Original subtitles

NARRATOR: A top secret complex in Arkansas

whose occupants carried the fate of a nation in their hands.

MAN:They would have been very aware of the fact

that they could be the person that started a nuclear war.

An ancient ruin in Cambodia ravaged by one man's cruel deception.

MAN:There were gun battles happening.

They were fighting over the statues.

Calling these "blood antiquities" makes a lot of sense.

A facility in Wales tainted by the actions

of an international hero.

Winston Churchill is most remembered in history for leading Britain

through the Second World War.

But for some, his legacy is more complicated.

And a stronghold in France that became the site of one man's

journey to clear his father's name.

The French commander, was he a traitor, a coward,

or did he stay with his men?

NARRATOR: In northeast Arkansas are the sprawling remains of a

secret facility that stood guard over America

during its most dangerous hour.

WOMAN:This place is huge.

It's obviously been used for something very big.

MAN:You've got offices, you've got playgrounds,

you've got athletic fields.

There's all the makings of a proper town here.

But this was no normal town.

It was built with a very specific purpose.

One area, in particular, provides the first piece of the puzzle.

MAN:The most obvious feature here is clearly the runway.

With all the housing and other facilities near the airfield,

you'd have to assume this is part of the military.

These places were all around the country and most people had no idea.

But what were they hiding?

Everything here was part of the nation's last line of defence

during a time of perilous uncertainty.

WOMAN:When the Cold War reaches its most fevered pitch,

the people on this base

are tasked with the most serious of responsibilities.

MAN:The crews knew that if they were ever called upon to go aloft

and use their payloads in battle, they would trigger World War III.

And for one terrifying instant, it looked like that moment had come.

This was the closest that we, as a nation, have ever come

to nuclear war.

Joseph Alley is a historian who has spent almost three years

uncovering what went on inside this clandestine compound.

Security was paramount.

There were very specific places that you were allowed to go,

and there were also places that you were explicitly forbidden to go,

and this was all laid out to you on day one.

This is Blytheville Air Force Base.

It was first operational during World War II.

But in the 1950s, as tension between Western democracies

and the Soviet empire mounted,

it became part of America's front-line defences in the Cold War.

JOSEPH ALLEY:In 1959,

when the Strategic Air Command took this base over,

this is where they were going to be making very important,

world-changing decisions.

WOMAN:So SAC, the Strategic Air Command,

is essential to the Cold War effort.

They're in charge of all the nuclear capabilities that come from the air.

A squadron of B-52 long-range bombers was based here,

poised to counter the increasing Communist threat.

MAN:So, these big B-52s could carry a nuclear payload.

And so they were meant to deter any adversary.

But as soon as the Strategic Air Command arrived at Blytheville

to evaluate the base, they realised there was a critical flaw

in their deterrence strategy.

MISSILE LAUNCHES

If the Soviets were to launch a first strike attack,

intended to cripple America's defences,

they would not have been able to retaliate fast enough.

WOMAN:SAC commanders understood that the US was not ready

to respond quickly to incoming nuclear threat.

Something had to be done to remedy that, and fast.

PROF WAWRO:You have to fuel these bombers.

You have to get them out of their hangars onto the runway.

You gotta put the right ordnance aboard.

The average time to do all that is six hours.

Well, if you're in a nuclear standoff,

and time is of the essence, that's way too long.

And so Strategic Air Command decides

it wants to get that down to 15 minutes.

By 1960, the construction of a new building designed to meet

the rapid-response objective was completed on this base.

JOSEPH ALLEY:So this is the Readiness Crew building.

This was a 70-man crew dormitory.

They would do what was called an alert rotation.

For seven days, they would be living, eating and working

in the Readiness Crew building.

The airfield's distinctive design was also a key part of the defence plan,

if the pilots were called into action.

The shape of the tarmac was all about speed.

It ends up looking a bit like a Christmas tree,

but without the kind of package we'd want Santa to deliver.

The planes were fully fuelled and armed on the branches,

ready to pull out onto the runway at any moment's notice.

JOSEPH ALLEY:And then they're gonna come up to the end of the runway

at a specific angle so that they can very quickly take off.

There's no stopping and turning.

There's no having to work your way in, arrange it.

It's just boom, boom.

Sometimes you would have one plane's tail

fitted right up against one plane's nose.

That's how close these guys would get.

The payload each bomber carried

had the potential to inflict unimaginable devastation.

JOSEPH ALLEY:You had five B-52s.

Each one was manned with two Hound Dog GAM-77 cruise missiles.

Each of those cruise missiles was roughly three times as powerful

as the nuclear weapons that were used on Japan

at the end of World War II.

You also have about 58 other bases all over the US,

so you can figure out just how much destructive force

the United States was capable of bringing to bear

with just the flip of a switch.

And it's not long before they get the call.

In October of 1962, an American spy plane flies over Cuba,

and they realise that there are missile bases being built

on the Cuban islands by the Soviet Union.

This was simply too close.

They could take out Miami or take out Washington DC

with no warning really.

So this triggers the Cuban Missile Crisis.

PROF MITCHELL:The B-52s across the country were put on 24-hour alert,

and Blytheville was no different.

In this room, there was a meeting

with all of the crewmen that were on alert at the time.

It was explicitly explained,

"Things are getting tense with the Soviet Union.

"There's something happening down in Cuba.

"And the Strategic Air Command has officially notified us

"that they're going to be implementing what they called

"their one-eighth program.

This means that one out of every eight bombers

"in the Strategic Air Command is gonna be in the air at all times."

This was all part of a wider plan called Operation Chrome Dome,

which would run for seven years.

For 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,

around 60 nuclear-armed bombers were circling the skies over America,

ready to strike Cuba, the USSR, or elsewhere at a moment's notice.

And, as the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated,

the threat edged ever closer.

On the 24th of October,

the Strategic Air Command issued a new order.

PROF ZARSADIAZ:They stepped up to DEFCON 2.

That's just one step away from nuclear war.

The DEFCON defence readiness system

prescribes five states of alert for the US military.

At DEFCON 2 You are at your station, your finger is on the button.

And then, of course, DEFCON 1 is pressing that button.

While the American people were aware that the country was on the brink

of nuclear war,

those inside this building knew that, at any moment,

they could be called on to launch a strike.

The tensions were real.

The stressors were real.

This was an incredibly dangerous time.

JOSEPH ALLEY:You had this kind of cycle where guys would wake up

and they would get their assignments,

and they would be in this building, just sitting and waiting

for that klaxon, telling them that it is now DEFCON 1.

They would have been very aware of the fact

that they could be the person that started

a nuclear war.

For eight agonising days during the crisis,

the personnel based here waited for the apocalypse to begin.

The purpose of these bases can be none other...

But behind the scenes,

President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev were negotiating.

Luckily, neither side really wanted to go to war,

and so Kennedy and Khrushchev

were able to come to a peaceful conclusion.

Nobody was happy, but nobody was dead either.

The Soviets agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba

in exchange for the US removing its missiles away from Turkey.

The immediate danger may have passed,

but the conflict was far from over.

In the decades to come, those stationed at Blytheville

continued to quietly guard the nation from the skies.

JOSEPH ALLEN:You've got thousands of people

that are working to keep up the alert facilities,

so you've got a veritable army of men and women

who are working to keep the country safe.

DR SHARP LANDDECK:As we move through the 1980s,

and the Cold War starts to ease,

American military bases are being closed.

And so Blytheville was on the chopping block.

In 1991, the last aircraft left its hangar,

rolled along the runway and took to the skies.

Following its closure in 1992,

Blytheville became a municipal airport

and the Ready Alert facility was permanently closed down.

Now, Joseph and his team plan to turn this, once top secret site,

into a Cold War museum.

Originally, there were 59 alert facilities over the continental US.

This is the last one that is fully intact.

This is the last one that the public will ever be able to visit.

And so we are very proud to be able to take on a project like this.

In northern Cambodia is the ruin of an ancient site

caught in the middle of a modern day scandal.

MAN:On the ground, we can see we're kind of in Indiana Jones territory.

There are ruined temples.

There are stone carvings, pillars, walkways.

WOMAN:The labour alone that would have been required to construct

something of this scale is staggering.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

You get the sense that these structures

were part of an entire city.

NARRATOR: At its height,

this was once the capital of a formidable dynasty

that mysteriously vanished.

Leaving behind an extraordinary treasure trove

that lay forgotten for a thousand years.

When it was rediscovered, that became the beginning

of a different kind of tragedy.

If you look, you can see these pedestals,

but it looks like something is missing.

The treasures of this place would be plundered in, what some

people have called, the greatest art heist in history.

WOMAN:The mastermind operated in plain sight,

masquerading as a friend of the Cambodian people.

He was warm, he was funny.

And so he was a brilliant conman.

But his luck would eventually run out.

Dr Ea Darith is an archaeologist and expert on this site.

He first came here in 2005

and has been unearthing its secrets ever since.

The origin of this lost world dates back to the birth

of a great civilisation.

MAN:The Khmer Empire began to come together in about 900 CE,

when a leader named Jayavarman began to unite various warring tribes

into a large entity like a modern state.

But just over a century later, it was hit by a power struggle,

with Jayavarman IV emerging as the potential new leader

of the Khmer people.

He needed an impressive city to prove his superiority,

so he built this...

..Koh Ker.

He cemented his power with deliberately

ambitious construction projects.

It would have been furnished with priceless objects,

including statues revered by the Khmer people.

By 928, Jayavarman's rivals were no more,

and he proclaimed himself the sole emperor at Koh Ker.

But Jayavarman IV's reign would be short lived.

He died in 941, and in the political shifts that followed,

the Khmer capital was relocated.

That, coupled with a likely water shortage, left his city abandoned.

Koh Ker would remain hidden for almost a thousand years,

but when it was rediscovered, it opened the door to some

very nefarious characters.

In the late 19th century, French explorers stumbled upon the remains

of Koh Ker and began documenting the site,

including its numerous statues.

But a century later, in 1975,

when Cambodia was taken over by the Communist Khmer Rouge regime,

the country and this ruin were cut off from the world

until the late 1990s.

As the country recovered slowly, it was becoming clear

that it wasn't just the Cambodian people who had suffered.

Their ancient history had been destroyed and ravaged.

Hundreds of temples were looted, and at Koh Ker

virtually every statue was missing.

In 2012, lawyer Bradley J Gordon, an American based in Cambodia,

was called in to help bring them back.

I'd been hired by the Department of Justice

to track down stolen Cambodian antiquities.

My assignment was to find the smuggling network,

and we were just focused on one statue, the Duryodhana statue.

One year earlier, the statue had gone up for auction at Sotheby's

in New York, with a list price of $2 to $3 million.

It was a 500lb sculpture of a mythical Hindu warrior,

and it was taken from Koh Ker.

After a tip-off from the Cambodian government

that this was a stolen artefact,

the US Department of Justice stopped the sale and opened an investigation.

BRADLEY GORDON:We interviewed more than 100 people.

We found one man in particular, who remembered seeing it

at Koh Ker village on an oxcart.

But we also started to realise

that many of the people we were talking to,

knew a lot more than just about that one statue.

As Bradley dug deeper, it appeared that the widespread theft

of treasures from Koh Ker could be linked back to one man.

I came across the name of this dealer, Douglas Latchford.

He was a well-known character when it came to the sale

of Cambodian antiquities.

JIM MEIGS:He was this charming guy.

He presented himself as almost an amateur archaeologist.

The idea that he might be a kind of kingpin of an international

looting scandal was really shocking.

Latchford was born in British India and moved to Thailand in the 1950s.

From there, he began searching the ancient ruins of Cambodia

and became obsessed with the statues at this site.

To me, Douglas Latchford was the Shadow King of Koh Ker.

He was behind one of the greatest art crimes in history.

Bradley's investigation revealed

that Latchford had used his contacts and knowledge of the region

to exploit the chaos of the Khmer Rouge period and make himself rich.

For 40 years, from his home in Bangkok, he organised gangs

of Cambodian looters to smuggle out statues.

The reward was so great, these looters were willing

to risk their lives to get their hands on the ancient treasures.

Er, calling these "blood antiquities" makes a lot of sense

because they definitely have blood attached to them.

There were gun battles happening.

They were fighting over the statues.

And so we've heard stories about individuals being killed,

out here at Koh Ker.

It's estimated that Latchford's gangs stole up to 100 statues

from Koh Ker alone.

We know that from one billionaire client,

he sold him $35 million of statues.

That's just one client.

Latchford had many.

ALICIA GUTIERREZ-ROMINE:His customers were private collectors.

But also museums, including the world-renowned Met in New York

and the British Museum.

He was even knighted by the Cambodian government

after donating a number of statues to the National Museum.

Latchford had fooled the world

and in the process earned himself around £75 million.

But the volume of evidence was adding up

and his time was running out.

In 2019, US federal investigators made their move.

He was indicted by the US government

for the trafficking in stolen Cambodian antiquities.

Douglas Latchford escaped justice.

He died in his late 80s, and he didn't serve any time

for these incredibly massive crimes he carried out.

Bradley and his team didn't give up the fight to get back

what belonged to the Cambodian people.

We entered into negotiations with the Latchford family.

We were dealing mostly with Douglas's daughter.

During the negotiations, Julie Latchford did the right thing.

She agreed to give back everything.

Now, of course, there remains a huge problem of identifying and returning

the hundreds of other Cambodian antiquities that Latchford peddled

over the years, but that's underway.

Our restitution team has already successfully brought home

about 300 objects.

We know that there are more out there, especially from Koh Ker.

I think for the rest of my life, I will be working on this

and it will be far from over.

Today, Koh Ker is still revered as a place of worship by the local people.

Meanwhile, in July 2024, 14 of its statues were finally returned

to the National Museum of Cambodia.

For the Cambodian people, these statues are not artwork.

They're not Picassos, they're not Van Goghs.

They're living, they're spirits.

So they feel very strongly that the statues were taken

out of the house, out of the family, and now they need to come back.

In the Welsh town of Tonypandy stands the relic of a time

when this region was the centre of a fierce rebellion.

MAN:This building looms large,

and it's clearly from an era that's now been forgotten.

WOMAN:Inside, it's just this vast, cavernous space.

There's nothing really to suggest, you know, what it was used for.

Yet, within these walls, a desperate people mobilised

against the might of the British Army.

MAN:This building was at the heart of a conflict that was gonna

reverberate across the nation.

MAN:The townspeople here tell stories of mounted cavalry

marching down their streets.

It must have felt like an occupation.

And for them, the treachery lay at the hands of one of Britain's

most lauded politicians.

Winston Churchill is most remembered in history for leading Britain

through the Second World War,

but for some his legacy is more complicated.

In time he would be regarded as a hero.

Back then, he was seen as a villain.

He faced an impossible decision, do nothing or send in soldiers

against his own citizens.

His decision still haunts the town to this day.

This place was the flashpoint.

What happened here spread like wildfire.

Philip Rowlands grew up in this small Welsh town.

His grandfather worked here in the early 1900s

and told him stories of a very different place.

It was a little bit like the Klondike.

People were coming in from everywhere.

It was a vibrant, burgeoning community, you know.

It's places like these that used to be the industrial heart

of the country.

Each morning, men would file out of their homes

and make their way to the sites that built this town, the coal mines.

This coal field was the largest in Britain,

and the town of Tonypandy sat in the middle of it.

My grandfather's generation never wanted me to go down the mine.

You know, they only wanted you to be a teacher or something.

They wouldn't have given it up for anything,

because the camaraderie and the bonding that they made

was second to none, really.

But the nature of the work meant that each day

could be the miner's last.

At the time, this was one of the most dangerous jobs in the world,

and the pits in this valley were no exception.

The issue the miners encountered in the wet Welsh hills

was that as they dug, the water, would pool and fill the mine shafts,

so they needed to constantly pump the water out to prevent

it from flooding.

This is the Tonypandy Powerhouse.

Built in 1905, it housed state-of-the-art machinery

capable of pumping up to 5,000 gallons of water from the mines

every minute.

It would have been very noisy in here because of the machinery

that was used to...to pump and to keep the mine clear of water.

It would have been a steam engine.

You would need to stoke the steam boilers.

And that was incredibly dirty, hard work.

Without these engines running, the mines would be unworkable.

In many ways, this was the beating heart of the operation.

But even with the powerhouse in place, it was still a risky business.

The coal seam the miners excavated, was one of the most hazardous

in Britain, and they wanted their wages to reflect this.

It's gaseous, which means that it's especially volatile.

It wasn't uncommon for workers to end up dead from explosions,

partial collapses, any number of accidents.

Meanwhile, the mine-owning cartel who controlled these coalfields,

refused to compensate for the dangers despite their exorbitant profits.

They called the shots, and they would squeeze their workers

as much as they could.

There was no minimum wage in the mining industry.

Wages depended on how much coal a miner could cut during their shift.

Years of hard work, injuries and meagre pay took a toll

on a place like this.

At some point, people were going to demand a change.

It was a scene all too familiar in mining centres across the world.

And in Tonypandy, in 1910, came the final straw.

A new pit opened in the valley and it came time to negotiate pay.

Workers and management were immediately at odds.

The Cambrian Colliery Company first offered its workers

one shilling and ninepence for every ton of coal extracted.

The workers came back with two shillings and sixpence.

The new pit was extremely difficult to mine,

and the miners ended up with even less pay.

The two sides wouldn't budge, and the haggling went on

until the mine owners decided to force the issue.

On September 1st, 1910, the company locked out the entire workforce

from one of their mines.

It was a deliberate act of provocation

because of the growth of the South Wales Miners Federation

that would have challenged the coal owners' power,

and they didn't want that.

But the union was already stronger than the owners realised.

Miners across the region responded by balloting for a strike,

and on November 1st, 12,000 men went out on strike.

Tensions were high and Tonypandy had become a ticking time bomb.

Only one pit was left operating in the area,

and it relied on the powerhouse to keep it going.

On the 7th of November, angry miners descended here,

determined to force the crucial facility to shut down.

8,000 striking miners began to gather in the town,

with their sights set on the powerhouse, still churning away.

But the police knew the strikers were coming

and had prepared for the assault.

There were about 100 police drafted, waiting for any problems.

A tense standoff ensued.

The whole situation was balancing on a knife's edge.

And then a stone came crashing through one of the windows.

The scene quickly turned violent and a riot erupted in town.

After repeated baton charges, police drove strikers back

just before midnight.

Yet the police were terrified they would be overrun by the strikers

and made a frantic call to the government in London for help.

The man in charge of homeland affairs at the time

was Winston Churchill.

30 years before he became Prime Minister.

Churchill had authorised police forces from London and Bristol

to maintain order.

But it was becoming clear this wasn't just gonna go away.

The next day, the riots didn't subside. In fact, they escalated.

People were smashing in windows, breaking into shops.

It was a mess.

Churchill was faced with a tough decision.

Appease the miners or send in the army to crush the uprising.

He chose to use military force against his own people.

At 1.20am on the 9th of November, two days after the riots began,

Churchill dispatched a British cavalry squadron to restore order.

This was a big call to make,

one that was guaranteed to be contentious.

Fear spread throughout the town.

Not only were there hundreds of police in the streets,

now there were armed troops alongside them too.

The miners faced such an overwhelming force

they had no choice but to back down.

The strikers had to go back slowly, drift back because they didn't

have any money and, you know, they were...

..Children were starving. Their wives were starving.

The line had been crossed and that would never be forgotten.

These weren't foreign enemies.

These were his own countrymen.

Winston Churchill was vilified here for many years.

The stories go when the news showed a picture of Churchill

during the war, you know, people would boo.

The Tonypandy Powerhouse continued operating until 1966, and today,

following the decline of Welsh coal mining, only one mine

here remains in use.

That's the sad part. We are losing our legacy

and we're losing our memory of things.

We are trying to raise the awareness of the rich and unique heritage

of this area, that people should be proud.

In northern France, near the Belgian border,

a bizarre collection of structures litters the landscape.

MAN:It's an area covered in rolling hills and sprawling farms.

But up on one ridgeline is a massive metal saucer, tilted on one side,

almost like a UFO crashed there.

This huge, heavy piece of steel has been popped up like a bottle cap.

What power was required to knock that loose?

The land is scarred and riddled with craters.

It looks as if a violent and terrible event has taken place.

A short distance away is a building that at first seems unrelated.

Yet further investigation reveals they are intimately connected.

When you go inside, you realise that most of this site is actually

underground and it is enormous.

We see bunk beds, crumbling walls, twisted metal.

This was clearly a military site on a massive scale.

This marvel of 20th century technology

became the pride of France that came before its fall.

Benjamin Dumont is part of an association dedicated

to preserving the memory of this site.

He was inspired to return when he understood its importance to history.

That story began after Europe was engaged in a conflict

that had grave consequences for future generations.

After World War I, French leaders began to debate how to best prepare

for what they saw as a second, inevitable conflict with Germany.

They therefore began to construct this line of defences

that would straddle the demarcation between Germany and France,

and protect France from an attack.

It was called the Maginot Line

and was named after France's Minister of War, Andre Maginot,

who ordered its construction.

By 1938, the line of fortifications was complete.

This section was called L'Ouvrage De La Ferte.

The result was meant to be invulnerable,

both to airplane bombing and to tank fire.

If a French soldier can stand in a dome with a machine gun

and shoot Germans all day, that makes the French

soldier more powerful.

The technology is a substitute for...for manpower,

and the technology is gonna save lives in the next war.

Of course, it didn't work.

In 1940, the Nazis invaded France

and the nation's defences would be put to the test.

But there had been a major oversight in the French design.

They never expected the Germans to invade through Belgium,

and this part of the Maginot Line had been left vulnerable to attack.

The idea is they're going to armour the whole border of France.

But then budget cuts...

..it's expensive.

There wasn't enough money to fully fortify this section of the line,

and this was a fact the Nazis were all too aware of.

On the 18th of May, 1940,

the Germans began pounding L'Ouvrage De La Ferte.

The French soldiers stationed as the garrison there, fell

under the command of Lieutenant Maurice Bourguignon.

With only around 100 troops, he was left to fight a battle

against the Nazis he could never win.

The Germans have got 88mm anti-tank guns.

These high-velocity artillery pieces are capable of drilling rounds right

into those steel domes.

We can see the scars.

But worse was to come.

The German soldiers then moved to the next stage

of their carefully orchestrated assault.

The German forces had dug trenches up the sides of the hill,

reaching the gun emplacements.

Once the fort's defences had been breached,

the German attackers began to drop bombs and smoke down inside.

Fire raged throughout the fort, detonating munitions and filling

the passages with smoke.

It was clear the battle was over and Lieutenant Bourguignon

made a desperate plea for help.

Lieutenant Bourguignon wanted to save his people.

And the general comes back,

"Your fortress is like a submarine

"and you are going to go down with the ship."

The French soldiers had no choice but to retreat to the lowest levels

of the fallen stronghold.

They put on their gas masks and try to survive.

The myth of the Maginot Line's strength had been shattered

and the Nazi propaganda machine went into overdrive.

The Germans are able to say that superior German technology

and German racial superiority overcame the vaunted Maginot Line.

One German leaflet read, "The Maginot Line is a mass grave

"for all those who defend it.

"There's no way of resisting the German army.

"Stop fighting, lay down your arms."

In the chaos that followed,

Lieutenant Bourguignon was accused of betraying his country.

In June, the Germans gave the French soldiers a burial.

14 of them were not named.

Among those unidentified was Lieutenant Bourguignon.

Rumours swirled that he had deserted his men, or even collaborated

with the Germans to hand over the fort.

This was a theory that had some currency during the war

and immediately after.

But one man was determined to find out the truth and clear his name.

Eve worked tirelessly to contact German war veterans,

hoping one of them might know something.

33 years after the fateful German assault, his prayers were answered.

They exhumed the shallow grave, identifying some by their ID tags.

Bourguignon's body was confirmed by his uniform stripes.

It was discovered that Lieutenant Bourguignon had not

deserted his men.

Posthumously, he was given the Legion of Honour,

which is France's highest military order.

Today, the site is open to the public and includes

a small cemetery for those who gave their life defending France

in its darkest hour.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media