Original subtitles

In New Jersey, a secretive facility

infiltrated by a Soviet spy ring.

It's believed the damage they did

to national security was incalculable.

A palatial compound in Peru

that held lavish parties for the country's elite.

But something terrible was happening

right underneath their feet.

And an island stronghold besieged by the Nazis.

This battle is such a disaster for the allies

that it gets called "Churchill's Folly."

In the lowlands of New Jersey

are the remains of a sprawling complex

linked to a devastating infiltration.

We're just a few miles from the Jersey Shore

in a typical residential area with wide tree-lined streets.

But this one area is set apart.

Lots of wide-open spaces, buildings that look like

they were constructed as part of a unified project.

There appear to be theaters or lecture halls.

So was this maybe a school or university?

But other areas start to paint quite a confusing picture.

One building has a room,

it's all filled with inward-facing cones.

It feels otherworldly,

like something out of a sci-fi movie.

You get the feeling that there was something very advanced

and highly classified happening here.

For decades, this facility was

at the cutting edge of military research.

But that would make it a target.

You could argue that this was the worst case

of internal espionage in American history.

Melissa Ziobro became the official historian

for this innovative complex in 2004.

For close to 100 years, this site was essential

to making sure that the US Army was the best prepared

and best equipped in the world.

It was built to solve a fundamental problem

that any military faces.

How do you ensure accurate communication

in the midst of battle?

In May 1917, just one month

after America joined World War I,

a temporary camp was established here.

It was dedicated to training the Army's Signal Corps.

This was a group completely devoted

to the correct transmission of information

under the harshest conditions.

They used telegraphs, telephones,

even carrier pigeons.

In recognition of the crucial role

they played in defeating Germany in 1918,

the camp was soon transformed into a permanent installation.

In the gap between World War I and World War II,

the world was changing rapidly.

The aircraft carrier mechanized transport meant

the wars of the future were gonna take place

over even larger expanses of terrain or ocean.

That would strain the existing communications technology.

We are in one of the barracks buildings on Barker Circle,

the first permanent construction done here on base.

They were very involved in early wireless technologies,

early radio-- they were testing air-to-ground radio.

The high-tech innovations made here

led to this place developing a nickname,

The Army's House of Magic.

But its official name was Fort Monmouth.

During the 1930s,

they made a pivotal breakthrough

with a technology that would change warfare.

Radar.

The radar systems developed here would be deployed

on many fronts.

One of the first was Hawaii,

the home of the US Pacific fleet.

There are actually radars from Fort Monmouth

at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.

They detect the incoming Japanese planes.

Panicking at what they saw, they reported

the incoming planes to their superiors.

But the radar operators told them, "Don't worry about it,

it's probably birds, or maybe it's our own planes,"

because the technology was just so new,

people didn't understand it, they didn't trust it.

And, of course, then the Japanese attack happens.

Now, back here at Fort Monmouth,

the radar folks are at first horrified.

They think that their technology has failed.

Then they find out, no, it worked,

but the warning wasn't heeded.

This will go down in history as one of the great

communications disasters in modern warfare.

Thrust into global war, Fort Monmouth's mission

was now more critical than ever.

And thousands of civilian engineers

were brought into the Signal Corps

to create vital new communication technologies.

This would have been a highly classified facility.

The anechoic chamber absorbs sound and electromagnetic rays

and allowed personnel to test things

like antennas and radars.

As well as further advances in radar,

they also developed groundbreaking backpack radios.

These made a vital difference on the battlefield.

The technologies coming out of Fort Monmouth

were the envy of the world, and so there was

a constant recognition that we might be infiltrated.

Yet Fort Monmouth had already been compromised,

with a mole embedded within its ranks.

Julius Rosenberg joined the Army Signal Corps

Engineering Laboratories in 1940.

He worked as an engineer and inspector for them

until 1945, but early in the war,

he'd been recruited as a Soviet spy.

The history here is tricky.

The Soviets were nominally America's allies

in fighting the Germans, but everyone knew the Soviets

would again be America's enemies at some point

after the end of the war.

Julius Rosenberg was perfectly positioned

to gather as much information as possible.

And he wasn't operating alone.

Rosenberg and his handlers recruited two more people

who worked at Fort Monmouth, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant.

Rosenberg's spy ring copied more than 9,000 pages

of top-secret documents, information about

a hundred different weapon systems.

In one case, Rosenberg obtained the actual unit

of a proximity fuse,

an incredibly vital piece of technology.

He literally put it in a box and wrapped it up

as a Christmas present for his Soviet handler.

As World War II was morphing into the Cold War,

Rosenberg continued to smuggle top-secret material

back to his Soviet overlords,

now America's primary foe.

In this dawning nuclear age,

the stakes were higher than ever .

He recruited his brother-in-law,

who worked at the post-war period's most important,

most top-secret project, Los Alamos,

where they were doing the work to develop the atomic weapon.

The information that Rosenberg passed on to the Soviets

allowed them to greatly accelerate

their own program to develop an atomic bomb.

On August 29th, 1949,

the Soviet Union tested their first nuclear weapon.

It was almost a carbon copy of the Fat Man Bomb

developed at Los Alamos.

US intelligence investigated a potential leak,

which eventually led them back to Rosenberg

and his co-conspirators, who began their betrayal

at Fort Monmouth.

Helped by a tip-off from the Russian handlers,

Barr and Sarant fled to the Soviet Union.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were not so lucky.

Ethel's brother, David Greenglass,

implicated the pair after his own arrest in June 1950

for leaking confidential information from Los Alamos.

The Rosenbergs were put on trial

in one of the most publicized and closely watched events

in American history.

They were both sentenced to death and executed

at Sing Sing Prison.

Two months later, in 1953, the Rosenbergs' connection

to Fort Monmouth was pounced on

by a fanatical anti-communist crusader,

Joseph McCarthy.

The complete wholehearted support now

of the commanding generals in Fort Monmouth

who want to clean communists

and potential espionage agents out of their organization.

2 In 1950, a security breach was discovered at Los Alamos,

where Oppenheimer and his team had developed the atomic bomb.

It led investigators to Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg,

and his wife, Ethel, who were both executed in 1953.

A flamboyant senator, Joseph McCarthy,

was taking advantage of the concerns

about communist infiltration

to boost his own profile and career.

So once McCarthy knows

that Rosenberg had worked for the Signal Corps,

Fort Monmouth is the home of the Signal Corps,

he becomes convinced that surely

there must still be a communist spy ring operating.

He actually visited the base as part of his investigation

in the fall of 1953.

He made a big show of how he was here and he was,

you know, personally trying to root out these communists.

Based on McCarthy's allegations, the officials at Fort Monmouth

suspended 42 employees.

Of the 42 accused,

all but two were reinstated by 1958.

But 15 years later,

after a military reorganization,

the Signal Corps was relocated in 1973.

What remains behind here at Fort Monmouth

is something known as the Electronics Command.

And then we start getting into things like

night-vision technologies, and GPS and early cellphones,

and on, and on, and on,

up through the global war on terror.

The base was officially closed on September 15th, 2011.

And with that, nearly a century

of US Army occupation came to an end.

But Fort Monmouth would have one more brush with fame.

Bruce Springsteen, who is a Monmouth County native,

practiced here in the Expo Theater

that we're standing in.

I have met Bruce. He is lovely.

You know, he's just another Jersey Shore guy

who happens to be an international rock star.

Today, like many retired US military bases,

there are plans for Fort Monmouth

to be converted to various kinds of civilian uses,

including business and housing.

And there are plans underway to turn parts of the campus

into a movie studio.

In North Wales, near the Irish Sea,

is a scarred landscape that helped inspire

Tolkien's Mordor and Middle Earth.

We're in the ancient rugged mountains of Wales.

It's one of the wettest parts of Britain, cloudy and misty,

but the landscape has a special majesty.

But the landscape around here isn't pristine.

It's deeply scarred,

and there are huge piles of rubble and debris everywhere.

You see old structures, some of them in ruins

with all kinds of equipment laying around.

Clearly, there's something in the hills here that was worth

an enormous amount of human effort.

This material was carved out of the land,

transforming the region,

and creating a vast unseen labyrinth.

When you descend into the mountainside,

you enter a completely different world.

It seems like there are miles and miles of tunnels,

and then interspersed along them,

these enormous cavernous rooms.

But the material they were mining was prized

across the world, from New York to San Francisco,

even as far as Australia.

At one time, half the buildings in New York

were covered with this material.

Phil Lee Jones has a deep connection to this site.

He gives tours around the complex

where his forefathers once toiled.

I can go back about five generations of my family

working in these places, probably more.

You can imagine all the machinery,

all the wheels turning.

It'd be a very noisy place, it'd be a very busy place.

As far back as Roman times,

humans have tried to extract

a precious resource from this land.

But into the mid-1800s, that extraction

began to change it beyond all recognition,

from rolling green hills

into the blackened landscape of today.

This whole enormous complex began

with one man's determination to find his fortune

in these barren hills.

Entrepreneur John Greaves arrived here in the 1840s.

Greaves was convinced there was a seam

of what was known as blue grey gold somewhere here.

He just had to find it.

That blue grey gold was a precious rock called slate.

He dug for three years and found nothing.

The story goes that he sank his entire fortune

into the search and was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Then, in 1849, his prayers were answered.

They found what's known as the Merioneth Old Vein,

and they began to follow it deep underground.

Eventually, they would dig out 250 chambers across 16 levels,

stretching 1,200 feet from top to bottom.

And it's all connected by 25 miles of tunnels.

This is Llechwedd mine,

in an area called Blaenau Ffestiniog,

which became known

as the slate capital of the world.

The slate from Wales has a reputation of being

some of the best in the world.

It's very smooth, has a beautiful color,

it weathers well, and despite being easy to split

on one axis, it remains extremely durable.

That makes it a wonderful building material.

Highly resistant to fire and corrosion,

it's also waterproof,

lending itself perfectly to roofing.

Slate roofs can last 100 years, even a couple of centuries.

Wagons would be coming in with big slabs along the rail tracks

here from underground. They'd come to...

these sawing tables...

and then they were sawn into manageable blocks,

and then they were transported down to these cubicles

down over here, where then they would be

turned into finished roofing slates.

Into the 1850s, it was being exported

to all corners of the globe,

giving rise to the saying, "Wales roofed the world,"

a fact not lost on the mine's owner.

Greaves was an astute businessman,

and he invested in a series of railways and shipping wharves

to ensure that he could export his slate

around the rest of the country and the world.

As San Francisco was having a huge building boom

due to the gold rush, a lot of the buildings

were roofed with slate from this mine.

Greaves' operations were proving to be a huge success.

But even by the standards of underground mining,

slate mines were particularly hazardous.

He was working in this area, and unfortunately,

the blast went off early.

2 Llechwedd mine was part of a slate mining boom

in North Wales, which became famous

in the mid-1800s for roofing the world.

It's hard to imagine just how dangerous

and difficult this work was.

First of all, no electric lights.

So they're descending deep, deep, deep

into the mountainside with a candle at best.

They can see basically what's in front of their faces.

The miners could be crushed to death by cave-ins,

burned by gas explosions, or blown up by gunpowder.

This is what happened to my grandfather.

He was working in this area,

and unfortunately, the blast went off early,

and he lost the use of his hand.

His hand was mangled, it was like that,

couldn't straighten his fingers out.

He had a big scar on the inside of his wrist,

and blue freckles all over his hand.

It's where the slate had gone in underneath the skin.

So I can appreciate the dangers.

But there was another unseen threat,

perhaps the biggest risk of all.

Mining and processing the slate was very dusty,

and the workers had no protection against it.

They spent their lives breathing in

harmful silica dust.

The government was so concerned they did an inquiry

into the death rate in these mines

and they found that it was even worse

than that of coal miners.

The risks would eventually prompt the miners

to call for action.

In 1874, a mine workers' union was formed.

This is one of the first places where there was a real effort

to unionize the workforce, to fight for some

of their rights, to fight for greater safety, better pay.

But as this movement was gathering pace

among its workers,

Llechwedd's owners were struck by tragedy.

John Greaves died in 1880 and passed the operation

over to his son, also called John Greaves.

He was soon faced with a wave of strikes

that swept across the region.

And a recession, which dragged on

into the 1890s, compounded by a changing global market.

There was increasing competition from cheaper slate

brought in from abroad, including mines

in Pennsylvania, which were originally set up

by Welsh miners.

The industry's decline continued,

driven by the Great Depression, and two World Wars.

The last underground mining here finally ended

in the 1980s.

That's the downfall of Welsh slate.

It's the best in the world,

but it's the most expensive in the world as well.

The slate landscape of Northwest Wales

is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

But Llechwedd and other local mines have also been repurposed

to boost employment.

In 1972, the Llechwedd slate caverns

opened to the public as a tourist attraction.

As well as historical tours, a company called Zip World

has turned the complex into an adventure playground,

which includes the fastest zip line in the world.

In Greece is the rugged island of Leros,

a strategic outpost that's been the envy of leaders

and dictators through the ages.

On one of the largest peaks is a strange three-sided formation

made of concrete.

From the ground, this just looks like some concrete construction.

But when you get above ground

and you look down at this place...

that is one strange three-sided structure down there.

Though unique looking, it becomes clear

that it doesn't stand alone.

It's part of a wider network.

Low concrete buildings, tunnels, bunkers,

towers with high vantage points.

These must be some type of military structures,

but they've fallen into disrepair.

Is this natural decay,

or signs of a more violent event?

Up close, the walls,

riddled with bullet holes and pockmarks,

provide the answer.

We were scared.

They were bombing continuously.

It was psychologically unbearable.

2 On the Greek island of Leros,

shattered structures are all that remain

of a bitter conflict that ripped

this quiet community apart.

This modern sculpture was the acoustic mirror.

It was a concave structure that trapped and amplified the sound

of the incoming aircraft.

Local resident Nicos Phocas has been entranced by

these formations for decades.

So the operator would work within this trench.

When he heard the noise, let's say now here,

he knew that it was coming from that direction.

Around it, there was a lot of anti-aircraft guns,

and also the command center for all the air defense control.

Leros is part of Greece today, but these structures date back

to an era when the island was under foreign control.

This aircraft warning system was part

of an extensive network of fortifications

built in the 1920s and '30s

on the orders of Italian fascist dictator

Benito Mussolini.

Their purpose was to protect

the island's greatest strategic asset,

a port that would allow Mussolini to challenge

the British Navy's domination of the region's seas.

This island is providing a massive naval base,

a deep-water port that enables the Italians to keep sea power

active against rival powers in the Eastern Mediterranean.

It was one of the largest naval bases they had

outside of the mainland Italy.

They had seaplanes, they had warships,

they had the submarine base.

It gave them total control of the area.

Mussolini's rapidly expanding navy could now vie

for supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean,

able to refuel and resupply in safety under the protection

of the island's fortifications.

It wasn't until World War II that these defenses

would be put to use.

By 1943, the region was largely occupied by the Axis powers

of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

But when the Allied invasion of mainland Italy

began in September,

Mussolini's regime crumbled

and his armies surrendered.

The race was now on for control of Leros.

The Germans rushed to seize all the areas

held by the Italians,

who were now seen as traitors.

This made British Prime Minister Winston Churchill

incredibly nervous. He, like Mussolini,

saw these islands as strategically crucial.

And he says,

"We have got to take these islands."

But his American allies would have none of it.

The American decision-makers,

Dwight Eisenhower in particular,

want nothing whatsoever to do with trying to grab

Italian-held Greek islands off the coast of Turkey.

From an American point of view, if we're gonna attack anything

in the Mediterranean, it's Italy.

But Churchill was hell-bent on seeing his plans through,

even if it meant the British going alone.

Churchill rushed 3,000 British troops to the island

to reinforce the 8,000-man Italian garrison

now stranded on Leros.

They won the race against the Nazis,

but a reckoning was coming.

On September 26th, the German air attack began.

The Luftwaffe began a relentless campaign

that lasted over 50 days.

Nickolas Daloglou was just nine years old

when the bombardments began.

Every time we heard those bombs, we would cry.

We'd spend the whole day in the shelters.

In our shelter, there were 60 people.

We were scared.

We were children, and we were crying.

But the Germans didn't just target military positions.

They attacked the islands, towns, and villages.

We would return to our homes, only to find nothing left.

Our homes were also destroyed by the Germans.

It was psychologically unbearable.

After seven weeks of relentless attack,

in the early hours of November 12th,

a German invasion force approached Leros.

Nearly 3,000 elite troops launched an assault

across the island,

hoping to claim the vital port for Nazi Germany.

Some units landed right beneath

this arsenal of weapons.

These were the mounting bolts for the guns.

The guns placed here were anti-ship guns.

Everyone knows that a naval ship can never win

in a gunfight against a shore battery.

But the cannon on top of this steep peak had a fatal flaw.

The gun is built to fire at something far.

If you bring something up close,

you can't depress the barrel far enough to shoot at it.

This gun is fearsome at range.

It is useless up close.

German landing craft managed to sneak in

under the blind spot of the guns.

They started climbing up the hill.

The allied artillery troops stationed in this battery

were about to be confronted with hand-to-hand combat

against elite Nazi infantry.

And little did they know, paratroopers were preparing

to drop right behind them.

2 November 12th, 1943.

Britain and their new ally, Italy, are defending

the island of Leros as elite Nazi shock troops

land under the blind spot of a coastal battery.

So the German troopers that landed there

were specially trained to climb the rocks.

The fighting was close quarters,

hand-to-hand fight with handguns.

It was actually like being on a street fight.

It was that close.

Once they secured positions on the rocky slopes,

it was impossible to dislodge the German soldiers.

Soon, the allied troops were hemmed in on all sides.

There were also some paratroopers that fell

on the other side of the hill,

and there were heavy losses on both sides.

It took the Germans two days to conquer this gunpoint.

With total control of the skies,

the Nazis dropped waves of paratroopers

onto the narrow neck at the center of the island,

splitting the Allied forces in two.

After four days of bitter fighting,

the Germans had the Allied HQ surrounded.

At that point, the British commander surrendered.

He was keen to avoid a massacre.

Out of the 3,000 British troops on the island,

almost 600 were killed, and the rest were either injured

or taken as prisoners of war.

The Italians lost nearly 300 men, and in total,

8,500 allied troops were taken captive.

This is said to be one of Germany's last victories

in World War II.

It's such a disaster for the British

that it gets called "Churchill's Folly."

Despite its obvious flaws from the very start,

Winston Churchill remained defiant.

Privately, he blamed the Americans.

With their help, it might've been avoided.

Germany occupied Leros until the end of the war.

After their defeat, it returned to British control.

The island finally became part of Greece in 1948.

Since then, the gun battery ruins

have sat abandoned,

slowly crumbling down the mountainside.

In recent years, the Greek cultural ministry

declared Leros' World War II remains

as an historic monument.

Leros stands as a living museum of one of the most epic

and tragic battles of World War II.

Eighty miles south of Peru's capital city, Lima,

is a palatial compound designed by an owner

living a double life.

We can see farmlands stretching out into the distance,

but surrounded by modern structures is a building

that looks really out of place.

This building has a real mishmash of features,

with its ornate arches and tiling.

There are also Gothic spires,

castle-like walls,

and these towers.

The gardens indicate wealth and opulence,

which is mirrored inside.

Decorative wallpaper, wood carvings,

and stained-glass windows.

Whoever built this had some serious cash to play with.

This was more than just a house.

It was the gateway to Peru's elite.

On a lower level, we find a trapdoor

that leads to a dark, dungeon-like space.

It's a completely lightless network of narrow tunnels.

They could have been for access or storage,

but you can't help wondering if they had

a more sinister purpose.

Behind these bright and colorful walls

lie terrible secrets that most Peruvians remain unaware of.

In the early 1800s,

a vast estate growing sugar cane and cotton

was acquired by an iconic figure in Peru's history,

Hipólito Unanue.

He was an academic and politician that supported

Peru's fight for independence.

After liberation from Spain was achieved in 1824,

Unanue served as president of the Congress

and the Minister of Finance in the new Republic of Peru.

He died in 1833, and the estate passed

to his son, José Unanue de la Cuba.

José Unanue was determined to build himself

the most luxurious home on the Peruvian coast,

as well as have it serve as a tribute to his father.

Construction began on this project in 1843.

Local historian David Pino

has spent years investigating this place,

and has unearthed some surprises along the way.

In the mid-19th century, the house looked

vastly different from its current state.

Nevertheless, traces of its former grandeur

can still be seen.

The walls were adorned with tapestries,

lamps illuminated the space,

and the furniture was imported from Europe.

Legend has it that Unanue bought a Bavarian castle,

stripped it of its doors,

windows, and furniture, and transported them all the way

here to decorate his own palace.

He was heavily influenced

by North African Moorish architecture,

and you can definitely see those influences.

Its construction was a passion project

and continued to evolve for decades.

The many visitors who enjoyed these spaces knew it

as Hacienda Unanue.

The mansion hosted

an array of people from the Peruvian elite

and regularly hosted lavish banquets.

But just feet away from these extravagant parties

lay the dark secret behind Unanue's wealth.

2 In the Cañete Valley, near Lima,

José Unanue constructed an elaborate palace.

Throughout the mid-1800s, he welcomed

the Peruvian aristocracy, hosting parties and banquets.

But a trapdoor leads to a different world

that underpinned his wealth.

It's known that these spaces were used to confine

dozens of enslaved individuals

who were subjected to torture, mutilations,

and great suffering in the narrow corridors.

The estate was run on a system of slavery.

Unanue didn't just own enslaved people.

His mansion also served as a marketplace.

The auctioneers were located on this terrace,

where they could see enslaved people being brought in

and offered like livestock.

The price of a slave at that time was 250 pesos,

half the cost of a pack donkey.

The slave trade in Peru had technically been abolished

in 1821, but illicit imports of enslaved Africans into Peru

continued, albeit in secret.

It's believed the tunnels were used both to hold

and punish the 400 enslaved people

that Unanue is thought to have owned.

This continued on the estate until 1854, when slavery was

abolished by president Ramón Castilla,

who became known as The Liberator.

Landowners found a way

to replace the labor shortage by bringing in Chinese workers.

In the 20 years after emancipation,

some 100,000 Chinese immigrants came to Peru.

They were promised a better life

or coerced into leaving China by recruiters

and brought here to work as indentured servants.

This system of forced labor was brutal,

and it led to about half of these Chinese workers

dying before the age of 40 for things like exhaustion,

ill treatment, but even suicide.

But soon, these workers would be presented

with an opportunity to seize freedom

and enact a measure of revenge.

In 1879, war broke out with Chile.

The following year, an invasion force landed

40 miles south of Unanue.

The Chilean army rampaged through the area,

moving north towards the capital,

passing through Cañete Valley.

Many of these Chinese laborers joined the Chileans

in ransacking these Peruvian estates.

But their collaboration led to terrible reprisals

from the local Peruvian peasants.

In 1881, tensions boiled over, and a riot broke out.

In the ensuing violence and chaos,

1,000 Chinese workers were massacred,

including on the Unanue estate.

Peace only returned to the region in 1884,

when the Chilean army withdrew.

The following year,

José Unanue died childless, and the estate passed through

his nephew's family for generations.

But the 1960s would see seismic changes

that would transform Peru.

In 1968, army general Juan Velasco Alvarado

led a coup to seize control of the government

and forcibly implemented agrarian reform across Peru.

The estates were transformed into farming cooperatives,

partly owned by the peasants who worked them.

Jose Unanue's descendants were forced to leave,

and the surrounding estate divided up among the poor.

The palace itself was left abandoned,

and its fittings and furniture looted.

In 1972, Unanue Palace was declared

a national historic monument.

Despite it being open to the public,

this abandoned building has suffered

from lack of investment and has fallen into ruin.