Photo: ‘Kiss me, Number 2…’ (Patrick McGoohan and John Sharp in A Change of Mind)
To count down to our special screening of Fall Out, the final episode of ace television show The Prisoner, PHIL KIRBY introduces a new episode every day in the order outlined by director Alex Cox in his book I Am (Not) A Number…
Tonight’s episode is A Change of Mind …
Number 6 is branded ‘unmutual’ (The Village’s equivalent of a CBO) and subjected to an ultrasonic lobotomy. A seemingly newly compliant Number 6 returns to daily life ready to give up his secrets. Or is he simply pulling everybody’s leg..?
After the Second World War all sorts of people were abducted in broad daylight, whisked away to isolated interrogation units and subjected to unspeakable tortures in order to extract damning confessions.
When I say “all sorts of people” I really mean anti-Reds. And they were abducted by the growing forces of International Communism.
This caused quite a bit of panic amongst the Western elites, especially when the damned confessions started coming from the unlikeliest of directions – our brave boys on the front line in the war to stop the dominoes falling in Indo-China.
In May 1952, North Korean radio announced that two American pilots from the 3rd Bomber Wing had confessed to dropping bacteriological bombs on North Korea in January 1952. Lieutenant Kenneth Enoch and Lieutenant John Quinn had been shot down on January 13 near Anju. Their North Korean interrogators demanded that they confess to dropping biological bombs, and when the two refused, they were placed in solitary confinement for weeks, and tortured. After two months, Enoch broke. He later explained that, faced with horrible physical and mental pain, insanity, death, or a “ridiculous confession,” he chose to blab.
Soon after a handful of soldiers captured by the Koreans decided to defect. Which was if anything even worse than admitting to biological warfare.
This caused a problem. Of course American airmen wouldn’t drop dirty bombs, and American troops wouldn’t go Commie, so something else must be behind these odd incidents.
Brainwashing.
Brainwashing In Red China was the title of a 1951 book by Edward Hunter, reprinted dozens of times in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Hunter testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958, describing himself as “a writer and foreign correspondent.” It wasn’t until twenty years later it was revealed Hunter was working for the CIA. Here’s what he told HUAC
The concept of brainwashing was retrospectively applied to earlier abduction/confessions, most famously of Cardinal Mindzsenty
Mostly forgotten today, but a prototypical example, is the case of American Robert Vogeler, who was arrested for espionage in Communist Hungary, imprisoned, and tortured. Vogeler was snatched from his car by two machine-gun toting Hungarian State Department border guards on November 18, 1949. Stripped of his passport and all personal effects, taken to a secret prison, Vogeler was beaten, accused of being a spy, drugged and then interrogated for sixty-five hours straight. He was then taken to a tiny, windowless prison cell adjoining a room where other prisoners were tortured every night.
After several days of this, he was told by a special interrogator, “Before I’ve finished, we’ll know everything there is to know about you.” Vogeler replied, “I’ve already told you the truth.” “Not the truth I want to hear,” said the interrogator. “If Mindszenty told me what I wanted him to tell me, so will you…. Even if Jesus Christ were sitting in your chair, He’d tell me everything I wanted Him to.”
Eventually, Soviet inquisitors broke Vogeler.
In a book he wrote a few years later, I was Stalin’s Prisoner, he confirmed in minute detail the inquisitorial technique employed to force him to ‘confess’.
The toxins of fatigue are enough in themselves, I suspect, to account for my partial breakdown at the hands of No 1. Shortly before noon on Monday, 21 November 1949, I agreed to sign the fifth of the ‘confessions’ that he placed before me. It was so much less incriminating than the other four, which I had refused to sign, that it seemed to me, in my weakened state, to be hardly a confession at all.
He shows the important part played in this technique by the moral and social isolation of the prisoner. His inquisitors told him: “You’ve now been our prisoner for three days… So far, we haven’t been asked a single question by the American Legation…” It was a deliberate lie, of course, and Vogeler did not believe it, but it sowed a tiny seed of doubt, which was its purpose. As the weeks and the months went by, the seed grew. “On the seventy-first day I surrendered to despair… Convinced at last that I had indeed been abandoned, I told No 2 that I would sign anything if he would only cease his merciless inquisition.’
After he had signed his final ‘full confession’ rehearsals of the part he was to play were staged, his lines carefully scripted, right up to the day before the trial. On occasions these rehearsals took the form of confrontations with the other accused, in order to ensure that there were no obvious contradictions between the confessions. Just before the trial Vogeler was told by one of the examining magistrates:
Your entire future will be determined by your behaviour at the trial. If you fail to answer the president’s questions in the proper spirit, you will be removed from the court-room and taken to a special hospital. There you will be given special treatment that will make you happy to come back and answer the president’s questions. But it will also make you a cripple for life. (p 192)
A Prisoner. At the mercy of a Number One and Number Two. On trial, isolated and ostracised, sent to a special hospital if he doesn’t cooperate, threatened with a special treatment that will make him happy to answer questions, under constant surveillance… Sound familiar?
As I’ve said before, if you think The Prisoner is far-fetched and the plots way over the top then you need to read some history.
Oh, and that ultrasonic lobotomy?… October 1954, American Archives of Neurology and Psychology, PREFRONTAL ULTRASONIC IRRADIATION—A SUBSTITUTE FOR LOBOTOMY, P. A. LINDSTROM, M.D. The “load of guff about the ‘aggressive frontal lobes of the brain” turns out not to be a load of guff. It’s almost a direct quotation from a top American medical journal of the 1950s.
This episode’s odd moment. Number 58 in aversion therapy? Last time we saw 58 she was running the place…
Read about previous episode It’s Your Funeral here
theCV presents The Prisoner Fall Out plus a Q and A with Six of One’s Ant Brierly and Roy Stambrow moderated by Phil and Neil (God help us!) at The Courtroom, Leeds Town Hall at 19.00 on Friday 25th May 2018. Tickets are £5 (plus booking fee) and are available here.