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Suddenly, she realized the potential that existed for using Italians against
their own political masters. Soon after transferring from Aden to Cairo,
she therefore formally proposed the following in a widely distributed
memorandum: (1) the converting of the Italian colony in Egypt; (2) the
‘defascizing’ of the upper strata of the Roman Catholic clergy in Egypt;
and (3) the organizing of Italian prisoners-of-war as antifascist subversion
agents (commonly known in SOE parlance as ‘Bonzos’).^15
Historians have since carelessly attributed this ill-fated Bonzo scheme—
subsequently dubbed Operation YAK—to Thornhill and/or Peter
Fleming,^16 ignoring the fact that it was entirely Freya Stark’s novel con-
cept, which later failed in implementation partly because Thornhill,
Fleming, and certain other officers in North Africa and India completely
bungled it operationally. Stark duly delivered the ball; the team failed to
score a try.^17 Perhaps because he had such personal confidence in Stark,
the scheme’s most steadfast supporter was her friend Archie Wavell, who
in August 1942 attempted to find a way to resurrect her idea and therefore
summoned her to Delhi.^18 However, by the time Stark reached India in
February of the following year, the Italian scheme had been finally
laid to rest.
After originally floating her Bonzo scheme in August 1940, the realiza-
tion of which she was happy to leave to others, Freya Stark began to work
enthusiastically on establishing her Ikhwan-al-hurriya (Brotherhood of
Freedom) in Egypt along the lines she had pioneered and tested in
1939–1940 while working in Aden. To understand how Stark organized
propaganda—she preferred to call it persuasion—in Aden, Egypt, and Iraq
over a period of four years between 1940 and 1943, one simply needs to
consult her discarded lecture entitled ‘Apology for Propaganda,’ which
she later renamed ‘A Pamphlet in Defence of Propaganda,’ and which
bears no date.^19 When asking Stewart Perowne to cast his expert eye over
her draft, Stark annotated the manuscript with the message: ‘I think not
for publication anywhere now, and never for America,’ to which Perowne
replied: ‘I’m afraid I agree. It tells too much.’^20 And so the lecture was
never given, and the pamphlet never published—a pity because it provides
a definitive key to Stark’s propaganda priorities and methods.
It was while working with Perowne in Aden early in the war that Freya
Stark had conceived of a persuasion scheme that would consume most of
her considerable energy until the time came for her to leave the Middle
East and apply her talents to other enterprises. ‘In the summer of 1940,’
she wrote, ‘I was interested in what is called “oral propaganda”. On hot
RESTORING THE PEACE