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01:29remained over Europe for many years after World War II which was the belief
01:37by many military men that one day the Russians would suddenly make a move and
01:43head for the English Channel. This state of perpetual tension was called the Cold
01:50War. Now in the second half of the 20th century the United States and the Soviet
01:59Union set their intelligence services against each other in a secret and
02:03deadly game of global one-upsmanship. How many weapons did the other side have?
02:11What did they plan to do with them? Not knowing bred fear and anxiety. Not
02:17knowing drove each to build more and bigger weapons of mass destruction, racing
02:22to be ready for the day when the other would show its hand.
02:30Intelligence became the world's most precious commodity. Intelligence gathering
02:36the world's most dangerous profession. For the United States that job fell to the
02:43men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the outset of World War II the
02:51Soviet Union was the largest country on earth covering one-seventh of the planet's
02:57surface. By 1946 having absorbed territories previously held by Germany and
03:03Japan the communist nation now controlled one-sixth of the planet. Western leaders had good reason to
03:11believe that the Soviets wanted more. Only months after the Yalta agreement
03:17Premier Joseph Stalin had publicly declared that the world was too small to
03:21peacefully contain both communism and capitalism. War between the systems the
03:28Russian dictator said was inevitable. The United States brought World War II to an
03:35abrupt end with the atomic bomb. Western strategists now believed they at least held
03:42that trump card against Soviet aggression. Then one week after Stalin's ominous prediction,
03:50a ring of Russian spies was caught stealing atomic secrets in Canada. The idea that the
03:55Russians might be close to building the bombs and to shudder throughout the free world.
04:03On February 26, 1946, George Kennan, an American diplomat in Moscow and longtime Soviet observer,
04:11sent a secret yet lengthy message to his superiors in the U.S. State Department.
04:16It's known as the long telegram. It was described in considerable detail.
04:24The Russian system, where they came from, how they reacted, how they wanted to do business.
04:32And it jolted people.
04:34The 8,000-word message described America's former allies as a genuine and highly aggressive threat to the West.
04:42The Soviet economic system was internally weak, the message went on, and therefore it was essential for their survival that they be an aggressor.
04:48The Soviet-style communist system needed to acquire and exploit satellite countries in order to survive.
05:03They could not and would not stop short of total world domination.
05:08Kenan's message caused a sensation in Washington. President Harry Truman, his cabinet and military leaders, all read the telegram.
05:19Truman was already concerned with Soviet expansionism and inclined to agree with Kenan's assessment.
05:25If the Western way of life was to survive, the Soviets would have to be contained.
05:35The United States, the President knew, was the only country in the world strong enough
05:39to stand up to Russia.
05:41But in order to do this, they would need to know how strong the Soviets were, and be able
05:46to predict their next move.
05:49In 1945, with the war over, President Harry Truman had disbanded the United States foreign
05:55intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS.
06:02Now in the face of this new threat, Truman resurrected the idea of a civilian intelligence gathering
06:08agency.
06:10On July 25, 1947, he signed the National Security Act, creating the Central Intelligence Agency.
06:19The new agency was staffed almost entirely by veterans of the OSS.
06:25The first four directors would be military men.
06:31George Cannon's message had called for containment of Soviet aggression, but leadership at the
06:36new intelligence agency disagreed with that policy.
06:41The best defense they maintained was a strong offense.
06:44It was time to bring back some of the dirty tricks the OSS had developed in World War II.
06:50There were sort of two worlds of intelligence.
06:54One was intelligence gathering, traditional spies, people who meet you on park benches and
06:59try to steal documents.
07:01That was one side.
07:03The other side was covert action, which was much more aggressive, overthrowing a government,
07:08staging a coup d'etat.
07:09Or it would be psychological warfare, sending out disinformation.
07:15Covert action is riskier.
07:17There's a higher return.
07:19Once the Cold War starts, both sides realize that there's going to be a lot of back-alley
07:26action.
07:27There's going to be things happening that are not going to be on the front page of Pravda
07:33or the New York Times.
07:35On June 18, 1948, with the endorsement of President Truman, a secret and autonomous branch of the
07:44CIA was born.
07:46It was called the OPC.
07:49The Office of Policy Coordination was a wonderfully benign name to throw people off the idea that
07:56really it was the Department of Dirty Tricks.
07:58They were the covert operators.
08:00They were the hardball types who wanted to jump behind enemy lines and get behind the Iron
08:05curtain.
08:07The ultimate mission of the CIA and the OPC was to subvert the Russian hold on Eastern
08:12Europe.
08:16But in 1948, there were more immediate concerns.
08:20The Communist Party had built a strong presence in Italy, and the new agency feared the leftists
08:27might win the free elections scheduled for that spring.
08:30It was perfectly reasonable for the United States to fear that Stalin might have a master
08:36plan in which he was going to use the Communist Party in Italy and the Communist Party in France
08:41to take over those two countries.
08:43He wasn't, but the United States had no means of knowing it.
08:45The Italian communists were being financed from Moscow.
08:51Armed with cash, the CIA went to Italy determined to outspend the Russians.
08:57Politicians, newspaper publishers, and election officials were bribed.
09:02The CIA-backed Christian Democrats won the election.
09:07It was a big win for the West and soon led to more interventions in Europe.
09:14The CIA soon had a clandestine station in every country in the world.
09:18We soon had all kinds of foreign agents operating.
09:22We set up various organizations, front groups, to work with various peoples, indigenous, outcasts,
09:30exiles, providing them with money, inspiration, leadership, support.
09:37There were few limits on the OPC, but there was one basic restraint.
09:42Any and all operations were to be planned and conducted so that the responsibility for these
09:47actions could not be directly traced to the United States government.
09:54It was imperative for the credibility of U.S. foreign policy that the President or the State
09:59Department be able to plausibly deny any knowledge of such actions.
10:06Plausible deniability is the underlying definition of a covert action.
10:11Covert really means plausibly deniable by the President.
10:16Global Denial is probably better known as spinning.
10:20Their success in swaying the Italian elections left the CIA feeling optimistic.
10:27If a country could be prevented from turning communist, maybe an existing communist system could
10:33be overthrown.
10:36In the spring of 1949, the United States chose Albania for the CIA's first attempt at subversion
10:43behind the Iron Curtain.
10:47OPC got greedy and they thought that they could overthrow communism in Eastern Europe, so they
10:52hoped to stage a counter-revolution essentially.
10:55Well, of course, the communists were good at counter-subversion.
10:58They had very strong state security and they rolled it all up.
11:03It was a fiasco.
11:05Pretty much everybody we dropped behind enemy lines in Albania was captured and put on a
11:09show trial and shot.
11:14There was good reason for the efficiency of Albanian state security in rounding up the CIA-backed
11:20penetrators.
11:21They'd been tipped ahead of time in each case.
11:24The informant was a senior British intelligence official with close ties to the CIA.
11:30His name was Kim Philby.
11:32He'd been spying for the Soviets since the 1930s.
11:38The Albanian operation had been a cruel, yet valuable lesson for the CIA.
11:43The Soviets were not to be underestimated, but neither was the OPC, and they were just
11:49getting started.
11:59By 1950, the CIA and its new operations arm, the OPC, realized they were at a distinct disadvantage
12:06when it came to clandestine warfare.
12:09For one thing, the Russians had been at it longer.
12:11They'd been spying on the world and each other since the Tsars had been in power.
12:18The KGB had the backing of a totalitarian state and was extremely powerful and was well known
12:25to the people.
12:26I mean, it had a secret police arm.
12:28A KGB guy can grab you in the street and you might not be heard from for a long time,
12:33if ever.
12:34The CIA has no law enforcement powers, never has, never will.
12:40The KGB win, in my opinion, because they developed more good spies operating in the United States
12:49than the United States developed good spies operating behind the Iron Curtain.
12:54It was easier to keep secrets in a closed society and it was much more difficult to spy in a country
13:01when access to that country was controlled and everyone in it was being watched.
13:07The communists helped get themselves in power by subversion, so they were good at it.
13:12They knew how to do sting operations and to spy and to run covert operations and the KGB was
13:22really better than we were, at least at the outset.
13:25And they were very good at sucking us in, making us think that we were having a success,
13:30drawing us in and then slamming the door on our hands.
13:36Grown zero in the Cold War was the occupied city of Berlin.
13:40The line that divided the Russian-held sector from that of England, France and the United States
13:47marked the figurative border between East and West.
13:50Between the free world and the authoritarian world.
13:58There were literally thousands of Soviet and East German state security agents in Berlin,
14:04enough to watch every man, woman and child who lived there.
14:09The CIA operatives had a nickname for the former German capital.
14:13They called it Kidnaptown.
14:17It was wild and woolly, it was the wild west.
14:20The Soviets would try to kidnap our agents and this guy would be walking down the street
14:23and a car would come along and just pull him into the car and he would disappear.
14:28There was an unwritten agreement that they didn't kidnap Americans.
14:31They mostly take our clients, Eastern Europeans who are working for us or Germans who are working for us.
14:39There were other rules of procedure in this deadly game of cat and mouse, of tit for tat.
14:45Arrest one of their spies and they took one of yours.
14:49Captured spies were not prosecuted, but instead exchanged.
14:54These exchanges usually took place on a bridge like the Gleinecke which spanned the Sprey River.
15:00It marked the border between East and West Berlin.
15:03Assassination was not an option because retaliation was sure to come in kind.
15:09You're much better off knowing who the top agent is than to shoot him and get rid of him.
15:14Who will replace him?
15:15You don't know who to replace him.
15:17You've identified that agent.
15:19You're that much ahead of the game.
15:21Then you try to see if you can double that agent back.
15:23You begin to try to feed him information or open contact with him.
15:26In other words, this is the game.
15:28Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
15:30Actually, we had sort of a tacit agreement not to kill each other, you know, not to murder
15:38each other.
15:39We met the CAA people all the time.
15:42I myself did it a lot of time, but mainly with the purpose to, well, to find out what
15:48sort of a man he is, whether he is recruitable or non-recruitable and so on.
15:56But it's, well, it's a normal procedure for spying.
16:04In September 1949, CIA and U.S. Air Force scientists detected the presence of a radioactive
16:11cloud over the North Pacific, which indicated that the Russians had detonated an atomic device
16:17somewhere on the mainland of Asia.
16:21Now the Russians, too, had the ultimate weapon of terror.
16:24Did they use it?
16:25And if they did, how and where would they use it?
16:31At the annual May Day Parade in Moscow in 1948, the Soviets had unveiled a new bomber, the Tu-4.
16:40The fact that they developed the plane so quickly gave rise to the theory that the Russians were
16:45far more advanced in their bomber production than previously thought, and might actually
16:50have more bombers than the United States.
16:53Now that the Russians had displayed the bomb for all the world to see, that debate took
16:58on new urgency.
17:01Was there a gap?
17:02Did the Russians have more bombers and atomic bombs than the Americans?
17:08While the CIA searched for answers, the United States stepped up the pace in the arms race.
17:14In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower came to the American presidency with a pledge to end the Korean War.
17:22He brought with him a new enthusiasm and respect for clandestine warfare.
17:29Once he'd negotiated a truce in America's last remaining hot war, he set out to fight the
17:34cold one.
17:36It's only with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower that covert action becomes simply the main activity
17:45of the CIA.
17:46Now, Truman had been won over it bit by bit, but he would go so far and no further.
17:53Eisenhower was fascinated by covert action.
17:56He was impressed by what OSS had done for him to help him in Europe during the war, and
18:02he thought this was a technique that could be more widely applied.
18:07And he distrusted the use of the army.
18:10He didn't want to get into that, being a general himself.
18:14So he turned the CIA into a private presidential army.
18:19While Harry Truman had authorized covert action against the Soviet bloc, Korea, and Southeast
18:25Asia, Eisenhower saw opportunities for covert action wherever American interests were at
18:31stake.
18:32And the former Supreme Allied Commander especially appreciated the concept of plausible deniability.
18:42Eisenhower appointed Alan Dulles, ex-OSS spymaster, as the new director of Central Intelligence.
18:52The two men endorsed covert action as by far the lesser of two evils.
18:57Neither man had any desire to fight another hot war, but both were looking to score a win
19:02against the Soviets in the cold one.
19:07Since the 1930s, much of the Western world depended on Iran as their oil supplier.
19:14The Shahs had an agreement with a British oil company which paid them royalties.
19:19Then in 1951, a nationalist named Mohamed Mossadegh came to power, undercutting the weak Shah.
19:27Mossadegh nationalized the British oil holdings, turned a cold shoulder to the Shah's Western
19:33allies, and began to court favor with Russia.
19:37The United States, at risk of losing influence in the Middle East, turned to the CIA.
19:46Kermit Roosevelt, grandson to Teddy, was the CIA's best Middle Eastern operative.
19:52He had himself smuggled into the palace in Tehran, where he met secretly with Reza Pahlavi,
19:58the young Shah.
20:01Roosevelt tried to convince the Shah to denounce Mossadegh before the Iranian National Assembly.
20:08Pahlavi agreed, but shortly afterward, rioting broke out in the streets and the Shah fled
20:13to Rome.
20:17Roosevelt said the Shah is a wimp, but he still had a plan left.
20:23He paid $10,000 to some street toughs and circus musclemen to stage a riot favoring the
20:28Shah.
20:29To everyone's surprise, the riot escalated, and Mossadegh was forced to relinquish his power.
20:36The Shah returned to rule as a strong ally of the Western influences that had given him
20:41back his throne.
20:43The CIA's success in Iran brought elation to Washington.
20:47Restoring the Shah through covert means had been relatively easy.
20:51The entire operation had cost less than $200,000.
20:56And the CIA's involvement in the coup had stayed a secret.
21:02This gave the CIA the feeling that they could do anything, that if you could get rid of the
21:07communists in Iran, why couldn't you do it elsewhere?
21:11So they did the next year in Guatemala.
21:16In 1954, the Central American country of Guatemala seemed on track to become the first country
21:22in the Western Hemisphere to turn communist.
21:26That country's apparently leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz, had seized the holdings there
21:32of the United Fruit Company, an American enterprise.
21:35Flush with the success of Iran, the CIA organized a revolt in Guatemala.
21:40They raised a guerrilla army, deployed a secret air force, and even chose a leader to replace
21:45Sarbenz.
21:47The CIA's man, Colonel Castillo Armas, was virtually unknown in the general population,
21:53and his army was outnumbered.
21:56But propaganda broadcasts from secret CIA radio stations portrayed the rebel leader as the
22:01people's choice for president, in command of an overwhelming force.
22:09The rebels attacked Guatemala City on June 18th under CIA air support.
22:15That support had been approved personally by President Eisenhower.
22:19It was over in a matter of days.
22:23Arbenz was driven from power, and the CIA-backed Armas was installed as president.
22:29And that made them very heady with success.
22:33The feeling was they were kind of world shakers and world movers, and they could probably overthrow
22:39any government they really put their mind to.
22:42But the CIA would soon find that success in the Cold War was all too often an illusion.
22:56In June of 1950, civil war split Korea in two.
23:03The Russians supported North Korea.
23:06The United States and her NATO allies entered the war in defense of the South.
23:13During the course of this conflict, the United States became alarmed as captured American servicemen
23:18were displayed in show trials.
23:22They were shocked further when these servicemen denounced their own country for crimes and
23:27aggression against the Korean people.
23:32How can I go back and face my family?
23:35In a civilized world, how can I tell them these things, that I am a criminal in the eyes of
23:41humanity?
23:42They are my flesh and blood.
23:46The CIA suspected the communists were using drugs to brainwash prisoners.
23:52In an effort to find out what drugs the enemy was using and develop some means of countering
23:57their effects, the CIA began a series of top secret projects that would ultimately be known
24:03as MKUltron.
24:08These programs tested various drugs on human guinea pigs.
24:12Army doctors had observed that certain anesthetics made soldiers speak freely while unconscious.
24:19The CIA experimented with various truth serums for use in debriefing captured agents.
24:28And they were particularly interested in developing a means of controlling or changing human thought
24:33patterns and behavior.
24:37The ultimate aim of these tests was to create nothing less than a human robot.
24:43In some cases, the persons being tested were volunteers.
24:49In others, they were completely uninformed as to what was happening to them.
24:54At one point in 1953, seven volunteers were kept on lysergic acid, diethylamide, better known
25:01as LSD for 77 days.
25:10Following another LSD experiment that November, Frank Olson, an Army scientist who had volunteered
25:16to be a guinea pig, became severely depressed and committed suicide by hurling himself through
25:22a tenth-story hotel window.
25:28Subproject 142 of MKUltra was a series of experiments with animals to see if they could be used as delivery
25:35systems for microphones, cameras, and bombs.
25:37In one case, a cat was surgically implanted with a listening device, batteries and all.
25:49In his tail was an antenna for transmitting back to his handlers.
25:53The CIA scientists took their eavesdropping cat to a park for a test run, but before they
25:59even got started, the animal was run over by a taxi.
26:05Despite occasional setbacks, like the death of Frank Olson, the MKUltra experiments continued
26:12until 1975.
26:14In that year, a Senate investigation into CIA activities brought the excesses of MKUltra
26:20into the open, causing much embarrassment for the agency.
26:27The CIA was feeling confident with its successes in Iran and Guatemala, but the Americans still
26:33hadn't been able to penetrate the Soviet bloc, or had they?
26:40In 1953, the CIA partnered with British intelligence for a brazen foray into and underneath the Soviet
26:48sector of Berlin.
26:50The plan was to tunnel into East Berlin to reach a bank of underground phone cables.
26:56From there, they could tap into secret communications between Soviet and East German military headquarters.
27:02The Berlin tunnel operation ran for 11 months, not including the year it took for the US Army
27:11Corps of Engineers to dig it.
27:13It ran 15 feet below the surface for 300 yards and had 6 feet of headroom.
27:20Many of the details surrounding the tunnel remain classified to this day.
27:25What is known remains a topic of controversy.
27:31Questions still abound as to the genuineness of the intelligence extracted from these phone
27:36taps.
27:38Because the KGB apparently knew from the beginning that the West was digging the tunnel.
27:45One of the tunnel planners, a British MI6 operative named George Blake, was in fact a KGB spy.
27:54It was not until 1961 when Blake was betrayed by a defector and arrested that the CIA learned
28:00the truth.
28:01The KGB had known about the tunnel all along before the first shovelful of dirt was turned.
28:08Why did the KGB wait a full year before alerting the Soviet military that their phones were
28:13being tapped?
28:19In the years following Blake's arrest, interviews with Soviet defectors revealed that the KGB,
28:25in order to protect Blake from discovery, deliberately failed to inform the Soviet military of the tunnel's
28:31existence and the fact that the CIA was listening to their phone conversations.
28:36George Blake's safety was that important to them.
28:42And having an agent at the heart of British intelligence at the time was regarded by them
28:48as priceless.
28:50And all I can say is that it took a very strong KGB influence to be willing to forget the Soviet
29:00military.
29:01So I imagine that most of that stuff is valid today, just as it was valid then.
29:07The CIA had tried with uncertain success to penetrate Soviet security from 15 feet below.
29:17Their next attempt to spy on the Russians would take them more than a mile into the sky.
29:22Since the Cold War began, the CIA had been unable to penetrate the Soviet bloc far enough to
29:35discover just how immediate the Soviet threat was.
29:38Then in 1954, President Eisenhower approved a top secret plan to develop an airplane capable
29:45of flying across the Soviet Union, north to south, without refueling.
29:55The plane, designated U-2, would eventually fly at 70 to 80 thousand feet, higher than Soviet
30:02missiles could then reach.
30:04It was outfitted with a high-resolution camera designed by the Polaroid Corporation.
30:10In order to maintain utmost secrecy, responsibility for developing and operating the U-2 was given
30:16not to the Air Force, but to the CIA.
30:21Eisenhower did not trust the military to be secure.
30:26And it's hard to imagine, but he's the guy who picked CIA to be in charge of the U-2, the
30:33SR-71, and the Corona satellite.
30:37It's the kind of thing that the military could have done, I think, and probably should have
30:42done.
30:44But Eisenhower wanted security, and he thought the only way to do it was to let the CIA run
30:49the thing.
30:52The CIA estimated they could safely fly the U-2 over Russia for two years before the Russians
30:58would be able to detect the plane and shoot it down.
31:02But it's now clear that the Soviets tracked the first flight and everyone after that.
31:11Khrushchev knew it was overflying Russia at 80 thousand feet.
31:16We had announced that the height that that plane could fly was 65 thousand feet.
31:21It was flying at 80 thousand feet because Khrushchev's most powerful missile would only go to 65 thousand
31:26feet.
31:27There was this plane flying overhead, his missiles unable to reach it, and he was furious, fit
31:32to be tied.
31:35The U-2 flights gave the CIA the comprehensive look inside the Soviet Union they'd wanted for
31:40ten years.
31:43In approximately two dozen flights over a two-year period, the U-2 pinpointed Soviet air bases,
31:49allowing the U.S. Air Force not only to count bombers and missiles, but to specifically target
31:55these sites.
31:58But the Americans did not hold their advantage for long.
32:03In 1957, the Russians stunned the West with two demonstrations of technological strength.
32:09In August, they successfully fired their first long-range intercontinental missile, and two
32:15months later launched Sputnik, the first satellite into space.
32:20It was immediately apparent to the CIA that a country capable of launching a rocket into
32:25space was more than capable of shooting down the U-2.
32:29The flights were halted temporarily.
32:31The U-2 flew only sporadically over the next three years.
32:36Then, on May Day 1960, the Russians finally shot one down.
32:46The Americans, thinking the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had been killed, called the flight
32:51a weather plane that went astray.
32:53But the Soviets had the CIA pilot in hand and displayed him to the world in a show trial.
33:01The CIA had been caught red-handed.
33:06An embarrassed American president was forced to take responsibility for this by-flight, and
33:12the Russians scored a major propaganda coup.
33:16Powers' ill-fated mission brought a halt to the U-2 flights over Soviet airspace.
33:22Plausible deniability had sounded good in theory, but when the chips were down, it hadn't
33:29worked.
33:30The idea was to keep Eisenhower from having to admit that he had approved the flight.
33:38Well, eventually, Eisenhower himself made the decision that he was going to admit that
33:42he'd done it and be honest with the world and with the American people.
33:46Plausible deniability, if it didn't die with the U-2, you might as well say it died with
33:51the U-2.
33:52We simply thought that the U-2 was impregnable, that the Soviets weren't capable or bright
33:58enough to knock it down.
34:01This was one of the problems.
34:02We did not think through in some of our covert actions what happens if the things go sour.
34:08we did not think through the U-2.
34:09Less than six months after the last U-2 flight over the Soviet Union, the CIA was flying again,
34:15this time even higher.
34:18Corona, the world's first spy satellite, was successfully launched into space on August 18,
34:251960, after more than a dozen failures.
34:29Since the launch of a rocket ship was difficult to keep secret, the United States publicized
34:35the launchings but concealed the rocket's real mission.
34:39To the world, Corona was a weather satellite known as Discoverer, but its real mission was
34:46photographing the Russians from space and dropping the film back to Earth in a protective capsule.
34:52On that first successful flight, Corona photographed one and a half million miles of Soviet airspace,
35:00more than all the U-2 flights combined.
35:03By the time this particular photographic satellite had finished its work over a period of two or
35:10three years, the United States had a very good idea of how strong the Russians were militarily.
35:16In fact, the information pulled together over time was sufficiently accurate that when the
35:25SALT-1 negotiations were going on, the Russians finally said,
35:29we won't tell you all the things that we have, we'll use your figures.
35:37In the 1960 presidential campaign, candidate John F. Kennedy made political capital by criticizing
35:44the Eisenhower administration for falling behind Russia in the production of missiles and warheads.
35:50This assault put his opponent, Richard Nixon, in a difficult position.
35:56As Eisenhower's vice president, Nixon was privy to CIA reports which proved there was no missile gap.
36:06In fact, Russia was having difficulties with their intercontinental missile system.
36:10But this information was top secret, and Nixon couldn't use it to rebut Kennedy's attacks.
36:22Another Kennedy campaign promise called for assisting the Cuban patriots who wanted to overthrow
36:27Cuban Premier Fidel Castro, an avowed communist with strong Soviet ties.
36:32Here again, Nixon was unable to divulge another top secret that the Republican incumbents were already planning a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba by a force of exiles.
36:44Kennedy won the election, but both of these issues would soon come back to haunt him.
36:50The CIA had been training a lot of Cuban exiles in Central America, the theory that they would go back to Cuba and overthrow Castro.
37:02And Kennedy inherited this expedition.
37:06It's not something he would have initiated himself, but he was, in a sense, trapped by it.
37:11On April 16th, 1961, less than three months after Kennedy took office, a brigade of CIA-backed Cuban exiles prepared to invade Cuba.
37:24The plan called for a military-style landing at the Bay of Pigs.
37:29But when preliminary bombings raised an outcry in the United Nations,
37:33U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson demanded the attack be canceled.
37:38That hesitation would prove fatal.
37:41Adlai Stevenson just really wrecked it by saying,
37:48You know, I'm here at the United Nations giving out this information on my word,
37:53and you're doing something else.
37:55Makes me look like a liar.
37:56We're going to have to change things so you don't fly that second flight of airplanes.
38:01So, President Kennedy stood down our second flight of airplanes.
38:06There wasn't time to call off the landings,
38:10but Kennedy canceled the air support.
38:15By this time, Castro's army was ready and waiting.
38:24Although President Kennedy publicly took blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco,
38:28privately he blamed the CIA.
38:31Both Director of Central Intelligence Alan Dulles
38:34and his covert chief Richard Bissell,
38:37the man behind the U-2 and Corona's successes,
38:40were forced to resign.
38:42Bay of Pigs was a horrible setback.
38:46They lost their director.
38:47They lost their head of dirty tricks.
38:50The President of the United States vowed to,
38:53quietly vowed to break the CIA into a thousand pieces.
38:56They lost their prime position as the President's action arm.
39:01It was the end of sort of high opera covert action,
39:05but it was not the end of covert action by any means.
39:08As bad as the humiliation of the Cuban invasion had been for the new President,
39:14the failure at the Bay of Pigs only served to intensify ongoing American efforts to depose Fidel Castro.
39:22Now Kennedy wanted him as badly as the CIA did.
39:27Cuban Premier Fidel Castro had come to power in 1959 and immediately made an enemy of the United States
39:37by first seizing American property and then dispatching teams of guerrillas to invade other Latin American countries.
39:45He'd been in power less than a year when the CIA began considering plans to eliminate him.
39:54Since the CIA did not wish to be directly involved in an assassination plot,
39:59most of these attempts involved third parties.
40:02Some potential operatives were recruited from South Florida's large population of anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
40:10But the exiles were infiltrated by members of Castro's secret police
40:15who had been trained by intelligence officers from the Soviet bloc.
40:19Plots against Castro were compromised before they left the United States.
40:25Mongoose, the CIA code name for the government-wide operation to overthrow Castro,
40:31came under the personal direction of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
40:36Richard Helms, the CIA's new deputy director for plans,
40:41found himself under intense pressure from the White House.
40:45Both President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were obviously very upset by the Bay of Pigs' failure.
40:54And I haven't any doubt that they decided that they were going to do everything they possibly could to get even with Castro.
41:02Bobby Kennedy pushed very hard. There wasn't any doubt about just as hard as he could.
41:07But there were limits to how fast one could do this kind of thing.
41:12Some of the more imaginative plans to kill Castro bordered on the ludicrous.
41:19They tried to put poisons on a cigar to give Castro, so he would smoke a cigar that would kill him.
41:26They wanted to plant an exploding seashell off the coast of Cuba in the hopes that Castro, as a skin diver, would pick it up.
41:34Why they thought Castro would pick up that particular shell was never clear.
41:38Another plan involved sprinkling thallium salts into Castro's shoes, which were expected to make his beard fall out and destroy his charisma.
41:50Still another plan had the CIA enlisting the help of the American mafia in putting a hit on Castro.
41:56The Dons were more than happy to accept the contract.
42:00Castro's revolution had brought a halt to their gambling operations in Havana and driven them out of Cuba.
42:06But getting to Castro would prove difficult.
42:09At least one expedition of mafia-backed Cuban expatriates disappeared soon after landing in Cuba.
42:16As each plan failed, or was discounted as impractical, the CIA and the Kennedy brothers became more determined to get rid of the Cuban dictator.
42:31The most ominous effect of the Bay of Pigs episode was that it made the Russians bold.
42:39Premier Nikita Khrushchev decided Kennedy was weak and stepped up the pressure by sending more arms to Cuba.
42:47Then, in another act of Soviet belligerence, the Berlin Wall went up, seemingly overnight.
42:54The reports came in, they're building a wall right in the middle of the city.
43:00Why are they doing this? Well, we didn't understand Lenin's famous saying,
43:07People must not be allowed to vote with their feet.
43:10You cannot leave communism. You can't walk out because that threatens the whole system.
43:15So the Berlin Wall was to keep people in, not to keep us out.
43:23In 1960, a disgruntled Soviet military intelligence officer, Oleg Penkovsky, began to pass secret documents and photographs to the CIA.
43:33This material included descriptions of Soviet missile emplacements.
43:40Two years later, in October 1962, a CIA spy in Cuba reported something strange going on in the Cuban countryside.
43:49His report prompted a U-2 flyover of the island.
43:53Photographs from this and subsequent flights revealed what the CIA believed were missile sites under construction.
44:00CIA analysts checked the photographs against the manual of the Russian SS-4 medium range missiles Penkovsky had given them.
44:11In the manual was a diagram which showed exactly what a completed missile firing position should look like.
44:18By comparing the diagram with the U-2 photographs, the CIA was able to determine that it would be several days before the missiles could be ready for firing.
44:27This information gave President Kennedy the time he needed to decide his strategy and to confront and face down Khrushchev.
44:36Pankovsky's manual may have been the most critical piece of intelligence in the Cold War, because it prevented what could have been a catastrophic overreaction by the United States.
44:49The CIA's U-2 spy flights coupled with the information provided by Penkovsky gave President Kennedy the intelligence he needed to confront the Soviets in the Western Hemisphere and to force their hand.
45:02The Soviets dismantled their missile sites and the crisis was over for the moment.
45:09The missile crisis had passed, but Operation Mongoose, the plan for the removal one way or another of Premier Fidel Castro, remained the CIA's top priority.
45:19The agency, at the urging of Robert Kennedy, continued to shop for assassins.
45:25They believed they'd found one in Rolando Cobella, a Cuban major with access to Castro.
45:31In the fall of 1963, a high-level CIA staff officer met with Cobella in Paris.
45:37Cobella was willing to kill the dictator as part of a coup d'etat.
45:42The Cuban asked for snipers rifles and poisons.
45:47He also requested a personal meeting with Robert Kennedy, the President's brother.
45:52That request was denied.
45:54Another meeting was set for the following month.
45:57On November 22nd, Cobella met with a CIA case officer who offered him a pen capable of injecting poison,
46:04with instructions to stick it into Castro at his first opportunity.
46:09Cobella refused the weapon, but asked that the rifles be smuggled into Cuba for him.
46:14On the day that meeting took place in Paris, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
46:21Speculation arose in some corners of Washington that Cobella was a double agent actually working for Castro.
46:29Some senator got the idea that because a CIA man was in touch with Cobella on the day that Kennedy was assassinated,
46:37he had something to do with the assassination.
46:39That's nonsense.
46:40In the conversation that this man had with Cobella had nothing to do with assassinating Castro.
46:46It had to do with whether they could organize a coup in Cuba.
46:51This is exactly what the Kennedys wanted us to try to do.
46:54There were other interpretations.
46:59President Lyndon Johnson himself would later tell an advisor,
47:02Kennedy was trying to kill Castro, but Castro got him first.
47:06The new president sent word to his central intelligence agency that there were to be no more attempts on the life of the Cuban leader.
47:14The Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War.
47:23It would not be the last, but never again would tensions between superpowers rise to such a boiling point.
47:29For three more decades, the global chess match plotted on.
47:33In the glacial struggle, neither side was willing to commit its most powerful peace.
47:39The skirmishes took place for the most part in the Third World.
47:42Vietnam, Central America, South America, the Middle East, Africa.
47:48Superpowers vied for influence, prestige, and more power.
47:53For 28 years, the Berlin Wall stood as a symbol of the political, economic, and philosophical divisions between East and West.
48:01Then in 1989 and 1990, political unrest behind the Iron Curtain led to the reunification of Germany.
48:10The Cold War, after 45 years, came to an end.
48:15The wall had come tumbling down.
48:18Could a winner be declared?
48:20We won the Cold War.
48:25We won the Cold War.
48:26Let's not hide our heads under a bushel here.
48:28We won the Cold War.
48:31Communism was rejected.
48:34The evidence that this agency has that we won the Cold War is we have a piece of what I think was the most palpable, dramatic representation of the Cold War.
48:48And that was the Berlin Wall.
48:51We have it on our compound, three panels of the Berlin Wall.
48:55We got a piece of the rock.
48:57But how much credit could the CIA take for this victory?
49:03The CIA did the job that it was supposed to do.
49:11Its slice of the thing was to find out what was going on in the Soviet Union, how big their military establishment was, what they were doing in the way of producing new weapons, how many intercontinental ballistic missiles they had, etc.
49:26But the American people also contributed to this.
49:29They paid the taxes.
49:30They paid the bill.
49:31We won the Cold War, in effect, less because of anything we did than because communism turned
49:39out to be a moral disaster, an economic disaster, and a political disaster.
49:44And the people of Russia couldn't stand it any longer.
49:47And the people in Eastern Europe hated it anyway.
49:49And that's why the Cold War came to an end.
49:56It was a clear victory, but it had taken a long time, 45 years.
50:01The best evidence of the CIA's effectiveness in fighting the Cold War is that it was able to buy time as the Cold War progressed.
50:10By providing a constant window into the closed society of the Soviet Union, the CIA kept fear and paranoia from driving the superpowers into war.
50:22The world stood on the brink for 45 years, but World War III never came.
50:29In the end, one way of life prevailed over another.
50:33The ideals of one society gave way to the imagination of the other.
50:39One system collapsed.
50:42The other endured.
50:44The Berlin Wall, at last, was down, and the people were reunited.
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50:56The tribe had gone pray and over a neighborhood.
51:00The place under the code, he permitted it out and defeated it for you, and the people wanted to know.
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