Directed by Dirk Pohlmann

Norbert Langer, Uwe Koschel, Steven Charles

Secret operations at the North Pole, CIA parachute agents in Ukraine and helicopter missions in North Korea - the actions of the secret services during the Cold War presented in this film could have come from a James Bond film. But they are With never-before-seen footage, including footage of the secret agents and spy pilots themselves and previously unpublished archive material, the story of the "secret" war behind enemy lines is documented. But many of the operations themselves are also presented on television for the first time worldwide. The dimensions of the deadly and not at all "cold war" of the secret services are astonishing. There are still no exact figures. The experts in the film estimate that several thousand CIA agents were parachuted into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. However, the selection of the "divers", as they were called by their communist opponents, was evidently not squeamish. Contemporary witness Tinofej Ostrikow, trained in Kaufbeuren and infiltrated his homeland of Belarus by plane from the US airbase in Wiesbaden, reports on conditions that are similar to the recruitment of sailors 200 years ago. He slipped into partisan training and was then unable to get out. Immediately after jumping ship, he was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in a camp. A common fate. To this day, Western intelligence experts consider the operations a complete failure. There were double agents and "moles" right up to the highest levels of leadership in the secret services involved. The KGB agent hunters, who also have their say in the film, see things very differently. They report on CIA spies who made it to the 2nd party secretary, on a high number of unreported people - and 80,000 Soviet soldiers and secret service agents killed by the "Forest Brothers" in the Baltics alone. During the Korean War, several thousand agents were also infiltrated into the North Koreans. Contemporary witnesses report on their helicopter and airplane missions at night, which were incredibly risky. In Korea in particular, the emphasis was on quantity, not quality. It happened that double agents threw a hand grenade into the plane that took them to their destination immediately before jumping. The situation was completely different for the Tibetan guerrillas who jumped over their Chinese-occupied country. After training for jumping in impassable terrain by firefighters (!) and military guerrilla training by the CIA, the men jumped to almost certain death. Their fight was hopeless. The pilot of a US special unit operating from England and Libya reports how he used a flying boat to get a German scientist and his family out of the Soviet Union. In order to be able to pick up agents behind enemy lines, two systems were tested one after the other, the tests of which, documented with archive material, can only be described as adventurous. The people to be rescued were tied to parachute harnesses and pulled off the ground in an airplane. This brutal procedure was improved by Robert Fulton, a brilliant inventor and artist for the CIA. His Skyhook procedure allowed the agents to ascend vertically, first slowly, then ever faster, until they were winched into the rescue plane. Leonard A. LeSchack, a US Navy and intelligence officer with training as a geophysicist and polar researcher, developed a plan to jump onto an abandoned Soviet North Pole ice station, examine it and then be rescued again using the Skyhook. The Arctic has now become the focal point of the conflict between the superpowers, and polar research is a secret military matter. Nuclear submarines can now seek shelter under the polar cap or fire missiles through cracks, and bombers can make stopovers at ice island airports. The Americans therefore want to know at all costs what the Soviets are doing in their ice stations. The operation is fully documented in film footage and is shown on television for the first time worldwide. Film author Dirk Pohlmann, a specialist in secret operat

Not rated

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