Posts Tagged ‘British Intelligence Services’

Interview with Dr David Owen
Monday, November 22nd, 2010

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: Via telephone
Date: 2005
Interviewee: Dr David Owen (now Lord David Owen)

This interview, with Dr David (now Lord) Owen shows a far more caring side to William Sargant – and hopefully puts paid to some of the more ‘out-there’ rumours about him and his treatments (‘he wasn’t a Doctor Sinister, you know’). Is it possible for both Sargant-haters and the Sargant-lovers to be correct? Actually, I think it probably is.

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The fact is [William Sargant] was an extremely controversial figure. He was not averse to – he was such a dominant personality that he, I mean he wouldn’t ask a patient: he would say ‘You’re better, aren’t you?’ And they would say ‘Yes, Doctor Sargant.’ And then he would put a tick. And then that particular ECT or whatever it was, was successful. A normal scientist would say ‘How are you feeling today?’ and they would say something and he would make a judgement about whether or not they were better. But Sargant would say ‘You’re better today, aren’t you!’ (laughs)

That meant that his terms as a researcher – he was not really always the best of, of the highest standard as an objective researcher. That, I think, is a valid criticism of him.

Did he think he was a researcher at all?

Well, he wrote many, many papers. He was a prolific publisher and he used every form of technique to get his view of psychiatry across. Like, you would sit in the consulting room with him and the doorknob would turn, and Sargant would say ‘He’s better!’ And I’d say ‘He hasn’t even walked through the door yet!’ And he’d say ‘Ah – but did you see the way he turned the doorknob? He’s better! That would have been very slow a week or a fortnight ago.’

This is the downside about him. What he was, was an optimist. It was said that he had a very serious depression when he was a registrar at St Mary’s. I think that the advantage of that is that he did understand what it was like to be depressed, and a lot of psychiatrists don’t understand it…

For me [working alongside William Sargant] was particularly interesting because I might well have ended up doing psychiatry. [Sargant] was very difficult to be – most people were either positive or negative about him. They aren’t in-between about Will. I consider that he was, for all his flaws and faults – and they were quite considerable ones – a great man. And I think one of the keys to his greatness, was that he understood.

As neurologists we used to deal with terrible pains and he used to say to us, ‘How often have you seen somebody commit suicide because of pain?’ Answer: practically never. Occasionally but very, very rare. ‘How many times have you seen somebody commit suicide on depression?’ Frequently. Ipso facto, according to Sargant, that explains why depression is such a bloody awful illness. ‘That is what people forget, what they don’t understand. This is a terrible, terrible thing. Absolutely demoralising, you just can’t live with it.’ Therefore, he would say, ‘OK, I take risks! In order to relieve them of the depression. I double the dose of the antidepressants, or I run the risk of slight liver thing’ (the drugs then were in those days questioned as to whether they had some adverse effects, especially on the liver.) … Some would say that that was a reason for dropping the drugs. For Sargant it was not at all. He would weigh up the effect of that with the depth of their depression. And if he thought their depression was very serious he would carry on with the drugs. Or double the drugs. And he would be quite open about it. He’d say ‘I think you have to assess this question of side effects vis-à-vis how ill and depressed they are. This is not just a question of making a judgement, “this drug has a side effect therefore I can’t use it”: if this drug has an effect that can help this person, then they should do so.’

So he was a therapeutic optimist, not necessarily a rationalist, and I think this did lead him to making some claims for the treatments. He over-claimed. And then his style in dealing with the analysts who didn’t believe you should have any physical methods… –  he would, run a sort of vendetta, I’m not sure if that’s the right word – a vitriolic denigration of the analysts, whereas most psychiatrists who support methods of physical treatment would still say, ‘Well, there’s a role for psychiatry and maybe even analysis.’ But this led to him being absolutely hated by anyone who thought psychotherapy had any meaning and value in psychiatry. He polarised opinion and probably did a little harm to physical methods of treatment by this record of over-claiming, this therapeutic optimism, and then this sort of bravado. But great men don’t come packaged neatly, do they? … And he IS the father of physical methods of treatment! …

He never brainwashed me! I remained catholic with a small ‘c’ on the treatments.

Did Sargant ever mention his work with the military, or intelligence agencies, to you?

No. I didn’t know him well enough to know that. And I never really kept up with him once I had become a politician. There were some aspects of him which I found – not my bag, really.

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Interview with SAS NCO Trained Interrogator
Thursday, November 18th, 2010

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: Via telephone
Date: 3rd Febuary, 2005
Interviewee: SAS NCO, Trained Interrogator and Korean War veteran

This individual – one of The Regiment’s most famous characters – is in a great position to talk about interrogation and the evolution of the techniques used by the British Army in the early 1970s: he was captured and held in Korea for some time, then returned to the UK, where he joined the SAS and was trained to interrogate by the Intelligence Corps at Maresfield. Here he talks about the whole experience – including the evolution of the use of white noise, sensory deprivation and hooding during interrogation exercises.

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Brainwashing?

I’m very sensitive to brainwashing of various sorts and have been utterly disgusted. The Chinese didn’t get anywhere well with us. They used brainwashing techniques on us which they had used on Chiang Kai Shek’s troops in the civil war in China. Basically they had the wrong techniques for the wrong people. I don’t think –well – from what I saw they got nowhere with it. Absolutely nowhere. There were times when we thought ‘Christ, this communism thing must be a good thing’, probably, I don’t know. But it didn’t last long before you saw through it.

The British mentality is not easily baffled. They had some of their best patter merchants there, the commissars, who lived, ate and scoffed communism and politics and they could tell you black was white and prove it, politically. But they couldn’t get through to us. Not because we were thick, but because we were way ahead of them most of the time. Although we knew nothing about politics, and the vast majority of the army in those days knew absolutely nothing about politics, and I mean that. We were as thick as shit with politics, didn’t want to know. I was twenty. A lot of the blokes were 19, 20-odd in my group.

They split us up into squads of ten in the camp and ten squads to a platoon and 3 platoons to a company or something. I can’t remember. But they had us organised into platoons but the squads of ten were each to a room and in my room we were jammed in like sardines. Some rooms they had plenty of room but not many. Most of the rooms were about 7-8ft by 6, something like that. Our room was 6’ by 6’ and there were three of us who were over 6ft at least. So we didn’t have much room, and we were jammed in like that and being taught politics, for Christ’s sake.

They had us out on the square, lectures for hours on end, freezing cold or burning up in the sun, whatever times of year it was. We started off [sat on the ground] but we just weren’t strong enough to sit like that, really. People just keeled over and went to sleep. It was a job for the instructors – so-called – to keep us up together to listen to the lectures. We were supposed to stay awake. We finished up getting stools, made of a log about 18 inches long with a plank nailed across one end so that you sat on the plank, like a one legged stool. That sort of kept us up where we could be watched in rows and it made sleeping more difficult. But in fact for the rest of my life I’ve been able to go to sleep during a lecture and make it look as if I’m not asleep – with my eyes open. I switch off. I have a hard time being lectured. The army didn’t know it of course and I was sent on lots of courses when I got back, different things, and lectures just put me to sleep. I sat there with eyes wide open, never knew a thing about it.

What did you think? Lectures about communism?

It was done by saying ‘You’ll wonder why you’ve been left alive’. It’s because the Chinese – Chinese People’s Volunteers, as opposed to the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army, their regular army. CPP were all supposedly non-military people. Or not army units. They were volunteers that had volunteered to go and help their Korean brothers. They had this lenient policy. This was the cornerstone of all their propaganda and everything, the lenient policy. And they had this lenient policy which was to take prisoners and not shoot them all. And they said ‘But of course, it’s a two way thing. We have kept you alive and your families will be grateful for that but you must learn about the lenient policy and where it comes from.’ And that was the edge of the sword, the leading edge of the brainwashing.

So they said ‘This is a deal’?

Yeah. Devised by Communism for POWs and that’s why the communist forces were so kind to their prisoners. And we were not ‘prisoners’, we were ‘students’, liberated from capitalism. Oh yeah. We were called ‘students’.

Presumably this didn’t wash with you?

No, it didn’t wash at all. We thought it was washing a bit with the Americans and I suspect they thought the same about us but I suspect we were as bad as each other, as students. They took the mick out of the Chinese rotten and so did we. The great thing about that whole experience was that I didn’t finish up hating the Chinese but I finished up hating politicians and politics and most of all Communism. I have volunteered for wars against communism ever since. My little bit of ability going here and there.

We’d never heard of brainwashing, we knew nothing about it, we knew nothing about the press, back home. We knew absolutely nothing. It wasn’t until we were released that I realised the Glosters had put up quite a fight at the Imjin River. We were just beaten troops. And we’d lost. As far as we were concerned, we’d had a hell of a hiding. They just trampled all over us and we couldn’t stop them

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Interview with British Interrogator #2
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: Kent, UK
Date: 3rd November 2004
Interviewee: Senior British Army interrogator/instructor

A former senior instructor from the Intelligence Corps. It’s rather a rambling interview – I don’t manage to get many questions in (try interrogating and interrogator for yourself sometime!) – but covers many of the right bases, including sensory deprivation, the origins of the use of white noise in interrogation and treatment meted out to the 12 so-called ‘Guinea Pigs’ in Norther Ireland in 1971. Most interesting here is the relationship between ‘Resistance to Interrogation’ and interrogation itself – and how one can bleed over into the other

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Interrogation is the search for truth. … It can be a fishing expedition, in which case you want to find out what you can find out. But usually interrogation, particularly focussed interrogation – which is against the clock – (which is the most dangerous type to engage in) is done to find out a specific piece on information. …

…In a perfect world, where we’re all full of deep, liberal convictions, we sit down and say ‘Will you tell me about the PRF [Pulse Repetition Frequency] of the radar?’ and he says to you ‘Fuck off’ and you say, ‘Oh dear, do tell us, please, we really want to know!’ Sadly the real world is not like that. It never has been and it never will be.

If you have a terrorist who has planted a plutonium bomb in London, does this individual’s human rights override the rights of the hundred thousand people [who are going to be blown up]? I have no doubt as a human being where my sympathies lie. And therefore I would say that pressure to make the subject to give you the information you require is reasonable. But never forget that the information that the subject is giving you – if you put him under duress, he will tell you what he thinks you want to know to stop the duress. So you have to reach a stage where the individual is conditioned to come up with the answers that you want.

There’s a lot of nonsense talked about interrogation because of the SAS, the prone-to-capture troops, the hard-man role and the resistance-to-interrogation. A long time ago I was responsible for resistance to interrogation, which were certain types of submariners, (very few), a rather larger clutch of aircrew, particularly special forces aircrew, and of course the Special Forces themselves. By Special Forces I include MI5 and MI6 officers who…won’t be treated as nicely by the people who capture them as perhaps The Guardian would like us to treat them. That’s a fact of life. Therefore you have to give these people the chance to withstand the kind of pressures they might get from people who don’t believe in the Geneva Conventions or haven’t heard of the bloody Conventions. So a tradition has grown up, a folk-lore about how interrogation is – about black gloves, black rubber hoses, beating on the soles of the feet.

You can cause a lot of discomfort and some people will talk but interrogation is not about talking. It’s about the search for the truth. So you have to condition the person in such a way that he tells you the truth. That’s a function of his personality, of the time that’s available to you and the constraints under which you work. Most interrogators in my experience – which is limited to Northern Ireland and to training with people, MI5, MI6, the SAS – most people will talk to you if they find you congenial. So all the methods of interrogation are designed to speed up the process so that you can get to the sitting-down chatting bit.

There are 4 main methods. The first one is the hard man: slapping around, brutal treatment, being really horrible, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, buckets of cold water over people, don’t let them sleep, push a wall across Wales. These are all things that we would have done to the SAS under very close control.

Where were you in charge of training like this?

[In the early 1970s]. In those days – post-Compton, we were very clear that we were doing resistance to interrogation training, not interrogating. Although occasionally someone would crack…

What you’re at, with someone who is resisting, all the time, is the assault on the personality. Because we have a social personality… Why are SAS officers the way they are? If you hold up a mirror to the way a man appears, you will see his weaknesses, his perceived weaknesses. The guy who comes across as the hard man, why does he behave like that? You’re going for the nuclear personality. This is where brainwashing becomes interesting. The social personality is what hides the nuclear personality as far as possible. With Greville Wynne, the Soviets found out that he was a very fastidious man. So the Soviets put him in a bottle dungeon where he had to stand up and shit on the floor. When Wynne got back to this country, he was so psychologically damaged that he had to tear up tissue paper and clean his room obsessively in his hotel. He had a horror of being dirty.

All the time you’ve got a psychological attack going on, which is just as damaging as beating the guy with rubber hoses. The aim is to develop the point where the individual wants to tell you because he sees no other way. What usually happens in my experience is that people don’t break and burst into tears and say ‘I’ll tell you everything you want to know. What do you want to know?’ It’s like running into the wall in the marathon. They run out of steam. They’re just so tired, worn down by it all. They’ve got no lies to tell.

[Interrogation subjects in the world of intelligence tend to construct series of cover stories, like the skins of an onion. Interrogators have to] go through these stories, peeling the onion, trying to get to the core. And eventually, people run out of stories.

There are four techniques. There’s a) the hard man; b) The soft man (‘come on old chap, I’m your friend’). C) There’s the stupid interrogator, and d) there is the monotonous interrogator. Monotonous takes time, like wearing down a stone; and the stupid one is the hardest one because you have to be very, very good to be very bad.

Those are the four basics. A good interrogator can switch from one to the other. A good interrogator can also use dislocation of expectations. These four are like piano keys you can mix and match. You can use humiliation and ridicule. Now, we’re not supposed to do that in the West now, because we mustn’t make anyone unhappy. [Is stripping someone naked and ridiculing the size of his penis] humiliation? Of course it is! Is it a reasonable technique? By my judgement, yes. By the standards of wartime, yes. It may not be by the standards of Matrix Chambers…

In the end the guy talks because he wants to.

Traditional interrogation methods will come around again because the pressures of reality will force them to come around and again. What’s happened now because of various civil rights pressures – and also as a result of efforts by people like the IRA because they knew how damaging it was for them. For example, anyone who fell into the hands of the RUC immediately in Northern Ireland was assumed to have been turned, to have been targeted or to have given stuff away. We know that *** ****, the ****, was a member of  big IRA family – if he was not in the IRA, he was the only member of the IRA who wasn’t and it was his job to go round Castlereagh and find out exactly what information IRA volunteers had given so that action could be taken to stop it. So there was a deliberate attempt by terrorist organisation – especially the IRA – to damage the interrogation process.

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Interview with British Interrogator #1
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: London
Date: 19th July 2005
Interviewee: British Intelligence Officer

A senior British ex-military officer, who spent years working on intelligence issues and was trained to interrogate by the Royal Intelligence Corps in the early 1960s. This officer explains the training he received, and some of the techniques used to interrogate.

He also discusses violence and interrogation, sensory deprivation and the difference between resistance to interrogation training and interrogation training itself. His comments on the use of hoods by the British Army in Iraq are particularly noteworthy. All names in this interview – including the units he served with, and where – have been removed.

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How did you come to be taught to interrogate?

It was 1963, April, May–time. I’d been sent to [the Royal Intelligence Corps’ HQ at] Maresfield. All I was told was: ‘You will go on an interrogation course’.

You didn’t choose this?

No. I was summoned to an office in GCHQ and off we went. And I found out on arrival that I was the only candidate on the course – for 2 weeks. And I was told it was the standard course. The only difference was that I was the only guy there. So I had 100% attention from the instructors and from, very interestingly, the ‘stoolie’, the guy who was the subject for the interrogation. Who was a member of … the Glosters [regiment] and he had been captured – like several hundred of the battalion had been – in Korea, so his experiences were absolutely brilliant for use by the Maresfield centre. Now, at that stage, it was completely new to me. I knew other people who had done the [Russian] interpreter course who had been sent on the interrogation course, but it wasn’t a standard sequence, and none of my colleagues on the Russian interpreter course actually did an interrogation course. So I didn’t know at that stage why I’d been sent.

So I went back to Cheltenham and I found out after a couple of days that I had passed the course. I was summoned into my boss’ office and told I was going to be sent to **** **** for a 6 month posting, and the purpose of my posting would not be told to me. I should take nothing military, nothing associated with the military. On arrival in *** *** I would be given a briefing and I would discover what I would do. I assumed of course my interrogation course was something to do with this. I toddled off to **** ****… where I used my skills. I used my Russian interpreter skills, and also my newly-acquired interrogation skills…

Can you talk about the interrogation course?

Yes, I think this is now – I think it was probably graded ‘restricted’ in 1963 and that’s now 40 years ago. I would particularly like to counter a statement I read in the press a couple of weeks ago when they were talking about the abuse in Iraq that techniques of deprivation and hooding were taught in the army interrogation centre in Chicksands – ie, it’s part of the syllabus. I can say that in 1963, when the whole world was far less sensitive and nervous about physical violence of all sorts, the techniques of interrogation as taught at the then-interrogation centre were entirely what you would call respectable, in other words they covered the methods, the organisation, the personal organisation, the way you run an interrogation session, how to work in a team, what to look for in the subject, of an interrogation. And basically, you’ll be surprised to know – how to behave like a British gentleman and still be a successful interrogator.

For the rest of my life under various circumstances, I’ve been able to apply those various techniques without fear or favour. I would have thought that if we’d had brutality as part of our SOPs in the centre where we’re taught all this in 1963, on a one-person course, I would have gained some inkling of those. I didn’t.

But of course I did when I did a counter-interrogation course two years later in Aden.

The [Aden] Emergency involved people, there were several cases of British forces being caught, tortured and decapitated. I remember a horrid incident at Sana where the heads of the British military that had been captured were cut off and impaled on pikes and displayed to the public on pikes. You were dealing with – as today in Iraq – with medieval attitudes and nobody on the other side adhered to the Geneva Conventions. So officers and NCOs – I was by then the patrol officer of a company of *** [regiment] who were on duty there – officers and NCOs were sent on a counter-interrogation course by a visiting team who briefed us on the techniques used by nations that did not sign up to the Geneva Conventions.

This was an army team?

An army team. And this was by now almost exactly three years later. About February-March 1966. There we were told all about hooding and brutality.

They hadn’t taught you about sensory deprivation and how to apply it to prisoners in your interrogation course?

No. I think this was clear to me: what we were being taught, as I think we knew, were methods which our SAS recruits went through. All regiments supply recruits for the SAS and some pass and some fail. And it is accepted that the SAS selection course, which is – I’m glad to say, very tough indeed – does include the volunteers being put through the techniques, the sorts of techniques that we were taught about at Aden. So within the British forces there is first-hand experience by going on SAS courses, where resistance to interrogation – your resistance, your psychological abilities – is tested.

But the technique that all of us in Aden listened to agape was a method that had been developed allegedly very recently, which was to suspend the prisoner in a tank of liquid gelatine which was at 94.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Naked. With your arms and legs tied and your head encased in a sort of diver’s helmet, through which you were breathing. You were hung into this tank, so all you could hear was the [breathing noise] of your own breath. And in theory you would go bonkers. Because you didn’t know which way was up, you had no sense.

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