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Overview
The British system of interrogation has always been distinctly different from other countries. Subtler, quieter and far more devious than its contemporaries, it has been admired by those who have inadvertently succumbed to it. So much so that the Nazis adopted some of the British methods in their own intelligence operations. During the Second World War the system became highly developed and vast numbers of people were employed in the collating and recovery of information. Vital data regarding military advances such as the Enigma machine and the Tiger Tank were wrung from prisoners not by force but by trickery and deceit. The eccentric, quirky, but also very successful, wartime interrogation methods of the British are revealed in this book, including their triumphant discoveries and also their occasional disastrous mistake.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752478272 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 11/30/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 677 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
British Interrogation Techniques
In the Second World War
By Sophie Jackson
The History Press
Copyright © 2012 Sophie JacksonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-7827-2
CHAPTER 1
Britain vs. Germany
Imagine a small cell, painted in uniform grey, the only furniture a heavy table and two chairs opposite each other. A bare bulb swings from the ceiling and minimal light comes in from a heavily barred window. A man (or woman) is escorted into the room by unsympathetic guards who deposit their charge in the nearest chair. In the far chair an unassuming man sits, perhaps bespectacled, but always with a calculated smile and a file of papers before him.
He sets forth a series of questions to his prisoner, which are stonily ignored so, with a grin, he begins describing various tortures and, when his victim continues to withhold their information, he sets about acting upon his threats. A huge number of Hollywood movies, television dramas and books can now fill in the gaps when it comes to the imaginative tortures inflicted on our 'hero', whether they are a spy, criminal or a Second World War soldier.
This is the typical image the word interrogation brings to mind; a picture reinforced by recent revelations of Guantanamo Bay and popular media. It has become stereotypical that should any hero, real or fictional, be captured, they should expect physical torment, and that image is strongest from the Second World War, with Germans usually portraying the evil interrogators.
Ironically, however, torture was not as prolific in the war, either on British or enemy soldiers, as is commonly portrayed. There is no denying it occurred, but the evidence for it being a universal practice in the interrogation services is simply not there. In fact the best and most successful interrogators, British or German, refrained from torture, deeming it 'unproductive'. Lieutenant Colonel R.W.G. Stephens, the fearsome commandant of British Camp 020, where numerous spies and suspect civilians were interrogated, was clear on his views of torture: 'Violence is taboo, for not only does it produce an answer to please, but it lowers the standard of information. There is no room for a percentage assessment of reliability.'
Torture was therefore viewed as the tool of amateurs or the inefficient. What reliability could be placed in the words of a man who has been made to confess under physical duress? It is an age-old question that has been asked time and time again, whether during the seventeenth century witch trials or the early days of interrogation in the First World War.
These views were not the enlightened opinions of peaceful men who abhorred violence, however, they were ideas bred from practicality. Stephens knew what others would come to realise: torture provoked easy answers, but not necessarily true ones. It was considered a great failing of the German intelligence services that they relied so heavily on blackmail and violent threats to gain information and recruit spies. Those same spies were so easily turned by their British interrogators that it was almost laughable; once out of the clutches of their Nazi masters they willingly divulged their missions.
Unfortunately. a minority did not share Stephens' views. The London Cage, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Scotland, became infamous for its supposed use of physical torture, and even Stephens detested his counterpart Scotland, who was banished from Camp 020 after hitting a recalcitrant suspect over the head.
The same applied in Germany; there was no universal code for extracting information in either countries, and both British and German interrogators were free from limitations other than those of their conscience or pragmatism. The cases of Bad Nenndorf, mentioned in a later chapter, show that the British could equal the Gestapo and Nazi concentration camps for violence and lack of humanity.
While for the British these detestable practices were the rarity, it was often the reverse in Germany. Why these two countries diverged in their information gathering is as much a case of culture as a case of the fledgling system of intelligence gathering. The early history of spying is vital to the understanding of the interrogators' role and attitude.
How to Build an Intelligence Service
It is strange to realise that intelligence gathering as an organised body is really the creation of the twentieth century. The game of spying is as old as civilisation, but the organised compiling of the information these men and women found, and the interrogation of enemy agents, is relatively new. Prior to Queen Elizabeth I diplomats or courtiers were expected to pick up useful information from reliable sources and pay for it out of their own purse. It was not exactly a system and certainly not efficient or reliable. That all changed with the appointment of Sir Francis Walsingham in 1573, the iconic spymaster who excelled at the game of information gathering.
Walsingham's greatest triumph was successfully ending the war against Spain and the defeat of their armada, in part achieved by his intelligence network. Unfortunately his success was spying's downfall, and the lack of a significant enemy threat made intelligence gathering rather redundant. Throughout the history of the intelligence game it has always been the case that in peace it is neglected, only for that neglect to be regretted when another war threatens seemingly out of nowhere. Various leaders failed to realise this lesson. Cromwell employed spies to gather news on Catholic Spain before attacking them, and then proudly declared his superior intelligence system had enabled the victory. Yet once again, as soon as conflict ended the system was disbanded.
For the next two centuries British agents were a loose band of individuals employed by whoever footed the bill. The government's creation of the Secret Service Fund was commonly tapped into by MPs wishing to fund their election campaign or bribe other MPs (Lord Bute stole £80,000 for this purpose). No wonder the British people saw the secret service as a money-making scheme for corrupt politicians. This view was not helped when Irish Republicans began a bombing campaign in England in an attempt to gain Irish independence, and the intelligence service was unable to cope with the new threat. Even so, it took the Boer War to convince the War Office that they needed a properly developed and maintained intelligence service.
When Britain found itself in an arms race with Germany, for the first time intelligence gathering was viewed as a true priority. In 1909 the Security Service Bureau was established with Captain Vernon Kell of the South Staffordshire Regiment and Captain Mansfield Cumming of the Royal Navy heading it. Despite being formally recognised, Kell still found his service woefully undermanned. He only had fourteen staff to deal with finding and arresting German spies and counteracting espionage prior to the First World War. The government was regularly, and rightly, accused by intelligence men of failing to recognise the importance of the system.
Meanwhile, Germany was also developing a network of intelligence agents and spies, whom it regularly attempted to get into Britain. Twenty such spies were rounded up by Kell before the outbreak of the First World War, but he was still aware that a large spy ring was in operation and that useful information on the Royal Navy was being relayed to the kaiser. The spy ring could have had serious repercussions for Britain had one of Kell's officers not overheard a chance conversation on a train in 1911. The conversation concerned a strange letter received from Germany by the proprietor of the Peacock Hotel in Leith, wanting details of Britain's war preparations. The Germans presumably considered the proprietor a possible agent, though his confusion suggests he was not the man they wanted.
In any case, he was interviewed and agreed to allow future communications to be intercepted by Kell's team. Through this not only were Kell's team able to develop a scientific means for reading the secret ink the Germans used (which would be invaluable during the war), but on 4 August 1914, as war against Germany was declared, they were able to launch an operation to arrest twenty-two enemy agents. All but one were caught and interned. It was a deadly blow against German intelligence and Kell was rightly proud of his success.
Yet capturing a spy was only half the story. Without a dedicated band of interrogators who could work tirelessly to extract information, uncovering an espionage suspect would have been difficult. Confirming his (or her) guilt and wringing military secrets from them would have been impossible (or, at least, a hit-and-miss affair).
The Security Service Bureau became MI5 in 1916, but a name change did not give Kell any new powers. The service, as it is today, was purely advisory. Arrests and interrogation had to be left to the police, perhaps with MI5 agents looking on but without the ability to interfere. It was frustrating for those working at the forefront of intelligence, but their hands were tied.
The main interrogator of the many suspects MI5 brought to the police was Sir Basil Thomson, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Typical of his age, Sir Basil had little time for 'foreigners', was deeply patriotic and damning of the Germans: '... it is characteristic of the German mentality to underrate the intelligence of other nations and really to believe that anything German must be uber alles. It was largely owing to this self-satisfied obtuseness that they lost the war.'
He possibly had a point and certainly his views would be carried over into the Second World War, when Lieutenant Colonel Stephens made similar comments about the German Abwehr and the state of their spy network. Yet it could also be argued that these same interrogators, who condemned their enemies for being arrogant and self-confident, suffered from exactly the same syndrome. In any case, Sir Basil was laying down the foundations and guidelines that two decades later his successors would follow.
Interrogators maintained a strong sense of honour and patriotism and respected this in enemy agents. More favour and sympathy was shown to a spy who served Germany because he believed in the cause than in a spy who was merely working for money. Spies that cracked too easily or willingly offered to switch sides were viewed with such distaste that often interrogators seemed all too eager to have them sent off to the firing squad or gallows.
The patriotic German spy Hans Karl Lody struck a particular chord with Sir Basil and drove him to declare that it was a crying shame that a distinction could not be made between spies driven by patriotism and those by money, and that the former could avoid execution. Lody was described in glowing terms as he faced his firing squad, and 'died as one would wish all Englishmen to die – quietly and undramatically ...'
In fact Sir Basil broke a cardinal rule that Stephens and other Second World War interrogators would insist upon – he became friendly with an enemy agent. When the interrogators of twenty years later questioned POWs and suspected spies it was always with professional and conscientious detachment, but then they had learned from the errors their predecessors had made. The First World War interrogators were, in many respects, having to make it up as they went along. They were in new territory and while the police may have been used to questioning criminals, it was a far cry from questioning men trained to betray an entire country. Even at this early stage those working in intelligence were frustrated with the minimal training the police interrogators were given. They did not have the knowledge to deal with espionage suspects and many of those sitting on the outskirts watching longed to get into action themselves.
One such man was Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland. He would later become notorious as the commandant of the London Cage, but he learned his art on the battlefields of France in the latter years of the First World War.
Scotland began his career spying on the German military in South Africa and he claimed proudly to have 'infiltrated' the German army. In fact he was a supplies agent for them, given an honorary military rank to enable him to move about the army lines more easily when delivering goods. But it was typical of Scotland to exaggerate his involvement and to come across as single-handedly winning the intelligence war.
With the air of someone who had grown up on boyish adventure stories, but the appearance of someone more suited to sitting behind a desk (Scotland readily admitted that his outward appearance was 'least impressive'), he offered himself to the War Office to serve as an intelligence man and was promptly turned down. It took some persistent wrangling and heavy name dropping before he was finally accepted and sent out to France. In actuality, Scotland did have some highly useful assets – he was fluent in German and from his time in the German army in South Africa was familiar with their various protocols and procedures, something that regularly baffled the other British intelligence officers.
His first mission was to go to a prisoner transit camp at Le Havre to try and answer the rumours that the Germans were rehabilitating sick soldiers and getting them back to the front far faster than the British could. Intelligence needed to know if this was true and whether it meant the Germans were already feeling 'the pinch' in their manpower.
Scotland approached the problem laterally; instead of confronting each man individually with questions he assembled them on parade and, speaking in German, summoned the senior NCOs. He then issued them with paper and pencil and instructed them to work through the other men and ask each one if he had been in hospital, the nature of his injuries and how long he had been out of action. Two hours later he had a stack of grubby, but legible, papers with the information he wanted. By midnight they were in the hands of a dispatch rider and heading for GHQ. Scotland remarked: 'It seemed to me a reasonable reflection that the war could not last long if only the direction of affairs were left in my hands!'
Modesty indeed! However Scotland's efforts did earn him the accolade of German experts at GHQ, and he now spent a great deal of time interrogating prisoners. He was a natural intelligence officer with a knack for holding on to the smallest detail and thinking on his feet. He could bend his mind around corners if he needed to and knew when flattery or tact would work better than force. In the later controversies that emerged about him, his earlier skills were obscured; possibly with age he found it harder to keep pace with prisoners and to out-think them, thus resorting to violence and abuse. But that is for a later chapter.
Scotland started to build the basis of a true interrogation system out of the prison camps in France. Unlike Sir Basil, who allowed familiarity and fondness for a prisoner to get the better of him, Scotland always maintained distance and kept in mind he was dealing with the enemy – a tactic that Second World War interrogators would readily adopt as part of their professional guise.
In 1916 he was sent to a camp called The Cage, which was used for prisoners from the Somme. There was a field hospital right next door for both British and German casualties. It was here that Scotland employed his methods in what he called 'the first war crime'. A German plane flew over The Cage one night and dropped several light bombs on the field hospital, wounding numerous people and, ironically, killing one of their own comrades who was having emergency surgery on the operating table. The surgical section took a direct hit and the German patient stood no chance.
A short time later a pilot was captured and brought into The Cage, and Scotland instantly suspected this was the culprit (largely based on the man's 'sullen, shifty expression'). Getting the man to admit to the crime was another matter. Normal questioning failed and the Prince of Wales started breathing down Scotland's neck for results. He decided to escort the enemy pilot to the ruined hospital and show him the body of the dead German patient. Making it clear this was the direct result of the bombing the pilot broke down; this was enough proof of his guilt for Scotland, though the pilot later escaped trial by committing suicide.
On another occasion, when he questioned a German oberleutnant, he was more tactful in his approach. The oberleutnant, who arrived at The Cage with a letter of recommendation from the Australian troops who had captured him, had apparently led his machine-gun unit in such fearsome resistance against the Allied soldiers that he held them up for four days.
Scotland realised this man would be likely to resist normal interrogation and, due to his dogged determination that had so impressed the Australians, it seemed disrespectful to single him out for interview and chance the scorn of his fellow prisoners. So Scotland walked to the prison tent with the letter, asked for the oberleutnant to step forward and announced to the prisoners that he had a letter from the Australians praising the man's bravery. He explained he wanted to know more about the incident, and the oberleutnant left the tent with his fellow prisoners smiling at him approvingly.
Praising the man in front of his comrades had the desired effect, and when Scotland began talking with him he was open enough to talk of his upbringing in South Africa. Another piece of luck now presented itself to Scotland and he pounced on it; he happened to know of the oberleutnant's father. Aided by this coincidence the conversation quickly developed and soon they were talking about German morale and the state of the country; the prisoner never suspected that four men were stationed around the outside of the tent with notebooks, taking down every detail.
Thus Scotland had already mastered two of the most common tactics of the interrogation service – confrontation and conversation.
However, the end of the war brought a familiar conclusion to the intelligence (and therefore the interrogation) system. Most of the interrogators, who had perfected their skills in France on enemy prisoners, were stood down, including Scotland, who went with characteristic bad grace. Meanwhile, Vernon Kell at MI5 started clandestine infiltrations of communist cells with a staff that had been reduced to barely a dozen. He firmly believed that Bolshevism was the biggest threat to peace and that Hitler was not about to launch another intelligence offensive against Britain. Germany could, effectively, be ignored.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from British Interrogation Techniques by Sophie Jackson. Copyright © 2012 Sophie Jackson. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Introduction,
1 Britain vs. Germany,
2 Making a Man Talk,
3 The Smallest Detail,
4 The Usefulness of Traitors,
5 Masters of the Microphone,
6 Tiger Tanks and Enigma Machines: the Great Successes and the Disastrous Failures,
7 The London Cage,
8 Post-War Interrogation: Bad Nenndorf,
9 Chained Lions: Characters of the Interrogation Files,
Bibliography,
Copyright,