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earlier that day. Underwood appears to have promptly contacted Bishop’s
close friends and brother officers Aidan Philip, Robin Zaehner, and Teddy
Hodgkin, who arranged for Bishop’s grave in Shemiran to be cared for
properly in future and collected some generous contributions from
Bishop’s Arab friends for his mother.^9 He was buried as an acting major
(local lieutenant colonel) of the General List with full military honours at
the Tehran War Cemetery. The following year, on 24 June 1943, he was
Mentioned in Despatches (MID).^10
Adrian Bishop was first posted to Iraq in early 1941 after working in
Jerusalem for Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to establish
liaison and coordination with the Palestinians.^11 In Palestine he established
contact with the Jews, but he had no contact with the Arabs, except those
Arabs who had joined the Jewish labour movement. From this time on,
the Jews and the official Zionist organization recognized by the British,
The Jewish Agency for Palestine (JAFP), specifically its paramilitaries in
the Haganah, proved most eager to help the British war effort, including
subversive activities of the kind that Bishop was organizing.^12 At the begin-
ning of 1941, an attempt was made by George Pollock, the head of SOE
in Cairo, to have Bishop ‘of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’ appointed to
overall SOE command in Baghdad, but Pollock’s proposal was turned
down by London on the extraordinary ground that ‘no one previously
connected with that company would be likely to give satisfactory ser-
vice.’^13 This negative, highly politicized decision occurred amidst some of
the worst infighting in London and Cairo between SO1 and SO2. It
doubtless had little to do with Bishop’s true suitability for command. In
the interim, though Bishop was transferred from Jerusalem to Baghdad,
the assistant oriental secretary in Baghdad, Cecil Hope-Gill, who had
served as an infantry officer during the Great War,^14 was persuaded to take
over SOE Iraq, but he seems to have been out of his depth and proved
ineffectual as field commander throughout the Anglo-Iraqi War. To be
fair, it must be said that Hope-Gill faced two insurmountable obstacles in
his path to effective command: (1) Cornwallis’s predecessor Sir Basil
Cochrane Newton (1889–1965) stubbornly refused to provide diplomatic
cover for SOE officers attempting to mount covert propaganda and
subversion operations; (2) even after Cornwallis had replaced Newton,
Hope- Gill (together with Bishop) was confined to the besieged Baghdad
embassy during the entire Anglo-Iraqi conflict, unable to execute his oper-
ational role.^15
SOUTH GATE