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While space has always been the final frontier, it’s also been an unknowable one that every country has wanted to be first to conquer. Finally, newly released documents give us glimpses into NASA’s covert plan to blow up the moon with a nuclear warhead, the Soviet Union’s cover-up of history’s deadliest space disaster, and how U.S. attempts to put spies in orbit paved the way for the first space station–and the secret space race that were hidden from headlines.

The dark underbelly of science has never lurked as prominently as when it was harnessed for state-sanctioned “research”. In newly published records, discover Stalin’s gruesome trials to create a hybrid human-ape super army, the eerie reason East Germany’s Stasi collected the scents of dissidents in airtight jars, and how the CIA uncovered a secret Soviet island devoted to developing deadly bioweapons. Even generations later, the extreme experimentations executed in the name of national security continue to chill one’s blood.

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.