COLD WAR Secrets

The CIA built a ship the size of two city blocks to steal a Soviet submarine off the Pacific seabed — and then invented a phrase to avoid ever admitting it. That was one of six Cold War programmes both superpowers buried for decades. This documentary looks at what the United States and the Soviet Union actually approved behind closed doors between 1953 and 1979: a submarine recovery three miles down, a spy tunnel under a divided Berlin, an anthrax release hidden behind a story about contaminated meat, a semi-automatic nuclear retaliation system nobody was told about, and a missile city built inside the Greenland ice sheet. Almost none of it stayed secret. And one of these projects is still sitting exactly where they left it — under the ice, waiting for a warming Arctic to hand it back. CHAPTERS 0:00 The ship alone in the Pacific 2:16 Finding a submarine 16,000 feet down 3:53 Eight days on the lift — and what fell back 5:25 Berlin: the cables under the pavement 7:54 The man who told Moscow before the first shovel 8:50 The Urals, 1979: thirteen years of a cover story 11:18 The machine built to answer for you 12:18 Five years, one cat, and the files burned in 1973 14:36 A town inside the Greenland ice 16:24 What the melting ice is giving back COVERED IN THIS VIDEO • The CIA deep-sea recovery operation and the cover story that created "we can neither confirm nor deny" • The Berlin cable tap the other side knew about before digging started • The 1979 anthrax release in the Urals and the thirteen-year cover story • The Soviet biological weapons network built while an international treaty was being signed • The semi-automatic nuclear retaliation system the West only learned about after 1991 • The surveillance animal programme written off in 1967 • The behavioural research files destroyed in 1973 • The abandoned Arctic base whose waste inventory was published in a 2016 scientific study