9
intercultural awareness or even sensibility. However, their knowledge of
the secret world, where they might have applied such skills and aptitudes,
would have been negligible, and their opportunity to be recruited into it
as a scout even scarcer. Even had they succeeded in establishing contact
with an interested agency, one can imagine the amount of initial resistance
they would have encountered before receiving any measure of serious
consideration.
So how on earth did Freya Stark manage to become a scout? To use
Harry St John Philby’s euphemism, how was it that she began ‘travelling
for the government?’^24 What made her, in an intelligence community pop-
ulated almost exclusively by men, uniquely suited to undertake hazardous
desert adventures that required extraordinary mental and physical tough-
ness; self-confidence and assertiveness; practical linguistic, photographic,
and cartographic skills; and a deep intellectual familiarity with such schol-
arly fields as archaeology and ethnology? The answer is simple: Stark was
tremendously courageous, she always worked very hard (and expected
those around her to do so too), and she was amazingly versatile. However,
though these outstanding qualities no doubt accelerated her professional
progress, they also made her conspicuous in her early years as a scout, at a
time when she sought the obscurity of solid cover. In such circumstances,
self-deprecation is a useful technique for dissociating oneself from the
secret services and for preserving cover, and Stark employed it right from
the start with great skill, not only as an operative but also as a postopera-
tional report writer. Throughout her long literary career as a descriptive
and analytical author, Stark never betrayed the true nature of her clandes-
tine work, frequently deflecting her friends, associates, and readers from it
with understatement and false humility. For instance, when starting from
Paris on one of her oriental odysseys, an obliging chef de train who had
been about to remove Stark’s luggage from her immediate oversight com-
mented on restoring it to her that it was not the first time he had helped
‘the English intelligence.’ To this Stark immediately adds in her account of
the incident that the train conductor was overestimating her, which is
presumably what she also said to the official at the time.^25 Yet such con-
trived modesty did not always suffice. In fact, on her very first visit to
Baghdad in late 1929, ostensibly just to improve her Arabic, in a matter of
days she had already become the centre of unwanted attention among the
suspicious ex-pat community: ‘It seems that even the British here have
picturesque imaginations and have been asking whether I am a spy,’ she
wrote to her father in Canada.^26 No doubt, however, Stark effectively dis-
PROLOGUE: OF SPIES, SCOUTS, AND COVER