Camp X: SOE school for spies by Stafford David

Author:Stafford, David [Stafford, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2014-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

“Rackets and Balls”: Casting the Global Net

Midsummer’s Day, 1942, was swelteringly hot in Washington. Winston Churchill, on his second wartime visit to the American capital to discuss Allied strategy and TUBE ALLOYS, the code-name given to the atomic bomb project, luxuriated in the air-conditioned comfort of the White House, took a leisurely breakfast while reading his morning cables, and then joined Roosevelt in his study. While the two men were standing talking beside the president’s desk, General George Marshall brought in a telegram addressed to the prime minister. Thus Churchill learned of the fall of Tobruk and the surrender of its garrison of 30,000 men to the triumphant forces of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. This was one of the heaviest blows that Churchill was to receive during the war. “Defeat is one thing, disgrace is another,” he wrote later, linking the defeat in North Africa to the surrender of another British garrison at Singapore only four months before. The fall of Tobruk opened the gateway to Egypt and Cairo, headquarters of the British forces in the Middle East. Within three days of the catastrophic news reaching Churchill, Rommel had crossed the Egyptian border and was speeding towards Cairo. The British Army took up defensive lines around El Alamein, just forty miles to the west of Alexandria, and throughout the city of Cairo smoke began to rise from the chimneys and back gardens of British political and military offices as documents were burned and preparations made for the evacuation to Jerusalem.

Cairo was not just the headquarters of British forces in North Africa and the Middle East. It was also the site of SOE’s major base outside London, and the Cairo offices periodically would be purged as SOE London attempted to assert its authority over what it saw as inefficiency or insubordination. SOE Cairo was responsible for operations into the Balkans as well as the Middle East, but co-ordination with both London and the local military command provided fertile ground for misunderstanding and muddle. The Cairo headquarters were in a block of flats known as the Rustem Buildings, and as Rommel’s forces threatened Britain’s hold on Egypt, SOE London took the opportunity to carry out yet another purge of personnel. One of the newly appointed SOE officers was Basil Davidson, in pre-war life a journalist, but since 1940 an SOE agent who had operated first in Hungary and then in Istanbul. As the battle in the Western Desert reached its climax, Davidson found himself placed in operational command of the SOE Yugoslav section at the Rustem Buildings.

“After the provincial quiet of Istanbul,” Davidson wrote many years later in Special Operations Europe , his wartime memoir, “Cairo had all the bustle of a strange and various metropolis. Forceful characters abounded.” One of them was Maurice Oldfield, of the Secret Intelligence Service, later destined to become its head (“C”) and reputed to be the model for John le Carré’s fictional hero, George Smiley. Another was the historian Hugh Seton-Watson, an expert on Balkan affairs,

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