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NARRATOR: D-Day.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
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 MI5 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 War 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 War 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.
RORY (off-screen): 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.
RORY (off-screen): He was very old fashioned, an 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 1944 by MI5 officers.
ALAN (off-screen): Friday 3rd of March 1944.
Two MI 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.'
RORY: 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 war,
but had an active and personal role in it himself.
NARRATOR: Then a second discovery gave further
evidence of the King's role.
In 1950, five years after the war's end,
the MI5 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 MI5,
and it described every detail of the World War II deception
operations he'd run.
Masterman called it his 'secret book'.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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 had developed during the second world war.
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.
ALAN (off-screen): Dear Masterman, Thank you so much for trusting me
with the book.
RICHARD: I'm most grateful.
It looks thrilling.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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 MI5 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 MI5
when, at the beginning of his reign,
it had viewed him with suspicion?
In December 1936 George's brother,
Edward VIII, abdicated.
The British Intelligence Services suspected Edward of
being a Nazi sympathizer.
They even put him under secret surveillance,
and tapped his phone.
MI5's suspicions about the monarchy continued,
particularly the new King's attitude to the Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Hitler.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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.
RICHARD (off-screen): Edward VIII who is known to be close to Hitler,
close to the Germans.
NARRATOR: MI5 hoped that George would not follow in his
brother's footsteps.
RORY (off-screen): Everyone associates appeasement with Edward VIII.
But King George wasn't a Nazi sympathizer,
but he was an appeaser, because he did not want to go
to war with Nazi Germany.
RORY (off-screen): Not only had he lived
through the horrors of the First World War,
but also feared that a war might threaten to destroy
the, 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.
So there's this desire here to stave off war at all costs.
CHAMBERLAIN (over TV): And here is the paper which bears his name
upon it as well as mine.
NARRATOR: For MI5, the Munich agreement of September 1938
was a pivotal moment in its battle against appeasement.
The Security Service expected King George VI
to stay neutral.
RORY (off-screen): The King is a constitutional monarch.
It is not his job to weigh 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.
RORY: My Dear Prime Minister, I am sending this letter...
GEORGE VI (off-screen): 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 RI.
RORY: What we see here is the King personally backing one faction of,
of, of the Cabinet,
Chamberlain's appeasement faction.
RORY (off-screen): To the extent that after Chamberlain comes back from Munich,
the King invites him straight round to Buckingham Palace
and even engineers a photo shoot on the, on the balcony where again,
he is publicly and visibly aligning himself
with the political approach of appeasement.
RICHARD (off-screen): MI5 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".
RICHARD (off-screen): 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 this.
NARRATOR: The Foreign Office blocked the King's letter.
Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland
finally put pay to appeasement.
With Britain at war, MI5 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.
RORY (off-screen): 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.
RORY (off-screen): And a duty officer from the cabinet war 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 asthe 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 10th, 1940, 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.
NARRATOR: George VI, once a supporter of appeasing Hitler,
now King of a nation at war,
still lacked the full trust of MI5.
His relationship with his new Prime Minister,
Winston Churchill, was not an easy one either.
Like MI5, 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.
Then, as war tested both men's mettle,
came a critical moment.
MAN (over TV): Now Adolf Hitler stood,
just as Napoleon had stood more than 100 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 1940, MI6,
fearing a Nazi invasion, made preparations to
evacuate the royal family to Canada.
Churchill put the intelligence agency's intricate plan
to the King.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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 kill at least one of the invaders,
and we will all fight to the last".
RICHARD (off-screen): When Churchill hears about this he says,
"Well, really, you need to be able to kill more than one German".
NARRATOR: Out of the blue, a specially gift,
wrapped package arrived at Buckingham Palace.
The sender's address was marked '10 Downing Street.'
Inside was a gleaming early Christmas present.
RICHARD (off-screen): Churchill sends the king a Tommy Gun.
And we know, actually, after this, not only the king,
but the royal family and indeed equerries,
they're all practicing at Windsor
and several other locations.
With pistols, with rifles,
but also with Churchill's Tommy Gun.
RICHARD (off-screen): The queen actually enjoys taking pop shots at rats.
It's the Blitz,
there's lots of rats in Buckingham Palace garden.
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, its 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...
MAN: Received a couple of bottles of 1941 Burgundy,
one of which he served to Churchill at one of their
regular Tuesday luncheons 'a 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."
RORY (off-screen): 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, 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 SOE, 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.
RICHARD (off-screen): We have to bear in mind,
the Queen actually is someone who has the closest relations
with the intelligence services.
Her brother's in SOE.
So actually, Buckingham Palace is almost an outpost,
an outstation, if you like, of the intelligence services.
RORY: 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 1943, George VI took an active part in the war
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 1943.
MAN (over TV): The Maltese were 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 the
island of Malta to thank its people for resisting three
years of Nazi siege and bombardment.
But with the Luftwaffe still menacing Malta's skies,
there was real danger.
British intelligence's answer was Operation Loader.
RORY: 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 Germans had been in active operation.
And so, Buckingham Palace put out a false line that the King
was visiting troops in Portsmouth at this time.
RORY (off-screen): 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,
Supreme Commander in Chief of Allied Forces,
in North Africa.
On June the 7th 1943 he landed in Algiers.
For Eisenhower at least, it was no surprise that 'General Lyon'
was none other than - the King Emperor, - George VI.
RORY: 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.
RICHARD: In November 1943, the entire Royal Family,
visit RAF Tempsford.
RICHARD (off-screen): This is not any RAF station.
This is the location of the secret special duties flights
that take the agents of SOE and the agents
of MI6 to Europe.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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.
SOE like to disguise explosives as innocent
materials, wine bottles, dead animals,
and the favorite of course,
is explosive disguised as horse poo.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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 war.
NARRATOR: In March 1944 with the visit to Buckingham Palace
of two MI5 men, noted in his diary by King's Private Secretary
Alan Lascelles, George the VII was invited
to join the Allies greatest deception operation of the war,
fooling the Nazis about the timing and location
of Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings.
The man who devised the deception operation was the
Oxford don, John Masterman.
Back in August 1914, Masterman had been teaching in Germany
and was interned for the duration of the war.
But he used his time there to learn the language,
and study the mind set of his German captors.
DAVID (off-screen): 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.
DAVID (off-screen): Even with the, 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 war broke out, Masterman was signed up to the
intelligence corps and then MI5 where he helped devise the
Double Cross system, which used double agents to feed
misleading information to the Nazis.
DAVID: He was a Chairman of a subcommittee which dealt with
the Double Cross System.
DAVID (off-screen): The 20 Committee.
XX.
They were actually in control of 39 spies
working in different areas in Europe.
DAVID (off-screen): And in England.
They were all deceiving the Germans in some way
or another.
NARRATOR: One of his team was a long serving MI5 officer,
Tar Robertson.
RORY: 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 double agents known only as 'Garbo',
'Freak' and 'Brutus'.
Agent 'Brutus' was a Polish air force pilot who'd been
parachuted by theBritish into German occupied France.
The Nazis captured and tortured him,
saying 'return to England and spy for us or be executed'.
He pretended to change sides but his loyalty to the allied
cause never wavered.
GERRY: 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 I say, really as a, 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 23,000 local and
national newspapers printed in Britain between March
and August 1944, 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.
RORY (off-screen): Here is a cutting from The Times newspaper,
dated 10th of March 1944.
And the headline is, "Canadians Inspected by the King."
NARRATOR: MI5's plan was to drip feed
the Germans information which would make them think
they were piecing together the jig-saw
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.
RICHARD: The whole secret of deception is to get the
Germans to work these things out for themselves.
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.
RORY (off-screen): 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 war planning is being stepped up.
There might be troops movements to the isle of Wight.
RORY (off-screen): Visiting troops in Hove suggests that there might be
some sort of attack on Normandy,
but would there just be a diversionary attack to, to draw
German attention away from the real invasion of Calais?
RICHARD: 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.
RORY: 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.
NARRATOR: Another deception was to draw Nazi 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.
RORY (off-screen): This article comes from the Times ,
on the 24th March 1944.
The headline is, "The King With His Army,
Tour with the Queen and Princess."
RICHARD: The king goes north on the royal train to visit
Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.
These are attack formations.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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.
RORY (off-screen): 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.
RICHARD: When you have the queen,
when you have Princess Elizabeth,
the whole royal family there, dramatic forces.
RICHARD (off-screen): Airborne gliders, snipers, 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 18th April, the King's Private Secretary Alan Lascelles
wrote in his diary.
ALAN (off-screen): 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 too keen to be kept fully in the loop
by John Masterman.
DAVID: 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 MI5's double agents,
Garbo and Freak, its aim to create confusion about
what was real and what was just rehearsal.
RORY (off-screen): 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.
RORY (off-screen): 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 a, 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 1944, 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.
RORY (off-screen): This is the front page of The Daily Mail ,
from the 15th of May 1944.
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 Nazi,
occupied Norway was being prepared.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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.
NARRATOR: 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.
RORY: Its 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 MI5.
NARRATOR: On June, the 6th 1944,
a fleet of 7,000 ships emerged from the early morning mist,
heading for the Normandy beaches.
The panic ridden German defenders radioed for
urgent reinforcements.
RICHARD: The response from Berlin is somnolent.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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.
MAN (over TV): The armies of the United Nations have made their first
landings on the soils of Western Europe.
This is D-Day.
NARRATOR: The King, who had played a vital role in the
deception plan broadcast to his people.
GEORGE VI (over radio): 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 MI6 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 the Kings presence was a further attempt
to distract the 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 war's end, John Masterman,
key player behind double cross system and D-Day deceptions,
wrote a top secret MI5 report,
detailing every aspect of the Double Cross system.
It was also a template for future MI5 and MI6 operations.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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 War, during the 1950s,
during the 1960s, 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 1950, five years after the war 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.
RICHARD: Dear Masterman, I think it would be remiss of us both...
ALAN (off-screen): 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.
RICHARD (off-screen): On the 4th of October 1951 Masterman writes
from Worcester College Oxford where he's provost and he
writes to Lascelles, and he says...
JOHN (off-screen): I'm sorry to trouble you at a time like this...
RICHARD: Of course the king is, is increasingly ill.
JOHN (off-screen): 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...
RICHARD: Lest it be overlooked.
Yours sincerely, John Masterman.
RICHARD (off-screen): 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 MI5's prize missing,
perhaps even lost, top secret document,
extremely awkward.
CAROLINE: I think he admired him as a person,
but he was at times difficult.
CAROLINE (off-screen): He wasn't very easy because he did 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.
MAN (over TV): On this day of mourning is 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 war.
NARRATOR: On February, the 6th 1952,
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 MI5 was
determined to tighten security.
Masterman, now in desperate straits,
wrote one last time to Lascelles.
JOHN (off-screen): Dear Lascelles, once more I have to apologize for
ringing you when you must be overwhelmed with anguish.
I want to ask to ask if you can manage to get my secret book
to me.
I am nervous, I hope needlessly...
RICHARD: With the change of Director General.
And here is referring to Sir Dick White...
ALAN (off-screen): I can't very well say
that I haven't got it, or say where it is.
RICHARD: 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 MI5, Dick 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.
ALAN (off-screen): 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.
CAROLINE: Ones guess is that the king confided in her and
found her 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 1972, he published his Secret Book.
But even then, 28 years after D-Day,
MI5 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 1955 the Prime Minister Anthony Eden,
or AE, 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 Hussain of Jordan.
However, the British feared he had fallen under the influence
of his Nationalist and anti-British uncle, Nasser Shariff.
Shuckburgh noted in his diary in 1955...
RORY: 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.
EVELYN (off-screen): She had seen poor little Hussain,
fresh from Harrow, a year or two ago and all he could
do was stand stiffly to attention, saying...
RORY: Saying, "Your Majesty and not another word."
EVELYN (off-screen): 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.
RORY: Of course, King Henry had said,
just before the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Thomas Beckett, will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?
EVELYN (off-screen): 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 have
heard about Hussain.
I was a little handicapped, by having a cigarette in my hand,
which steadily burnt my fingertips, behind my back.
RORY: AE was looking wonderfully fit and relaxed
EVELYN (off-screen): And was very friendly to both of us.
RORY: And that's, startling, because we never get a sense
of the Queen discussing these kinds of things,
we never get a sense of her, her humor.
RORY (off-screen): And, 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 MI6,
against countries across the Middle East, most famously,
the other Nasser, the President of Egypt.
RORY (off-screen): 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 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 was 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.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.