by Helen Fry
Fate of intelligence personnel
Many of those who had worked at the London Cage went on to have distinguished careers after the war. On 1 October 1948, Scotland transferred to the depot of the Intelligence Corps at Maresfield, near Uckfield in West Sussex.8 The following December he retired; but that retirement was short-lived: he was recalled for special security duties under an agreement with the American government for the trial of Nazi war criminal Field Marshal Erich von Manstein.9 Manstein had already spent time in Nuremberg prison as a key witness at the Nuremberg trials. Now he faced the court for crimes committed, although he always maintained that the German army had never been involved in war crimes. Scotland was responsible for ‘top security’ documents produced during the trial. Afterwards, Scotland returned to his home in Bourne End and spent the next year going through documents that he had removed from the London Cage ‘for security reasons’.10 He then burned the papers which he believed were of no further official value. All that was left were those papers impounded by the security forces in 1957. After taking early retirement, Scotland and his wife moved into a flat at 19 Clarence Gate Gardens in north London.
Of the other intelligence personnel from the London Cage, the subsequent careers of only a few are known. Scotland’s deputy, Antony Terry, became one of the most highly respected British journalists of the Cold War, and never really retired. In 1949, he was invited by Ian Fleming, the Naval Intelligence officer of James Bond fame, to work on the foreign section of The Sunday Times. From 1949 to 1980, he worked on major assignments, and from 1972 until 1980 he was the paper’s European editor. He became the longest-serving foreign correspondent at The Sunday Times, covering Middle Eastern affairs and the Cold War (working out of Budapest), and in the process gaining an intimate knowledge of secret arms deals and corruption in the Eastern bloc. Later, in 1970, he went to Biafra and covered the war there. Given his background and subsequent employment, including covering conflicts in Africa, it is likely that he worked for MI6. Terry died at home in New Zealand on 1 October 1992, at the age of seventy-nine.11
Interrogator Bunny Pantcheff worked for SIS/MI6 after the war, being stationed for a time with the British Army of the Rhine, first with the Intelligence Division of Control Commission Germany and later with the Joint Operations Research Group at Rheindahlen.12 He was appointed Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1977 after tours of duty in Lagos and Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo, as well as in Germany, and was listed as a ‘Counsellor, Foreign & Commonwealth Office’ in the London Gazette entry. He retired in 1979 and wrote about the wartime occupation of the Channel Islands in Alderney: Fortress island. His collection of papers was donated to the Military Intelligence Museum Archives at Chicksands. He died in Alderney on 28 November 1989, at the age of sixty-eight.
After the war, interrogator Kenneth Morgan left MI19 with the rank of captain and joined the German section of the Foreign Office as a lecturer at Wilton Park, Beaconsfield. It was here that the Foreign Office ran a re-education programme for German prisoners of war to promote values of democracy, in preparation for their repatriation to Germany. In 1951, when these courses were moved to Steyning, West Sussex, he joined the BBC World Service at Bush House as a news sub-editor, retiring in 1972 as a chief sub-editor. He died in October 2000 in the village of Jordans, Buckinghamshire.
Interrogator Randoll Coate joined the diplomatic service of the Foreign Office and served in Salonika, Oslo, Leopoldville, Rome, The Hague, Buenos Aires, Stockholm and Brussels, where he was the head of press and information. During a state visit to Belgium by Her Majesty the Queen, he was appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order. For his services to Belgium, he was made a Chevalier of the Order of King Leopold II. Coate was an internationally recognised expert on the design of mazes and labyrinths, planning and building more than twenty in the United Kingdom and abroad. These included the maze at Blenheim Palace near Oxford, Longleat in Wiltshire, the Château de Beloeil in Belgium and the ‘Beatles Maze’ at the 1984 International Garden Festival in Liverpool. He retired in 1969 and lived in London. In 2005, he died at the family’s second home in Le Rouret, France, at the age of ninety-six.
The German-Jewish émigrés at the London Cage were demobbed from the Intelligence Corps and the British army, applied for British nationality and settled down to rebuild their lives in the country that had saved them from Nazism.
The exclusive street of Kensington Palace Gardens has always retained an air of mystery. It was suggested that No. 8a could be used as a special research facility on a temporary basis. A letter dated 6 October 1945 from Fort Belvedere, Surrey, where the Office of the Crown Commissioners had been evacuated during the war, stated that the Crown Estate was prepared to lease No. 8 and No. 8a to ‘erect, equip and maintain a new building to be used as an Establishment for Fundamental Scientific Research’.13 It is not known whether it was in fact used for this purpose; if so, it would have functioned for a time alongside the War Crimes Investigation Unit, located at Nos. 6–7 and No. 8.
After the war, a member of the family of the late Lord Duveen inspected the premises at Nos. 8 and 8a to assess the war damage, estimating the repair bill at £1 million. On 23 February 1948, accounts were submitted for work carried out on the houses: ‘The apportionment of the part of the works attributable to war damage is made more difficult because of thefts of lead and other vandalism which occurred at these premises.’14 On 20 May 1949, Nos. 6, 7 and 8 Kensington Palace Gardens were formally relinquished by the War Office to the Commissioners of Crown Lands.15
During the Cold War, there were rumours of spies watching spies in the shadows there, and of rooms in some of its buildings being lined with cork to prevent any remote eavesdropping. But this was probably all the product of an overactive imagination on the part of spy enthusiasts and James Bond devotees. Kensington Palace Gardens retained (and does to this day) a Russian presence in the street, as it had throughout the Second World War, with the Russian consular section at Nos. 6–7. Snippets about this have emerged in official files and other sources. An entry in the 1950s in the post-war diaries of Guy Liddell, then MI5 director of counter-espionage, recorded: ‘The Soviet Embassy have had ten new telephone lines installed, in addition to the five that were already there at 18 Kensington Palace Gardens where the Soviet Press Section is to be housed.’16 Another file discusses the Russian use of premises in the street in June 1965, of which some pieces have been retained under Section 3(4) and are not available under a freedom of information request.17
During the 1960s, Nos. 1, 2 and 3 Kensington Palace Gardens were handed back to the Crown Estate Commissioners; No. 5 was on lease to the Russians; and another house was occupied by the International Rubber Group. Nos. 8 and 8a were demolished and rebuilt as a modern glass block of luxury apartments. A retired diplomatic protection officer, Peter Lawrence, recalls the time he went into the vacant premises of 6–7 Kensington Palace Gardens in the 1980s to view it for possible use in training:
I was shown into a room with a full-height metal stationery cabinet in one corner, invited to open it and found the back of the cabinet opened into a small windowless room lined with cork.18
The precise use of that room is a matter of speculation – but cork is a good material for sound-proofing. Whether the room was there in Colonel Scotland’s day is unknown. It could have been a remnant of Cold War espionage that was rumoured to have taken place in certain buildings in Kensington Palace Gardens in the 1960s.
Daily Mail headlines
It was at the height of the Cold War, in 1960, that rumours about the London Cage interrogation centre broke very publicly in the Daily Mail, with sensationalist headlines that it had been the scene of brutality, torture and psychological abuse. Overlooked was the fact that the London Cage had gathered material and evidence that was used at fifteen different war crimes trials – including the Sagan case, the Kesselring case, Wormhoudt, Emsland and Le Paradis – which resulted in a con
siderable number of Germans being sentenced for their crimes.19 Some twenty years after its closure, the London Cage had once again become the centre of controversy. Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe began an investigation into possible malpractice at the wartime cage – and even into whether it had been the scene of war crimes. A Daily Mail journalist tracked down Sergeant Major White, the guardsman who had been removed by Lord Belper in 1946, and interviewed him.
Even then, a nervous intelligence service sought not to publicly disclose the evidence. Behind the scenes, another branch of Military Intelligence, MI11, liaised with Lord Belper over how to handle the affair. There seems to have been a reckoning in dialogue and conversation. Previously unpublished files that have been released into the National Archives now show that officials agreed privately that White might have acted discreditably during his time at the London Cage.20 Lord Belper was questioned by Arthur Christopher Soames, a Conservative MP and secretary of state for war under Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Lord Belper admitted that the alleged activities might have occurred during his predecessor’s time, and partly during his own. No satisfactory conclusions were drawn. Publicly the intelligence services maintained their silence. But the War Office wrote to the Daily Mail:
Brutal treatment of prisoners is, and always has been, contrary to War Office policy. Whenever instances have come to light, severe disciplinary action has been taken. An officer was court-martialled in 1948 for brutality to prisoners under interrogation and more recently in 1954 and 1958 officers were court-martialled and sentenced for mal-treating members of the Mau Mau and EOKA terrorist organisations. The fact is that no such disciplinary action was taken over activities at the London Cage.21
During 1960, there was an exchange of letters between Thorpe and Soames about the allegations. The questioning went deeper than the London Cage and began to probe the training of personnel in the Intelligence Corps, after a former trainee by the name of Strickland claimed to have received training in torture at the Intelligence Corps depot at Maresfield. Strickland cited numerous examples of training in how to torture a prisoner and leave no physical trace, including beating a prisoner who had been wrapped in a wet blanket and holding him against a hot stove.22
In a letter of 16 June 1960, Jeremy Thorpe queried two suicides at the London Cage between 1942 and 1945. He wrote:
There is a fair amount of evidence which I have on this matter which appears to be somewhat disquieting, and I am wondering whether your categorical assurance that no brainwashing techniques were ever used during the Second World War can be held to apply to the questioning, and other methods used, at this particular centre?23
Soames replied categorically: ‘There was no question of the employment of techniques commonly described as brainwashing at the London Cage.’24 Thorpe delved further and asked about the other suicides there: Hans Ziegler, implicated in the Stalag Luft III murders, who allegedly killed himself after he realised that the evidence of guilt against him was too overwhelming. Soames replied:
After this period of time it would be extremely difficult to identify the other suicides which German prisoners-of-war may have committed, but I have no reason to think that they were caused either by ill-treatment or by employment of brainwashing techniques. It is, and always has been, contrary to the policy of the British Army to use any form of torture, physical or mental, on prisoners-of-war, and whenever such treatment has come to light, the offender has been severely dealt with … As to the London Cage, we can find no records of any complaints of brutality, nor of disciplinary action having been necessary.25
Soames took the opportunity to comment on Colonel Scotland’s contentious unpublished manuscript. He told Thorpe:
The book mentioned certain instances of severity towards arrogant Germans which, although in our opinion very far from being breaches of the Geneva Convention, might be represented as such by ill-disposed persons … I expect you realise that the so-called brainwashing techniques are quite a different thing from physical brutality. In any case, I can assure you that the army does not condone, and never has condoned, either.26
The issue of the mistreatment of prisoners refused to go away. Prime Minister Macmillan received a letter in July 1963 from the MP Francis Noel-Baker in connection with a general review of the security services at the height of the Profumo affair, in which Noel-Baker proposed:
that during the [Second World] war a technique of brainwashing was certainly used by Major Kennedy and other interrogators at Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre outside Cairo and elsewhere. Unfortunately similar techniques were also employed during the emergency in Cyprus. I understand that Kennedy’s methods included such devices as the suggestion of thirst in interrogations under drug-induced hypnotism and the deprivation of sleep.27
He concluded the letter: ‘I should appreciate your assurance that formal instructions have been given forbidding these practices. Could you also give assurance that they are not taught to British interrogators when they are being trained?’
At the end of that year, on 10 December 1963, a hand grenade was thrown at a party of senior officials at Aden airport, including the high commissioner, as they were about to board a plane for the United Kingdom. In response to a request from the Colonial Office for an investigation into the incident, a team of interrogators from the Intelligence Corps was sent out and the detained suspects interrogated by a team from Special Branch (Aden). Relatives of the detainees complained that the detainees were
being held in small, narrow cells, two in each cell, unable to move their limbs freely. They looked extremely tired and weak, although their morale was quite high. They told us that they were not allowed to leave their cells except to go to the lavatory or to be interrogated by Scotland Yard officers. Interrogation, we were told, continues non-stop, four hours at a time. A detainee is ordered to stand upright for the full length of the interrogation.28
It all sounded very familiar. The intelligence services would have had everything to lose from such revelations. Their authority, the legitimacy of their methods and the very credibility of their reports and evidence were at stake – something they couldn’t afford at such a sensitive time in the Cold War, when tensions were already heightened between East and West. The British government depended on the information it was given to make judgements on whether to act. Strategically the revelations were extremely damaging, because they forewarned the enemy of the methods used to obtain information during interrogation, thus forearming them. Attempts were made to discredit the rumours as not being part of official military guidelines, but the truth had emerged. In times of war and extreme tension, moral boundaries can often become blurred.
The death of Colonel Scotland
In January 1958, the year after the publication of his censored memoirs, Colonel Scotland wrote to the Home Office asking for the return of all impounded copies of the original manuscript. His request was denied. He died on 3 July 1965 in a nursing home. He was quite a wealthy man – his estate was valued at £13,254. His wife Roma had predeceased him in October 1962.
After Scotland’s death, as the estate was being tidied up after probate, publisher John Farquharson Ltd requested copies of the manuscript to be returned. The intelligence services now faced a legal challenge that they believed they would lose. Perhaps they knew that anyone who worked through the files and Scotland’s manuscript would be hard pressed to prove conclusively that mistreatment and torture had occurred. And there were secrets which even Scotland was apparently not prepared to reveal about the use of truth drugs, hypnosis and experimentation in interrogation. Such matters would go on to constitute the murky side of espionage in the early Cold War. And so it was that the War Office was instructed to quietly release the manuscript into the National Archives, where it lay undiscovered for decades.
Today, Nos. 6–7 Kensington Palace Gardens are part of the Russian Embassy. No trace is left of its clandestine wartime role. Occasionally the street makes headline news – as after the Britis
h verdict on the murder of Russian dissident and spy Alexander Litvinenko, when a Russian official appeared outside the embassy to issue a statement to the media. Kensington Palace Gardens continues as an enclave of foreign embassies and high-class residences for billionaires, under heavy armed guard and still owned by the Crown Estate. The two gatehouse entrances are guarded by the armed police who patrol this exclusive and enigmatic street.
EPILOGUE
The legacy
Sensitivity over the London Cage can be felt even after seventy years. There is a nervousness in official circles that has nothing to do with the fact that it was an interrogation centre or that it held German prisoners of war and Nazi war criminals. The sensitivity lies in what went on behind closed doors – particularly the rumours of mistreatment of prisoners in the basement of No. 8 and the four suicides within its walls. Is there still an attempt going on to protect the truth?
No files for the London Cage have been declassified into the National Archives for the years prior to 1943. A request several years ago by British journalist Ian Cobain to gain the release of all files was denied, and they remain locked deep in the archives of the War Office. Other key files have been ‘contaminated by asbestos and destroyed by flood water’,1 and were therefore too damaged to be scanned before their destruction, in order to establish their date and contents.
A death certificate ordered by the author from the local registrar went missing in the post. Enquiries to the coroner’s office about the inquests for the four suicides drew the response that the files have not been retained and only files of important cases are kept in the coroner’s library. So are files pertaining to the suicide of four German prisoners in custody at a clandestine interrogation centre run by an intelligence agency during the war not deemed important? This begs the question whether the files have in fact been destroyed or are being withheld from public release.