Introduction.
In 1971, 342 people were swept up by the British army and interned, i.e. subjected to indefinite detention without a trial.
Britain’s intelligence community was looking for people they hoped would be able to provide them with information about members of the IRA.
14 men were chosen for ‘special treatment’ and taken to a secret interrogation centre at Ballykelly, Co. Derry. They were forced to wear hoods and thrown to the ground from low-flying helicopters while hooded.
This group became known as the ‘Hooded Men’. They were subjected to what would become known as the Five Techniques: hooding; stress positions; white noise; sleep deprivation; and deprivation of food and water.
There was more brutality than just the deployment of the Five Techniques.
But there was more. Jim Auld, one of the Hooded Men has told this magazine that ‘it is important that people realise that there were more than the five techniques. There were physical beatings which were constant and severe.’ At one stage during his ordeal he suffered what he thought was a ‘hallucination that a soldier was standing on my left foot. When I got back to the prison, I had no nails on my foot – they were all broken off.’
Humiliation was another factor. This included the indignity of ‘standing for a minimum of seven days and nights without [being let go to the] toilet.’
None of the 14 men were ever convicted of any criminal offence.
The tactics deployed against them had been refined over decades by senior intelligence officers such as Sir Dick White of MI5 and, later, MI6.
In 1978 the treatment was defined by the European Court of Human Rights as ‘inhumane and degrading’.
Irish governments have had ample opportunity to take legal action to have the treatment redesignated as torture but have failed – and continue to fail – to act.
In the meantime, other governments can claim that they are not guilty of torture when they engage in the type of brutal tactics inflicted on Irish prisoners at Ballykelly.
Jim Auld insists that since ‘the Irish government gave up and allowed the British government to get away with it – that is the direct reason why America, Britain, Israel and many other countries have got away with torture. This is a shame on Ireland because had [the Irish government] continued, there is a chance and at least a belief that [these countries] would not have been able to use the excuse’ they were not engaged in torture.
The Irish government could also – and should – be placing London under pressure to reach a settlement with the Hooded Men and the families of those who have died.
White’s black heart
The roots of the ‘enhanced techniques’ meted out at Ballykelly reach back to at least WW2. Sir Dick White was central to the development of an array of torture tactics refined over decades. In 1968, White was appointed as Britain’s overarching spymaster with offices at the Cabinet Office in Whitehall. He remained in that position until 1972.
Britain’s archives reveal that White was one of the architects of Operation Calabra, the secret British interrogation programme unleashed after internment in Northern Ireland in 1971.
The preparations for Ballykelly began in April 1971, when the Ministry of Defence’s Joint Services Interrogation Wing (JSIW) began training a team of RUC Special Branch officers in Belfast in torture techniques.
Those who administered the torture included the team of trained RUC special branch officers who were commanded by John Whiteside. He later rose to become the Head of the Special Branch and an assistant chief constable. He was awarded an OBE and an MBE.
After a media furore erupted, White found himself fighting a rear-guard action, hoping to preserve at least the use of ‘white noise’ on prisoners. It was an incessant hissing sound which was used to disorientate the minds of targeted prisoners and demolished their will to resist questioning.
Latchmere House
White had developed his skills as a torturer during the WW2 when he was attached to MI5’s B division. He and another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, had helped create a secret interrogation centre at Latchmere House, a Victorian mansion near Ham Common in the south-west of London.
At the time Liddell was also the head of MI5’s Irish desk and responsible for helping the de Valera government set up G2, Irish military intelligence.
The interrogation centre at Latchmere House was given the codename, Camp 020. After the war broke out, White and his associates swept up members of the British Union of Fascists across the UK. The dragnets took place at night and the targets were transported to a daunting camp which was surrounded by double rows of barbed wire and patrolled by guards with fixed bayonets. Once inside, they were fed meagre rations, held in solitary confinement and denied sleep.
During what little time they were allowed to exercise, they were warned they would be shot if they spoke to each other. As a matter of routine, many were pulled from their beds in the middle of the night and hauled before a secret tribunal of men sitting behind a bank of glaring lights.
Others were kept in the dark for lengthy periods of the time; more again were subjected to incessant glaring light. It was also the practice to move them about frequently to disorientate and exhaust them. Some, if not all, were threatened with execution at one time or another.
Mock executions, beatings and starvation rations
In November 1940 the Home Office learned about what was going on and curtailed some of the camp’s more excessive practices. However, White would suffer no adverse consequence. On the contrary, his reputation would soar due to his participation in one of MI5’s greatest successes of WW2, the Double Cross programme. It turned a string of key German spies who were operating in the UK into double agents. They were told they could go to the gallows or work for the British. Once turned, they fed disinformation back to Berlin. MI5 also used these Germans to lure others agents to Britain who were arrested, interrogated and turned too. A lot of this work was done at Camp 020 which remained open during the war. Mock executions, beatings and starvation rations were used to break their will while some were left naked for months at a time. Harold Dearden, a psychiatrist assigned to the facility, contributed by developing sleep and sensory deprivation programmes. He also oversaw experiments to find ways of torturing prisoners without leaving visible marks on them.
Bad Nenndorf interrogation
When the war ended White took up a post at the Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre in the British zone of occupation in Germany. Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens, with whom White had served at Camp 020, commanded the facility. Stephens, on secondment from MI5, took a fists-on approach to the task: he was prone to yell questions at prisoners as a preliminary punching them.
During the two years Bad Nenndorf was open, 372 men and 44 women passed through its gates. They received severe beatings, sometimes involving whippings.
‘Shin screws’ which had been confiscated from a Gestapo prison in Hamburg were put back into use.
Some prisoners were forced to stand for twelve hours at a time and threatened with execution.
Inmates were doused in water despite sub-zero temperatures. One man was forced to stand in a cell in cold water for eight days.
At least one inmate was told that his wife was being brought in for torture; another was suspended by his wrists and beaten by men wielding rubber truncheons. A few died from this maltreatment. A doctor in a nearby hospital complained about the number of filthy and confused patients he was required to treat. Many were suffering from multiple injuries and frostbite; others were painfully emaciated after months of starvation. One prisoner, Robert Buttlar-Brandenfels, lost his toes. He was taken to a bare unheated cell where his shoes and jacket were taken from him. There were no panes in the window. Next, he was given a bucket of water and a brush and told to scrub the cell walls. He later described how:
‘There was a temperature of about 20° below freezing outside. That is Fahrenheit. I was told this by one of the guards. My feet were bandaged. Both my feet were soaked. At 9 o’clock I was given two blankets and told to lie down. I pointed out to the corporal that I could not because the floor was too wet. Later on, because I was getting too tired to stand I lay down. I could not sleep. I had lost the feeling in my feet. Next morning .. my feet were still more swollen and they were getting of a blue colour. I was so despairing to get out of this cell I swallowed a spoon. I stayed in the cell, under the said conditions, exactly 72 or 73 hours.
‘I was called in to see the officer who interrogated me. Not only my feet were swollen but my legs as well, so I literally had to crawl on the floor to the interrogation room. The sentries were ordered by one of the corporals not to help me. The officer asks me whether I had had enough. I told him that I had been a prisoner for two years of the Gestapo in Germany, and sentenced to death by the German People’s Court, but that I’d never in all those two years undergone such treatment. Then he told me that apparently I did tell him the truth and that I should write another statement. He told me I would be taken to a warmer room.’ [1]
Four toes of his right foot had to be amputated. Those of his left became so stiff he was eventually unable to walk. [2] An operation was carried out to remove the spoon.
Russian deserters picked up in the British zone who were suspected of espionage were interrogated harshly at Bad Nenndorf. One inmate, Gerhard Menzel noticed how they were treated ‘the worst’. He recalled that they ‘really beat them up’. When they were finished ‘you couldn’t see where their eyes were’. [3] [56]
Threats to torture children
Many of these internees were entirely innocent and were eventually released but not before they were warned that if they spoke out about what was happening up, they would be rearrested along with members of their family – including their children – and subjected to far worse treatment than they had already experienced.
Making a mockery of the historical ‘masterpiece’ that ‘stunned the world’
During his time at Bad Nenndorf, White resided in a comfortable 18-century stately home near Herford in North Rhine-Westphalia. It was here that he set in train a sequence of events which would result in one of the most remarkable disservices to history and a lesson that torture rarely yields reliable results.
White had become concerned about Russian rumours that Hitler was still alive asked Hugh Trevor Roper to carry out an investigation into his death. This would later result in the publication of Roper’s undeservedly acclaimed book, The Last Days Of Hitler.
It did not deserve applause because much of the content was based on information provided by Nicolaus von Below of the Luftwaffe who made it up rather than put up with the starvation and sleep deprivation White and his colleagues were meting out to him.
Von Below had been arrested by the British in 1946 and held until 1948. He concocted the tale of Hitler’s ‘last message to the world’ with its stirring plea that: ‘The efforts and sacrifices of the German people in this war have been so great that I cannot believe that they have been in vain. The aim must still be to win territory in the East.’ All this and plenty more, according to Von Below was ‘bullshit’ and he derived ‘much pleasure’ later when he read it in Trevor-Roper’s book.[4] Von Below died in 1983.
A rosy picture of Bad Nenndorf
A rosy picture of Bad Nenndorf was painted for the new prime minister Clement Attlee of the Labour party. He was told that among the fruits of the interrogations was clarity about Hitler’s death and the production of a detailed history of German espionage in Ireland between the wars and during 1939-1945. One of MI5’s sources was an agent called BASKET who provided information to them at his own volition. [5]
Eventually details about what was happening at Bad Nenndorf filtered out and an official enquiry took place. It found that White and Tin Eye Stephen’s regime was to “bear the major share the ultimate responsibility for the treatment meted out at Bad Nenndorf”. It recommended that an investigation be mounted by the Control Commission’s civilian police force in view of the fact that “considerations of manslaughter arose in the case of two internees”.[6]
Bad Nenndorf was closed in July 1947. It no more damaged White’s career in MI5 than the excesses of Camp 020 had. Instead, he rose to become deputy director-general and director-general in 1953, a post he occupied for three years before being appointed as chief of MI6.
While White walked away unscathed, ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens faced a court martial which took place behind closed doors. He did not deny the occurrence of the beatings, whippings, freezings, sleep deprivation or starvation. Instead, he relied upon a defence some Nazi concentration camp commandant had tendered, albeit unsuccessfully: that he was unaware that the prisoners in his charge had been violated or some killed. On this occasion, the defence was accepted.
After the war Stevens was asked by MI5 to write a history of camp 020 and the other interrogation centres. A copy of it was published by the public records office in 2000. The author of the document was not identified even though this was a MI5 classified document. Stephens warned the reader, without either irony or awareness, that: “Violence is taboo, for not only does it produce an answer to please, but it lowers the standard of information.‘ [7]
Aden
Over the next few decades some of these tactics were developed and deployed by Britain during its colonial struggles, including Aden in the 1960s.
On 10 December 1963, the deputy high commissioner of Aden, George Henderson, was killed in a grenade attack on the High Commissioner, Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, and a delegation which was waiting for a flight at Aden airport to take them to talks in London. Suddenly, the British press was up in arms. Henderson had spotted the grenade as it flew through the air and threw himself on it absorbing the full force of the explosion. He died in hospital a veritable hero ten days later. An Indian woman also perished during the attack. In response, London declared a state of emergency, suspended the legislative council which had ruled Aden and gave Trevaskis sole political authority. The horrors would shortly begin. Not for the first time, the entire population would suffer.
The British army ran an interrogation centre at a house in Ahwar, a village 160 miles east of Aden. According to a MoD report, eleven of those swept up in the dragnet after the assassination of Henderson had been brought to it where they were hooded, exposed to loud noise, sleep deprivation, starvation and were forced to stand in stressful positions for long periods.
The Fingernail Factory
The British began to rely more and more upon interrogation as their penetration of the NLF, one of the insurgent groups which was fighting against them, was non-existent. In September 1964 they opened Fort Morbut, a two-story building behind the gates of an army base overlooking the harbour at Steamer Point.[8] It became known as the ‘Fingernail Factory’, which was a misnomer as toenails were also extracted from those reluctant to co-operate.
The interrogators at Fort Morbut began to put in longer hours and were supplied with a string of captives who were snatched by the army, usually at night. An Irishman called Prendergast ran the torture regime. He made his interrogators sign documents limiting them to acting within the law. What was to happen next demonstrates that he failed to enforce his own edict. Most likely, the documents were a ruse to provide political cover in case the use of torture ever came to the attention of the public. Behind closed doors Prendergast’s creatures were to discover via torture and brutality that the Aden police and army were littered with rebel supporters.
‘Successful interrogation may be a lengthy process.‘
While the torture proceeded, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in London prepared another high-sounding directive which was issued in February 1965. It stressed that
‘Successful interrogation depends upon careful planning both of the interrogation itself, and of the premises wherein it is conducted. It calls for a psychological attack. Apart from legal and moral considerations, torture and physical cruelty of all kinds are professionally unrewarding since a subject so treated may be persuaded to a talk, but not to tell the truth. Successful interrogation may be a lengthy process.’ [9]
Amnesty International report on Aden.
The directive specifically prohibited ‘cruel treatment and torture’ and ‘humiliating and degrading treatment’. No one in Aden paid it much heed. According to a December 1966 report from Amnesty International, the following human rights violations were committed in Aden:
1. Undressing the detainees and making them stand naked during interrogation;
2. Keeping detainees naked in super-cooled cells with air conditioners and fans running at high speed;
3. Keeping the detainees awake by irritating them while they are exhausted;
4. Offering food to hungry detainees and removing it just as they start eating;
5. Forcing detainees to sit on poles directed towards their anus;
6. Hitting and twisting their genital organs;
7. Extinguishing cigarettes on their skin;
8. Forcing them to run in circles until they are exhausted;
9. Banning visits to lavatories so that they soil their cells with faeces and urine;
10. Keeping them in filthy toilets with the floor covered with urine and faeces.[10]
Prisoners were also subjected to electric shock treatment.
George Brown, then serving as Britain’s Foreign Secretary, appointed Roderick Bowen, QC, to conduct an investigation for Parliament after the Amnesty report. In it, Bowen stated that conditions in the Aden were ‘extremely grim’ and what had taken place had been ‘highly undesirable’.
Bowen also found that a string of medical and legal officers had repeatedly complained to the deputy high commissioner that the interrogations were ‘assisted by physical violence’. Indeed, at one stage the high commissioner had advised Brown that the allegations Amnesty was making were indeed accurate. Bowen’s report revealed that the claims about torture ‘circulate[d] round three men’. They were an officer in the intelligence corps and two NCOs.
The case of Jim Auld
Ireland was next. On 9 August, 1971, at around 3:30, Jim Auld was returned to his home in Belfast after a house party. He was not aware that “Operation Demetrius”, which unleashed internment, had been launched.
The lights were still on at his home and the front door was open. A soldier with a rifle was waiting for him on the other side of it. Soldiers jumped out from the bushes and shoved him inside.
He described what happened to him next to Summer Eldemire of Intercept magazine. She described how Auld had been quick witted enough to whip off his jacket so his parents could bear witness to the fact he had no bruises before the soldiers took him away.
Auld says a British military captain assured him, ‘While you’re with me Mr. Auld, I guarantee nothing will happen.’
The soldiers loaded him into the back of a truck and took him to a local detention center. When they offloaded him, the captain told him, ‘You’re no longer under my custody’, and a guard hit him over the back of the head with a rifle butt.
Deep Interrogation at Ballykelly
The government detained about 350 men, mostly Catholics, between Aug. 9 and 10, but selected Auld as one of only 14 for ‘deep interrogation’ in a secret facility in Ballykelly, a remote village in Derry. Before being taken away, Auld glimpsed his friends Kevin Hannaway, Francis McGuigan and Joe Clarke. He says one of the soldiers gave him a cigarette and told him: ‘Here you poor bastard, you’re going to need that.’ As Eldermire put it, it was at this point that ‘he realized that things were serious’. The guards placed a hood over his head.
Kicked out of a helicopter
A couple of weeks before his arrest, Auld had picked up a Newsweek magazine at the dentist’s office. A picture of an American helicopter in Vietnam stretched across two pages, and ‘circled in the middle was a figure that had just been thrown out…to be killed,’ said Auld. This is what he thought of when he heard the sound of a helicopter and the guards loaded him into it. The next thing he felt was a boot on his back. He didn’t have time to see his life flash before his eyes; he landed about six feet below, the helicopter had been hovering just off the ground.
‘Do no harm’, the doctor who certified men for torture
When he arrived at the Ballykelly facility, a doctor examined Auld and ruled him fit for interrogation. To this day, Auld is still in disbelief. ‘A human being looked at me and approved me to be tortured.‘
In 1978 the European Court of Human Rights described the ‘Five Techniques’ as ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’ not torture.
Lying to the European Court of Human Rights
Over the decades it emerged that false evidence had been supplied to the Court.
An appeal was heard in 2018. Part of it hinged on documentation that a doctor had misled the Court by saying that the effects of the ill-treatment were short-lived, all the while knowing their long-lasting impact. The court did not find this evidence convincing. They ruled that even if the doctor had provided misleading evidence, it could not be said it would have influenced a finding of torture. They concluded that there was simply not enough scientific evidence on it at that time.
Seven days and nights
Auld was a victim of the Five Techniques and more besides. He was placed standing with his hands against the wall with his fingers spread. When he moved, they beat him. When he fell, they lifted him and put back against the wall. After a while, he didn’t mind the beatings, as they ‘were allowing your blood to circulate and giving you a relief from that heavy numbness’, he said. This went on for at least seven days and nights.
The guards removed the hood only once during his detainment. A bright light was shined into his eyes, and a voice repeatedly asked: ‘Who do you know in the IRA?’ Auld said he didn’t know anyone. ‘It was like something out of a movie,’ he recalled. He told them names of two famous republican paramilitary leaders who appeared regularly on the television. ‘Trust me — if I had known anyone, I would have told them,’ he said.
It is not clear why Auld was selected out of the 350 men initially rounded up. It is possible that geography played a factor. At first there were only 12 men taken in for interrogation, four from each of the three provinces, according to a 1974 book called The Guineapigs. Questioned about whether he had any obvious links to the I.R.A., Auld responds that even if he did, no human should have been treated the way he was. The government never charged him with a crime.
He passed in and out of consciousness. He hallucinated. He had no access to a toilet. They fed him only once, but having not drunk water for three days, his mouth was too dry to eat it. In the background there was a constant noise that he thought would drive him mad.
An attempt to commit suicide
Auld didn’t think the government would possibly allow him out alive. During one of the ten or fifteen times he remembers collapsing during his interrogations, he identified a heating pipe running along the bottom of the wall. He tried to throw his head against it to kill himself. When he regained consciousness he bawled because he realized his worst nightmare had come true – he was still alive.
When the guards released Auld from Ballykelly, they detained him in prison for nine months before admitting him to a mental hospital for ‘blackouts’, a likely symptom of post traumatic stress. ‘I’d start thinking about what happened and my brain would just shut off’, said Auld. After a few weeks, he realized he could check himself out. He says he signed the papers, walked out the door, and took the bus home to his astonished family.
Aftermath
Auld had a difficult time adjusting back to life afterwards. He couldn’t settle in a job. He went back into a mental hospital. Auld received a payment of £16,000 after a settlement in the courts in Belfast. He bought a blue sports car. He found satisfaction working in conflict resolution with youth who had experienced violence because he felt he had ‘an empathy‘.
He had no idea that the government of Ireland, in 1976, had taken a case to the European Commission of Human Rights. He says no-one consulted him. Ireland initially won the case. But two years later the government of Northern Ireland appealed it in a higher court which reversed the ruling. The Hooded Men, it was deemed, had only been subjected to ‘inhumane and degrading treatment”.
New Evidence 2014
It wasn’t until 2014 that new evidence would come to light. Documents uncovered by RTE revealed that the British government lied to the European Court of Human Rights about the severity of the methods and the long-term physical and psychological consequences for the victims. The documents also revealed that the then-Secretary of Defence, Peter Carrington, had authorized the interrogation tactics, and that then-Prime Minister James Callaghan knew about it.
In 2014, the Irish government appealed to have the case revised after an investigation uncovered that high cabinet British government officials had authorized the detainment and hid evidence from the court showing the treatment’s long lasting effects. An all-star legal team, including Amal Clooney, represented the men.
The death of Baha Mousa
Although the British government banned the use of the Five Techniques in 1972, the country’s military would go on to use them until at least 2003, when they resulted in the death of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian detainee. The U.S. also adopted and fine-tuned the same methods for use after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The Bush administration cited the European Court’s 1978 verdict in defence of its so-called enhanced interrogation techniques during the War on Terror.
Similarly, the Israeli government used the verdict to defend itself against accusations of torturing Palestinian detainees.
The Executive Director of Amnesty International Ireland, Colm O’Gorman, described the ruling as ‘regrettable’. The judges focused on a narrow legal technicality, he said, rather than addressing the substance of the torture claims. Because the case was a request to revise an earlier judgment and not a fresh case, the court debated whether the new evidence would have impacted the original 1978 decision, not what it would mean in today’s society. ‘We are quite confident what was done to these men would be deemed as torture by the court in today’s terms if this case were heard afresh’, said O’Gorman.
Grainne Teggart, Amnesty’s Northern Ireland campaigns manager, said the court had ‘missed a vital opportunity to put right a historic wrong’. She added: ‘The “hooded men” have been denied justice for too long.’
Auld felt that if the court had revised the ruling, it could have set a precedent, establishing that any use of the Five Techniques after 1978 amounted to torture. He felt that the judges overseeing the case did not want to deal with the immense implications that a revision may have caused.
Where to now?
In late 2017, the High Court ruled that the failure by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to investigate the allegations of torture was unlawful and should be quashed.
The PSNI sought to appeal this decision to the Court of Appeal, but in September 2019 the Court ruled that the decision should stand. An appeal by the PSNI to the UK Supreme Court was rejected in November 2019.
However, the PSNI will once again challenge this judgement and the case will be heard on Monday 14th June 2025 at the UK Supreme Court.
There is a lot the Irish government could be doing with all its resources, rather than leave the Hooded Men to fight the might of the British government on their own.
David Burke is the author of four books published by Mercier Press.
These books can be purchased here:
Footnotes
[1] Cobain pp. 50-51
[2] Cobain 50-51
[3] Cobain p. 56
[4] Cobain pp. 59-60
[5] Public Records Office, Secret History Files, Camp 020, MI5 and Nazi Spies introduced and edited by Oliver Hoare (Public Records Office, London 2000) p. 166-168.
[6] Cobain p. 61
[7] Camp 020, MI5 and Nazi Spies introduced and edited by Oliver Hoare (Public Records Office, Secret History Files London 2000) pp. 57-58.
[8] Cobain p. 101
[9] JIC (65) 15, 17 February 1965
[10] Amnesty Report December 1966 by Dr. S. Rastgeldi in the possession of the author.