78 • BULGARIA
inCairo. Thompson was also an Oxford man, but a committed Com-
munist too. He had been recruited into Force 133 byJames Klug-
mann in September 1943 and, after a spell at STS 102, had
volunteered to use his knowledge of Russian to assist Davies, whose
only foreign language was Spanish. Their combined mission, code-
namedmulligatawny, was disrupted at the end of March 1944
when they were caught in a watermill by a Bulgarian patrol. Davies
and his sergeant wireless operator were killed, but Thompson man-
aged to escape.
The nearest British liaison officer, Major Dugmore, signaled Bari
from Macedonia, and a replacement team was arranged by theSecret
Intelligence Service(SIS). However, on the night of the intended
drop, the head of SIS’sYugoslav Section, John Ennals, and the wire-
less operator were injured in a motor accident, so Flight Lieutenant
Kenneth Syers was obliged to drop alone. This was not the first time
he had been forced to do so; the previous August he had joinedtypi-
calas Bill Stuart’s replacement. On this occasion he was to be with
claridges, a new team to organize the Bulgarian partisans, assisted
by a wireless operator, Sergeant Kenneth Scott of theRoyal Corps
of Signals, who was dropped in April 1944, and joined by Sergeants
Monroe and Walker from Major Dugmore’s headquarters.
The team made its way deep into Bulgaria, leaving Syers to under-
take a reconnaissance mission for SIS. In June 1944 Monroe and
Walker were killed in an ambush, and Thompson and Scott were
taken prisoner by Bulgarian troops and handed over to the Gestapo
in Sofia. Four days later Thompson, who boasted of his Communism,
was shot by a firing squad, supposedly for the crimes of learning the
Bulgarian language and being a political activist. Scott was forced to
transmit usingclaridges’s surviving wireless set, but his traffic was
instantly recognized as being under enemy control because he had
deliberately omitted his security check. By convention, the case was
handed to SIS, which successfully maintained the radio link, thereby
preserving Scott’s life.Bickham Sweet-Escottrecalls one of the
many difficulties in keeping up the charade:Each message we received from Scott had to be passed to SIS, which in
due course handed to us the reply it thought should be sent. Sometimes we
did not agree that the reply altogether met the case and we had many anx-