Traitors and Spies Portillo's State Secrets

One thousand years of history under one roof -

the National Archives, a treasure house of secrets.

The records of extraordinary times and people.

These files are this nation's story, our shared past.

Documents housed here were highly classified,

intended for the eyes of only the privileged few.

Protected from your sight for decades.

But not now.

I've been granted special access to files once kept hush-hush.

I'll unearth amazing tales from our hidden history.

Forget what you've been told - these documents tell the truth.

Coming up in this programme - traitors and spies.

How the Gunpowder Plot was foiled

and how the best-known conspirator confessed.

This is a terrible instrument of torture.

Guy Fawkes was secured by the wrists here and by the ankles there.

The fictional agent and his real-life inspiration.

How close do you think SOE was to James Bondism?

I think one of the closest parallels you can draw are

some of the devices that SOE produced.

And many of these were extraordinary.

And the not-so-great escape.

The secret file on the jailbreak by one of our most notorious traitors.

The rope ladder, enormous rope ladder which

could loop over the wall on one side

and come down the other side with knitting needles for rungs.

MUSIC: Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols

The face that launched a thousand protests.

The image that's become associated with disorder and even anarchy.

Because the real man represented by this mask aimed at

nothing short of the complete destruction of the British state.

And on the 5th of November 1605, he nearly achieved it.

MUSIC CONTINUES

The failure of Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators to blow up the

Houses of Parliament turned him into the ultimate antihero.

And today he remains the supreme traitor,

to be ritually punished, year after year.

His arrest and torture are part of our history, but the role

that the King played in his brutal interrogation has rarely been told.

Inside the National Archives, the entire story is laid bare.

These extraordinary documents tell us how the King gave his

instructions for the interrogation of Guy Fawkes - 16 questions.

Where he was born, what were his parents' names, what age he is of,

how he hath lived, by what trade of life, if he was ever in service.

Now that was an important question,

because he had in fact served with the Spanish Catholic forces

before returning to England to carry out the plot.

Torture was not legal and this secret note implicates

the King in the sordid business of extracting a confession.

He says here at the end,

"If he will not other ways confess, the gentler tortures are to

"be first used unto him and 'Sic per gradus ad ima tenditur'.

"And ever by degrees to the worst.

"And so God speed your good work."

Signed James R.

Can you imagine a head of state today putting

his or her signature to such a document?

For the Protestant King James, this was intensely personal.

The Gunpowder Plot was a treasonous attempt by Catholic plotters

to assassinate him and his entire government.

When Fawkes was discovered in cellars beneath Parliament, he was

within hours of lighting the fuse that would blow the building apart.

The torture authorised and encouraged

by the King four centuries ago would occur here.

The Tower of London instilled terror in those brought for interrogation

or execution.

But if Guy Fawkes was frightened, he didn't show it.

He was amazingly defiant.

And not only was he defiant, he was making racist comments

about the King's Scottish origins and he said he wished that the

explosive had gone off so he could blast all Scotsmen back to Scotland.

Er, and the King was, despite himself, very impressed by

this show of bravado

and he commented to his courtiers afterwards that

he'd been a fine, strapping, defiant brave fellow.

But nevertheless, he gave personal orders that,

starting with the gentler methods,

more and more extreme methods of torture should be used on Fawkes.

As he was led through the Tower, Guy Fawkes would have known

what torment to expect.

The rack was amongst the most notorious of

the Tower's inhuman devices.

This is a terrible instrument of torture.

Guy Fawkes was secured by the wrists here and by the ankles there.

The torturer, by means of this lever, was able to rotate this

roller in that direction, and that in the other,

so that Guy Fawkes's body was gradually drawn apart,

dislocating his limbs, causing ruptures to the internal organs.

There's grim handwritten evidence in documents

about the effectiveness of such unspeakable suffering.

Have you ever thought what is the impact on a man of torture?

Well, here us an indication in this very precious

and very valuable and delicate document.

Here, on the 7th of November,

he signs a document clearly,

legibly, firmly,

Guido Fawkes.

Then he's pulled apart on the rack

for two full days.

On the 9th of November,

he's forced to sign another declaration.

Ha!

The effect of the pain.

He's named Robert Catesby,

John Grant,

Thomas Wintour

as co-conspirators,

and he's signed his confession,

but not the strong, clear,

confident hand of 48 hours before.

No, now it is the feeblest, weakest,

scarcely perceptible signature.

Such has been the impact of the torment on him.

Fawkes and the other conspirators were put on trial

in January 1606.

The King watched in secret

as the list of charges was read out against the plotters.

Even though Fawkes pleaded not guilty,

the verdict was never in doubt -

guilty of high treason!

Despite his dislocated limbs,

there was enough life left in Guy Fawkes

for a public execution.

He was dragged from the Tower of London

and through the streets of the capital,

to a place where, as the law prescribed,

he would be first hanged and then disembowelled.

And the site of his execution

was to be the very place that he'd tried to blow up,

the Palace of Westminster.

After the hanging and the quartering

came the scattering.

Fawkes' body parts were distributed

to the four corners of the kingdom.

King James was determined to send out a message

to other would-be traitors,

wherever they might lurk.

Today, any revelation that the state's authorities

are complicit in the use of torture

causes a scandal.

But in 1605,

the country celebrated the King's survival.

It wasn't squeamish about the agonies endured by the traitors.

Remember, remember the 5th of November...

and the man whose grisly end is commemorated

whenever we burn a guy.

My next story from the archives concerns the most audacious

fake ID in history.

Today, we still honour the heroism of our armed forces

in the Second World War.

Alongside the Army, Royal Navy and RAF

was another vital organisation that worked in secret.

The Special Operations Executive,

or SOE,

was set up by Churchill to conduct reconnaissance,

espionage and sabotage

in Nazi-occupied Europe.

This top-secret file gives a clue

to the SOE's extraordinary skill

in deceiving the enemy.

During World War II,

they produced documents for spies

and for those escaping from the Nazi regime,

for all of the occupied countries.

This book is full of their forgeries.

They produced literally hundreds of thousands of forged documents

and they enlisted, for the purpose,

people who, in pre-war life, had been criminals,

master forgers who were able to reproduce

every crest and stamp,

and impersonate every piece of type.

This magnificent,

meticulous work

must have made an important contribution to our war effort.

The SOE became so expert at forging Nazi official documents

that it couldn't resist showing off.

I have in my hands

a Deutsches Reich Reisepass,

a German Reich's passport,

issued during World War II.

It's stamped with a J,

as required by Nazi law,

indicating that the holder is, in fact, a Jew.

He is a painter by profession

and under "distinguishing features",

it notes that he has a small moustache.

This person has, in fact, emigrated to Palestine,

admitted through the port of Haifa on the 19th of July 1941.

The holder's name is Adolf Hitler.

Here is his photograph and his signature.

This is, of course, a hoax,

a forgery, a joke.

But a forgery perfect in every detail.

It is a playful spoof by the Special Operations Executive

to demonstrate that they were capable of forging anything.

The SOE's work was secret during wartime

and so it remained for decades afterwards.

Now, these files enable us to glimpse its breathtaking activities.

I must say, I was astonished when I saw this forged passport

of Hitler as a Jew.

What was your reaction when you saw it?

Well, it's a surprise to see it.

At the same time,

I think it's a very impressive piece of documentation.

It's a great example, I think, of the ingenuity

that the British had at that time of the war

and the resources that they had, as well.

So they had the fantastic skills of production.

The fake Hitler passport was a private joke within the SOE.

But the organisation had serious designs on the German Fuehrer.

There's a very famous plot called Operation Foxley.

That was to kill Adolf Hitler

and SOE put this into motion in 1944

and they spent several months gathering information

and trying to work out various forms of killing him.

But, in the end, the war really sort of, um...

the momentum of the war took over

and the operation was never given the green light.

The SOE did get the go-ahead

to unite resistance movements in German-occupied countries.

It also set Europe ablaze

and devised deceptions that bought the Nazis to their knees.

But, apart from helping Britain to victory,

the Special Operations Executive provided us with another legacy.

The fact that its boss, one Brigadier Colin Gubbins,

went by the code name M should give you a clue.

A young Ian Fleming, later to be the author who invented James Bond,

worked closely with the real-life M

and it's clear that the SOE's inventiveness

was an inspiration for him as he conceived Q's gadgets and gizmos,

such an entertaining feature of movies like Goldfinger.

You'll find a little red button.

Whatever you do, don't touch it.

And why not?

Because you'll release this section of the roof

and engage and then fire the passenger ejector seat.

How close do you think SOE was to James Bondism?

I think one of the closest parallels you can draw

are some of the devices that SOE produced to assist its agents

in the work that they had to do in enemy territory.

And many of these were extraordinary.

They started off, for example, with lipsticks

which were converted to hold written messages right at the start.

And then they move on to things like explosive rats, for example.

Rats?

Explosive rats, which were...

Where they would take the carcass of a rat and the skin of a rat

and they would take out the insides, scrape out all the insides,

replace that with explosives and then leave the rat lying around,

perhaps in a marshalling yard or in a factory,

in the hope that a worker would come along and idly pick up this rat

and throw it into a local furnace

and then the furnace would explode, causing damage.

Its influence lives on in the Bond movies.

But the SOE was dissolved officially in January 1946,

no longer needed, it seemed, in peacetime.

I've had the privilege of seeing the file with Hitler's passport here.

Do you think we know all about SOE now?

No, I don't think so.

I don't think we'll ever know the full story of SOE.

A lot of documents were destroyed after the war,

so it's incredible, in fact,

that some of these documents, like this one, like Hitler's passport,

do survive today.

But, sadly, for every Hitler's passport,

there may be a dozen other documents that don't exist.

Very intriguing.

Espionage achieved another golden era

at the height of the Cold War,

when British intelligence services pitted their wits

against the Soviet KGB.

The West had its agents, the Russians had theirs.

What both sides feared were the double agents,

people thought to be working for us,

who were, actually, supplying secrets to the other side.

George Blake was one of Britain's most notorious double agents.

Recruited by MI6 during the Second World War,

he later offered his services to the KGB

and betrayed dozens of British agents.

When he was discovered, Blake was tried for treason,

found guilty

and jailed for 42 years,

one of the longest sentences in British legal history.

But just five years into that term,

Blake escaped over the wall of London's Wormwood Scrubs Prison.

-REPORTER:

-It's believed that he got out of B Block,

where he is housed with 320 other long-term first offenders,

by smashing a window and sawing through an iron bar.

Blake's escape was highly embarrassing for the British state.

How could it lose one of its most infamous prisoners,

a notorious traitor?

Not surprisingly, the authorities wanted to keep their failings quiet.

But now they can be revealed.

Here is the secret file on the way that he was being treated in prison.

"During the first part of Blake's sentence,

"he was treated with as much consideration as was consistent

"with preventing his escape."

Ho-ho...!

"The object being to see whether

"as favourable treatment as possible

"might persuade him to cooperate with the security services

"in making disclosures.

For a while, the authorities must have thought

their approach was the right one.

Blake appeared to be a model prisoner.

They didn't know that he was planning his great escape,

communicating with an accomplice on the outside

with a walkie-talkie that had been smuggled in.

It seems to me that the security services

had always underestimated George Blake

and so it was possible for him to escape.

These police reports document what is known

of the events of that night.

It's clear that the authorities have no idea where Blake is.

"Estimation of time varies enormously in prison,

"but I can find no tangible evidence

"of Blake's whereabouts after 6pm."

The prison authorities, so complacent about their inmate,

don't even know where he's meant to be

and, therefore, aren't sure whether he's escaped.

In the interval, they have discovered a ladder,

which has been thrown over the prison wall from the outside.

"This ladder had 20 rungs, each about a foot apart.

"Each rung was reinforced

"with Milward steel knitting needles, size 13,

"which are very thin and pliable and covered with grey plastic material."

The identification of Blake as the escaped prisoner is made quite late.

"At 8.10pm, Chief Officer Whittaker handed the police

"a photograph of George Blake,

"taken in prison on the 2nd of January 1965.

"This was the first time that it became known with certainty

"that the escaped prisoner was, in fact, George Blake, the spy."

"The conclusions of this report are that George Blake,

"by reason of his long sentence,

"had nothing whatsoever to lose by escaping

"and was, therefore, a potential escaper at all times.

"The structural condition of HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs

"presents no problem to a person determined to escape."

The British authorities had entrusted

one of their most important spies to an insecure prison.

These files represent a comedy of incompetence.

The people who helped Blake to escape weren't professionals,

as the authorities assumed.

Once he'd made it to the other side of the wall,

Blake had a new set of problems.

In fact, the escape turned into something of a farce.

His accomplices, Michael Randle, Pat Pottle and Sean Bourke

were not crack KGB agents.

They were, actually, three former inmates,

who'd met Blake in Wormwood Scrubs.

Their plan to spring him was high on daring but low on detail.

This is slightly the shambolic bit about it, I suppose.

It's a very long rope ladder.

It has knitting needles for rungs.

And so, it's thrown over.

What they didn't realise, or what they'd forgotten about,

is when Blake gets to the top there and looks down

the 20 feet down the other side,

he can't come down on the ladder

because there's nothing to secure it at the top,

there's no hook or anything like that.

They'd forgotten about that.

So, he jumps.

And, as he jumps, he twists a little bit in midair.

When he lands on the ground here, he lands on his wrist,

his face gets injured,

but his wrist is very badly broken.

Sean Bourke bundled Blake into a getaway car.

Destination? A safe house a short distance from the prison.

But minutes later, near-disaster struck again.

It's raining, so the visibility isn't great.

The windows are all steamed up

and Bourke drives his car into the back of the car in front

as they approach a passenger crossing.

And the driver gets out to remonstrate with Bourke,

but Bourke isn't having any of it.

He has to get to that safe house as quick as possible.

Blake made it to a bedsit half a mile from the jail.

But when this proved unsuitable,

the gang had to move him to a number of other addresses.

His escape was very big news and a huge manhunt was underway.

With the police issuing an all-ports alert,

Blake's accomplices now faced the problem

of smuggling him out of Britain.

Gang member Mike Randle came up with an unusual, even bizarre, plan.

Michael Randle had read a book about an American journalist,

who'd wanted to go into the Deep South

to investigate racial segregation

and he'd taken this drug that changed the colour of his skin.

And the thought was, how are we going to get Blake out of the country?

We need to disguise him, perhaps.

Shall we go and find this drug?

See if we can get enough quantities of this drug

to change the colour of his skin

to make him look, if not black, Arabic, perhaps.

In December 1966, eight weeks after the prison escape,

the gang made their move.

They got hold of a camper van and fitted it with a secret compartment

in which Blake could hide.

They took a ferry at Dover, sailed to Ostend

and drove all the way to East Germany.

Despite all the pitfalls along the way,

Blake had made it to his destination,

the Communist bloc.

George Blake's escape from Wormwood Scrubs

reads like a rollicking good spy novel,

full of action and intrigue

and somewhat unbelievable characters.

But, for the British authorities,

there was nothing entertaining about it.

He had betrayed Allied agents,

allegedly leading to the deaths of many.

And nothing more undermines or corrodes an intelligence service

than suspicion and paranoia.

That fear that you can trust nobody.

To appreciate Britain's discomfort over this whole episode,

we have to remember that this happened in the mid-1960s.

Just how sensitive would this case have been during that era?

I'm making contact with a source.

Well, we're at the heart of the Cold War in this period, the '60s.

The British and the West,

the Americans and West

don't know what the Russians are doing.

The Russians don't know

what the British and the Americans are doing.

Spies are extremely important,

because you're trying to gather intelligence on...

particularly from the West side,

on a very, very secretive world.

It's difficult to get around in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc.

It's difficult to find out information in any...

..any normal way, as you would now.

MI6 was reeling from the discovery

that there were other double agents in the so-called Cambridge spy ring.

Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt were all traitors.

But some think that the most dangerous of all was George Blake.

I think he probably did more damage

in terms of direct damage than Philby.

Philby did an awful lot of damage

and it's difficult to get to the heart of that.

But, in terms of what he gave away, in immediate terms,

Blake was more...was worse, yeah.

What does it do for the reputation of the British state

that a man like Blake hops out of Wormwood Scrubs

on a ladder made of knitting needles and escapes in a camper van

and walks across the Iron Curtain?

Well, it was the final humiliation, really, wasn't it?

This man had destroyed our networks in East Germany,

he had been one of the worst traitors

inside our most secretive organisation, MI6,

and, suddenly, like a will-o'-the-wisp,

he disappears from the country,

out of one of our, supposedly, safest jails.

Blake may have made it to his communist masters,

but they were the losers in the Cold War.

Today, he lives in Moscow on a KGB pension,

with no wish to return home.

The prison that he escaped from remains operational,

with tighter security, I hope,

than that described in those embarrassing once-secret files.

The towering walls of Wormwood Scrubs...

Pretty daunting, you would think.

Unless, of course, you were as determined, ruthless, brave,

as good at organising a conspiracy as was George Blake.

In which case, these walls would be about as effective

as a picket fence.

Today's documents shine a light into the dark world of espionage.

Guy Fawkes' bold plot was foiled by state intelligence

and his mangled body dangled from a rope close to this spot.

The Tower had proved a more secure prison for him

than Wormwood Scrubs would be for George Blake.

British forgeries during World War II

were another spy success.

But to stamp "Jew"

on the counterfeit passport of Adolf Hitler,

who ordered the Holocaust, one of the worst mass murderers of history,

was surely an example of gallows humour.