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he wrote, ‘holds out the best chance of any really valuable result’, though it would be a very difficult operation to execute and could probably be carried out only once. Valentine Vivian agreed with Bowlby (‘sound common sense’) and thought something of the sort was ‘worth doing’, but ‘only if it can be done [?regularly] and in such a way that it does not become known’ (which was surely rather an unnecessary point to make). He suggested that Bertrand should be asked to obtain ‘through chauffeur an exact and detailed account of journey, so that we can judge whether any opportunity of secret opening & scrutiny presents itself’. Only then could permission for the operation be considered.

But joint Anglo-French ventures were (for the moment) swept away by the fall of France, after which British activities in Syria and the Lebanon were severely restricted by the Vichy authorities. In March 1941 Teague reported from Jerusalem that the United States consul-general in Beirut was ‘well disposed’ towards the British and had granted him diplomatic-bag facilities for communications into Syria. The following month (as the British were retreating from Greece) there were fears that the Germans might occupy Syria, and London asked Teague if he were in a position to give early warning of such an eventuality. Teague explained that he had a portable wireless set in Beirut and one en route to Aleppo. In addition, an (unidentified) American diplomat in Beirut was ‘always ready to help’ and could give some warning. Teague thought that he could ‘do something’ with local smugglers. There was also an embryonic anti-Vichy organisation which might be able to assist. ‘So’, he reported, ‘from one source or another we should have very early intimation of German landing there.’

In the end there was no German invasion, but Teague’s Syrian sources were able to provide Middle East Command with the complete Vichy French order of battle before the British Commonwealth and Free French operation which wrested Syria from Vichy control in June 1941. Teague thought that the subsequent formal British presence in Syria was a ‘temporary and God-sent opportunity to consolidate the organisation against the probable time when we shall no longer be there’. Illustrating the difference between SIS’s long-term approach to intelligence-gathering and the more immediate concerns of, say, its armed service colleagues, he shrewdly (though expansively) observed that the ‘primary task of the present’ was the establishment of ‘effective organisation for all possible contingencies in the future’.

On the political side, Teague told Menzies in July 1941 that relations with the Free French were extremely strained. He considered that for the British, ‘it is like trying to live amicably with a jealous, touchy and domineering wife’. At every corner the Free French saw sinister British plots. De Gaulle had appointed General Georges Catroux as Commander-in-Chief of the Free French Forces in the Levant, and, although he was ‘more reasonable’ than de Gaulle, even he presumed that the British were out to annex Syria to the British empire. When Catroux became de Gaulle’s representative in Syria, an SIS agent (source ‘Volcano’) in the former’s headquarters passed over copies of Catroux’s and de Gaulle’s correspondence which provided a picture not only of de Gaulle’s attitude towards the British in the Middle East, but also of his intentions regarding French North Africa. Volcano, who continued to operate until the summer of 1943, was a highly prized asset, some of whose product was fed directly both to the Foreign Office and to Churchill through Desmond Morton.13

The Allied invasion of Syria had partly been triggered by a pro-Axis seizure of power in Iraq, led by Rashid Ali early in April 1941. Baghdad station sources had been predicting a coup for the end of March. During the crisis one SIS agent gathered valuable information from Iraqi army officers of troop dispositions, on the prearranged line for retreat decided on by the Iraqi army and on the attitude of Middle Euphrates tribes to