Margalit Fox - The Confidence Men : How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

This is the true story of the most singular prison break ever recordeda clandestine wartime operation that involved no tunneling, no weapons, and no violence of any kind. Conceived during World War I, it relied on a scheme so outrageous it should never have worked: Two British officers escaped from an isolated Turkish prison camp by means of a Ouija board.

Yet that schemean ingeniously planned, daringly executed confidence gamewas precisely the method by which the young captives, Elias Henry Jones and Cedric Waters Hill, sprang themselves from Yozgad, a prisoner-of-war camp deep in the mountains of Anatolia.

The plan seemed born of a fever dream. Using a handmade Ouija board, Jones and Hill would regale their captors with a tale, seemingly channeled from the Beyond, designed to make them delirious enough to lead the pair out of Yozgad. The ruse would also require our heroes to feign mental illness, stage a double suicide attempt that came perilously close to turning real, and endure six months in a Turkish insane asylum, an ordeal that drove them to the edge of actual madness.

And yet in the end they won their freedom.

I first encountered this story several years ago, through Joness 1919 memoir, The Road to En-dor. Long after I finished it, two things haunted me. The first was that this astounding tale, rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22, had slipped into a crevice in history, where it languished unknown to most of the twenty-first-century public. The second was that it had at its center an enduring mystery: How in the world was this preposterous plan actually able to succeed?

Joness book dwelled minutely on how his ruse worked, detailing a web of plotting, rehearsal, and performance. But there remained the question of whythe precise ingredients of the psychological cocktail that transformed his captors into clay in the potters hands. Hills posthumous memoir, The Spook and the Commandant, likewise favors exposition over explanation.

The passage of a century has made it possible to solve the mystery at the storys heart. Besides chronicling one of the most ingenious hoaxes ever perpetrated (and one of the only known examples of a con game being used for good instead of ill), The Confidence Men explores the strategy that underpins all confidence schemes: the subtle process of mind control called coercive persuasion, colloquially known as brainwashing. The answers to this books central questionsHow does a master manipulator create and sustain faith? Why do his converts persist in believing things that are patently false?also illuminate the behavior of present-day figures such as advertisers, cult leaders, and political demagogues.

Above all, The Confidence Men is the story of the profound friendship of two men who almost certainly would not have met otherwise: Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep station. Vowing to see the scheme through if it cost them their lives, each was sustained throughout its myriad hardships by the steadfastness of the other.