‘What would they have done to you if you hadn’t escaped?’ asked Jean. It was nice to know someone had been worried.
‘Escaped is too strong a word,’ I said. ‘Luckily I had enough information about their methods to make an informed guess. Most of the previous inmates never dreamed that they were still in England. There was no point in getting out of the house only to find yourself thousands of miles behind the Iron Curtain. As to the next stages; the beginning is this severing of connections, a feeling of isolation and physical and mental fatigue and uncertainty; that’s what they started with me. Tension and an uncertainty; about what will please and what won’t please. Any sort of humour is dangerous to the technique. You’ll notice how the American treatment after my arrest on Tokwe, had these same basic characteristics. Well, had I stayed at Wood Green the next stage would most likely have been the memorizing of long passages of dialect. Probably they would have told me to memorize that long document about my trial.’
Jean poured out some more coffee. I was very tired, and just talking about how near I had come to being converted made my throat nervously dry. ‘After that?’ Jean said. She lit a Gauloise and passed it across to me.
‘Group therapy. We know they had five others there at the same time as me. Maybe even more. The tape recordings of moans and groans and talking in sleep in a foreign language must have worked everyone up to a fever pitch, but since it was identical to the tape that Keightley had found, it only encouraged me. Soon there would be group meetings, and we would be allowed to discover that one is an informer, to increase the tension. Then there is the confession and autobiography stage. This is detailed. Things like why you smoked, had love affairs, drank, mixed with certain people.’
‘Had love affairs?’ said Jean.
‘I escaped before that part,’ I said.
‘Now I know why,’ said Jean. ‘It was very sweet of you.’
I drank my coffee. The sun shone brightly in the Soho street below. Large blocks of ice stood outside restaurants and melted into the gutter. A man in a straw boater arranged a large Severn salmon across a wet marble slab. Around it he carefully placed soles and turbot and scallops and flat oysters and portugaises that looked like pieces of rock, and herrings and mackerel, and a fountain of water played over it, and Jean was talking to me. I turned and gave her my full attention.
‘What happened after the mutual confession stage?’
‘You don’t have an ulterior motive?’ I asked.
‘Oh, every woman understands brain-washing. It’s letting a husband get furious about a new hat and then knowing when to ask him to pay for it. Just when he starts to feel guilty.’
‘You don’t know how right you are,’ I said. ‘The whole process is one of discovering weaknesses; preferably the subjects find their own. Self-criticism, etc. Then the third phase is using the information so far gained to create what is technically called “abreaction”. This is caused by intense mental work, indoctrination by meetings. In fact by overwork and stress, and is the culmination of all brain-washing. Abreaction is the point of no return.’
‘How do you know when you’ve reached it?’ asked Jean.
‘You know all right — it’s a complete nervous collapse. Dilated pupils, rigid body, the skin goes clammy with perspiration. You feel you can’t get your breath, you breathe in and out very quickly, but not deeply at all. That’s just the beginning; after that, there’s continuous sobbing hysterics, complete loss of control. In World War One it was called “shell shock”, in World War Two, “battle fatigue”. As soon as abreaction hits one of your group, the others soon topple — one after the other they are hooked.’
‘You said there were three basic systems,’ said Jean. ‘You’ve told me only one.’
I said, ‘Oh, did I? I didn’t mean that the systems were different — only the way the one system was applied. The haunted house was the first sort. Then Jay thought of using small private nursing homes — less conspicuous, you see, and no need for all the building work — or the conversion back to normal before they moved out again. It was the nursing home aspect that Carswell found with his “concens”; do you remember the description he gave us? The fever rate was high because that is the best physical debility to prepare one for brain-washing.’
‘You mean that they were deliberately given fever, then whipped into one of these nursing homes?’ Jean said.
‘The other way round,’ I told her. ‘They were brought in, then given fever.’
‘Injected with it?’ Jean asked.
‘Apparently medical science still uses mosquitoes. They strap a glass cup on the skin and the mosquitoes bite. That’s when it’s needed to give a patient fever; it’s pretty rare nowadays.’ Jean didn’t wrinkle her nose or say ‘how awful’ when I got to the mosquito bit and I appreciated that.
‘The fever speeded things up,’ Jean said.
I agreed, ‘It certainly did, which led to the third system. This was to create this breakdown…’
‘Abreaction?’
‘Yes, this abreaction. To create it by drugs alone; what doctors call a pharmacological shock. It’s done by injecting lots of insulin into the blood stream; this lowers the sugar in the blood, and very soon you have the same twitches and convulsions that one sees in abreaction — shouting and sobbing and finally collapse into a deep coma. Later they gave intravenous sugar.’
‘Why didn’t they do that to you?’ asked Jean. ‘Why didn’t you go to one of their nursing homes?’
‘I do believe you still have doubts about me.’ Jean laughed nervously, but it went home. ‘That was my big worry, I can tell you, but it’s tricky; they needed the man who had experience, but he was deeply involved at the place in Scotland. Luckily he couldn’t be in two places at once. Plus the fact that the older system is more thorough, and I was considered difficult.’
‘You can say difficult again,’ said Jean. ‘But I’m still not sure if I understand even now. You mean, after this brain-washing, these people, these “concens”, went back to work but were really working as Russian agents, their convictions totally reversed?’
I said, ‘No. It’s far more complex than that. Everything revolves round Jay, really; to understand IPCRESS you must understand Jay. Jay has spent his life amidst changing political scenes. Here in England it’s easy for us to have allegiance to a government that has stayed pretty constant since the Stuart restoration; but Jay has seen governments come and go too often to place too much reliance on them. He remembers the Tsars; government by ignorance; Paderewski, government by gentle pianist; Pilsudski, the general who won the brilliant battle of Warsaw in 1920, and smashed the new Soviet Armies under Voroshilov. He remembers the dictator who seized power by shouting “This is a whorehouse, all get out!” to Parliament. He remembers the government who followed Hitler’s example in 1938 by grabbing a piece of Czechoslovakia by force. He remembers the Nazis, and then, after the war, the proteges of London and Moscow fighting each other for power. Jay has come through all these changes like a plastic duck going over Niagara — by floating along with the current. He has sold information. Information from Klaus Fuchs in Britain, Alan Nunn May in Canada, and the Rosenbergs in the US. Then he graduated to kidnapping and arranging that Otto John from West Germany, the Italian physicist, Bruno Pontecorvo, and Burgess and Maclean should travel eastward. But always for money. He would have sent them equally willingly to anyone who named the right price. Then one day, perhaps while he was shaving, an idea hit him; he would brain-wash a network of wellplaced men, and all of them would clear their information through Jay. They would be loyal to Jay personally. Jay knew enough about psychiatry to know that it was possible (and let’s not forget that it’s been working very well for nearly a year), and he knew that it would make us all “trigger happy”, suspicious of everyone once we got on to it.’
I ordered some more coffee and phoned Charlotte Street to see if there were any cables for me, but there was nothing fresh. I went back to Jean.
‘What was that water tank that you mentioned in the “haunted house” report?’ she asked.
‘Yes, the water tank. I should have perhaps said four ways because that was for another system. You mask the subject’s eyes and fit him with breathing apparatus, then suspend him face down in a tank of blood-heat water. At first he sleeps; when he awakes he is completely disorientated and subject to anxiety and hallucination. You choose the right moment and begin to feed him information…’
‘Hence the tape recorder.’
‘Exactly…’
‘It’s a quick way of brain-washing then?’
‘It is, but they discontinued it, so it probably wasn’t so sensational.’
‘And they didn’t use TAP[30] either,’ Jean said.
