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legends inevitably depreciate, becoming ever more transparent and
implausible. This partly explains why SIS will not release its past opera-
tives’ personal files (P/Fs) to intelligence historians, for their old legends
and false identities have eroded and grown flimsy with the passing years.
Only their interment deep within the Vauxhall registry still protects them.
We now know so much about Freya Stark’s life and times—we have grown
so familiar with her operational space—that it is justifiable to suspect that
the extant narratives of her explorations and achievements conceal some
deeper purposes and connections than those portrayed. Some scholars,
however, are simply not able to see official cover for what it is. For exam-
ple, in a study of female diplomats, one historian has recently suggested
that Freya Stark’s career as a ‘lady attaché with diplomatic rank’ was rela-
tively unsuccessful because it did not lead to a postwar FO appointment.
There appears to be no realization that Stark was never a real diplomat: her
second-secretary status at the Baghdad embassy was not a career achieve-
ment but merely wartime cover.^37 Though they do occasionally mention
it, all three of Stark’s biographers—Caroline Moorehead, Molly Izzard,
and Jane Geniesse—are vague about her interwar and wartime relation-
ship with British intelligence. While there is no evidence of their having
undertaken any detailed, methodical enquiry into her undercover work or
her secret activities, such vagueness may be deliberate. It may conceal a
disingenuous attempt to ‘spin’ Stark’s life in such a way that her espionage
remit is muted and her factual covert employers remain unidentifiable. Or
perhaps, by relying heavily upon Freya Stark’s own diaries and correspon-
dence as their primary sources, these three writers have simply been suc-
cessfully co-opted by Stark’s commendable reluctance throughout her
career and into retirement to permit any insight into the details of her
professional recruitment, training, cover, or control. Either way, the out-
come must of course be of some satisfaction to whatever secret services
she served.
It is, however, difficult to believe that writers who have studied Stark’s
life in such depth could not have been struck by how her interwar and
wartime activities typified those of the covert operative. Nothing rings
true about Geniesse’s depiction of Stark’s curious epiphany and ‘escape’
from her Italian home after the Great War. The notion of her as a stereo-
typically romantic young woman drawn to the mysterious orient by some
irresistible magnetism is hardly credible, especially when one considers
Stark’s customary assertiveness and clear sense of mission in all that she
undertook. Freya Stark was essentially a thinker and a purposeful doer, not