218 • GREECE
There they found John Pendelbury, the distinguished archaeologist
with a glass eye and swordstick who had previously been the curator
of Knossos and had been active on the island forSection D. Unfortu-
nately, his embryonic organization, which included two academics,
Terence Bruce-Mitford from St. Andrews and Jack Hamson from
Cambridge, disintegrated after he was killed by German paratroopers
in May. Thereafter, effectively starting from scratch, SOE’s Greek
subsection sent three resourceful officers to theSpecial Training
School(STS) at Haifa to instruct agents for clandestine insertion
back into Greece. They were Hammond, the Cambridge don who had
been studying the archaeology of southern Albania and northeast
Greece since 1930; the HonourableMonty Woodhouse; and travel
writerPatrick Leigh Fermor.
While SOE opted to associate itself with the Greek Left, theSe-
cret Intelligence Service(SIS) concentrated its efforts in Athens on
liaison with the Greek intelligence services, run collectively by Gen-
eral Demetrius Xenos. The local Britishpassport control officer,
Albert Crawford, was responsible for cultivating this overt contact,
but when the legation was evacuated, the Passport Control Office was
closed, leaving its assets unsupported and its few individual agents
to fend for themselves. A parallel SIS network, run under commercial
cover by Roland Gale from a shipping office, was also obliged to
abandon its sources, thus leaving the field to SOE which, in the short
time available, established good links with the Communists and other
antimonarchists, not realizing that there was even the remotest pros-
pect of a Greek government-in-exile being established under King
George.
One significant problem confronting SOE was a contradiction
within the reports received fromprometheus ii, which suggested
thatELAS—the guerrilla wing of the Greek National Liberation
Front, EAM—enjoyed more local popularity and constituted a better
organized resistance movement than its more right-wing rival, the
antimonarchist resistance front EDES. Accordingly SOE sent two
missions into northwest Greece to liaise with EDES, led respectively
by Hammond and Rufus Sheppard, a lecturer at Cairo University who
had fought in the Abyssinian campaign. Sheppard’s group of two
Greeks and an English wireless operator was dropped during the first
full moon of 1943. It was followed the next month by Hammond and