[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Tonight on "Secrets Declassified,"
extreme extractions carried out under pressure,
under fire, and under the enemy's nose.
From hunting lost nuclear weapons
in a frozen wasteland--
- As the teams are searching, it's minus 50 degrees outside
and it's dark 24 hours a day.
- To a prison break in Panama
in the midst of a full army invasion.
[Don] A guard is outside the American's cell
with instructions to execute him
at the first sign of a U.S. invasion.
- And a bold plan to steal a Russian helicopter
from a desert battle zone.
- Extracting this helicopter will be extremely difficult.
Libyan forces could attack at any time.
- These are the astonishing top secret missions
undertaken by governments and the people who work for them.
It's time to bring them to light.
♪ ♪
It's 1989, and a former American soldier
is in prison in Panama with an execution order on his head.
The U.S. has just one hour to free him
before a full invasion begins.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- The U.S. is preparing to launch an invasion of Panama
to depose General Noriega,
the military dictator accused of drug trafficking,
election fraud, and human rights abuses.
[David] Noriega knows the U.S. is closing in.
But he's got one last bargaining chip,
a U.S. Army veteran locked away in one of his prisons.
[Don] Kurt Muse is imprisoned in Cárcel Modelo,
a notorious Panamanian prison.
He's been imprisoned for running a clandestine
radio station called "The Voice of Liberty,"
which broadcast anti-Noriega messages.
[David] It's also suspected,
though never confirmed by the agency,
that Kurt Muse is a CIA asset.
[Andrew] Noriega has given the order
that on the first sign of a U.S. invasion,
Muse is supposed to be killed on the spot.
In fact, there's a guard stationed outside his cell 24/7
specifically for that purpose.
[David] President George H.W. Bush
doesn't want to abandon Muse,
so in 1989,
he gives the green light for an invasion of Panama.
He issues an impossible command.
Muse must be extracted first.
- Delta Force, which is an elite U.S. Army unit
known for their expertise in impossible missions,
is selected for the task.
[Greg] To prepare for this mission,
they build a full-scale, three-story mock-up
of the Modelo prison at a base in Florida.
- Operatives conduct intense assault rehearsals
with live fire and close quarters combat
based on operational plans derived from intelligence.
They wanna be prepared for every eventuality.
[David] By mid-December, practice is over.
The invasion is set for 1:00 a.m. on the 20th.
And the Delta Force operatives
have one chance to get this right.
They fly into a U.S. Air Force base
just 4 miles from the prison.
♪ ♪
[Sami] The hour's before midnight.
In secret, Delta Force operatives
assume positions across the city.
[David] The mission starts at the stroke of midnight.
Delta operators will have just one hour
to get in, grab Muse, and get out
before the full U.S. invasion begins.
- Two teams of snipers move in.
They target an anti-aircraft battery
and the prison's main power supply.
[thunder crashes]
[Sami] That takes time, but eventually
they manage to take it out and the whole prison
is plunged into darkness.
[Don] Two U.S. helicopters then approach the prison.
They land on the roof and 23 Delta operatives rush out.
[David] By now, 45 minutes have passed.
The Delta Force operatives have only 15 minutes left
to rescue Muse.
[device beeps]
- They load the rooftop door with explosives.
They back up, light it up, it blows up, and they're in.
[Martin] Heavily-armed Delta operators
make their way down the stairs
to the cell where Muse is being held,
and they kill the guard before he has a chance to kill Muse.
[Sami] The operatives shoot the lock off the cell door.
One of them shouts, "Muse! We're gonna take you home."
They lead him out of his cell
and up through the prison to the roof.
[alarm blaring]
[David] To break in, to break out,
the whole thing takes just six minutes.
But that's when this precision plan starts to fall apart.
- He's then loaded onto one of the little bird aircraft,
one of the helicopters.
And just as the pilot begins to pull pitch and climb out,
it's raked by gunfire.
[rapid gunfire]
- The chopper falls to the earth.
Muse and the pilots are unharmed,
but the four Delta Force operatives are injured.
Then time's up.
At 1:00 a.m., the wider invasion begins.
They're now caught in the middle and they're under fire.
[gunshot]
- The Special Forces operators, as well as Muse,
take cover as fire erupts
between Panamanian forces and the Delta team itself.
♪ ♪
- The perfect extraction has suddenly fallen apart.
They decide to do anything that they can.
- They use strobe lights to signal U.S. aircraft
that's flying overhead.
- The strobe light, which is invisible to the naked eye,
alerts U.S. troops to their location.
♪ ♪
[Greg] Finally, an armored personnel carrier
spots their signal and it whisks them away to safety.
[suspenseful music]
[car rumbling]
[explosion]
[David] Hours later, Kurt Muse is back
on U.S. soil and reunited with his family.
As for Noriega, his bargaining chip is gone.
♪ ♪
Two weeks later, he surrenders.
He's brought to the U.S.,
where he's sentenced to 40 years for drug trafficking
and money laundering.
- In 2006, Kurt Muse publishes his account of the mission...
♪ ♪
And reveals the minute-by-minute details
for the first time.
♪ ♪
- Pulling one man out of a Panamanian prison
is tough enough.
But extracting six men from a frozen country
where the sun never comes up?
That's a whole different ballgame.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- On the 21st of January, 1968,
a U.S. B-52 bomber armed with thermonuclear weapons
is flying over Greenland when a cabin fire breaks out.
[Hakeem] Cabin is filling with smoke,
so the captain, John Haug, he orders the crew to evacuate.
They are in pitch-black darkness
in the cold in the Arctic.
And one by one, the crew have to jump out of the plane.
[David] The unmanned bomber and its deadly load
of four hydrogen bombs careens toward the ground.
♪ ♪
- It smashes into the frozen sea ice of North Star Bay,
just miles from the U.S. operated Thule Air Base,
and then erupts in a massive fireball.
[David] Miraculously, the nuclear bombs don't detonate.
But now, seven airmen
and thousands of highly classified bomb components
are scattered across this hostile environment
in the middle of the Arctic winter.
- An immediate and desperate search and rescue mission
is launched by the U.S. and Denmark,
which controls the territory of Greenland.
[Martin] The first objective is to identify a crash site.
Secondly, they then have to carry out
a search for survivors.
♪ ♪
[David] The problem is neither the Danes nor the Americans
have intimate knowledge of the treacherous terrain.
So the rescuers turn to the people who do.
♪ ♪
- Greenlandic Inuit dog sled teams are assembled
to lead a coordinated ground search.
[Martin] These dog sled teams,
they begin mushing out in the black of night
under intense snowfall, blindly searching
out across the landscape of northwestern Greenland
in the search for survivors from the B-52.
♪ ♪
- They soon find five of the seven ejected crewmen alive,
suffering from frostbite and exposure.
Another is found dead, but the final crew member
remains missing, navigator Curtis R. Criss.
[Amy] It turns out he's landed on a piece of ice
that has broken loose and he's now floating at sea.
[Hakeem] He is out there unprotected, unsheltered.
He's buffeted by the wind, and the temperature
keeps falling all the way down to -50 degrees Fahrenheit.
[Amy] The only thing he has with him is his parachute.
He wraps himself in the thin nylon of the parachute,
hoping that it'll keep him warm enough to stay alive.
♪ ♪
[David] 20 hours later, an Inuit-led dog sled team
spots a body on an ice floe in the bay.
[James] Sled team make their way carefully
across the floating ice.
They can see a huddled figure wrapped in a thin covering,
but they have no idea if he's actually alive.
[David] It's navigator Curtis R. Criss.
- He's hypothermic, frostbitten,
barely conscious, but alive.
So they bring him in.
[David] The extraction team has found the missing crew.
But now the bigger question-- where are the nuclear weapons?
- In 1968, a U.S. B-52 loaded with four nuclear bombs
goes down in the frozen north of Greenland.
The crew is rescued, but the bombs are still missing.
And as spring approaches
and the ice begins to shift and melt,
the window to find them is closing fast.
♪ ♪
- The plane crashes with four hydrogen bombs on board.
These four hydrogen bombs consist of a nuclear core
that's encased in conventional high explosives.
And when the plane crashes, the nuclear cores,
luckily, do not explode.
But those conventional explosives, they do.
[David] Force of the explosion rips the bombs apart,
spreads their material, casings,
classified components, and radioactive nuclear fuel
across an 800 million square foot area.
To prevent a radioactive disaster,
U.S. Armed Forces race to clear up the crash site.
- They're working under
the most impossible conditions imaginable,
because first of all, the deep, bitter cold,
visibility is reduced to almost nothing,
and there's blinding snow being driven into your face
at all times.
[James] The conditions are brutal.
Under floodlights, the teams dig with
everything from bulldozers to hand shovels.
Many workers work without any adequate protective gear.
[Hakeem] The U.S. workers and the locals collect
around 600,000 gallons
of radioactive snow and slurry
that they place in the steel drums
for transport back to the United States.
[David] Retrieving all the bombs' classified components,
however, is a different story.
- It's not like you're finding intact bombs.
You're finding fragments of bombs
that have been ripped apart by conventional explosives.
And so that makes it vastly more difficult
to account for every last piece
of all four of the thermonuclear bombs.
♪ ♪
[David] In 1968, after nearly 2,000 personnel
have spent seven months on the ice,
the U.S. government announces the cleanup is over.
- According to the government, all the hazardous material
and all four bombs have been recovered safely.
The mission is over.
- At least, that's the official story.
And it stands for decades, until British journalists
dig into declassified records of 2008
and uncover what really happened.
- The American cleanup was not quite as thorough
as they made it out to be.
A key component of one of the bombs was never found.
The thermonuclear secondary, which triggers
the fusion reaction, is missing.
♪ ♪
[Amy] This is the part of the bomb that contains
the most radioactive fuel, and it's still missing.
- So it still remains out there somewhere just sitting
like a ticking time bomb.
♪ ♪
- An extraction in the Arctic requires precision
and help from the locals.
But in World War II, when British forces
rushed to liberate a concentration camp
in the heart of Axis Italy, precision goes out the window.
They load a squadron of commandos
on a hijacked passenger train and pray for the best.
[explosion]
♪ ♪
- In September 1943,
Allied forces come ashore in southern Italy.
The objective is to liberate Italy from Axis control.
[Hakeem] Across southern Italy,
the plan is working.
The Italians and Germans are in retreat.
[David] The Germans, however,
are destroying everything as they leave.
40 miles from allied lines,
this spells danger for prisoners
held inside a brutal concentration camp.
[Sami] Pisticci is fascist Italy's
first concentration camp.
Nearly 1,000 prisoners are being held behind barbed wire.
These include Jews,
partisans from Yugoslavia, Poland, and France,
as well as artists, writers, and priests
who oppose fascist rule.
[James] At Pisticci, the Germans' plans are hatched
to deport prisoners to Nazi-controlled camps
in Germany and then stage mass executions.
[David] The British know they need to act fast,
but they've just landed in Italy
and don't have enough troops for a full-scale attack.
They turn to SAS Major Cary-Elwes,
a specialist in daring raids.
[Jack] He's tasked, really, with mission impossible.
He has to get behind enemy lines
and liberate concentration camp victims,
and then find a way to repatriate them
back to friendly lines.
[Sami] The camp is 40 miles behind enemy lines,
and all they have is themselves and their Jeeps.
They know that if they all cross behind the frontline
in those, they'll be spotted right away.
[suspenseful music]
[David] The camp sits close to a railway line,
and that gives the British an idea.
- On September 13, 1943,
50 SAS commandos led by Major Cary-Elwes
gather outside the station in the small town of Chiatona.
- Their plan is to seize a passenger train,
hide the commandos on board, ride it to the nearest station,
then storm the camp.
[Martin] It needs to be a passenger train
instead of a military train.
To the Germans at the camp, it won't attract
so much attention to see a passenger train.
♪ ♪
[David] Major Cary-Elwes orders his men
to commandeer the train.
But now he spots another issue.
♪ ♪
The tracks ahead run straight along the coast.
To reach the camp, the train has to be diverted inland.
[Sami] While his men steal the train,
Major Cary-Elwes will take a small party of men in Jeeps
deep into enemy territory
to change the points ahead of the train.
It's an incredibly risky operation.
- They know that if they encounter German forces,
they'll find themselves outnumbered and outgunned.
[David] Less than half an hour later,
the Jeeps pull up at the points.
♪ ♪
- Quickly, they secure all the roads and railway tracks
leading to the crossroads
and park their Jeeps to form makeshift barricades.
[David] Then they switch the points.
Now all they can do is wait.
♪ ♪
- At any moment, they can be spotted.
But then one of the units
spots the hijacked train from a distance.
♪ ♪
This is the critical moment.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
The train steams past. It made it through.
The officers watch it disappear down the track
on its way to Pisticci, uninterrupted.
[David] A few hours later,
the train loaded with SAS commandos
pulls up just short of a deserted station.
And the SAS makes the final leg to the camp on foot.
♪ ♪
[gunfire]
- The only thing that the SAS have on their side
is the element of surprise.
♪ ♪
In a lightning attack, they break through
the wire perimeter of the camp, and the guards at first
are so shocked that they're paralyzed.
They're unable to understand, much less react.
[rapid gunfire]
[David] Within minutes,
the SAS have the camp under control.
They disarm the guards, take the camp commandant prisoner,
and free the detainees.
- SAS officers escort as many as they can onto the train,
putting 180 prisoners into carriages
that are bound for safety.
[David] They can't rescue everyone.
The remaining prisoners are reportedly advised
to flee into the nearby mountains
and to lay low until Allied soldiers can reach them.
- The passenger train carrying the rest of the prisoners
speeds back to Chiatona.
Shortly thereafter, the train, the SAS men,
the prisoners all arrive safely behind Allied lines.
[David] For nearly 80 years, the story stays secret.
♪ ♪
Then author Damien Lewis reveals it to the world.
♪ ♪
A revelation that no one saw coming.
♪ ♪
[James] Before this discovery,
even Major Cary-Elwes's daughter
didn't know about the astounding mission.
- Most extraction missions retrieve people.
But one of the most extreme ever targeted a machine--
a 9-ton Soviet-built helicopter
sitting in a desert battle zone.
♪ ♪
[Don] Nine years into the conflict between
Chad and Libya, the Libyan Army suffers
a crushing defeat and suddenly pulls back at speed.
Out in the desert, they leave behind
around $1.5 billion worth of military equipment.
[David] The Libyan Army has been armed by Moscow
and is fighting with the very latest Soviet hardware.
In the north of Chad, the U.S. spots one item
in particular it would like to get its hands on.
- The crown jewel in this bounty of treasure
is an armored helicopter, the Soviet MI-25 Hind,
one of the most advanced aircraft
in the world at the time.
- The Hind helicopter is tantalizingly close.
It's abandoned at the Ouadi Doum Air Base
in northern Chad.
[David] The U.S. knows that if it can recover
this enemy chopper, it will be an intelligence gold mine.
But that means a daring recovery mission
near the Libyan frontline.
- Extracting this helicopter will be extremely difficult.
Libyan forces could attack at any time.
Soviets would rather blow up this helicopter
than allow the Americans to capture
and examine its technology.
[David] The CIA gets approval from Chad's government
to attempt an extraction of the Hind.
The mission is handed to the Night Stalkers,
the U.S. Army's elite aviation unit.
[Hakeem] The advance team flies in on May 30, 1988,
and the mission sounds relatively simple.
Get to the helicopter, hotwire it,
start it up, fly it back to the capital.
But they discover a problem.
They examine the engine.
They find that there is a bullet lodged in it.
Critical components could be damaged,
so it's just too risky.
They don't wanna be airborne
and the engine go out and they all die.
- They decide the only way to extract this thing
is to airlift it out using a technique
called "sling loading."
[Martin] Sling loading is something that
can be done by helicopters, whereby
a cargo load of some kind can be strapped up
to a hovering helicopter.
[Sami] Flying a slung load of this size
is extremely difficult.
It's 21 meters long and it weighs 9 tons.
But they have no choice.
[David] The weight of the Soviet Hind
is almost exactly the limit of what the Chinooks can carry.
The Night Stalkers spent days planning this risky lift.
They even calculate how the temperature of the desert air
will affect the maximum power of the Chinooks.
Then, at midnight on June 11, the Night Stalkers' main team,
led by Major Gary Hasselbach
load into two Chinooks and fly to the airstrip.
- At Ouadi Doum, the team works through the night
prepping the chopper for the lift.
[David] Under cover of darkness,
they're safe from Libyan attack.
♪ ♪
But they must be ready to take off as soon as the day breaks.
[Martin] They pull the heavy equipment off of the aircraft,
put it on one Chinook, then sling load
the entire airframe beneath the other Chinook.
The two aircraft then take off
and begin flying back toward N'Djamena,
which is the capital of Chad.
♪ ♪
- For the first few hours of the flight back,
everything goes smoothly.
But 45 minutes out from their destination,
they're hit, not by enemy fire,
but a 3,000-foot high sandstorm.
♪ ♪
[Hakeem] Big sandstorms like this
can be deadly to an aircraft.
The particles of dust and sand get into the engine,
causing them to lose power and sometimes cut off completely.
♪ ♪
[Sami] Now, normally, Major Hasselbach
would fly higher to avoid the sandstorm,
but because of the 9-ton Soviet chopper
he's carrying beneath him, that isn't an option.
♪ ♪
[Martin] They have to power through the sandstorm,
and the result is that the aircraft,
they can't see a single thing.
Visibility drops to absolute zero.
[David] There's no visual contact.
The Chinooks are a danger to each other.
- So now the pilots of the Chinooks
are concerned that they may collide with each other.
[David] Soon they lose not just visuals,
but also radio contact.
30 tons of military equipment
is flying completely deaf and blind.
[helicopter blades whirring]
- Suddenly, the wall of sand dissolves away
and Major Hasselbach in his Chinook
can see his destination 12 miles away,
and he makes a dash for it.
Just as he's about to land, he sees the second Chinook
emerge from the sandstorm right behind.
And in that second Chinook, the pilot barely
has enough time to land his helicopter
before the sandstorm engulfs them again.
[David] The Night Stalkers' courage and quick thinking
has secured the U.S. one of the great prizes
of the Cold War, an intact Soviet Hind helicopter.
- The Hind helicopter is flown back to the United States
in the belly of a military transport plane,
where it's taken to Fort Rucker for examination.
- It's a huge coup.
Access to the Hind gives the U.S. military
firsthand knowledge of one of the USSR's
most integral pieces of air technology.
♪ ♪
[David] The U.S. government keeps
its daring snatch-and-grab under wraps.
But in 1991, the USSR collapses,
and a year later, the details
are fully declassified with one of the most
audacious extraction operations of all time.
- In 1944,
deep in the hills of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia,
hundreds of downed American airmen are stranded.
Facing impossible terrain and enemy threats,
the U.S. Air Force launches a bold extraction operation,
which involves digging a top secret aircraft runway
by hand.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- By July of 1944, 150 American airmen
have been shot down during recent bombing runs
over Axis oil fields,
now lie scattered across the hills of Yugoslavia.
- Yugoslavia is controlled by the Nazis,
but there are intense pockets of anti-Nazi resistance
inside the country.
- The downed aviators are located near a village
called Pranjani,
which is under the protection of a local resistance leader.
[David] Unfortunately,
they can't stay there for much longer.
- German patrols are combing the countryside.
If the aviators are caught, they face imprisonment
or even execution.
[David] The OSS gets word of the stranded airmen.
It's determined to get the men home.
But a rescue won't be easy.
[Martin] You can't get these men out by land because
they're deep in Axis-controlled Yugoslavia.
You can't get them out by sea
because they're far away from the sea shore.
Really, the only way to get them out
is to get them out by air.
♪ ♪
[Sami] It's risky.
It's possibly even suicidal, but it's the only way
to try and save the 150 men.
[David] The mission is codenamed Operation Halyard.
First, the OSS inserts a small team into Serbia
to locate the airmen.
Serbian-American OSS Officer George Musulin
is selected to lead the operation.
In August 2, 1944, his team flies in.
♪ ♪
- Men parachute into the countryside near Pranjani.
Resistance fighters in the area have been informed
that they're coming and are waiting.
- George Musulin and his team link up
with local partisan fighters who lead them
to the downed aircraft pilots.
- Musulin's team meets the stranded airmen,
but there's a surprise.
There aren't 150 men in hiding.
There are now over 250 with more arriving.
Their next task is to find
a workable landing area for the rescue planes.
[Hakeem] They scout the area looking for an obvious place
for planes to land, but the problem is
the area is heavily forested and highly mountainous.
There's no clear area for the planes to safely fly into.
[David] There's only one option.
They'll need to build a runway from scratch.
- The villagers have no machinery,
no electricity, only ropes, axes,
pitchforks, and livestock.
They dig and drag and clear the earth by hand.
When German planes fly over,
they scatter into the trees, hoping not to be seen.
♪ ♪
- In a few days, they're able to clear
a 700-yard strip through the forest.
- Just long enough for a C-47 plane
to land if the pilot is skilled enough
and if the wind cooperates.
[David] The OSS team radios Allied command in Italy
to tell them the airfield is ready.
- The first C-47 transport plane takes off from Italy,
and it's a dangerous journey because the pilot
is navigating at night,
flying low over unmapped enemy mountains.
And he has no radio beacons, no radar guidance,
and no air traffic control to aid him.
[Martin] What the troops on the ground can do
is they can light hay bales and fire,
which they do, and that helps.
But it's still not ideal.
[David] The C-47 comes in for the landing,
but the pilot pulls up at the last second.
Mountain landings are notoriously difficult,
and the runway looks too short.
[Sami] It's an incredibly risky operation,
taking on a makeshift runway in enemy territory
at night without proper equipment.
[David] If he can't make this landing,
hundreds of American airmen will be left stranded.
Pilot lines up again, and this time,
he gets the plane down.
- On the ground, desperate airmen
scramble onto the aircraft.
- Somehow the pilot gets out.
And three more planes touch down that night,
and dozens of men are evacuated.
The following night, more flights arrive.
Plane after plane lands and departs,
each carrying up to 12 American airmen to safety.
By the final extraction flight,
Operation Halyard has rescued every last man.
♪ ♪
[David] By the time the mission finishes,
over 500 airmen have been extracted from the region,
making Operation Halyard the largest rescue ever
of downed airmen behind enemy lines.
Despite this, the story is kept secret.
- Throughout the Second World War,
OSS operations remain classified.
But by the late 1960s, it was decided that
the story of the Operation Halyard extraction
should be made public.
[David] In 1967, the U.S. government
finally acknowledges the work of OSS and Serbian forces
in rescuing the American airmen.
- Extreme extractions usually mean extreme technology,
helicopters, night vision, satellite communication.
But in Poland in 1981, the CIA doesn't have any of that.
So they have to make do with something much simpler--
cardboard boxes and a plan that sounds insane.
♪ ♪
[Sami] In 1981, Poland, like most of Eastern Europe,
is controlled by the Soviet Union.
So to obtain top secret information about its enemy,
the U.S. relies on a network of spies there,
and Ryszard Kuklinski is one of the best.
[Andrew] By November 1981,
Kuklinski has passed tens of thousands of pages
of Soviet intelligence to CIA.
[David] Kuklinski discovers, however,
that his Soviet superiors have caught wind of a leak.
And sooner or later, it's going to lead back to him.
- If he's discovered, he'll be executed for treason.
[David] Kuklinski signals to his CIA handlers
he's in danger and needs to escape Poland fast.
[Andrew] Kuklinski is being handled by a CIA officer,
who has been promising Kuklinski throughout
his entire career that if he ever came into danger
or fell under scrutiny,
the United States would keep him safe.
[David] Kuklinski's CIA handler
quickly devises an exfiltration plan.
The CIA will pick Kuklinski and his family
up in a car at a designated meeting point.
Then they'll be taken to the U.S. embassy,
disguised, and smuggled out of Poland to West Germany
and on to the U.S.
- That night, Kuklinski comes clean to his wife
and two adult sons, confessing that
he's been spying for the Communist enemies
and they now need to escape.
[David] Kuklinski and his family
go to the meeting point in the city and await.
But no one shows up.
- The CIA van that's en route to pick them up
can't actually pick them up
because it falls under surveillance.
After multiple efforts to try to break free
of that surveillance,
it's just too tight to be worth risking.
[David] The Kuklinskis tried twice more
on successive nights, and each time,
the CIA pickup van is trailed too closely.
- Kuklinski can feel the noose tightening
on him and his family.
[David] Kuklinski's handler can see the original plan
isn't gonna work.
For the extraction to succeed,
he needs to catch the secret police off guard.
- He looks to Tom Ryan,
a CIA Bureau Chief who's in Berlin,
and asks him to drive all the way out to Warsaw.
[Sami] The plan is on.
Ryan drives a circuitous 12-hour route,
and this is a monumental challenge.
In order to evade all surveillance,
Ryan has to drive over 300 miles
without anyone trailing him.
- It's a lengthy drive,
and so if he does pick up a tail at some point,
he's got lots of time to hopefully lose that tail
or convince the tail that
he's not actually interesting after all.
[suspenseful music]
- When he reaches Warsaw, the Kuklinskis are waiting.
♪ ♪
- Immediately, he throws jackets and blankets
over the Kuklinski family and drives them
straight away to the U.S. embassy in Warsaw.
Once in the embassy,
they're put into a van with diplomatic plates.
[David] In the van, the family are told
to get into huge cardboard boxes,
and they're sealed inside.
- They now set off on the 340-mile trip to Berlin,
encased in darkness and unable to see a thing.
[Mark] This must have been excruciating.
They can't see anything.
They don't really know what's going on outside.
And God help them if one of them is claustrophobic.
In fact, one of Kuklinski's children
is actually sedated
so that they can make it through
this long and arduous trip.
[David] After several hours on the road,
the van suddenly slows.
- The Kuklinski family knows that they are
clearly approaching a border.
It's gotta be the border
between Poland and East Germany.
They're just hoping
that the doors don't come swinging open.
[David] Outside, though, there's a problem.
The Kuklinskis hear raised voices.
The van's diplomatic plates
haven't been properly registered,
and the guards are now suspicious.
They have every right to search the vehicle.
- They're in darkness. They can do nothing.
All they know is that they can hear people
outside screaming, yelling,
talking about how they wanna search this vehicle.
Their lives are over.
[David] Kuklinski is sure
his family's cover is about to be blown.
- If the family is discovered here right now,
the whole operation is a failure,
and there's no way to explain the evacuation of people
through a cardboard box across an international border.
[Greg] The doors remain shut.
The Kuklinski family continues to sit
in darkness until finally
they hear the engine roar back to life.
- The CIA's driver has managed
to calm the border guards down.
♪ ♪
Hours later, the Kuklinskis arrive in West Berlin.
They can't quite believe it.
They've arrived in the West, safe and unharmed.
[David] On November 11,
they fly out of Europe and land in Maryland.
Just a day after his arrival, Kuklinski is awarded
the Distinguished Intelligence medal from the CIA.
- Back in Poland, Kuklinski is sentenced to death in absentia
by the Communist government for treason of the fatherland.
[David] Details of the extraction,
however, remain top secret for the next two decades.
In 2004, Benjamin Weiser writes a book,
"A Secret Life."
Granted access to CIA documents for the first time,
his book reveals the full story
of Kuklinski's extraction,
revealing he smuggled out crucial intelligence,
including the locations of secret
Soviet nuclear weapons stores in Eastern Europe.
- You're a U.S. pilot downed in enemy territory.
The good news is you're carrying
an emergency beacon that tells the U.S.
exactly where to find you.
The bad news? It tells the enemy too.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
- In 1995, Americans are patrolling the skies
over the former Yugoslavia and attempting
to keep the peace between warring factions
that are fighting for control of the country.
[David] On June 2,
U.S. Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady is on
a standard patrol of NATO no-fly zones in Bosnia.
[whooshing]
Enemy fighters fire a surface-to-air missile.
[explosion]
- He's just able to evacuate before the F-16 falls apart,
but O'Grady finally lands
on the opposite side of a highway
inside the hostile-controlled Serbian ground.
♪ ♪
[David] O'Grady knows the Bosnian-Serb enemy
will have tracked his descent.
He needs to contact U.S. forces
and secure extraction fast.
- Whenever possible, the United States tries
to establish an underground railroad
in the areas that we operate,
where downed pilots can be recovered.
But sometimes these networks don't exist.
In this case, Scott O'Grady was behind enemy lines and alone.
- He has a pistol and some survival gear,
but notably he has a survival radio.
O'Grady's survival radio has two different functions.
One is that it can transmit voice, like all radios do.
And the other is that it can transmit an SOS frequency
to allow the American military
to try and hone-in on its position.
[David] The signal will be bounced by satellites
to analysts half the world away
at the U.S. Signals Intelligence Center
in Pine Gap, Australia.
♪ ♪
There, signals analysts are on alert for any sign
that O'Grady is trying to communicate.
[Andrew] The benefit of the emergency beacon
is that as soon as he triggers that beacon,
those forces in Pine Gap will inform local forces
to come rescue him.
[David] But triggering the emergency beacon
has one big downside.
[Andrew] If he uses the emergency beacon,
he's gonna send out such a strong signal
that anyone in the area that's collecting signals
will also be able to identify him
and direct the patrols into his direction.
All the Serbian forces in the area
would know to look for an emergency beacon signal
coming from this downed American pilot.
[David] It's the first day on the ground.
O'Grady decides it's too big a risk.
He opts for the voice radio instead.
- But almost as soon as O'Grady takes his radio out,
he notices enemy Serbs combing through the forest nearby.
So he stays absolutely still.
It's only when he sees them leaving again
at 6:00 p.m. that he thinks about trying the radio.
He waits until he's convinced they're not coming back,
and then he tries the radio again.
[plane whooshing]
[David] U.S. planes are searching for him,
but no one hears him.
- In a busy war zone, there's a huge amount of radio traffic,
and it's really a matter of luck
whether a pilot tunes in at the right frequency
and within range to hear O'Grady's communications.
♪ ♪
- Over the next few days, O'Grady constantly
tries to send radio transmissions.
But he's greeted with silence every time.
♪ ♪
[David] He doesn't wanna use the emergency beacon.
It's just too much of a risk.
On the ground, however,
O'Grady can feel the net tightening around him.
[tense music]
- In one instance, a Serbian helicopter
flies so close by his position
that he can actually make out the pilot's face.
[Sami] By the fifth day, he's starving,
he's freezing, and he's almost out of water.
He's having to resort to eating ants.
He knows that if he doesn't do something,
he will either be killed by the enemy or die in the wild.
♪ ♪
[David] Finally, O'Grady realizes
he has no other option.
[static buzzes]
- O'Grady decides to use the emergency beacon on his radio.
He turns it on and off for short periods of time,
hoping that the Serbs aren't gonna be able to find him.
[David] 8,500 miles away,
in the middle of the Australian desert,
the U.S. signal team at the Pine Gap base
picks something up.
It's what they've been waiting days for.
It's O'Grady. He's made contact.
- Pine Gap analysts pass the information on
to U.S. Forces off the coast of Italy.
- 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit launches
two CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters.
[David] At dawn, rescue helicopters
head toward O'Grady's signal.
- O'Grady can hear the beat of rotor blades.
And when he spots an American helicopter,
he knows that this must be the rescue force.
O'Grady runs out of the woodline
to get on that helicopter as fast as he can.
[Sami] Less than two hours later,
O'Grady is back at his base with American forces.
He survived six days hiding in enemy territory
and returns a hero.
♪ ♪
[David] O'Grady's rescue makes the headlines at the time,
but the full story of Pine Gap's involvement
is only told in 2021,
when U.S. Signals Intelligence analyst David Rosenberg,
who was at Pine Gap at the time,
gives a blow-by-blow account of the rescue mission.
♪ ♪
From prison breaks to desert heists,
nations have always gone to extreme lengths
to extract people and tech from hostile territory.
Some of these secrets are locked away for decades,
but the truth always finds a way out.
♪ ♪