592 • YOUNG, GEORGE
first at St. Andrew’s, brought him into theSecret Intelligence Ser-
vice, which, after the invasion of Italy, opened a small branch in Bari
to oversee its operations intoYugoslaviaand Poland.
At the end of the war, Young was posted to Vienna, where he be-
came the first postwarSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) head of sta-
tion in the quadripartite city, liaising closely with his SIS colleagues
at the British military base in Klagenfurt. It was inAustriathat
Young saw the Cold War at close quarters, handling Sovietdefectors
and the other flotsam of the intelligence conflict. After a three-year
tour in Vienna, Young returned toBroadwayto head an economic
intelligence unit, designated R8 and known as Economic Require-
ments, the principal objective of which was to identify certain indus-
trial commodities needed by Soviets that they were obliged to
purchase on the world market. The intention was to monitor their
production and, if it became necessary, intervene to deny them to the
Eastern Bloc. This was a contingency plan that had failed to work
against the Nazis, who had continued to receive Swedish iron ore and
Romanian oil after war had been declared in 1939. Young’s plan was
to ensure that in the event of hostilities, key minerals would be de-
nied to the Kremlin, thereby handicapping the Soviet military ma-
chine.
Two years later, upon the retirement ofJohn Teague, Young was
appointed controller, Middle East, and took a central role in the plan-
ning of Operationbuccaneer, a plan to seize the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company’s assets that Mohammed Mussadeq had nationalized in- Although the foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, had en-
dorsed the scheme, it had been rejected by the Cabinet, but within a
few months the conditions had changed: Young had been promoted
to vice chief bySir John Sinclair, and Britain had elected a new
administration. The discarded Operationbuccaneernow became
bootand, with help from theCentral Intelligence Agency, was to
prove a tremendous success—but only just. At a vital moment, the
U.S. State Department lost its nerve and decided to abandon the proj-
ect in mid-coup. However, all the CIA’s communications to Tehran
were being routed through the SIS station in Cyprus, and Young engi-
neered a delay so the recall signal reached the agents in Iran only
after Mussadeq had been overthrown and the shah reestablished.
Young always believed he was destined for the top, especially as