The secrecy surrounding what took place at the London Cage, the British government's intelligence gathering center in Kensington Palace Gardens during the Second World War, has become something of a cause célèbre within the field of intelligence history. In this new book, Helen Fry makes use of the material now available to shed further light on what was hitherto only suspected about what took place there. She begins her story by rehearsing the tale of its former director, Colonel Alexander Scotland, and how he attempted to publish his memoirs in the mid-1950s, much to the horror of security services. While a heavily redacted version did appear in 1957, it was commonly supposed that much detail had been suppressed. At the time, the reasons for this suppression appeared to be the possibility that British might have been deemed to have breached the terms of the Geneva Convention, something that they had been very keen to use as evidence against the Nazis, and also because the burgeoning Cold War meant that interrogation techniques had to remain a closely guarded secret.
Perhaps because his memoirs were not allowed to see the light of day in their original form, they created the basis for all manner of conspiracy theories about what actually had taken place in the London Cage. Fry attempts to solidify the record, providing a wealth of detail on the building, on the interrogators, on some of its more famous inmates, and on the methods used by Colonel Scotland and his men in attempting to extract information from captured Axis prisoners—methods that included violence, sensory deprivation, humiliation, and the use of so-called truth drugs. While Fry provides additional evidence from Scotland's own writings, there is little here that was not already suspected albeit not proven by those who had studied British intelligence gathering methods during and after the Second World War. Scotland always denied that any sadistic practices were carried out in the London Cage, but he was also on record as saying that some things were done that were mentally just as cruel, with prisoners forced to strip naked and exercise, forced to stand for hours at a time, or required to carry out humiliating tasks.
In the second half of the book, Fry includes a series of case studies on the intelligence gathering carried out by the London Cage, including attempts to understand the abortive German breakout from the prisoner of war camp at Devizes in the last days of 1944 and postwar investigations of German war crimes against British prisoners of war, such as the activities of Fritz Knöchlein, the so-called “butcher of Le Paradis,” and the murder of fifty Allied prisoners after the mass escape attempt from Stalag Luft III (Sagan, Poland). In her conclusions, Fry places the London Cage within the wider context of other British military intelligence establishments. She notes that while the War Office did take disciplinary action against intelligence officers accused of brutality against prisoners, no inquiry was ever mounted into the London Cage itself. This refusal to investigate continues to reflect the attitude of the British government, which seems unwilling to open a Pandora's box that might uncover the work of interrogators not just in the Second World War but in subsequent conflicts as well.
In sum, this book brings together a great deal of material related to the London Cage, largely culled from Scotland's own writings and declassified material housed at the National Archives in London. There are, however, some surprising omissions in what purports to be a comprehensive survey. The reader will look in vain for references to most of the standard texts on British intelligence during the Second World War, although Fry condemns these same texts for not giving proper credit to the information gathered by Scotland and his men (47). Fry also offers some rather vague statements that probably needed to be more carefully contextualized. For example, her statement that “in 1944 there were around 300,000 German POWs in England” could have been more accurately rendered if attributed to December of that year, as it was only after the Normandy landings that it became imperative to evacuate Germans from forward areas (102). The fact that Scotland himself spent three years in the German colonial army between 1904 and 1907, exactly at the time of the Herero Wars, goes all but unremarked. Fry notes his military service to establish his credentials as a German speaker and someone who understood the German military mind, but she does not mention that he might have been an eyewitness, or even complicit in one of the major genocides of the twentieth century. In complete contrast, Fry does suggest that Scotland may have acted as guarantor for 250 refugee Jews while running a company in Argentina in the 1930s. These questions of interpretation relate to questions of method. Given that Fry does provide references for some of her material, there is no doubt that The London Cage would have been improved by connecting its story more directly to existing scholarly literature on the subject, and it would certainly have been more useful to researchers if her references to material in the National Archives had provided more than just the relevant file numbers.
