BULGARIA• 77BUCHAN, JOHN.Born in Perth, Scotland, in 1875, the son of a cler-
gyman, John Buchan was educated at the Glasgow Academy and
Brasenose College, Oxford, and was called to the bar in the Middle
Temple in 1901. Two years later he was appointed private secretary
to Lord Milner, the high commissioner for South Africa, and during
World War I he served on the General Staff in France until 1917,
when he was madeMI5’s press liaison officer and entitled director
of intelligence at the Ministry of Information. In his memoirs.Mem-
ory Hold-the-Door, he recalled, ‘‘I have some queer recollections of
those years—of meeting with odd people in odd places, of fantastic
duties which a romancer would have rejected as beyond probability.’’
In 1927 Buchan was elected the Conservative MP for the Scottish
universities, a seat he held until 1935 when he was elevated to the
House of Lords as the first Baron Tweedsmuir and appointed gover-
nor-general of Canada.
Buchan’s espionage novels influenced a generation. His character
Richard Hannay inThe Thirty-Nine Steps(1915) was based, so he
said, upon his friendEdmund Ironside(later Field Marshal Lord
Ironside of Archangel). Buchan died in Montreal in 1940, one of the
most successful writers of the era.
BUCKMASTER, MAURICE.A former Ford Motor Company man-
ager in France, Maurice Buckmaster joinedSpecial Operations Ex-
ecutivein 1940 and was appointed head of the French Section,
designatedF Section. After the war he wrote his memoirs,Specially
Employed. Under his leadership, F Section suffered a high rate of
losses and was criticized after the war because it had been penetrated
so comprehensively by theAbwehr.
BULGARIA. Special Operations Executive’s man in Bulgaria was
Mostyn Davies, who parachuted into Macedonia with a Canadian
Croat interpreter in September 1943 and then crossed into Bulgaria
to receive Frank Thompson in January 1944. An Oxford-educated
civil servant who had been Lord Llewellyn’s private secretary at the
Ministry of Transport and Shipping before joining SOE, Davies had
worked forLouis Franckin Lagos, Nigeria, and then moved with
him to New York to take control ofBritish Security Coordination’s
South American operations. This had led to a posting toForce 133