The Monocled World War II Interrogator

The gloomy, sprawling Victorian mansion is nestled in the center of Ham Common, a village outside London. During World War I, Latchmere House served as a hospital for the Ministry of Defence; officers were treated for shell shock in the bucolic setting along the Thames. But by World War II, Her Majesty’s Prison Service had taken control of the house and surrounded it with barbed wire. The silence there gave little indication of the intensity and importance of the work being done in the building known as Camp 020, MI5’s secret interrogation center. Within those walls, captured German agents were questioned under the command of a ferociously tempered British officer named Lieutenant Colonel Robin Stephens. Boorish, disdainful of the non-English but half-German himself, Stephens was nicknamed “Tin Eye” for the monocle he was said to wear even when he slept. He had a record of breaking down even the most hardened of German spies.