Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

(Michael S) #1
SATYR• 469

of Man and released there in September 1943, never having been
charged with any offense. He gassed himself in January 1949, out-
raged that his loyalty had been called into question.
Rutland had retired from the Royal Navy in 1923 and he, like Lord
Semphill, was engaged as a consultant by the Japanese navy to advise
on maritime aviation and to help Mitsubishi’s designers build an un-
dercarriage suitable for landing on the deck of a warship. By 1937 he
had taken up residence in California, where he came to the notice of
theFederal Bureau of Investigationas a suspected Japanese agent.
Nine days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he returned to London,
only to be detained for what were later described by the home secre-
tary in the House of Commons as his ‘‘hostile associations.’’ The pre-
cise nature of the evidence against Rutland has never been disclosed.

–S–

SALMONE, HABIB ANTHONY.A Syrian professor educated in En-
gland, Habib Salmone offered secret information in March 1885 to
the Foreign Office about plans of the Mahdi to undermine the British
occupation of Egypt. He was in contact with Djamal-ed-din, a noted
scholar who had confided in him. Prime Minister William Gladstone
and the foreign secretary, Lord Granville, authorized various pay-
ments to him fromsecret service funds, but these were terminated
when Salmone’s role became known in the region.


SARAFAND.The British Army radio relay station inPalestine,lo-
cated at Sarafand, wasGCHQ’s principal intercept site in the region.
In March 1946Irgunterrorists, dressed in army uniforms, entered
the compound driving army trucks and raided the armory, stealing
enough weapons to equip theHaganah.


SATYR. MI5code name for a classified contract given to Marconi in
1952 to discover the secrets of an ingenious listening device con-
cealed in the Great Seal that had hung in the office of the U.S. ambas-
sador in Moscow since it had been donated as a gift some years
earlier. The capsule containing the microphone appeared to have no
external power source and theFederal Bureau of Investigationhad

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