© The Author(s) 2019 93
A. O’Sullivan, The Baghdad Set,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15183-6_5
CHAPTER 5
South Gate
The whole trouble about the Special Operations Executive—anyhow as
far as its activities in this part of the world are concerned—seems to me
to lie in the fact that it still does not appear to receive the whole-hearted
sympathy and support of His Majesty’s Government.
—George PollockOne unlikely rumour has it that Freya Stark’s dear friend Adrian Bishop,
Special Operations Executive (SOE) field commander in Iraq, was assas-
sinated in a picturesque North Tehran hill station on 11 October 1942 by
‘the Nazis.’ Although no individual Nazi (or Nazi agency) ever claimed to
have done the deed, the pro-Nazi press seized on the opportunity to sen-
sationalize Bishop’s death, reporting variously that he had been shot as a
spy or killed with a bomb.^1 The fact is, there were only two Nazi opera-
tives capable of committing such a crime in Persia at the time, both fugi-
tive and neither of them in Tehran. One was hiding with the Qashgai tribe
in the far southwest^2 ; the other was hiding in Isfahan^3 ; and neither was in
the business of terminating British officers. Nor was the Persian Nazi fifth
column, which was leaderless, disorganized, and interested only in railway
Pollock to Nelson, 19 May 1941, HS 3/146, The National Archives, Kew,
Surrey [TNA].