File on 4 Investigates

Operation Venetic was the UK’s largest-ever law enforcement operation, following the infiltration of the encrypted communications network, EncroChat.
Among those arrested was Faye Dunn, a former international footballer who had become involved as an administrator in an international operation to supply drugs. After three years in prison, Faye has now completed her sentence and is rebuilding her life away from the drugs trade.
In prison, Faye saw close-up the disastrous effect drug abuse has on users for the first time.
In this File on 4 investigation, Danny Shaw explores the unexpected consequences of the EncroChat operation, as prisons struggle to cope with organised criminals behind bars. Speaking publicly for the first time, Faye tells Danny the story of how she stepped off a plane at Manchester Airport and straight into the hands of the police.
EncroChat was a mobile phone network used almost exclusively by organised criminals. When it was compromised by French and Dutch police, it supplied the biggest windfall of criminal intelligence in British history. It allowed police to view entire chains of communication used to coordinate the international drugs trade.
In the context of the decades-old ‘War on Drugs’, it was a bunker-busting super-weapon, unlikely ever to be surpassed in law-enforcement terms.
Thousands were arrested. Tonnes of drugs and millions in cash were seized. Weapons, ammunition and digital trails stretching across the global drug trade were uncovered. Major players were jailed. The police called it a once-in-a-lifetime victory.
But six years later, has this Hollywood-style policing operation made an impact on the supply of drugs on our streets?
Has it truly disrupted the drug trade – or simply shifted it?
And with law enforcement and custody costing hundreds of millions of pounds, are there other ways of reducing the harm cased by drugs?
Danny visits cities across Britain to look at programmes that aim to reduce demand for drugs - the other side of this most lucrative business model.
Presenter: Danny Shaw
Producer: Beth McLeod
Technical Producer: Steve Wyatt
Executive Producer: Andrew Wilkie
Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
Image: Andy Aitchison
A Prison Radio Association production for BBC Radio 4

A Romanian Ransom uncovers one of the Cold War's strangest secrets - a covert trade in which Jewish lives were bought and sold for livestock and cash. In 1958, MI5 agents watch pigs being loaded onto a plane in Hertfordshire, bound for Communist Romania. The man behind it, Henry Jakober, was a London livestock trader with hidden ties to Romanian intelligence.
The documentary follows Andrea Bernard and Radu Horaud, two children raised in communist Romania, where Jews faced decades of persecution, from the wartime Holocaust through Ceaușescu's secret police. Both hid their Jewish identity growing up, and both were separated from their parents, who defected to the West. Their reunions, in Tel Aviv and Paris, hinged on a name neither had heard before - Jakober.
Historians and the families reveal how Jakober brokered exit visas for desperate Romanian Jews, paid for with pigs, cattle, and farm equipment, later escalating to cash running into millions. Mossad, alarmed at first, ultimately co-opted the scheme, and Ceaușescu expanded it into an industrial operation, selling around 100,000 Jewish lives for tens of millions of dollars, while his secret police profited from the proceeds.
The documentary wrestles with Jakober's legacy - a Schindler-like rescuer, or a profiteer trading in human freedom? Through testimony and declassified files, we trace the moral complexity of a scheme that reunited families while treating them as commodities.
A Message Heard Media production for BBC Radio 4

The quality of maternity care in hospitals across the country has been in the spotlight following a series of scandals. On File on 4 Investigates families allege serious failings of care at the Countess of Chester maternity unit - the same hospital where neonatal nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering and attempting to murder 14 babies.
We speak to families about their experiences and ask what implications the quality of maternity care could have had on the Letby case.
Presenter: Stephanie Hegarty
Producer: Ben Robinson
Production Co-ordinators: Tom Dunster and Tim Fernley
Technical Producer: Nicky Edwards
Editor: Tara McDermott
Details of organisations offering information and support with traumatic birth or child bereavement are available on the pregnancy related issues page at www.bbc.co.uk/actionline

Whistleblower Simon Andriesz reveals how he unearthed evidence that US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had failed to disclose a business relationship with the paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein. The British broker, who worked at one of Lutnick’s Wall Street firms, made the discovery in the Epstein files, some of which were released earlier this year.
Mr Andriesz also speaks for the first time about the personal cost of disclosing what was going on inside one of the companies then run by Howard Lutnick and his decade-long battle with courts and regulators. And he reveals how Mr Lutnick's firm was keen to agree a $1m deal with the former Prince Andrew for introductions to wealthy individuals and sovereign institutions.
This programme has been edited since it was first released to correct errors in dates.
Presenter: Andy Verity
Producer: Rob Byrne
Production Co-ordinators: Tom Dunster & Tim Fernley
Technical Producer: Cameron Ward
Editor: Tara McDermott

Last year a Parliamentary Report concluded that between 1949 and 1976, around 185,000 babies of unmarried mothers were put up for adoption in England and Wales, many of these by force. For File on Four, The Skewer’s Jon Holmes investigates whether he was one of them.
Jon Holmes has always known he was adopted, but was never very interested in searching for his birth parents until results of a recent DNA test proved he was of Irish heritage and his curiosity was piqued.
A large folder arrives from Warwickshire County Council and slowly Jon begins to unpick the story of his life and the world he was born into. As secrets of Jon’s past are revealed, a Parliamentary Report by the Committee on Human Rights is published detailing shocking and vivid accounts of mothers being forced into giving up their babies by a society that outcast and shamed them at every turn.
What will Jon discover about his own family? What truths will he uncover as he speaks to mothers forced into handing their newborns over, as well as fellow adoptees about the damaging and traumatic culture he was born into?
Government has always denied any responsibility and is refusing demands for an apology, but is that really the case?
As Jon slowly finds out more about his own past, he also investigates the impact of this era and asks where does responsibility for this societal culture lie… and can it ever be repaired?
Presenter: Jon Holmes
Producer: Elizabeth Foster