17
before and during the Second World War. All of them, once encountered,
would remain Stark’s lifelong friends.
Adrian Bishop was the one member of the Baghdad Set of whom Stark
was particularly fond (Fig. 1.3).^47 After all, he too was conspicuous in hav-
ing had an eccentric career during the interwar years that bears the telltale
traces of covert scouting. Though never profiled at length in a biogra-
phy,^48 Bishop has had his fragmentary legend spun and woven by various
authors, who have sought to explain away his often unconventional behav-
iour and unpredictable presence in certain operational spaces as ingenuous
and circumstantial. Like Stark, Bishop was a nomad, a conversationalist,
and also a brilliant linguist who could achieve seemingly effortless fluency
in any language or dialect he encountered.^49 He served as an infantry offi-
cer in Flanders and southern Russia during the Great War,^50 and he worked
briefly after graduation from Cambridge in 1923 as a junior executive with
the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC).^51
After leaving Persia with fluency in Farsi and a wide knowledge of
Persian literature, Bishop roamed Europe—especially central Europe and
the Balkans—during the interwar years, always appearing wherever and
whenever political turmoil was to be observed. Ostensibly jobless and
impecunious, ‘Bishop the sponger’ appeared to drift around Europe, rely-
ing entirely on his good humour, considerable wits, and a network of
Fig. 1.3 Herbert
Francis ‘Adrian’ Bishop,
SOE field commander.
Source: Peter T. Wright
PROLOGUE: OF SPIES, SCOUTS, AND COVER