While wars may be won by men, they're fought with weapons--and every country wanted to leave nothing to chance. Teetering between the apocalyptic and absurd, declassified records will unveil the top secret weapons programs that attempted to bring down the world, uncovering the Soviet atomic test that shook the Earth with a force 1,500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, the CIA's creation of a gun that fired a shellfish-harvested toxin, and the Allies' bizarre secret plan to end World War II by feminizing Hitler.

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.