The Great Wash

By BERNARD LEVIN AM sure,' said President Eisen- hower between rounds, 'Powers has not been brainwashed.' And Captain Powers's father took one look at his son's demeanour in the dock and told reporters in confirmation, 'That's my boy.' The President's certainty, not to mention that of Captain Powers's family and the whole of the British press, seems to have been based on the fact that Captain Powers obviously believed what he was saying. Since this is precisely the effect that brainwashing is meant to have on its victims, it is not easy to understand the logic that argues from such an effect to the absence of a cause for it. As a matter of fact, to anybody with five senses and the ability to keep his head while all around him are throwing theirs away, it is clear that Captain Powers was meticulously brain- washed into the exact degree of co-operation that his captors required and then carefully rehearsed in the part his shattered will was to play.

This I shall presently demonstrate. But before doing so, I had better say clearly that I am not criticising Captain Powers for his behaviour. Indeed, I am concerned to vindicate the character of a brave young man whom the incompetence, cowardice and irresolution of too many Western leaders and voices of opinion have eagerly helped to condemn and betray. There is not the slightest doubt that Captain Powers compromised with the Russians; and the vacillating poltroonery of Presi- dent Eisenhower leaves us to conclude that he did so of his own free will. But he didn't.

First, the evidence a posteriori. There is almost too much of this. The entire bearing during the trial of Captain Powers could only be that of a man who had been carefully taken through the role he was to play. He answered difficult and dangerous questions without hesitation, and with- out relaxing the air of confidently calculated deference that was the very last attitude a man in his position, with his training, could have been expected to adopt on his own. At no time did he consult sotto voce with Grinev, his 'defence counsel' (a Soviet lawyer was recently disbarred for arguing that the client he was defending was not guilty of the charge against him); though at a number of points such consultation seemed essential. And the language in which he confessed his 'crime' was exactly the language that we have heard over and over again from the dock in Soviet show-trials. 'I have committed a most serious crime and deserve pUnishment. . . : I have committed a crime . . . deeply repentant and profoundly sorry . . . a man who has deeply realised his guilt.' Most macabre touch of all was his demeanour during his final statement to the 'judges,' which was that of a Christian martyr going with genuine gladness to the lions—the precise, textbook effect that the unburdening of the conditioned mind through induced confession inevitably has.

The chief objection to the argument that Captain Powers was brainwashed has been, pathetically, that he argued with the prosecution from time to time. But it is not the fact of his answering back that is important; what counts is the area in which he was permitted this carefully- controlled exercise at the end of a carefully- measured rope. He was allowed to disagree with the prosecution on such trivia as the markings on his aeroplane; but he made, with hideous and tragic completeness, all the points that were im- portant to the Soviet case. He admitted flying his aeroplane from Turkey, from Pakistan and from Germany. He admitted that his flight had de- stroyed the Summit Conference—but this, of course, was the fault of those who sent him, for whose decision he was profoundly sorry. He de- clared that he would not, given the choice again, undertake such work. His aeroplane, he said, had been serviced by British forces. And—the point at which the stage-manager's head could be seen poking round the wings even by the blind— Cardinal Spellman had been at Adana to bring the blessing of the Church to the aggressive plans of the American warmongers.

There was, after all, no need for Captain Powers to confess in the more traditional manner of Moscow trials of the Stalin model: President Eisenhower and Mr. Herter had obligingly done this for him months ago. His role was a more subtle and complex one—that of chief witness for the prosecution in the Soviet indictment of the United States Government and its allies. He acted that part to perfection—but can it be seri- ously supposed that he would have been allowed on to the stage if the producer had not been quite certain that he would be word-perfect? One unscripted outburst, one false step, and the whole evil charade would have fallen apart.

As it was, it received rave notices from practi- cally the whole of the British press, some of which ought to have known better. The flight was 'a foolish, ill-timed blunder,' an example of 'American folly.' The trial was 'conducted fairly,' and 'when Powers is sentenced the whole Western alliance is sentenced.' The success of the trial— which was after all never meant to be anything but a propaganda exercise—must have astonished its organisers, who could hardly have believed that they would get such reactions in the com- mitted nations of the West, whatever might have been the effect in Delhi, Accra or Singapore. Once again, there is demonstrated—as a by- product of the trial—the effect of the Soviet censorship on reporting from Moscow. Only one British national newspaper—the Daily Express— has a resident correspondent in Moscow, together with a representative of Reuters. (There are about nine resident Americans.) I have seen at first hand the conditions under which these men must work, which is quite simply that they are not permitteetto send home the truth in any form; when they are relaying some official Soviet state- ment, any comment or explanation they may add to expose its falsity will be immediately excluded by the censor, and a correspondent who re- peatedly submits censorable material is warned that he may be expelled if he does so any more. With remarkable skill and even more remarkable patience, these men continue to probe for any chink through which they may let the world know the reality of Soviet conditions, and of course when their copy arrives it may well have added to it the gloss the senders cannot supply.

The correspondents who covered the trial did as good a job as the circumstances allowed. But in fact the pass was sold in London and Washing- ton, not in Moscow. For the a priori evidence that Captain Powers was brainwashed into his co-operation is stronger, and more melancholy, than the deductive kind. I do not rely on such details as the fact that he was kept in solitary confinement for 108 days, which to a man accus- tomed to gregarious service life must have been nearly enough on its own to break his spirit. Nor is it necessary to rely on the fact that he was completely cut off from any contact with the West —either through letters or newspapers—during the whole period; and that he was not allowed to see the American lawyers retained on his behalf, or his wife, before the end of the trial (though this last fact is immensely significant; the irrup- t:on into his induced fantasies of a living contact with reality, such as his wife, might well have destroyed the whole elaborate facade in a moment).

Because the sad truth is that we have been here before. There is no need to compare Captain Powers's trial with the Stalin show-trials, in which men would confess to crimes which they had not only not committed but which it was quite im- possible for them to have committed. If we think of such trials, it is indeed true that the one which has just finished bears no relation to the one—for instance—in which Yagoda, then head of the Ogpu, confessed that he had murdered his pre- decessor by spraying his office with poison from a flit-gun; nor to the one in which a doctor named Levin confessed to the murder of Maxim Gorki; nor even to the terrible Slansky-Clementis trial. But the whole of the Captain Powers trial was played out fifteen years ago, in the very same building—the Hall of Columns in Moscow—and to the very same encomiums of praise from the Times for the fairness of the proceedings and obvious independence of the accused.

Sixteen Polish leaders went to Moscow at the end of the war to discuss co-operation with the Red Army. They disappeared for three months, and were suddenly produced for trial in the Hall of Columns on trumped-up charges. The parallels between the two trials seem positively uncanny until one realises that they are not uncanny at all. Hear the Times, in June, 1945:

All the accused except one stated that the charges brought against them were wholly or partly correct. . . .

The accused men showed no sign of strain and listened attentively to the witnesses.. . .

General Ockulicki, who defended himself with spirit, denied . . . [he] stated his case with a vigour that has not deserted him at any time since the trial. . . .

Three men were acquitted [they had pleaded guilty]. . . . Baginsel, one of Mr. Eden's candi- dates for a new Polish Government, one year ... Urbansk, another of Mr. Eden's candi- dates, four months . . . the trial was conducted in an atmosphere of slackening ten- sion. . . .

A noteworthy feature was the freedom allowed the Poles in setting forth their political views.... General Ockulicki . . . said he had been treated well during his imprisonment.. .

The conclusion of the trial . . . will help clear up many misunderstandings. . . .

Plus ca change. But it ought to. Because one of the sixteen Polish leaders subsequently escaped to the West. He was Mr. Stypulkowski, and he told his story in Invitation to Moscow (Thames and Hudson, 1951), in which he related, in the most meticulous detail, how the trick was done. The continuous interrogations, the physical dis- comforts that do not amount, in the eyes of Times-washed sophisticates, to torture, the re- peatedly broken sleep, the carefully calculated undernourishment, the systematic questioning. Hear Stypulkowski: The cold in my cell was enough to make my, breath visible, and as my strength waned I felt it more.

Over the door is a very strong electric light bulb. It is lit almost incessantly and is always on at night. The beam falls directly on the bed of the prisoner. If at any time of the night I turned on my side, always the guard entered the cell and turned my head so that' my eyes should directly face the lamp.

One always had to leave the hands uncovered . . . [the guard] would gently, like a nurse with a child, remove my hands from under the blanket. . . . This always woke me, and pre- vented me for a long time from falling asleep again.

During the seventy days of my examination there was only one night when I was not sum- moned.

At the end of countless hours of discussion with Tichonov, he still maintained that I had not told him anything at all . . . when at 4 a.m. i was called to the seventh examination 1 thought: twenty will be about my limit. I had to enda one hundred and forty-one.

The prisoner still relies on his intelligence. t. critical powers and his character to guide by and restrict his depositions to harmless slat ments of fact. But here he is wrong. He does n realise that during the few weeks of questitnur his faculties have diminished. his po%% ci reason has become corrupted Did Captain Powers, after all this. say that he had not been ill-treated? So, in e.laci the same words, did General Ockulicki. one Mr. Stypulkowski's fellow-prisoners.

And if Mr. Stypulkowski's evidence w as not sufficient, and it evidently wasn't, there was that of Mr. Alex Weissberg. who detailed in his Conspiracy of Silence the same treatment leading to the same effect. He tells how he graduallY came to wonder whether the idiot rigmarole with which he had been charged (the attempted assr siltation of Stalin and Voroshilov) might in I've be true; if you think that unlikely, try being deprived of sleep altogether for seven days and nights on end, and see how real reality seems to you. In the end, even a man as resilient as Mr. Wcissberg 'confessed' (his interrogators cried out at one point that he was torturing them), but was never put on trial, because he had, while he was fighting the treatment, repeatedly withdrawn confessions he had just made, and his captors could never be sure that he would not depart from the script in court. (So he was handed over to the Nazis under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; he too eventually escaped to freedom.)

Powers cracked in something under 108 days.

Most of us would be unlikely 'to last half that time under treatment such as Stypulkowski and Weissberg—and a dozen others—recordi (Actually, he may not haVe lasted quite that long, because if they had to reduce him to the condi- tion one of Stypulkowski's fellow-prisoners reached—'His eyes were restless and wild, sunk deep in his skull. His skin was yellow and wrinkled. . . . The face . . . was spotted. . • His body was incessantly shaking. . . . His feet were so swollen that they almost overlapped his footwear. His voice was uncertain and spasmodic' ---they would have needed a few weeks to get him looking fit again. Did he deny ill-treatment? So did the man Stypulkowski thus describes.)

And having cracked, and played his part to

perfection, he was rewarded by the Times saying that his trial had been 'conducted fairly,' and that 'a man who admits total guilt can be given a lair hearing in Russia,' and that 'the evidence given by Powers was sufficiently embarrassing for the West not to need any embellishing.'

We have no shadow of right to condemn Captain Powers for co-operating with the enemY. What is more, we would still have no right to condemn him even if everything said by the Russians and the Times about the fairness of the trial and the propriety of his treatment were flue. for no man has the right to ask that another be a hero. But can there be condemnation too strong for those in the West who betrayed him before his trial, during his trial, and after his trial? We believe that the democratic way of life is prefer- able, on moral grounds among others, to the Communist. It is a belief that has been sadly shaken, these last few weeks, and can never again be quite secure while Captain Powers lies in g 1

,c) • Corruptio optimi pessima.

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