3
synonymous with intelligence ‘officers’: the former are usually contracted
externally and rewarded by an intelligence ‘agency’ for services rendered,
whereas the latter are generally employed internally by it as members of it.
Confusingly, however, officers of the wartime American military-
intelligence and security-intelligence organizations—the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), and the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC)—were offi-
cially called ‘agents.’ Conversely, many people refer inaccurately to officers
of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) and of the Security Service
(MI5) as ‘intelligence agents,’ which as employees they are clearly not. In
popular parlance, the latter are also often referred to as ‘spies,’ when it
would of course be more accurate to call them ‘spycatchers.’
In the Middle East during the Second World War, every conceivable
covert function was to be found both at Cairo headquarters and in the
field. To plan and implement the clandestine operations that were to be
executed by the many different role-players scattered throughout North
Africa and the desert lands east of Suez, a preposterous, entangled jungle
of highly competitive, often overlapping secret organizations was allowed
to proliferate. So vicious was the feuding and so frenzied the politics
among these Cairo intelligence bailiwicks that one senior SOE officer^6
habitually referred to the region as the ‘Muddle’ East, while one junior
SOE officer (a friend of Freya Stark’s) was able to distil from his Cairo
experiences not one but two satirical bestsellers.^7 Despite the notorious
intriguing and infighting at senior levels of the Cairo-based clandestine
services, external liaison among individual officers of the various entities
was generally amicable and fully functional, at least at the tactical opera-
tional level. At the individual level, the borderlines were also frequently
blurred. Throughout the war, personnel would transfer from SIS to SOE
or from SOE to SIS.^8 After transferring, some SIS operatives would con-
tinue to use their SOE identity as extra cover in addition to their Foreign
Office (FO) diplomatic or consular cover. Consequently, in some cases, it
is unclear which service they actually belonged to, or whether they
answered to more than one. Freya Stark (SIS/MOI/FO)^9 and Adrian
Bishop (SIS/SOE/FO), as well as their friends Aidan Philip, Pat Domvile,
and Robin Zaehner (all SIS/SOE/FO), are typical of SIS operatives in the
Middle East and elsewhere who maintained this kind of ambivalent
cover- within- cover after leaving or joining SIS.^10 Our continued confu-
sion, especially when operatives were under a third layer of FO camou-
flage, is of course a measure of the fluidity, effectiveness, and durability of
such double or triple cover.^11
PROLOGUE: OF SPIES, SCOUTS, AND COVER