The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949. Simon Ball

government of Palestine and the commander of British troops in Palestine all ordered Adrian Bishop, the champion of their use, to break off contact. Like any good secret operative he simply took pains to conceal his activities more carefully.

      His critics objected not only to the fact of Jewish recruitment but to the nature of the recruits. Bishop reasoned that it was no good having intellectuals and politicians on one’s side. Men of action were needed. He found such men, ‘toughs’, among the Irgun. This was dangerous ground. The Irgun were unreconstructed terrorists, tarred, not least, with the brush of murdering fellow Zionists. The Irgun had been responsible for blowing up a refugee ship in Haifa harbour, killing over two hundred civilians and a number of policemen. The military wing of the Revisionists, of which they were part, had in the mid-1930s been the clients of Mussolini. Then they had accepted supplies and training from the Fascists; now they were accepting them from the British. ¹⁶ It was only when the call went out for ‘special operations’ in Iraq and Syria that Bishop was able to reveal, triumphantly, that ‘it is perhaps extremely fortunate that we have a certain number of trained men at our disposal–trained, that is to say, against the wishes of all the authorities’. The first mission for which the ‘toughs’ were put up was the assassination of von Hentig, in which they refused to participate. ¹⁷ Instead they were sent to Iraq with orders to pose as Arab terrorists; their violence was to spread discord amongst supporters of the revolt and aid British intervention propaganda. However, the leader of the Irgun ‘was shot dead before they were able to function’. As SOE’s internal assessment concluded: ‘the whole of this undertaking was most dangerous and ill-conceived, and it is lucky that the Iraqis never discovered that we employed Palestinian Jews against them during their revolt’. ¹⁸

      As planning for the Syrian operation got under way, Wavell cabled home that ‘all senior officers on my staff who have dealings with [special operations] are convinced that the organisation in the Mideast is a racket’. He had decided to bring all special operations firmly under military control through the creation of a ‘Jerusalem bureau’. ¹⁹ As British power teetered in the spring of 1941, many looked to the dark arts of propaganda to make right what had been lost on the battlefield. But those in charge of black propaganda turned their weapons on each other, rather than any external enemy; charges of sexual and financial misconduct rebounded around the Middle East. ²⁰ As one of the officers sent in to clear up the mess remarked, ‘nobody who did not experience it can possibly imagine the atmosphere of jealousy, suspicion and intrigue that embittered the relations between the various secret and semi-secret departments in Cairo during the summer of 1941’. ²¹ In any case there was little to suggest that the secret departments had anything to offer in the way of expertise in manipulating Levantine politics to British advantage. They comprised a hotch-potch of military intelligence, Indian policemen, civilians who might speak Serbo-Croat, or were believed to be good at deception because they were, for example, lawyers. SOE’s chief ‘Islamic expert’ was Heyworth Dunne, a tarbush-wearing English Muslim with an Egyptian wife. Dunne devoted his time mainly to ‘astrologers, whom he used to prophesy the future and the outcome of the war’. ²² This is not what Churchill had in mind when he called for such experts to be consulted.

      With so few friends, all that was left to Britain was the exercise of military power. Wavell was ordered to strike west along the Libyan littoral and north into Syria. He welcomed neither order, believing that he should be given more time to amass a critical weight of trained and equipped forces before taking on another major operation. Thus the stratagems emanating from Churchill’s fertile and information-rich mind were contested at the time and have remained controversial since. There has remained, however, an odd imbalance in these controversies. Wavell ordered his forces to fight a battle and a war in June 1941. The battle–on the Egyptian-Libyan frontier–lasted for two days and changed very little. The war–against France in Syria and Lebanon–lasted for five weeks and led to the occupation of the Levant and the definitive joining of the Near East to the Mediterranean. It took British forces towards the Turkish border at a particularly vital moment. The Turks, always good bellwethers of military fortune, chose the moment when both the Syrian campaign and Libyan battle were in the balance to sign a Friendship treaty with the Nazis. At the same time they colluded with the Italians to subvert the Montreux Convention that banned warships from passing through the Straits in wartime. Churchill himself claimed that the ‘prize is Turkey’. Yet the battle has been regarded as important, the war not. This imbalance was a product of propaganda as much as strategy. ²³