220 • GREECE
News of Gordon-Creed’s success was well received inCairo, but
the celebrations were short lived. Soon afterward Donald Stott made
his way into Athens on a sabotage mission and found himself negoti-
ating with the German occupiers through the offices of the mayor of
Athens. When word of his initiative had spread, SOE was denounced
for colluding with the enemy, and Cairo ordered him to extricate
himself immediately without compromising SOE any further.
Relations between SOE’s men in the field and the desk men in
Cairo were always strained, sometimes unnecessarily so. The pres-
sure of operating in enemy territory, constantly at risk from betrayal
and ambush, made the agents hypersensitive to the need for security.
A signal addressed to Denys Hamson, a former Section D adventurer
in the Balkans, once asked for his true name and those of the rest of
his team, which consisted of the New Zealander engineers Barnes
and Edmonds, five months after they had landed. Cairo explained,
less than tactfully, that ‘‘owing to reorganization, previous records
had been mislaid’’ and headquarters needed to know with whom it
was communicating. Apparently Colonel William Hamilton and
Major Derek Lang, the two SOE officers responsible for mounting
the operation, had been transferred soon after Hamson and his men
were dispatched and SOE had been unable to establish the mission’s
composition. Not surprisingly, they were bitter at their treatment.
Nor were all the British liaison officers prepared to tolerate
ELAS’s ruthless tactics. Hammond requested to be withdrawn from
the field, prompted by a fleeting visit to his mission by Karl Barker-
Benfield, Keble’s successor at SOE Cairo, who countermanded Ham-
mond’s instructions and gave concessions to ELAS. Of this episode,
Hammond says:It was thought in military circles that [Woodhouse] and I had had become
embittered by too long an experience in the field, and that our view of
ELAS had grown distorted and biased. [Woodhouse] had fought against
this attitude in the Middle East and in London but without success.Once in Italy, Hammond went to see General Stawell, but found him
‘‘a tired man with little fight in him, and he made it clear that he
adhered to Barker-Benfield’s views and to those of the higher com-
mand.’’ Nor did he have much confidence in the head of SOE’s Greek
subsection, the solicitor John Stevens, whom he believed to be