London Cage Read online

  Behind the scenes, an emergency meeting was convened for 15 February 1955 between the director of public prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, Mr Bernard Hill of MI5, and Chief Superintendent George Smith and Commander Burt, both of Special Branch. The four parties concerned (Scotland, Mitchell, the publisher and the literary agent) were given a warning yet again that any publication of the book would amount to a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

  In his defence, Scotland argued that the only reason he wrote his version of events was for his own personal safety: ‘I may become the target of attack by vindictive relatives of men who were hanged or imprisoned as the result of the work done at the London Cage.’4 However, the intelligence services had the upper hand; on 3 September 1940 Scotland had signed a statement declaring that ‘All official and military information acquired by me in or from the War Department is to be regarded as the property of that department.’5 Despite this, and although Scotland was threatened with arrest if he published a single word, the War Office knew it could not hold out for long. The memoirs could be published in America and the fallout felt across the Atlantic. A deal was brokered. Scotland could publish his book, but heavily redacted by MI5.

  The cutting-room floor

  How extensively were the memoirs redacted and what ended up on the cutting-room floor? In a four-page report compiled by MI5 officer Bernard Hill, the objections to the memoirs were outlined. The problematic passages were primarily on pages 57–78, where Scotland recalled incidents of undue pressure being applied to extract information from prisoners, and ways in which they were occasionally disciplined at the London Cage.6 Scotland admitted that a number of U-boat officers sent to him for interrogation had been required to undertake certain chores:

  The next thing that the U-boat officers knew was that their beds had been turned right over and that they were underneath. We took away their uniform and set them to work in denim suits on cage chores for three days … We found the ruling of the Geneva Convention that prisoners may be employed on various duties and chores in transit camp to be useful on many occasions … it was a salutary exercise in discipline when awkward prisoners found themselves put to work with a bucket and scrubbing brush.7

  Although this was not technically a breach of the Geneva Convention, it was noted to be against the spirit of it.

  Joining these excerpts on the cutting-room floor was Scotland’s mention on pages 67–8 of prisoners being forced to stand for twenty-six hours to ‘discipline’ them if they had been initially uncooperative, so that they would answer questions more readily during interrogation. Also removed from the original manuscript was the case of a German officer who had been forced to kneel before officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) of the guard to have his ears boxed – described by MI5 as a clear example of physical violence. Any mention of intimidation techniques was excised from the memoir; for example, the case of a German Merchant Navy captain who was threatened with being shot as a spy if he refused to provide information.8 In another incident, the failure of Scotland’s interrogators to ‘break’ a resilient group of U-boat officers led to Scotland resorting to the bucket-and-mop tactic for three days.9

  The section of the memoir that dealt with Nazi war criminals proved equally problematic. It revealed precisely how Scotland had obtained their statements to be used as evidence at the war crimes trials. If a prisoner refused to answer questions, he was subjected to certain degrading duties that eventually broke his morale. He would become quite docile and would compliantly write down an account responding to the charges against him.10

  MI5 objected to Scotland making public the methods by which Nazi war criminals were cross-examined at the cage, with examples of how unwilling witnesses were frightened into giving the desired answers.11 A number of cases were cited in Scotland’s memoir, including how General von Falkenhorst, the German commander in Nazi-occupied Norway, was instructed to write down each charge against him precisely and sign the document.12 Another war criminal, Erich Zacharias, was psychologically worked on to make him sign a confession to war crimes of which he had originally claimed to be innocent; he was subsequently hanged.13 Such methods did not mean the prisoners subjected to them were necessarily innocent; but the cases did highlight the unacceptable methods employed to extract statements. All this was potentially embarrassing for both the War Office and MI5, which feared that German defence lawyers might seek to reopen the cases of certain war criminals and challenge the verdicts.

  The final version of Scotland’s text excluded all examples of interrogation, anecdotal stories about named and unnamed prisoners, general life inside the cage and precise methods of questioning. In reality, it meant that there was very little of the original manuscript left which was of any real interest. Apart from its early chapters, which provided a safe but scant overview of the wartime role of the London Cage, the memoir focused mainly on war crimes investigations after 1945. In so doing, it revealed nothing publicly that could not have been gleaned by attending the war crimes trials. This sanitised version of Scotland’s memoirs was finally published in 1957 – the year in which Scotland was asked to be a technical adviser on a Hollywood film of his life called The Two-Headed Spy, in which he was played by Jack Hawkins.

  In subsequent decades, rumours continued to surface about irregularities at the London Cage. From the British Secret Service there was only silence. But when the official files of the London Cage were released into the National Archives in the 1990s, some were clearly missing. Enquiries addressed to the Ministry of Defence produced a response that they had been contaminated by asbestos and destroyed by floodwater, fuelling speculation that the files had been destroyed to hide damaging evidence.

  Now, drawing on the unredacted, declassified manuscript, it is possible to reveal that even Scotland did not tell the whole story. There were aspects of the treatment of German prisoners that even he was not prepared to disclose. What emerges in the following pages is an often grim picture of life inside the London Cage, with fresh insights into the terrible treatment of enemy prisoners of war – dark secrets involving the intelligence services that have lain dormant for decades.

  1

  GENESIS OF THE CAGE

  In the autumn of 1940, the Battle of Britain raged in the skies of southern England. The future of Britain hung in the balance with the wide expectation of an invasion by Adolf Hitler. Only four months earlier, German troops had overrun the Low Countries and France, forcing the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force and the mass evacuation of 300,000 Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in small boats and fishing vessels. Militarily, that retreat may have been a disaster, but British intelligence viewed it merely as a temporary setback. At SIS/MI6 headquarters at Broadway in London, the service’s head, Stewart Menzies (‘C’), believed that Britain could win the war, despite the odds stacked against her. Encouraged by the unofficial motto ‘Whoever wins the intelligence game wins the war’ (a 1715 quip by the Duke of Marlborough), Menzies knew that his intelligence officers needed to be prepared for military gains – and to be ready to receive thousands of captured Germans. Their interrogations would now have to take place in England rather than in France. A clandestine interrogation centre was to open just yards from the royal palace in Kensington.

  On 15 October 1940, with the fear of invasion still looming, Mr Nulty, the gatekeeper of Kensington Palace Gardens, received an unexpected visitor. Three of the millionaires’ mansion houses in Europe’s most select residential street were to be requisitioned under Defence Regulations 1939 by Major Dale Glossop of the Military Police, on the orders of Requisition Officer Colonel L.M. Gibbs. The freehold of Kensington Palace Gardens still belonged to the Crown Estate; indeed, the land occupied by the road had once formed part of the grounds of Kensington Palace, and the current road’s eastern boundary bordered the formal gardens of the palace.

  Just the previous day, Kensington Palace had received a direct hit from an incendiary device that fell on Apartment 9 (home of
Lady Bertha Dawkins, Queen Mary’s former lady-in-waiting), inflicting the worst damage that would be suffered by the palace during the war:

  The fire had spread to the Athlone’s [sic] apartment (No. 4), the Keppel’s [sic] (No. 5), Lady Milford Haven’s (No. 7) and Lady Patricia Ramsay’s (No. 8) as well as the Queen’s State Apartments. Despite the efforts of thirty fire engines, the blaze was not extinguished until 3am.1

  So the smell of scorched timbers still lingered in the air as Glossop arrived at Kensington Palace Gardens the following morning. It remains a puzzle why the intelligence services should have requisitioned properties in a street near to which several bombs and incendiary devices had already fallen. Locating an interrogation centre here risked the lives of intelligence officers and valuable German prisoners. Indeed, only eight months earlier, another secret MI9 interrogation and bugging site had been moved out of the Tower of London to the country estate of Trent Park in north London precisely because of the risks posed by the Blitz.2

  As Major Glossop passed through the ornamental black iron gates, so reminiscent of Victorian London, and exchanged a few words with Mr Nulty, little appeared to have changed in this wealthy enclave in a hundred years. As he made his way down the street, it was clear that the three-storey mansions, with their impressive cream-stuccoed fronts, had seen better days. Hidden from public view, the street could be described as very secluded. It was because it afforded complete privacy that the intelligence services had been eyeing it up ever since November 1938, when an unnamed man from the ‘German Section of the Foreign Office’ (a section of MI6 based at Hayes in Middlesex) discreetly photographed the gatehouse and exterior of Nos. 6–8 and No. 8a. His eerie black-and-white photograph of the gatehouse could have been straight out of Dickensian London.

  Baron Joseph Duveen of Millbank

  The first property on Glossop’s list was No. 8 and the adjoining No. 8a. Built by John Marriott Blashfield in 1843 to the designs of Owen Jones, its Byzantine style – so reminiscent of a Black Sea resort – was nothing if not exotic; it was, according to the Illustrated London News, ‘novel to this country’. Inside, few traces remained of the grandeur of its pre-war occupant, Baron Joseph Duveen of Millbank, who had died of cancer at the age of sixty-nine on 25 May 1939. One of the wealthiest and most prominent art dealers of the twentieth century, Duveen had been born in Hull on 14 October 1869. He was the eldest son of Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, a highly successful Dutch businessman of Sephardic Jewish origin, who had made his money in the import business and who, in the 1880s, became the first Jewish resident of Golders Green.3 After Sir Joseph’s death in 1908, his ambitious son turned his attention to the highly lucrative, if risky, business of selling art. He realised that Europe had a great deal of art and America a great deal of money; this was a synergy that he would harness. His foresight soon saw him shipping masterpieces across the Atlantic, many of which survive to this day in America’s greatest museums. His clients were often self-made industrialists, whose wealth had left the traditional, increasingly impoverished British aristocracy behind. Among his American clients were the banker John P. Morgan, the oil magnate John Rockefeller (founder of the Rockefeller Foundation), gas businessman and philanthropist Frederick Taylor Gates and industrialist Henry Clay Frick.

  Raised to the peerage as Baron Duveen of Millbank in 1933, Duveen’s connections took him into the heady world of espionage, art dealers and collectors, royalty and aristocracy. His royal friends included Edward VII, whom he provided with art for the walls of Windsor Castle. Duveen moved in the same circles as Sir Philip Sassoon, who was from a wealthy Baghdadi-Jewish family that had made its fortune trading in opium and who was a close friend of Edward VIII. Sassoon was to pass away within a week of Duveen, and his stately home at Trent Park was also requisitioned by the same branch of the intelligence services, MI9.

  Duveen and Sassoon were immersed in the art world: both were involved with the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery; both were friends of Evan Charteris, trustee of the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection, and of Sir Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery. In his lifetime, Duveen funded the construction of the Duveen Gallery at the British Museum to house the Elgin Marbles and financed the Modern Foreign and Sargent Galleries at the Tate, opened by King George V in June 1926 (an event captured in a painting by the Irish artist Sir John Lavery). By then, Duveen was also director of the Duveen Galleries in New York. But his life was not without controversy, as he became enmeshed in disagreements over the extent to which the grand masterpieces should be cleaned up for his new clients, and embroiled in a scandal and court case about fake art (never proved in his lifetime).

  Duveen was also a friend of the Anglo-Austrian art collector and art historian Count Antoine Seilern (who, on his death in 1978, bequeathed his famous art collection covering the Renaissance period up to the twentieth century to the Courtauld Institute in London). In 1938, Seilern was living in Vienna at a critical time in European history when Hitler annexed Austria. He became caught up in the crisis facing Austria’s Jewish intellectuals and began to smuggle prominent Jewish art dealers and their art out of Europe, helping figures like Ludwig Münz and Johannes Wilde and his Jewish wife to escape. Some of the priceless masterpieces were stored temporarily at Seilern’s new home at Hog Lane Farm, in the village of Ashley Green in Buckinghamshire, which he had purchased in 1939. Transferring into the Intelligence Corps in the war, Seilern was sent on secret missions abroad, information about which is still deemed too sensitive to declassify. He was also a close friend of MI6 spymaster Thomas Joseph Kendrick, one-time British passport officer in Vienna, who in the Second World War became head of a unit that bugged the conversations of German prisoners of war. It was a small world, because Kendrick was also a close colleague of Colonel Scotland, who had provided Kendrick’s original reference to enter the intelligence world in the First World War.4 Scotland and Kendrick both worked for MI9 (later MI19) during the Second World War, and would liaise over German prisoners of war in an effort to extract maximum intelligence.

  When the War Office took over Nos. 8 and 8a on the east side of Kensington Palace Gardens, it signed an agreement with the late Lord Duveen’s executors, to whom the lease had transferred upon his death. The lease still had forty-nine years to run: it had been signed by Duveen on 5 July 1929 for a period of sixty years, at a rent to the Crown of £1,060 per annum. There were no concessions made to the War Office when it took on the high rent due to the Crown, equivalent to approximately £40,000 a year in today’s money. Under the terms of the requisition order, nothing in the street could be visibly changed. The War Office was under a strict obligation to keep it a private road and to ensure the privacy of the other inhabitants. Safeguards in the requisition order guaranteed a fair value to Duveen’s estate for the lease, as well as compensation and repair work for any damage caused during the war by the new occupant. No one could have foreseen that the compensation bill would eventually run to a staggering £1 million when the London Cage closed in 1948.

  Prisoner of War Interrogation Section

  Just days after the requisition, Scotland, then a lieutenant colonel, arrived at Kensington Palace Gardens to open the interrogation centre. Under the auspices of MI9 (from 1941, MI19), it became the headquarters of the Prisoner of War Interrogation Section (PWIS(H)), a unit that had more than eight other ‘cages’ – slang for interrogation quarters – around Britain.5 In the closed circles of the intelligence world, it became known as the ‘London Cage’. On 23 October 1940, the first German prisoners arrived and were initially housed in Nos. 8 and 8a under heavy guard. No. 8, with its grassy lawn at the rear, had been vacant since Duveen’s death the previous year. It was soon reserved as the quarters for the guards and the camp commandant. During the course of the war, it would have its own dark secret.

  The adjoining No. 8a had been in a state of total disrepair for some time. Its music room, drawing room, library and large dining room were but shadows of their former glor
y. Duveen had planned to demolish and rebuild the house, but his death had intervened. At the rear was a disused hard tennis court and surrounding paths, borders and shrubs. The War Office agreed that the garden space in front of the house would not be tampered with.

  Shortly after the London Cage opened, it was agreed that the basement of No. 8a could be used by a balloon squadron of the RAF as a rest room, recreation area and shelter for airmen. The squadron was under the command of Flying Officer W.W. Spooner of RAF Kensington, based at 11 Kensington Palace Gardens. The squadron used it until the house reverted to the Crown in October 1942.6 The property then remained empty until new leaseholders demolished it after the war and constructed luxury flats.

  The number of staff rose to ten officers and ten NCOs, in addition to the guards. With the requisition of Nos. 6 and 7 Kensington Palace Gardens, Scotland and his team had at their disposal a further twenty-eight rooms that provided facilities for up to sixty prisoners at a time. This included quarters suitable for solitary confinement and five interrogation rooms. Occasionally, the third floor was full to capacity with prisoners. The front entrance at No. 6 was sealed off so that the premises were only accessible via No. 7. A connecting door was knocked through between the mansion houses to allow intelligence officers and interrogators to pass between Nos. 6 and 7 without having to use the street, largely to avoid attracting suspicion from the outside world.

  As Colonel Scotland passed into No. 8 through the portico, he would first enter a large vestibule-hall which led into the rotunda. This rose up through the upper floors to a glass dome. Double doors on the left of the rotunda led directly into the main hall, with its grand staircase. Here, too, doors led off the main hall into the dining room foyer and then the dining room. Double doors to the right of the rotunda opened into the south hall (a room in itself that stretched half the length of the front of the house), leading into a traditional library that overlooked the ornamental garden. To the rear of the house, a 20-foot-by-20-foot drawing room and adjacent 27-foot conservatory led out to a terrace. The house benefited from two lifts. On the first floor were six double bedrooms, each with its own separate bathroom, quarters for a lady’s maid and a valet, and the rotunda continuing upwards. Large, airy and spacious, these rooms became the cells: carpets and rugs were removed, leaving draughty bare floors, the only furnishings a single bed, a chair and a chamber pot. Larger rooms could hold between eight and ten prisoners. The smaller rooms were used to segregate men who were undergoing special interrogation and who needed to be kept in solitary confinement. In winter, the unheated rooms were bitterly cold and grim. Laundry facilities were poor, and harassment of inmates was a frequent occurrence. There were no home comforts for these prisoners, in complete contrast to MI19’s site at Trent Park, where German generals roamed the stately house in comfort and luxury. Treatment at the London Cage was deliberately harsh, to cow the prisoners into submission.