by Helen Fry
Solitary confinement
A stubborn prisoner could find himself in solitary confinement. Psycho-logically, a period of isolation from other prisoners was considered a useful tool in breaking down a man’s will to resist as well as isolating him from fellow Nazi ideologists. German prisoners were found to be so dependent on their comrades for moral support that, once deprived of it, they could easily be persuaded of another viewpoint. Contact only with an interrogator could prove effective if the interrogator constantly reminded the prisoner that his ideology was based on untruthful propaganda crafted by the Nazi regime. Sometimes a prisoner who had ‘seen the light’ could be taken to his cell and used to persuade his cellmate. This ruse was known in interrogation circles as ‘political deconditioning’, and attached to it were various rewards for the prisoner, such as being taken to a restaurant, theatre or cinema in central London.
Trips into central London reinforced the political deconditioning because the prisoner was taken to parts of the capital that had not been affected by the Blitz. Back in Germany, the prisoners had been led to believe that London was in ruins and on the verge of collapse. Now they saw for themselves private cars on the streets and a wide selection of goods in shop windows. All this added to the process of transforming opinion. They compared what they had heard from their own propaganda machine with what they were seeing at first hand. It was a hugely effective way of turning a prisoner around. With very little persuasion from an interrogator, the Germans realised that they had been duped by their own commanders and by Nazi propaganda. In some cases, these prisoners were successfully ‘turned’ to work as double agents against Germany. In many cases, staff at the London Cage found that this political deconditioning by propaganda lasted long enough for an interrogator to extract the necessary intelligence.
The average German soldier could normally be induced to talk by means of a number of clever ruses and frequent long interrogations; and if that failed, then by a period of solitary confinement. But the die-hard Nazis were tough and disruptive. They cared little for cage discipline and appeared unaffected by periods of solitary confinement. A decision had to be made whether to hold them for longer in the cage or transfer them to the special prisoner-of-war camp at Comrie, Perthshire, which was reserved almost exclusively for the toughest Nazi prisoners in British custody. One example was a bullet-headed young Nazi who refused even to give his name, rank and number. He glared at Scotland with a measure of arrogant defiance and contempt, protesting that nothing would make him talk to the elderly gentleman sitting across the desk. It was clear to Scotland, as he thought back to his own period of solitary confinement in Windhoek prison during the First World War, that nothing was going to induce this prisoner to talk. In this particular case, Scotland ordered him to remain in the cage until his will to resist was broken, but it did not work. The prisoner was eventually transferred to Comrie.
Soviet-style prison
The basement at No. 8 was reserved for the interrogation of prisoners who failed to cooperate in Room 22. They were escorted into the basement with a black canvas hood over their head – to disorient them and instil some fear ahead of the next interrogation. It was hoped that the uncertainty over what was to happen next would be enough to prompt the prisoner to open up. Life was straightforward, unless they still proved uncooperative. Out of bounds to most cage personnel except the interrogators, the basement mirrored a sinister Soviet-style dungeon, designed to intimidate. With its dark, damp, isolated position, a prisoner knew that any screams for help would go unheard. If the inferences of the surroundings failed to have any effect on him, then physical abuse and torture seem to have been the next step. Forcing a prisoner to stand naked for up to eight hours, sometimes chained or handcuffed to objects (a chair or pole); making him perch for long periods of time on a one-legged stool or chair; forcing him to pick up and put down oil drums; or keeping him in a cold bath for four hours with cold spray on his head – all these were methods used at the London Cage.
The basement became the domain of physical torture and threats of torture. MI19 files for the London Cage make three independent references to ‘secret control gear’ – i.e. electric shock equipment and other torture apparatus.8 Captain Egger and Captain Hay, both German speakers who aided the interrogators, were described as ‘assistant interrogators and operators of special gear’.9 A separate report records that ‘Both these officers are experts on the control gear operations.’10 Those two officers had already served with CSDIC at Latimer House near Chesham. Even after the war, and in fact to this day, there are bleak cells in the basement of the house. When a relative of intelligence officer Leslie Parkin asked about his wartime work at Latimer House, Parkin replied, ‘You really don’t want to know what we did.’11
A prisoner at the London Cage could be threatened with Cell 14, also in the basement at No. 8. Cell 14 was another part of the psychological war waged by the interrogators in their efforts to break the really hardened prisoner. ‘From Cell 14 emanated the overpowering stench of dead rats, wet rags and rotting flesh,’ recalled one eyewitness, who wishes to retain his anonymity.12 He shuddered as he remembered, and screwed up his nose. ‘But nothing actually went on there. Allegations of torture have always puzzled me, because for the fourteen months that I worked there from 1946, I never saw any mistreatment of prisoners. I attended four or five interrogations which were always in the rooms upstairs. Torture could have taken place at 1 a.m. in the night when I was asleep and I wouldn’t know anything about it.’ He testifies that he never saw any torture or electric shock equipment at the London Cage.
Such cells existed elsewhere. In May 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Stephens, the MI5 officer who had run Camp 020 at Latchmere House during the war, was posted to Bad Nenndorf in Germany to set up an interrogation centre. Known as No. 74 CSDIC, prisoners were threatened with being taken to what was called ‘Cell 12’ – and indeed some were taken there.13 Cell 12 was designed to humiliate, intimidate and weaken their resistance to interrogation. This was the interrogation centre where the conversations of interned civilians, German scientists and political prisoners were secretly bugged. These prisoners were relevant to the Allies’ mass hunt for Nazi scientists, technicians and technologists who had to be captured before they fell into the hands of the new enemy – Russia. At Bad Nenndorf, prisoners were forced to scrub the walls and floor for days, with no heating or proper lighting. A prisoner had to sleep on the concrete floor of a cell with only two blankets. Here in this camp, Stephens was accused of resorting to torture and starvation of the internees. Their plight came to the attention of the authorities after many became so ill that they were transferred to a nearby hospital for treatment. They arrived at the hospital in a desperate state, looking like concentration camp survivors. The sight of them was so shocking that staff reported the cases to the Red Cross. Stephens eventually faced court martial for his torture of victims, although he was subsequently acquitted.
There were cases of suicide at Bad Nenndorf, as there were in the London Cage and at five other sites in post-war Germany. At these sites, those who committed ‘suicide’ died in circumstances of torture, starvation and prolonged periods of solitary confinement. Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at Nuremberg, wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee:
If cruelties did occur at Bad Nenndorf they were of the kind systematically adopted as the practice at MI5 Interrogation Centres during the war, and at Camps in Germany subsequently and authorised by ministers through Sir David Petrie [head of MI5].14
Camp 020 and No. 74 CSDIC at Bad Nenndorf both sanctioned violence. In the words of historian Ian Cobain: ‘The claim that violence was taboo at Camp 020 was a lie. It had been run on the same brutal lines as Bad Nenndorf. It too had been a torture centre.’15
Within MI5 and MI6, there were differing opinions over the treatment of prisoners and captured German spies, with some officers endorsing and employing violent methods and even torture at interrogation sites which could
not be inspected by external organisations like the Red Cross. Other intelligence officers, like Guy Liddell, placed torture firmly within the realm of foul play and unethical behaviour.16
Gestapo methods
Rumours of what happened at the London Cage liken it to the brutality of the Nazi regime. Had British intelligence at this clandestine site behaved no better than Hitler’s henchmen? Could there ever be justification for such treatment, even if the man standing before the interrogators had information that could change the course of the war? How far would Colonel Scotland push the boundaries to force information from a completely uncooperative prisoner? Soft methods might quickly turn to harsh treatment in an attempt to get intelligence from him quickly.
Colonel Scotland admitted that on two occasions he had been provoked into using violence against a prisoner. In reality, as we shall see, during the lifetime of the London Cage the figure was much higher. There is an independent source which corroborates the fact that Scotland struck prisoners during interrogation. This evidence comes from the personal war diary of Guy Liddell, MI5’s director of counter-espionage. The diary was extraordinarily helpful in the amount of detail it provided about various double agents before MI5 released their personal files into the National Archives. One incident recorded in the diary concerns double agent Tate. A Danish national born in 1911, Tate’s real name was Wulf Dietrich Schmidt. Schmidt parachuted into England in September 1940 on a mission from the Abwehr, the German Military Intelligence. Another agent who had been captured by the British gave advance details of Schmidt’s mission in return for an undertaking that Schmidt would not being executed.17 Schmidt was arrested on landing and taken to Camp 020 at Latchmere House, MI5’s secret interrogation centre reserved for captured German spies. It was here that MI5 interrogators tried to ‘turn’ German spies to make them double agents, as part of the Double Cross System. Initially, they had little success with Schmidt.
On 21 September 1940, Colonel Scotland arrived at Camp 020 to interrogate Schmidt. A full verbatim transcript of Schmidt’s interrogation by Scotland has been declassified. The interrogation was recorded via hidden microphones, and provides a rare surviving example of one of Scotland’s full interrogations. It was not common practice for an interrogator to take notes during an interrogation, or to have a transcriber present; that is why it was recorded and later transcribed word for word. The transcript reveals Scotland’s technique of using threats and intimidation, with persistent accusations that Schmidt was a spy. At one point, Scotland threatened:
If you don’t wish to speak the truth, we have methods to make you speak the truth, which will be very unpleasant for you, because we have complete evidence against you. Do you understand that? Alright. You just make up your mind very quickly what you are going to do, because what will happen to you will be something you will never forget.18
The results of Scotland’s interrogation reached the ears of Guy Liddell, who wrote a lengthy piece in his diary the following day:
I have just been told that the officer at MI9 who was present at the interrogation of TATE yesterday took it upon himself to manhandle the prisoner without saying anything to Colonel Stephens, Dick White, or Malcolm Frost. The interrogation broke off at lunchtime when Colonel Scotland left the room. Frost, wondering where he was, followed him and eventually discovered him in the prisoner’s cell. He was hitting TATE in the jaw and I think he got one back himself. Frost stopped this incident without making a scene, and later told me what had happened. It was quite clear to me that we cannot have this sort of thing going on in our establishment. Apart from the moral aspect of the thing, I am quite convinced that these Gestapo methods do not pay in the long run. We are taking the matter up with the DMI [director of Military Intelligence] and propose to say that we do not intend to have that particular MI [military officer] on the premises any more.19
Tate, who was issued with false identity papers in the name of Harry Williamson, went on to become one of the longest-running agents of the Double Cross System. He successfully fed his German handlers information that led the Germans to believe that the Allied landings were planned for the coast near Pas de Calais instead of Normandy, and that the Soviets were going to attack through Bulgaria and Norway.
Lieutenant Colonel Stephens banned Colonel Scotland from setting foot in Camp 020, but as we have seen, Stephens himself would face court martial at the end of the war on serious charges of the brutal treatment and torture of German prisoners and civilians.
Back at Kensington Palace Gardens, the surroundings echoed the cage’s unsavoury reputation, with the building described as ‘tatty and seedy, the brusque bawling of the corporals and sergeants undiminished’.20 Scotland’s establishment was different from the other sites run by MI19, from which he received prisoners who could not be dealt with using ordinary measures: this was where the London Cage slid into unorthodox territory. Rumours began to circulate about the mistreatment of prisoners and terrible happenings in the basement of No. 8, where five interrogation rooms were located. Contraventions of the Geneva Convention were alleged to have taken place throughout the war and into the period when the cage became the War Crimes Investigation Unit.
7
CAGED LIES
The truth drugs
The allegations of brutality at the London Cage are shocking enough, but evidence emerges to reveal for the first time in this book that Colonel Scotland apparently sanctioned the use of ‘truth drugs’ on his prisoners. Clearly, this needs to be placed in the broader context of the military’s experimental use of drugs in this period, but the matter was so classified that even Scotland dared not mention it in his memoirs.
In 1957, when Scotland’s autobiography was published, experimentation with truth drugs had become common among the intelligence services of Britain, America, Russia and North Korea. All had their own secret research programmes and experimented with ‘truth drugs’ on prisoners and enemy spies; in some cases they even used their own civilians. Drugs, hypnosis and mind control – that was the new trend in Cold War espionage. It was believed that these could enable the intelligence services to control a person’s mind or induce them to speak truthfully. The idea of mind control and brainwashing was nothing new – it featured in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – yet, generally, it was seen simply as fiction, pure fantasy; few suspected how close to reality the accounts came, or that the early use of truth drugs dated back to the Second World War, or even earlier in scientific research.
An entry for 22 September 1940 in Guy Liddell’s diary reveals that Colonel Scotland threatened to use drugs during an interrogation at Camp 020, Latchmere House. The prisoner was, once more, double agent Tate. The entry read:
I am told that Scotland turned up this morning with a syringe containing some drug or other, which it was thought would induce the prisoner to speak. Stephens told Scotland that he could not see TATE, who was not in a fit state to be interrogated. Actually, there was nothing seriously wrong with TATE.1
It was during this same interrogation that Colonel Scotland was supposed to have physically assaulted Tate, which prompted Lieutenant Colonel Stephens banning him from ever setting foot on the premises again – though the ban appears to have been motivated by a dislike of Scotland and personal rivalry, rather than by a policy disagreement over the treatment of prisoners.
Tate finally broke under interrogation and agreed to become a double agent for the British, as part of the Double Cross System that successfully turned a number of German spies. One of the most famous double agents was Garbo (Juan Pujol Garcia), who, like Tate, helped fool the Germans into believing that the main Allied invasion was to take place at Pas de Calais, meaning that Hitler kept an unnecessarily large number of troops and crack Panzer divisions in that region instead of diverting them to Normandy. As a result, they could not get to the beaches quickly enough to fight the Allied troops after the D-Day landin
gs in June 1944.
In the early days of the war, because the fruits of interrogation could be fragmentary, it was necessary to obtain vital information in the shortest possible time. This was when various MI6 intelligence officers began to experiment with drugs. The most common at the time were barbiturates like barbital (Veronal), scopolamine hydrobromide, atropine and later sodium thiopental (Pentothal). These worked by relaxing the subject and depressing higher cortical functions to stupefy them.
In 1932, Dr J. Stephen Horsley at the London Hospital noticed that pregnant women became uninhibited when the barbiturate drug Nembutal was administered to them during labour. The discovery led him to experiment with other barbiturates: amytal sodium and sodium pentothal. After intravenous injection at a slow rate, he discovered that his patients became relaxed enough to recount very personal incidents from their past. Horsley believed he might have discovered ‘truth drugs’. The implications could be far-reaching and were of interest to the military and intelligence services for interrogation. Discussions took place about their effectiveness for the police in forensic investigations. Files now reveal that Naval Intelligence was already experimenting with truth drugs in 1939.
Truth drugs and Naval Intelligence
In December 1939, Naval Intelligence Division tried out truth drugs on their own willing intelligence officers. The experiment was, of course, highly classified and not to be leaked into the public domain. It must be borne in mind that a highly effective team of naval interrogators was attached to MI19 at a number of its clandestine sites, in a joint services operation involving the army, Royal Air Force and Naval Intelligence. The first truth-drug experiment was carried out on civilian officer Charles Mitchell of Naval Intelligence Division, but it had no particular effect on him at all. That same month, Vice Admiral John Godfrey, the then director of Naval Intelligence, held two consultations with three unnamed doctors on the effective use of drugs and hypnosis during the interrogation of prisoners of war.2 One of the unnamed doctors was a consultant psychologist to the army. Godfrey’s full report of the meeting confirmed that two of the doctors had already carried out detailed studies for the army on the military use of certain drugs. They advised Godfrey that the use of Evipan, when combined with hypnosis, could put a patient in a condition where he would be unable to resist interrogation. Evipan was used to treat types of epilepsy and certain psychotic disorders, and belonged to a group of drugs that made a person more susceptible to hypnosis. Hypnosis ensured that the patient had no memory of the interrogation.