Probably the most intelligent of intelligencers to work in Iraq during the Second World War were two close friends and former members of Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)1: the celebrated travel writer and photographer Freya Madeline Stark (1893â1993) and her dear friend and frequent companion, the brilliant Anglo-Irishman, Old Etonian, and former Anglican monk, Herbert Francis âAdrianâ Bishop (1898â1942), known to his family as âFrank,â to Freya Stark as âBish,â and to many of his Baghdad friends as âBrother Tom,â on account of the fact that he had only recently left the cloisters of Nashdom Abbey, where his religious name had been Brother Thomas More.2 On the face of things, Freya Stark and Adrian Bishop were an odd couple: Bishopâa tall man, heavy-set like a rugby prop-forward, with a loud, booming voiceâtowered over the diminutive Stark. Openly homosexual but celibate, and very masculine, he delighted in sharing with Stark his daily breviary readings in the beautiful gardens of the Baghdad embassy, while she was doubtless temporarily forced to suppress her naturally coquettish ways. In reality, however, the two had far more in common than met the eye, as both were gifted linguists and literate conversationalists, both were well-travelled and wise to the world, and both had a deep knowledge of and interest in Arab and Persian affairs, including the contemporary issues around Zionism, pan-Arabism, and of course fascism. When in England and Europe before the war, both had moved in glittering literary circles, and between them they had known many celebrities, including Isaiah Berlin, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, and Rose Macaulay among others, not to mention many distinguished academics. For years beforeâand even after Bishopâs religious epiphany in 1935âhis partner had been the eminent classics don and Master of Wadham College, Maurice Bowra (1898â1971).3 Few doors at Oxford and Cambridge were closed to the couple. Apart from insignificant snippets mentioned by Stark in her memoirs and correspondence, we cannot know precisely what she and Bishop discussed during their daily conversations or on other social occasions in Baghdad. An entry in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) War Diary in late April 1941 certainly suggests that they may have been discussing profound secrets. It says that the entire British community were being interviewed at the embassy and were being enrolled into a whispering organization, while other more secret organizations were being created under Bishop, who was coordinating all propaganda.4 Certainly there must have been much to discuss, for both Stark and Bishop shared one great secret that was at the very core of their friendship: they were both spies, and they had both been spying for Britain during most of the interwar yearsâin one way or another.5
To spy is merely to watch, and a spy is therefore merely an observer, usually of some enemy or other, or even of an ally or a friend. In the secret world of clandestine or âspecialâ operations, however, there is really no such thing as a spy, for operatives who inhabit this twilight zone are specifically tasked with complex activities that go far beyond mere gazing. Each of these players bears the unique label of his or her own nuanced occupational role: intelligence agent, security officer, propagandist, saboteur, codebreaker, and so forth. Unfortunately, some labels are widely misunderstood and conflated. Intelligence âagents,â for instance, are not synonymous with intelligence âofficersâ: the former are usually contracted externally and rewarded by an intelligence âagencyâ for services rendered, whereas the latter are generally employed internally by it as members of it. Confusingly, however, officers of the wartime American military-intelligence and security-intelligence organizationsâthe Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC)âwere officially called âagents.â Conversely, many people refer inaccurately to officers of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) and of the Security Service (MI5) as âintelligence agents,â which as employees they are clearly not. In popular parlance, the latter are also often referred to as âspies,â when it would of course be more accurate to call them âspycatchers.â
In the Middle East during the Second World War, every conceivable covert function was to be found both at Cairo headquarters and in the field. To plan and implement the clandestine operations that were to be executed by the many different role-players scattered throughout North Africa and the desert lands east of Suez, a preposterous, entangled jungle of highly competitive, often overlapping secret organizations was allowed to proliferate. So vicious was the feuding and so frenzied the politics among these Cairo intelligence bailiwicks that one senior SOE officer6 habitually referred to the region as the âMuddleâ East, while one junior SOE officer (a friend of Freya Starkâs) was able to distil from his Cairo experiences not one but two satirical bestsellers.7 Despite the notorious intriguing and infighting at senior levels of the Cairo-based clandestine services, external liaison among individual officers of the various entities was generally amicable and fully functional, at least at the tactical operational level. At the individual level, the borderlines were also frequently blurred. Throughout the war, personnel would transfer from SIS to SOE or from SOE to SIS.8 After transferring, some SIS operatives would continue to use their SOE identity as extra cover in addition to their Foreign Office (FO) diplomatic or consular cover. Consequently, in some cases, it is unclear which service they actually belonged to, or whether they answered to more than one. Freya Stark (SIS/MOI /FO )9 and Adrian Bishop (SIS/SOE/FO ), as well as their friends Aidan Philip, Pat Domvile, and Robin Zaehner (all SIS/SOE/FO), are typical of SIS operatives in the Middle East and elsewhere who maintained this kind of ambivalent cover-within-cover after leaving or joining SIS.10 Our continued confusion, especially when operatives were under a third layer of FO camouflage, is of course a measure of the fluidity, effectiveness, and durability of such double or triple cover.11
And how wondrously diverse were the roles these participants played and how varied the covert spaces they inhabited. Imagine planning officers in crisp tropical service dress coolly sipping their pink gins and chota pegs before dinner on the front terrace of Shepheardâs Hotel in Cairo, while swapping the latest inter- and intraservice gossip or initiating schemes to further the interests of their operational causes. Such operatives were a world away from officers in the field, sweating it out perhaps in the superheated hell of life under canvas in western, southern, or northern Iraq: coping with creepy-crawlies and swarming flies, surviving on army rations, learning how to find shade behind a jeep or even a telegraph pole,12 struggling perhaps with a temperamental W/T set. The former had little more to concern themselves with than their hush-hush careers and their next best political trick. The latter on the other hand could be in serious danger with every personal contact or chance remark. Their relative safety depended much upon the opacity of their cover and the nature of their work. Propaganda officers under embassy cover in Baghdad were arguably at less risk than sabotage officers in Kurdistan preparing tribesmen to resist a German invasion. On the Persia and Iraq Force (PAIFORCE ) war establishment, 337 people worked to ensure the security of the territory and polity of the two nation-states of Persia (Iran) and Iraq. There were defence security officers (DSOs), assistant defence security officers (ADSOs ), area ...