The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [251]
The Middle East stations
In 1939 few people foresaw how important the Middle East and North Africa would become as a theatre of enemy activity and military operations. On 22 August that year, however, anticipating the possibility that in the event of war communications might be interrupted, Sinclair instructed his four stations in the region - Jerusalem, Cairo, Aden and Baghdad - that Major John Teague, the Jerusalem station chief, was to be the senior SIS representative in the Middle East. Teague, who had been in post since 1936, ran the largest operation, with seven officers and a similar number of support staff. In Cairo, Desmond Adair, a fluent Arab-speaking cavalryman, was head of station. In the 1920s and 1930s he had spent ten years in the Egyptian army and Sudan Defence Force, before being taken on by SIS in July 1936. He then spent a couple of months being trained in Jerusalem under Teague, before being posted as assistant to the Cairo station chief, whom he succeeded in July 1938. By the beginning of the war, Adair had an assistant of his own, five support staff and over forty agents on the books. He was also responsible for the Aden station at the mouth of the Red Sea, where another fluent Arab-speaker, who had worked for the police and Air Intelligence in Iraq, had been appointed joint SIS and MI5 representative in August 1936. The smallest of the Middle Eastern stations was at Baghdad, established only in March 1939, though there had previously been a station there in the early 1930s. Here the sole SIS representative had fourteen agents, three of whom (reflecting the strategic importance of Iraqi and Iranian oil) were dedicated to Ministry of Economic Warfare work.
In December 1939, John Shelley, who had been head of station in Jerusalem before serving in Warsaw, was sent out to strengthen the SIS presence in the region, and to concentrate especially on getting better information on the Italians. Based in Cairo, over the next two months he visited Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Iran to review the overall situation for Menzies. He reported (on 8 March 1940) that the Jerusalem station was ‘most efficient’, with an ‘adequate staff’. He had interviewed the Palestine civil and military authorities, who told him that the ‘burning question’ was Jewish illegal immigration which they said was ‘encouraged by 12-land [Germany]’, and that German agents ‘were being included amongst the illegal immigrants’. What they wanted was help from SIS to stop the flow. In contrast to this perceived Jewish threat (and reflecting the different ways in which the Service could be pulled), Shelley was approached in Jerusalem by a former contact from the Jewish Agency, the main Jewish organisation in Palestine, which worked ceaselessly to protect Jewish interests and facilitate Jewish immigration, offering the Agency’s help for intelligence work. Shelley was happy to accept the offer, passing it on to Teague to exploit. The Palestine Director of Immigration had told him, moreover, the ‘interesting item of information’ that Jews were returning from Palestine to Italy as ‘conditions for Jews in Italy had improved’, and Shelley may have seen an opportunity here to boost his coverage of Italy.
Part of Shelley’s mission was to build up links with Allied intelligence agencies, including the French, based in French-administered Syria, the Poles, who were currently running their organisation from headquarters in Paris, and the Czechoslovaks. In Syria he ‘established a most cordial liaison’ with the local Deuxième Bureau representative who told him that there were active German agents in the area. The Frenchman