The King Who Fooled Hitler

[ Birds squawking ] -D-Day... behind the invasion lies a secret story never before told... of how King George VI, the Queen, and even Princess Elizabeth, the Queen-to-be, were enlisted by MI5 to fool Hitler about D-Day.

In this story of double agents and decoys, a groundbreaking investigation uncovers for the first time the identity of the grandest and most secret of them all... ...George VI himself.

The investigation further reveals how he was entrusted with one of Britain's greatest state secrets of World War II... ...how the royal household managed to lose it whilst it was in the King's possession... that only the intervention of the Queen Mother saved the day... ...and how the monarchy emerged from the shame of appeasement to put itself at the heart of Britain's secret state.

Ever since World War II, George VI's true role in D-Day remained a secret.

Then Professor Richard Aldrich of Warwick University, and Dr. Rory Cormac of Nottingham University, made a tantalizing discovery in the diaries of the King's Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles.

-Alan Lascelles, known as Tommy, was the King's Private Secretary, so the most senior courtier in the land and went on to be Private Secretary for Queen Elizabeth II as well.

He was very old fashioned, an old-world kind of man.

And he left a diary.

And there's one very interesting clue in his diary giving insight, a snippet of insight, into the King's personal role in the D-Day deception operation.

-Lascelles' diary records a visit to Buckingham Palace in March 1944 by MI5 officers.

-"Friday, 3rd of March, 1944.

Two MI Men called on me yesterday and explained how the King's visits in the next few months could assist the elaborate cover scheme whereby we are endeavoring to bamboozle the German Intelligence over the time and place for Overlord."

-And this is a really significant clue, because it just gives us a little hint that the King not only knew about one of the biggest secrets of the war, but had an active and personal role in it himself.

-Then a second discovery gave further evidence of the King's role.

In 1950, five years after the war's end, the MI5 officer who'd run the D-Day deception operation, John Masterman, sent a top-secret document to Buckingham Palace.

It was an internal report Masterman had written for MI5, and it described every detail of the World War II deception operations he'd run.

Masterman called it his secret book.

-This is one of the most secret documents in British government.

It captures a whole new art form of secret service, or at least an art form taken to a whole new level that Britain has developed during the Second World War.

-Masterman sent his secret book to the King, care of Alan Lascelles, who was still the King's private secretary.

Lascelles replied to acknowledge safe receipt.

-"Dear Masterman, Thank you so much for trusting me with the book."

-"I'm most grateful.

It looks thrilling."

-"I know that my master will read it with as much interest and admiration as I shall myself.

Yours sincerely, Alan Lascelles."

-These two discoveries, the first hinting at the King's secret role in D-Day, the second showing that he was close enough to MI5 to be allowed sight of such a top-secret document, sent Aldrich and Cormac on a quest.

What really was George VI's wartime role?

And how had he come to be so trusted by MI5, when, at the beginning of his reign, it had viewed him with suspicion?

In December 1936, George's brother, Edward VIII, abdicated.

The British Intelligence Services suspected Edward of being a Nazi sympathizer.

They even put him under secret surveillance, and tapped his phone.

MI5's suspicions about the monarchy continued, particularly the new King's attitude to the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Hitler.

-The intelligence services are watching everybody who was connected with appeasement -- Chamberlain and also the royal family, because there are continual emissaries to Germany, and of course, there's the shadow of Edward VIII -- Edward VIII, who is known to be close to Hitler, close to the Germans.

-MI5 hoped that George would not follow in his brother's footsteps.

-Everyone associates appeasement with Edward VIII.

But King George wasn't a Nazi sympathizer, but he was an appeaser, because he did not want to go to war with Nazi Germany.

Not only had he lived through the horrors of the First World War, but also feared that a war might threaten to destroy the British Monarchy.

Nazism -- it didn't have such a threat to the British establishment or the British Monarchy in a way that, say, Communism did.

So there's this desire here to stave off war at all costs.

-And here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.

[ Crowd cheers ] -For MI5, the Munich agreement of September 1938 was a pivotal moment in its battle against appeasement.

The Security Service expected King George VI to stay neutral.

-The King is a constitutional monarch.

It is not his job to weigh in on the biggest and most controversial political issues of the day.

-Instead, in this letter, unearthed by Rory Cormac, George wrote privately to Chamberlain, leaving no doubt where he stood.

-"My Dear Prime Minister, I am sending this letter..." -"...by my Lord Chamberlain, to ask you if you will come straight to Buckingham Palace, so that I can express to you personally my heartfelt congratulations on the success of your visit to Munich.

Believe me yours very sincerely and gratefully, George RI."

-What we see here is the King personally backing one faction of the Cabinet, Chamberlain's appeasement faction to the extent that, after Chamberlain comes back from Munich, the King invites him straight round to Buckingham Palace and even engineers a photo shoot on the balcony, where, again, he is publicly and visibly aligning himself with the political approach of appeasement.

-MI5 knows that the King is on board with appeasement, and remarkably the King is actually vying with Chamberlain to establish relations with Hitler.

The King drafts a letter to Hitler.

He says, "This is a letter to Hitler, not as one statesman to another, but one ex-serviceman to another."

There's no doubt that the King is as keen on appeasement as is Chamberlain, and the security agencies are not sure what they think about this.

-The Foreign Office blocked the King's letter.

Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland finally put paid to appeasement.

With Britain at war, MI5 realized the King could no longer be excluded from vital matters of state.

Suspicion needed to be replaced by trust.

The opening moves were tentative.

-The intelligence services agreed to special arrangements being made to supply confidential information to George VI on a daily basis.

So we're talking about confidential stuff, nothing really classified, nothing really top secret.

And a duty officer from the cabinet war room attended Buckingham Palace every day and carried with him some of this confidential material.

But they didn't trust the Palace enough to leave it there.

He stood with the King as the King read it and the Private Secretaries read it, and then he carried it back home, back to the cabinet office.

-On May the 10th, 1940, German armies rolled into Belgium, then France.

The King had no option but to ask Winston Churchill to be Prime Minister.

George's role as a symbol of national unity was now crucial.

But full trust of the royal family remained elusive.

The King had to find a way to earn it.

George VI, once a supporter of appeasing Hitler, now King of a nation at war, still lacked the full trust of MI5.

His relationship with the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was not an easy one either.

Like MI5, Churchill had been on opposite sides to the King over appeasement, and temperamentally, the two men were very different -- Churchill charismatic and bullish, George shy and reticent.

-And whether Churchill showed off when he was going into the palace, whether the footmen picked up the feeling that -- or when he came out of seeing the King, still probably the word got around that it wasn't very easy for either of them.

They were very different people, and Winston, to begin with, didn't know how to cope with the King as a person.

The King was rather frightened of Winston -- overawed by him.

-Then, as war tested both men's mettle, came a critical moment.

-Now Adolf Hitler stood, just as Napoleon had stood more than 100 years before, and looked across the English Channel to the one fighting obstacle that stood between him and world domination.

-In the autumn of 1940, MI6, fearing a Nazi invasion, made preparations to evacuate the royal family to Canada.

Churchill put the intelligence agency's intricate plan to the King.

-It's elaborate.

There are converted armored cars.

There's a chain of stately homes.

The royal family are going to be rushed to the port at Liverpool, taken away to Canada.

The King's response is, "We're not going."

Not even the children are going to be evacuated.

Everybody is going to stay.

Everybody is going to fight.

At this point, what they're expecting is a German invasion led by German paratroopers, and the King says, "I want to get my German.

I want to kill at least one of the invaders, and we will all fight to the last."

When Churchill hears about this, he says, "Well, really, you need to be able to kill more than one German."

-Out of the blue, a specially gift-wrapped package arrived at Buckingham Palace.

The sender's address was marked "10 Downing Street."

Inside was a gleaming early Christmas present.

-Churchill sends the King a Tommy Gun.

And we know, actually, after this, not only the King, but the royal family, and indeed the equerries -- they're all practicing at Windsor and several other locations with pistols, with rifles, but also with Churchill's Tommy Gun.

[ Rapid gunfire ] The queen actually enjoys taking pot shots at rats.

It's the Blitz.

There's lots of rats in Buckingham Palace garden.

When the King and the Queen and the whole royal family are practicing with firearms in the garden of Buckingham Palace at Windsor, this reflects that the King genuinely expects German paratroopers to turn up at any moment.

He never goes anywhere in his car without a rifle and a pistol.

But it's also symbolic.

The King is actually showing this off to Cabinet ministers, to visiting diplomats, and he's sending out the message, "We're not gonna run.

We're not gonna run."

And so it's real, but it's also a performance.

-But the King still did not have access to all state secrets.

At times, he resorted instead to a DIY approach.

Through the royal families of Europe to whom he was related, he already had an intelligence network of his own.

George's personal use of his own private network could potentially create problems for the Secret Service, and the Prime Minister too.

One intelligence officer recorded that the King... -"...received a couple of bottles of 1941 Burgundy, one of which he served to Churchill at one of their regular Tuesday luncheons deux.

Churchill asked sharply how the King had got hold of it, and was much put out to be told 'Kings have their Secrets too.'"

-The King might well be joking but Churchill's a bit alarmed.

Churchill fears that the King has resurrected some of the royal family's private network of contacts to gather his own information.

-The King was able to secure the wartime vintage from occupied France because the royal pilot Mouse Fielden also happened to fly missions for the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, which Churchill had created to, in his own words, set Europe ablaze.

And if that wasn't enough, George VI's wife, the Queen, had her own private contacts too.

-We have to bear in mind, the Queen actually is someone who has the closest relations with the intelligence services.

Her brother's in SOE.

So actually, Buckingham Palace is almost an outpost -- an outstation, if you like, of the intelligence services.

-And so, the solution would seem to be to give the King a bit more access to official British secret material.

-Slowly but surely, the King was inching his way to the heart of the Secret Service.

And finally in 1943, George VI took an active part in the war of deception.

His first personal encounter with it was the use of disinformation to fool the enemy about a hazardous mission he embarked on in June 1943.

-The Maltese were a people of old traditions and simple manners of life.

But Hitler turned that island into a target of perpetual fire.

-The King flew to North Africa and then the island of Malta to thank its people for resisting three years of Nazi siege and bombardment.

But with the Luftwaffe still menacing Malta's skies, there was real danger.

British Intelligence's answer was Operation Loader.

-Operation Loader was a deception operation in which the King was personally involved.

It was the attempt to provide cover for his visit to North Africa.

And it's very, very dangerous to escort the King across the Mediterranean where Germans had been in active operation.

And so, Buckingham Palace put out a false line that the King was visiting troops in Portsmouth at this time.

And yet there was a mysterious General Lyon who was on board the plane and who landed in Algiers.

-Stories appeared in the press that General Lyon was visiting General Eisenhower, Commander in Chief of Allied Forces, in North Africa.

On June the 7th, 1943, he landed in Algiers.

For Eisenhower at least, it was no surprise that General Lyon was none other than the King Emperor George VI.

-After leaving Algiers, General Lyon carried on to Malta, and this was an important morale-boosting mission.

The people of Malta had been under barricade for a long, long time and really appreciated the King making a very dangerous journey.

-Operation Loader was a success, and George returned home to Buckingham Palace safe and sound.

It showed that the King could be a valuable asset to the deception planners.

A few months later, he was invited to a day out with the Special Operations Executive.

-In November 1943, the entire royal family visit RAF Tempsford.

This is not any RAF station.

This is the location of the secret special duties flights that take the agents of SOE and the agents of MI6 to Europe.

All the James Bond material is laid out for the royal family to see.

There are daggers in handbags.

There are compasses hidden in the top of lipsticks.

There's all sorts of exploding devices.

SOE like to disguise explosives as innocent materials -- wine bottles, dead animals, and the favorite of course, is explosive disguised as horse poo.

The Queen is absolutely thrilled by this and she calls the King over and says, "Look at this.

This is amazing -- exploding horse poo."

-The King, it seemed, had earned his spurs.

A few months later, he would be invited to join the greatest deception operation of the war.

In March 1944, with the visit to Buckingham Palace of two MI5 men, noted in his diary by King's Private Secretary Alan Lascelles, George the VII was invited to join the Allies' greatest deception operation of the war, fooling the Nazis about the timing and location of Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings.

The man who helped devise the deception operation was the Oxford don, John Masterman.

Back in August 1914, Masterman had been teaching in Germany and was interned for the duration of the war.

But he used his time there to learn the language and study the mind-set of his German captors.

-It was important in many ways, because if you knew how they thought, it was much easier to deceive them and lead them astray.

Even with the spies that the Germans sent over to us, he had a relationship with them, and in the end, he got them to spy for us.

-When war broke out, Masterman was signed up to the intelligence corps and then MI5, where he helped devise the Double Cross System, which used double agents to feed misleading information to the Nazis.

-He was a Chairman of a subcommittee which dealt with the Double Cross System -- the 20 Committee, XX.

They were actually in control of 39 spies working in different areas in Europe and in England.

They were all deceiving the Germans in some way or other.

-One of his team was the long-serving MI5 officer TAR Robertson.

-TAR Robertson was involved in working with Masterman to coordinate the activities of all of these double agents to make sure that the Germans were sufficiently confused and misled and that this very intricate and sophisticated web of lies, misinformation, and some real information, was coordinated in such a way as to not breach British security whilst misleading the Germans.

-The D-Day deception, code-named Operation Fortitude, would be Double Cross's greatest challenge.

Key to it were double agents known only as Garbo, Freak, and Brutus.

Agent Brutus was a Polish Air Force pilot who'd been parachuted by the British into German occupied France.

The Nazis captured and tortured him, saying, "return to England and spy for us or be executed."

He pretended to change sides, but his loyalty to the Allied cause never wavered.

-When he eventually came to England he contacted the intelligence services here, presenting them with what he believed to be an invaluable opportunity for him to work as, as I say, really, as a triple agent on the belief that the Germans were asking him to work and supply information to them.

And at that point, you start to see over the next two years, this extraordinary build up of information in which he is part of the Double Cross Network supplying the Germans information to make them believe that the landings would take place in Calais.

-The Nazis knew from the massing of troops in southern England that an invasion was coming.

The Allies' aim was to deceive them into thinking the main landings would be at Calais.

Anywhere else, like Normandy, was just a sideshow.

The King's movements, as reported in the British press, were a central part of the deception plan.

Rory Cormac has done a search of nearly 23,000 local and national newspapers printed in Britain between March and August 1944, three months before, and two months after D-Day.

This historical detective work reveals that what has been seen until now as a random series of morale-boosting royal visits to troop concentrations was in fact a calculated program, carefully choreographed with misleading reports from the Double Cross agents.

-Here is a cutting from "The Times" newspaper, dated 10th of March, 1944, and the headline is, "Canadians Inspected by the King."

-MI5's plan was to drip-feed the Germans information which would make them think they were piecing together the jig-saw of the secret plan for D-Day.

Newspapers covered the King's visits to key attack formations, but their locations were not revealed in print.

Tantalizing clues however, made the Nazis think they were doing the detective work, like reports from the Double Cross agents in London, which helped identify the troops the King was visiting.

-What you can see is there's a team of people in London who are minutely examining each piece of information.

"How do we want this piece of information about the King's visit to get back to Germany?

Do we want this to come through newsreel?

Do we want this to come through a newspaper?

Do we want this to come through an agent report?

Do we want the Germans to discover something through photo reconnaissance?"

The crucial thing is it's fragmentary.

The Germans shouldn't be given everything on a plate.

The whole secret of deception is to get the Germans to work these things out for themselves.

-It doesn't say in the newspaper where the King was actually visiting these troops.

It just says "somewhere in England."

But a bit of detective work, cross-referencing with memoirs, with troop dispositions, with royal train timetables, we worked out that this was in Hove on the South Coast.

Hove, at first look, would be the obvious place for troops to invade Normandy from, but remember that MI5 told Lascelles the job was to bamboozle the Germans.

-The first part of this deception was to suggest to the Nazis that a full-scale invasion, or perhaps a large coastal raid, might be imminent.

So, that same day, Double Agent Brutus fed back to Berlin false information that ordinary traffic to the Isle of Wight had been stopped, to free the roads for troop movements.

-Because the King is down in Hove, not far from the Isle of Wight, it suggests to the Germans that something might be up -- maybe that war planning is being stepped up.

There might be troops movements to the isle of Wight.

Visiting troops in Hove suggests that there might be some sort of attack on Normandy, but would there just be a diversionary attack to draw German attention away from the real invasion of Calais?

-The King's visit is working like a highlighter pen.

He's identifying particular units that later they want the Germans to follow.

-The suggestion that the invasion was only days away was a bluff.

There were still nearly three months to D-Day.

The second part of the deception was about location.

Initially, Hove implied some kind of force leaving from Sussex to Normandy.

Then one of the Double Cross agents wired Berlin to say that the troops there were moved just after the King's visit to Dover, directly opposite Calais.

-It's aimed to confuse the Germans, about location of forces, about the order of battle, and where and when the ultimate invasion is going to come from.

-The Germans are looking at what the King is doing, so it's a wonderful tool with which the Double Cross Team can highlight things which they want the Germans to look at.

[ Birds chirping ] -Another deception was to draw Nazi attention away from the south to the north of England.

This time, royal involvement was to be ratcheted up, and for the first time, the Queen, and Queen-to-be, Princess Elizabeth, were enlisted in the ruse.

-This article comes from "The Times" on the 24th of March, 1944.

The headline is, "The King With His Army Tour with the Queen and Princess."

-The King goes north on the royal train to visit Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.

These are attack formations.

They're in the east of the country, so this very much reinforces the deception story they might be going east to Calais.

They might actually be going east to attack Scandinavia.

-It was the King's seventh such inspection in recent weeks, but it was the first time the Princess had made a full-length tour with her parents.

-When you have the Queen, when you have Princess Elizabeth, the whole royal family there, dramatic forces, airborne gliders, snipers, special forces, this just makes for really fantastic news coverage.

So, this is a way in which the King is using the royal family to amplify the process of deception.

-The King's role in Double Cross was working exactly as planned.

On the 18th April, the King's Private Secretary Alan Lascelles wrote in his diary... -"Overlord has done a good job with the elaborate cover scheme intended to bamboozle the Germans and seems to have succeeded."

-And according to Masterman's nephew David, the King was keen to be kept fully in the loop by John Masterman.

-I think he was informed about everything that was going on, I'm sure he said that the King wanted to be informed about everything.

-A week later, George inspected troop formations in Hampshire.

The visit was then spun back to Berlin by MI5's double agents Garbo and Freak.

Its aim -- to create confusion about what was real and what was just rehearsal.

-Agent Garbo's report just a few days after the King makes this visit backs up the narrative by suggesting that invasion might be imminent from Hampshire.

Freak's report on the very same day adds even more credibility to this narrative by suggesting that there might well be some military exercises in the Channel, and crucially, Freak warned that they couldn't rule out that this was an actual operation.

And this is significant because it's designed to confuse the Germans.

The Germans are thinking, when it doesn't materialize, "Well, maybe it was just an exercise."

And this lowers their defenses for when the ultimate D-Day comes.

-The royal deception operation was elaborate and complex.

But it was not just limited to the British mainland.

In May 1944, the King embarked on his most dangerous mission, to Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

Again, the paper omitted George's destination, but the mention of one clue made it very clear to the Nazis where the monarch was.

-This is the front page of "The Daily Mail" from the 15th of May, 1944.

We see the report talking about cold and lonely Northern waters.

And the headline is, "The King Takes Leave of His Fleet."

It says, "The King has taken leave of his captains in the Home Fleet and has bidden them, their ships' companies, and their ships God Speed before battle.

-This part of the deception plan, called Fortitude North, was designed to suggest that a full-scale Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Norway was being prepared.

-The King's visit to the Orkneys is remarkable.

The Orkneys are further away from London than they are from Norway.

And of course, because they're quite close to Norway, they are fiercely patrolled by German U-boats, by German fighters.

This is a hazardous mission, so the question is, why is the King going there?

And the answer is to give credence to Fortitude North.

So the King is taking actually quite a significant risk.

-A few days after the King's visit, Double Agent Garbo warned Berlin that an Allied invasion of Norway was imminent and that it might be the first attack in the invasion of Europe.

-It is a deliberately complex deception operation, and this is why Double Cross and Fortitude is such a fascinating operation, and ultimately a successful operation, because it was so nuanced, because there were so many moving parts which were being coordinated by MI5.

-On June the 6th, 1944, a fleet of 7,000 ships emerged from the early morning mist, heading for the Normandy beaches.

The panic-ridden German defenders radioed for urgent reinforcements.

-The response from Berlin is somnolent.

On the day of the invasion, Hitler is sleeping late.

He's having a lie in.

No one wants to wake him.

And when he does wake up and he's told about this, because it's Normandy, because he's been fed all this deception material, he doesn't believe this is the main attack.

He thinks this is a coastal raid.

And so, really, he just shrugs it off.

-The armies of the United Nations have made their first landings on the soils of Western Europe.

This is D-Day.

-The King, who had played a vital role in the deception plan, broadcast to his people.

-Four years ago, our Nation and Empire stood alone against an overwhelming enemy, with our backs to the wall.

This time, the challenge is not to fight to survive... ...but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause.

-A week later, the King and Prime Minister Winston Churchill sifted through piles of MI6 classified reports on D-Day.

The King, once denied full access to all intelligence material because his family was seen as a security risk, was now allowed to see everything.

Two days later, an eminent dignitary arrived in Normandy for the final phase of Double Cross.

British Intelligence would maintain the ruse that D-Day was only a diversionary attack right up until August, to give Allied troops time to consolidate their positions.

The eminent dignitary was in fact none other than King George VI.

The Germans thought this King's presence was a further attempt to distract their attention from Calais.

But as it would turn out, one extraordinary further twist would show that George still could not be entirely trusted with a secret.

At the war's end, John Masterman, key player behind the Double Cross system and D-Day deceptions, wrote a top-secret MI5 report, detailing every aspect of the Double Cross system.

It was also a template for future MI5 and MI6 operations.

-This is one of the most secret documents in British government, it's a form of strategic leadership that Britain doesn't want to give away.

During the Second World War, during the 1950s, during the 1960s, and indeed Britain has set up a special department called the Department of Forward Plans, particularly to keep this kind of specialist expertise alive.

-Masterman called the report his secret book.

In 1950, five years after the war when he'd returned to academic life at Oxford University, he sent his one and only personal copy of it to Buckingham Palace for the private attention of King George VI.

The King's private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, wrote to Masterman that it had arrived safely.

-"Dear Masterman, I think it would be remiss of us both..." -"...If we didn't exchange a receipt.

Here it is."

-Lascelles passed the secret book on to the King.

But then, as the months ticked by, came an extraordinary twist to the story.

With no sign of his only copy of his secret book being returned by Buckingham Palace, Masterman was becoming a worried man.

-On the 4th of October, 1951, Masterman writes from Worcester College Oxford where he's provost and he writes to Lascelles, and he says... -"I'm sorry to trouble you at a time like this."

-Of course, the King is increasingly ill. -"But I'm wondering whether I ought to send you a reminder about the book which I lent to you.

I see that it went in December, and I'm beginning to be worried, probably quite unnecessarily... -"...lest it be overlooked.

Yours sincerely, John Masterman."

And of course, it's almost a year that this book has been out of his possession.

-Lascelles was in an unenviable position.

The King was never an easy person to approach, and now the lung cancer from which he was slowly dying, made any approach on a matter so serious as MI5's missing, perhaps even lost, top-secret document, extremely awkward.

-I think he admired him as a person, but he was at times... difficult.

He wasn't very easy because he did get very emotional about all sorts of things and needed help with his work.

And I think he used to go off in a rage and almost like having a fit, and then people just had to soothe him and calm him down.

And the Queen was very important in that way, I think.

-On this day of mourning, it's a London silent and still, its citizens remembering that, here in this very city, their King had faced with them the dangers of the last war.

-On February the 6th, 1952, the King died.

There was still no sign of the secret book.

Masterman feared the worst -- either it had got into the wrong hands or it was lost forever, along with the late George VI.

Even more worryingly, the incoming boss of MI5 was determined to tighten security.

Masterman, now in desperate straits, wrote one last time to Lascelles.

-"Dear Lascelles, once more I have to apologize for ringing you when you must be overwhelmed with anguish.

I want to ask if you can manage to get my secret book to me.

I am nervous, I hope needlessly... -"...with the change of Director General."

And here he is referring to Sir Dick White.

-"I can't very well say that I haven't got it or say where it is."

-Masterman's in a panic, because he's now convinced that the book is missing, and you can tell he's in a panic because he's not just writing, he's also ringing up.

This is urgent, and really he can almost feel the new Director General of MI5, Dick White, grabbing his collar.

He really like a schoolboy who feels that the headmaster is bearing down on him, and he needs this book, and he needs it now.

-Two months later, Lascelles was finally able to convey some good news to Masterman.

George's widow, now the Queen Mother, had been on a secret operation of her own.

-"Dear Masterman, my trouble has been that all the personal dispatch boxes have been out of my control.

However, this very day, I got the Queen Mother to look at them, and sure enough, there it was.

It is now locked up in my room.

A.

Lascelles."

-One's guess is that the King confided in her and found her a very important, very necessary shoulder to lean on, and he -- presumably he told her things that he wouldn't tell anybody else.

-The Queen Mother had got Masterman out of jail.

In 1972, he published his secret book.

But even then, 28 years after D-Day, MI5 believed that Double Cross and all deception work should remain secret and tried to block him.

Masterman thwarted them by publishing in America.

But there was one thing he decided not to reveal -- the role of George VI in the D-Day deception, it has remained a secret until Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac's investigation today.

The monarchy's role in Britain's Secret State would not die with George.

His eldest daughter, the young Queen Elizabeth II, would inherit his mantle.

The Crown, once under the scrutiny, and even investigation of the Secret Service, was now its trusted friend and counselor.

One extraordinary meeting demonstrates this intimacy.

In 1955, the Prime Minister Anthony Eden, or AE, and the Head of the Foreign Office's Middle Eastern Desk, Evelyn Shuckburgh, traveled to Buckingham Palace.

The Suez Crisis was looming, and the empire alive with conspiracy.

But one apparent friend was the young Harrow-educated King Hussein of Jordan.

However, the British feared that he had fallen under the influence of his Nationalist and anti-British uncle, Nasser Sharif.

Shuckburgh noted in his diary in 1955... -"I told her," the Queen, "the machinations of the wicked Uncle Nasser.

The Queen said she didn't really think it a good idea to send Arabs to English public schools."

-"She had seen poor little Hussein, fresh from Harrow, a year or two ago, and all he could do was stand stiffly to attention, saying... -"...saying, 'Your Majesty,' and not another word."

-"As for Uncle Nasser, she said, she was surprised nobody had found means of putting something in his coffee."

"It was not until afterwards that I thought of what I ought to have said to this -- that it was dangerously like a remark made on a famous occasion, by her predecessor King Henry II."

-Of course, King Henry had said, just before the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, "Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?"

-"Instead, I said it was a good idea, which ought to be applied to a number of people in the Middle East.

I promised to send her the gossip we've heard about Hussein.

I was a little handicapped by having a cigarette in my hand, which steadily burnt my fingertips behind my back."

-"AE was looking wonderfully fit and relaxed..." -"...and was very friendly to both of us."

-And that's, startling, because we never get a sense of the Queen discussing these kinds of things, we never get a sense of her humor, and we never get a sense of her talking to diplomats about matters of state, particularly against the background of a range of covert operations being launched by the foreign office and MI6 against countries across the Middle East, most famously, the other Nasser, the President of Egypt.

We think of the intelligence services as the most secret institution in Britain.

Well, the royal family certainly give them a run for their money, at least in terms of historical documents, so when the queen appears on a page, you take notice, and when the queen starts talking about potentially assassinating somebody, you really take notice.

-The queen's words were, no doubt, delivered in jest.

Uncle Nasser was never assassinated, but the queen remains close to her Secret Service.

From suspicion to trust, the relationship between the monarchy and British Intelligence had come full circle -- a relationship which endures to this day.