Real-life hell of my 'pretend' torture

WHAT does it take to make a man sing like a canary? Not much for a coward.

Bad cop 'Dave' reads the riot act to journalist Damian Whitworth in an 'interrogation experience' in London's West End. Picture: Tom Pilston

"FEET back. Back, back, back, back! Further! Right the way back. Fingertips only! If you move your hands or your feet you'll experience a lot of pain, so don't."

I am standing with my feet a metre apart and the same distance from a wall. I am leaning against the wall, supported by my fingertips. I have a hood over my head. The amplified sound of an electric drill is blaring in my ear.

After a while, this position starts to become very uncomfortable so I ease down off my fingertips on to my palms to relieve the pressure. "Oi!" yells one of my tormentors. "Back on fingertips or I'll pull your fingers out."

In Homeland, it took years of torture and interrogation to break Nicholas Brody and reduce him to a husk of a man who was putty in the hands of his tormentors.

In a disused office building in London's West End, faced with some shouty men in balaclavas and forced to sit and stand in some challenging positions, I last 80 minutes. By then, I am physically exhausted, thoroughly miserable and eager to tell my captors anything they want to hear.

What does it take to make a man sing like a canary? This man can handle being shoved to the ground by a thug waving a gun. I am not too put out by the threats to break bones. I don't take entirely seriously my interrogator's stated desire to explore my rectal passage with his fist.

The moment I realise I've had enough comes after a little more than an hour, as I struggle to sit cross-legged with a straight back and with my hands on my head.

This may not sound overly impressive. Brody endured beatings with barbed wire, being urinated on by his guard and long periods in solitary confinement. Brody, however, was a fictional US marine, played by dashing ginger Damian Lewis, with a television hit series to support. Of course he's tough. I am a real-life cowardly journalist. I, too, am a ginger Damian, but the photos do not lie: there the similarities end.

Emboldened by a Homeland boxed-set binge, I fancy trying my hand at being Brody. That is why I find myself among a small group gathered in a Soho office to meet a bunch of ex-SAS and other former special forces toughs who have promised an "interrogation experience".

There is a great deal of interrogation in Homeland. Not only are there flashbacks to Brody's treatment by jihadist terrorists but there is a lot of CIA grilling of suspects, including Brody. After I have signed a faintly alarming declaration that accepts I am quite happy to be "made to feel uncomfortable both physically and mentally", we are shown clips of some of the scenes, including the bit where a CIA agent stabs the hand of a character he is interrogating.

At this point I have no real sense of what is to come; clearly, no one will be stabbing my hand. It hasn't really occurred to me that I will be shaken up in any way by this experience and, as I am ushered into a disused building, after a morning's surveillance exercise, all I am thinking about is lunch. No sooner has the door slammed than the lights go out and men start waving guns and screaming at us to lie on the ground. There will be no lunch today.

We do as he says, but someone else is lying virtually on top of me so I can't get my head right down. "What the f . . k are you looking at?" one of the thugs yells in my ear. "Eat the dirt. Hands in the small of your back." I am a bit slow doing this and he presses my face to the floor. "Move that head again, I'll kick it like a f . . king football. Do you understand?"

This is all a bit rougher than I imagined it would be and our captors seem to be relishing their roles rather too much. Still, I suspect that is true of all interrogators, so it is probably realistic.

A sack is pulled over my head and I am dragged to my feet and taken into another room and made to stand in the fingertip position. Stress positions are a common tactic used for softening people up for interrogation, but I thought this would be a jolly day out of the office. So, when, after 10 minutes, I lean on my palms rather than my fingertips and get an earful of abuse: I'm pretty sure he won't break my fingers but I fear he may do something else unpleasant so I daren't risk it.

Using amplified sounds, which change from the drill to discordant car alarms and explosions, is another favourite CIA trick. In Homeland, one of Brody's original captors is deprived of sleep by blasts of rock music. I am pouring with sweat in my raincoat and my man-bag is dangling, pathetically and annoyingly, from my neck. I take one hand from the wall to adjust it and one of the brutes bellows into my face and forces my feet further from the wall.

After what feels like hours but is probably about 15 minutes, I am shuffled from the room and pushed into a seat. The sack is removed and a lamp is shone directly into my eyes. "F . . king look at me, not the f . . king lamp." The speaker, wearing a balaclava, demands my name. As soon as I answer, he barks: "When?"

"When what?"

"I ask the questions round here, not you, you piece of shit."

He runs through rapid-fire questions: who I am, where I live and with whom. I say "um" and he gets right in my face. "You say 'um' one more f . . king time and I will jam this pen in your eye. Do you understand me? Do you f . . king understand me?"

"I understand you."

"If you blink one more time, I'll dig it out with a f . . king spoon."

I let slip an "er".

"You say 'er' one more f . . king time . . ."

I mistakenly refer to Homeland as a film. "What film? What f . . ing film? There's no f . . king film. Have you been paying attention today or what?"

He's had enough. "I f . . king dislike you, f . . king intensely, and there is nothing more I would like to do than f . . king shove my fist up your arse and f . . king cut your throat and do it to your f . . king wife and kids. Would you like that?"

"No, I wouldn't."

"Get this f . . king piece of shit out of here. F . . k off!"

Not very friendly, but I'm a journalist and sometimes people talk to us like that. Back in the other room, on my fingertips, the physical discomfort bordering on pain is not so easily ignored.

A few years ago I did basic hostile-environment training. We were subjected to kidnap scenarios, but there were none of these horrible positions that make a semi-fit, middle-aged man realise how useless he'd be in a seriously sticky situation. I am made to sit with my hands on my head cross-legged. I can't get my back straight but the thug in the room keeps trying to force me upright.

Each time I sense he has moved away, I hunch over for some relief. Moments later, he is back. Then I'm up on my fingertips against the wall again and he's chilling the sweat on my face with a fan, another Homeland CIA trick.

I yearn to be taken into the interrogation room again so the stress positions stop. This is not a subtle business. Physical pain loosens tongues. Eventually it's my turn for the good-cop routine. I'm hauled through to the interrogation room and this time I am met by the CIA agent Carrie Mathison character, a smiling blonde woman. In the second series of Homeland, Carrie gives a masterclass in how to use tenderness to elicit information from a suspect who has been badly roughed up by a bad-cop colleague.

This woman tells me she is the "welfare officer". An obvious lie. I know full well she is just being friendly to lull me into telling her everything about myself and what I have been doing today.

In hostile-environment training I was taught to be as co-operative as possible under interrogation because if you are caught in a lie or upset your captors you could be in serious trouble. I wish I could say that this is why I tell her the names of the other people in my group and exactly what we were doing, but really I hope to delay the moment I am sent back into the other room.

After having the sack yanked over my head again, I am about to quit when we are hauled out and seated. Our hoods are removed. The interrogator whips his balaclava off and grins broadly. "I'm Dave and you can relax!"

We stare at him blankly. "It's not a trick, it is over," he says.

Dave was in the SAS and explains that interrogators are not going to keep to the letter of the Geneva Conventions. "In reality, and as seen in Homeland, they are going to physically abuse you in some way. The CIA will do it for hours and hours and days and days. They don't need to drill the kneecaps and beat somebody about the head to make them extremely uncomfortable.

"Our aim was to make you think: 'I want to stay in this room. It is a lot more comfortable here being shouted at than it is going next door with guards forcing me to stand in extremely uncomfortable positions' . . . The key thing is that, if you collapse against the wall, don't give in. But it's easier said than done."

I stagger out and sit slumped and dazed on the Tube. "What have you been doing?" my wife says when I get home. I mutter something and go for a lie-down, feeling a bit ill and a bit ashamed.
The Times

The third season of Homeland begins tonight on Ten at 8.30pm.