Kiriakou was the first CIA official to talk openly about the US policy of waterboarding ‘high value targets’ in the War on Terror.

His crime, apparently, lay in revealing the identities of two employees involved.

Now, I don’t know whether that’s true (he’s certainly never revealed the identities of any undercover operatives to me), and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not up to speed with the intricacies of Kiriakou’s case. But it does seem to me unjust that a man who did not take part in ‘enhanced interrogation’ (widely acknowledged as constituting torture) is currently facing a lengthy stint in prison when those who did take part – and especially those who made the decision to pursue the policy itself – face no charges at all.

Kiriakou has five children – one just five months old. His legal defence is likely to cost in excess of $500,000. According to the Times his wife, an analyst at Langley, has been summarily dismissed from her post.

Please take a look at the following sites. It costs nothing to click ‘LIKE’ on the facebook page and to suggest to your friends that they do the same. I’m sure that John will be heartened to learn that people here in the UK, and around the world, are taking an interest.

http://www.defendjohnk.com/

https://www.facebook.com/DefendJohnKiriakou

What about the reaction to 9/11? Afghanistan. Bali. Iraq. Madrid. London. Hundreds of thousands more dead. Summarising 9/11 and its aftermath, one is reminded of the Peanuts cartoon in which the hapless Charlie Brown faces the exam question: ‘Explain World War II (use both sides of the page, if necessary)’.

Eight months ago, following 4 years’ research, I thought I had pretty much knocked this subject on the head. I’d interviewed hundreds of policymakers, been to Iraq, come to a few conclusions; delivered a manuscript on time (well, sort of). The book was out. It was over.

Then came the call. Al Jazeera wanted a documentary series. A big one.  I was summoned to London and introduced to a deceptively quiet, smartly-suited chap who turned out to be the Head of Programmes. We drank coffee. Then I went home. The next day some personnel-type in Qatar, whose name I still can’t pronounce, emailed me a contract to produce a three hour series. Someone was in a hurry.

For non-TV people, a catch-me-up: a three hour documentary series takes a long time to make. Probably the best part of a year. Al Jazeera wanted this one in four months. Clearly, it was going to be tight. But then, Al Jazeera is a news organisation, with experience of turning around breaking stories in a matter of minutes. The company probably knew what it was doing. I signed the contract, moved up to London and started research.

Then came The Discussion.

It happened in a cafe near Al Jazeera’s Knightsbridge offices, shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden. The Head of Programmes, for once, was in casual mode: wearing a short-sleeved shirt. He grabbed me by the arm and ushered me outside. The ensuing exchange went almost exactly like this:

Head of Programmes: (thoughtfully): Dominic, you know what we’re missing in this series?

Me: No. What are we missing?

HoP: Al Qaeda.

Me (with some trepidation): Aha…

HoP: I think we need them. You’ll have to arrange interviews.

Me (guarded now): Won’t al Qaeda be hard to find at the moment, after the death of bin Laden and all?

HoP: We’ve got three months till transmission, though, haven’t we?

I should perhaps add here. I had only had one interaction with al Qaeda up to this point. It was in Baghdad in 2008 and was so nerve-jangling that even my Iraqi fixer shortly afterwards changed his line of work.

How we eventually got al Qaeda to talk to us – and what, exactly, they said – is perhaps a subject for another time. But we did get some interviews. Six, in fact.

We used them sparsely, slotted amongst other individuals that we thought might help to put a human face to events since that fateful September day. Bin Laden’s next door neighbour in Jalalabad (Osama never attended parties, apparently); the CIA officers who captured al Qaeda logistics chief, Abu Zubaydah, in Pakistan in 2002 (Zubaydah had accidentally been shot three times: ‘we had to keep him alive’ recalled one ‘so we could interrogate him’.)

The interviews came slowly at first, then in a glut. The Danish artist responsible for the bomb/turban cartoon whose publication led to rioting and two hundred deaths in 2006; the guards at the al Askari shrine in Samarra, Iraq – whose bombing the same year kick-started the civil war. The al Jazeera journalist incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay for 6 years while US intelligence tried to persuade him to spy for them against the news organisation.

Others were less well-known. The Afghan boatman who ferried bin Laden away from Tora Bora in 2001. The American soldier who plucked a fatally wounded Iraqi child from the back of a minivan his colleagues had just attacked – and ran him to safety. The Palestinian-born journalist who took bin Laden to one side in 1996 and suggested that single-handedly declaring war on the United States was perhaps not such a wise idea.

So now the series is finished. What emerges? What are we to make of the 9/11 Decade? For me, the overriding impressions: chaos. Destruction. And, above all, casualties. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Jordan. Spain, London. And, of course, in New York and Washington.

It’s an old cliché that those who do not learn their history are condemned to repeat it. Hopefully we have learned something from the last ten, bloody, years. Let’s hope the next ten are a bit better.

An extract of Chapter 5: Stuff Happens from A History of the World since 9/11 which was printed in The Guardian newspaper in the UK in January 2011.

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If you really, really can’t wait that long (I’m probably addressing my parents here), Radio New Zealand has posted a podcast of an interview I did with them about the book last week. You can listen to it here:

Interview on Radio New Zealand: A History of the World since 9/11

Following are eight famous images, all of which have been argued – by Key, and others – to contain subliminal images. Click on each image to enlarge it, then take a long, hard and see what filth leaps out at you. What is really going on? Answers are below each image.

The Photos

Explanations

World Trade Centre.

This is the famous image that is purported to show a demon in the sky, laughing as the twin towers burn. August Bullock, author of ‘The Secret Sales Pitch’ (Norwich Publishers, 2004) explains how to view it:

“The head of the monster is looking directly at the camera and is formed by the circular ball of smoke on the far left side of the photograph (to the left of the building). The creature’s right eye (the left as you look at it) is a small dark area that touches the edge of the picture. Its left eye (the right as you look at it) is a dark area towards the upper center of the circular ball. The mouth is a larger, dark area, and the bottom center of the ball. The cloud of smoke in the upper/center of the picture forms a giant hand about to snap the top off the Empire State Building. The small amount of smoke visible on the left side of the tower forms the monster’s thumb. Light coloured portions of the smoke on the right side of the tower form the creature’s fingers. Its hand is connected to an arm that is connected to its body. The creature’s shoulder is hidden from view by the building.”

Absolut Vodka

Again, Bullock explains:

‘[T]he ad…is quite provocative. The bending stem resembles a developing erection. The light colored shape in the interior of the container looks like a hot flame, or perhaps a woman’s vulva. The most intriguing aspect of the picture, however, is a figure-ground illusion… If you focus on the light coloured space behind the glass for a few moments, the shape of a woman’s buttocks will emerge. The bottom rump is especially clear. It is formed by the lower edge of the bent glass; the dark shadow along the bottom of the container erotically forms the dark space between the woman’s cheeks. The woman’s skin has been extended slightly over the edge of the glass to accentuate the illusion. The upper cheek is enhanced by an almost vertical curved shadow inside the glass, to the left of the flame.’

Betty Crocker MMMM Moist

According to Key:

“There is something dissonant about the slice of cake on the fork… Look at the slice of cake. Either that slice is the size of a postage stamp or the fork is the size of a hay fork. You cannot have it both ways.’ But there is further trickery afoot. ‘Don’t strain! Relax!’ advises Key. ‘Let your eyes play over the picture… Notice casually…what has been sculpted into the icing on the cake. Any standard anatomy text will confirm that the shape painted into the icing is an accurate tumescent female genital. “Super Moist” [the slogan beneath the picture] at the portrayed state of excitation, constitutes a normal physiological event” [The Con in Confidence, the Sin in Sincere, Key, 1989]

[see close-up].

Camel Cigarettes

See the Wilson Bryan Key interview:

“If you look at the camel, it’s facing to the left and if you look at the forelegs of the camel, there’s a little man standing there, looking to the rear of the camel. His hand is on his hip, his right leg is formed by the camel’s left foreleg, his left leg by the camel’s right foreleg. He is looking backwards, with his hand on his hip. He has an erection. And that’s been there since 1913. In 1950 they went back and they gave him a longer pecker and they gave him a more conventional head. It used to be more triangular.”

Gilbey’s Gin.

Another Key favourite.

Look at the ice cubes in the glass. The second cube from the top appears to contain the letter ‘S’, the third down an ‘E’ and the bottom one an ‘X’. The ‘E’ is clearest; you’ll have to use a little imagination to find the ‘S’ and the ‘X’. Again, there is further manipulation afoot. The top ice cube contains a face, looking down at the three below it and winking. Why? Well, says Key, something distinctly smutty is going on. The cap of the bottle represents a penis. The melting ice on the cap ‘could symbolise seminal fluid… the green color suggests peace and tranquility after tensions have been released.’ To Key, the conclusion is clear: ‘Therefore the scene is likely after orgasm, not before… At this point, if you are curious and broad-minded, you might look between the reflection from the tonic glass and that of the bottle. The vertical opening between the reflection has subtle shadows on each side which could be interpreted as lips – vaginal lips, of course. At the top of the opening is a drop of water which could represent the clitoris. If the scene were put into a story line, this still-open vagina is where the discharged penis has just been… There appears one additional female genital symbol horizontally drawn into the tonic glass reflection. The vagina is closed, suggesting the owner might be lying down awaiting her turn.’

Soft Whiskey a La Mode

This ad, according to Key, contains a mass of subliminal trickery. So much, in fact, that I’m going to let him explain it for himself:

Judas Priest

The cover of the album Stained Class, apparently responsible for the attempted suicide of James Vance and Ray Belknap.

“Stained Class’ record sleeve features a metallic-coloured human head with what appears to be a bullet, or a laser beam, entering the left eye socket and exiting the right temple. A dark red substance flows from the right eye. Key thought that this was suspicious: this album had apparently encouraged two teenagers to shoot themselves in the head, and its cover featured a facsimile of a human head with a projectile passing through it. Then he saw something else and, excited, called Ken McKenna. In the bridge of the nose of the head, he said, was a smaller image of a human silhouette, facing downwards. The laser beam (or projectile) passed directly into the front of this head. The back of the head was blown away, with what appeared to be fire, or blood, all over it.” [Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, 2006]

Le Reve

From the Key interview:

“And of course you find Picasso. We’ve just had an exhibition in Las Vegas – 14 paintings, including Rembrandts and Picassos, a billion dollars worth of art. And the Picasso, I’ve used in one of my books, it’s The Dream. I’ve seen the original in New York several times. To see the original was remarkable. There were some changes: in the original, all the prints that were made in the painting show the penis on the head as purple. And in an art department, purple is usually known as a genital colour. The original of that somehow has faded, somehow it’s almost brown now. But in the reproductions of the painting, that thing appears purple. Very light purple. It’s fascinating to see.

But here again, we went – and I had students at the time, I was a professor. Students dug up about 50 reviews of that painting ‘Le Reve’. None of these reviewers, including Life Magazine, that reproduced it full-page back in the nineteen thirties, no-one mentioned the penis. No-one mentioned there were 6 fingers on each hand. No-one asked the simple questions! If someone had asked me, I would have asked those questions from the beginning. No-one asked. Either that, or at the end, beside: ‘The thing you cannot deny [pointing at the Picasso painting] is that that’s a prick on the top of her head, and that she’s masturbating. It’s clear. You can see it, you can explain it, you can deal with it. And you didn’t know it was there before I told you! 30 years from now you will look at that painting and your eyes will go straight to the top of her head. You can’t help it. That’s why it’s subliminal. Nothing is hidden in these pictures. Nothing. Except what you have hidden from yourself. Perception is total.”

Dr Ronald Sandison was the first British psychiatrist to use LSD clinically. Here he talks about his involvement with the drug, its effects, his thoughts on Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffman, Aldous Huxley, R Gordon Wasson and William Sargant. At the end of the interview is a second one – much shorter, but more interesting to intelligence-watchers – in which we discuss funding for his LSD programmes in the 1950s, and debate whether he was unwittingly being used by MI5, MI6 and Porton Down as a source of information on ‘truth drugs‘.

Dr Sandison was a huge help to me when I was researching ‘Brainwash’ and we spoke many times. I thought he was a wonderful, wonderful man. He died in 2010.

The first interview here took place at his home, the second was by phone.

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

How did you come to be involved with LSD?

I first went to Basel on a study group – this was about 1950, 52 – and met [Albert] Hoffman, who had restarted experimenting with LSD around 1948. By the time I was there, they were working on spiders spinning webs…

Hoffman had discovered the drug in 1938, then sat on it and rediscovered again?

That’s right, yes, you see, I have this translation here [reads from a conference paper]: ‘The medical profession has been interested in ergot…’ Another early paper, ‘14 normal people, one of whom is given LSD twice…’ What’s interesting about these are that they were not influenced by anybody else – because nobody knew what to expect. Then Hoffman went [reads on]:  ‘One subject tried to describe the state of not being in control and said “I can watch myself all the time, as if being in a mirror, and realise my faults and mental disorders. Despite my great efforts, I find it impossible to correct myself, as everything keeps slipping away and appearing at once again.” Another subject said spontaneously she was glad not to have been questioned a lot. She would not have been able to answer any of the questions either positively or negatively. One is reminded of the state of narcoanalysis, the state among others that is produced by pentothal.’

I think it was really that – people were experiencing something about themselves that they hadn’t previously known about. There was one subject who said it made her think things that were better left forgotten.

Then after that Hoffman went to the a hospital and gave LSD to a number of psychotic patients. Which he didn’t get much from. Apart from some brief work by Bush and Johnson in the States, where they gave LSD to eight psychoneurotic patients but never followed it up (and it was a rather poor paper that they wrote) we were really the first people to use LSD with psychoneurotic patients.

Why did Hoffman pick this up again?

Hoffman seemed to have this curious sort of intuition. He just said, he thought there was something in this drug, he wasn’t sure. But he never told me exactly why. I don’t think he really describes it himself. Have you come across his book? He doesn’t really go into it.

When you went to Europe, had anyone else had done anything with LSD?

No, except for Bush and Johnson in the States. They weren’t serious investigators. I learned afterwards. I think it was Charles Savage who told me that they’d said ‘Well you know we’ve got these psychoneurotic patients, we’re not quite sure what to do with them. Let’s give them some LSD and really shake things up a bit and see what happens.’ And that was really their attitude. That’s not a very scientific attitude. But they did a report that the patients seemed to have benefited. How they benefited they never described and it was a very short paper. They never showed up again, they never showed up at any of the conferences. As far as I know they never tried it again.

If they hadn’t read the German paper in 1947, how would they have heard of LSD in the first place?

I’m not quite sure how it got into America. But Sandoz was an international company and I’ve no doubt that people in New York were talking about it, and the Americans were always great at getting hold of new things.

Why were you so interested in it?

Difficult to answer that. When you’re working in a mental hospital your main problem is the enormous weight of patients. In a number of cases you’ve got the [ones that] you’d really like to do something for but you never have the time. Here was a drug which – I wouldn’t say it was a short cut to the unconscious – but it was certainly helping people to understand themselves at a deeper level. And it seemed to me that this was a worthwhile approach. And I think it was also just a curiosity about this extraordinary substance. Because it doesn’t work like any other drug. You don’t get the same results in the patient one day to the next, which would rule it out in terms of drugs where the effect is expected to be the same. At one time I compared it with penicillin and I thought let’s look at an ampoule of penicillin and an ampoule of LSD.  The effect of penicillin as far as we know is independent of what the patient thinks or does. Whereas the mood of the patient who is being given LSD is a vital factor in what happens under the drug. The co-operation between the observer and the therapist, the patient and the drug, these three, form an extraordinary combination. And the other thing that I was working on at the time was the influence of the observer.

Were there any other drugs around where the mood of the patient would affect the result?

I think the work that Shorvil and co were doing with abreactive drugs – the same applied to a lesser extent. But I think it was [different] with LSD

Monsignor Denis Faul - Northern Irish human rights campaigner on Internment, the British Army’s use of ‘interrogation in depth’ in 1971 and how the IRA purloined secret interrogation techniques in the immediate aftermath of the incident, including the use of white noise, wall standing and hooding.
Reverend Sam Davies - the only British military padre taken prisoner in Korea on Chinese brainwashing techniques and conditions inside the camps.
Dr Ronald Sandison - the first British doctor to use LSD – on the drug, his discovery of it, how he gave it to psychotic patients in Wales in the 1950s and his relationships with Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffman and Aldous Huxley.
Wilson Bryan Key - the godfather of subliminal conspiracy theorists on how US advertising agencies insert smut into merchandising campaigns for household products, his purported role with US Special Forces in Panama (!) and the Judas Priest subliminal trial.
Examples of Key’s work and theories will follow shortly.

Wilson Bryan Key was the man who first popularised the notion of subliminal advertising. In a series of books starting in 1973 he explained how the advertising industry craftily inserted sexually explicit images into mainstream advertisements in order subliminally to persuade consumers to buy products they neither wanted nor needed. Over the course of his life he would sell over 8 million books. He died in 2008.

This is an amalgamation of two interviews with Key, the first conducted by telephone in March 2005, the second in person at his house in Nevada on June 30 that year. Both interviews have been heavily edited (Key made some extraordinarily slanderous claims, which I have cut ). In the interviews he runs through his ‘discovery’ of the subliminal deception, the origins of his theories about the technique and his controversial dismissal from an – apparently tenured – post at a university in Canada. He then moves onto his recruitment by US Special Forces, his role in the Judas Priest subliminal trial and the impact of subliminal advertising today.

I really liked Key: he was a formidable, personable, hospitable, intelligent man. At the same time, however, I was unable to stop myself wondering whether he had in fact slipped irreversibly into a fantasy world. You decide

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

How did you get interested in subliminal advertising?

In the beginning I spent a big part of my life in the military. And I had a lot to do with reading aerial photographs. And in aerial photographs, if you look at it from a military perspective, wherever you see something that looks too normal, it should be there, it’s perfect, distrust that – because someone is putting one over on you. You begin to question everything.

I’d been a journalist and a feature writer, when I found myself writing four or five stories all over again I decided to get the hell out of it and get a PhD. And my life was half-way between business, advertising, public relations work and universities. I ran a market research business in Puerto Rico for about 6 or 7 years, and I was tied in with a political party… And then I needed a way to make a living so I went back to teaching. Ended up in Canada, University of Western Ontario. I was there 6 years.

What was your PhD in?

Psychology.

And your position at Western Ontario was teaching psychology?

Communications Studies. I was a tenured professor. I worked in the journalism department, sometimes in the psychology department and I even took some art classes occasionally. But my background is very un-concentrated, I wandered all over the place. I thought, when you get a tenured professorship you think, ‘Well now I’m safe. They can’t fire me any more’. Well, that’s not true.

So what happened? You discovered this subliminal business? How did that come about?

The first one was I think an illustration in Esquire Magazine, and I was lecturing to the class on this particular article, it was on one of the beatnik poets of the day. And I looked at the picture, I think it was of him, a painting of him, upside down. And there on the bookshelf behind him was an erect penis as a bookend. I walked around the table: ‘Jesus Christ! That shouldn’t be there!’ Then I started poking around and within three months I had a two foot pile of the stuff in my office. And then I got the students interested. They were delighted with this. It was almost like participating in a revolution! So I had no trouble getting material. Once I started looking for it I started, for a month or so, looking at the pages of magazines just off the edges, looking horizontally, not confronting it. I knew that they were putting something into this printing. And then I discovered the S E X business.

You see, the whole society depends so greatly on marketing, advertising, whatever you want to call it. And to assume that these people left language and pictorial communication alone? They have refined it to a degree vastly beyond what anybody suspected before. And to assume everything is the same as it is in language? Forget it! That can’t be true! They spend an enormous amount of money. These ads, some of them that I have used in these books, I was able to make a fairly good estimate of the amount that was spent: $10 million! In one of [my] books there is an advertisement featuring ice cubes in an empty glass – Johnnie Walker, I believe, and that thing was in use for at least 10 years. It’s been on the back cover of every magazine in this country and probably many others.

The advertisers know that most of it doesn’t work. But they try everything. And part of it depends on the volume of ads they put out. But when they find one that does work, demonstrably, they’ll go with it, they’ll milk it as much as they possibly can. So we tried to go in the book with these ads that were repeated immediately. And invariably when you look at these super-ads, you find subliminals.

Anything in communications studies that looks sincere, honest, straightforward, that it’s all hanging out: distrust it! Distrust it very much! Because someone is pulling your leg.

In the beginning I got a lot of help from radiologists, people who spend their lives looking at x-rays. And they again were very well-trained in being very distrustful. For example, no physician will read an x-ray of someone he is emotionally involved with, his wife, for example, or his child. Because you can’t be certain what’s there is really there: the big question is, how do you differentiate between reality and fantasy? And our society now has got to the point where it is extraordinarily difficult for us to make this differentiation.

The x-ray people were very sensitive about this because they’d have someone else read the x-ray, they wouldn’t touch it. I asked ‘Why do you do that?’ and they said it was this business of projection. It’s like looking at a Rorschach inkblot. And looking at a Rorschach inkblot, there’s nothing there. Anything you put there, you are making it up. It’s a fantasy. And that’s where a lot of my interest in this evolved.

Your suspicions were piqued by the vast amounts of money being spent on advertising by major corporations, weren’t they?

I figured at least 10 million dollars over a period of 7 years was spent printing one single advertisement. That probably cost $100,000 for one artist to do it. Now, what the hell’s going on here? They’re not playing a game. If it doesn’t work, they will know about it in 2-3 weeks. I used to work for Seagram’s. And most ads probably don’t work. At least, not dramatically. They do succeed in keeping the name out there. But if they find one that does work, that one ad for Seagram’s was used for 10 years and they spent several million dollars buying space for it. And a good ad is an ad that sells. That’s all. Nothing else matters.

I worked in advertising for a long time. And I ran a consulting firm for 10 years. Publicly, no, they can’t admit to all this. There’s a law against it! It would be dreadful!

Monsignor Denis Faul was a prominent campaigner for civil rights in Northern Ireland. Here he talks about ‘Interrogation in Depth’ and reveals how he and his colleagues managed to discover what the British Army was up to in 1971, then get the word of the abuses out in the Press. I like his take on US interrogation techniques and Guantanamo Bay.

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

Where were you at the time of Internment?

In 1971 I was teaching in a grammar school, St Barter’s (sp). I was up there for years but I was on holiday. I was applying for a place in Pomeroy which is in County Tyrone, and the Internment day was 9^th August, which I think was a Monday, and on Wednesday after Mass a man came in to see me, a past pupil of mine, he was a young teacher and he said ‘I was taken away to be interned and we were brutally ill-treated’. I said ‘Where did this happen?’ He said ‘I think it was Ballykinder’. The British army stamped on them and kicked them around and put them into stress positions and treated them very, very badly. ‘Oh, it happened to everybody’, he said.

I got in touch with a colleague of mine, Fr Brian Brady in Belfast, and he’d had the same very bad reports from Belfast. So I went down to Belfast and we straight away got a number of priests together and we started recording the statements from all these people and eventually we formed a little group, the Association for Legal Justice… We got together some excellent men who worked very, very hard, set up a little office at the bottom of the Falls Road and [interviewed] everybody who was interrogated by the police or had been in and out. We gathered a terrible picture of ill-treatment over the next – well it went on for the next nine years. But then a few days went past and we were told by relatives that a number of people were missing. There was in particular a young man here, Paddy Joe Maclean, who was also a teacher and a good friend of mine and a very peaceful man. The relatives could get no trace of them.

His wife contacted you?

Yes, as far as I remember, the message came to me, probably from the wives – the relations and different ones – and we couldn’t work out where these people were. We worked out eventually that there were about 10 – I think it was 12 – and there were 2 more later on, that were missing from different parts.

I went to Belfast every day and we were collaborating together to put together this information. It was most mysterious: these ten were missing. It began to get into the Irish news, the local papers a little bit about this but not very much. Eventually then after about 7 or 8 days we found these men had arrived back into the Crumlin Road prison, which was a remand prison in Belfast and we were able then to get the whole story. Some of our staff and workers got the whole story then – had to be 16^th or 17^th August 1971, we began to get the story. So by about the 21^st, we had the whole story

How did you get the story?

We advertised and made it known public that we were taking statements. People came to Belfast and relatives got in touch with us from different parts…it was that little committee, a number of priests in Belfast. People came up to the Falls Road and saw the group and told them. The relatives were in a state of terror and they just went to anyone to tell them. And we managed to assemble the material and find out that there was 10, I think, that were missing.

You were phoning the authorities?

Oh yes. But they would put you off. We did that, I did a lot of that. But they wouldn’t tell you about it, they didn’t seem to know themselves.

You rang up…

Yes. ‘I’m looking for Sean McKenna, where is Sean McKenna? His mother or his wife is looking for him’ (he was one of the ones from Newry and then there were two from Armagh). As you can see it was a rather confused situation, we were trying to gather a bit of information here, a bit of information there. We thought at first it was simply – since they had taken in 330 men and let out a good number of them all right, like my teacher friend who came to Mass. We thought it was just a bit of bureaucratic confusion, that these men would turn up somewhere.

Then they turned up and we found how they had been treated. Hooded, put in stress positions, and beaten up for seven days non-stop, day and night. We immediately recognised this as torture. We gathered up all the facts as best we could. Father Brady went to the ** (hotel). I also conveyed the information to Cardinal Conway but he had it already.

How did he get it?

He got it from Paddy Joe Maclean. As soon as Paddy Joe got back to the Crumlin Rd Prison, about 16^th, 17 August, he wrote it all out and gave it to one of the prison officers who took it to Cardinal Conway. When I saw Conway he already had got it from Paddy Joe. He went over to see Mr [Edward] Heath. But I didn’t know that.

We went to the Sunday Times Insight Team on 24, 25 August and we gave it all to them. We thought it was a great scoop. It never appeared.

Reverend Samuel Davies was the only British military padre taken prisoner during the Korean War. Here he reminisces about the camps he was held in, the alleged ‘brainwashing’ received by British and American troops, and discusses why some men broke down and made false confessions whilst others managed to resist.

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

What made people confess to crimes they had not committed in Korea?

Difficult one, that. I think people at times felt that if they didn’t make sort of pretence at giving some sort of – something – they might even be killed or treated very, very severely indeed. People varied tremendously in the way they reacted to that pressure. Some were totally heroic and wouldn’t say a single word – and faced very unpleasant experiences; others gave way a little, hoping that the people at home would understand that they were under pressure. I couldn’t give the exact numbers but I think a number of the American prisoners gave way compared with – I think hardly any of the British prisoners – perhaps one or two. But there it is.

Was this the result of just plain brutality or was it something more?

I think the threat of very unpleasant, cramped imprisonment in cages: we had a young Northumberland fusilier, Kinne, who would never yield to any Chinese pressure, and he spent some time in a sort of cage with hardly room to lie down in. He wrote a book about it.

So it was just brutality?

Yes. I think the conviction in people’s minds was so strong that they were doing the utterly wrong and disgraceful thing to join in the Communist propaganda at this time. It was so strong that they would not, and could not, give way. We were – people varied tremendously about it but I think – also the threat of prolonged punishment and confinement in appalling conditions, often very cramped, was a threat some people couldn’t really live up to. Others could, and did.

In my camp we had to attend these absolutely boring lectures on Marxism-Leninism from the instructors day after day, and we were often told ‘Now, tonight you will get a pencil and paper. You must write down you appreciation of what you’ve learned’. Well, of course, we all had to do that in the officers’ camp. And we wrote a lot of verbal tripe really, which confused the Chinese. They were rather naïve and were trying to take it really seriously. We were not. We wrote a lot of verbal stuff so that nobody could really understand what was going on at all. But we had to write something and that’s how we managed to – you’d be taken down to Chinese HQ with Ding, the very able interpreter, he’d tell you what the Chinese commandant was saying and you had to account for what you had written. It was up to you to play it as coolly and stupidly as you could. And it often succeeded.

Did the Chinese/Korean interrogators deliberately target the officers? Colonel Carne for example?

[Carne] was the senior officer and the Chinese realised as far as he was concerned that he had tremendous influence. Sadly the officers and senior NCOs’ camp was isolated from the other ranks. I begged the Chinese to allow me, as the only surviving padre, to visit the other ranks. I begged them but they wouldn’t hear of it. Because they thought it was all bound up with sort of anti-communist propaganda. I was never allowed to visit them.

On Christmas day [they would present us] with special food ‘and in return we want you to sign this greetings card to our commander at the front.’ Well, of course, we all said ‘no’. Nobody in the camp was prepared to sign the greetings card.

It seems that the Chinese were being pretty sensible, separating the officers from the men?

Absolutely. The Chinese sensed that it was his [Carne’s] example and his steadfast adherence to what was the right thing to do in the face of this. They knew that his example and his leadership were immensely strong. So they wisely, from their point of view, thought to take him away completely. We never saw him again, until 19 months later.

Was there a particular trait that helped some to resist when others confessed and signed false confessions?

I think there were only one or two British prisoners who agreed to do that and they were other ranks. No single officer did – though I don’t think that’s true about the Americans. There was just something in our backgrounds. We were British and I suppose we were very proud of that. We would rather die in prison, or face death, than take part in any seditious propaganda.