The UnXplained

Shadowy assassins

who vanish into the crowd.

Double agents who sell their own country's secrets.

And coded messages hiding in plain sight.

Throughout history, spies have played

a unique role in shaping world events.

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

a government or perhaps even a single leader.

Their covert orders could range from

simply collecting information

or something as deadly serious

as assassinating an enemy.

Secrecy is critical to a spy's success,

so how do these masters of deception fulfill

their assignments without getting caught?

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

The CIA, MI6

and MSS.

These are the foreign intelligence services

for some of the most powerful countries in the world.

These agencies, and hundreds of others,

engage in clandestine operations

to aid and protect their countries.

For many, their mission is to gather

the most closely guarded secrets of their enemies,

and their secret weapons are often...

spies.

Spies are

utilized by states to collect

intelligence that is necessary to advance policymaking.

From figuring out whether an adversary

has nuclear weapons, to figuring out whether

a leader of a foreign state is about to die.

We have intelligence agencies that specialize in

visual intelligence, say satellite imagery.

We have intelligence agencies that specialize in

the interception of communications.

But there are spies that more commonly

come to mind, which is

the people at the front line, the individuals

willing to put their lives at risk to share information.

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

because the spy world is kind of its own domain.

It remains this kind of puzzle or mystery

that most people will not have exposure to

beyond those few moments we read about in the newspaper.

Hollywood movies and books and TV

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

That is nothing like real espionage.

The purpose of espionage

is to be so secret

that nobody even knows you're there.

True professional espionage

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

That makes your average spy

much more like an average person.

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

One day, we're hunting terrorists.

Sometime later, we're exchanging information in secret.

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

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

It's an incredible

web of information and impact

that the average person is not aware of.

How can we ever hope

to understand the mysterious world of espionage

if it remains completely hidden from us?

Well, every so often, information does come to light

that illustrates how a single spy

can change the course of history.

A massive scientific complex is established in secret

for the research and development of a truly devastating weapon.

This laboratory becomes ground zero

for the most consequential

top secret military program ever devised.

It's called the Manhattan Project.

The Manhattan Project was this top secret,

federally funded $2 billion program

to explore whether it was possible to develop

an atomic weapon

in the midst of World War II.

And they built this secret city in Los Alamos,

gathering together chemists and engineers

and physicists and other scientists

into one spot so that these scientists can collaborate

and fully converse inside the secret city

to build this weapon.

As history shows, these scientists

would prove successful in creating the atomic bomb.

But little did they know at the time

there was a spy among them,

sharing the program's most intimate secrets.

His codename was "Rest,"

but his identity has since been revealed

to be a German physicist named Klaus Fuchs.

Klaus came from Germany,

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

he quickly got a job

within the Manhattan Program in Los Alamos.

And, unknown to the people there,

Fuchs began to share information

with the Soviets about the program.

A U.S. counterintelligence program

that involved decrypting Soviet communications

revealed the scope of the information

that Fuchs collected and shared with the Soviets.

In his particular role

as a lead scientist within the program and access

to the development of the bomb,

he was able to share

pretty detailed technical information about

the science that goes into

the generation and enrichment of plutonium,

which served a huge deal in advancing

the Russians' capacities in those spaces.

And he collected intelligence and shared intelligence

for about seven years, until he was revealed.

The greatest find in the history of espionage

is the theft of the atomic secret.

Klaus Fuchs pretty much shared the recipe

with the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was able to get a nuclear weapon

roughly five years before they could have

done it on their own.

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

If one spy can alter the course of atomic history,

how else has espionage shaped our world?

Has secret intelligence informed nearly every

major event in human history?

You have to assume

that you only know about five percent

of all espionage operations.

Every negotiation, every diplomatic agreement,

every transition of power from one president

to another president, for 167 countries,

all over the world, over the course of decades,

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

So now, when you start to ask yourself

about how the Soviet Union fell,

and you start to ask yourself about

how the end of Afghanistan happened,

and the winning of Gulf War II,

and the taking down of Saddam Hussein,

you start to see these major instances in history

where intelligence worked or failed.

So, when you try to consider

the impact that espionage has had

over the long-term history of the world,

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

nobody knows about

except for "need to know" secret circles.

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

that just a single spy or intelligence source

can have on world events.

And the irony is that

we often don't know

what that impact is until many years

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

Even historians looking back

on historical events or geopolitical movements,

may never have access

to the behind-the-scenes intrigue and espionage

that took place, or the machinations

of various intelligence organizations.

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

This sleek, modern building

houses over 7,000 unique artifacts

from the history of espionage.

And among them are ingenious devices

created to hide things,

record secret conversations,

and some are even meant to kill.

The International Spy Museum

houses the world's largest collection

of intelligence and espionage-related artifacts.

We have all kinds of ingenious devices

to do all type of different types of stuff.

So, a lot of the gadgets that we see

are there to try to help

to be a more effective agent,

to recruit spies better, to steal secrets better.

And we've got a fantastic

James Bond collection.

Some of the James Bond movies

have actually influenced the development

of gadgets in the CIA.

CIA directors come out of the movie theater

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

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

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

the gadgets in fiction and in reality.

When you look at spy gadgets, a lot of them

are weapons of one thing or another.

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

So, the KGB came up with a lipstick gun,

which was a little 4.5 millimeter bullet

that could be fired from a lipstick tube.

The CIA had an ice gun,

which fired a super-cool needle of ice,

preferably through your opponent's heart.