Derek Nudd's Blog - Posts Tagged "interrogation"

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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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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