21
Christopher Sykes. Though all of them competed for Stark’s services, she
remained an employee of MOI until leaving Iraq in 1943. However, from
these Cairo meetings, she emerged with what amounted to an additional
short-term contract with MEIC to make her way somehow to Sana’a and do
some spying there, particularly on any Italian activities in the region. No
doubt Stark’s bilingualism, coupled with all her other characteristics and
experience, made her uniquely qualified for such a mission.
The clandestine activities of scouts like Freya Stark and Adrian Bishop
will continue to be masked by impenetrable retrospective cover, probably
forever. Few clues to the covert spaces they inhabited, bravely and often at
great personal risk, are to be found in the many books Stark published or
the many moments Bishop inspired in the memoirs of his friends. Stark
remained a buttoned-up intelligence professional to the end. In fact, for
someone so prolific (she published 22 books and 8 volumes of letters),
and talkative (she was a chatterbox), there was ample opportunity to let
something slip, but she never did. As for Bishop, the brilliant raconteur
was silenced by untimely death. Unlike his kindred spirit Oscar Wilde
(whose middle-class Anglo-Irish roots and style he shared), he was sadly
not a writer, which was for him possibly a kind of insurance against indis-
cretion.^64 Having excessively enjoyed the gay nightlife of Berlin during the
Weimar Republic, Bishop’s continued existence amidst the new Nazi aus-
terity after 1933 must have been unpleasant, for he detested the Nazis and
all that they stood for. The story Bishop told his friends was simply that
Berlin was cheap, and that was that.^65 But in reality of course that was not
at all that: Bishop was on a mission. In fact, had he not contracted enceph-
alitis while visiting London in 1935,^66 he might have been scouting in
Germany for three or four more years. Instead he experienced near death
and a religious epiphany, leading to his becoming an Anglican Benedictine
monk. When war broke out, however, Bishop was quick to exchange his
religious habit for an army uniform.^67 He was swiftly reeled in by military
intelligence (Section D of SIS) and recommissioned in November 1939 as
a General List captain.^68 After deployment to Palestine with the rank of
major and transfer to SOE in 1940, Bishop’s name and his propaganda
work appear here and there in SOE records,^69 always mentioned with
obvious respect, for by the time he took over SOE operations in Iraq as
field commander in 1941, Bishop was considered an important asset. Had
he not been scouting for most of the interwar years, there is no way that
he would have carried so much responsibility or have achieved such senior-
ity in SIS and SOE in so short a time.
PROLOGUE: OF SPIES, SCOUTS, AND COVER