, as the plane is getting closer

24. and closer to its destination in DC, there's a huge storm.

25. Just after 11:00 AM, the plane drops altitude way too quickly,

26. ends up crashing into the side of a mountain

27. on the Virginia border.

28. All 92 people aboard the plane die on impact.

29. - As the rescuers get to the top of this mountain

30. and start searching for survivors,

31. poring through the wreckage,

32. they find, puzzlingly, that they're not

33. the first people on-site.

34. - They see cars nearby, in the middle of the wilderness,

35. lined up like— like a parking lot.

36. And neatly parked cars don't belong halfway up a mountain.

37. - It doesn't take long for journalists

38. to realize that there's a whole infrastructure

39. atop this mountain that isn't on any map.

40. - The land actually belongs to the Department of Defense,

41. but the DOD just claims that,

42. oh, it's nothing but a weather-monitoring station.

43. There's nothing special about this area.

44. - But journalists keep pushing to figure out

45. what secrets this Virginia mountain is hiding.

46. - And eventually, in Senate hearings a year

47. after the crash, the Pentagon finally

48. confirms the existence and the purpose of this black site.

49. - It's called Mount Weather,

50. and its true purpose is surprising.

51. It's a top secret doomsday bunker.

52. - It wasn't always secret.

53. It started out as a weather observatory.

54. Then for a brief period in the 1920s,

55. it was President Calvin Coolidge's summer home.

56. - The spot doesn't stay idyllic for long.

57. In 1949, the Soviet Union detonates

58. its first nuclear bomb, and Mount Weather's mission

59. becomes far more strategic.

60. - You have to remember that this is right after

61. World War II, which means the beginning of the Cold War.

62. And thanks to fears around a possible Soviet nuclear attack,

63. President Truman makes plans in the late '40s to make every

64. American home, workplace—

65. basically, everywhere in the country—survivable.

66. - You have, like, the duck-and-cover drills

67. for the public to help them survive atomic warfare.

68. But then separately, the government

69. is thinking hard about how the president survives,

70. how the government functions continue.

71. - They decide to build three massive nuclear fortresses

72. to ensure what they now start to call

73. the continuity of government.

74. One of these immense fortresses is Mount Weather.

75. - To create this base, they need to hollow out a mountain

76. and keep it a secret.

77. So in 1953, work begins on the project.

78. Thousands of tons of greenstone are excavated

79. from the interior of the mountain.

80. - And it costs over a billion dollars.

81. And when it's finished, it is a 600,000-square-foot

82. underground city and has everything ranging

83. from a hospital to restaurants to a movie theater.

84. - The entrance is protected by a 20-feet,

85. 34-ton blast door that is 5 feet thick,

86. and it takes 15 minutes to open.

87. It's under 2,000 feet of granite.

88. So you could fire missiles at it all day long,

89. and the people inside would barely even notice.

90. - Its construction and its activities are classified,

91. and its staff is sworn to secrecy.

92. - While the community of Berryville, Virginia,

93. helps build it and staff it,

94. the public at large has no idea that this facility exists.

95. - Then in the 1960s, partly thanks

96. to the Cuban missile crisis, Mount Weather is expanded.

97. - Mount Weather has its own communications facilities,

98. its own water treatment plant, its own fire department,

99. in fact, even text messaging

100. and one of the world's first computers.

101. That technology begins for the first time at Mount Weather

102. as the way for the doomsday bunkers to communicate

103. amongst themselves.

104. - With its cover blown

105. thanks to the crash of flight 514,

106. Mount Weather is pretty much mothballed.

107. That all changes on 9/11.

108. - Government decides to reactivate

109. and expand Mount Weather.

110. The Defense Department never mentioned it officially

111. anymore, and the complex's plans and operations

112. are all classified to this day.

113. - As far as we know, Mount Weather today

114. is as active and advanced a facility as it ever has been.

115. - It is now believed to sprawl over 700,000 square feet.

116. That's the size of four baseball fields.

117. So it supposedly can hold as many as 2,000 lucky people.

118. - Mount Weather was built to survive

119. a Soviet nuclear bomb attack.

120. Over in Russia, a black site built to make those bombs

121. would also be exposed by tragedy.

122. This time, a terrible accident is covered up for a decade.

123. - It was a fall day in September 1957,

124. in a village called Kyshtym in southern Siberia.

125. The villages are suddenly shocked by a vast noise,

126. and the sky turns to a completely

127. different shade of blue.

128. - When this occurs,

129. it spreads panic through the local people.

130. And even worse, the government officials

131. descend upon the village,

132. and they start killing livestock, burning crops.

133. Things are getting incredibly strange.

134. - Evacuations begin.

135. Several hundred villages, several hundred

136. thousand people, and they're all being evacuated.

137. They're not being informed, and so they're left

138. with nothing but question marks.

139. - Because it's behind the iron curtain,

140. in the West, we have no idea.

141. So it's a complete mystery as to what's going on there.

142. - In the years that follow, rumors circulate

143. that people are beginning to experience

144. unexplained illnesses,

145. pregnant women are giving birth to children

146. that have obvious birth defects,

147. Kyshtym and the 20,000-square-mile area

148. around it being a zone of death,

149. and that nobody could go there

150. because the entire area was contaminated.

151. - The real story of this disaster

152. remains hidden for another 16 years,

153. until a top Russian scientist named Zhores Medvedev defects

154. to London and tells all.

155. - Medvedev is a problem as far as the KGB is concerned.

156. He's critical of the government.

157. He is a troublemaker.

158. And so as soon as he leaves Russia,

159. they cancel his citizenship.

160. He can't come back.

161. - When he feels no obligation to the authority

162. of the Soviet government, he begins to speak out.

163. - For Zhores to come to London to write whatever he wants

164. and to get it published, you know, he became

165. a truth revealer and truth teller.

166. - And one of the things that he comments about

167. is this incident that occurs at Kyshtym

168. in Siberia in September 1957.

169. - Medvedev reveals that the Kyshtym disaster

170. was caused by an accident at the top secret

171. nuclear processing plant called Mayak,

172. just 8 miles away.

173. - The Russians have been caught flat-footed

174. by the end of the Second World War

175. and the introduction of nuclear weapons

176. at the conclusion of that conflict.

177. And so the Soviets are desperately attempting

178. to build a nuclear arsenal of their own.

179. They're desperately trying to catch up to the West.

180. - So the Soviets install a network

181. of weapons-grade plutonium processing plants

182. across the vast country.

183. Mayak is the most notorious,

184. but it's constructed at breakneck speed

185. by an unconventional workforce.

186. - Mayak's built by 40,000 prisoners,

187. all shipped in from gulags, and it's huge.

188. We're talking 35 square miles with an exclusion zone

189. around it that's three times bigger than that.

190. - Mayak has five nuclear reactors

191. producing plutonium, refining it,

192. and turning it into weapons.

193. - Even though there's not a big city nearby,

194. there are hundreds of small villages

195. and settlements like Kyshtym,

196. places that, when you combine them,

197. have tens of thousands of civilians in them.

198. - In 1957, disaster strikes.

199. - The cooling system for a cistern of radioactive waste

200. at Mayak fails.

201. It explodes with the force of 70 tons of TNT.

202. - And that explosion showers the surrounding area

203. with irradiated material.

204. This encompasses an area covering

205. 217 separate settlements, and over 250,000 people

206. are forcibly evacuated without explanation.

207. - Medvedev's revelations are central because without him,

208. we wouldn't know any of this.

209. - Then 20 years later, there's a new twist.

210. Declassified documents show that the CIA knew all along

211. and kept it secret.

212. - US government had learned of the horrific events

213. within months of the explosion at Mayak,

214. but they kept quiet about it because they think that news

215. of the tragedy might turn public opinion away

216. from the US's own fledgling nuclear industry.

217. - Imagine planning to place a vast nuclear arsenal

218. under a polar ice cap and then pretending

219. something entirely different.

220. That's just what the US did at the height of the Cold War

221. at a black site in Greenland.

222. - It's 1956, and the US Department of Defense

223. releases a documentary about this groundbreaking

224. polar research station in Greenland,

225. 800 miles south of the North Pole.

226. - The United States Army has established

227. an unprecedented nuclear-powered

228. Arctic research center.

229. - In the Arctic, you have to contend with sometimes

230. minus 20 to minus 40 conditions.

231. It's just an incredibly difficult

232. environment to operate in.

233. - An army colonel named John Kerkering

234. is tasked with constructing a polar city.

235. It's housed in huge covered tunnels

236. with dormitories, a hospital,

237. even a chapel and a barbershop.

238. - The documentary presents the polar research station

239. as being well ahead of its time,

240. primarily because of the fact that it

241. is powered entirely by the world's first

242. portable nuclear reactor.

243. - The name of the base is Camp Century.

244. It's an ambitious project.

245. They put a nuclear reactor in one of the most brutal

246. and difficult environments on Earth.

247. As wild as that is, that's not even

248. the craziest thing about this.

249. - Although only a few people know it,

250. Camp Century is just a cover story.

251. The real plan here is to construct

252. an immense nuclear launch site deep under the snow.

253. Its name: Project Iceworm.

254. - When Project Iceworm was envisioned,

255. there were a lot of legitimate fears

256. that we were on the precipice of nuclear war.

257. - In the 1950s, the threat of nuclear war

258. couldn't be more serious.

259. Iceworm will give the West an opportunity to survive it all.

260. - Their idea is to have hundreds of nuclear warheads

261. all prepped, all ready to go,

262. in the tunnels under the ice—

263. a full-on nuclear arsenal.

264. - If the Russians initiated a nuclear first strike

265. on America, there would be this secondary base

266. in Greenland that could fire a retaliatory counterattack

267. into Russia.

268. - The Camp Century cover story is so convincing,

269. it fools the Russians.

270. - They did actually do experiments there

271. and work on science, but it was basically

272. a test bed to see what else we could do under the Arctic ice.

273. - In the end, the real challenge

274. to the success of Project Iceworm

275. doesn't come from being discovered

276. but from the landscape itself.

277. - The Greenland ice cap is so dynamic,

278. you just can't maintain a permanent structure

279. underneath the ice.

280. - The base was being sandwiched

281. between the ice walls as they constricted

282. because every year, the ice moves another 6 feet.

283. - You've got 600 nuclear warheads

284. and a nuclear reactor.

285. You cannot put them in shifting ice.

286. - And so Camp Century is abandoned in 1967.

287. - They end up pulling the plug on the entire thing,

288. and they just walk away.

289. - I think the line they used—

290. we'll just open the door and let it snow.

291. And they thought it would be kind of permanently

292. entombed in this ice and be safe in that way.

293. - Although the nuclear reactor at Camp Century was removed,

294. the material that was left behind

295. is still dangerous to the environment.

296. - If the story of a top secret

297. US black site in Greenland sounds improbable,

298. consider our next case,

299. a covert military training camp hidden in Colorado.

300. - It's a dark and snowy night in Colorado,

301. about 50 kilometers west of Denver.

302. You have a military personnel transport

303. that's leaving a secret base,

304. en route to this small local airfield.

305. The bus is moving under cover of darkness

306. to keep this mission covert and its occupants classified.

307. The bus ends up skidding and crashing

308. on the icy Colorado roads, and the delay

309. adds hours to the trip.

310. - When it arrives, the sun is just coming up,

311. and the employees of the airfield

312. are beginning to arrive for their workday.

313. - Armed men suddenly herd them at gunpoint into a hangar

314. and swear them to secrecy.

315. But through a gap in the hangar door,

316. some of them witness an unexpected sight.

317. They see 15 men with East Asian features,

318. wearing camouflage fatigues,

319. prepare to board a cargo jet that has blackout windows.

320. - Foreign personnel at a Colorado base?

321. Men in black waving guns at innocent witnesses?

322. What is happening here?

323. - There's a little bit of initial whispering about it,

324. and there's some reporting in the local press,

325. but then the story is completely suppressed.

326. There's no further reporting about it.

327. It's not until decades later that the reality

328. of what was actually happening there is revealed.

329. - According to documents declassified in 1974,

330. the airfield employees came across a secret CIA operation

331. targeting Communist China.

332. - In the early 1950s, the Chinese expand to

333. and envelop Tibet into

334. the Greater People's Republic of China.

335. - When its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama,

336. is put under house arrest, Tibetans begin to organize

337. against Chinese occupation.

338. - As Chinese domination began,

339. Tibetans formed into resistance groups,

340. and they turned to the United States.

341. And the CIA saw an opportunity to gain

342. an upper hand against the People's Republic of China.

343. - In 1958, the CIA sets up this base in Colorado to begin

344. training the Tibetan rebels.

345. It's much easier and much more effective

346. if you can clandestinely move them to the United States

347. and give them training here.

348. - The site in Colorado is known as Camp Hale.

349. - Tibet is, of course, in the high mountains

350. in the foothills of the Himalayas,

351. and so is Camp Hale in the Colorado Rockies—

352. similar altitude, similar mountainous terrain.

353. And it was sufficiently remote,

354. so a couple hundred Tibetans could filter into this camp

355. without too many questions among the local populace.

356. - In 1959, the trained Tibetans

357. are now ready for action.

358. They parachute into their homeland

359. on a top secret mission

360. to help extract the Dalai Lama.

361. - They are taking literally the spiritual leader of Tibet

362. and trying to smuggle him to safety.

363. The way they do that is by moving him

364. through a clandestine underground railroad

365. going from home to home, village to village.

366. That's a treacherous path not just because of the terrain,

367. but also, they have to sneak past the sentries

368. and border guards that are manned

369. by the Chinese Communists.

370. - Against the odds, the rescue succeeds.

371. Over the next five years, 300 trained Tibetan fighters

372. take on a series of daring missions,

373. from photographing military sites

374. to attacking Chinese government installations.

375. - Despite the bravery of the Tibetan resistance,

376. they are not ultimately successful, even with US help,

377. in throwing off Chinese domination.

378. - So Camp Hale is just quietly closed.

379. Training there quietly ceases.

380. - Some of the most lethal weapons ever devised

381. are chemical and biological.

382. And the US has a top secret facility

383. in Utah to create them.

384. But when something goes very wrong there in 1968,

385. it risks the lives of thousands of citizens.

386. The story of this black site begins

387. with a declaration of war.

388. - The US has just been attacked at Pearl Harbor,

389. and it's desperate to find a way to hit back.

390. It decides to build a testing ground

391. to develop the weapons that will turn the tide of the war.

392. - The military grabs

393. over a million square miles of desert

394. just 80 miles from Salt Lake City.

395. It is one of the most isolated parts of the US,

396. nothing there but rattlesnakes and wild horses.

397. And they build one of the most secretive

398. government facilities ever devised.

399. It's called Dugway Proving Ground.

400. - Much of Dugway is basically

401. like being on the moon or Mars.

402. Its security comes from the fact

403. that it's so far away from anything

404. that the effort it takes to get there

405. would be noticed long before you got to the fence.

406. - The first weapon that undergoes development at Dugway

407. is a weapon system that can be used

408. to destroy Japanese cities.

409. - American architect who actually lived in Japan

410. is given a team of prisoners who actually create

411. an at-scale replica of Japanese villages

412. in downtown Tokyo so they can test the M69 incendiary bomb.

413. They test over and over again until they can perfect

414. the chain reaction that maximizes

415. the M69's destruction.

416. - And then on the night of March 9 and 10, 1945,

417. M69 incendiary clusters that were developed at Dugway

418. are used for the first time effectively.

419. - They hit back for Pearl Harbor

420. by firebombing Tokyo.

421. And it works.

422. - The firestorm burned out the entire

423. Sumida district of downtown Tokyo

424. and killed 120,000 people.

425. The argument could be made that the M69

426. incendiary cluster was a vastly more deadly weapon

427. than the nuclear weapon.

428. - Dugway has proved itself deadly effective.

429. And so after World War II ends,

430. the secret facility is steadily expanded

431. and deployed in the Cold War.

432. - So Dugway was a major part of the biological

433. and chemical weapons programs for the US.

434. - Dugway starts to develop what it calls

435. biological warfare agents in a range of extreme programs

436. that run from the apocalyptic to the absurd.

437. - They're developing anthrax; dirty bombs;

438. radioactive fallout; odorless, paralyzing gases;

439. even mutant microbes.

440. All the most dastardly things you can imagine

441. are being created here at Dugway.

442. - All attempting to disable huge amounts of people

443. and all highly classified.

444. - So one of the programs that the US had

445. was to use insects as your tools of warfare.

446. - The idea is to load biting insects with bacteria

447. or viruses and then drop them as disease agents

448. on a target population.

449. - Now, the insects never worked out,

450. but it really goes to show what they were willing to do

451. at Dugway to try to execute their mission

452. of being on the cutting edge of biological warfare.

453. - But one spring morning in 1968, disaster strikes,

454. and the locals awake to a scene straight out of a horror movie.

455. - Farmers find their livestock dead or dying in the fields.

456. - Some are dying. Others are paralyzed.

457. Some are foaming at the mouth.

458. And it's happening across the region.

459. - Immediately, the finger points

460. to the secretive facility nearby.

461. - It was pretty easy to connect the dots here.

462. - In the face of this kind of evidence,

463. even the military can't keep its secret forever.

464. It takes a year of pressure, but they finally

465. admit that Dugway is involved.

466. - A Pentagon official explains to the press

467. that the sheep were killed by a test gone wrong.

468. An aircraft malfunctioned,

469. dropping its load at the wrong altitude.

470. 320 gallons of VX nerve gas is spread by the wind

471. over local ranches.

472. - VX nerve agent is a terrifying thing.

473. A few milliliters in gaseous form can kill a grown man.

474. - Imagine what it would have done

475. if it got to Salt Lake City, which is only 80 miles away.

476. - The Dugway sheep incident

477. comes at a time of public protest

478. over US foreign policy.

479. - There was a court of public opinion

480. during the era of the war in Vietnam.

481. We shouldn't be fighting in Southeast Asia using napalm

482. and Agent Orange and all of these other chemicals

483. that will eventually pressure Nixon to disavow

484. the use of weapons like this.

485. - In 1969, President Nixon signs a statement

486. renouncing US use of lethal biological weapons

487. and limiting its use of chemical weapons.

488. Despite that,

489. Dugway continues to operate.

490. - The fact is, we have to understand

491. these horrifying chemicals and the threat they pose,

492. and that means there will always be a black site

493. just like Dugway studying them somewhere.

494. - We all know the physician's creed:

495. first, do no harm.

496. But 87 years ago, a Russian doctor

497. is given a mission in a top secret lab

498. to achieve exactly the opposite.

499. - On the outskirts of Moscow is a nondescript

500. concrete building, unremarkable to look at,

501. ignored by people that pass by it every day.

502. And no one knows it at the time,

503. but inside is a chemical and medical laboratory.

504. The site has had many names,

505. but now it has come to be known as Lab X.

506. - In 1938, Stalin himself

507. assigns chemist Grigory Mairanovsky

508. to take over Lab X and to come up

509. with the perfect way of killing,

510. to create methods that are silent,

511. untraceable, undetectable, and officially deniable.

512. - Mairanovsky develops narcotics

513. and psychotropic substances.

514. He tests new poisons like sodium cyanide,

515. colchicine, and curare.

516. - Mairanovsky would need human test subjects

517. for this awful research.

518. But he could just pick up the phone or fill out a form,

519. get a hundred gulag prisoners delivered the next day.

520. Almost certainly, he worked on captured Germans as well.

521. - He's literally using them as guinea pigs,

522. injecting them with chemical solutions

523. and then timing how long it takes for them to die.

524. - Mairanovsky is very quickly nicknamed by his superiors

525. the Doctor of Death

526. and protected behind the walls of a black site

527. that does not officially exist.

528. - For decades, what happens at Lab X remains a mystery.

529. But when the USSR collapses in 1991,

530. a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer

531. named Pavel Sudoplatov

532. reveals shocking details about this black site.

533. - Sudoplatov, sort of a career secret policeman.

534. Not just an assassin and a killer;

535. he's a boss of assassins and killers.

536. Stalin needs some messy work done,

537. Sudoplatov is kind of on the short list

538. of people you talk to.

539. He was rumored to have been part of the team

540. that set up the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

541. - Sudoplatov reveals methods Mairanovsky devised at Lab X:

542. cyanide-loaded bullets, ingested powders,

543. and injections at routine medical checkups.

544. - Stalin had countless enemies,

545. but what's incredible is that

546. over the course of five years,

547. it's estimated that up to 100 of his political rivals

548. were killed by the techniques that were perfected at Lab X.

549. - Sudoplatov also reveals that the success of Lab X

550. brings about the Doctor of Death's own downfall.

551. - In the early 1950s, Stalin is getting paranoid

552. about his grip on power.

553. He actually starts to fear that Mairanovsky's lethal poisons

554. are going to be used on him.

555. So in 1951, Stalin accuses Mairanovsky,

556. along with 39 other Jewish doctors,

557. of planning his assassination.

558. It becomes known as the Doctors' Plot,

559. and he imprisons them all, which is his MO.

560. Joseph liked to throw everybody in jail.

561. - Mairanovsky is given a choice.

562. Confess, and you'll get 10 years.

563. You know, don't confess, and we might just have to shoot you.

564. - He's nearly beaten to death.

565. He actually survives 10 years in a Russian prison

566. before he's released by Khrushchev

567. and flees to the southern part of Russia, to Dagestan,

568. to live out the rest of his life.

569. - The Doctor of Death dies in obscurity in 1964,

570. but his methods live on.

571. - Russia's regimes continue to embrace

572. Lab X's officially deniable methods of toxic assassination.

573. - In 1959, Ukrainian politician Stepan Bandera

574. is assassinated with a cyanide bullet.

575. In 1978, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov

576. is stabbed with a poisoned umbrella point.

577. - That's nothing compared to Putin.

578. Since 2000, almost two dozen of his critics

579. have died from apparent poisonings.

580. - In 2006, you have former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko

581. killed by radioactivity after being dosed

582. with polonium-laced green tea.

583. And then, most famously, Alexei Navalny,

584. who was a vocal critic of Putin's regime

585. and actually ran against Putin,

586. was poisoned with Novichok in 2020.

587. - Many experts believe that even as we read headlines today

588. about Vladimir Putin killing his political rivals today,

589. the actual origins of the chemical components

590. that he's using were perfected in Lab X in the 1950s.

591. - Black sites aren't only designed to conceal secrets.

592. Some are built to steal them,

593. including one notorious project in the Australian outback.

594. - It's 1966, and America is spending millions

595. to win the Space Race.

596. - Russia was racing to put someone on the moon,

597. and we had to beat them and assert our dominance in that.

598. So the American government partnered

599. with the Australian government to build

600. a space research facility.

601. - The facility is known as Pine Gap,

602. located in the center of Australia.

603. And it's staffed by about 400 American employees

604. and their families.

605. - But that's not the real story.

606. - It's not a space research facility.

607. It's a global monitoring station run by the CIA.

608. - The site receives data to assess

609. Soviet missile capabilities.

610. - America needs a location

611. from which to observe the skies

612. above the mid-Pacific,

613. the part of the globe they can't see from North America.

614. - The truth, known only to its workers at the time,

615. is that Pine Gap will be a vital overseas spy facility.

616. - Pine Gap allows them the ability

617. to monitor spy satellites

618. moving in the Eastern Hemisphere

619. over Russia and China.

620. - The CIA now have eyes and ears

621. on the third of the world that it can't usually reach.

622. - The true power of Pine Gap is its location,

623. bang in the middle of the Australian desert.

624. - It's over 500 miles from the coast.

625. So spy planes and ships from foreign countries

626. are unable to intercept any of the data

627. that's traveling to the facility.

628. - The remoteness of the location is actually perfect.

629. - Eventually Pine Gap's cover story is blown,

630. not by a journalist or whistleblower

631. but by the leader of Australia's government.

632. - A new prime minister is elected,

633. named Gough Whitlam.

634. And he learns the truth of the facility

635. when he takes on the role.

636. - Gough Whitlam comes to office,

637. and he objects to the idea of Australia

638. being host to this nest of US spies.

639. - Prime Minister Whitlam really was on this crusade

640. to shut this facility down.

641. - He's the first Australian leader

642. to question the US having such a potentially

643. powerful facility on his land.

644. - When the Australian prime minister goes public,

645. the White House is said to be furious.

646. No way they are giving up Pine Gap,

647. and they get the UK's secret service, MI6, to help.

648. - Whitlam plans to flat-out cancel

649. the agreements made with the US and close down Pine Gap.

650. But he's suddenly summoned by the governor-general,

651. Sir John Kerr.

652. - The British governor-general found this very archaic

653. British law and used that as a way to fire

654. the Australian prime minister.

655. - Plunging Australia into the deepest constitutional crisis

656. in its history.

657. - But while Whitlam stays sacked,

658. Pine Gap stays operational.

659. - The Whitlam problem is solved,

660. and the CIA continues to use Pine Gap

661. to monitor half the world.

662. - Since the end of the Cold War in 1991,

663. all the way through the war on terror in 2001,

664. the base has been continually ramped up.

665. And today it's as vital as ever

666. to the US military machine.

667. - America's first president had a Virginia estate

668. famously known as Mount Vernon.

669. Part of it is now a popular tourist spot named Fort Hunt.

670. Back in World War II, it served a much darker purpose.

671. - The national park at Fort Hunt

672. has a direct link to America's founding father

673. and was also a Confederate stronghold in the Civil War.

674. - One day, a curious tourist is walking around the site

675. and asked one of the park rangers

676. what happened here during the Second World War.

677. And the park ranger was caught off guard by this question

678. and said, well, I'm not sure, but I'm going to have

679. to look into the matter.

680. - The Park Service manages to track down the men

681. with the answers, veterans who have been sworn

682. to secrecy their whole lives.

683. But 60 years after the end of the war,

684. they share the truth about Fort Hunt.

685. Its code name was its address, PO Box 1142.

686. And during World War II, it was a black site prison.

687. - The prisoners of war that are being incarcerated

688. at PO Box 1142 were high-ranking German officers

689. captured off of the battlefields

690. of Europe and North Africa who

691. could provide very useful intelligence information.

692. - That Nazi prisoners are secretly brought to the US

693. is surprising enough.

694. But what's more, the interrogations

695. at this black site are the opposite of what you'd expect.

696. - They did the most primal thing

697. that we need as human beings: they allowed them to feel safe.

698. You inspire someone to share the truth

699. before they have an opportunity to lie.

700. And what they did to do that is, they treated them well.

701. - These Germans are treated to luxury—

702. fine clothes, cocktails,

703. trips to the swimming pool, and movies—

704. because the whole site is rigged with hidden microphones.

705. The bugs are placed in the bedrooms,

706. the mess hall, even the trees.

707. - Comfort rises, shields come down,

708. mouths open up.

709. - This was a bold move.

710. Counterintuitive interrogation is not new,

711. but there are few examples of it

712. being done in quite this way.

713. - There is such secrecy behind this camp

714. because there would have been a complete public outcry

715. if the public knew how well we were treating Nazis.

716. - The predominantly Jewish American interrogators

717. are refugees chosen for their fluency in German.

718. In this way, vital intelligence

719. is secretly extracted from the Nazis.

720. The most astonishing is the name

721. of a location that changes the course of the war

722. for one ally, Britain.

723. - The United Kingdom had survived

724. the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.

725. And then word starts to emerge

726. that something worse is coming:

727. the V-1 rocket, also known as the buzz bomb.

728. - Then, incredibly,

729. there's a breakthrough at PO Box 1142.

730. In the summer of 1943 during a chat between two

731. German naval officers in the room,

732. one of them lets slip that when the work

733. at Peenemuende prevails,

734. Germany will be victorious.

735. - When allied photoreconnaissance aircraft

736. then fly down and photograph Peenemuende,

737. they hit the jackpot.

738. - The island is home to the secret rocket factory

739. where the V-1 is being built.

740. The Allies immediately hit it with everything they've got.

741. - 596 Lancasters hit Peenemuende in one night

742. and absolutely destroyed the entire complex,

743. forced the enemy to move all assembly underground.

744. And that's not how you win a war.

745. - This one piece of intelligence,

746. secretly obtained from two chatting Nazis

747. at PO Box 1142, delays the Nazi plans.

748. - This intelligence literally saved

749. hundreds of thousands of lives.

750. As they always say, loose lips sink ships.

751. - When the war ends,

752. PO Box 1142 is decommissioned.

753. Every reference to its mission is classified,

754. and its interrogators are sworn to secrecy.

755. - Fort Hunt then kind of packs everything up,

756. and this chapter of its history is largely forgotten.

757. And the US government kind of wants it to be forgotten.

758. And that's because the operation

759. that was carried out there

760. was something that violated our obligations

761. in the treatment of prisoners of war.

762. We were not permitted to eavesdrop.

763. - However controversial the tactics were,

764. they are now part of the history

765. that tourists come to enjoy at Fort Hunt.

766. - Black sites can be anywhere,

767. carefully cloaked to keep people out

768. and their missions within.

769. But even though it can take many years,

770. somehow their secrets find a way to the light.

771. I'm David Duchovny.

772. Thanks for watching "Secrets Declassified."