70
afternoons, sailing with Stewart Perowne, my information officer, up and
down the bay of Aden, beyond the reach of submarines or the monsoon,
we worked out, as it were, a philosophy. And I put it into practice in Egypt
and Iraq during the next two years. ... We had the good fortune—in
Aden, Cairo, and Baghdad—to work under imaginative chiefs. Even when
they did not believe in our El Dorado, they encouraged us to seek it. It
was the non-official latitude they gave to our amateur adventures which,
more than any other factor, helped them to success.’^21
In fact, Freya Stark originally launched her Ikhwan-al-hurriya in Aden
that summer, not in Egypt as many sources suggest. This prototypical
Ikhwan in southern Arabia enabled Stark to develop and test the principles
she would apply to the much larger organizations she subsequently cre-
ated and expanded throughout Egypt and Iraq. She consciously evolved
the following seven principles of her work as a template that could be
implemented in any Arab country, regardless of cultural or religious differ-
ences: (1) that it should involve voluntary participation; (2) that it should
be structured as a dynamic cell system; (3) that it should use the Arabic
language as its vehicle; (4) that, though propagating anti-Nazi counter-
propaganda, it should employ positive, not negative persuasion; (5) that it
should capture and own the enemy’s slogans and catchwords; (6) that
there should be two-way communication throughout the organization
(today’s communications specialists would term this a feedback loop); and
(7) that its ultimate goal should be the propagation of truth by means of
oral persuasion.
Freya Stark was naturally amused to discover that some people thought
she was using communist methods—that she had evolved a ‘bolshevik’
cell system, though her concept was really just a benign, nonmonetary
pyramid scheme. Stark herself claimed that its precedents were to be
found in early Christianity and Islam. According to Stark’s paradigm, a
central group of not more than 20 people met once a week. Each member
was bound to hold another weekly meeting with a second group of his/
her own, which had the same requirements of its members. Thus the
Ikhwan’s influence could radiate indefinitely from a single centre, how-
ever small: there were cells of all sorts—students, lawyers, police, and mer-
chants. Stark began her work in Egypt in July 1940; by the end of the
year, she had already recruited about 400 people (or ‘brothers’ as she
called them, though not all were men). The beautiful Pamela Hore-
Ruthven, wife of a young Eighth Army special-ops officer (yet another
former Section D operative) fighting (and soon to be killed) in the Western