Article 17 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention added that prisoners must also supply their date of birth. These obligations are required by the International Committee of the Red Cross to help identify prisoners of war. Prisoners are also protected under the Geneva Conventions:
No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever.
Initially, the Army had no interrogation organization but as the need for military, political, scientific and social intelligence grew, interrogations of shot down aircrew, U-Boat survivors and prisoners captured on raids centred on the Prisoner-of-War Interrogation Section (Home), in which District and Home Commands administered ‘cages’ that selected prisoners to be sent to one of Combined Services’ Detailed Interrogation Centres (CSDIC). These were at Latimer, Beaconsfield, Trent Park and Cockfosters in London and Wilton Park in Sussex. British methods of guile, deception and the widespread use of eavesdropping proved profitable. Some of those in the Monitoring Rooms listening to the unguarded conversations on military and technical intelligence were German-speaking refugees who had fled from Nazi oppression themselves. Many were ATS badged as Intelligence Corps, such as Susan Lustig (nee Cohn), who herself had left Poland in 1939. Apart from the military and technical intelligence, information on the Holocaust and other atrocities also emerged. Interrogators were trained at Hawk’s Club and the Chestnut Theological Club in Cambridge and supported by German and Italian language courses at 6 St Peter’s Terrace. The Officer’s Mess was at 21a Trinity Street with billets at Christ’s and St John’s Colleges.
When a piece of burnt paper found in the cockpit of a shot-down German aircraft attracted technical intelligence interest during the Battle of Britain, Cockfosters had an early success. In a letter to The Times in September 2010, Murray Wrobel, an Intelligence Corps second lieutenant at the time, recalled his experiences at Trent Park:
The prisoners were kept two to a room. All the rooms had been made acoustically efficient with carpets and curtains, and fitted with hidden microphones, which allowed us to record conversations on gramophone records. Sometimes, we found it paid to pair air force and naval prisoners who would try to keep each other’s morale up by talking up all the war-winning tricks they had up their sleeve. Shortly before the Blitz began, I remember the excitement when one of our microphones picked up a German air force officer telling a U-Boat captain all about the wonders of Knickebein. He explained how accurate the bombing had become, guided by two radio signal beams set to cross over the designated target so that when the two sounds merged, they knew they were directly overhead and could release their bombs.
The intelligence was passed to Air Ministry Scientific Intelligence where Dr Reginald Jones developed jamming counter-measures to defeat Knickebein. The Detailed Interrogation Centres recorded 64,427 conversations of 10,191 German and 567 Italian prisoners onto 78rpm gramophone records. Between 1942 and 1945, more than 3,500 prisoners passed through London Cage. After 1945, about 1,000 suspects gave statements during war crime investigations.
In the field, interrogators were located at all levels of command from brigade HQs upwards to Command CSDICs. The Small Scale Raiding Force, also known as 62 Commando, was formed specifically to capture prisoners from Occupied Europe. The London District Cage, commanded by Colonel Scotland, occupied Nos. 6, 7 and 8, Kensington Palace Gardens between July 1940 and September 1948 and could handle sixty prisoners. Randall Coates returned to the UK from Switzerland in 1939 and, responding to the War Office advert in The Times for linguists, was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps. First posted to No. 2 Eastern Command Cage at Hounslow, he was transferred to the London Cage where Scotland allowed him to accompany Combined Operations commando raids to capture prisoners. In December 1941, Coates took part in Operation Archery against the German garrison on Vaasgo Island in Norway and, in 1942, accompanied Operation Myrmidon diversionary raid in support of the St Nazaire raid. He was then made responsible for all prisoners captured in raids to the east and north of Dover. Coates became an internationally recognized expert on mazes, designing those at Blenheim Palace, Longleat and the Château de Beloeil in Belgium.
MI2 Liaison (USSR) handled military relationships with the Soviet Union. Lieutenant Colonel Peter Squires, a Cambridge University classicist, accompanied the British Military Mission to Moscow and after arriving at Archangel in a convoy then helped unload munitions for the Red Army. He achieved the reputation of being the best non-native Russian speaker of his generation and the fastest simultaneous interpreter in Great Britain. Not unnaturally, he was treated with suspicion by the Soviets and developed elaborate counter-surveillance measures when he moved to Moscow in 1944. Major Arthur Birse interpreted for Prime Minister Churchill and gained such respect with Stalin that he was awarded the Soviet Union Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
The brief seizure of power by the pro-Nazi Vidkun Quisling in Norway and the spectre of a British Fifth Column led Prime Minister Winston Churchill to instruct the former Air Secretary Lord Swinton to establish Home Defence (Security) Executive and ‘to find out whether there was a Fifth Column in this country and, if so, to eliminate it’. As the Nationalist General Emilio Mola advanced on Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, he claimed that his four columns would be supported by a ‘fifth column’ inside the city. When the term was exploited by German propaganda to encourage the paranoia of the enemy within, the Ministry of Information magnified the corrosion by suggesting that anyone who thought that such an enemy did not exist had fallen into the trap of being persuaded that one did not exist. The Defence Regulations of the 1939 and 1940 Emergency Powers (Defence) Act restricted aircraft movement and generated investigations into 64,000 ‘aliens’, many refugees from Nazi oppression. Several thousand were either interned on the Isle of Man or sent to Canada and Australia. The legislation also restricted photography, had signposts removed and enforced control of access to military training areas and research and development facilities.
As it became evident in June 1940 that MI5 was ill-prepared for war, Prime Minister Churchill dismissed Major General Kell, Director-General since it had been formed in 1909. To fill the gaps in expertise, the Intelligence Corps provided personnel, including, in April 1941, Captain David Petrie from Middle East Command. Formerly head of the Delhi Intelligence Bureau and aged 60 years, he had been commissioned into the Corps in the Middle East. Tasked to review MI5 in November 1940 and then appointed Director-General, he injected reforms that enhanced its ability to deal with the demands of war in the busiest years of its history. The regeneration of MI5 was considerably eased by the Radio Security Service intercepting Abwehr communications. Bletchley Park cryptographers cracking ciphers in December led to Abwehr information, which was generally reliable, being highly graded as ‘ISOS’ information, ISOS stood for ‘Intelligence Service, Oliver Strachey’, the cryptographic Section head. Petrie was one of the first to question the loyalties of British communists working in sensitive government positions, some of whom were already ‘sharing’ information with Moscow, for example Captain Anthony Blunt. He had commanded 18 FSP in France and had been dismissed from an Intelligence course at Minley Manor after expressing his communist sympathies. Nevertheless, by March 1941 he was controlling Section 5 B1 (Counter Intelligence) monitoring diplomatic missions in London. Blunt had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and was exposed as a Soviet spy in the 1980s.
In September 1939, Captain Robin Stephens (2 Gurkha Rifles) exploited the ‘old boys network’ to join MI5 and was employed interviewing British Fascists and interned aliens in the Oratory Schools. But the location was not fit for purpose and when the normal occupant of one room, that was also being used as an interrogation cell, could not find his trousers on being asked to vacate it, the Swinton Committee authorized Stephens to establish an interrogation centre for non-military suspects at the Victorian mansion of Latchmere House in the suburbs of Ham Common, London. A psy
chiatric hospital for officers during the First World War, it was requisitioned by Stephens on 10 July and was open for business within a fortnight. In December, it was named Camp 020. The Intelligence Corps provided several officers with linguistic skills, including Japanese from 1942, as interrogators. In 1945 a German censor officer was captured with a party of Japanese diplomats by Italian partisans in Milan. After a bomb hit the camp in January 1941, Reserve Camp 020R was established at Huntercombe Internment Camp, Nuffield. Stephens insisted that since both centres dealt with suspected agents, it was not subject to the Red Cross visits, nevertheless he managed both camps using military discipline. While he trained his interrogators to believe that violence degraded the quality of information and resistant prisoners would eventually talk, he encouraged psychological intimidation, for instance, the threat of ‘You will now be taken to Cell 14’ playing on the prisoner’s worst fears. ‘Cell 14’ did not exist. Convivial conversation was the preferred option. The philosophies developed by Stephens set the standard for future Intelligence Corps interrogators.
Camp 020 received 480 suspects, 107 arriving in 1940 when invasion threatened and 119 in 1944 prior to imminent opening of the Second Front in Europe. Germans formed the bulk followed by Belgians, French, and Norwegians. Fourteen of the sixteen convicted spies were unearthed at Camp 020, including three British. The Waldburg Group of a German and three Dutchmen wading ashore near Lydd on 3 September 1940 were the first agents to arrive. In the same month, the MV La Part Bien, with a crew of three skippered by a Swede, arrived in Plymouth and told 46 FSS that they had agreed a request with some Germans in Brest to use their neutrality to collect several passengers in Le Touquet and deliver them to England. The three were sent to Camp 020 where it emerged that the Abwehr had provided the vessel but a faulty compass and a beer cask that was too much of a temptation saw them unintentionally arrive in Plymouth. Seven agents paddled ashore from flying boats and one who parachuted into Ireland made his way to Belfast where he surrendered. Compared with the frenetic activity in large ports, the HPSS in smaller harbours had to be equally alert. Sergeant Ron Barker of the Buckie Detachment, 143 (Aberdeen) HPSS was involved in the capture of two men and a Belgian woman who arrived in Cluny on 30 September 1940 in a dinghy. But discrepancies in her story and the wireless, revolver, codes and list of aerodromes in the suitcase carried by one of the two men exposed them as agents. When an Edinburgh railway station porter then reported that a man had deposited a damp suitcase in a left luggage locker, Werner Waelti was arrested by an armed police surveillance team. Inside was another wireless and codes. All were transferred to Camp 020 where a Belgian stool pigeon was used in their interrogations. MI6 information confirmed that the woman had lost her temper with a Major Ritter during a meeting in Brussels. All were convicted and the two men executed, one of them eventually admitting to being Abwehr.
Twenty-nine British were interrogated at Camp 020, most before October 1940. In 1939, when the cruiser HMS Gloucester visited Dar es Salaam, Ordinary Seaman Duncan Scott-Ford was smitten by the daughter of a German landowner and shared naval codes with her. A year later, he became embroiled with an Egyptian prostitute in Alexandra but when she became expensive and he ‘cooked’ an account book, he was dismissed from the Royal Navy. He joined the Merchant Navy and when his ship anchored off Lisbon in May 1942, he was talent-spotted by an Abwehr agent named Rittman, who promised to deliver a letter to the daughter provided that he found out why all British ships had to be in port on 28 June. Scott-Ford had two further meetings with Rittman and a friend in which he supplied information on convoy routes, casualties from U-Boat attacks and morale in Great Britain. They tasked him to collect identity cards, ration books and clothing cards. When Scott-Ford arrived in Liverpool eight days later, he admitted during the routine Home Port Security check that he had been approached by German agents but claimed that he had rejected their requests. Returning to Lisbon in July, he re-established his contact with the Germans. Meanwhile, his treachery had been confirmed by ISOS information and when his ship, the SS Finland, docked at Salford on 19 August, Scott-Ford was arrested by 118 (Liverpool) FSS and admitted to meeting Abwehr agents but denied giving information. Transferred to Camp 020, he supplied information on German activities in Lisbon; nevertheless, he was charged under the 1940 Treachery Act that ‘with intent to help the enemy, did an act between 7-9 March 1942, that is, he did record information relating to the movements and composition of a convoy’. He was executed in November 1942, a dark year for the Allies in the Battle of the Atlantic. A German aircraft bombed the offices of 118 FSS at Eastham Lock. The aircraft was then shot down and Company Sergeant Major Duke rushed to the crash site and rescued the surviving aircrew from being lynched.
One Camp 020 task delegated to the Intelligence Corps was to provide ‘minders’ for the agents ‘turned’ by MI5, who were known as ‘bonzos’. The deception had originated in 1936 after an MI5 officer had criticized the prosecution of defecting agents and had suggested ‘turning’ them. The management of the exploitation was delegated to the Twenty Committee, which took its nomenclature from Roman numeral for twenty, XX, or double cross. Its Chairman for most of the war was Lieutenant Colonel John Masterman, an Intelligence Corps officer attached to MI5. Several Corps officers were agent controllers. Sergeant Andrew Corcoran transferred from the Royal Armoured Corps in April 1941 and was posted to 307 (Special) FSS on port security in London and then to 308 FSS, which, in January 1942, was listed as a War Office Reserve section but actually supported MI 5 and had a higher number of sergeants than other FS sections. In 1942 Corcoran was allocated two Norwegians nicknamed ‘Mutt’, the wireless operator, and ‘Jeff’, who had surrendered to the police after paddling ashore to a Banffshire beach from a flying boat. Transferred within twenty-fours from Camp 020 as ‘bonzos’, they were escorted by Corcoran to the safe house at 35, Crespigny Road, Hendon, from where he escorted them around Great Britain so that they could give their phony reports credence. In the event that the operation was compromised, Corcoran was to activate Operation Hegira, dismantle ‘Mutt’s’ antenna at Crespigny Road, burn sensitive documents, collect a Polish Air Force officer also posing as a double agent, and make his way to a safe house in North Wales. Sergeant Paul Backwell and Corporal Allan Tooth, from 50 FSS, ‘minded’ the British double agent Eddie Chapman, alias Agent ZigZag, at Crespigny Road and helped organize his dummy sabotage of the de Havilland aircraft factory to convince the Abwehr that he was one of their agents. Before returning to Lisbon, Corporal Hale tested Chapman’s cover. Continuing his double cross, Chapman was awarded the Iron Cross by the Germans.
Responsibility for GHQ Home Forces security at St Paul’s School, Hammersmith and its emergency Command Post underneath Wentworth Golf Clubhouse was also held by 50 FSS. Corporal Norman Kirk, a languages teacher and transferee from the Royal Engineers, was one of seven NCOs from the Section trained in sabotage at a SOE Special Training School under the direction of Lord Victor Rothschild, then head of MI5 B1 (Counter-sabotage). Setting a precedent for future Intelligence Corps security sections, the seven spent the next eight months on a nationwide exercise testing infrastructure key point security, for instance, by using false papers at the main gate, breaching the perimeter fencing and placing dummy bombs. Completely self sufficient and living in seedy flats, the ‘saboteurs’ risked being bitten by dogs, shot at by trigger-happy Home Guard and interrogated by local police officers, quite apart from falling into rivers and being suspended on barbed wire. Rothschild was commissioned into the Corps in 1943. A post-1945 successor to this role was 163 Special Security Section, which specialized in conducting anti Soviet Spetsnaz sabotage operations.
MI5 B1 (D) established the London Reception Centre at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School, Trinity Road, Wandsworth and 14 Kenrick Place, SW1 in January 1941. From July 1941, the MI9 liaison officer was Captain A.E. Acton-Burnell. A year later, MI9 and MI19 were both placed under the direct control of the Deputy Director of Military Int
elligence with London Reception Centre placed with the latter. Commanded by the canny Dutch Military Intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Oreste Pinto, its interrogators vetted 30,000 people who wished to enter Great Britain and achieved the fine balance of trapping spies and ensuring that bona fide exiles did not feel that they had escaped from the Gestapo and General Franco’s police only to fall into the hands of an equally unpleasant security organization. Its collation cell dissected possessions that could be used by Allied agents, such as identity documents, a bus ticket, clothing, and cigarettes, and developed not a picture of life in Occupied Europe, but also collated German counter-intelligence methods, including Gestapo interrogation and operations against resistance networks. The television series Spycatcher between 1959 and 1961 dramatized identifying enemy agents at the Centre.
MI6 had played a significant role during the First World War and since, but its Second World War performance was precipitated by calamity in September 1939 when Captain Sigmund Payne-Best, one of the first 1914 Intelligence Corps officers, now heading Section Z in the Netherlands, and Major Richard Stevens, the Passport Control Officer at the British Embassy, were fooled by the SD head of counter-intelligence, SS-Major Walter Schellenberg, into meeting fake anti-Hitler conspirators and were captured in the Venlo Incident. Both spent the war in several concentration camps. Their tradecraft failures of carrying compromising information and skilled interrogation led to MI6 operations in Europe proving difficult for agents and contacts, particularly in Czechoslovakia. Several members of the Corps served with MI6.
The Political Warfare Executive conducted psychological warfare operations using such measures as propaganda and ‘black flag’ propaganda broadcasts purporting to be of German origin, but internal conflicts with BBC, Special Operations Executive and MI6 proved counter-productive. It lacked an effective intelligence department until Brigadier Eric Sachs MBE (late Royal Artillery), a barrister, arrived as Director, however, interdepartmental faction disagreements sometimes led to him being denied classified information until he appointed a Director of Intelligence in 1942. Several Intelligence Corps served in the Executive.
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