On the night of Good Friday, 2nd April 1920, Captain Francis McCullough was arrested by the Soviet Secret Police in Moscow and taken from his room at the Savoy Hotel to the notorious Lubjanka prison. He was arrested for sending a signal to the War Office informing them about Captain Brian Horrocks and the other British Army prisoners-of-war he left behind in Krasnoyarsk.
He had just removed the photograph with Director of Military Intelligence stamped on the back from the lining of his coat, which is just as well because the armed guards searched his belongings thoroughly. In Lubjanka, he suffered the de-humanising process of three intrusive body searches and was then shoved into a cell with a wrenching smell of urine and excreta. On the third day of solitary confinement, with his senses tortured by light and noise assaults, he was interrogated by the infamous Tcheka inquisitors Xenofontov and Mogilevsky.
After several hours of questioning, they switched tack and tried to recruit him into the Soviet intelligence network. All this is revealed in the MI6 report written after he returned to London and was interviewed in the Hyde Park Hotel.
Rupert Wieloch 