© The Author(s) 2019 1
A. O’Sullivan, The Baghdad Set,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15183-6_1
CHAPTER 1
Prologue: Of Spies, Scouts, and Cover
Spies are like ghosts—people seem to have had a general feeling that
there might be such things, but they did not at the same time believe in
them—because they never saw them, and seldom met anyone who had
had first- hand experience of them. But ... they do exist, and in very
large numbers, not only in England but in every part of Europe.
—Sir Robert Baden-PowellProbably the most intelligent of intelligencers to work in Iraq during the
Second World War were two close friends and former members of Section
D of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)^1 : the celebrated travel writer and
photographer Freya Madeline Stark (1893–1993) and her dear friend and
frequent companion, the brilliant Anglo-Irishman, Old Etonian, and for-
mer Anglican monk, Herbert Francis ‘Adrian’ Bishop (1898–1942),
known to his family as ‘Frank,’ to Freya Stark as ‘Bish,’ and to many of his
Baghdad friends as ‘Brother Tom,’ on account of the fact that he had only
recently left the cloisters of Nashdom Abbey, where his religious name had
been Brother Thomas More.^2 On the face of things, Freya Stark and
Adrian Bishop were an odd couple: Bishop—a tall man, heavy-set like a
Robert Baden-Powell, My Adventures as a Spy (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2011), 1.