Some just count tanks.
Others steal blueprints for nuclear bombs.
The Cold War is the battleground
for thousands of spies and spotters.
(speaking foreign language) Both sides collected
intelligence in order to avert what was considered
to be a looming war.
The secret services have few scruples
when it comes to procuring intelligence.
They pay for acts of treason which may spell death
for those exposed.
Do I have an awareness of blood guilt?
No, no, I didn't.
They were spooks with a license to spy.
The men of the Allied Military Liaison missions in Germany
were at the forefront of the intelligence war
between East and West.
Yet even today, hardly anything is known about their feats.
(speaking foreign language) No other Western
intelligence service got as close
to Soviet military equipment.
But where there are secrets,
there's danger, too.
We knew that Soviet sentries were trigger-happy.
They tended to shoot first and ask questions later,
if at all.
Krasznikof stuck in my neck, okay,
so you don't move, okay.
The risks were pretty enormous.
In fact, how on earth I'm still alive,
in fact, how on earth any of us are still alive,
I have no idea.
They were friends.
And I understand what it takes to lose a friend,
a close friend, of this murder.
(dramatic music)
Nigel Dunkley, a veteran of the
British military mission, in a hangar near Uteborg,
a small town south of Pottstown.
He is meeting up with Manfred Miller
of the local Garrison Society.
Dunkley is telling him about his missions,
about reconnaissance tours in enemy territory at night.
Manfred Miller has several items in his museum
that were high on the British military mission's wishlist
in the 1980s.
The officers of the Allied Military Liaison Missions
were constantly on the road.
As couriers with a diplomatic passport,
their original task was to solve problems
between the four occupying powers in Germany.
However they soon exploit their freedom
by spying on their opponents, the Soviets
in Western Germany and the Americans, British
and French in the east, the German Democratic Republic.
Each side is allowed to send out 63 men.
An all-terrain vehicle is approaching a Soviet bunker.
It is the early 1980s.
The British are on the hunt for new types of ammunition
that could contain biological or chemical warfare agents.
The bunker should only be manned during military exercises.
The intruders can't be completely sure of that, however.
They have reached the room that holds the air filters.
How these filters are constructed tells experts
which warfare agents they are supposed to protect against.
Nigel Dunkley takes part in the hunt for these filters.
In Uteborg he sees the once highly coveted barrels again.
Dunkley never talks about the background of his missions.
Most of it is still top secret.
He only talks about what he experienced.
It was dark, I dropped the filter that I was removing.
The guard heard that.
His dog barked and so I ran away as fast as I could.
There's no other expression for it.
NATO insists on speeding up the investigation.
How are the Soviet filters constructed?
What warfare agents did the Soviets prepare for
in an emergency?
Could it by types of agents the west does not
know of yet?
In 1982 at a military exercise area,
the British get their hands on the first filter.
The news of the captured barrel hits the Ministry
of Defense in London like a bombshell.
The filter apparently protects against germs as well,
biological particles being scattered
by grenades for example.
In response, NATO is said to launch a research program
to upgrade their own filters.
Of course we knew that anything that was important
that we borrowed, as we would say, would probably
pretty quickly be replaced.
And so a few weeks later we went back
and there was a brand new one.
That was the one that we wanted.
So we stole that as well. (laughs)
Afghanistan, Soviet troops have been
occupying the country since December, 1979.
Moscow wants to break any resistance against
the communist regime that has been installed in Kabul.
The insurgent Mujahideen appear powerless
in the face of full Soviet fire power.
(bombs exploding)
Attack helicopters dominate the battlefield
yet secretly the Americans are supporting
Islamist resistance groups in Afghanistan.
The war at the Hindu Kush turns into yet another
theater of operations for the secret services.
(speaking foreign language) The CIA launched
Operation Cyclone, which is one of the longest
and most expensive CIA operations to date.
In all, the cost of this covert program
which included arms delivery as well as economic aid
amounted to several billion dollars.
This money mostly flows to Pakistan,
the central hub for the armament of the Mujahideen.
The CIA also supplies them with modern stinger
anti aircraft missiles.
The tide is starting to turn.
With stinger missiles, the Mujahideen can shoot down jets
and helicopters.
(bomb exploding)
Soviet troops sustain severe casualties.
In the mountains of Afghanistan, the super powers
heavy arms are ineffective.
The alliance of Mujahideen and the CIA win the war.
The US bolster a partner who will soon turn against them
while the Soviet Union loses a lot of prestige.
Roughly one million people die, 15,000 Soviet soldiers
among them.
HIND attack helicopters fly over East Germany.
Scouts from a western military mission
observe a maneuver.
The war in Afghanistan deepens the divide
between east and west.
Soviet troops exercise new attack strategies.
The HIND pilots impressed me, and I was an
attack pilot as well albeit in jets
rather than helos.
They flew low, aggressively and maintained
positive control over their aircraft.
I doubt that our helo pilots could have flown better
than many of the HIND pilots that I saw.
The military mission's task is to find out
whether the Soviets are deploying combat units
from East Germany to Afghanistan.
They need to produce information no matter
how they get it.
The officers with diplomatic passports put on
thigh-length over boots and protective gloves.
None of them know what they will have to touch that night.
They check their flashlights one last time.
The barracks rubbish tip is their target.
But they are not alone.
The smallest noise could give the scouts away
and alert the guard.
Examining rubbish tips at night was part
of the British operation Tomahawk,
activities which had been classified top secret
until just recently.
A noise alerts the guard.
The snoopers scan the area.
Could there be a second guard?
It is just a stray dog.
All clear, however scouts feared dogs
on night missions as Nigel Dunkley remembers.
There were quite often wild dogs out
on the rubbish tips.
These dogs scared me and I don't mind admitting it.
One of them I remember came up to me like they often did
and started sniffing around my leg.
And I thought this dog must have rabies.
It's not acting properly.
A single dog can put the men in danger.
After half an hour, the guard finally gets in his jeep
and drives off.
With the way to the rubbish tip clear,
the British scouts are hoping for discarded data sheets
on tanks, duty rosters, note pads and maybe
evidence for missions in Afghanistan.
Instead they find rotting kitchen waste.
While methodically feeling around for something useful
for their analysts, they get lucky.
A grubby postcard with a field post number.
They know that such numbers are the key
to an army's structure and to its order of battle
in the event of war.
Soldiers have numbers just like the units they serve in
and the tanks they are scheduled to fight in
in an emergency.
That's routine business to the military missions,
a seemingly endless roster of digits on tens
of thousands of vehicles that is often boring but important.
Heavily armed men are protecting a visitor
to the cemetery.
Ryszard Kuklinski, a former officer and traitor
in the general's staff of the Polish army
fears a revenge attack.
He is visiting his parent's grave in 1998
one year after his death sentence for treason
has been reversed and he has been rehabilitated.
(speaking foreign language) Ryszard Kuklinski
passed on documents on the Warsaw Pact
to the Americans for nine years from 1972 to 1981.
With these almost 350,000 photograph documents,
he provided the Americans with in depth knowledge
on the Soviet side of the Warsaw Pact.
Kuklinski contacts the CIA in the hopes
of reducing the risk of a nuclear war, a war
in which Poland would become a battlefield as well.
He reveals military installations and strategies
of the Warsaw Pact.
(speaking foreign language) The Americans were wondering
whether the Soviet nuclear arsenal was intended
to serve as a threat or whether they would use it
in an attack on western Europe.
And Kuklinski's documents indicated that the Russians
were indeed using their nuclear potential
offensively as well.
Poland in the late 1970s, the labor union's
solidarity is challenging the communist regime.
Kuklinski cautions against a Soviet invasion into Poland
reporting plans to declare martial law to the CIA.
When it is finally imposed in December, 1981,
the defector has already escaped to the United States.
Hiding in boxes, Kuklinski, his wife
and their two sons are smuggled out of the country
via East Berlin by the CIA in a transporter
disguised as diplomatic baggage, they escape
at the last minute.
(speaking foreign language) In 1984 he was sentenced
to death in absentia.
The sentence was not reversed until 1997
long after the Warsaw Pact had been disbanded
and Poland was no longer a communist country.
Kuklinski was controversial because there was dispute
over Poland's status in the Cold War.
Was it a sovereign state?
If so, Kuklinski would have betrayed Poland
and could be considered a traitor even today.
Or was it just a puppet of the Soviet's
and Kuklinski had therefore only betrayed
the occupying power.
Ryszard Kuklinski does not fall prey
to an act of revenge.
In 2004, he dies of a stroke in his exile in the US.
To the present day, he is a controversial figure in Poland.
The Warsaw Pact is not the only victim
of a master spy however.
NATO is as well.
This spy's employer is the Ministry for State Security
of the GDR, the Stasi.
His code name is Topaz.
His real name is Ranier Rupp.
As a spy, he makes no mistakes.
It is not until 1993 that he is arrested
and put on trial.
Rupp had been releasing top secret documents
on NATO's military strategy and armament plans
to East Germany since 1977.
(speaking foreign language) Ranier Rupp had access
to documents you could only dream of, key documents
from NATO headquarters.
They were so fantastic the Ministry of State Security
immediately passed them on to the KGB the minute
they received them.
Rupp is a spy by political conviction.
He is sentenced to 12 years on charges
of high treason, which could have been disastrous
in the case of a conflict, as the opinion
of the court stated.
NATO is working towards its nuclear rearmament
in the late 1970s.
Yet nobody suspects Moscow to have gained
this intelligence via its mole, Topaz.
Nigel Dunkley on the premises of a former
military hospital in Beelitz, a place that still haunts him.
About 30 years ago, he was secretly rummaging through
the trash from the operating theaters.
There was a sickly sweet disgusting rotten smell.
The Beelitz Sanitariums were built
in the late 19th and early 20th century.
After World War Two, the Soviets move in.
In the 1980s, the military missions interest
in hospitals of the Soviet military is growing.
That's especially true for the British
who are hoping that in Beelitz they will gain
new information on the war in Afghanistan.
The Soviets suffer severe casualties in the Hindu Kush.
It is quite possible that some of their wounded
were treated in Germany as well.
The British want to get to the bottom
of that assumption.
That is why Dunkley is sent to Beelitz
on some of the most depressing field trips
he has ever been on.
The military missions did not have access
to the sanatorium itself, only to its rubbish tip.
Coming back to this place after all these years
still is a very emotional experience when I think
of what happened here, when I think
of what went on, the number of people who suffered here
from the Soviet army, for me still all these years later
it is still a very, very moving experience.
The operating theaters lie in ruins
but it only takes a few of the remnants
to send Dunkley back on a journey through time.
A medicine cabinet in the anesthesia department
provides a window into the past.
Wow, absolutely amazing
to find these medicines here.
Dunkley contemplates the fate
of patients and the work of the doctors.
It's extraordinary to think that while
the Russians were doing their surgical preparation
in here, in the operating theater, we at the same time
are out there waiting for the bloodstained bits
of uniform, for the bandages covered in mess,
and bits and pieces, body parts even from time to time
while waiting there as it was described
like vultures on a branch.
For hours they are on standby
at the disposal site.
They want to know where the fresh bags are being dumped.
As soon as the dust cart leaves, their work starts.
Dunkley discovers remains of amputated tissue
in a boot, a find that upsets him.
I did this for two and a half years.
You can't do this kind of stuff without
after a while, it has an effect on you.
You begin to think in your quieter moments
what you have found.
And then you begin to wonder about the fate
of the young person whose jacket pocket
you looked through.
Going through waste is hardly a new method
in the business of espionage.
That the missions employ it as well remains
a well-kept secret for quite some time.
They're rummaging for papers and letters,
systematically looking for them in the pockets
of discarded uniforms.
In their uniform jacket pocket, there was this letter
that said (speaks foreign language) dear mum,
dear mother, I think I'm the last one left.
We were attacked recently.
It was terrible.
I think I'm the only survivor of that ambush
by the Taliban.
And that had a really big impact when you start
to think what happened to the soldier
because the letter was never finished.
How many soldiers who were wounded
in Afghanistan were treated in Beelitz is disputed.
There probably were individual cases,
soviet soldiers who had been detailed there
from East Germany.
Hospital waste can reveal quite a lot
even without war wounded, about medical standards
or protection against infections.
All of that is relevant for the combat strength
of an army.
In the late 1970s, the Cold War undergoes
its next dangerous escalation.
Each SS20 carries three nuclear warheads
and could reach any location in western Europe
from Russia.
A nuclear conflict confined only to Europe is looming.
It might be an alternative for the super powers
but it would be the end for Germany.
(bomb exploding)
In West Berlin, the ruin of a listening post
shrouded in mystery is rotting away.
Its protective sheathing in tatters,
its antennae dismantled.
Helmut Muller Enbergs, an expert on secret services
is imagining the battle of voices on the airwaves
that the spies on the Teufelsberg, the Devil's Hill
used to listen to.
(speaking foreign language) They don't know
what's happening in the east, but from this location
they can peak at the desks of their enemies
so to speak.
Where are tanks being moved?
Where are maneuvers being conducted?
What is going on?
The Americans and the British
use Teufelsberg as a base for spying.
1,500 personnel intercept, translate and analyze in shifts.
Their antennae pick up communications several hundred
miles away.
(speaking foreign language) If there hadn't been sources
or agents of the Stasi here, we probably still
would not know who was on duty here
or how many of them there were.
And we wouldn't know what is recorded.
Teufelsberg is one station
in a global network operated by the National
Security Agency or NSA.
An effective squad of eavesdroppers that in the early '80s
is still top secret.
However that is about to change with James William Hall,
a US soldier working at Teufelsburg.
In 1982 Hall begin passing on secret documents
on the American eavesdropping operations to the KGB
and the Stasi.
Among them were long lists of the NSA's targets.
Hall's photocopier is running hot.
He and his associate are said to wear sunglasses
so they can keep the copier's lid open
and therefore work faster.
Even a classified document with the code name canopy wing
is sent to East Berlin that way.
(speaking foreign language) Canopy wing has
to be the best piece of intelligence the Stasi
was ever able to gather.
Unfortunately we cannot read the documents today.
We only have the projections and statements
and hints about them.
But with all the speculation combined we can assume
that the state security service had the ingredients
required for a preemptive nuclear strike.
They had a strategy for electronic combat.
Hall betrays how NATO would communicate
in the case of an emergency and how they want
to disrupt the Warsaw Pact's communications.
The Stasi describes how the west wants
to manipulate radio communications between pilots
and control centers on the ground.
Strategies that must have been unsettling for Moscow.
In the chaos surrounding the Stasi's files
after the reunification of Germany, insiders
secure the canopy wing documents.
In 1992, the Kohl administration hands them over
to the US without causing a stir.
Hall's cover is blown in 1988 and he is sentenced
to 40 years in prison.
Jeffrey Carney betrays the NSA as well.
He doesn't do it for money but for conscientious reasons.
His punishment, 38 years in prison.
He is released after almost 12 years.
In 1983 Carney is a soldier in the Air Force
stationed at the NSA field site in Marienfelde, Berlin.
That is where he learned about operations
which still disgust him today.
(speaking foreign language) We didn't simply want
to provoke the sleepy guys on the other side
to see what they would do.
We actually wanted to set off the alarm,
literally the alarm.
For those who don't know, that means we were planning
to provoke the Russians into thinking it was the real thing.
Think about what that means, an actual alert,
1983, the Cold War, Able Archer.
Carney provides only vague hints, no details.
He might have to go back to prison if he were more specific.
(bombs exploding)
The command post exercise Able Archer is the highlight
of the annual autumn maneuvers.
Just like every year, NATO practices the defense
of western Europe against an attack.
The deployment of troops for training purposes
has been a routine exercise since the 1960s.
But in 1983, Moscow has reason to follow
the autumnal maneuvers with particular suspicion.
This year, NATO relocates 40,000 troops in Europe
and 16,000 are flown in from the US in silent missions.
In early November, the command post exercise
Able Archer follows.
Its scenario, NATO responds to poison gas attacks
by its enemy with a nuclear strike.
It also practices new procedures of nuclear release.
There is evidence that Moscow misunderstood Able Archer
as the initial phase of an eminent nuclear attack.
An officer in the British Military Mission later reports
that Soviet backfire atom bombers, seen here
in original footage of their takeoff, had been stationed
in East Germany during Able Archer.
Was it just a routine stopover or were the bombers
ready for a counter attack?
Able Archer is going to plan.
Then a double agent sends reports about flash telegrams
in Moscow saying NATO bases were on alert.
West recognizes the misunderstanding and reacts.
The agent who warns NATO is Oleg Gordievsky, a colonel
in the KGB and a mole for the British Secret
Intelligence Service.
He has been betraying secrets since 1974.
The Able Archer crisis makes him famous.
(speaking foreign language) There was great danger
that bad decisions would be made.
With intercontinental ballistic missiles,
which take just 30 minutes to reach the other side,
there's no time to think or to conduct
an organized decision-making process.
Since the early '80s, a Kremlin's fear
of a first strike by NATO has been growing.
Uri Andropov, the terminally ill general secretary
of the Communist Party, orders the secret services
to look for evidence that the west is preparing a war.
Moscow readies its nuclear arsenal as classified
US documents prove.
A number of redacted passages suggests that Able Archer
was not as harmless as Washington still
makes it out to be.
(speaking foreign language) Gordievsky was able
to plausibly explain and convey the dilemma
and the psychological state of those involved.
That was his real achievement, describing
what was going on in the apparatuses
and in people's minds, making clear the the Soviet leaders
were frightened and concerned and needed
to be treated with consideration to prevent fatal decisions.
NATO takes Gordievsky's message seriously
and abandons certain parts of Able Archer.
In 1985 Gordievsky comes under suspicion.
He flees Moscow by train and is smuggled
into the west by the British secret service.
Today he is living near London.
(speaking foreign language) Among the many defectors
in the Cold War who went from the east to the west,
Gordievsky was one of the few we can ascribe
idealistic motives to.
He really did want to keep the peace for both sides
and avert a catastrophe.
Jeffrey Carney sees himself
as a traitor for peace as well.
He sees the NSA deliberately creating confusion
within a nuclear power as reckless.
When he comes under suspicion he disappears
and assumes a new identity with the help
of the East German State Security Service
living as Yans Carney in East Berlin,
he is captured by US agents in 1991.
To this day he is convinced he has done the right thing.
(speaking foreign language) Many people were not aware
back then how close to the brink we were.
Why should I regret something like this?
A journey back to the atomic age
to when the world stood at the brink of destruction,
Nigel Dunkley is visiting the site of a former
storage facility for nuclear warheads.
Fantastic, amazing.
The crane runway to transfer the warheads
is very well preserved.
An air conditioning system provided a constant
storage temperature.
We are at the special weapons site Linda Stolzenhain,
one hour south of Berlin.
The site used to be a restricted area
that was closely guarded.
To military missions it was unattainable.
Stolzenhain provided space for 328 nuclear warheads
in two identically structured bunkers.
In the ground, there are mountings to anchor
the nuclear weapons.
[Speaking Foreign Language) Each Storage Facility
has 164 anchoring points, four points per warhead.
So there were 41 warheads in one tunnel.
To be underground in a storage facility
of Soviet nuclear warheads, over 300 of them,
over 300 of them.
When you think of the combined destructive power
of so many warheads, that is absolutely shocking.
It is stunning.
It is, it's extraordinary.
Manfred Muller, the bunker guide,
appears conspicuously well informed
and Dunkley wonders why.
And so I asked him, I said Manfred, what were you?
And he said, (speaks foreign language) I was a major.
And I said, well that's it.
(speaks foreign language) I was a major too.
And then we both laughed and we both realized
that we must have been exact contemporaries
but exact opposites.
So we were opposite each other.
He was for me, potentially a very dangerous person
in those days.
But here we were, laughing, talking,
and the nice thing was, being very friendly with each other.
(speaking foreign language) Two former enemies
who are now friends.
I think that's fantastic.
(speaking foreign language) Thank you for the information.
(speaking foreign language) You're welcome.
(laughing)
Unfortunately their friendship
only lasts for a short time.
A few months later, Manfred Muller dies.
Minsk, in Belarus, fashionable clothes
and international brands of car are everywhere
to be seen.
40 years ago when Wladimir Pazkalev reported
for duty in West Germany, it was very different.
He is a driver for the Soviet military mission.
Having been thrown into the hustle and bustle
of the western consumer society, he chauffeurs
officers on their reconnaissance missions.
He doesn't think of himself as a spy.
(speaking foreign language) I wouldn't say we spied
on one other.
We observed one another and we kept in touch
with the high command of Soviet forces in Germany.
Who could we observe anyway?
We only monitored troop movements as we had no access
to restricted areas.
Age 21, he arrives in Bunda, West Thalia.
The site of the Soviet Military Mission
or SOXMIS in the British sector.
His main task consists of reconnaissance missions.
They have become routine in the conflict
between two blocks that don't trust each other.
Pazkalev's superiors are officers in the Soviet
Military Intelligence Service.
Their mission mirrors those of the British,
the French and the Americans in East Germany.
Cold War routine.
Today Pazkalev is heading to a meeting
with a former comrade.
Mioda in the Belarus countryside, three hours
from Minsk by car.
Sergei Sidorenko is expecting Pazkalev.
The two have made contact via the internet
almost 40 years after their time in Germany.
Sergei used to be a driver as well.
He was with the mission in Frankfurt.
Today he is in a wheelchair, as he lost his leg
after a stroke.
A great misfortune that forced the long distance
truck driver into retirement.
His photo album reminds him of a better time
when they were driving fast cars through Germany.
(speaking foreign language) Did the police
constantly chase you too?
(speaking foreign language) Yes, British military police
always followed us.
Just like western missions did
in East Germany, the Soviets operate within site
of counterintelligence.
This is a surveillance video filmed in Frankfurt.
A few years earlier, it could have been Sidorenko
behind the wheel.
US military police are waiting at the gate.
All off a sudden they take off at full speed.
The car chase is on.
The Soviet missions are suspected of
conducting intelligence operations as well
such as using dead drops to pass on classified material.
However there is no proof of this.
These car chases are familiar to Sidorenko
who finds them to be a nuisance.
This photograph shows him in 1979 near Munich.
Soon after he will find himself with a gun
to his head as Germany armed forces stop him.
His officer had been trying to take pictures
of an antiaircraft system.
For hours he and his officer are trapped
before the Americans rescue them from their predicament.
(speaking foreign language) Of course we were scared,
especially when that officer from the German army
was pointing his gun at me.
I thought, that's it, I'm going to be shot.
And my, up until that point, short life passed
before my eyes.
Lawrence G Kelley is exploring terrain
near Neustrelitz.
Former forester Eris Gabauer provides him
with orientation.
In 1984 on this this country road, Kelley scored
his biggest coup.
It's the time of the so called rearmament in West Germany.
In response to the Soviet SS20, NATO deploys Pershing
Two Missiles.
Their nuclear warheads threatened targets
as far as Moscow.
The nuclear confrontation in the middle
of Europe intensifies.
The Soviets respond to the Pershings.
Night convoys in East Germany spell trouble.
Kelley encounters one of those at the time.
I attempted to call out the VRNs, the license
plate numbers for the vehicles in the column,
but there were none.
The column was transporting cylindrical environmental
canisters with very prominent longitudinal ribs
and those ribs were the primary signature feature
for the scaleboard system.
The SS12 scaleboard is a well-known
missile model, but it has not been seen
in East Germany before.
The SS12 has a range of 560 miles,
enough to pose a nuclear threat to Pershing two sites
in West Germany.
Kelley is taking pictures of the ominous canisters
from his tour's moving car.
He expects the Soviets to force him off the road
any second, yet they don't react.
It is only later that it becomes clear
how important his photographs were.
They were actually the first ground level shots taken
of this compound into the weapons system at all,
at least in the west.
The public does not see the ribbed
canisters of the SS12 scaleboard until they leave
East Germany in 1987.
One year earlier, US President Ronald Regan
and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev
had agreed to eliminate all intermediate range
ballistic missiles from Europe in the INF treaty.
Not only the SS12 but also the Pershing Two
and SS20 missiles were destroyed.
Yet despite the policy of detente at the highest level,
the spying war continues.
Robert Hansen ranks as one of the most serious traitors
in the history of US intelligence services.
It takes him til 2001 for the FBI to expose
and arrest him.
Hansen holds a key position in US counterintelligence,
a dream position for a KGB mole.
(speaking foreign language) Hansen is a devout Catholic.
He attends church, has a family and several children
and is a devoted father.
None of that fits the pattern.
Traitors usually have broken biographies,
somebody who has divorced three times
and is an alcoholic would be more typical.
Mere greed is what drives the supposedly
upright citizen.
He begins his lucrative double dealing in 1979.
The investigative authorities estimate that over
the years he has received $1.4 million in payment.
As an intelligence professional, Hansen knows
the pitfalls of the business and avoids them.
(speaking foreign language) The Soviets didn't know
who he was until he was arrested.
He never met with anybody.
He was extremely cautious and very clever.
That's why it took so long to find him.
Hansen's arrest is a shock
to US counterintelligence.
He disclosed the position of secret bunkers
for the government and information about operations
against the KGB.
His worst betrayal however, was revealing CIA sources
in the Soviet Union and thereby sending these
informants to their doom.
(speaking foreign language) Being this cold blooded,
without showing any external signs and committing
such a crime, make him the perfect criminal.
He should have been sentenced to death
but narrowly avoided this fate by providing
comprehensive testimony.
Hansen is sentenced to 15 consecutive
life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Aldrich Ames is serving a life sentence as well.
In exchange for several million dollars
in blood money, he sends US agents in Moscow
to their death, yet he shows no remorse.
As I get in my car, as I walk in my house,
as I put on an expensive suit, do I have an awareness
of blood guilt?
No, no I didn't.
He shows no sympathy for those
he has betrayed even as they are executed by the KGB.
To Ames, death is an occupational hazard
for top spies.
One of those who was executed was Adolf Tolkachev,
a radar specialist.
He gives away information about the electronics
of the latest Soviet missiles and jets.
General Dimitri Polyakov is executed as well.
He was a top informant for the CIA.
Ames also exposes Oleg Gordievsky, who narrowly
escapes the KGB.
Aldrich Ames has got blood on his hands,
blood of those 10, about, Soviet officials
who died, executed by the KGB as a result
of his betrayal.
Ames and Hansen, men without scruples.
To them it's all about money, not about status
or matters of conscience.
As East Germany celebrates the 40th anniversary
of the democratic republic, its fall is eminent.
Gorbachev presses East Berlin to implement reforms.
He makes it clear to the SED that Moscow will
no longer employ its troops against the groundswell
of revolt in East Germany.
The crucial question remains whether East German
security forces would take up arms
to save the republic.
Will the GDR's leadership risk open conflict
with Moscow?
West Germany's federal Intelligence Service sends
an all clear signal to bomb, drawing on sources
in East Berlin that have not been revealed to this day.
(speaking foreign language) It showed how dependent
the GDR and its SED leadership was.
They were not allowed to make such a decision themselves
but received orders from Moscow not to shoot.
The very moment that order was issued
and leadership followed it, it was basically all over.
On November 9th, the wall comes down.
The paralyzed regime watches on as their people's
desire for freedom becomes overwhelming.
(speaking foreign language) This is our time at last.
The time for freedom.
Germany is on its way to reunification.
The Cold War is ending.
And the withdrawal of hundreds of thousands
of soldiers starts in the East as well as
in the West.
With the reunification of Germany in October of 1990,
the era of the Allied military missions ends as well.
Back in Belarus, in Sergei Sidorenko's garden,
this countryside idal does not seem quite right for him.
During his time with the Soviet Military Mission
in Germany he was always on the road,
as he was later as a long distance truck driver.
Today he is in a wheelchair.
He got to know Lawrence G Kelley via the internet.
They share memories of their service in the Missions.
(speaking foreign language) I did not expect
a high-ranking officer of the American Military Mission
such as Kelley to establish contact with me,
a soldier of the Soviet Mission.
I am very happy to have found such a friend.
Sergei Sidorenko is back on the road.
His new wheelchair has restored some of his freedom.
It was a Christmas present from veterans
of the American and the British Missions
organized by Lawrence G Kelley, a gesture
of solidarity between former members
of the reconnaissance corp with a diplomatic passport,
a gesture that goes beyond old enemy lines.
Whether they were weapons scouts, spies, traitors
by conviction or greed, they all acted
as informers in the service of two super powers, the US
and the Soviet Union.
(light music)
Many risked their lives and some even lost theirs.
But most of them contributed to security
during the Cold War through reconnaissance,
espionage and even through betrayal.
For nothing is more dangerous in the atomic age
than to know nothing about your potential enemy.
(light music)