134 • DARLING, DONALD
Vichy government. According to Sir Alexander Cadogan’s diary
entry for 14 November 1942: ‘‘We shall do no good till we’ve killed
Darlan.’’ Six days after the assassination, Cadogan wrote that he
‘‘went to see Pound to arrange telegram to Cunningham to deny
charges that the Secret Service was in any way connected with Dar-
lan murder.’’ The earlier entry demonstrates a willingness to contem-
plate drastic action against Darlan, whose right-wing politics were
alienating the Communist resistance cells, even if the second appears
to show that there was no British involvement. However, one unex-
plained aspect to the affair was the unusual appearance ofStewart
Menziesin Algiers over the Christmas period.Fred Winterbotham
recalls that he lunched with Georges Ronin and Louis Rivet, of the
Deuxie`me Bureau and the Service de Renseignments, respectively,
in a villa only ‘‘a few yards hundred yards away’’ from the scene.
‘‘With the coffee came the news that Darlan had been shot,’’ he
wrote. ‘‘They could not have cared less.’’DARLING, DONALD.Donald Darling had worked forZ Organisa-
tionof theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) in France before the
war, so it was no surprise when in July 1940Claude Dansey, the
assistant chief of SIS, asked him to act as repatriation officer in the
Iberian peninsula, shepherding British military personnel home. His
connections with SIS actually predated the war, for he had occasion-
ally undertaken small jobs for them while he was operating as a travel
courier in France and Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Once for-
mally on SIS’s books, Darling was attached to the British embassy
in Portugal in the guise of a consular official handling refugee affairs,
as one ofPhilip Johns’s subordinates, and made a short visit to Ma-
drid, where he received a frosty welcome fromSir Sam Hoare, the
newly appointed ambassador. Hoare strongly disapproved of SIS op-
erating on his territory and was convinced that SIS’s undiplomatic
activities would jeopardize his task of keeping Spain neutral. Darling
returned to Lisbon and spent the next two years based in the Portu-
guese capital, enabling Allied evaders to make the arduous journey
from northern Europe, across enemy occupied zones and over the
Pyrenees. One of the many agents Darling dispatched into France
was the oil magnateNubar Gulbenkian, who recalled his controller
as ‘‘a very cheerful, intelligent and dedicated man who lived for his