King Who Fooled Hitler, The (2019)

Post by **bunniefuu** » 02/28/26 22:28

[gulls squawking]

NARRATOR: D-Day.

[firing]

Behind the invasion lies a secret story never before told.

Of how King George VI, the queen,

and even Princess Elizabeth, the queen-to-be,

were enlisted by MI to fool Hitler about D-Day.

In this story of double agents and decoys,

a groundbreaking investigation uncovers for the first time

the identity of the grandest and most secret of them all...

...George VI himself.

The investigation further reveals how he was entrusted

with one of Britain's greatest state secrets of World w*r II.

How the royal household managed to lose it

whilst it was in the king's possession.

That only the intervention

of the queen mother saved the day.

And how the monarchy emerged from the shame of appeasement

to put itself at the heart of Britain's secret state.

Ever since World w*r II,

George VI's true role in D-Day remained a secret.

Then Professor Richard Aldrich of Warwick University

and Dr. Rory Cormac of Nottingham University

made a tantalizing discovery

in the diaries of the king's private secretary,

Sir Alan Lascelles.

CORMAC: Alan Lascelles, known as Tommy,

was the king's private secretary,

so the most senior courtier in the land,

and went on to be private secretary

for Queen Elizabeth II, as well.

He was a very old-fashioned, old-world kind of man.

And he left a diary.

And there's one very interesting clue in his diary

giving insight, a snippet of insight,

into the king's personal role in the D-Day deception operation.

NARRATOR: Lascelles' diary

records a visit to Buckingham Palace

in March by MI officers.

LASCELLES [dramatized]: Friday, rd of March, .

Two M.I. men called on me yesterday

and explained how the king's visits in the next few months

could assist the elaborate cover scheme

whereby we are endeavoring to bamboozle

the German intelligence over the time and place for Overlord.

And this is a really significant clue,

because it just gives us a little hint

that the king not only knew

about one of the biggest secrets of the w*r,

but had an active and personal role in it himself.

[projector whirring]

NARRATOR: Then a second discovery

gave further evidence of the king's role.

In , five years after the w*r's end,

the MI officer who'd run the D-Day deception operation,

John Masterman,

sent a top-secret document to Buckingham Palace.

It was an internal report Masterman had written for MI,

and it described every detail

of the World w*r II deception operations he'd run.

Masterman called it his "secret book."

ALDRICH: This is one of the most secret documents

in British government.

It captures a whole new art form of secret service,

or at least an art form taken to a whole new level

that Britain has developed during the Second World w*r.

NARRATOR: Masterman sent his secret book to the king

care of Alan Lascelles,

who was still the king's private secretary.

Lascelles replied to acknowledge safe receipt.

LASCELLES [dramatized]: Dear Masterman,

Thank you so much for trusting me with the book.

I'm most grateful.

It looks thrilling.

ALDRICH: "I know that my master will read it

"with as much interest and admiration

"as I shall myself.

Yours sincerely, Alan Lascelles."

NARRATOR: These two discoveries,

the first hinting at the king's secret role in D-Day,

the second showing that he was close enough to MI

to be allowed sight of such a top-secret document,

sent Aldrich and Cormac on a quest.

What really was George VI's wartime role,

and how had he come to be so trusted by MI,

when, at the beginning of his reign,

it had viewed him with suspicion?

♪

In December , George's brother,

Edward VIII, abdicated.

The British intelligence services

suspected Edward of being a n*zi sympathizer.

They even put him under secret surveillance

and tapped his phone.

MI's suspicions about the monarchy continued,

particularly the new king's attitude

to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy

of appeasing Hitler.

♪

ALDRICH: The intelligence services are watching everybody

who was connected with appeasement:

Chamberlain and also

the royal family, because there are continual

emissaries to Germany,

and of course, there's the shadow of Edward VIII.

Edward VIII, who is known to be close to Hitler,

close to the Germans.

NARRATOR: MI hoped that George

would not follow in his brother's footsteps.

CORMAC: Everyone associates appeasement with Edward VIII.

But King George wasn't a n*zi sympathizer,

but he was an appeaser,

because he did not want to go to w*r with n*zi Germany.

Not only had he lived through

the horrors of the First World w*r, but also feared

that a w*r might threaten

to destroy the British monarchy.

Nazism, it didn't have such a threat

to the British establishment or the British monarchy

in a way that, say, Communism did.

Um, so there's this desire here

to stave off w*r at all costs.

And here is the paper

which bears his name upon it, as well as mine.

NARRATOR: For MI, the Munich agreement of September

was a pivotal moment

in its battle against appeasement.

♪

The Security Service expected George VI to stay neutral.

CORMAC: The king is a constitutional monarch.

It is not his job

to weigh in on the biggest and most controversial

political issues of the day.

NARRATOR: Instead, in this letter unearthed by Rory Cormac,

George wrote privately to Chamberlain,

leaving no doubt where he stood.

CORMAC: "My dear Prime Minister,

I am sending this letter..."

GEORGE VI [dramatized]: ...by my Lord Chamberlain

to ask you if you will come straight to Buckingham Palace,

so that I can express to you personally

my heartfelt congratulations

on the success of your visit to Munich.

Believe me.

Yours very sincerely and gratefully,

George R.I.

CORMAC: What we see here is the king

personally backing one faction of, of the Cabinet,

Chamberlain's appeasement faction,

to the extent that after Chamberlain comes back

from Munich,

the king invites him straight round

to Buckingham Palace and even engineers a photo sh**t

on the, on the balcony, where, again,

he is publicly and visibly aligning himself

with the political approach of appeasement.

ALDRICH: MI knows

that the king is on board

with appeasement, and remarkably,

the king is actually vying

with Chamberlain to establish relations with Hitler.

The king drafts a letter to Hitler.

He says, "This is a letter to Hitler,

"not as one statesman to another,

but one ex-serviceman to another."

There's no doubt that the king

is as keen on appeasement as is Chamberlain.

And the security agencies

are not sure what they think about that.

NARRATOR: The Foreign Office blocked the king's letter.

Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland

finally put paid to appeasement.

With Britain at w*r,

MI realized the king could no longer

be excluded from vital matters of state.

Suspicion needed to be replaced by trust.

The opening moves were tentative.

CORMAC: The intelligence services agreed

to special arrangements being made

to supply confidential information

to George VI on a daily basis.

So we're talking about confidential stuff,

nothing really classified, nothing really top secret.

And a duty officer from the Cabinet w*r room

attended Buckingham Palace every day

and carried with him

some of this confidential material.

But they didn't trust the palace enough to leave it there.

He stood with the king as the king read it,

and the private secretaries read it,

and then he carried it back home,

back to, back to the Cabinet Office.

♪

NARRATOR: On May the tenth, ,

German armies rolled into Belgium,

then France.

The king had no option but to ask Winston Churchill

to be prime minister.

George's role as a symbol of national unity was now crucial.

But full trust of the royal family remained elusive.

The king had to find a way to earn it.

George VI, once a supporter of appeasing Hitler,

now king of a nation at w*r,

still lacked the full trust of MI.

His relationship with the new prime minister,

Winston Churchill, was not an easy one, either.

Like MI,

Churchill had been on opposite sides

to the king over appeasement,

and temperamentally, the two men were very different:

Churchill charismatic and bullish,

George shy and reticent.

CAROLINE ERSKINE: Whether Churchill showed off

when he was going into the palace,

whether the footmen picked up a feeling that,

or when he came out of the, seeing the king,

probably the word got around

that it wasn't very easy for either of them.

They were very different people,

and...

Winston, to begin with,

didn't know how to cope with the king as a person.

The king was rather frightened of Winston, overawed by him.

NARRATOR: Then, as w*r tested both men's mettle, came a critical moment.

FILM NARRATOR: Now Adolf Hitler stood,

just as Napoleon had stood more than a hundred years before,

and looked across the English Channel

to the one fighting obstacle

that stood between him and world domination.

NARRATOR: In the autumn of ,

MI, fearing a n*zi invasion,

made preparations to evacuate the royal family to Canada.

Churchill put the intelligence agency's intricate plan

to the king.

ALDRICH: It's elaborate.

There are converted armored cars.

There's a chain of stately homes.

The royal family are going to be rushed to the port at Liverpool,

taken away to Canada.

The king's response is, "We're not going."

Not even the children are going to be evacuated.

Everybody is going to stay, everybody is going to fight.

At this point, what they're expecting is a German invasion

led by German paratroopers,

and the king says,

"I want to get my German.

"I want to k*ll at least one of the invaders,

and we will all fight to the last."

When Churchill hears about this, he says, "Well, really,

you need to be able to k*ll more than one German."

NARRATOR: Out of the blue,

a specially gift-wrapped package arrived at Buckingham Palace.

The sender's address was marked Downing Street.

Inside was a gleaming early Christmas present.

ALDRICH: Churchill sends the king a tommy g*n.

And we know, actually, after this,

not only the king, but the royal family

and indeed the equerries,

they're all practicing at Windsor

and several other locations

with pistols, with r*fles,

but also with Churchill's tommy g*n.

[tommy g*n firing]

The queen actually enjoys taking pot shots at rats.

It's the Blitz, there's lots of rats

in Buckingham Palace garden.

When the king and the queen and the whole royal family

are practicing with firearms

in the garden of Buckingham Palace, at Windsor,

this reflects that the king genuinely expects

German paratroopers to turn up at any moment.

He never goes anywhere in his car

without a r*fle and a p*stol.

But it's also symbolic.

The king is actually showing this off, to Cabinet ministers,

to visiting diplomats.

And he's sending out the message,

"We're not gonna run.

We're not gonna run."

And so it's, it's real,

but it's also a performance.

NARRATOR: But the king still did not have access to all state secrets.

At times, he resorted instead to a DIY approach.

Through the royal families of Europe to whom he was related,

he already had an intelligence network of his own.

George's personal use of his own private network

could potentially create problems for the Secret Service,

and the prime minister, too.

One intelligence officer recorded that the king...

OFFICER [dramatized]: ...received a couple of bottles of Burgundy,

one of which he served to Churchill

at one of their regular Tuesday luncheons à deux.

Churchill asked sharply how the king had got hold of it,

and was much put out to be told,

"Kings have their secrets, too."

CORMAC: The king might well be joking, but Churchill's a bit alarmed.

Churchill fears that the king has resurrected

some of the royal family's

private network of contacts to gather his own information.

NARRATOR: The king was able to secure the wartime vintage

from occupied France

because the royal pilot, Mouse Fielden,

also happened to fly missions

for the Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E.,

which Churchill had created to, in his own words,

"set Europe ablaze."

And if that wasn't enough,

George VI's wife, the queen, had her own private contacts, too.

ALDRICH: We have to bear in mind,

the queen actually is someone who has the closest relations

with the intelligence services.

Her brother's in S.O.E.

So actually,

Buckingham Palace is almost an outpost,

an outstation, if you like, of the intelligence services.

CORMAC: And so the solution would seem to be

to give the king

a bit more access to official British secret material.

NARRATOR: Slowly but surely, the king was inching his way

to the heart of the Secret Service.

And finally, in ,

George VI took an active part in the w*r of deception.

His first personal encounter with it

was the use of disinformation

to fool the enemy about a hazardous mission

he embarked on in June .

FILM NARRATOR: The Maltese are a people of old traditions

and simple manners of life.

But Hitler turned that island into a target of perpetual fire.

♪

NARRATOR: The king flew to North Africa and then to the island of Malta

to thank its people for resisting three years

of n*zi siege and bombardment.

But with the Luftwaffe still menacing Malta's skies,

there was real danger.

British intelligence's answer was Operation Loader.

[firing]

Operation Loader

was a deception operation

in which the king was personally involved.

It was the attempt

to provide cover for his visit to North Africa.

And it's very, very dangerous to escort the king across

the Mediterranean, where the Germans

have been in active operation, and so,

Buckingham Palace put out a false line

that the king was visiting troops in Portsmouth

at this time.

And yet there was a mysterious General Lyon

who was on board the plane

and who landed in Algiers.

NARRATOR: Stories appeared

in the press that General Lyon was visiting

General Eisenhower,

commander-in-chief of Allied forces, in North Africa.

On June the seventh, , he landed in Algiers.

For Eisenhower, at least,

it was no surprise that General Lyon

was none other than the king emperor, George VI.

After leaving Algiers,

General Lyon carried on to Malta,

and this was an important morale-boosting mission.

The people of Malta had been under barricade

for a long, long time,

and really appreciated the king making a very dangerous journey.

NARRATOR: Operation Loader was a success,

and George returned home to Buckingham Palace

safe and sound.

It showed that the king could be a valuable asset

to the deception planners.

A few months later, he was invited to a day out

with the Special Operations Executive.

In November ,

the entire royal family visit R.A.F. Tempsford.

This is not any R.A.F. station.

This is the location

of the secret special duties flights

that take the agents of S.O.E.

and the agents of MI to Europe.

All the James Bond material is laid out

for the royal family to see.

There are daggers in handbags.

There are compasses hidden in the top of lipsticks.

There's all sorts of exploding devices.

S.O.E. like to disguise expl*sives

as innocent materials: wine bottles, dead animals,

and the favorite, of course,

is expl*sive disguised as horse poo.

And the queen is absolutely thrilled by this,

and she calls the king over and says,

"Look at this, this is amazing.

Exploding horse poo."

NARRATOR: The king, it seemed, had earned his spurs.

A few months later, he would be invited to join

the greatest deception operation of the w*r.

♪

In March ,

with the visit to Buckingham Palace of two MI men,

noted in his diary by the king's private secretary,

Alan Lascelles, George VI

was invited to join the Allies'

greatest deception operation of the w*r,

fooling the Nazis about the timing

and location of Operation Overlord:

the D-Day landings.

♪

The man who helped devise the deception operation

was the Oxford don John Masterman.

Back in August ,

Masterman had been teaching in Germany

and was interned for the duration of the w*r.

But he used his time there to learn the language

and study the mindset of his German captors.

DAVID MASTERMAN: It was important in many ways because,

if you knew how they thought,

it was much easier to,

to deceive them and lead them astray.

Even with the spies

that the Germans sent over

to us, he had a relationship

with them,

and in the end, he got them to spy for us.

NARRATOR: When w*r broke out,

Masterman was signed up to the Intelligence Corps and then MI,

where he helped devise the Double-Cross System,

which used double agents

to feed misleading information to the Nazis.

He was a chairman of a subcommittee

which dealt with the Double-Cross System.

The Twenty Committee, XX.

They were actually in control

of spies

working in different areas in Europe

and in England.

They were all deceiving

the Germans in some way or other.

NARRATOR: One of his team was the long-serving MI officer

Tar Robertson.

Tar Robertson was involved in working with Masterman

to coordinate the activities of all of these double agents

to make sure that the Germans

were sufficiently confused

and misled, and that this very intricate

and sophisticated web of lies,

misinformation, and some real information

was coordinated in such a way

as to not breach British security

whilst misleading the Germans.

♪

NARRATOR: The D-Day deception,

code-named Operation Fortitude,

would be Double-Cross's greatest challenge.

Key to it were the double agents

known only as Garbo, Freak, and Brutus.

Agent Brutus was a Polish air force pilot

who'd been parachuted by the British

into German-occupied France.

The Nazis captured and tortured him,

saying, "Return to England and spy for us or be ex*cuted."

He pretended to change sides,

but his loyalty to the Allied cause never wavered.

When he eventually came to England,

he contacted the intelligence services here,

presenting them with a,

what he believed to be an invaluable opportunity

for him to work as a, as I say,

really, as a triple agent on the belief

that the Germans were asking him

to work and supply information to them.

And at that point,

you start to see, over the next two years,

this extraordinary build-up of information

in which he is part of the Double-Cross Network,

supplying the Germans information

to make them believe that the landings would take place

in Calais.

NARRATOR: The Nazis knew,

from the massing of troops in Southern England,

that an invasion was coming.

The Allies' aim was to deceive them

into thinking the main landings

would be at Calais.

Anywhere else, like Normandy, was just a sideshow.

The king's movements,

as reported in the British press,

were a central part of the deception plan.

Rory Cormac has done a search of

nearly , local and national newspapers

printed in Britain between March and August --

three months before

and two months after D-Day.

This historical detective work

reveals that what has been seen until now

as a random series of morale-boosting royal visits

to troop concentrations

was in fact a calculated program,

carefully choreographed with misleading reports

from the double-cross agents.

CORMAC: Here is a cutting from The Timesnewspaper,

dated tenth of March, .

And the headline is

"Canadians Inspected by the King."

NARRATOR: MI's plan was to drip-feed the Germans information

which would make them think they were piecing together

the jigsaw of the secret plan for D-Day.

Newspapers covered the king's visits to key attack formations,

but their locations were not revealed in print.

Tantalizing clues, however,

made the Nazis think they were

doing the detective work,

like reports from the double-cross agents in London,

which helped identify the troops the king was visiting.

What you can see is, there's a team of people in London

who are minutely examining each piece of information.

"How do we want this piece of information

"about the king's visit to get back to Germany?

"Do we want this to come through a newsreel?

"Do we want this to come through a newspaper?

"Do we want this to come through

"an agent report?

"Do we want the Germans to discover something

through photo reconnaissance?"

The crucial thing is, it's fragmentary.

The Germans shouldn't be given everything on a plate.

The whole secret of deception is to get the Germans

to work these things out for themselves.

CORMAC: It doesn't say in the newspaper

where the king was actually visiting these troops.

It just says, "Somewhere in England."

But a bit of detective work,

cross-referencing with, with memoirs,

with troop dispositions,

with royal train timetables,

we worked out that this was in Hove,

on the South Coast.

Hove at first look would be the obvious place

for troops to invade Normandy from.

But remember that MI

told Lascelles that their job was to bamboozle the Germans.

NARRATOR: The first part of this deception

was to suggest to the Nazis that a full-scale invasion,

or perhaps a large coastal raid,

might be imminent.

So that same day, double agent Brutus

fed back to Berlin false information

that ordinary traffic to the Isle of Wight

had been stopped to free the roads

for troop movements.

CORMAC: Because the king is down in Hove,

not far from the Isle of Wight,

it suggests to the Germans

that something might be up,

maybe that w*r planning

is being stepped up, there might be troops movements

to the Isle of Wight.

Visiting troops in Hove suggests that there

might be some sort of attack on Normandy,

but would this just be a diversionary attack

to draw German attention away

from the real invasion of Calais?

ALDRICH: The king's visit is working like

a highlighter pen.

He's identifying particular units

that later they want the Germans to follow.

NARRATOR: The suggestion that the invasion was only days away was a bluff--

there were still nearly three months to D-Day.

The second part of the deception was about location.

Initially, Hove implied some kind of force

leaving from Sussex to Normandy.

Then one of the double-cross agents wired Berlin

to say that the troops there were moved

just after the king's visit

to Dover, directly opposite Calais.

CORMAC: It's aimed to

confuse the Germans about location of forces,

about the order of battle,

and where and when the ultimate invasion

is going to come from.

The Germans are looking at what the king is doing,

so it's a wonderful tool with which the Double-Cross team

can highlight things which they want the Germans to look at.

[wildlife chittering]

NARRATOR: Another deception was to draw n*zi attention

away from the South to the North of England.

This time, royal involvement was to be ratcheted up,

and for the first time, the queen and queen-to-be,

Princess Elizabeth, were enlisted in the ruse.

CORMAC: This article comes from The Times

on the th of March, .

The headline is "The King With His Army;

Tour With the Queen and Princess."

The king goes north on the royal train

to visit Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.

These are attack formations.

They're in the east of the country,

so this very much reinforces the deception story

they might be going east to Calais.

They might actually be going east to attack Scandinavia.

CORMAC: It was the king's seventh such inspection in recent weeks,

but it was the first time the princess had made

a full-length tour

with her parents.

When you have the queen,

when you have Princess Elizabeth,

the whole royal family there,

dramatic forces-- airborne gliders, sn*pers,

special forces-- this just makes for

really fantastic news coverage.

So, this is a way in which the king is

using the royal family

to amplify the process of deception.

♪

NARRATOR: The king's role in Double-Cross

was working exactly as planned.

On the th of April,

the king's private secretary, Alan Lascelles,

wrote in his diary...

LASCELLES [dramatized]: Overlord has done a good job

with the "elaborate cover scheme"

intended to bamboozle the Germans,

and seems to have succeeded.

♪

NARRATOR: And according to Masterman's nephew David,

the king was keen to be kept fully in the loop

by John Masterman.

I think he was informed about everything that was going on.

I'm sure he said that

the king wanted to be informed about everything.

♪

NARRATOR: A week later,

George inspected troop formations in Hampshire.

The visit was then spun back to Berlin

by MI's double agents, Garbo and Freak.

Its aim: to create confusion about what was real

and what was just rehearsal.

CORMAC: Agent Garbo's report

just a few days after the king makes this visit

backs up the narrative by suggesting that

invasion might be imminent from Hampshire.

Freak's report on the very same day

adds even more credibility to this narrative

by suggesting that there might well be

some military exercises in the Channel,

and crucially, Freak warned that they couldn't rule out

that this was an actual operation.

And this is significant,

because it's designed to confuse the Germans.

The Germans are thinking, when it doesn't materialize,

"Well, maybe it was just, uh, an exercise."

And this lowers their defenses

for when the ultimate D-Day comes.

♪

NARRATOR: The royal deception operation was elaborate and complex.

But it was not just limited to the British mainland.

In May , the king embarked

on his most dangerous mission,

to Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

Again, the paper omitted George's destination,

but the mention of one clue

made it very clear to the Nazis where the monarch was.

CORMAC: This is the front page

of The Daily Mail from the th of May, .

We see the report talking about

"cold and lonely northern waters,"

and the headline is

"The King Takes Leave of His Fleet."

It says, "The king has taken leave

"of his captains in the Home Fleet,

"and has bidden them,

"their ships' companies, and their ships

God-speed before battle."

NARRATOR: This part of the deception plan,

called Fortitude North,

was designed to suggest that a full-scale

Allied invasion of n*zi-occupied Norway

was being prepared.

ALDRICH: The king's visit to the Orkneys is remarkable.

The Orkneys are further away

from London than they are from Norway.

And of course, because they're quite close to Norway,

they are fiercely patrolled by German U-boats,

by German fighters.

This is a hazardous mission.

So the question is,

why is the king going there?

And the answer is to give credence to Fortitude North.

So the king is taking actually quite a significant risk.

A few days after the king's visit,

double agent Garbo warned Berlin

that an Allied invasion of Norway was imminent

and that it might be the first attack

in the invasion of Europe.

It was a deliberately complex deception operation,

and this is why Double-Cross and Fortitude

is such a fascinating operation,

and ultimately a successful operation,

because it was so nuanced,

because there were so many moving parts

which were being coordinated by, by MI.

♪

NARRATOR: On June the sixth, ,

a fleet of , ships emerged from the early morning mist,

heading for the Normandy beaches.

The panic-ridden German defenders

radioed for urgent reinforcements.

The response from Berlin is somnolent.

On the day of the invasion,

Hitler is sleeping late.

He's having a lie-in.

No one wants to wake him.

And when he does wake up,

and he's told about this, because it's Normandy,

because he's been fed all this deception material,

he doesn't believe this is the main attack.

He thinks this is a coastal raid.

And so, really, he just shrugs it off.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The armies of the united nations

have made their first landings on the soil of Western Europe.

This is D-Day.

[expl*si*n bursting]

NARRATOR: The king,

who had played a vital role

in the deception plan,

broadcast to his people.

GEORGE VI: Four years ago,

our nation and empire

stood alone against

an overwhelming enemy,

with our backs to the wall.

This time, the challenge

is not to fight to survive,

but to fight

to win the final victory

for the good cause.

♪

NARRATOR: A week later, the king and Prime Minister

Winston Churchill sifted through piles of

MI classified reports on D-Day.

The king, once denied full access

to all intelligence material

because his family was seen as a security risk,

was now allowed to see everything.

Two days later,

an eminent dignitary arrived in Normandy

for the final phase of Double-Cross.

British intelligence would maintain the ruse

that D-Day was only a diversionary attack

right up until August, to give Allied troops

time to consolidate their positions.

The eminent dignitary was, in fact,

none other than King George VI.

The Germans thought this king's presence

was a further attempt

to distract their attention from Calais.

But, as it would turn out,

one extraordinary further twist

would show that George still could not

be entirely trusted with a secret.

♪

At the w*r's end,

John Masterman, key player behind

the Double-Cross system

and D-Day deceptions,

wrote a top-secret MI report

detailing every aspect of the Double-Cross system.

It was also a template for future MI

and MI operations.

ALDRICH: This is one of the most secret documents in British government.

It's a form of strategic leadership

that Britain doesn't want to give away

during the Second World w*r,

during the s, during the s,

and indeed, Britain has set up a special department

called the Department of Forward Plans,

particularly to keep this kind of specialist expertise alive.

NARRATOR: Masterman called the report his "secret book."

In , five years after the w*r,

when he'd returned to academic life at Oxford University,

he sent his one and only personal copy of it

to Buckingham Palace,

for the private attention of King George VI.

The king's private secretary,

Sir Alan Lascelles,

wrote to Masterman that it had arrived safely.

ALDRICH: "Dear Masterman,

I think it would be remiss of us both..."

LASCELLES [dramatized]: ...if we didn't exchange a receipt.

Here it is.

NARRATOR: Lascelles passed the secret book on to the king.

But then, as the months ticked by,

came an extraordinary twist to the story.

With no sign of his only copy of his secret book

being returned by Buckingham Palace,

Masterman was becoming a worried man.

ALDRICH: So on the fourth of October, , Masterman writes

from Worcester College, Oxford, where he's provost,

and he writes to Lascelles, and he says...

JOHN MASTERMAN [dramatized]: I am sorry to trouble you

at a time like this...

Of course, the king is, is increasingly ill.

JOHN MASTERMAN [dramatized]: ...but I'm wondering

whether I ought to send you a reminder

about the book which I lent to you.

I see that it went in December,

and I'm beginning to be worried,

probably quite unnecessarily...

"...lest it be overlooked.

Yours sincerely, John Masterman."

And of course, it's almost a year

that this book has been out of his possession.

♪

NARRATOR: Lascelles was in an unenviable position.

The king was never an easy person to approach,

and now the lung cancer from which he was slowly dying

made any approach on a matter so serious as

MI's missing-- perhaps even lost--

top-secret document extremely awkward.

I think he admired him as a person,

but he was at times,

uh,

difficult.

He wasn't very easy,

because he could get very emotional

about all sorts of things,

and needed help with his work.

Well, I think he used to go off in a rage.

And...

Almost like having a fit.

And then people just had to

soothe him and calm him down.

The queen was very important in that way, I think.

♪

REPORTER: On this day of mourning,

it's a London silent and still,

its citizens remembering that here in this very city

their king had faced with them

the dangers of the last w*r.

NARRATOR: On February the sixth, , the king died.

There was still no sign of the secret book.

Masterman feared the worst.

Either it had got into the wrong hands

or it was lost forever, along with the late George VI.

Even more worryingly, the incoming boss of MI

was determined to tighten security.

Masterman, now in desperate straits,

wrote one last time to Lascelles.

JOHN MASTERMAN [dramatized]: Dear Lascelles,

Once more I have to apologize for ringing you

when you must be overwhelmed with anguish.

I want to ask if you can manage

to get my secret book to me.

I am nervous, I hope needlessly,

with the change of director general...

And here, he's referring to Sir d*ck White.

JOHN MASTERMAN [dramatized]: I can't very well say that I haven't got it,

or say where it is!

Masterman's in a panic,

because he's now convinced that the book is missing,

and you can tell he's in a panic

because he's not just writing,

he's also ringing up.

This is urgent, and, and really, he can almost feel

the new director general of MI, d*ck White,

grabbing his collar.

He, he's really like a schoolboy who feels

that the headmaster is bearing down on him,

and, and he needs this book, and he needs it now.

NARRATOR: Two months later,

Lascelles was finally able

to convey some good news to Masterman.

George's widow, now the queen mother,

had been on a secret operation of her own.

LASCELLES [dramatized]: Dear Masterman,

My trouble has been that all the personal dispatch boxes

have been out of my control.

However, this very day,

I got the queen mother to look at them,

and sure enough, there it was.

It is now locked up in my room.

A. Lascelles.

One's guess is that the king confided in her,

and found her a very important,

very necessary shoulder to lean on,

and he, presumably he told her things

that he wouldn't tell anybody else.

NARRATOR: The queen mother had got Masterman out of jail.

In , he published his secret book.

But even then, years after D-Day,

MI believed that Double-Cross and all deception work

should remain secret, and tried to block him.

Masterman thwarted them by publishing in America.

But there was one thing he decided not to reveal.

The role of George VI in the D-Day deception.

It has remained a secret until Richard Aldrich

and Rory Cormac's investigation today.

♪

The monarchy's role in Britain's secret state

would not die with George.

His eldest daughter, the young Queen Elizabeth II,

would inherit his mantle.

The crown, once under the scrutiny

and even investigation of the Secret Service,

was now its trusted friend and counselor.

♪

One extraordinary meeting demonstrates this intimacy.

In , the prime minister, Anthony Eden-- or A.E.--

and the head of the Foreign Office's

Middle Eastern desk, Evelyn Shuckburgh,

traveled to Buckingham Palace.

The Suez Crisis was looming,

and the empire alive with conspiracy.

But one apparent friend was the young, Harrow-educated

King Hussein of Jordan.

However, the British feared

that he'd fallen under the influence of

his nationalist and anti-British uncle,

Nasser Shariff.

Shuckburgh noted in his diary in ...

CORMAC: "I told her"-- the queen--

"the machinations of the wicked Uncle Nasser.

"The queen said

"she didn't really think it a good idea

to send Arabs to English public schools."

SHUCKBURGH [dramatized]: She had seen poor little Hussein, fresh from Harrow,

a year or two ago, and all he could do was

stand stiffly to attention, saying...

"...saying, 'Your Majesty,'

and not another word."

SHUCKBURGH [dramatized]: As for Uncle Nasser, she said,

she was surprised nobody had found means of

putting something in his coffee.

♪

It was not until afterwards that I thought of

what I ought to have said to this.

That it was dangerously like a remark

made on a famous occasion

by her predecessor King Henry II.

Of course, King Henry had said,

just before the m*rder of

the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket,

"Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?"

SHUCKBURGH [dramatized]: Instead, I said it was a good idea,

which ought to be applied to a number of people

in the Middle East.

I promised to send her

the gossip we've heard about Hussein.

I was a little handicapped

by having a cigarette in my hand,

which steadily burnt my fingertips behind my back.

"A.E. was looking wonderfully fit and relaxed"...

SHUCKBURGH [dramatized]: ...and was very friendly to both of us.

CORMAC: And that's startling,

because we never get a sense of

the queen discussing

these kind of things, we never get a sense of her, her humor.

And we never get a sense of her

talking to diplomats about matters of state,

particularly against the background

of a range of covert operations

being launched by the Foreign Office and MI

against countries across the Middle East,

most famously the other Nasser, the president of Egypt.

We think of the intelligence services

as the most secret institution in Britain.

Well, the royal family certainly give them a run for their money,

at least in terms of historical documents.

So, when the queen

appears on a page, you, you take notice.

And when the queen starts talking about

potentially assassinating somebody,

you really take notice.

NARRATOR: The queen's words were,

no doubt, delivered in jest.

Uncle Nasser was never assassinated,

but the queen remains close to her Secret Service.

From suspicion to trust,

the relationship between the monarchy

and British intelligence had come full circle,

a relationship which endures to this day.

♪