Читать книгу Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire - Calder Walton - Страница 21

During the Second World War British intelligence developed imperial responsibilities in ways that it simply hitherto had not. MI5 posted more officers to British colonial and Commonwealth countries than it ever had previously, and GC&CS dramatically expanded its capabilities, hoovering up enemy traffic from its regional collection stations across the empire. Meanwhile, SOE armed guerrilla fighters against the Axis Powers. However, there is one chapter in the story of Britain’s wartime imperial intelligence responsibilities that is apparently so sensitive it has only recently been disclosed. It has some remarkable parallels with controversial intelligence and security practices in the present day.

As part of its counter-espionage efforts, during the Second World War British intelligence ran a top-secret process of detaining, interrogating and transporting enemy agents between various parts of the British empire. At times this came close to being a form of state-sponsored kidnapping – closely resembling the process of ‘extraordinary rendition’ employed by the US government in the so-called ‘war on terror’ closer to our own time. After December 1940, Ultra decrypts revealed a number of German agents operating throughout the British empire and Commonwealth. In the first six months of 1942, six high-level agents were identified (but not arrested) in different British colonies, and in June 1942 one of them operating in Mombasa, in Kenya, was detained by local police. His detention sparked a debate within MI5 about what should be done with him and other such agents. MI5 wanted them, as well as any other agents who may have been working in different parts of the empire, to be interrogated, and if possible turned into double agents as part of its Double Cross System. However, MI5’s officers in Section B1a, responsible for counter-espionage, were reluctant to have them interrogated in the distant outposts of empire, where effective methods could not be guaranteed. Furthermore, MI5 feared that if the identified agents were interrogated locally, it would have to release the most closely guarded secret of the war, Ultra, to colonial authorities who could not necessarily be trusted – interrogators invariably used information derived from Ultra to trick enemy agents into thinking that British intelligence knew everything about their missions. Instead, MI5 wanted the agents to be brought to its own top-secret interrogation facility, Camp 020, located in a former lunatic asylum, Latchmere House, in Ham Common, a suburb of South London.

Camp 020, which probably derives its name from the ‘Twenty Committee’ responsible for overseeing the Double Cross System, operated outside the control of any British government department except for MI5, and was without legal oversight. Its aim was to isolate and ‘break’ enemy agents, who were held without trial, in some cases for years, with the intention of turning them into double agents. Because its detainees were non-combatant enemy agents, international regulations concerning the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to Camp 020. Nor was it inspected or listed by the Red Cross. In short, its detainees were placed in a legal void. The question that MI5 needed answering was whether it was legally justifiable to detain foreign nationals, and transport them from British territories overseas for interrogation in Britain. One of the leading figures in B-Division, Dick White, put it in the following terms to MI5’s legal adviser Toby Pilcher (a future High Court judge):

… we shall find ourselves in a particularly serious position if it is ruled that the legal machinery for detaining an enemy agent in a Colony and subsequently bringing him to the U.K. is found to be faulty in law … I am afraid that this is a case in which we cannot leave the matter in doubt, for were the detention of an enemy agent brought here under this proposal to be tested by Habeas Corpus [the legal process by which a prisoner can demand to be brought before a court], in all probability it would be a moment when he was already installed in Camp 020. Subsequent publicity attendant upon a test of Habeas Corpus would be extremely detrimental to Camp 020 and might jeopardise our whole position with regard to it.⁵²

Under the draconian Defence Regulations that had been enacted in Britain on the outbreak of war, it was impossible for the overwhelming majority of those detained to bring habeas corpus proceedings against the responsible authorities – which was invariably MI5, acting behind the cover of the ‘War Office’. That said, in at least one case a detainee did demand to be brought before a court, though unsurprisingly, given how expansive the British state’s powers of detention were under the Defence Regulations, his case was ultimately unsuccessful.⁵³

There is also some evidence to suggest that there was more going on behind the scenes in the famous wartime legal case of Liversidge v Anderson in 1942 than appears in the recorded judgement of the House of Lords. The case has gone down in the annals of legal history as a low point in the story of civil liberties and the rule of law in Britain, with the judiciary cowing before the power of the executive. It involved a Polish-born naturalised British citizen, Jack Perlzweig, who went by the name of Liversidge, who was detained in 1940 under Regulation 18b of the Defence (General) Regulations 1939. This regulation allowed the Home Secretary (Sir John Anderson) to detain persons of hostile origin if he had ‘reasonable grounds’ to suspect them of being involved in acts contrary to the defence of the realm. Put simply, Mr Liversidge asked to see what evidence the Home Secretary had against him, and asked the court to consider whether it constituted ‘reasonable grounds’ for his detention without trial, which he argued was false imprisonment. The majority verdict of the Law Lords – who heard the case in an annexe to the House of Lords because their usual chamber had been bombed out in the Blitz – stated that in times of national emergency courts had no authority to question whether the Home Secretary’s evidence against an individual constituted reasonable grounds for his detention. It is likely that the ‘reasonable grounds’ for Liversidge’s detention were really derived from adverse intelligence on him provided by MI5. The case of Liversidge v Anderson was really, it seems, to do with how intelligence could be introduced into court, which was difficult, if not impossible, because the British government only tacitly recognised the existence of MI5. The use of intelligence as evidence is an issue that courts in England, and in the Western world more generally, are still grappling with to the present day.

There was a significant problem for MI5 when it came to the detention and transportation of enemy agents from overseas territories to Britain. By a curious omission in the colonial legislation passed by Parliament on the outbreak of war, Colonial Order 12(5)a, there was no equivalent to Defence Regulation 18b, which meant that it was legally permissible for aliens detained in British colonies to bring habeas corpus proceedings. This brought a stark warning from MI5’s legal adviser Toby Pilcher, who stated that in his opinion, under the existing legislation it was ‘undesirable, and probably illegal, to remove an alien from a ship and detain him in a colony’. Following a high-powered meeting in June 1942 between Dick White, Pilcher and the Colonial Office’s legal adviser, it was decided that the only way to resolve the problem was to introduce ‘ad hoc legislation’ under the Defence Regulations ‘specifically empowering the Governor [of a colony] to remove a suspect alien from a ship or aircraft visiting the colony, and to detain him pending his removal from the colony’. Before long MI5 and the Colonial Office had formulated a written codicil, or warrant, which could be quickly signed by colonial governors allowing enemy aliens to be detained on British territory and then rendered to Britain for interrogation. This was precisely what occurred during the rest of the war – confirming the axiom that laws are silent during wars (silent leges inter arma).⁵⁴

The willingness of MI5 to go along with this process of detaining and transporting – kidnapping, in all but name – individuals, despite its original lack of legal authority to do so, is all the more striking when the heavyweight legal brains it employed during the war are considered. One of the B-Division officers centrally involved in detaining and transporting enemy agents to Camp 020 was H.L.A. (Herbert) Hart, an Oxford academic lawyer who went on to become one of the most eminent legal philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. On one level, it is surprising that ideas of ‘natural justice’ and ‘fairness’ did not prevent lawyers working in MI5 – a large number of whom were wartime recruits from the Law Society – from supporting such legally dubious practices as detention without trial. On another level, however, it is less surprising than it may seem. H.L.A. Hart is most famous for his ideas of legal positivism, which, put crudely, argue that there is not necessarily an inherent association between the validity of laws and ethics or morality, and that laws are made by human beings. The thrust of legal positivism is therefore that laws are essentially malleable.⁵⁵

One cannot help concluding that MI5’s wartime lawyers (in both its legal section and its counter-espionage division) were willing to overlook the weighty ethical and moral issues raised by detaining and transporting enemy agents, so long as the formality of ‘ad hoc’ emergency legislation was in place and all the other legal niceties were fulfilled. This narrow focus on formality, rather than substance, is a characteristic as common among some lawyers today as it apparently was then. Furthermore, it is notable that prior to the passing of ‘ad hoc’ emergency legislation, neither H.L.A. Hart nor MI5’s legal advisers, including several future High Court judges, nor the Colonial or Foreign Offices’ legal advisers, could find any legal justification for the detention and transportation of foreign nationals without due process – which is striking given the allegations of ‘extraordinary rendition’ today, because it allegedly involves exactly the same matters, but the law requiring due process is no different now from what it was during the Second World War.

It is impossible to state with certainty how many enemy agents were transported from British colonies to Camp 020 for interrogation during the war. At least twenty-three such agents can be identified in declassified MI5 records, though the true number may be considerably more. Whatever it was, many of the cases were highly dramatic, while others bordered on farce. One of the most important involved an Argentinean national of German descent, Osmar Hellmuth, who worked in the Argentine consulate in Barcelona, and who in September 1943 was identified as acting as a courier between the officially neutral Argentine government and the Third Reich. Working under diplomatic cover, Hellmuth’s mission was to travel to Germany, where he was to meet the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and possibly even Hitler, and purchase arms and other equipment for the Argentine government, which from June 1943 was ruled by a military junta led by General Pedro Pablo Ramírez. Hellmuth’s high-level mission made a mockery of the claims by General Ramírez that the Argentine government remained neutral in the war.

The tip-off about Hellmuth’s mission to Nazi Germany came from the SIS head of station in Buenos Aires, who forwarded it to SIS’s headquarters at the Broadway Buildings in London, where it was received by none other than Kim Philby, then working on the Iberian desk of Section V (counter-espionage), based in St Albans, just outside London. Philby passed the information on to MI5 – as he probably also did to his KGB masters. SIS and MI5 together orchestrated a detailed plan for Hellmuth’s detention and transfer to Britain, which was put into effect the following month, October 1943, when Hellmuth set sail from South America to Spain. As soon as his ship touched British soil en route, at Trinidad in the West Indies, MI5’s DSO there arranged for him to be arrested by local police. This was authorised at the highest level, by the British Governor of Trinidad, who signed Hellmuth’s arrest and detention order under the newly enacted ‘ad hoc’ legislation – though in fact it was clearly in violation of Hellmuth’s diplomatic status. Hellmuth was put on a waiting British seaplane that flew him to Bermuda, and from there he was transported on board a Royal Navy cruiser, the Ajax, to England, where he arrived in early November.

After his installation at Camp 020, MI5 interrogators set to work on him, and he was quickly broken. He revealed an array of highly explosive diplomatic information, producing letters written with secret ink, giving up the identities of senior Nazi intelligence officials, such as Siegfried (or Sigmund) Becker, the head of the Sicherheitsdienst mission in Argentina, and disclosing that the Argentine Minister of War, the future President Juan Perón, was involved in the Nazi arms deal. Hellmuth also confessed that part of his mission to Germany had been to contact the notorious Nazi espionage chief Walter Schellenberg, the head of the SS’s foreign intelligence department and later head of Section VI (foreign espionage) of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA). With duelling scars on his cheeks, a signet ring stashed with cyanide, and a desk in his Berlin office mounted with machine guns which could spray the room with bullets at the flick of a switch, Schellenberg was very much the stereotype of an arch villain.⁵⁶

The information produced by MI5’s interrogation of Hellmuth at Camp 020 was of such massive diplomatic importance that the British government decided to go public with it and expose the duplicity of the Argentine government. This caused a sensation, with General Ramírez being forced publicly to disavow Hellmuth. As the post-war history of Camp 020 noted, the Hellmuth case forced Argentina to sever diplomatic relations with the Third Reich, and helped to precipitate the collapse of the Ramírez government. It also had repercussions in Nazi Germany itself, with Himmler blaming the head of the Abwehr, Canaris, for the chaos it caused and demanding Canaris’s resignation.

Other Axis agents were also arrested when they landed in Trinidad, and transported to Camp 020. This happened with the German agent Juan Lecube – a former footballer, greyhound-owner and ex-Spanish civil servant – and also with Leopold Hirsch, who was arrested on board the Cabo de Hornos in Trinidad harbour after his identity was revealed when his name was given en clair in a German telegram intercepted by Bletchley Park. The case of Gastäo de Freitas Ferraz is a striking example of how seizing an agent at sea saved Allied lives. De Freitas was a wireless operator on a Portuguese fishing depot ship, who was recruited by the Abwehr to provide maritime intelligence under the neutral cover provided by his Portuguese employment. However, while his ship was en route from Newfoundland to Lisbon in October 1942, he was arrested and removed first to Gibraltar then to Camp 020. At the point when he was arrested on the high seas, his ship was on the tail of a convoy taking part in Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. De Freitas was interrogated at Camp 020, confessed and was detained for the duration of the war. If he had not been kidnapped, it is almost certain that he would have seen the invasion convoy taking part in Torch and reported it by radio, which would have had disastrous consequences for the Allies. His arrest seems to have saved the Allied invasion of North Africa.⁵⁷

Perhaps the most bizarre wartime rendition case was that of Alfredo Manna, an Italian agent operating in the neutral territory of Portuguese South Africa (present-day Mozambique). Manna was one of a number of agents run by the Italian Consul, Umberto Campini, in Lourenço Marques (today the city of Maputo), whose mission was primarily to report on Allied shipping movements off the coast of East Africa. It is unclear how British intelligence identified Manna: it may have been from an Ultra decrypt, or it may have been the result of good old-fashioned detective work on the part of the local SIS representative stationed in Lourenço Marques, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. Nevertheless, by early 1943, MI5 and SIS, sensing that he was far from loyal to his Italian masters, hoped to turn Manna into a double agent. Muggeridge worked closely with a local SOE team to devise an elaborate plan, ‘along the best Hollywood lines’, as he later put it, to detain Manna and transport him to Britain for interrogation. According to Muggeridge, a devout Catholic and future biographer of Mother Teresa, the plan was essentially to ‘kidnap’ him. Knowing that Manna’s great weakness was women, Muggeridge hired an exotic casino dancer named Anna Levy to lure him to the border of British territory in Swaziland. As the later history of Camp 020 noted: ‘There he was seized, gagged and bound by British agents, who took care to leave him on the right side of the border.’ Manna was promptly arrested by local police 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.’