Derek Nudd's Blog - Posts Tagged "csdic"

Interrogation in War and Conflict by Christopher Andrew

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


An interesting and useful review in thirteen separately authored chapters of the development and use of interrogation in the twentieth century. It covers both intelligence sought from servicemen, who were protected to some extent by the Hague and Geneva conventions, and from insurrectionists (or dissidents) who were not. More might have been made of this point.
In a surprising statement Christopher Andrew's introduction states that the WW2 Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) 'still awaits its historian'. Neitzel's Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations 1942-45 (2007) and Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying, The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWS (2011), and Fry's The M Room: Secret Listeners who Bugged the Nazis in WW2 (2012) all predate this book, and the good coverage elsewhere is the only excuse for omitting CSDIC's remarkable work from this account. Moreover Andrew repeats the frequent (but incorrect) assertion that the controversial London Cage was part of CSDIC - a surprising slip from an intelligence historian of his calibre.
Heather Jones' chapter on the development of interrogation techniques in WW1 is a valuable contribution to a topic which has received too little attention. Its main focus is on the military aspect in forward areas with a couple of pages on naval technical intelligence toward the end. As such I feel it misses one of the most significant developments: the joint service centre set up at Cromwell Gardens in 1917. As a central facility backed by a comprehensive filing system this was the essential template for CSDIC.
Much of the rest of the book covered areas where I am unqualified to comment, except to note the frequency with which the lessons, mistakes, and sometimes people from earlier conflicts pop up again.
I must however offer a final word for Simona Tobia's concluding review, which I thought excellent.
As a private buyer it took me a while to chase down a paperback copy of this at a halfway acceptable price. As for the hardback - Routledge, who are you kidding?



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Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two World Wars by Helen Fry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It is almost always useful to look at a topic from a different angle, and Helen Fry has done this with the 20th century history of intelligence, focussing on the two world wars from a female perspective. The approach is (mostly) successful.
Dr Fry draws out a number of consistent themes: that British and Allied agencies, under the pressure of existential threat, abandoned entrenched views and appointed the most appropriate person for the job; that commanders felt women had certain abilities men lacked (while carefully not endorsing or contradicting this view); and that women had greater freedom of movement than men in occupied territories, while running the same risks if caught.
There is impressive research into the lives of many of the personalities involved, drawing on both oral and documentary sources. If anything, these stories follow too thickly upon each other and slow down the overall narrative. It's difficult to see what else she could do though, other than move some of the detail into an appendix.
There is an extensive and useful plate section.
There are a few typos and factual slips which should have been picked up by Yale's editors (tut! tut!) and which I hope will be corrected in the paperback edition. Also one or two points where I read the evidence differently - but that's normal disagreement and no reason to dock a star.



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Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture by Ian Cobain

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A curate's egg of a book, this. Aiming to dispel some comfortable myths of British exceptionalism, Ian Cobain mixes some genuinely impressive research with speculation and inference.
It starts early. Looking at the impressive results achieved by the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centres (CSDIC) in WW2, Cobain concludes that they produced those results quickly so they must have used torture. Transcripts of prisoner conversations provide evidence of widely varying lengths of stay, and show that the mix of direct interrogation, stool pigeons and microphones rendered violence unnecessary as well as counterproductive.
More seriously, he uses the same inferential approach to denounce MI5's Camp 020 where there is decent evidence that inmates' treatment was firm, going on harsh, but not brutal. Yet Camp 020 is repeatedly invoked as a platform on which allegations about later mistreatment stand, and in many cases where he has better contemporary evidence.
This is not to say there were no excesses. Prisoners were probably abused at the notorious London District Cage (see Helen Fry's The London Cage: The Secret History of Britain's World War II Interrogation Centre and certainly at the post-war centre in Bad Nenndorf in Germany. Robin 'Tin Eye' Stephens who headed both Camp 020 and Bad Nenndorf was tried and acquitted for the abuses there - which Cobain presents as a stitch-up. Nonetheless he went on to become a Security Service liaison officer in Accra in the Gold Coast (Ghana), which sounds distinctly like being put out to grass.
Subsequent chapters deal with the messier experiences of retreat from empire and domestic insurrection, where military and police forces have been asked to face opponents who don't wear uniform, cannot be distinguished from the civilian population, and don't acknowledge the same values or rules of combat. All of which is a perilous formula for a spiral of violence. Here Cobain's journalistic approach pays off. He has managed to track down a number of survivor accounts from both sides of the table to build a compelling story. There is just a nagging question left by the earlier lacunae: are we getting a selective account here?



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Arctic Convoys: Bletchley Park and the War for the Seas by David Kenyon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Kenyon's aim is to tell the story of the WW2 Arctic convoys in parallel with the Bletchley Park cryptographic effort, putting each in the context of the other. In this he succeeds, laying several myths on the way. The book is organised in three parts: Codebreakers, Defence (1941-42) and Attack (1942-45).
As resident Bletchley historian his focus on the radio war is explicit and understandable. The reader should however remember that naval intelligence was filtered through the Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) which integrated information from all sources. There are a few moments where he arguably fails to give due credit to those other sources. For example his claim that traffic analysis in 1939 provided 'the only source of information on German naval activity' ignores the role of prisoner interrogation, as does his passage on the 'Zaukonig' (T5) homing torpedo. The value of the information in captives' heads can be judged by the fact that GC&CS staff Paul Leonardo de Laszlo and Charles O’Callaghan were temporarily seconded to the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC). Equally Captain Colpoys' assertion that special intelligence provided 'the only source of information on 'Scharnhorst's' departure from Altafjord' is quoted without comment. Later research suggests Norwegian coast watchers were equally prompt.
This is not to detract from the book's achievement. By looking explicitly at the numbers of ships and cargoes despatched and lost, the attacks on them and their results, the tactics of attack and defence, the strengths and weaknesses of command on both sides, and comparing all these with other theatres Kenyon has made a major contribution to the literature.



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