The Declassified History Of The British Secret Service | David Jason's Secret Service | Timeline

Historical Identity
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Only Fools and Horses star and passionate espionage enthusiast Sir David Jason searches for the origins of the British Secret Service and discovers the legendary characters, audacious missions and makeshift methods that characterised the early days of spying.
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I'm David Jason and ever since I was a boy
I've been obsessed with the cloak and dagger world of spies.
I always wanted to know what it takes to be dropped behind enemy lines
and risk everything for queen and country.
You are the original femme fatale. Now I'm on a mission of my own to
uncover the true history of the British secret service.
They were a new kind of intelligence unit which still exists today.
From the world's first professional spy network
The whole place was alive with spies. To the real-life agent who inspired
James Bond. I'm going to bust a bank here my mate.
And the ingenious gadgets that made it all possible.
And done. Golden bleeding belly. Did it go off?
This week I'm going back to world war one
and the very beginnings of the secret service.
Sir Mansfield coming. I'm put through my paces at spy school.
This is actually the unit that Adolf Hitler fought with. One bullet in the
right place would have saved us the second world war.
For the first time I'll uncover how an army of granny spies led Britain to
victory. Drop 10 stitches. We'll get that to
the allies. And recreate a remarkable experiment
that helped British intelligence win the war.
It's ingenious. It's great isn't it? I'm about to rendezvous with Alan Judd
whose years of active service with the foreign office
have given him a unique insight into the world of espionage.
Good morning Sir David. Good morning. We're going to recruit you into the
secret service as it might have been in 1909. What the hell was that?
Alan wants me to experience the life of Britain's first secret agents.
So he's put me on a crash course in a hundred year old supercar,
the beast of Turin. My first taste of the spy life and
crikey this thing goes like the clappers.
I thought spies racing around in fast cars was just a cliche
but apparently not. Well David how was that?
Cool. I'll tell you this, only my laundry is gonna know
how much I really enjoyed it. Well let's have you out of there and I'll tell you
a little bit more. It's like being born again. Thank you.
Right what has this got to do with the secret service? Well
I wanted to introduce you to the brilliant and unconventional world of
Sir Manfield Cumming who was the first chief of the secret service. He founded
MI6. He was a larger than life character. He
was also a significant racing driver in his day who raced cars
just like this. On the face of it he was a pretty unlikely
choice of person to start a very secret organisation that nobody was supposed to
know about. So this was in what 1909? It was 1909.
Before 1909 we didn't have a permanent secret service
but it was decided we needed one partly because
of this. William Leque, the author, writer of spy thrillers, imagines a
German invasion of Britain in 1910 using a kind of sleeper army of German
agents. So the stories in books like this people
thought that it was real. Well they really did. The press took it up in a big
way. They claimed that they had a secret
arsenal hidden a quarter of a mile from Charing Cross.
However there was a kernel of truth at the bottom of it. There was a real
threat. The German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II,
was building up the country's armed forces
and his expansion of the German fleet was a direct challenge to Great Britain's
Retired naval officer Mansfield Cumming
was given £7,000 and a small Whitehall office
to set up a secret service from scratch and he had some highly original
recruitment techniques. Imagine you've come for an interview.
He wants to know about your background. He wants to know about your military
service but he might also seek to distract you
quite a bit. Gordon Bennett, what did you do that for? You failed the test. What do
you mean? Because you not only winced, you jumped
half a yard back. Well what do you expect? Look at this, your dagger in your
bloody leg. Coming out of wooden legs you see.
Not many people knew that. It sounds completely bonkers.
Now there was method in his madness. He'd used his psychology in a very modern way
just as he wanted the latest science to inform
his espionage. He was fascinated by a secret ink.
This was usually used between the lines in an innocuous letter
that could only be seen if subjected to a heat source or a certain kind of light
source. This is great, isn't it? It's marvellous.
How successful was he about, you know, getting the whole thing up and running?
Well they got really good access to the German naval
building programme and German ships but of course the real test for Cumming
was the forthcoming First World War in which espionage was to play a
significant and growing part. When the First World War started in 1914
Germany was on the rampage. Belgium had been invaded and the
Kaiser's army was headed for France. In a matter of months over a million
British Tommies had volunteered to join the front line.
But for Mansfield Cumming and British intelligence
the war began much closer to home.
The focus was about to shift to a very unlikely place.
Where was that?
Your next destination. Here.
Right. There's nothing on it. It's blank.
Is it, David?
Now you're talking. That's more my style.
Sean Connery drove one of these in Dr No but he was probably going
somewhere very exotic. I'm heading to a sleepy seaside town on
England's south coast. But in 1914 this was Spy Central.
Michael, good morning. Sir David, welcome.
Thank you.
I've heard that Michael George is the expert on Folkestone's secret
World War One history. Why was Folkestone considered the hotbed
of the spy industry?
Unlikely, isn't it? Yeah.
And the reason for that is just across the channel.
Refugees from Belgium were fleeing the German army.
Many of them had seen terrible things in the face of the German onslaught.
From across the channel in 1914 came an armada of ships.
The refugees from Belgium were sailing across to escape the invader.
And the nearest point for them was Folkestone.
How many people are we talking about?
180,000.
But there was something about them when they arrived.
These people had something in their eyes.
What do you mean?
They wanted somehow or another to get back to fight for their homeland.
British intelligence planned to use this influx of refugees to their advantage.
They decided to recruit spies of our own from amongst the refugees who've arrived here.
Any sensible person would say, I'm safe here, no way am I going back.
So how did they persuade them?
The very first success was a young 21-year-old girl.
Her name was Gabrielle Petit.
In July 1915, Gabrielle Petit fled occupied Belgium
and travelled on the SS Copenhagen to Britain.
She was looking for her fiancé who had been injured fighting on the Western Front.
Instead, she found the perfect opportunity for revenge.
By the time she arrived here in Folkestone,
she had signed up to become a secret agent working for British intelligence.
Refugees like Gabrielle Petit were invaluable to Cummings' new secret service.
But they were not professional spies.
They were just ordinary people.
British intelligence knew they had to find a way to give their new recruits the edge.
Spy school?
Spy school it is.
I'm in Folkestone where, in 1915, new recruit Gabrielle Petit
was preparing to return to her war-torn homeland to spy for Britain.
Brutal trench warfare had created a stalemate on the Western Front,
and Mansfield Cummings realised that the side with the best intelligence would win the war.
If the Allies could predict where the Germans were moving their troops,
they could be ready to repel their attacks and exploit any weakness in the line.
The plan was to get agents like Gabrielle Petit to send back vital information.
But before Gabrielle could take on this special mission,
she had to be trained in spy school.
Hello, John.
Hello, sir.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you.
Teaching me the art of espionage will be John Naylor,
spy instructor and gadget man.
We'll start at the top.
Right.
Lesson one, uniform ID.
This is an officer.
He's not any old officer.
He's a Prussian.
We can tell because of the cockade, the national colours.
He's an artilleryman, a heavy artilleryman.
If you know where he is, you know where the heavy guns are.
That's crucial information back home.
Well, if we move on, this guy's likely...
Blimey.
Gabrielle had to recognise over 100 of these uniforms in just two weeks.
These are the infantry you don't want to mess with.
Right, okay.
I'm not sure if I could remember the difference between a Prussian and a Russian.
Pickle out.
Bavarian crest.
This is actually the unit that Adolf Hitler fought with.
God, if we'd have known that one bullet in the right place,
we'd have saved us the Second World War.
Yeah, quite.
Now that Gabrielle could identify specific German troops...
Come over to the table, David.
British intelligence needed to know where they were going.
The Germans were using the railway to supply the front line with guns and troops.
British intelligence needed Gabrielle in Belgium to tell them which way the troops were headed
so the Allies could prepare for battle.
Gabrielle's challenge was how to identify these trains.
Right.
And how to recognise what a train was carrying.
We've got different examples here.
Is there anything that, just by looking at them, that you can tell me about those trains?
Those carry passengers and those are open trucks, by the looks of things,
that could carry goods or ammunition or whatever.
This train, yes, it carries people.
Yeah.
In fact, it's a hospital train.
Oh, how do you know that?
Because of the markings on the side of the train.
And depending on how big it is,
you might be able to work out how many injuries they sustained.
You know, you're getting into the detail now.
Yeah.
Imagine you have got your information that you've gathered.
You've written it down.
Yes.
Probably in very small writing.
Yes.
And you want to get it to GHQ here in Folkestone.
How am I going to do it?
That was the next part of Gabrielle's training.
Wartime Belgium was a brutal place.
If undercover agents like Gabrielle were caught, they'd face the firing squad.
To give themselves the best chance of getting information out and staying alive,
they had to come up with ingenious ways of hiding their messages.
If I give you this potato.
OK.
And hand you a knife.
Ask you to cut into it.
The secret with these messages that were hidden in other ordinary everyday objects
was to make them small.
It wasn't just the humble spud that agents used to move messages across enemy territory.
They repurposed anything they could get their hands on.
From hiding intelligence in false teeth,
to coding messages in newspaper adverts,
and passing vital information in Red Cross supplies and sacks of flour.
Yeah, hold on a sec.
That's a piece of potato.
What a plonker.
Not my finest hour.
Right, just a sec.
Yeah.
Ah, look at that.
There it is.
Look at the size of that.
And it's amazing how much information you can get on a piece of paper that size.
Brilliant.
I want to find out what happened to Gabrielle
when she went undercover for the British Secret Service.
I'm following in her footsteps.
First stop, Tournai, Belgium.
Ah.
Hi.
Good morning, Emmanuel.
Emmanuel De Bruyne is an expert on Belgium's undercover agents.
This was her hometown.
And she came back to spy for the Allies, didn't she?
She travelled a lot around Tournai.
And here, she observed the German troops quite close to the front.
And she tried to identify the units.
She also described if they were young, if they were motivated.
On the 1st of October 1915, one of Gabrielle's reports
identified a weakness in the German reinforcements to the front.
350 to 400 soldiers have arrived from Charleroi, or so they claim.
They must have just been dismissed from hospitals.
They look so deathly pale.
When Gabrielle Petit was spying, she was very close to the front line.
And of course, it was fraught with danger.
She used to write her reports on this stuff, cigarette paper.
If she was watching, say, six artillery units, you know, 400 troops, right?
She'd write that down like this.
And then if she thought she was going to get caught by the Germans,
she'd simply roll it up and then she would smoke it.
Now, that's thinking like a spy.
Brave agents like Gabrielle provided Britain with up-to-the-minute intel from the front.
But the German secret police weren't far behind.
Alone and taking more and more risks,
she was ultimately betrayed by one of their double agents.
Gabrielle Petit was executed at the Thiers National Military Base on 1st April 1916.
Defiant to the end, her last words before facing the firing squad were,
Now you will see how a Belgian woman dies.
When the Germans invaded neutral Belgium in 1914, they slaughtered thousands of civilians.
It was these massacres that allowed the British Secret Service
to recruit one of the most important spies of the war.
A man called Doudonné Lambrecht.
He was a 30-year-old businessman from Liège,
and he wanted revenge for what the Germans had done to his people.
But what British intelligence needed was a way to see the bigger picture.
Lambrecht set up a network of train-watching posts outside Liège,
halfway between Germany and France,
so he could accurately predict where the Germans were sending their troops.
Emmanuel took me for a bike ride along the railway lines
where Lambrecht's agents spied on German troop movements.
The goal of the Lambrecht network was to monitor
the movement of the German units in Belgium, so behind the front.
So I see what you're saying, it doesn't really matter how close you are to the front.
In fact, you don't need to be at the front.
You don't, you absolutely don't need.
You are more useful behind the front,
working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, all over the occupied country.
What that meant was that no matter where they were in the country,
they would monitor the movement of the trains with the troops or guns or tanks.
They would understand where all of this stuff was heading.
They would read in the mind of the enemy.
That was the ultimate goal.
Lambrecht's network often delivered the goods.
In 1916, it provided crucial intelligence ahead of the Battle of Verdun,
one of the bloodiest in human history, with nearly a million casualties.
The German army used the flamethrower for the first time
as part of their plan to crush the French into submission.
If the Germans had taken this stronghold, they could have won the war.
But Lambrecht's intelligence reports had reached
Allied headquarters before the battle commenced.
The French had time to send reinforcements,
and the Germans were stopped in their tracks.
If the Battle of Verdun had taught the Germans anything,
it was that local spies like Lambrecht were the key to Allied success and must be stopped.
You know, those early networks still had great weaknesses.
And the German secret police exploited these weaknesses.
He was arrested, Daniel?
Yes, in March 1916. He was condemned to death and executed in April.
Without proper tradecraft and training,
the success of the Belgian spy networks couldn't last forever.
All the agents knew each other, and if one was betrayed,
the entire network would come crumbling down.
I've come to Fort de la Chartreuse to pay my respects to Lambrecht
and all those who had worked behind the lines for British intelligence.
Well, this is where it all ended for Lambrecht.
Being here certainly brings it home to you. It's a bit eerie.
But this is where he wrote his last letter to his family
before he was taken out the next morning and executed.
And it began,
My dear beloved Jeanne,
I've just been transferred here from the prison of St Leonard.
The sentence of death has been confirmed.
My soul is filled with the intense sadness thinking of you all.
Think of my life as having been given up for my country.
For I am only doing what so many have done before me
and will do again.
For our darling little daughter, for my parents and for you.
Receive on this letter the last affectionate kisses
of he who was your Donny.
Lambrecht wasn't alone.
By autumn 1916, Britain's spy networks in Belgium had collapsed.
Many agents providing information had been captured or shot.
It was time for the British Secret Service to go back to the drawing board.
I'm uncovering the secret history of Britain's first spies.
Ah, look at that.
I want to discover how British ingenuity helped turn the tide of war.
By the end of 1916, the early Belgian spy networks
that had provided so much valuable intel to the British Secret Service
were in tatters.
And worse was to come.
The Germans built a deadly electric fence
that stretched along the border of occupied Belgium and neutral Holland.
With the border sealed,
British intelligence were willing to try anything
to get information out from behind enemy lines.
I want to find out what they dreamt up for myself.
It's not quite what I was expecting.
Good grief.
Good morning, John.
Morning, sir.
I'm back with my spy gadget expert John Naylor to find out more.
You dragged me out here in the middle of the field for a balloon.
What has it got to do with what happened in the First World War?
Well, it's about getting secret agents behind enemy lines.
As you know, when the wire came down,
information couldn't cross the lines.
Yeah.
So we needed to find a way to get our spies to drop into occupied territory,
collect their information, and then fly back with it.
In the autumn of 1916, British intelligence came up with a bold idea.
To send undercover agents behind enemy lines in hot air balloons.
But it was very risky.
Agents had to take off dangerously close to the front line
and hope the wind was in their favour.
As the balloon neared the ground,
they had to sit on the edge of the basket and jump out.
The only problem is, if you fly them in the daytime, they're going to get shot.
Fly them at night, the landings are going to be a bit rough.
And in fact, brave agents were badly injured
trying to make landings behind enemy lines.
How do you get your information then?
Still with balloons, but we need special paratroopers, special agents.
And I've got just the man to introduce you to them.
Mike?
Oh, you can't get many parachuters in a little box like that.
I see it all now.
Pigeons, eh?
Homing pigeons.
Of course, these are your paratroopers.
Paratroopers, see?
They probably know how to speak, do they?
Not quite.
It's amazing what these pigeons can do.
In September 1914, Britain was presented with 15 homing pigeons by the French.
By the end of the war, this pigeon empire had grown to 20,000 birds.
Pigeons carried essential information from the troops on the front line back to HQ.
And they were so effective that the German army promised 14 days leave
for any soldier who shot one down.
Now, if British intelligence could use unmanned balloons to get pigeons to informants,
perhaps they could turn the tide.
I can see how these guys can fly home, that's fairly obvious.
But how do they get dropped?
Yeah, they can't pull their own ripcord, can they?
No.
Little bit of British ingenuity.
Let me show you this.
Right, okay.
This is it, the secret weapon.
An alarm clock with a wire from the winder to a pin.
Can't understand it so far.
One basket with one pigeon and a parachute.
The pin goes through there.
You set the alarm.
When the alarm goes, it rotates, pulls the pin, parachute drops away.
That is so simple, but it works.
It works, and this is a 100-year-old unmanned military drone.
This is British technology at its best, isn't it?
Absolutely.
Okay, Alan, bon voyage.
Of course, they work out the timings and everything,
so it dropped roughly in the right area.
Ah, there it goes.
It's ingenious.
It's great, isn't it?
It works perfectly, excellent.
Can we go and see if the pigeon is still alive?
That's the main thing.
Right.
So hopefully a civilian is going to come along and find it.
Recover our pigeon.
Oh no, he's dead.
He's a stunt pigeon.
Oh, he's plastic.
That's all right.
Well, in here, instructions for the Belgian civilians,
and a message for them, asking them to record troop movements,
gun positions, anything that might be useful to the war effort.
Right, I get it.
Now what we do, we put on the pigeon's leg there.
All ready for action.
Cup your hand underneath its body.
That's right, and now you're going to liberate the pigeon.
It should go home.
What's his name?
Blue Boy.
Blue Boy, stand by.
Go home and take the message with you.
British intelligence only expected to get 5% of the pigeons back,
but in fact they got 40%.
This meant they had almost real-time intel from informants behind enemy lines.
Transporting pigeons by unmanned hot air balloons
was British ingenuity at its best.
But it could never replace the now-extinct Belgian spy networks.
Cumming and the Secret Service needed a new plan of attack.
I'm meeting Dr Helen Fry at the Imperial War Museum.
Helen.
To delve into a remarkable archive that holds the key
to the greatest spy network of the First World War.
What have you got here?
This archive has rarely been seen,
and it's as yet uncatalogued and kept in a very secure place
because it is of such importance.
See what you make of that?
20th of September 1916.
Good Lord.
It must be some sort of code.
Yeah, well this isn't just any ordinary code.
This is the instruction manual to a new agent from La Dame Blanche.
So this would be like the Rosetta Stone of code-breaking, as it were.
What was La Dame Blanche?
La Dame Blanche, which means the White Lady,
was a new network that was established in the second half of the war.
It was a train-spotting organisation
watching German movements through Belgium.
La Dame Blanche was set up by Belgian resistance fighter Walter Dewey.
By the summer of 1916, the Battle of the Somme was raging on the western front.
Claiming the lives of nearly half a million British troops,
it has come to symbolise the horror of trench warfare.
Only accurate intelligence from behind enemy lines could break the deadlock.
And Spy Chief Mansfield Cumming saw the potential of La Dame Blanche.
With British money and training, the network expanded rapidly.
And by 1918, it had train-watching posts across most of Belgium
and over 1,000 agents collecting up-to-the-minute intel.
They had to find ways of transmitting that information to British intelligence
and that's where they thought of the idea of creating invoices.
So you can probably see over here, lard means horses, peas, that's empty wagons.
So they're using words of everyday use
and it is interpreted into something that is important in the German war machine.
Yes.
It's got here Kaiser Grand Fromage.
So that would be, if you see the Kaiser, that's the big cheese.
Yeah.
Clever. So how would this work actually in practice?
Well, if you pull up a chair, we can have a go.
So we've got an example of an invoice and every invoice has a number
and that number, when it's decoded, will tell you where the reports come from.
Oh, OK. The number of the invoice is 35, which is L, then it's 27, which is I, 19 is E,
is G and the last one is E. So that's Liège.
Yeah, so now you know these reports come from Liège and we know what they've seen
because it's coded here in ordinary items. Costume de dame, women's outfits,
which actually translates as machine guns, 26 francs, 26 wagons of those
and the direction that they're going, we can tell because at the top there it says paid.
So all this is moving away from the front line through Liège.
Oh, I see. So it's all beginning to fit together.
By 1918, the information provided by Madame Blanche was more crucial than ever.
Germany was planning a final push with 500,000 troops added to their armies from the Russian
front. The Kaiser was confident of success. Britain needed Madame Blanche to precisely
predict where the Germans would attack. Get it wrong and the war would be lost.
I'm on the trail of Madame Blanche, a secret network of spies in World War I.
I'm traveling to Nivelles, one of the network's key observation posts,
to meet up with Dr. Helen Fry once more.
I want to know more about who these undercover agents were and how they operated.
What are we doing here? This was one of the provincial railway stations. It's abandoned now,
but this, of course, was where some of the train spotting occurred.
So the watchers would be in a place like this? Yes, absolutely.
I couldn't help but notice when I arrived you were knitting.
Well, in fact, the knitting was one of the ways that they could record the intelligence.
Women sat on the train station outside their little cottages doing an ordinary action of
knitting. But in fact, they were coding into their pattern something which British intelligence
would later understand. So various stitches would mean something. Knit one could be artillery
carriages, purl one cavalry movements and whether it was going towards the front or not.
So that would be a permanent record in the object like the scarf and that could be deciphered later?
Yes, it was a way of recording the information without the Germans suspecting.
A wonderful way to do two fingers to the Germans.
And in fact, whole communities were involved and particularly the women.
Who would suspect a little old grandma sitting there knitting and she's actually recording
information that is going to be so useful to the allies?
Yeah, I just love it. So simple.
Here's one quick. That's a purl two there. How many carriages? One, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten. Drop ten stitches. We'll get that to the allies.
These families have been watching and observing all the train movements and the troops and that.
How do they get it out? How do they get it to the allies?
Well, they use dead letter drops where somebody drops off a letter
at a relocation and then someone else picks it up. But the person dropping it off doesn't know
who is going to pick it up and vice versa. Where does that take place?
So this could be in the local village and even in the cafe, for example.
But down the road, the local baker, he's looking for Germans in the area.
If he sees Germans, three loaves of bread in the window, you walk past the bakery,
you see the loaves of bread, you know it's not safe to then drop your letter off in the cafe.
So the whole network is safe because nobody knows who the next link in the chain is.
Yeah. Clever.
All these little bits are very, very simple subterfuge.
They add up to a very sophisticated spy network.
Exactly.
And of course, that's how you don't get caught.
Brilliant.
By 1918, Le Darm Blanche was so vast that no German military convoy
could arrive at the front without having been spotted by one of its agents.
But to get this crucial information to British Intelligence HQ in Rotterdam,
they had to cross the Wire of Death, a lethal electric fence that stretched over 300 kilometers
from the German border to the North Sea.
Completed in the summer of 1915, the wire claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people.
I've come to Zonderijchen on the Dutch-Belgian border to follow in the
footsteps of the countless brave agents who made that crossing.
Jan, how are you?
Jan Huybrechts' great-grandfather risked his life getting information across the wire.
This is the infamous Wire of Death.
On that side is Neutral Holland.
This side is Belgium, occupied by the Germans.
And the Germans want to prevent any traffic between Holland and Belgium, especially smuggling.
250 meters from the wire is the killing zone.
In that zone, a German soldier can shoot you on sight immediately.
Electricity was an unknown thing.
So did people come up and actually test it?
And it killed them?
Yes.
The average tension on the wire was 2,000 volts, ranging up to 4,000 volts.
If you touch the wire when it's under 2,000 volts, you get a heart attack immediately.
Yeah.
If it's 4,000 volts, you're cooked.
Yeah.
You're just baked.
Right.
Being a Belgian, I want to get some information from here to there.
But there's an electric fence.
How did they approach it?
The British intelligence service provided their agents with
wire cutters that were isolated with rubber.
Problem is solved then, isn't it?
What's wrong with that?
If you cut it, the alarm goes off immediately.
And normally, within 15 seconds, there's a German guard in shooting distance.
So really, the fence is now impregnable, isn't it?
Almost impregnable.
Yeah.
There was one Belgian agent who invented something really interesting,
and I'm going to show it to you.
Here you are, David.
How is this going to help us get through the electric fence?
It's just a piece of wood, isn't it?
It's much more than a piece of wood.
It's one of the most ingenious machines ever designated to go through the wire.
The British intelligence services produced more than hundreds of them
in Rotterdam to give to the couriers and use it on the wire.
Right.
Better be good.
I'm on the Belgian side.
You're on the Belgian side, and you're going to cross to the Dutch side.
I've got my six pieces of wood.
So what do I do?
Looks difficult, but it's quite easy.
Now you're going to drop the zone, which is isolated with rubber, on the wire, like that.
This wire.
Be careful, it's electrocuted.
Okay, and now you push this frame.
This frame.
Which is isolated too, to that side of the wire.
Got to keep my hands away from the wire.
Keep your hands away.
Right, got that.
And now you clasp two sides out.
You just push them.
And this?
And this one also.
Now you can pass without danger.
Right, okay.
I'm just going to put it to the test, to see whether your contraption works.
Right.
I've got my information from Ladam Blanche.
Ladam Blanche, yes.
And here we go.
You step out first with your leg.
Put that next to it.
Go.
Then I get through.
You get through without being electrocuted.
It's easy, really.
Oh no, sorry.
Sorry, I couldn't resist that.
How successful over the course of the war were contraptions like this?
It was very successful, especially during 1918, the last war year.
It was reported that every week an average of 700 messages came through in this sector alone.
So Ladam Blanche helped to not only win the war, but it certainly shortened it.
Yes, and save a lot of lives.
Thanks to Ladam Blanche, when the German spring offensive began in March 1918,
the Allies already knew exactly where the offensive would start.
Ladam Blanche had thwarted Germany's last attempt at a breakthrough.
Au revoir.
Before I leave Belgium, I want to find out what happened
to all those brave people who served the British Secret Service so faithfully.
I've come to Liege to visit this magnificent monument
that celebrates the birthplace of Ladam Blanche, Walter Dewey's network of spies.
Walter, bonjour.
I'm meeting his great-grandson.
There she is.
What an amazing statue.
This chapel was built to commemorate the resistance.
After the First World War ended, over 1,000 members of Ladam Blanche
were publicly recognized by the British government, many of them receiving OBEs.
Their names were printed in the London Gazette in 1919,
but it was the last time the British Secret Service would ever reveal the identity of
With the names now public knowledge, when the Nazis invaded Belgium 26 years later,
they had a list of known enemy spies.
Did your grandfather, did he survive?
I mean, that is really hard to take in.
You know, you go through all of this once and it's all over,
except it all happens again and the Germans come back and they remember you.
They remember some of the Ladam Blanche and they take their revenge.
A tragic loss.
When you look at the white lady, you can see that she's got a finger like this to her lips.
It looks like she's saying,
Wow, is that what she's trying to tell us?
Thank you.
Next time, we unlock the secrets of World War II's super spies.
Amateur Hour is over as the spying game gets professional.
The document's hidden inside.
And the states have never been higher.
Well, there's only one number I'll play now.
Everything on 007.
