head of the Abwehr, Canaris, for the chaos it caused and demanding Canaris’s resignation.
Other Axis agents were also arrested when they landed in Trinidad, and transported to Camp 020. This happened with the German agent Juan Lecube – a former footballer, greyhound-owner and ex-Spanish civil servant – and also with Leopold Hirsch, who was arrested on board the Cabo de Hornos in Trinidad harbour after his identity was revealed when his name was given en clair in a German telegram intercepted by Bletchley Park. The case of Gastäo de Freitas Ferraz is a striking example of how seizing an agent at sea saved Allied lives. De Freitas was a wireless operator on a Portuguese fishing depot ship, who was recruited by the Abwehr to provide maritime intelligence under the neutral cover provided by his Portuguese employment. However, while his ship was en route from Newfoundland to Lisbon in October 1942, he was arrested and removed first to Gibraltar then to Camp 020. At the point when he was arrested on the high seas, his ship was on the tail of a convoy taking part in Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. De Freitas was interrogated at Camp 020, confessed and was detained for the duration of the war. If he had not been kidnapped, it is almost certain that he would have seen the invasion convoy taking part in Torch and reported it by radio, which would have had disastrous consequences for the Allies. His arrest seems to have saved the Allied invasion of North Africa.57
Perhaps the most bizarre wartime rendition case was that of Alfredo Manna, an Italian agent operating in the neutral territory of Portuguese South Africa (present-day Mozambique). Manna was one of a number of agents run by the Italian Consul, Umberto Campini, in Lourenço Marques (today the city of Maputo), whose mission was primarily to report on Allied shipping movements off the coast of East Africa. It is unclear how British intelligence identified Manna: it may have been from an Ultra decrypt, or it may have been the result of good old-fashioned detective work on the part of the local SIS representative stationed in Lourenço Marques, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. Nevertheless, by early 1943, MI5 and SIS, sensing that he was far from loyal to his Italian masters, hoped to turn Manna into a double agent. Muggeridge worked closely with a local SOE team to devise an elaborate plan, ‘along the best Hollywood lines’, as he later put it, to detain Manna and transport him to Britain for interrogation. According to Muggeridge, a devout Catholic and future biographer of Mother Teresa, the plan was essentially to ‘kidnap’ him. Knowing that Manna’s great weakness was women, Muggeridge hired an exotic casino dancer named Anna Levy to lure him to the border of British territory in Swaziland. As the later history of Camp 020 noted: ‘There he was seized, gagged and bound by British agents, who took care to leave him on the right side of the border.’ Manna was promptly arrested by local police and transported, via South Africa, to Britain. Thus an Italian agent, enticed by an exotic dancer to a border and dragged across it by British agents, came to be interrogated at Camp 020. Although Manna’s interrogation at Camp 020 did not result in him becoming a double agent, it did yield valuable intelligence on Axis espionage in southern Africa, particularly on local ship-watching operations.58
One of the reasons MI5 was determined to have Axis agents brought to Camp 020 for interrogation was to avoid disclosing the Ultra secret. It also wanted them to be interrogated in the most effective manner possible – which for MI5 meant not resorting to physical violence. Contrary to what we might assume, and contrary to its ominous first appearances, Camp 020 did not permit the use of physical coercion during interrogations. This is confirmed by contemporary records, such as the diary of Guy Liddell, the wartime head of MI5’s B-Division, which was written without the intention of ever being made public, and by the subsequent testimonials of Axis agents who were detained at the camp, and who had no reason to lie about their treatment. The MI5 officer who ran Camp 020, Lt. Col. Robin Stephens, enforced a strict policy of no physical violence, or ‘third degree’ measures, in the facility. ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens, so called because of his thick monocle, believed that the aim of interrogation should be to draw out all information possible from an agent, and not simply to obtain quick answers to specific questions. The only way to do that, he judged, was to refrain from physical coercion. ‘Violence is taboo,’ he wrote in his in-house post-war history of Camp 020, entitled A Digest of Ham after the camp’s location at Ham Common, ‘for not only does it produce an answer to please, but it lowers the standard of information.’ He wrote in another post-war report:
Never strike a man. In the first place it is an act of cowardice. In the second place, it is not intelligent. A prisoner will lie to avoid further punishment and everything he says thereafter will be based on a false premise. Through stupidity, therefore, an investigation becomes valueless.59
None of this should give the impression that Camp 020 was a soft place. Its tactics for ‘breaking’ agents included every conceivable trick of what Stephens termed ‘mental pressure’: newly arrived prisoners were usually stripped, humiliated and disorientated; they were terrified by rows of barking dogs; confined to small solitary cells; threatened with court-martial and execution. Microphones were installed in their cells to overhear conversations; guards disguised as prisoners (known as ‘stool pigeons’) were sent into cells to get them talking; false newspapers were printed to trick them into thinking their friends and family at home had been killed; and Ultra decrypts were used to convince them that all the details of their missions had already been discovered. Stephens noted that every man has a price, and every man is capable of being broken – it is simply a question of applying the right mental pressure to do so.
The way in which MI5 interrogators broke Osmar Hellmuth is instructive. As soon as he arrived at Camp 020 in November 1943, Hellmuth was marched into a room where he was faced by a number of high-ranking British officers sitting behind a desk, in what looked like a military court. He was then subjected to a barrage of shouts from ‘the Commandant’ (Stephens), who told him that the Argentine government and his German spymasters had abandoned him, and that he would be executed as a spy. As a final touch, the Commandant added that he hated all spies with a passion. The bad-cop show was now over, and the good cops were free to go to work. Hellmuth was taken into another room, where a different group of officers plied him with soft words, telling him that they understood the difficult position he was in, and wanted to help. It did not take long for Hellmuth to break.60
Stephens’s rule against the use of physical coercion is all the more striking given that in the summer of 1940, Camp 020 interrogators were desperately questioning enemy agents amid an invasion crisis – undoubtedly the greatest threat to British national security in the twentieth century. Many of the techniques that they employed, such as sleep deprivation and humiliation, would today constitute forms of ‘torture’ under international law. However, for Stephens there was a clear distinction between ‘physical pressure’ and ‘mental pressure’. It should be stressed that he did not reject physical ‘third degree’ measures because he was a humanitarian at heart – fourteen German agents held at Camp 020 were executed, and Stephens later declared that he wished more had been. Rather, he rejected them because in his opinion they produced unreliable intelligence. Stephens was one of the most successful Allied wartime interrogators. His interrogations at Camp 020 played a significant role in the Double Cross System, producing about twelve double agents run by MI5 during the war (out of about 120 in total). They also helped to build up a unique card-catalogue index on the German intelligence services.61
Although it was not termed ‘rendition’ at the time, the process devised by British intelligence during the Second World War resembles the US government’s recent policy of ‘extraordinary rendition’, which is claimed by its proponents to be a necessary tactic in the ‘war on terror’. However, there is a fundamental difference between the two. During the Second World War, German and Axis agents were brought from British territories abroad to Britain specifically in order to safeguard their effective interrogation – which at Camp 020 meant every method short of physical coercion. In sharp contrast, ‘extraordinary rendition’ policies instigated after 11 September 2001 involve exactly the opposite: the US government and its allies deliberately sending suspects to third-party countries with poor track records on human rights, where they have allegedly been tortured to gain intelligence. The assumption behind recent ‘extraordinary rendition’ policies is that torture can produce intelligence. Given MI5’s experiences during the Second World War, and the observations of its most successful interrogator,