Documents That Changed The World

In this Sony Award-winning investigative history series, BBC international correspondent Mike Thomson and guest presenters pore over private papers, public records and primary sources, uncovering the hidden truth about historical events. As they follow the documentary trail, they talk to key participants, contemporary commentators and academic experts, and explore shocking stories of cover-ups, covert operations and collusion.

Here are the extraordinary tales of the 1956 French offer to merge the UK and France; the Wall Street plot to overthrow Franklin D Roosevelt; and the journalist's notebook that came perilously close to revealing one of Britain's greatest Cold War secrets. Plus, Gordon Corera travels to Stockholm to investigate the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, David Loyn investigates how a lost document is helping Afghanistan come to terms with its painful past, Heather Jones asks why an intelligence warning given seven weeks before Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland was ignored, and Sanchia Berg traces the career of an MI5 agent left out in the cold...