Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

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СКАЧАТЬ and transported, via South Africa, to Britain. Thus an Italian agent, enticed by an exotic dancer to a border and dragged across it by British agents, came to be interrogated at Camp 020. Although Manna’s interrogation at Camp 020 did not result in him becoming a double agent, it did yield valuable intelligence on Axis espionage in southern Africa, particularly on local ship-watching operations.⁵⁸

      One of the reasons MI5 was determined to have Axis agents brought to Camp 020 for interrogation was to avoid disclosing the Ultra secret. It also wanted them to be interrogated in the most effective manner possible – which for MI5 meant not resorting to physical violence. Contrary to what we might assume, and contrary to its ominous first appearances, Camp 020 did not permit the use of physical coercion during interrogations. This is confirmed by contemporary records, such as the diary of Guy Liddell, the wartime head of MI5’s B-Division, which was written without the intention of ever being made public, and by the subsequent testimonials of Axis agents who were detained at the camp, and who had no reason to lie about their treatment. The MI5 officer who ran Camp 020, Lt. Col. Robin Stephens, enforced a strict policy of no physical violence, or ‘third degree’ measures, in the facility. ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens, so called because of his thick monocle, believed that the aim of interrogation should be to draw out all information possible from an agent, and not simply to obtain quick answers to specific questions. The only way to do that, he judged, was to refrain from physical coercion. ‘Violence is taboo,’ he wrote in his in-house post-war history of Camp 020, entitled A Digest of Ham after the camp’s location at Ham Common, ‘for not only does it produce an answer to please, but it lowers the standard of information.’ He wrote in another post-war report:

      Never strike a man. In the first place it is an act of cowardice. In the second place, it is not intelligent. A prisoner will lie to avoid further punishment and everything he says thereafter will be based on a false premise. Through stupidity, therefore, an investigation becomes valueless.⁵⁹

      None of this should give the impression that Camp 020 was a soft place. Its tactics for ‘breaking’ agents included every conceivable trick of what Stephens termed ‘mental pressure’: newly arrived prisoners were usually stripped, humiliated and disorientated; they were terrified by rows of barking dogs; confined to small solitary cells; threatened with court-martial and execution. Microphones were installed in their cells to overhear conversations; guards disguised as prisoners (known as ‘stool pigeons’) were sent into cells to get them talking; false newspapers were printed to trick them into thinking their friends and family at home had been killed; and Ultra decrypts were used to convince them that all the details of their missions had already been discovered. Stephens noted that every man has a price, and every man is capable of being broken – it is simply a question of applying the right mental pressure to do so.

      The way in which MI5 interrogators broke Osmar Hellmuth is instructive. As soon as he arrived at Camp 020 in November 1943, Hellmuth was marched into a room where he was faced by a number of high-ranking British officers sitting behind a desk, in what looked like a military court. He was then subjected to a barrage of shouts from ‘the Commandant’ (Stephens), who told him that the Argentine government and his German spymasters had abandoned him, and that he would be executed as a spy. As a final touch, the Commandant added that he hated all spies with a passion. The bad-cop show was now over, and the good cops were free to go to work. Hellmuth was taken into another room, where a different group of officers plied him with soft words, telling him that they understood the difficult position he was in, and wanted to help. It did not take long for Hellmuth to break.⁶⁰

      Stephens’s rule against the use of physical coercion is all the more striking given that in the summer of 1940, Camp 020 interrogators were desperately questioning enemy agents amid an invasion crisis – undoubtedly the greatest threat to British national security in the twentieth century. Many of the techniques that they employed, such as sleep deprivation and humiliation, would today constitute forms of ‘torture’ under international law. However, for Stephens there was a clear distinction between ‘physical pressure’ and ‘mental pressure’. It should be stressed that he did not reject physical ‘third degree’ measures because he was a humanitarian at heart – fourteen German agents held at Camp 020 were executed, and Stephens later declared that he wished more had been. Rather, he rejected them because in his opinion they produced unreliable intelligence. Stephens was one of the most successful Allied wartime interrogators. His interrogations at Camp 020 played a significant role in the Double Cross System, producing about twelve double agents run by MI5 during the war (out of about 120 in total). They also helped to build up a unique card-catalogue index on the German intelligence services.⁶¹

      Although it was not termed ‘rendition’ at the time, the process devised by British intelligence during the Second World War resembles the US government’s recent policy of ‘extraordinary rendition’, which is claimed by its proponents to be a necessary tactic in the ‘war on terror’. However, there is a fundamental difference between the two. During the Second World War, German and Axis agents were brought from British territories abroad to Britain specifically in order to safeguard their effective interrogation – which at Camp 020 meant every method short of physical coercion. In sharp contrast, ‘extraordinary rendition’ policies instigated after 11 September 2001 involve exactly the opposite: the US government and its allies deliberately sending suspects to third-party countries with poor track records on human rights, where they have allegedly been tortured to gain intelligence. The assumption behind recent ‘extraordinary rendition’ policies is that torture can produce intelligence. Given MI5’s experiences during the Second World War, and the observations of its most successful interrogator, Stephens, it seems doubtful whether this is so. An inescapable conclusion is the dictum given by William Pitt the Younger: ‘Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.’

      ALLIES AND ENEMIES: BRITAIN AND THE USSR

      If the greatest wartime successes of the British secret state were against its enemies, the Axis Powers, its greatest failure was its inadequate surveillance of its ally, the Soviet Union. Britain’s intelligence services – MI5, SIS and GC&CS – were not blind to the Soviet threat during the war, even after June 1941, when the two countries became allies. As early as 1942, Guy Liddell, the chain-smoking wartime head of MI5’s B-Division, was sombrely noting in his diary, which he dictated to his secretary at the end of every working day:

      There is no doubt that the Russians are far better in the matter of espionage than any country in the world. I am perfectly certain that they are well-bedded down here and that we should be making more active enquiries. They will be a great source of trouble for us when the war is over.⁶²

      The problem for the British intelligence community was that investigating an ally was an extremely delicate matter. Liddell noted in his diary in 1943 that if MI5 did try to investigate the Soviet threat, which he increasingly felt was necessary, but got found out, there would be ‘an appalling stink’. As soon as the Soviet Union entered the war in June 1941, the Foreign Office placed an embargo on all British intelligence-gathering efforts on it. Apparently allies do not spy on allies – an honourable, but totally naïve, assumption when it came to the Soviet Union. We now know from Soviet archives that Moscow devoted as many resources to gathering intelligence on its wartime allies, Britain and the United States, as it did on its enemies, the Axis Powers.⁶³

      Despite Britain’s intelligence services effectively having their hands tied by the Foreign Office in terms of spying on Moscow after June 1941, they tried to devise ways around the embargo. GC&CS concocted an ingenious method of sidestepping the ban, using intercepted German communications that discussed Soviet matters to gain information. MI5 also undertook measures to continue investigating the Soviet threat, opening a new department, F-Division, to investigate ‘subversive activities’ – the main focus of which was communism and Soviet activities. F-Division was led by Roger Hollis, a pre-war entrant to MI5 recruited from a tobacco firm in the Far East, who had left Oxford before taking his degree СКАЧАТЬ