LONDON, 3 February 2004 — Prisoner exchanges are a modern invention. In ancient times, it was, in most cases, more convenient to slaughter captured enemies rather than imprison and feed them.
The Romans, however, knew the psychological value of displaying their more illustrious captives in triumphal victory parades. Henry VII shrewdly realized that the pretender, Lambert Simnel, was more valuable as a humiliated kitchen scullion than as a martyr on the executioner’s block.
Some prisoners, like Richard the Lionheart, had a price, but most had none. During the Hundred Years’ war, the French had a penchant for cutting off the index and middle fingers of captured English archers, then turning them free in the knowledge that they were no longer militarily useful.
The bowmen who remained unmutilated, it is said, used to wave their fingers at the enemy in a gesture that remains well known to naughty schoolboys and sufferers from road rage.
The practice of taking prisoners caught on late. Sir Francis Drake, when he was commissioned to hunt down Spanish survivors of the Armada in Ireland, did not trouble to take many of them alive. Captives of later conflicts, such as the wretched yokels who joined the Duke of Monmouth’s abortive rising against James II in the 1680s, had a marginal value as transportees to the Caribbean, but they were the exception.
By the time of the Napoleonic wars, civilization had advanced to the stage where prisoners were taken and kept alive, albeit in primitive conditions. Some, particularly of the officer class, were exchanged, or more correctly ransomed, by their wealthy families.
The American Civil War brought new refinement to the system, with an elaborate table of equivalence which meant, for example, that a full general had a value of 46 privates; a brigadier was worth 20; a major eight, a lieutenant four, and so on. The scheme worked only fitfully, and tended to be suspended when the Confederates insisted on enslaving black Union soldiers.
The system of weighting the value of captives has come to full flower in the contemporary Middle East, where Israel’s huge regard for the value of Jewish lives has produced some very unequal exchanges. In the latest swap, one kidnapped Israeli businessman and three sets of Jewish military remains have been brought home in return for the release of 435 Arab prisoners, plus 59 Lebanese buried in Israel, as well as a German convicted of spying for the Iran-backed militant group, Hezbollah, and maps of landmines laid by the Israeli Army in Lebanon.
The history of Israeli exchanges of prisoners with her neighbors, dates back to the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948. It is state policy to “bring the boys home”, at almost any cost.
Less altruistic motives inform prisoner exchanges elsewhere. Last month, an elaborate deal to free soldiers, politicians and three US military contractors held by the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, collapsed when a leading rebel commander, Simon Trinidad, was captured in neighboring Ecuador. He had been brokering the hostage deal, but now tops the list of those whom the rebels want back.
Now, it is something of an international norm for prisoners who have passed through a host country’s criminal courts to be repatriated to their home countries to serve out their sentences. Occasionally, however, such sensible and humanitarian arrangements are scuppered by the intricacies of diplomacy. Thailand and Taiwan, for example, have been working on a mutual prisoner swap. It has been held up because Thailand recognizes the People’s Republic of China, not the Republic of China.
There is an argument, admittedly on the wilder fringes of debate, for routinely shipping the Western world’s burgeoning prison populations to countries that have primitive standards of custodial care.
This, the nuttier stratum of the penal reform movement argues, would reduce costs and act as a more robust deterrent to recidivism.
Since its inception 150 years ago, the Red Cross has played a leading role in the welfare of prisoners.
It played a vital role in looking after legions of captured men in both world wars, and was central to the complex negotiations for the exchange of prisoners during the Korean War.
Perhaps the most clandestine negotiations, however, were those which took place in the 50s and 60s as the leading Cold Warriors swapped their spies.
In February 1962, for example, the highly successful Soviet agent William Fischer, aka Rudolf Abel, was exchanged for the US spy plane pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who had been shot down over Russia in his U2 spy plane.
The most redoubtable British spy swap took place in 1966, when KGB colonel Konon Trofimovich Molody, known in Britain as Gordon Lonsdale, was handed over in Berlin in exchange for Greville Wynn, businessman and part-time spy.
As a bonus, the Russians got husband and wife team Peter and Helen Kroeger. The three Soviet agents had run a highly successful operation, passing on information about British submarine capability.
