However, Nasir Khan, the leader of the Qashgai, was reliably reported to
have stated that, while he was willing to intrigue with the Germans, if the
Japanese were ever to set foot on Persian soil, he would fight them. Enemy
submarine activity off the Makran coast, CICI Iraq, 14 February 1943,
AIR 23/5951, TNA.
Rogers was later appointed consul at Bandar Abbas with effect from 3
February 1943. PR Persian Gulf to SNOPG, 1 February 1943, AIR
23/5951, TNA. Thomas Edward Rogers (1912–1999), educated at
Bedford and Cambridge, was an Indian Civil Service officer who went on
to a distinguished postwar career as a British diplomat.
The auxiliary patrol vessel HMIS Ratnagiri (Alexander Kelly, RINR) and
the survey sloop HMIS Investigator (R.M. Snelgrove, RINR/Roy
Emerson, RINR).
Resident in Bandar Abbas and Jask were also certain individuals who were
former agents of the German and Japanese shipping lines, and whom
Rogers considered likely enemy agents with their own networks. Wright to
Hammill (SNOPG), 14 December 1942, AIR 23/5951, TNA; Prior to
Hammill, 24 December 1942, AIR 23/5951, TNA.
PAIC to Political Resident Persian Gulf et al., 22 December 1942, AIR
23/5951, TNA.
Terence Bruce Mitford (ex-Dorsetshires and Section D [SIS]), sometimes
known as Bruce-Mitford, was a tough, rugby-playing Scot, and also an
Oxford-educated archaeologist and classics don from St Andrew’s, who
was tasked with raising a special guerrilla force for southern Turkey while
serving with SOE Syria at Aleppo. It is said that his Kalpaks were all thugs:
murderers and gangsters liberated by Mitford from Syrian and Turkish
jails. Mitford subsequently went on (with his Kalpaks) to serve in Italy with
the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Squadron (SBS). For
more about Mitford and Force KALPAK, see ‘Prof Terence Mitford:
Classical Archaeologist and Explorer (Obituary)’, The Times, 25 November
1978; Adrian O’Sullivan, Espionage and Counterintelligence in Occupied
Persia (Iran): The Success of the Allied Secret Services (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015) [ECOP], 44–5; also Malcolm Atkin, Section D for
Destruction: Forerunner of SOE (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2017),
Appendix 2, 15.
Enemy submarine activity off the Makran coast, CICI Iraq, 14 February
1943, AIR 23/5951, TNA.
Reports of landing of arms from U-boats on the Persian coast inside the
Straits September–December 1942, Hammill to CinC Eastern Fleet, 4
March 1943, AIR 23/5951, TNA. Charles Ford Hammill (SNOPG) is best
known for commanding the cruiser HMS Cornwall during the South
Atlantic search for the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee in 1939.
