by Helen Fry
William Sargant was a prominent psychiatrist on the scene during the 1930s and 1940s. He became a household name for his work on brainwashing and for two bestselling books, The Unquiet Mind and Battle for the Mind. During the Second World War he was primarily based at the Sutton Emergency Medical Service in Surrey. His treatment of patients was controversial – and shocking to many in the medical world. It involved deep-sleep treatment, psychosurgery, insulin shock therapy and electroconvulsive therapy. After the evacuation of Dunkirk in May–June 1940, he was known to have treated traumatised soldiers with barbiturates, sedation and electroconvulsive therapy. The treatment then extended to civilians and other military patients – but what is not known is whether any of the latter were German prisoners of war. A number of psychosurgical procedures were carried out, including deep-sleep and electro-shock treatment on the brain under anaesthetic; leucotomy, which consisted of cutting away connections in the brain to and from the prefrontal cortex; and ablative psychosurgery, which aimed at destroying small areas of tissue in the brain to cure psychological problems. The procedures were highly risky and could lead to seizures, cognitive impairment and even death.
One deeply traumatised evacuee soldier was given a dose of the barbiturate amytal sodium, which produced positive results for Sargant. The soldier went from being nervous and mute to recalling in detail exactly what had happened to him. Sargant started to administer amytal sodium to other traumatised soldiers and they began to talk freely. He discovered that his patients were not merely recalling trauma from the battlefield, but were actually reliving it; and so he extended his research into other barbiturates. He started to mix barbiturates like amytal sodium and Pentothal with amphetamines like Benzedrine or Methedrine. The former removed a person’s inhibitions and made him drowsy; the latter increased alertness; and the combination was thought to make the ideal truth drug. The use of ether was found to cause a more violent expulsion of deep-seated emotions and memories, and was therefore avoided. ‘With [truth] drugs, Sargant had rediscovered the technique of cathartic abreaction pioneered by Freud and Brevet in the 1890s.’29
Sargant’s findings were published on 6 July 1940 in the medical journal The Lancet, in an article entitled ‘Acute War Neurosis’. Six days later, he was contacted by Brigadier John Rawlings Rees (1890–1969), medical director of the Tavistock Clinic in London and chairman of the Army Psychiatry Advisory Committee, who was working for British intelligence.30 MI5 and MI6 took great interest in Sargant’s work: if he could make patients talk, then the drugs could do the same to German prisoners of war during interrogation. Two months after the article was published, Colonel Scotland arrived at Camp 020 with a syringe containing a drug for use on agent Tate, which would ‘induce the prisoner to speak’, but Colonel Stephens prevented Scotland from seeing the German (see page 87).31
From 1948, Sargant worked at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, where he continued his controversial treatment in special wards and laboratories away from the public gaze. Many patients were left traumatised: some of the deep-sleep treatment, for example, was carried out without the patients’ consent. Sargant worked for the intelligence services and military for over thirty years in this experimental field, which became popular for a variety of clandestine uses.
A CIA document dated 22 June 1948 confirmed the existence of a joint American–British intelligence operation to use truth drugs, with further research into amphetamines and barbiturates. The use of these drugs was never admitted publicly, but an OSS document once in circulation seems to have confirmed the use of ‘Truth Serum 5678A’ in interrogation.32 In London, the experiments took place on civilians at the Royal Waterloo Hospital, a branch of St Thomas’ Hospital, where William Sargant was operating.
By the 1950s, the British, Russians and Americans were all experimenting heavily with truth drugs. The Soviets gave drugs to people being interrogated while held in jails in the Soviet Union and North Korea via coffee and cigarettes with a strange, unfamiliar odour. British and American intelligence knew that they needed to keep up with the Russians, the new enemy in the Cold War.33 On 20 April 1950, the CIA authorised a classified project headed by Colonel Sheffield Edwards of the US army: Project Bluebird. A committee was formed to establish how soldiers could resist indoctrination, drug-based interrogation and mind control if captured by the Russians. The following year the project was renamed Artichoke, and two years later, in 1953, was given the cover name MKUltra. What began as a defensive weapon against brainwashing and drug control soon turned into offensive warfare. Apparently, no thought was given to the ethical boundaries.
Truth drugs and Rudolf Hess
The use of drugs at the London Cage must be understood within the wider context of their use by the intelligence services. The most infamous wartime case of truth drugs concerned Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who in May 1941 was being held by MI6 at Mytchett Place, a Georgian house near Aldershot.34 There, Colonel Scotland’s close MI6 colleagues, Thomas Kendrick, Frank Foley and ‘Capt. Barnes’ (whose real name has never been released by the intelligence services) were monitoring Hess, having been entrusted with the task of extracting information from their prized prisoner. Hess became convinced that they were trying to poison him, and accused Kendrick and Foley of drugging him with ‘Mexican Brain Poison’, understood to have been mescaline. It has since emerged that MI5 was also using drugs on Hess, having been encouraged by the War Office to try the barbiturate Evipan. MI5 wrote to the War Office that Hess was ‘a poor type, completely devoid of intellectual interests’.35 The use of drugs on Hess to induce him to tell the truth has never been openly admitted by the intelligence services, but becomes apparent from a careful reading of Hess’s Foreign Office files.36
Hess had flown to Scotland on 10 May 1941, on a solo flight from Germany. Forced to bail out of his Messerschmitt a few miles from the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, he was captured on landing and taken by the Home Guard before being handed over to the intelligence services. After a few days, Hess was transferred to the Tower of London under heavy guard, and then to the Queen’s House, overlooking the White Tower. Within hours, Charles Fraser-Smith of MI6, working during the war for MI9, received a telephone call from MI5 asking whether he could replicate the uniform of a senior German officer. Fraser-Smith readily agreed: as a member of MI9, the escape and evasion branch, he was used to making gadgets and forging items for the intelligence services. When Fraser-Smith arrived at the Tower, he was informed that Hess had been given ‘something to ensure that he doesn’t wake up until morning’. A duplicate of Hess’s uniform was duly copied before sunrise. ‘What it was used for – if it was used,’ wrote Fraser-Smith, ‘is something I shall be interested to know one day.’37
On 20 May 1941, a military ambulance transferred Hess to Mytchett Place, accompanied by medical officer Lieutenant Colonel Gibson Graham. Shortly afterwards, Hess began to notice that his food and medication left him with a distinctly unusual sensation, reoccurring over the next few weeks. He was able to describe it:
A curious development of warmth rising over the nape of the neck to the head: in the head feelings which are similar to headache pains, but which are not the same: there follows for many hours an extraordinary feeling of well-being, physical and mental energy, joie de vivre, optimism. Little sleep during the night but this did not in the least destroy my sense of euphoria.38
Hess observed withdrawal symptoms when the substance was not being given. He felt the difference in his own body, especially after drinking milk. Hess was being given truth drugs by MI6, it can be argued, to loosen his tongue, so that he revealed Germany’s most closely guarded secrets.
Lieutenant Colonel Gibson Graham found it increasingly difficult to deal with Hess, who had become unstable and suicidal. Graham was relieved of his duties by psychiatrist Lieutenant Colonel Henry Dicks of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who was already conducting work for British intelligence. This was the same psychiatrist who aided Colonel Scotland with interrogations at t
he London Cage and who made occasional visits for the interrogation of suspected German spies at Camp 020. The bulk of his clandestine wartime work from 1942 would be carried out at the three CSDIC bugging sites: Trent Park, Latimer House and Wilton Park.
Dicks arrived at Mytchett Place on 29 May 1941 and was joined that same day by Brigadier John Rawlings Rees, consultant in psychological medicine to the army at home, and a fluent German speaker. The psychiatrists made various assessments of Hess which survive in Foreign Office files.39 On 2 June, it was noted that Hess had periods of restlessness and had requested something to help him sleep. He was prescribed the barbiturate Phanodorm. By the morning, he had become more unstable and suicidal. During this period, Hess was being given sedatives as a sleep aid. During his time at Mytchett Place, he made one suicide attempt – in June 1941. The following year he was transferred to Maindiff Court Hospital, near Abergavenny in Wales, where he remained for the rest of the war.
The Hess case seems to indicate that the intelligence services used truth drugs on prisoners – in his case, with very few positive results. Hess’s unstable mental condition and his mood swings between euphoria, deep depression and paranoia may well have been caused by the drug experiments conducted by British intelligence while he was in their custody, rather than by any inherent mental illness. His case does not appear to be unusual; rather, it is in line with the culture within MI5 and MI6, where the use of truth drugs and mind-altering substances on prisoners during the war was apparently considered acceptable (even if their use was not officially sanctioned or recorded in the files). Within that environment, Colonel Scotland had no qualms about using drugs on his prisoners being interrogated at the London Cage.
8
THE GERMAN ‘GREAT ESCAPE’
On the night of 14 December 1944, two coaches with a strong detachment of guards left London for Camp 23 POW camp in Wiltshire. When they arrived at Le Marchant Barracks at Devizes, the commandant paraded the whole camp under the lights of the parade ground. Thirty-two unsuspecting prisoners were asked to step forward and were escorted to the waiting coaches. Believed to have been involved in a thwarted daring escape plan that nearly turned into a major breach of security in Britain, they were driven to Kensington Palace Gardens under heavy guard. On arrival, they were taken to rooms on the first floor of No. 8. Over the next five days, the prisoners underwent intensive interrogation to ascertain what had happened, who was responsible, and whether they had had any contact with German agents secretly operating in Britain.1
During the war, several escapes were attempted from POW camps, but rarely were they successful; they often failed due to bad planning.2 Anybody involved in an attempted escape was transferred to the London Cage, which was known in army circles for its extreme toughness. Of the Devizes escape, Colonel Scotland wrote in an official report:
The importance of making prisoners of war en masse feel the weight of our control when they attempt to break the peace cannot be over estimated … the whole camp [at Devizes] was profoundly impressed by the arrest, the security measures taken and word of warning given afterwards by the camp commandant.3
In 1944 there were around 300,000 German POWs in England, guarded by a comparatively small number of troops (because most of the Allied forces were in Europe). The plot at Devizes was far more ambitious than anything undertaken elsewhere, and would have far-reaching consequences beyond the borders of the camp – or indeed the London Cage.
No one underestimated the seriousness of an escape plan that came close to success and which would have seen around 4,000 German POWs absconding from the camp over the quiet Christmas period, when guard duties were perhaps more lax; if it had been successful, the escapees could have wreaked havoc or carried out acts of sabotage across the country. The plan involved capturing an aircraft from a nearby military base and eventually linking up with German forces at sea. Morale in POW camps in Britain had reached a new high, with prisoners’ hopes raised by the Ardennes campaign and the destruction being caused by V rockets landing on England. German prisoners began to believe that maybe Germany’s fortunes could turn, in spite of the successful Allied landings at Normandy six months earlier.
Reflecting later, Scotland was impressed by the escape plan: ‘If the prisoners could have surprised the guards, collected their weapons, raided the quartermaster’s stores, and got themselves some transport, they could have formed a dangerous, desperate band.’4 It would be his job to ensure this daring was properly punished.
Escape plan from Devizes
Just prior to D-Day, the camp at Devizes had come under the temporary command of the Americans until the push into Germany in 1945. British and American armies both needed more interrogators to deal with the large number of German prisoners anticipated after the Normandy landings and in preparation for the advance westwards. A special training centre for these new interrogators was run at Devizes, with instructors provided by the London Cage. The camp held 4,000 prisoners – many SS or former Hitler Youth, described as ‘dangerous and violent young brutes’5 – so there was ample interrogation material for practice. German-Jewish émigré Herbert Sulzbach, who had fled the Nazis, transferred to Devizes as an interpreter with the British army. It was here that he encountered his first Nazis since leaving Germany. ‘I didn’t see them as people at all. I only saw the swastika on their uniforms,’ he revealed in an interview.6 Sulzbach had been interned as an ‘enemy alien’ on the Isle of Man in 1940, when Britain feared a German invasion. From the internment camp, he enlisted in the only unit available for ‘enemy aliens’ at that time, the Pioneer Corps. He served with 229 Company and was stationed for a time at Didcot, near Oxford. In January 1942, he was transferred to the Prisoner of War Interrogation Section, working out of Devizes. As the German escape story unfolded, he was transferred as an interpreter to Camp 21 at Comrie in Scotland, where events took a nasty turn.7
It was in early December that an American officer overheard a chance remark during a training course. The unnamed American officer, a former German-Jewish refugee with fluent German, had been interrogating a young German prisoner on routine subjects. After he dismissed the prisoner, the officer lit a cigarette and watched as he joined two others. The officer’s curiosity was aroused – why were these prisoners casually loitering? He listened from the door. They spoke rapidly, but, catching words such as ‘escape’ and ‘plan’, he gathered that some kind of breakout plan might be afoot and reported it to his superior officer.
The alert soon reached the camp commandant, and finally there was a phone call to Colonel Scotland, who was on a short period of leave with his wife at their home, ‘The Dell’ in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire. He advised the commandant to call the prisoners to the parade ground on the pretence of exercise. The instructors and trainee interrogators were set the task of finding out whether a plan was actually being hatched. The entire camp was paraded. The trainee interrogators walked down the ranks, selecting prisoners at random and ordering the guards to take them to the interrogation rooms. The first few prisoners yielded little, but clearly something was amiss.
Over the next couple of days, several parades were called, and it was noticed that the same group of men invariably stood together – all tough specimens, some from the German army, others from the German navy. All had one thing in common: they were hardened Nazis.
No progress was made, and the guards were on alert for any activity at night in the camp. It was not long before two prisoners were caught returning through the single barbed wire fence. They were marched into the main interrogation room and had a barrage of questions fired at them to establish why they had been outside the camp and who had sent them. They said very little. At the same time, unbeknownst to them, their huts were being searched: stockpiles of food and crudely made bludgeons were found. The men were confronted with this, and told that they would be charged with theft and severely punished unless they proved that they had not stolen the weapons or the food. This proved to be the turning point in the
case. Fearing military discipline, the men began to talk. Soon the interrogators had a rough outline of the ambitious mass escape.
One of the German prisoners, who was a doctor and trained pilot, had observed that a large number of troop-carrying aircraft used an airfield not far from Devizes. He proposed to the men in his hut that they should attempt to reach the airfield, capture a plane and fly back to Germany. His comrades supported the idea. On successive nights, two prisoners were helped through the barbed wire fence to reconnoitre the guard system at the airfield, its general layout and where an aircraft might be collected. It was a senior German NCO, Sergeant Hermann Storch, who suggested that instead of a comparatively small number of men escaping by air, a mass escape by most of the 4,000 prisoners in the camp should be attempted. The prisoners acquired accurate information that a fleet of small German craft was forming at the mouth of the River Weser in Germany. This fleet was to link with Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s drive in the Ardennes, once the German army had driven a wedge between the American and British troops. The ships were to sail for the Rhine delta, to cause a diversion of Allied troops. During its investigation into the Devizes escape plot, the London Cage never discovered how the prisoners had acquired this classified information about the German naval fleet.