266 • IRONSIDE, EDMUND
consist of several three-pounder guns, six tons of gelignite, and a
quantity of grenades. Twelve naval ratings were detained and then
deported, escorted onto a British tanker bound for Istanbul. The re-
mainder of the team was subsequently rounded up and allowed to
leave Romania without charge. After that, bowing to the outrage ex-
pressed by the Foreign Office, Section D abandoned the entire opera-
tion. Minshall, the Royal Navy’s liaison officer who had conducted a
clandestine survey of the Iron Gates from his yacht before the war,
succeeded in extricating himself from the Romanian security police,
largely due to his status as a British vice consul, and made a swift
exit into the Black Sea aboard a fast launch, having abandoned his
own explosives-packed ship, theOxford. Harris-Burland was also
evacuated, albeit under less dramatic circumstances, to Istanbul,
where he was later to succeed Gardyne de Chastelain as head ofSpe-
cial Operations Executive’s local Romanian subsection.IRONSIDE, EDMUND.Born in 1880 in Aberdeenshire, the son of an
army surgeon, Edmund Ironside entered the Royal Artillery in 1899
to fight in theBoer War. He was commanding the 9th Infantry Bri-
gade in October 1918 when he was appointed commander-in-chief of
the Allied intervention in North Russia. After the withdrawal from
Archangel a year later, he commanded British troops in Persia and in
1922 went to the Camberley Staff College as commandant. Ironside
went to Gibraltar as governor in 1938, became chief of the Imperial
General Staff in 1939, promoted to field marshal, and then became
commander-in-chief, Home Force, in 1940. Because of Ironside’s ad-
ventures in northern Russia, his friendJohn Buchanused him as the
model for his fictional character Richard Hannay, hero ofThe Thirty-
One Steps.
ISCOT.Code name for a cryptographic source created by Bernard
Scott, who studied and solved Soviet ciphers used for wireless com-
munications between Moscow and certain overseas Communist par-
ties. Work on the traffic was begun in conditions of the tightest
security by a Russian subsection ofGCHQ’sDiplomatic Sectionat
Allford House, overlooking Park Lane, in 1943 with a small team of
cryptographers that included Felix Fetterlein, John Croft, and an of-
ficer named Sainsbury.