STRAGGLE• 5271953, Stirling gives a heavily sanitized account of his arrival by air
in Athens on his first secret mission.STRACHEY, JOHN.A minister of food and then secretary of state
for war for the last year of Clement Attlee’s administration, John
Strachey was a confirmed Marxist and had been recorded holding an
‘‘open code’’ telephone conversation withDonald Macleanshortly
before the latter’sdefectionin 1951. According to aCentral Intelli-
gence Agencyreport dated February 1952, Strachey had also ‘‘been
responsible for having the surveillance onBruno Pontecorvolifted,
which reportedly made possible Pontecorvo’s escape to Russia’’ in
1950.
STRACHEY, OLIVER.A brilliant cryptographer, Oliver Strachey
joined the Admiralty’sRoom 40during World War I and continued
to serve in theGovernment Code and Cipher Schoolas one of
Alastair Denniston’s senior assistants. In 1940 his work on theAb-
wehr’s hand ciphers resulted in the circulation ofisosdecrypts, the
source known internally as ‘‘Intelligence School Oliver Strachey.’’
He died in 1942.
STRAGGLE.Code name for the recovery of theSuez CanalZone
in November 1956. TheSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) had few
resources in Egypt at that time, and when diplomatic relations were
severed, the SIS station, headed by Freddie Stockwell, had to be
withdrawn to Cyprus, leaving only SIS’s commercial cover organiza-
tion, the Arab News Agency (ANA), but this too was closed down
when its manager, James Swinburn, was arrested by the Mukhabarat.
While the ANA had fulfilled a useful function as a conduit for British
propaganda, it was too transparent as a cover for intelligence officers
posing as journalists and certainly never fooled the Egyptians, who
scooped up the entire structure, thereby leaving SIS dependent on
intermittent reporting from neighboring stations, and incidentally
isolatinglucky break, supposedly a source in General Abdel Nas-
ser’s immediate entourage with access to documents.
The SIS chief,Sir Dick White, had been indoctrinated intoAn-
thony Eden’s plan to invade Egypt by theCabinet secretary,Sir
Norman Brook, and was informed of the scheme to have Britain and