Original subtitles

A top secret site in Arkansas whose occupants carried

the fate of the nation in their hands.

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.

There were gun battles happening, they were fighting over the statues.

Calling these blood antiquities makes a lot of sense.

And 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.

In northeast Arkansas are the sprawling remains of a secret site

that stood guard over America during its most dangerous hour.

This place is huge.

It's obviously been used for something very big.

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.

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 defense

during a time of perilous uncertainty.

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

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

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

This is 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 facility.

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 the Blytheville Air Force Base.

It was first operational during World War Two.

But in the 1950s, as tension between Western democracies

and the Soviet empire mounted, it became part of America's front line

defenses in the Cold War.

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.

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.

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

And so they were meant to deter any adversaries.

But as soon as the Strategic Air Command

arrived at Blytheville to evaluate the base,

they realized there was a critical flaw in their deterrent strategy.

If the Soviets were to launch a first strike attack

intended to cripple America's defenses,

they would not have been able to retaliate fast enough.

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.

You have to fuel these bombers.

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

You've got to 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.

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 defense plan

if the pilots were called into action.

The shape of the tarmac was all about speed.

The planes were fully fueled and armed on the branches,

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

And then they're going to 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 and arrange it.

It's just...

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.

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 Two.

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 1962, an American spy plane flies over Cuba, and they realize

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.

B-52s across the country were put on a 24-hour alert,

and the ones here were no exception.

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 going to 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 around 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.

So the aircraft at Blytheville Air Force Base are then raised to DEFCON 2,

which is the highest defense readiness, short of nuclear war.

In 1962, at Blytheville Air Force Base,

the crews of B-52 nuclear bombers were on high alert

after the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

On October 24th,

Strategic Air Command issued a new order,

the crisis was about to enter a critical new phase.

They stepped up to DEFCON 2.

That's just one step away from nuclear war.

The DEFCON defense 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.

You had this 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 agonizing days,

during the Cuban missile 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.

Blytheville and those stationed here

continued to quietly guard the nation

from the skies in the decades to come.

You've got thousands of people that are working to keep up the alert facilities,

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

who are working to keep the country safe.

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.

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.

On the ground, we can see we're kind of

in Indiana Jones territory.

There are ruined temples.

There are stone carvings, pillars, walkways.

You get the sense

that these structures were part of an entire city.

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 1000 years.

When it was rediscovered, that became the beginning of a different kind of tragedy.

If you'd 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.

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 con man.

But his luck would eventually run out.

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

He first came here in 2005,

and has been unearthing its secrets ever since.

I was astonished to see these ancient temples.

They'd been built here

more than 1000 years ago.

We estimate that around 10,000 workers

we were involved in building this capital city.

The origin of this lost world dates back to the birth of a great civilization.

The Khmer Empire began to come together in about 900CE

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, the fourth, 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.

In order for a location to be considered a capital,

it had to have a pyramid-shaped temple

with multiple levels.

This was a competition to showcase the leader,

Jayavarman, the fourth's power.

It would have been furnished

with priceless objects, including statues revered by the Khmer people.

The statues in Cambodia are important symbols

of our respect for our ancestors and those who ruled before us.

By 928, Jayavarman's rivals were no more,

and he proclaimed himself the sole emperor at Koh Ker.

But Jayavarman, the fourth'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 1000 years.

But when it was rediscovered, it opened the door

to some very nefarious characters.

In the late 19th century, after French explorers

stumbled upon the remains of Koh Ker,

they documented the site,

including it's 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 have 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 $2-3 million.

It was a 500-pound sculpture of a mythical Hindu warrior,

and it was taken from Koh Ker.

After a tipoff from the Cambodian government,

that this was a stolen artifact,

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

We interviewed more than 100 people, and we found one man in particular

who remembered seeing it at Koh Ker village on an ox cart.

But we also started to realize

that many people we were talking to knew a lot more

than just about that one statute.

As Bradley dug deeper, it appeared 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.

He was this charming guy.

He presented himself as almost a amateur archeologist.

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 to make himself rich.

For 40 years, from his home in Bangkok,

he organized gangs of Cambodian looters to smuggle out statues.

The reward was so great, the looters were willing to risk

their lives to get their hands on the ancient treasures.

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 $35,000,000 of statutes.

That's just one client.

Latchford had many.

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 $100,000,000.

But the volume of evidence was adding up and his time was running out.

In 2019, US federal investigators made their move

because the attempted sale of the stolen Duryodhana statue

was going to take place at an American auction house.

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.

Julia 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 under way.

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 art work.

They're not Picassos.

They're not Van Goghs.

They are 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 northern France near the Belgian border,

a bizarre collection of structures litters the landscape.

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 realize 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.

In northern France is the fallen symbol

of a nation vanquished by a powerful enemy.

The first time I came to La Ferte, I was 10-years-old.

It was a school visit.

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.

I have been here for 15 years now.

What happened at La Ferte is a story that touches people in different ways.

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 defenses

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, Andrei Maginot,

who ordered its construction.

By 1938, the line of fortifications was complete.

This section was called Ouvrage 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 it makes the French soldier more powerful.

The technology is a substitute for manpower,

and the technology is going to save lives

in the next war.

Of course, it didn't work.

In 1940, the Nazis invaded France.

And the nation's defenses 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 armor

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 May 18th, 1940, the Germans began pounding Ouvrage 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 88 mm anti-tank guns.

These high velocity artillery pieces

are capable of drilling rounds right into those steel domes.

We can see the scars.

On May 18th alone, 8000 shells fell on the wall on the block here.

It was extremely violent.

But worse was to come.

The German forces had dug trenches

up the sides of the hill, reaching the gun emplacements.

The Germans put 40 kilos of explosives on the side of the turret,

and it's these 40 kilos of explosives that lifted the top off the turret,

which dropped back down.

Once the fort's defenses

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.

Bourguignon requested an evacuation order

from his superiors several times and systematically,

this evacuation order was refused.

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.

Around 50 soldiers arrived in this gallery

and joined 40 others already there.

They put on their gas masks, and try to survive.

The vast majority of the fortress's soldiers died in this gallery

on the morning of May 19th.

Twelve hours after the German attack began,

it's over.

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.

Fourteen of them were not named.

Among those unidentified, was Lieutenant Bourguignon.

Rumors 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.

In 1940, Hitler's Nazi forces overran

this French military stronghold along the Maginot Line.

Soon after, rumors spread that the man in command,

Lieutenant Maurice Bourguignon had deserted his post

when no trace of his body was found.

When Bourguignon died in 1940,

his only son, Yves, was just five-years-old.

But years later, Yves wanted to know what happened to his father.

Yves 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.

Wilhelm Penniman had been a German sub officer at the time,

and he dealt with the bodies.

In 1973, he showed Bourguignon's son where the missing bodies were buried.

They exhume 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 Honor,

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.

In the Welsh town of Tonypandy,

stands the relic of a time when this region

was the center of a fierce rebellion.

This building looms large, and it's clearly from an era

that's now been forgotten.

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 mobilized

against the might of the British army.

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.

He faced an impossible decision,

to 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.

People flooded into Tonypandy

and the surrounding valley, to dig for a major commodity of the time...

coal.

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

This coal field was the largest in Britain,

and this town sat in the middle of it.

At the time,

mining was one of the most dangerous jobs in the world,

and the pits in this valley were no exception.

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.

Without these engines running, the mines would be unworkable.

But even with the powerhouse in place,

it was still a risky business.

The coal seam the miners excavated

was one of the most dangerous 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 coal fields

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.

Years of hard work, injuries and meager pay

took a toll on a place like this.

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

The miners had fought for years to receive a fair wage

for their life threatening work,

but their pleas had been ignored.

It was a scene all too familiar in mining centers across the world,

including the US.

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 new pit was extremely difficult to mine, and the miners ended up

with even less pay.

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.

But the mine owners had underestimated

the strength of a new workers union.

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 the Tonypandy powerhouse

had become a ticking time bomb.

In 1910, the miners of Tonypandy

in Wales had reached a breaking point

and gone on strike, demanding higher wages.

Only one pit was left operating in the area,

and it relied on the Tonypandy powerhouse to keep it going.

So on November 7th, angry workers descended upon the facility,

determined to force the crucial powerhouse 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

by drafting in 100 extra officers.

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 authorized police forces

from London and Bristol to maintain order.

But it was becoming clear this wasn't just going to 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 1:20 am on November 9th, 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.

Not only were there hundreds of police in the streets,

but now there were armed troops alongside them, too.

The miners faced such an overwhelming force,

they had no choice but to back down.

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

These weren't foreign enemies.

These were his own countrymen.

The Tonypandy powerhouse

continued operating until 1966.

And today, following the decline

of Welsh coal mining, only one mine 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.