Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny

Throughout time, governments and the people

who work for them have done strange and even terrible

things in the name of national interest.

Tonight, soldiers spiked with dangerous drugs.

No one's going to volunteer to test brain-frying chemicals.

And citizens with unusual gifts recruited to spy.

Psychic spies would be able to unlock Soviet secrets.

What about channeling an enemy's

deepest fears to defeat them?

The viet cong began hearing these disembodied,

echoing voices.

These soldiers are terrified that their very

worst nightmares might have come to life.

Sometimes the best weapons governments use are mind games.

Now it's time to bring these strange secrets to light.

The 1950s is a boom time for pharmaceutical companies.

They're turning out radical new psychoactive

drugs that give some in the U.S. military an idea.

Could these drugs be turned into weapons?

To find out, they decide to test them on American soldiers.

Edgewood arsenal, Maryland, headquarters

of the U.S. chemical and biological defense command.

The military is attempting to create a non-lethal weapon,

something that can incapacitate the soldiers on the other side,

but not necessarily kill them.

So at edge wood arsenal, they began developing

psychoactive compounds.

They decide that their best candidate

is this substance known as 3-quinuclidinyl

benzilate, or bz.

Bz is developed as a stomach medicine.

Side effects like confusion and hallucinations

mean it never gets fda approval.

But it's those side effects that interest the army.

Now the team faces a problem.

Where will they find people to test bz on?

The army gives them permission to recruit volunteer soldiers

from around the country.

Recruiters tell the troops they'll be testing equipment.

The edge wood team wants to record exactly what happens

to the volunteers on bz.

So they construct a mock communications outpost

and fill it with cameras to record their experiments.

The team doses four volunteers with varying

amounts of this horrific drug.

They want to see how these young men are going to react

while they're high on bz.

And they test them across a broad range of scenarios,

including simulating a poison gas attack.

The peak of the compound's physical effects

was reached within four to six hours, the peak

of mental incapacitation several hours later,

when a simulated chemical alarm sounded.

The initial results are promising.

The men are distracted.

They're disoriented.

It seems like bz is the non-lethal weapon

the army dreamed of.

Soon bz testing takes an ominous turn.

Ronald zadrozny is the soldier

given the highest dose of bz.

And this causes him to go into a drug-induced psychosis

for 36 hours, and he still has lingering effects afterwards,

which makes him nervous and panicky.

Other volunteers are also badly affected,

but the army decides the experiments should continue.

In November 1964, the edge wood team

is ready to test bz outside.

They settle on dug way proving ground as a safe space

to test this out of doors.

When you're at dug way, you are far away from prying eyes.

You're out in the middle of nowhere.

In that way, dug way is the perfect place to go.

The men suit up in the pre-dawn cold and are

then doused with the gas.

These unfortunate troops are dosed with choking amounts

of bz gas for 15 minutes.

Then these befuddled volunteers are taken for evaluation.

The test proves that bz can incapacitate soldiers,

making them unable to fight.

The army is convinced of the potential for bz weapons

on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, back at edge wood, testing on bz

variants continues.

In 1975, after details of CIA LSD experiments leak out,

president Ford instructs vp Nelson rockefeller

to investigate.

The rockefeller commission starts to go through

the army's dirty laundry.

And in June 1975, they haul army

bosses in to interrogate them about the edge wood experiments.

When the congressional investigators ask them what's

going on, they just start fessing up like boy scouts

and they tell them, like, yeah, the bz testing is ongoing

and it's been going on for years.

The things that have been done,

which are in contradiction to the statutes.

But...

The army admits that somewhere between 2,100

and 2,900 volunteers were subjected

to bz gas during the course of their experiments.

Bz is not the only drug they test.

The us army dosed some 7,000 unsuspecting

soldiers with more than 250 different chemical agents.

The volunteers aren't told what they're testing,

so there's no way they could give informed consent.

So basically, the soldiers are being treated like lab rats.

So the lawmakers are naturally furious.

In 1975, the bz research program is shut down,

but that doesn't stop U.S. intelligence

agencies from developing other ways to play mind games.

In 1968, they decided to turn the viet cong's

own weapons against them.

It's the summer of 1968, and U.S. troops

are fighting the communist viet cong

near the Cambodian border.

A north Vietnamese fighter takes deadly aim

at a vulnerable gi on patrol.

But when the communist soldier pulls the trigger,

he signs his own death warrant.

His Chinese-made ak-56 explodes on firing

killing him instantly.

The gi got lucky, but this is not a one-off.

The thing about these deadly misfires

is that they weren't accidents at all.

The extraordinary truth is that the exploding guns

are the result of a secret U.S. military operation.

Anybody who's ever fired a gun

has the same nightmare that one day they're

going to pull the trigger, and the round in the chamber

is going to blow up in their own face.

And this nightmare is exactly what

was playing through the mind of every vc combat member

during Vietnam.

It's not until 30 years later that a book

by a Vietnam vet reveals the operation,

code named eldest son.

The Vietnam studies and operations group

was charged with a mission to undermine the will

to fight of the viet cong.

The sog identified that along the ho chi minh trail,

there were several munitions cache areas where

the viet cong would resupply ammunition, actual bullets

and rounds for their guns.

The recon teams were finding these caches of ammunition.

So they come up with this brilliant idea.

And that is, rather than trying to haul

this ammo off or destroy it on sight,

why don't we just sabotage it?

But importantly, not sabotage all of it.

Sabotage some of it.

They'll make the communists afraid of their own guns

by booby trapping their bullets.

But how would they pull this off?

Sabotage is a very tricky business,

because it's part engineering and part espionage.

And that's exactly what the sog had

to do to find a way to engineer a round that

would explode, but still look like other rounds.

First, they refill the bullets with high explosive.

But there's a problem.

The most commonly available military-grade explosive

at the time actually had a white color to it

that did not match the gunpowder that was inside

the round itself.

If the communists investigate,

they'll detect the fakes.

So the sog had to create a whole new different kind

of explosive that had the same power

but matched the color of black powder.

The next challenge is how to get the sabotaged bullets back

in viet cong hands.

Sog's green beret reconnaissance patrols come

up with an ingenious solution.

So the viet cong don't suspect sabotage,

they make sure to load up only one phony bullet

in each magazine or ammo can.

We're not going to kill them one soldier at a time,

one bullet at a time.

What we're going to do is we're going

to create psychological chaos among the enemy's ranks.

And that's a pretty big win for a pretty low investment.

Eldest son is so successful in Vietnam

that the U.S. makes it part of its psychological

warfare arsenal.

It will use the tactic again years

later in Iraq and Afghanistan.

- In world war ii, the U.S. - army creates a top secret unit

whose sole job is fooling the enemy.

It calls itself the ghost army for a very good reason.

Nothing about this army is real.

It's 1944, and the United States

is preparing to take the fight to Hitler by invading

Nazi-occupied Europe.

America needs to leverage any advantage they can find.

So army chiefs turn to an industry

where the nation leads the world, show business.

The Pentagon creates the ghost army.

They're not using rifles and machine guns.

This unit will ultimately use Hollywood