Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: It's great to be here. You know.
Speaker 1: It's funny whenever you bring up the idea of like
secret bases, everyone's mind just immediately snaps to one.
Speaker 2: Place, Area fifty one.
Speaker 1: Area fifty one. Of course, it's become this pop culture monolith.
It's on t shirts, it's the entire plot of Independence Day.
It's you know, it's almost a brand at this point.
Speaker 2: It really is. It's the celebrity of classified locations. It's
famous for being famous, right.
Speaker 1: I was even looking at some travel blogs the other day,
and people book tours to go out into the Nevada
Desert just to take a picture with the mailbox on
the side of the road. It's become a tourist attraction.
Speaker 2: Which, if you think about it, is probably the best
counterintelligence strategy you could.
Speaker 1: Ask for exactly. That's what I was thinking. Looking through
the stack of reports we have today. It strikes me
that if you know the name of the base, the
real secrets are probably long gone.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, the moment something enters the public consciousness, it's
no longer the bleeding edge of secrecy. It's a distraction.
Speaker 1: It's the magician's left hand isn't it waving this big,
flashy handkerchief that says aliens while the right hand is,
you know, doing something truly terrifying just out of sight.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy. Stake craft, especially at the highest
security levels, is all about managing perception. The really sensitive stuff,
the operations that can genuinely alter geopolitics or destabilizer region.
They're not happening where tourists are taking selfies.
Speaker 1: So today we're pulling the thread on those other places,
the ones that make Area fifty one look like I
don't know, a public park. We're talking about the unknown unknowns,
or at least.
Speaker 2: They recently known unknown. Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, We've got documents here on holloed out glaciers in
Greenland that were meant to be a hidden nuclear launch site.
We're looking at reports on invisible prisons tucked away in
Polish forests that legally just didn't exist.
Speaker 2: And then there's this one completely non descript office in
North Korea that is, for all intents and purposes, a
state run mafia that funds the entire regime.
Speaker 1: But this isn't just a travelogue of keepout signs. I
think what's important is to look at Why.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's the psychology behind it all. Why do we
hide things? Why do nations feel the need to build
entire cities inside mountains? Why does a corporation guard a
soda recipe with the same intensity as nuclear launch codes.
Speaker 1: It's really the mechanics of concealment. We've gone through declassified
Army Corps of Engineers reports, State Department cables that were
leaked years ago, even some incredibly dense glaciological surveys to
piece this together.
Speaker 2: And the common theme, the thread running through all of
it is paranoia. It's Cold War military paranoia, it's corporate
economic paranoia. It's the existential survivalist paranoia of an isolated regime.
It all comes from the same place.
Speaker 1: So for you listening, I want you to imagine something.
Imagine you're standing at a fence line. It's not just
barbed wire, it's brizzling with sensors and cameras, and you
know that crossing it doesn't just mean a fine or
a slap on the wrist.
Speaker 2: It means you vanish.
Speaker 1: It means you step into a legal black hole, a
place where the normal rules just don't apply. Today, we're
going to take you inside that perimeter.
Speaker 2: So where should we start. The ice seems like a
good place.
Speaker 1: Let's start with a project that on paper sounds like
one of the most ambitious engineering feats imaginable. But in
reality it was just a ticking environmental time bomb.
Speaker 2: You have to be talking about the Greenland ice sheet.
Speaker 1: Camp century now. The official story, the public facing narrative
in nineteen fifty nine, was that this was a scientific
research station, science under the stars, or I guess science under.
Speaker 2: A mile of snow, a noble cause, studying glaciology, weather patterns.
Speaker 1: Right, But looking at the actual declassified mission profile, this
was never really about studying ice cores, was it. The
project had another name.
Speaker 2: A much more revealing one, Project ice Worm.
Speaker 1: Project ice Worm. I mean, the name alone just tells
you something is deeply wrong here.
Speaker 2: It does. The scientific research was the cover story. It
was a plausible reason to have hundreds of Army engineers
digging around in the Greenland ice cap. The real strategic
goal of Project ice Worm was to fundamentally alter the
nuclear balance of power.
Speaker 1: They wanted to turn Greenland into a massive hidden and
this is the key part mobile missile launch pad.
Speaker 2: They get around the biggest fear of the Cold War.
The First Strike explain that well, in the late fifties,
US military planners were terrified that Soviet ICBMs could wipe
out all of our stationary missile silos in a surprise attack.
Mutually assured destruction, you know the principle, it keeps everyone
from pushing the button. It only works if you can
guarantee a retaliatory strike.
Speaker 1: So if your missiles are all in fixed locations, they're
sitting ducks exactly.
Speaker 2: So the army's logic was, what if the missiles aren't stationary,
what if they're constantly moving?
Speaker 1: It's the shell game, the ultimate.
Speaker 2: Shell game, played with thermonuclear warheads. The plan, and I'm
looking at the diagrams here. That scale is it's staggering.
They proposed a network of tunnels covering fifty two thousand
square mile.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, fifty two thousand square miles.
Speaker 2: That's three times the size of Denmark, a hidden subterranean
railway system, all carved out from inside the ice sheet.
Speaker 1: How is that even physically possible? How do you build
a railway inside a glacier?
Speaker 2: They brought in these enormous Swiss snow milling machines. They
were called Peter snow Miller's. They would carve these massive
trenches into the ice, like digging a subway line. Then
they'd cover the trench with a big corrugated steel arch
and just let the snow fall and bury it completely.
From the surface, it would be invisible and down below,
down below, you'd have these rail lines. The plan was
to deploy six hundred specially designed Iceman missiles, each on
a railcar, constantly circulating through thousands of miles of tunnels.
The Soviets might know the general area, but they could
never pinpoint where a missile was at any given moment.
Speaker 1: It's diabolically clever. But the infrastructure to support that, you'd need.
Speaker 2: A city, and that's what camps Centry was. It was
a prototype city. It wasn't just tunnels. They had prefabricated
buildings inside the ice caves. There was a chapel, a hospital,
a library, a theater that showed movies every night.
Speaker 1: A hobby shop, I see that in the notes, a
hobby shop.
Speaker 2: It housed two hundred soldiers, living year round, one hundred
feet beneath the surface of the.
Speaker 1: Ice, which brings up the next obvious problem. How do
you power a city? That's buried in ice hundreds of
miles from.
Speaker 2: Anything, right, you can't exactly run an extension cord, and
diesel generators would be a nightmare for ventilation. So they
came up with a solution that is the absolute peak
of Cold War technological arrogance.
Speaker 1: Oh, I know where this is going.
Speaker 2: They installed a portable nuclear reactor, a.
Speaker 1: Portable nuclear reactor inside a glacier, the.
Speaker 2: Alco PM two A. It was the world's first mobile
nuclear power plant. It arrived in modules my giant sleds
pulled by tractors, and they assembled it on site inside
a cavern carved out of the ice.
Speaker 1: It's just every part of that sentence is more alarming
than the last. Now you'd think someone, some engineer would
have paused and asked, hey, hey, is the ice actually
stable enough to hold a nuclear reactor.
Speaker 2: You would think so, But according to all the post
wartem reports, they severely catastrophically underestimated the reology of glacial ice,
the what freology, the study of how materials flow. They
treated the glacier like it was a solid piece of rock,
but it's not. It's a viscoelastic material, meaning it flows
like incredibly slow incredibly heavy molasses. As soon as they
dug the tunnels, the immense weight of the ice sheet
above them started to compress everything.
Speaker 1: The walls were literally closing in, quite literally.
Speaker 2: The tunnels were deforming. The main reactor tunnel was shrinking
by several inches a month. They had to send out
teams with what were basically giant chainsaws to constantly shave
back the ice walls just to keep the reactor's containment
vessel from being crushed.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a horror movie. You're living in this
nuclear powered freezer that is actively trying to squeeze you
to death.
Speaker 2: It was an engineering nightmare. By nineteen sixty four, they
knew it was untenable. They removed the reactor in sixty seven.
The entire camp was abandoned, the ice at one.
Speaker 1: But that's not where the story ends, is it. And
this is the part that I find genuinely terrifying today.
Speaker 2: No, it's not. When they left they decommissioned and removed
the reactor itself, yes, but they left everything.
Speaker 1: Else, all the dirty infrastructure. We're talking about what two
hundred thousand liters of diesel fuel.
Speaker 2: PCBs, which are incredibly toxic and estimated twenty four million
liters of untreated sewage in a giant sump, and of
course low level radioactive coolant water from the reactor.
Speaker 1: All just left there, buried under the snow. What was
their thinking?
Speaker 2: They operated under the assumption that the Greenland ice sheet
would accumulate snow forever. It was the old mantra the
solution to pollution is dilution or in this case, burial.
They genuinely thought the ice would seal it all in
for eternity, an icy tomb, right, But they didn't account
for one thing climate change. Climate change has completely flipped
the script. The ice sheet is no longer accumulating mass
in that region. It's melting. A big study in twenty
sixteen show that the rate of melt means camp century
and all its toxic waste could be exposed to the
surface environment within this century.
Speaker 1: So it's not a tomb. It's a time bomb, a
cold war toxic waste stump that's about to be unsealed
by modern climate dynamics.
Speaker 2: And it creates a huge geopolitical mess. Greenland is a
self governing territory of Denmark, but this is a US
military project built under a treaty that's now defunct, so
who's responsible for cleaning it up?
Speaker 1: Nobody wants to touch it. It's a perfect example of
short term military paranoia creating a long term, multi generational catastrophe.
It is, and speaking of a massive paranoid construction projects,
let's move from the shifting ice of Greenlands to the
solid granite of Russia.
Speaker 2: Come Mount Yemen Tao.
Speaker 1: This feels like the spiritual successor to the Camp century mindset,
the same impulse to burrow into the earth, but on
a much much more permanent scale. We're looking at the
closed town of Mesgori.
Speaker 2: In the Southern Neural Mountains. And when we say closed town,
we need to be clear about what that means in
a Russian content.
Speaker 1: This is a zatto, a closed administrative territorial formation.
Speaker 2: Right. These are entire cities that for decades did not
appear on any public maps. They had code names like
Arzama sixteen or Jellievents seventy. To get in or out,
you need a special pass, a propusk, even for Russian.
Speaker 1: Citizens, and Mezgori exists solely to service whatever's happening inside
Mount Yamontou.
Speaker 2: That's right, and the satellite imagery from over the years
is just it's wild. You see these massive excavation projects,
new roads, heavy gauge railway lines that just disappear straight
into the face of the mountain.
Speaker 1: The amount of dirt and rock they've pulled out of
that mountain is supposedly equivalent to dozens of Great Pyramids
of Giza.
Speaker 2: The scale is almost incomprehensible. And the prevailing theory among
Western intelligence analysts, and this is backed up by defector
reports and construction data, is that Yamantao is the crown
jewel of Russia's continuity of government program.
Speaker 1: It's their doomsday bunker.
Speaker 2: It's more than a bunker. This isn't just a command
post for a few dozen officials. The infrastructure suggests it's
a survival city.
Speaker 1: A survival city.
Speaker 2: It's designed to house the entire Russian leadership, political and military,
along with their families and enough technical and support staff
to maintain a functioning government for months, maybe even years,
after a full scale nuclear exchange.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate prepper fantasy, just funded by a superpower.
The US has Chian Mountain and Raven Rock, but from
what I've read, the sheer volume of rock excavated at
Yamantao suggests something far, far.
Speaker 2: Larger and much newer. What's really telling is when the
major construction happened. Cheyenne Mountain is largely a relic of
the fifties and sixties. At Yemantoo, construction kicked into high
gear in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Wait after the Cold War.
Speaker 2: Ended, right, think about that timeline. The Soviet Union has
just collapsed. The Russian economy is an absolute free fall.
People are standing in breadlines, but somehow billions of rubles
are still funneled into digging out this mountain.
Speaker 1: That tells you everything you need to know about their
strategic priorities.
Speaker 2: He tells you that the survival of the state apparatus,
the core of the government, was deemed more important than
the entire civilian economy.
Speaker 1: This is their backup hard drive, and Russia's official explanation.
Speaker 2: Is oh, They've offered a whole menu of cover stories.
They've claimed it's a mining site, a repository for state treasures.
My personal favorite is that it's a giant food storage facility.
Speaker 1: A food storage facility guarded by spetsnaws and serviced by
heavy rail lines going miles underground.
Speaker 2: It's not plausible. You don't drill into solid granite to
store buckwheat. You do it to survive a direct hit
from a multi megaton warhead.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting to contrast the two camp Century was
offensive right hiding the sword.
Speaker 2: And Yamantew is defensive, hiding the shield or at least
the person holding it.
Speaker 1: But both of them rely on the geography itself to
provide the ultimate security. One uses ice, the other uses rock.
Speaker 2: Geography is the original armor.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's pivot back to the US for a minute.
We started this by sort of bashing Area fifty one
for being too famous to mainstream the decoy. The decoy,
So if that's the distraction, where is the real work happening.
Our notes point to a place just about seventy miles northwest.
Speaker 2: Of Groom Lake, the Tanopa Test Range.
Speaker 1: NOPA feels like the I don't know, the indie band
version of Area fifty one. It's where the really cool
classified projects are happening before they sold out and got famous.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it. It's where the
operational testing happens. If Area fifty one is the R
and D lab where you build the prototype TOANPA is
the proving ground where you figure out how to actually
use it as a weapon, and.
Speaker 1: Its history is just incredible. This is where the F
one seventeen Nighthawk, the original stealth fighter, lived in secret
for nearly a decade.
Speaker 2: From nineteen eighty two to nineteen eighty nine. The F
one seventeen was a fully operational aircraft. They had an
entire wing of pilots flying these bizarre triangular jets out
of to Noopa every night, and the public had no
idea they even existed.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine what that life was like for those pilots.
The notes described their routine and it's exhausting just to read.
Speaker 2: It's surreal. They'd fly in from Las Vegas on these dedicated,
completely unmarked seven thirty seven, the infamous Janet Airlines. They'd
fly in on a Monday, live at the base all
week in dorms that supposedly had no windows to preserve
their night vision. They'd fly their missions only at night.
Then they'd fly home on Friday, and.
Speaker 1: They couldn't say a word to their wives, to their kids,
to their friends. They were ghost commuters working in a
secret air force.
Speaker 2: The psychological pressure must have been immense. You're flying the
single most advanced aircraft on the planet, a machine that's
basically invisible to radar. And when your neighbor at a
barbecue asks what you do for a living, you have
to lie and say, oh, I push paper at a
logistics hub at Nellys.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just American tech they were flying, was
it Toanopo was also home to the Red Hats and
the Red Eagles.
Speaker 2: Correct the four to four hundred and seventy seventh Test
and Evaluation Squadron an amazing story. They had managed to
acquire through various clandestine means, actual Soviet Meg fighters.
Speaker 1: So they're flying real MiG.
Speaker 2: Real MiG seventeens, MiG twenty one's, MiG twenty threes. They
were flying them over the Nevada Desert, dogfighting against our
own pilots to find their weaknesses, to develop tactics to
beat them.
Speaker 1: That is just wild. So imagine you're a civilian, maybe
camping out in the desert in say nineteen eighty four,
You look up at the night sky and you see
a Soviet Mid twenty one chasing a black triangular UFO.
Speaker 2: No wonder the alien stories took off. The reality was
arguably stranger.
Speaker 1: The aliens were just classified aerodynamics. But Tona's mission isn't
just historical. It's still very active, right under the Department
of Energy as well as the Air Force.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's a key part of its modern mission, nuclear
weapons Stockhile's stewardship.
Speaker 1: What does that mean exactly?
Speaker 2: It means they do joint test assembly missions. They take
a real nuclear bomb, like a B sixty one gravity bomb,
but they remove the ftle core, the plutonium pit.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it can't go nuclear.
Speaker 2: Correct, But everything else is live, the casing, the electronics,
the radar, the parachutes. They drop these dummy bombs from
bombers to make sure that the web's non nuclear components
work perfectly, to make sure the bomb will go exactly
where it's supposed to go, if it wherever needed.
Speaker 1: So, if you're an amateur explorer and you wander past
the perimeter at TONOPA, you're not just risking getting arrested
by some CAMO dudes.
Speaker 2: You're risking wandering into the designated drop zone for a
practice nuclear bomb. The security there is it's not theatrical.
It's deadly serious because the work is deadly serious.
Speaker 1: It's the quiet professional to Area fifty one's flashy showmen.
Speaker 2: I think that's the perfect description.
Speaker 1: Now, of course, Russia has its own counterpart to this,
a place that combines the missile testing of Tonopa with
some of the space age history of a cake canaveral,
but with a much much darker origin.
Speaker 2: You have to be talking about Capustaennar.
Speaker 1: Copyar, as it's known. This site, way out in the
asterisk In Oblast near the Volga River is basically the
cradle of the entire Soviet rocketree program. But it started
with stolen goods.
Speaker 2: It started with Nazi technology. Just as the Americans had
Operation paper Clip to grab German signientists like Werner von Braun,
the Soviets had Operation Osooviekam.
Speaker 1: And they rounded up every German rocket scientists and V
two rocket component they could find and ship them all east.
Speaker 2: Shipped them to Kapusignar. So in nineteen forty six, this
remote patch of step became, for all intents and purposes,
a German V two launch site operated by the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: And this is where they reverse engineered that technology to
build their first ballistic missile, the R one. This is
literally ground zero for both the Soviet space program and
the Soviet nuclear missile program.
Speaker 2: And we can't forget the dogs, the space dogs.
Speaker 1: Before Laika the first dog in orbit, there were other pioneers.
Speaker 2: Desert and Siegen. They were launched on suborbital flights from
Kapustignar way back in nineteen fifty one. They were the
first mammals to be successfully launched and recovered from such
a high altitude.
Speaker 1: It's just amazing to think that humanity's first real steps
into the Cosmos began in these two secret desert locations,
White Sands in the US and Kapustignar in Russia using
captured Nazi weapons.
Speaker 2: The history is incredibly messy, but kPr has also developed
this reputation, much like Area fifty one for being the
Russian Rosswell.
Speaker 1: Right, there are endless rumors and conspiracy theories about crashed
UFOs reverse engineered alien tech, especially centered around to suppose
at underground complex there called ZIPCRE.
Speaker 2: But honestly, when you look at the declassified history, the
reality of what happened a Kapustinar is far more frightening
than any alien story.
Speaker 1: You're talking about the atmospheric nuclear.
Speaker 2: Tests between nineteen fifty seven and nineteen sixty one, they
conducted a series of high altitude nuclear detonations right over
the site. They were testing anti ballistic missile systems by
trying to shoot down incoming rockets with nuclear.
Speaker 1: Warheads, detonating nukes in the sky.
Speaker 2: Y Yes, and the radioactive fallout from those tests was
not well contained. They had to evacuate entire villages in
the surrounding area, turning the region into a permanent military
exclusion zone.
Speaker 1: It's that recurring theme, isn't it. A government draws a
circle on a map, declares everything inside it restricted, and
that land becomes a sacrificial altar for technological advancement, and
it is still.
Speaker 2: A very active, very restricted place. Capustinyara is where Russia
tests some of its most modern systems, like the Escandalam
tactical missiles and the topol miicbms. When at a no
tema notice to air missions goes up over that part
of Russia, it means something very fast and very dangerous
is about to fly.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's shift years a little. We've talked a lot
about hardware, missiles, stealth planes, reactors, but some of the
darkest restricted places on Earth aren't designed to hide objects.
They're designed to hide people.
Speaker 2: Specifically people the government wants to make disappear.
Speaker 1: The black sites, and the one that always stands out
to me is Stairkaycuty in Poland. This story still gives
me chills because it's so recent. This wasn't the Cold War,
this was in the two thousands, right in the heart
of modern Europe.
Speaker 2: It completely challenges our assumptions about how liberal democracies are
supposed to behave. Stair Keaycouti is a small village in
northeastern Poland. It's home to an intelligence training center, the
Orto dek Stanya Kadra Uyadu.
Speaker 1: A training center. It sounds so so banal, such a
bland euphemism, but between two thousand and two and two
thousand and three this base was not being used to
train Polish intelligence.
Speaker 2: Cadets, not at all. A secluded section of that base,
a private villa, really was handed over to the CIA
in cooperation with Polish intelligence. They operated a secret detention
and interrogation facility there. Its internal code name was Quartz.
Speaker 1: And this is where they brought some of the so
called high value detainees from the War on terror people
like Khalud Chik Mohammad, the alleged architect of nine to eleven, and.
Speaker 2: Abd al Rahim a Lashiri. They were flown into a
nearby sleepy regional airport at Semone on unmarked CIA registered planes.
Speaker 1: And those flight logs they were the smoking gun, weren't they.
That's how investigators eventually broke the story.
Speaker 2: They were planes registered to known CIA shell companies landing
at this remote Polish airport in the middle of the night,
being met by vans with blacked out windows. You connect
the dot. The prisoners were taken straight to this villa
on the restricted military base.
Speaker 1: The whole point of this, the legal concept, was to
create a place that was outside the law right.
Speaker 2: That was the entire goal. If you hold a prisoner
on US soil, they have rights under the Constitution, they
have a habeas corpus, they have a right to a lawyer.
But if you hold them in a secret facility in
a Polish forest, a place that is technically under Polish
sovereignty but is operationally controlled by the US, you create
a legal vacuum, a black.
Speaker 1: Hole, a gray zone where enhanced interrogation techniques, which many
human rights groups define as torture could be used without
any judicial oversight.
Speaker 2: And for years the Polish government flat out denied it.
They said it was impossible, a conspiracy theory. It took
relentless work from investigative journalists and human rights groups and
eventually a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights
to force the.
Speaker 1: Truth out, and the court found that Poland was complicit,
that they had allowed it to happen.
Speaker 2: Yes, they ruled that Poland had violated the European Convention
on Human Rights. It was a huge political scandal and
a major blow to the country's reputation.
Speaker 1: It's just such a stark example of how a restricted
place isn't just about fences and guards. It's about drawing
a line on the ground and saying here here the
constitution does not apply.
Speaker 2: It is the deliberate suspension of the social contract within
a very specific set of geographic coordinates.
Speaker 1: That's a powerful way to put it. And that brings
us to another site that deals in the suspension of ethics,
though this time ostensibly for defensive reasons. Let's talk about
port and down in the UK, the.
Speaker 2: Defense Science and Technology Laboratory DSTL.
Speaker 1: This place has been the absolute heart of British chemical
and biological weapons research since nineteen sixteen. We are talking
about more than a century of dealing with the absolute
nastiest substances known to science.
Speaker 2: It was established in direct response to the German gas
attacks in World War One. The logic was simple and brutal.
They are using chlorine and mustard gas against our troops.
We need to understand how to make it, how it works,
and how to defend against it.
Speaker 1: A grim but understandable motivation. But the history of the
testing there, especially the human testing, it's just so dark
it is.
Speaker 2: Over the decades, thousands of British military personnel volunteered for
experiments at portin Down. They were often told they were
helping to find a cure for the common cold or
testing new protective equipment, but.
Speaker 1: In reality they were sometimes being exposed to nerve agents
in some cases.
Speaker 2: Yes. The most infamous and tragic case is that of
Ronald Madison in nineteen fifty three. He was a twenty
year old Royal Air Force mechanic. He volunteered for what
he thought was research to cure the common cold. He
was offered a small payment and a three day.
Speaker 1: Pass, And what does they do to him.
Speaker 2: They dripped two hundred milligrams of pure seren nerve agent
onto a piece of cloth that was taped to his arm.
My god, he died less than an hour later. It
was a horrific tragedy that was covered up for decades.
The official cause of death was listed as misadventure.
Speaker 1: It was until a new in quest in two thousand
and four that the truth came.
Speaker 2: Out right, and his was the most extreme case, but
thousands of other servicemen participated in these trials over the years,
and many believe they suffered long term health effects as
a result.
Speaker 1: The government's argument, i suppose, is always national defense. We
need to test the gas mask, we need to develop
and test the antidotes, and you can't test an antidote
unless you expose someone to the poison.
Speaker 2: That is the grim calculus of this kind of research.
Port and Down is where the VX nerve agent was
first synthesized in its British form. It's one of the
handful of maximum containment laboratories on Earth that holds live
samples of things like ebola, anthrax.
Speaker 1: And the play like a biological library of everything that
can kill us.
Speaker 2: It is, but it's also a library of how to
save us. We have to be fair. They were the
ones who were instrumental in identifying the Novachuk agent used
in the Salisbury poisonings a few years ago. Their expertise
is what helped save lives.
Speaker 1: So it's a paradox.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate paradox of biodefense. You have to keep
the monster locked in the basement in order to learn
how to fight it if it ever gets out.
Speaker 1: I suppose I'd rather they have the monster in a
secure basement than have nobody know how to fight it.
But looking at the history of accidents and the ethical breaches,
it requires an enormous amount of public trust.
Speaker 2: In secrecy, by its very nature, erodes trust. That's the catch.
Twenty two.
Speaker 1: Let's shift from biological threats to economic ones. We tend
to think of these restricted zones as military installations, but
money requires just as much protection, and sometimes the pursuit
of money creates the most bizarre restricted zones of all.
Speaker 2: You must be talking about North Korea's Office thirty nine.
Speaker 1: Room thirty nine. It sounds so boring like a record's
office with a DMV, but this is arguably the most
successful and sophisticated state sponsored criminal enterprise and modern history.
Speaker 2: It was established by Kim Il sung back in the
late nineteen seventies. The mission was brutally simple that Kim
dynasty needs hard foreign currency to survive. The country is
under crippling sanctions, so find a way to get the
money anyway.
Speaker 1: And they took the anyway part to heart. The portfolio
of Room thirty nine based on desector testimony and intelligence reports,
it just reads like a criminal wrap sheet.
Speaker 2: It does drug trafficking. They became one of the world's
largest producers of high purity methamphetamine, insurance fraud, smuggling, endangered species,
weapons sales.
Speaker 1: But their most legendary operation has to be the counterfeiting.
Speaker 2: Oh the supernote, It's the stuff of legend in intelligence circles.
Speaker 1: These weren't just photocopies of hundred dollars bills, not even close.
Speaker 2: These were masterpieces. North Korea somehow acquired the same kind
of intallio printing presses used by the US Bureau of
Engraving and Printing. They sourced the same specific blend of
cotton linen paper. They even replicated the microscopic security fibers
and the color shifting inc.
Speaker 1: The fakes were so good that for years even the
US Secret Service, the world's foremost experts on this, could
barely tell the difference.
Speaker 2: It was a form of economic warfare. You flood the
global market with perfect fakes. You undermined confidence in the
US dollar, and every one hundred dollars BILLI you print
is pure profit for the regime.
Speaker 1: But that was the old game. Cash is heavy, it's
risky to move, So Room thirty nine has evolved. Now
the big money is digital.
Speaker 2: Now it's cybercrime. The Lazarus Group is winely believed to
be the hacking arm of Room thirty.
Speaker 1: Nine, and their most famous operation was the Bangladesh bank
heist in twenty sixteen. That story is just it's like
something out of a movie.
Speaker 2: It's unbelievable. They used malware to hack into the Swift
International banking system. They were minutes away from electronically transferring
yar than one billion dollars out of the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York.
Speaker 1: A billion dollars, and the only reason they failed.
Speaker 2: A combination of dumb luck and a spelling mistake. A
connecting bank noticed a typo in one of the transfer requests.
They spelled foundation as Fandation, which raised a red flag
in a printer error at the Bangladesh Bank stopped them
from seeing some of the confirmation messages, so.
Speaker 1: They only got away with about eighty one million dollars.
Speaker 2: Only eighty one million, which is still a catastrophic security
breach and a massive windfall for a regime that's cut
off from the global economy.
Speaker 1: And that money goes where straight to the top.
Speaker 2: It funds the nuclear weapons program, and it pays for
the luxury goods, the Kognak, the Mercedes benzes that keep
the elite loyal to the Kim family. Room thirty nine
is the financial lung that allows the whole system to
keep breathing.
Speaker 1: And we don't even know for sure where it is.
It's likely some heavily guarded, nondescript building in Pyongyang filled
with hackers and accountants who are essentially cooking the books
for an entire nation.
Speaker 2: It's a true black box of international finance.
Speaker 1: Now, speaking of black boxes and secret formulas, let's look
at the complete flip side of that coin. A restricted
place designed not to fund a criminal state, but to
protect a massive, legitimate corporate fortune.
Speaker 2: The Coca Cola vault in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: I love that this is on the list because it
feels so trivial compared to nerve gas and nuclear bunkers.
But when you look at the mechanics of the secrecy,
they are identical.
Speaker 2: Intellectual property is a form of power, and the secret
formula for Coca Cola is one of the most valuable
and most fiercely guarded trade secrets in history.
Speaker 1: So here's a basic question, why keep it a secret
at all? Why not just patent it?
Speaker 2: Ah, that's the key. If you patent formula, you have
to publish exactly what's in it. That's the trade off,
and patents expire usually after twenty years. After that, anyone
could legally make generic.
Speaker 1: Coke, but a trade secret.
Speaker 2: A trade secret can last forever as long as you
can keep the secret.
Speaker 1: So they built a literal fortress around a piece of paper.
Speaker 2: Well, the vaults you can see at the World of
Coca Cola Museum is partly for show. It's great marketing,
but the security protocols behind it are very real. The
key principle is split knowledge.
Speaker 1: Explain what that means.
Speaker 2: It means no single person on earth knows the entire formula.
It's compartmentalized. One senior executive might know the recipe for
the merchandise seven X flavor component, which is the heart
of the drink, while a different executive knows the precise
mixing methodology and ingredient ratios.
Speaker 1: And they're never allowed to travel on the same plane.
Speaker 2: Right, that's the legend. Yes, it's the same protocol that
the US President and vice president follow, and it extends
to the manufacturing process. The concentrate is made in different stages.
The components are labeled with code names, not ingredients. The
workers who are physically pouring the syrups don't know exactly
what they're pouring, just that it's component A and component B.
Speaker 1: It's just fascinating. They've effectively turned a recipe for a
soft drink into a state secret with national security level
clearance protocols.
Speaker 2: When your brand equity is worth north of eighty billion dollars,
you could argue it is a matter of corporate national security.
Speaker 1: Okay, for our last section, let's zoom ount. We've looked
at individuals, site spaces, bunkers, labs, vaults, but sometimes an
entire region can become a restricted place. A line on
a map that defines who is in and who is out.
Speaker 2: You're talking about the Russian border security zones exactly.
Speaker 1: Most of us, you know, we think of a border
as a thin line. You walk up to it, you
show you passport out of booth, you cross it. But
that's not how it works. In Russia. The border isn't
a line.
Speaker 2: It's a zone, a very deep zone. It's a buffer
controlled by the FSB Border Service. In some places, this
zone can extend for miles, even dozens of miles inland
from the actual border. We're talking about millions of hectares
of landforests, tundra, coastline, even entire.
Speaker 1: Villages, and people live their whole lives inside these zones.
Speaker 2: They do, but their lives are intensely regulated. If you
live in Moscow and you want to visit your aunt
who lives in a border zone village near Finland, you
can't just drive there. You need to apply for a
special FSB pass, weeks sometimes months in advance, explaining exactly
who you are, why you're going, and for how long.
And if you're a foreigner, good luck, you need a
very very compelling reason. It's designed to create a state
of constant surveillance. If you're found inside the zone without
the right paperwork, you are automatically a suspect. You could
be a smuggler, a spy, or someone trying to flee.
Speaker 1: It feels like a holdover from the Soviet mentality, where
the border wasn't just about keeping enemies out, but also
about keeping their own citizens in.
Speaker 2: It is absolutely that it's a psychological barrier as much
as it is a physical one. It reinforces the idea
of the state's absolute control over movement.
Speaker 1: Which brings us, i think, to our final stop. The
original restricted zone, the historical prototype for all of these
other places.
Speaker 2: The Forbidden City in Beijing.
Speaker 1: We think of it now as this massive, beautiful museum,
but for five hundred years this was the most exclusive,
most heavily restricted piece of real estate on the entire planet,
the Great Within.
Speaker 2: From fourteen twenty until the fall of the Last Emperor
in nineteen twelve, this was considered the literal center of
the universe, and the rules of access were lethal. If
you were a commoner and you so much as stepped
across the threshold of the reading gate without permission, instant execution,
and the secrecy inside the walls was just as intense.
The thousands of Eunich servants and concubines, many of them
live their entire lives within those red walls, that were
born there, or entered as children, and died there as
old men and women, having never once seen the outside world.
Was a gilded cage on an epic scale.
Speaker 1: And even today as a tourist attraction that gets millions
of visitors. Vast sections of the complex remain sealed off.
Speaker 2: The unopened areas, and that's what's so fascinating. There are
nearly one thousand buildings and almost ten thousand rooms in
the Forbidden City. Only a fraction are open to the public.
Speaker 1: What's in those closed off sections.
Speaker 2: All sorts of things. Some are storage areas for the
Palace Museum's archives, just filled with dusty, priceless artifacts that
haven't been seen in a century. Some are residential quarters
that are simply too fragile to withstand foot traffic. Others
are just left as they were sealed history, so.
Speaker 1: You can't buy a ticket to the real hidden history.
Only conservation workers and specially proved researchers ever get past
those locked doors.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It preserves the mystique as long as some doors
remain closed, the full power and secrecy of the place
remains intact.
Speaker 1: So we've toured the world of the forbidden. We've been
under the Greenland ice, inside Russian mountains, through Polish black
sites and corporate vaults.
Speaker 2: It's a heavy list, to say the least.
Speaker 1: What's the final synthesis here, What's the thread that ties
all of these wildly different places together.
Speaker 2: For me, it comes back to the inherent fragility of
secrecy itself. Think about it. Camp Sentry failed because they
couldn't control the ice. The Polish black sites were exposed
because you can't hide flight logs forever. Even the Coca
Cola vault is only one disgruntled employee away from having
its secrets posted on the Internet.
Speaker 1: It seems like the more energy and resources you pour
into hiding something, the more explosive the revelation is when
it finally inevitably gets out.
Speaker 2: Entropy applies to information, to secrets decay. They want to
be free, and that.
Speaker 1: I think leads to the really scary question, doesn't it.
We know about all these places now because they failed,
or they were leaked, or they became obsolete, declassify.
Speaker 2: Their secrets of the past.
Speaker 1: So what are the restricted places we don't know about?
What is the Project ice Worm of twenty twenty six?
What is being built right now today that we won't
find out about for another fifty years.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's a deep question. If I had to guess,
I'd say the next generation of restricted places aren't being
built under the ice or inside mountains where then they're
being built in servi farms in Utah. They exist inside
the code of autonomous drone swarms. The new restricted zones
aren't just physical anymore. They're digital and algorithmic. And the
terrifying part is we're probably walking through them every single
day on our phones and laptops and we don't even
realize the fences are there.
Speaker 1: That is a thought that is definitely going to keep
me up tonight.
Speaker 2: Sorry about that.
Speaker 1: No, No, it's why we do this. So we want
to hear from you listening. Which of these threads pulled
at you the most. Is it the slow motion environmental
time bomb ticking away in Greenland.
Speaker 2: Or the legal black hole of the CIA.
Speaker 1: Black sites, or maybe just the surreal idea that a
soda company runs tighter operational security than most governments.
Speaker 2: I'm still stuck on Yamatal the idea of survival city.
That level of preparation implies a deep, profound level of
pessimism about the future that I'm just not sure I'm
ready to accept.
Speaker 1: Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for
listening to Thrilling Threads. Keep digging and watch where you stepped.