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Operations in North Africa

Sir David Petrie stayed in Cairo only until December 1940 when he was called back to London to conduct an investigation into SIS’s troubled sister-service, MI5. Teague was temporarily brought in from Jerusalem to replace him, but when Petrie was appointed head of MI5 in April 1941, Cuthbert Bowlby was sent out from London to serve as regional supremo, with responsibility for the Balkans as well as the Middle East. Both at Broadway and in Cairo Bowlby had to cope with the dramatic ebb and flow of the Desert War in North Africa. In early 1941 he had favoured establishing an advanced base in Libya (first in Bardia just across the Egyptian frontier, then in Tobruk further west) from which parties could be sent out into the desert behind enemy lines, but this proved un-feasible when the Afrika Korps pushed the British back into Egypt during April. After his move to Cairo, Bowlby also had to fight SIS’s corner institutionally and establish good working relations with the Middle East military headquarters. This was not only necessary from an intelligence perspective, but also essential if SIS was to obtain the resources required for reorganisation and expansion. That Bowlby managed to improve relations with the local authorities owed much to his ability to get on well with colleagues, but he was severely overworked and his health suffered in consequence. Towards the end of 1941 he had a spell in hospital, but assured London that he was not ‘breaking up’. ‘Far from it,’ he declared, ‘it is only result of unbroken period of toil since I arrived.’

There was, too, the matter of relations with SOE, who were also competing for scarce resources. Both SIS and SOE needed air support, and the scarcity of aircraft was a constant concern. Although it was agreed at the beginning of 1942 to have a dedicated RAF unit in the Middle East for all SIS and SOE operations, even by 1943 there were fewer than five long-range aircraft available for both agencies, with the result that the despatch of SIS agents, as well as much SOE equipment, was frequently delayed. Bowlby and the Middle East head of SOE, Terence Maxwell, petitioned London to champion their needs, and when, on one of his visits to the Middle East, SOE handed Churchill a paper on the subject they got a few more long-range sorties at SIS’s expense and some further temporary friction between the two agencies ensued. These problems were eased in mid-1943 by the creation of 334 Wing (Special Duties) under Wing Commander R. C. Hockey, operating out of airfields in North Africa and later Italy. Early in 1942 Bowlby also complained to London that SOE was trying to take over responsibility for the local MI9 organisation. He reported that SIS had built up a strong relationship with MI9 and worked closely with them. The principal interests of SOE, he said, were more to get large numbers of people into enemy countries than out of them, and to mix escape work with offensive duties would be disastrous to the former. Besides, he thought that SOE was ‘more anxious to take over our transport and communications facilities than our responsibilities’. This apparent SOE empire-building was blocked. Bowlby later described Maxwell as having a ‘form of megalomania’, and a further proposal from him that all clandestine organisations in the Middle East should be co-ordinated under one individual (assumed to be Maxwell himself) was also stillborn after Henry Hopkinson in the Foreign Office declared it ‘unthinkable’.

Actual intelligence work continued alongside bureaucratic infighting. From Malta Major Morris ran some groups in Tunisia, mainly ‘patriotic and stout-hearted Frenchmen . . . working without the knowledge of the [Vichy] French authorities’. In January 1941 three French soldiers who had escaped to Malta in a small boat brought news of Morris’s previous contacts in Tunisia and the existence of a clandestine organisation which was ready to operate but needed wireless sets. The leader