When Britain used torture to control the Strait of Hormuz

Previously secret military files reveal links between the use of torture by British forces in Oman and Northern Ireland during the 1970s.

An army major who led the worst of these interrogations in the Gulf would later earn a senior role in a secretive intelligence unit in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles.

Although that unit colluded with paramilitaries, the officer involved appears to have been promoted to MI5’s most senior role in Northern Ireland.

The interrogations done by his men in Oman were more extensive than previously reported and would be considered illegal by today’s standards.

They were employed as part of a counter-insurgency campaign waged for Sultan Qaboos , a pro-British dictator installed in Oman after an MI6-backed coup in 1970.

UK support for Qaboos was driven by a desire to secure oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, which is flanked by Iran on one side and the disputed Musandam peninsula to the south.

British planners helped Qaboos annex Musandam in 1970, creating an Omani exclave separated from the rest of the country and surrounded by the Trucial States (which are now the United Arab Emirates).

The annexation, codenamed Operation Intradon, was resisted by Musandam’s indigenous population, the autonomous Shihuh people.

‘Splendid job’

Britain inserted elite SAS troops into Musandam in December 1970 to round up suspected rebels.

Declassified has previously found that while one member of the Shihuh tribe was being questioned, he refused to give up his ceremonial dagger and was shot in the arm, shoulder, and neck.

It can now be revealed that another detainee who allegedly escaped in March 1971 was shot in the back and shoulder.

Regarding the incident, Geoffrey Arthur – British political resident for the Persian Gulf – told Conservative foreign secretary Alec Douglas-Home: “We might also eventually have to face questions as to why such persons had been detained and/or interrogated by British forces at Sharjah, but we would naturally try to prevent this aspect getting out.”

Douglas-Home wrote back that they should be detained and interrogated in Muscat, Oman’s capital, rather than in Sharjah – one of the Trucial States – to reduce the risk of leaks.

The interrogation team, dubbed No. 1 Holding Unit, was then commanded by Major H Sloan of the army’s Intelligence Corps.

According to records kept by the Ministry of Defence, four Shihuh tribesmen were interrogated in January 1971 at the notorious Bait-al-Falaj fort in Muscat. They were subjected to now banned methods of torture which involve sensory deprivation, such as completely covering someone’s head with a sack and bombarding them with noise.

Such a large number of arrests had been made, however, that Bait-al-Falaj was no longer suitable to interrogate them all, despite the “splendid job” that Sloan’s team had done.

His team, composed of two interrogators, had been given “too many subjects to handle” and so the interrogations were deemed unsuccessful. The Shihuh detainees had been apparently “fully indoctrinated by Maoist communists” and trained to resist interrogation, or so the documents claim.

The Commander of British Forces in the Gulf requested another interrogation team be deployed in Sharjah, north of Dubai, where “some members of the security forces” were active.

Many extracts from the files, some of which could shed light on these security forces, have been fully withheld.

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From Aden to Oman

The Ministry of Defence later approved the request for another interrogation team to be sent to the Trucial States, this time under the control of Major J.H.S. Burgess.

This appears to fit the description of a John Howard Searles Burgess, a decorated military intelligence veteran active in Oman during the 70s, who appears to have passed away in 1999.

Military records explain that Burgess had been awarded an MBE after being “personally connected” with the capture of 26 “terrorists” in Aden, Yemen, where he worked in intelligence during the “emergency” in 1965, when detainees were allegedly tortured .

The rest of Burgess’ team in Oman was composed of one other officer, possibly Sloan, and seven unidentified troops.

They set out on a path of brutal interrogation that saw 31 Shihuh tribesmen interrogated between May and June 1971.

The longest interrogation lasted 84 hours, although another individual subjected to almost 33 hours of interrogation had become “so mentally retarded there was no point in questioning him further.”

They did this by forcing the Shihuh detainees into unnatural stress positions against walls, hooding their faces and subjected them to an “electronic noise machine” – the first use of its kind.

In addition to these two incidents in 1971, Ministry of Defence briefing notes reveal two earlier interrogation episodes in 1970, bringing the total to four.

When faced with questions from an MP, officials sought to only admit the interrogations happened somewhere “in the Gulf area but we must clearly be ready for him to press us to the point where we cannot conceal any longer that the operations were in Oman.”

Ultimately parliament was only told the interrogations took place in the “Persian Gulf”, when a committee investigated aspects of the abuse.

A memo showing the MoD did not want to tell parliament it had conducted interrogations in Oman.

The army’s Joint Services Interrogation Wing

Burgess was considered so successful in his interrogations that he would go on to command the Joint Services Interrogation Wing (JSIW), a highly secretive unit within the army’s Intelligence Corps.

The JSIW was responsible for developing new interrogation techniques and simultaneously training soldiers to resist them if they were captured.

The unit’s methods were so extreme that a report written by military psychiatrists warned interrogation subjects could suffer “hysterical” dissociations, terror, delusions and suicidal ideation – even in training scenarios.

If a trainee prisoner needed hospital care “only the absolute minimum of contact should be made” so they could get the “maximum benefit” from the training exercises.

A year before landing in Musandam, the SAS also ran several training exercises for the JSIW.

However when England’s top judge, Lord Parker, was tasked with investigating allegations of torture in Northern Ireland, the Ministry of Defence claimed the SAS were not involved in the evolution of interrogation techniques, despite the fact they were running training exercises and reporting findings back to the JSIW.

These exercises were offered to MI5, the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, Royal Hong Kong Police Special Branch and military students from the USA, Holland, Jordan, Belgium, Germany, Norway and Denmark.

In one exercise, a trainee volunteer believed he was being blamed for the assassination of the Prince of Wales, which he imagined entirely. Another said he would have done anything his interrogator said: “even jumped over a cliff.”

Three participants in an SAS-run exercise required medical treatment where the average interrogation time was three and half hours. This was only half what Burgess’ interrogation team would later subject the Shihuh to.

From Oman to Ireland

After his tour of Oman, John Burgess, a lieutenant-colonel at this point, was sent to Northern Ireland, where he was awarded an OBE for his intelligence work. He would also go on to become the deputy director of the Intelligence Corps between 1977-79, during the Troubles.

He has been described as MI5’s “Northern Ireland Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence … an experienced intelligence officer who had commanded the Special Military Intelligence Unit (SMIU) in the province in the mid-seventies and later the Intelligence Corps depot at Ashford in Kent” by security expert Stephen Dorril in his book The Silent Conspiracy .

The late Irish journalist Frank Doherty wrote that the SMIU had “members working undercover in every police division in Northern Ireland, sometimes posing as RUC men” in order to supervise the local security forces on behalf of MI5.

The Intelligence Corps is known to have worked closely with MI5 and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Special Branch in Northern Ireland; and all have been accused of colluding with loyalist paramilitary groups.

Military intelligence’s learnings from the JSIW in Oman would go on to heavily inform interrogations in Northern Ireland.

Oman was the British government’s breakthrough success with interrogation, with one briefing stating that using specialist officers and bespoke interrogation centres “enabled complete security to be planned and obtained, for the first time during the second phase of operations [in Oman], and subsequently, when a requirement for interrogation was recognised in Northern Ireland.”

The Northern Ireland Office had initially sought to have Metropolitan Police interrogators operating on behalf of the RUC, but this idea was stamped out.

It was finally agreed that the JSIW would provide interrogation training to the RUC Special Branch. They even provided guidance, supervision, and technical assistance to the RUC during Operation Calaba in August 1971.

This saw hundreds of people were arrested and imprisoned without trial on the suspicion that they supported the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

Among those interned, 14 were selected for “deep interrogation”. They were taken to a secret location and subjected to what became known as the five techniques.

The men were hooded and forced to stand against a wall for hours in painful stress positions – as had been done in Oman weeks earlier. White noise was played to overwhelm their senses, as they were deprived of food, water and sleep to weaken their resistance.

The combination of these five interrogation methods was carefully designed to leave no marks, but it was so traumatic that one detainee, 42-year-old Sean McKenna, died prematurely four years later from a heart attack.

When the interrogations came to light later in 1971, MPs were so outraged that Britain’s Conservative government had to commission an inquiry chaired by Lord Parker.

He found that the interrogation tactics were illegal under domestic law. Privately, ministers had gone further. Merlyn Rees, a former Northern Ireland Secretary, described the five techniques as “methods of torture”.

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‘Dirty secret’

However officials managed to conceal the interrogations of the Shihuh despite them having been subjected to worse treatment.

In the official Parker inquiry publication, Oman is not mentioned once. This is because “Oman is such a special case that it should not be covered”, according to Brigadier Richard Bremner, who was inspector of the Intelligence Corps in 1971.

Commenting on the findings, Paul O’Connor from the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry, said: “The declassified documents on Oman are both revealing and relevant to what is happening today in the Strait of Hormuz.

“As the clamour grew here in 1971 for an inquiry into the five torture techniques these documents reveal that government ministers were knowingly providing misleading replies to parliament questions.

“The exact same interrogation methods were being used by British forces in Oman but Ministers made vague references to the ‘Persian Gulf’ when asked where else ‘noise machines’ were used to disorient prisoners during interrogation (the other confirmed uses were Brunei and the North of Ireland.)

“The purpose of this undeclared ‘secret war’ in support of the Sultan was to ensure the safe passage of vital oil supplied through the Strait of Hormuz.

“The documents reveal concerns that the trail from the interrogation centre at Ballykelly RAF base near Derry could potentially lead back to the ‘Persian Gulf’ and yet another dirty secret.”

The post When Britain used torture to control the Strait of Hormuz appeared first on Declassified UK .