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that the Turkish leader was primarily a nationalist, whose main interest was to clear Asia Minor of the Greeks. If Britain were to back Turkey rather than Greece (as Lloyd George preferred), he argued that this would at once ‘put a stop to the unnatural collaboration between the Turks and the Bolsheviks’. In his study of British intelligence during the Chanak Crisis, John Ferris has argued that SIS accurately identified the differences between Ankara (which became the capital of Turkey in 1923) and Moscow, demonstrating that the Turkish nationalists were not in any way Bolshevik pawns. In January 1923, for example, SIS reported that Kemal was reluctant to fall in with Soviet plans to form a bloc consisting of ‘Russia, Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and other Moslem States’. SIS’s analysis suggested that the Turks were more than happy to intrigue behind the backs of the Soviets in order to create a ‘Moslem Federation’ which would exclude Moscow’s involvement.27 Although SIS’s principal preoccupation in Turkey, as in other places, was Soviet diplomatic and subversive activity, the Service’s clear-sighted assessment of the integrity of Turkish nationalism suggests that it could at times move beyond that limited world-view which, in the 1920s and after, saw every threat and adverse shift in international relations as being in some way caused by the evil machinations of Communists.

SIS was similarly unalarmist about Communism in Egypt. In September 1921 Major G. W. Courtney, an MI5 officer who had been head of the Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau, was appointed to be head of a new SIS Cairo station, a post he was to hold until 1938. Courtney was also instructed to collect intelligence from Palestine and Syria, though Head Office appreciated that this might take some time, and (according to Courtney) declared that they would treat him ‘as a bride and expect nothing for nine months’. In fact the new station was not finally established until early 1923. From then until 1937, when its strength was increased by one officer, it consisted of just Courtney and a single secretary. While little evidence of work during the 1920s in Syria and Palestine survives, the Cairo station reported regularly on Bolshevism in Egypt. When London was alarmed by reports of strong Communist agitation among the Jewish and Arab population in Alexandria, Courtney expressed the opinion that the significance of the Communist movement was liable to be ‘greatly exaggerated’. Reflecting the general attitude of the Istanbul station, Cairo asserted that there was no evidence that the nationalist leader Sa’ad Zaghloul ‘and the Extremists’ were ‘enlisting bolshevik support to gain their ends. Rather the reverse is the case. All parties here, whatever their differences, are intensely national at the present moment, and will not entertain the idea of any foreign interference.’ In the mid-1920s, partly because of robust police work against the movement, Courtney likened Communism in Egypt to ‘a pulled up weed, which has still part of its roots in the soil’, and he noted evidence of contacts between Communists in Egypt, Syria, Palestine and the Sudan. In the summer of 1926 he characterised attempts by Communist agitators to make inroads in Egypt as ‘somewhat feeble efforts’. In June 1928, Courtney dismissed as ‘journalistic licence’ sensationalist reports in The Times (published on 6 and 7 May) describing the growth of Communism in Egypt, and denied that there was any ‘new and dangerous complexion to the prospects of Communism in Egypt’.

The limited scale of SIS’s deployment in the Middle East did not result from any strategic choice on the part of the Service, but was dictated by its tiny budget. It is clear that, had funding been available, the Service would have expanded its reach in many parts of the world. This is illustrated by a detailed report prepared in 1927 by Valentine Vivian on the prospects of secret service work ‘in Arabia and the Red Sea area generally’. After leaving Istanbul in 1923, Vivian had served as Regional Inspector for Western