The American war machine, explained
Johnny Harris
0:00 (dramatic music) (bomb whizzes)- Let me show you
0:15 how much the United States spends on its military.
0:19 Over here you've got Russia, China, India, and other big military powers.
0:23 And yet, if you combine them all into one, the U.S.
0:26 still spends more.
0:28 More than the next 10 countries combined.
0:31 But I'm interested in what happens inside of this circle.
0:35 Like, what are we spending our money on.
0:37 (intriguing music) (papers shuffling) (highlight scrapping)
0:49 In here we'll see everything that the military
0:51 spends their money on, from salaries
0:53 for soldiers to elementary schools for their children.
0:58 We'll see the $21 million helicopters,
1:00 and these missiles that cost $1.6 million each.
1:04 And we'll see how much the Pentagon spends on the development of new weapons,
1:09 new technology, like these ship-based laser weapons.
1:12 And of course, the most expensive of all,
1:14 the F-35 fighter jet that will end up costing the taxpayers $2 trillion.
1:21 We even made a little model of this guy,
1:23 and, like the real thing, the model is continually breaking down.
1:28 No.
1:28 Okay, here we go.
1:30 [Producer] The door thing is really hard to put in.
1:31 Yeah.
1:32 Of all the money our Congress budgets to run our government on any given year,
1:36 almost half of it goes to the military.
1:39 Here you've got education, and there's diplomacy,
1:42 and health science, energy, environment.
1:46 We've been deep in the spreadsheets and the data, luckily,
1:49 all this stuff is pretty public and open to scrutiny,
1:52 with the goal of visualizing all
1:54 of this, trying to understand where the money goes.
1:56 To understand why the U.S.
1:58 spends so much more than any other country on its military.
2:02 And most important of all, to try to answer the question of whether
2:06 all of this money actually makes us safer.
2:09 [Senator Wicker] Almost all of our witnesses
2:10 before the Armed Services Committee tell
2:13 us that we are in the most dangerous global threat security since generations.
2:22 (gentle music)- This is the Pentagon's budget for 2023.
2:26 It's how they planned to spend money that year.
2:28 It turns out that how much they spend on defense
2:31 is pretty complicated and depends a lot on who you ask, so go to the sources,
2:35 you can see how we got all these numbers and what decisions we made.
2:38 The total number we got was $853 billion.
2:42 That's more than the entire economy of Switzerland.
2:45 It's a lot, so let's start to break it down.
2:47 (intriguing music) Close to half of all of this money
2:53 goes to the vague-sounding category of operations and maintenance.
2:58 This is $352 billion that we spend just on O&M.
3:03 That's larger than the entire economy of Portugal.
3:06 Like, just to create the report to get all
3:09 these numbers assembled in one place costs the DoD $269,000.
3:14 But also, credit to the Pentagon and the U.S.
3:17 government for giving us all of this very clear
3:20 data that we can shine a light on and scrutinize.
3:23 A lot of countries aren't this transparent.
3:25 So anyway, operations and maintenance,
3:27 this is all the costs required to keep the Department of Defense,
3:31 one of the largest organizations in the world, running.
3:34 It's a lot of not very sexy stuff,
3:36 like transportation, fuel, maintenance of equipment,
3:39 administrative costs, training expenses.
3:42 (guns firing) (intriguing music continues) It includes $39 billion just
3:47 for the doctors and health services for active duty personnel.
3:51 And it also covers the stuff that you don't
3:53 really think about when you think of military spending,
3:55 like environmental cleanup in areas that the military has
3:59 left unexploded bombs or spilled chemicals in the local environment.
4:03 It also includes disaster relief and humanitarian money,
4:06 which is something the military does as well.
4:09 Here's nearly $1 billion dedicated to anti-drug activities.
4:14 And here's $10 million for security at international sporting competitions.
4:19 This huge category also captures the cost to run
4:22 every one of the U.S.'s approximately 1,250 military bases.
4:27 (intriguing music continues) Including the approximately 800
4:31 bases that are not in the United States,
4:33 that are in other countries, which, by the way,
4:36 are quite expensive to run, because the U.S.
4:38 military has basically created a slice of America in these other countries.
4:43 You've got Pizza Hut and McDonald's
4:45 and Subway and grocery stores with products flown
4:48 from the United States to make military personnel
4:51 serving abroad feel like they're right at home.
4:54 Okay, but let's just pause right here on this map,
4:56 because this is a good moment to recognize
4:58 that the United States military is not a normal army.
5:02 It is not a normal military.
5:03 (soft piano music continues) Most militaries
5:06 are tasked with protecting their country, securing their borders, but the U.S.
5:11 military is so much more than that.
5:13 It sprawls out throughout the entire globe, giving the U.S.
5:17 control over every corner of the planet, allowing the U.S.
5:21 to be the global policeman, where it enforces the rules and norms of the system
5:25 that it created and from which it benefits immensely.
5:29 So one quick answer to this big question of why the United
5:32 States spends so much more on its military is actually pretty simple,
5:36 because this is the cost of being the global hegemon,
5:39 the one who gets to enforce the rules and maintain control over the globe.
5:44 (soft piano music continues) Okay, but let's keep going on our budget.
5:48 That's the point of the video.
5:49 (lively music) The next big category here is people, military personnel.
5:56 $172 billion.
5:58 (lively music continues) Pay, benefits, retirement,
6:09 healthcare for the over 3.4 million soldiers,
6:12 reservists, and civilian military personnel.
6:14 By some estimates, the Department of Defense
6:16 is the largest employer in the world, though it depends on how you count it.
6:21 The Pentagon also spends a lot of money on recruiting new talent,
6:24 like the $28 million that they spent
6:26 on hiring experts who work in artificial intelligence.
6:33 Next, the military spends $140 billion on research and development.
6:38 And a reminder, I know that these numbers are abstract
6:40 and billion doesn't mean anything to anyone, but $140 billion,
6:43 that's the entire economy of Morocco that the Pentagon spends on R&D,
6:48 thinking about the future,
6:49 with the goal of "maintaining technological superiority
6:52 "on the battlefield." Meaning they're working on new tech.
6:55 It's a huge part of what the Pentagon does.
6:58 Now, a lot of this stuff is classified,
7:00 but we do know that the Pentagon is spending money on stuff like AI,
7:04 using AI to analyze drone footage, to improve their targeting capabilities,
7:08 building autonomous submarines or these insane military lasers
7:12 that they use at sea to attack other ships.
7:15 For years, they've also been trying to develop
7:18 this exoskeleton that will supercharge the abilities of their soldiers,
7:22 allow them to carry more weight over long periods of time.
7:25 Although this technology, while potentially promising,
7:28 isn't really there yet, but it might be soon.
7:30 Now, the Pentagon pours a lot
7:31 of investment into these technologies for the battlefield,
7:35 but sometimes this tech actually turns into stuff that we use every day.
7:40 Like GPS, drones, voice recognition, the computer mouse and the internet itself
7:46 are all technologies that were first developed, at least in part, by the U.S.
7:51 military.
7:52 The worldwide web, or the web,
7:53 was created for and by the United States Department of Defense.
7:57 (intriguing music)- Let's quickly look at this smallest of the categories,
8:02 still $19 billion, but compared to all these other ones, it's pretty small.
8:07 This is construction, building new facilities both at home and abroad.
8:12 Like this little project, $85 million for jet fuel tanks in Japan,
8:17 supporting "force projection in the Pacific." Or it looks like they're proposing
8:22 $75 million to spend on a new
8:25 operations support facility in southern California.
8:30 And finally, we get to the part of the budget
8:32 that you probably think about when you think of military spending, procurement.
8:36 (thrilling music) $167 billion, the entire economy of Ethiopia,
8:44 to purchase all of this.
8:46 (thrilling music continues) Okay,
8:53 I've always known that military stuff is expensive, but now I really know it.
8:57 Let's look at some of this stuff.
8:59 (thrilling music continues) (cannon firing) This jet cost around $142 million.
9:08 The U.S.
9:09 bought 77 of them in 2023 and is asking
9:12 for another $14 billion to buy 83 more this year.
9:17 And they're pretty spendy to fly too.
9:19 (thrilling music continues) (jet roaring) Look at these four
9:25 cruise missiles parachuting out of a plane.
9:29 Each one of these missiles costs $1.6 million.
9:36 Oh, and the American taxpayer bought 600 of them last year.
9:40 (cannon firing) This vehicle costs $372,000.
9:46 It's used to move troops around the battlefield.
9:49 Last year we bought about 3,700 of them, and this year we want another 3,100.
9:53 $2.8 billion buying 24 of these F-15s.
9:57 For the Navy, this is going to cost $7.3 billion.
10:00 $1.2 billion for these 56 Black Hawk helicopters for the Army.
10:05 $8.2 billion for three destroyer-class ships.
10:08 Probably doing the same thing with those— (cut-off by overlapping
10:10 speech) (overlapping speech continues) ...is going to be by $2.2 billion.
10:16 I mean, it's a lot.
10:18 And these are just a few tiny little samples.
10:20 I'm just scratching the surface.
10:22 And in fact, this diagram that looks so
10:25 complex and granular is also highly simplified and condensed.
10:30 Each one of these categories actually contains
10:33 billions of tiny little things inside of it.
10:36 (puzzling music continues) This organization is
10:39 much bigger than we could ever fathom.
10:41 And in fact, it's much bigger than the Pentagon itself can even fathom.
10:46 The Pentagon has, up until this point in 2024,
10:48 never successfully passed an audit.
10:51 American taxpayers want to know how our tax dollars are getting spent,
10:55 and the fact that the department that's getting such a huge chunk of the federal
11:00 budget can't account for all of the dollars
11:02 it's getting is definitely a problem.
11:04 For six years in a row now,
11:05 the Pentagon has failed to pass an independent audit.
11:09 They've brought in a bunch of accountants and said,
11:11 "Tell us where all of our stuff is "and what
11:13 we spend our money on." And the accountants say, "No,
11:16 we can't do it." 61% of their physical assets are missing,
11:22 they don't know where they are,
11:23 which means they're probably investing a lot of money in stuff
11:25 that they already have and they just don't know it.
11:28 But my bigger question here is: why?
11:31 The United States pulled out of Afghanistan a few years ago,
11:34 the war in Iraq is over, but spending continues to go up.
11:39 And spending went down for, like, a split second.
11:42 But look, it's going up again.
11:45 (puzzling music continues) Okay, well, first off,
11:48 remember what we talked about earlier.
11:49 The U.S.
11:50 is not a normal country with a regular military.
11:52 The U.S.
11:53 is the global hegemon, who uses its military to assert control
11:57 and order over every corner of the globe.
12:00 But there's another reason why this budget is so high,
12:03 and this reason is much more infuriating to me.
12:06 (intriguing music) What our little graph here
12:11 doesn't reveal is that most of this money
12:14 is going to private corporations who get
12:16 466 billion of these dollars, about 54%.
12:19 And once again, the U.S.
12:21 government tells us exactly which corporations they give all this money to.
12:24 We pulled the last 19 years worth of data on these private contractors.
12:29 At the top of this list, you start to see the same names over and over.
12:33 Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin.
12:39 These are the names at the top of these lists year after year.
12:43 There used to be a lot of different defense contractors,
12:46 but over the last three decades, they got gobbled up by these big five.
12:52 "Transitioning," from the words of the Pentagon,
12:54 "from 51 to 5 aerospace and defense prime contractors.
12:59 "As a result, the DoD is increasingly reliant
13:02 "on a small number of contractors "for critical defense capabilities." I.e.,
13:06 we've got kind of a monopoly issue on our hands.
13:09 These five contractors own the space and the Pentagon
13:13 can't really go elsewhere if they need an F-35.
13:16 There's only one shop in town that makes it.
13:19 For this reason, the prices can get pretty out of control.
13:22 The Pentagon used to pay $25,000 for this Stinger missile and now
13:26 they pay nearly half a million dollars for the same missile.
13:30 The price went up more than 16 times in just a couple decades.
13:35 It's a little more than inflation.
13:37 There's a history of defense contractors overcharging the U.S.
13:41 government.
13:41 They can overcharge.
13:42 If they're the only company producing a certain widget,
13:46 then there's no competition.
13:48 And that's one of the problems with monopoly,
13:50 is if there's not competition, it's easy to overcharge the buyer.
13:54 In addition, the Inspector General of the Department of Defense has
13:57 found routinely that there's overcharging
14:00 through corruption and waste and fraud, and there have been lawsuits.
14:05 For example, KBR is a contractor that's been used overseas and they
14:10 were found to overcharge in dining halls by 30 to 40%.
14:15 It's also why a Pentagon inspector realized that the Pentagon was paying Boeing,
14:20 (airplane engine roaring) yes, that Boeing, $3,357 for one ball bearing,
14:27 a small little piece that the Pentagon could
14:30 actually get for $15 in their own warehouse.
14:34 $15.42, to be precise.
14:36 When the Pentagon does get around to investigating these contractors,
14:39 they sometimes find that they're taking huge profits,
14:42 like 40 to 50% profit margins,
14:45 giving them hundreds and millions of dollars above what they
14:48 should be making in any kind of typical business environment.
14:51 And what do they do with all these profits?
14:53 Well, they pay their executives very well.
14:56 But this list also tells us what they do.
14:59 (dramatic music) This is a list of how
15:06 much money these defense contractors spend to influence
15:10 our lawmakers into spending more money on the military
15:14 so that these companies can make more money.
15:16 You can see right here that Lockheed Martin is at the top of the list.
15:20 So far this year in this election cycle, Lockheed Martin has spent $2.7 million
15:26 split pretty evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
15:30 This is a number that will continue to go up as we get closer to the election.
15:33 And it is money spent to cozy up to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
15:37 Contributing to their campaigns,
15:39 bringing them out to show them how great their weapons are,
15:42 doing whatever they can to make sure
15:44 that the money keeps flowing to their companies.
15:50 These companies also benefit from the infamous revolving door.
15:55 (intriguing music) The revolving door is not a literal door,
16:01 it's a metaphorical door between the Pentagon and the defense corporations,
16:06 which allows top military leaders like Jim
16:08 Mattis to serve in the military for decades, retire as a general,
16:13 and then join the board of General Dynamics, a defense contractor,
16:16 only to pass through the proverbial door
16:18 to become the Secretary of Defense under Trump.
16:21 After which he passes through the door again
16:24 to go back onto the board of General Dynamics,
16:27 bringing with him all of his insider
16:30 knowledge and government contacts and influence.
16:32 And no, this is not just Jim Mattis.
16:35 This is a very normal thing that people do here in D.C.
16:38 One analysis found that in 2022,
16:41 top defense companies hired 672 employees directly
16:45 out of the Pentagon to work as lobbyists, board members, and executives.
16:53 Go check my sources if you want to read more about this.
16:55 I mean, yes, the revolving door is metaphorical,
16:58 but it's also pretty physical and literal.
17:01 I drive on this freeway all the time,
17:03 and I'm always struck at how close all of this is.
17:05 Over here is the Pentagon and over here are all
17:09 the defense contractors in an area of town literally called Pentagon City.
17:14 If there's someone working in government who is deciding on contracts,
17:19 and they have a conversation with someone who's going to receive that contract,
17:24 the person in the firm can promise a good,
17:27 high-paying job after that government official is out of government.
17:31 And so the government official then has an incentive to give a generous contract
17:36 to the contractor because they know they're getting this kind of quid pro quo.
17:41 They're going to get a high-paying job after they leave government.
17:44 And to add insult to injury here,
17:46 some of the lawmakers who approve the Pentagon's
17:48 budget own stocks in the defense contracting companies.
17:52 Like, the lawmakers get richer if we spend more money on defense.
17:58 No, no, no, no.
17:59 Why do we do this?
18:00 Like, this is...
18:01 This is, like, classic, basic, simple.
18:03 Like, no, conflict of interest.
18:05 We should not do this.
18:06 This is not a thing we should do.
18:08 But actually owning stocks in these companies is not the biggest way,
18:11 I think, that our lawmakers are influenced by defense contractors.
18:16 There's something more subtle going on here
18:18 that I think is actually the best explanation.
18:20 And it has to do with this excellent map.
18:22 (upbeat music) This map was assembled by an Air
18:29 Force veteran and analyst named Christian Sorensen.
18:32 This map makes it easy to see how
18:34 contractors intentionally allocate their operations all across the country,
18:39 spanning dozens of states and political districts.
18:43 Building all of this stuff means jobs, which people like.
18:47 So lawmakers are incentivized to keep
18:50 these contractors making stuff in their district
18:53 to provide jobs for their people so they can keep getting elected.
18:56 It's honestly brilliant.
18:57 It's smart.
18:58 This is political engineering.
19:00 You can see it very clearly with lawmakers like Roger Wicker,
19:03 a senator from the state of Mississippi.
19:05 Senator Wicker is a member of the U.S.
19:07 Senate Committee on Armed Services,
19:09 which plays a huge role in giving taxpayer money to the Pentagon,
19:13 which in turn feeds the bottom line of the contractors.
19:16 Wicker loves the military,
19:18 and you often hear him advocating that we should spend way more on the military.
19:24 We need in the United States to spend more on defense.
19:27 It's a necessity.
19:28 He writes op-eds in The New York Times calling for more shipbuilding.
19:32 And when you look at his state, you realize, of course he does.
19:36 The largest employer in Mississippi is this naval
19:39 shipyard run by a defense contractor named Huntington Ingalls,
19:43 which means more jobs and economic stimulus for Wicker's people in his state,
19:48 which means a better likelihood of being reelected.
19:50 Now, these defense contractors know that Senator Wicker
19:53 is an important part of their bottom line,
19:56 so they contribute huge amounts of money
19:58 to his campaign to make sure he gets reelected.
20:01 It's this virtuous cycle between Senator
20:03 Wicker and the defense contractors that results
20:06 in us spending more money on things that maybe we don't need to.
20:10 Senator Wicker's job is to represent the American people.
20:14 He sits on a committee that is supposed
20:16 to be looking at our national security as a whole.
20:19 And yet thanks to the strategy of these for-profit defense contractors,
20:23 this lawmaker has way too much incentive to advocate for more military spending,
20:28 which is exactly what he does.
20:30 My issue here is less with Senator Wicker or Congressman Mike Rogers,
20:34 who has the same thing, sits on a committee,
20:36 gives a bunch of money to the Pentagon,
20:38 has a state where billions of dollars of defense contract money
20:41 comes into, takes tons of money from defense contractors for his campaign,
20:45 gets reelected, continues to approve more money for the Pentagon, et cetera.
20:49 My issue is with the system that allows this to happen,
20:53 that allows the money from our military spending to be
20:57 used to influence our lawmakers into more military spending.
21:00 It's so clearly a conflict of interest.
21:02 (dramatic music continues) And it is
21:06 this system that has created an environment where
21:09 there is very little political pushback
21:11 to the endless ratcheting up of our military budget.
21:15 No Congressperson wants to be the person who loses jobs in their district.
21:19 Nobody wants to be the one known
21:21 as shutting down a plant and people becoming unemployed.
21:24 And so Lockheed can say,
21:27 "We have to have increased funding of this contract "or you
21:30 will lose jobs." And so that idea that jobs are essential,
21:34 the Department of Defense's spending is
21:37 essential really gives the contractor political power.
21:40 (soft dramatic music continues) (intriguing music)- Let me make one point clear,
21:46 which is that this isn't all corporate lobbying that contributes to the U.S.
21:52 spending so much on the military.
21:53 That would be too lazy of an explanation.
21:56 We live in a world where there's a well-documented paradox that explains
22:00 that strong militaries are actually the key ingredient to avoiding conflict,
22:06 in deterring an enemy from attacking,
22:09 keeping a balance between big militaries so that no one attacks.
22:14 Maybe someday we won't need militaries even
22:17 close to the size that we have today, but it appears that in today's world,
22:20 we still do need big militaries with credible
22:24 threats to avoid the age-old human curse of war.
22:28 And yet, on the other side of that paradox
22:30 is the fact that if you grow your military,
22:33 you force your adversary to do the same, to keep pace with you.
22:37 The U.S.
22:37 and the Soviet Union did that for decades during the Cold War.
22:41 Each ratcheting up their military until suddenly
22:44 both sides had over 10,000 nuclear warheads.
22:47 That is madness.
22:48 It diverges from the rational.
22:51 And yet it's the logical result when we decide that the main
22:56 solution to beating our rivals is to just make more weapons.
23:01 As the U.S.
23:02 spends more, Russia, China, other countries are spending more.
23:05 If you look at the discretionary budget,
23:08 about 50% of that goes to the Department of Defense,
23:11 and only 1 or 2% of that goes to the Department of State.
23:14 You can see where our priorities are.
23:15 A show of force is really the first foreign policy of the U.S.
23:20 For this one, the explanation is easy.
23:21 Diplomacy is hard and complicated and long.
23:24 It doesn't make leaders feel as powerful
23:26 and secure as having a big military does.
23:29 And no one's getting rich off diplomacy.
23:32 And yet diplomacy, international law, and organizations, treaties,
23:37 cooperation, that is how we solve our differences.
23:40 That is how we have learned to live peacefully on this globe.
23:43 The fact is no one ever achieved
23:46 sustainable peace by spending more on their military.
23:50 And finally, we have to remember that, while we pour so much into our military,
23:54 that is money that can't be spent elsewhere.
23:57 If we increase defense spending,
23:59 that necessarily has to mean something else decreases.
24:02 Bigger piece of the pie for defense, smaller piece of the pie for other things.
24:06 And those other things might be healthcare,
24:08 education, climate change, and so on.
24:11 And then we can also think of this notion of security.
24:14 What actually makes us secure?
24:16 Does spending more on defense make us more secure?
24:19 If you look at other sources of security,
24:21 having good roads and bridges, having safe drinking water,
24:25 these are all things that Americans need
24:27 investment in to be safe, to be healthy.
24:30 So we're economically secure,
24:32 people have jobs that they can go to, funding for college,
24:36 those are all sources of security as well.
24:39 So it's not just military security we need
24:40 to think of when we think of the federal budget.
24:43 I deeply respect the men and women who
24:45 work and serve the country in the military,
24:48 but I think that our laws and norms around how much money
24:51 we give to the military prevents us from assessing this situation clearly.
24:56 The system we have incentivizes the wrong priorities.
25:00 Priorities that have a lot more to do
25:02 with profit margins of companies and the electability of lawmakers.
25:07 All of this setting us on a path
25:10 of infinite escalation that risks ending in disaster.
25:13 (intriguing music continues) (dramatic music)- War used to be simpler,
25:25 violent, yes, always violent, but more straightforward.
25:31 It used to be about large groups
25:33 of men fighting with their muscles, their spears,
25:36 and eventually their swords and their crossbows,
25:39 and then their guns and their cannons.
25:41 (cannon fires) But then we hit a point
25:45 where it just started to change so quickly, faster and faster until...
25:51 (suspenseful music continues) eventually we got
25:56 this: private corporations who make unfathomably powerful
26:00 death machines and then ship those weapons to every corner of the globe.
26:05 (jet engine roaring) I once heard about these guys
26:09 who would make weapons and sell them 150 years ago,
26:15 sell them to anyone who would buy them.
26:17 These were industrial weapons, and sometimes they were sold to the opposite
26:22 sides of really big rivalry's conflicts.
26:26 I heard these guys started World War I, though I'm skeptical of that.
26:31 (soft music) This is something I've
26:35 wanted to understand forever, the arms trade.
26:38 As a student of conflict, it's something I feel like I have to understand,
26:43 and I recently found a way to better understand it.
26:48 In an old bookstore in Portland, Oregon,
26:51 I found a book that has changed my perspective on this.
26:56 It's called "Merchants of Death," and it is surprisingly relevant to today,
27:04 even though it was written in 1934.
27:07 This book has been the center
27:09 of something I've been thinking about and studying.
27:12 Why do countries, especially the United States,
27:16 make and sell weapons to every corner of the globe?
27:19 That's what we're gonna get to the bottom of, and it all starts with this book.
27:25 (soft music fades) (dramatic music) So I'll start with planting seeds,
27:33 just emailing experts.
27:35 We're trying to map arms trade.
27:37 Data is a huge part of this, like, I wanna make a map, I wanna see it visually,
27:41 and there's not a lot of clear maps out there,
27:44 so we're gonna make our own, but that's not easy.
27:47 Look at my beautiful art here.
27:48 Talk to the team, loop them in, let them know what we're up to.
27:52 Testing one, two, three, four, five.
27:53 Big lines coming out of either side.
27:55 Oh god, I don't know what I'm doing here.
27:57 (dramatic music continues) (Johnny speaking indistinctly) All right,
28:02 let's put the mapping aside for a little bit, turn back to this book.
28:05 This book is what hooked me on this topic, and there's a lot here.
28:11 (somber music) Our starting place is
28:14 that point in history where war dramatically changed.
28:19 Instead of large groups of men fighting with handheld tools,
28:23 war became much more about fighting with machines, bigger and bigger.
28:27 This was made possible by the massive amounts
28:29 of energy that were found stored in coal and oil.
28:33 Now warships could be pushed by steam instead of wind,
28:36 shielded by iron instead of wood.
28:39 Armies and supplies could be brought to the battlefield on trains.
28:42 Out with the horses and in with the trucks.
28:45 It's the late 1800s and the fires are burning hotter than ever.
28:49 Metal is taking the shape of souped-up cannons and guns and ships,
28:53 tools of war that were never thought possible now flowing in abundance.
28:57 (somber music continues) "Arms makers engineer
29:07 'war scares.' "They excite governments and peoples
29:10 "to fear their neighbors and rivals "so that they can sell more armaments.
29:15 "The simple, relatively inexpensive weapons of earlier
29:18 ages "were displaced by highly scientific death machines,
29:22 "and the cost of these, "together with the upkeep of huge armies,
29:25 "brought a rapid increase in national war budgets." So that's when it happened.
29:30 And overseeing all of this, this production of industrial weaponry,
29:34 not governments, but businessmen.
29:40 (somber music fades) (Johnny sips) (soft music)
29:56 "But the arms merchant doesn't see himself as a villain.
30:00 "According to his lights, he is simply a businessman "who
30:03 sells his wares under prevailing business practices.
30:05 "The uses of which his products are put "and the results
30:09 of his traffic "are apparently no concern of his, "no more than they are,
30:13 for instance, "to an automobile salesman." Still
30:16 haven't heard back from a lot of experts,
30:18 and still just kind of intimidated by this data set.
30:24 "One British arms manufacturer compared his enterprise
30:27 "to that of a house furnishing company, "which went so far as to encourage
30:33 matrimony "to stimulate more purchases of house furnishings.
30:37 "The arms maker felt that he too was justified
30:40 "in promoting his own particular brand of business." Hey Steven,
30:44 Happy New Year to you.
30:46 I'm curious if you can help us crunch this data.
30:50 Would love your thoughts, and we'll go from there.
30:54 "The arms industry is undeniably a menace to peace,
30:58 "but it is an industry "to which our present civilization clings
31:03 "and for which it is responsible." (soft music fades) (keyboard keys
31:09 clacking) (intense music) SIPRI is this organization that shows all
31:16 of the weapons being transferred from every country to every other country.
31:22 So here's ChatGPT's initial take on the dataset.
31:27 It's really disheartening how horrible it all looks at first.
31:30 So these lines are telling me nothing,
31:32 and you know that at some point it will get into a pretty place,
31:37 but it's not there, not even close.
31:41 (intense music continues) (dramatic music) First up, Hiram Maxim,
31:55 world-famous as the inventor of the wholesale killing machine,
32:00 a type of machine gun.
32:01 Maxim invented this gun that could fire 666 rounds per minute.
32:07 That was very fast, and crucially, it didn't jam like most machine guns.
32:12 With his amazing invention, Maxim takes his gun out on the road all over
32:18 the world to try to pitch it to different governments.
32:21 He's in South Africa and France and Switzerland and Italy and Germany.
32:25 His gun-selling missionary efforts eventually take him to Russia,
32:29 where he was almost thrown out for looking like a "foreign Jew." Man,
32:33 that's, like, kind of aggressive.
32:35 But then eventually he was able to stay and show them his gun,
32:38 but they were skeptical.
32:39 They're like, "No gun can shoot 666 rounds a minute," but...
32:43 (gun fires rapidly) And they were incredibly impressed.
32:51 His fame became so great in Russia that the Czar
32:54 invited him to visit him, which he did.
32:56 He was also decorated with other Russian orders.
32:59 The British eventually start using Maxim's
33:01 gun in their big adventures in Africa.
33:03 They were taking over modern-day Sudan and started using
33:06 this gun against the locals who were fighting with swords.
33:10 The British newspaper giddily reported that "when
33:12 the Maxim gun was turned on the Arabs,
33:14 "'A visible wave of death swept over the advancing
33:19 hosts.'" (dramatic music continues) "In most of our wars, it has been the dash,
33:29 the skill, "the bravery of our officers and the men
33:32 "that has won the day, "but in this case,
33:34 the battle was won "by a quiet scientific gentleman living down in Kent." Yeah,
33:41 this book is so good.
33:42 War was changing and Maxim was on the front lines of it,
33:45 and he was making a (beep) ton of money in the process.
33:48 China hears about the Maxim gun and immediately
33:51 sends someone to go check it out.
33:53 The Chinese representative gets to the UK and the first
33:55 words as he stepped off the ship on English soil were,
33:58 "I should like to see Hiram Maxim." The Danes passed on the gun,
34:03 the king himself, saying that it would,
34:05 quote, "bankrupt my little kingdom in about two hours." But the King of Persia,
34:09 the Shah, wanted some of these guns,
34:11 so he asked the Prince of Wales to gift him some, and this is a key moment.
34:15 The Prince of Wales says that he actually is not authorized to give
34:19 the king of Persia any of these guns
34:21 because they belong to Hiram Maxim's corporation.
34:26 Pause here for a second.
34:27 Do you see how this works?
34:29 Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, governments couldn't sell weapons.
34:34 It was the corporations that sold the weapons.
34:36 They were the ones who were in charge.
34:37 It was a free market of weapons
34:39 and the weapons kept flowing to everyone on Earth,
34:43 and these guys kept on making a lot of money,
34:45 which gets us to our next character in the story,
34:48 our next merchant of death, Basil Zaharoff,
34:52 aka, the Super-Salesman of Death, aka,
34:55 The Mystery Man of Europe because he was, quote,
34:59 "a shadowy figure." This guy has an insane story and someone
35:03 should make a movie about him because his story is wild,
35:06 but he was the Super-Salesman of Death.
35:09 He went around Europe and around the world selling guns and submarines
35:13 and all manner of weapons to anyone who would purchase them,
35:17 including two sides of the same war like Greece and Turkey,
35:21 which was the Ottoman Empire at the time, were definitely like arch rivals,
35:25 and they would break out into conflict at any moment.
35:28 Zaharoff first goes to Greece and sells them some
35:30 outdated submarines that the Great Powers didn't want to buy,
35:32 and then goes right to Turkey and says,
35:35 "Hey, Greece just bought a bunch of submarines.
35:37 "You need some too." And they buy some submarines.
35:39 And then he goes to Russia and does the same thing.
35:42 "Hey, Greece and Turkey have these submarines.
35:44 "They're in the Black Sea.
35:45 "You probably need some." And indeed,
35:47 Russia bought one because of that, and this guy's
35:50 commissions go through the roof.
35:51 It was rumored that Zaharoff became one of the richest
35:54 men on Earth because of the arms trade.
35:56 (lively music) (keyboard keys clacking) Luckily,
36:03 I have very skilled map friends that are gonna
36:08 help me make this data look pretty, including Marcus.
36:11 [Marcus] Hey Johnny, this is a multi-level problem,
36:14 so I'm gonna try to break it down.
36:16 Who invented the mapping tool that we use called geolayers.
36:19 [Marcus] So I've transformed your data, and I have imported it here,
36:23 and right now we can create a data-driven style.
36:26 (lively music continues) (keyboard keys clacking)-
36:29 So you have all these international businessmen
36:31 that we're making lot of money off of this new demand for industrial weapons,
36:36 the Krupp family and their steel,
36:38 the DuPont family and their gunpowder, Remington making guns,
36:41 and of course, Alfred Nobel, the dynamite king,
36:44 (dynamite explodes) who did go on to repent
36:46 for his sins by creating a Peace Prize in his name.
36:50 Peace, brought to you by killing machines,
36:54 the paradox of the heart of international
36:56 relations and the theme throughout this entire video.
36:59 These men got richer and richer.
37:01 The weapons got better and better until one day it all blew up.
37:07 (explosion thunders) (siren rings) "The number and variety
37:18 of death machines "had never been equaled.
37:21 "All of the sinister engines of war "invented and perfected
37:24 in the previous half century "were used in the fighting, "and naturally enough,
37:29 there was further development "of these during the war itself.
37:32 "The machine gun was improved,
37:34 "artillery was motorized, and its range became longer.
37:37 "Sights and fire control apparatus "became more scientific and more accurate.
37:41 "Many new implements of war were invented.
37:44 "The tank, a combined American and French invention,
37:47 "was first used by the British.
37:49 "Hand grenades were supplied in the trenches,
37:52 "and rifle grenades increased the range
37:54 "of these deadly missiles." (somber music continues)
37:57 (siren continues ringing) The First World War took place between 1914 and 1918,
38:03 and thanks to all these new deadly chemicals and weapons,
38:06 it was easily the deadliest conflict that the world had ever seen,
38:10 tens of millions of people killed or wounded.
38:14 It was after this war that the world woke up and realized that making weapons
38:20 a free market to be sold to the highest bidder was probably a bad idea,
38:27 and that's when this book came out, in the 1930s.
38:30 It was a part of a larger
38:32 discussion and critique of the international arms trade.
38:35 Some of these critiques went so far as to say that it was
38:38 the arms makers themselves that exacerbated
38:40 tensions between countries and caused the war,
38:44 though most historians just say that the arms trade actually
38:47 just exacerbated the violence by putting more weapons into the system.
38:51 But then in the conclusion of this book, you have this kind of prophecy moment.
38:55 (soft music) "The future may very well bring fiercer
39:00 "and more destructive wars "and increased business for the arms makers.
39:04 "If war continues, it is not at all fantastic
39:07 to predict "that the arms merchants will grow increasingly important.
39:12 "Already the stage of national affairs has been reached "where
39:15 the largest item on national budgets "is for past and future wars.
39:19 "Already war appears the greatest "and most important activity of government.
39:24 "The economic consequences "of this new
39:27 nationalistic militarism "will soon be apparent in the arms industry." "This new
39:36 nationalistic militarism," it was new back then,
39:39 it's not new anymore, but this is where it started.
39:42 So now it's time to fast forward and see how right they were.
39:46 (dramatic music) All right, this is for MJ.
39:50 This is the pass off for you to make a beautiful map.
39:54 Okay, so Johnny just sent me over the direction for the next map.
39:57 This one is a bit complicated.
40:00 (dramatic music continues) I think I finally have a good map update to show you.
40:09 [Johnny] Today the United States is the global superpower and the country
40:12 who exports more weapons than any other country and by a long shot,
40:15 and this is what we've been working to try to map.
40:21 All this data hunting and trial and error is to try to see what this looks like.
40:26 Today private companies still make and sell the weapons,
40:29 but, unlike in the "Merchants of Death" era,
40:31 weapons sales go through a government approval process,
40:34 which means that weapons are no longer
40:36 just a product that make money for businessmen.
40:39 Instead, they are a currency that countries use to purchase influence.
40:44 In this case, the United States being the top country.
40:47 (rocket launches) Thanks mostly
40:50 to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute,
40:53 or SIPRI, we know where these weapons come from and where they go.
40:58 This has been the bedrock of our data hunting,
41:00 and I'm happy to say that, after a fairly long process, we have mapped this.
41:07 So let me show you what it looks like when the global
41:10 superpower uses weapons as a currency for influence around the globe.
41:14 (intense music) (soft music) This map is pretty beautiful,
41:29 and I'm really grateful for the team that helped me make it.
41:32 I've got a great team, and it's helpful for seeing one really important thing,
41:36 which is the expanse of U.S.
41:40 arms trade, how far it goes, how wide it goes.
41:43 The thicker the lines, the more weapons flow,
41:45 but this map only shows us the first layer.
41:48 In reporting this story,
41:49 I've realized that there's a deeper way to understand this map,
41:53 and it's going to take a little extra reporting,
41:54 which is why there's going to be a part two of this video,
41:57 which dives into the modern arms trade, what it looks like when the U.S.
42:01 sells weapons all over the world, and why they do it.
42:04 The purpose of this video was to introduce you to the "Merchants of Death,"
42:08 so that they could teach us about how the business of war came to be,
42:12 and what happens when that business goes too far.
42:15 (ominous synth music) We've been busy mapping where weapons flow in this world,
42:22 especially those that originate in the United States.
42:26 And this is part two of a series on the arms trade.
42:29 If you watch part one, you'll already know that there's a long
42:32 history of businessmen getting rich off of war.
42:37 But I wanted to see what the weapons trade looks like today using data.
42:41 So after months of working on this, we finally
42:44 got a map that looks nice, it looks pretty.
42:47 The thicker the lines, the more weapons flow.
42:49 So in this video I want to go deep into these lines to show
42:53 you what they can teach us about how the United States projects its power,
42:57 about what happens when you sprinkle weapons all around the globe.
43:00 I've been looking at every one of these countries,
43:02 and with the help of my new colleague,
43:04 Sam, I'm hoping to bring you in into a much
43:07 deeper understanding of the American arms trade.
43:09 I also want to let you in on some
43:11 of the conversations I've been having with experts in this field,
43:13 which for me was very helpful in decoding all of this.
43:18 Hello.
43:18 Hello.
43:19 I'm Jeff Abramson, I'm a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy,
43:23 and I also lead something called The Forum
43:24 on the Arms Trade which is really where my passion is.
43:27 I'm Bill Hartung.
43:28 I'm currently a senior research fellow
43:30 at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
43:33 I've been working on arms trade issues since the '90s.
43:36 Why do we sell weapons to other countries in the first place?
43:41 I mean, at the most basic level it is to promote peace and security.
43:45 When we talk about the currency of international relationships,
43:48 sometimes weapons become that currency,
43:50 and what we desperately need is alternate currencies.
43:54 Well, there's the textbook reasons and then the real reasons.
43:57 The Pentagon would tell you it promotes stability,
44:01 it helps allies defend themselves.
44:03 So there's this kind of strategic argument,
44:05 but it's really about if you believe the U.S.
44:07 should be able to go anywhere, fight any battle, beat any adversary.
44:12 It's kind of premised in a fairly militarized view of foreign policy.
44:17 The United States sold weapons to 103 countries, and that's major weapons.
44:20 Generally whenever the United States provides weapons to another country,
44:23 they have to agree on how to use them,
44:25 and they're not supposed to use them to violate human rights.
44:28 But it's hard to see the leverage
44:30 that the United States can use with that government.
44:33 (mysterious synth music continues)- One last thing I wanna do before
44:38 we dive fully in is give you a theoretical point in IR, international relations.
44:42 Understanding this will help us understand this map much better.
44:46 It's this concept of balance of power.
44:47 The big paradox in international relations is
44:51 that countries will naturally get into conflict
44:53 with each other unless they calculate that it is unwise to do so,
44:57 that they actually don't have a chance of winning or gaining anything.
45:00 So countries are always building up their weapons so that they
45:03 have just enough so that their enemy will not attack them,
45:07 but not too much to where they will provoke some kind of escalation
45:11 and their enemy will start to get into a race to have more weapons.
45:15 Every country is making this calculation all of the time,
45:18 this balance of power with their rivals in their region.
45:22 And weapons systems and capabilities tends to be
45:26 the ingredients that are used for that calculation, for that balance of power.
45:30 When the U.S.
45:31 government approves a bunch of weapons being sent to some country,
45:34 in all of their press releases they always say the same thing,
45:37 which is that this sale will not alter the balance of power in the region.
45:41 An imbalance of power is what leads to escalating conflict and instability.
45:47 What an irony that the promotion of peace
45:49 and security is sell killing machines to other countries.
45:53 There are people who believe this creates better peace and security.
45:56 At the moment of the transfer it seems like a good idea.
45:59 It feels like you've gotta provide them or like this is the only
46:02 solution is you put these weapons
46:04 in this situation because we're out of options.
46:07 The first takeaway from this is just what you can see immediately,
46:12 that the United States has a massive presence all around the world.
46:16 You could look at these lines as almost tentacles of U.S.
46:20 influence in almost every country on Earth,
46:23 selling jets and guns and tanks and missiles
46:26 and bombs and radar and helicopters in exchange for influence.
46:30 I'd say at the real global level is this idea
46:33 that if we are engaging in you in the arms trade,
46:37 if you are buying weapons from us, we will have some say in how you act.
46:43 But that's about all this map will show you.
46:46 The U.S.
46:46 has influence all over the world.
46:47 It's something we kind of know.
46:49 I want to get a deeper understanding
46:51 of what's going on with each of these lines,
46:53 which is why I reached out to my good friend Sam Ellis.
46:57 Sam, what we are trying to do here is we
47:00 want to understand the why 'cause this map doesn't say why.
47:04 It doesn't say what is the U.S.'s motive in this.
47:06 It's often securing the loyalty of a regime
47:09 somewhere and weapons are the currency for securing loyalty.
47:12 The U.S.
47:13 sometimes wants stability in the region,
47:14 and it achieves that sometimes by wanting stability
47:17 in terms of we picked you as a government, we would like you to stay in power.
47:21 One of the reasons we sell is so that we don't have
47:24 to be the world policemen everywhere all the time doing all the work.
47:28 We can have people who we basically outsource it to.
47:31 What I'd like this map system to somehow convey is that what the U.S.
47:37 buys with the currency of weapons varies.
47:39 And I think it would be really interesting to zoom
47:42 in to some of these case studies and somehow show what the U.S.
47:46 is buying.
47:47 So it's stability, it's allies—- It's ally, stability, resources, relationship,
47:53 and we put all the categories
47:54 on, and then you zoom into the different combinations.
47:57 Let's zoom into Saudi Arabia.
47:58 They have all four.
47:59 Why do they have all four?
48:00 Let's go to Columbia.
48:01 They have two.
48:02 Why two?
48:03 So when we zoom into these cases,
48:07 we should be more descriptive and less analytical.
48:09 What do you think the map is gonna look like?
48:11 Do you think that the most weapons are gonna
48:13 go to the country with the most number of badges?
48:17 Yes.
48:17 At the end of the day, there is a deep underlying force in all
48:22 of this, which is that the more weapons we sell, the more money they make.
48:26 And the people in this town wanna make a (beep) ton of money.
48:28 (soft music fades)- Okay, so the goal here is to take this map,
48:34 which shows who the U.S.
48:35 is selling weapons to and add what they're asking for in return.
48:40 But that's a lot easier said than done.
48:42 Because the U.S.
48:42 doesn't say exactly what it wants back
48:44 for these countries in exchange for weapons,
48:46 it's hard for us to make any definitive claims.
48:49 But I think if we look at these countries' locations,
48:51 their history and their relationship with the U.S., we can surmise that the U.S.
48:55 is asking for basically five main things: stability, alliances, friendship,
49:01 help against an enemy or a rival, and vital resources.
49:04 So we looked at the more than 100 countries that the U.S.
49:07 sell's weapons to and tried to estimate what they could give the U.S.
49:11 in return.
49:11 And then we mapped it.
49:13 (rising synth music) So now we can see not only who the U.S.
49:21 sell's weapons to, but we have an idea of why.
49:23 And although this is based on subjective estimations by us,
49:27 it's still useful to see that American weapons come with expectations,
49:31 namely that these countries will help the U.S.
49:33 project its influence and its power all over the globe.
49:36 (steady synth music) So if we think of weapons as a currency,
49:40 then the most common thing it's buying is friendship.
49:43 Weapons are one of the most effective ways for the U.S.
49:46 to get other governments on its side.
49:48 And so it's a goal of almost every weapons deal.
49:50 But some countries have more to offer than others.
49:53 If we zoom to Europe, you'll see that the U.S.
49:56 is also buying stronger allies.
49:58 The U.S.
49:58 is in the NATO alliance with most of these countries so the U.S.
50:02 sells them weapons as a way to make their defenses as strong as possible
50:06 and to prepare them for the possibility
50:07 that they may have to fight a war together.
50:09 The U.S.
50:10 considers many countries allies, but we only included countries that the U.S.
50:14 is obligated to defend because it signed a treaty.
50:17 Ukraine is an example of a country that the U.S.
50:20 sells lots of weapons to but isn't in the NATO alliance.
50:23 Instead, the U.S.
50:24 is asking for Ukraine to counter an enemy.
50:27 We've defined four countries as the main enemies or rivals of the U.S.
50:31 The U.S.
50:32 often sells weapons to their neighbors as a way to fight
50:35 a war against them or deter them from starting a new one.
50:38 Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, and so the U.S.
50:41 is selling Ukraine weapons and in exchange the U.S.
50:44 is stopping Russia from conquering it and other countries in the region.
50:47 In the Middle East, the U.S.
50:49 sells weapons to a number of countries
50:50 as a way to counter its other enemy, Iran.
50:53 The primary example is Israel who gets a huge number of weapons from the U.S.
50:57 But the U.S.
50:58 also sells weapons to countries that control vital resources that it needs.
51:02 In the case of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, that's oil.
51:05 But a vital resource can also mean a strategic passageway like the Suez
51:09 Canal in Egypt where a lot of the world's shipping goes through.
51:12 By selling them weapons, the U.S.
51:14 is asking these countries to protect and give it access to these resources.
51:18 In Africa, the U.S.
51:19 sells weapons to many governments, not just to secure resources,
51:23 but also to try and make them more stable.
51:25 War and coups have made many regions
51:27 in Africa volatile and unpredictable, and the U.S.
51:30 hopes that by selling weapons to these governments,
51:32 it can help them stay in power and maintain the status quo.
51:36 It's important to understand that these labels often overlap like in East Asia.
51:40 (flowing synth music) China, a major U.S.
51:43 rival, is pushing to assert its control over this region and the U.S.
51:46 is responding by selling weapons to countries standing in its way.
51:50 Some are allies, some control vital resources,
51:53 like Taiwan's semiconductor industry.
51:55 Then there are many that the U.S.
51:57 feels it needs to strengthen so that China can't destabilize the region.
52:00 So now we can see not only where these weapons flow, but why.
52:04 The definitions are based on some subjective categories that we came up with.
52:08 But even still, it's useful to see that American weapons
52:11 come with expectations that these countries will help the U.S.
52:14 project influence and power all over the globe.
52:19 So for the final chapter of this video,
52:21 I'm going to address something that many of you familiar
52:25 with the arms trade are maybe thinking about right now which is,
52:29 does all of this actually work?
52:32 If weapons are a currency for influence and the U.S.
52:36 is using that currency to buy stuff,
52:38 to buy influence or stability around the world,
52:40 does that actually work the way that the Pentagon
52:43 and the United States government think it does?
52:46 The short answer is sometimes, but not really.
52:51 Where weapons really do work is in keeping alliances strong.
52:56 There's no question some countries welcome it.
52:58 Our allies like Korea and Japan and so forth.
53:01 Australia.
53:02 And it probably does cement those relationships,
53:05 make it more likely they'll support the U.S.
53:08 in a crunch.
53:10 But when it comes to trying to use weapons as an incentive to get countries
53:15 to behave the way you want them to, that's
53:18 where it kind of starts to break down.
53:19 And the best case for this is Saudi Arabia.
53:22 You can see on this map we give a lot of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
53:26 The Obama administration approved loads of weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia,
53:31 and in doing so, we had some strings attached.
53:34 A big one being that those weapons could not be used to violate human rights,
53:39 or from the horse's mouth: "genocide,
53:40 crimes against humanity, "grave breaches of the Geneva Convention,
53:43 "serious violations of Common Article 3 "of the Geneva Conventions,
53:47 "attacks directed against civilians "who are legally protected from attacks
53:51 "or other war crimes as defined by 18 U.S.C.
53:55 2441." Translation, Saudi Arabia is not to use
53:57 these weapons against civilians in any of their conflicts.
54:00 And yet, as Saudi Arabia has been waging this war against Yemen,
54:04 they've done exactly that, using American weapons.
54:08 They've bombed hospitals, weddings, and even a school bus.
54:11 And we know that this is
54:13 American weapons because investigators and journalists have
54:16 looked at the wreckage of these attacks and looked at the actual serial numbers,
54:21 concluding that these are American weapons, that they flow through these lines.
54:26 Although Saudi Arabia was dropping bombs,
54:29 most people in Yemen viewed it as an American war.
54:32 Sent arms to Saudi Arabia that slaughter people in Yemen.
54:36 But there was sort of this notion of, well, they're an oil supplier.
54:39 They're a bulwark against Iran.
54:41 Those so-called larger strategic interests
54:44 overrode the human rights imperatives.
54:47 Shout out to Bellingcat, the open source investigative journalism project
54:51 that helped uncover a lot of this stuff.
54:53 So Saudi Arabia isn't obeying the conditions that we put on these weapons,
54:57 and Congress tried to pass a resolution that said that they were gonna
55:00 cut off some of this military aid that we were giving to Saudi Arabia.
55:03 The problem is a lot of the power to approve
55:06 these weapon sales rests with the executive, the president.
55:09 So President Trump actually vetoed this resolution.
55:12 And even under the Biden administration, even though there was a brief pause,
55:15 the weapons have kept flowing,
55:17 making it very clear that this leverage that the U.S.
55:21 thinks it has because it's the provider of all of these weapons,
55:25 is actually kind of reversed.
55:28 Turns out Saudi Arabia has a lot more leverage than we thought.
55:32 The idea that the United States has captured
55:34 Saudi Arabia by having this weapons and defense arrangement,
55:37 that the Saudis need to rely on us.
55:39 They will do things that we ask them to do.
55:41 But I think the opposite is now happening,
55:44 that Saudi Arabia's been able to turn the tides and say,
55:46 "Hey, if you don't provide this, "we'll find
55:48 an alternate partner." The relationship has been perverted.
55:52 Okay, but Saudi Arabia is a monarchy.
55:54 Maybe we have better luck influencing fellow democracies.
55:58 So let's look at Israel,
56:00 who receives more military aid from the United States than any other country.
56:03 I think Israel's the prime example of the lack of leverage
56:06 that you would think a well-developed long-term weapons relationship would have.
56:12 The U.S.
56:13 government has come out and said that they are not happy with the way
56:16 that Israel is conducting its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
56:19 And yet what we see here is an effort to push more
56:23 military aid to Israel without any pause or withdraw of these weapons transfers.
56:27 And that's the reality of the arms trade is
56:29 that we can hope countries will take things into mind.
56:33 We can tell them we want to do things,
56:35 but ultimately they end up making local decisions for their local needs.
56:40 There's a lot more cases just like this, like the Philippines,
56:42 where the Duterte regime has used American weapons
56:45 to carry out a brutal war on drugs,
56:48 murdering and jailing civilians in the process.
56:51 What's confusing about this is that in some
56:53 sense the weapons are working for U.S.
56:55 interests.
56:56 We sell them these weapons, we give them these weapons,
56:59 we buy their support in deterring our enemy.
57:01 But in the process, these weapons that we use as our currency are
57:05 used for other things that have nothing to do with deterring our enemy.
57:10 And sometimes it gets really out of control,
57:11 like we give a lot of weapons to Turkey, a NATO ally.
57:15 Turkey will then transfer that to its proxies in Syria who will
57:19 use them to fight against American-backed rebels that are also using U.S.
57:24 weapons.
57:24 So American weapons are being used on both sides of a conflict.
57:28 It just feels a little bit like deja vu
57:31 from the book that was written a hundred years ago,
57:34 stating that this was a problem and it still kind of is.
57:37 The other big issue with using weapons as your main currency
57:40 for influence around the world is that weapons don't just go away.
57:44 Back in the '80s, the CIA transferred a bunch of weapons
57:47 to rebel fighters in Afghanistan who were fighting against the Soviets.
57:51 Decades later, those same weapons were being used by those fighters
57:56 and their descendants to fight against
57:58 Americans who were then invading Afghanistan.
58:02 Same thing happened in Libya.
58:03 We gave a bunch of weapons there and they leaked out and ended
58:06 up in the hands of militants and insurgents in Syria and South Sudan.
58:11 So if weapons are this currency that don't actually give
58:13 us leverage and that can create more danger than stability,
58:17 why do we keep making them and sending them to over a hundred countries?
58:21 There's a lot of answers to that question, but one of them has to do with money.
58:27 There's a lot of money in making weapons.
58:29 There always has been since the Industrial Revolution.
58:32 Lots of these weapons are made all over our country,
58:35 intentionally creating a network of jobs
58:39 that no congressman ever wants to vote down.
58:42 If a congressman votes to make fewer weapons,
58:44 they could be voting against a factory or production facility in their district.
58:50 Add to that, that some of our lawmakers own shares in these companies.
58:55 If these companies make money, they make money,
58:58 and yet they're the ones approving the money that goes to these corporations.
59:02 A massive conflict of interest that we've reported
59:05 on before in a previous video on insider trading.
59:08 What you get is this military-industrial complex,
59:12 a permanent economic business machine that is
59:16 incentivized to make more and more weapons,
59:19 both to prepare for war and provide national security,
59:22 but also to keep people rich and to keep the constituents of lawmakers happy.
59:28 So in short, one of the reasons the map looks like
59:32 this is to keep a bunch of private corporations nice and rich.
59:37 (plaintive piano music continues) (plaintive piano music fades) Okay,
59:45 well that is the end of a journey for now.
59:49 It started with an old book that really piqued my interest
59:54 and brought me into a history that I didn't know about.
59:58 And through this process, I feel like I've been able to draw
1:00:02 a linkage between this history and how it works today.
1:00:06 How for-profit corporations are still motivated to expand
1:00:10 their business by making more and more killing machines.
1:00:14 Now, weapons are a stabilizing force in our world.
1:00:19 That is true and that is an irony of stability in the world.
1:00:24 You have to have weapons to have some kind of stability for now.
1:00:27 Weapons also are political leverage that the U.S.
1:00:31 uses to keep the world somewhat stable,
1:00:34 and yet there's a lot to scrutinize and critique about the way that it's done.
1:00:40 We're dealing with weapons.
1:00:42 This is dangerous stuff.
1:00:43 We should be able to properly criticize it and critique it.
1:00:47 But instead, our ability to do that is hindered by the conflict of interest
1:00:52 and the incentives that are brought on by these for-profit
1:00:56 corporations and their relationship to our lawmakers.
1:00:59 To me, this is what's wrong about the system.
1:01:02 It perverts our ability to actually look into it,
1:01:04 to actually scrutinize it properly and to actually make
1:01:08 the best decision for the safety and stability of our world.
1:01:11 The weapons industry got out of control in the early 1900s
1:01:15 and ended up contributing to the worst devastation the world had ever seen,
1:01:20 which woke us up to actually being able
1:01:22 to criticize this and trying to change it.
1:01:25 A lot of those same conflicts of interests
1:01:27 that keep war permanent and enriching still exist today,
1:01:31 and my hope is that it doesn't take
1:01:33 another devastating conflict for us to wake up.
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1:03:09 Let's get back to it.
1:03:10 (somber music) I wanna show you this map
1:03:17 of the 54 countries that participated in a secret CIA program
1:03:21 to abduct people from all around the world and hide
1:03:24 them so that they could secretly interrogate them using violence,
1:03:28 both physical and psychological.
1:03:33 This story begins six days after 9/11 when George W.
1:03:37 Bush signs a memo giving the CIA free
1:03:40 reign to secretly capture and detain suspected terrorists.
1:03:44 But the question became what to do with these suspects once they were captured.
1:03:48 Putting them in prison in the U.S.
1:03:50 would be problematic because it would mean that the U.S.
1:03:52 would have to follow the rules of war,
1:03:54 which entails declaring them as prisoners of war
1:03:57 and giving them access to a lawyer and a trial,
1:04:00 and crucially, no torture allowed.
1:04:03 Those are the rules that most of the world has agreed upon.
1:04:07 And the CIA didn't want to play by these rules.
1:04:10 The country was raging with anger and a thirst
1:04:13 for revenge against those who did this.
1:04:15 For the CIA, the rules would just slow them down in their hunt
1:04:19 for the intelligence they needed to not only find the terrorists,
1:04:22 but to stop future attacks.
1:04:24 So the CIA looked abroad and began
1:04:27 constructing a global network of secret prisons
1:04:30 that would allow them to abduct and detain
1:04:32 people outside of the view of the public, the press, and the law.
1:04:36 (pulsing music grows) (pulsing music fades) (suspenseful music)
1:04:50 The first target was a Palestinian citizen named Abu Zubaydah.
1:04:55 He was hiding in Pakistan,
1:04:56 and the CIA believed that he was a top Al-Qaeda leader.
1:05:00 In March 2002, CIA and FBI forces capture him in a raid in Pakistan.
1:05:05 Zubaydah was shot in this raid, and almost didn't survive,
1:05:09 so the CIA flew in a doctor from a top U.S.
1:05:13 hospital to treat his wounds.
1:05:14 They needed to keep him alive so that they could extract intelligence from him,
1:05:19 vital knowledge that the CIA wanted.
1:05:21 But where to take him?
1:05:22 The CIA had decided on Thailand where they had worked out a deal
1:05:27 with the Thai government where the CIA could use this old U.S.
1:05:30 military base for whatever they were up to here.
1:05:34 This facility became known as Detention Site Green,
1:05:39 and the plan was to get Zubaydah to talk using,
1:05:42 quote, "novel interrogation methods," meaning
1:05:45 they were planning on using torture.
1:05:47 (suspenseful music continues) But there was yet another problem: the law.
1:05:57 Capturing people in someone else's country and then sending them to a third
1:06:01 country without any plan to give them a trial or apply local laws,
1:06:05 and then using torture,
1:06:06 is all illegal according to both international and American laws.
1:06:11 So one key step in this effort was to ask the government lawyers back
1:06:15 in Washington to create a legal justification for what they were about to do.
1:06:19 And the lawyers did exactly what they were told.
1:06:22 They drafted up a series of memos
1:06:24 that argued that Al-Qaeda members were not typical soldiers.
1:06:29 Instead, they would be considered, quote,
1:06:31 "unlawful enemy combatants." So according to the legal theory in this memo,
1:06:36 which was meant to remain secret, the rules don't apply here.
1:06:41 So the CIA got their legal justification, but even still,
1:06:44 the CIA agents in Thailand needed to make sure that none of this would get out.
1:06:49 They send this cable back to Washington, D.C., asking for, quote,
1:06:53 "Assurance that Abu Zubaydah "would remain in isolation
1:06:57 and incommunicado "for the remainder of his life." And here we see in a cable
1:07:02 from Washington that they gave these agents that assurance.
1:07:08 Before I go on, let me note that I will not
1:07:11 be going into detail about the interrogation techniques used by the CIA.
1:07:16 I think that is well covered elsewhere.
1:07:18 So instead, I will be using sterile words like enhanced interrogation,
1:07:22 partly because I'm publishing this to a lot of people and I
1:07:25 want to make sure that this video remains accessible to a large audience,
1:07:28 including younger viewers.
1:07:30 And partly to spare all of you of these details.
1:07:33 I believe that the story can be well understood without those details.
1:07:35 If you do want more information on this, go
1:07:37 to the sources in my description where all of this is documented.
1:07:42 Okay, so the CIA has their first secret prison, and it's in Thailand.
1:07:46 And Abu Zubaydah secretly remains there for nine months,
1:07:50 during which the CIA uses its expanded authority to torture this man
1:07:55 to get information that they think will help them catch more terrorists.
1:07:59 But here comes another problem for the CIA.
1:08:01 The Thai government officials are starting
1:08:03 to learn more about the secret program,
1:08:06 and are becoming uncomfortable with the CIA doing this in their country.
1:08:09 Not to mention the media starts poking around and learning
1:08:12 more details about what the CIA is up to.
1:08:15 So much so that Vice President Dick Cheney himself tries to convince
1:08:19 an American news outlet not to publish any of the details.
1:08:23 They partly comply, but the whole thing spooks the CIA.
1:08:27 They realize that they need to leave Thailand.
1:08:29 (suspenseful music) This is the CIA moving
1:08:49 its secret prisoners from Thailand to another location,
1:08:52 but they would have to cover their tracks.
1:08:58 And that's how we get this document.
1:09:01 We're looking at a receipt for the booking
1:09:03 of a private jet through a contractor working with the CIA.
1:09:08 We see that they booked a Gulfstream IV to go from D.C.
1:09:12 to Thailand.
1:09:13 (suspenseful music continues) This is where they loaded
1:09:19 up Abu Zubaydah and a few other secret prisoners.
1:09:22 They then fly to the United Arab Emirates.
1:09:26 And here's where things get interesting, because from there,
1:09:28 the official flight records say that this plane went to Austria and then London,
1:09:33 but it actually didn't.
1:09:36 This is a dummy flight record that the CIA planted,
1:09:39 so that we would never know what they actually did.
1:09:43 But because of this receipt,
1:09:44 we know that they actually flew to a small airport in rural Poland.
1:09:50 The CIA then drives their prisoners 20 minutes
1:09:52 from this little airport to a military prison in the woods.
1:09:56 The CIA had paid the Polish Intelligence Agency
1:09:59 $15 million of cash delivered in cardboard boxes,
1:10:04 all in exchange for the use of this facility,
1:10:06 their second secret terrorist torture prison,
1:10:09 or what we're now going to call Black Site.
1:10:13 This one was called Detention Site Blue.
1:10:18 This is where they would continue their interrogation work,
1:10:21 continuing to abduct suspected terrorists and quietly bringing them here,
1:10:26 often scrambling their flight paths and faking their flight
1:10:29 records so that this story could never be told,
1:10:32 and continuing to use violent torture to interrogate their prisoners.
1:10:35 But again, this couldn't last too long.
1:10:37 After a year, they were on the move again,
1:10:39 worried that the world was catching on.
1:10:41 So in September 2003,
1:10:43 and here comes another series of flight paths, from Washington, D.C.
1:10:46 bouncing around a few countries before ending up in Poland
1:10:52 where they loaded up their secret prisoners once again,
1:10:55 and took off headed to Romania where the CIA had negotiated
1:11:01 access to the basement of a government building in September 2003,
1:11:05 their next black site, and then to Morocco where the CIA was
1:11:11 negotiating with the government for another black site.
1:11:14 They ended up paying $20 million to build a prison that was code named Bombay,
1:11:18 but in the end, they never used it.
1:11:20 Instead, using Morocco's local prisons to house
1:11:23 their prisoners for a short time.
1:11:25 And then over to Cuba to the U.S.
1:11:27 Naval base at Guantanamo Bay,
1:11:29 where they opened two black sites: Detention Site Maroon and Indigo.
1:11:34 These sites were kept separate from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay,
1:11:39 and honestly, not much is known about them.
1:11:41 In fact, they're only mentioned one time and in a footnote
1:11:45 in this Senate report that eventually came out.
1:11:48 (suspenseful music continues) (dramatic music) Look at this map.
1:11:57 This is one way to visualize the global network that the CIA created.
1:12:02 These are the known flight paths that the CIA
1:12:05 took to transfer prisoners around their black sites.
1:12:08 By 2004, they had captured about 100 prisoners,
1:12:12 consistently moving them around, hoping to stay out of the light,
1:12:16 out of the scrutiny of the public, the press,
1:12:19 and oftentimes the home governments of these places
1:12:22 where they were moving their prisoners.
1:12:24 And by the way, all of this data, these flight paths, this information,
1:12:27 we know about because of an investigation
1:12:31 and a Senate report that later came out,
1:12:33 and some amazing investigative journalism by the Rendition Project,
1:12:37 who boiled a lot of this down, pieced together a lot of the information,
1:12:41 and allowed us to see this in an accessible way.
1:12:43 You can find so much more detail at The Rendition
1:12:46 Project website if you wanna check that out.
1:12:48 Let's look at this network again.
1:12:49 The CIA using 54 countries to traffic their secret flights
1:12:53 through to cover their tracks from the law and the press.
1:12:56 This reportedly includes a little known British
1:12:59 territory in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia.
1:13:03 And in the end, the CIA had a total
1:13:06 of nine secret prisons at least that we know of.
1:13:11 The network included another Eastern European country,
1:13:14 a prison in Lithuania where the CIA used a shell company
1:13:18 to purchase this nondescript barn that had been an elite horse riding club.
1:13:22 It was called Detention Site Violet.
1:13:25 They ran four of these secret prisons in Afghanistan,
1:13:28 including one that was nicknamed Dark Prison because prisoners were
1:13:32 held in metal shipping containers in complete darkness and isolation,
1:13:36 sometimes with loud music playing to keep them awake,
1:13:39 among other horrific treatment.
1:13:42 The CIA would also work with countries like Jordan
1:13:45 and Egypt where their intelligence officers would use torture.
1:13:48 But the CIA agent would be right there guiding the whole thing.
1:13:51 And there's evidence that the CIA also turned ships into black sites,
1:13:57 floating prisons where they could
1:13:59 interrogate their prisoners on international water.
1:14:01 (dramatic music continues) (radar beeps) (suspenseful music) All in all,
1:14:09 the CIA ended up interrogating 119 prisoners using this network of black sites.
1:14:14 And of the 119, they ended up releasing 94 of them.
1:14:19 Some were sent to foreign custody, some were just released,
1:14:22 and some have a status that is still unknown.
1:14:26 And some turned out to be totally innocent, like Maher Arar,
1:14:30 who was a Canadian-Syrian dual citizen who was taken by the CIA
1:14:34 in an airport in New York on his way back home to Canada.
1:14:38 Then he was transferred to Syria and tortured for a year
1:14:41 before the CIA realized that he was the wrong guy.
1:14:44 The Canadian government ended up paying him $10 million for his troubles.
1:14:48 One guy named Gul Rahman died of hypothermia at a black
1:14:52 site in Afghanistan while he was chained naked to a concrete floor.
1:14:56 No CIA officers were punished.
1:14:59 One German citizen was held and interrogated in a hotel room in Macedonia
1:15:04 for 23 days before being flown to Afghanistan and imprisoned for four months,
1:15:09 before the CIA realized that once again, he was the wrong guy.
1:15:12 He was released with a meager apology and a small payment.
1:15:17 But then there's prisoners like Khalid Sheik Mohammed,
1:15:20 who most people consider the mastermind of 9/11, the guy who planned it.
1:15:24 Or Abd Al-Nashiri, who's charged with planning the bombing
1:15:28 of an American Navy ship just before 9/11, the USS Cole.
1:15:32 Or this guy, Hanbali, who's known as the Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia.
1:15:37 Like, these are guys who need to face justice.
1:15:40 They're most likely responsible for the gruesome
1:15:43 murder of thousands of innocent people.
1:15:46 And in a post 9/11 America, there was so much anger and need for revenge.
1:15:51 The idea was that torture was totally justified,
1:15:54 especially if it stopped another attack.
1:15:56 But what's really happening here with this massive network of secret prisons
1:16:01 and this enhanced interrogation is that CIA is falling into Al-Qaeda's trap.
1:16:08 And internally you start to see how people
1:16:10 in the CIA know that this is actually a bad idea.
1:16:14 Many stopped wanting to participate in the enhanced interrogation.
1:16:18 Some were brought to tears while witnessing it.
1:16:21 One memo shows how the CIA started sending their worst
1:16:24 people to do these interrogations leading to mediocre or useless intelligence.
1:16:30 And while all of this was secretly happening,
1:16:32 President Bush was publicly saying:- I wanna be
1:16:35 absolutely clear with our people and the world.
1:16:37 The United States does not torture.
1:16:40 It's against our laws and it's against our values.
1:16:42 I have not authorized it and I will not authorize it.
1:16:46 [Johnny] But eventually the world would catch on.
1:16:48 The Washington Post was one of the first to report on this in detail.
1:16:52 And then a former CIA chief of counter-terrorism in Pakistan,
1:16:56 the one who directed a lot of the raids to capture these prisoners,
1:17:00 went public telling a journalist that the CIA had been waterboarding prisoners,
1:17:04 a torturous technique that induces the sensation of drowning over and over.
1:17:09 Feet at a slight incline.
1:17:11 There's some cellophane or material over your mouth
1:17:14 and then they pour water on this cellophane.
1:17:17 You can't breathe, and it feels like the water's going down your throat.
1:17:21 But you might be thinking that if we're talking about terrorists,
1:17:24 people who have committed heinous atrocities against innocent people,
1:17:29 that the normal rules and values that we abide by don't apply here,
1:17:34 especially if these techniques could potentially give us information that would
1:17:39 thwart the next horrific attack and save thousands of lives.
1:17:43 In that case, isn't torture justified?
1:17:45 Well, it turns out that in addition to being a violation of our own values,
1:17:50 torture doesn't actually work.
1:17:53 There's been extensive research on this that finds
1:17:55 that despite what the movies say, torture doesn't work.
1:17:59 It creates stress, making it harder
1:18:01 for the person being interrogated to remember facts,
1:18:04 and often pushes them to make up information to get the torture to stop.
1:18:08 There are many cases of this happening within the CIA Black Site program.
1:18:12 Like when the mastermind of 9/11 was being waterboarded hundreds of times,
1:18:16 he finally gave the names of two men who the CIA spent a bunch of time
1:18:20 going to capture only to learn that they
1:18:22 had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda or terrorism.
1:18:26 It's just not as straightforward as you would imagine.
1:18:30 But the CIA disagrees.
1:18:32 They said that they got useful intelligence on this.
1:18:34 So the Senate, when they were investigating this program,
1:18:37 went case by case to actually evaluate
1:18:41 whether or not torture led to useful intelligence,
1:18:44 ones that thwarted the terrorists' plans.
1:18:47 And what they found was that there was, quote,
1:18:49 "No relationship between the information from torture "and thwarting
1:18:54 these plots," and stopping the next terror attack.
1:18:56 They found that the CIA did get useful intelligence from these prisoners,
1:19:01 but not from torture.
1:19:03 And that they often tried to retroactively justify the torture
1:19:07 by saying that useful intelligence did come out of the program.
1:19:10 But most of the time, that information was gained from other sources,
1:19:15 or it was information that the government already had.
1:19:17 And even worse, they found that the CIA never
1:19:21 actually did an evaluation on how useful these techniques were.
1:19:24 They just kind of did them, evading any kind of accountability and oversight
1:19:29 that would make this not only ethical and legal,
1:19:33 but also effective in getting the intelligence they were after.
1:19:36 Overall, the conclusion of this report is that, quote,
1:19:41 "The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques
1:19:45 "was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence
1:19:48 "or gaining cooperation from detainees." (offbeat music continues)
1:19:55 (suspenseful music) So they shut the program down.
1:19:58 And of the 119 men who went through these black sites,
1:20:03 21 of them remain in the custody of the United
1:20:07 States government at the military base in Cuba called Guantanamo Bay.
1:20:11 But of all of these people, only three of them have faced any version of a trial
1:20:17 of justice where evidence is presented and a verdict is given.
1:20:21 And this gets to what to me is the worst outcome of this torture program,
1:20:27 which is that it turned into a massive
1:20:30 success for the terrorists who attacked Washington, D.C.
1:20:33 and New York on that day.
1:20:35 Al-Qaeda successfully provoked the United States
1:20:38 and the CIA to lash out in revenge, to violate their own norms and values,
1:20:45 the ones that they preach to the rest of the world,
1:20:48 to lay bare the hypocrisy of the United States,
1:20:51 which is something that a lot of the world already has a problem with.
1:20:55 The view that the U.S.
1:20:56 is a hypocritical empire, eager to preach about human rights and rule of law,
1:21:01 but quick to violate those very values when they become inconvenient.
1:21:05 And in the process, not only did the CIA fail to get any
1:21:09 useful intelligence out of this, but they also turned these men into victims,
1:21:13 like the guy who probably planned the USS
1:21:16 Cole bombing that killed dozens of U.S.
1:21:19 sailors.
1:21:19 That guy should face justice.
1:21:21 He should sit in a courtroom and have his crimes proved to the public,
1:21:26 and he should be punished at a measure that is proportional to his crime.
1:21:31 However, due to the CIA's use of brutal and illegal torture,
1:21:35 his case has been totally tainted.
1:21:38 The evidence obtained in his interrogation is now inadmissible in court.
1:21:42 He's even been granted victim status in the European Court
1:21:46 of Human Rights for the torture he endured in Poland,
1:21:49 forcing Poland to pay him 100,000 Euros.
1:21:52 And so now the families of those who
1:21:55 died in that horrific bombing have no closure.
1:21:58 The person who did this will never be brought to justice.
1:22:02 And this goes for so many of the men who plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks.
1:22:08 If you go to their Wikipedia page,
1:22:10 you're gonna see a lot about what the CIA did to them,
1:22:14 the Black Site program that they were a part of.
1:22:17 The reason why I call it a trap is because the CIA, in doing what they did,
1:22:22 helped turn these men into symbols of American hypocrisy,
1:22:26 whereas they should be seen as symbols of terror.
1:22:29 When we stoop to the level of revenge,
1:22:31 the most primitive form of justice, we go backwards.
1:22:35 We erode the foundations of our system, what we've built,
1:22:40 and then of course our government and our press
1:22:43 has to spend years or decades picking up the pieces,
1:22:47 shining a light on all of it, making sure we stand accountable,
1:22:50 and that hopefully we learn from our mistakes.
1:22:53 (suspenseful music continues)- This was a struggle
1:23:01 of Cuban patriots against a Cuban dictator.
1:23:04 [Johnny] On March 13th, 1962,
1:23:06 the Joint Chiefs of Staff put this document in front
1:23:09 of the Secretary of Defense for approval from the President.
1:23:13 This is a memo prepared by the most senior leaders in the U.S.
1:23:16 military, some of the most powerful men in the country.
1:23:20 And they're asking for permission to execute a plan.
1:23:22 A plan to lob mortar shells into their own military bases with "some damage
1:23:28 to installations." And then to make hijacking
1:23:31 attempts against civilian air and surface craft.
1:23:33 They're proposing to blow up a U.S.
1:23:35 ship in the U.S.
1:23:37 Naval base, Guantanamo Bay, and even to conduct a terror campaign on American
1:23:41 soil exploding a few plastic explosives in carefully chosen spots.
1:23:46 We're looking at a plan to blow things up
1:23:48 on American soil and then to blame it all on Cuba.
1:23:52 The Cuban people have not yet spoken their final piece.
1:23:56 [Johnny] This operation never happened, but it almost did.
1:23:58 And that gets to a big question.
1:24:00 Why would some of America's most powerful
1:24:02 leaders charged with safeguarding our nation think
1:24:04 that their duty would require them to lie to and terrorize the American people?
1:24:10 In other words, why were they planning Operation Northwoods?
1:24:15 [JFK] It is not the first time that communist
1:24:17 tanks have rolled over gallant men and women.
1:24:19 Let the record show that our restraint is not inexhaustible.
1:24:25 (suspenseful music continues) (dramatic music)- [Johnny] Operation Northwoods
1:24:31 was a response to a problem the U.S.
1:24:33 government had.
1:24:34 They called it the Cuba problem.
1:24:38 Cuba became a problem for the CIA when they watched this young
1:24:42 activist with an affinity for cigars lead a Communist revolution on the island,
1:24:46 throwing out the American-friendly dictator
1:24:49 and nationalizing all the valuable land
1:24:51 and industries that American businesses had been getting rich off for decades.
1:24:55 This was the Cold War, and Communism was now 90 miles away threatening
1:24:59 to spread to other countries in Latin America.
1:25:01 Countries that American businesses also
1:25:03 wanted to continue controlling and exploiting.
1:25:06 And any day, this new leader could align with the Soviet Union giving
1:25:10 the U.S.'s biggest geopolitical rival a military
1:25:13 base within breathing distance of Florida.
1:25:18 So this was what the Joint Chiefs called their Cuba problem.
1:25:25 The U.S.
1:25:25 had a few solutions to their problem.
1:25:27 First, they put an embargo on Cuba blocking all U.S.
1:25:30 exports to the country except for food and medicine.
1:25:33 Second, they stopped buying Cuba's largest export, sugar.
1:25:36 This actually ended up backfiring when the Soviet Union stepped in to buy
1:25:40 Cuban sugar kicking off an economic
1:25:42 alliance between these two communist countries, exactly what the U.S.
1:25:46 didn't want.
1:25:46 And third, the U.S.
1:25:48 started making plans.
1:25:50 (dramatic music) Lots of plans.
1:25:54 Plans to somehow get rid of Castro, to turn Cuba back into the American
1:25:58 business-friendly client state through whatever means necessary.
1:26:02 In one of these secret plans called Operation Zapata,
1:26:05 the CIA recruited 1,500 Cuban exiles who
1:26:09 fled to Miami during the Cuban Revolution.
1:26:11 It was this little CIA-funded army called Brigade 2506,
1:26:15 and the goal was to have them invade Cuba and remove Castro from power.
1:26:19 So the CIA trains them at this camp in the mountains of Guatemala
1:26:22 where they had just recently executed
1:26:24 a coup and installed a U.S.-friendly dictator.
1:26:26 And right in the middle of the planning stages of this operation,
1:26:29 JFK wins the presidency.
1:26:31 Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
1:26:37 [Johnny] And he inherits this scheme to invade Cuba using exiled Cubans.
1:26:42 The CIA briefs him on it, this plan to fix the Cuba problem
1:26:45 by forcibly unseating Castro using Cuban exiles.
1:26:49 And after some debate, JFK approves the plan.
1:26:52 (dramatic music) So on the 17th of April, 1961, they launched their invasion.
1:27:00 Brigade 2506 landed on Playa Giron with the plan
1:27:04 to invade the island and spark a popular revolution against Castro.
1:27:09 [Reporter] The assault has begun on the dictatorship of Fidel Castro.
1:27:12 Landings were effected by rebels as several...
1:27:14 [Johnny] But it was a complete failure.
1:27:16 Castro had found out about the invasion ahead of time.
1:27:19 A radio station on the beach had spotted
1:27:21 the invading ships arriving and called for help.
1:27:23 Several of the invading ships sank on the coral reef,
1:27:26 and the invading forces were met with immediate resistance
1:27:29 from Cuban armed forces who defeated them within three days.
1:27:33 Most of them were captured.
1:27:34 Nine U.S.
1:27:35 servicemen actually flew combat missions in support of this invasion,
1:27:39 four of which were shot down and killed in the process, something the U.S.
1:27:42 government and the CIA would go on to deny for almost 30 years.
1:27:46 But the point is that this invasion failed miserably,
1:27:49 and JFK and his administration were to blame.
1:27:53 Too long we have fixed our eyes on traditional military needs,
1:27:58 on armies prepared to cross borders, on missiles poised for flight.
1:28:03 Now it should be clear that this is no longer enough.
1:28:07 [Johnny] JFK would later fire the CIA director,
1:28:09 holding him responsible for the disastrous invasion plan
1:28:11 that we know as the Bay of Pigs.
1:28:13 But this didn't change anything.
1:28:15 The U.S.
1:28:15 government was still obsessed with removing Castro from power.
1:28:19 They just needed a new plan.
1:28:20 So JFK initiates his own plan called the Cuba Project, aka Operation Mongoose.
1:28:26 Over the next year, the CIA employs
1:28:28 hundreds of spies to collect intelligence on Cuba.
1:28:31 They send submarines on recon missions to Cuban waters.
1:28:34 They fund anti-Castro protest movements
1:28:36 spreading propaganda throughout the country.
1:28:38 They sabotage Cuban infrastructure to create chaos,
1:28:41 and they make dozens more plans to assassinate Castro directly,
1:28:44 including preparing poisonous pills to be planted
1:28:47 in a beverage to be drunk by Castro.
1:28:49 They even hired the American mafia to deliver the pills,
1:28:52 knowing that the mafia had their casinos kicked out
1:28:55 of Havana during the revolution and would want revenge.
1:28:57 But none of this worked.
1:28:58 The assassination attempts all fell apart.
1:29:01 Fidel Castro still remained in power, and his support wasn't wavering.
1:29:06 And the U.S.
1:29:07 military was getting desperate.
1:29:08 They needed to solve the Cuba problem before
1:29:10 the Soviets could get more involved on the island.
1:29:13 So after all these botched assassination attempts and failed invasions,
1:29:17 the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that the only
1:29:19 way to get rid of Castro was for the U.S.
1:29:22 military itself to invade Cuba and take him out.
1:29:25 But they knew that the U.S.
1:29:27 public would not support an outright invasion.
1:29:29 They needed to create a reason, a justification.
1:29:33 And this gets us back to our document.
1:29:35 (dramatic music) The one that went
1:29:38 to the Secretary of Defense for the President's approval.
1:29:40 This cover and deception plan to make attacks on American targets.
1:29:45 Fake attacks that will be blamed on Cuba to raise tensions between the U.S.
1:29:49 and Cuba to justify an invasion,
1:29:52 a legitimate provocation as the basis for a U.S.
1:29:56 military intervention in Cuba.
1:29:58 In other words, a lie to the American public and the international community,
1:30:01 a series of false flags to get what they wanted,
1:30:03 and all detailed in this classified document
1:30:07 that was only meant for a few people,
1:30:08 with hopes that the President would approve in the spring of 1962.
1:30:12 (dramatic music)- If the nations of this hemisphere should
1:30:17 fail to meet their commitments against outside communist penetration,
1:30:23 then I want it clearly understood that this government will not hesitate
1:30:28 in meeting its primary obligations which are to the security of our nation.
1:30:33 [Johnny] So let's see what this plan actually says.
1:30:35 It starts with the U.S.
1:30:36 military base at Guantanamo Bay, where they would start rumors using
1:30:39 fake radio stations and get American-friendly locals
1:30:42 to stage fake attacks on the base starting riots in the surrounding area.
1:30:47 Another proposed part of the plan was to blow up a U.S.
1:30:49 ship and blame it on Cuba.
1:30:51 This was specifically called out as a, quote,
1:30:54 "Remember the Maine" incident referencing the sinking of an American
1:30:58 warship in Cuba in the late 1800s that the U.S.
1:31:01 used to justify intervening in Cuba back then to fight the Spanish.
1:31:05 This is often thought of as a planned sabotage to justify the intervention.
1:31:09 And here was the U.S.
1:31:11 military in the '60s at it again.
1:31:13 The document predicts that the newspapers would start reporting
1:31:16 on the casualties causing a helpful wave of national indignation.
1:31:20 They also wanted to create a fake terrorist
1:31:23 campaign on American soil in Miami or Washington.
1:31:26 They wanted to sink boats of Cuban
1:31:28 refugees and stage the shooting of refugee targets,
1:31:31 and even suggested exploding a few plastic bombs in American cities.
1:31:36 These weren't all going to be pretend.
1:31:37 They even say in the document that they would go to the extent of wounding
1:31:41 people and then making fake arrests with prepared
1:31:44 documents so it could all be widely publicized,
1:31:47 making Cuba look like an irresponsible
1:31:49 government worthy of American intervention.
1:31:52 They thought through having American Air Force
1:31:54 pilots fly over places like Nicaragua and drop
1:31:57 bombs on cane fields to burn them down using weapons from the Soviet Union.
1:32:02 But for this to work,
1:32:03 they would have to be flying Cuban military-style aircraft.
1:32:06 They would need to ensure that their planes were properly painted.
1:32:09 They would also use these planes to harass Americans civilian aircraft,
1:32:13 making it look like it was the Cubans doing this.
1:32:16 They planned a fake hijacking of commercial
1:32:18 planes to blame the Cuban government,
1:32:20 or to fake shooting down a civilian airliner.
1:32:23 And if that wasn't enough,
1:32:24 the Joint Chiefs planned to create an incident which will
1:32:28 make it appear that communist Cuban jets have destroyed a U.S.
1:32:32 Air Force aircraft while it was flying
1:32:34 over international waters in an unprovoked attack.
1:32:38 Operation Northwoods was a reckless plan to lie and hurt people proposed
1:32:43 by top government leaders who were more and more desperate to invade Cuba,
1:32:48 and they wanted to move fast.
1:32:49 They say in just a few months.
1:32:51 They needed to do this so that this attack wouldn't involve the Soviet
1:32:55 Union who still hadn't established any defense pact or military bases in Cuba.
1:32:59 So what we're looking at here is the increasing desperation of the U.S.
1:33:04 military to achieve its goal to solve the Cuba problem.
1:33:07 If JFK would just approve this plan,
1:33:10 then the military would get to work blowing things up,
1:33:13 attacking their bases and terrorizing the American people.
1:33:16 But he rejected it.
1:33:18 Operation Northwoods never happened.
1:33:22 JFK's rejection of this plan is one reason
1:33:25 that there was a rift between him and the military,
1:33:28 with the military wanting to take a hard line on Cuba
1:33:31 and JFK feeling the sting of the Bay of Pigs invasion,
1:33:34 thinking that something like this was too much of a risk.
1:33:37 A month later, another document came to him,
1:33:39 the Joint Chiefs following up with another memo saying that the only
1:33:43 way to remove the communist regime
1:33:44 was military intervention by the United States,
1:33:47 and that Cuba was a vital base of operations for espionage,
1:33:51 sabotage, and subversion against other countries in the region.
1:33:54 The fear was that communism would spread across Latin
1:33:57 America because of this, and time is running out.
1:34:01 The rift between JFK and the military
1:34:03 continued during the Cuban Missile Crisis when
1:34:05 the Joint Chiefs hoped to deploy nuclear
1:34:07 missiles against the Soviets and invade Cuba.
1:34:10 But JFK stood up to the military once again and said no.
1:34:13 JFK eventually went on to deny General Lyman Lemnitzer
1:34:16 another term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
1:34:19 likely because of his leading role in planning Operation Northwoods.
1:34:22 And looking at this bizarre episode in American history,
1:34:25 you might feel like this is a moment where our system worked.
1:34:29 Military leaders tried to abuse their power to launch
1:34:31 an unprovoked and illegal invasion of another country,
1:34:34 and the President stopped them.
1:34:36 Checks and balances, right?
1:34:38 But the reality is all these men had the same goal:
1:34:43 Castro out of power and Cuba under their control again.
1:34:47 Their disagreement was one of just a few degrees.
1:34:50 The means not the ends.
1:34:51 The reality is that the U.S.
1:34:53 was one man, just one person away from this operation happening,
1:34:57 from a full-scale invasion.
1:34:59 If JFK had lost the presidency to Nixon,
1:35:02 would Operation Northwoods have happened?
1:35:04 We can't say conclusively, but it certainly raises the probability.
1:35:08 But what's more startling is that outside
1:35:10 of a few norms and some ideas about government,
1:35:13 nothing fundamentally has changed in our government.
1:35:15 The political military machine still runs
1:35:17 on the same software it did in the '60s.
1:35:20 If the U.S.
1:35:21 government felt like it and had a big enough enemy,
1:35:23 a big enough threat to American interests, it could happen again.
1:35:28 (suspenseful music)- [Vivek] If you want to seal the border, vote Trump.
1:35:33 If you want to restore law and order in this country, vote Trump.
1:35:38 If you want to defeat the deep state, vote Trump.
1:35:41 (suspenseful music continues) (keyboard keys clacking)- Hey, Johnny.
1:35:51 Hey, Paji.
1:35:52 I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around this story, I must admit.
1:35:55 Yeah, and this concept of deep state has been so, I think,
1:36:01 poisoned by politics and Trump sort of using
1:36:05 it for everything that he doesn't like.
1:36:07 And it kind of makes it hard to approach it earnestly,
1:36:10 but I think we have to keep digging.
1:36:12 I think there's something here.
1:36:14 Is the deep state real?
1:36:16 Is the deep state real?
1:36:17 (ominous music) (glasses clinking) (people speaking
1:36:27 indistinctly)- There's this moment in the '60s
1:36:30 (music glitching) (rocket exploding) where you
1:36:33 really see how this actually works,
1:36:35 like, where power really is, to the height of this moment where the U.S.
1:36:38 and the Soviet Union are in this massive staring contest.
1:36:42 There's nuclear weapons involved.
1:36:43 Everyone thinks the entire globe could be wiped out in this conflict.
1:36:46 And Cuba is centered right in the middle of it all,
1:36:49 right off the coast of the U.S., but they're on the Soviet side of the conflict.
1:36:54 The U.S.
1:36:54 at this point wants nothing more than to snatch Cuba, to make it their own.
1:36:58 And they've been trying to kill Fidel Castro a million different ways.
1:37:03 They're looking for an excuse to invade,
1:37:05 and to push back on all of this, the Soviets
1:37:07 actually start shipping nuclear weapons to the island.
1:37:13 The U.S.
1:37:13 has no idea until one day a spy plane is flying over the island,
1:37:17 and they snap this wild photo.
1:37:20 (camera snaps) I mean, it doesn't look like a wild photo,
1:37:23 it just looks like a random field in Cuba.
1:37:26 But you zoom in and you see canvas tents, trailers, missile launch equipment.
1:37:31 I mean, the U.S.
1:37:32 government immediately knows what they're looking at here.
1:37:34 The world's most destructive weapons are actually
1:37:36 hiding under these tents, ready to launch,
1:37:39 sitting right in the United States' backyard,
1:37:42 right off their coast, nuclear war 103 miles away.
1:37:46 Within the past week,
1:37:48 unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive
1:37:54 missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.
1:37:59 It's a crisis, a Cuban Missile Crisis.
1:38:03 (suspenseful music) And one man in Washington, D.C.
1:38:08 suddenly has a really difficult decision to make.
1:38:13 Everyone around him wants him to invade Cuba, but he's not sure.
1:38:18 Okay, but here's the kicker of the whole thing.
1:38:20 Instead of stay at work that night and figure out this crisis with his advisors,
1:38:25 Kennedy gets in a car and travels across town to a cocktail party.
1:38:31 He came here to a house in Georgetown, the home of Joe Alsop,
1:38:35 one of the nation's most influential newspaper columnists.
1:38:38 It was the eve of nuclear war and the President
1:38:40 of the United States kept his dinner date in Georgetown.
1:38:43 And the reason why is because at that party were the people he trusted,
1:38:48 the people who really had power in Washington during that time.
1:38:51 Most of them lived here in this neighborhood,
1:38:54 many of them side by side, all within a few blocks.
1:38:58 William Colby, the far east chief of the CIA,
1:39:01 he would later become the director of the agency.
1:39:03 Chip Bohlen, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union.
1:39:05 Allen Dulles, who...
1:39:07 (exhales) Boy, Allen Dulles, where do you even start?
1:39:09 He's the CIA's longest-running director, and he lived right here in Georgetown.
1:39:12 Frank Wisner, one of the founding officers of the CIA,
1:39:15 he lived just six blocks away.
1:39:16 Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court Justice, just a couple minutes walk away.
1:39:20 And Kennedy himself had a house in this neighborhood.
1:39:22 (suspenseful music) The reason JFK kept his date in Georgetown
1:39:28 that night was because this is where power in Washington was,
1:39:33 on the other side of town from the Capitol building,
1:39:36 the seat of American democracy, the decisions were being made here by unelected
1:39:41 men who had an immense amount of secret power.
1:39:44 (suspenseful music continues) (pictures clicking) These were
1:39:47 powerful men who were not elected or accountable,
1:39:50 and at this point they'd become drunk on the worst kind of power,
1:39:53 the secret sort of power that corrupts,
1:39:56 the kind of power that our founders sought
1:39:58 to check and balance with all of their founding documents.
1:40:01 But here in Georgetown,
1:40:03 it had moved beyond anything the designers of the country could have predicted,
1:40:07 into a shadowy, separate part of our government, a deep state that was actively
1:40:12 blackmailing the Congress and working to undermine
1:40:14 the President of the United States and being horrifyingly successful at it.
1:40:20 [Trump] Unelected deep state operatives who divide
1:40:22 the voters to push their own secret agendas.
1:40:26 You take on the intelligence community,
1:40:28 they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.
1:40:31 So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman,
1:40:35 he's being really dumb to do this.
1:40:37 As far as I know, we don't engage
1:40:39 in assassinations and kidnappings and things of that kind.
1:40:41 I do think there has to be serious questions raised about some of the foreign
1:40:46 policy blunders that this country has had over the last 20 to 25 years.
1:40:50 There's some truth in the idea that there is an ongoing group
1:40:55 of people who continue the work of government as administrations come and go.
1:41:01 Is it possible for these entities to go rogue?
1:41:06 Absolutely.
1:41:07 Was the agency involved in the kind of domestic
1:41:09 surveillance that has been portrayed in the news reports?
1:41:13 My feeling is that it has not.
1:41:17 Okay, I am doing this.
1:41:19 The deep state: is the deep state real?
1:41:21 And if so, what is it?
1:41:22 (suspenseful music) So we ready, Nick?
1:41:26 We're good.
1:41:27 Okay, sweet.
1:41:27 Paji, are you all aboard over there?
1:41:30 [Paji] Right here, we're here at the same...
1:41:31 [Johnny] Okay, if you can hear us.
1:41:32 I really want this.
1:41:33 Could you start by introducing yourself, who you are, and what you do,
1:41:37 and what your relationship to this topic of the history of the CIA is?
1:41:41 Yeah, so my name's Jefferson Morley.
1:41:43 I'm a journalist in Washington.
1:41:45 I've been a journalist in Washington for the last 40 years.
1:41:48 In the old days, spy agencies were a war thing.
1:41:51 When the U.S.
1:41:52 was at war, it would set up
1:41:54 an international spy operation to best wage that war.
1:41:57 And then when the war was over,
1:41:59 they would pare down or totally get rid of the spy agency.
1:42:02 The thinking here was that a spy agency took
1:42:05 up a lot of resources and threatened civil liberties.
1:42:09 It's a lot of power concentrated into a bunch of unelected people.
1:42:12 Worth it during war, not worth it during peace.
1:42:15 But then the biggest war of them all
1:42:18 came to America's Pacific doorstep and it changed everything.
1:42:22 [Reporter] And in today, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemies going rogue.
1:42:25 (bombs exploding)- And so Roosevelt now has a license,
1:42:29 more of a license to do what he wants.
1:42:31 And one of the first things he does is consult with a man named Bill Donovan.
1:42:35 [Johnny] Wild Bill, a corporate Wall Street lawyer
1:42:38 who was obsessed with the power of intelligence.
1:42:41 Donovan had very strong opinions and he said,
1:42:44 "You need a wartime intelligence, sir,
1:42:46 "'cause you're going to war."- Wild Bill Donovan would
1:42:49 be in charge of the Office of Strategic Services,
1:42:52 or OSS, a centralized intelligence agency
1:42:56 that would be given immense power to do
1:42:59 whatever it took to keep our people safe and to keep our team on top.
1:43:03 This was the birth of modern intelligence, a euphemism for spying and lying
1:43:09 and cheating and deceiving and sneaking and breaking,
1:43:13 coercing, dividing and conquering.
1:43:16 No idea was too crazy for the OSS during this time.
1:43:19 Like one OSS psychologist had this idea that Hitler could be
1:43:22 demoralized if they just showed him a vast quantity of porn.
1:43:26 [Jefferson] Paramilitary operation.
1:43:27 [Johnny] Strapping explosives to a bunch
1:43:29 of bats and letting them loose over Tokyo.
1:43:32 [Jefferson] A guy skiing into Nazi-occupied Norway.
1:43:35 [Johnny] Making fake companies,
1:43:36 recruiting off Wall Street from all of his old colleagues,
1:43:39 bringing in bankers and movie directors, fake radio stations,
1:43:44 anything to demoralize, divide or confuse the enemy.
1:43:47 The OSS is the first intelligence agency that the United States ever has.
1:43:52 Oh, and one of Wild Bill's favorite things
1:43:54 to do was to have parties at his house.
1:43:56 Hi, are we the first ones here?
1:43:58 [Announcer 2] It's the big night.
1:44:01 [Johnny] To plan and plot his operations with his friends in Georgetown,
1:44:05 a neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
1:44:07 that is strikingly beautiful.
1:44:09 Here is Bill Donovan's house.
1:44:11 It's now worth $17 million.
1:44:13 It's beautiful.
1:44:14 And this is where he would have
1:44:15 a drink and chat with other Washington power brokers.
1:44:18 He would recruit new agents from American high society,
1:44:21 earning the agency the nickname Oh So Social, pretty clever.
1:44:25 Okay, but remember that spy agencies like this were a war thing only,
1:44:29 and the war ended in 1945 and the OSS got dissolved.
1:44:35 The forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations.
1:44:39 What do we do with the OSS now that we're at peace?
1:44:42 And Truman says, "We don't want to risk
1:44:46 having an American Gestapo."- A political police.
1:44:49 His meaning, especially in the context of having just defeated the Nazis,
1:44:53 was that's what led our enemy astray.
1:44:55 They had a secret intelligence agency, the Gestapo,
1:44:58 which wound up enforcing political norms and enforcing tyranny,
1:45:03 and we don't wanna risk that.
1:45:05 Here's Harry Truman doing the right thing and signing a piece
1:45:07 of paper that says that the OSS can no longer exist.
1:45:11 I mean, Truman was freaked out.
1:45:12 He's like, "This was really great to help us win the war,
1:45:15 "but this is way too much power "in the hands of unelected
1:45:19 officials "holding secret information." But it was kind of too late.
1:45:22 Putting the genie back in the bottle would prove to be an impossible task.
1:45:26 (ominous music) Is it significant that all these guys
1:45:30 live four blocks from each other in Georgetown?
1:45:33 [Jefferson] Yeah, it's very significant because
1:45:35 they're the product of this wartime culture.
1:45:37 This is one party that just has to turn out right.
1:45:40 Here is target number one for the Reds.
1:45:43 And who's in the bullseye?
1:45:45 You are.
1:45:46 So there was a brief moment after World War II when the Cold War didn't exist.
1:45:50 We were at peace.
1:45:52 But then almost immediately tensions started to rise between these two
1:45:57 great empires that had been allies to defeat the Nazis,
1:46:00 but were now skeptical of each other.
1:46:02 And senators were suddenly declaring that it was impossible to know
1:46:05 "where war begins and where it ends."- The Soviet Union
1:46:08 and its agents have destroyed the independence and democratic character
1:46:13 of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.
1:46:16 And this is when all the intel people that had run the OSS,
1:46:19 many of them who lived in Georgetown, by the way,
1:46:21 start calling for the resurrection of the OSS,
1:46:24 a centralized intelligence agency that we can use
1:46:27 to fight this new global war with the Soviet Union.
1:46:30 But no, say a bunch of other lawmakers,
1:46:32 the Constitution wasn't designed for us to put so much
1:46:36 power in the hands of men who are doing secret things.
1:46:38 Doing this will result in, "A police
1:46:41 state "run by power-grabbing bureaucrats." (ominous music
1:46:46 continues) Too much power to, "military leaders,"
1:46:50 and their "insatiable appetite for more money, "for more men and more power,
1:46:54 "whatever the cost to democracy."- Truman's mind changed.
1:46:58 And what changed Truman's mind was
1:47:00 the growing confrontation with the Soviet Union.
1:47:04 And soon the papers were signed and a new agency was formed,
1:47:07 the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.
1:47:11 When Truman signs the National Security Act, he says,
1:47:13 "We have to be careful "that we don't have
1:47:16 an American Gestapo." So that thought is still on his mind.
1:47:19 The CIA was the big shiny new weapon of the United States in the Cold War,
1:47:24 and their mission was to, quote,
1:47:25 "Gain and distribute intelligence," and to perform, quote,
1:47:29 "other functions and duties "related to intelligence
1:47:33 affecting national security." What does that mean?
1:47:37 Everybody knew what that language meant.
1:47:39 Everybody knew that that was, and we just weren't going to talk about it
1:47:42 because we didn't want to write it down on paper.
1:47:45 Like, what do they do with this vague mandate of national security?
1:47:50 Oh boy, they go to town.
1:47:52 Who's that?
1:47:53 (crowd chattering)- [Announcer 3] You must
1:47:54 stir the ingredients in your chocolate cake.
1:47:57 [Announcer 4] "Tonight Show." (screen screeching)-
1:47:59 So clean but so soft and smooth.
1:48:02 Operation Paperclip, 1945 to 1959,
1:48:05 the Americans wanted to get those Nazi rocket scientists
1:48:09 on their side so that they could develop their own rocket capacity.
1:48:12 James Angleton, for example, protects a general under Hitler.
1:48:17 CIA, gets involved in the Italian elections.
1:48:19 Italian elections, 1948,
1:48:20 puts its thumb on the Italian democracy and makes sure that U.S.
1:48:24 allies win.
1:48:25 [Johnny] Operation Ajax, coup in Iran, 1953.
1:48:29 [Jefferson] The CIA and the MI6 organized
1:48:30 a coup to overthrow the democratically elected government.
1:48:33 Now that we encouraged the Shah to take that action I will not deny.
1:48:37 [Johnny] CIA coup, Guatemala, 1954.
1:48:39 Bananas, for of course, bananas.
1:48:40 [Jefferson] Again, democratically elected government,
1:48:42 reformists wanted to engage in land reform and the CIA
1:48:45 overthrows it really at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
1:48:48 The CIA is now helping American corporations?
1:48:51 [Jefferson] The influence of American corporations
1:48:53 on the CIA actions is unmistakable.
1:48:55 Allen Dulles was on the board of directors.
1:48:57 Howard Hunt, Birch O'Neal, David Phillips.
1:49:00 CIA coup in Congo.
1:49:01 Congo.
1:49:02 [Jefferson] Early 1960s.
1:49:03 CIA coup in Chile, 1973.
1:49:05 (bomb explodes) (suspenseful music)- Las Vegas.
1:49:11 The assassination operation against General Schneider
1:49:13 in 1970 is coordinated with Kissinger's office.
1:49:17 Thank you.
1:49:17 Nice to see you all.
1:49:19 [Johnny] Mind control experiments, MKUltra.
1:49:22 In 1950, the CIA launches a massive
1:49:25 program to develop means of controlling people's minds.
1:49:29 Some 40 U.S.
1:49:31 academic institutions were involved in this kind of research.
1:49:33 Feeding LSD to people without their permission.
1:49:35 [Jefferson] Can we develop a truth serum,
1:49:37 dosing somebody with LSD 60 times in a week?
1:49:41 NSA's Operation Shamrock.
1:49:43 Operation Shamrock.
1:49:44 [Jefferson] Electronic surveillance, 1945 to 1975,
1:49:46 the first warrantless wire tap.
1:49:48 Oh God, Bay of Pigs nightmare.
1:49:50 [Jefferson] There were hundreds of CIA assassination plots.
1:49:53 Operation Phoenix.
1:49:55 Eventually Bill Colby, who was later director,
1:49:58 admitted that they had killed 20,000 people.
1:50:01 Operation Mockingbird.
1:50:02 COINTELPRO.
1:50:02 And COINTELPRO.
1:50:03 Operation Chaos, Watergate, Jim Critchfield, Frank Wisner,
1:50:07 James Angleton, Roosevelt, John Foster, McCrory.
1:50:10 The CIA coup in Indonesia, CIA coup in Greece in 1967,
1:50:12 CIA involvement in the Guatemalan Civil War.
1:50:15 It was a CIA crime spree for 20 years.
1:50:18 There's no other way to describe it.
1:50:21 So by the 1970s, the CIA is this powerful,
1:50:24 well-funded machine of intelligence that is doing
1:50:29 a lot of secret things all around the world.
1:50:32 They start blackmailing lawmakers to scare them
1:50:35 away from investigating them and reigning them in.
1:50:39 These agencies had harmful personal information on lots of people.
1:50:44 When I was doing my Angleton book,
1:50:46 a guy told me one day when he went to meet Angleton,
1:50:48 Angleton quoted back to him what he had
1:50:51 said to his wife in bed the night before.
1:50:55 Jesus.
1:50:56 And so, they had this capacity, and people knew that they had this capacity.
1:50:59 The Kennedys knew that J.
1:51:01 Edgar Hoover had information about his affairs with various women.
1:51:07 Happy birthday, Mr.
1:51:10 President♪- This kind of knowledge that they had,
1:51:14 Angleton and Hoover were masters at using those kind of secrets as leverage.
1:51:19 Kennedy had this thing hanging over his head,
1:51:21 and he knew Hoover had that on him, and so he couldn't fire Hoover.
1:51:29 And so much of this power is concentrated among just a few people,
1:51:33 many of them not elected, and many of them living right here
1:51:37 along these streets in this neighborhood of Georgetown,
1:51:39 living in fancy homes, having fancy cocktail parties,
1:51:43 and kind of running the Western world.
1:51:45 It's exactly the nightmare of the founders
1:51:48 of the country and the nightmare of President Truman.
1:51:52 One month after the assassination of President Kennedy,
1:51:55 Harry Truman publishes an article in the Washington Post and says,
1:51:58 "The CIA should be abolished."- Wow.
1:52:02 And he says, "It has cast a shadow "on the historical
1:52:05 reputation of the United States." (ominous music continues) (pictures
1:52:08 clicking)- The man who signed the piece of paper
1:52:11 that created the CIA comes out and says he regrets it.
1:52:14 Eventually Americans start to get savvy to the fact
1:52:16 that their government is sort of going off the rails.
1:52:19 (suspenseful music) (bell ringing) As this war in Vietnam drags
1:52:25 on, more and more Americans stand up and say enough,
1:52:29 demanding accountability for a national security
1:52:31 apparatus that had gotten out of control.
1:52:34 And what does the government do in response?
1:52:36 They start spying on the protestors.
1:52:39 Operation Chaos was the CIA spying on the anti-war movement.
1:52:42 Johnson calls in Dick Helms and says, "What's going on?" They said,
1:52:46 "Communists have to be behind this." And so
1:52:48 they start infiltrating the anti-war movement,
1:52:50 and they come back in about a year and they say,
1:52:53 "Well, you know, Moscow and the North Vietnamese,
1:52:56 "they really like this anti-war movement,
1:52:58 "but it's not controlled by them, it's not funded by them.
1:53:01 "It's pretty much an American thing,
1:53:03 you know." But that doesn't change anything.
1:53:05 And Chaos continues to grow, and eventually by 1970,
1:53:09 there's 30 officers working on it, hundreds of agents.
1:53:12 And the ostensible purpose of Chaos, to detect a foreign hand, I mean,
1:53:17 Chaos was in existence for seven years,
1:53:19 every time they were asked to report on it, they came back and said,
1:53:23 it's not foreign controlled and it's not foreign funded,
1:53:26 which was obvious to anybody who was involved in the anti-war movement.
1:53:29 There were a lot of people inside the CIA saying,
1:53:32 "We're spying on our wives and kids basically.
1:53:36 "They're going to the demonstrations "and we're reading the reports at night.
1:53:39 "We shouldn't be doing this."- Are we trying to exterminate an entire people?
1:53:43 What have we become as a nation?
1:53:45 Americans were waking up to the fact that these unelected men were
1:53:48 wielding way too much power and spying not only on the entire world,
1:53:52 but on Americans themselves.
1:53:55 (suspenseful music)- We have been victimized by excessive secrecy,
1:54:05 not only with respect to the failure of the Congress
1:54:07 in the past to exercise proper surveillance over intelligence activities,
1:54:11 but also excessive secrecy has created
1:54:15 this kind of mischief within the executive branch.
1:54:18 [Johnny] Senator Frank Church helps lead
1:54:20 the charge of taking all of these secrets
1:54:23 and excesses and thrusting them onto the national
1:54:26 stage and shining a light on them.
1:54:28 There has never been a full
1:54:29 public accounting of FBI domestic intelligence operations.
1:54:33 The American people are learning for the first time just how bad this was.
1:54:39 800 witnesses, 10,000 documents.
1:54:43 Their secrets were shared.
1:54:45 CIA, FBI, NSA, assassination plots.
1:54:50 Does this pistol fire the dart?
1:54:54 [William] Yes, it does, Mr.
1:54:55 Chairman.
1:54:55 [Senator Church] When it fires, it fires silently?
1:54:58 [William] Almost silently, yes.
1:54:59 Spying on Americans.
1:55:01 A wholly comprehensive listing of everything those people
1:55:05 thought or did on any subject you can imagine, they're having a concern with.
1:55:10 [Johnny] Targeting people like Martin Luther King Jr.
1:55:13 and other civil rights or feminist activists.
1:55:16 Bureau agents were told to attack
1:55:18 the new Left by disinformation and misinformation.
1:55:22 [Johnny] Anti-war protestors were spied on, intimidated.
1:55:26 COINTELPRO is the name for the effort
1:55:29 by the Bureau to destroy people and to destroy organizations,
1:55:35 or as they used the words, disrupt and neutralize.
1:55:37 The Bureau went so far as to mail anonymous letters to Dr.
1:55:41 King and his wife.
1:55:42 "King, there is only one thing left for you to do.
1:55:45 "You know what it is.
1:55:46 "You have just 34 days in which to do it.
1:55:49 "You are done."- [Senator Schwarz] That was taken by Dr.
1:55:52 King to mean a suggestion for suicide, was it not?
1:55:54 [Frederick] That's our understanding, Senator.
1:55:58 The CIA's LSD mind control experiments were also detailed to the public.
1:56:03 [Jefferson] One of the first things they come across is the MKUltra papers.
1:56:07 And so were the FBI and CIA's attempts to infiltrate the free press,
1:56:12 planting journalists within our newspapers.
1:56:15 We would later learn in some investigative reporting that this infiltration
1:56:18 of the free press was much more widespread than Church even discovered.
1:56:22 He reported that up to 400 journalists had
1:56:24 been paid by the CIA under Operation Mockingbird.
1:56:28 And there's no doubt that it was a massive effort and effective.
1:56:33 The Church Committee made a few things clear: number one,
1:56:36 that indeed a group of unelected government employees used immense power
1:56:42 and resources of the United States
1:56:44 government to pursue programs that were illegal,
1:56:48 unethical, and generally out of line with American values and norms.
1:56:53 And they did it in secret outside of any sort of accountability,
1:56:56 partly because the U.S.
1:56:58 Congress wanted to give them money and turn a blind eye.
1:57:02 I can recall members of Congress who
1:57:05 recoiled from responsibility of knowing what was happening,
1:57:12 members of Congress who said, "Don't tell me.
1:57:14 "I don't want to know." I think that is an indictment of the Congress
1:57:20 just as severe as any indictment which
1:57:23 is labeled against any in the intelligence community.
1:57:26 When Dulles wanted to get approval for the CIA budget,
1:57:29 all he had to do was take a top line number
1:57:33 to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and he would say,
1:57:37 "This is what we want for this year."
1:57:38 And the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee would say,
1:57:41 "Okay, that's what you've got,
1:57:43 "and please don't tell us anything "about what you're doing with it."
1:57:46 And so there was no internal challenge to this world of CIA people.
1:57:51 But here's the other thing that is so crucial here,
1:57:53 which is that when you listen to these hearings,
1:57:55 you see people who thought they were doing the right thing,
1:57:58 who thought that they were doing what they needed
1:57:59 to to protect the country during a very scary time.
1:58:03 After a 30-year period, all of a sudden,
1:58:05 you woke up one morning and here was this creature that had
1:58:08 been created that no one along the line had ever really contemplated.
1:58:12 Each of these steps that I think initially were innocent, honest steps.
1:58:16 Many of these agents were earnest patriots,
1:58:19 but they were operating in a system free of accountability and transparency.
1:58:24 Even within the deep state,
1:58:25 there were people who were doing things for altruistic and good reasons.
1:58:30 And then there were people who were doing
1:58:32 things for their own selfish or bad reasons.
1:58:35 And exactly how many are in each category is sort of impossible to delineate.
1:58:42 I got sucked in when I should have
1:58:44 known better and where many other more intelligent,
1:58:47 sophisticated people got sucked in in other areas.
1:58:49 So after the Church Committee, all kinds of new oversight regulations come in.
1:58:53 There's new committees formed, there's new regulations,
1:58:55 and suddenly the intelligence community now finally has some kind of oversight.
1:59:00 The deep state was reigned in.
1:59:02 Now, they did fight back.
1:59:04 Church was undermined and intimidated by these agencies.
1:59:07 CIA people, I mean, they hated Frank Church.
1:59:10 Jim Angleton would go around and say Frank Church was a KGB agent.
1:59:13 Dick Helms raged against him.
1:59:15 Kissinger, they couldn't believe that U.S.
1:59:18 intelligence was being opened up.
1:59:20 On the other hand, Americans were like, "Oh my God,
1:59:21 "this is what was being done in our name?"- But overall,
1:59:24 this is a story of American democracy doing what it's supposed to do,
1:59:28 reign in the worst impulses of humans with power,
1:59:31 and in the process avoiding disaster at least for a few decades.
1:59:37 One of you is about to be elected the leader
1:59:41 of the single most powerful nation in the world.
1:59:44 Have you formed any guiding principles for exercising this enormous power?
1:59:50 When it comes to foreign policy, that'll be my guiding question.
1:59:53 Is it in our nation's interests?
1:59:56 Peace in the Middle East is in our nation's interests.
1:59:59 Having a hemisphere that is free for trade.
2:00:03 (screen screeching) (people speaking indistinctly)- Have some very,
2:00:08 very sketchy details reaching us here at SkyCentral,
2:00:10 important enough to bring it to you at this early stage.
2:00:12 We believe that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.
2:00:17 Move.
2:00:17 Gotta move back!
2:00:18 [Johnny] A new threat.
2:00:19 (dramatic music continues) (people yelling indistinctly)
2:00:26 And a new call to give power
2:00:28 to professional spies and bureaucrats to keep us safe by doing secret things.
2:00:34 And by passing the Patriot Act,
2:00:36 we will make America safer while safeguarding our civil liberties and privacy.
2:00:41 [Johnny] And then of course, new agencies, all with variations on the same name.
2:00:45 9/11 is kind of like a Pearl Harbor.
2:00:47 There's this desire, we've been attacked, anything goes, we have to strike back.
2:00:51 This is an existential struggle.
2:00:53 And that same ethos of the early Cold War,
2:00:57 anything goes, that returns big time after 9/11,
2:01:01 and the CIA seeks or asserts without being checked
2:01:06 all sorts of powers that they hadn't asserted before.
2:01:09 They implement the torture program,
2:01:11 they massively expand the warrantless wiretapping,
2:01:14 the kind of things that we had seen Angleton do in Chaos.
2:01:18 Those exact same techniques are revived and expanded
2:01:21 after 9/11 on a very large scale.
2:01:25 Taxpayers funneling money into millions of new top secret jobs.
2:01:30 22 Capitol buildings worth of new office space
2:01:34 that spring up all around this area where I live,
2:01:37 to house all these new secrets, and inside them waterfalls of new programs,
2:01:43 so many weirdly named programs that no one leader could ever hear about,
2:01:49 let alone regulate all of them.
2:01:51 There's not a whole lot of effective oversight
2:01:54 on something that has grown so big and so bushy.
2:02:00 [Johnny] And none of which should be known to the public,
2:02:02 that is until someone who's worried that history
2:02:05 is repeating itself decides to spill the beans.
2:02:08 Our breaking news this evening is the identity of the man
2:02:11 who sent the Obama Administration into defend and explain mode this week.
2:02:15 His name is Edward Snowden.
2:02:16 He's an American former CIA employee and computer technician.
2:02:20 Today he came out as the leaker
2:02:22 of classified NSA documents that spell out a secret...
2:02:25 [Johnny] And we all kind of wonder, what if we actually need this now?
2:02:30 What if we need all these dark windows and top secret
2:02:33 PowerPoint decks where they design how they're gonna spy on us?
2:02:37 What if our safety relies on what happens inside of all these buildings?
2:02:41 So we keep funding them, but in doing so,
2:02:43 we must at least acknowledge what we're doing here.
2:02:46 We are trading a portion of our freedom in exchange for a sense of security,
2:02:52 and in the process we're creating and feeding
2:02:56 kind of a new branch of our government power,
2:02:58 one that operates outside of this elegant
2:03:01 triangle that the founders constructed,
2:03:04 to trip up the corrupting forces that run
2:03:07 the risk of always possessing men with secret power.
2:03:11 Most everybody agrees that there's over classification,
2:03:14 there's way too much information that's classified.
2:03:18 But information is power, and the fewer people that have it,
2:03:22 the more power the people that do have it have.
2:03:25 [Johnny] And the result is that when the most powerful man
2:03:28 in the world arrives to the most powerful house in the world,
2:03:32 promising to reign all of this in, to reign in the excesses,
2:03:36 he actually finds that he can't.
2:03:38 He's not able to change much of it.
2:03:40 Instead, he sits there and watches much
2:03:42 of the things that he critiqued grow under his watch.
2:03:46 The thing that he's supposed to control he
2:03:48 finds he doesn't have that much control over.
2:03:50 These targeted strikes against Al-Qaeda terrorists are indeed ethical and just.
2:03:56 Secrets keep us safe, but secrets also degrade this delicate thing
2:04:01 that we have called democracy and accountability,
2:04:05 that is until we save ourselves from their everlasting seductive pull.
2:04:11 (suspenseful music continues) (screen scratches) We're ready to go up the hill,
2:04:23 up the mountain to glimpse the elusive Area 51 with our own eyes.
2:04:29 (suspenseful music continues)- [Interviewer] When did you see your first disc?
2:04:37 The first disc I saw, I believe it was the second,
2:04:40 or I think it was the third time I was up there.
2:04:43 We came out and I saw the disc in the hangar.
2:04:46 Upon seeing it, it struck me that, well this explains all the UFO sightings,
2:04:52 that this must have been some advanced form of fighter that we've been working
2:04:56 on for years and people have just caught it being tested, so on and so forth.
2:05:00 (suspenseful music continues) (car zooming by) (dramatic music)- We're
2:05:07 driving basically to the back side, is that right?
2:05:10 [Man] This side is where you see a cliff
2:05:12 when you're going up from the back side.
2:05:14 [Johnny] I see.
2:05:16 Johnny is a crazy driver.
2:05:18 Dude with this Jeep, I feel like I am impervious.
2:05:21 But that is making me a little anxious.
2:05:26 (bright music)- We are arriving to Rachel, Nevada,
2:05:31 which I looked at it on the map and I was like,
2:05:32 "Oh, it's like a little city."- It's not a city.
2:05:35 (Johnny chuckles)- It's like a little settlement in the middle of nothing.
2:05:41 (bright music continues) (jet whooshing)- [Paji] You can hear the sound.
2:05:55 Wow.
2:05:56 (beep) Yeah, it's just up there freaking cruising.
2:06:03 Turning left and right.
2:06:04 Here's another one.
2:06:05 (jet whooshing) Look at this thing, look at this thing turn.
2:06:08 Look at that.
2:06:09 Oh my God.
2:06:10 (jet whooshing) Look, it just made a 90-degree turn.
2:06:14 Just whoop.
2:06:16 Who is in that plane right now?
2:06:17 Wow.
2:06:20 Did you see that 90 degree?
2:06:22 [Paji] Dude, that looked insane.
2:06:23 (dramatic music continues)- [Johnny] Look at where we are right now.
2:06:30 Here next to what was once a lake deep in the vast desert of Nevada.
2:06:36 During World War II, the military took over huge amounts of land out here.
2:06:40 They eventually used it to test weapons, nuclear weapons.
2:06:43 (atomic bomb exploding) If you were in Las Vegas in the '40s and '50s,
2:06:48 sometimes you could see these tests in the distance.
2:06:51 Then in the 1950s, the newly created CIA
2:06:54 had a secret project they wanted to work
2:06:56 on, but they needed a vast tract of land where no one would see them.
2:07:00 So they turned to the desert of Nevada and they found this dry lake bed.
2:07:05 It would be perfect for a runway.
2:07:07 The CIA, a spy organization, was building an airplane.
2:07:12 Back in the 1950s, the chief adversary of the West was the Soviet Union.
2:07:17 And that was a closed society,
2:07:20 so it was not easy to find out what their military strength was,
2:07:24 their order of battle.
2:07:25 It was deemed that overhead reconnaissance would be the way to go.
2:07:29 [Johnny] The result was this.
2:07:31 (dramatic music continues) This is a super strange aircraft,
2:07:37 it's called the U-2, and the thing flies high, like super high.
2:07:42 In the 1950s and '60s,
2:07:44 your average airliner would be flying up 30,000, 40,000 feet.
2:07:48 For the U-2, reaching altitudes above 60,000 feet,
2:07:52 above 70,000 feet was truly impressive.
2:07:55 What does it look like when you're 70,000 feet above the Earth's surface?
2:08:00 From 70,000 feet, you can easily see the curvature of the Earth.
2:08:03 It's almost like being in outer space.
2:08:06 [Johnny] So it's the 1950s and the CIA
2:08:08 is secretly in the business of making spy planes,
2:08:10 and they're using the U-2 to spy on the Soviets from high,
2:08:14 high above, outside the reach of Soviet radar and missiles.
2:08:18 [Peter] Military bases, infrastructure,
2:08:19 intercontinental ballistic missile sites,
2:08:21 rocket testing, cosmodromes where the space rockets were being launched,
2:08:25 the submarine pens, the navy, all of the Soviet's assets were studied.
2:08:29 [Johnny] The CIA was able to keep their base in the desert secret.
2:08:32 Once the U-2 was successfully flying, they packed up and shut it down.
2:08:35 It had fulfilled its purpose, but this base would be back soon
2:08:39 and eventually the entire world would know about it.
2:08:41 (mysterious music) (air whooshing)- Okay, we're meeting Jorg.
2:08:51 (Johnny knocking on door) Hello, hello.
2:08:55 Oh hey.
2:08:55 How are you?
2:08:56 Good.
2:08:56 Nice to meet you.
2:08:57 Very nice to meet you.
2:08:58 Come on in.
2:08:59 Thank you, thank you.
2:08:59 Not very many people move into the middle
2:09:02 of the desert for their interest and passion?
2:09:05 What brought you here?
2:09:06 Well, like many tourists, I came up here for what was supposed to be a day trip.
2:09:10 I learned that Area 51 is a real base in the Nevada desert that you
2:09:15 can go to the perimeter and visit it, so I had to see it.
2:09:18 So I fell in love with the desert and I
2:09:20 fell in love with the mystery of Area 51.
2:09:23 That's almost 30, 27 years ago now.
2:09:27 [Johnny] Wow, did you have
2:09:29 a open-mindedness towards the extraterrestrial narrative?
2:09:34 I was open to UFOs, military, CIA base where they keep hardcore prisoners.
2:09:40 Who knows what all the conspiracy theories are about Area 51.
2:09:44 And then through my own research
2:09:46 and through communication with other like-minded,
2:09:50 I very quickly got in the right direction and learned
2:09:54 what Area 51 is about and what it's not about.
2:09:57 The owner of a website devoted to the Area 51 military base wants
2:10:01 to know why federal agents busted down the doors to search two of his homes.
2:10:05 They busted through my fence line.
2:10:06 They broke the door to my house.
2:10:08 I heard hollering, "Jorg Arnu, this is the FBI.
2:10:11 "We have a search warrant."- Wow.
2:10:13 A bunch of guns drawn, pointed at me, a riot shield,
2:10:16 people with helmets on, with bulletproof vests, full riot gear on.
2:10:20 So what is the major fear?
2:10:22 That it was some sort of espionage effort?
2:10:24 They thought that I was a hardcore spy, apparently,
2:10:28 spying on the base maybe even for a foreign government.
2:10:31 Who knows what they were led to believe.
2:10:34 None of that is true.
2:10:35 I'm a guy who runs a website.
2:10:37 (dramatic music)- [Reporter] We're now learning Area 51,
2:10:49 America's capital city for UFO sightings, is apparently real.
2:10:53 [Announcer] The reports even include a map saying the site
2:10:55 was merely a testing location for aerial surveillance programs.
2:10:59 [Jorg] As we pass this little hill here, we're passing one of the road sensors.
2:11:04 And right now that sends a blip, sends out a little data blip to the base.
2:11:08 Hey, there's somebody coming.
2:11:10 Yeah, that's security.
2:11:13 [Johnny] So the '50s, the U-2 spy plane is flying high over the Soviet
2:11:17 Union successfully evading detection and collecting intelligence of all kind.
2:11:21 Everything was going smoothly.
2:11:23 Until 1960, when Frank Powers got shot down.
2:11:26 (dramatic music)- [Reporter] It's the Hall of Columns in Moscow,
2:11:30 scene of many a previous Russian trial.
2:11:32 "Hey, we've got your pilot and he's
2:11:34 talking."- [Reporter] And now Francis Gary Powers,
2:11:36 pilot of the American U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia,
2:11:39 faced the judges with composure.
2:11:41 Of course they had the wreckage of the airplane,
2:11:43 its sensors and cameras as well, so the game was up.
2:11:46 The CIA knew there had to be a replacement for the U-2.
2:11:48 (dramatic music grows)- [Johnny] The CIA headed back
2:11:52 to the desert of Nevada to try again.
2:11:54 This time they would actually be building this up
2:11:56 to be a permanent base and testing facility.
2:11:59 (pulsing music)- [Peter] That construction project was called Project
2:12:04 51 and subsequently the base became named Area 51.
2:12:09 [Johnny] To replace the U-2, they developed and started testing a series
2:12:12 of aircraft that were on a whole other level.
2:12:15 Orders of magnitude more advanced than other aircraft of its time.
2:12:20 (jet booms)- [Johnny] These secret aircraft could fly
2:12:24 five times faster than the U-2, 20,000 feet higher.
2:12:28 Pilots had to wear full-pressure suits, basically space suits.
2:12:31 It was a marvel of human engineering,
2:12:33 and yet only a handful of people on Earth even knew that this was happening.
2:12:38 This was an aircraft that could cruise at Mach 3 speeds.
2:12:42 That's 2,100 miles per hour faster than a speeding bullet.
2:12:46 (jet booms) (jet roars)- [Johnny] Now these things look weird on the runway,
2:12:58 but they can look even weirder when they're in the sky.
2:13:00 (dramatic music)- [Peter] People back in the '60s would
2:13:05 be blown away by the spectacle of this unusual shape.
2:13:09 It still looks futuristic even today.
2:13:15 [Announcer] UFO sightings persist,
2:13:16 and skeptics often become confirmed believers.
2:13:19 I saw two red lights, and I saw what looked to be shaped like a pie.
2:13:23 I could just see the front of it,
2:13:24 and I just saw the round front and I could see the lights on either side.
2:13:28 And then the red light was sort of casting a glow over the whole thing,
2:13:32 so it looked like a round disc.
2:13:34 What are you looking at?
2:13:35 A flying saucer.
2:13:36 This is the real thing, Conrad.
2:13:37 Do you believe in UFOs?
2:13:39 Virtually no, sir.
2:13:40 [Johnny] The CIA was able to keep Area 51 secret,
2:13:43 but they had a hard time hiding these massive otherworldly aircraft.
2:13:47 Soon air traffic control towers and pilots and the military itself
2:13:51 were seeing things in the sky that they did not understand,
2:13:54 that didn't seem possible.
2:13:55 And remember almost everyone in the military
2:13:58 and even the CIA didn't know about this.
2:14:01 [Interviewer] How do you know that you're not being used?
2:14:02 How do you know that you know the full story when you...
2:14:04 (people laughing)- Everything is highly compartmentalized.
2:14:07 Some of them have to have a deep knowledge of what the program's about.
2:14:12 Others only need to know certain things in order to do their specific jobs.
2:14:16 It's all tightly controlled.
2:14:18 [Johnny] The CIA knows that their high-altitude aircraft are causing a, quote,
2:14:21 "unexpected side effect, "a tremendous increase in reports of UFOs."
2:14:26 They conclude that during this time over half
2:14:29 of the UFO sightings are attributed
2:14:31 to these spy planes they're testing at Area 51.
2:14:34 But strangely, they didn't see this as a problem.
2:14:37 In fact, they kind of embraced it,
2:14:39 secretly feeding the rumors that these could be extraterrestrial visitors.
2:14:43 One engineer called the UFO sightings a, quote,
2:14:46 "bonus." A useful distraction for a program
2:14:49 that in order to remain useful must remain secret.
2:14:51 But the CIA also used the rise of UFO sightings to study human behavior,
2:14:57 to use the public as their Guinea pig,
2:14:59 testing how mass perception can be shaped and manipulated.
2:15:03 I absolutely do believe that there is a psy-ops program going on where
2:15:06 they want to throw something out there and see what comes back.
2:15:10 How do people react to it?
2:15:11 I know from stories that I've been told from people
2:15:14 that have worked at Area 51 many, many years ago,
2:15:17 that they would actually put on light shows for the benefit
2:15:20 of people to just kind of further this UFO myth.
2:15:24 They want to confuse people that come out here and may
2:15:27 actually see something that they are not supposed to see,
2:15:29 and at the same time test their new stuff and how do people react to it.
2:15:33 I absolutely think there is a lot of stuff going on that most military personnel
2:15:38 have no concept of, and that they are subjected to as Guinea pigs, if you will.
2:15:44 [Johnny] But soon the Soviets caught up,
2:15:46 and even these planes that could fly so fast
2:15:49 and so high couldn't fly over the Soviet Union undetected.
2:15:52 So here at Area 51, the attention
2:15:55 turned from developing and testing these planes that could fly fast and high
2:15:59 to testing aircraft that could disappear altogether.
2:16:03 [Jorg] So this is really the back gate of Area 51,
2:16:06 but today it is the most known gate of Area 51, very heavily fortified.
2:16:11 Back in the late '90s, there was a cattle fence here,
2:16:15 a little guardhouse, that was it.
2:16:17 And as more tourists come here, they feel the need for more security.
2:16:20 So we got a double gate here.
2:16:22 Don't go past the gate.
2:16:26 This is probably as far as we want to go.
2:16:27 (suspenseful music continues)- Okay, we are at the back gate.
2:16:40 Here it is.
2:16:41 It's quiet, barbed wire.
2:16:43 We've got some cameras looking at us right now.
2:16:46 (suspenseful music continues) No drones.
2:16:50 I will respect that.
2:16:52 So there's a new radio tower right there and it
2:16:55 apparently is transmitting a radio signal that you can tune into.
2:16:59 It is a part of an experimental program to use radio
2:17:03 waves from like civilian radio stations to see things in the air.
2:17:07 Passive radar is this technology, it's existed for a while.
2:17:09 But anyway, if you tune into the right frequency,
2:17:12 you can hear what they're playing at their radio station in Area 51.
2:17:16 Not for people to listen to but to test radar and aircraft.
2:17:22 [Jorg] No, come on.
2:17:23 That's it.
2:17:23 Oh, this is it.
2:17:24 (lively rock music continues)- [Man] That's it.
2:17:29 (lively rock music continues) (Johnny claps hands)- Oh my god, this is amazing.
2:17:34 You go through this gate and walk that way,
2:17:37 you will get to the highly secretive base where they are testing things.
2:17:43 What is going on over those mountains?
2:17:46 (suspenseful music continues)- [Jorg] It is about 10
2:17:56 or 12 miles to turn off to Tikaboo from here.
2:18:00 (lively rock music)- Solos are so good.
2:18:08 You've got the wah-wah pedal going.
2:18:10 (lively rock music continues) So we are now headed to the peak,
2:18:18 the one place where you can look into Area 51.
2:18:21 It is a mountain, a peak up there.
2:18:25 It's gonna require a bit of a hike, some off-roading,
2:18:28 but it is the one vantage point where you can look down and see Area 51.
2:18:33 So that is our goal, and we are off on that mission right now.
2:18:38 [Announcer] We are in the midst of a global communications explosion.
2:18:42 So by the late 1970s, the CIA was trying to get out of the aircraft business.
2:18:47 [Johnny] They had satellites to do their spying
2:18:48 with, and in fact a satellite accidentally photographs Area 51,
2:18:52 (camera clicking) something they weren't supposed to do.
2:18:56 Whisperings of a secret airstrip in the Nevada desert are getting out.
2:19:00 Area 51 was now under control of the Air Force, not the CIA.
2:19:04 And they set about trying to make their planes invisible to radar,
2:19:08 not by flying high, but by designing them in these strange shapes.
2:19:12 (angular music continues) If you wanna
2:19:15 make your aircraft invisible to your enemy,
2:19:17 you have to trick their radar, the main tool that they use to look at you.
2:19:20 These radar are constantly pumping out invisible radio waves into the sky.
2:19:24 If nothing's there, the waves will just keep going.
2:19:27 But if a plane is flying by, the radio waves will hit
2:19:30 the plane and bounce back to this dish that captures and records that signal,
2:19:35 that radar signature.
2:19:36 It's able to detect how big the object is,
2:19:38 how far away it is, how fast it's moving.
2:19:40 This is how you get eyes on enemy aircraft flying in your airspace.
2:19:44 We've moved into an age where stealth became more prevalent.
2:19:48 [Johnny] So how do you trick this system?
2:19:49 You have to mess with those waves, get them to bounce off somewhere else,
2:19:53 absorb them, scatter them so that they barely make it back to the radar,
2:19:57 which is how you get this, (angular music continues)
2:20:01 a full-scale model of a plane that they were designing,
2:20:03 and radar scattered everywhere shooting radio waves at this plane,
2:20:07 collecting data on how big the radar signature is and hoping
2:20:11 that those radio waves aren't bouncing back to this dish.
2:20:14 That's what these strange angles are for.
2:20:16 The Air Force would even get their hands on enemy radar
2:20:19 systems to see how well they could measure these stealthy planes.
2:20:23 There's a huge array of adversary radars that are
2:20:26 used to measure the radar signatures of different aircraft.
2:20:31 [Johnny] And the designs just kept getting wilder and wilder.
2:20:36 The early stealth planes looked like they were from out of this world.
2:20:40 Yeah, I think it's likely that many of the things that have been tested there,
2:20:43 if they were seen out of their context by someone who wasn't
2:20:47 witting of the program could easily just take it for a UFO.
2:20:50 [Johnny] And unlike the planes developed earlier at Area 51,
2:20:53 these carried weapons so soon they were used in combat.
2:20:56 (suspenseful music)- The F-117A, known as the Nighthawk or the Stealth Fighter,
2:21:02 became the star of Operation Desert Storm.
2:21:05 [Johnny] By the 1980s,
2:21:06 Area 51 had become the ultimate test laboratory for the U.S.
2:21:10 to remain the dominant air power on Earth.
2:21:12 And secrecy was the key ingredient for keeping it that way.
2:21:15 But secrecy has a byproduct.
2:21:17 It kills trust, it produces speculation.
2:21:20 [Bob] Well there's several, actually nine flying saucers,
2:21:25 flying discs that are out there of extraterrestrial origin.
2:21:29 [Jorg] Well, I'm off here.
2:21:31 Great, thanks.
2:21:32 [Jorg] Just go straight from here and follow the directions.
2:21:34 Okay, thank you so much.
2:21:36 This is it.
2:21:36 [Johnny] I really appreciate everything.
2:21:38 Good luck, guys.
2:21:39 Yeah.
2:21:39 And shoot me a text when you get up there.
2:21:41 Make sure so I can know that you guys got out there okay.
2:21:44 [Johnny] Absolutely, we will.
2:21:45 If you get in trouble, call me, I'll bail you out.
2:21:48 We are on our own.
2:21:49 Jorg is awesome.
2:21:50 Website, his project is just, like, his passion.
2:21:53 And I am such a fan of him and his approach to all of this.
2:21:58 All right, now we gotta navigate through some gnarly roads.
2:22:02 I got this offline GPS situation,
2:22:05 and we are gonna try to make our way to that peak
2:22:08 so we can glimpse the elusive Area 51 with our own eyes.
2:22:13 (dramatic music)- On Capitol Hill today,
2:22:22 a bipartisan call for more government transparency on UFOs
2:22:25 or as the military calls them unidentified aerial phenomena, UAPs.
2:22:29 Three retired military veterans testified before a House subcommittee.
2:22:32 One was asked about alien bodies.
2:22:34 Two others talked about seeing UAPs.
2:22:39 [Rep.
2:22:40 Mace] You've stated that the government
2:22:40 is in possession of potentially non-human spacecraft.
2:22:44 Do you believe our government
2:22:45 has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials?
2:22:49 Something I can't discuss in a public setting.
2:22:51 (dramatic music continues) (air whooshing)- [Johnny]
2:22:59 This is more adventure than I expected.
2:23:03 (air whooshing) (car roaring by) (dramatic
2:23:14 music fades) (pulsing music)- Listen, listen, listen.
2:23:23 (jet rumbling) You hear a rumble, you hear it all the time around here.
2:23:29 Oh boy.
2:23:31 Okay, we are at over 7,000 feet, which is about 2,200 meters maybe.
2:23:39 The air is a little thinner.
2:23:41 Things are getting steep and rugged and beautiful.
2:23:46 I mean, there's a stunning view of the valley.
2:23:48 (dramatic music) We're definitely gaining a lot of elevation here.
2:23:54 (dramatic music continues) I think that's the top right there.
2:24:07 That's the top.
2:24:07 It better be the top.
2:24:09 I better be laying my eyes on Area 51 in, like, 20 feet.
2:24:15 Let's do this.
2:24:16 Whoo.
2:24:19 It better be worth it.
2:24:23 Oh my gosh.
2:24:24 Dude.
2:24:25 Look at these guys.
2:24:28 (Paji panting)- We made it.
2:24:31 We are on the top of Tikaboo Peak.
2:24:33 We did it.
2:24:34 This is sick.
2:24:34 This is so sick.
2:24:35 (Paji laughs) (light music) (air whooshing)- There's a rumble of sound.
2:24:53 [Paji] It's there, you see it?
2:24:54 Those buildings I think.
2:24:56 Oh yeah.
2:24:56 There is is, yes.
2:24:57 See it?
2:24:58 We are going to get the big long lens out.
2:25:01 See if we can point it at Area 51.
2:25:06 (light music continues) That is Area 51.
2:25:13 You can't see it very well because the sun is setting in it.
2:25:16 It's backlit.
2:25:17 [Paji] Look up, look up.
2:25:19 Look at that fighter jet just cruising.
2:25:21 Nice.
2:25:22 He's doing a show for us.
2:25:24 [Paji] That's sick.
2:25:26 That's a tight turn man.
2:25:27 Wow.
2:25:29 [Johnny] Yeah, they're doing some practice.
2:25:30 (light music continues) (jet whooshing)- The United States has
2:25:42 unveiled its latest stealth bomber at a ceremony in California.
2:25:46 [Reporter] The B-21 is named in honor of airmen
2:25:49 who carried out the surprise World War II Doolittle Raid.
2:25:53 It can carry both nuclear and conventional weapons.
2:25:55 [Secretary Austin] We are again making it plain to any potential foe.
2:25:58 The risk and the cost of aggression far outweigh any conceivable gains.
2:26:05 We're just surrounded by jets doing crazy maneuvers.
2:26:08 I mean I've never been a military guy,
2:26:11 but there's a little boy inside of me right now
2:26:13 being very much in awe of these machines up there,
2:26:16 and the people sitting inside of them who may or may not actually be humans.
2:26:21 These may be AI-controlled or remote-controlled somehow, so who knows?
2:26:25 But dude, that thing turning looks so crazy.
2:26:29 This is so fun.
2:26:31 We've got a scanner in case there's some activity tonight.
2:26:33 We will hear it.
2:26:34 We're gonna set up camp here.
2:26:35 Get some dinner started.
2:26:36 We are going to place them, we're gonna line up.
2:26:39 I think this goes on top.
2:26:40 (air whooshing) (Johnny grunts) This is where we'll be sleeping tonight.
2:26:47 Area 51 is right there.
2:26:48 Janet will be taking off soon.
2:26:51 By the way, when I say Janet, I'm referring to one of these planes that flies
2:26:55 between Area 51 and Las Vegas every day,
2:26:57 bringing employees to and from the base.
2:26:59 [Announcer] As the operation at Watertown grew in scope,
2:27:02 more transportation was required.
2:27:04 Five minutes.
2:27:05 Will we get Janet taking off into the sunset?
2:27:07 [Producer] We do have the lens that would,
2:27:09 if it is possible, with Paji as the operator.
2:27:12 This is such a surreal moment.
2:27:14 It is like desolation and then desert, and then it's the most sophisticated
2:27:22 aircraft technology that humans have ever invented.
2:27:24 [Producer] Oh, and I think it's taking off.
2:27:27 Oh.
2:27:27 See the jet?
2:27:28 [Johnny] Oh (beep), yeah.
2:27:30 Did you get a glimpse of it?
2:27:31 [Paji] I have it.
2:27:32 I'm recording it.
2:27:34 [Johnny] Ah dude.
2:27:35 Janet.
2:27:36 There goes Janet to Las Vegas.
2:27:38 [Pilot] 3-6 Whiskey at 7,000, climbing to 1,500.
2:27:41 We're going to turn to Bugsby here, departing.
2:27:47 (pilots speaking indistinctly) (pulsing music continues)- I took
2:27:58 this time lapse while we were sleeping in this tent
2:28:00 because I wanted to see if there was
2:28:02 any activity on the base while we were sleeping.
2:28:03 And sure enough, at around 3:26 in the morning,
2:28:08 boom, right there, you'll see that the base lights up.
2:28:11 These are the runway lights that come alive
2:28:13 here at 3:00 in the morning at Area 51.
2:28:14 Here it is, they're off, and then boom, they turn on.
2:28:17 Now we're fast asleep at this point,
2:28:18 but what this represents is a moment in time where
2:28:22 the base comes alive probably so that they can test
2:28:25 something so that people like us who are watching
2:28:27 from the one place you can see Area 51 can't see anything.
2:28:30 And sure enough here in these photos, I don't see anything take off.
2:28:33 Photo by photo, whatever took off, if anything, did so very discreetly.
2:28:38 I'm looking real closely.
2:28:40 Oh, keep in mind this is taking a photo every 30 seconds.
2:28:44 So at one point during this moment you see a little green fleck right there,
2:28:50 right there, which could be something, I don't know.
2:28:54 And then it goes away.
2:28:56 Green fleck goes away.
2:28:57 All of this is a reminder that Area 51 is an Air Force
2:29:00 base that is doing what it's been doing for a lot of years,
2:29:03 which is testing secret new technology.
2:29:06 And that for most of its history,
2:29:08 this place was not associated with UFOs or aliens.
2:29:12 That's kind of a new thing.
2:29:14 That didn't happen until about 1989.
2:29:16 Former government scientist has alleged that the U.S.
2:29:20 military is flying recovered UFOs at a secret base in the Nevada desert.
2:29:24 The allegations about the secret facility near the Groom
2:29:27 Mountains first surfaced on Eyewitness News last Friday.
2:29:30 [Bob] Well, there's several, actually nine flying saucers,
2:29:35 flying discs that are out there of extraterrestrial origin.
2:29:39 Scientist Bob Lazar says there are at least nine of the flying
2:29:42 saucers being tested and that they were not built on Earth.
2:29:45 I got to look inside and it had really small chairs,
2:29:48 and things began to click together just all too fast.
2:29:50 Yeah, well, it's obvious it came from somewhere else other than Earth.
2:29:55 [Johnny] Lazar claimed that all of this extraterrestrial technology was
2:29:59 being researched in a secret facility south of Area 51.
2:30:03 Bob Lazar's claims are the root of the modern fascination with Area 51.
2:30:07 News media and tourists descending on the remote parts
2:30:11 of the desert in Nevada to see flying saucers.
2:30:14 [Man 1] Did you see that move it did?
2:30:15 [Man 2] No I didn't.
2:30:16 It went like this.
2:30:17 Because it kept flying.
2:30:17 [Man 1] It went woo-woo.
2:30:19 Look at how bright it's getting.
2:30:20 [Man 3] Look at it now.
2:30:21 It came up above the same mountain, it moved around, it did a step move.
2:30:25 It actually went up in the air like this and hovered.
2:30:29 The Lazar story happened at the beginning of the internet really burgeoning.
2:30:33 And people all across the world will know
2:30:36 what you're talking about if you say Area 51.
2:30:39 But the first thing they're going to think of is flying saucers.
2:30:42 Area 51.
2:30:43 Officially the government won't even admit it exists.
2:30:45 Take my word for it, there's no Area 51.
2:30:47 That's not entirely accurate.
2:30:50 Where conspiracy theorists think the government has aliens on ice.
2:30:54 I mean, I'd love to see this huge mothership, but anything's fine at this point.
2:30:58 [Interviewer] Don't you have UFOs in Germany?
2:31:00 No.
2:31:01 There are no reports according to CNN of any alien sighting.
2:31:04 The Bob Lazar thing, I wanted to know, first of all,
2:31:06 I wanna be around him and see if I could smell bull (beep)?
2:31:09 Did you?
2:31:09 No.
2:31:10 And we also sent people to Area 51 to make sure there were no aliens.
2:31:13 Clinton said he did go right in and he did check and there was nothing.
2:31:18 That's what we're instructed to say.
2:31:19 It's never been my thing, I have to be honest.
2:31:21 I have never been a believer.
2:31:22 I have people that Area 51, or whatever it is,
2:31:25 I think it's the number one tourist
2:31:27 attraction in the whole country or something.
2:31:29 A Facebook post calling on people to storm Area 51.
2:31:32 It's now clear the 1.1 million Facebook followers who
2:31:35 said they're going to storm Area 51 are real.
2:31:40 (suspenseful music)- Okay, it's like 5:00 AM.
2:31:46 Sun's coming up, and we've got a helicopter
2:31:49 that is maybe circling around us right now.
2:31:54 Definitely circling around us.
2:31:55 Yeah.
2:31:57 Look at this.
2:31:58 (helicopter roaring) There it is.
2:32:03 (helicopter continues roaring) And then it's a goner.
2:32:09 Wow, that is a weird looking helicopter.
2:32:12 It has no lights on.
2:32:15 And it just popped over and it kind of just flew around us,
2:32:18 and I thought it was just going somewhere else.
2:32:20 But then it started banking around and circling us,
2:32:22 and then it just descended deep into this valley and then back to the base.
2:32:26 Like, it definitely was just...
2:32:28 It definitely was just a little patrol to be like, "Hey,
2:32:31 good morning, guys, we see you." Yeah, so that happened this morning.
2:32:35 Paji, did that freak you out?
2:32:36 A little bit, yeah.
2:32:37 I was like, "Are you gonna like hover over us "and be like,
2:32:40 'Get the (beep) outta here.'" Or like, "Give us your SD cards."- Yeah, yeah.
2:32:43 I was getting ready to hide the SD cards.
2:32:45 I was like, no, let's not...
2:32:47 Let's not play around with the footage we have.
2:32:49 Exciting way to wake up here at 5:00 AM at Area 51.
2:32:52 The sun is rising, soon it will hit the base
2:32:55 and we'll get some beauty footage of the base itself.
2:32:59 (pulsing music) What are you seeing in there?
2:33:02 I am seeing a bunch of water towers, a big one in the middle kind of.
2:33:08 And then I see this UFO shaped thing
2:33:10 on the right that looks like it's on a pole.
2:33:13 It's probably also a water tower, but who knows?
2:33:14 [Johnny] Could just be a flying saucer.
2:33:16 Could just be a flying saucer.
2:33:17 Oh yeah, I see the runway now.
2:33:19 That's fun.
2:33:19 (pulsing music continues)- I got more than two
2:33:27 dozen people who have come to me with bits
2:33:29 and pieces of the story who had worked out
2:33:31 at Area 51 that I confirmed were out there,
2:33:34 security people who had seen a disc under a tarp in a hangar.
2:33:39 Different people who had worked there at different times, '50s,
2:33:41 '60s, '70s and '80s, who had little pieces of the story.
2:33:44 He said that they eventually told me that they had a live alien out there.
2:33:48 [Joe Rogan] Oh yeah, (beep), there's a Janet.
2:33:50 (pulsing music continues)- [Jorg] I don't believe
2:33:54 that they actually have any evidence because
2:33:56 I really don't think there is such a thing as crashed UFOs, all of that.
2:34:01 [Johnny] Yeah, it's taking off.
2:34:02 It's taking off.
2:34:03 It's going across the frame right now.
2:34:04 The Air Force initially really hated the whole
2:34:08 UFO alien connection to Area 51 because it brought a lot of attention and helped
2:34:13 shut down the work that they were doing.
2:34:15 But eventually they sort of adopted it, kind of got in on the joke.
2:34:20 And so now you see a lot of unit and project
2:34:22 emblems that feature aliens and flying saucers and things like that.
2:34:26 And they've sort of embraced that mythology a little bit.
2:34:29 (flowing music)- [Johnny] We're gonna leave our mark here on the little book
2:34:38 at the top of Tikaboo Peak where all the people have left their little note.
2:34:44 What's our message to the future hikers?
2:34:46 Peace and love.
2:34:47 Peace and love.
2:34:48 [Paji] Don't drop bombs on people.
2:34:50 [Johnny] Yeah, that's probably a good one.
2:34:52 Even though looking at planes that drop the bombs.
2:34:55 I came here to the desert to better understand Area 51.
2:35:00 But I'm walking away with a deeper understanding of secrecy.
2:35:05 Secrecy, especially state secrecy, has an odd psychological weight to it.
2:35:10 It draws not just attention but projection.
2:35:13 A custom lens that we all see it through.
2:35:16 [Jorg] I always like to say Area 51 is like a magic mirror.
2:35:19 You look at it and you see whatever reflection you want to see.
2:35:25 [Johnny] It activates that old mechanism in our minds
2:35:27 that fills in the gap with certainty.
2:35:29 A story that helps us make sense of it all.
2:35:32 The patriot sees brilliant engineers protecting a free nation.
2:35:36 The skeptic sees a militaristic country arrogant with power.
2:35:40 The dreamer sees a gateway to other worlds.
2:35:44 The cynic sees a lie so big that it must contain something nefarious.
2:35:49 And the believer sees proof of the paranormal.
2:35:52 And the curious tourist just sees an opportunity
2:35:55 to indulge in a conspiracy theory for a few days,
2:35:58 all while picking up some souvenirs and traveling
2:36:00 through the beautiful high desert of Nevada.
2:36:04 All of us look at the same chain link fence and all
2:36:07 of us see something different because they were hiding something here.
2:36:11 They are hiding something here.
2:36:13 Secrecy for the last 70 years at Area 51 has been the main objective,
2:36:18 and they got it down very well.
2:36:19 It's been applied to everything, sometimes to a fault.
2:36:23 [Johnny] And the military and government have
2:36:24 fueled rumors to confuse us, to distract us.
2:36:28 And herein lies the paradox of secrecy.
2:36:32 Secrecy may be essential to national defense, but for an open society,
2:36:37 secrecy breeds mistrust, the very thing we need to stay secure and peaceful.
2:36:42 Mistrust becomes suspicion and suspicion becomes belief.
2:36:45 And beliefs, once crystallized, are hard to dislodge.
2:36:50 What I feel fairly certain of is that the U.S.
2:36:53 Air Force will continue to develop and test all kinds
2:36:56 of super advanced technology here on this dry lake bed.
2:37:01 They'll do this to retain their position as the world's dominant air power.
2:37:05 And they're making stuff now that we probably won't learn about for decades.
2:37:09 But that part of the story isn't a mirror.
2:37:11 The world is much less interested in that because at Area 51,
2:37:15 the secrecy is the story.
2:37:18 Sometimes bizarre, sometimes dangerous,
2:37:21 sometimes beautiful, and nearly always confusing,
2:37:25 which I think is exactly what the secret keepers want.
2:37:29 Hey, if you're still watching,
2:37:30 you are probably somebody who wants to better understand the world.
2:37:33 So do the thousands of members of our club called Newpress.
2:37:37 Newpress is where smart,
2:37:38 curious people get a deeper version of what we do across all of our channels.
2:37:43 In-depth interviews with experts we speak to, conversations between creators,
2:37:47 and a place to connect with other members directly.
2:37:50 And I just launched a podcast with Iz that only Newpress members get access to.
2:37:54 Right now it's 60 bucks a year to become a founding member.
2:37:57 That money goes directly to support work like this.
2:38:00 You can go check it out at newpress.com.
2:38:02 The link is in the description.
2:38:03 And I'll see you over there.
2:38:06 (suspenseful music)- [Johnny] A satellite hurls around the globe
2:38:17 at seven and a half kilometers per second.
2:38:20 Then it drops a six meter rod
2:38:22 that starts falling the 400 kilometers towards Earth.
2:38:26 No explosives, just speed.
2:38:28 Things like Rods from God,
2:38:29 which is dropping big tungsten rods from space having them fall very quickly.
2:38:33 [Johnny] Mach 24 at first,
2:38:35 but the atmosphere eventually slows it down to Mach 8.
2:38:38 It's still going super fast till it reaches the surface of the Earth.
2:38:41 (bomb exploding) Another satellite waits in orbit for years.
2:38:46 And then when given the command, it releases a capsule.
2:38:50 [Clayton] That reentry capsule with hundreds of drones, thousands of drones,
2:38:53 you can put it anywhere you want within a matter of minutes.
2:38:57 Here's a caravan of a dozen satellites.
2:38:59 They've got small missiles inside,
2:39:01 and they're just waiting till a military commander on Earth gives
2:39:04 them the order to go hit a group of enemy satellites,
2:39:07 knocking out the vital communication and navigation capabilities of the enemy.
2:39:13 (suspenseful music fades) These aren't sci-fi scenarios.
2:39:18 These are real projects that militaries are working on, powerful militaries.
2:39:23 They've been thinking about these things for years,
2:39:25 but we're in a new era of space.
2:39:26 It's a lot easier to get up here.
2:39:28 And so as happens, countries want to control it.
2:39:31 Now we're getting to the point where these crazy ideas
2:39:33 that people would've said were science fiction are becoming more possible,
2:39:37 and we should be looking at all these things on the horizon.
2:39:39 Advances in space happen very rapidly.
2:39:42 The new military space race is really between the U.S.,
2:39:45 China, and Russia, though less and less Russia.
2:39:48 This is really a rivalry between the United States and China.
2:39:51 Both countries have a relatively new
2:39:53 wing of their military dedicated to controlling,
2:39:56 defending, and preparing for combat in space, or in the words of the U.S.
2:40:01 Space Force, "to fundamentally transform our approach to space "from a combat
2:40:06 support function to a warfighting domain." And it's getting crowded.
2:40:11 Lots and lots of satellites are going up there.
2:40:13 There are over 12,000 floating around the Earth right now.
2:40:15 Oh, and by the way, I've always had a little
2:40:17 trouble with these visuals of all the dots that are satellites.
2:40:20 This is not to scale.
2:40:21 These satellites are not right next to bumping into each other,
2:40:24 but the fact remains there's a lot of high-tech stuff floating around our Earth,
2:40:28 and more and more of that is dedicated to military purposes.
2:40:32 It's become a vital tool of modern warfare,
2:40:34 and that is what this video is about.
2:40:36 It's about these devices,
2:40:38 satellites that not only let planes and troops navigate and communicate,
2:40:42 but also scan the world looking for missile launches.
2:40:45 They reveal secrets, looking through clouds and at night
2:40:48 to capture underground submarine headquarters,
2:40:51 deep sea cable cutters, North Korean warships.
2:40:54 I'm gonna show you how militaries are working on technology that they
2:40:57 could potentially use to attack the satellites
2:41:00 of their enemy with grappling hooks,
2:41:02 with lasers, (satellite explodes) with a nuclear bomb.
2:41:07 I've been talking to experts,
2:41:09 including one that you'll hear a lot from in this video,
2:41:11 as I set out to understand war in space,
2:41:15 this escalating race to control and dominate a domain shrouded in mystery,
2:41:21 one that is hard to police.
2:41:23 And it's all happening right at a time
2:41:25 when we're entering into an era of global rivalries, they're heating up again,
2:41:30 all while the most powerful people on Earth have a deeper
2:41:33 and deeper interest in what happens in this space far above our heads.
2:41:38 It's space, it's the final frontier, and it's time we start paying attention.
2:41:42 (suspenseful music continues)- [Narrator] Space, an infinite ocean,
2:41:46 where man is not content unless he's pressing
2:41:49 himself to the limits of his knowledge or beyond.
2:41:52 (dramatic music continues)- [Johnny] Okay,
2:41:56 first, we gotta talk about satellites.
2:41:58 These little computers bolted to a metal
2:42:00 frame that are orbiting around our planet.
2:42:03 Some are very small, some might be referred to as a cube sat.
2:42:06 So a cube sat is something very small, you can fit it in your hand.
2:42:09 [Johnny] That's Clayton Swope,
2:42:10 who's an expert on space policy here at a think tank in D.C.
2:42:14 called CSIS.
2:42:14 Could be the size of a refrigerator in a college dorm room,
2:42:17 but then you have others that could be the size of a bus.
2:42:19 So solar panels will be a lot bigger than the satellites.
2:42:22 So think about it, you're just moving your arms out usually,
2:42:25 and that's how the satellite looks with solar panels.
2:42:28 Some of these satellites are way far
2:42:30 out in this orbit called geostationary orbit.
2:42:33 They're a 10th of the way to the moon,
2:42:35 and they're moving at the same speed as Earth.
2:42:37 So if you were to look at them in the night sky,
2:42:39 they would just kind of look like a star.
2:42:41 They stay in one place.
2:42:42 But most satellites these days are here, in this sweet spot of low-Earth orbit,
2:42:47 about 400 to 800 kilometers above our heads.
2:42:52 And look, there's the International Space Station hurtling around the Earth.
2:42:55 This one's obviously a lot bigger than a refrigerator.
2:42:57 And a reminder of something that may be obvious to some of you,
2:43:01 but was kind of fuzzy in my head,
2:43:04 and now it's not, which is that these satellites
2:43:06 are not zooming around the Earth with jet engines.
2:43:09 They're actually kind of falling.
2:43:12 When a rocket launches a satellite into space,
2:43:15 it goes upwards for a few kilometers, but then it starts to go sideways.
2:43:19 And in fact, most of the energy being blasted
2:43:21 out of this rocket is being used to move it,
2:43:25 let's say, horizontally, getting close to 30,000 kilometers an hour.
2:43:29 You're trying to outrace gravity.
2:43:30 Once you're moving that fast, you can cut the engines because you're
2:43:33 at this magical speed where you keep missing the Earth.
2:43:38 So you're trying to move so fast while gravity's pulling you
2:43:41 in that you are effectively staying in an orbit around the Earth.
2:43:44 So you're trying to defeat gravity.
2:43:46 So people who are floating in the International Space
2:43:48 Station are not floating because they're not in Earth's gravity.
2:43:50 They're floating because they've kind of reached this perfect
2:43:54 equilibrium of speed and gravity that makes them constantly falling.
2:43:59 So before we get to all the war and defense stuff,
2:44:02 let's just take a moment and appreciate this magical thing
2:44:05 we've invented called putting things into orbit around our Earth.
2:44:08 (bright music continues) These days,
2:44:15 a lot of these satellites are talking to one another,
2:44:18 forming a constellation where they can send signals between each other,
2:44:23 all to serve a variety of purposes, like helping guide ships and airplanes,
2:44:26 or tracking pollution, or running scientific analysis on crops, or internet.
2:44:31 Starlink has around 7,000 of these satellites in a big constellation
2:44:37 that provides internet access to remote
2:44:40 areas that were very disconnected before,
2:44:42 and to those fighting in the war in Ukraine.
2:44:45 There's one satellite constellation that I use more than any other,
2:44:49 and it looks like this.
2:44:50 This is a very special constellation.
2:44:53 The biggest thing that we take for granted
2:44:55 is the global positioning system, is GPS.
2:44:57 Around 30 satellites that are flying 20,000 kilometers above us,
2:45:01 run by the American government.
2:45:03 At any given time, anywhere on Earth, three of these satellites can see us,
2:45:07 and this signal allows them to provide a very
2:45:10 accurate location of where we are on the Earth.
2:45:12 If you lock onto four satellites, you can even get your elevation.
2:45:15 I mean, this is magic.
2:45:16 Not to mention, it's all delivered to me on an easy-to-use software
2:45:20 like Google Maps that allows me to navigate anywhere in the world.
2:45:23 By the way, Russia has their own kind of GPS constellation,
2:45:26 so does China and the EU.
2:45:28 My other big use case for these satellites is something
2:45:30 you've seen me do a lot on the channel, this.
2:45:33 Incredibly high-res photos that we take from space
2:45:36 and stitch together to create something like Google Earth.
2:45:39 I've spent hundreds of hours on Google Earth, sometimes just for fun,
2:45:43 sometimes for work, and I gotta say, it never gets old for me.
2:45:46 And it works because a bunch of these satellites
2:45:47 have big advanced cameras on them, like this one.
2:45:51 They take high-definition images of our planet,
2:45:53 send them back down to Earth with this little antenna.
2:45:56 Oh, and these days, it's not just
2:45:57 visible light that we're capturing from satellites.
2:45:59 Some satellites send out super long waves,
2:46:01 like microwave radiation, and then record how it bounces back.
2:46:05 This allows them to see through things like clouds.
2:46:07 It allows them to see elevation and seismic activity, weather patterns,
2:46:12 or maybe a secret nuclear submarine base hidden in a mountain in China,
2:46:17 or a missile production facility in a mountain in Iran.
2:46:20 So you see where this is going.
2:46:21 We have to remember why these things were put up into space in the first place,
2:46:25 and the answer is war.
2:46:28 (suspenseful music) It was the 1950 and '60s
2:46:35 when space kind of became a war thing.
2:46:37 The U.S.
2:46:38 and Soviet Union were racing to put satellites in space,
2:46:42 not only to flex on each other scientifically,
2:46:44 but also to spy on each other from above.
2:46:46 Back then, these satellites would have huge rolls of film on board that would
2:46:50 take a bunch of pictures of enemy territory and then eject the canister of film,
2:46:55 which would barrel back down into the atmosphere
2:46:58 and then be caught in midair by like an airplane,
2:47:02 brought back to HQ, and developed.
2:47:04 And boom, you've got a bunch of pictures of Soviet missile sites, pretty nuts.
2:47:08 So this was the main military application of space.
2:47:11 But of course, over the decades,
2:47:13 militaries floated some pretty crazy ideas on how to actually militarize space,
2:47:18 how to threaten the enemy satellites.
2:47:19 But it was all really difficult and expensive,
2:47:22 and eventually the Soviet Union fell.
2:47:24 So the threat was like: why are we doing this?
2:47:26 But fast forward to today, and two things have happened.
2:47:29 The threat is back, and the cost for going to space is down.
2:47:33 And by 2020, humanity had 3,000 active satellites floating around our planet.
2:47:39 And then right after, yeah, wow, I mean, the graph says it all.
2:47:44 It has become way cheaper to put stuff into space
2:47:47 thanks to the rise of innovative private space companies,
2:47:50 most notably Elon Musk's SpaceX.
2:47:52 I mean, there's so many satellites up there that some astronomers
2:47:54 are complaining that when they look up in the night sky,
2:47:57 satellites are getting in the way.
2:47:59 And this also comes at a time when global rivalries are heating up.
2:48:03 So in 2019, the U.S.
2:48:05 Congress passed a law that created the United States Space Force,
2:48:09 the newest branch of the U.S.
2:48:11 military, officially classifying space as, quote,
2:48:14 "A warfighting domain," just like the other domains, air, land, sea, and cyber.
2:48:20 So let's quickly go over how militaries use space today,
2:48:23 how space has become so vital to modern warfare,
2:48:26 and then how these countries are preparing to fight war in space.
2:48:30 (dramatic music) So first up, militaries still use satellites to spy.
2:48:36 Let's just say sensing.
2:48:37 That could be taking pictures of things happening on Earth.
2:48:40 We want to know when a missile gets shot off.
2:48:42 We want to see a signal.
2:48:43 We want to be able to see a thermal signature.
2:48:47 We want to track something.
2:48:48 So you could think surveillance or reconnaissance, things like that.
2:48:51 Countries use this imagery to keep an eye on their enemy.
2:48:54 Like look at how far satellite imagery has come in just a few decades.
2:48:59 So the U.S.
2:48:59 immediately knows if Russia is moving a bunch of troops
2:49:02 to the Ukrainian border like they did in February 2022,
2:49:05 right before they invaded.
2:49:06 And China and Russia know that the U.S.
2:49:09 has recently moved a bunch of B-2 bombers
2:49:11 onto this tiny island in the Indian Ocean,
2:49:14 potentially preparing to bomb Iran, who knows?
2:49:17 But you can't really keep this stuff a secret anymore.
2:49:20 Militaries can see each other,
2:49:21 and they can see much deeper into each other's worlds.
2:49:25 This is how we know so much about the military of North Korea,
2:49:29 a notoriously closed place.
2:49:30 There are people spending all their time looking at maps of North Korea,
2:49:34 spotting things like this concealed submarine.
2:49:37 In fact, we're making an entire video exploring what we
2:49:39 can learn about North Korea purely from the satellite map imagery.
2:49:43 And that's coming out soon, so keep an eye out for it.
2:49:45 (suspenseful music continues) So now that it's
2:49:48 much cheaper to get stuff up into space,
2:49:50 you're gonna expect to see a lot more of these constellations,
2:49:54 more and more like swarms of satellites that can direct
2:49:57 their gaze to anywhere on Earth and monitor it in real time.
2:50:02 This is something that is actively being worked on actually.
2:50:05 According to some reporting from Reuters,
2:50:07 SpaceX was awarded a $1.8 billion contract with the National
2:50:12 Reconnaissance Office to develop this spy satellite swarm concept.
2:50:16 This stuff will be taking so many photos and feeding back so much data that no
2:50:21 one person or group of people is gonna be able to sort of process it,
2:50:24 which is the perfect time for artificial intelligence to come in.
2:50:27 We made a whole video about how AI is
2:50:30 transforming war and how huge amounts of data from all
2:50:33 these different sensors can be fed in to a command-and-control
2:50:36 software to give intel and even target recommendations to commanders.
2:50:40 So that's a whole other video.
2:50:41 Okay, so that's spying and sensing,
2:50:43 and that's a huge part of the future of how space will be used by militaries.
2:50:48 The other is an early warning system.
2:50:51 The U.S., China, and Russia, and to a limited degree,
2:50:54 other countries like India and France,
2:50:56 have satellites to just keep an eye on the missile sites
2:50:59 of their enemies looking for something like this, a missile being launched.
2:51:04 These satellites are an early warning system.
2:51:06 They can tell the people back on Earth that something's coming their way
2:51:09 so that they can shoot it down before it gets too close.
2:51:12 Now, quick accuracy caveat here.
2:51:14 We've had this tech for a really long time, but it's kind of outdated,
2:51:16 and it doesn't have the capability to look
2:51:18 for hypersonic missiles and all of these things.
2:51:21 So the U.S.
2:51:21 has this Space Development Agency that just
2:51:24 sent up a new generation of satellites, with the vision of creating a big
2:51:28 constellation of hundreds of small satellites that surround
2:51:31 the globe in low-Earth orbit and constantly monitor
2:51:34 for the heat signature of a missile launch.
2:51:37 The third thing is GPS, the ability to just know where you are and to have a way
2:51:41 to not have to use a map and compass when you navigate.
2:51:44 And then of course, there's potentially
2:51:45 the most valuable thing for any military, which is just communication.
2:51:48 So we want to be able to use space to talk to each other.
2:51:51 So you can see that space
2:51:53 for these space-faring militaries is like a nervous system,
2:51:57 an invisible nervous system that gives militaries
2:52:00 the ability to see the whole world,
2:52:03 to sense it, to communicate between it, and to make decisions.
2:52:07 It's a really powerful capability.
2:52:09 If your enemy knocks some of these out, the communication, the navigation,
2:52:13 that could really hinder your ability to operate in a combat scenario.
2:52:19 When you disrupt those, and we've seen indications of that in Ukraine,
2:52:22 munitions don't work right,
2:52:23 soldiers don't know where they are, systems just don't know how to work.
2:52:28 If you're a Marine on a beach in an island in the Indo-Pacific,
2:52:32 you're getting out a map and compass though.
2:52:33 You're gonna be storming those shores
2:52:34 like your great-grandfathers did in Iwo Jima.
2:52:36 It's a very different environment without GPS.
2:52:40 And look, they're just kind of up here.
2:52:42 Nothing's really protecting them.
2:52:45 And this gets us to the moment of the video
2:52:47 that you probably clicked on this for: the weapons.
2:52:52 According to a general at the U.S.
2:52:53 Space Force, there are already attacks happening in space every single day.
2:52:58 The war in space has already begun,
2:53:00 but these aren't like boom attacks, kinetic attacks.
2:53:03 These aren't like things exploding yet.
2:53:06 (suspenseful music continues)- It's not just missiles
2:53:15 shooting at satellites and blowing up satellites.
2:53:17 It's things like GPS jamming and spoofing,
2:53:20 that effectively is a way to defeat a space capability.
2:53:22 If you can't receive it, you can't use it.
2:53:26 Jamming is a big one, and you can do it from the ground.
2:53:29 It's when an attacker uses an antenna
2:53:30 to send a super loud radio signal that drowns
2:53:34 out the original signal between the satellite
2:53:36 and the ground station so a message can't get through.
2:53:39 And then there's spoofing, kind of a silly sounding name,
2:53:42 where an attacker sends up a message to the satellite that throws it off course,
2:53:46 tells it to do something it's not supposed to.
2:53:48 You can render it effectively useless, at least for a time.
2:53:51 Jamming and spoofing is very common.
2:53:52 We actually know of locations that are doing
2:53:55 this, that are committing these types of attacks, that have these capabilities.
2:53:59 And then there's lasers, yes,
2:54:01 just as we all imagined when we hear the words space war, there are lasers.
2:54:05 So if it's trying to take pictures of space,
2:54:07 if you point a laser at it, that's gonna disrupt its ability to do that.
2:54:10 So it could be a temporary disruption,
2:54:12 or it could be permanent, depending on how strong that laser is.
2:54:15 Then there's good old cyber attacks.
2:54:16 Hack into the satellite's software by sending malicious code to the satellite,
2:54:21 you can either steal the data that's in the satellite,
2:54:24 you can stop it from working, you can take control of it temporarily,
2:54:27 or you could even just plant a little virus in the satellite
2:54:31 and just have it sit there dormant until you need to activate it.
2:54:34 So again, these are happening all of the time.
2:54:36 We saw it in 2022.
2:54:38 Just an hour before Russia conducted its full-scale invasion of Ukraine,
2:54:42 they sent a bunch of cyber attacks to the satellites
2:54:45 that were providing internet and communications to the Ukrainian troops.
2:54:49 It went dark, which again, in a wartime scenario, is a big deal.
2:54:54 One Ukrainian official described the attack as, quote,
2:54:57 "Catastrophic." And China is working on an anti-satellite
2:55:01 cyber weapon whose purpose is to, quote, "Seize control of a satellite,
2:55:05 "render it ineffective to support communications,
2:55:08 "weapons, intelligence, surveillance,
2:55:10 "and reconnaissance systems." Basically everything
2:55:12 a satellite is good for, this Chinese
2:55:15 weapon is just going to kind of wipe it out.
2:55:17 Again, you don't have to blow the thing up to make it not useful anymore.
2:55:21 Now, there's very little doubt in my mind that the United States
2:55:23 doesn't have a similar if not superior weapon that does the same thing.
2:55:28 We just don't know about it.
2:55:29 But at least from my reporting,
2:55:30 I haven't seen any evidence of that kind of weapon.
2:55:33 But the U.S.
2:55:34 probably has one.
2:55:35 In 2023, when the Wagner Group attempted a coup in Russia,
2:55:38 they first hacked the Russian satellite telecom system.
2:55:42 That same year, Chinese hackers attacked Japan's space agency.
2:55:45 These are the types of attacks that are happening every day.
2:55:48 You need to show your adversary your capabilities, "Hey,
2:55:51 we can do this," which hopefully avoids an escalation in conflict,
2:55:54 but it's also a way of just showing off, projecting power,
2:55:57 and in some cases, trying to sabotage the capabilities of your adversary.
2:56:01 The ability to disrupt maybe not even the satellite,
2:56:03 but maybe the ground station,
2:56:04 the ground infrastructure, which is just as key to be able to use it.
2:56:08 If we can't operate space launch during a conflict,
2:56:11 we can't replace satellites that get damaged or destroyed.
2:56:14 So a lot of things that don't really look like bombs going off,
2:56:18 but they still have a chain that quickly leads to this degradation
2:56:22 of our ability to use space when we need it.
2:56:24 And the advantage of all these non-kinetic attacks is
2:56:26 that they don't blow anything up and create a bunch
2:56:29 of debris which could hit another satellite and create
2:56:33 a cascading effect that could be really, really bad.
2:56:36 They are also kind of more subtle, deniable.
2:56:39 They're not as escalatory.
2:56:40 But the disadvantage is that they are reversible.
2:56:43 They don't actually take the system out.
2:56:44 They just kind of mess with it for a little bit.
2:56:47 (dramatic music) Okay, we've arrived to the blowing up part of the video,
2:56:54 and I intentionally kind of put it here and didn't make it the full focus
2:56:58 because even though it's a kind of like
2:56:59 a more sensational version of this story,
2:57:01 these other capabilities, the non-kinetic stuff,
2:57:04 is actually the stuff that's happening right now.
2:57:05 It is, like, the conflict and the war that is currently happening up there,
2:57:11 and it's the most likely to continue.
2:57:13 But we can't go on without talking about
2:57:16 the kinetic stuff because countries are working on it.
2:57:19 And in fact, we already have a lot of the capabilities to take out satellites.
2:57:23 The first one is to actually just target the ground station.
2:57:27 A satellite's not very useful if it can't communicate back down to the surface.
2:57:31 Ukraine did this last year in Crimea.
2:57:33 They attacked this Russian early warning satellite station.
2:57:36 Another is by shooting a missile up into space to hit a satellite,
2:57:40 which is something a lot of countries can do already.
2:57:43 So we've seen a lot of countries do that.
2:57:44 The U.S.
2:57:45 has demonstrated that.
2:57:46 We've seen China do it, we've seen India do it.
2:57:48 Now, these aren't countries shooting other people's satellites.
2:57:51 It's shooting their own satellites, like decommissioned satellites.
2:57:54 It is the thing that you do to deter your enemy by being like,
2:57:56 "We could blow up your satellite if we
2:57:58 wanted to."- This creates a lot of debris.
2:58:00 The Russia test was in 2021, and it created debris that was at around
2:58:05 the same altitude as the International Space Station.
2:58:08 What the Russians did today with these 1,500 pieces of trackable
2:58:13 orbital debris poses a risk not only to those astronauts,
2:58:16 not only to those cosmonauts, but to satellites,
2:58:19 to the interests of all nations.
2:58:21 Okay, and now we're getting to the kind of cutting edge,
2:58:24 stuff that we kind of technically can do, but it's in its early stages,
2:58:28 which is the ability for satellites that are up
2:58:31 there to attack each other while they're up there.
2:58:35 This is not "Star Wars" where everyone's
2:58:37 zipping around and shooting at each other.
2:58:39 It's kind of like if there was a bunch of cars
2:58:41 driving around a race track at a hundred miles an hour.
2:58:44 If you want to attack another one, you kind of have to drive up to it
2:58:48 and attack it while you're going a hundred miles an hour.
2:58:51 And put that in three dimensions and make it space,
2:58:54 and suddenly you've got satellite co-orbital attacks.
2:58:59 You can maneuver in space.
2:58:59 It just doesn't look like airplanes flying in the atmosphere.
2:59:03 And so now we're seeing these big militaries develop capabilities
2:59:05 to maneuver their satellites around in more and more sophisticated ways.
2:59:10 (dramatic music)- So China has demonstrated they
2:59:15 can put a satellite into geostationary orbit.
2:59:17 I mean, it was called SJ-21.
2:59:19 It's apparently tasked with cleaning up space junk.
2:59:22 So in January 2022, this Chinese satellite starts to break from just
2:59:27 the boring old orbit and starts to do some crazy stuff.
2:59:30 They start to go 3,000 kilometers up and down from the orbit.
2:59:35 They sync up with one of China's dead satellites and they grab
2:59:39 onto it with a kind of like grappling hook robotic arm thing.
2:59:44 They get back into orbit with the trash in hand,
2:59:47 and they eventually push it out into what's called graveyard orbit.
2:59:51 I mean, we're looking at this on an animation
2:59:53 and it looks all simple and it's like, "Well yeah,
2:59:54 "they just met up and he grabbed it "and he like threw it away,
2:59:57 and like..." No, this is insane.
2:59:59 The physics and the maneuvering and the fuel.
3:00:02 So demonstrating, you could say,
3:00:04 the ability to do very sophisticated maneuvers in orbit,
3:00:06 no one's done something like that before.
3:00:08 Those types of capabilities, those could also serve a military purpose.
3:00:12 The ability to grab onto a satellite and move it.
3:00:14 One of the Space Force folks
3:00:15 at the Pentagon characterized this as China practicing...
3:00:18 [General Guetlein] Dogfighting in space.
3:00:20 [Johnny] Dogfighting meaning like what airplanes do when they fight
3:00:22 each other and chase each other and shoot each other down.
3:00:25 They are practicing tactics, techniques,
3:00:27 and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.
3:00:31 So why would they do that?
3:00:32 Don't know.
3:00:33 They're testing, are they showing off?
3:00:34 Does this go back into the deterrence piece that we talked about earlier?
3:00:37 It's hard to say what the messaging is of that, but what it does
3:00:40 show is that they're operating in an increasingly
3:00:43 sophisticated way in space with their satellites,
3:00:45 around their own satellites, but still concerning.
3:00:47 And then two, that they just don't seem to care
3:00:49 as much about fuel use as we historically have.
3:00:53 Being able to precisely maneuver to another
3:00:56 satellite while you're in orbit doesn't
3:00:57 just allow you to grab onto it with this claw machine looking thing.
3:01:01 You can also do some other clever military things.
3:01:03 For example, Chinese military researchers published a paper speccing
3:01:07 out a concept for a satellite bomb that you
3:01:11 could theoretically deliver into the exhaust pipe of a satellite
3:01:15 in orbit and just have it sit there.
3:01:17 They're thinking about this stuff.
3:01:18 Now, I'm making it sound like China's the only
3:01:20 one who has the ability to maneuver, that's not true.
3:01:22 The U.S.
3:01:23 can do this, and so can Russia even.
3:01:25 And in fact, last year, multiple Russian satellites got close to an American
3:01:30 spy satellite and kind of surrounded it.
3:01:32 The U.S.
3:01:33 complained, and they eventually backed off.
3:01:34 But, like, there's movement happening up there.
3:01:37 One of these Russian satellites even was seen shooting something off,
3:01:41 it didn't shoot it at another satellite, but it shot it off into space.
3:01:44 Russia swears this was perfectly peaceful, but...
3:01:48 You could say like a projectile from Russian satellites.
3:01:51 What is that test?
3:01:51 Is that a test of an anti-satellite weapon?
3:01:54 So effectively a projectile that could shoot from one satellite to another?
3:01:57 Is it indicative of some other type of testing?
3:02:00 We really don't know.
3:02:01 I'm suspicious of anything Russia would be doing like that in low-Earth orbit.
3:02:05 So I'm thinking weapons test.
3:02:08 And even if that's not the intention,
3:02:09 I still think that could serve as a weapon.
3:02:12 A lot of these things look like civilian operations
3:02:14 that can be used for civilian or commercial purposes.
3:02:17 But if things got real down here on Earth,
3:02:20 those same capabilities could be flipped to be
3:02:23 used as attacking weapons from one satellite to another.
3:02:27 Now, the U.S.
3:02:28 has not acknowledged whether or not they have any of these kinds of weapons.
3:02:31 They have come out and said that they could develop these types of weapons
3:02:35 if they wanted to, but they don't
3:02:38 acknowledge any programs with co-orbital anti-satellite weaponry.
3:02:42 But knowing what we know about this stuff,
3:02:46 we can assume, or at least I assume, that the U.S.
3:02:50 probably has really sophisticated capacity for satellite-on-satellite attacks.
3:02:55 We just don't really know about it.
3:02:56 (dramatic music) One thing we do know about kind of is this puppy.
3:03:06 I mean, this thing looks like space wars, little mini space shuttle thing.
3:03:11 Much to my disappointment,
3:03:12 this thing is not just zipping around in space like in "Star Wars," it
3:03:17 is also a satellite that is just
3:03:18 going around doing the falling through space thing.
3:03:21 This space plane is an experimental aircraft that's
3:03:23 working on all kinds of crazy new tech,
3:03:25 including capturing solar power from the sun
3:03:28 and then converting that into high-powered microwaves, and once again, lasers.
3:03:36 That could happen too.
3:03:37 Lasers and microwaves, that's space wars.
3:03:42 So the U.S.
3:03:42 space plane has been up there 4,000 days worth of experimenting in space,
3:03:47 much of it very confidential.
3:03:49 China's also got this sort of space drone that they're doing similar stuff with.
3:03:53 And let me just pause and remind you that a lot
3:03:56 of this stuff that we're doing now was thought up decades ago.
3:03:59 During the Cold War, people were thinking of crazy ideas.
3:04:02 There was actually a program that was nicknamed Star Wars.
3:04:04 Rods from God, the thing that we started
3:04:06 the video with, with the rods going down to Earth,
3:04:08 that was thought of during the Cold War.
3:04:09 A lot of this stuff was conceived during that time.
3:04:13 It was too expensive and impractical, but they were thinking of this stuff.
3:04:16 One of the programs during that time was called Brilliant Pebbles,
3:04:19 and it was a missile defense shield idea.
3:04:22 You put a bunch of satellites up into space, and those satellites are just going
3:04:26 around Earth waiting and waiting and waiting.
3:04:27 And the moment that your enemy launches a rocket towards you,
3:04:31 these satellites go down and they shoot
3:04:33 the rocket down and you are safe, Brilliant Pebbles.
3:04:36 Incredibly expensive and complicated in the '80s.
3:04:39 But guess what?
3:04:40 A couple months ago, Donald Trump takes office,
3:04:43 Elon Musk by his side, and guess what's back on the agenda?
3:04:46 Brilliant Pebbles.
3:04:47 Now rebranded as America's Iron Dome, aka...
3:04:51 Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield.
3:04:53 And not surprisingly,
3:04:54 Elon Musk is the frontrunner to build the Golden Dome Missile Shield.
3:04:58 Yeah, that makes sense.
3:04:58 Right now, there are no active weapons in space, like blow things up weapons.
3:05:03 If this goes forward,
3:05:04 there will be missiles in space that, again, are there for defense,
3:05:08 but could easily be turned a little bit this way
3:05:10 and be turned into a weapon to take out another satellite.
3:05:14 (dramatic music) And then there's nukes.
3:05:21 Man, this one freaks me out.
3:05:23 So back in the Cold War,
3:05:25 there was talk of putting a nuclear weapon in orbit and just having it there.
3:05:30 I guess the crazy idea was like,
3:05:32 are people gonna have weapons stationed in space that you drop on Earth?
3:05:35 But this was the Cold War.
3:05:35 Crazy ideas were the name of the game.
3:05:37 Soviet Union and the United States both put nukes super high up
3:05:41 into the atmosphere and detonated them just to see what would happen,
3:05:44 testing this idea out.
3:05:45 And sure enough, it completely obliterated a huge portion
3:05:49 of the satellites that were going around Earth at the time.
3:05:52 There weren't a ton back then,
3:05:53 but it did some real damage, not because of an explosion,
3:05:56 but because of an electromagnetic pulse radiation that goes
3:05:59 in and messes with the electronics of these orbiting satellites.
3:06:02 So not good.
3:06:03 And in fact, so not good that the Soviet Union
3:06:06 and the United States decided to sign an agreement where they say,
3:06:10 "We promise not to do any nukes "or weapons
3:06:12 of mass destruction in space." So at least from orbit.
3:06:15 We still send ICBMs with nuclear warheads into space to then go down.
3:06:20 But having them in orbit all of the time was just a little too risky.
3:06:24 They do have limits it turns out.
3:06:26 [Nixon] We are taking the first firm step toward
3:06:30 keeping outer space free forever from the implements of war.
3:06:35 And that's been kind of our one big treaty in governing weapons in outer space.
3:06:41 We don't really have an international framework around this.
3:06:44 And in fact, that very treaty is now being tested.
3:06:48 Russia is developing a nuclear weapon in space.
3:06:50 (dramatic music)- [Johnny] In a big drama that occurred last year, U.S.
3:06:56 intel came out that said that Russia actually
3:07:00 has the capability to put a nuke in space.
3:07:03 And for a hot minute, there were people saying that there is
3:07:06 a nuclear weapon in orbit that Russia has launched.
3:07:10 We think Russia has put a nuclear device in orbit.
3:07:14 Big freak out, super scary.
3:07:16 Turns out there wasn't a nuclear weapon in space,
3:07:19 but there was a weird Russian satellite
3:07:23 that was in graveyard orbit, but it was active.
3:07:26 It was kind of doing some weird stuff.
3:07:27 And the U.S.
3:07:29 military insisted that this was and is a part of a program
3:07:34 that Russia has to eventually put a nuclear warhead in orbit.
3:07:40 Some type of anti-satellite nuclear capability,
3:07:43 nuclear weapon that would be based in space.
3:07:45 That's what the allegation is.
3:07:48 If we are unable to convince them otherwise
3:07:50 to ultimately fly a nuclear weapon in space,
3:07:52 which would be an indiscriminate weapon, doesn't have national boundaries,
3:07:56 doesn't determine between military satellites,
3:07:59 civilian satellites, or commercial satellites.
3:08:01 And how do we know that they have this?
3:08:03 And here's where you have me again at a disadvantage,
3:08:05 I'd be happy to have this conversation in a classified session.
3:08:07 So we don't know.
3:08:08 We are concerned about it.
3:08:09 The department and the entire administration,
3:08:11 and I know this Congress is taking this deadly seriously.
3:08:14 So you'd say, "Oh, wow, would Russia really do that?" I think what has happened,
3:08:17 though, is that Russia is the declining space power.
3:08:20 They're driving around a 1989 Buick.
3:08:23 It's still working.
3:08:24 It's reliable.
3:08:25 It's a testament to Soviet engineers that the systems work as well as they do.
3:08:29 They're not launching new stuff.
3:08:30 They're not making new technology.
3:08:32 Now, Russia flatly denies that they're doing this.
3:08:35 And in fact, Putin has come out and said he doesn't want an arms race in space.
3:08:41 And of course he doesn't.
3:08:42 Russia's a declining space power.
3:08:43 But he's framing it as kind of this moralistic high ground of saying,
3:08:47 "We don't want an arms race in space." But the U.S.
3:08:50 is like, "No no no, Putin, we see you.
3:08:52 "You're developing a nuclear weapon to put
3:08:54 into space "to get the ultimate leverage
3:08:56 over the rest of us "because we are surpassing you." So the next month,
3:09:01 April 2024, everyone's at the UN, it's the UN Security Council.
3:09:04 And the U.S.
3:09:05 with Japan puts out this resolution that says,
3:09:08 "Why don't we all sign a promise that we want
3:09:12 to reaffirm "that treaty that says no WMD or nukes in space?
3:09:17 "Everyone, let's just reaffirm it." And guess what?
3:09:19 Russia vetoes the resolution.
3:09:21 And boom, the U.S.
3:09:23 is like, "Gotcha.
3:09:24 "We know that you're actually not serious about this.
3:09:26 "You wanna put a nuke in space.
3:09:27 "Why didn't you sign this resolution?"- Why, if you are following the rules,
3:09:31 would you not support a resolution that reaffirms them?
3:09:35 What could you possibly be hiding?
3:09:37 So then in a kind of wild defensive gambit in geopolitics,
3:09:42 Russia drafts their own resolution that says "We
3:09:45 want to ban all weapons in space," quote,
3:09:49 "'for all time.'" They're like, "We don't wanna just reaffirm the old treaty,
3:09:52 "we want to ban all weapons in space, stop the arms race." And guess what?
3:09:57 The U.S.
3:09:58 vetoed this.
3:09:59 And now Russia's like, "Ha.
3:10:01 "Now you are the one who wants to weaponize space.
3:10:04 "We said we want to ban it for all time
3:10:06 and you vetoed it." I'm painting this picture because I want you
3:10:09 to see that there is a tense set of negotiations that are
3:10:13 heating up about what do we do with weapons in space?
3:10:16 Where do we pump the brakes?
3:10:18 And so far, the countries can't quite agree.
3:10:21 And so the status quo of it being the wild west up there continues.
3:10:25 And boy, do I hope that that changes soon, because in my opinion,
3:10:30 there is no reason why we can't cooperate up there.
3:10:33 It's space.
3:10:34 It's not land and territory and borders and ethnic identities and language.
3:10:38 It is space.
3:10:40 And it is my hope that even though space is going to become a bigger,
3:10:44 more crowded, more militarized place,
3:10:46 these countries can figure out a way to talk to each other and put
3:10:49 on some breaks on how far they're willing to go to weaponize all of this.
3:10:54 Because weaponizing it doesn't actually help any of us.
3:10:57 So until these countries can come to the table and actually agree on something,
3:11:00 stop playing these mind games, it's going to continue to be this arms race.
3:11:03 China will continue to catch up to the U.S.
3:11:05 and their space capabilities.
3:11:07 Elon Musk will continue to get very rich off of all of this.
3:11:11 The U.S.
3:11:12 will forge ahead with all of its
3:11:14 secretive capabilities that we'll someday learn about.
3:11:16 And space up there with all those satellites will
3:11:21 certainly be a big part of any future conflict.
3:11:25 (suspenseful music continues) (suspenseful music fades) (dramatic music)
3:12:30 (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music fades)