Known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) until 1935, the Anglo-
Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) became British Petroleum (BP) in 1954.
Tim Milne, Kim Philby: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal (London:
Biteback, 2014), 24.
Maurice Bowra, Memories, 1898–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1967), 286. Alan Pryce-Jones, a journalist and equally
nomadic friend of Bishop and Bowra—and another possible scout—who
spent time with Bishop in prewar Austria (and wrote a novel about him),
recalled cryptically: ‘...at all seasons one tried to penetrate Austrian and
German secrecies. ...It was a happy time if one were protected by a foreign
passport.’ Alan Pryce-Jones, The Bonus of Laughter (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1987), 98 (my italics). Pryce-Jones later served in the
Intelligence Corps in France, Italy, and Austria, and worked at Bletchley
Park on ULTRA.
Bowra, Memories, 284.
Leslie Mitchell, Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 241.
According to Bishop’s great nephew, the family were pretty sure that his
time in Berlin in the 1930s was espionage-related. Peter T. Wright, letter
to the author, 14 November 2017. See also: Bowra, Memories, 272–7,
280, 282–6.
Cf. Priya Satia, ‘The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British
Idea of Arabia’, American Historical Review 3, no. 1 (February 2006):
19n15.
‘Black’ propaganda is covert propaganda; ‘white’ propaganda is overt pro-
paganda, often synonymous with publicity; ‘grey’ propaganda is unsourced
propaganda. ‘Black operations’ or ‘black ops’ are generally covert, decep-
tive, and deniable operations.
See Minute, 8 January 1941, PWE in Middle East, HS 3/189, TNA.
Good reads on the two generals are inter alia: Elie Kedourie, ‘Wavell and
Iraq, April–May 1941’, Middle Eastern Studies 2, no. 4 (July 1966): 373–
86; Ronald Lewin, The Chief: Field Marshal Lord Wavell, Commander-in-
Chief and Viceroy 1939–1947 (London: Hutchinson, 1980); Harold
E. Raugh, Wavell in the Middle East, 1939–1941: A Study in Generalship
(London: Brassey’s, 1993); Victoria Schofield, Wavell: Soldier and
Statesman (London: John Murray, 2006); Henry Maitland Wilson, Eight
Years Overseas, 1939–1947 (London: Hutchinson, 1951); Patrick Maitland
Wilson, Where the Nazis Came (Lancaster: Carnegie, 2002).
Geniesse, Passionate Nomad, 252–3.
Cf. Ibid., 167.
During the Second World War, in the wealthy central Cairo district of
Garden City, ‘Grey Pillars’ on Sharia Tolombat housed GHQ, while
Rustum Buildings on Sharia Rustum was SOE HQ.
