Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny

Imagine a world where you could be compelled to do anything and everything, your government orders. That's not just a post-apocalyptic worst-case scenario, but at one point in time, the reality of state-run programs designed to warp and control minds, both in the lab and on the battlefield. From the CIA's decades-long pursuit of the perfect truth serum to the U.S. Army's secret PsyOps in Vietnam, mind games have long been at play among countries, its enemies, and even its own citizens. Every one, a more alarming deception than the next.

The dangerous, emotional and arduous toll of stealth ops has never been felt more deeply than by those who adopted completely separate personas to integrate themselves into a shadowy underworld. From "The Pond", an intelligence operation so secret the CIA was kept in the dark, to a luxury Red Sea diving resort covertly operated by Mossad agents, to the British security services' daring rescue of a double agent in Moscow. These undercover smokescreens were all driven by daring agents in service of executing a greater purpose.

Stalin's gruesome trials to create a hybrid human-ape super army and the eerie reason East Germany's Stasi collected the scents of dissidents in airtight jars.

Glimpses into NASA's covert plan to blow up the moon with a nuclear warhead and the Soviet Union's cover-up of history's deadliest space disaster.

From the seemingly innocuous children's toy engineered to save an informant, to hirsute-inspired movie disguises, your government's most clandestine inventions are never what you would suspect, and that's exactly why no one never saw them coming.

They say better the devil you know, but what happens when you have to hold hands with him? When governments strike dark deals with cults, mobs, and even sworn enemies, frosty relationships and mounting tensions are tested head on. From the CIA's attempt to enlist the Chicago Mob to assassinate Castro, to the only World War II battle where U.S. troops fought alongside the German Army, to Vladimir Putin's recruitment of a convicted murderer as his personal assassin, which sacrifices are worth the bigger picture?