Correct me if I'm wrong, but the statement "gravity is so strong that nothing can escape" encapsulates a lot more physical ramifications than just a really strong "pull force" coming from the center of the black hole. Defeating gravitational stress in itself is mostly meaningless, because there are other mechanisms keeping you inside a black hole.

Spacetime becomes curved to the point where there is no path out of the black hole. You could be alive and your spacecraft be perfectly functional, any direction you choose will only take you around the inside of the event horizon, even if you could go faster than the speed of light.

Also remember, from a relativity standpoint, objects at the event horizon have stopped in time. I'm not sure this is perfectly correct, but from the perspective of an outside observer, your "pendulum tether" would only ever asymptotically approach the event horizon - there would never be an "upswing" with which you could pull anything out. So yes, if you could pull a wire out, you could have the information at the end of it, but you can't pull it out, so no universal secrets for you.

Now, the craziest part is that those last two paragraphs are two different ways of saying the same thing. Even weirder, we also already know of a mechanism by which energy can escape a black hole: quantum tunneling (see: Hawking Radiation). We just need to invent a method of information transfer via quantum tunneling, and then we could have someone transmit the information back out to us from just "inside" the event horizon. There are other problems with this, like: when would you expect to receive a return signal from an observer that has crossed the event horizon?

Current BH research suggests that you can recover all of the information about what has fallen into a black hole by looking at the "soft hair," which are the spacetime traces of the objects that have stopped in time at the event horizon - you don't even need any fancy camera on a wire.