Tonight on "Secrets Declassified,"
the ingenious disguises and elaborate ruses
used by governments everywhere to deceive the enemy,
from the decoy army created by some unlikely tricksters...
Army chiefs turned to an industry
where the nation leads the world--
show business.
To the luxury dive resort
that's really a secret spy base.
The scuba diving tourists
wake one morning to find that the entire senior staff
have deserted them.
And the Allied agent who takes on the Nazis
by baking the perfect camouflage.
He's carrying a bomb disguised as lunch.
These are some of the strange and terrible schemes
created throughout history by governments
and the people who work for them.
It's time to bring them to light.
The bigger the mission, the bigger the disguise.
In the 1950s, when the CIA needs to hide
its covert operations across all Southeast Asia,
it secretly purchases one of the world's
biggest airline companies.
In the early 1950s, the French military
is fighting Communist rebels for control
of their greatest Southeast Asian colony, Indochina.
But it's a battle that they're losing.
By 1954, much of the French army,
just over 10,000 troops, are holed up
in this mountainous valley named Dien Bien Phu,
surrounded by enemy troops.
The French don't have the air power
to actually resupply their troops.
Outnumbered, outgunned and out of options,
the French make a desperate appeal for aid
to the Americans.
President Eisenhower sees the French
as a major ally in fighting Communist expansion
across the globe.
The president realizes, though,
that the American public has no appetite
for another ground war.
We recently had World War II and the Korean War,
and he doesn't wanna write the French a blank check.
So Eisenhower is more interested
in covert assistance to the French
than in sending the Marines.
To keep the U.S. support under wraps,
he's gonna need a major smoke screen.
The answer could be an extraordinary air service
with a very inconspicuous name--
Civil Air Transport, or CAT for short.
CAT was formed in 1946 by combat veteran pilots
flying supplies to anti-Communist forces
fighting in the Chinese Civil War.
Weapons, people, livestock,
no cargo was too wild
and no route is too hazardous for CAT's pilots.
Their gung ho reputation
catches the attention of the CIA,
who start using CAT to help supply
their overseas operations.
Soon, CAT is flying
hundreds of covert missions for the U.S.,
and by 1950, the CIA have bought
the entire airline using a shell company
called the Airdale Corporation.
And CAT has the perfect disguise.
They become an actual legitimate business,
flying regular passengers all around Asia.
In fact, their work ends up making them
the second largest air transport company in the world.
CAT is a ready made solution to secretly funnel supplies
to French troops.
But there is a problem.
This mission is so politically sensitive
that the CIA worries CAT's cover might not be enough.
So they add a whole new level of subterfuge.
The U.S. government wants to be 100% sure
that these airdrops are never traced back to them.
So they begin working with the CAT pilots
to make sure that this entire operation
looks like a French enterprise.
Overnight, a fleet of CAT's finest planes
and pilots get a French makeover.
All the planes are repainted in French colors
to make them appear to be
regular French military flights.
Some of their aircrews
even use French language commands over the radio.
In March 1954, the supply drops begin.
Disguised as French airmen, CAT pilots risk it all,
flying ammo and equipment through hostile skies.
These are incredibly dangerous missions.
Two pilots die.
Among those who survive,
they say that the anti- aircraft fire they receive
is as intense as the worst they faced during World War II.
For two months, CAT pilots run a deadly gauntlet,
flying almost 700 missions to supply besieged French troops.
Despite Eisenhower's top secret aid mission,
the French forces are defeated in May 1954.
Even so, CAT's adventures in the region are far from over.
In the late 1950s, CAT is rebranded as Air America.
And as the Vietnam War heats up,
it flies thousands of covert missions in Southeast Asia,
until 1975, when the conflict ends
and its doors are closed for good.
In 1979, journalist Christopher Robbins
publishes a best-selling book called "Air America."
And the truth about this amazing airline...
Is finally revealed.
The CIA goes to extreme lengths to protect CAT's cover story.
This next spy does, too, but his disguise
doesn't hinge on what's in his papers
but what's in his pants.
In the late 1950s, Egypt's President Nasser
is determined to turn his nation
into an unshakeable power in the Middle East.
One of the ways he wants to do this
is to launch an Egyptian ballistic missile program.
The problem is that he doesn't have
the expertise inside the country
to be able to launch this program.
So he turns to German rocket engineers
who were actually part of the missile program
during World War II.
For Egypt's neighbor, the state of Israel,
the rocket program is a major red flag.
Israel is alarmed by the idea of the dictator
of an unfriendly country having long-range missiles.
If Egypt perfects these missiles,
it could strike Israel with no warning.
Israeli intelligence decides to send in a spy.
That means finding a Jewish agent
who can operate amongst Nazi engineers undetected.
One man fits the bill.
Wolfgang Lotz is an Israeli spy who was born
in Germany to a Jewish mother.
He's blond haired, blue eyed, and speaks fluent German,
which makes him the perfect fit to go into Cairo
to cozy up to some German rocket engineers.
In December 1960, Mossad deploys Lotz to Egypt,
armed with an extravagant cover.
Lotz's cover story is that he's a fabulously wealthy
ex-Nazi officer who has an unquenchable thirst
for champagne.
To find his marks, Lotz begins wining and dining
Egypt's high society.
Lotz is a fun guy.
He's really good at parties.
He's great at cocktail conversations.
He quickly becomes the drinking buddy
of a lot of high-ranking Egyptian officers,
including in particular General Osman.
This is the very general who oversees security
for the rocket bases that he's here to spy on.
But Lotz's party is cut short
when Mossad sends an urgent report.
Israeli reconnaissance identifies what it believes
to be a rocket base in the desert east of Cairo
in a place called Shallufa.
They want to send Wolfgang Lotz in
to basically see whether or not this is an active base.
If it turns out to be the real deal,
Mossad will probably recommend that
the Israeli Air Force bomb the site.
Lotz heads into the desert to investigate.
He brings his wife along so they can pose as tourists
visiting a nearby lake.
At a crossroads, they identify
a lone track and a sentry box.
No barriers and a single guard, and that one guard
steps away for a bathroom break.
So the two of them jump on the accelerator and charge down
the track past the barrier.
This is a terrible idea.
They haven't thought through the ramifications
of what they're doing.
Lotz and his wife are intercepted by a Jeep load
of heavily armed Egyptian military troops.
Inside the base, the commanding officer
interrogates them.
Lotz makes up a tale about how they were
trying to find a place to picnic, and they just got lost.
So he tells the base commander to call his friend,
General Osman, to prove his identity.
A few minutes later, Lotz is chatting with Osman,
who even unknowingly teases him about his spy mission.
Osman has no idea how close to the truth he really is,
and the pair is set free.
But just as Lotz's operation is gaining momentum,
his plan falls apart.
Lotz has been secretly communicating
with the Israelis using a covert radio transmitter,
and the Egyptians pick up on his transmissions.
In February of 1965, Lotz and his wife
return home, and it's filled with Egyptian agents.
They find the radio transmitter.
Lotz knows at this point the game is up.
Lotz and his wife are accused of being Israeli spies.
The punishment for that is execution.
To save them both, this smooth-talking spy
must spin his greatest lie of all.
Lotz insists that he's a German patriot,
and he only agreed to spy for Israel
because he needed the money.
And they threatened to expose his SS background
if he refused.
The problem is, Lotz's interrogators
aren't convinced.
They press him with the same question over and over.
Is he Jewish?
Luckily for Lotz, he has one ace left to play--
a bold move that could put their doubts to rest.
Lotz's father wasn't Jewish, and his Jewish mother
wasn't particularly religious, so he'd never been circumcised.
Lotz decides that his best form of evidence
is to pull down his pants.
Faced with this incontrovertible
physical evidence, his interrogators
finally buy his story.
Lotz is imprisoned for spying,
but he escapes execution.
Three years later, he's returned to Israel
in a prisoner exchange, yet the details
of his mission remain secret.
Then, in 1972, Lotz breaks his silence
by publishing an explosive memoir, "The Champagne Spy."
The book finally reveals how this silver-tongued spy
fooled Egypt's military by baring it all.
In the lead up to D-Day, the Allies are scrambling
to knock out a key Nazi armament factory in France.
To blow it sky high, one young agent cooks up
an ingenious deception.
3 cups flour, 2 cups water,
and 40 pounds of plastic explosive.
It's April of 1944, and D-Day is just weeks away.
The Allied commanders are working overtime
to weaken the German defenses that they're gonna face
when they invade Normandy.
An important target
is the national munitions factory
that's located in Saint Medard-en-Jalle
just outside of Bordeaux.
The Allies drop 268 tons of bombs
in an attempt to raze it to the ground,
but it's back up within days.
Knocking out a factory is not as simple
as it seems from the air.
So Britain's wartime sabotage unit, the SOE,
devise a black op--
send someone behind enemy lines to blow it sky high.
It's a black op at its boldest.
High reward and high risk,
which is why Britain calls on an unlikely recruit--
a 20-year-old French aristocrat.
Robert de La Rochefoucauld
is a young count from one of France's oldest noble families.
He flees to Britain once his father
is imprisoned by the Germans.
While in Britain, he learns of a new covert unit
known as the SOE, or the Special Operations Executive.
They were formed by Churchill for the purpose
of carrying out sabotage missions in occupied Europe.
Robert arrives in Britain at the perfect time
for the SOE.
Their operatives on the continent
keep getting caught because they're given away
by their school boy French.
So they're looking to recruit eager French exiles
to carry out sabotage missions.
Rochefoucauld is the perfect fit--
gung ho, willing, French,
and desperate to avenge his family.
He's given the mission to take out the munitions factory
at Saint Medard-en-Jalle.
On May 7, 1944, Rochefoucauld and another SOE agent
head to Southwestern France in two Halifax bombers
loaded with weapons, ammunition, and explosives.
The two men parachute into the countryside,
where they link up with the local resistance
and begin plotting how to take down the Saint-Medard plant.
Early surveillance reveals
the scale of the challenge.
The place is crawling with guards
who run regular patrols,
and they stop the workers at random
to make sure that none of them are smuggling in explosives.
Then the team spots a way
for a native Frenchman like Robert to just walk right in.
Rochefoucauld observes that the workforce
in the factory, they're French civilians.
And what that means is that he has an opportunity now
to blend in.
He can pass for French because he is French.
To convince the guards at the gate,
Robert has to look like a real employee.
So the team scour the workers and eventually find
a close match who, desperate to stop the Nazis,
hands over his ID.
It's a major risk for both men, to be sure,
because being caught would almost certainly mean death.
Getting Robert inside is one thing.
Disguising 40 pounds of explosives
is a much bigger problem.
So the team looks for a cover no guard would question.
They notice that most workers come into the plant
each morning carrying a baguette.
It might be possible to smuggle
small amounts of plastic explosive inside baguettes.
In France, nothing raises less suspicion
than the humble baguette.
But how can you engineer it into the perfect secret bomb?
Robert needs a baguette with the right structure
for concealing explosives.
So it's not as simple as just
popping over to the local bakery.
Any ordinary baguette might be too dense to hollow out,
too brittle to hold a charge,
or too dry to seal up convincingly.
The team starts baking.
They shape dough around a cavity,
bake it firm but make it pliable,
then load it with plastic explosives
and seal it with a flour and water paste.
It's black ops by baking.
Now it just needs to fool the guards.
Robert starts out with a small amount
of plastic explosives, which he smuggles past the guards,
knowing that if anything looks out of place,
the entire operation is over.
He slips away just long enough
to plant the explosives at critical points
around the factory, including fuel tanks
and munitions stores.
Once one artillery shell gets detonated,
it has enough explosive power to detonate
all of the shells around it.
To trigger this chain reaction,
Robert needs to plant a network of hidden explosives.
This means returning to the factory every day
for an entire week.
Each baguette can only hold a limited amount
of explosive, so Robert repeats the mission
over and over again.
And each visit carries the very real risk of being caught.
By the end of the week, he's planted
eight baguette bombs in total,
enough to blow the factory to pieces.
It's May 20, 1944.
As thousands of workers begin to exit the factory,
Rochefoucauld hides under a piece of machinery.
Robert moves quickly,
and he begins attaching timers to the bombs.
But he knows that this is incredibly dangerous
because these devices don't always work as predicted,
and they sometimes set off the bombs early.
By 7:30, the last charge is armed,
leaving Robert less than 10 minutes to escape.
Robert finds himself trapped inside the factory grounds
by an 18-foot wall.
But the resistance throws him a ladder,
he climbs up over the wall, and disappears into the night.
At 8:00, the explosions begin.
They are incredibly effective,
leveling the factory and stripping the Germans
of crucial munitions in the run-up to D-Day.
This secret mission remains secret for decades
after the war.
It's not until 2017, when a journalist
named Paul Kix publishes a book that describes
the baguette bomb incident.
The full story is finally revealed--
how a young Frenchman pulled off one of World War II's
boldest black ops with nothing more than nerve,
ingenuity, and a handful of baguettes.
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, and 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 stagecraft
to fight the enemy.
The purpose of the Ghost Army is to create diversions
and feints and deception.
Officially known as
the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops,
the Ghost Army is made up of just 1,100 men.
The concept is that you're engaging
in force multiplication by having
a small group of soldiers
pretend and give the enemy the impression
that they're actually a very large group of soldiers,
up to two divisions.
So you have a unit with about 1,000 people in it
that is able to make the enemy think it's 30,000 strong.
In June 1944, the Ghost Army Vanguard
Task Force Mason gets an airlift
onto the battleground in France.
Here, their mission is to support
the U.S. 928th Artillery Division
by providing an attractive target for German gunners.
The Ghost Army inflate a series of rubber howitzers,
matching the real guns.
The idea is to draw in the Nazi fire
to get them to focus on that area
where these inflatable weapons are,
as opposed to where American soldiers actually are.
The Ghost Army has to keep their inflatable guns
ahead of the real artillery for almost a month,
taking as many hits as possible themselves.
So these guys are either just
really, really brave or really crazy.
Possibly both.
Over the next 12 months, the Ghost Army supports the Allies
in some 20 operations before this wartime Hollywood team
gives their finest performance on the banks of the Rhine
in March 1945.
The biggest obstacle that we had to confront
after the Normandy landings
was crossing the Rhine.
General Patton and his Ninth Army
are trapped behind the river, which blocks them off
from the path to Berlin.
Rivers are a natural obstacle,
especially to heavy treaded vehicles like tanks.
You have to bring in army engineers,
start erecting bridges.
It turns into a big mess.
Meanwhile, German forces
are waiting on the other side,
and they're just poised to rain hell
on any Allied troops that try to make
that difficult river crossing.
The Ghost Army is ordered
to divert German defenders' attention
from Patton's crossing point
to draw the fiercest German fire.
The first phase is to generate
sneaky signals traffic.
Ghost Army communications teams fill the airwaves
with bogus radio chatter, creating the illusion
of a huge army on the move.
But that's just the beginning for the Ghost Army.
During the day, sonic teams
play the sound of heavy construction
through 500-pound speaker systems.
To the Germans on the other side,
it sounds as if pontoon bridges are being constructed.
The enemy would then be led to believe that
I'm about to be attacked by this very powerful force,
when in actuality, all that was over there
were a couple of Jeeps with loudspeakers on them.
The supporting cast plays its part
behind the lines, but the key part
of the operation is yet to come.
The Germans are conducting daily photo reconnaissance
sorties over Allied lines, measuring what our strength
looks like across the river, so that if there's any
noticeable build up, those photo reconnaissance aircraft,
they will detect it.
To fool these pilots,
the Ghost Army creates an entirely fake front line.
600 inflatable Sherman tanks
and field artillery pieces are moved into position
purposely so that an aircraft can photograph them,
and the enemy can then be left to wonder, all right,
it looks like there's a build-up here.
The Nazis react as intended,
pounding the Ghost Army's position with artillery fire.
Three of the unit lose their lives, but the ruse works.
Patton's army crosses the Rhine miles up the river,
facing only scattered Nazi resistance.
They take only minimal casualties.
This is a critical victory for the Allies.
In 2024, the Ghost Army is presented
with the Congressional Gold Medal for heroism.
It can be quite difficult to quantify
psychological operations, but it has been estimated
that the Ghost Army saved tens of thousands of American lives
during the war.
Desperate times demand daring deceptions.
In 1941, when one American singer
wants to save her husband from the horrors
of a Japanese internment camp,
she deceives hundreds of enemy troops
and puts on the performance of a lifetime.
On December 8, 1941,
the Japanese begin an amphibious landing operation
on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.
These islands host key U.S. military bases,
and Tokyo is determined to stop them
from becoming a launch pad for future American counterattacks
in the Pacific.
U.S. forces beat a hasty retreat
out of the capital, Manila.
Fleeing with them is a young American couple in love,
Claire and John Phillips.
Claire is a singer from Michigan
who's been performing in the Philippines
for the last two years.
John is a young and handsome sergeant
that she met while working there.
Despite the war, Claire and John marry,
tying the knot in a makeshift chapel.
But these newlyweds are torn apart
when John is sent to the front line.
Five months later, Claire gets the news she's been dreading.
Claire learns that John has been captured
by Japanese forces and sent to a prison camp
called Cabanatuan,
roughly 60 miles north of Manila.
This is one of the most infamous prisoner of war camps
in the Philippine Islands.
Meals are mainly basic rations of rice.
Sanitation is all but non-existent,
and dysentery and malaria are everywhere.
The thought of her husband suffering
is unbearable, so Claire dreams up an audacious scheme
to help him survive, one that will call on all her skills
as a performer.
Claire's idea is to open a high-end nightclub
in the heart of Manila that she'll run and star in.
She'll pack it with paying Japanese officers
and use the profits to help her husband and other POWs
by smuggling money and medical supplies into the camps.
Claire's grand plan has just one problem.
She's an All-American girl.
To run the hottest nightspot in Manila,
she needs an entirely new identity.
So Claire Phillips disappears,
and Dorothy Fuentes, a Filipino-Italian showstopper,
steps into the spotlight.
Dorothy's persona is perfect for Claire.
Claire is already an accomplished performer,
and although she doesn't speak Italian,
she knows most Japanese troops won't either.
She persuades someone who
used to work in the Italian embassy
to cook up some fake documents to support
the Dorothy Fuentes cover story.
Now Claire gets to work opening
the best cabaret in town.
She pawns her jewelry, including her wedding ring,
and pours every dollar she has
into leasing a modest dance studio.
Then she painstakingly transforms it
into one of the city's most glamorous nightspots.
To appeal to Japanese clientele,
she names it Club Tsubaki,
named after a delicate Japanese flower.
On October 15, 1942,
Club Tsubaki finally opens its doors.
Japanese officers are treated to dazzling dance routines
and very overpriced drinks.
The liquor is flowing. The music is hot.
And at 10:00 p.m. on opening night,
they're already turning away customers.
Her grand opening is the talk of the town.
But before Claire can funnel any profits to help John,
her world is turned upside down.
Claire receives word that John caught malaria
and has died at Cabanatuan.
Claire is devastated by the news,
but she realizes that
while she couldn't save John,
she can press on to help other prisoners.
Driven by Claire's grief,
Club Tsubaki is soon raking in thousands of dollars a week.
Now Claire needs to get this money
and the aid it can buy to the prisoners inside Cabanatuan.
She links up with a Filipino allied guerrilla network,
and they quickly devise an ingenious way
to slip goods past the guards.
They have sweet-faced young women
pose as street vendors, and they sell bags of fruit
to prisoners on work detail for just a few centavos.
The bags look completely innocent,
but inside are hollowed out bananas
stuffed with medicine or secret messages,
while some bags have false bottoms
that hide hundreds of pesos.
Soon, Claire is funneling the equivalent
of $20,000 U.S. a week into the camps,
money that's used to buy vital rations
at the camp's commissary.
Thanks to Club Tsubaki, countless lives are saved.
But after almost two years, the curtain finally
comes down on Claire's daring act.
In early 1944, incriminating resistance letters
are discovered inside Cabanatuan
that point directly to Claire.
Soon after, armed policemen storm the club,
and Claire is arrested.
Japanese military police subject Claire
to weeks of brutal interrogation and torture.
She displays incredible resolve,
refusing to reveal the names of co-conspirators
who could be targeted and keeps the details
of her operation completely hidden.
In November 1944, Claire is tried
in a military court and sentenced
to 12 years in prison.
Claire endures brutal conditions.
She's starved and forced to do hard labor.
Her weight drops to a mere 85 pounds,
leaving her on the brink of death.
Her rescue comes in the nick of time
when, in February 1945, U.S. troops retake Manila.
Two years later, she shares her story with the world
in a sensational memoir.
Shortly after, the United States government
awards the singer-turned-spy the Medal of Freedom
for her truly heroic wartime deception.
Imagine relaxing at a five-star beach hotel,
then waking up one morning to find
every member of the staff has left.
That's exactly what happened
to the guests of Arous Dive Resort,
a luxury vacation getaway in Sudan
where nothing was what it seemed.
As a result of the Ethiopian Civil War
and the famine that was produced
as a consequence of it, Ethiopian Jews by the thousands
fled Ethiopia into Sudan.
In total, 16,000 end up packed
into refugee camps in this neighboring country.
Sudan is an Islamist country
and hostile to Judaism.
So the problem for the Ethiopian Jewish refugees
is that in Sudan, they're not safe.
They are actively being hunted,
and they are a target for killing.
So Israel has to find a way to exfiltrate their Jews
out of the refugee camps in Sudan
and smuggle them to Israel.
The Sudanese government won't help.
Time for Mossad to come up with a plan.
Mossad identifies an officer, Dani Limor,
to go to Sudan to try to find a way
to bring these Ethiopian Jews back to Israel.
Well, he knew from the start that he needed something
on the sea because these evacuations
would have to start on the coastline.
The rat line would lead them over water directly to Israel.
So he starts shopping for a location,
when he finds the perfect cover story in the form
of this abandoned Italian dive resort
right on the water's edge.
The resort is called Arous.
For most, it's a collection of crumbling buildings.
For Limor, it's an opportunity.
Nobody would ever suspect a luxurious dive resort
on Sudan's Red Sea Coast
could ever disguise a secret spy op.
So he does a deal with Sudan's government to lease the resort
for $1/4 million.
Mossad rebuilt the resort at Arous
to turn it into a functioning vacation destination
that Europeans would want to go to
and that the Sudanese government
would not want to interfere with.
Mossad would use the resort as a cover story
to slowly and secretly exfiltrate Ethiopian Jews.
During the day, the plan is for Mossad to host guests.
Then at night, they will drive over 500 miles
to collect the refugees.
A two-night truck convoy will then take them to the coast,
where Israeli special forces will ferry them
via Zodiac dinghies to a naval ship offshore
bound for Israel.
The mission is highly classified.
All involved are well aware of the mortal danger
that they face, not only to themselves,
but all the fleeing refugees.
Mossad agents are convinced that anyone who's uncovered
participating in the operation could be hanged in Khartoum.
By spring 1982, this luxury resort
has been rebuilt, and Mossad's escape route opens.
The refugee camps that were holding the Ethiopian Jews
were about 500 miles from the coastline.
But under cover of darkness, the actual agents on the resort
would go to the refugee camps and literally wake up
the Ethiopian Jews to smuggle them by truck.
And then by night, they take the refugees out
and deliver them to the Israeli Navy,
who then takes them back to Israel.
The rescue resort operates
for more than two years.
A thousand refugees escape to a new future in Israel,
until political chaos in Sudan
makes it impossible to continue the mission.
The scuba diving tourists wake one morning
to find that the entire senior staff
have deserted them.
The mission stays secret for more than 20 years,
until a British journalist hears rumors
that lead to Dani Limor.
And Limor, feeling comfortable that enough time
had passed, reveals details about the way
that the Mossad operated a fake dive resort.
This is why Mossad has the reputation that it has,
because it is willing to rebuild a resort
to smuggle Jews across 500 miles of desert
to take them back to Israel.
The scale of this operation is absolutely mind boggling.
Cover stories can fool the enemy.
They can also ensnare the innocent.
In the hunt for Osama bin Laden,
the CIA tricks thousands of ordinary people
to catch one man.
The United States has been hunting
for Osama bin Laden for well over a decade,
but he's been like a ghost.
But then in August of 2010,
an operation tracking an al-Qaeda courier
leads the CIA to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Satellite imagery shows a man taking
regular walks through the courtyard of this compound.
And visually, it looks like a match to Osama bin Laden,
but it's not a certain match.
And if you're going to undertake a mission like this
in a foreign country, then you need to be
100% certain, or at least as close as possible to that.
Pakistan is a nuclear power,
and a raid like this risks destabilizing the government.
We have to be absolutely sure that Bin Laden is there
before we decide to launch.
We can't just rely on some grainy satellite photos.
The race is on to verify
Bin Laden is inside the compound.
Then the surveillance team spots something,
which leads to a brilliantly devious bit of deception.
Teams watching the compound have observed
that very few people are allowed in,
but one group that is allowed in
is health workers administering polio vaccines.
So the thinking is, one way the CIA can get inside
is to set up a fake inoculation program.
If they can get medical professionals into the compound
and collect blood samples,
they're probably not gonna get his blood,
but they might be able to get blood of his relatives.
The plan is hatched,
but then they discover a critical flaw.
There is no historical sample of Bin Laden's blood,
so we don't actually know what his DNA
specifically looks like.
The CIA does some digging and learns that Bin Laden
has a sister who died in Boston of brain cancer,
and there is some of her genetic material
still in the United States.
Because she's a close blood relative,
they can use this sample to make a DNA match.
With the DNA secured,
now they need to find a local accomplice to run the scheme.
The CIA identifies Dr. Shakil Afridi
as a man who might be able to help them
set up this healthcare scheme without arousing suspicion.
He's a leading physician in the Khyber tribal district
who's already overseen a number
of U.S.-funded vaccination programs in Pakistan.
Even better for the CIA, Afridi needs cash.
Afridi was recently kidnapped
by a local Islamic warlord.
His family paid $10,000 for his release,
and that was money that they didn't have.
So the agency offers him about $60,000 to set up
this covert vaccination scheme.
Afridi accepts the CIA's offer,
and to maintain total secrecy over the operation,
he's not even told who the prime target is.
With their doctor signed up,
the CIA starts devising a program
to get health workers into the compound.
They pick a hepatitis B vaccination program
for their cover because it requires a drop of blood
be taken from the subject and blotted on rapid test strips.
And then the blood can be later tested for DNA.
But ethically, it's quite dubious
because the vaccine needs three rounds to work.
And here, they're only planning to do one.
They're leaving an entire community
thinking they're immune to hepatitis B,
when really, they're not protected.
Ultimately, Bin Laden
is considered such a high-value target
that the CIA decides mass subterfuge
is a price worth paying.
In March 2011, the CIA roll out the scheme.
After administering 1,000 jabs, the time comes
to enter Bin Laden's suspected compound.
In late April, one of Afridi's nurses
is sent to the compound.
If she's denied entry at the door,
the entire scheme, months of work, could come crashing down.
The stakes are incredibly high.
This might be their one shot to confirm that Bin Laden
is actually on the compound.
And then the door opens and she's allowed in.
Exactly what happens next within the compound
is fiercely debated.
A nurse tells a local journalist
that she was able to enter and take a sample
from a young woman whose description
matched Bin Laden's daughter, Mariam,
but she later retracted that statement.
But according to Pakistani intelligence,
the nurse hands over the hep B blood test to Afridi.
As far as the results from those blood samples,
it's still a bit of a mystery today
as all the Bin Laden files haven't been declassified.
Tonight, I can report to the American people
and to the world.
What we do know is that just a few days
after those blood samples were reportedly taken,
President Obama gave the okay to a mission
to go into the compound and either capture or kill
Osama bin Laden.
That's not quite the end of the story.
Three weeks after Bin Laden's death,
Afridi is arrested by Pakistani authorities
for colluding with U.S. intelligence.
A British newspaper investigates the arrest,
revealing the CIA's clandestine operation
to the world.
From phantom armies to fake doctors
and exploding baguettes,
the most powerful weapon in covert warfare isn't force.
It's deception.
But no matter how dark a disguise is,
it will always be revealed in the end.