When Barack Obama recruited Winston Churchill into the debate over CIA interrogation techniques, recalling that he never stooped to torture even in Britain’s darkest hour, something about his remarks struck me as oddly familiar.

In his press conference on Wednesday night, the President referred to “an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture’, when the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.”

The diligent American press corps immediately set out to find out which article the President was referring to. The Huffington Post duly tracked down a posting by the British-born journalist Andrew Sullivan on The Atlantic website entitled “Churchill v. Cheney”. Sure enough, that article quoted extensively from an article I had written back in 2006, about Colonel Robin “Tin-Eye” Stephens, the monocled commander of Camp 020, Britain’s wartime interrogation centre, who banned violent interrogation techniques against captured spies.

In two small steps, through the magical Chinese whispers of the internet, a three-year-old article and a hitherto obscure British intelligence officer had morphed suddenly into US government policy.

Along the way, the facts had altered slightly. The 500 enemy spies processed through Camp 020 had become 200. Stephens’s prohibition on torture had been transformed into official Churchillian policy.

But in a wider sense, Mr Obama was right: Churchill presided over a military machine that generally regarded torture as unnecessary, unethical, unproductive and un-British. He never exactly said “we don’t torture”, but he did not need to.

The evolution of this story offers a fascinating insight into the way the Obama presidency works, and the speed of internet news. The story started at Mr Obama’s press conference, was picked up by one website, traced to another, then another, and now, with this article, is heading back into the news spin.

In some ways, Stephens is a most unlikely inspiration for the Democratic President. The MI5 officer was extrovert and extremely right-wing. He was also ragingly xenophobic, given to making remarks about “shifty Polish Jews” and “weeping romantic fat Belgians”. He was, in truth, a bit mad.

A brilliant amateur psychologist, Stephens knew that there were far better ways to break a man than pulling out his fingernails: he used every trick to wring information from captured enemy agents, including the very real threat of execution. Some 16 Nazi spies were executed during the war.

But he was determined that interrogators must never resort to violence. His reasoning had nothing to do with ethics or humanity and everything to do with efficiency. “Never strike a man,” he said. “It is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please, an answer to escape punishment.”

Mr Obama said that Britain’s wartime leader had eschewed torture because of its corrosive moral effect: “Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.”

This was certainly not true of “Tin-Eye”, who was not remotely worried about the state of his soul and positively relished the opportunity to break suspected spies by any means short of torture. But any interrogator who resorted to the third degree at Camp 020 was immediately sacked. “Violence is taboo,” he insisted.

Yet Stephens’s methods were psychologically brutal. “Figuratively,” he said, “a spy in war should be at the point of a bayonet.” In the latter stages of the war he was accused of ill-treating prisoners, but was cleared.

To judge by results Stephens’s techniques worked superbly. About 500 spies from 44 countries passed through Camp 020 (almost all picked up thanks to the breaking of the Enigma Code). Under interrogation by Stephens and his MI5 colleagues, most co-operated fully, a few refused and were hanged and dozens were persuaded to become double-agents.

After the war, British spy-masters could boast that the entire German espionage system in Britain was actually working for the Allies. The “Double-Cross System” was one of the most successful espionage operations of all time, thanks in large part to the bristling little martinet with a monocle, who refused to countenance torture.

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