Showing results for "The Last Secret" in History

In June 1940, a covert new force - the Special Operations Executive (SOE) - was set up to wage a secret war. Its agents were tasked with sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines, and over the course of the next five years, 470 special agents would be sent into France. Only 25 female SOE agents would return. None before have told their story in their own words.

After rewriting history with their discovery of a Nazi U-boat off the coast of New Jersey, legendary divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler decided to investigate the great enduring mystery of history's most notorious shipwreck: Why did Titanic sink as quickly as it did? To answer the question...

When the Florentine Diamond, a 137-carat yellow gem once worn by Habsburg emperors and Medici princes vanished in the chaos of WWI only to improbably reappear a century later in Canada, the art world reeled. How did one of Europe’s most storied treasures cross the Atlantic? And why was it hidden away in a battered suitcase belonging to Empress Zita, the last Empress of Austria, Queen Consort of Hungary?

In 2017 the Salvator Mundi was sold at auction for $450m. But is it a real da Vinci? In a thrilling narrative built on formidable research, Ben Lewis tracks the extraordinary journey of a masterpiece lost and found, lied and fought over across the centuries. In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s small...

On 1 August 1990, British Airways Flight 149 departed from Heathrow airport, destined for Kuala Lumpur. It never made it there, and neither did its nearly 400 passengers. Instead, Flight 149 stopped to refuel in Kuwait, as Iraqi troops amassed on the border—delivering the passengers and crew into the hands of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army, to be used as 'human shields' during their invasion. Why did BA flight 149 proceed with plans to refuel in Kuwait City, even as all other flights were rerouted?

In the final days of World War II, with the ravenous Red Army marching across Czechoslovakia, a wily band of American soldiers did the unexpected: They teamed up with the Nazis and went behind enemy lines to save the world's rarest horses from imminent extinction at the hands of the Russians - including the exquisite white Lipizzaner, whose bloodlines date back to Genghis Khan.