23
- Of Stark’s three biographers, Molly Izzard, who was herself a wartime
intelligence professional (she was a black propagandist with the Political
Warfare Executive [PWE], and her husband served in naval intelligence
with Ian Fleming), appears to have the clearest sense of the importance of
Stark’s secret life and of the need for deniability in such a case. Perhaps this
is why, though Izzard certainly seems to have known what went on
between Stark and Bishop, she does not attribute such knowledge to any
specific source or sources. While I strongly suspect that Izzard’s verbal
source was Seton Lloyd, corroboration remains an issue. The main thrust
of her (therefore speculative) précis of the embassy-garden conversations
seems to be that it was Adrian Bishop, not Stark or Perowne, who concep-
tualized the official propaganda programme for Iraq—not only for Stark’s
‘black’ persuasion work, but also for Perowne’s ‘white’ embassy publicity
department (see also note 58). According to Izzard, Bishop counselled
Stark to concentrate her efforts on persuading young men of the Baghdadi
middle class, not the Hashemite circles around the Regent or the tribal
chiefs. In her Freya Stark biography, Izzard makes no mention of Bishop’s
SOE black-propaganda programme and dirty tricks, perhaps deliberately,
or perhaps because, though aware that he was SOE, she was unfamiliar
with the detailed SOE records that I have accessed. While I have no doubt
that Bishop would have voiced his personal opinions about Stark’s ‘persua-
sion’ and Perowne’s publicity, he apparently had no executive authority
beyond SOE. (Or did he?). See Izzard, Freya Stark, 246–9, 441nn10-11.
- Bickham Sweet-Escott (A/D.1). See also D. Garnett, Political Warfare
Executive, D Section, unpublished narrative, final version, 53–64, CAB
102/610, TNA.
- Christopher Sykes (D/H.206; D/N.11), High Minded Murder (London:
Home & Van Thal, 1944); A Song of a Shirt (London: Verschoyle, 1953).
- Infamous examples would be the Cambridge Five traitors Kim Philby (SOE to
SIS), Guy Burgess (SIS to MI5), and John Cairncross (Government Code and
Cypher School [GC&CS] to SIS), who all transferred during the war between
clandestine services. Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, eds., TRIPLEX: Secrets from
the Cambridge Spies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 2.
- MOI = Ministry of Information.
- In the case of Terence Bruce Mitford (D/H.45) (see also Chaps. 5 and 7 ),
the ambivalence of his role was even spelled out in official correspondence.
He was recruited by Section D of SIS in June 1940, although he did not
become operational until after the transfer of the section to SOE. At this
early stage in the war, GHQ Cairo still saw a division of Section D and
MI(R) rather than a unified SOE, and correspondence with MI5 over
Mitford’s security report was still signed as ‘Section D.’ When posted to
Crete, a note as late as 23 November 1940 from SOE Cairo to Mitford
explained that instead of a ‘separate D Mission’ he would be loaned to the
PROLOGUE: OF SPIES, SCOUTS, AND COVER
