588 • WOOLWICH ARSENAL
of Lord Terrington, he was educated at Winchester and New College,
Oxford, where he was awarded a double first. Commissioned as a
gunner in 1939, he was recruited into SOE to train agents at theSpe-
cial Training Schoolat Haifa, but was then selected to join Opera-
tionharling, a daring scheme to blow up a strategically important
viaduct on the railway line used by the Germans to resupply General
Erwin Rommel. The plan was executed in November 1942 and
Woodhouse remained inGreeceto reorganize local partisans.
After World War II, Woodhouse was appointed secretary-general
of the international commission supervising the Greek general elec-
tion, and in 1946 he returned home to work in industry. In 1951
Woodhouse moved to the SIS station in Iran to supervise an ambi-
tious scheme to remove Prime Minister Mohammed Mussadeq from
power. Codenamed Operationboot, the plan was givenAnthony
Eden’s approval after Woodhouse, accompanied by Robert
ZaehnerandGeorge Young, briefed him. Based in Cyprus because
of broken diplomatic relations, Woodhouse masterminded the coup
in August 1953 and paved the way for theCentral Intelligence
Agency(CIA) to replace Mussadeq. One unforeseen development
was the sudden flight of the young shah, but he was quickly per-
suaded to return home from his refuge in Rome.
After Woodhouse’s retirement from SIS, he was elected to the
House of Commons as the Tory MP for Oxford; he lost his seat in
1966, but recovered it in 1970. Woodhouse attained ministerial office
in the Ministry of Aviation and the Home Office and retired from
Parliament in September 1974. He has written extensively on Greece
and his own account of his behind-the-lines adventures,Apple of Dis-
cord, was published in 1948. In 1982 Woodhouse released his mem-
oirs,Something Ventured, in which he recalled candidly his role in
bootand gave an entertaining account of how he had delayed relay-
ing a signal from Tehran to Washington so as to give the CIA’s revo-
lution crucial additional time to rally their forces on the street in the
face of stiff resistance from Mussadeq’s Communist supporters.WOOLWICH ARSENAL.In 1938 the Royal Ordinance factory at
Woolwich Arsenal was the target of Soviet espionage, with blueprints
and other data removed from the premises and copied by a spy ring
headed byPercy Glading, formerly theCommunist Party of Great