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‘very unsavoury sort of person’; however, this was the result of having
spent 17 years in the field experiencing intrigues, rebellions, and plots. He
had watched British bureaucratic methods being exploited and felt justi-
fied in employing the same methods in retaliation. His courageous advo-
cacy seems to have paid off temporarily, but the official responses he
received were at best ambivalent. Domvile was told that any decision to
close down SOE work in the Middle East would not be taken lightly, and
that London was ‘carefully considering’ his démarches.^53
Essentially, what had happened was that, up to the beginning of April
1943, SOE activities in the Arab countries had been concerned mainly
with the establishment of a sabotage organization and of W/T communi-
cations, both of which would function in the event of the invasion of the
Arab lands and Persia by the Axis. With the recession of the invasion
threat, the necessity for these plans no longer existed; therefore, the post-
occupational organizations which had been built up in Palestine, Iraq, and
Persia had to be dispersed. The emphasis of SOE work in the Middle East
had shifted towards subversive propaganda activities; personnel specializ-
ing in any other kind of activity were now required elsewhere (for exam-
ple, in the Balkans).^54 By the end of the year, SOE’s Middle East role had
been redefined to include only secret oral propaganda, news agencies to
influence the press, broadcasting stations, and the penetration and neu-
tralization of terrorist organizations. Unfortunately all these competencies
overlapped—potentially if not actually—with those of other agencies:
PWE, MOI, CICI, and not least ISLD. There was said to be possible
scope for SOE in the direction of exerting an indirect influence on poten-
tially dangerous political movements which could not be handled openly
by the FO, but that was of course precisely the role normally performed
by SIS. It would be relatively simple for SOE to pass any existing political
contacts to ISLD; tribal relations could equally well be transferred to
them. Knowledgeable SOE officers could always be transferred too. Even
the unique covert work begun by Adrian Bishop and Freya Stark to
encourage a new generation of young pro-British Iraqi politicians seemed
to be under threat, unless SOE’s charter could be so altered as to provide
for the continuance of such activities into the postwar period.^55
As things turned out, SOE was in fact able to survive at South Gate
until the war’s end, despite significant obstruction by Freya Stark’s old
flame, the oriental secretary Vyvyan Holt, who seemed determined to
rekindle the hostility that had existed between the embassy and SOE when
Basil Newton was ambassador early in the war. As the final months of
SOUTH GATE