Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A luxurious resort in america

that conceals a top secret facility.

If this door was actually being opened,

it would mean something very dramatic was happening outside

and many millions of lives in the us would be in danger.

A mysterious complex in Bali that's hard to place.

If you think of it as sort of a Jurassic park meets disneyworld,

you wouldn't be too far off.

A mighty stronghold in Belgium that fell victim to a daring raid.

Swiftly and silently they prepared to blast their way

in to what was then one of the biggest buildings

in all of Europe.

And a forlorn compound near Jerusalem

that emerged from a moment of hope.

This was a time of optimism

and the building represented that.

Decaying relics.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Sites haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

(Theme music)

On the southern tip of the tropical island of Bali

lies a collection of ramshackle structures

with a mystical past.

From the air over this site

you see the jungle reclaiming all kinds of buildings

which don't appear to be in use any more.

This place is really quite beautiful in its own way.

There are lots of trees around

and you have this classical eastern architecture.

You can see one large building with this arched roof.

Only it's been burnt out, only the shell survives.

This place is full of spiritual iconography,

statues of half-dragon, half-serpent figures,

which suggest religious connotations.

These buildings are designed to intrigue,

but this place isn't quite what it might seem.

The whole place is covered from head to toe in street art.

Now, if it was indeed spiritual, surely that wouldn't be there.

This place is where you feel like

you're walking in a ruin of something ancient,

but then you realise that's kind of a facade,

that in fact everything is relatively recent,

it was just built to look old.

The biggest part of that facade

is this enormous lump of earth covered in trees

and towering over the rest of the site,

it looks like it's a hill but it isn't.

It's entirely artificial.

A lot of money was put in to this place

to make an impression on people, it's all very Jurassic park.

So, what was this place

and why did such extensive investment

fail to pay off?

There are lots of legends about this place,

enough that people just don't go there anymore.

And once you know the story about this site

you'd be right to tread very carefully.

This is the taman festival park

and it was designed to be the Disneyland of Indonesia.

But something happened here

that made the plan go terribly wrong.

It was opened in 1997 and cost $100 million to build.

Ajik atu is a local resident and guardian of the site.

This place had it all, it had a 3D cinema screen,

pavilions, restaurants,

they even advertise the world's first inverted rollercoaster.

In addition to the rides and all the concessions,

it was also meant to be kind of a celebration of nature

with a lot of exotic plants, birds.

The main attraction though was the huge mound

at the centre of the park.

The laser show was the piece de resistance

of the park.

Vegas has its water fountains, Disneyland's got its fireworks,

taman festival had this amazing technology

that could draw beautiful shapes across the sky.

Their timing couldn't have been worse.

Just before they opened the park,

the countries of south east Asia

went through a spectacular financial crisis

that really dragged a lot of them in to deep, deep recession.

If you remember the financial crisis of 2008

in the us and around the world,

this was a preview of that but it mostly only affected Asia.

And on top of that Indonesia was going through

a major political upheaval.

The financial crisis also led

to the downfall of president suharto,

who'd ruled the country with an iron fist

for about 30 years.

So, when he left

that led to a lot of political turmoil and uncertainty,

it wasn't a good climate for tourism.

The park was meant to get over 1,000 visitors a day

but often only one person turned up.

As if that wasn't enough, a huge storm rolled in

and the park suffered a dramatic stroke of bad luck.

The five million dollars' worth of gadgetry

that was designed to wow the people

lay a smouldering mess of metal and glass.

That turned out to be a crushing blow,

they just didn't have the money to repair their laser light show.

And that was supposed to be kind of the central draw,

the symbol of the whole park.

Later other parts of the complex suffered a similar fate.

Yet, this rusting frame

is all that remains of the central restaurant

after an unexplained fire.

For some this wasn't just bad luck.

Bali is predominantly a hindu island,

and the balinese have their own interpretation,

spiritually and philosophically,

of why things went wrong at the park.

The temple of the dead,

one of three types of sacred temple in Bali,

is typically dedicated to Shiva, in the hindu religion,

the god of destruction and the destroyer of evil.

But it wasn't only this temple that was built over.

For the local people

building on sacred land was a huge mistake

and could explain why the park was struck down

in such dramatic fashion.

Abandoned in the year 2000,

the park has since remained eerily silent

but many believe that the spirits live on.

There are lots of legends

and cautionary stories about this place

so much so that people just don't visit anymore.

The locals say

that there are even man-eating crocodiles

on the loose.

With no plans to demolish the complex,

the tropical forest is claiming it for it's own,

yet the reasons behind its untimely demise

are still heavily debated.

When you see something built as recently as the 1990s

that is today completely decaying and in disuse and in disrepair,

there has to be have been some hubris involved,

some massive miscalculation, some misreading of the market.

Whatever your personal beliefs about it,

when you add up the financial crisis,

the failed launch, the fire in the restaurant,

and the catastrophic thunderstorm,

it seems that the odds were just never in favour of this park.

In Belgium, a series of concrete circles

hint at something hidden from view.

These structures look almost like landed flying saucers.

When you get a little bit closer,

you can see there are guns, in fact there are lots of them.

Venture below ground

and the true extent of this place becomes clear.

There's a maze of tunnels, it goes for miles

and they are of really strong reinforced concrete.

Whatever this was, it was absolutely built to last.

It's like you're going in to a concrete battleship.

There are generators, there are laundries,

there are kitchens, there's everything you need

to sustain people living in closed quarters.

One section suggests that whoever was based here

came under siege.

The concrete has been ripped away

from the reinforcing bar, the metal is twisted out of shape.

The amount of power and blast and shock and heat

that was released here was phenomenal.

This was the scene of a pivotal moment.

It sent shock waves

rippling out from Belgium across Europe,

this would change history.

On may 10, 1940,

something really incredible happened here.

This like outnumbered, outgunned, small German detachments

landed on top of this state-of-the-art

20th century fortification,

meant to resist the onslaught of armies.

And they took it,

it was one of the most audacious acts

in military history.

It was deemed to be impregnable.

It was the largest one fortress from Western Europe,

and it was taken in the enemy hands in 36 hours.

Tom hendrikx is an expert on this fortification

and its pivotal role in the history of the country.

There wasn't an official war declaration at the time,

so everybody was so surprised.

Construction here began in the early 1930s,

but after the world war I,

Belgium had no appetite to get involved

in another devastating conflict.

This place was all about defence.

Belgium was ripped to shreds in the world war I.

The battle lines had been drawn right through Belgium,

and the violence and destruction bled Belgium dry.

In 1936 the Belgian king announced

the country would remain neutral in the event of another war.

That absolutely did not mean

that Belgium was gonna leave itself open to attack.

It focused instead on defending very specific areas

that it thought would be vulnerable to attack by enemy forces.

With the German border just 20 miles away,

a ring of forts had been built around the city of liege.

Now, four new forts were added to further protect the border,

the biggest was fort eben-emael.

Fort eben-emael was designed

to cover the critical Bridges across the Albert canal,

which would be the German highway in to Belgium.

They constructed this fortress with everything

that they had learned from the world war I,

the war that took place in trenches.

And that's the reason

why they constructed such a big fortress

with many barriers, anti-tank ditches,

everything to prevent an attack by infantry men or by tanks.

The total surface area is approximately 185 acres,

yet much of this site lies hidden from view.

Here we have arrived

at what they call in French (speaks French)

So it means in English 'the junction of the star'

and it connects five galleries of the fortress with each other.

Now, in total we have here a gallery system

of 5 kilometres inside of the fortress.

The fort had all the man power and supplies

to be able to hold out

and defend this part of Belgium for months.

The planners had war gamed every scenario they could think of

and they believed it to be indestructible

and totally impregnable.

Even by today's standards

the fire power held here is seriously impressive.

Here we are at the largest gun emplacement of the fortress,

like you could see it was equipped with two barrels of 120 millimetres

and it could throw a shell for about 17, 17.5 kilometres.

With this range of 10 miles,

these guns could fire two tonnes of artillery rounds at any moment.

So, why then did Hitler choose to attack the fort?

Belgium is sometimes cruelly called

the doormat of Europe,

and that's because when Germany wants to smash on the door

to France,

they stand on Belgium in order to do it.

France had its own line of fortifications,

an imaginary line,

but that could be easily got round by the Germans

by simply going north of it through Belgium.

But fort eben-emael

and it's formidable arsenal stood in the way.

The Germans pondered this dilemma,

how do we circumvent a fortress as sophisticated as eben-emael.

If we attack it in a conventional way

it'll be a frontal assault against this entrenched artillery.

It will be a really attritional bloody battle,

it will disjoint the whole German war plan.

So, they decided to do it by stealth.

Kurt student who is one of the people

who invented the idea of German paratroops,

decides the only way to defeat fort eben-emael

is to drop people right down on the roof.

This was the first time it had ever been attempted in war

and they weren't just going to drop these men from normal planes.

The Germans decided to use a platform

that the Belgians would never suspect,

instead of coming at them clanking away

and throwing up lots of dust and smoke and noise,

they would use gliders,

they would land relatively small detachments

of German paratroops in gliders on the roof of these fortresses,

silently in the dead of night.

The roof of the fort

afforded only a very short landing space.

So, the pilots of the gliders trained very specifically.

They dropped the wheels immediately after take-off

and they had wrapped the nose cones of the gliders

in barbed wire and metal strips

in order to make the craft stop more quickly.

And in practice they found that they could stop in a space

of just 20 yards.

The 10th of may 1940, 4:25am.

Under the cover of darkness the silent assassins landed,

armed with a deadly weapon.

Each glider could carry a squad

of seven or eight fully armed and equipped men,

but they were carrying something new,

the hollow charge,

this was a dome shaped explosive with a concave bottom

that focused the blast in one direction only.

It was an absolutely lethal bit of kit.

The German paratroops had trained on this for months,

they were expertly trained they knew exactly what to do.

And swiftly and silently,

they prepared to blast their way

in to what was then one of the biggest buildings

in all of Europe.

First they had to take out the major case mates

in order to immobilise the Belgian guns.

Here we are at the masaryk-cowan,

this case mate was attacked

by a German group of fallschirmjager.

They placed the shape charge of 12.5 kilograms

and blew in this whole gun inside

against the back wall of the gun room itself,

so the power was very large.

The Germans struck multiple positions

causing massive destruction to the fort

and enabling them to get inside.

For the Belgian soldiers,

inside there was instant disorientation,

for them they were in the strongest, safest place in Belgium.

There was no way any enemy would be anywhere

except in the sights of their machine guns way outside.

Now, the German paratroopers had to contain the Belgians

until reinforcements arrived.

The battle itself inside the fort

was terrifying for all concerned.

They would drop explosives and smoke grenades

down the air shafts to confuse the Belgians, keep them down below

and disorganised

and on the defensive until help arrives.

Seeing the tremendous damage, the hollow charges could inflict

and knowing the Germans had back up on it's way,

the Belgians quickly surrendered.

But the attack was all part of an elaborate deception.

German army group b

was pretending to be the armoured fist

that was going to smash

through northern Belgium into France,

and that was a trick.

Army group b that was smashing past fort eben-emael

was distracting everybody from the German army group a

that was sneaking in to France through the back door.

Clearly, this was a major victory operationally

and it opened up the way for Germany's blitzkrieg

to roll across Europe,

but more broadly it sent a far more powerful message

to the allies.

Germany was saying it could take out Europe's strongest defences,

it was sending the simple message that it was coming for the allies

and it did.

And one hesitates to give Hitler credit for anything

but there was a seed of brilliance in this plan.

Landing these paratroopers on the roof

and using this shaped charge to blast a hole through the parapets

and get down in to the guts of the fortress quickly

and contain the Garrison

while relief columns came up unopposed

and reinforced you, truly brilliant.

Fortunately, Hitler's plans eventually crumbled

and Belgium was liberated in 1944.

But this fortress is a painful reminder

that when blood wars came to Europe,

Belgium was always on the front line.

In West Virginia, usa lies a place so well hidden

that for decades no one knew it was there.

You come around this bend,

you see this grand sprawling hotel in the classic style.

There's this croqueted lawns and very well tendered gardens

and this majestic looking estate building.

It looks like one of the most upscale

resorts in america.

This grand hotel attracted movie stars and presidents.

Joseph and Rose Kennedy, honeymooned here from Boston.

The Duke of windsor comes here with Wallace Simpson,

nehru comes here from India,

and you've got all manner of celebrities.

There's nothing abandoned or disused about this place,

but it has a secret.

It's almost imperceptible

but there's something strange going on here.

You start to see things which are a little bit odd,

there's something just not quite right here.

It's not your average five star hotel.

You've got these green walls

and it looks almost like a garage door,

but it doesn't fit with the place.

It looks armoured, it looks fortified.

There's ventilation shafts that don't seem to be attached

to the actual complex itself.

And inside is a door that no one wants to see opened.

If this door was actually being opened,

it would mean many millions of lives in the us

would be in danger.

What links this ominous steel door

to the incongruous structures in the woods?

Doctor Robert conte has worked at greenbrier resort for 30 years.

He's written the book on the history of this place.

The greenbrier hotel has been here since 1913

with lots and lots of additions.

You can see over the years

the hotel has expanded with these banquet halls,

then up on the hill is the West Virginia wing.

This was known for fine dining,

was known for the New York interior decorator

who does the inside.

You walk in to this place, you know, it's chandeliers,

persian rugs, beautiful furniture.

I mean, this place is first class all the way.

This now and has been for generations,

one of the finest resorts in america.

And this luxurious interior is the perfect cover

for an abandoned underground site

accessed by the threatening out of place door.

The chances of anybody

stumbling upon this were pretty remote.

And behind the door a deserted tunnel

leads deeper underground.

You're looking down

a very long over 400 foot long tunnel,

and it's pretty spooky looking.

You don't know where all this is leading.

The date of construction offers up a clue.

1958, the height of the cold war.

It was very much built within the assumption

of a large scale war.

You know, a whole generation of Americans

lived in fear of nuclear armageddon.

In the early 1950s president Dwight eisenhower

started to plan for a doomsday scenario.

Soviet nuclear attack on the us.

When the greenbrier was converted in to a military hospital

during the world war ii, eisenhower stayed here.

When eisenhower became president,

he remembered this region

and realised it might be a good place

for a special plan he had.

Eisenhower saw the need

for a top secret anti-nuclear bunker.

Who would suspect...

A... a bunker prepared for war

to be in a place like this lavish resort.

This whole hidden in plain sight.

That was probably the cleverest of the whole project.

But it had to be built without anyone knowing.

So, its construction had to coincide

with the addition of a wing to the greenbrier resort.

And while they were placing this wing

on the surface of the earth

beside the greenbrier resort, underneath

they were building this very secret construction.

On the surface, work began on the hotels new West Virginia wing

but the cover story didn't fool everybody.

There was a hell of a lot of concrete

being poured in to the ground.

Clearly something major was being constructed.

Of course, you can't build something this big

without people asking a few questions,

the manager of the resort at that time said.

But I just saw 110 urinals being installed,

there's obviously something else going on here.

The construction went over two levels.

The walls were some two feet thick

with steel reinforcements

and the whole lot was capped with a concrete roof

and then some 20ft of earth above,

so the whole thing was completely encased

and hidden away.

The bunkers were just about where these buildings are

where the fountain is against the brick wall.

It's really just on the other side, there's only about 50ft of dirt

between the bottom of the oval building

and the top of the covert building.

By 1962 the bunker was complete

and unsuspecting hotel guests had no idea

what lay under these buildings.

Out here on these terraces there have been lots of parties,

those people would never realise

that underneath the West Virginia wing

is a secret bunker.

It's very important to realise

that this was just an active hotel at the same time

that this thing was being maintained.

The Ryder's cup was held there of all things.

The staff were also kept in the dark.

The secret of the greenbrier bunker

was so well kept that employees that served there

while this bunker was operational they knew something was there

but they had no idea what it was.

I must have walked through this corridor,

you know, thousand times

and it never crossed my mind

that there was, hidden behind the wall was a ten tonne blast door.

The only people who knew about its existence,

fewer than five people in the us government.

That's how secret it was.

So, who exactly was this vast shelter built for?

Eisenhower, you know, asked the question,

"how do we maintain the continuity of the American government

"during a nuclear war?"

If Washington DC was attacked, there needed to be a place

for law makers to retreat to.

The idea was they could lead the entire leadership

of the us government underground to survive a potential nuclear war.

This was an emergency relocation centre

for the legislative branch of the federal government.

It was big enough to hold the members of congress,

the senate, and the house, the leaders of government.

Following a nuclear strike,

the members of congress would be bought here.

If this door were to open

that means catastrophic has happened out there,

it meant that the seat of the federal government

was under attack

and hundreds of millions of Americans are terrified

because their lives are hanging in the balance at this point.

The congress people who were to enter this now

deserted Warren

would have little idea what lay ahead.

Once you went through this door

then you just entered this long 433 foot tunnel.

It's a long walk to find out what the new world was gonna be.

At the end of the corridor

are the remnants of a series of showers.

This is a decontamination unit here,

so the water would come out along here,

couple of nozzles on top.

And that's just so that you don't bring the fallout

from that contaminated dust inside the bunker facility itself.

Deeper inside

the 100,000 square foot bunker

was equipped with everything required to govern the nation.

This is where the house of representatives

would have met.

So, altogether there are 435 seats.

And every one of them would have had a microphone,

so they would have recorded all sessions of congress.

And then the mountaineer room with 130 seats

that would house the United States senate.

They gave a lot of thought to communications.

They had extensive facilities for radio and television,

they even had a broadcast room with a backdrop of the capitol dome

so they could talk to the public on TV

as if they'd never left Washington.

The floor below hid all the backup

government would require.

There were 18 dormitories altogether.

There were 1,100 beds,

every one of these beds

was assigned to a member of congress.

And when they would go through a re-election cycle

or people retired or died or whatever,

they had to reassign all these beds.

And a clinic, 12-bed hospital and pharmacy were also built

in preparation for the worst.

The greenbrier bunker remained on high alert

for 30 years.

With the end of the cold war in the early 1990s

many in government felt it no longer had a use,

but nobody could agree on what to do with it.

If you wanted to get something done,

you leak it to the Washington post.

In 1992 the Washington post ran a big article

exposing the existence of the bunker.

Soon after that,

the government began to decommission the facility.

The question of an emergency government facility

is no less relevant today.

Is there a new greenbrier underground bunker

somewhere for congress to go in the event of a nuclear war?

And if so, where is it?

In abu dis on the edge of Jerusalem

stands a monument to a lost piece.

It appears like it was built recently.

The stonework is all clean and in good condition.

But there are no windows, there are no doors.

It's clear that whatever was started here

didn't get finished.

Inside it appears to have been designed

for a very specific function.

And it kind of reminds you of the Roman senate a bit.

You can imagine that this was a place

where lively debate was meant to carry on.

Clearly, this place was meant to be packed full of people

and now it's deserted.

Climbing through the vacant floors,

it's proximity to the holy city

and it's troubled history becomes clear.

When you're looking out these upper windows

towards the old city of Jerusalem,

you can see a golden dome, a dome of the rock.

You can see the separation barrier

that divides Israel and Palestine.

It's hard to imagine

that it wasn't somehow connected to that conflict

that has consumed this region for decades.

But why wasn't it ever finished?

Ahmed qurei is the former prime minister

of the palestinian national authority.

It's designed in a very good way,

look, how beautiful it is.

In 1992 mr qurei travelled to Oslo, Norway

for a series of secret meetings with Israeli representatives.

They led to the momentous Oslo peace accords

signed in September 1993.

The accords created a path towards palestinian self-governance

in the west bank and gaza strip

and laid the ground work for a more permanent peace deal.

The Palestine liberation organisation

was going to come and take up governance,

and instead of governance by Israeli military authorities,

the Palestinian Territories would be governed

by their own rulers.

What had seemed like an impossible quest for peace

was now on the horizon.

Out of that era-defining deal came this,

the palestinian legislative council building

or parliament.

It was to become a centre of palestinian democracy.

The palestinian national council

had been meeting in exile for years,

but now finally because of the Oslo accords

they could meet here in their own lands.

But deciding on the exact location to build it

was a deeply political decision,

even within the palestinian leadership itself.

To this day it is Israeli government policy

that Jerusalem is undivided capital

of the state of Israel.

And the problem is that

the palestinian authority is very unequivocal

that from their point of view,

Jerusalem is the capital of a palestinian arab state.

Some thought that the town of abu dis

could provide an artful solution to this problem.

The line declared by Israel

as the municipal boundary of Jerusalem

runs right past the parliament.

Abu dis was considered by some of the palestinian authority

to be part of Jerusalem.

Whether by accident or by design,

part of the parliament was actually located

in the Israeli side of the line.

It's impossible to say for certain whether this was intentional

but the symbolic significance of it

was hard to ignore.

Construction began in 1996 this was a time of optimism,

and the building represented that.

As construction progressed

it seemed that this chamber

would soon become a place of lively political debate.

I was the speaker of the council,

this is the plenary where the meetings of the council.

There are rooms for the speaker, for the committees,

and upstairs also for the employees.

Hundred and sixty-two seats

were installed for elected palestinian representatives.

It certainly looked like

it would have been an impressive place

to plan for the state's future.

But as the imposing concrete barrier

that weaves it's way past the building suggests,

the peace deal and the parliament were built on very shaky ground.

Awad awad is a palestinian photo journalist

who witnessed the construction of this important building

and the events that led to its demise.

(People cheering)

The Oslo peace accords had provided a timeline

for a more permanent deal.

But while the parliament was still being built,

time to reach an agreement was running out.

It really all came to a head in the year 2000.

And there was an attempt that July to broker a peace deal

under Clinton's oversight at camp David,

but it just didn't work.

Yasser arafat the revered chairman

of the Palestine liberation organisation

turned down an offer for a deal

which would have given him almost everything

the palestinian people had asked for.

But almost everything was not enough

to reach an agreement

and one of the key reasons the talks failed

can be seen from this very office.

Among other disputes

the two sides could not reconcile

their conflicting claims to Jerusalem

and the holy areas surrounding the al-aqsa mosque.

And events there would soon leave this building empty

and cut off from it's future.

Ariel Sharon,

the Israeli leader of the opposition,

a hate figure across the arab world.

When he and a massive Israeli security force

walked on to the Plaza at the al-aqsa mosque,

he was putting up a finger to the arab population,

to the palestinian population, to the Muslim population.

Sharon declared that the site home

to some of the holiest places in both islam and judaism

would remain under Israeli control forever.

A wave of violence broke out

which came to be called the second intifada,

where palestinian suicide bomber attacks

in Israeli cities and Israeli military advances

on to the west bank.

Construction of the building stopped,

but then what happened next sealed its fate.

As the torrent of violence raged on,

Israeli forces moved

to physically separate the two sides.

They maintained it was necessary for security

but it had another effect.

The wall made of concrete surrounded much of the west bank,

and it cut the parliament off from Jerusalem.

You can see just how close it runs to the building today.

From the palestinian point of view

they couldn't put their leadership

in a space that was now cut off

from what they thought of as their capital, Jerusalem.

That barrier is a reminder of how little trust

there can be between these two nations.

This building, which was the product

of this hard fought and hard won peace process,

was ultimately also a victim of it's failure.

Today, this forlorn ruin has become a symbol

of a more optimistic time.

After decades of fighting

this building showed that peace might one day be possible.

I think that peace is always a possibility

that the hope is always there

as long as there's people willing to hold on to it.

And the parliament building may yet play a different role

in the future of Palestinians.

Ownership of the building

was transferred to the al quds university.

But since then they've struggled to find investment

to renovate the site,

but they haven't given up hope yet.

So, who knows, one day this place might get a positive use.

(Theme music)

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV