Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones Storyville

MEN SPEAK MANDARIN

I'm searching for the site of a murder which took place

out here nearly 80 years ago.

This is the only film of the man who died.

A few seconds, taken at a meeting with Adolf Hitler.

News, journalism, intelligence - it's all about knowledge.

And a little bit of power.

The murdered man was

a brilliant Welsh journalist called Gareth Jones.

He was trying to find out what the Japanese army was plotting in China.

Gareth must have been really excited because he would have

felt he was on the verge of another great scoop.

His greatest scoop had been

to expose the story few dared put their name to.

It made him enemies among those who wanted to hide the truth.

Gareth wasn't afraid of saying what people didn't want to hear

and also, regardless of personal safety.

He was shot twice in the back and then once in the head.

So was he the victim of a Soviet vendetta?

Or the chance casualty of a life lived dangerously?

"I should consider myself a flabby little coward if ever I gave up

"the chance of a good, interesting career

"for the mere thought of safety.

"I have no respect for any man whose acceptance

"or judgement of a post depends on the answer to the question,

"'will it give me a pension?'

"'Is it safe?'"

Five years later, the writer of that letter was somewhere in this intimidating landscape,

prisoner of bandits whose language he couldn't speak.

For most of his adult life,

his gift for languages had opened every door.

But among these Chinese bandits,

singing in Welsh was his last resort.

THEY SPEAK MANDARIN

He says the bandits would work for whoever had money,

whether it was the Japanese or the local government,

or even the Communist Party in those days.

Whoever paid the highest price, they'd work for them.

Philip Colley is Gareth's great-nephew.

By strange chance, he does speak Chinese.

In the old days of England,

the government would have considered Robin Hood to be a bandit as well.

He said Robin Hood was a good bandit and he said in those days

there were also good bandits in China.

But these were not good bandits.

Gareth Jones had trespassed

into a snake pit of international intrigue.

What happens here has global implications.

It's serious journalism.

I mean, this is not something one would do casually.

A fortune-teller had said to Gareth

at one time that he would never see his 30th birthday.

And he didn't.

So what came back from China was his ashes,

these fading photographs of him in strange company,

and an echo of his final days,

through a letter he never posted.

"Inner Mongolia. This has been the most exciting week I've ever had

"in my life, packed with adventures and strange encounters"

And, before long, he was forgotten.

CHURCH BELLS CHIME

In a small house in a small street

lives another of Gareth's descendants, Philip's brother Nigel.

Even in the family, Gareth was a shadowy figure.

The only time he would ever be mentioned would be at Christmas

when my grandmother and great aunt Gwyneth came for Christmas lunch.

Apart from that, he was very rarely mentioned.

I didn't realise that I'd had an uncle who had been murdered.

My aunt wanted to stay in Barry until she died but,

of course, she had this robbery.

People rang us up and said there'd been a robbery

and, fortunately, people next door had heard the dog bark.

It was decided that she'd have to live with her younger sister,

who was about 90 herself,

and the whole family rallied together and we went and cleared the house.

Underneath my grandmother's bed,

which was thick with dust, was a big trunk.

There were all sorts of papers there.

There were some letters in the dining room

but at the bottom of the second flight of stairs was

this particular suitcase.

With the letters G R V J - Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones -

monogrammed on the outside.

And inside were his letters which he must have sent

to his mother and his father on a weekly basis,

and also these diaries.

"And that is why, one summer's day,

"I found myself heading down to the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth."

There are several people in this story called Jones.

One of them is the chief archivist here, Graham Jones.

In the week of this burglary, this relatively small archive of

Gareth's papers transferred to our custody basically for safekeeping.

I have to be honest and confess that, at that point,

I'd never even heard of Gareth Jones. He was totally unknown to me.

I'm not quite sure how many letters there were.

But now, from these humdrum files,

the story of an extraordinary life has emerged.

At its centre is not Wales, where he lived,

nor China, where he died,

but Russia.

It's 1889.

In this corner of the Tsar's empire,

a Welshman called John Hughes is king.

And that's Hughes' house, high on the hill, overlooking everything.

The monster house was his reward for building a steelworks for the Tsar.

The settlement became like a corner of Wales.

Scores of workers were brought over from the valleys

and the town that grew up was named Hughesovka, in his honour.

When his son Arthur was looking for someone to tutor the children,

the woman who volunteered was a miner's daughter

who'd never left Wales before, Annie Gwen Jones.

This is a picture of Nain, as I call her, Mrs Annie Gwen Jones,

taken in Hughesovka when she was there with her writing on the back.

She must have had it taken when she was in Russia, yes.

That young woman, of course, was Gareth Jones' mother.

He was born in 1905, the youngest of three children.

He went to the local school in Barry,

that's his father who was the headmaster,

and then on to Aberystwyth University

where he was a totally brilliant student.

He got a first in German and French and then a scholarship to Cambridge.

There he is.

To study Russian, of course.

By the time he made his first trip to Russia,

there had been revolution against the Tsar and a bloody civil war.

Gareth by then was 25.

He'd just left Cambridge with another first

and now spoke Russian well.

At one level,

he was making a sentimental journey into his mother's past.

But it was also a journey into a present

that Gareth found fascinating.

To some, Stalin was a frightening figure.

To others, including many friends of Cambridge,

the plan to transform Russia into a workers' state

was an inspiring alternative

to the war-weary, class-ridden, stagnant West.

On August 15th, Gareth sent this postcard to his parents,

saying he was off to see a collective farm,

then bought himself a hard-class ticket on a slow train south.

His letters from Russia are carefully worded for the censors' eyes.

"The train left Moscow at four o'clock yesterday afternoon

"and in Tula station, I had a real treat,

"cheese sandwiches, cakes and lemonade."

"A Cossack communist with the order of the red flag told me

"a lot of things about present-day Russia."

Almost precisely 81 years ago,

Gareth Jones was sitting on this station,

he'd been travelling for three or four days,

he was tired, he was exhausted,

he was "bearded", he says, in his letter home,

and he was waiting for that great moment he'd dreamt of,

just down there to Hughesovka.

It wasn't like this then, of course,

and it wasn't the Hughesovka his mother had known, either.

No more Hughesovka says the sign.

It's socialist Staliner now.

But not everything of his mother's world had disappeared.

Even today, you can still find houses

where the more privileged workers lived.

We even found a woman who was actually living here on this street

on the very day that Gareth arrived.

She called the Welshman English, as they all do around here,

and had a black eye because she'd fallen off her ladder.

She took me to her house.

Her father had been a baby here when

Gareth's mother was living in Hughesovka,

and Valentina was a little girl of three when Gareth himself turned up.

Gareth's pilgrimage here, as it turned out, was a brief affair.

He wrote to his parents saying

he was sitting in a garden near the church.

He's addressing this to everyone as usual, especially "Mama".

He was thrilled to be in Hughesovka, he told them,

but had to hurry on to join his prearranged tour.

Stalin's famous five-year plan

was all about industrialising a land of peasants.

The new state farms had to produce food

to feed factory workers and to sell abroad in exchange for machinery.

Peasants became largely expendable.

A stream of Western intellectuals, like George Bernard Shaw,

dined well on the new farms and declared the plan was working.

And stories of cruel enforcement?

"Well, you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs,"

said one journalist.

Gareth got on well enough with his hosts

to hitch a rare flight back to Moscow and wrote home to say

how impressed he'd been by the farm they'd shown him.

But somewhere out in that vast land,

he'd met people he wasn't supposed to meet

and, on his way home, from Berlin, he wrote this,

"Russia is in a very bad state," underlined again and again.

"No food, only bread. Oppression, injustice.

"Misery among the workers.

"It makes me mad," he says, "to think that people..."

And it's fascinating, he's crossed it out. I wonder who on earth he meant.

"People like so-and-so go there and come back,

"having been led around the nose, and having had enough to eat,

"and just say that Russia is a paradise."

He sure as hell doesn't think it's a paradise.

# I just got an invitation through the mail

# Your presence is requested this evening... #

Paradise to Gareth right then

was an invitation to the man he came to know as the chief,

fellow Welshman and former Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Though a depleted force politically,

his country house parties still attracted powerful people.

He was a man who simply had enormous authority, enormous prestige,

enormous personal charisma and magnetism,

and that's what gave Churt its special quality, I think.

It was a great political centre.

Large numbers of journalists, intellectuals.

You would have these very intense political weekends,

political sessions, in which a wide variety of topics were discussed.

And that was the set Gareth had wanted to join

when he left Cambridge the year before.

But unemployment was rising and his mother in Wales pleaded with him

to take the safe option of life as an academic.

"Tell me why you have no confidence in my future.

"Why do you want a son of yours to have no courage

"and just stick in the mud for the feeling of security?"

Security.

So he took a short-term contract with Lloyd George instead,

and after his first trip to Russia, was invited down to Churt.

He was picked up by chauffeured limousine and, much to his surprise,

there were many grandees there.

And when he came out,

Lord Lothian said he'd never heard Lloyd George keep quiet for so long.

He was absolutely fascinated by Gareth's tales.

This was the upshot, a couple of letters from Lord Lothian,

one handwritten, introducing him to the editor of The Times

and, soon after that, Gareth finds

he has three articles in Britain's leading newspaper of the day.

At a stroke, Gareth had been reborn as an expert in Russian affairs,

a journalist and a novice member of the political establishment.

So how many years back does this go?

Right back to 1836.

-So when did I say he joined?

-1930, I think.

ALED JONES: 'What politics could do was to ensure a degree of mobility.'

Gareth Richard Vaughan, there we go.

'Someone like Gareth Jones from Barry,

'with the right political connections,

'given Lloyd George's dominant role within British liberalism,

'that was an open door.'

Right. Proposer Clement Davies, leader of the Liberal Party.

The Reform Club was the temple of British liberalism,

one of those exclusive places where

the old boy networks that ran Britain met.

You don't have to like those people.

You don't have to support those people's policies,

but you need to get to them and you need to talk to them.

Easy rules for Gareth Jones to live by,

as for Chapman Pincher,

a near contemporary and legend of modern journalism.

There's a picture of me with the Beaver.

Lord Beaverbrook to the rest of us,

but in those days, Pincher was just a student at London University.

Less than a mile from the Reform Club was a different world.

I walked down from Bloomsbury to King's College which was in the Strand

and there, in the gutter, literally in the gutter,

walking down Southampton Road, was a long string of Welsh miners

singing their hearts out and then on the pavement,

a fellow with a collecting tin,

"Welsh miners, please, Welsh miners, please,"

trying to get a few pennies to keep themselves alive and, hopefully,

enough to send home to their families in Wales.

The world economy was in freefall but one young man from Wales

seemed to cruise effortlessly above it.

"Mr Ivy Lee, who is a big businessman,

"Rockefeller's right-hand man,

"came to see me today,

"offered me a post beginning at £800 plus expenses.

"Mr Somerville says that Mr Ivy Lee is

"a great force in American public life.

"His special interest is Russia."

And since Lee had virtually invented public relations,

for Gareth it was a fast-track into American society.

# They used to tell me I was building a dream... #

But in the land of opportunity, the dream was falling apart.

# Why should I be standing in line just waiting for bread? #

Banks were teetering, industrial output was falling,

and millions were out of work.

Even capitalists began asking whether the Soviet Union

might be doing something right.

Gareth found his expertise in great demand.

"I'm going to Russia with the son of Mr Heinz,

"baked beans, 57 varieties.

"Mr Heinz, whom I liked very much,

"is paying all my expenses and my salary."

And for history, a huge bonus.

Jack Heinz had a camera.

And among the mementoes,

a rare picture of Gareth in Russia.

The whole world was in distress in those days,

each country in its own way.

Which of the competing visions of something better would save it?

That was the puzzle everyone wanted to unravel.

This crumpled telegram was waiting for Gareth Jones,

Poste Restante, Stalingrad.

READS LETTER

It's asking for more information and then says,

"Chief desirous of seeing you on your return. Sylvester".

Sylvester was AJ Sylvester, Lloyd George's secretary.

By now, Gareth was more of a journalist, but the line between

journalism and gathering political intelligence then

was not very clear.

The detail with which he records his impressions

and the detail in which he records facts about the people he meets,

for example, when he goes to the United States,

are far beyond what any journalist would normally record for use in press articles.

I'm loath to use the term 'spy' but I'm convinced that he was

transferring information to the national government in the 1930s.

Harry Ferguson is at home in that world.

He used to be a spy himself.

The service was very much an upper-class institution,

and if you went to the great universities,

Oxford, Cambridge, if you mixed in that very clubbable world,

the world of weekend house parties, there was a good chance that

you might be asked to take part in intelligence in some way.

Gareth may have started as the boy from South Wales,

but his time at Cambridge,

his talent and ferocious networking had transformed him.

There he is in the background.

That building over there, the Post Office, used to be

the headquarters of something called the Air League.

On the eve of that first trip to Russia, he'd gone there to

meet a secret agent called Colonel Thwaites.

"Colonel Thwaites was in a small room in morning dress,

"top hat hanging on peg.

"He had keen dark eyes, not very attractive personality,

"absolutely unscrupulous and very cold.

"He told me it was difficult to get facts about Soviet aviation."

At some point, Thwaites has heard that he's travelling to Russia.

They would have checked him out, they would have known that

he came from the right sort of background, so why not ask him?

It's a good way to test out someone.

And he seems to have done what he was asked.

Pages of notes about an obscure organisation called Osoaviakhim,

abbreviated to Oso, literally aviation and chemicals.

"Aims.

"To struggle for the five-year plan.

"Shop brigade.

"Every member of Osoaviakhim must be a shop brigade worker.

"We prepare pilots."

News, journalism, intelligence - it's all about knowledge.

Giving your domestic audience an edge, a little bit more power,

and a capacity to perhaps take better decisions.

This was the year that would define this man of many parts.

"Hooray," he says.

"I have arranged to write some articles for The Economist about Russia."

But the interesting thing is on the last page.

"I remain a member of Lloyd George's staff until

"the end of March - entre nous - at a nominal salary,

"but it's worth everything to me to go to Germany as his secretary.

"It gives me a wonderful entree," he says.

Germany was Gareth's great love

and he spoke the language even better than Russian.

But it was changing fast.

Hitler had just became Chancellor.

The Nazis were expected to win the coming election.

Gareth's entree was no less than Joseph Goebbels,

Hitler's propaganda chief.

There is just one brief reference

in Goebbels' voluminous diaries, 1932 to 1934.

Here, on 24th February 1933, Goebbels writes,

"A long conversation with Lloyd George's secretary.

"He's in Germany for purposes of study.

"A very clever young man.

"He tells me terrible things about Soviet Russia."

"For study."

Gareth was a master at choosing the right word.

Goebbels, "We dined together and talked. Charming man.

"Dark brown eyes.

"Very narrow head.

"Like a South Welsh miner. High brow.

"Tremendous humour. Very great personal charm.

"Small, with limp."

Gareth's diary of that day makes surreal reading now.

"The leader is coming. A car drives through the snow.

"Out steps a very ordinary-looking man.

"Looks like a middle-class grocer.

"Has an ordinary greyish brown mackintosh, just as everybody has."

"His hair is very dark and brushed.

"Hitler surprised me by his smile.

"Quite intelligent. Natural."

And there in the German film archive of that same day

we found the only surviving shot of Gareth Jones.

"We saw Goebbels' new car. Most interested.

"Gets inside, wants to learn all about it.

"The new brown car with Hitler inside is driven through the snow.

"Hitler comes out just like a boy."

Somehow, he got permission to fly with Hitler's entourage,

so probably about a dozen people flying from Berlin to Frankfurt.

"If aeroplane should crash, whole history of Germany would change.

"Hitler is a few feet away. Goebbels behind him."

He wrote to his parents,

"The Hitler meeting was the most thrilling thing I've ever seen in my life.

"Absolutely primitive."

"Hitler flabbily waves his hand.

"Young schoolgirls shout.

"Hitler begins.

"Calm, deep voice.

"Gets louder and louder, higher and higher.

"Tremendous applause."

And his true friends were Germans, believe it or not.

Some of them were Nazis and some of them weren't.

Gareth was a little bit ambivalent.

Sometimes he could see both sides of the picture,

and sometimes I don't quite decide which side he would have been on.

He didn't like to commit himself.

One has to remember that Gareth had been travelling to Germany

since he was a teenager, every single year, and had seen a change.

When he flew with Hitler on that trip,

he did see that the Nazis were doing good things

to do with creating employment.

Gareth commented very favourably on that and even, in an article,

says this is something Wales might learn from.

He similarly was intrigued by the labour camps

which the Nazis were extending for young people,

and felt that that might be a positive thing.

Nobody knew that the Holocaust was about to happen at that time.

When David Lloyd George met Hitler, he referred to him as

the George Washington of Germany, the greatest living German.

So having an interest in Germany

was really having an interest in modernity in many ways.

It was a delusion many people then shared.

From Gareth's articles,

you can see he was acutely aware of the threat of anti-Semitism.

But at that moment,

his focus was on a tragedy already happening somewhere else.

"I go on to Moscow tonight and arrive Sunday, 12.50.

"I shall be very careful."

DOGS BARK

In this house lives the daughter-in-law of a man

who would play a key part in the next few weeks of Gareth's life.

Maxim Litvinov was commissar for foreign affairs.

He had two immediate objectives -

diplomatic recognition by America and opposition to Hitler.

In those days, Flora lived in a flat near the railway station

which brought people in from the Ukrainian countryside.

This was the real effect of Stalin's policies on the countryside.

The new farms were failing to meet their targets.

So every scrap of food was being confiscated by the state

and the peasants left to starve.

People knew but mostly said nothing, Litvinov included.

He admired Stalin as a leader but, very privately,

his family knew he was becoming uneasy about his methods.

Gareth Jones had had enough dealings with Soviet officialdom by now

to know that the key to getting what he wanted lay here,

in Litvinov's foreign office.

Two months earlier, a letter had arrived from the embassy in London

asking them to give Gareth Jones special treatment.

"Gareth Jones is a really influential journalist.

"He's got a direct line to Lloyd George.

"Give him all the help you can."

That's Majsky, the Soviet ambassador.

Majsky's saying conversations

and "bisanye", which probably means diplomatic cables,

about the critical situation in the Soviet Union are flooding Europe

and Lloyd George wants to know what's going on.

So did Gareth Jones.

And he knew that even if the chief's influence was fading in Britain,

abroad, his name still carried weight.

This is his passport, which he would have used at the time.

'Litvinov knew that bad press right then would be a disaster.

'He decided to back his ambassador's faith in Jones.'

This is the 1933 Soviet visa

which was actually given to him free of charge.

Gareth duly turned up in Moscow

on March 5th, to find Litvinov had ordered the red carpet treatment,

culminating in a key meeting with... See the name down there?

Comrade Umansky, head of Litvinov's press department

and the man who controlled the activities of all foreign correspondents.

As far as Umansky was concerned,

Gareth was going to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv

to look at a tractor factory.

But it was all a front. Gareth's mission was to expose the famine.

These are the most important of his diaries

and I believe that they represent the only independent verification

of arguably Stalin's greatest atrocity.

This man, Tim Snyder,

has just written a monumental book which documents the horrors

both Stalin and Hitler inflicted on Ukraine.

Gareth's next few days have a brief but gripping part.

Gareth Jones does what he knows very well he's not supposed to do.

He gets on a train to Kharkiv,

but rather than going all the way to Kharkiv,

where he might have been controlled when he got out of the train,

he jumped out at train at a small stop with a knapsack full of food

and went walking, until he found people.

And when he found people, they said to him two things he noted down.

They said, "We are all bursting from hunger,"

that is, their bellies were bloated from hunger,

and "We are all waiting to die."

This is what Gareth was doing in that dreadful winter of '33.

That's our producer, Teresa.

She'd once met Mikhailo over 20 years ago.

-Maybe there's another door.

-Try to open the door.

-OK.

-Teresa?

-Da.

Teresa Cherfas.

He could hardly see now, nor walk,

but the wanton cruelty of collectivisation

seemed like yesterday.

Gareth's plan was to gather evidence like that

to break the conspiracy of silence about the famine.

"Everywhere I talked to peasants, they all had the same story.

"There is no bread, we haven't had bread for over two months.

"A lot are dying. The first village had no more potatoes left"

"and the store of buryat, beetroot, was running out."

They all said the same. "The cattle is dying.

"We used to feed the world and now we're hungry."

He went into a little hut and he shared his food,

and one of the girls who ate some of this food said,

"Now that I've eaten something so wonderful, now I can die."

He meticulously recorded virtually every step he took.

"I caught up with a bearded peasant. We started talking.

"'You see that field? It was all gold, but now look at all the weeds.

"'We were the richest country in the world for grain.

"'Now they've taken it all away from us we, we are ruined.'"

Gareth understood the reality of what was happening.

I think for him at that point,

it became indelible and all his work after that

was an attempt to try to convey what had actually happened.

With his notebooks filled, Gareth left these fields of death.

He headed on to the tractor factory

and then went to the opera with the German Consul.

"Plenty of lipstick," he notes, "but no bread."

Back in Moscow, a big story had broken.

Six British engineers had been arrested and accused of sabotage.

It threatened to become a major international row.

Gareth reverted to his official role.

On March 19th, he went to a reception

being held here in Litvinov's official residence.

"19th March, met Litvinov."

Same day, another chirpy letter home.

No mention of famine, all sweetness and light.

He's saying he had dinner with the German ambassador

and then he repeats how helpful the foreign office, the Narkomindel...

"Spared no trouble in making my visit a success."

He got his private briefing from Litvinov on March 23rd.

He writes 1932, curiously.

And then he was off again. This time to Berlin.

En route, he started writing a letter to Lloyd George.

"The five-year plan is a complete disaster."

He describes how he tramped around.

He then says who he's interviewed, Litvinov, various other key players.

Then says down here, "The situation is so grave

"that I'm amazed at your admiration for Stalin."

Bold words. Did the dynamite in his notebook make him brave, I wondered.

"Would you like me to come down to Churt...Saturday afternoon?

"Whenever you like, I'll come and report."

The election a few weeks earlier

had left the Nazis the largest party in Germany.

There in their new heartland,

this complicated man now did something extraordinary.

He gathered some journalists together and gave them his story.

I think Gareth was a man of conviction.

I think that getting the story out was most important to him.

Nobody knew who this 27-year-old was

but everybody knew who Lloyd George was

and for an aide of Lloyd George to say that there was a famine

meant that there was probably a famine.

The Moscow press corps reacted in a way I still find hard to believe.

They knew they should have written a story themselves,

so they denied it was true.

Living in this flamboyant mansion at the time

was one of Gareth Jones's best contacts,

a man called Eugene Lyons

who belonged to a group of American correspondents

then working in the Soviet Union.

I could see from Gareth's diary that Lyons had given him

a full briefing about the situation in the countryside

before he went down to Ukraine.

"Death penalty for stealing."

"Extension of police powers."

"New policy. Serfdom for the peasant."

But straight after Gareth's press conference,

Lyons held a meeting with his colleagues.

In his memoirs, he describes how they conspired to betray him.

"Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore

"as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts

"to please dictatorial regimes. But throw him down we did."

Leading the charge was this man, Walter Duranty,

the New York Times correspondent,

who'd likened peasants' suffering to broken eggs.

Duranty was the highest-paid foreign journalist in the world.

He was the doyenne of the foreign correspondents in the Soviet Union,

and within 24 hours of Gareth's news conference,

he had denigrated Gareth in the New York Times.

"Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive

"when the facts he had so painstakingly garnered

"from our mouths were snowed under by our denials."

The famine became politics even as it was happening.

Thanks to the rise of Hitler,

he's the one person who does want to talk about the famine.

So what that means is that these victims out in Ukraine,

even as they are literally still dying

and Gareth is writing about them,

they're being folded up into this larger political story

of the Nazi right, which then the left feels like it has to oppose.

And that meant denying that millions were starving

because of Stalin's policies.

"The filthy business having been disposed of,

"someone ordered vodka and zakuski.

"Umansky joined the celebration

"and the party didn't break up until the early morning hours."

So far, so good. But Litvinov knew his policies would be in jeopardy

if stories of the famine gained further traction.

The documents we'd unearthed in Moscow show what happened next.

Look at this one, marked "Secret."

It's from Litvinov to the embassy in London,

complaining bitterly about Gareth Jones.

He can't understand how they can possibly not have checked

that he was really acting for Lloyd George.

But much more curious is this one, apparently a letter from Sylvester,

wrong initials though, copied by the London Embassy

and sent to Litvinov to prove just how furious Lloyd George was too.

"During the time that he was in his employ,

"Mr Lloyd George deliberately refused,

"not once but on a number of occasions,

"to allow him to go to Russia."

And so the loyal Sylvester goes on,

apparently disowning Gareth on the chief's behalf.

Lloyd George was extremely good at using people,

squeezing the information out of them.

When problems occurred, he would drop them.

In some cases, drop them with extreme savagery.

Gareth was expecting to be invited to Churt.

In his letter to Lloyd George he says, "I'll make myself available."

But the call never came.

Worse still, the Soviet Secret Police had been alerted.

One day in Moscow, we traced a man called Nikolai Leonov.

He's one of those shadowy players who's long had the ear

of powerful people in the Communist world.

He rose to be a general in the KGB

and Deputy Head of Foreign Intelligence.

He looked at the file we'd extracted from the Foreign Ministry.

This is what he meant. Some excoriating articles

written by Gareth as soon as he returned, about the famine.

What he described as blunders by OGPU, the Secret Police.

# The very thought of you... #

Six months later, Gareth was back where he started.

Realpolitik had triumphed.

The Metrovick engineers had been released.

# I'm living in a kind of daydream... #

Litvinov had established diplomatic relations with America.

# And foolish though it may seem... #

And the story of Stalin's lethal famine was buried.

# The mere idea of you... #

Gareth was living quietly at home with his parents,

working as a staff reporter on the Western Mail in Cardiff.

One day in 1934, he got a letter from Margaret Stewart,

a great friend from Cambridge.

She was off to Russia - would he be there too?

Gareth replied, grimly cheerful...

"You'll be very amused to hear that inoffensive little Joneski

"has achieved the dignity of being a marked man on the blacklist of OGPU

"and is barred from entering the Soviet Union.

"I hear that there is a long list of crimes which I have committed

"under my name in the secret police file in Moscow

"and funnily enough, espionage is said to be among them."

He joked, but he was restless.

Instead of being a hero for revealing the truth,

he was out in the cold.

That autumn, he went to see some friends

in the nearby village of Llantwit Major.

He had some news for them.

He said that he was on his last long expedition now.

He told his mother that when he got home from this round-the-world trip,

he would settle down and take a permanent post

in this country.

Morfydd Williams was then a young woman of 17

in her last year at school.

One afternoon, she'd met Gareth as she came home on the bus.

I saw Gareth reading a book,

so I sat by him and he gave me that book.

He said, "You'll enjoy that." Which I did.

I think, actually, he was on his way then to see Mr Hearst

at St Donat's Castle.

'Mr Hearst was the eccentric American newspaper tycoon,

'Randolph Hearst.

'He owned this castle near Morfydd's home.'

I think this must be the place.

It's a bit like the sort of gateway that Randolph Hearst might have had.

Gareth, ever fascinated by power,

went to interview him for his newspaper.

This was the time when Hearst was changing his allegiance

from the Soviets towards Hitler

not because he liked Hitler,

but because he disliked Roosevelt's New Deal.

Hearst had already in mind an anti-red campaign

and invited Gareth over to California to spearhead it.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Roosevelt's New Deal was getting people back to work,

but with methods which to some Americans smacked of socialism.

Randolph Hearst, initially a Roosevelt supporter,

had turned into a virulent enemy.

Gareth crossed America to see him

in his extravagant palace in California

and then took his dubious shilling.

On January 1st 1935, he met Hearst and was then commissioned

to write probably three of the most vitriolic articles

against the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Now, more than ever, Gareth was a marked man in Soviet eyes.

This was the very last thing that he sent, and that was to me.

"With my love from Gareth."

-Honolulu!

-Yes.

-Can you sing it for me?

-Oh, heavens no! No, I'm sorry!

He hoped to be back for Christmas.

But he would never see these shores again.

There is an immense amount of political and military intrigue

in China around that period.

Anthony Best is an expert on the world that Gareth was entering.

This is the area of Manchuria.

This has been seized by the Japanese

and turned into the puppet state of Manchukuo.

Gareth sensed that what the Japanese did next

was going to be the big story

and the focus of that was Inner Mongolia.

We have Japanese activity in this area,

we have the Soviet Union using Outer Mongolia

to try to subvert Inner Mongolia

and we have the Chinese themselves having interests in Inner Mongolia.

Inner Mongolia is an area of enormous intrigue at this point.

Gareth arrived here wanting a scoop to relaunch his career.

My guide on the ground was his great-nephew, Philip.

Gareth certainly wouldn't recognise Beijing today

and nor would most of the residents of Beijing from that time.

Transport from those days was Bactrian camels, horses

and within the city human rickshaws taking people from place to place.

He headed for the old embassy zone.

It's now full of Chinese Government offices.

Filming is discouraged.

Behind that scaffolding is the old Peking Club,

social centre in those days for all foreigners.

And it was here that Gareth, who'd been made a temporary member,

was approached by a distinguished German diplomat,

Baron von Plessen, with a very interesting suggestion.

He asked Gareth whether he'd like to join him and Dr Herbert Muller

on a trip up to Inner Mongolia to meet Prince De Wang.

In Gareth's archive were some photographs.

This grainy image is Prince De Wang.

From the front...

..and from behind.

And this is the elegant Baron von Plessen.

And this, I think, is Dr Muller -

a bit portly, good fun and fluent in Chinese.

It was just what Gareth wanted

and the journalist Muller seemed the perfect guide.

He'd done a lot of travelling in Inner Mongolia and in China.

He spoke fluent Chinese,

he'd married a Chinese lady and had some children with her

and he'd been here for many, many years

and really knew the country very well.

So off we went, Phil and I, to follow their trail.

Our first stop would be a city called Zhangjiakou.

In those days, a dusty town called Kalgan

on the very edge of what China controlled.

What do you think, setting out on the same journey as Gareth?

It's quite exciting to be following in his footsteps.

Slightly different. I think he was travelling in first class

when he set off for Kalgan.

Actually, in Russia, he was very keen to go hard class, wasn't he?

-That's right, yeah.

-He liked talking to people.

I think this time because he was travelling with Baron Von Plessen

who liked the comforts of life, they went first class.

Gareth as usual was describing everything to his parents.

The letter he was writing then was never posted,

but it did survive to lead us through his final journey.

In those days, this was, as it still is to a certain extent,

very much a frontier town.

It still has that frontier feel today.

Go beyond here, you were taking your life in your own hands.

In the spidery hand of his last unposted letter,

I could see that they'd been required by the authorities

to sign a piece of paper

saying that they'd been warned of the dangers ahead

and were going at their own risk.

Then here are the signatures, Plessen, Muller...

Gareth Jones...

Kalgan.

He was met by Adam Purpiss,

a Latvian gentleman who was...

BEEPS HORN

..running a company called Wostwag.

I think this one's Purpiss...

with leather boots.

He describes him as tall

and dressed just like that. See?

That's a close-up of the same photo. And there's another one of him here.

Leather booted.

He was known as the King of Kalgan in those days.

He was the man in the middle between the Chinese and the Mongols.

Provided them with two cars for their journey

up to the meeting of the princes.

It was hard to say who controlled the land they were driving through.

Prince Teh Wang was one of those local potentates

who survived by playing all interested parties

off against each other.

Most of the major powers had sent someone to his gathering.

"The Prince summoned me to his presence

"and gave me an interview in his tent,

"guarded by two pigtailed Mongol soldiers."

He wants to have a great Mongol empire,

uniting the Mongols of Inner Mongolia

with those under the Soviets and those under Manchukuo.

Wishful thinking.

Teh Wang was in league with the Japanese

who had daggers drawn with Russia.

Teh Wang.

If you look at the contemporary literature,

the one thing all of the international specialists

on East Asia are telling you

is there's going to be a Russian-Japanese war.

Almost as if they would lay money on it.

At this point, the German diplomat Von Plessen returned to Peking.

But Gareth and Dr Muller decided to press on.

"Monday, July 15th.

"Muller and his boy, aged 46,

"who's a superior with the Mongols,

"as an English butler among Hottentots,

"Anatoli the Russian chauffeur and I,

"decided to cross a big part of Inner Mongolia,

"almost as far as the Soviet Manchukuo frontier."

Their target was a disputed town called Dolonor

on the border of Manchukuo,

the territory the Japanese had already seized.

It would have been a very tough journey,

three days instead of the six or seven hours

that they'd anticipated.

They only really had enough food for one day so they were starving

by the time they got here.

They came in through the western gate and there were no sentries there

so nobody would have noticed their arrival.

They managed to find an old inn where they slept the night.

"The innkeeper says they intend to occupy Kalgan on 15th August.

"About 14,000 troops have assembled not far away."

The following morning, he and Muller set out

for a Buddhist temple on the edge of town.

They never made it here. Instead, they were marched off

to the Japanese military headquarters

and questioned for some three or four hours.

They obviously weren't happy with them being here.

In fact, they thought they'd come to steal military secrets.

They were told to get out of town early next morning.

But the ever confident Gareth was in high spirits.

"What luck", he writes.

"There are great events here.

"The Japanese have decided to make this region part of Manchukuo.

"Thousands of Japanese soldiers are assembled here

"and many have left on the road to Kalgan."

Gareth had his scoop, but he had to get to Kalgan to file it.

According to the last note he ever wrote,

there were two principal roads.

"On one, 200 Japanese lorries have travelled.

"The other is infested by bad bandits."

And that road it seems was the one the Japanese told them to take.

The weather had changed the morning we set off

to find the place he was captured.

We were looking for a tiny village called Guan Mah Goh.

Technically, the whole area still belonged to the Chinese.

But the Japanese command had insisted that the Chinese

withdraw all their troops

to avoid any clashes.

There was a sort of peacekeeping force called the Ba Wan Deah,

but they were rarely seen.

This is the actual road that Dr Muller and Gareth Jones

would have been driving down.

According to the story, when they approached Guan Mah Goh,

Gareth spotted a man dressed as a Ba Wan Deh,

the Chinese Peace Preservation Corps.

Dr Muller said, "It's not a problem, don't worry."

But shortly after they entered the village,

shots rang out and they were under attack.

GUN SHOT

When the firing died down,

Dr Muller, as the one who spoke Chinese,

went off to find out what was going on.

Gareth starts remonstrating with the so-called peace preservation guys.

Says, "You can't do this, you can't touch me, I'm British."

It cut no ice with the bandits.

They took him off into one of the houses

and threatened to execute him.

Uh-huh.

The bandits knew what they were doing.

They released the driver and the man servant

and waited for the story to break.

My sister Dorothy was expecting her first baby...

..and my brother Lewis

came back and he opened the door and he shouted out

to my parents,

"Be prepared for a shock."

And I thought, gosh, something's happened to Dorothy's baby

and to Dorothy.

And then he said, "Gareth's been captured."

It was terrible.

A couple of days later, Dr Muller was freed.

His improbable story was that he'd been released on parole

in order to raise ransom.

My mother went down to Wales which was a long fortnight

or nearly three weeks while he was in the hands of the bandits.

It was terribly stressful.

You didn't go outside the door without someone saying

something about it.

And...

Was he the local hero by then?

He was then, yes.

The family waited as the Chinese authorities

tried to arrange the ransom,

the usual solution to kidnap stories.

And one morning, the postman turned up with this...

Telegram received in Barry.

"Well treated. Expect release soon. Love, Gareth."

The telegram came from Kalgan

probably sent by Dr Muller.

It was typical.

Rumours were wild and rife.

Real information in short supply.

It was like living on the edge of a precipice all the time.

And no-one could really feel cheered up by anyone else.

We were all miserable.

It was such a sad thing to have happened.

I don't suppose that any of us really could have expressed

how we felt, really and truly.

We were just devastated.

Then of course when he was actually killed, it was even worse.

It was the day before his 30th birthday.

A picture fell off the wall and my aunt said,

"Gareth is dead." That was on the Monday.

Of course, we didn't know anything about it until the following Friday.

It was as though a cloud had come over the house.

All the gaiety, the jollity and everything

had gone out of the house.

My grandmother always wore black after he died.

She never really recovered from it because she devoted her life to him.

No-one has worked harder to find out what really happened

than his niece, Siriol.

This was under my grandmother's bed, thick with dust.

To begin with, she more or less accepted a Foreign Office report

which concluded that Gareth's rescue had been bungled,

but he had after all gone at his own risk.

I believed everything I read to begin with.

Since then, I have questioned every word that they've said.

I don't know how much is true and how much isn't true

because I think some of it was made up.

The files she'd unearthed are kept here at the Public Record Office.

I went down to take a look for myself.

Closed for 50 years.

The documents were a fascinating echo of the politics of the day.

After the murder, Sylvester in Lloyd George's office

had written to enquire about rumours that the Japanese were behind it.

"Lloyd George."

"Suspicions that Germany and Japan

"have been trying to effect a military arrangement

"and they're most anxious that this information should not leak out."

That was the letters from Sylvester.

'Had Gareth picked up on the rumour? Was that why he was silenced?'

The Foreign Office just didn't want to know.

"We need not, perhaps, tell Mr Sylvester

"that this is the first kidnapping case

"which has occurred in this area in recent years, for he may take this

"as tending to confirm the suspicion of Japanese foul play."

For the British government, the best possible strategic outcome

is that Japan and Russia stay on this border,

eyeball to eyeball, and just deter each other.

'That meant not rocking the boat,

'which was just what the Foreign Office feared

'Lloyd George was likely to do.'

"I cannot help fearing that Lloyd George is looking for something

"out of which he can make political capital."

I think they wanted a cover-up.

They were worried that Lloyd George might go into Parliament

and embarrass His Majesty's government.

GUNSHOT

But it was her son Nigel

who'd uncovered what seemed to be the most illuminating material

about Gareth's enigmatic companions.

To my amazement, the British Intelligence had a dossier on Muller

from 1917 through to 1951. That's 34 years.

So when Muller's name was in the newspapers

about being kidnapped with Gareth,

there was another department of the British government

which had an ongoing dossier about him.

'And that dossier showed that British intelligence

'had long marked Muller down as a Soviet agent.'

"Muller was said to be a member of the Communist Party,

"working for the Third International,

"having instructions to try and organise propaganda

"amongst the Indian troops in China."

And a later document, closer to the time Gareth was kidnapped,

was even more incriminating.

This piece of evidence shows that

Muller could have been working for the Soviets and possibly the Germans.

It says that he was something of an adventurer, and unprincipled

and it's possible he would undertake any task

for a substantial consideration,

provided it was not directed against the interests of his own country.

-Double agent?

-He could have been a double agent.

And there was more to the elegant Adam Purpiss and his company Wostwag

than just trading with the Mongols.

"What we've discovered is that Wostwag

"was created by the Fourth Department in Berlin

"as cover for espionage activities

"of a large number of Fourth Department agents

"and to provide funds for the Fourth Department work."

The Fourth Department was a branch of Soviet military intelligence.

And Purpiss was a serious player,

who would have reported Gareth's presence to Moscow.

So dangerous, he did not survive it.

A few weeks before I went to China,

Siriol Colley had told me that she'd once been visited by a man

who said he'd been to the village where Gareth's body was found.

I managed to trace the man, Edward David,

to the Pyrenees, where he now lived.

He sent me some photographs.

This was the well we needed to find

to be sure we were in the right place.

There aren't many maps, and the maps we did find

didn't have tiny villages on them.

All we had was a name - Meng Jia Ying.

For two weeks, the bandits made Gareth ride with them

through this landscape. At what point, I wondered,

did he realise that his German friend was not coming back?

That his great adventure might end badly?

'As we got closer, we tried to compare what we were seeing

'with the photos Edward David had taken.'

Our arrival was big news

and we were taken off to meet the oldest man in the village.

Wang? Wang, xie-xie. Ni hao.

He didn't know much about the murder,

but he remembered the man who'd taken the photographs.

He's found a picture of himself.

Liang qian nian, ling san nian? 2004.

Philip and I had one last place we needed to find.

The Chinese police had said there'd been one witness of the killing -

a man from this village, who'd been tending his cows in fields nearby.

He saw the bandits gallop up

and he hid behind some trees or behind some mounds and he watched

and according to his story,

Gareth had fallen off his horse and refused to get back on

and the bandits shot him.

What an extraordinary ending

to an extraordinary life.

The boy from Barry.

The body was moved to a temple in the nearest town.

The man from the embassy reported, rather touchingly,

that he'd been identified by his hairy chest

and was lying in the best coffin available

with incense burning night and day.

MONK CHANTS

The bandits were killed before the coffin was moved,

and before the British could question them.

Armies set on war don't like nosy reporters, so Leonov may be right

to say he was killed for poking his nose into Japanese plans,

but the Soviet Secret Police have form too.

I believe that he was murdered by the Soviets, possibly as retribution.

For breaking the silence.

Both communism and fascism in those days

were peddling lies on a grand scale.

The lies had currency because people wanted to believe them.

But Gareth wasn't like other visitors to these cruel utopias.

He was intoxicated by power and access to powerful people,

but that did not make him blind.

People died in the fields around here,

they died along the roadsides, probably along this roadside,

there's no one place where you can say, "This is where it happened."

The whole country is dotted by crosses like this.

Gareth did what he had to do. He actually went out

into the countryside and took it in with his own eyes.

That's the simple and the amazing thing about him.

And that is his true epitaph.

A young man who dared to speak about this catastrophe

while those who also knew kept silent

for more than 50 years.

MOURNFUL UKRAINIAN SINGING

MUSIC: "Poor People" by Alan Price

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd