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July 16, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

49:45

Edition 739 - Margalit Fox

"The Confidence Men" is the spellbinding tale of two servicemen - one British and one Australian - who pull off a daring prison escape during World War One - using pure deception - and a Ouija Board! It's a story involving lies, paranormality, deep terror and comedy... Margalit Fox is a superb storyteller and researcher.

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This is the unexplained.
	Circling the globe like a great girdle of interest and hopefully entertainment for you.
	17 and a half years of this podcast.
	I don't know.
	How do you do it, Howard?
	I've no idea, but I'm really pleased that you seem to be liking it.
	Thank you for all of the emails and response and the nice things that you say.
	They really do keep me going at those times when inevitably you feel a bit low and you wonder, you know, what you're doing and are you getting anywhere?
	And, you know, your emails always help.
	Now, this edition of the show is going to be something taken from my radio show, an interview that I loved doing.
	And it's a little different.
	It's a story.
	It's a true story.
	It's the story of a daring wartime, almost Alcatraz-style prison escape, enabled by a lot of deception and a Ouija board.
	It's got some echoes of the story of Kolditz, you know, the German prisoner of war camp in which British and Allied prisoners were kept.
	It even includes the story of feigning insanity in order to get released, which was a theme in the Kolditz story.
	The person I'm speaking with is a wonderful storyteller, not only in her writing, but also in her speaking, as you're going to hear.
	The book is called The Confidence Men.
	It hasn't been out very long.
	It's Margolite Fox and her riveting account of two British officers, actually one Australian, who sprang themselves from an Ottoman prisoner camp during World War I, we have to say.
	Most of these stories seem to be from World War II.
	It's a marvelous story.
	I think it's well worth hearing.
	And although it's not specifically about ghosts or weirdness, it's very much about the human psyche.
	And it's about the way that deception works.
	And the way that some people, when deceived, refuse to believe that they have been deceived, you know, which may be a theme of some people might argue some political happenings in recent years.
	That, you know, people are told something, and even when it's proved to be not so, then they feel that for their sake, maybe for other sakes, that they have to hold on to it.
	This is a classic case of that, but years and years before a lot of psychoanalysis and the internet and all the rest of it.
	It's a marvelously told story, which I absolutely loved reading, and I don't have a lot of time in my life for reading.
	The book is called The Confidence Men.
	The story is a true story of two remarkable people.
	And from my television show now, we're going to hear that story.
	Like I say, thank you very much to you for being part of this show.
	And as I have said, you know, thank you very much to Adam for his work on the show.
	All right.
	This is Margolit Fox.
	And again, this book, which is well worth reading, is called The Confidence Men.
	Great story.
	Margolette Fox is an author who has found and is retelling, but in her way, an astonishing story.
	I had no idea about this one.
	And it's a wartime story, but unusually it's a World War I story from the Great War, not World War II.
	And the story involves a daring wartime Alcatraz-style prison escape that was facilitated by powers of deception and a Ouija board, essentially.
	It's a wonderful story.
	Two British prisoners of war in Turkey in the First World War, I think 1917 was the year.
	I think they were captured in 1916.
	And they pulled off what people today in London would call a stunt to get themselves out or try and get themselves out of incarceration in a cul-it-style prison for prisoners of war like themselves that was claimed to be unbustable out from because of the terrain that it was in.
	I mean, it was in such difficult terrain, which included a desert nearby, that people were just not able to escape.
	So they didn't even bother putting a fence up because you couldn't get out.
	Unless you found some method of subterfuge, which these two people did.
	And the two people were Elias Jones and Cedric Hill.
	Online to us now, I've done way too much talking.
	Here's Margolita Fox, who wrote the book about this story.
	Margolite, thank you very much for coming on.
	Am I pronouncing your name right?
	Is it Margolites?
	Margolites.
	It's Margolit Rhymes with Sweet, which I hope people will think this story is a sweet story.
	And thank you for having me.
	Hello from broiling hot New York.
	How hot's it in New York today?
	It's pretty hot here in London.
	In the high 80s, I believe.
	I didn't check today because it's simply too dispiriting to know the temperature.
	I think that's a good idea.
	Unfortunately, I checked before I got the train tonight, and I was sorry I did it.
	Okay, we need to unpick this, and we've got three segments to do it.
	We've got some commercials to run in between everything.
	So I'm going to try and delineate it.
	This is a great story.
	Now, I was brought up, as you might be able to see from my face and my age, on stories of codits and British prisoners and prisoners of all allied countries being kept in this castle in Germany that the Germans claim was unescapable from, if that's the word, inescapable from, because of its location and the fact that it was an old castle.
	I had no idea that there may have been a similar story in World War I, and you found it.
	That's right.
	And of course, the story was there for the taking, but it's one of those stories, like everything I like to write about, that had slipped into a crevice in history.
	And I had the great privilege, with 100 years of hindsight and everything we've learned about psychology, of levering it out again.
	And the short version of the story, as we say here, the elevator pitch, if I were to give it to an editor or a Hollywood producer, they would think I had lost my marbles.
	But the short version is literally this.
	In the depths of World War I, two handsome young British officers escaped from a remote Ottoman prisoner of war camp by means of a Ouija Board.
	It sounds mental, yet that is literally what happened.
	But indeed, Marguerite, it was mental, wasn't it?
	Because the technique they used was, and we'll get into it, we won't spoil it for people by bringing it all on stage right now, but the technique they used was a technique that I suspect a lot of politicians today use.
	In other words, if you create a lie and you look like you believe it and you sell it well enough, surprise, surprise, people will believe you.
	That's right.
	And that psychological art of slowly, imperceptibly reeling people in, lulling them into suspending critical thinking and believing any line of malarkey you want to sell them, that's what psychologists now call coercive persuasion.
	And it abets the work of everyone from confidence men, which our two heroes had to become in order to escape, to present-day figures like advertisers, cult leaders, and let's face it, political demagogues.
	All we have to do is look all around us.
	You said that, not me, but you'll get no disagreement on me.
	I mean, it's the technique that is used here if you're confident with a thing, like these guys were, in an era when we didn't have.
	And I think I saw an interview with you where you pointed this point out precisely, that we didn't have the understanding of psychiatry, psychology, and all the rest of it.
	But these guys used all of those techniques in order to persuade the commandant of the place that they were in, you know, who was not the nicest person because, you know, I guess that went along with the job, that they were genuine in what they were doing.
	Let's talk about the two men first, Elias Jones, Cedric Hill.
	You know, who were they and how did they come to be out there?
	I couldn't have asked for a better buddy movie scenario because these two men who clearly, from their own recountings of the events, each one wrote a memoir after the Great War, they clearly came to love and trust and depend on each other deeply, but they never would have met had it not been for the war because they couldn't have come from more different backgrounds.
	Elias Henry Jones, known to everyone as Harry Jones, was the Oxford educated son of a British knight.
	His father, Sir Henry Jones, was one of the most famous moral philosophers in the world.
	And young Harry himself was a barrister.
	Before the war, he had joined the colonial service and became a magistrate in what was then British Burma.
	Now, on the other hand, his partner in crime, Cedric Hill, had never been to university.
	He was from a sheep and cattle family in the Australian countryside.
	And before the war, he was working as a mechanic on a sheep station in Queensland.
	Couldn't have been from more different backgrounds.
	Were they captured together?
	They were not.
	One of the reasons I found this book a real fascination and a real privilege to do was because this story, in a sense, had been doubly marginalized by history.
	As you say, the wartime escape stories that we all know and love, and I'm just as guilty as the next person loving those movies, think about what they all have in common.
	Escape from Kolditz, Stalag 17, The Great Escape, The Wooden Horse, all World War II.
	Now, it goes without saying that plenty of World War I prisoners escaped and some even wrote memoirs, but for various reasons, their stories are much less well known by our generation.
	And the second marginalization was that when we do think of the Great War, we think of the Western Front, Landers Field.
	You know, we only have to see the poppies in British lapels every November to take the point.
	Yet, this story took place in the Ottoman theater, which is often called rightly the forgotten theater of the Great War.
	And in that theater, Harry Jones, who was an artilleryman, was captured in the Mesopotamian theater after the disastrous five-month siege of Kut, at which tens of thousands were killed and tens of thousands of British were taken prisoner, placed on a devastating two-month forced march all through Mesopotamian desert and mountains.
	He eventually wound up at Yozgod, this remote prison camp in the mountains of Anatolia, in the summer of 1916.
	His co-conspirator, Cedric Hill, was actually captured in a different theater.
	He was a flyer.
	Fascinatingly, he had wanted to fly since he was a boy in Australia, but the airplane was such a new technology that Australia didn't yet have a fully functioning military air corps.
	So he set sail for England, where he joined the Royal Flying Corps, the precursor of the RAF.
	What an amazing man.
	Yes, and he was on a solar reconnaissance mission in a biplane that looks as though to modernize a gust of wind would take it out.
	He was shot down over Egypt.
	He too was captured, marched to Yozgad, and arrived there about two weeks after Jones.
	So they didn't know each other.
	Now, you said marched to Yozgad.
	Now, this is a hard jail.
	They said it was escape-proof.
	But it wasn't just the experience of being there that was difficult.
	It was the getting there, wasn't it?
	Because a lot of people died getting there on a terrible, tortuous march.
	Right.
	On the march that Jones was on, the march after the British raised the white flag after the siege of Kut Alamara, that took two months through desert, over mountains.
	The men who lived to be forced on the march were already ill, injured.
	Had they been starving to death, 15 To 20 men were dying of starvation a day at the time the British surrendered.
	That was one of the reasons they did surrender.
	And so, of course, on the march, the conditions there-desert, mountains, thirst, being whipped along by the Ottomans overseeing them, men simply dropped and died and were left waiting for them.
	So these men who were already depleted were faced with a tortuous march, and many of them obviously wouldn't make it.
	That's right.
	One of the, there's a quote in Jones's 1919 memoir where a British officer who'd been captured in another theater saw this ragged column of the men from Kut Alamara passing.
	He turned to his compatriot and said, by God, those fellows have been through it.
	They all look fit for nothing but hospital.
	And indeed, it was hospital or the grave for many of them.
	But those who survived were dispatched to various remote POW camps, and Jones, along with 100 other British officers, was sent to Yozgod, 4,000 feet above sea level.
	It was considered, it was one of the remotest camps in the Ottoman Empire, and as you say, by virtue of geography, considered escape-proof.
	But there was something else that precluded escape even more forcibly.
	On orders of the iron-fisted camp commandant, an escape attempt by any one British officer, even just an attempt, would result in the most severe reprisals, lockdown, solitary confinement, and even execution on every single British officer who remained behind.
	So men of honor, the British in turn there swore to one another that they would not flee.
	It was called giving their parole in the military language of the day because they knew to do so would endanger the lives of all of their countrymen.
	How brutal.
	Did anybody, before this escape effort that we're going to talk about, did anybody try?
	It's interesting.
	When Hill got there, he was a scrappy, cocky, young Aussie.
	And it's important to know how young these guys were.
	They were junior officers.
	Jones was maybe in his early 30s.
	Hill was only about 25, 26.
	He was this scrappy young guy, not married.
	He felt he had nothing to lose.
	He chafed and seethed at the idea of giving parole.
	So he started training for a solo escape in secret.
	This was before he met Jones.
	They were confined in different houses, didn't know each other except perhaps by sight.
	And because there are few secrets in a prisoner of war camp, word got back to the senior British officer interned there that young Lieutenant Cedric Hill was plotting an escape.
	And of course, he was hauled before this officer, forced to give his parole, and all his escape plans were quashed.
	So farther on, when Jones and Hill conceive a con game that they hope will spring them from prisoner of war camp, they have the onus not only of keeping it secret from their captors, but also of keeping it secret from their fellow captives, because the captives would immediately put the kibosh on any escape plans they got wind of.
	I'm glad you used that.
	It's a very World War I word, kibosh.
	Okay, so we're coming up to commercials in a couple of minutes here.
	Let's tantalize my viewer and listener with this.
	The idea of using a Ouija board came about in a particular way, wasn't it?
	Wasn't Elias Harry Jones sent one or told about a Ouija board in a letter that he was allowed to receive through the Red Cross?
	Isn't that the story?
	That's right.
	The Ouija board came about purely as a lark for the entertainment of Jones and his fellow prisoners.
	And you can tell me how much you want to tell folks now or whether you want me to save it for the break.
	But it came about in a very interesting way.
	All right.
	Well, give me the germ of how he came out with the idea that not only are we going to play with this, because they did play with this and, you know, they got some results that we'll discuss in the next segment, but, you know, the idea of this could be a way to get out of here.
	I mean, you've got to have a particular kind of brain to come up with that, haven't you?
	Right.
	And the idea that it could be a ticket to freedom didn't come till months later.
	Originally, the Ouija board was conceived purely as entertainment because the chronic problem that these men in captivity faced, as all such people do, was boredom.
	You're with the same people day after day, hearing the same stories.
	You have few books, few diversions, you can't get out, you're locked in every night.
	And so they all faced a malady that would be known soon as barbed wire disease, based on studies of prisoner of war.
	And the hallmarks are depression and rushing ennui.
	And barbed wire disease is what all of us have experienced during these years of lockdown in recent times.
	You'll get no disagreement from me about that.
	I did two years of this show when it was on radio from home, and I started climbing the walls by the end of it.
	It is, and you describe this yourself, Maganit, as a story of cunning, danger, and farce.
	All of those things, not necessarily an equal measure in this story, the confidence men, about two British service people who were kept in a seemingly escape-proof prisoner of war camp in World War I in Turkey.
	But managed to get themselves out of there.
	But thereby hangs a big tale.
	The idea developed from the receipt of, or rather news of, a Ouija board.
	Right?
	Did they make a Ouija board?
	What happened?
	One day in early 1917, Harry Jones, our British officer, gets a postcard from an aunt in Britain.
	She knows he and his compatriots have these long, empty days with nothing to do, so she suggests something they'd never before considered, that he and his comrades start experimenting With a Ouija board.
	But if you're in a remote prisoner of war camp in Anatolia in 1917, you can't very well go to Woolworths and buy a commercial Ouija board as we all did when we were kids.
	So you make one.
	You make one out of found objects, out of any scrap materials that come to hand.
	And so what they made is unlike the rectangular boards we're used to seeing, it was a square of polished scrap iron topped by a raised wooden ring, oh, maybe about a foot across.
	Around the ring, the men in Jones's house where he was confined cut the 26 letters of the alphabet out of paper and pasted them in random order around this ring.
	And for the planchette, the little pointer that moves, again, they found objects, something erzots.
	They used an inverted drinking glass, which had begun life as a jar of potted meat in one of the prisoners' food parcels.
	So night after night, sitting at a rickety table, which like everything else in their empty house where they were confined, was made from salvage, various British officers took turns placing their fingers lightly on this upturned water tumbler and waiting for the spirits to speak.
	Night after night, nothing happened.
	Right.
	Now, you say night after night, nothing happened.
	But then it started.
	Now, the story of how it started, I think, is interesting in itself.
	And then what was subsequently connected with, supposedly, is even more interesting than that.
	Can you go through the stages?
	Indeed.
	Harry Jones, who was both an inveterate trickster and clearly a very good-hearted fellow, saw that this effort at amusement was going to end in failure, as so many of their efforts at amusement had.
	They'd already been through chess, poker, amazingly roulette with a homemade roulette wheel, and all had paled over time.
	So as the Ouija board looked as though it too was going to end in failure, Jones, who had a brilliant visual memory, nearly photographic memory, he had long since internalized the positions of these random letters all the way around the boards.
	So he said, I think I feel the spirits moving through me.
	And indeed, with his eyes closed, in fact, ultimately blindfolded, as depicted on the cover of the UK edition behind me, he could push this inverted drinking glass to letters and spell out words that were supposedly from the spirit world.
	And he was no fool.
	Whom do men who've been interned for a long time want to hear from?
	The ghost of a saucy, ribbled wench, in this case named Sally.
	And Jones, in his memoir, was too much of a Victorian gentleman to spell out exactly what Sally said, but it was clear she was saying some pretty raunchy stuff.
	And that guaranteed an audience.
	That guaranteed.
	The men were delighted.
	Night after night, more and more men pressed around the table, and crucially, more and more men became believers.
	So without even trying, without even conceiving of this as an escape plot, Jones had already made his first converts.
	Was there...
	I wouldn't recommend people use them.
	And, you know, that's just common sense, I'd say.
	But a lot of people did experiment with these things in the 60s and 70s.
	And, you know, there are people who write books about Ouija boards.
	Was there ever any suggestion that the messages that were coming through were anything other than complete invention?
	Jones, of course, who was the mastermind of first of simply using the board as entertainment, knew that it was a preposterous idea to suppose the spirits could actually be channeled.
	But as you say, that idea was very much in the air.
	The intense interest in spiritualism that had swelled in the Victorian age, of course, had a resurgence during wartime as families of war dead on both sides of the Atlantic sought to contact fallen loved ones.
	And there was a great upsurge of spiritual charlatanism where these mountebanks who knew full well they were deceiving bereaved families were willing to bilk families for a lot of money and pretend they were contacting war dead.
	So in a sense, the ideology was in the air and Jones was very smart.
	He knew he could capitalize on the fact that the culture was leaning toward belief anyway.
	But he knew from day one that what he was doing was trickery, pure and simple.
	But it was purging to an extent that sense of, as you call it, that I think in one interview I heard you do, did you call it something like a festival or fiesta of ennui?
	There was so much boredom there.
	You know, if anything was going to break the boredom, the roulette wasn't doing it, but this absolutely did because it was pure theatre.
	And, you know, Elias Harry Jones absolutely knew that.
	Not only did they come out with Sally, but I think there was another woman, Dorothy.
	Then he started branching out into other characters, including, is it Silas P. Warren and then a pure spirit that I think they called the spook?
	That's right.
	And it was, as you say, it was theater with Jones as the unseen puppet master creating these delightful characters.
	You had Saucy Sally, you had the cantankerous American Silas P. Warner, and then the Orgos, the most powerful of all, known simply as the spook.
	And it was the spook who ultimately would have a starring role in the confidence game that Jones and Hill would enact.
	So was this a fully formed notion at that stage that I might be able to use this to get myself out of this inescapable incarceration?
	Was that beginning to form at that point?
	Or This was just pure entertainment then?
	It was pure entertainment and remained so for several months until the aha moment came for Jones.
	What happened was this.
	The camp interpreter, who was a runty little man known derisively among the British officers as the pimple.
	And I want to get down and kiss the ground in thanks for the pimple because he gives the book, this true story, moments of high comedy that rival anything in Catch-22, let's say.
	So one day, several months after this Ouija board as entertainment had begun, the Pimple sidles up to Jones, and there are no secrets in a prisoner of war camp.
	So he says, I hear you were a student of spiritism, no?
	And Jones thinks privately, oh my God, am I going to be punished?
	So he very occasionally says, well, yes, sort of.
	And the Pimple leans in closer and whispers, so can the spirits find a buried treasure?
	Now, it had long, this is 1917 in Anatolia, all of the Ottoman, the Armenians in the region had been murdered or purged in the Great Genocide of 1915.
	In fact, the prisoners at Yozgod were kept in empty private homes that had belonged to murdered Armenian families.
	So the prisoners knew that it had long been rumored that one or more rich Armenians of the region, anticipating the coming genocide, had converted their wealth to gold and buried it somewhere.
	And that the Turkish captors of the POW camp had been searching for that treasure in vain.
	So when the pimple says, can the spirit find a buried treasure?
	That is Jones' aha moment.
	And for the first time he thinks, maybe I can foment the same degree of belief in my captors that I have already in my fellow captives, but for much higher stakes.
	Now we're no longer playing for mere amusement.
	We're playing for some way.
	I don't yet know how, I don't know where, but it'll open the door to freedom.
	So what was the mechanic?
	This is great.
	What was the mechanic whereby the spirit, the spook, whatever you want to call it, started to filter out little bits of information that would suggest to those who would be, and here we have it, isn't it?
	It's the whole political thing, isn't it?
	You've got an audience who would be conditioned to believe this because of the background, the idea that some of the treasure was buried in various places.
	So, you know, you've got a willing consumer, a willing consumer there.
	So how do you start filtering out information to get to the people who might actually allow you to get out of there, which presumably was the end game for this, allow you to get out of there in search of X-Marks the Spot?
	That's right.
	Well, Jones knows, as you say, he's had the larger narrative handed to him.
	He knows that whatever he does, there has to be a hunt for buried treasure involved because his Ottoman captors already believe that such treasure exists.
	So that work has been done for him already.
	He also knows that he'll need a partner, that the task ahead, whatever it may be, is too big for a single conman.
	So he chooses Cedric Hill for a couple of reasons.
	Hill, as we know from his aborted solo escape attempt, wants to escape as fiercely as Jones.
	And Hill in civilian life was a skilled semi-professional magician.
	He's a brilliant sleight-of-hand artist.
	Now, that's going to come in awfully handy when you're making a con game centering on a ghostly treasure hunt.
	So the two of them join forces and begin plotting what today would be called a long con.
	And it was enacted literally over more than a year.
	Months and months of planning, months and months of rehearsal.
	They get the pimple who was the most susceptible of their captors to start coming to covert seances.
	Little by little, in tiny doses, they meet out the following story.
	A certain rich Armenian of Yozgod, anticipating the coming troubles, converted his wealth to gold and buried it somewhere in the region.
	We don't quite know where.
	He, as he did, gave clues to the treasure's whereabouts to three friends whom he expected to survive the war.
	The first clue told the spot from which to measure.
	The second told the distance to measure.
	The third told the direction to measure.
	The three combined, and only the three combined, would yield the treasure.
	He buried the clues in separate spots and then went off to his doom.
	The Pimple's getting more and more excited, and they know that reports of these seances are filtering back to the iron-fisted camp commandant, Kizim Bey.
	But the Commandant is wary.
	He's aloof.
	He's very protective of this nice, soft job he has, running a prison camp in a remote location, and he won't come and he won't come.
	So for months, the focus is reeling in the Commandant, making him part of the scheme, and getting hard evidence that will implicate him as being in league with the prisoner's escape, because this will protect the compatriots they're leaving behind.
	So this is kind of Shorshank Redemption style, is it that they were reeling the commandant, who was a hard nut into all of this, the hardest nut of all to convince.
	But once they got him Involved in this, he would then be trapped because he would be trapped for the reason that he participated in it.
	That's right.
	And what could be more amenable to a court-martial than a prison camp commandant being in league with the escape of two prisoners in his charge?
	But the amazing thing is, if the con game went well, they would all go, Jones, Hill, and three of their captors, including the Commandant, they would all go on the road in search of this non-existent, storied, vast buried treasure.
	And if all went well, the Commandant would lead them on the road to freedom, and the Ottoman government would pay their travel expenses.
	However, and this is a big however, if their ruse were discovered at any point, it would mean a bullet in the back for each of them.
	It's a real high-risk thing, and you have to have nerves of steel to pursue this thing.
	But look, it's serious and it's scary, but like you say, there are elements of farce in this, and we're coming up to some more commercials now.
	But I saw a movie.
	I was doing research on your book, and I was also half-watching a road movie in one of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies, The Road to Bali.
	There were elements, I think, in this story of the farce that was often portrayed in those road movies with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, where they were going to weird places and doing strange things.
	It was bizarre at points, yeah?
	That's exactly right.
	At one point, Hill actually is able to make up two of these clues that the doomed Armenian supposedly made that disclose parts of the whereabouts of the treasure.
	He buries them in the countryside around Yozgod, and they actually lead their captors.
	They've reeled the Commandant in at long last by this time.
	They lead their captors on these hikes to dig up clues.
	And meanwhile, Hill is covertly with a smuggled camera photographing the Commandant and digging in league with Jones for clues.
	And the negatives from that photography session were the life insurance policy for the British captives they were leaving behind.
	What a fantastic story.
	Let's park it there for a moment.
	You are a wonderful storyteller, both in the words that I'm hearing and the words that you write.
	Margolit Fox, The Confidence Men.
	A British guy, an Australian guy are both captured and put in this highly secure prison in 1917, 1916, 1917, World War I. You can't get out of it, or can you?
	Hey, we don't have a lot of time, and this is a great story.
	Margolit Fox, the book is called The Confidence Men.
	British guy, Australian guy gets sent to a prison in Turkey, World War I. It is said to be escape-proof.
	But they, and this is Elias Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, come up with a cunning plan using a Ouija board to con the commandant of the camp and their other captors into believing that the Ouija board was sending them clues to where some buried treasure was going to be.
	And just to make sure that as we say here in the UK, the commandant was banged to rights, one of them had what they call, what was it, a vest pocket camera, I think it is.
	My granddad had one of these things, a little folding camera, one of the first, and took pictures of the commandant participating in this thing that would have had him court-martialed, probably executed, so that there was evidence that could be used against him should it be necessary.
	What a great story.
	Doesn't entirely go entirely to plan.
	Margolit Fox in New York.
	We're going to tell the rest of this story now, Margolit.
	Sorry that we haven't got the two hours or three hours we would need to tell this, but you are a great storyteller.
	So, the Commandant has been reeled in, hook, line, and sinker.
	So has everybody else.
	And if you tell people a lie that they want to believe, they're going to believe it.
	And that is proof of this before we had psychiatrists, psychologists on TV, before we knew anything about this.
	This proved the point.
	So how far did it get?
	Well, their cunning plan was, I'm happy to say, a lot more successful than Baldrick's cunning plans.
	And they got almost to the eve of liberty.
	If things had gone according to plan, Jones, Hill, and their three captors, including the Commandant, would have set out on the road to unearth this vast buried treasure that was buried, well,
	somewhere in Turkey that was conveniently near the Mediterranean coast, from which Jones and Hill planned to make their escape and sailed to join British forces in Cyprus, possibly if things really went according to plan, with their drugged, bound, and gagged captors in tow in the boat.
	So it was an escape plot and a kidnapping plot all rolled into one.
	And as Hill said, it would have been some stunt to hand over a complete prison camp staff to the British authorities in Cyprus.
	What a wonderful plan.
	Yes, and it almost came to be on the eve of their setting out on this non-existent treasure hunt, Jones and Hill, sadly, were betrayed.
	They were betrayed with the best of intentions by a fellow British captive who, of course, was not privy to the con game, was not privy to the escape plot, and he literally thought that the captors were going to take them on the road so they could have the excuse of hauling them off and shooting them,
	just like that scene in The Great Escape where they stop for a cigarette break and you know that's going to be curtains for Gordon Jackson and all the others.
	So he ratted them out with the best will in the world, but it meant that the escape plot, the kidnapping plot, the escape by boat over the sea was over.
	They very quickly had to have recourse to A terrifying plan B. And that's astonishing.
	You have to have, I mean, look, these people were remarkable by the standards of any generation.
	But to get out of that one, you have to be particularly special.
	What happened?
	Plan B, as literally crazy as it sounds, was to feign insanity, feign it so convincingly that Jones and Hill would get themselves committed to an insane asylum in Constantinople, as Istanbul was then known.
	Once there, if their madman act could actually persuade the highly trained Ottoman psychiatrists that they had authentically lost their minds, there was the tiniest chance, tiny, that they might be repatriated to Britain in a formal exchange of sick prisoners.
	It was the longest of long shots, and again dangerous because they were enemy combatants in this military hospital that contained a psych ward.
	They were suspected of malingering 24-7 and subjected to all kinds of tests and traps.
	Worse still, they thought maybe they would have to spend a couple of weeks in the insane asylum before they were dispatched home.
	That couple of weeks stretched to six months where they had to keep up their madman act every minute of every day.
	Now, there is a famous episode of the BBC television series from the 70s that I've seen several times, Colditz.
	You may have seen it too.
	And it is a true story from the whole Colditz era, where one of the inmates decided and got permission against, I think, the better judgment of the person in charge of the escape line, but got permission to feign insanity to the extent that he was shipped home to the United Kingdom for that reason.
	But sadly, the man, I believe if I'm telling the story right, actually did, because he played the part so well, actually did go insane and had to be cared for in a special hospital on his return home.
	So the plan worked, but it had a terrible downside.
	In this case, these guys had to keep this act going for six months with other people around them who might spill the beans, with medics who might find a test that would force them to out themselves.
	How on earth did they pull that off?
	That was the danger.
	And Jones and Hill are very articulate, each of them in the memoirs they wrote after the war, about the fact that if you play your part too well, you might never get out.
	It's analogous to the trope in crime novels of the detective that has to inhabit the mind of the serial killer to solve the crime, and then he finds he can't get out, and he's psychotic forever.
	And a similar danger existed with these poor men feigning insanity 24-7 for six full months.
	Jones, it was the, they confided in a wonderful man, a captured Irish doctor who was with them at Yozgot, Doc O'Farrell.
	And so he coached them before they were packed off to the mental institution.
	He said, it'll be more convincing if you each have a different kind of insanity.
	So Jones's wasn't so bad to have to enact.
	He had a type of insanity whose hallmarks were paranoid delusions and rants, but he could do all sorts of comical things and run around and throw eggs at people and act out and rant and be grandiose.
	And, you know, it was sort of grand drama.
	Hill had a much harder time.
	He became a religious melancholic where he would literally have to sit in this catatonic state and do nothing but weep and read the Bible for 10, 12 hours at a time.
	It was really awful.
	And you have to keep that up 24-7.
	Yes, you do, because they were constantly subjected to tests and traps.
	The doctors were told to watch them.
	The junior doctors were.
	The orderlies were told to watch them.
	So they could not let the facade slip for even a second.
	There is a bit of the story that we have to go back to, because I know that people will be asking this.
	We said that this commandant was a hard nut, was a hard man to crack.
	And because he wanted to believe it, and so did the others, he did.
	He got reeled in.
	How were they able to persuade him that they were insane?
	This is the fascinating part.
	And again, here again, the times were on their sides.
	When the whole idea of going off on this ghostly treasure hunt fell through, fortunately, they had instilled such fealty in their captors that the captors didn't suspect them at all.
	Thank God, or they would have been shot.
	So they were able to say, okay, the treasure hunt is still on, and we'll be able to do our work as spirit mediums better from this hospital in Constantinople.
	So please have some local doctors come and certify us to be sent there, which the commandant was happy to do.
	And the cover story, this is amazing to read about today, was that they were going to tell their doctors that using the Ouija board had driven them insane.
	And this was literally something that credentialed psychiatrists thought at the times.
	And you can see articles in the paper from the Victorian age on through the 1920s of, you know, Ouija board use drives couple insane, become raving lunatics and must be committed.
	So as bizarre as it sounds to us today, they had plausible deniability for feigning madness.
	And in the meantime, right up to the end of this, their captors were complicit.
	Yes, they were.
	And even after the war, when I will leave out specifically how, but they do manage to get back to Britain in one piece eventually, Jones receives three letters from the Pimple after the war, who is still such an ardent believer.
	He says, They've told the Pimple that the spirits have simply sent them off to Britain for a well-earned rest, and soon they'll be back and resume the treasure hunt.
	And the Pimple keeps saying, When are you coming back?
	When can we resume our spiritual investigations?
	He bought into it and he was walking around saying, Well, it'll only be a matter of time before they will come back and we will be able to find the buried treasure.
	I suppose psychologically, although again, you know, more commonly we didn't understand how these things work.
	You know, we see reflections of this all the time in this modern world, don't we?
	Going back to politics, where people who do something like that and are complicit in something like that and have been involved in it cannot admit it to themselves.
	Right.
	And when I started work a few years ago on this book, I thought of this as being this purely early 20th century story.
	Of course, it has such dark relevance to the early 21st century where we seem to be awash in fiercely held erroneous belief, everything from anti-vexors to climate change deniers to Holocaust deniers.
	And it's very clear that this insidious form of coercive persuasion is alive and well with large swaths of the public.
	And, you know, taking it away from those things that you talked about, because they're always going to be the subject of controversies everywhere.
	But if you think about cults, you know, people join cults.
	And, you know, I have a certain amount of knowledge of this myself from my own life.
	You know, people join things and maybe they find out that it's not what it was cracked up to be and they leave or they become dissociated with the cult, but they can't admit that.
	They can't admit that they've done something bad, so they have to continue to believe that there was something in it all along.
	Similarly with these guys, all those years ago, 1917, the people who aided and abetted the captors continued to believe that the treasure had to be out there.
	You know, this couldn't be.
	How could we fall for such a thing?
	So it must be real.
	They must be coming back.
	And they never did.
	That's right.
	And people allow themselves to be seduced by persuaders because they want to feel cared for.
	And Jones significantly had studied psychology as an undergraduate at university.
	So even though he didn't have the terminology we have today, he had the sense of what to do.
	The pimple was this kind of marginal figure.
	I mean, he was made fun of both by the captives and by the captors over him.
	They made him feel cared for.
	He felt Jones and Hill had become his lifelong friends.
	Margalee, can you tell me, because time is running out on us and they're counting me down like they do on TV, can you tell me what happened to these two men, these two remarkable men when they came back?
	Were they given honours for this?
	They were very quiet about it, actually.
	They each wrote memoirs.
	Jones went back to the colonial service.
	Hill became a very, very high-ranking officer with the RAF and served through the Second World War.
	Margolit, what a fantastic book.
	You are an amazing storyteller in yourself.
	I hope that we talk again.
	I hope we did you justice.
	The book is called The Confidence Men.
	It's out both sides of the Atlantic.
	The person you've been seeing is Margolit Fox.
	I think it's an astonishing story, and I hope you enjoyed hearing it here on The Unexplained.
	Taken from my television show, Margolit Fox, the book is called The Confidence Men, and that's one hell of a story, as you indeed reflected in your emails to me.
	I must speak to Margolit Fox about her other work.
	She's a great storyteller.
	I could listen to her read an audio book from here to eternity.
	Not, you know, the book or the movie From Here to Eternity.
	I mean, in terms of the length of time, you know, I just wouldn't ever get bored with hearing her.
	How about you, Hey?
	All right, more great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained Online.
	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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