The Spies Who Loved Folkestone World War I at Home


The Spies Who Loved Folkestone

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The south-east coast of England, 100 years ago.

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As the Great War began,

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one town was turned on its head by a flood of troops and refugees.

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With its eddying currents of humanity, it became

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a hotbed of espionage which helped change the course of the war.

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The Germans couldn't stay in one place for more than a week

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before they were bombed.

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'And it became a natural home for the collection of information.'

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"Corpses, many of them horribly burnt, even in the trees."

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Oh, this is amazing stuff.

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'For the fruits of the latest spying techniques...'

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The mapmaker, it was said,

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could write 1,600 words on the back of a postage stamp.

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..and for an extraordinary cast of characters.

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The fact that he was a fraudster and a liar and a thief somehow

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transfers to actually being the guy we want to push forward

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once he gets out of jail.

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Characters who were ready to risk everything.

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And if they got caught, they were going to get shot.

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These are the spies who loved Folkestone.

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We all love stories about spies,

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and as an author, I've created one or two fictional spies myself.

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But when a country is at war, secret information is a serious matter.

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It is the key to victory and hundreds,

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maybe thousands of lives can depend on a few scant facts.

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Where armies use brute force, spies use their brains.

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They don't call it "intelligence" for nothing.

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Just before the war started,

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Folkestone was an ordinary coastal town.

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A place to enjoy the fun of the seaside.

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But that wasn't to last.

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Thousands of Belgian refugees fled across the Channel.

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In those days, the ferry went from Flushing in neutral Holland

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to Folkestone.

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Well, they were all pouring into this place.

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Little sleepy Folkestone found itself a hub for soldiers,

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for would-be soldiers, for spies and would-be spies.

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We're going to look at some remarkable characters.

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You might call them the spooks of the Great War,

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who operated out of Folkestone.

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They could easily be something out of a novel.

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And we begin with the spymaster lurking in the shadows -

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Major Cecil Aylmer Cameron.

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He was certainly an interesting choice for this particular job.

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The thing about Cecil Cameron was that he had form.

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In fact, he'd been involved in something of a national scandal.

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A few years earlier, his Army career seemed to be going well.

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Good evening, sir, how do you do?

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But he and his wife needed money,

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and they hatched a plot involving a string of pearls.

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They had rented a pearl necklace worth £6,500.

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-An awful lot in today's money, of course.

-Absolutely, in those days.

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And they'd insured the necklace. And then lost it somehow.

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They were done for an insurance fraud, basically.

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Cecil Aylmer Cameron and his wife were convicted in Edinburgh.

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They both got three years.

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And that was all happening in Scotland.

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And because Aylmer Cameron was the son of an Indian Army hero,

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a man who had the VC, the officer class in London

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decided this was some sort of Scottish stitch-up.

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The fact that he was a fraudster and a liar and a thief

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somehow transfers, because of this officer-class attitude,

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to actually being the guy we want to push forward

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once he gets out of jail.

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Once he was out of jail, about the only option available to him

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was the shadowy world of espionage.

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When he first got back to London he was foisted on

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Mansfield Cumming, who was the head of what we now call MI6,

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but then was called MI 1c,

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where he completely messed up, he was absolutely useless,

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and he really, really upset everyone around him.

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But the officer class in the Army still thought

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he was a first-rate chap.

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So they took him off MI 1c and put him in charge

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of Military Intelligence in Folkestone.

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And despite Cameron's lack of people skills,

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he did set up a highly effective spy network.

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Jim Beach from the University of Northampton

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is an advisor to the Military Intelligence Museum.

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And here they have some surviving agent reports

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which would have passed through Cameron's hands.

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What we have here are instructions and also reports,

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written on tissue paper so they can be easily secreted about the person.

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And also very easy to dispose of the paper

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if you thought you were at risk of being caught.

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And then what we have from Folkestone itself,

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a sort of typed-up version,

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and we see here train movements and it's report CF -

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Cameron Folkestone - 759, issued on 21 March 1917.

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In the Grand Hotel in Folkestone,

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I've enrolled in our very own low-tech spy school.

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Here I'm learning that some spies would smuggle messages

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using nothing more than a candle and a small fruit.

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One of the ways in which secret writing was undertaken

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was by the use of lemon juice.

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Here's the candle.

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-Oh, can I do this?

-You can do that.

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Something is happening. Look, letters are forming

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in front of our eyes.

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It says "Meet at the... G-R-A," it looks like.

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At the Grand. It's here. Meet at the Grand!

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So somebody has sent me

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a secret message on a bill to meet at the Grand in lemon juice.

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-This is what they used to do in the First World War?

-Exactly.

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A German called Carl Muller was caught spying in Folkestone

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when his letters were found to contain messages...

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in invisible ink.

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One gave details of troops in the town.

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So to fight back, what Major Cameron really needed were refugees

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who could learn techniques like this and be turned into spies.

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When I wrote a series of books about a teenage spy called Alex Rider,

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I never dreamed that there had once been a real-life original.

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But there was.

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In 1915, a 17-year-old Belgian refugee arrived

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in Folkestone Harbour. The boy's name was Leon Trulin.

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As soon as he arrived, he tried to join the Belgian Army in exile,

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only to be turned away because he was too short.

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He said, "Perhaps I can offer my services as a spy."

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Which is exactly what he did. He went back across the Channel.

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He got his friends,

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some of them 15 or 16 years of age, to spy on the Germans.

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The were known as the Glorious Teenagers.

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And yet, they were highly effective in bringing back information

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here to Folkestone.

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Him and his child spies, they did invaluable work,

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and as I say, all brought back to Folkestone,

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collated here and used by the British Army to attack the Germans.

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It was a big adventure,

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it was an extremely dangerous adventure because they were going

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behind enemy lines, and if they got caught, they were going to get shot.

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There are still some remains of Folkestone's secret spying history,

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if you know where to look for them.

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This building overlooking the harbour was once

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the German Consulate.

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And it had this room at the top with all these windows.

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It would've been perfect for the Germans.

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They would've had an excellent view of the harbour

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and all the British troop movements going on below.

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Sadly for the Germans, but hardly surprisingly,

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the Consulate was closed down when war broke out.

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This building, 8 Marine Parade,

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was a fashionable hotel until the end of 1915,

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when suddenly, almost overnight, it vanishes from the records

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and nobody speaks about it again.

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That's because it had become the headquarters

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of Army intelligence here in Folkestone.

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By a strange coincidence,

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the building is now owned by a current serving Army officer -

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Lieutenant Colonel Martin Neame.

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So here we have the entrance hall to what was a hotel.

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I'm afraid it's very derelict, which is why I've purchased it

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to turn it into flats.

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Presumably, you knew nothing of its history.

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No, nothing - this is all a big surprise.

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It must have had a great contribution

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towards the winning of the war, I assume.

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Oh, they say that these spies saved hundreds

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if not thousands of British lives, absolutely.

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'Inside this building,

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'the day-to-day business of espionage would take place.'

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You've got the head of the office,

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Cameron, who was there in terms of direction.

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And then he would've had a series of junior officers

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working beneath him who are either out of the office,

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doing recruitment and training and liaison.

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Then they would also have officers who would be decoding

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and sorting out the reporting.

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And what you would also have would be connections and visits

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from your representatives in the Netherlands

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who would then be operating agents on your behalf.

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And being yourself a serving lieutenant colonel

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in the British Army, just back from Afghanistan,

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that's quite a coincidence.

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How do you feel about owning a piece of British military history?

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It's fantastic, actually.

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I was quite taken aback. I had no idea.

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I really just looked at the property as being an investment

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from the perspective of buying and doing it up,

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turning it into flats and bringing it back into use.

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But the fact that it has some sort of military history as well

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is just outstanding.

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And it's inside this building where one special spy

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would have been taught the tricks of the trade.

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Not a Belgian refugee this time, but a well-connected French woman.

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Her name was Louise de Bettignies.

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Louise de Bettignies was the daughter

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of quite a well-known family with aristocratic origins,

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who had fallen on hard times.

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She was from a small town near Lille in northern France.

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She was partly educated in England and spoke several languages.

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Lille was invaded by the Germans in October 1914.

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Louise was so devastated when she saw the damage

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that, as a patriot of France,

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she decided to do whatever she could to fight back.

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She was passing through Folkestone

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and, of course, she was spotted straightaway

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as perfect spy material.

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She was university-educated, she was well-connected,

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she spoke several languages and she was female.

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What could be better?

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And so Louise was trained in all the latest spying techniques

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and was put on a boat straight back to France.

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One of the names she operated under was Alice Dubois,

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and she recruited a ring of female spies

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called the Alice Network.

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They would, for instance, send information back

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about where the German military units were sited.

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The Germans couldn't stay in one place

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for more than a week before they were bombed

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because all the information was coming back to Folkestone.

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Louise's great nephew is Bertin de Bettignies.

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And of course, the memory of what she achieved

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is kept alive in the family.

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HE SPEAKS FRENCH

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One resistance fighter, a Monsieur Sion,

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refused to believe that this rather delicate-looking woman

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was really working undercover for British military intelligence.

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He wanted proof.

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So he added his own note to the bottom of one of her spy reports

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that she said was going to be sent back to Folkestone.

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Monsieur Sion Sr wrote,

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"If this person is who she says she is,

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"could you please bomb a particular place

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"on a particular day at a particular time."

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One was a munitions dump,

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I think that the other was... a gun emplacement or something.

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So she took her message to Flushing and it was taken over to Folkestone.

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And at the appointed time, appointed hour,

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hey presto - the bombs fell.

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-And they never questioned her again?

-They never questioned her again.

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One technique Louise used to smuggle secret reports

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was to stitch tiny messages into her clothing.

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She was lucky enough to have a friend who was a mapmaker.

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Most of Louise's messages that came over here to Folkestone

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came in the form of this very small writing.

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The mapmaker, it was said,

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could write 1,600 words on the back of a postage stamp.

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Major Cameron wasn't the only person operating an espionage network

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out of Folkestone. Another spy turned up with the perfect cover.

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After all, who would suspect a priest?

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Father Pierre Marie Cavrois O'Caffrey

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was a priest of Irish-French descent.

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He had already been working as a spy in northern France.

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And just like other intelligence organisations,

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he realised that the Flushing to Folkestone ferry

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could be a vital source of information.

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He sees all these Belgian refugees around him,

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he suddenly thinks, "Well, actually,

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"if we had an office in Folkestone,

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"we could collect intelligence from these guys

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"and we could send them back."

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After all, the Belgian refugees knew where all the enemy troops were,

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because that's what they were running from.

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So O'Caffrey would board all steamers from Holland

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asking questions.

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And from there, it was a small step to send some of them back

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to work as spies for him.

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And so Father O'Caffrey set up his own network of agents,

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regularly transmitting very useful information across the Channel.

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How do we know this?

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Because his files have surfaced here at the National Archives.

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'Phil Tomaselli discovered several large files

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'relating to the work of O'Caffrey

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'at the National Archives in Kew in Surrey.'

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These are the actual field reports that O'Caffrey's spies sent back.

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They should've been kept secret in the MI6 archives

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but they somehow ended up in the more public National Archives.

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But even then, it wasn't easy for Phil

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to get some of the documents released by the authorities.

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They normally take six weeks to be opened -

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they took nine months on this one.

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I kept getting letters,

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saying, "We are having to refer it to another department."

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So I said, "I know he's a spy, I can prove it.

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"I know he worked for MI6, I can prove it."

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And they kept delaying. Eventually, they opened the file

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and they have taken a couple of pages out,

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copied them and carefully blanked the information

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they didn't want me to see.

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But the pages we're going to look at here have never been seen before?

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These ones have not been seen before.

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-That's exciting.

-THEY CHUCKLE

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Many of the documents are daily reports coming in about aviation.

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So they're telling you what's going on in the various aerodromes.

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How many aeroplanes were flying.

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Where the Zeppelins were at any one time.

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Suggesting targets.

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In Ghent, there's a factory that is repairing machine guns,

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good idea to bomb that.

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'So how was this information getting across the Channel?

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'Well, back at the School for Spies,

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'I'm learning that one incredibly simple but effective technique

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'is to use a template.

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'This seems to be a perfectly innocent letter.

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'But if the writer and the reader both have the same template,

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'significant words can be buried inside the writing.'

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This is interesting.

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Here is Frederick writing to Annette,

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making reference to Aunt Nancy.

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Ah, but it's not Nancy the name of the person -

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it's Nancy, the little town in France.

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-I think you're right.

-Subtle, very clever.

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So it says "14 reserved division at Nancy, the 20th depleted."

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Absolutely.

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Presumably, the spymasters knew

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exactly what was meant by that message.

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And of course, if it meant they were depleted,

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or would be depleted, on the 20th, what a good day to mount an attack.

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So at this time, Major Cameron was running a network for the Army

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while O'Caffrey was running a completely separate network

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for the Navy.

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But this doubling up was a good thing.

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It works much better to have separate networks

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where people don't know each other.

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So if the Germans roll one network over,

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the other network's still there.

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Some of the reports really do stop you in your tracks.

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Like this one about the Germans' new secret weapon -

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the invisible aeroplanes.

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It says that in Dusseldorf, 30th July 1915,

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"Yesterday we had an opportunity of convincing ourselves

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"that the new aeroplanes are practically invisible.

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"The wings of the aeroplane are made of a new substance called Cellon."

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They must have been really rather worried.

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And it turns out that the reports were actually true.

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But they needn't have worried.

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It didn't really work as a camouflage,

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and the invisible aeroplane, in a sense, disappeared.

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The spies would have to get information

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from occupied Belgium into neutral Holland.

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But the Germans had built

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an enormous electrified fence on the border.

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So how do we get messages across that fence?

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You throw something - tell me.

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You could throw something - what sort of things would you throw?

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If it was me, I would throw...

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..hollowed-out vegetables.

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Ah! Yes...

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Possibly some little sack of some sort?

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I don't know, you tell me.

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Because, don't forget,

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the land on either side of this border, high-voltage fence,

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was agricultural land.

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-Ah, right.

-And British intelligence...

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Oh, my God, don't tell me I was right? I was right!

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-It was a mangelwurtzel - what is it?

-A turnip.

-A turnip!

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They would...is one of these hollow?

0:21:510:21:54

I don't know, is it?

0:21:540:21:55

Surely not. I want to tear this open, now.

0:21:550:21:59

They all seem to be completely intact.

0:21:590:22:01

-Oh, dear, that's disappointing.

-No, there's nothing unscrewing.

0:22:010:22:04

Tell me, how do we find the message?

0:22:040:22:06

That's, of course, exactly what we want.

0:22:060:22:08

Had you been a suspicious German policeman

0:22:080:22:11

and looked at them, you haven't discovered what is...

0:22:110:22:14

Let's use our pen - it's useful for many things.

0:22:160:22:20

Uncork it and pull out...

0:22:200:22:22

Oh, to pull it out. This is so great.

0:22:220:22:24

And they just threw that over the fence,

0:22:250:22:27

and then collected it, took it home, took out the message.

0:22:270:22:31

And that found its way across Holland to Flushing onto the boat

0:22:310:22:37

which brought it all the way to Folkestone

0:22:370:22:40

where Cecil Cameron would read it.

0:22:400:22:42

And back in the National Archives,

0:22:450:22:47

there is one report received by O'Caffrey

0:22:470:22:49

which seems to leap off the page.

0:22:490:22:51

It describes how a British plane attacked a Zeppelin at Gontrode

0:22:530:22:57

on 7th June 1915 at 2.15am.

0:22:570:23:02

"Flames burst out of the airship and were soon seen to envelop it.

0:23:020:23:06

"Two terrific explosions were heard

0:23:060:23:08

"and the airship, broken in two, was crushed down to the ground."

0:23:080:23:11

Oh - "Corpses, many of them horribly burnt and charred,

0:23:110:23:14

"were seen amidst the debris, others on the roof

0:23:140:23:16

"and even in the trees."

0:23:160:23:18

This is amazing stuff.

0:23:180:23:19

"It was said that a corpse

0:23:190:23:20

"fell right through the roof

0:23:200:23:22

"of the 'Cafe St Amand'

0:23:220:23:24

"and was found horribly mutilated

0:23:240:23:26

"in the kitchen of that establishment."

0:23:260:23:28

-Yes.

-Spoilt someone's dinner, I bet.

0:23:280:23:30

"During the day,

0:23:300:23:31

"little boys were selling pieces of the wrecked Zeppelin

0:23:310:23:34

"to the inhabitants."

0:23:340:23:37

That's an extraordinary piece of writing for a dry official report.

0:23:370:23:41

O'Caffrey was gathering intelligence like this

0:23:410:23:43

in parallel to the work of Cameron's agents.

0:23:430:23:46

And of course, given what Cameron was like, the two did not get on.

0:23:460:23:50

I know that you write mainly factual books, but the way you talk,

0:23:510:23:54

this all sounds like an extraordinary piece of fiction -

0:23:540:23:57

it does sound stranger than life.

0:23:570:24:00

You've got a wonderful protagonist in O'Caffrey

0:24:000:24:04

and you've got a wonderful antagonist in Aylmer Cameron.

0:24:040:24:07

The whole story is just brilliant - you don't even need the Germans.

0:24:070:24:12

You've got the hero and villain already.

0:24:120:24:14

There's no doubt that all the spies we've encountered

0:24:190:24:21

inflicted huge damage on the enemy.

0:24:210:24:24

But what became of them?

0:24:240:24:26

Louise de Bettignies was arrested by the Germans

0:24:260:24:29

near Tournai in Belgium on 20th October 1915.

0:24:290:24:33

She had been operational for just nine months.

0:24:330:24:36

We think she was tortured.

0:24:360:24:39

I'm sure she was.

0:24:390:24:41

But she never gave anybody away,

0:24:410:24:44

she remained silent and stoical.

0:24:440:24:46

At first, she was condemned to death.

0:24:470:24:50

Then her sentence was commuted to a life of forced labour.

0:24:500:24:54

But while in prison, she fell seriously ill.

0:24:540:24:57

She had, first of all, pneumonia,

0:24:570:24:59

which developed into pleurisy with an abscess.

0:24:590:25:03

And they refused to let her go to hospital

0:25:030:25:05

to have the operation, she had to stay in the prison.

0:25:050:25:08

She died in 1918.

0:25:110:25:13

There is a memorial to her

0:25:130:25:15

in the military cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette

0:25:150:25:17

near Lille in northern France.

0:25:170:25:19

The name of Louise de Bettignies is almost completely forgotten now,

0:25:220:25:26

but she almost certainly did as much to save British lives

0:25:260:25:29

as any secret agent in the Great War.

0:25:290:25:31

Leon Trulin was caught on the frontier near Antwerp

0:25:350:25:38

trying to re-enter Belgium.

0:25:380:25:40

Leon was arrested by the Germans and brought to the very spot

0:25:410:25:45

where I'm standing now

0:25:450:25:46

and executed by firing squad.

0:25:460:25:48

He was 18 years old.

0:25:480:25:50

Leon Trulin wrote to his mother in his last letter,

0:25:520:25:56

"I forgive the Germans. They did their duty.

0:25:560:25:59

"But they have been very harsh on me."

0:25:590:26:01

O'Caffrey went on to work for what became MI6.

0:26:040:26:07

We know that he went to Greece

0:26:070:26:09

and got married on a forged British passport.

0:26:090:26:11

At the outbreak of the Second World War,

0:26:110:26:13

he rejoined the Navy.

0:26:130:26:15

Doing what exactly, nobody knows.

0:26:150:26:18

No photograph of him is known to exist.

0:26:180:26:20

And Major Cecil Aylmer Cameron had a mysterious fate.

0:26:280:26:32

Although his work did more to help the war effort

0:26:320:26:34

than most Army officers,

0:26:340:26:36

no photograph of him is known to exist either.

0:26:360:26:39

And for reasons that are not clear, he shot himself in 1924.

0:26:390:26:44

So would it be true to say that, in one sense,

0:26:460:26:49

what we now call MI6 and modern spying

0:26:490:26:52

began in Folkestone?

0:26:520:26:54

MI6 had existed a little bit before that and ran a few agents.

0:26:540:26:58

But when it comes to running big networks,

0:26:580:27:01

O'Caffrey's was one of the first.

0:27:010:27:04

So in a sense, yes.

0:27:040:27:06

It is the start of MI6's agent networks

0:27:060:27:10

that spread right the way throughout the world during the war

0:27:100:27:12

and which are still there today.

0:27:120:27:14

When we look back at the First World War,

0:27:140:27:16

we think of poppies, muddy fields, the trenches of northern France.

0:27:160:27:21

But that's only part of the truth.

0:27:210:27:23

Walking through a town like this,

0:27:230:27:25

it's all too easy to forget that the war was fought here too.

0:27:250:27:28

100 years ago, Folkestone had a vital part to play

0:27:280:27:33

in the secret work done by brave men, women and children.

0:27:330:27:38

And even now, it's impossible to say how many lives they saved.

0:27:380:27:43

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