Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

PRENDERGAST, SIR JACK• 431

After the war, he worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of Works,

Ministry of House, and Ministry of Defence, but was considered the

best candidate to be aGRUspy, revealed in threevenonatexts,

codenamedreservist.

POSTMASTER. Special Operations Executive(SOE) code name for
an operation conducted by the West Africa country section, headed
by Julius Hanau, a former Vickers representative in Belgrade who
had been evacuated from the Balkans. The plan involved Gus March-
Phillipps, Anders Lassen, and Geoffrey Appleyard sailing a Brixham
trawler, theMaid Honor, to Freetown, Sierra Leone. Crewed by six
volunteers and skippered by Graham Hayes, formerly the captain of
a Finnish grain ship, theMaid Honorreached the Gold Coast in Feb-
ruary 1942 and made contact with Philip Leake and Leonard Guise,
then working underLouis Franckin SOE’s West African operations
section. With the benefit of local intelligence provided by Leopold
Manderstam and Hedley Vincent, they then proceeded to hijack two
Italian vessels, the freighterDuchessa d’Aostaand the tankerLi-
komba, which were sheltering off the neutral islands of Fernando Po,
then part of Spanish Guinea. Meanwhile an undercover SOE officer,
Captain Lippett, visited Fernando Po and threw a tremendous party
for the Spanish port officials in Santa Isabel. This diversionary tactic
worked admirably, and the two ships were towed into international
waters where the Royal Navy boarded them.

PRECAUTIONARY INDEX.Created in 1921 byEric Holt-Wilson,
deputy director-general of the Security Service, this handbook identi-
fies suspects who are to be taken into custody, or placed under sur-
veillance, in the event of war being declared with any of 27 different
foreign powers. Constantly updated, the index was the basis of any
MI5assessment of threats to British interests throughout the empire.

PRENDERGAST, SIR JACK.The long reach of British Intelligence
overseas is nowhere better exemplified than in the career of Jack
Prendergast, an Irish-born local government official in London until
World War II when he joined the army and reached the rank of major.
In 1946 Prendergast went toPalestineas an assistant district com-
missioner, and the following year he joined the Palestine Police and