Clogg SOE in Greece

St Antony’s Series
General Editor: Richard Clogg (1999– ), Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford
Recent titles include:

Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov (editors)
MATERIALIZING BAKHTIN
Mark Brzezinski
THE STRUGGLE FOR CONSTITUTIONALISM IN POLAND
Reinhard Drifte
JAPAN’S QUEST FOR A PERMANENT SECURITY COUNCIL SEAT
A Matter of Pride or Justice?
Simon Duke
THE ELUSIVE QUEST FOR EUROPEAN SECURITY
Marta Dyczok
THE GRAND ALLIANCE AND UKRAINIAN REFUGEES
Ken Endo
THE PRESIDENCY OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION UNDER
JACQUES DELORS
Ricardo Ffrench-Davis
REFORMING THE REFORMS IN LATIN AMERICA
Macroeconomics, Trade, Finance
M. K. Flynn
IDEOLOGY, MOBILIZATION AND THE NATION
The Rise of Irish, Basque and Carlist Nationalist Movements in the
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Anthony Forster
BRITAIN AND THE MAASTRICHT NEGOTIATIONS
Azar Gat
BRITISH ARMOUR THEORY AND THE RISE OF THE PANZER ARM
Revising the Revisionists
Fernando Guirao
SPAIN AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF WESTERN EUROPE, 1945–57
Anthony Kirk-Greene
BRITAIN’S IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATORS, 1858–1966
Bernardo Kosacoff
CORPORATE STRATEGIES UNDER STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT IN ARGENTINA
Responses by Industrial Firms to a New Set of Uncertainties
Huck-ju Kwon
THE WELFARE STATE IN KOREA
Cécile Laborde
PLURALIST THOUGHT AND THE STATE IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE, 1900–25
Julio Crespo MacLennan
SPAIN AND THE PROCESS OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION, 1957–85
Jennifer G. Mathers
THE RUSSIAN NUCLEAR SHIELD FROM STALIN TO YELTSIN
Eiichi Motono
CONFLICT AND COOPERATION IN SINO-BRITISH BUSINESS, 1860–1911
The Impact of the Pro-British Commercial Network in Shanghai
C. S. Nicholls
THE HISTORY OF ST ANTONY’S COLLEGE, OXFORD, 1950–2000
Shane O’Rourke
WARRIORS AND PEASANTS
The Don Cossacks in Late Imperial Russia
Laila Parsons
THE DRUZE BETWEEN PALESTINE AND ISRAEL, 1947–49
Karina Sonnenberg-Stern
EMANCIPATION AND POVERTY
The Ashkenazi Jews of Amsterdam, 1796–1850
Miguel Székely
THE ECONOMICS OF POVERTY AND WEALTH ACCUMULATION IN MEXICO
Ray Takeyh
THE ORIGINS OF THE EISENHOWER DOCTRINE
The US, Britain and Nasser’s Egypt, 1953–57
Suke Wolton
LORD HAILEY, THE COLONIAL OFFICE AND THE POLITICS OF RACE AND
EMPIRE IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
The Loss of White Prestige
St Antony’s Series
Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71109–2
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order.
Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with
your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,

Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Anglo-Greek Attitudes
Studies in History
Richard Clogg
Fellow
St Antony’s College
Oxford
in association with
ST ANTONY’S COLLEGE, OXFORD
First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-40029-4 ISBN 978-0-230-59868-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230598683
First published in the United States of America 2000 by

ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, LLC,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clogg, Richard, 1939–
Anglo-Greek attitudes : studies in history / Richard Clogg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Greece—Relations—Great Britain. 2. Great Britain—Relations—Greece. 3.

Greece—Foreign relations—1935–1967. 4. Great Britain—Foreign relations–
–1936–1945. 5. Great Britain—Foreign relations—1945–1964. 6. World War,
1939–1945—Greece. 7. Greece—History—Civil War, 1944–1949. 8. Greece–
–Study and teaching—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Title.
DF787.G7 C56 2000
303.48'2495041—dc21
00–031116
© Richard Clogg 2000

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000 978-0-333-68285-2
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written
permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright
Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained
forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
For C.M.W.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 Anglo-Greek Attitudes: an Introduction 1
2 The British School at Athens and the Modern History

of Greece 19
3 The ‘ingenious enthusiasm’ of Dr Burrows and

the ‘unsatiated hatred’ of Professor Toynbee 36
4 The Special Operations Executive in Greece 60
5 ‘Pearls from Swine’: the Foreign Office Papers, SOE

and the Greek Resistance 78
6 Distant Cousins: SOE and OSS at Odds over Greece 108
7 The Greek Government-in-Exile, 1941–44 144
Notes 166
Index 200
vii
Acknowledgements
Five of the seven essays in this book have been published previously.
Chapter 2 was first published in the Journal of Modern Hellenism, X
(1993) 91–109; Chapter 3 in the Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, IX
(1993) 75–98; Chapter 4 in John O. Iatrides, ed., Greece in the 1940s
(Hanover and London: University of New England Press, 1981)
102–18; Chapter 5 in Phyllis Auty and Richard Clogg, eds, British Policy
towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (London:
Macmillan/School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1975)
167–205; Chapter 7 in The International History Review, I (1979) 376–98.
I am grateful to Professors Harry Psomiades, Theophanis Stavrou,
Edward Ingram, Macmillan Press Ltd., and the University Press of New
England for permission to reprint them here. Minor changes and
corrections have been made to the published texts.
viii
1
Anglo-Greek Attitudes:
an Introduction
The photograph on the dust jacket of this book is emblematic of the

relations, at once intense and troubled, between Britain and Greece,
two countries which, although situated at opposite ends of Europe,
have been closely linked at various times during the century and a half
or so since Greece, partly as a consequence of British intervention,
became an independent state in 1830. It depicts the British prime
minister, Winston Churchill, together with Archbishop Damaskinos of
Athens and All Greece, in Athens on 26 December 1944.1 Churchill
had undertaken the (then) exhausting journey to the Greek capital in
a desperate attempt to stem the bitter fighting that had erupted some
three weeks earlier between erstwhile allies, ELAS, the military wing of
the communist-controlled resistance movement EAM, and the British
troops that, earlier in October, had accompanied the exiled govern-
ment headed by Georgios Papandreou back to Greece on its liberation
from three and a half years of harsh occupation by the Germans,
Italians and Bulgarians.
Churchill’s hazardous journey to Athens, which got under way late
on Christmas Eve to the manifest dismay of his staff, was a striking
example of the extent to which, as the war progressed, he had become
obsessively concerned about Greek affairs.2 His dramatic intervention
failed to bring about any significant measure of agreement between
the warring parties, but the British prime minister did leave Athens
convinced at last that King George II of the Hellenes should not return
to Greece until there had been a plebiscite on the future of the monar-
chy. Once back in London, Churchill, together with the Foreign
Secretary, Anthony Eden, had considerable difficulty in prevailing
upon the reluctant King to accept such a policy – which hitherto he
had stubbornly resisted. Fighting continued in Athens (but, oddly, not
1
R. Clogg, Anglo-Greek Attitudes
2 Anglo-Greek Attitudes: Studies in History
elsewhere in Greece) until an armistice came into effect on 15 January

1945. This was followed by the Varkiza agreement of 12 February
which, inter alia, provided for the holding of a plebiscite and elections.
So polarized, however, had the political climate in Greece become,
that, towards the end of 1946, the country lurched into a fully-fledged
civil war which was concluded only with the defeat of the communist
Democratic Army in the summer of 1949.
If the immediate results of his potentially dangerous Athenian
adventure were meagre, Churchill did strike up a warm relationship
with Archbishop Damaskinos, whom he had earlier castigated as ‘a
pestilent priest, a survival from the Middle Ages’, and whom he feared
might, if appointed regent, turn out to be a dictator and ‘the
champion of the extreme Left’. His personal encounter with the
Archbishop in battle-scarred Athens convinced Churchill that
Damaskinos would, as most observers were agreed, make the most
appropriate regent, an office which he duly assumed and retained
until September 1946.
Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 of this book deal with various aspects of the
troubled relationship between Britain and Greece during the Second
World War and provide some of the background necessary to under-
stand how it was that in December 1944 British troops found
themselves engaged in bitter hostilities with their former, albeit some-
what uneasy, allies in ELAS. Always close, relations between the two
countries became particularly intense during the years of the Second
World War. British involvement in Greek affairs was bitterly resented
by the far left in Greece but was welcomed and indeed encouraged in
some quarters. At an early stage of the occupation, Pierson Dixon of
the Southern Department of the Foreign Office, recorded a conversa-
tion with Emmanouil Tsouderos, prime minister of the Greek
government-in exile, in which the latter had said that he ‘realised that
at present our attitude was one of “non-intervention” in Greek affairs.
He hoped that we should feel able to change this attitude, and take a
more direct part in advising the Greek Government on Greek affairs
than we had been willing to play up to now’.3
The degree of Britain’s entanglement with Greek affairs during this
period is strikingly demonstrated in a valedictory letter written on 27
February 1946 by the British ambassador to Greece, Reginald (Rex)
Leeper, to Sir Orme Sargent, the Deputy Permanent Under-Secretary at
the Foreign Office. Among his proposals for keeping Greece within the
western sphere of influence – and one which he urged in all seriousness
– was that an elected Greek government should be eligible to apply,
Anglo-Greek Attitudes: an Introduction 3
after a plebiscite, for membership of the British Commonwealth with

dominion status. He foresaw that objections ‘could no doubt be raised
to the incorporation of a very foreign, very Mediterranean element
from the other end of Europe in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon group.
But France, to whom we offered Commonwealth status not long ago4
without any great outcry on the score of “imperialism”, is nearly as
foreign racially and in outlook as Greece; and are we not hoping that
before long the utterly foreign peoples of India will enjoy that status?’
He was confident that, outside the hard core of the Greek Communist
Party (KKE) and EAM, the idea would arouse ‘unmistakably genuine
enthusiasm’ in Greece were it ever to be mooted. Outside ‘a few
restricted Right-wing cliques’ there was ‘no enthusiasm for King George
II as an individual, and of course nobody regards him as a Greek’. ‘Most
of the Greeks who now want him back’, Leeper maintained, ‘would
very much rather have King George VI than King George II’. Non-
communist opponents of the monarchy would, he believed, ‘willingly
sacrifice their republican principles for the acquisition of Dominion
status under a genuinely constitutional monarch’. As an additional
bonus, he added, the Cyprus problem would solve itself.
Officials in the Foreign Office gave the idea short shrift. One,
William Hayter, conceded that, during a recent visit to Greece, a
number of Greeks, including General Napoleon Zervas, the comman-
der of EDES the principal non-communist resistance organization
during the occupation, had talked about Greece becoming part of the
British Empire: ‘what they clearly meant was that they should govern
the country themselves and that we should pay for it and defend it’.
This would in effect be to turn Greece into a Crown Colony rather
than a Dominion.5
A major theme of Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 concerns the bitter disputes
over policy in Greece that raged between the Foreign Office and the
Special Operations Executive (SOE), the wartime agency established in
the summer of 1940 and charged by Churchill with ‘setting Europe
ablaze’ through the encouragement and equipping of resistance move-
ments in occupied Europe. From the autumn of 1942 onwards SOE had
sent increasing numbers of its operatives to act as liaison officers with
EAM/ELAS (much the largest group) and other resistance groups. The
Foreign Office, taking its lead from Churchill, was strongly committed
to the return of King George II, partly out of the conviction that consti-
tutional monarchy afforded the best guarantee of political stability in
Greece and partly out of a strong sense of obligation towards the king
for his steadfastly pro-British stance during the grim winter of 1940–41
when Greece had been Britain’s only active ally in Europe. SOE,
however, through its operatives on the ground, was more aware of the
degree to which opinion in occupied Greece had turned against the
king, who had left Greece with his government in May of 1941 at the
time of the fall of Crete. In a Greece wracked by famine and economic
exploitation on the part of the German, Italian and Bulgarian occu-
piers of the country, King George had become the focus of the
bitterness and resentment occasioned by such a harsh occupation.6
If there were misunderstandings and disagreements between the
Foreign Office and the Special Operations Executive over the policy to
be followed in Greece, there was likewise considerable friction between
SOE and its American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), in relation to their activities in Greece. These are analysed in
Chapter 6. A considerable number of those involved in Greek affairs in
both SOE and OSS had in civilian life been classical scholars and
archaeologists, closely associated with the British School (sometimes
termed the British School of Archaeology) at Athens, and with its
American counterpart and immediate neighbour, the American School
of Classical Studies. It was presumably at a lecture at the British School
that Major David Wallace, who was sent into Greece on behalf of the
Foreign Office in the summer of 1943 to report on the increasingly
complex politics of the resistance, heard a former British ambassador
in Athens ‘assure a gathering of 300 distinguished Athenians that, in
his opinion, the spirit of Ancient Greece had long since fled from the
mountains of Greece and had taken refuge in Oxford and Cambridge’,7
surely one of the least tactful remarks ever made by a British ambas-
sador to Greece.
During the First World War, a number of those associated with the
British School at Athens had been involved in military and intelligence
activity in the Eastern Mediterranean. The distinguished excavator of
Mycaenae, A.J.B. Wace, for instance, was employed by British intelli-
gence in both World Wars. Chapter 2 discusses, inter alia, the wartime
activities of alumni of the School and also the contribution of the
School to the study of the modern history and society of Greece, for at
various periods of its history the School has ventured beyond the study
of prehistory and antiquity.
The British School at Athens also figures in Chapter 3, a study of
aspects of the controversy that dogged the early years of the Koraes
Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and
Literature after its establishment in 1919 at King’s College, London.
This bitter academic fracas culminated in the ‘involuntary’ resignation
(as he himself termed it) in 1924 of the young Arnold Toynbee, the
first holder of the chair, who went on to become probably the twenti-
eth century’s best known historian.8 For not only Toynbee himself but
a number of other contenders for the chair when it was first estab-
lished had close links with the British School. Toynbee, after
graduating from Oxford, had spend his Wanderjahr in 1911–12 in, or
rather out of the British School, covering between 2000 and 3000 miles
on foot in less than a year.9 In the course of these strenuous hikes he
acquired that intimate first-hand knowledge of the Greek landscape
that so informs his writings on Greece.
Chapter 3 in effect constitutes an addendum to a book-length study
of the whole imbroglio which I wrote some years ago: Politics and the
Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair (London, 1986). This had
first appeared as a special issue to mark the 21st anniversary of Middle
Eastern Studies,10 whose editor, Professor Elie Kedourie, had a consid-
erable interest in, and distaste for, Toynbee’s grandiose ideas. The text
was reprinted as a book as it stood, complete with misprints, ‘atonic’
(unaccented) Greek and no index. Such an appendix is called for
because, although I was able to document the whole story in consid-
erable, indeed perhaps excessive, detail, I was unaware of a critical
dimension to the story when I wrote my book.
Nowadays academic intrigue and back-biting, not to mention back-
stabbing, tends to be conducted by phone and e-mail, which, despite
its disconcerting tendency never to leave cyberspace, can be difficult
for the historian to access. But, in the early 1920s, pen, paper and type-
writer were the means of communication (King’s College had all of
two telephone lines at the time), although one of the protagonists in
the dispute, Ioannes Gennadius, the overbearing former Greek minis-
ter in London, consciously eschewed the use of the typewriter when
exercising his extraordinary mastery of the English language. The row
generated reams of paper, much of which survived, and I was able to
unearth an abundance of material reflecting the views of all the major
parties to the controversy.
The King’s College, London archives, for instance, yielded a wealth
of detail on the untiring efforts of the Principal of the College,
Professor Ronald Burrows, a classicist, ardent philhellene11 and
personal friend of the charismatic Greek statesman, Eleftherios
Venizelos,12 to champion the cause of Greece, of Venizelism and of
Greek studies. I was, however, unable to track down Burrows’ personal
papers, which, on his death in 1920, the year after the foundation of
the Koraes chair, were given to the Greek Legation in London. At some
stage they were apparently sent back to the archive of the Greek
Ministry of Foreign Affairs but they cannot now be traced.13 The
College archive, inter alia, contained the references for those who
applied for the chair. These included one, written by the President of
Magdalen College, Oxford, for a brilliant young scholar, John Jackson,
whom he lauded as ‘a modern Porson with Porson’s genius for Greek
of every sort’ (high praise indeed) but who had gone ‘on the bust’ on
being elected a fellow of the College. President Warren asked Burrows
to destroy the reference once he had read it. Fortunately he did not
and I proceeded to quote from it and from other references.
After the book was published I became aware of vague mutterings to
the effect that it was improper to publish references which had been
given in the strictest confidence. This was but one indication of the
unusual degree of secrecy with which academic institutions tend to
cloak their affairs. Historians rightly demand access to the archives of
intelligence services and have no qualms about consulting and quoting
from the medical and financial records of the deceased. Why should
academic references be treated as uniquely sacrosanct, provided that
all the parties concerned are dead? I had a curious insight into the
unusual secretiveness of academic institutions when, in the early
1980s during the course of my researches into the Toynbee affair, I
sought access to minutes of the Board of Studies in History of the
University of London dating from the early 1920s. I was astonished to
learn that these routine records of academic affairs, quite as mundane
and boring as they sound, were, like those of the Special Branch, closed
for 100 years. A letter to the then chairman of the Board, along the
lines of ‘Physician, heal thyself’, secured a special dispensation to look
at these humdrum papers, which duly yielded no skeletons.14
The controversy had arisen when the benefactors of the chair, rich
members of the Anglo-Greek community and the Greek government,
demanded Toynbee’s head when he developed a strong sympathy for
the Turkish nationalist cause15 in the Greek–Turkish war that broke
out shortly after the establishment of the chair. The row clearly split
the College from top to bottom. Moreover, because the University of
London is a federal university, the Toynbee affair was considered in
various university committees and the Senate. I was fortunate in being
able to see these papers which, significantly, continued in the early
1980s to be kept in the office of the Principal of the University rather
than in the Senate House archives.
By good fortune I also had access to the records of the Subscribers’
Committee which represented the Anglo-Greeks who had put up the
money for the chair and who retained an element of control over it
until as late as 1961. So thoroughly anglicized were these Anglo-Greeks
that their correspondence with each other was conducted exclusively
in English, although their identification with Greece was in no way
diminished. The papers of the cantankerous and opinionated
Gennadius, previously the Greek minister in London, also proved
accessible in the Gennadeion Library in Athens, the nucleus of which
is formed by the superb collection of books on the Greek world
amassed by this magnificently obsessive bibliophile. Another very
useful source was the papers of R.W. Seton-Watson, who, as Masaryk
Professor of Central European History, became the most redoubtable
of Toynbee’s antagonists within the College. One of his main concerns
was that the ever-more bitter, and increasingly public, dispute between
the Greek donors and Toynbee might undermine the edifice of subsidy
from foreign governments on which the School of Slavonic Studies at
King’s College (from 1932, as the School of Slavonic and East European
Studies, an independent institution within the University of London)
depended.16
The most valuable resource was the voluminous and meticulous
notes of the fracas kept by Arnold Toynbee himself. When I
approached Toynbee, then in his eighties, and mentioned my interest
in his time of troubles at the College he was clearly quite amenable to
having the ashes of this long-forgotten controversy raked over and
agreed to let me see his files, but just before we were due to meet he
suffered a devastating stroke. In July 1974, in what must have been
one of his last letters, he wrote that ‘. . . I have a bundle of contempo-
rary papers about my resignation from the Koraes chair, which I shall
be happy to lend to you, if you would find them useful. There is
nothing confidential about them, as far as I am concerned, but,
though they are now ancient history for me, they do have a perma-
nent interest because of their bearing on the perennial question of
academic freedom’. In welcoming an attempt to investigate the
circumstances of his unhappy departure from King’s College, he was
echoing words he had written to his bitterest critic within the profes-
soriate, R.W. Seton-Watson, almost exactly 50 years earlier, in January
1924: ‘. . . personally, I have always wished that full public light should
be thrown upon the whole history of the chair and of my tenure of it’.
On Toynbee’s death in 1975, his voluminous papers were deposited
in the Bodleian Library, inaccessible to researchers until William H.
McNeill had completed his magisterial authorized biography which
was published in 1989.17 Because Toynbee had himself been prepared
to make them available to me, his widow, Veronica, kindly allowed me

privileged access to the files specifically relating to the Koraes Chair
imbroglio. Because, however, I did not have access to all his papers in
preparing my book, I was unaware of the full significance of remarks
made by Toynbee to Burrows when he had expressed his initial hesi-
tation over applying for the chair. Tipped off by his father-in-law, the
Hellenist Gilbert Murray, about its establishment, Toynbee in the
summer of 1918 had written to Burrows to ask informally whether it
would be worth his while putting in an application. Burrows strongly
urged him to do so, but Toynbee wrote in reply that he felt that the
chair should be held by ‘more of an active Philhellene’ than he felt
himself to be. Burrows replied that nothing in Toynbee’s writings had
given him any qualms on the score of his philhellenism, adding that,
such was his confidence in Greece, he had not the least doubt that
anyone seriously studying her history and people would strengthen
‘his sympathetic interest in it’. Toynbee replied that he still felt that he
would ‘not fully fit the chair’, and adding, with some prescience, that
he feared that he might find himself ‘not really fulfilling the inten-
tions of the founders’.
It was certainly the case that Toynbee, besides documenting Turkish
atrocities against the Armenians for a Government Blue Book18 that
appeared under the name of Lord Bryce, had written a number of
crudely anti-Turkish propaganda tracts in his capacity as a govern-
ment propagandist during the First World War, and which he was
subsequently to disown. From Burrows’ perspective Toynbee had
manifested appropriately anti-Turkish sentiments. But what Burrows
did not know, and neither did I until the publication of McNeill’s
biography, was that Toynbee, during his Wanderjahr in Greece, had
privately manifested not mere dislike of, but a profound loathing for,
the modern inhabitants of the Greek lands.
The phenomenon of the Westerner steeped in the Classics and with
a mythologized and idealized view of the ancient world developing a
distaste for the modern descendants of the ancient Hellenes on actu-
ally visiting the Greek lands and encountering real live Greeks is
scarcely without precedent.19 Alexander Pushkin, for instance, who
joined in the general philhellenic rejoicing of liberal Europe on the
news of the outbreak of the Greek war of independence in 1821,
tempered his enthusiasm after encountering some of the Greek
merchants of Kishinev in Bessarabia and wrote two years later to
Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky ‘that all the enlightened peoples of Europe
should be raving about Greece is unforgivable childishness’.
What is striking about the case of Toynbee, however, is both the

intensity of his dislike of the Greeks and the rapidity with which it
developed. Within a matter of days of his arrival in the country in
November 1911, he made this distaste clear in letters to his mother,
Edith. He was based at the British School and arrived in Greece bent
on seeing the ‘best’ in the Greeks, knowing of the general prejudice
against them that existed among the Students at the School (‘all
Levantines are “dagos” in their language, and the would-be cultured
among them “black coats”’). Writing from Naxos shortly after his
arrival in Greece and before he had the opportunity to acquire even
the most cursory acquaintance with the country and its people, he
wrote, with all the supreme assurance of a precociously brilliant
22-year old, that the Greeks ‘are hangers-on of Europe, and come to us
for their models in everything – and their best is always a second rate
imitation of our second best’. He found an encounter with the local
schoolmaster, who wore ‘a European cloth cap and overcoat’ and
spoke in a French that was a good deal better than his own, ‘rather
pathetic’. For here was a man ‘trying to be educated and up-to-date in
a place no European had been to for two years (why should they go
there?)’: ‘I am afraid that the British School would scoff at them as
black coats’.20 Within three weeks of his arrival in Greece he had come
to the conclusion that the Greeks were ‘dreadful’, while the Albanians
of Attica, Boeotia and Argolis were ‘white men, with fair hair and
square faces – far superior to these half-baked, flabby cheeked Greeks’.
The smallness of scale of everything, including the Greek fleet at
Salamis where he had witnessed a naval review, had him ‘laughing
inside all the time’.
Moreover, the indolence, as he saw it, of the present-day Greeks
explained much about their ancient forebears. Toynbee was himself a
hyperactive individual, a compulsive and extraordinarily productive
worker, and, like many of those at the British School at the time, given
to extravagant feats of hiking in the Greek countryside (he scorned the
efforts of one of the rare female students attached to the school to keep
up with him). Toynbee took what he termed ‘café-loafing’ almost as a
personal affront: ‘at 11 A.M. you will find all the men in a village sitting
in front of the cafe doing nothing: they have been there since 5 A.M.
and will stay till their siesta, whereafter they will return for the
evening’. He invoked the authority of Plato’s Dialogues to argue that
the ancient Greeks behaved in much the same way in their gymnasia:
‘for one man who did gymnastics, twenty lounged’. These were not the
only parallels between ancient and modern Greece that he thought he
detected. Reading Greek newspapers put him in mind of Thucydides’

preface to his history of the Peloponnesian war: ‘magnificent talk
about child’s play’. ‘Ancient Greek politics were like modern – bribery
and jobbery: and every man heard the orators, just as now every man
reads the papers (orators and papers equally in someone’s pay)’. He
found parallels, too, between ‘ancient Greek wars’ and ‘modern Balkan
unrest’: ‘innocuous farce enlivened by occasional bloody massacres. . . .’
The Romans’ dealings with the Greeks before they ‘sat’ on them in
147 BC were much the same as the Great Powers’ dealings with Crete
and the Balkans: ‘these people are quite irresponsible, and don’t care
how much trouble they give respectable people, over their quite child-
ish affairs – and respectable people tolerate them, then as now, because
of the glamour of Hellenism’. As Sulla had said to the Athenians ‘it is
your ancestors who have saved you’. The Europeans had stationed half
a dozen warships to police Crete, which had undergone one of its peri-
odic insurrections against Ottoman rule in 1896, ‘instead of hanging
the whole population and having done with it’. ‘And why not hang
them?’, he asked: for ‘their existence is utterly pointless: you feel that
they will never get any further (nor did the ancient Greeks get any
further than the city-state)’. There was no ‘meaning’ in the modern
Greeks as there was in England, Germany, Russia and Japan. The rate
of literacy in the country might be high but there was no tradition of
education, hence the Greeks were ‘negatively democratic’ (a term
which he did not explain): ‘many there be that wear black coats: but
your “Black Coat” will spit on the floor, take bribes, and throw his
slops into the street’. The ‘black coats’ were ‘really abominable’. How
he sympathized with Anglo-Indians ‘who want to kick babus21 – who
must be “dagos” exaggerated. . . .’
After little more than a month in Greece, so he wrote, he could now
understand race prejudice. He would have liked, so he told his mother,
to install ‘a government of Englishmen’ in Greece to ‘dragoon these
café loafers (who might make more wealth even out of this stony
country, if they worked)’. In Antiquity it was other peoples who
‘adopted Hellenism second hand: now they themselves take every-
thing second hand from Europe: and even if they had the creative
energy still in them, the presence of Europe, far ahead of them, would
stifle it’. Interestingly, his contempt for the modern Greeks was not
matched, as it so often was in the case of other disenchanted classi-
cists, by an adulation for the worthies of ancient Greece: ‘when I
compare them [ancient Greek politics, philosophy and literature] on
their actual merits with modern European, I shall take care not to be
blinded by any misty sentiment – and when advocates of “compulsory

Greek” talk about the “intrinsic and permanent supremacy of the
Greek genius”, I shall say “Abraham Lincoln, Kant and Shakspere [sic]
are ten times greater than Perikles, Aristotle, and Euripides”’.22
Over the next few months, Toynbee’s views became, if anything,
even more strident. Modern Greek men were ‘dirty, unshaven, under-
fed (or, if prosperous, underexercised and double chinned), while the
ancient people were healthy and well set-up and did not wear heavy
moustaches and a week’s bristles on the rest of their face’.23 Greece was
a ‘dago country’ 24 and when the post office in Volos, ‘one of the chief
business places in Greece’, ran out of stamps, he complained that ‘such
things are common in dagoland’, although the Greeks ‘are the most
efficient people in the Levant, and once were the most efficient in the
World’.25 Hermes, as sculpted by Praxiteles, was ‘in fact, a “dago”, a
very clean, handsome, and healthy one, such as are extremely rare
among adult males in Greece now, but I have seen that type of face in
many boys and monks – beautiful but expressionless, and if it took on
an expression it would be one of cunning’.26 He believed most Greeks
to be ugly27 and the Jews of Thessaloniki, shortly to be incorporated
into the Greek kingdom, to be ‘uniquely ugly’.28 In the course of his
sojourn he decided to forswear cigarettes, for these were ‘the mark of
the dago’, although he conceded that on this reckoning Oxford was
awash with dagos.29 He was cheered by a visit to Crete, for there he
encountered the Greek-speaking Muslims of the island. These, he
declared, were ‘delightful people – not inquisitive and rude, like the
Greeks’, although he was shocked when the owner of a han [inn]
where he was lunching one day took off his turban to wipe Toynbee’s
fork before he ate.30
Predictably, he had little sympathy for the aspirations of the
Christian majority on the island for enosis or union with the kingdom:
‘these people are fools to want union with Greece, and Greek taxes,
tariffs, and military service therewith’. But he conceded that the sight
of the many ruined villages burned by the Turks in 1897 explained
why the Cretans felt so deeply: ‘Balkan politics, like ancient Greek,
seem farcical to the outsider, because they are on such a petty scale:
but when death and burning enter in, it makes even petty questions
serious’.31
His loathing for the Greeks reached a crescendo in the summer of
1912, just a few months, it should be noted, before the outbreak of the
First Balkan War, when he was arrested as a Turkish spy by ‘silly little
people’ while seeking to cross the Asopos viaduct, which carried the
only railway line to the north and to the contested territory of

Macedonia – at that time, although not for much longer, under
Ottoman rule. To his fury, he was examined by eleven people in turn,
culminating in an interview with the local police chief who emptied
his pockets and counted out his money. To add to his humiliation he
was marched at rifle point through the streets and detained for a total
of nine hours. According to his own account he managed to keep his
temper throughout: ‘contempt for the dago has a wonderfully calming
effect in that way’.
With what appears to be an astonishing effrontery, on his return to
Athens he hastened to the British Legation to complain to the
Minister, Sir Francis Elliot, of his treatment. Although Toynbee
assured his mother that his captors, and especially the chief of police,
would all receive heavy punishment, it appears that the British
Minister had the good sense to let the matter rest. Toynbee was subse-
quently to record that the Legation ‘tactfully showed sympathy, but
prudently took no action’. In fairness it should be pointed out that,
writing about this episode almost 60 years later, he showed a
commendable degree of contrition for the arrogance of his behaviour
as a young man.32 At the time, however, his experience prompted an
outpouring of abuse. He recorded that, during his captivity, one ‘little
man’ had said that ‘“he is only a schoolmaster, he is not anything: it
does not matter what we do”’. But when punishment was meted out
they would say ‘“Ah, he was a great lordhos after all”. It is a thing a
dago could not realise, that though, quite truly, I am “not anything”,
it matters nonetheless what they do. A fixed law without respect of
persons is as strange to him as a fixed price. It is the struggle for exis-
tence uncurbed – the man with power uses his power to crush the man
without it, and every affair of buying and selling is a battle . . .’. He
assured his mother that ‘these little men’ at Lamia would be dropped
on heavily enough to deter them from ‘playing the fool’ with the next
archaeologist they encountered.
In this letter, dated 24 July 1912, which appears to have been the last
to his mother that he wrote from Greece during his Wanderjahr, he
wrote that he considered that the greatest result of his year abroad had
been to make him appreciate ‘the value of England (or rather, of the
small group of countries, England, Scandinavia, France, Germany, with
parts of Austria and U.S.A., which can be called civilised). We are very
small and very precious, and o, the folly of it, if we and Germany destroy
each other’. His time in Greece had confirmed in him ‘the soundness of
race prejudice, and meaninglessness of the “Rights of Man”’.
He declared his intention on his return to Britain to study ‘the dago

deeply’: ‘. . . unlike the barbarian, he is a parasite – he can only grow
under the shadow of a vigorous civilisation – his nature is unsuccess-
ful imitation’. He did not suppose that the Greeks had become dagos
until they came into contact with Europe at the time of the Greek War
of Independence in the 1820s: ‘even now the remoter villages, and all
the shepherds in the mountains are not dagos yet, but white-skinned
savages: the savage picks the vermin from his body, while the dago
fidgets and pretends they are not there’. He added that Mohammedans
could not be dagos: ‘there is something primitive and independent in
their religion which saves them from imitativeness . . .’. Henceforth, he
wrote, ‘I shall religiously preach mishellenism to any philhellene I
come across’, adding that ‘the consensus of dislike for the Greeks
among Europeans who have lived and worked for many years in the
country is very impressive’.33
Perhaps it is just as well that a few days later he left Greece, for there
was clearly something unbalanced in his loathing for the Greeks.
Certainly it was with a great sense of relief that he took ship via Corfu
and the Adriatic on his way back to England. He was delighted to reach
Corfu at the end of July. The island, he decreed, was ‘European’, at
least up to Italian standards. He was unable to pinpoint the difference
‘except that the ladies in European clothes don’t look as if they were
dressed up, and the men’s moustaches look real. I wonder why?
Perhaps because they have had Venice and ourselves [the Ionian
Islands had been under British rule between 1815 and 1864] to mould
them, instead of the Turk’. One hopes with tongue in cheek, although
one cannot be entirely sure, he proclaimed that ‘the one great blessing’
of once again being in Europe is that ‘you can get tea when, and wher-
ever, you want it – it is a great consolation’.34
In his letter to his mother of 24 July 1912, Toynbee wrote ‘all bless-
ings on this country, and all curses on its inhabitants’. For he was
clearly bowled over by the physical grandeur of the country: ‘. . . the
beauty of this country penetrates me more and more, I never before
knew what beauty was’.35 Moreover, he was forced to acknowledge the
extraordinary hospitality of Greeks, many of whom were very much
worse off than he was: he had never yet come across a village ‘where
they would not put themselves to the trouble of providing you with
food and somewhere to sleep’.36 Indeed, in a postcard to his mother,
he complained that ‘one is almost driven desperate by Greek hospital-
ity – when you go through a place they detain you almost by force to
drink coffee’. Although living on a modest stipend during his months
in Greece, he conceded that by Greek standards he was very rich.

Nonetheless he begrudged it when a boatman charged him one
drachma for a journey which, according to his Baedeker guide, should
have cost only 40 lepta, demonstrating the rather obsessive concern
with money that, according to his biographer, characterized him
throughout his life. One might be inclined to dismiss Toynbee’s broad-
sides against the Greeks as the immature rantings of a highly
precocious undergraduate. After all he had graduated only a few
months before his arrival in Greece in November 1911. But, as he
assured his mother in March 1912, he had now grown up into a man:
‘anyhow I am feeling quite ready to take up man’s work at Balliol’,37 a
reference to the Fellowship in Ancient History to which he had been
elected at Balliol College, Oxford, where he had been an undergradu-
ate, and which he was to take up on his return to Britain.
After his 1911–12 Wanderjahr, Toynbee’s next encounter with large
numbers of Greeks in the flesh occurred after his appointment to the
Koraes chair and came during his visit to Asia Minor in 1921, in the
guise of a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, to see how the
Greeks were faring now that they had control over large Muslim popu-
lations, following the Greek occupation, with the backing of the
Powers, of a sizeable part of Asia Minor. This led him to revise his
earlier opinions and his views were once again expressed in private
letters to his mother. As he wrote to her, he liked the Greeks on renew-
ing acquaintance with them, for the first time since 1912, although he
conceded that this might be because they were now subject to military
discipline: ‘I somehow think they are rather different from what they
were nine years ago – not nearly so Levantine. But may be it is wrong
to judge by the army, which has become a veteran army during these
9 years. I suppose the military frame of mind is the same in all prac-
tised armies and it is the opposite of Levantinism. Anyway, these men
combine the friendliness and informality of Greeks with being thor-
ough soldiers’.38 A few weeks earlier, he had been ‘bowled over’, so he
wrote to his wife Rosalind, by the Greek officers that he had met: ‘they
are something quite different from my impression of G[ree]k officers 9
years ago. These men are well shaved, lean and smart. You would take
the dark ones for French, the fair ones for English or German’. General
Nieder, the commander of the First Army Corps on the Ushak front,
was in fact descended from Bavarians who had arrived in the
entourage of the young King Otto of Wittelsbach in the early 1830s:
‘but the others are all pure Greeks . . . and you couldn’t meet more
charming soldiers in any country’. The Venizelist officers made a
particularly favourable impression on him. Generals Vlakhopoulos,

commanding the 2nd Division, and Manettas, commanding the 13th
Division, ‘have not only very great kindness and very good, reserved
(non-Greek) manners, but they talk all kinds of politics (not only their
own party politics), read books (not only French novels), are interested
in the economics of this country and in the Turkish peasantry and in
the Byzantine and Ancient remains. . . . I think they have been enor-
mously influenced by the years they spent on the Macedonian front in
contact with the British. You can see it externally in the way they clip
their moustaches and brush their hair, and I think it has gone deep.
Certainly the Royalist officers (who were interned during the war) are
of quite a different type, much more like the old one. They tend to
have elaborate moustaches, and they carry swords (which these people
laugh at)’.39
He retained, however, all his old prejudices about the meretricious-
ness and artificialness of Western civilization when transplanted to the
Levant. Just as the sight of the Greek fleet at anchor in 1911 had him
‘laughing inside’, so ‘Smyrna made me laugh from the first moment I
saw it. Cafés – I have never seen any so big and so bright (the Kafeneion
Photi was the first object I have sighted in Asia)’. An encounter with a
Levantine family, whose ‘natural language was English with a G[ree]k
accent’, enabled him to catch ‘the smell of Smyrna’; ‘neither a
G[ree]k nor a Moslem smell – the wine is not a bit like G[ree]k wine,
and the G[ree]k soldiers here have the look of being in a foreign
country’. The contrast between Smyrna and Athens was ‘an advertise-
ment for the Greeks, or at any rate for their success in taking the
Western inoculation. But I mustn’t let myself be Philhellene . . .’.40
Although Toynbee was favourably impressed by the Venizelist offi-
cers whom he encountered in Asia Minor in 1921, there is no evidence
to suggest that he had revised his views of the Greeks in general when,
in early 1919, and despite his earlier reservations, he wrote to Principal
Burrows to ask whether the chair was still vacant. It was clearly wrong
of Burrows to have dangled before the Greek community the prospect
of a chair whose incumbent he seems to have envisaged would act as
a more or less full-time propagandist for the cause of a Venizelist
‘Greater Greece’. At the same time it is difficult to see how Toynbee
could have imagined that he could have occupied such a chair, given
not merely his lack of sympathy for the Greeks but his profound
antipathy towards them. The conjuncture of Burrows’ naïve philhel-
lenism with Toynbee’s deep-seated loathing for the Greeks was not
merely an unhappy one but a recipe for disaster. The almost inevitable
confrontation between Toynbee and the Greek donors, which was not
long in coming, is documented in Chapter 3.
Principal Burrows always intended that the foundation of the Koraes
Chair should contribute to the strengthening of ties between Britain
and Greece, an objective that was particularly close to his heart. In fact
the Koraes Chair, more or less from the outset, has generated more
controversy than good will. Toynbee’s resignation was followed by
protracted negotiations with representatives of the donors, some of
whom believed that they should take their benefaction back, as the
original conditions attaching to the chair entitled them to require. In
fact, the chair was saved, with the University being prepared to allow
the Subscribers’ Committee, which represented the interests of the
donors, to nominate two representatives to the Board of Advisors
which would appoint to it. When the chair was first established there
had been only one representative of the donors on the Board.
The unpleasant and latterly very public controversy over the chair
clearly predisposed the university and college authorities to play for
safety in making the next, and indeed, subsequent appointments to
the chair in the supposedly less contentious fields of Byzantine history
or modern Greek literary studies rather than in modern history, the
field which Principal Burrows and the donors had regarded as of para-
mount importance but which had proved to be such a minefield.
Toynbee’s successor, F.H. Marshall, was likewise a classicist, whose
interests in the Byzantine, Ottoman and early independence periods,
were safely removed from the contentious issues of contemporary
politics which had so caught Toynbee’s interest.
In introducing Marshall’s inaugural lecture in October 1926,
Dimitrios Caclamanos, the Greek minister in London, while referring
to Greece’s strenuous efforts ‘for the accomplishment of its national,
historical and civilizing mission in the East’, mentioned the efforts of
Ernest Barker, Burrows’ successor as Principal of King’s College, ‘in
overcoming some difficulties which have arisen with regard to the
Chair’, difficulties on which he tactfully chose not to dwell. Marshall
closed his lecture, entitled ‘Some debts to Byzantinism’, on a literally
upbeat note: he declared that preferred the positive to the negative
and believed ‘that if Professorships have any value they should be
directed in the main to showing that the epochs and peoples with
whom they are concerned have accomplished things calculated to
inspire rather than depress. . . .’41
In the 1960s, two of Marshall’s successors, the Byzantinists Romilly
Jenkins and Cyril Mango, aroused ire in some Greek quarters when
they appeared to question the physical and cultural continuity of the

modern Greeks with their ancient forebears.42 Reference was made to
this more recent controversy in an inaugural lecture given by Professor
Averil Cameron in 1990, not in the Koraes Chair but in the newly
established Chair of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s
College. In this lecture, she re-assured a heavily Greek audience that
the tradition in Byzantine studies established at the College was due to
‘a passionate attachment to classical Greece and an enthusiasm for the
modern Greek state’ on the part of a number of earlier Principals,
whose example the then Principal, Stewart Sutherland, was continuing
in establishing both her chair and a new Centre for Hellenic Studies,
of which she was to be Director. For good measure she added that a
recent Principal of the College, General Sir John Hackett, ‘a
philhellene and a patron of classics’, kept a copy of Thucydides at his
bedside.
Newly installed professors customarily sing the praises of their acad-
emic forebears in their inaugural lectures. But whereas Professor
Cameron was fulsome in her praise of academic bureaucrats, she was
at pains to put some distance between herself and earlier Byzantine
scholars at the College, and more particularly Marshall’s successor in
the Koraes chair, the ‘neo-Fallmerayerist’ Romilly Jenkins, and his
successor, Cyril Mango, byzantinists who ‘seem to have gone out of
their way to denigrate the subject’. She made clear her distaste for ‘the
notorious Jacob Fallmereyer [sic]’ himself. Not only had he articulated
the case against Hellenic continuity, so central to the Greek self-image,
but he was an anti-clerical and an ‘ardent supporter of Ottoman
Turkey’ to boot.43 The fact that when an inaugural lecture in the
Koraes Chair had been delivered the previous year, 1989, the Principal
of the College, Stewart Sutherland, in presiding should have taken a
swipe at Toynbee, again in the presence of a heavily Greek audience,
is an indication of the way in which, even after the passage of 70 years,
the row between Toynbee and the donors still remained something of
an issue and Toynbee himself someone for the College to be embar-
rassed about.
One of the first responses that I had to my book on the Toynbee
controversy was a letter from Stanford Shaw, Professor of Turkish and
Near Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He
offered his congratulations on what he termed a ‘courageous and
enlightening’ study and told me of some of the problems that he had
experienced at the hands of California’s large Armenian American
community on account of his views on the Ottoman massacres of the
Armenians during the First World War. The UCLA campus had been
overrun by thousands of Armenian Americans demanding his
dismissal from the university and the suppression of his books. He had
received numerous death threats from Armenian terrorist organiza-
tions, threats which were taken seriously enough by the FBI that it
twice advised him to leave the country for his own safety. On one
occasion his house had been bombed while he and his family were
sleeping in it.44
I could understand that Professor Shaw might have found my book
enlightening but was puzzled as to why he should have regarded it as
‘courageous’. It was quickly borne in on me, however, that, as the
Irving Berlin song has it, ‘there may be trouble ahead’. I was somewhat
disconcerted to be told by a Greek former student that the book had
given her a sleepless night. When I asked why, she said that she was
sure that the book was going to be used by the Turks in propaganda
against Greece. I was inclined to dismiss this reaction as exaggerated,
although I was subsequently told that the book was indeed the object
of study in the Department of International Relations of the Middle
East Technical University in Ankara.45 Professor P.J. Vatikiotis, a
member of the editorial board of Middle Eastern Studies in which Politics
and the Academy had first been published, told me that members of the
London Greek community had complained of his having ‘allowed’ the
publication to appear in the journal. He had sought to disarm criticism
by pointing out that I had concluded my study by drawing attention
to Toynbee’s strong expression of interest in the offer of a chair at the
University of Istanbul in the wake of his ‘involuntary’ resignation
from King’s College. In the event, I rather doubt that Elie Kedourie, as
editor of Middle Eastern Studies, took Vatikiotis’ advice as to whether or
not the article should be published.
Burrows’ well-meaning intention to contribute to an improved
climate in Anglo-Greek relations – to which he attached such impor-
tance – through the establishment of the Koraes Chair, was in the
event to be thwarted by the controversy that dogged the early years of
the chair and indeed subsequently. Likewise, my own exhumation and
detailed anatomy of a long-forgotten skeleton in the cupboard of
King’s College, London, clearly touched on some raw nerves in some
Greek, and indeed British, quarters. But thereby hangs another tale of
academic and political intrigue to which I shall return in a future
study.
2
The British School at Athens and
the Modern History of Greece
The archaeological sites that proliferate throughout the Greek lands

constitute a vast and incomparably rich resource for the study of
antiquity. Over the years these have been the object of intensive study.
But the politics of archaeology in the independent Greek state have as
yet has been relatively unexplored. Given the importance of the
heritage of the ancient Greek world to the formation of the modern
Greek identity, this relative neglect is puzzling. A significant dimen-
sion of the politics of archaeology in Greece is the role of the foreign
archaeological schools in uncovering the physical remains of an-
tiquity. Their function is necessarily a sensitive, and sometimes a
controversial, one and not only in Greece.1 Melina Mercouri, in the
run-up to the 1981 elections in Greece that resulted in a decisive
victory for Andreas Papandreou’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement
(PASOK), more than once called for the closing down of the foreign
archaeological schools on the grounds that they were institutions for
the training of spies. Such a contention is inherently implausible, but
it is nonetheless unquestionably the case, as we shall see, that alumni
of the archaeological schools served in the intelligence services of their
home countries in both world wars.
The story of the foreign archaeological schools necessarily forms a
part of the modern history of Greece. The present chapter is a survey of
the role of the British School in promoting the study of modern
Greece. For although the interests of the British School have very
largely been focused on antiquity this focus has not been an exclusive
one and, as we shall see, at certain periods there has been a consider-
able interest in modern Greece, its history, language and culture. This
chapter is a revised version of a paper I delivered at the conference held
in Athens in June 1986 to mark the centenary of the establishment of
19
the British School (sometimes referred to as the British School of

Archaeology) at Athens.
At the time that I was invited to give the paper on the contribution
of the British School at Athens to the study of the modern – which I
interpreted as being the post-Byzantine, history of Greece – I was
putting the finishing touches to a detailed study of the strange but
fascinating circumstances of the foundation in 1918 of the Koraes
Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and
Literature at King’s College, London, and of Arnold Toynbee’s brief
and stormy initial tenure of it.2 In writing this book, I had been very
much struck by the fact that virtually all those who were seriously
considered for this chair when it was established at the end of the First
World War had a close connection with the School. Besides Toynbee
himself, these included A.W. Gomme, R.M. Dawkins, A.J.B. Wace,
F.W. Hasluck and C.A. Scutt, all former students of the School. This
represented an extraordinary array of talent and at no stage since has
so much of the School’s effort been devoted to the study of the recent
history of Greece and of its modern language and society as during the
‘Golden Age’ which coincided with the directorships of Dawkins
(1906–13) and Wace (1913–23).
From the very beginning of the School’s existence, there had been
students with a very real interest in modern Greece. R.A.H. Bickford-
Smith, for instance, who was admitted as a student as early as 1888–89,
was the author of The Greece of King George (London 1893), a mine of
information on the kingdom of Greece in the last decade of the nine-
teenth century that retains its value to the present day. Bickford-Smith
recalled that soon after he had arrived in Athens a foreign diplomat
had observed to him ‘you are off to study the dead, and I the living;
but I think you will pay attention to the living too some day’, a
prophetic remark that reinforced a proposition that Bickford-Smith
believed to be almost universally true, namely, that ‘however anti-
quarian the instincts may be that send a traveller to Greece, he is
certain to become infected after a little while by the patriotism of the
Greece before his eyes’. In his chapter on archaeology, Bickford-Smith
not only solicited subscriptions to the newly founded British School
but went so far as to list the name of the treasurer, Walter Leaf. He also
called, predictably without result, for the Chancellor of the Exchequer
to make an annual subsidy of £5000 per annum to the School.3 A
further indication of early interest in contemporary Greece on the part
of the School is afforded by the publication in the third volume
(1896–97) of its Annual of an article entitled ‘Macedonian Customs’ by
The British School at Athens 21
Helen Triandaphyllides, a graduate of the Arsakeion School, perhaps

the leading girls school in Athens at that time. Ms Triandaphyllides is
described as ‘a Greek lady who was attached, during the past season to
the British School, and who, by her attainments, no less than by the
circumstances of her nationality, is peculiarly fitted for the work she
has here undertaken’. Another of the early students of the School,
Edward S. Forster (1902–4) developed a strong interest in the history of
modern Greece. This interest was reinforced by his service as an intel-
ligence officer in Macedonia and in Constantinople between 1915 and
1919 and resulted in the publication in 1941 of a Short History of
Modern Greece 1821–1940.4
Arnold Toynbee, probably the best known historian of our century,
and certainly in the course of a long and hard-working life, one of its
most prolific, is not normally thought of in connection with the
British School. But it is clear that the nine months that he spent in
Greece in 1911–12 was one of the truly formative periods of his life
and that it had a profound influence on the subsequent development
of his scholarly interests. Toynbee had not been at all happy at the
boarding schools to which he had been sent and was not to be as thor-
oughly happy as he had been at the age of nine until he arrived at the
School and learned at last to stand on his own feet.5 Moreover, it was
during this Wanderjahr that he was to come to see the history of clas-
sical, Byzantine and modern Greece as a unity and that he was to
develop that concern with the rise and fall of civilizations which was
to form the basis of his best known, if most controversial, work, the
multi-volume Study of History.
In his Experiences, published in 1969 when he was approaching
eighty and which constitutes the nearest thing to an autobiography
that he ever produced, Toynbee writes at some length about his time
at the School or, rather, out of it. For, as he wrote, to sit stewing in
the School’s library, reading books that would have been equally
accessible back in Britain, would have been a perverse misuse of time
when he was within reach of historical sites the opportunity to visit
which might never recur.6 Toynbee reckoned to have hiked between
2000 and 3000 miles during his time at the School, a formidable
achievement even at a time when prodigious feats of cross country
walking were something of a tradition at the School, albeit one to an
extent enforced at that time by poor communications in rural areas.
The School’s Annual Report, in a rare personal note, paid tribute to
Toynbee’s prowess: ‘his time was spent (the winter months included)
almost entirely in travel, mostly alone and on foot, with the briefest
possible intervals of rest . . . Mr Toynbee’s record for travel is a

remarkable one’.7
One of the great strengths informing Toynbee’s many writings about
the Greek lands is his marvellous sense of place and it is clear that this
largely derives from his months at, or rather away from, the British
School. Indeed, it was during 1911–12 that he had a number of those
intense mystical experiences that were to occur at various stages of his
life and which, more often than not, were prompted by visits to
historic sites in the Greek lands. One such had occurred on 19 March
1912 when he had been hiking alone in a remote area of Eastern Crete
and had come across the ruins of a Venetian baroque villa. This had
given rise to an experience that was, he relates, the psychic counter-
part of an aeroplane falling into an air pocket: ‘the spectator was
suddenly carried down in a “time-pocket” from a day in the year A.D.
1912 to a day in the fifth decade of the seventeenth century on which
History, in that house, had come abruptly to an end in an evacuation
without any sequel except solitude and decay’. Two months later, on
23 May 1912, like Gibbon ‘musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol’,
Toynbee at Mistra was moved to reflect on the importance of geog-
raphy in determining those patterns of history that were to be his great
concern in the Study of History.8 A month earlier, again in Laconia, on
23 April 1912 (Toynbee was always very precise about dates) he under-
went a similar experience in which he was ‘transported to the evening
of the day – whatever that day may have borne in Archbishop Ussher’s
chronological chart – on which this historic fortress had been stranded
on the flowing Time-stream’s motionless marge’.9
Toynbee acquired much more than a profound knowledge of the
topography of ancient and medieval Greece during the months that
he spent at the School. He had come to Greece, as he wrote, to learn
more ‘about the dead and buried Greek world’ that had become his
spiritual home as a consequence of his classical education. Yet in the
course of this pilgrimage he had, like Bickford-Smith before him,
encountered ‘living Greek men and women who were highly intelli-
gent, alert and vocal’.10 These present day Greeks had initiated him
into the twentieth-century world from which he had hitherto been
very largely sheltered. It was in the village coffee shop, after strenuous
days of hiking, that he was to receive his ‘unexpected Greek education’
in ‘the deadly game of international power politics that was being
played by the European great powers’. In February 1912, after climb-
ing to the top of Mount Khlomos, he had encountered some amateur
klephts in the form of armed shepherds who had considerately not
deprived him of his father’s gold watch on the perennially valid

ground that schoolmasters were not rich, while in July he was briefly
arrested for crossing the railway bridge spanning the Asopos gorge on
foot. (It should be remembered that he was travelling on the eve of the
First Balkan War and the single line railway was to be the Greek army’s
major line of supply for the front.) Subsequently Toynbee, somewhat
self-importantly as he himself conceded, complained to the British
Legation which ‘showed sympathy, but prudently took no action’.11
At the time, however, as is clear from a letter which he wrote to his
mother, he hoped that ‘these little men at Lamia’ who had had the
temerity to arrest him would ‘be dropped on heavily enough to
prevent them playing the fool with the next archaeologist who comes
along’. The experience of arrest had been enough, so he wrote, to
inculcate in him a belief in ‘the soundness of race prejudice’ and make
him ‘religiously preach mishellenism to any philhellene I come
across’.12
It was during his time in Greece that some awareness dawned on the
extremely precocious but somewhat sheltered Toynbee of what he
termed ‘the passionateness of the hatred between nation and nation
which was to accentuate the horrors of warfare’ in his lifetime. His
initiation into the intensity of ethnic conflict and the reality of
‘Original Sin’ came on 15 March 1912 as he travelled across the Mesara
plain in the company of an elderly man driving two mules. His travel-
ling companion was the soul of hospitality but Toynbee confessed
himself to have been considerably shaken by the old man’s answer to
his inquiry as to why the villages at the edge of the plain were
deserted. In 1897 the villagers had all had their throats cut.13
Toynbee’s Wanderjahr at the British School not only gave him some
insight into the nature of ethnic conflict in the twentieth century but
probably also ensured that, unlike so many of his former classmates at
school and university, he was to survive the slaughter of the First
World War. For it was on 26 April (again note the precision of his
recollections) that he contracted dysentery while walking from Kato
Vezani to Gythion by drinking from a stream, a condition which he
sought to alleviate by dosing himself with an alarming concoction of
sugar lumps soaked with arsenic. Toynbee regarded the acquisition of
dysentery, which lasted for some six years, as a blessing in disguise for
it spared him from a combatant role in the slaughter of the First World
War which killed so many of his contemporaries.14 He was, however,
actively engaged in other forms of war work, compiling, inter alia, a
dossier of evidence on Turkish atrocities against the Armenians which
was published as an official government Blue Book.15 He also penned,

at government behest, a crudely anti-Turkish propaganda tract that he
was subsequently to disown and which was entitled The Murderous
Tyranny of the Turks (London, 1917).
Toynbee’s unusually distinguished academic attainments, coupled
with abundant evidence, if not necessarily of philhellenic then of
Turcophobic sentiments, clearly attracted the attention of the prin-
cipal of King’s College, Ronald Burrows, when he was looking for
suitable candidates to fill the Koraes Chair. Burrows, a classicist who
had worked on one of the School’s earliest excavations at Rhitsona in
Boeotia, was an old-fashioned romantic philhellene and, moreover, an
ardent Venizelist. At the time of the Balkan wars, when still a profes-
sor at the University of Manchester, he was to pen a curious paean in
praise of Venizelos that began: ‘Venizelos! Venizelos! Do not fail us! Do
not fail us!’16
It was with Venizelos’ active help that the Koraes Chair was estab-
lished and, indeed, it was initially intended to call the chair the
Venizelos Chair. When Toynbee, in applying, expressed doubts as to
whether the incumbent should not be more of an active philhellene
than he felt himself to be, Burrows replied that he had not the least
doubt that anyone who studied the history and people of Greece
would strengthen their sympathetic interest in the country.17 Toynbee
was duly appointed to the chair and, shortly before taking it up at the
beginning of the autumn term 1919 (for once he does not record the
precise date), he had perhaps the most remarkable of his several mys-
tical experiences. Walking along Buckingham Palace Road he was to
find himself ‘in communion, not just with this or that episode in
History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come. In that
instant he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing
through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a
wave in the flow of this vast tide’.18
Toynbee’s inaugural lecture on ‘The place of mediaeval and modern
Greece in history’ was delivered in October 1919 in the Great Hall of
King’s College in the presence of Eleftherios Venizelos. The lecture was
introduced by Ioannes Gennadius, the recently retired Greek minister
in London whose library forms the basis of the Gennadius Library.
(Perhaps in parenthesis, as a modern historian, I may be allowed to
lament the very different turn the British School’s direction might
have taken had Gennadius’s original intention that his magnificent
library should go to the British rather than the American School
been realized.)19 In introducing Toynbee, Gennadius launched into a
characteristic outburst, urging that the newly established department

should teach only the katharevousa, the ‘purifying’ form of Greek,
eschewing ‘the queer fancies of Mr. Psichari [Yannis Psicharis] and his
concert of sciolist youths’. At interview, another candidate for the
chair who was closely associated with the British School, C.A. Scutt,
had been given a thorough grilling by Gennadius, who, inappropri-
ately, was one of the electors, over his championing of the demotic or
spoken Greek. One of Scutt’s referees for the chair, the Revd. G.F.
Fisher, at that time headmaster of Repton School and a future
Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote that while he thought that Scutt had
a ‘very good brain’ he would nonetheless have been more favourably
impressed if he had had a better set of false teeth. Scutt went on to
enjoy a distinguished career as Professor of Greek in the University of
Melbourne.20
Toynbee’s inaugural lecture in the Koraes chair was a characteristic-
ally wide-ranging tour de force in which he expressed his interest in the
way in which the Greeks would administer the large Muslim popula-
tion in the territories that they had recently acquired in western Asia
Minor. This interest in the co-existence, peaceful or otherwise, of
different civilizations was to prompt Toynbee, soon after taking up the
chair, to apply for leave of absence so as to enable him to investigate
at first hand for some nine months in 1921 (a period during which he
was re-admitted as a Student of the School) the nature of Greek admin-
istration in the newly acquired territories, somewhat unusually in the
guise of a special correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. His find-
ings, which were unflattering to Greece, were embodied in the
despatches which he telegraphed back to the Manchester Guardian, in
other journalistic writings and, above all, in that remarkable book The
Western Question in Greece and Turkey: a Study in the Conflict of
Civilizations (London, 1922).
Toynbee’s observations on the conduct of the Greek army in Asia
Minor and his increasingly manifest emotional attachment to the
Turkish nationalist cause enraged the wealthy London Greeks who had
put up the money for the Koraes Chair endowment. These now began
to put pressure on the College authorities to remove Toynbee from his
chair, a pressure which enjoyed significant support from a powerful
group in the King’s professoriate, fearful lest other endowments might
be jeopardized. Toynbee involuntarily resigned from the Koraes Chair
in 1924, whereupon he was immediately contacted by the Turkish
ambassador in London and offered a chair at the University of
Istanbul. This he was quite interested in, although, in the event, he was
attracted to new pastures at the British (subsequently Royal) Institute

of International Affairs or Chatham House. Although from then on he
was to be immersed in the analysis of contemporary international rela-
tions and in the writing of A Study of History, Toynbee never lost his
profound interest in Greek history throughout the ages and it is char-
acteristic that his last book, The Greeks and their Heritages (Oxford,
1981), published posthumously, should have ranged effortlessly and
penetratingly over the whole of Greece’s historical experience.
But to return to what I have called the ‘Golden Age’ of the School’s
interest in post-Byzantine Greece, which coincided with the director-
ships of Dawkins and Wace. The runner-up to Toynbee in the election
to the Koraes Chair was A.W. Gomme who, after being Prendergast
Scholar at the School in 1908–9, had been appointed lecturer in
Ancient History at the University of Glasgow. He had subsequently
spent a further period in Greece, presumably also under the aegis of
the School. In a reference which he wrote for Gomme, J.L. Myres wrote
that he had given ‘much attention to modern Greek literature, espe-
cially to romance, poetry and drama. Greek acquaintances in Athens
have expressed to me very favourable opinions of his knowledge and
judgement. He has followed carefully the current controversies as to
standards of Greek speech and style. . . .’21 Gomme remained at
Glasgow for the rest of his academic career but the slim, and still
useful, Greece (Oxford, 1945) indicates a continuing and sympathetic
interest in the modern Greeks.
William Miller, the great historian of medieval and modern Greece,
had always been Principal Burrows’ favoured candidate for the chair.
He was never apparently an actual Student of the School but was a
frequent user of its library, having been elected an associate in 1906
and an honorary student in 1933. Miller, however, had declined to
stand for the Koraes Chair, fearful lest the acceptance of a post
endowed with foreign funds might compromise his independence as a
commentator on the Greek political scene. When Miller declined,
Burrows then turned to A.J.B. Wace. Given the refusal of Miller and
also of R.M. Dawkins (who in 1920 was to be appointed to the Bywater
and Sotheby Chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and
Literature at Oxford) to stand and given the poor state of Hasluck’s
health, so Burrows wrote to Wace, his personal feeling was that he
(Wace) would be the best candidate, provided that he was prepared to
abjure prehistory.
Wace, however, replied that he was much too interested in archae-
ology to give it up, besides which he was too old to do so. ‘The only
thing that would attract me is modern Greek history . . . but that I can
study just as well here and besides’, he over-modestly added, ‘I know
nothing of it’. Not only did he feel that it would be a gross presump-
tion on his part to stand but, furthermore, his duty to the British
School, of which at this time he was director, tied him to Athens.22
Wace, and the companion of many of his travels, M.S. Thompson,
belonged very much to the hard walking tradition that characterized
the School at that time and for several decades afterwards. Helen
Waterhouse, in her centennial history of the School, has written of
Wace and Thompson tramping through Thessaly equipped only with
a toothbrush and waterproofs, while Toynbee, no slouch himself,
compared them to a couple of sleuth hounds on the scent. Like klephts
they were unburdened by impedimenta and were ‘indifferent, while
chasing their quarry, to heat, cold, hunger, or exposure to the
elements’.23 In 1911–12 Wace was working simultaneously on
neolithic stratification, on the excavations at Mycenae, on Greek
island embroideries and on the Vlach community of Samarina in the
Pindus. Wace and Thompson’s pioneering ethnographic study Nomads
of the Balkans: an Account of Life and Customs among the Vlachs of
Northern Pindus remains to this day one of the fundamental sources for
those interested in the Vlachs in modern times. It is touched with a
lightly ironical style as when the authors observe that in 1910 ‘the
annual disturbance in Albania had begun somewhat earlier than
usual’. Re-reading the book during the winter of 1985 (when the hys-
teria over the virtually invisible Halley’s comet was at its height), I was
fascinated to learn that in 1910 – when the Vlach mule trains with
which Wace and Thompson travelled camped overnight in the open
‘on most occasions when the night was clear conversation turned on
Halley’s comet which was then blazing in the western sky. It was
pointing towards Macedonia, and was thought to be a sign of war’.24
Certainly the time was not far off when Macedonia was to be
convulsed by hostilities during the Balkan wars of 1912–13.
F.W. Hasluck, who was assistant director and librarian of the School
between 1906 and 1910 and between 1911 and 1915, was to be ruled
out of consideration for the Koraes Chair by ill health, for by 1918/19
he had already been struck down by the tuberculosis that was very
soon to take his life. Although still a young man, he had published
widely in the field of classical, medieval and modern Greek studies and
had demonstrated a particular interest in the symbiotic relationship of
Christian and Muslim in Asia Minor. Perhaps his most important
contribution was the posthumously published two volume collection
of papers, edited by his wife Margaret (née Hardie, School Student in

1911 and herself a distinguished Albanologist), and entitled
Christianity and Islam under the Sultans (Oxford, 1929). These are full of
fascinating and recondite lore about obscure by-ways in the history of
the Levant, much of it clearly derived from intensive reading in the
Finlay Library.
Another person in whom principal Burrows had a considerable inter-
est as a possible holder of the Koraes Chair was R.M. Dawkins.
Dawkins, of course, was primarily a linguist but he was also clearly
fascinated by the historical and social context of the various modern
Greek dialects which he studied with such assiduity. The preface to his
Modern Greek in Asia Minor (Cambridge, 1916) is a mine of information
on the Greek speaking villages of Cappadocia on the eve of the Balkan
wars and it was, sadly, not to be long before the communities whose
dialects he studied, and for which he had such an affection, were to be
permanently uprooted and moved to Greece. Tragic though the subse-
quent fate of these communities was, we may be thankful that
Dawkins carried out his researches when he did, preserving a record of
a number of the dialects of Asia Minor while they were still being
spoken in situ. He also wrote, inter alia, on the Greek dialects of Pontos,
on karamanlidika, the writing of Turkish with Greek characters prac-
tised by the numerous Turcophone Greek communities of Asia Minor,
and on the phenomenon of crypto-Christianity in the Ottoman
Empire (the practice whereby in certain areas of the Empire commu-
nities of Orthodox Christians outwardly conformed to Islam while
secretly remaining faithful to the precepts and practices of the
Orthodox faith).25 Dawkins also wrote extensively on folklore, which
was likewise a major concern of two others closely associated with the
School at this time, J.C. Lawson and W.R. Halliday. The latter, so we
learn from a testimonial by the School’s then acting secretary in
London, was a gentleman both by birth and education, a man from an
old Devonshire family who acted ‘the young squire’ during the vaca-
tions.26 Lawson, a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge and a
former Student at the School, was the author of Modern Greek Folklore
and Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1910) in which he sought ‘to
trace the continuity of the life and thought of the Greek people, and
to exhibit modern Greek folklore as an essential factor in the interpre-
tation of ancient Greek religion’.
During the years immediately before the outbreak of the First World
War there was, as we have seen, an extraordinary galaxy of talent in
the School, producing work on post-Byzantine Greece of the highest
quality. But, as it will be recalled, the Vlachs with whom Wace and
Thompson travelled had looked upon the arrival of Halley’s comet in
1910 as a portent and it was not to be long before Greece would be
caught up in the tides of war which were to engulf Europe. The tumul-
tuous events of the second decade of the twentieth century in Greece
could not but affect the life and activities of the School. Indeed,
already during the Balkan wars of 1912–13, the Marasleion School next
door had become a temporary hospital, some of whose nurses were
housed in the School hostel.27
When the First World War broke out its repercussions were not
immediately felt in Greece and, indeed, at the beginning of hostilities,
the absence of students at the School gave Hasluck more time to work
on his catalogue of the Finlay Library and Wace the opportunity to
work on the Finlay papers (that superb repository of material on
nineteenth-century Greece), a calendar to which was published some
years ago by Professor Joan Hussey as The Finlay Papers: a Catalogue
(London, 1973). It was not to be long, however, before the war
intruded on the School’s affairs and the Director, Wace, seconded to
the British Legation, assumed responsibility for the relief of British
refugees from Turkey after the Ottoman Empire had entered the war
on the side of the Central Powers.28 Wace, with Mr and Mrs Hasluck
together with another former Student, F.B. Welch, were soon set to
work in the euphemistically named Passport Control Office, which
was actually housed in the School. Compton Mackenzie has given a
characteristically amusing, if somewhat hyperbolical, account of his
time working in this office. His description of the School as he found
it in the autumn of 1915 will strike many a nostalgic chord and
certainly bears an uncanny resemblance to the School as my wife and
I knew it in the mid-1960s: ‘the photographs upon the walls of
temples, theatres and mountains; the faded groups of student archae-
ologists in old-fashioned straw hats, who in bygone years had
sojourned here for a while and hence sallied forth to excavate some
classic site; the library of Hellenic scholarship and research; the long
table in the deserted dining room; the subtle air of learning which
permeated the whole place with a faint dusty perfume’.29
Not all of those associated with the School were as enamoured of the
frowzy atmosphere of scholarship that emanated from it. One such was
Pierson Dixon, one of a number of former students to enter the diplo-
matic service. He wrote how in 1927, having just graduated in classics
from Cambridge where he had won the Porson Prize and the Craven
Scholarship, he arrived at the British School ‘and immediately hated its
lovely garden, palm trees and pepper trees, the composed building
with pots, stelae, and busts in the entrance hall, its two libraries, clean
bare corridors and atmosphere heavy with academicism . . .’30 Dixon
was to marry Ismene, the daughter of S.C. Atchley, Oriental Secretary
to the British Legation in Athens (where he was to live for some forty
years) and of his Greek wife, whom he had met at a ball held in the
British School in the 1890s. This Greek connection seems to have given
Dixon a sympathy with Greek aspirations that was not always shared
by his colleagues in the Foreign Office.
Compton Mackenzie lived in the hostel and Wace, who was likewise
engaged in intelligence work, invited him to join him for lunch every-
day in the Director’s house. Mackenzie records that there were ‘few
things that I remember with such pleasure as that Mess, which
provided every day an opportunity to slip back out of the war into a
civilized existence’. Among Mackenzie’s numerous, and not infre-
quently far-fetched, anecdotes is one which deserves retelling. It
concerns a Captain Potts of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, a man
of immense physical strength who once, when crossing an Athenian
street, had with one arm pushed a horse back on its haunches to stop
a hackney carriage from running into him. Potts visited the temporar-
ily incapacitated Mackenzie one evening when he was at the School,
and, on leaving, had unwisely refused Mackenzie’s offer of a candle to
light his way downstairs. But Potts’ electric torch failed him and he
was left in pitch darkness. Primed to expect the worst in the dubious
world of intrigue in which Mackenzie moved, he was alarmed to see
the outline of a lurking form against the glimmer of light coming in
through the front door.
‘“Look here”’ said Potts, “if you don’t say who you are, it will be the
worse for you . . .”’. The sinister form neither spoke nor moved. So
Potts, as Compton Mackenzie relates, ‘determined not to take any risk
of getting a knife under his ribs and thinking that it behoved him to
take precautions on behalf of me lying upstairs with a game leg, drew
back a mighty fist to a massive shoulder, and then drove it with all his
force below the jaw of the taciturn assassin. That the jaw of the
assassin, which was of Parian marble, did not completely smash Potts’s
knuckles, was due to its owner being a bust on a pedestal, and so less
stable than a life-size statue. Still, even as it was, the assassin made a
pretty mess of Potts’s hand’.31 This was, of course, the statue that
graced – and continues to grace – the entrance hall of the School.
The years of the First World War were clearly exciting ones for the
British School and, indeed, for many of its former students. During the
critical winter of 1916–17 two rival governments came into existence

in Greece and there was a great deal of anti-British feeling in royalist
Athens. As a consequence, the British Legation was actually transferred
to the transport Abbasieh anchored off Keratsini and the director of the
neighbouring American School temporarily took charge of the
School’s buildings.32 At least four members of the School served in
naval intelligence in Greek waters and a further dozen or so on the
Salonica front. J.L. Myres, for instance, cut a dashing figure in his
motorized caique. In cattle-raids on the Anatolian coast, so Compton
Mackenzie tells us, ‘the Assyrian Myres came down like a wolf on the
Turkish fold’. These exploits, however, while they may have delighted
the ward-rooms of the British Mediterranean fleet, and, indeed, may
even have incommoded the enemy, were eventually stopped ‘as doing
more harm to the Greek population on the (Anatolian) mainland than
to their Turkish masters’. As Mackenzie put it, there was indeed ‘some-
thing irreconcilable between Myres the Assyrian pirate and Myres the
purveyor of information to the Commercial Department, between
Myres the Blackbeard of the Aegean and Myres the Gladstone Professor
of Greek at the University of Liverpool’.33
David G. Hogarth, the second Student to attend the School, and
subsequently Director, became the Director of the Arab Bureau in
Cairo and played an influential role in shaping the map of the modern
Middle East.34 Dawkins, by now commissioned as a lieutenant in the
RNVR, was despatched as an intelligence officer to Eastern Crete,
where he joined another former student at the School, J.C. Lawson,
whose wartime experiences are entertainingly recounted in Tales of
Aegean Intrigue (London, 1920).35 The end of the war brought a return
of the School to its traditional pursuits, although here again external
events impinged on its activities. Although women had been admitted
as Students as early as the mid-1890s, they were permitted to reside in
the hostel for the first time only during the winter of 1920–21, as a
consequence of pressure on the part of the British Minister, Lord
Granville, who was fearful of the turmoil consequent on the defeat of
Venizelos in the November 1920 elections and the restoration to the
throne of King Constantine I.36
With the ending of the First World War, Wace was re-appointed
director in 1919 for a further three years. Myres at this time proposed
a rather extraordinary scheme by which the School would become a
centre for propaganda ‘in the widest sense’ engaged in what was some-
what mysteriously termed the ‘gradual assimilation of various spheres
of Greek life to British ways’. This proposal met with no favour on the
part of the Managing Committee.37 Wace, more realistically, suggested

widening the School’s sphere of work to include subjects such as
geology and botany, a proposal reflecting his own catholic interests in
many aspects of Greek life. Nothing, alas, came of Wace’s imaginative
proposal and, for much of the twenties and thirties, the School’s inter-
ests appear to have been fairly narrowly archaeological. This more
restricted focus was recognized in the formal adoption in 1935–36 of
the title ‘British School of Archaeology’. Only in 1970 did the School
revert to its original title ‘The British School at Athens’.38
There were, however, one or two exceptions to the general rule:
Romilly Jenkins, was Macmillan Student at the School in 1932 and, for
a brief period, was subsequently assistant director. He later became the
third Koraes Professor at King’s College, writing, in a predominantly
Byzantine corpus, a pioneering English language study of the poet
Dionysios Solomos (London 1940) and The Dilessi Murders (London,
1961), a detailed anatomy of the kidnapping and murder in 1870 of a
party of English milordoi on an excursion to Marathon and of its exten-
sive political ramifications. H.D.F. Kitto published in 1933 an
attractive small book entitled In the Mountains of Greece. A more
modern leaven to the School’s activities was also given by William
Miller who, although not formally attached to the School, was a
regular reader in the library, having been elected, as we have seen, an
associate of the School in 1906 and an honorary student in 1933.
Miller had a prodigious knowledge of medieval and modern Greek
history and his Greek Life in Town and Country, which was published as
long ago as 1905, remains in my view one of the most informative,
perceptive and sympathetic books ever to have been written about
modern Greece.39 I cannot leave the 1930s without referring to Dilys
Powell’s The Traveller’s Journey is Done (London, 1943) with its marvel-
lously sympathetic portrait of her husband Humfry Payne and its
wonderful, if not entirely flattering, evocation of the School during
the early thirties.
In 1940 Greece was again to be caught up in the maelstrom of war
and the British School was once again to be harnessed to war purposes.
The hostel was given over to those on official or British Council busi-
ness. The director, Gerard Mackworth Young, became director of
information for the British Legation, with an office in the Penrose
Library, while David Wallace, in Greece as a student of the School and
carrying out research into crusader castles, became press attaché.
Wallace was subsequently parachuted into Greece on behalf of the
Foreign Office and was killed in the course of a guerrilla engagement
in the summer of 1944. A.R. Burn was with the British Council in
1940–41, while Wace resumed the work for MI5 that he had under-
taken during the First War. An atmospheric evocation of the febrile
climate of the times in Athens is contained in the third volume of
Olivia Manning’s well-known Balkan Trilogy.
Not surprisingly, many of those who had been associated with the
School were employed in war work in Greece. J.D.S. Pendlebury who,
on the outbreak of hostilities, had been appointed vice-consul in Crete
as a cover for his activities on behalf of the Special Operations
Executive (SOE), was killed in mysterious circumstances at the time of
the German airborne landing in May 1941.40 A number of those who
had been at the School were parachuted into Greece to work with the
Greek resistance on behalf of SOE. These included C.M. Woodhouse,
who had been at the School on the outbreak of hostilities, and who, in
1943, succeeded Brigadier E.C.W. Myers as commander of the British,
subsequently Allied, Military Mission to the Greek resistance. N.G.L.
Hammond, who had carried out some epic journeys of archaeological
exploration in Epirus, Macedonia and Albania before the war, also
played a leading role in liaison with the Greek resistance, as did, inter
alia, Anthony Andrewes, J.M. Cook, P.M. Fraser and John Stevens. The
British had so many academics in occupied Greece, indeed, that the
joke within SOE’s American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), was that Oxford ruled in northern Greece and Cambridge in the
south of the country.41 The propensity of the British military and intel-
ligence authorities to seek to make use of the linguistic and other
talents of former members of the British School was by no means
unique. Many alumni of the American School of Classical Studies
served in a similar capacity, as, indeed, did former members of the
German Archaeological Institute. Indeed, when working on the papers
relating to the Greek affairs of OSS in Washington, I encountered such
names as J.L. Caskey, Rodney Young, Jerome Sperling and Virginia
Grace.42 This was not in the least surprising, nor were the trenchantly
expressed criticisms levelled at British policy by many of the ‘archaeo-
logical captains’ (as they were known within OSS and who sometimes
came under fire for their prima donna-ish ways). British policy in
wartime Greece has come under fire for being too supportive of the
existing status quo and too hostile to the aspirations of the communist-
controlled National Liberation Front (EAM). In this context it is worth
noting that General Stephanos Saraphis, the commander of the ELAS
guerrilla army, EAM’s military arm, after the war married Marion
Pascoe who had been a student at the School between 1936 and 1939.43
Other former students were engaged in various forms of war work

bearing on Greek affairs, whether military, diplomatic or other.
Stanley Casson, for instance, who had been assistant director in the
early 1920s, was on the staff of General Heywood of the British
Military Mission in 1941, wrote a widely distributed book Greece and
Britain (1942), which pointed to the long ties of friendship linking the
two countries, and subsequently worked for SOE.44 E.S. Forster, as we
have seen, a former student of the School and latterly professor of
Greek at Sheffield University, was inspired by Greece’s entry into the
war in October 1940 to write his A Short History of Modern Greece
1821–1940, which was published in 1941. The purpose of Forster’s
book, like that of Casson’s, was to promote a better understanding of
a country which in the winter of 1940–41 had been Britain’s only
active ally in Europe. A.R. Burn latterly served in the Foreign Office
and still managed to find the time to produce an attractive small book
entitled The Modern Greeks, first published in Alexandria in 1943 and
which was sold to raise funds for Greek War Relief. I have already
referred to the similar short book on modern Greece published by
A.W. Gomme.
Not all those students of the School involved in the turbulent events
of Greece during the Second World War were there in a combatant
role. Donald Nicol, for instance, served as a member of the Friends’
Ambulance Unit during the Battle of Athens in December 1944, while
Mercy Money-Coutts was engaged in work for the United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA). Likewise, during the First
World War, R.C. Bosanquet, who had been director of the School
between 1900 and 1908, had similarly served in the Friends’
Ambulance Unit and had also been active in relief work on behalf of
the Serbs.45
During the occupation, the School was initially placed in the charge
of the American School of Classical Studies and, following America’s
entry into the war, of the Swiss Legation, under whose aegis it became
a centre for the distribution of food by the Swiss and Swedish Red
Cross. The School’s annexe was originally built as a store house to
accommodate relief supplies. On liberation the hostel was used by the
British Embassy as a mess and it was not until October 1946 that the
School regained control of its premises.
In the post-war period we can trace a gradual expansion in the
School’s interests in the direction of more recent periods of Greek
history, culture and society. Philip Sherrard’s two periods as assistant
director were a pointer in this direction and the volume Modern Greece
(London, 1968) which he wrote together with another former student

at the School, the anthropologist, John Campbell, certainly ranks as
one of the best books on modern Greece to appear in any language in
the post-war period, a worthy successor to William Miller’s earlier
endeavours. Topics such as the Sarakatsanoi, refugee communities in
Piraeus, folk poetry, the folk textiles of Crete, urban folk music and the
attitude of Greek political parties towards European integration afford
evidence enough, if such were needed, that the study of modern, even
contemporary Greece, is firmly integrated into the life of the School, a
development all the more fruitful now that Greece is a member of the
European Community. The range and diversity of the studies being
undertaken at the School in recent years are beginning to match those
of the first two decades of the century. Modern Greek studies in
general have enjoyed a significant resurgence over the past twenty
years or so and the distinguished list of Students engaged in various
aspects of these studies at the School amply demonstrates the increas-
ingly important role that it has played in the development of these
disciplines.
Although inevitably I have not been able to mention all aspects of
the School’s activities in relation to the study of post-Byzantine
Greece, I hope that I have been able to give some indication within the
compass of this paper of the British School’s distinguished contribu-
tions to the study of modern Greece. Despite some fallow periods, the
School during the century and more that it has been in existence has
much to be proud of in encouraging the sympathetic study of the host
country. We can, I am sure, confidently expect, during the next
hundred years, that work of equal distinction will be forthcoming.
3
The ‘ingenious enthusiasm’ of Dr
Burrows and the ‘unsatiated
hatred’ of Professor Toynbee
On 9 March 1920, almost a year after the fateful Greek landing in

Smyrna in May of 1919, Admiral Sir John de Robeck, the British High
Commissioner in Constantinople, penned a remarkably percipient
dispatch which its recipient, Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary,
looked on as ‘frank but exceedingly important’. In this, he expressed
grave doubts about the peace terms with the Ottoman Empire that
were soon formally to be incorporated in the Treaty of Sèvres of August
of that year – the treaty that was, albeit ephemerally, to usher in the
vision of a Greece ‘of the Two Continents and of the Five Seas’. What
particularly alarmed de Robeck was the prospective cession of Smyrna
and Thrace to the Greeks, the ‘Turks’ secular enemies’. For such a
move, he maintained, would be a ‘flagrant violation’ of one of the
cardinal principles for which he understood the Great War to have
been fought, namely, that of self-determination. The provisional
Greek occupation of the Smyrna region, which had been sanctioned
by the victorious Powers, had already proved to be the ‘canker in the
Near Eastern situation’.
It appeared to de Robeck that the Powers had been prepared to ride
roughshod over their stated principles and to contemplate indefinite
bloodshed in the Near East in order to keep Eleftherios Venizelos, the
Greek prime minister, in office for a few years. ‘I cannot help wonder-
ing’, he continued, ‘if the game is worth the candle. I should wonder,
even if Mr. Veniselos were immortal; he is not immortal but
ephemeral,1 but as regards Greece, a phenomenon. By that I mean that
he has no successors of his own calibre. In other words, he is not
Greece. He is not, strictly speaking, even Greek’.2 De Robeck went on
to speculate as to the reasons for the hardening in the attitude of the
Supreme Council (of the Paris Peace Conference) towards Turkey. ‘If it
36
Dr Burrows and Professor Toynbee 37
were due’, he wrote, ‘to the thunder of the Canons of Canterbury

[Cathedral], to the outcry of Near Eastern cranks, and to the ingenious
enthusiasm of Dr. Burrows and his friends’ then it did not seem to him
to be defensible.3 Whether Ronald Burrows, at that time Principal of
King’s College of the University of London and a leading light in phil-
hellenic circles in Great Britain, could reasonably be dismissed as a
‘Near Eastern crank’ will become apparent in due course, but Admiral
de Robeck’s exasperated outburst is striking testimony to the apparent
influence of the philhellenic and anti-Turkish agitation orchestrated
by Burrows and his ilk during the First World War and its aftermath.
Whereas in 1920 de Robeck regarded Principal Burrows as a philhel-
lenic nuisance exercising a pernicious influence on the conduct of
British policy, two years later, in 1922, it was the turn of Professor
Arnold Toynbee to be castigated as an unregenerate Turcophile whose
journalistic and academic writings gave succour to the enemies of
Greece. It was Major G. Melas, MC, who made reference to Toynbee’s
‘unsatiated hatred’ for the Greeks in his The Turk as He is. Answer to a
Libel. Sidelights on Kemalism, Bolshevism and Pan-Germanism. This
curious opuscule was published in Hove, and was dedicated to Bessie,
The Lady Headley, who is described as ‘a friend of Greece’. Major
Melas, a former secretary to King Constantine I of Greece, was also, so
we learn from the title page, an habitué of the Devonshire Club in St
James’s. Some 80 pages in length, the book largely consists of a philip-
pic directed against Toynbee’s then very recently published The
Western Question in Greece and Turkey: a Study in the Contact of
Civilizations.4 It was this book which, together with his dispatches and
articles in the then Manchester Guardian and elsewhere, was to provoke
the wrath of the Greek donors who had put up the endowment for the
chair which Toynbee held, the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and
Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College in the
University of London. This chair Burrows had been instrumental in
founding in 1919 and it was undoubtedly the branch of study to
which this pioneer academic entrepreneur in the field of area studies
was most personally committed. The pressure exercised by the donors
on the college and university (for London is a federal university) was
to result in 1924 in what Toynbee himself was to characterize as his
involuntary resignation.
Major Melas began his tirade with a curious complaint against
Toynbee’s use of his wife as a shield for a number of the assertions that
he had made in The Western Question. It is, he wrote, ‘indeed difficult
to refute a lady’s impressions’. Nonetheless, given that ‘a wife generally
– be it duty or devotion to her husband – views things through his eyes’

[sic], he felt able to take issue with their mutual findings. Lavish in his
denunciations of the ‘blind fanaticism’ and ‘shameless cynicism’ of
this ‘blind disciple of Fallmerayer’, the Austrian Hellenist who had
caused outrage by questioning the physical continuity between the
ancient and modern Greeks, Melas found it difficult to comprehend
‘how a man of the supposed standard of a Professor of the University of
London’ could so obviously contradict himself. At one stage, seeking to
drive home a point about the nomadic ancestry of the Turks, Melas
rhetorically asked of Toynbee whether he knew of many Turks who
would close the door behind them.5 Somewhat ironically, as we shall
see, Toynbee, at an earlier stage in his career, had himself been the
exponent of such crude Turcophobia.
In characteristically heavy-handed fashion Melas also insinuated
that Toynbee was a paid apologist for the Turks:
he ought to have known that a few months ago it had been offi-
cially decided in the Angora Parliament to dispose of about
£300,000 from the gold forwarded to Kemal from Moscow with
propagandistic aims. And as in every country there are many
worshippers of the ‘Golden Calf ‘, I have reasons to believe that this
sum has already been disposed of to great advantage. If the
Kemalists openly admit that they dispose of such sums for propa-
ganda, one can easily imagine what far greater sums are secretly
used; so many people prefer dealings in the dark!
Melas declared that it was emphatically not the case, as Toynbee had
maintained, that ‘the Turks, as a nation, are almost ludicrously inno-
cent of the propagandist art. . . .’ Quite the contrary, indeed, for it was
only a subsidy from ‘the well-known generous Greek patriot’, John
Casulli, that had enabled the publication of his own rejoinder to
Toynbee.6
Burrows, who had incurred the wrath of Admiral de Robeck, and
Toynbee, who had aroused the ire of Major Melas and, indeed, of
many other members of the Greek community in Britain, were to find
themselves inextricably enmeshed in the thickets of Greek politics
from the moment that the one had established the Koraes chair and
the other had been appointed to it. This was perhaps inevitable given
the coincidence of the founding of the chair in 1919 with a critical
period in the history of Greece and given that both, indeed, saw them-
selves not merely as commentators on the Greek political scene but
also, to an extent, as actors. I do not intend to rehearse the curious but

instructive story of Toynbee’s travails as the first holder of the Koraes
chair.7 Rather I want to look at Principal Burrows within the context
of the somewhat dotty, but nonetheless politically fairly influential,
philhellenic circles in which he moved, and indeed in which he was a
prime mover, and also at the process whereby Toynbee, within
scarcely more than half a dozen years, underwent the process of trans-
mogrification from rabid Turcophobe to enthusiastic champion of the
fledgling Turkish republic, more than willing to consider, following
his forced departure from King’s College, the offer of a professorship,
at a suitably and substantially enhanced salary, at the University of
Istanbul.
Burrows was an Oxford-trained classical scholar. He had taught at
the University of Glasgow, where he was a protégé of the professor of
Greek, Gilbert Murray who, in turn, was to become Toynbee’s father-
in-law. Burrows subsequently held chairs of Greek at Cardiff and
Manchester before becoming principal of King’s College in 1913. He
had conducted excavations at Pylos, Sphacteria and at Rhitsona in
Boeotia, and was the author of an account of Sir Arthur Evans’ exca-
vations on Crete, The Discoveries on Crete and their bearing on the History
of Ancient Civilization,8 a book which won plaudits from Evans himself,
from Gilbert Murray and Jane Harrison, and which was the basis for
the award of Burrows’s Oxford DLitt degree.
Burrows’s time in Greece had inspired in him a keen interest, rare in
his classicist contemporaries, in modern Greece and its politics, the
vigour of which he contrasted favourably with the apathy that he had
encountered when he ventured into the municipal politics of Glasgow
(Burrows managed to combine socialist sympathies with a penchant
for speculation on the Stock Exchange, salving his conscience by
donating a tithe of his profits to good causes). He had been particularly
impressed by one local election that he had witnessed in Pylos, in
which the local citizenry ‘with many bands and banners’ set about the
election of a town council of 15 members. For these 15 seats there were
no fewer than 127 candidates out of a total electoral role of 1200.9
Greece’s successes in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 awoke in him a
passionate devotion to the Greek cause, an emotional commitment
manifested in his ‘Song of the Hellenes to Veniselos the Cretan’, first
published in the Manchester University Magazine (January 1913). This
extraordinary outpouring of naively philhellenic and fulsomely pro-
Venizelos sentiment begins with the stirring refrain:
Veniselos! Veniselos!
Do not fail us! Do not fail us!
Now is come for thee the hour,
To show forth thy master power.

Lord of all Hellenic men,
Make our [sic] country great again!10
On becoming principal of King’s College in 1913, Burrows was able

to give a more practical expression to his philhellenic sentiments. In
1913, for instance, he was instrumental in founding the Anglo-
Hellenic League in conjunction with two prominent members of the
Anglo-Greek community, D.J. Cassavetti11 and A.C. Ionides, together
with another academic philhellene, William Pember Reeves. Pember
Reeves, a New Zealander, was Director of the London School of
Economics, which, like King’s College, was part of the University of
London, and he was subsequently to act as a clandestine adviser to the
Greek subscribers to the Koraes chair endowment in their war against
Toynbee. Pember Reeves shared Burrows’s passionate admiration for
Venizelos. He, too, was a poetaster, being the author of ‘Greek Fire, a
Byzantine Ballad’ and, according to his biographer, he never tired
of ‘drawing parallels between ancient Greece and modern New
Zealand’.12 Quite what these may have been is not immediately
apparent.
The stated objectives of the Anglo-Hellenic League included the
defence of the ‘just claims and honour of Greece’, the removal of exist-
ing prejudices, and the prevention of future misunderstandings
between the ‘British and Hellenic races’. Its offices, conveniently for
Burrows and Pember Reeves, were situated in the Aldwych, more or
less midway between King’s College and the London School of
Economics. From its inception, the League identified the cause of
Greece with the cause of Eleftherios Venizelos, an identification that
became even closer as the Greek prime minister’s unconditional
attachment to the Entente Powers manifested itself on the outbreak of
the First World War. Burrows once described the League as ‘a fighting
Society of keen friends of Greece13 and it certainly adopted a high, and
unashamedly political, profile throughout the period of the First
World War. Burrows was in the forefront of all this propagandistic and
political activity. Indeed, he appears to have envisaged that his cher-
ished foundation of the Koraes Chair would afford ‘the best way of
obtaining a “whole time” man [sic] of ability and position to run the
Greek cause in England by means of the [Anglo-Hellenic] League’, for

no paid secretary would be able to fulfil the role of the new professor
as ‘a directing force that has time to think out orders’.14 In effect he
saw the chair as providing academic cover and legitimacy to someone
whose role he envisaged as essentially that of a propagandist.
Throughout the period of his principalship of King’s College,
Burrows was indefatigable in his efforts to promote the Venizelist
cause. His newspaper and periodical articles and pamphlets on polit-
ical topics amount to almost 50 items.15 These included ‘The New
Greece’, published originally in The Quarterly Review (April 1914) and
reprinted as pamphlet no. 14 of the Anglo-Hellenic League; ‘King
Constantine’s treachery’ in The Sunday Times (10 December 1916); ‘Mr.
Veniselos states his policy’ in The New Europe (29 March 1917), which
took the form which took the form of Venizelos’ answers to questions
put to him by Burrows; and ‘The state of feeling in Old Greece’ in The
Contemporary Review (July 1917). With R.W. Seton-Watson, whom we
shall encounter later, and H. Wickham Steed, foreign editor of The
Times, he was the author of a manifesto entitled ‘Greece and Smyrna’
that was published in The New Europe (21 November 1918).16 Likewise
he penned, with R.W. Seton-Watson, a memorandum, dated King’s
College, 28 March 1916, for circulation among members of both
houses of Parliament and entitled ‘Is it expedient or honourable to
make a separate peace with Bulgaria?’ Burrows’s last published venture
into political polemic, entitled ‘Misgovernment in Bulgaria and in
Turkey’, appeared in The New Europe on 7 August 1919.
Burrows was likewise an indefatigable speaker at public meetings
organized in support of the Greek cause. On 23 January 1919, together
with the Bishop of Oxford, Athelstan Riley and the Reverend J.A.
Douglas,17 a noted high churchman who was to emerge as one of
Toynbee’s harshest critics in the Senate of the University of London,
he spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Crusade for the Redemption
of Saint Sophia. At this no doubt highly charged meeting, a motion
was carried by acclamation urging ‘the importance on the grounds of
justice to the long-suffering and oppressed Christians of the Turkish
Empire, of the Restoration of the Great Christian Church of Saint
Sophia to Christian worship’.18 Burrows’s speech was predictably
emotional. If we wish to be correct ‘politically and historically’, he
argued, we should properly describe the Greek war of independence as
‘the revolt of the Byzantines against the Turks’. He maintained that
Greece had nothing to fear from proposals to place Constantinople
under the control of a mandatory power such as the United States; for
‘the Greek nation knows perfectly well that her race alone is native to
the soil’ and that ‘as a matter of fact it would not be many generations
before an Internationalized Constantinople would in fact be a Greek
Constantinople’. The Bishop of Oxford’s peroration was rather odd.
What, he asked, was ‘the beastly thing’ in the British character that
had made it quite common when he was a boy to be told by one’s rela-
tions that ‘the Turk is such a gentleman’: ‘there is something bad in us
that we have got heartily and profoundly to repent’.19
It was Burrows who was instrumental in organizing, on behalf of the
Anglo-Hellenic League, the huge meeting which Venizelos addressed
at the Mansion House in the City of London on 16 November 1917.
Students from King’s College were mobilized to act as stewards and
thousands of would-be attenders had to be turned away. The Lord
Mayor was in the chair and, besides Venizelos, the speakers were the
Foreign Secretary A.J. Balfour, Lord Curzon, Winston Churchill, at that
time Minister of Munitions, Ioannis Gennadius, the bibliophile and
Greek minister in London, who was subsequently to play an impor-
tant, if not always positive, role in the establishment of the Koraes
Chair and in the ensuing controversy, and Burrows himself.20
Burrows did not merely see his role as that of publicist on behalf of
Greater Greece and of Venizelos, but, from time to time, he directly
sought to influence the course of events. In October 1915, for instance,
soon after Bulgaria’s alignment with the Central Powers had posed a
grave threat to Serbia, and in the wake of Venizelos’s second enforced
resignation as prime minister in 1915, in concert with R.W. Seton-
Watson, he formulated a proposal for the cession of Cyprus to Greece
by Britain on the sole condition that Greece enter the war on the side
of the Entente Powers. They contrived to get the Foreign Office to take
up the scheme but it was prosecuted with insufficient vigour by Sir
Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, and thus nothing came of what
might well have proved to be the most opportune occasion for the
enosis of Cyprus with Greece.21
In November 1916, shortly after the establishment of his provisional
government in Thessaloniki in the wake of the schism with King
Constantine, Venizelos wrote to Burrows to ask him to act as the ‘semi-
official representative’ of the Thessaloniki government for as long as it
was not officially recognized by the British government. With this
invitation Venizelos enclosed a letter of credentials for Burrows to
present to Sir Edward Grey. This was to the effect that ‘l’éminent
Professeur Burrows, du King’s College, qui suivant les libérales
traditions de sa noble et grande Nation, n’a cessé de donner à
l’Hellénisme les temoignages de la plus inestimable amitié, veut bien

se charger d’être à Londres le représentant officieux du Gouvernement
Provisoire’. Burrows seems to have seen no incompatibility in his
being at once the principal of King’s College and acting as Venizelos’s
‘semi-official representative’ although, in the event, nothing came of
the proposal, for Ioannis Gennadius, the former Greek minister,
assumed the role of Venizelos’s plenipotentiary pending the formal
recognition of his government in June 1917.22
Again, when Compton Mackenzie who, by his own account, had
been masterminding Britain’s intelligence effort in Athens, returned to
Britain for a time in late 1916, one of the first people he saw in London
was Burrows, whom he described as a great philhellene and a devoted
champion of Greece. Burrows took Mackenzie to see Sir Edward
Carson, the Ulster unionist politician, who, somewhat improbably,
was threatening to engineer the overthrow of the British government
if matters grew worse in Greece. Carson told Mackenzie to communi-
cate with him through Burrows on his return to Greece.23
It was entirely characteristic of Burrows that he simply could not
envisage any educated person not having an automatic sympathy for
the Greek cause. As he once wrote to Toynbee, who had expressed
doubts as to whether he were enough of a philhellene to be considered
for the Koraes chair, Burrows had such confidence in Greece that he
had not ‘the least doubt that anyone who seriously studies her history
and people will strengthen his sympathetic interest in it’.24
One might reasonably assume that Burrows’s work as principal, in
which he appears to have been widely admired by staff and students
alike, coupled with the ‘ingenious enthusiasm’ which he unstintingly
expended in promoting the Greek case on all possible occasions,
would have left him with little time for other causes. But this was far
from being the case. He responded with alacrity to a suggestion made
early in 1915 by R.W. Seton-Watson, at that time an independent
scholar of private means and a tireless publicist on behalf of the prin-
ciple of self-determination for the peoples of Eastern Europe, for the
establishment of a School of Slavonic Studies at King’s College. The
School, the precursor of the present School of Slavonic and East
European Studies of the University of London, rapidly engaged in an
ambitious programme of sophisticated academic propaganda on
behalf of the oppressed nationalities of Eastern Europe, many of them,
conveniently, groaning under the not-so-oppressive yoke of the
Habsburg monarchy, one of the Central Powers with which Britain was
then at war. There was thus a strong national interest, which Burrows
and Seton-Watson were quick to exploit, in fostering a branch of study

that had hitherto been almost totally ignored in British universities.25
One of the leading lights of the newly established School, although he
did scarcely any teaching, was subsequently to emerge as the first pres-
ident of the independent Czechoslovak state. On 19 October 1915,
Thomas Garrigue Masaryk inaugurated the work of the School with a
highly influential lecture entitled ‘The problem of small nations in the
European crisis’, in which he argued against fears of ‘the so-called
Balkanization of Europe’ and urged that ‘small nations are capable of
and have a right to independent development as states, each accord-
ing to its own culture.26
Although the initial focus of the School was on Slavonic studies,
Burrows, with his inexhaustible energy, was soon keen to add
Byzantine and modern Greek studies and also Romanian studies. It was
during his principalship, too, that the Camoens Chair of Portuguese
and the Cervantes Chair of Spanish were created at the College, the
former with subventions from the Portuguese and Brazilian govern-
ments, the latter with help from the Spanish government. In his zeal to
promote Romanian studies Burrows became caught up, at the end of
the First World War, in an extraordinary scheme, whereby King’s
College would train English school teachers for service in Romania.
The scheme had an oddly modern ring to it as it was envisaged that the
Romanian government would supply the funds for two teachers of
Romanian and that the scheme would thus become ‘self-financing’. It
was hoped that young Romanians would, in place of the ‘corrupting
influence’ of the French and German educational systems, be intro-
duced to the more bracing and character-forming British delights of
‘open air games, cold baths and plenty of draughts’. The scheme never
in fact got off the ground although Romanian studies were initiated
with the appointment of Marcu Beza, a highly educated Vlach from
Kleisura and vice-consul at the Romanian Legation in London, to teach
Romanian at the College.27
In parenthesis it is interesting to note the curious obsession in the
philhellenic circles in which Burrows was such an influential figure
with transplanting the ethos of ‘muscular Christianity’ of the British
public [i.e. private] school system to Greece. D.J. Cassavetti, for
instance, scion of a prominent Anglo-Greek family long established in
Britain, a co-founder with Burrows of the Anglo-Hellenic League and
an intermediary in Burrows’s efforts to secure an endowment for the
Koraes Chair from Helena Schilizzi, was convinced that what the
Greeks needed above all was ‘the physical and moral education of
the Public School’. It was a matter of great regret to him that it was ‘the
excitable coffee-house politician’ who had come to be regarded as the
representative Hellene whereas it was the evzone, the kilted Greek
soldier, ‘with his manliness and his jolly but courteous ways’, who was
the true counterpart of the English public school boy.28
At the war’s end, an ‘Anglo-Hellenic Educational Foundation’ was
established at a preliminary meeting on 20 November 1918. This was
presided over by none other than Venizelos himself. Its stated purpose
was ‘to advise and assist in the foundation in Greece of schools
conducted on English principles and in general questions of English
teaching in Greece’. Its first regularly constituted meeting took place
on 3 December 1918 under the chairmanship of Sir Francis Elliot, the
former British minister in Athens. Its secretaries were Nicholas
Eumorphopoulos, who was to play a prominent role in the Toynbee
controversy, and Dr Walter Seton, both of University College, London.
In his address to the annual general meeting of the Anglo-Hellenic
League on 20 June 1919, J.L. Myres, the archaeologist, whose wartime
privateering exploits had earned him the title of ‘the Blackbeard of the
Aegean’,29 made reference to the ‘educational experiments foreshad-
owed under the catch-word of a “Greek Eton”’. ‘If the latter is to
succeed’, he stated, seemingly in all seriousness, ‘in being either “Eton”
or “Greek”, I suspect that its curriculum must be that of ancient Persia
– to ride and to shoot, and to tell the truth’.30 It would appear that, for
once, the ‘Anglo-Hellenic Educational Foundation’ was a philhellenic
undertaking in which Burrows was not directly involved although he
would undoubtedly have subscribed heartily to its objectives.
Burrows’s many enthusiasms manifested themselves in his cham-
pionship of the Armenian cause and in his membership on the
executive committees of the Anglo-Spanish, British-Italian, United
Russian and Anglo-Portuguese societies. Undoubtedly, however,
Burrows reserved his greatest enthusiasm for the promotion of modern
Greek studies and, of all the new chairs established at the College
during the period of the First World War, the Koraes chair, from his
perspective, was the jewel in the crown.
As we have seen, Burrows conceived of the role of the Koraes profes-
sor as being essentially that of a propagandist for the cause of a Greater,
and at the same time a Venizelist, Greece. The Subscribers’ Committee,
which was composed of prominent Anglo-Greeks who had raised the
funds for the Koraes chair and which was charged with negotiating the
terms on which the endowment for the chair was to be offered to the
University, was part of an interlocking web of philhellenic and Greek
committees that formed part of Greece’s propaganda effort at the

critical period when the elusive vision of the Megali Idea, the ‘Great
Idea’ of uniting all areas of compact Greek settlement in the Near East
within the bounds of a single state, appeared to be in reach.31
One such committee was the London Committee of Unredeemed
Greeks, composed, like the Subscribers’ Committee, of well-to-do
members of the Anglo-Greek community. The London Committee of
Unredeemed Greeks, inter alia, published pamphlets, one such, The
Liberation of the Greek People in Turkey being published in Manchester
and London in 1919. This declared that ‘wonderful indeed is the vitality
of this [Greek] race which has survived the persecutions of centuries of
Turkish rule, and which is even now the most advanced in civilization
of all the other races in European or Asiatic Turkey’ and argued that it
was ‘inconceivable that the end of a great war, which was fought and
won for the cause of freedom and the principle of nationalities, should
leave such a very large number of intelligent, industrious, cultured, and
freedom-loving Christians under the brutal power of the Turk’. The
committee clearly had substantial resources at its disposal for it not only
adopted a pamphlet by Pember Reeves, entitled An Appeal for the
Liberation and Union of the Hellenic Race, as ‘the best general statement of
the case of the Unredeemed Greeks’ but it distributed, at its own
expense, no fewer than 20 000 copies. Pember Reeves’ pamphlet,
published by the Anglo-Hellenic League in 1918, reflects, inter alia, the
extraordinary and unqualified adulation of Venizelos that existed at
that time in British philhellenic circles. Venizelos, he enthused,
for years had to struggle against the whole of the Powers in one of
the world’s two warring camps, and against half those in the other
camp, and that when his own King, and his King’s party, were his
deadliest foes. Was there ever a combat more unequal? Two Kaisers,
two Czars, two Kings and a Sultan pitted against one undaunted
man! Leonidas himself might have thought such odds too great. It
has required a union of the integrity of Aristides, with the quick
resourcefulness and wider vision of Themistocles, to bring
Venizelos out as victor.32
In the preface to his Western Question in Greece and Turkey, the book
which was to occasion a good part of his troubles at King’s College,
Toynbee was to remark that ‘Western partisans of non-Western
peoples are often more fanatical than their favourites’. Pember Reeves,
as indeed does Burrows, well exemplifies the truth of this contention.
It is instructive to look at the composition of the London Committee

of Unredeemed Greeks. Its chairman, G. Marchetti, the president of
the London Greek Community, was joint honorary secretary of the
Subscribers’ Committee for the Koraes Chair. Its vice-chairman, whom
we have already encountered as joint secretary of the ‘Anglo-Hellenic
Educational Foundation’, was Nicholas Eumorphopoulos, who was
also the highly energetic and competent honorary secretary of the
Subscribers’ Committee. Eumorphopoulos was an honorary lecturer in
physics and a popular character at University College, London where
he was universally known as ‘Eumo’. Other members of the London
Committee of Unredeemed Greeks were the hugely rich Helena
Schilizzi, who was shortly to become the second wife of Eleftherios
Venizelos; John Mavrogordato, at that time in the employ of the Greek
Legation in London and subsequently Bywater and Sotheby Professor
of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature in the
University of Oxford, and A.C. Ionides, another member of the
Subscribers’ Committee who was to prove particularly intransigent
when the row with Toynbee broke out. It was into this pretty philhel-
lenic pie, or should I say hornet’s nest, that Toynbee was to stumble
when he took up the Koraes chair in the autumn of 1919.
The arrival of Toynbee at King’s College to take up the Koraes Chair
leads to the second purpose of this study, namely a consideration of
his conversion, within the space of a few years, from committed
Turcophobe in the traditional Gladstonian mould to enthusiastic
champion of the Turkish nationalist cause, a metamorphosis all the
more remarkable given his Labour Party sympathies. It will be recalled
that, while considering whether or not to apply for the Koraes chair,
Toynbee had expressed doubts to Burrows as to whether he was
enough of a philhellene to be a serious candidate. Burrows replied
that nothing that he had seen of Toynbee’s writings up to that date
had given him any reason for doubt on that score. This was not
surprising, for Toynbee, incapacitated for active service as a result of
dysentery contracted from drinking bad water while walking between
Kato Vezani and Gythion in April 1912,33 had during the First World
War been employed as a propagandist by the British government. On
relinquishing his fellowship in Ancient History at Balliol College,
Oxford, in 1915 he had, between 1915 and 1917, worked at
Wellington House, which specialized in disguising government propa-
ganda as though it had originated from private sources, and, in
1917–18, in the Department of Information. Subsequently, in 1918,
he transferred to the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign
Office and later became a member of the British delegation at the

Paris Peace Conference.34
While working at Wellington House, Toynbee had been responsible
for marshalling and collating the documents that constituted the
dossier presented by Viscount Bryce to the Foreign Secretary, Sir
Edward Grey, on The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
1915–1916 (London, 1916). Toynbee was also the author of ‘A
Summary of Armenian History up to and including the year 1915’,
published as an appendix to the volume. Originally published as a
State Paper, this ‘terrible mass of evidence’ was published more widely,
with Grey’s imprimatur, ‘for the immediate information of public
opinion as to the conduct of the Turkish Government towards this
defenceless people’. Toynbee also compiled a short volume, entitled
Armenian Atrocities: the Murder of a Nation (London, 1915). The essen-
tially propagandistic nature of this volume is demonstrated by the fact
that it was published in Danish (Copenhagen, 1916), in Dutch
(London, 1915), in French (Paris, 1916), in German (London and
Lausanne, 1916), in Portuguese (London, 1916) and in Swedish
(Stockholm, 1917). Other works by Toynbee in similar vein were The
Destruction of Poland: a Study in German Efficiency (London, 1916) and
in Polish (1916), Dutch (1916), French (1916) and German (1916)
translations; The Belgian Deportations (London, 1917) and in Danish
and Swedish translations (1917); The German Terror in Belgium
(London, 1917) and in Danish (1917), French (1917), German (1917),
Portuguese (1917), Spanish (1917) and Swedish (1917) translations;
and The German Terror in France (London, 1917).
One of the most interesting examples of this genre, in view of the
later development of Toynbee’s ideas, is his The Murderous Tyranny of
the Turks, published, with a preface by Viscount Bryce, in London and
New York in 1917. It was also translated into Dutch as Het bloedig juk
van den Turk (London, 1917) and into German as Die blutdürstige
Tyrannei der Türken (London, 1917). This is a document in the classic
tradition of Gladstonian Liberal Turcophobia and Toynbee even pref-
aces it with Gladstone’s classic appeal (which is also quoted in the
text), with its distinctly racist overtones to the modern ear, that the
Turks and ‘their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their
Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and
baggage, shall I hope clear out from the province they have desolated
and profaned’.
Bryce, in his preface, declared that the Turk was
hopelessly unfit to govern, with any approach to justice, subject

races of a different religion. The Turk has never been of any use
except fighting. He cannot administer. . . . He cannot secure justice.
As a governing power, he has always shown himself incapable,
corrupt and cruel. He has always destroyed: he has never created.
Bryce believed that the Turks should be expelled not only from Europe
but from the western coastal region of Asia Minor and from
Constantinople, with whose guardianship they were unfit to be
trusted. The faults of the Turkish government were incurable, for ‘the
Young Turkish gang’ which had deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid had
surpassed ‘even that monster of cruelty in their slaughter of the un-
offending Armenians’. Enver and Talaat, leading lights in the Young
Turk movement, were ‘prussianized Muslims worse than the old
Turkish pashas’.
Toynbee, in the body of the text, enthusiastically developed the
theme of Turkish iniquity. Talking of the janissary levy, he averred
that ‘the Ottoman Empire literally drained its victims’ blood, and its
history as a Vampire State is unparalleled in the history of the world’.
The Turkish government had ‘nothing but its military tradition of
violence and cunning’. The Young Turks were nationalists who had
learnt in the German and Magyar school. Their treatment of the non-
Turks was modelled on the ‘Prussianisation’ of the Poles and the
‘Magyarisation’ of the Romanians, Slovaks and South Slavs in
Hungary. From the beginning, the Young Turks had pursued their
nationalistic programme by butchery. In 1913 the Turkish army had
been engaged in exterminating the Albanians because they had ‘an un-
Ottoman national spirit of their own’. Since 1915 atrocities against the
Armenian and Arab populations of the Empire had been the order of
the day. The whole course of Ottoman history justified the statement
in the Allies’ note to President Wilson that ‘the Ottoman Empire has
proved itself radically alien to Western Civilization’. Wherever
Ottoman rule had spread, civilization had remained in abeyance.
There were, Toynbee conceded, areas of Asia Minor where the Turk was
the undisputed occupant of the land. ‘Out of the broad territory of
which he at present domineers’, the Turk will be allowed to keep ‘his
just pound of flesh, but woe to him hereafter if he sheds one drop of
Christian blood. . . .’ The interests of Russia and Rumania, both of
course at this stage of the war allied to the Entente, were to be
protected in the matter of the Straits, for the destiny of Constantinople
was a matter of life and death to them. But control of the Straits, as
well as dominion over subject peoples, must be taken from the

Ottoman Turks.
The British people had two aims with regard to the settlement with
Turkey, namely the ‘liberation of the subject peoples’ and ‘the expul-
sion of Turkey from Europe’. The attitude of the Young Turks towards
Western missionaries in the Ottoman Empire had demonstrated that
their nationalism had rendered them not merely criminal but insane.
There was no possibility, Toynbee concluded, of returning to the status
quo as it had existed before August 1914, for the status quo under the
Turks was ‘the mere perpetuation of an oppression and a misery that
disgraced the civilized world, and that should have been ended long
before’. Moreover the situation had been made ‘unspeakably worse
during the war than it was before it’.
Every element of good that had maintained its existence under the
Turkish government, and that made less intolerable a system that in
itself was too wicked to survive, is being stamped out now by depor-
tation, spoliation, abduction and massacre. The evil has purged
itself altogether of the good. . . . It is not a question of ameliorating
the status quo. The status quo in Turkey, irremediable before, is being
actively changed into something infinitely worse, and this is being
accomplished, behind the bulwark of militarism, under the eyes of
the civilised world.35
Toynbee’s wartime writings on the Near East were by no means limited

to denouncing the ‘murderous tyranny of the Turks’. In his contribu-
tion to a collective history of the Balkans, with contributions, beside
himself, from Nevill Forbes, D. Mitrany and D.G. Hogarth, and
published in 1915, he espoused a view of the legitimacy of Greece’s
territorial aspirations in Asia Minor that was much in keeping with the
thinking of Creek irredentists. In the event of the defeat of the Central
Powers, Toynbee wrote,
Greece will no longer have to accommodate her regime in the liber-

ated islands to the susceptibilities of a Turkey consolidated on the
opposite mainland, but will be able to stretch out her hand over the
Anatolian coast and its hinterland, and compensate herself richly in
this quarter for the territorial sacrifices which may still be necessary
to a lasting understanding with her Bulgarian neighbour. The
shores that dominate the Dardanelles will naturally remain beyond
her grasp, but she may expect to establish herself on the western
littoral from a point as far north as Mount Ida and the plain of
Edremid. The Greek coast-town of Aivali will be hers, and the still
more important focus of Greek commerce and civilization at
Smyrna; while she will push her dominion along the railways that
radiate from Smyrna towards the interior.
Warming to the theme he continued that
south-eastward, Aidin will be hers in the valley of the Mendere

(Maiandros). Due eastward she will re-baptize the glistening city of
Ala Shehr with its ancient name of Philadelphia, under which it
held out heroically for Hellenism many years after Aidin had
become the capital of a Moslem principality and the Turkish
avalanche had rolled past it to the sea.
Greece might plant her flag on the ‘Black Castle of Afiun

[Afyonkarahisar] for all this and more was once Hellenic ground’. In
this Western region with its admixture of Turkish and Greek villages
‘under the government of compatriots the unconquerable minority
[i.e. the Greeks] would inevitably reassert itself by the peaceful
weapons of its superior energy and intelligence’.36
The most zealous megaloideatis, or champion of the ‘Great Idea’,
could scarcely have expressed Greece’s territorial ambitions in Asia
Minor more enthusiastically. Small wonder then that Principal
Burrows should have regarded Toynbee as sufficiently philhellenic in
his sentiments as to justify his incumbency of his most cherished
foundation at King’s College, the Koraes Chair. What Burrows was
unaware of, however, and what presumably made Toynbee somewhat
hesitant in putting himself forward, were the kind of sentiments that
he had expressed to his mother in letters home during the Wanderjahr
that Toynbee had spent in Greece in 1911–12. Toynbee was by no
means the first Westerner nurtured on the classics to be disillusioned
by his first contact with modern Greek reality, nor was he the first to
be particularly repelled by what he termed the educated ‘black coats’.
Whereas the Greeks had once been the centre of the world, their
modern ‘dago’ counterparts were now the ‘hangers-on of Europe, and
come to us for their models of everything-and their best is always a
second rate imitation of our second best’. His year in Greece, which
included a brush with the Greek authorities when he was arrested near
the Greek–Turkish border on suspicion of spying, inspired in him a
greater appreciation of ‘the value of England’ and of ‘the soundness of
race prejudice’ as well as a determination ‘religiously [to] preach

mishellenism to any philhellene I come across’. Muslims, he main-
tained, were spared the fate of being ‘dagos’: ‘there is something in
their religion which saves them from imitativeness’.37
Moreover, by the time that Toynbee was considering whether or not
to apply for the Koraes Chair, he was still a member of the British dele-
gation at the Versailles Peace Conference and was beginning to have
doubts as to the viability of the Greek claim to Smyrna. In mid-April
1919, shortly after his election to the chair but before he had taken it
up, Burrows had written to ask Toynbee whether he could tell him
anything about what was being proposed for Smyrna at the peace
conference. Toynbee had replied in a somewhat noncommittal
fashion to the effect that: ‘Smyrna is a geographical conundrum – and
I see no solution for the Greek and Armenian diaspora in Anatolia,
which is bound to exist in every Anatolian town so long as the Turk
doesn’t learn professions or trades’.38 In the interests of this diaspora
he hoped that the mandatory system would be extended to ‘what was
left of Turkey, as well as to the new states’. He did not tell Burrows,
however, that at about the same time, mid-April 1919, together with
his colleague Harold Nicolson, he had plotted a possible solution to
the vexed question of Constantinople and the Straits. The two were
agreed that the allies would be unable to put the Greeks into Smyrna
and keep them there: ‘they can’t hold it without allied support or
unless the whole of Turkey behind them is split up among the Allied
Powers. Yet if they do not get Smyrna Venizelos will fall from power’.
They proposed, therefore, to cut the Gordian knot by letting the Turks
keep ‘Anatolia as their own’, while ceding to the Greeks only European
Turkey.39 This, of course, represented a considerable retreat from the
heady views that Toynbee had espoused just four years earlier.
In a later letter to Burrows of 22 May, Toynbee did express, some-
what tentatively, a number of his reservations over the Greek position
in Asia Minor. Burrows had naturally been delighted by the news of
the Greek landing in Smyrna of 15 May, although alarmed at the
reports of the anti-Turkish violence that had accompanied it. Toynbee
had replied to Burrows that his feelings about Smyrna were tempered
by the fact that the Italians had occupied a large slice of territory in the
south and southwest of Anatolia. He feared that although Greece
might be able to secure the immediate zone around Smyrna ‘the wider
hinterland in Anatolia which might otherwise have been given to
Hellenism will be closed to it by Italian policing’. He stated his belief
that, in the natural course of events, Anatolia would eventually have
become ‘a Greek and Armenian country in the west and east respec-
tively, and that the Moslems would gradually have disappeared’. It
was, he maintained, fairly clear, as it had turned out, that Smyrna
could only fall to Greece through a general partition of Anatolia ‘and
I believe this will be less advantageous to Greece in the long run than
the more gradual solution’.40
In the peroration to his inaugural lecture in the Koraes Chair, deliv-
ered in October 1919 in the presence of Venizelos himself, Toynbee, in
a significant anticipation of one of his major concerns in The Western
Question in Greece and Turkey, made reference to the common task that
lay ahead of Greece and England. The Greek nation was taking the
place of the Ottoman Empire as the land bridge between the Middle
East and Europe and ‘Greek statesman will be exercised by the problem
– which Turkey never attempted to solve – of enabling Europeans and
Moslems to live together, not only as peaceful neighbours but as
members of the same democracy’. England, for its part, had no Muslim
community to rule over at home, but she did have the task of ruling
huge Muslim populations, separated by thousands of miles of sea: ‘we
cannot tell which task will prove the more difficult, but one thing is
indisputable: we shall have much to learn from one another’.41
Toynbee took up the Koraes Chair in October 1919 and was clearly
not overburdened with teaching for, before the academic year was out,
he was applying for study leave, hoping, as he wrote to Seton-Watson,
to get out to Greece to see ‘how Greece is handling her Moslem minor-
ity’. He was duly granted two terms leave of absence to travel to
Greece, there to establish connections between Greece and the
Department of Modern Greek in the College.42 No mention was made
of the fact that, during his visit to the Greek lands, Toynbee was to act
as a special correspondent of The Manchester Guardian, the flagship of
British liberalism.
In his autobiographical work, Acquaintances, published towards the
end of his life, Toynbee has some interesting and revealing reflections
as to his motivation in making this study-cum-journalistic visit to Asia
Minor. ‘It was’, he writes, ‘a mental voyage and, as I see it now in retro-
spect, a spiritual one too: for, in essence, it was an inquiry into the
mystery of human nature’.43 It was a voyage prompted by his work in
compiling for Lord Bryce the evidence of the Ottoman genocide of the
Armenians. Even after the compilation of the Blue Book, Toynbee,
‘haunted by the victims sufferings and by the criminals’ deeds’, had
been unable to dismiss its contents from his mind. He was troubled by
the question as to how it could be possible for human beings to do
what those perpetrators of genocide had done. It had been the Young
Turk Revolution that had prompted him as a young man to take a
serious interest in current international affairs. Some ten years earlier,
in 1897, he had first encountered the Armenian problem. An
Armenian survivor of the great anti-Armenian pogrom of 1895–96 had
applied to Toynbee’s father, who worked for a charitable organization,
for assistance. The infant Toynbee, then aged eight, had asked his
mother about the Turks who had persecuted the Armenians. This had
elicited a spirited reply from his mother. She had outdone Gladstone
in wanting to expel the Turks not only from Europe but also from Asia
Minor, which was ‘much too good a country’ for them to have. To this
Toynbee had replied that he supposed that the Christians were not
powerful enough to turn the Turks out of Asia Minor. His mother had
replied in turn: ‘yes, they are, they could turn them out any day if they
wanted to. What keeps the Turks where they are is the Christian coun-
tries’ selfish rivalry with each other’.44
The Committee of Union and Progress’ (CUP) conduct of the
Armenian deportations might have had some justification on political
grounds, Toynbee believed, but they had been carried out with a
brutality that had been calculated to take the maximum toll of lives en
route. His wartime study of the CUP’s crimes had left an impression on
his mind that ‘was not effaced by the still more cold-blooded genocide,
on a far larger scale, that was committed during the Second World War
by the Nazis’. The question of culpability for the genocide that had
been committed in Turkey in 1915 had brought home to Toynbee the
reality of original sin, the fact that human nature had within it ‘an
inherent vein of abominable wickedness’. In order to comprehend the
phenomenon he had to get to know live Turkish men and women
individually, meeting each of them as one of his fellow human beings,
for criminals among the Young Turks had constituted only a minority
and ‘the dehumanizing effect of collective labels’ must never be forgot-
ten. The first step in getting to know his Turkish neighbours had been
to learn Turkish. Even before his appointment to the Koraes Chair he
had spent a year learning Arabic. As soon as he had taken up the post
and he had at his disposal what he termed ‘a don’s margin of leisure’,
he had enrolled as a student of Turkish at the School of Oriental and
African Studies of the University of London. This had brought him his
first Turkish friend, the School’s lecturer in Turkish, Ali Riza Bey. Ali
Riza, however, as he was subsequently to learn from the School’s direc-
tor, Sir Denison Ross, had initially balked at the idea of teaching
Toynbee, the compiler of a book that showed him to be an enemy of
Turkey. Denison Ross’s advice to Ali Riza, however, had been to urge
him to teach Toynbee, for, if he truly believed in his country, he would
be confident that someone who seemed to him to be prejudiced would
change his mind on better acquaintance. Interestingly, Principal
Burrows had used the same argument when Toynbee, in making
preliminary inquiries about the chair, had expressed doubts as to
whether he was enough of a philhellene. Burrows had expressed
himself confident that the more Toynbee studied Greek culture the
more philhellenic he would become.
During the course of his journalistic travels in Turkey, Toynbee was
to encounter similar prejudices on the part of other Turks, who had
approached him with hostility and suspicion, for not only had he
worked on the Blue Book for Lord Bryce, whose name to Turkish minds
was almost as offensive as that of Gladstone, but he was a professor of
modern Greek studies, who had been visiting a Greek army that, in the
view of the Turks, was trespassing on Turkish soil. Worst of all, he was
the representative of that most Gladstonian of English newspapers,
The Manchester Guardian. For the very same reasons the Greeks had
every reason to expect that he would be sympathetic to their cause.
Indeed, the Greek authorities had gone out of their way to show
consideration to Toynbee, on the express instructions of the prime
minister, Dimitrios Rallis. A police report on Toynbee’s activities in the
Greek zone claimed that he had been seen to fill his notebook with
philhellenic notes.45
One Turk who viewed Toynbee, initially at least, with unconcealed
suspicion, was Hamid Bey, the director of the Red Crescent, the Turkish
equivalent of the Red Cross, in Istanbul. Hamid Bey one day chal-
lenged Toynbee to board a Red Crescent ship, the Gül-i Nihal, which
was steaming that very evening to Yalova to evacuate Turkish refugees.
There, Toynbee and his wife, Rosalind, were to witness at first hand the
results of a massacre of Turks by local Greeks and Armenians. This
experience made a profound impression on the Toynbees and Toynbee
records Hamid Bey’s astonishment when, on his return, he showed
him a dispatch that he had just sent to The Manchester Guardian, based
on his experiences in the Yalova peninsula. Hamid Bey had been
surprised to read this and was even more surprised some days later
when Toynbee showed him the issue of The Manchester Guardian in
which his dispatch had been published. Forty years later Toynbee
could still recall the scene in the Red Crescent office: ‘big Hamid Bey
with the English newspaper in his hands, and his colleagues crowding
round, with radiant faces. Their case was being put in Britain at last’.46
It is noteworthy that whereas the Greek authorities placed few obsta-

cles in the way of Toynbee’s travels, their Turkish counterparts kept
him from the Turkish side of the front where he might have encoun-
tered scenes similar to those in the Yalova peninsula which had so
profound an effect on him. Toynbee had certainly planned to see
things from both sides, which he considered to be his professional
duty towards The Manchester Guardian, as it had been his own instinct.
In a highly significant passage he records that he had long since taken
to heart the precept audi alteram partem. This he took not simply to
mean trying to understand the other party’s case but as signifying
‘particularly the case that, of the two, was the more in danger of not
being given a fair hearing’. He had already appreciated the propaganda
advantage enjoyed by the party that is able to monopolize the recount-
ing of a particular tale: ‘I had realized that we saw the Persians through
the Greek’s eyes, the Spartans and Boeotians through the Athenians’
eyes, the Philistines and Pheonicians through the Israelites’ eyes’. The
mute party’s point of view must receive a proper hearing: ‘the vocal
party [should not] have the last word as well as the first’. In the
Anatolian entanglement, the Greeks were ‘the vocal party once again’,
able to bend the ear of a West that was ascendant in the world: ‘I was
familiar with the Greeks’ case; I felt that it could take care of itself, the
Turks’ case was the one that I must take pains to understand’.47
Toynbee’s attempts to put across the Turkish case, which was to
occasion so much pain to his would-be Greek patrons, however, some-
times attracted plaudits from some rather unsavoury quarters. In April
1922, for instance, one Hellenophobe, whose name I have been unable
to decipher, wrote to Toynbee from the Windham Club in St James’s
Square to the effect that
the Greeks have nothing to learn from their neighbouring savages

in the way of massacre pillage torture outrage low cunning and
dago-like deceit . . . the people of this country are still befooled with
the idea that the Greeks are a noble race of cultured heroes instead
of people more bloodstained than the Turk more traitorous and
treacherous than any other dago breed.48
Toynbee records an instructive example of the kind of inherent pro-

Greek bias that he claimed to have been rife in Britain. Soon after his
return from the Near East and anxious to put the case for the Turks, he
had approached his old mentor at the Foreign Office, Sir James
Headlam-Morley, to ask that he be invited to speak at the British
(subsequently Royal) Institute of International Affairs at Chatham

House. The meeting was arranged for 22 November 1921, with the
well-known archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Knossos
in the chair. Evans invited Toynbee to dine with him before his talk.
Over dinner, Evans outlined to him what he was going to say in his
introduction. This was to the effect that the British and the modern
Greeks were common heirs to the civilization of ancient Greece and
that the ‘Western heirs of ancient Greece’ had a duty to support those
who shared this heritage against those who did not. Toynbee coun-
tered by arguing that the correct ‘criterion for passing judgement on a
dispute was not one’s respective degrees of affinity with the
disputants’ but rather ‘the rights and wrongs of the case’. Evans,
however, was not to be moved. He introduced Toynbee on exactly the
lines that he said that he would and his remarks attracted loud
applause from the audience, which presumably would have included
many influential opinion makers. Toynbee believed that the chairman
of a meeting on a controversial topic should refrain from backing
either side but his chairman at Chatham House had given ‘Sisyphus’
stone a kick-off that had sent it rolling down from the top of the
mountain to the bottom, and I had to start rolling my stone up against
a steep adverse gradient of hostile prejudice. This was indeed uphill
work’.49 In seeking to present the Turkish case in Britain, Toynbee had
found himself confronted by two formidable obstacles. The first was
the traditional Christian prejudice against Muslims and Turks. The
second was that, for almost all his fellow countrymen, the Turks were
‘anonymous ogres’.
Toynbee summed up his view of the Greek-Turkish imbroglio in
Anatolia in The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, the manuscript
of which he appears to have finished in an astonishingly short period
of time, the book being published in May of 1922. It is difficult to
dissent from Elie Kedourie’s view that The Western Question remains
perhaps the best book that Toynbee ever wrote, demonstrating as it
does ‘the breadth of his learning, the fecundity of his imagination, his
ability to connect the political, the economic, the social, the spiritual
and his topographical eye’.50
Toynbee’s essential conclusion was that ‘the Greeks had shown the
same unfitness as the Turks for governing a mixed population’ and
that the commission of atrocities had emerged ‘not as the peculiar
practice of one denomination or nationality’. He explicitly repudiated
earlier writings such as The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks (London,
1917) as an example of Western prejudice against the Turks.
Westerners, he maintained, had no right to be self-righteous over

Greek and Turkish atrocities. They could commit only one greater
error of judgement, namely to suppose that the Turks were more
unrighteous than the Greeks. Toynbee certainly made no effort to
conceal the fact that the Turks had committed atrocities and conceded
that the Turks had in fact committed more atrocities against the
Greeks than vice versa. He explained this, however, by the fact that
the Turks had had greater opportunities for wrongdoing than had the
Greeks. For the Greeks had only had considerable numbers of Turks in
their power since 1912, whereas between 1461 and 1821 most Greeks
had been in the power of the Turks. He therefore suggested a some-
what bizarre calculation whereby the number of atrocities committed
should be weighted to take account of the number of opportunities to
commit them.51
Toynbee was well aware that his book was certain to arouse contro-
versy. In the preface he conceded that it was likely to be ‘painful to
Greeks and “philhellenes” that information and reflections
unfavourable to Greece should have been published by the first occu-
pant of the Korais chair’. Toynbee regretted this but, he added, ‘from
the academic point of view it is less unfortunate than if my conclu-
sions on the Anatolian Question had been favourable to Greece and
unfavourable to Turkey’. For ‘the actual circumstances, whatever
personal unpleasantness they may entail for me and my Greek friends
and acquaintances, at least preclude the suspicion that an endowment
of learning in a British University had been used for propaganda on
behalf of the country with which it is concerned’.52
As Toynbee had himself foreseen, his book was to arouse a storm of
protest, a storm that was intensified by the fact that it was published
shortly before the defeat of the Greek armies in Asia Minor, at a time
when, as R.W. Seton-Watson put it, the Greek people were in greater
danger than at any time since the days of Xerxes.53 Although, in
general, the book enjoyed a good critical reception, the response in
the Greek community was predictably adverse. The Subscribers’
Committee for the Koraes Chair, in which were grouped a number of
leading members of the Greek community in London, together with
their allies in the academic community, put great pressure on the
College and University to remove Toynbee from the chair. In the end,
in response to these unremitting pressures, he submitted what he
termed his ‘involuntary’ resignation and from June 1924 he ceased to
hold the chair. Principal Burrows, whose ‘ingenious enthusiasm’ had
been instrumental in the establishment of the chair, had died in 1920
and so was spared the ensuing furore. His romantic philhellenism and
his naive faith in what he regarded as the self-evident rightness of the
Greek cause occasioned major problems for his College and for the
University. Moreover, his successors signally failed to learn the blind-
ingly obvious lesson of this cautionary tale, namely that he who pays
the piper usually calls the tune, no less in academic than in other
walks of life.
4
The Special Operations Executive
in Greece
Few wartime organizations in Britain can have subsequently been the

target of such abuse as the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which
has been criticized not only on the grounds of general ineffectiveness,
incompetence and waste1 but also for its supposed political bias. In
this last respect, the SOE has been vigorously attacked from both right
and left. In a review of Julian Amery’s Approach March (London, 1973),
Hugh Fraser has written that ‘at the best times in my opinion SOE was
a bad organisation frequently lacking a strong or political or even
honourable direction. SOE was particularly inane in the Balkans, posi-
tively assisting the adventurer Enver Hoxha to seize impregnable
Albania for communism and, had it not been for Churchill and
Macmillan’s personal intervention, permitting a communist takeover
in Greece’.2 A diametrically opposed view had been advanced by The
Times Literary Supplement’s anonymous reviewer (Basil Davidson) of
F.W.D. Deakin’s account of his wartime experiences in Yugoslavia, The
Embattled Mountain (London, 1971). Davidson has suggested that the
‘nabobs of SOE London’, most of whom were bankers or businessmen,
suppressed intelligence of the Partisans’ activities in Yugoslavia ‘in the
interests of restoring the status quo ante bellum’.3 Now it is conceivable
that either one or the other of these conflicting views may be correct,
but scarcely both.
One fundamental obstacle to a balanced assessment of SOE’s role in
Greece is, of course, the question of access to records. SOE, as the body
charged with fomenting and supporting resistance in occupied
Europe, was strictly a wartime creation and was wound up soon after
the end of hostilities. How much of its archives are still extant is a
matter of conjecture, for SOE’s files remain closed, apparently for the
foreseeable future. Many of SOE’s papers relating to its crucial early
60
The Special Operations Executive in Greece 61
contacts in Greece, both before and after the occupation, were appar-
ently burned in the ‘Great Panic’ of the summer of 1942 when Marshal
Rommel’s army appeared poised to take Cairo. Such was the volume of
documents consumed, and such was the pollution caused, that the day
on which most of the burning took place became known as ‘Ash
Wednesday’.4 A fire in 1946 apparently caused extensive damage to
the archives extant in London although it is clear that a substantial
body of SOE material must still survive. M.R.D. Foot’s S.O.E. in France
(London, 1966) is the only in-depth study available of SOE activities in
a particular country and was intended as the forerunner of a series of
country histories. The first edition of Foot’s book, however, which was
published by the government printing office (Her Majesty’s Stationery
Office), provoked expensive libel actions. It is apparently fear of libel
rather than security considerations that has prevented the publication
either of further volumes in the projected official series or of Professor
W.J.M. Mackenzie’s official history of the SOE which was compiled
shortly after the war.
It is true that the Foreign Office papers that were opened to official
inspection in the Public Record Office in 1972 contain a considerable
amount of SOE material – for example, SITREPS or situation reports.
But this material represents only the papers that SOE wished the
Foreign Office to see. Given the at times almost incredible degree of
mutual suspicion and recrimination that characterized relations
between the two bodies, these papers cannot be regarded as providing
a full or balanced view of SOE’s activities in Greece. The great bulk of
the Foreign Office’s own papers are, however, freely available. This
means that while we can document fairly fully the Foreign Office’s
case against SOE, SOE’s case against the Foreign Office has inevitably
largely gone by default.
The inaccessibility of SOE’s records means that we shall probably
never get to the bottom of such extraordinary incidents as the subjec-
tion to a military court of inquiry and subsequent exoneration of
Yannis Peltekis, who, under the pseudonym of Apollo (or Yvonne)
controlled one of SOE’s most successful sabotage and espionage
networks in Greece. During the winter of 1943–44 rumours began to
circulate in Cairo that Peltekis was some kind of double agent or, at
best, an out-and-out supporter of the National Liberation Front (EAM).
These rumours increased in intensity with the arrival of George
Papandreou in the Middle East, where in April 1944, he became prime
minister of the Greek government-in-exile, and emanated principally
from his entourage. In August one of his principal advisers reported a
rumour current in Izmir to the effect that Peltekis was receiving sover-
eigns from SOE, which were then being promptly passed on to EAM.
Papandreou retailed these suspicions to the chargé d’affaires of the
British Embassy to the Greek government-in-exile in the temporary
absence of the ambassador, Reginald (Rex) Leeper, in London. This
official in turn, on August 15, 1944, passed on to the Foreign Office
Papandreou’s complaint that, at a time when the government-in-exile
had the greatest difficulty in scraping together 400 sovereigns to send
to its own official organization in Greece, some 5,000 sovereigns had
been despatched to the Peltekis organization during a period of six
weeks.
The chargé added that Papandreou ‘was himself approached last
December by the head of this group (i.e. Peltekis) . . . with a view to
joining with M. [Alexander] Svolos and forming an EAM Government
and he has no doubts (and I from other information have very few) of
close contact of this man with EAM’. He had been able to confirm that
SOE had indeed sent in arrears of four months money to Peltekis at a
rate of 1,500 sovereigns per month and reported that SOE had claimed
‘that they are under no obligation to keep anyone informed; nor have
they done so although they are fully aware of the misgivings felt both
by M. Papandreou and this Embassy about political activities of head
of this organisation’. This last observation touched on a raw nerve in
the strained relations between the Foreign Office and SOE, namely the
Foreign Office’s rooted conviction that, despite various agreements to
the contrary, SOE, was deliberately keeping the Cairo Embassy in the
dark about what it was doing in Greece. The chargé was therefore
instructed to raise with the General Headquarters Middle East the
question of how this transaction had been carried out without either
the political adviser (a Foreign Office official) to SOE or the Special
Operations Committee, on which the embassy was represented, being
informed.
What might have proved a relatively minor skirmish in the perpet-
ual warfare between the Foreign Office and SOE suddenly escalated
into a crisis of major proportions with the intervention of Prime
Minister Winston Churchill himself, who happened to see the relevant
Foreign Office telegram and considered it far too mild. ‘There should
be a court of enquiry’, he thundered, ‘. . . to ascertain the official guilty
of this neglect or perversion of his duties. Someone must have been
responsible. That person should be ascertained and immediately
dismissed from any share in our affairs. Nobody ever gets punished for
doing these kind of things’. Lord Selborne, the Minister for Economic
Warfare with overall responsibility for SOE, replied to Churchill with

a spirited defence of Peltekis. ‘The organisation concerned’, he wrote,
‘has a splendid record. It has sunk or damaged 26 major vessels from
7000 tons downwards and many smaller craft in the last 14 months,
and provided much intelligence on German sea traffic in the Aegean
enabling sea and air strikes to be made with marked success’.
But despite Selborne’s plea on his behalf, Peltekis was subjected to a
military court of inquiry convened by the Commander-in-Chief,
Middle East, Sir Bernard Paget. He was cross-examined together with a
large number of witnesses, both British and Greek. Witnesses from the
Greek government-in-exile, however, could not be called, and Leeper
rebuffed efforts to examine him and his staff. After sifting the available
evidence, the Court of Inquiry entirely cleared Peltekis and SOE and
severely censured the Foreign Office officials responsible. Although
Peltekis was exonerated, during his absence from Athens seventy-one
members of his organization were rounded up by the occupation
authorities and fifty-nine of them were executed.5 Peltekis argued that
had he been in Athens at the time he might have been able to avert,
or at least mitigate, the disaster. The award of a Distinguished Service
Order was small compensation for the humiliation to which he had
been subjected. The report of the three-man committee of inquiry,
together with a substantial dossier of evidence, is known to survive but
is not available for consultation.6 There is, however, a document avail-
able in the open files which, if wiser counsels and cooler heads had
prevailed in the Foreign Office, might have averted this shabby
episode altogether. Major E. Boxshall of SOE on 14 August sent
D.S. Laskey of the Southern Department of the Foreign Office a
message that had been transmitted on August 9 by the Apollo group. It
read as follows: ‘The internal situation in Athens has greatly deteri-
orated. Political murders are multiplied. There is systematic murder of
officers by EAM and of communists by Rallis troops. . . . The population
is in despair’.7 Whatever else the Apollo group was, it was scarcely in
the hands of pro-EAM elements.
SOE was created in July in the desperate aftermath of the Dunkirk
evacuation, from the fusion of a number of existing espionage and
sabotage groups, principally Section D of MI 6 and M I(R), a section of
the War Office.8 Its purpose was to ‘co-ordinate all action by way of
subversion and sabotage against the enemy overseas’, and it was
initially divided into S01, with overall responsibility for propaganda,
and S02, with overall responsibility for sabotage. Enjoined by Churchill
to ‘set Europe ablaze’, the new organization was afforded a very high
priority in terms of recruitment of manpower and the acquisition of

materials, which at this time were in short supply. At this stage, before
the United States had entered the war and when Britain stood virtually
alone in Europe, the British Chiefs of Staff attached a very high priority
in their strategic planning to the ‘detonator’ concept. It was considered
highly unlikely that Britain, on the basis of her own resources, would
ever be able to mount a full-scale invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.
For this reason, British strategic planners envisaged supporting and
encouraging those in occupied Europe who were prepared to resist.
‘Home armies’ and resistance movements were to be supplied and
trained so as to be ready for the moment when the British were in a
position to mount small-scale raids against continental Europe which
would coincide with ‘patriot revolts’ in the enemy’s rear.9 The empha-
sis on the ‘detonator’ concept and the ‘patriot revolt’ largely accounts
for the priority afforded to the new organization. It also goes some way
in explaining the resentment of existing bodies, such as the Foreign
Office and the War Office, which felt that SOE, charged as it was with
fomenting resistance in occupied Europe, posed a threat to their estab-
lished prerogatives. Although SOE’s objectives were primarily military,
the encouragement and organization of resistance inevitably entailed
a political dimension, for many of those most eager to resist were
people to whom His Majesty’s Government would not normally be
prepared to give aid and comfort. Throughout the war SOE was
uncomfortably caught in the crossfire between the Foreign Office,
with its predominantly political concerns, and the military authori-
ties, who were concerned with maximizing the war effort without
undue regard for political considerations.
Diplomats and professional soldiers were never able to rid them-
selves of the feeling that SOE was largely composed of bungling
amateurs, and it has to be conceded that SOE did enlist some unlikely
operatives, and did think up some harebrained schemes. As was
perhaps only to be expected, the diplomats and professional soldiers
saw the new organization as threatening their own professional inter-
ests and generally regarded it with an ill-disguised hostility. Equally,
SOE operatives tended to regard the professionals as too hidebound to
embrace the unorthodox military tactics and ‘dangerous’ political
alliances that were the essential concomitant of guerrilla warfare. The
infighting between SOE, the Foreign Office and the military sometimes
reached incredible proportions, nowhere more so than in the case of
Greece, but then violent inter-service rivalries seem to have been
common to all the protagonists in World War ll.10
There was also rivalry between SOE and the Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS or MI 6). SIS was undoubtedly active in Greece, and
indeed seems to have been able to secrete radio transmitters in Athens
before the fall of Greece, although its operations have remained a
much better-kept secret than those of SOE. Good security, however, is
not in itself a guarantee of competence, and what little we do know
of SIS’s activities in occupied Greece would scarcely appear to justify
that organization’s reputation in Greece for omniscience and omni-
competence. Indeed SIS’s representatives in Cairo dealing with Greek
affairs appear to have been, during the later stages of the war at least,
singularly ill-informed as to what was actually going on in the
country and certainly less knowledgeable than SOE. SIS’s antagonism
towards SOE was not without cause. Early in 1944, for instance, an
SOE operative shot SIS’s principal agent in north-western Greece, a
Greek–American who had made no secret of his pro-ELAS (National
People’s Liberation Army) sympathies, for purportedly communicat-
ing with the Germans.11
As befitted such an unorthodox organization, SOE’s recruitment of its
operatives was eccentric. Shrouded in secrecy, the new organization
could scarcely advertise openly for volunteers. Operatives were almost
literally recruited on an ‘old school tie’ basis, the main centre of recruit-
ment popularly believed to be the bar of White’s Club. The unwritten
guide of those responsible for SOE’s recruitment appears to have been
Admiral Lord Fisher of Silverstone’s maxim that favouritism is the secret
of efficiency. There were plenty of bankers, businessmen, lawyers,12
and, particularly in the case of Greece, academics in SOE. For there
existed a substantial pool of British archaeologists and classical scholars,
with a good knowledge of the language and first-hand experience of the
topography of the country. In the early months, SOE’s Greek activities
in London were handled by Sir Gerald Talbot, a businessman who had
many interests in Greece and a long-standing connection with Greek
affairs. He had first come into contact with Eleftherios Venizelos as an
arms salesman for the firm of John Brown and Company and, as a lieu-
tenant-commander RNVR, had been close to the liberal statesman
during World War I. It was Talbot whom the British Foreign Secretary,
Lord Curzon, dispatched to Greece in 1922 in a vain mission to inter-
vene with Colonel Nikolaos Plastiras’s Revolutionary Committee on
behalf of the six politicians and army officers sentenced to death for
high treason following the Asia Minor débâcle.
One of SOE’s key operatives before the occupation in Greece, and
subsequently in Izmir, until his capture by the Germans during the
ill-fated British attempt to take the Dodecanese in the wake of the

Italian armistice in September 1943, was David Pawson. He had lived
in Greece since 1933 as an employee of the British-owned Electric
Power and Traction Company and had an extensive and useful range
of contacts.13 There were those with a close family connection with
Greece, such as Francis Noel-Baker, whose family owned an extensive
estate in Euboea and who spoke fluent Greek. Then there were the
academics, such as the classicists Christopher M. Woodhouse,
Anthony Andrewes, Nicholas G.L. Hammond, and David Talbot Rice,
the art historian. Another group was composed of the Levantines,
from families who had long been resident in the eastern
Mediterranean and who were Greek-speaking. There was also a leav-
ening of professional soldiers such as Brigadier E.C.W. Myers, first
commander of the British Military Mission to the Greek resistance, and
the eccentric but ruthlessly efficient Brigadier C.M. Keble, chief of staff
of SOE Cairo.
Most of SOE’s operatives, whether based in London, Cairo, or in the
field, tended to be drawn from the hermetic world of the British estab-
lishment.14 A curious instance of the value of the right family
connections occurred early in 1944 when Churchill suddenly showed
a keen interest in a memorandum submitted to the Foreign Office by
the young Francis Noel-Baker after being told of its existence by his
wife who in turn had been told about it by Noel-Baker’s mother. Noel-
Baker challenged the whole drift of British policy, namely the building
up of the National Republican Greek League (EDES) and other organi-
zations as a counterweight to EAM. The anti-EAM groups, he argued,
were essentially reactionaries seeking a restoration of the pre-war status
quo, whereas a majority of the population, and many members of
EAM, held liberal and progressive views and were by no means
Bolsheviks: ‘The EAM membership now follows Communist leaders,
not because it wants to Bolshevise Greece, but because it believes that
the EAM will enable it to fight the Germans’. Part of the trouble, he
believed, was the political insensitivity of many British Liaison
Officers (BLO) (one of whom had referred to the Greeks as ‘the hairy
apes who infest this country’). For this reason he proposed the sending
of a small commission to Greece to ascertain the true state of affairs.
The Foreign Office was not impressed by Noel-Baker’s reasoning, nor
did Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, believe that Churchill would
be. Nonetheless, as has been said, family connections had ensured that
his views were given serious consideration at the very highest levels of
government.15
Some of SOE’s operatives were very much to the right.16 Many

others were of liberal opinions and certainly held few illusions as to
the nature of the pre-war regimes whose restoration so many of those
active in the resistance in the Balkans were determined to forestall.
Still others, such as Frank Thompson, were very much to the left. Out
of sympathy with the general trend of British policy toward Greece,
Thompson volunteered for service with the Bulgarian partisans, with
whom he lost his life in I944.17 But even those who actively supported
left-wing resistance movements were for the most part also drawn
from the tightly knit world of the British establishment, having been
educated at the same private schools. Moreover, although there were
sympathizers with EAM/ELAS in SOE – Colonel Rufus Sheppard, the
BLO with ELAS in Thessaly was one such – it is nonetheless true to say
that the great majority of SOE’s operatives in the field, as in SOE Cairo
and London, shared the common assumption that communism was a
‘bad thing’, and that the establishment of a communist regime in
postwar Greece would be seriously damaging to British interests. This
assumption, as much implicit as explicit, explains to some extent how
it was that British agents, many of them scarcely graduated from
university, could be sent on highly sensitive political missions into
remote areas of the Balkans where they were often out of contact with
their headquarters in Cairo for weeks or months at a time and yet
nonetheless retain a more or less instinctive appreciation of the line
that their superiors would expect them to follow.
The lack of years of many of SOE’s operatives in the field had its
advantages in terms of resourcefulness, receptivity to new ideas, and
adaptability to the rigours of guerrilla warfare in the mountains. But
it also had its drawbacks in that the natural exuberance of youth was
not always matched by a realistic appraisal of the likely consequences
of particular actions. A case in point was the kidnapping in April
1944 of the German commandant in Crete, General Karl Kreipe, by
Patrick Leigh Fermor and W. Stanley Moss. Despite the strenuous
opposition of one senior SOE official, Bickham Sweet-Escott, who
argued that at such a late stage in the war an operation of this kind
would scarcely justify the likely cost, the plan went ahead. The oper-
ation was carried out with great courage and resourcefulness, but
whether the spiriting out of Crete of a general who was unpopular
with his own staff justified the almost two hundred Cretan lives that
were taken in reprisal is a moot point. 18 Within SOE it was argued
that propaganda to the effect that Kreipe had not been kidnapped
but had deserted had contributed powerfully to sapping the morale
of the German occupation forces during the last months of the

occupation.
One basic and obvious distinction between operatives of SOE and
those of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was that the majority of
OSS operatives appear to have been Greek–Americans and therefore
had a natural advantage in language. By virtue of their Greek ancestry,
they were often already parti pris in terms of Greek politics before they
entered the country. It is perhaps worth noting in passing that OSS
also relied heavily for its Yugoslav operations on Americans of
Yugoslav descent. But whereas the Greek–American operatives of OSS
tended to have left-wing sympathies,19 its Yugoslav-American opera-
tives tended to sympathize with Draza Mihailović’s Chetniks rather
than Tito’s Partisans. Indeed, OSS’s insistence on maintaining contact
with Mihailović long after SOE had abandoned him was to occasion
considerable embarrassment to the British authorities. This was despite
an agreement reached in London in June 1942 between OSS and SOE
by which SOE had been accorded primary responsibility for subversive
activities throughout the Balkans.20
SOE’s activities in Greece differed in one highly important respect
from its activities in the other countries of occupied Europe. In Greece
alone was it possible to make serious preparations for post-occupation
resistance in advance of the Axis occupation of the country. The first
moves in this direction seem to have been made in May 1940 by
Section D of MI 6, perhaps the most important of SOE’s antecedent
organizations.21 A group known as the Apostles, and consisting of five
British businessmen resident in Athens, was set up. A month later Ian
Pirie,22 a former Oxford history scholar and bantamweight boxing
blue, under the cover of air raid precautions adviser to the British
community, took up residence in Athens as assistant to the head of the
Apostles, H.J. Sinclair. The British Legation, headed by Sir Michael
Palairet, absolutely declined to allow his mission to become involved
in any activities that might conceivably compromise it with the Greek
government to which it was accredited. Even so it seems that the lega-
tion in Athens was less hostile to these embryonic undercover
activities than were British legations in the other Balkan capitals.
Section D’s initial steps in Greece were rather halting. When a Greek
doctor was caught smuggling dynamite into Albania, at SOE’s behest,
an alarmed Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, cabled Athens on 5
July 1940 that on no account should trouble be stirred up on the
Greek–Albanian frontier, as this might give the Italians a pretext to
invade. At the same time MI (R) engaged in a similarly fruitless
escapade when it landed a Greek agent, code-named Sphinx, by sub-

marine in Crete with instructions to contact General Emmanouil
Mandakas, a leading opponent of the dictator General Ioannis
Metaxas, to discuss the possibility of fomenting a revolt against the
Greek government if it showed signs of weakening in the face of Axis
pressure. Sphinx was arrested by the efficient Greek security authorities
within a few days of his clandestine landing and was only with diffi-
culty repatriated to Egypt. Other schemes met with greater success.
These included the purchase of substantial quantities of small arms,
ammunition, grenades, and incendiary bombs produced by Bodossakis
Athanasiadis’s Poudreries Helléniques, ostensibly for shipment to the
Middle East. Instead, however, together with several hundred pistols
purchased on the open market, these were secreted in the basement of
the British consulate in Merlin Street.
In August 1940, following a meeting of Section D representatives for
the Balkans in Istanbul, Pirie was placed in charge of Greek operations.
Pirie developed a close working relationship with the British consul-
general, Graham Sebastlan, and his honorary vice-consul, Thomas
Bowman, who had lived for 30 years in Athens, spoke excellent Greek,
and had a wide range of contacts, including Constantine Maniadakis,
Metaxas’s much feared minister of public order. In the crucial weeks
before Metaxas’s death at the end of January 1941, SOE was able to
have direct contact with him through Maniadakis. Moves were made
at this time to extend the field of operations to Thessaloniki. In this a
key role was played by Major Menzies, a Canadian who was Imperial
War Graves Commissioner for the Balkans and whose cemeteries
afforded many useful hiding places. Menzies’s principal contact in the
city was Alexander Zannas, a member of the prominent Venizelist
family. Another willing contact was the Bishop of Kavalla who gladly
hid explosives in the basement of his cathedral.
Section D studiously avoided any kind of official or indeed unoffi-
cial contact with the Greek government, fearing that if the
government fell and was replaced by one more sympathetic to the
Axis, as had happened in Rumania, then agents and plans might be
needlessly exposed to the enemy. After the Italian invasion, and
particularly following the visit of the Commander-in-Chief, Middle
East, General Archibald Wavell, to Greece in November 1940, SOE’s
preparations for post-occupation sabotage and resistance in Greece
were stepped up, although they were still concealed from the Greek
General Staff, partly because of security and partly because it was
maintained that to reveal that the British were making contingency
plans for post-occupation sabotage might undermine the will of the

Greek military to resist by implying that an eventual occupation was
inevitable. During this period as many as three to four hundred poten-
tial saboteurs (a number of them communists) were trained and well
over five tons of explosives were secreted in Greece. Sabotage kits were
manufactured out of four-gallon petrol cans, which contained explo-
sives, a saboteur’s primer translated into Greek, £100 in Greek money,
two pistols, a quantity of ammunition, and a few knuckle dusters. By
the time the Germans had arrived in Athens in April 1941 almost one
hundred of these kits had been hidden in Greece.
In seeking reliable Greek agents, SOE operatives, during the winter
of 1940–41, found a ready-made constituency in senior Venizelist offi-
cers who had been cashiered after the abortive coups of 1933 and 1935
and whom Metaxas had refused to allow to the front. Almost by defin-
ition pro-British, and with British contacts going back to 1916, this
group of officers was eager to contribute to the war effort but
condemned by Metaxas’s vindictiveness to kicking its heels in Athens.
They provided a number of key agents. Through the redoubtable
Venizelist, Elli Papadimitriou, SOE came into contact with Colonel
Euripides Bakirdzis, the so-called Red Colonel, who had been awarded
a British Distinguished Service Order in World War 1. Bakirdzis briefly
headed the British-sponsored Prometheus organization whose function
was to spearhead post-occupation sabotage and resistance. His place
was taken by Lt Commander Ch. Koutsoyiannopoulos who, like
Bakirdzis, had been cashiered following the 1935 coup.
During the winter of 1940–41, SOE, besides preparing for sabotage
and resistance, also undertook a number of political initiatives. Pro-
allied ‘whispering’ campaigns were organized and SOE footed the bill
for the wining and dining by British Council officials of Greek intel-
lectuals, particularly from the universities. They were thinking of
extracting Colonel Nikolaos Plastiras from Vichy France to head a Free
Greece Movement in the Middle East. After Metaxas’s death at the end
of January, SOE believed, as did the British minister, Palairet, that this
was an opportune moment for broadening the Greek government, but
the king disagreed. Following the suicide of Metaxas’s successor,
Alexander Koryzis, SOE’s agents were involved in a complicated and
unsuccessful intrigue in trying to ensure that he was succeeded by
General Alexander Mazarakis (Ainian), a leading Venizelist. This polit-
ical manoeuvering seems to have underlain the marked resentment
which Emmanouil Tsouderos, who did emerge as prime minister,
manifested toward SOE during the occupation.
Perhaps the most important achievement of SOE in Greece before

the occupation was to leave behind radio transmitters. Only two could
be spared for Greece and both were entrusted to Koutsoyiannopoulos
in Athens on 24 April, 1941 in the confusion of the German invasion.
Their initial value, however, was negated when the caique transport-
ing part of SOE’s supplies to Crete sank with the codes that
Koutsoyiannopoulos was to use. It was intended that Crete should be
held as an impregnable fortress, and that SOE would be able to work
back from the island to the mainland. But when the island fell to the
Germans at the end of May, SOE’s activities were transferred to Cairo.
It was not long before Sir Miles Lampson, the British ambassador in
Egypt, was complaining to Anthony Eden, the British foreign secre-
tary, of the activities of ‘rival British secret and propaganda
organisations in Greece’.23 Tensions within SOE indeed had reached
such a pitch that Sir Frank Nelson, accompanied by Bickham Sweet-
Escott, his personal assistant for Balkan and Middle Eastern Affairs,
flew out at the beginning of August 1941 to the Middle East, or
‘Muddle East’ as it was popularly known. Nelson conducted a charac-
teristically ruthless inquest into the Cairo malaise, uncovering what he
termed ‘bloodthirsty internecine warfare . . . between two parts of the
same entity’. The situation, he believed, had been aggravated ‘by
intrigues on all sides, facilitated by parallel communications, by clash-
ing of personalities, by slinging of mud and by orgy of gossip’. The
upshot of Nelson’s visit was the purge of a number of senior officials
of both SO1 and SO2 in the first of what became an annual series of
summer purges of SOE Cairo.
This first purge of August 1941 had the unfortunate effect of alien-
ating Reginald Leeper, the head of SO1, which now became the
Political Warfare Executive (PWE) from SO2, which constituted the
essential core of SOE.24 It goes some way at least toward explaining the
zeal with which Leeper, following his appointment as ambassador to
the Greek government-in-exile in March 1943 on its move to Cairo,
pursued what he himself termed ‘the Great War against SOE’. It was an
indication of the institutional instability of SOE Cairo that its head
was to change no less than four times in two years. OSS’s record was
not much better; OSS Cairo had three heads in as many years. The first
change, that of August 1941, which brought the banker Terence
Maxwell, to the headship of SOE Cairo, was to have unfortunate
consequences. For Maxwell, against the advice of his senior staff, was
to introduce sweeping administrative changes. The effect of these was
to break up the existing country section structure of SOE Cairo, which
gave each section a considerable autonomy in handling the affairs of

a given country. In place of the country sections, Maxwell created four
main directorates: the Directorate of Special Operations, the
Directorate of Policy and Agents, the Directorate of Special
Propaganda, and the Directorate of Finance and Administration. A
year later this cumbersome structure was to be dismantled but it was
responsible, in part at least, for a number of major gaffes and blunders
and these will be examined later.
Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1941, SOE was making its first direct
contacts with occupied Greece. A key role was played in these earlier
contacts by a Greek agent known by the pseudonym Odysseus.
Odysseus, having been left behind in the confusion of the evacuation
of Crete, made his way to Izmir where, after a journey of truly Homeric
incident, he arrived in September 1941. From this time onward he was
able to make a number of visits to occupied Greece on behalf of David
Pawson who was in charge of SOE’s operations in Izmir. Odysseus was
soon able to make contact with the various sabotage and intelligence
groups established by SOE before the occupation, to whom he brought
supplies of money and of gold sovereigns. He was clearly well
informed as to the situation in occupied Greece for by the end of
October Pawson’s superior in Cairo, Ian Pirie, was able to write to
London that ‘Pawson advises strongly that we should make contact
with the co-called Communist organisation which is reported to be
being set up in Greece’. Pirie believed the movement to be a ‘nation-
alist movement of the extreme Left’ calling itself communist for ‘want
of a better name’. The Directorate of Policy and Agents agreed to Pirie’s
suggestion that money and sabotage equipment be sent to the new
organization, clearly EAM, which had been founded on 28 September,
1941. Pawson on 3 November received clearance to make contact with,
and offer support to, the new organization, provided that the commu-
nists were not given the impression that SOE was supporting them as
a political party in opposition to the existing Greek government.
Pawson was delighted to receive the go-ahead. As he wrote to Cairo on
November 4, ‘We have no illusions, it suits them and it suits us’. This
seems to have been the first contact between any British authority and
EAM and, while the British showed a certain wariness of the new
organization, their attitude was certainly not one of unremitting
hostility to the far left from the very beginning, as is sometimes
claimed.
Shortly afterwards Pawson was able to make direct radio contact
with Koutsoyiannopoulos, whose code name was 333, after Odysseus
had taken in new crystals and a code book. As a result of this contact
a somewhat unsuccessful arms drop was arranged at Kymi in Euboea
on 2/3 March, 1942, the first SOE supply drop of arms and ammuni-
tion to occupied mainland Greece and the first of 29 such sorties in
1942. At this stage the British authorities and SOE Cairo were placing
much hope on Panayiotis Kanellopoulos and his deputy, Epaminondas
Tsellos, whom it was hoped might be able to lead resistance in occu-
pied Greece in support of the king and the government-in-exile. This
was a policy with which Pawson strongly disagreed. He argued that it
was criminal to pursue a policy of reinstating ‘an unpopular and
unsuitable monarch and the rump of a totalitarian government’. In
any event, this initiative came to nothing. Ioannis Tsigantes, who
landed in Greece with the double mission of blocking the Corinth
Canal and of liaising with the Kanellopoulos group, was killed in a
shoot-out with the Italian police in January 1942. The same month, an
MI9 agent25 landed by submarine on Antiparos on a dual mission for
SOE and MI9 and was promptly arrested by the Italians with a
complete list of his contacts in Greece, together with large sums of
money. Following this débâcle, Kanellopoulos fled Greece to avoid
certain arrest. Thus ended SOE’s single, somewhat half-hearted,
attempt to build up a resistance movement that would take its orders
from the government-in-exile. This enterprise had been engineered by
the Anglo-Greek Committee, whose ostensible purpose was to co-
ordinate SOE activities in Greece with the Greek authorities in the
Middle East. It was, in fact, little more than a public relations exercise;
SOE had no intention of making its activities in occupied Greece
known to the Greek authorities, because of justified fears of Greek
laxity in security matters.26
The Antiparos disaster was soon followed by another large-scale
blunder. This arose out of a broadcast by the ‘Free Voice of Greece’
station, which purported to operate clandestinely from within Greece
but was in fact operated by SOE in Jerusalem. In view of the difficul-
ties of communication with Greece and of the inevitable delays, the
station had understandable trouble in maintaining the pretence that it
was broadcasting from within Greece. One way to overcome this
inherent problem was to adopt a political line that differed radically
from that of the BBC’s Greek broadcasts from London, a line that
reflected views and attitudes as they were believed to exist in Greece
itself. Such a broadcast occurred on 7 February 1942, announcing that
Aristides Dimitratos, who had been Metaxas’s unpopular minister of
labour, had finally been eased out of the Tsouderos exile government.
The offending passage went as follows: ‘The Greek Government

continues the Metaxas dictatorship in London. It continues as a trav-
esty of Italian and German fascism in London. . . . While they [the dead
of the Albanian campaign] died, the 4th of August continued in
London with Dimitratos, and Nikoloudis, the right hand man of
Metaxas . . . Papadakis of the fascist Neolaia, now Tsouderos’ right hand
man, and Maniadakis, murderer of A. Michalakopoulos and thousands
of others’. Not surprisingly the Foreign Office regarded broadcasts of
this kind as altogether too ‘black’, as indeed did elements within SOE
itself.27
Yet undoubtedly SOE, through its Greek contacts, was much better
informed of the trend of opinion within Greece than was the Foreign
Office, which was pursuing its somewhat hopeless policy of ‘selling’
King George II to his subjects in the belief that constitutional monar-
chy afforded the best guarantee of both political stability and of a
postwar Greece well disposed to British interests. As early as 16
November, 1941 Pawson in Turkey was writing to Pirie in Cairo that
‘the King and his Government have only a very small following and
that they are hated and looked upon as traitors by the vast majority of
the people’. He also stressed the need for broadening the exile govern-
ment and at the same time removing the leftovers from the Metaxas
regime. He stressed, too, the need to persuade the king that he would
abide by the people’s will as to the form of post-war government. He
concluded his dispatch on a note of caution. He believed that the
Russians were having a considerable success in Greece and that, unless
the British acted quickly, the Greeks would look to Russia for deliver-
ance. Pawson was under no illusions as to the ‘whole mountain of
prejudice’ that would have to be surmounted before any move could
be made to implement his recommendations. The Foreign Office,
however, was inclined to discount reports of this kind, emanating
from SOE sources, which it believed to be tainted by its Venizelist
contacts.
In the autumn of 1942, SOE’s involvement in Greek affairs was to
enter a new plane. The Commanders-in-Chief, Middle East, demanded
that the Athens–Thessaloniki railway, a vital supply line for Rommel’s
North African armies, be cut. As a result, the Harling mission was para-
chuted into Greece at the end of September 1942. The mission was to
be commanded by Brigadier E.C.W. Myers, a professional engineer
officer. Of the team that was hastily assembled in Cairo, only Colonel
C.M. Woodhouse and Lieutenant ‘Themi’ Marinos were intended to
remain behind to form a permanent liaison with the resistance. But so
successful was the operation against the Gorgopotamos railway

viaduct on the night of 25/26 November that the Chiefs of Staff devel-
oped a new enthusiasm for the potential of guerrilla warfare. Myers
and his entire team, not all of whom were enthralled by the
prospect,28 were ordered to stay behind in Greece to help co-ordinate
resistance activities.
Myers was now plunged willy-nilly into the politics of occupied
Greece and had in no way been prepared for what he was to find.
Neither he nor Woodhouse in the briefings that they had received
before leaving Cairo had been told anything of the existence of EAM
or its military arm, ELAS. For Myers, this is perhaps not too surprising,
as it was expected that he would be withdrawn from Greece as soon as
his immediate military task had been completed. For Woodhouse,
however, the lack of any kind of serious political briefing is extraordin-
ary.29 By September 1942, SOE Cairo had within its possession fairly
detailed and accurate information about the nature and activities of
EAM. Myers and Woodhouse, however, were told nothing of this, and
it was only at the insistence of Woodhouse that he saw Panayiotis
Kanellopoulos, the deputy prime minister and minister of war in the
exile government, the only person on the Greek side to be informed of
the mission. Why this vital political information was withheld from
the Harling mission remains a mystery. The most likely explanation is
that it was a consequence of the disastrous structural reorganization of
SOE Cairo in 1942. By September I942 the country sections had been
restored, but it could be that the after effects of the re-organization
prevented the Harling mission from receiving an adequate briefing.
After Gorgopotamos, Myers was rapidly forced to come to grips with
the political realities in Greece and, following Woodhouse’s visit to
Athens in January 1943, was in a position to report back to Cairo. He
found that there was overwhelming feeling against the king and an
almost universal demand that he should not return before there had
been a plebiscite. These findings incurred the wrath of the Foreign
Office, which was furious to discover that Myers had been meddling
in political matters which they regarded as being no concern of his.
The Foreign Office even tried to argue that they had not been
consulted before the Harling mission had been sent into Greece.30 But
this was not the case, for Myers’s proposal that leaflets be dropped
threatening counter-reprisals if the Germans engaged in reprisals after
the blowing up of the railway was discussed at the highest levels in
the Foreign Office before being turned down. Myers’s reports brought
to a head the crisis in relations between SOE and the Foreign Office
over Greek affairs. Relations between the two organizations had

already had to be regularized in a formal ‘treaty’. At one stage in the
spring of 1943 there were calls within the Foreign Office for a
complete suspension of SOE activities in Greece and the adoption of
what Pierson Dixon of the Southern Department whimsically called
‘an inactive sabotage policy’.31 These calls were rejected by the Chiefs
of Staff who placed a high value on the military contribution of resis-
tance in the Balkans, but the Chiefs of Staff went some way toward
meeting Foreign Office objections when in their 1943 directive they
charged that ‘besides close contact with Commanders-in-Chief,
Middle East, SOE should also be closely guided by the Foreign Office
in view of the dangers of entanglements with opposing political
groups and risk of action contrary to the policy of HMG and of
conflict with the Soviet Union’.32 The Joint Operational Staff of
Middle East Command, however, was somewhat concerned by this
passage, ‘fearing that Foreign Office interest in SOE activities might
detract from their operational value’. They argued that ‘operational
rather than political considerations are at present paramount and
our primary aim should be to organise maximum resistance to the
Axis’. The Commanders-in-Chief accordingly invited the SOE/PWE
Policy Committee to do their utmost to foster anti-Axis activities in
Greece.33
SOE’s position in Greece was considerably strengthened by the need
for a diversionary feint to mislead the Germans into expecting an inva-
sion of Greece instead of Sicily. This resulted in the setting up,
following the Military Agreement of 1 July 1943, of a joint general
headquarters under the aegis of the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East
and the planning of the successful operation known under the code
name Animals. The signing of the Military Agreement was followed by
the fiasco of the visit of the guerrilla delegation to Cairo together with
Brigadier Myers. I shall not go into this extraordinary episode here
because I have fully discussed it elsewhere.34 1 would, however, like to
emphasize that its consequences were quite as dire for SOE Cairo as
indeed they were for the prospects of developing a unified resistance
movement. The visit was to give Ambassador Leeper the pretext he
needed to emasculate SOE Cairo. It resulted in the third and most
vicious August purge of SOE Cairo. Myers, as a result of Leeper’s veto,
was forbidden to return. Lord Glenconner, the most able of the succes-
sive heads of SOE Cairo, was removed, as was his unorthodox but able
chief-of-staff, Brigadier C.M. Keble.35 Another direct casualty of the
Cairo fracas was the overall head of SOE, Sir Charles Hambro, who was
replaced as ‘CD’, the executive head of SOE, by Major-General Sir

Colin Gubbins.
The relative autonomy which SOE Cairo had enjoyed in its dealings
with the Balkan resistance movements was now brought to an abrupt
end and SOE operatives were placed under the ‘sole control and direc-
tion’ of the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, who was to receive
political guidance from the Foreign Office through a Special
Operations Committee composed of the British ambassadors to Egypt,
Yugoslavia, and Greece, together with representatives of SOE and the
office of the Minister of State in the Middle East. The relative freedom
of SOE to formulate and carry out policy in Greece, a freedom enjoyed
de facto rather than de jure, no longer existed. Up until the autumn of
1943, of course, SOE had been subject to overall guidance from the
Chiefs of Staff and the Foreign Office but had frequently been able to
interpret its instructions fairly freely and had not felt inhibited about
giving aid and encouragement to groups, principally groups drawn
from Venizelist circles, which the Foreign Office regarded with suspi-
cion or downright hostility. It had also felt free to channel money and
supplies to the left, although it could not be argued that SOE as such,
as opposed to a few individuals within the organization, showed much
sympathy with the far left in Greece. But SOE, through its operatives
in Greece, was always much better informed and much less ideologic-
ally hidebound than the Foreign Office. It was aware from the
beginning of the dangers inherent in the Foreign Office’s unremitting
support for the cause of King George and of the hopelessness of its
policy of trying to sell the king to a reluctant populace. As long as it
enjoyed a relative autonomy it was able in practice to mitigate the
harmful consequences of this policy.
5
‘Pearls from Swine’: the Foreign
Office Papers, SOE and the Greek
Resistance
I should make it clear that I do not intend in this chapter to give a

systematic analysis of the development of British policy towards the
Greek resistance during the period I particularly want to look at –
roughly the time from September 1942, when the Harling mission was
parachuted into Greece, until the signing of the Plaka agreement
(which patched up the civil war within the resistance that had begun
during the previous October) at the end of February 1944. Sir
Llewellyn Woodward has already performed this task competently in
his chapter on British policy towards Greece in his British Foreign Policy
in the Second World War,1 and it would be pointless to try to duplicate
his efforts. Sir Llewellyn himself made the point that his account is
told from the Foreign Office point of view and that he has not made
use of Special Operations Executive documents which might put SOE’s
case and which remain inaccessible, apparently for the indefinite
future (see page 178). This is a little puzzling for there is a considerable
amount of SOE material available in the Foreign Office papers, some of
it in the form of pièces justificatives written specifically to counter
Foreign Office criticism. My intention here is mainly to fill in some of
the gaps in previously published accounts and, in particular, to chart,
as far as is possible on the basis of the available documents, the disas-
trous course of the Foreign Office’s relations with SOE, which reached
their nadir during the visit of the delegation of six Greek guerrillas to
Cairo in August 1943, after which SOE in the Balkans was brought
under the direct control of the Commander-in-Chief Middle East.
Before looking at British policy after October 1942, I want to look
briefly at the way in which the British government became so
enmeshed in the cause of King George II of the Hellenes – a commit-
ment against which a number of major initiatives to change the
78
The Foreign Office, SOE and the Greek Resistance 79
direction of British policy foundered. The seeds of the Foreign Office’s

stubborn and ultimately disastrous rearguard action on behalf of the
King were sown at an early stage. Within a matter of weeks of the fall
of Crete, Edward Warner of the Southern Department, who was later
to become an adviser on Greek affairs to the Minister of State in the
Middle East, and subsequently to Reginald Leeper when the latter
became ambassador to the Greek government-in-exile in Cairo,
minuted:
It must be remembered that it does not in the least matter if we

offend extreme Veniselist opinion by backing the King and giving
honour where honour is due to Metaxas. What matters is that we
should not offend ‘Royalist opinion’. The Germans can never win
over the extreme Veniselists; but they may be able to make some-
thing out of some of the Royalist (or right wing) elements, as in the
last war.2
It is somewhat unfortunate that Warner, who was to play a fairly

important role in the formulation of British policy, both in London
and Cairo, should have had a rather unsympathetic view of Greek
politicians and their aspirations. In December 1941 he wrote off ‘most
of the upper class Greeks’ as ‘self-seeking Levantines . . . quite unwor-
thy of the rank and file’,3 while on 18 April 1943 he wrote to Pierson
Dixon of the Southern Department that the political mess in Cairo was
unbelievable and that he very much sympathized with King George ‘in
letting Metaxas go ahead’ on 4 August 1936.4 Warner was certainly
aware, however, that the hold of the King on the affection of his
subjects was somewhat precarious and believed that the Foreign
Office’s policy should be one of ‘selling the King and Government’ to
the Greek people.5
The Foreign Office’s strong commitment to the cause of the King –
who, they felt, had more or less single-handedly held the Greek
government together during the crisis caused by the German invasion
in April/May 1941 – went beyond mere propaganda to an active
involvement in the King’s manifold intrigues and obsessions. In the
autumn of 1941, for instance, the Foreign Office became deeply impli-
cated in King George’s efforts to have six Greek Republicans expelled
from Egypt. This, in the King’s eyes, at least, was the quid pro quo for
his dismissal from the government-in-exile of Konstantinos
Maniadakis, who as Metaxas’s deputy minister of public order had
been as unpopular as he was efficient in hounding opponents of the
dictatorship. Sir Orme Sargent, the deputy permanent under-secretary

at the Foreign Office, later conceded that it had been a mistake to get
involved in this particular intrigue,6 and it is a significant indication
of the extent of the failure of both the King and the Foreign Office to
appreciate the trend of Greek opinion that one of these six purported
undesirables, Vyron Karapanayiotis, was to reappear as Minister of War
in the Greek government-in-exile in 1943, while there was consider-
able embarrassment in the Foreign Office when it emerged that the six
for the most part had unimpeachably pro-British records.
The Foreign Office did however draw the line at an early stage of the
war when it received a request from the King and Tsouderos which
ultimately envisaged a restoration of the monarchy by force. The docu-
ment in which this request was made has been withdrawn, but that
such a request was made is clear from a minute by Warner of
21 November 1941. He wrote: ‘we have now been asked by the Greek
Prime Minister to co-operate in the execution of a policy which fore-
sees, as a last resort, the restoration of the King by force’. But, he added
that ‘we cannot for one moment contemplate helping to restore the
King by force’, and that this should be made plain to the King and his
Prime Minister, Emmanouil Tsouderos.7 A few months later, during the
course of a dinner conversation, an influential member of Tsouderos’s
entourage told Warner that the Greek government intended to use the
Greek army in the Middle East to impose a regime of its own choosing
‘when we return’. In a memorandum of 11 February 1942, recording
this conversation, Warner added that the Foreign Office had ‘the
uneasy feeling that this was the position’.8
King George of Greece emerges from the documents as a person with
an almost boundless capacity for self-deception. On 21 April 1943 he
wrote personally to Churchill from Cairo that the latter’s March direc-
tive urging all-out support for the King and government-in-exile was
‘starting to produce excellent results and will lead to an enormous
improvement in conditions regarding Greek affairs in this part of the
world’.9 Moreover, King George did not always reciprocate the warmth
of the Foreign Office’s support for his cause. In March 1942 the King
complained to the Director of Naval Intelligence that the Foreign
Office was ‘Republican and anti-King’, a charge described by Warner as
‘quite absurd’ and by Dixon as ‘ridiculous’.10 At about the same time a
close personal friend of the King told Harold Caccia of the Foreign
Office that the King felt that if he failed to return to Greece ‘the blame
would very largely attach to the Foreign Office and their agents’.11
Given attitudes such as this it is not altogether surprising that the
Foreign Office’s patience with the King’s obduracy, although very

considerable, was not boundless. Eden minuted on 30 March 1944 that
‘I have had many dealings with the King in recent years and I fear that
I am forced increasingly to the conclusion that he is little, if any, more
to be relied upon in his records of opinions or events than the Greeks
he abuses so freely’.12 A few days later on 3 April 1944, he minuted:
‘the King is not wise and he is obstinate. It is in my judgement increas-
ingly unlikely that he will ever return to Greece as King, and stay
there’.13
Only in 1943 did questions of policy towards the resistance involv-
ing the Foreign Office arise, for as late as March 1943 the Foreign
Office claimed to have had no knowledge of the existence of a British
military mission on Greek soil. But the 1942 documents do raise a
number of interesting points in connection with the resistance, and
particularly the extent to which the Foreign Office was aware of polit-
ical developments in occupied Greece, and how far this knowledge was
also available to SOE.
Colonel C.M. Woodhouse, in a pertinent article, has stressed the
complete absence in the briefing by SOE of the Harling party at the end
of September 1942 of any mention of EAM, ELAS or the KKE.14 Yet the
documents make it clear that the Foreign Office, and indeed other
British agencies, were at this time not only aware of the existence of
EAM but had evidence that it was by far the largest secret organization
in Greece. As early as February 1942, for instance, MI3 passed to the
Foreign Office an appreciation of the situation existing within Greece
which listed among the main anti-Axis groups ‘the so-called Popular
Front’, which I take to be a reference to EAM. MI3 had reports of some
22 secret organizations, which appeared to be resolving into four main
groups. These were the Venizelists, the constitutional monarchists,
‘scattered ex-Royalist groups now with conservative or Republican
sentiments’ and ‘the so-called Popular Front, consisting of Left-wing
groups under certain revolutionary officers and the two Communist
parties. The Popular Front is Republican and economically far to the
Left’. The appreciation concluded that ‘party differences seem at the
moment to have fallen into the background’ and that ‘the two
Communist parties are known to have received instructions from
Moscow to desist from ideological activity for the duration of the war
and to combine with the other parties against the Axis forces’.15 On
31 August of the same year, Dixon wrote to Warner in Cairo stressing
the need to build up the ‘Action Committee’ in Athens ‘as a magnet
for the various organisations constituting the Popular Front’.16 More
significantly, Warner was reporting back to London within a matter of

days of the Harling briefing about the political significance of EAM. On
5 October 1942 he cabled that he was preparing a lengthy report on
Greek secret organizations, which was to include an appendix on EAM.
Warner wrote that, according to his sources, EAM was ‘much the
largest secret organisation in Greece’ with 100 000 members in Athens
alone, who were organized on a cell system. Warner’s source consid-
ered that EAM was ‘not outwardly communist’ but was rather
‘non-political and purely patriotic’.17
It is difficult to believe that SOE in Cairo during the last week of
September knew less about EAM and its potential significance than the
Foreign Office. Presumably the absence of any mention of EAM or
ELAS in SOE’s briefing of the Harling mission was a consequence of the
reorganization of SOE Cairo in 1941 on functional rather than
geographical lines. This reorganization had been reversed in the
summer of 1942, but it presumably took some time for the newly
reconstituted country sections to function efficiently. Again at the
time of the Harling briefing, it is Woodhouse’s clear recollection that
Panayotis Kanellopoulos, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of War
in the government-in-exile, made no mention of the KKE as an active
force in the Greek resistance. Yet Kanellopoulos informed Warner at
the beginning of October 1942 that he thought the organizers of EAM
were ‘probably communists’ although the membership was ‘most
diverse’.18 A month later, on 2 November 1942, Warner wrote to
Dixon from Cairo that according to a Greek officer in Athens the ‘old
gang’ politicians were quite discredited with the younger generation,
‘who looked to E.A.M. as the only political organisation worth
supporting’.19 Further, in a telegram of 4 November the Minister of
State Cairo described EAM as ‘the only important political organisa-
tion in Greece’.
Incidentally, the documents do enable us to dispose fairly, if not
absolutely, conclusively of one canard put about in some analyses of
the Greek resistance. This concerns the BBC’s treatment of the blowing
up on 25 November 1942 of the Gorgopotamos viaduct on the
Salonika–Athens railway. André Kedros, Dominique Eudes and more
recently Heinz Richter have claimed that when the BBC broadcast the
news of the destruction of the Gorgopotamos viaduct, praise was
lavished on Zervas, but no mention was made of the participation of
the ELAS contingent or of its leader, Aris Veloukhiotis.20 Eudes porten-
tously adds that this signified that the British had already made their
political choice, that is to back EDES and not EAM/ELAS.
Unfortunately, the actual script of the Gorgopotamos broadcast is

apparently no longer preserved in the BBC’s archives. But a study of
PWE directives to the BBC for this period make it extremely unlikely
that the broadcast did take the form that these historians claim. While
stressing that ‘we must never neglect the question of Greek resistance
even when we have no fresh news’, the directives emphasize that ‘no
names of places or leaders must be given’ (30 October to 5 November
and 20 November to 27 November). The first explicit reference to
Gorgopotamos occurs in the directive for 11 December to 18
December, and it was presumably during this week that the news was
first broadcast. Here the directive read, ‘. . . in exceptional cases, such as
the blowing up of the Gorgopotamos bridge, on which we have
completely reliable evidence, we can give details of acts of resistance,
but in no case, unless otherwise advised, should we give the names of
guerilla leaders . . .’.21 It is true that in a minute of the previous February
Warner had written that most of the energies of Dilys Powell of PWE
were being ‘consumed in internecine warfare, owing to the refusal of the
BBC Greek section personnel to accept P.W.E. guidance’, and that, as a
result, she was thinking of resigning.22 But it is highly unlikely that the
BBC, at this particular juncture, would have wilfully disregarded such
clear directives for the treatment of the Gorgopotamos affair.
What I principally want to do in this chapter is to trace the stormy
history of relations between the Foreign Office and SOE after the possi-
bilities of large-scale guerrilla warfare in Greece had become apparent,
although of course there had been much friction at an earlier stage of
the war between the Foreign Office and SOE or its antecedent organ-
izations. In December 1941, for instance, Warner had complained of
the ‘quite incredible bias and lack of judgement prevailing in our
various intelligence [sic] organisations’.23
What is rather surprising is the extent to which the documents
reveal the depth of the bitterness, already known from other sources,
felt by the Foreign Office for SOE, as presumably those of SOE, if they
were made available, would reveal similar attitudes on the part of SOE
towards the Foreign Office. There are innumerable references to the
‘ramps’ being perpetrated by SOE,24 to telegrams from SOE being
‘Pearls from Swine’,25 to SOE’s inevitable preference for the ‘cranky
and unorthodox’,26 to the purported lack of political finesse of their
operatives. Leeper, for instance, described Brigadier Myers as ‘a
complete disaster’, ‘a very dangerous fool’ and a ‘fanatic’ ‘with a very
strong streak of megalomania’,27 while he found General Gubbins to
be ‘a very difficult man’.28
Sometimes the contempt felt by some members of the Foreign Office

for SOE, at least as far as its Greek operations went, reached almost
incredible proportions. As late as 23 January 1944 Orme Sargent
minuted: ‘the truth, of course, is that the whole guerilla movement in
Greece has been largely fiction created by S.O.E. to justify a vast expen-
diture of money and raw material in that country. As long as they kept
the whole management in their own hands we never knew whether this
investment was producing any dividends, but for the last six months,
since when the Commander-in-Chief has been in control, the military
have discovered that the movement is a complete fake, as far as resist-
ance to the Germans is concerned (even if we succeed in putting an end
to the actual civil war), and are increasingly inclined to write it all off’.29
Eden himself, who was not over-solicitous of the reputation of SOE,
wrote against this passage: ‘I really think that this is exaggeration’.
There is no evidence, however, that Sargent was ever convinced of
this, and indeed in this minute he was merely repeating views he had
advanced almost exactly a year previously, when, in January 1943, the
Southern Department were discussing the operational value of SOE’s
activities in Greece. Douglas Howard, the head of the Southern
Department, minuted only a couple of months after Gorgopotamos
that ‘S.O.E. have nothing very impressive to show as yet in Greece’.
Sargent added: ‘Nor do I think there will be in the future. The achieve-
ments of S.O.E. are sadly out of proportion with the vast sums of
money which, during the last year and a half, have been spent in
Greece, chiefly on subsidising communist organisations in opposition
to the Greek Government, which we are supporting’.30
It was in March 1943 that matters first seem to have come to a head
between the Foreign Office and SOE over questions related directly to
the guerrilla movement in Greece. This first crisis was prompted by the
receipt by the Foreign Office of the first political reports from within
Greece sent by Myers, Woodhouse and Colonel Rufus Sheppard, the
British Liaison Officer in Thessaly. The Foreign Office was incensed to
learn that Myers had, in their view, been meddling in internal Greek
political affairs. As for the idea that a plebiscite be held before the
King’s return – a proposal commended by Myers – Dixon minuted on
7 March 1943 that it was ‘plain that this idea has its origin in one or
two self-interested groups of guerillas in Greece, who cannot possibly
claim to represent the general feelings of the Greek people’.31 The
consolidated Myers–Woodhouse–Sheppard report, Dixon minuted,
strengthened ‘the case for suspending S.O.E. activities in Greece and
making a constructive effort to build up our official policy’.32
Some of the wind was taken out of the Foreign Office’s sails by the
receipt on 13 March of Zervas’s message of 9 March in support of King
George II. Howard minuted on the 14 March: ‘Sir C[harles] Hambro
[head of SOE] seized the opportunity yesterday morning of ringing me
up to ask if I had digested the telegram. He was, of course, delighted
with it, and said, somewhat smugly, that it was the perfect answer to
the Foreign Office’s accusations that SOE encouraged nothing but anti-
King movements. (I was busy, in fact, at that very moment drafting a
letter to him repeating the same accusation! It had to be toned down
as a result of the telegram)’.33 The Foreign Office pressed ahead,
however, with their efforts to curtail SOE operational activities in
Greece, on the grounds that they involved supporting elements hostile
to the Greek government. Eden wrote to the Chiefs of Staff to this
effect, but an agreement was patched up after the Middle East Defence
Committee had sent to the Chiefs of Staff on 18 March a spirited
defence of SOE’s activities in Greece. The Middle East Defence
Committee regarded ‘the sabotage which Colonel Myers has organised
and is continuing to organise and direct in Greece, as an important
element in our plans. We believe that it is effectively disrupting the
flow of enemy reinforcements, and supplies, and materially facilitating
the eventual re-occupation of Greece. We should like to see it main-
tained at the maximum which resources permit’.34
The Foreign Office did not get its way over the suspension of SOE’s
operational activities, although Hambro agreed that SOE’s operatives
would now be instructed to say that ‘while they don’t mix in politics,
they knew that H.M.G. support the King and his Government’.35 The
Foreign Office was still unhappy about the way in which, ‘as far as
[they] remembered’, the project of sending Myers into Greece had not
been discussed in advance. On 23 March Howard wrote formally to
Colonel J.S.A. Pearson, of SOE’s Balkan section in London, requesting
information about Myers and the British Military Mission.36 To this
Pearson sent a curt answer, which Sargent considered to be ‘frankly
impertinent’, provoking Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-
secretary in the Foreign Office, to speak to Hambro personally about it.
Pearson sent a more pacific reply on 9 April to the effect that Myers
had been sent in on the instructions of General Headquarters Middle
East for the specific purpose of cutting the Salonika–Athens railway
line. He added that ‘as this operation was of great secrecy, it was not
considered by the Anglo-Greek Committee in Cairo, although M.
Canellopoulos himself was privately told that it was to be undertaken’.
Following the success of the operation, Myers was asked by the
Commander-in-Chief Middle East to stay on in Greece and ‘attempt

the co-ordination of the guerrilla bands on a non-political basis for
resistance to the Axis’. Pearson concluded that ‘all these officers are in
uniform, and are therefore responsible, through SOE, to the control of
G.H.Q. Middle East, and are amenable to general army instructions’.
This reply was still considered unsatisfactory by the Foreign Office.
On 23 April Sargent minuted that ‘. . . the introduction of British offi-
cers into Greece to organise resistance movements and direct guerilla
warfare represents a very important new development not merely from
the military but from the political point of view. In spite of this we
were told nothing about it and only succeeded in extracting the neces-
sary information from S.O.E. when Sir A. Cadogan personally
intervened with Sir C. Hambro. The decision to introduce British offi-
cers into Greece ought obviously to have been reported by S.O.E. at
their monthly meeting with the F.O. under Sir A. Cadogan’s chair-
manship. Nothing however has ever been said on the subject at any of
these meetings’.37
Why Sargent should have written in these terms is unclear. For
Cadogan, at least, was certainly aware of the presence of a British party
on Greek soil as early as November 1942. For it was Cadogan who
initialled the reply, dated 15 November, sent to the Minister of State
in Cairo who had sought permission, following a request from Myers,
for leaflets to be dropped over Greece threatening counter-reprisals
if the Axis occupation forces carried out reprisals after the
Gorgopotamos operation.38
During the protracted negotiations leading up to the National Bands
agreement in July 1943, the Foreign Office, if worried about the impli-
cations of the joint General Headquarters agreement, were by and
large content to accept SOE’s handling of the matter, and indeed were
appreciative of Myers’s successful handling of the negotiations.39 In
concurring in the final instructions sent by Lord Glenconner, head of
SOE Cairo, to Myers, authorizing the latter to agree to the establish-
ment of the Joint General Headquarters, the Foreign Office stated that
they agreed with SOE ‘that their policy should be to increase the
number of British Liaison Officers as much as possible including the
despatch of naval and air force representatives to the joint
Headquarters. Our aim must be so to increase our influence on the
guerrilla bands that, by the time the King returns to Greece with the
British Commander-in-Chief of our army of liberation, British influ-
ence will so far have swamped the political aspirations of E.A.M. that
they will be unable to organise an effective opposition to the King’.40
Leeper during this period strongly advocated a showdown with EAM.

But the Foreign Office, while agreeing with Leeper that the influence
of E.A.M. must be diminished or broken, feared that a showdown
might involve ‘a very real risk of provoking civil war, and that at a time
when circumstances were not altogether favourable to us’.41
Relations between the Foreign Office and SOE were to reach a stage
of total breakdown during the critical confusion surrounding the
visit of Myers, Major David Wallace and the delegation of six repre-
sentatives of the guerrilla organisations to Cairo in August 1943. As
Reginald Leeper who, as ambassador to the Greek government-in-
exile found himself in the very eye of the storm, put it in a letter to
Sargent of 25 August: ‘there have really been two crises running at
the same time: (i) the crisis with the Greek Government: and (ii) the
crisis with SOE. The latter has been so unpleasant that in comparison
I could almost take the members of the Greek Government to my
bosom’.42
As Colonel Woodhouse and Brigadier Myers have emphasized else-
where, the Cairo visit marked a crucial turning point in the history of
the resistance in Greece. As a result of its failure any hope of a co-
ordinated resistance movement vanished, if indeed it had ever been
anything other than a chimera, in a welter of mutual recrimination
and bitterness. After Cairo, civil war within the Greek resistance
moved from the realm of possibility into the realm of probability.
I want to look in some detail at this episode, as the Foreign Office
documents do amplify in a number of important respects the previ-
ously published accounts of participants, those of Leeper, Myers,
Field-Marshal Lord Wilson and Komninos Pyromaglou,43 while Sir
Llewellyn Woodward devotes only a summary paragraph to this
crucial encounter, in itself perhaps an indication of the Foreign
Office’s failure to grasp the significance of the opportunity that had
presented itself.
As early as 21 February 1943, following Woodhouse’s meetings with
members of the EAM Central Committee in Athens, Myers reported
that EAM wanted to send representatives to Cairo, a proposal which
Myers strongly supported, adding that he had arranged provisional
details with Evmaios (the nom de guerre of Andreas Tzimas).44 The
Foreign Office was informed of this proposal on 6 March in a digest of
SOE telegrams from Greece forwarded by Pearson to Dixon,45 although
in the digest ‘representatives’ became ‘a representative’. On 23 March,
Pearson wrote Dixon that the Minister of State had agreed to such a
visit as useful. In his covering letter Pearson emphasized that the
attached paper on EAM should be taken as only an interim report,

pending the arrival of the EAM representative.41
Cairo was clearly expecting an imminent visit, but the proposal
seems to have lapsed, presumably due to the difficulties of organising
transport, until early May. On 6 May, Myers was asked to use his influ-
ence to get certain political leaders in Greece to send representatives to
Cairo.47 In reply Myers promised to exert the utmost influence but
urged, as Leeper expressed it, ‘that the Greek Government and the
Foreign Office should consider Greek political parties as they are now
and not as they were in 1940. The realities should be faced and repre-
sentatives of the present “Peoples’ Parties” be got out; namely E.A.M.,
Communists and Plastiras Party’. Myers was told in reply by Leeper
that his telegram was difficult to reconcile with a policy of splitting the
ELAS bands from EAM, that EAM and the Communists should in no
way be encouraged and their adherents should be attracted into the
National Bands. There was, however, no objection to a visit of an EAM
representative along with the politicians.48
On 24 May, Leeper, in a letter to Sargent, urged the need for further
statements by the King and the British government on the constitu-
tional question, the importance of making the Greek government
more representative and that means be found of ‘getting people out of
Greece both from the politicians and the resistance groups’.49 Clearly
then, Leeper, whatever he may subsequently have thought, had no
apparent objection to guerrillas being brought out of Greece and being
incorporated in the government-in-exile. He must also have assumed
that these guerrillas would be political animals; otherwise there would
be little purpose in engaging them in an attempt to broaden the basis
of the Tsouderos government.
Closely linked with the question of the six Greeks was the Wallace
mission to Greece, for Major David Wallace – after a short visit to
Greece between the end of June and the beginning of August –
returned to Cairo with Myers and the guerrilla delegation. From an
early date Leeper had urged that a Foreign Office representative be sent
to Greece as political adviser to Myers. He secured the ready agreement
of Lord Glenconner, the head of SOE Cairo, to this arrangement on 14
April and, in informing the Foreign Office, Leeper wrote that ‘the
appointment of a proper political adviser is a matter of urgency. Myers
is purely a soldier. As such he is doing excellent work but we cannot
leave him on his own without our own man there’.50 Leeper was
particularly anxious that Wallace be appointed political adviser, as he
duly was. The Foreign Office’s suggestions for the guidance of Wallace
arrived shortly after he had left for Greece, but are none the less of
interest, for Leeper’s own briefing covered the same points. Wallace’s
instructions were to insist on the implementation of His Majesty’s
Government’s policy and to keep HMG informed about political
feeling in Greece. He was to bear in mind that the main essentials of
British policy were (a) full support for the King and government; (b)
approval of the various undertakings given by the King and the Greek
government and particularly that of 4 July, by which the King
promised to respect the will of the people over the constitutional issue
and guaranteed general elections for a constituent assembly, which
would be held within six months of liberation; (c) the King’s return to
Greece in a military capacity along with the invading army. In the
meantime premature discussion of constitutional issues was ‘to be
deprecated since it will detract from the war effort’, while any direct
conflict or breach with EAM was to be avoided. Wallace was also to
assess the possibility of broadening the government with politicians
from within Greece and with representatives of the National Bands.51
There is little doubt that the Wallace mission was regarded by
Leeper, who had implicit faith in Wallace’s judgement (Wallace was
not a professional diplomat, although he had served in the informa-
tion department of the British embassy in Athens at the beginning of
the war), as essentially a means of double checking the reports he was
receiving from Greece via SOE. For Leeper had already expressed
serious doubts as to Myers’s political judgement. On 12 May, for
instance, he wrote to Sargent that Myers ‘has no political acumen and
does not see beyond his nose or, should I say the noses of his gueril-
las. He is not astute enough in dealing with E.A.M. and I am sure he
exaggerates their political importance’.52 He was particularly incensed
by Myers’s report of the reaction within Greece to the King’s 4 July
declaration, in which Myers said that ‘the King is prepared to make
any sacrifices except in anything concerning himself. Although it is
not my business as a soldier, once again I strongly recommend that the
sooner the King states he will not set foot in Greece, until asked for by
common vote of the people, the better. I lay a 100 to 1 bet that
Wallace will agree when he sees the position for himself’. Leeper,
however, was not amused by this and asked Glenconner to rebuke
Myers as he appeared ‘to be completely under the thumb of E.A.M’.53
This view that Myers was a tool of EAM or, conversely, that EAM was
the virtual creation of Myers, was widely held in the Foreign Office,
and was subscribed to, indeed, by Churchill himself. In a minute of
24 February 1944, Churchill described ‘General Myers’ as ‘the chief
man who reared the cockatrice brute of E.A.M.–E.L.A.S’. Somewhat

uncharacteristically, Sargent came to Myers’s defence but only to make
a further attack on SOE. ‘The hand that reared the cockatrice was that
of S.O.E. who fed it sedulously for two years in spite of our repeated
warnings and protests. All that Brigadier Myers did was to attempt to
introduce a little discipline and order into the tyranny and ineffi-
ciency of E.L.A.S. when he went into Greece last spring’.54
How these opinions of Myers received such wide circulation is in-
explicable. Long before Leeper had asked Glenconner to rebuke Myers,
there was plenty of evidence available to the Foreign Office that Myers
was under no illusions as to the long-term objectives of EAM/ELAS. In
a SOE report for the week ending 15 May, made available to the Foreign
Office, for instance, Myers warned that ‘Sheppard [the British Liaison
Officer in Thessaly] and his mission are becoming EAM yes-men, not
troubling to investigate deeper than E.A.M. desire’. Here it was the
compiler of the report who sprang to Sheppard’s defence: ‘It may be
here pointed out that both Major Sheppard and his principal assistant,
Captain Hammond, are thoroughly competent and have long experi-
ence of the Levant. They are both first-class officers fairly well known
to the writer, and in his opinion it would be most surprising if they had
in fact been hoodwinked by the E.L.A.S. leaders to whom they are
attached, to the extent feared by Brigadier Myers’.55 Again, it was
known to the Foreign Office that, in May, Myers had been considering
the withdrawal of all BLOs with ELAS if it became apparent that Aris
Veloukhiotis had acted on the instructions of the EAM Central
Committee in disbanding Psaros’s EKKA guerrillas, a threat which
Cairo ordered on the same day that he must not carry out.56
The immediate circumstances of the departure of the guerrilla dele-
gation from the Neraida airstrip and its arrival in Cairo have been
described by Brigadier Myers and by Colonel Woodhouse elsewhere. In
his book, When Greek meets Greek, Leeper maintains, and in this he is
supported by Sir Llewellyn Woodward, that the guerrilla delegation
was virtually sprung upon him: ‘I had been told a day or two before
that some Greek guerilla representatives were coming by air to discuss
military questions with G.H.Q. Cairo, but I did not know who they
were and I certainly did not expect them to be almost purely polit-
ical’.57 He made the same complaint, that he had no idea that the
delegation would be political rather than military in character, in a
letter to Sargent of 13 August.58
In fact, Leeper was by no means caught so unawares as he suggests.
In a letter to Sargent of 21 July (almost three weeks before their arrival)
he wrote that he had learnt from Glenconner and the Director of

Military Operations that a plane was being sent to Greece to bring out
Myers: ‘the idea is that he would also bring with him in the same aero-
plane Zervas and Evmaios (the well-known Greek Communist Tzimas)
. . . it is absolutely vital that Myers and I should have a talk, and I would
also welcome the arrival of these two Greek guerilla leaders’.59 In the
event, EDES was represented not by Zervas but by his second-in-
command, Komninos Pyromaglou, and indeed it seems that there was
never any intention within Greece that Zervas should accompany
Myers. But nonetheless Leeper, who had frequent occasion to
complain of the politicized nature of the Greeks, should surely have
realized that a guerrilla delegation of this calibre would have been
quite as much concerned with political as military matters. In retro-
spect it was clearly a serious error on Leeper’s part not to have
forewarned the King and the Tsouderos government of the arrival of a
guerrilla mission of considerable significance. Leeper was, given the
circumstances, adequately forewarned of the visit and indeed, shortly
before the arrival of the delegation, as Bickham Sweet-Escott has
recorded, ‘appeared to be delighted at the prospect of meeting them
all’.60
Leeper’s enthusiasm survived his initial shock in discovering that
Myers and Wallace had an entourage of six rather than two Greeks,
and he acknowledged that Myers had clearly made the right decision
in bringing them along. The morning the guerrilla delegation arrived
Wallace spent closeted with Leeper and Warner. Wallace stressed that
there was ‘practically no support that you can trace anywhere for the
immediate return of the King’ and ‘with even greater emphasis’ that ‘if
the King were to return at once in the face of the very strong public
opinion against it, there would certainly be disorders, and these disor-
ders would be exploited by E.A.M., who would greatly increase their
influence by being able to rally non-Communist elements against the
King’.61 As Leeper himself put it, Wallace was just as emphatic on this
point as Myers, and Leeper was clearly persuaded of the critical impor-
tance of the constitutional question, and indeed had shown himself
more aware than the Foreign Office of the need for further clarification
of the constitutional issue even before the arrival of the six Greeks. The
King’s statement of 4 July, inadequate though it subsequently proved
to be, was a direct consequence of Leeper’s urgings on this score.
Moreover, if Leeper needed any further persuading on the constitu-
tional issue, it was provided by a meeting just three days before the
guerrilla delegation arrived with Georgios Exindaris, who had arrived
in Cairo, quite independently of the guerrilla delegation (and quite

fortuitously), as a plenipotentiary of the liberal politicians in Athens.
This was, by an odd coincidence, the first official contact during the
war between the British government and party leaders in Greece.
Exindaris made it abundantly clear that he had a mandate to try to
persuade the King and the Greek government that the King should not
return to Greece before a plebiscite had been held.
This demand, that the King submit to a plebiscite before his return,
was in Leeper’s view not an insuperable obstacle to a settlement, even
if it did conflict with the existing policy of the British government.
Leeper was thus fully prepared for the similar demand made by the six
Greeks. Four of these represented EAM, Andreas Tzimas, Petros
Roussos, Kostas Despotopoulos and Ilias Tsirimokos, of whom the first
three were Communists. Komninos Pyromaglou represented EDES and
Georgios Kartalis EKKA.
In When Greek meets Greek, Leeper claims that the guerrillas over-
reached themselves in demanding three posts in the Tsouderos
government. He is rather ambiguous on this point in his book: ‘Had
these representatives been more moderate, I would have welcomed the
opportunity to establish contact between the Greek Government and
the guerillas and thereby to broaden the basis of the Government’.62 It
is by no means clear in this passage whether he thought that they
should actually form part of a coalition. Yet it is apparent from the
documents that even before he had met the delegation, let alone learnt
of their demand for a coalition, Leeper was keen to try and construct
a representative coalition there and then. After his first meeting with
Wallace, the day the delegation arrived, he decided to propose that
same evening to SOE that ‘we should accept as our goal the attempt to
form here and now an all-embracing coalition Government under the
King’,63 a proposal which Eden appeared to approve.64 In his book,
Leeper blames the EAM representatives for making totally unrealistic
demands about entering the government, but, initially at least,
Leeper’s fear, as expressed in a telegram of 11 August, was that EAM
might not join the coalition: ‘E.A.M.’, he wrote, ‘can hardly afford to
stay out of the coalition, as they need assistance both materially and
morally’.65 In a telegram sent next day, 12 August, Leeper reported
that both the King and Tsouderos were ‘fully prepared to examine all
possibilities arising out of the arrival of the six Greeks’. He concluded
on an optimistic note: ‘I cannot help feeling that the appearance on
the scene here of men who have been actively resisting the enemy at
home cannot but have a refreshing and stimulating effect on the Greek
Government and might in fact modify their present standpoint and

that of the King also’.66
Tsouderos, on 12 August, made it clear to Leeper that he was trying
to steer the King in the direction of a broad coalition to be formed
then if possible on the understanding that the King ‘would agree of his
own accord not to return until the future of the regime had been
settled’. In reporting this conversation to the Foreign Office in a
further telegram despatched on 12 August, Leeper wrote, ‘I fully realise
that events have developed more quickly than we could have antici-
pated. We cannot ignore the facts as they are now, for the first time
fully presented to us, and it is my duty to inform you that the case
against the King’s early return is strong and might well induce the
King to accept it’. He asked for very early guidance as to whether he
should let ‘the King be swayed in his own interest by advice which M.
Tsouderos has given him and will, I think, continue to give him even
more definitely during the next few days’. Leeper was clear in his own
mind that the British government should not advise King George to
resist Tsouderos’s advice. The King would, he believed, ‘gain in esti-
mation of all Greeks here including the new arrivals, and will enhance
his future prospects if he helps to find a solution which shows him to
be actuated purely by national interest. These six men will shortly be
returning to Greece, and we can count on some of them, if not all,
doing the King full justice on their return’. Things now appeared to be
moving altogether too fast for Eden, who minuted, ‘I am very doubt-
ful about this. The King has proved himself our true friend. We must
do the best we can for him.’67
The guidance which Leeper requested was contained in a telegram of
15 August (despatched 16 August). The Foreign Office, while reaffirm-
ing its wish that the Greek government be made as representative as
possible, feared that the incorporation into the government of ‘Left
Wing elements represented by the six Greeks and by Exindaris without
any corresponding representation of the Royalist elements in Greece
would result in Republican Government paying temporary lip service
to the King but resolved that he should not be given an opportunity
to state his case or appeal to his adherents when Greece is liberated’.
They took the view that Tsouderos would scarcely continue long as a
member of such a government, let alone as its Prime Minister. ‘As we
see it’, the telegram continued, ‘a Government formed on the basis
now proposed would be overwhelmingly Republican if not
Communist, and whatever professions its extremist members may
now make, such a government would be more than human if it did
not try to influence the Greek people against the absent King as soon
as it got into Greece, and a plebiscite, if one were ever held, would in
such circumstances be a foregone conclusion. In our view, if the King
now pledges himself not to return to Greece until after a plebiscite he
is in fact signing his abdication. . . . We must be very careful therefore
before we advise the King to take the big risk of placing himself at the
mercy of an E.A.M. Government, on the assumption that they will
play straight by him when established in Greece and allow a free
plebiscite to be held when the time comes’.
A possible alternative to the coalition proposal, as it now stood, was
that Royalist elements should be got out of Greece to form part of a
coalition. In this case the Royalist members, if supported by the
British, might be able to safeguard to a certain extent the King’s inter-
ests while he was out of the country. The Foreign Office accurately
predicted that the guerrilla representatives would press the King ‘to
decide immediately whether or not to pledge himself to remain
outside Greece for an indefinite period when it is liberated’.68 In fact
just such a demand was made a day after Leeper received this telegram.
The six guerrillas, together with Exindaris and Kanellopoulos, declared
on 17 August, as ‘representative of the greatest part of Greek public
opinion’, that the King should not return to Greece before the people
had pronounced on the form of the constitution. On the 19th
Tsouderos and the Greek cabinet issued a statement acknowledging
that the demand of the eight represented the will ‘of the great major-
ity of the Greek people’.69
Leeper’s enthusiasm for a coalition and for a concession by the King
that he would not return to his country before the constitutional ques-
tion had been settled rapidly waned on receipt of the Foreign Office’s
instructions on the 16 August. His policy was to try to play for time,
while King George received replies to his appeals for advice to
Churchill and Roosevelt. These appeals, which referred to the six
Greeks somewhat unfortunately as ‘certain individuals from Greece
who are supposed to represent various guerilla bands’, were
despatched on 18 August.70 One of those who weighed in – urging
uncompromising support for the King – was Lord Selborne, the
Minister responsible for SOE, in a letter to Sargent of 19 August. He was
disturbed by signs that Leeper appeared to be weakening in the face of
the politicians and guerrilla leaders. It was impossible under existing
circumstances to say who the politicians represented, Selborne wrote,
while ‘the leaders of the guerilla bands represent some 50,000 armed
brigands. These gentlemen are heroes of great gallantry, but have no
claim to speak for the whole of the people of Greece on a matter of this
sort’.71
Leeper managed to gain some breathing space at a meeting on 20
August between the Greek government, the Minister of State, the
Commander-in-Chief, Lord Moyne and Leeper, at which the Greek
government were persuaded to defer taking any precipitate action over
the King for at least a fortnight. To try to secure ‘a solution acceptable
to the King in a calm atmosphere’ Leeper also decided to pack the six
guerrillas back to Greece forthwith. Brigadier Myers, not unreasonably,
assumed that in this matter the British embassy in Cairo was merely
passing on instructions from London.72 But the documents make it
quite clear that the decision to get rid of the guerrillas was Leeper’s and
that in this matter he was acting on his own initiative. In a telegram
of 23 August Leeper wrote that, despite the objections of SOE,
For political reasons I asked both the Minister of State and the
Commander-in-Chief that we should send them back now on the
ground of having myself the responsibility for these very delicate
negotiations with the King and Tsouderos and knowing how much
the presence of these six men would influence M. Tsouderos’
colleagues, I was satisfied that it was essential for the Government
to try to find a solution acceptable to the King in a calm atmos-
phere. I maintained that a settlement of the crisis here which if not
found might lead to the disappearance of any Greek Government
was more important to His Majesty’s Government than adverse
effects in Greece anticipated by S.O.E.
The Commander-in-Chief ‘reluctantly’, as Leeper put it, agreed to see

the six Greeks and tell them that ‘in our opinion’ they should return
to Greece.73
The Foreign Office was agreed in condemning Leeper’s handling of
this particular matter. Sargent minuted on 25 August: ‘I am afraid this
is a bad business and that it was an error of judgement on the part of
Mr Leeper to try and send them back to Greece straight away’. D.S.
Laskey made precisely the suggestion that Myers makes in Greek
Entanglement, namely that if they had to be got out of Cairo then
rather than being returned to Greece they should have been sent on a
tour of the battle front.74 But Leeper had one powerful ally. Churchill,
who was under the impression that the decision to send the Greeks
back was ‘the settled policy of all other British authorities’, cabled to
Eden on 30 August: ‘I hold strongly that these six men should be sent
back to Greece. We cannot allow decisions so carefully arrived at to be

flouted. They cannot do so much harm in Greece as they will do in
Cairo to the distracted Greek Government and unhappy King. Strict
control should be kept on S.O.E.’75 The six Greeks received a last-
minute reprieve after a visit to Tsouderos on the way to the airport, a
detour which Leeper immediately suspected had been made at the
suggestion of SOE. It would be going too far to suggest that Leeper
rounded on SOE only after his attempt to dump the six Greeks had so
badly misfired, but this undoubtedly contributed to his determination
to bring SOE to heel, and he certainly held SOE wholly responsible for
what he regarded as a virtually inextricable mess.
In a telegram of 19 August to Sargent, three days before the airport
fiasco, he had already made it clear that he intended to try to exert
much closer Foreign Office control over events in Greece:
This crisis has shown how imperative it is for the Foreign Office
through Stevenson [British ambassador to the Yugoslav govern-
ment-in-exile] and me here to gain far greater control of the
situation in the countries in which we are concerned. I have been
placed in a position of acute embarrassment with the Greek
Government by the arrival of these Greeks on a political mission
about which I had no preliminary warning. Had I been consulted in
advance I would not have agreed without the approval of the King
and Tsouderos. I do not wish to make bad blood and I have covered
up the situation with the Greeks without recrimination but I have
told Glenconner and Minister of State that I can no longer carry on
under existing conditions and I must insist on receiving all SOE’s
information and that the political side of Myers’ work be regarded
as of equal importance with the military. In fact the political aspect
is more important.
I have never, as you know, been happy at the way His Majesty’s
Government have found themselves pursuing one policy inside
Greece and another policy in Cairo. For military reasons we have
accepted the former though I have never been able to satisfy the
King about it.
So long as the two sides we were backing kept apart we could
avoid a collision, but their presence together in Cairo has revealed
to me how embarrassing for His Majesty’s Government this double
policy can become.
In a letter to Dixon of 21 August, Leeper again wrote ‘that it would

be difficult to exaggerate the acutely embarrassing position in which

S.O.E. have placed me, the King and Tsouderos’. He again complained
about the lack of adequate forewarning of the projected visit, a
complaint which the Foreign Office did not regard with much sympa-
thy. On 2 September, for instance, Howard minuted that ‘I confess the
case against S.O.E. for bringing out these six Greeks is a poor one’.76
By an unfortunate coincidence it was only on 22 August, the very
day that the six Greeks were to be shipped back, that Leeper received
from SOE the series of telegrams which Wallace had radioed from
Greece between 23 July and 2 August. This delay was more likely due
to over-strained communications or incompetence than malice and
indeed the first telegram, dated 23 July, was forwarded by Pearson in
London to Dixon in the Foreign Office on 10 August,77 twelve days
before Leeper, in Cairo, received any of the telegrams. But Leeper, not
surprisingly, saw this delay as affording further evidence of SOE
intrigue, and he complained to Eden on 23 August: ‘You will appreci-
ate that, if I had received these telegrams in due time I should have
been much better informed at the opening of the recent negotiations
with the politicians who were brought out of Greece by S.O.E’.78
Yet even had Leeper received the reports before the arrival of the
delegation it is difficult to see that they would have made much differ-
ence to his handling of the crisis, because there was little, if anything,
in them to which Myers could not and did not subscribe. Moreover,
Wallace, in any case, was able to brief Leeper the moment he arrived.
But Leeper was, in retrospect, not happy with these initial meetings
with Wallace. When the latter first arrived in Cairo, he wrote to
Sargent on 25 August, ‘he must have been a little dazed, and certainly
very tired, because he did not disclose to me the picture as he really
saw it in Greece, and I had the impression that he was in full agree-
ment with Myers. He may have felt it was improper for him to go
against his senior officer, and I doubt if he grasped at once, as I
assumed that he did, that on arrival he automatically became a
member of my staff. Had I known the revelations which subsequently
emerged, I would have taken a very much stiffer line in the first two or
three days’.79 Wallace fell ill soon after arrival and it was only when he
recovered that Leeper, as he put it, discovered ‘the real enormities of
S.O.E.’s actions in Greece, conducted with an irresponsibility which
simply appals me’.
But what was the picture as Wallace really saw it? This is difficult to
say, for he seems to have shifted his ground on his arrival in Cairo. In
a significant passage in his letter to Dixon of 21 August, Leeper wrote,
‘. . . I have been able to convince him [Wallace] that Myers’ political

outlook and the policy he has been pursuing are quite mistaken. He
naturally has been anxious, in view of Myers’ many sterling qualities,
not to criticise over much his chief, but David [Wallace] has far too
clear a political head not to realise the folly of allowing a policy to be
run inside Greece independent of the official policy of H.M.
Government’.80 The only inference that can be drawn from this is that
until Wallace had become subject to Leeper’s persuasion he had in fact
been more or less ‘in full agreement’ with Myers. Illness prevented
Wallace compiling a detailed report during August but Leeper was able
on 24 August to cable a brief interim report, the gist of which had been
given to the Director of Military Operations in Leeper’s presence on
23 August.
There were two main points in this interim report. The first was that
the military capability of the guerrilla forces in Greece was not nearly
so great as had been claimed by SOE: ‘they are, in fact, untrained and
ill-disciplined: they are regarded with contempt by most of the British
liaison officers who are highly sceptical about their ability ever to
undertake serious military operations such as holding beaches or
neutralising airfields, which tasks S.[O.E.] cheerfully assured the C-in-
C they will be able to do on the day of invasion. . . . In the recent series
of operations against Greece’s communications which was part of
Sicilian cover plan, it is admitted that the guerillas were 95% cowardly,
unwilling or inefficient, and that the whole job was done by the
British officers themselves’.
The second was that Zervas had been more or less browbeaten into
signing the recent Joint General Headquarters agreement which he
regarded as highly detrimental both to his own interests and those of
the British. Leeper was concerned that this reluctance was never appar-
ently referred either to the Middle East or to the Foreign Office when
they were asked to approve the terms of the agreement.81 Leeper also
claimed that Pyromaglou had confirmed to him the way in which
Myers had made the joint General Headquarters agreement work ‘by
always forcing Zervas to give in to E.A.M’.82 The only conclusive
evidence however as to whether or not Wallace really did come to
agree with Leeper that Myers’s political outlook and policy was quite
mistaken is presumably contained in the considered report which
Wallace submitted to the Foreign Office on his return. This document
however has been retained in the department of origin and is not
available for consultation.83 It was presumably the fact that Brigadier
Myers showed no such readiness as Wallace to be convinced by Leeper
as to what was really going on in Greece that so aroused Leeper’s ire.

Leeper certainly expressed himself extremely forcefully, even
violently, about what he regarded as Myers’s obstinacy. Writing to
Sargent on the 25 August, he said: ‘Myers has been to my mind a
complete disaster. He is a man of most upright and obstinate charac-
ter, which I find very boring as it is quite impossible to penetrate his
skull. My blows seem to ricochet off his skull and disappear some-
where in thin air. He keeps on telling me that he must have hours and
hours of conversation with me in order to convince me. I have avoided
as many of these hours as possible, but even so I am completely
convinced that he is a very dangerous fool, and being a fanatic for his
own ideas, thinking that they provide the only means of winning the
war in Greece, he runs around exposing them to all and sundry, British
as well as Greeks. People of his kind naturally put their foot in it
almost every hour, and his indiscretions, which are always frightfully
well meant, came back and hit me in the face’.84
Leeper’s peremptory and abortive attempt to send the six Greeks
packing wrecked any chances there might have been of bridging the
vast gulf that had opened up between the resistance and the govern-
ment-in-exile, and in any case the uncompromising support given by
Churchill, Roosevelt (then attending the Quadrant Conference in
Quebec) and Smuts to the King gave him no room for manoeuvre. The
Foreign Office and Churchill were in complete agreement in this
policy of total support for the Greek King. Sargent had cabled Eden in
Quebec on 20 August that ‘our policy [is] still to give him all support
we can with a view to replacing him on his throne. . . . Greece is and
always has been a vital British interest and . . . the King is entitled to
look to us for support, in return for the gallant role he played in the
early part of the war’.85
Despite their ready acquiescence in the guerrillas’ demands over the
plebiscite, the members of Tsouderos’s government were incensed by
the guerrillas’ subsequent insistence that they hold three portfolios
within the government – those of the Interior, War, and Justice – actu-
ally on Greek territory.86 Leeper, despite his earlier enthusiasm for a
coalition, was not prepared to give any encouragement to such propos-
als. He was further alarmed to hear from Tsouderos in early September
that the King was considering forming a non-political government on
the Yugoslav model.87 When one of the EAM representatives declared
that they wanted the three portfolios whether or not the King made
the desired declaration on a plebiscite, Leeper characteristically inter-
preted this as a sign of EAM’s inherent weakness. He considered it clear
that the Greek government ‘counted for more in Greece than we had
been led to suppose if all these people were flocking into it as a kind
of Mecca’.88 Moreover he felt vindicated when the Foreign Office,
following Churchill’s 30 August telegram, joined in, calling for the
immediate expulsion of the guerrilla delegation.
Clearly, what most exercised Leeper during the latter phase of the
crisis was not so much the Greek government crisis as the need to
bring SOE to heel, and in this he now of course had a powerful ally in
Churchill. He was also absolutely determined that Myers should not
go back to Greece, a determination which he maintained to the bitter
end. It has been claimed that it was George II who prevented Myers
from returning to Greece by threatening to abdicate, but in fact the
opposition to Myers’s return came in fact very largely from Leeper,
although, according to Leeper, Myers had made a ‘deplorable impres-
sion’ on the King and Tsouderos.89 The Foreign Office certainly did
not share his strong feelings and were content that Myers should
return after his visit to London. As Howard put it in his minute of
6 October, ‘our case against Myers is weak. He was left without guid-
ance most of the time he was in Greece, and he therefore evolved a
policy of his own and carried it out heavily supported by SOE. This in
fact led to our difference of opinion with SOE’.90 It was the
Commander-in-Chief Middle East who, with Foreign Office encour-
agement, decided in October that it would be inappropriate to send
Myers back in view of the outbreak of open civil war in Greece, and in
particular until the circumstances surrounding the death of the New
Zealand BLO Lieutenant Hubbard following an incident involving an
ELAS detachment, had been clarified.91
Leeper, in the aftermath of the visit of the six Greeks, was deter-
mined that SOE’s political activities should be totally subordinated to
the Foreign Office. He told the Minister of State that it was imperative
to get complete control over SOE and, at the same time, he told
Glenconner that he must issue ‘the most stringent instructions to all
his officers that they are to have no political conversations whatever
with any Greeks, and they must leave the whole of this ridiculously
complicated situation to me’. ‘I hope’, he added, ‘that this will at least
be partially obeyed, but I am far from confident that all S.O.E. officers
understand what is and what is not a political conversation’.92
Leeper got quite a lot of what he was after. Certainly, it was the visit
of the six guerrillas that precipitated what Sweet-Escott has called ‘the
annual August re-organization of S.O.E. in the Middle East’.93 Lord
Glenconner was forced to resign, Brigadier Keble (whom Leeper
considered to be ‘completely unscrupulous’94) was removed, Colonel

Guy Tamplin died. Sir Charles Hambro, who resigned as executive
head of SOE in September, was a further indirect casualty of the Cairo
shakeup. General Wilson despatched Brigadier Davey, his Director of
Military Operations, to London to arrange with the Chiefs of Staff that
Force 133, the section of SOE concerned with the Balkans and the Near
East, be brought under military control.95 Doubtless Leeper approved
of this particular mission, although he considered Davey to be
‘entirely in the hands of Keble’.96
Leeper was to some extent mollified by this new arrangement but
his suspicion of SOE remained firmly ingrained. On 7 October 1943,
for instance, he wrote somewhat cryptically to Sargent that ‘S.O.E.
telegrams destroy many little patriotic illusions’.97 In a letter of
13 November 1943 to Sargent he complained that he found himself
‘quite unable to understand the S.O.E. telegrams in their code form.
It is not the vulgarity of the language in which they are couched, as
I have picked up various vulgar expressions in the course of my life;
it is not even the military abbreviations which defeat me; it is mainly
the incomprehensible use of code words, scattered about here and
there in every telegram just to make it more difficult for the
Embassy’.98
I have dwelt at length with the Cairo crisis of August/September
1943 because this was clearly crucial in determining the subsequent
course of British policy and because here the documents do add a great
deal to our knowledge. Leeper was aware of whispers emanating from
some General Headquarters and SOE circles that in his handling of the
crisis he was in ‘an excited mood about S.O.E.’ and it is difficult, in
fact, not to conclude this was in fact the case. But in fairness it should
be pointed out that the British Embassy in Cairo was seriously handi-
capped by illness throughout the August crisis. Leeper, Wallace and
Warner all spent several days confined to bed, the last in hospital,
during August, while the King of Greece was also quite seriously ill
during this period. This is clearly a factor that cannot be left out of
account. Moreover, Leeper was clearly up against a formidable adver-
sary in Brigadier Keble of SOE.
After Cairo, attitudes on both sides hardened, the six Greeks
‘returned to Greece [in mid-September] disgruntled at their treatment
and in a most disappointed frame of mind’.99 The total failure of their
mission and the ignominious treatment to which they had been
subjected, coupled with the evidence they had received of the strong
commitment of the British government to the support of the King, was
certainly a factor contributing to the outbreak of civil war between the

rival resistance groups in October.
In a minute of 7 October 1943 Howard referred to ‘the disastrous
effects of our dual policy in regard to Greece’.100 This dual policy
consisted of the Foreign Office policy of backing the King and govern-
ment and SOE’s of full support for EAM. There seemed to be, he
considered, only two alternatives: either to drop British support of
EAM and concentrate on the King or to drop the King and concentrate
on EAM. Following the outbreak of civil war in early October it was a
modified version of the first alternative which was adopted and
strongly advocated by Leeper, with the somewhat reluctant acquies-
cence of General Wilson, who was anxious to retain the cover that
ELAS provided for British officers engaged in sabotage missions in
Greece. In advocating a break with EAM Leeper enjoyed the support of
Churchill, who minuted on 3 November: ‘E.A.M. and E.L.A.S. should
be starved and struck at by every means in our power. But I fear that
these means are small . . .’.101
Leeper’s zeal to destroy EAM provides further evidence of his
tendency to discount unpalatable evidence or views he disagreed with
when supplied by on the spot observers. For when Woodhouse submit-
ted a lengthy report from Pertouli, dated 19 October, shortly after the
outbreak of civil war, in which he concluded that the Allied Military
Mission would have ‘to recognise the right of E.A.M.–E.L.A.S. to fight
the war in its own way but may be able to achieve a good deal of your
requirement by means of the personal popularity of individual British
liaison officers’, Leeper commented on 4 November that ‘I should
point out that Woodhouse’s report was written in the belief that Myers
would be returning to Greece and that we were committed to an
E.L.A.S. policy, whatever happened. I think we can take it that he
would have expressed himself much more strongly against E.L.A.S. if
he had thought there was any prospect of a change’.102
In mid-November 1943 Eden proposed to the War Cabinet that the
British government adopt a policy of breaking with EAM/ELAS;
General Wilson, again rather reluctantly, acceded to a modified
version of this plan put forward by Leeper. By this plan support of
EAM/ELAS was not to be renewed and, in an effort to wean the moder-
ate rank and file from EAM/ELAS, the King was to declare publicly that
he would not return until invited to do so by a properly constituted
and representative government. At the same time Zervas was to seek
the incorporation of EDES bands into the Greek regular army, and
propaganda was to be employed to induce the ELAS rank and file
similarly to seek incorporation into the Greek regular army. Wilson

was certainly conscious of the disadvantages associated with such a
plan, not least the fact that the lives of 146 British personnel in Greece
would be endangered, of whom 119 were in ELAS-controlled territory.
He added that ‘if British direction and energy were removed and then
Civil War or complete control by EAM/ELAS supervened, [the]
Germans might be able to withdraw a further 3 divisions from
Greece’.103 But despite the pleadings of Churchill and Eden, the King,
backed up by Roosevelt, refused to give the desired assurances and the
whole scheme foundered.
Following the collapse of this plan in November, the next initiative
undertaken by the Foreign Office was to propose to the Greek govern-
ment that they should appeal to Zervas (EDES) and Sarafis (ELAS) to
conclude an armistice and withdraw their bands to clearly specified
areas. To give added strength to this appeal, it was suggested that the
public approval of the British, American and Soviet governments
should be sought. This plan was basically Leeper’s and was outlined by
him in a telegram of 14 December. The proposed plan was
commended by Leeper on the grounds that it justified to the full the
help given to Zervas if ELAS ignored the appeal, while at the same time
it would undermine the authority of the leaders of ELAS if they did
refuse. It brought in the three Allied governments and this, so Leeper
thought, made it practically impossible for ELAS to ignore it. It would
greatly strengthen the Greek government both in Egypt and in Greece,
at the same time enabling the British government to avoid assuming
any direct responsibility for taking sides in Greek internal affairs.
Lastly, it would increase the chances of renewed resistance to the
Germans in Greece. The broad outlines of this plan met with the
approval of the Foreign Office in London.104
Yet within a few days Leeper engaged in a characteristically volatile
switch in policy. With the apparent concurrence of the Commander-
in-Chief Middle East, Leeper advocated a virtually total British
withdrawal from Greece and the complete dissolution of the guerrilla
movement in Greece. This astonishing volte face was prompted by a
meeting with Tsouderos on 17 December at which they discussed
reports of very serious distress among the civilian population in the
guerrilla-held territories, caused by German obstruction of the distrib-
ution of relief supplies. Tsouderos expressed approval for the proposed
appeal to the resistance groups but said that ‘he was very uncertain
about the continuance of the resistance movement at all. . . . He was
inclined to think that unless His Majesty’s Government held strong
views to the contrary, that it might be better to urge the guerrillas to

return to their villages, cultivate the land and await future possibilities
of action’. Before committing himself to such a withdrawal however he
wanted to consult with the Archbishop of Athens and other personali-
ties in Greece. Leeper however showed no such reservations and
wholeheartedly advocated such a policy, telegraphing to the Foreign
Office that ‘the sooner we can make a justifiable withdrawal from
Greece, the better it will be for the Greek people and for our future rela-
tions with them . . . I suggest that we should begin withdrawing B.L.O.s
on a large scale’,105 against which Eden minuted ‘Surely, we cannot do
this The war has to be carried on’. Leeper amplified his views in a
subsequent telegram despatched on the same day, 18 December, after
he had consulted with the Commander-in-Chief Middle East. Both
agreed that the situation was getting out of British control and that the
Greeks must be left ‘to settle their differences in their own way’.
Wilson, according to Leeper, believed that the limited aircraft at his
disposal should go to the Yugoslav Partisans and felt that ‘it would be
preferable to withdraw the majority (of BLOs) for proper military tasks,
leaving a few at key posts for intelligence purposes’. Leeper added that
‘the task of our officers in Greece has been rendered impossible by the
absence of outstanding patriotic leaders. Had they produced anybody
of the calibre of Tito, the results might have been very different’. ‘I
have come to this conclusion’, he continued, ‘with great reluctance but
I feel that I must advise you in this sense as I do not believe that further
Greek resistance under present conditions can help the war effort
against the Germans, while it will certainly inflict uncalled for hard-
ship on a people who, whatever their failures, have a warm affection
for the British’.106 The Foreign Office was not impressed by Leeper’s
arguments. ‘It is difficult’, minuted Laskey on 20 December 1943, ‘to
see how we could do anything which would suit the Germans better
than to secure the break-up of the whole resistance movement’. He also
pointed out how unlikely it was, in any case, that ELAS would heed any
appeal to disband itself voluntarily. Sargent shared Laskey’s doubts,
adding that ‘I cannot understand the attitude of the C-in-C in all this.
For a year past he has maintained that we must at all costs encourage
the Greek guerrillas however politically undesirable they may be,
however little direct contribution they made to the war effort, however
little material support we could give them. We often felt that he over-
stated his case, but here he is going to the other extreme merely
because the Germans have been more or less successful in preventing
supplies from getting into the mountainous districts’.107
Cadogan, similarly disconcerted by the sudden volte face, concurred

in Sargent’s suggestion that Leeper should pursue his original sugges-
tion of an appeal by the Greek government for an armistice. On 22
December Eden told Leeper that ‘we do not take the view that if we
cannot bring the civil war to an end, the bands should then go home.
On the contrary we want resistance to the enemy to continue. . . .’101 It
was at this juncture that Sweet-Escott approached General Wilson to
obtain a message to be broadcast to the Greek guerrillas urging an end
to the civil war. ‘The Greek peasant is a farmer’, Wilson told him, ‘and
his proper place at this stage of the war is on his farm, not in the
mountains’.109
In the event, Tsouderos broadcast his two appeals for a cease-fire in
late December, and the British, American and Soviet governments
issued public statements in support of his appeal for unity, in the case
of the Soviet government grudgingly, although this reluctance seems
to have been caused as much by an almost total ignorance of the situ-
ation in Greece as by wilful obstruction. Following Tsouderos’s appeal,
a cease fire was eventually agreed to by ELAS and laborious negotia-
tions began for the settlement of the protracted civil war. While these
negotiations were being carried out, however, Wilson and the Chiefs
of Staff were pushing hard for a policy of all-out support for ELAS. On
5 February, the very day that the ELAS cease-fire came into effect,
Wilson, reversing totally his position of mid-December when he had
backed Leeper in the latter’s advocacy of a policy of an almost
complete withdrawal from Greece, cabled the Chiefs of Staff that he
considered that the time had now come when political considerations
should give way to the necessity of achieving British objectives in
retaining German divisions in the Balkans. To do this it would be
necessary to give every help to the ELAS party in Greece, ‘which is the
only party in Greece which can give us effective aid in killing
Germans’. To obtain the best results, he urged that the Foreign Office
should reconsider ‘their ban on the return of Myers whose hold over
ELAS leaders produced such good co-operation last year’. The Chiefs of
Staff supported Wilson’s suggestion and proposed that the British
government resume full support ‘for the E.A.M. faction as being the
most effective resistance movement in Greece’. Eden, in a minute of
10 February, argued strongly against the proposals of Wilson and the
Chiefs of Staff. He accepted that if there were evidence that ELAS
would be prepared to make an all-out attack on the Germans, then
there might be serious grounds for considering whether or not the
British government should engage in a complete volte face and give all
out support to EAM/ELAS regardless of the political consequences. He

could see no grounds for such an expectation, however, and consid-
ered EAM/ELAS ‘a thoroughly unscrupulous gang of communist
fanatics, out solely for their own ends’.112 He did not advocate a break
with EAM but rather that existing efforts to secure a military and polit-
ical agreement should be pursued. Churchill fully supported Eden’s
view and minuted on 14 February that ‘we have not yet had any satis-
faction from ELAS for the murder of one of our officers [a reference to
the killing of Lieutenant Arthur Hubbard the previous November].
They are more hated in the countryside than the Germans. Obviously
giving them weapons will not increase their effort against the Germans
but only secure the domination of these base and treacherous people
after the war’.113
In a further minute to the Chiefs of Staff Committee on 24 February
Churchill wrote: ‘We must do our best to promote reconciliation
between Zervas and the E.A.M.–E.L.A.S. bands. This will almost
certainly prove impossible. We should suggest a British Commander-
in-Chief if no other agreement can be reached. To effect this we should
not hesitate to threaten and of course if necessary to use the weapon
of denunciation of E.A.M.–E.L.A.S. for what it is worth. If in spite of all
we can do the negotiations break down, then we give no more support
of any kind to E.A.M.–E.L.A.S. but all possible support to Zervas. No
great results are anyhow to be expected from the Greek guerrillas at the
present time. The return of General Myers cannot be allowed. . . . There
is no comparison between them [EAM/ELAS] and the bands of Marshal
Tito. They are a mere scourge on the population, and are feared by the
Greek villagers even more than the Germans’.114
At the end of February Colonel Woodhouse, after employing such a
threat of denunciation, was able to secure agreement for a permanent
armistice following the Merokovo conference. The agreement was
signed at Plaka on 29 February, an achievement which Laskey consid-
ered was ‘almost entirely due to Colonel Woodhouse’s tact and skill in
handling the guerrilla delegates’.115
In retrospect it may appear that the conflict between short-term mili-
tary gain and long-term political advantage was fundamentally an
irresoluble one. Whatever direction British policy had taken towards
the resistance, the ultimate outcome – the events of December 1944 – it
may be argued, would have been inevitable. Nonetheless the overall
impression left from a study of the documents is that SOE was generally
more aware of political realities and the balance of power within Greece
than was the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office’s stubborn rearguard
action in defence of the King, with scant regard for the wider interests
of the Greek people, critically impeded its scope for manoeuvre. It is
only fair to re-emphasize though that the Foreign Office could not
really be regarded as a free agent in this matter, given both the obdur-
acy of King George and the uninhibited support of Churchill for the
cause of the monarchy in Greece.116 Eventually, of course, under the
pressure of events, the Foreign Office was forced to face up to the reali-
ties of the situation in Greece and conceded what Brigadier Myers had
been urging from an early stage of the Harling mission, namely that the
King should not return before a plebiscite had been held on the consti-
tutional issue. Had such a concession been wrung out of the King in the
spring of 1943 it might not have significantly hindered the wide
control of the resistance in Greece which EAM/ELAS was able to build
up, although it might have delayed that process. But, to put it at its
lowest, an early and ungrudging adoption of this policy would have
placed Britain in a stronger moral position when, in December 1944,
she found herself engaged in bitter conflict with her former allies,
EAM/ELAS. The British government might then have escaped some of
the obloquy heaped on it both in this country and in the United States,
and the true direction of EAM/ELAS’s policies might have been brought
home to public opinion rather earlier than it was.
6
Distant Cousins: SOE and OSS at
Odds over Greece
I believe that a vast number of the American people have

wholly wrong ideas about the British, i.e. they believe . . . that
the people of the United Kingdom are old-fashioned, class
conscious, supercilious, patronising and imperialistic and
look down their noses at honest-to-God Americans. I do not
believe in the sentimental approach – common blood, culture,
language, ‘only the Atlantic divides us’, etc. The British and
Americans are different people and we do not basically under-
stand one another
Richard Casey, Minister of State in the Middle East,
to Winston Churchill, 29 December 19431
It used to be said at the time that liaison with Americans was

like having an affair with an elephant: it is extremely difficult,
you are apt to get badly trampled on, and you get no results
for eight years.
Bickham Sweet-Escott (SOE)2
After seeing some of the Greek machinations of the Fuehrer of

Whitehall I wonder whether it is possible to be too anti-
British.
Jay Seeley (OSS) to Louis Frechtling (OSS), 14 January 19453
Any detailed comparative analysis of the activities in Greece of the

British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and of its American coun-
terpart, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), during the Second World
War would be a formidable undertaking.4 For the manifold activities
of both organizations engendered massive archives. In the case of OSS
108
Distant Cousins: SOE and OSS in Greece 109
this has for some years progressively been made open to researchers in
the National Archives and Records Service in Washington, while the
records of SOE are in the process of being released to the Public Record
Office in London.5 The OSS archive is indeed a treasure trove, albeit
one that it is not easy to find one’s way around, for the organization’s
appetite for information was, fortunately, insatiable. It was voracious
enough, indeed, to embrace the acquisition of restaurant menus from
Thessaloniki in early 1944, which demonstrate that food was available
in abundance to anyone in a position to pay the astronomical prices,
and of copies of Aetopoula, the magazine for children published by
EAM, the National Liberation Front. Although very rich in terms of
content, the OSS papers are not well ordered. The records of SOE, by
contrast, are better organized and indexed, although not as catholic in
terms of content. The very bulk (by the early 1990s some 4000 cubic
feet of OSS records had been opened to researchers) of the OSS mater-
ial presents problems to the would-be researcher. One scholar, Robert
Brewer, has written with feeling that ‘the mass and weight of the OSS
documentation can overwhelm anyone contemplating a frontal
assault on its secrets’.6 Another, Robin Winks, whose Cloak and Gown:
Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 is a compelling study of the inter-
face between the intrigue-prone worlds of the academy and
intelligence, wrote in the mid-1980s of the OSS archive as a ‘veritable
mudslide that moves forward steadily each year’ and of ‘a controlled
avalanche of materials’.7
This chapter does not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the
respective roles in occupied Greece of these sister organizations. Rather
it focuses on the mutual perceptions, and misperceptions, of each
other’s policies on the part of the ‘cousins’ and, in particular, on OSS’s
ideas of what the British in general, and SOE in particular, were up to
in Greece during the period of the occupation. Both organizations
ranked Greece fairly high in their order of priorities, particularly so
SOE, given Britain’s longer-term strategic interests in the Eastern
Mediterranean.8 While a considerable amount has been published
about SOE’s activities in Greece, not least in the form of memoirs by
SOE operatives, relatively little has been written about the role of OSS.9
Although it would be a somewhat crude generalization – to which,
inevitably, there were some notable exceptions – it would nonetheless
broadly be true to argue that OSS as a whole was thoroughly disap-
proving of British policy in Greece. At times there were good grounds
for such disapproval. Sometimes, however, OSS’s misapprehensions as
to the mainsprings of British policy were breathtakingly wide of the
mark. This critical attitude towards Britain’s Greek entanglement on

the part of OSS was, of course, shared in large part by the US State
Department, although OSS, for obvious reasons, was generally better
informed than the State Department as to what was actually happen-
ing on the ground in occupied Greece, just as SOE’s understanding of
Greek political realities was in general more acute than that of the
Foreign Office. The point has, of course, more than once been made
that the somewhat sanctimonious American criticisms that were made
of Britain’s ‘imperialistic’ policies and, in particular, of her heavy
involvement in Greece’s internal affairs, were to be followed in
remarkably short order by a dramatic somersault in American attitudes
and policies.10 This 180-degree turn was to result in a degree of
American entanglement in Greece’s domestic politics that had scarcely
been matched even when British influence was at its apogee.
SOE came into existence in July 1940, in the dark days following
the fall of Dunkirk, with the merging of a number of small
antecedent organizations such as Section D (for ‘Destruction’) of the
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and MI(R), the unconventional
warfare branch of the War Office, which had been engaged in the
planning or implementation of subversive activities which the British
government preferred not openly to avow. The newly founded SOE
was charged, in Churchill’s now almost hackneyed phrase, with
‘setting Europe ablaze’. It was not long before the planning section,
SO(3), having generated vast quantities of paper, planned itself out
of existence, as Bickham Sweet-Escott, a senior SOE operative, has
felicitously put it.11 SO(1), which had been charged with the work of
propaganda, was soon hived off to form the Political Warfare
Executive (PWE). This left SO(2) (which became known simply as
SOE) as the body, under the overall authority (and cover) of the
Ministry of Economic Warfare, charged with giving support to,
fomenting, co-ordinating and supplying anti-Axis resistance activity
in occupied Europe and world-wide.
In parenthesis, it should be noted that the first head of SO(1) was
Reginald Leeper, who from 1943 until 1946 was ambassador to the
Greek government, initially during its exile in Cairo and subsequently
in Athens following the liberation. Indeed, the organization was
referred to by its detractors as ‘Leeper’s sleepers’.12 The slights, real or
imagined, suffered by SO(1) at that time at the hands of SO(2) appear
to have constituted one of the factors that shaped Leeper’s marked
antipathy towards SOE, an antipathy that was to have serious conse-
quences at the time of ‘the great war against SOE’13 that erupted in
Cairo in the wake of the abortive mission of the six representatives of

the Greek resistance to the Middle East in August/September 1943.14
If Britain had been little prepared for the exigencies of clandestine
warfare on the outbreak of the Second World War, then the United
States had been still less so. On the grounds famously – but, alas,
perhaps also apocryphally – expressed by Secretary of State Henry L.
Stimson that ‘gentlemen do not read each others’ mail’, the US had
manifested a pious disregard even for the need for clandestine intelli-
gence services, let alone organizations whose function would be
irregular warfare, subversion, sabotage and general mayhem. Once the
United States had entered the war, however, it was not long before
OSS, under the formidable direction of General William ‘Wild Bill’
Donovan, came into being, charged with carrying out much the same
kind of activities as the British SOE, SIS and PWE combined. Given
that the Americans were starting more or less from scratch, it was not
surprising that there was a certain British input into the newly-
founded OSS, although the extent of this influence should not be
exaggerated.15 It was characteristic that when Colonel Donovan
visited Athens under British auspices in January 1941, not only did he
stay at the British rather than the American Legation but that the US
minister to Greece, Lincoln MacVeagh, should only have learnt of his
mission from his British counterpart, Sir Michael Palairet.16
Both SOE and OSS were temporary wartime creations and both were
wound up at the war’s end (although the OSS was, of course, the
direct, if not the immediate, precursor of the Central Intelligence
Agency). Both attracted in full measure the hostility of the established
military, diplomatic and, in the British case, intelligence organiza-
tions. By and large, these already existing and long-established bodies
felt that SOE and OSS were overstaffed with bungling amateurs, ever
ready to intrude into preserves that properly belonged to the profes-
sionals. Both organizations, with their pressing need for linguistic and
what would now be termed area study expertise, recruited widely
among academics.17 In the case of their Greek activities there was,
inevitably, a substantial leavening of classical scholars, archaeologists
and art historians in both organizations. In connection with SOE, the
names of C.M. Woodhouse, N.G.L. Hammond, Antony Andrewes,
Peter Fraser, J.M. Cook, Stanley Casson, Tom Dunbabin, Eric Gray,
David Talbot Rice, David Wallace, T.Bruce Mitford and J.D.S.
Pendlebury,18 among others, spring to mind.19
Their counterparts in OSS or its antecedent organization, the Office
of the Coordinator of Information, included Rodney Young (who had
been wounded while driving an ambulance during the 1940 Albanian

campaign), J.L. Caskey, Jerome Sperling, John F. Daniel, J.F. Oliver,
Moses Hadas, Charles F. Edson, Virginia Grace, Alison Frantz, Carl
Blegen, Sterling Dow, Oscar Broneer, T. Leslie Shear and Benjamin
Merritt. Young, who was responsible for the S(ecret) I(ntelligence)
activities of OSS in Greece, arrived in Cairo in the spring of 1943 with
no fewer than four peace-time archaeologists on his staff, Sperling,
Caskey, Daniel and Oliver.20 Virginia Grace regarded J.L. Caskey as
having an ‘exceptional flair’ for military intelligence even if ‘his
appearance sometimes gives rise to an erroneous initial impression
that he can be pushed about’. Ms Grace’s work in turn came in for high
praise. A great improvement in the organization of the Izmir office of
OSS followed her arrival as Caskey’s assistant, although ‘it seemed
unfortunate that, with her command of the language and her know-
ledge of the country, so much of her time had to be spent in
accounting, typing and code work’.21 Unlike their British counter-
parts, very few of these American academics were given operational
responsibilities actually on Greek territory. They formed a recognizable
cohort within OSS and were referred to, not always with an entirely
flattering intent, as the ‘archaeological captains’. They were accused by
some of their colleagues in military intelligence of acting like prima
donnas.22 Not a few of these American archaeologists and classicists
demonstrated, as we shall see, a discernible Anglophobe streak. Is it
too fanciful to think that such attitudes may, in part at least, have had
their origins in arcane pre-war archaeological disputes?
Many of the ‘archaeological captains’, whether British or American,
had necessarily been closely associated in peace time with the British
School [of Archaeology] at Athens or with the American School of
Classical Studies; the two schools sharing the same campus [and tennis
court] in Athens, even if their relations with each other have in other
respects not been as close as might have been expected. This wartime
reliance by SOE and OSS, and indeed other intelligence organizations,
on the alumni of the two schools might, prima facie, be held to lend
some credence to the view more than once expressed by Melina
Mercouri, the actress who subsequently became Minister of Culture in
Andreas Papandreou’s first PASOK administration, in the run up to the
1981 Greek election that the foreign archaeological schools in Greece,
and more particularly the British and American Schools, were, and
indeed are, training grounds for spies.
It is, of course, an indisputable fact that a disproportionate number
of those who have passed through the portals of both institutions have
ended up engaged in various aspects of intelligence work during both

world wars (in the case of their British alumni) and during the second
(in the case of their American counterparts). Indeed, Anthony Cave
Brown records a saying current within OSS to the effect that during the
occupation Oxford called the tune in northern, and Cambridge in
southern Greece.23 During the First World War the euphemistically
named Passport Control Office had actually been housed on the
premises of the British School, while French intelligence made use of
the French Archaeological School. After the building housing the latter
had been deemed to be extra-territorial, a wireless transmitter, an
‘elaborate’ photographic studio and a chemical laboratory were
installed.24 Moreover, on the outbreak of the Second World War, the
German community in Greece (some 2000 strong in the area of the
capital and numbering some 5000 in the country as a whole) was
organized along Nazi lines by Landesgruppenleiter Dr Walter Wrede of
the German Archaeological Institute.25 The director of the British
School at the outbreak of the Second World War was seemingly
opposed to using the School either for archaeological purposes or as a
cover for any other activities on the grounds that to do so might
compromise the School’s position at the end of the war. Edward
Warner, of the Southern Department of the Foreign Office, thought
that it would be exceedingly short-sighted to close down the School,
particularly as the German Archaeological Institute had remained
open.26 It is also recorded that, following the Italian attack on Greece,
the Vichy French military attaché in Athens agreed to transmit the
wireless messages of his German counterpart – reporting Greek opera-
tional movements – from the premises of the French Archaeological
School. Transmitted to the Japanese Consulate-General in Alexandria,
they were then passed to the Italian General Staff. Once it was realized
what was afoot, the archaeological schools in Athens were apparently
closed down.27
The reason why the various paramilitary and intelligence agencies
that concerned themselves with Greek affairs during the Second World
War recruited to the degree they did among the alumni of the various
foreign archaeological schools is, of course, obvious and not at all
sinister. Until well after the war a knowledge of modern Greece and of
its people, language and topography in Britain, for instance, was very
restricted and, indeed, was a virtual monopoly of classicists and
archaeologists, together with a handful of locally based businessmen.
It stands to reason, therefore, that in both world wars the particular,
valuable, and rare expertise of those who had spent time at the British
and American Schools should have been called upon not only by the
military but also by the intelligence authorities and, in particular, by
SOE.28 It is worth noting, in passing, that among the alumni of the
British School were not only a number of future intelligence and SOE
operatives, but also Marion Pascoe, the future wife of General
Stephanos Sarafis. Sarafis, who himself became a communist party
member, was to emerge as commander of ELAS (National People’s
Liberation Army), the military arm of the communist-controlled EAM
(National Liberation Front), which was much the largest resistance
organization in occupied Greece.29
The United States, of course, in recruiting operatives for its activities
in Greece could, and did, draw on the resources of a very sizeable
Greek immigrant community. It is noteworthy, however, that whereas
many Greek–Americans were employed by OSS in connection with its
Greek activities, with some notable exceptions most of those involved
in Greek affairs at a senior level were not of Greek extraction. No doubt
one reason for this, apart from the general prejudice of the time
against what were dubbed ‘hyphenated-Americans’, was the not
untenable view that many, perhaps most, Greek–Americans were parti
pris in terms of Greek domestic politics. As G.F. Else wrote in a report
of January 1945 on OSS’s activities in Greece: ‘most of our Greek
agents had certain political leanings one way or another: an intelligent
Greek who does not have them hardly exists’.30 It appears that there
may have been some agreement between SOE and OSS to the effect
that no Greek–American above the rank of captain would be deployed
in Greece, presumably for fear that he might have strong preconceived
opinions on matters of Greek domestic politics.31
In the experience of SOE operatives on the ground in Greece,
however, Greek–Americans had by no means all taken sides in local
political conficts. Arthur Kellas, for instance, recalled that he had
feared that an OSS Operational Group (OG) (broadly the equivalent on
the British side of a unit of the Raiding Support Regiment which was
active in Greece in the summer and autumn of 1944), commanded by
‘two stout-hearted Californian lieutenants’ and consisting of ten
Greek–Americans, would be sure to engage ‘in the very Greek politics
which were the cause of our frustration, taking sides between EAM and
their adversaries’. ‘But we need not have worried; for Bambalis,
Stavridis, Daskalopoulos, Papadopoulos, Papanastasiou and the rest of
that happy gang of Yanks, all first-generation Americans from
Chicago, were wholly American and totally indifferent to the political
polemics of their fathers’ homeland’. They spoke very little Greek and
were even less sympathetic to ‘the native Greeks’ than his own ‘lance-
corporals of Royal Signals’.32 Nicholas Hammond likewise noted of an
American Operational Group, made up of Americans of Greek extrac-
tion, that ‘they had a profound contempt for the Greek guerrilla, an
attitude not uncommon in the expatriate Greek towards the homebred
Greek’.33 Another BLO, Major John Ponder, wrote of OSS operatives
whose ‘contemptuous pretension of superiority brought them little
honour in the fatherland which only reluctantly they claimed as their
own’.34 This was not, however, the view of Major John Mulgan, a BLO
in the Pelion area. The OG with which he came into contact consisted,
with two exceptions, of Greek–Americans who in many cases were
‘more Greek than American’: ‘we would have preferred purely
American troops who would have provided a greater contrast to the
Andartes’.35 Likewise, an American, Sgt Alfred Borgman, argued that to
send troops (or at least enlisted men) into their homeland was a
mistake, as they had a tendency to ‘go native and forget they are
American soldiers and are there for the purpose of fighting Germans
and not to listen to politically minded people’.36 The question of a
physical OSS presence in Greece was discussed at a meeting of the
SOE/OSS Committee in Cairo on 15 August 1943 at which Brig. ‘Eddie’
Myers, who had recently flown out of Greece for consultations with
the British authorities in the Middle East, was present. Major Louis
Huot of OSS, seemingly aware of British sensibilities on the score of the
deployment of Greek–Americans, reported that those of ‘recent’ Greek
extraction would not be included in the OSS ‘demolition squads’
currently undergoing training in the US.37 In a list of OSS personnel
present in Greece at the end of November 1944 approximately half the
mission can be identified as Greek–Americans.38
OSS’s deployment of Greek–Americans was one of the issues in a
furious row that erupted over OSS’s Greek activities in the summer of
1944, in which Winston Churchill himself became involved. In the
summer of 1944, a widely syndicated newspaper article by Drew
Pearson, the influential American political commentator, that was
highly critical of British handling of Greek affairs, had incensed the
prime minister. Pearson accused the British censorship of preventing
the real word as to what was happening in Greece from getting out. It
was, he contended, widely suspected that Churchill was ‘thumbing his
nose at the Atlantic Charter’ by intending to hold on to the
Dodecanese and Crete after the war for use as British bases. According
to ‘uncensored diplomatic reports’, 60 per cent of the Greek naval and
25 per cent of the Greek army forces in the Middle East were prisoners
of the British, a ‘tragic situation’ that had resulted from the British
starting to train the Greek armed forces ‘to fight against their fellow
Greeks in Greece’.39
Believing OSS to have been behind the Drew Pearson article,
Churchill fired off an angry message to General Walter Bedell Smith,
Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, to be passed on to Donovan. In this he
warned of ‘very formidable trouble brewing in the Middle East against
O.S.S. which is doing everything in its power to throw our policy
towards Greece for which we have been accorded the main responsibil-
ity into confusion’. Drew Pearson’s article, he added, was ‘a specimen
of the kind of stuff that fits in with the campaign of O.S.S. against the
British’. This would have ‘the effect of breeding a local quarrel between
them and the British’. He asked for Donovan’s help in the matter to
avoid having to raise the issue ‘as between governments’, which would
give rise to a lot of unwelcome public discussion.40 Churchill also
drafted a telegram to Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s special
advisor on foreign affairs, in which he asked whether nothing could be
done to correct ‘the crude assertions that British support of the King of
Greece is due to the fact that he has promised to deliver Crete and the
Dodecanese to British imperialism’. Churchill insisted that ‘we take
nothing, no territory, nor airfields nor naval bases’, adding that he had
been told that Pearson’s allegations were part of an OSS campaign
against the British in Egypt.41 Beaverbrook counselled against sending
the telegram, telling Churchill that Pearson was ‘irresponsible, corrupt
and paid 200,000 dollars a year for telling lies about Britain. He thrives
on denials and longs to be contradicted by the Prime Minister and
President’.42
The Drew Pearson article prompted the British Embassy to the Greek
government-in-exile in Cairo to weigh in with its manifold complaints
against OSS, which it also believed to have been the inspiration behind
the offending article, the publication of which, in its view, had been
deliberately timed to create the maximum trouble. Edward Warner of
the Embassy enumerated a whole litany of complaints against OSS,
which appear to have been passed up to Churchill. Once again the
complaint was made that OSS employed Greek–Americans who were
hostile to the British, as well as ‘discarded [Greek] SOE agents’.43 Not
only was the ‘extremely co-operative’ Major Wines, Woodhouse’s
deputy, not to be permitted to return to Greece, but Donovan had
reportedly declared that he would not allow him to be used ‘as a tool
of British Imperialism’. The S[ecret] I[ntelligence] Branch of OSS had
recently despatched small quantities of arms to ELAS in Eubœa and
Pelion without notifying the British authorities and contrary to

‘declared policy’. Furthermore, OSS had recently established a wireless
link with the Political Committee of National Liberation [PEEA], the
EAM inspired quasi-government in the mountains of Free Greece. This
had enabled Sophocles Venizelos, the son of the great Liberal states-
man, Eleftherios Venizelos, to communicate with PEEA behind the
back of his arch-rival George Papandreou, the prime minister of the
Greek government-in-exile in Cairo. The SI branch of OSS was giving
wide circulation to a mass of ‘intelligence’ which was in effect little
more than EAM propaganda. The Embassy suspected that the two
‘most troublesome’ Greek–American war correspondents [one of them
presumably being Constantine Poulos of the Overseas New Agency]
were on the pay-roll of OSS.44 OSS SI were planning to enter Greece at
the earliest possible moment: ‘they are out of hand and nothing but
direct action by the President would seem likely to put an end to the
trouble. They are in a position to provoke an Anglo-American quarrel
over Greece and possibly to frustrate the policy of H[is] M[ajesty’s]
G[overnment]’.45
Warner’s superior, Rex Leeper, the British ambassador to the Greek
government-in-exile, thought that Warner had gone ‘rather far’ in
describing OSS as ‘out of hand’ but otherwise was in broad agreement
with him. Significantly, Leeper held ‘O.S.S. agents working largely
through politically minded American Greek agents’ to be responsible
for the local [i.e. in Egypt] American criticism of British policy towards
Greece of which he had been aware for some months. This had not
originated with the American Embassy to the Greek government-in-
exile which had behaved correctly throughout. He was in no doubt
that Sophocles Venizelos, who had never forgiven Britain’s preference
for Papandreou as the successor to Emmanouil Tsouderos as prime
minister of the government-in-exile, was using OSS to maintain direct
contact with Greece behind Britain’s back. Likewise, he was convinced
that OSS was actively assisting Venizelos in his attempts to put
together an EAM–Venizelist coalition to replace the present govern-
ment of national unity that Leeper had laboriously striven to construct
in the Middle East. The sting in Leeper’s letter to Sir Orme Sargent, the
Deputy Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, came towards
the end when the ambassador, an inveterate enemy of SOE, said that
OSS have really only been carrying on in the way that SOE would have
done had they not been subject to political and military control: ‘it is
the S[ecret] I[intelligence] and not the S[pecial] O[perations] part of
O.S.S. who are making the mischief, the S[pecial] O[perations] part
being reasonably under our control’. ‘Their misdeeds’, he concluded,

‘may be due more to a crusading enthusiasm than to a considered anti-
British policy but at times it would be difficult to distinguish between
the two’.46
Churchill’s belief that OSS had inspired the Drew Pearson article was
looked upon with scepticism by an official of British Security
Coordination [the joint cover for SIS/SOE in North America]. He was
also inclined to dismiss British criticisms of OSS for its reliance on
Greek–Americans. ‘The complaint’, Halpern wrote, ‘that O.S.S.
employs Greek–Americans and are hostile to us is easily disposed of as
obviously the only people that O.S.S. can employ in Greece are
Greek–Americans; all Greek–Americans, or at least an overwhelming
majority of Greek–Americans, are against what they think is British
policy in Greece and we cannot expect much sympathy from them’. He
added, altogether too optimistically, that he followed OSS’ activities
very closely and that ‘in Greek affairs I have never seen any trace of
anti-British [undecipherable group: ?bias/animus].’ An uncompre-
hending G.L. Clutton of the Foreign Office minuted: ‘I don’t quite see
why O.S.S. can only employ Greek Americans in Greece. S.O.E. don’t
make Greek origin a qualification for their men in Greece.’47
Not only did SOE not have any significant community of Greek
descent on which to draw for its recruits, but it is clear that its opera-
tives in Greece were drawn from a much narrower social range than
their counterparts in OSS. Bickham Sweet-Escott has written of the
canard that not only was much of SOE’s recruiting conducted in
White’s Club in St James’s but that a disproportionate number of its
senior echelons were drawn from the partners of the establishment law
firm, Slaughter and May, prompting the inevitable jibe that SOE was
all May and no Slaughter.48 Elsewhere I have written that ‘the great
majority of SOE’s operatives in the field, as in SOE Cairo and London,
shared the common assumption that communism was a “bad thing”,
and that the establishment of a communist regime in postwar Greece
would be seriously damaging to British interests. This assumption, as
much implicit as explicit, explains to some extent how it was that
British agents, many of them scarcely graduated from university [and,
I might have added, in some cases only recently having left school],49
could be sent on highly sensitive political missions into remote areas
of the Balkans where they were often out of contact with their head-
quarters in Cairo for weeks or, in some cases, months at a time and yet
nonetheless retain a more or less instinctive appreciation of the line
that their superiors would expect them to follow’.50
The somewhat hermetic world of SOE in the Balkans was well appre-
ciated by a shrewd OSS operative with the Yugoslav partisans, Franklin
Lindsay. Lindsay noted of the entourage of Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean,
the head of the British military mission to Tito, that ‘these British offi-
cers who were drawn to irregular operations seemed not only to have
been together in early wartime operations but also to have had many
close school and family ties’. By contrast, Lindsay himself in three
years service with OSS had met only one person that he had known
before the war. If the old school – not to mention university and regi-
mental – tie network undoubtedly made for cohesion and esprit de
corps, its consequences were by no means always positive from SOE’s
perspective. James Klugman, a declared communist while at
Cambridge University before the war, was apparently recruited into
SOE through the usual informal channels. In 1942, while serving in
Cairo in the Pioneer Corps, he was recognized in the street by Lt-Col
Terence Airey, the head of the Directorate of Special Operations at
SOE’s Cairo Headquarters. Airey had been in the year behind Klugman
at Gresham’s School, Holt, and, recalling his academic prowess as a
schoolboy, had arranged for him to be transferred to SOE’s Cairo HQ.
Klugman specialized in Yugoslav matters and has been widely credited
with being at least in part responsible for the decisive shift in British
support from Mihailović to Tito in 1943, although his influence on the
decision has probably been overrated.51
Both SOE and OSS, besides recruiting large numbers of academics,
also attracted more than their fair share of cranks or worse.
Scatterbrained schemes were common to both organizations. The
notorious Guy Burgess’s extraordinary notion of setting the Hungarian
puszta on fire through the use of incendiary balloons, thus destroying
Hitler’s bread basket,52 was more than matched by a scheme that caught
the fancy of President Roosevelt himself. For Roosevelt shared with
Churchill a boy scoutish enthusiasm for special operations. This partic-
ular hare began to run when a private citizen from Pennsylvania wrote
out of the blue to the president, shortly after Pearl Harbour, to say that
the surest way of bringing the war in the Far East to a rapid end was to
exploit an alleged mortal fear of bats that existed among the Japanese.
Roosevelt was much taken by this idea which he passed on to ‘Wild Bill’
Donovan as the obvious person to take action. An enthusiastic
Donovan then investigated the possibility of breeding vast quantities of
bats with which to bombard the Japanese. The project came to grief
when test flights revealed that bats were unable to withstand the rigours
of high altitude flight and that they expired in droves.53
The two organizations demonstrated a similar capacity to attract

obloquy from all sides. In Britain, for instance, SOE has come under
fire from both right and left. In the early 1970s, Hugh Fraser, on the
right, characteristically remarked that SOE ‘at the best of times . . . was
a bad organisation frequently lacking a strong or political or even
honourable direction. SOE was particularly inane in the Balkans, posi-
tively assisting the adventurer Enver Hodja to seize impregnable
Albania for communism and, had it not been for Churchill and
Macmillan’s personal intervention, permitting a communist takeover
in Greece’.54 At much the same time, from a perspective on the left,
Basil Davidson attacked the ‘nabobs of SOE London’, most of them
bankers or businessmen, as being primarily concerned to ensure the
restoration of the pre-war status quo ante bellum.55 Either viewpoint
might conceivably have merit but scarcely both. OSS came in for
similar criticism: Drew Pearson wrote dismissively that it had recruited
‘one of the fanciest groups of dilettante diplomats, Wall Street bankers,
and amateur detectives ever seen in Washington’.56 Pearson routinely
referred to OSS as ‘Oh So Social’ or ‘Oh So Secret’. One SOE insider,
Hugh Seton-Watson, whose prodigious knowledge of Balkan affairs
was put to good use at SOE’s Cairo Headquarters, once suggested that
SOE should adopt as its insignia ‘Rackets and Balls’.57 According to Col
D.T. Hudson, the first SOE operative to be infiltrated into Yugoslavia,
Churchill himself had a low view of the organization. When Hudson
lunched with the prime minister in May 1944 on being evacuated
from Yugoslavia, he had listed his numerous grievances against the
organization, to which Churchill had apparently answered that he
knew SOE to be a nest of intrigues and that it had both cooked the
books and destroyed records.58
The activities of both organizations in the Near East, which particu-
larly concern us here, came in for especial criticism. Both
organizations managed to arouse in full measure the wrath of their
respective military authorities. The headquarters of both organizations
in Cairo appear to have been particularly prone to the afflictions
which Bickham Sweet-Escott associated with the rising of the Nile,
namely a chronic tendency to feuding and factionalism, a condition
by no means unknown in the academy, a constituency from which, as
we have seen, both SOE and OSS drew heavily for their wartime
recruits. There were even dark suggestions, for instance, that Colonel
John Toulmin, the head of OSS in the Middle East, had been deliber-
ately poisoned with nicotine (although in reality his collapse seems to
have been occasioned by overwork combined with excessive chain
smoking) in the summer of 1944 and had almost died because a power-
ful group of Egyptian Greeks opposed his attempts to oust George
Skouras, a director of the Greek War Relief Association and the brother
of the movie mogul Spyros Skouras of Twentieth Century Fox, from
OSS Cairo.59 The apparent reason why George Skouras so strenuously
sought to remain in the Middle East was that he was under indictment
in the United States.60 Strange things certainly happened in SOE Cairo
but attempted murder, so far as I am aware, was not one of them.
Dominique Eudes has, however, fatuously suggested that Colonel Guy
Tamplin’s death from a heart attack in the autumn of 1943 was in fact
a case of suicide in part brought about by being outmaneouvred in his
attempts to prevent the unceremonious shipping of the six guerrilla
delegates who had left the mountains for Cairo in August 1943 for
negotiations with the British authorities and the Greek government-
in-exile back to Greece against their will.61
Nothing better illustrates the climate of extreme suspicion of
Britain’s role in Greece in some Greek–American circles than the
‘persistent reports’ that circulated to the effect that the British had not
merely sent the six packing (which was bad enough) but that they
were being held in close confinement in Egypt or even that they had
been murdered. Edward Stettinius, the US Under Secretary of State,
while making it clear that the State Department attached no credence
to these rumours, nonetheless felt obliged to make enquiries of
Alexander Kirk, the US minister in Egypt who at the time also handled
relations with the Greek government-in exile, as to their whereabouts.
Kirk duly reported back that the allegations were without foundation,
while adding, with justification, that reports by the six of the treat-
ment that had been meted out to them had been an important factor
in precipitating fighting between ELAS and its principal rival EDES.62
Although OSS was founded in 1942, it was only towards the end of
1943 that it became involved to any substantial degree in Greek affairs.
SOE, on the other hand, or its antecedent organizations such as
Section D of SIS, had been heavily involved in the Greek scene even
before the Italian invasion.63 Moreover, much of OSS’s early interest in
Greek affairs appears to have centred on the extraordinary, nebulous
and still somewhat mysterious scheme known as the ‘Comprehensive
Greek Project’. This was the brainchild of an extraordinary figure,
Colonel Ulius Amoss, a Greek–American who in civilian life had been
an importer and who was one of the more exotic of the group of
colonels who were close to Donovan and who wielded great power
within OSS.64 Amoss cooked up this bizarre scheme after meeting with
Emmanouil Tsouderos, the prime minister of the Greek government-

in-exile at the time of the latter’s visit to the United States during the
summer of 1942.
Grossly over-estimating the resources at the disposal of the
Tsouderos government, Amoss produced elaborate plans for a
world-wide intelligence network based on the resources of the govern-
ment-in-exile and on the Greek communities of the diaspora, with its
principal focus being the Middle East and Greece itself. He boasted
that ‘the intimate acquaintanceship of officers’ of the OSS depart-
ments dealing with Greek affairs with ‘virtually every leading
personality of the country, both in the Government and out, had
placed the Office of Strategic Services in a position to secure extra-
ordinary facilities from Greeks both in and out of Greece’. OSS had, he
claimed, been given ‘rights rarely, if ever, granted to foreigners . . . the
Greek undercover system and other functions of the Greek govern-
ment are being offered for complete and almost proprietary use by
O.S.S’. The involvement of Rodney Young, the archaeologist, in the
project led to reliance being placed on the Greek Archaeological
Service as one of the bases for the network which Amoss hoped to
establish. Amoss was scathing about the British intelligence effort in
Greece which he deemed to be ‘lacking in co-operation, inefficient and
gullible’. ‘The great problem of American intelligence’, he believed,
‘will be to keep some measure of independence from the British until
such time as there are sufficient American forces on the ground to
guarantee such independence’. In discussing possible means of
communication with occupied Greece he was sceptical about the use
of carrier pigeons as these might be eaten by a starving population.65
At clandestine meetings in Washington on 14 and 16 June 1942,
attended by representatives of the FBI as well as of OSS, Tsouderos
apparently asked for a subvention of one and a half million dollars to
get the project started and to facilitate the escape of officers from
Greece for service in the Free Greek Forces, while plans were hatched
to keep an eye on prominent figures associated with the Metaxas
regime, including Aristides Dimitratos, who had been Minister of
Labour and who, somewhat confusingly, was described by Amoss as ‘a
Nazi-Communist’. Both Amoss and Tsouderos seem to have seen the
plan as affording an opportunity to break away from British tutelage
with regard to clandestine activity in Greece, with Amoss believing
that there existed a vast fund of goodwill towards America among the
Greeks which could be put to good advantage. He also drew exagger-
ated comfort from the fact that Franklin Roosevelt, like any street-wise
Democratic politician, was a paid-up member of AHEPA, the largest

Greek–American community association.
Although Amoss elaborated truly grandiose schemes of sabotage and
intelligence gathering, very little of substance appears to have emerged
from the ‘Comprehensive Greek Project’. His value as an intelligence
officer and the usefulness of his sources is indicated by a memorandum
which he sent to Donovan on 5 January 1943. In this he reported that
Admiral ‘Canarius’ [ie Canaris], the head of the German Abwehr, was
now located in Berne under the alias ‘Dr Meyer’, ‘the apostate Greek
admiral’ (Canaris was thought to be of Greek ancestry) having set up
his headquarters in Switzerland for fear of assassination by Himmler’s
agents. The ‘sinister Greek magnate’, Bodosakis Athanasiadis, whose
pre-war business interests in Greece included the manufacture of
munitions, had suggested to Amoss that the organization should
contact and ‘pervert’ Canaris. Amoss believed that he could work out a
plan whereby OSS could cover Bodosakis with complete safety and,
once his work had been done, ‘eliminate him if it is then necessary in
the interests of our country’.66
In October 1942, Amoss had reported the existence of a 300-strong
resistance group of ‘ex-officers loyal to King George’ on Mount
Taygetos in the Peloponnese, whereas, in reality, royalist guerrilla
activity in Greece was virtually unknown.67 Much of the so-called
‘intelligence’ provided by Amoss appears to have been fantastic. In
December 1941, for instance, inspired no doubt by childhood recol-
lections of the legendary exploits of the kleftic brigands when Greece
had been under Turkish rule, he wrote to DeWitt Clinton Poole, then
of the Office of the Coordinator of Information, OSS’s precursor organ-
ization, about ‘remote Greek regions loosely guarded and populated by
“Klefti”, whose services were available’. ‘Klefti’, he added, ‘are irregu-
lars with a tradition of hundreds of years. Many of their chieftains are
personal friends of mine’.68
In a memorandum apparently destined for Donovan, undated but
probably deriving from the second half of 1943, Amoss reported on
the basis of intelligence supplied by the ‘Greek Irregular Project’,
another term for the ‘Comprehensive Greek Project’, that, as early as
mid-1942, ‘four Russian agents arrived in Saloniki to organize the
E.A.M. after the pattern of the Yugoslav Partisans’, an absurdly in-
accurate claim. He also maintained that, at much the same time, SIS
and SOE had ‘commissioned a number of dubious Greeks and
Levantines whose activities in Greece brought panic to the resistance
groups’. But eventually, he reported, EAM had grown to such an extent
and contained so many non-Communist members that ‘it divorced

itself (for a long period) from the Communist Party’, an appreciation
that could scarcely have been less accurate. In a nicely calculated
appeal to Donovan’s vanity he reported that a group of more than 500
Cretans, led by ‘Kapetanios “Y”’, called themselves ‘Donovan’s Band’,
while another 300 andartes in Epirus went under the name ‘The
American Legion’: ‘a single American officer, trusted by Kapetanios
“Y” . . . can raise a levy of thousands who will act – in discipline – under
orders from the Middle East General Staff’. Almost unbelievably, in a
memorandum of 21 October 1943 to Donovan, Amoss complained,
without apparent irony, that OSS’s present sources of Greek intelli-
gence, that is, those not controlled by himself, were ‘inexpert,
inadequate, sometimes fallacious and, therefore, dangerous’. He added
that the policy being followed by SOE in Greece would ‘create a disas-
trous situation’.69
Amoss was apparently removed from OSS Cairo in the summer of
1943 on grounds of what was euphemistically termed ‘financial
mismanagement’ and after having brought to Cairo from the US a
convicted criminal whose task would be to carry out assassinations. In
the words of one OSS insider ‘he knew nothing and messed up every-
thing he touched’.70 Even after being recalled from Cairo he
grandiloquently complained to Donovan that his removal from the
Middle East had ‘allowed the guerrilla and government-in-exile situa-
tions to get out of hand’. Hitherto his activities in the Middle East had,
so he claimed, maintained ‘relative calm in Greek Government circles
– and in Greece and Crete’.71
OSS Cairo mirrored the organization of OSS as a whole and was
divided into several sections. There was SO (Special Operations) whose
activities, namely the promotion of sabotage and resistance in enemy
occupied territory, paralleled those of SOE. The functions of SI (Secret
Intelligence) more nearly matched those of SIS (MI6). The task of the
R and A (Research and Analysis) branch, which was staffed largely by
academics, was to provide detailed background briefings and to
analyse incoming intelligence.72 It had no direct equivalent within
SOE, some of its functions on the British side being carried out by the
Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. MO (Morale
Operations) roughly matched the British Political Warfare Executive
(PWE). There was also a Labour Branch, headed in the Middle East by
Arthur Goldberg, subsequently a justice of the Supreme Court, and
which had as one of its operatives Costas Couvaras, by some accounts
a communist, by others a fellow-traveller, and indisputably one of
OSS’s most important and effective operatives in Greece. Other

branches included X-2, whose function was counter-intelligence.
OSS did not have an altogether easy time in establishing itself in the
Middle East in the face of British opposition. As Bickham Sweet-Escott
has put it ‘our people [ie SOE] in Cairo frankly wished to keep any
similar organization out of the theatre altogether, or if this was not
practicable to keep it under strict control. . . . This attitude was unfor-
tunate because it naturally made the Americans suspicious and eager
to conceal their plans from us . . .’.73 The general parameters of
SOE/OSS co-operation were adumbrated at a series of meetings in
London in July 1942 between Sir Charles Hambro, the executive head
of SOE, and Donovan. At these, it was agreed that the Middle East
would be an area in which Britain would predominate, while recogni-
tion was given to the fact that there were many instances in which SO
might prove to be of considerable assistance to SOE in the form of
‘equipment, materials, and possibly personnel, which were not avail-
able to the British SOE, and in certain areas – for example Turkey and
Iran – American personnel could, in some respects, operate more easily
than British personnel’. It was agreed that the ‘form and extent of the
organization of the American Mission and also the scope and charac-
ter of its activities would be discussed and settled by the head of the
American Mission with the British controller under whom he would be
working’.74 Matters were further clarified at meetings in London and
Cairo between Lord Glenconner, the head of SOE Cairo, and his OSS
counterpart, Col Gustav Guenther, Strategic Services Officer, Middle
East.
Glenconner, according to American reports of these meetings, was
‘urbanely cooperative’ when the question of American supplies was
under discussion but hegemonistic in so far as he tried to bring the
whole of SO’s activities in the Middle East under SOE control.
Glenconner, again according to the OSS documents, also sought to
prohibit SO from engaging in direct contacts with governments-in-
exile or with the Balkan resistance movements without the knowledge
and consent of an SOE/OSS Committee which alone would determine
policy. On the part of OSS, Lt-Col Ellery Huntington objected that the
basic directive of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff had determined that
OSS’s primary responsibility was to the US Theater Commander, while
to discontinue negotiations that were already in progress with govern-
ments-in-exile ‘would be impolitic if not dangerous’.75 Glenconner
remained very guarded in his attitude towards OSS. As he complained
to Rex Leeper in May 1943 it was unclear whether the agreement
which Donovan had initialled in the summer of 1942 had ever been
ratified by the US Chiefs of Staff. Certainly, he maintained, the
Americans had never made any serious attempt to implement it. He
complained that at his meetings in London early in 1943 with
Huntington, who had overall responsibility within OSS for SO,
Guenther and Amoss, Huntington had been ‘very smooth’ but had
taken care to give only his verbal agreement to the minute of the
meeting which Glenconner had drawn up. He had not written to say
whether he approved it or had any amendments, ‘as an honest man
might have been expected to do’. Glenconner had clearly come under
pressure from Hambro to be more accommodating towards the
Americans, with Hambro urging him that the emphasis in his negoti-
ations with OSS should be on ‘consulting’ and ‘working with’ the
Americans rather than on their need to obtain British ‘approval’ and
‘consent’. Glenconner personally felt that OSS were merely paying lip
service to the idea of an agreement to keep SOE quiet: ‘as soon as they
have got their personnel, schools, equipment for war stations, w/t sets
and aircraft etc. they will throw off this paper control and do just what
they like’. Were this to happen, he warned, then the outcome in the
Balkans would be chaotic.76
The issue was finally resolved in London in August 1943 at a series of
top level meetings between Donovan and Sir Charles Hambro. It was
agreed ‘once and for all’ that American officers would be despatched in
future to Allied Military Mission headquarters and sub-missions in
Yugoslavia and that they would use a joint SOE/OSS cipher. Similar
arrangements were to apply to Greece and Albania and OSS was given
the green light as far as activities in Bulgaria and Romania went.77 In
the latter part of 1943, SI issued its ‘Declaration of Independence’ from
SOE. In congratulating – in December of that year – Lt-Cmdr Turner
McBaine, the head of SI Cairo, on SI’s having freed itself from the
conditions which SOE had sought to impose on intelligence gathering
in the Balkans, Whitney H. Shepardson, the head of SI in Washington,
wrote to say that the State Department had asked OSS to obtain ‘all the
American [underlined in the original] intelligence we can for
Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece, originating with Americans, commu-
nicated through American channels, processed by Americans’.78 It
would appear that on 23 August 1944, Donovan issued a directive the
effect of which was that OSS’s Greek operatives should ‘stay completely
clear of the British and preserve our independence’.79
As has been noted, OSS combined the functions carried out by SOE,
SIS and PWE. Care therefore has to be taken in differentiating between
the relations of SO, SI, MO with their British counterparts. Relations

between SI and ISLD (as SIS was known in the Middle East), for
instance, appear to have been for the most part good. ISLD apparently
made all its intelligence available to SI (or at least SI was under the
impression that it did). This was an apparently unprecedented
measure.80 In November 1943, Jay Seeley in Cairo reported that 60 to
100 ISLD reports crossed his desk each week ‘almost directly from their
[ie ISLD’s] agents in Greece’.81 There was clearly considerable friction,
however, between SI and ISLD in Turkey as each organization sought
to run their agents into Greece.82 However close the relations between
ISLD and SI may have been in Cairo, it is clear that SI from time to
time encountered considerable difficulties in working independently
into Greece. In June 1944, an exasperated Rodney Young wrote from
Cairo to J.L. Caskey in Izmir that ‘we have been trying to get a mission
into Crete for some time and have met an extreme of reluctance on the
part of our cousins and allies, who have left no stone unturned to
prevent or delay us and have made every possible attempt to find out
exactly who our personnel are, where they are going and for what
purpose. . . . Force 133 [ie SOE] seems to have got the idea it owns Crete,
Pelion and various other parts of the country and that everybody else
can operate there only under sufferance from them. The sooner Force
133 is disabused of this idea, the better’.83 There were also suggestions
that ISLD was deliberately delaying the transmission of SI material.
That ISLD and SOE might have had something to complain about as
far as OSS’s security in Turkey was concerned is indicated by J.L.
Caskey’s plaintive appeal to Rodney Young of OSS Cairo ‘for God’s
sake’ not to allow anyone to put OSS on the outside of any letter or
package addressed to Caskey in Izmir or Sperling in Istanbul (‘the
hottest hotbed of gossip’): ‘there is every reason why the embassy and
consulate clerks should not know who we are’. Indeed there was.84
Bickham Sweet-Escott has written of the antagonisms and rivalries
that bedevilled British intelligence organizations in Cairo that ‘nobody
who did not experience it can possibly imagine the atmosphere of jeal-
ousy, suspicion, and intrigue which embittered the relations between
the various secret and semi-secret departments in Cairo. . . . I knew of a
Lieut.-Col. in S.O.E. who had asked the signals authorities whether
they could install a device on his telephone whereby what his brother
officers said to him could be recorded and presumably used in
evidence against them. It was not quite Hobbes’s war of every man
against every man. But certainly every secret organization seemed to
be set against every other secret organization’.85
Just how profoundly suspicious the British military authorities were

of SOE Cairo throughout much of the period of the occupation is strik-
ingly illustrated by the curious case of the espionage against SOE
carried out at the behest of the Commander-in-Chief Middle East,
General Wavell, by Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly. Employed as a
secretary, she had been duly impressed by the arsenal of weapons and
ammunition and by the safe stacked high with gold ingots kept by SOE
in its Cairo HQ. She soon began to feel, however, that there was some-
thing ‘ rather peculiar’ about her employers and that all was not as it
should be in the organization.
Although employed in a humble capacity as a secretary, her social
connections gave her a ready entrée into the upper reaches of wartime
Cairene society. In 1941, she had the opportunity to warn Eden on one
of his visits to Cairo of her fears in relation to ‘security and double-
crossing’ within SOE. She also complained to Wavell who made the
astonishing proposal that she pass any particularly ‘worrying’ docu-
ments to a member of his staff. Although she felt ‘terrible’ about it,
Lady Ranfurly readily acquiesced in the ‘horrible job’ with which she
had been entrusted by Wavell. Security was apparently so lax that she
was able to leave the office (apparently secured by a single Yale lock)
at night with incriminating documents tucked into her bra. She then
typed up copies of these for Wavell overnight, returning to the office
with these early in the morning.86
Given the intensity of inter-service rivalries on the British side, it is
scarcely surprising that a not inconsiderable degree of antipathy seems
to have existed within OSS between SO and SI. Given the propensity
of British and American agencies to feud among themselves, it is
scarcely to be wondered at that there should have been similar antag-
onism and rivalry between SO and SOE. There does not appear to have
been the same free interchange of information between the two organ-
izations as existed between ISLD and SI. Nonetheless, a copy of Lt-Col
John Stevens’ report on the situation in Central Greece following his
visit between March and June 1943 did come into the hands of the US
naval attaché in Ankara in circumstances that are not clear.87 The
mole who made this report available to the Americans may have been
the same one who handed over at least one other of SOE’s reports,
Woodhouse’s report on the situation in Greece between January and
May 1944. This was circulated with the injunction that the OSS copy
be shown only to US army and navy officers ‘because of the circum-
stances under which this report came into the hands of the
undersigned. . . .’88 Numerous copies of the weekly reviews and daily
‘sitreps’ (situation reports) of MO4/Force 133 [ie SOE in Greece] are to

be found in the files of OSS. Again the manner in which these partic-
ular documents reached OSS are not clear. What is clear is that some
Greek officers were approaching OSS with information and reports
with the request that they not be disclosed to the British.89
In the OSS ‘History of S(pecial) O(perations) in the Middle East’, it is
recorded that personal relations with the British were, on an individ-
ual basis, generally pleasant. SO did, however, have a particular
bugbear in the shape of Lt-Col Vincent A.P. Budge, who in late 1943
and early 1944 was in charge of Greek affairs in Cairo. In the view of
Bickham Sweet-Escott ‘a most competent professional staff officer’, in
the SO History Budge is described as possessing ‘a surly, haughty, regi-
mental conscious nature’ and as a person who ‘took no pains to
conceal his obvious feelings that Americans had no place in Greece.
This he manifested on almost every occasion when an American
officer of lower rank called upon him – but being rank conscious his
attitude was entirely different when an American wearing comparable
insignia was present’. The ‘History’ has kinder words to say about
Budge’s successor Lt-Col D.A. Affleck-Graves of the Dorsetshire
Regiment. He, Maj.-Gen. W.A.M. Stawell, the head of Special
Operations Mediterranean (SOM), and Brig. K.V. Barker-Benfield, the
commander of Force 133 (as SOE in the Middle East was known in the
aftermath of its ‘militarization’ in the wake of the great crisis of
August–September 1943), at least gave the impression that ‘Americans
had something to contribute in Greece and should be given every facil-
ity to accomplish it’. Barker-Benfield, however, was, as will be seen,
not fully prepared to take OSS into his confidence.
The ‘History of SO in the Middle East’ recognizes that the antipathy
that existed between Budge and OSS Cairo was not reflected in the
field. Relations between Woodhouse, the commander of the Allied
Military Mission, and Major Gerald [‘Jerry’] Wines, the senior US
officer in Greece and, from December 1943, the deputy commander of
the Allied Military Mission, a World War I veteran and, at the age of
49, apparently the second oldest OSS operative to be sent into occu-
pied Europe, are described as ‘quite [in the American usage of the
word, ie very] close’.90 Woodhouse himself believed that Wines could
not have been improved upon as his deputy. It was to Wines’
‘indomitable tact and patience’ that Woodhouse attributed the failure
of EAM/ELAS to drive a wedge between British and American policies
‘at least in the field’. Wines records one such attempt soon after his
arrival in Greece. On a visit to ELAS GHQ in mid-December 1943,
Costas Despotopoulos, a prominent ELAS leader, told him that the

British Military Mission had failed to transmit a number of his prede-
cessor Winston Ehrgott’s messages. Wines, however, had seen these
messages when he was in Cairo and, through an interpreter, impressed
upon Despotopoulos that ‘there could be no success in any attempt of
his to drive a wedge between the Americans and the British in the
Mission, that we, the Americans, were only a minor part of the mission
in Greece, but we were a loyal part; that we were standing shoulder to
shoulder with the British as allies, here as elsewhere in the world; that
it was our purpose to work with Greeks who hated the Germans worse
than they hated other Greeks, and that it was a damned shame that
EAM–ELAS could not do the same thing’.91 Some months later, in the
course of another conversation with Despotopoulos, on this occasion
in the presence of General Mandakas of ELAS, he once again reiterated
that the Americans had ‘not fought British since 1812 and are in this
war as their Allies and we stand with them shoulder to shoulder in
Greece as elsewhere in world, as should Greeks too’.92
Such was the extent to which Wines saw eye to eye with the
commander of the Allied Military Mission that the R and A Branch of
OSS Cairo came to regard him as altogether too much under the influ-
ence of Woodhouse. Certainly Wines held views that ran counter to
the prevailing orthodoxy among American analysts. Whereas many
American observers thought that SOE was in general too hostile
towards ELAS, Wines was highly critical, describing Aris Veloukhiotis,
its kapetanios (politico-military commander) in his unpublished
memoir as ‘the Himmler of ELAS’.93 Of the ideology underpinning
EAM/ELAS he was of the colourful opinion that this was ‘no mere
academic sociology, no parlor-pink political philosophy, no fancied
bogey which lurked in the shadows. This was a real and evil ogre
which thirsted for blood and whose fangs would draw it from the veins
of those Greeks when they had not strength to drive it off’.94 Although
personal relations between Woodhouse and Wines were clearly excel-
lent, Woodhouse did complain of a lack of co-ordination between the
respective headquarters of SOE and OSS in Cairo. This led Wines to
state in December 1943 that Zervas was receiving no more by way of
supplies than ELAS, whereas SOE had informed Woodhouse, correctly,
that supplies had been cut off to ELAS, while Zervas would receive pref-
erential treatment.95
Wines’ predecessor as the senior US member of the AMM was
Captain Winston (‘Wink’) Ehrgott of the 7th US Cavalry (of which, to
the annoyance of his superiors in Cairo, he organized a ‘Greek
Squadron’, which he led on a fine horse purchased for 39 sovereigns

from an officer in the Italian Pinerolo Division). Not long after
Ehrgott’s arrival in Greece, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul West, the chief
operations officer in the Middle East, flew in with a DC3 to the
Featherbed airstrip near Neraida to evacuate twelve American airmen.
As his plane became bogged down he spent an uncovenanted three
days in the mountains during which time he took the opportunity to
‘straighten out’, as he put it, Ehrgott’s various misconceptions as to his
official position and his behaviour towards the British. He was alarmed
to find that Ehrgott wanted to establish a separate American mission
in Greece, and that he had discussed the idea with leading cadres of
ELAS.96
While Ehrgott was critical of the Foreign Office, which he held
responsible for the schism that had developed in the resistance by the
time that he was flown into Greece, he did not think much more
highly of his own State Department.97 It is clear that Woodhouse did
not take Ehrgott altogether seriously. When, soon after the Italian
surrender of September 1943, Ehrgott joined a group of Italian volun-
teers in an unsuccessful attack on Larisa aerodrome, he succeeded only
in shooting himself in the backside, a feat for which he sought recog-
nition with a request to OSS for the award of a Purple Heart.98 Even
before leaving for Greece, Ehrgott had caused something of a stir. For,
in mid-September 1943, he had arrived at the airport in Cairo, en route
for Tocra and Greece, wearing riding boots complete with spurs and a
Texas Rangers type of hat, replete with tassels and artificial acorns,
and, in breach of elementary security, accompanied by a glamorous
nurse, to whom he bade a fond farewell from the aircraft door.99
Ehrgott seems, however, to have been highly popular with ELAS.
Indeed, a newspaper published by EPON, the youth organization of
EAM, sought to present him as a proletarian hero. It quoted him, in an
apparently highly distorted interview, as saying that there was a defin-
ite class struggle in America, where had attended a school where
‘intramural sports pitted the plebeian against the aristocrat’ and that
he derived ‘an intense personal satisfaction whenever the proletariats
bested the capitalists’.100 SOE also had its share of mavericks in Greece,
among them the British Liaison Officer pseudonymously identified as
‘Eric Butler’. He arrived in Turkey wearing a jockstrap stuffed with his
own reserve of funds, namely 250 gold sovereigns, weighing some two
kilograms.101
Wines’ successor as deputy commander of the Allied Military
Mission was Lt-Col Paul West who, at 46, was only three years
younger than Wines. Since he had hitherto been responsible in Cairo

for OSS Special Operations in the Balkans it seems a strange security
lapse that he should have been infiltrated into Greece with such a
wealth of highly sensitive knowledge. His immediate superior, Col
John Toulmin, for instance, for reasons that are not immediately clear,
appears to have been privy to the date for the launch of Operation
Overlord, the invasion of Normandy.102 Perhaps, however, the deci-
sion to send West into Greece merely reflected confidence that he
would be unlikely to be captured, given the large areas of mountain
Greece under guerrilla control by that stage of the occupation. Like his
predecessor Wines, West also seems to have been well-liked by his
British opposite numbers. Nicholas Hammond, who assumed
command of the Allied Military Mission during Woodhouse’s absence
from Greece in the summer of 1944, appears to have established much
the kind of rapport with West that Woodhouse had enjoyed with
Wines. Hammond found him to be a ‘fine figure of a man’, who was,
moreover, ‘much more alert on the political side than Wines had
been’.
West was a useful ally in Hammond’s dealings with the Russian
Military Mission to the Greek resistance, whose uncovenanted arrival
in the mountains of Greece at the end of July 1944 caused such
consternation to the British authorities.103 Hammond seems to have
taken West fully into his confidence. Not so Brig. Barker-Benfield, the
commander of Force 133 in Cairo. When ‘B.B.’ made a tour of inspec-
tion in ‘Free Greece’ in the summer of 1944, he froze West out of his
discussions with Hammond, telling the latter that West could not be
taken into British confidence in regard to plans for the liberation of
Greece.104 Some of West’s colleagues in OSS seem to have regarded
him, like Wines, as too subservient to the British. In August 1944,
Stephen Penrose, the head of SI in Cairo, complained that Force 133
had been putting considerable pressure on SI ‘to confide in them all
our secret plans, the identities of our agents, their areas of operation,
and anything else which would enable them to keep us well under
control’. ‘We have’, he wrote, ‘politely resisted their efforts, which, I
am sorry to say, seem to be aided and abetted by Colonel West, and I
am girding my loins for a knock-down fight if necessary’. It was clear
to Penrose that ‘the British don’t like to have free information coming
out of Greece without their knowledge, and without their control’.105
Whatever the obstacles which SOE in London or Cairo may have
placed in the way of OSS’s involvement in Greece, Woodhouse himself
would have welcomed a greater American presence: ‘the Americans
never came to Greece in as large numbers, nor with as much seniority

or responsibility, as we wished’.106
As has been noted, one of the most immediately apparent differ-
ences between SOE and OSS is that, in contrast to SOE, OSS relied
heavily on those of Greek descent for its special operations and intel-
ligence activities in Greece. The essential reason for this, of course, was
the availability in the United States of a large pool of Greek-speaking
Americans of Greek descent. In many cases, their accent betrayed their
American connection. This was not the case, however, with perhaps
the most enigmatic of OSS’s Greek operatives, Costas Couvaras.
Couvaras was born of Greek parents in Braila in Romania and moved
with them to Ithaca at the age of two. He subsequently studied at the
American-run Anatolia College in Thessaloniki where Jay Seeley, at
that time teaching at the College and subsequently a member of the
Cairo R and A Branch of OSS, recalled that he was thought to have
been a communist.107 Couvaras subsequently studied on a scholarship
at Cornell, where he took degrees in history and political science. In
the spring of 1944 Couvaras, a member of the Labor Branch of OSS
Cairo, was sent into Greece to make contact with the Central
Committee of EAM, his mission being known under the code name
‘Pericles’. Aside from his left-wing credentials (although it is not clear
to what extent his superiors in Cairo were aware of these), he had the
considerable advantage of being the nephew of Nikos Karvounis, a
journalist and writer, a prominent member of EAM and the editor of
the clandestine communist newspaper Rizospastis. This contact
assured him immediate access when at the end of May 1944 he made
contact with the leadership of EAM at Koryskhades, the seat of the
Ethniko Symvoulio, or National Council which had been elected under
the aegis of the EAM-inspired Political Committee of National
Liberation. At this initial meeting he impressed on the EAM leadership
that it was to its benefit to cooperate with OSS, as it was important for
the Americans to get their information at first hand rather than
filtered through British channels, although OSS in Washington did
not fulfil Couvaras’ aspiration that it should play a more assertive role
in Greece.108 As The Secret War Report of the OSS put it ‘the chief contri-
bution of the Pericles Mission was that it gave to the USA independent
information of a political character about EAM, its composition and
leadership, its reaction to the conferences that took place in the
Middle East, about the organisation of the National Council in April
1944 and other similar information, valuable for the State
Department. The “Pericles” Mission also gave the first information
about the unexpected and undesired by the British arrival of the

Russian Military Mission in July 1944 at the time when the British
were studying the possibility of withdrawing their own missions from
EAM. The “Pericles” Mission transmitted exclusive information about
the personnel and apparent objectives of the Russian Mission and its
reception by EAM’.109
Couvaras’ reporting of the situation in Greece ran from May 1944
until the outbreak of hostilities in Athens in December of the same
year. He took a much more sympathetic view of the aspirations of EAM
than did almost all SOE operatives. On 14 July, for instance, we find
him writing to ‘Mort’ [Mortimer Kollender] of the Labor Desk of OSS
in Cairo that EAM was ‘a mild left wing movement’ in comparison
with resistance movements in the other Balkan countries: ‘the leaders
of the EAM tell you that they are not interested in taking power by
force at the end of the war, but they are not willing to let anybody else
do that either. They are interested, they say in a democratic regime in
Greece, in which all parties including the Communist will be free to
present their programme to the people’.110
Couvaras’ comments on the political situation were consistently
suffused by a markedly anti-British tone. In his letter of 14 July, for
instance, he reported that EAM had information about a number of
meetings that had taken place in Greece between British officers and
the Germans. He was not apparently referring to the New Zealand
British Liaison Officer Don Stott’s extraordinary and inevitably much
misunderstood capers in Athens in November 1943, when he had
(wholly unauthorized) contacts with fairly high-ranking German offi-
cials during the course of which there was confused discussion of the
possibility of a local understanding with the Germans as part of a wider
British/German front against the Bolsheviks.111 Rather he was referring
to subsequent supposed contacts with the German occupation author-
ities. For he reported that someone in the know had told him that ‘the
stink that Moscow raised some time ago [in Pravda] about Ribbentrop
meeting some British emissary somewhere in Europe, came from
Greece, where, as I was told, a certain British officer met with
Ribbentrop at a certain house in the aristocratic suburb of Athens,
Psychico’. He was told by his informant that there was a great deal of
information on the subject which could be vouchsafed when needed.
Reporting on the rumours being put about that the collaborationist
and virulently anti-communist Security Battalions, Greek-manned and
equipped by the German occupation authorities, enjoyed British
backing, Couvaras wrote that ‘[Napoleon Zervas’s republican but
non-communist] EDES, which is British-backed to a great extent has

many of its officers participating in the security battalions. Of course
one can’t say how much of this is British instigation and how much
imagination on the part of those claiming British backing; in any case
one can deduce that there must [my emphasis] be some truth in the
matter’.112
Some of the stranger notions as to British objectives in Greece were
to be found in the R and A Branch in Cairo, which was not well
regarded in some British circles. Indeed, the degree to which the acad-
emic analysts of the R and A Branch were looked upon as bêtes-noires
in certain quarters is strikingly illustrated in remarks made by Col
Robert Wingate to Anthony Cave Brown, Donovan’s biographer.
Britain, Wingate maintained, had suffered more, sacrificed more and
would eventually lose more than any other power during the Second
World War: ‘yet here were these God-awful American academics
rushing about, talking about the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic
Charter, and criticising us for doing successfully what they would try
and fail to do themselves later – restrain the Russians. Donovan was
very lucky we didn’t send a Guards Company to OSS Cairo.’113 Since
the R and A Branch was largely staffed by academics, few of whom
seem to have had first-hand knowledge of the situation in occupied
Greece, we should not, perhaps, be too surprised at the eccentric
nature of some of the analyses that emerged from its deliberations. The
views of Moses Hadas were a case in point. In civilian life Hadas had
been a professor of classics at Columbia University and became head
of the R and A Branch of OSS in Cairo. He was a man of forthright
opinions as far as Greece was concerned. When he went into Greece in
the summer of 1944, Hammond had arranged for him to join the New
Zealand British Liaison Officer John Mulgan, ‘the most enterprising of
our commanders’114 but this did little to allay his deep suspicion of the
direction being taken by British policy in Greece.In September 1944,
while on a visit to Washington, Hadas submitted a number of memo-
randa on Greek affairs to W.L. Langer, the Harvard historian who was
the overall head of the R and A Branch in Washington. Hadas claimed
to have found disapproval of Britain’s policy in Greece among all
authorities in Cairo, British or American. Indeed he had been told that
Col O’Toole of SOE, who was regarded as being particularly well
informed on Greek matters, deplored the policy of the British govern-
ment even more than Hadas and was even more pessimistic as to its
inevitable outcome. When Hadas had ‘mildly suggested’ to British
colleagues that it was extraordinary that His Majesty’s Government
persisted in pursuing a course of action of which its own experts disap-

proved ‘they shrugged their shoulders and laid all blame on the
Foreign Office’. In the American Embassy to the Greek government-in-
exile he had encountered, if not support for the Foreign Office line,
then indifference. Ambassador Lincoln MacVeagh’s view was appar-
ently ‘what evidence is there that Americans would run the show
better?’
Hadas took a particular dislike to Ellis Waterhouse, a member of the
British Embassy to the Greek government-in-exile who in civilian life
was an art historian, finding his conversation ‘generously interlarded
with adulatory comment on various wealthy patrons who had
commissioned him to make studies of their art collections’. So wary
indeed was he of Waterhouse that, on meeting him at a dinner party,
he had confined himself to comments on Herodotus’ writings about
Egypt.115 It was Waterhouse and Edward Warner, another member of
Ambassador Leeper’s staff, who in the summer of 1944 precipitated the
chain of events that led to the disastrous decision to convene, at the
direct behest of Churchill, a Court of Inquiry to determine whether
Yannis Peltekis, one of SOE’s most valuable Greek operatives, had been
channelling SOE funds to EAM. Waterhouse may also have been the
protagonist in a curious epeisodio or contretemps reported by Jay Seeley
to Hadas in September 1944. At a dinner party, a member of Leeper’s
embassy was alleged to have made remarks in the presence of two
Greeks, to the effect that he was ‘a) fed up with the Greeks; b) he had
no use for them; c) that they could not be trusted; and d) that they
were a despicable lot and uncivilized’. The next day, Seeley recorded,
one of the Greeks went to the British ambassador to protest. But Rex
Leeper would have none of it, not only refusing to consider the protest
but also apparently insisting that ‘the mishellene official’ was to go to
Greece at the earliest opportunity. The second Greek, according to
Seeley, had taken steps to inform EAM. ‘Should’, he added, ‘a British
official be shot in the near future, this may explain it’. The only clue
that Seeley gave as to the identity of the offending official, but one
that was presumably meaningful to Hadas, was a cryptic reference to
his having been the room-mate of Rodney Young, who was responsi-
ble for OSS SI’s activities in Greece.116 Whatever the frictions between
SOE and OSS in the Middle East it would appear that relations between
Leeper and his American counterpart, Lincoln MacVeagh, were
cordial. The supremely Waspish MacVeagh recorded in his diary that
he liked Leeper a lot. He believed that the British ambassador (who was
Australian by birth) had ‘some un-English qualities, like a love for
bargaining and indirection, which make . . . me think he may very well

have some Jewish blood’.117
Some strange notions as to Greek realities floated around the R&A
Branch in Cairo. Hadas in commenting on Greek communism made
reference to a report prepared by an unnamed observer (possibly
Couvaras) who had recently visited Greece. He himself conceded that
the analysis offered was a somewhat startling one: ‘communists are
those who believe in the sanctity of private property, the Church and
the family, and the integrity of Greece’s boundaries. Conservatives are
irresponsibles bound by no traditional concepts of property, the
family, or the state’.118 For his part, Hadas was obsessed with the idea
that British policy in wartime Greece was heavily influenced by the
personal financial interests of those involved in its making. He
retailed, for instance, charges that the family firm in Izmir of an
employee of the Ministry of Economic Warfare in Cairo had been
accused of charging the Greek government ‘outrageous prices for infer-
ior materials in contracts for food supplies destined for the Aegean
islands’. Hadas added that ‘the charge of having economic interests in
Greece, which they might be suspected of trying to protect or which
might at least affect their political convictions’ had been laid against
other British officials, and more particularly against Col C.M.
Woodhouse, the commander of the Allied Military Mission. He
described Woodhouse as ‘an extremely young, affable, athletic, hand-
some, polished Oxonian, whose genuine charm is irresistible’, whose
Greek was ‘fluent to the point of volubility’. His family was said to
possess large interests in Greece: ‘one cannot take exception to
Woodhouse’s views because his toryism is congenital and he is not
sufficiently mature to have evolved a different attitude’.119 What
Hadas found more deplorable was the attitude of Major Wines of the
OSS, whom he termed ‘a political illiterate with no knowledge of Greek
or Greeks, who seems to have followed Col Woodhouse about, flat-
tered by the consideration shown him and uncritically echoing and
giving wider currency to all Woodhouse’s attitudes’.120
In a further long memorandum, likewise addressed to Langer a few
days later, Hadas dropped his earlier qualification and baldly stated
that Woodhouse had ‘considerable financial interests’ in Greece.
According to Hadas, Woodhouse’s critics claimed that, despite the fact
that he was ‘perfectly sincere, cultivated, and competent’, he was
‘incapable of appreciating Greek problems in their totality’.
Complaints had also been laid against Col John Stevens, also of SOE,
who ‘in a mellow mood . . . freely admitted that he did not like
Greeks’.121 One of OSS Cairo’s sources, admittedly categorized by the

organization as ‘slightly tendentious’, in reporting on a meeting
between Georgios Exindaris, the Liberal politician whose arrival in
Cairo coincided with the ill-fated visit of the six guerrilla delegates in
August 1943, and Lord ‘Glencorn’ [read Glenconner], the head of SOE
Cairo, described the latter’s role as looking after the interests of British
capital in the Middle East.122 In this connection, Burton Y. Berry, the
US Consul General in Istanbul, had reported to his Secretary of State
on 13 August 1943 the view of Captain Alexandros Levidis, the chief
of Greek intelligence in Izmir, that Emmanouil Tsouderos had been
chosen to head the government-in-exile as ‘very acceptable to British
financial interests’.123
Hadas’ notion that an important key to an understanding of British
policy in Greece was the purported personal financial interests in the
country of Woodhouse and his ilk is demonstrable nonsense although
it appears to have met with little challenge within OSS. It is not a little
ironic that the only person on the British side who was to a degree
involved in Greek affairs and whose family could be said to have had
some kind of personal financial stake in the outcome in Greece was, as
it turned out, relatively sympathetic to EAM and strongly critical of
official British policy and of its hostility towards EAM. This was Francis
Noel-Baker, whose family had held substantial property at Achmetaga
on Euboea since the 1830s, and who was with SOE in Cairo, working
on Greek affairs, although he was never sent into Greece during the
occupation. He was to be elected to parliament in 1945 as a Labour
MP. The Noel-Baker family had close traditional ties with Greece and,
in the aftermath of the post-World War I land reforms in Greece, their
estate on Euboea was one of the very few private estates of any signifi-
cance in Greece to survive intact.
In January 1944, Noel-Baker wrote a memorandum on ‘British policy
to Greece’ which was submitted to the Foreign Office. In the ordinary
course of events not a great deal of notice would have been taken of a
document of this kind written by someone holding the rank of
captain. But Noel-Baker’s mother, the wife of Philip Noel-Baker, a
prominent Labour politician, happened to mention to Churchill’s wife
that her son had submitted such a memorandum. Clementine
Churchill, in turn, mentioned the existence of the document to her
husband. Churchill manifested a sudden and urgent interest in it,
thereby obliging the Foreign Office to accord Noel-Baker’s views much
more serious consideration than might otherwise have been the case.
(In parenthesis one might note that Greece is by no means the only
society in which having the right mesa, or connections, can be highly

useful.)
In his memorandum, Noel-Baker sought to account for what he
believed to be a wave of violent anti-British feeling sweeping over the
Greeks. So serious had the situation become, he maintained, that it
threatened ‘the whole edifice of Anglo-Greek friendship now, and may
well imperil the foundations of our relations after the war’. The thrust
of Noel-Baker’s argument was that Greek society during the occupa-
tion was divided into two basic groups; the great majority consisting
of liberal and progressive elements, the small minority consisting of
reactionaries. While EAM might not be coeval with the majority, he
believed nonetheless that it certainly formed a part of it, while he
placed Zervas’ EDES in the reactionary minority. It would be difficult
for Greeks ‘to avoid coming to the conclusion that the British
Government, for political reasons of its own, was doing everything in
its power to support and strengthen an unrepresentative “Vichyist”
minority and to strike at and weaken the majority to the detriment of
resistance against the Germans’. British support for this minority,
combined with her meddling in Greece’s internal affairs, had led to a
large-scale revulsion against Britain.
Noel-Baker believed, with considerable justification, that the bulk of
the membership of EAM/ELAS were not committed communists. He
had no evidence that EAM aimed at creating a Soviet Greece. While it
would be absurd to argue that the KKE did not want a communist
Greece this was ‘a very different thing from maintaining that the small
[communist] minority can force the bulk of the membership (which
wants only to expel the Germans and then to settle down to a toler-
able and free peacetime life) to start a new civil war for the imposition
by force of a Left Wing dictatorship’. Since, in his view, British Liaison
Officers in Greece and Embassy staff were ‘either biased or ill-
informed’, he argued for the despatch of a commission of enquiry to
Greece to determine the true state of affairs.
The Foreign Office was not greatly impressed by this reasoning
which ran counter to reports from officers in the field who were largely
in agreement in believing that EAM/ELAS was bent on seizing power
on liberation. D.S. Laskey of the Southern Department, for instance,
minuted that the best antidote to the Noel-Baker memorandum was
the report of Lt-Col Robert MacMullen. On going into Greece,
Macmullen had had much the same political views as Noel-Baker but
his experiences in the Peloponnese had convinced him that ELAS were
a ‘gang of self-interested fanatics whose only aim is to secure power for
themselves’. Douglas Howard, the head of the Southern Department,

was of the opinion that Noel-Baker had overstated his case and that the
memorandum was ‘full of inaccuracies and unjustified conclusions’.
Churchill’s reaction to the Noel-Baker memorandum is not recorded,
although Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, minuted that ‘the
p[rime] m[inister] is most unlikely to be impressed by this’.124 Needless
to say, no commission of enquiry as suggested by Noel-Baker was sent
to Greece. Nor did efforts by Noel-Baker’s father, Philip, to engineer the
despatch of his son to Greece bear fruit. When C.M. Woodhouse, the
commander of the Allied Military Mission, returned to Britain for a
time in the summer of 1944, he was approached by Philip Noel-Baker
(yet another example of the usefulness of mesa in British society) with
the complaint that his son was being prevented from going in to
Greece. Woodhouse, who believed that the best antidote to romantic
notions about EAM was personal experience of the organization,
assured him that he was in no way involved in the decision.125
The fact that neither Noel-Baker nor some of the analysts of the R
and A Branch had actually set foot in occupied Greece would appear to
be one of the underlying reasons why their estimates of EAM/ELAS’s
intentions and methods were frequently at odds with the views of
those who did have first hand experience of the country. Those who
sought to analyse the complex politics of Greece under occupation
from outside the country were more prepared to take at face value
EAM’s own view as to its immediate and ultimate goals. But even a
short visit to Free Mountain Greece could result in a radically different
estimation.
One of the most compelling testimonies of which I am aware of as
to EAM/ELAS’s propensity to resort to terror comes not from the
reports of British or American liaison officers, who may or may not
have had a political axe to grind, but from an OSS debriefing of two US
airmen shot down over Greece, and who had spent several weeks in
the Peloponnese before being evacuated. Interrogated at the beginning
of February 1944, they were described as ‘typical American boys, intel-
ligent, resourceful but with practically virgin minds as far as Modern
or Ancient Greece were concerned’. They were reported as looking on
EAM ‘with scarcely less aversion than they did the Germans’. ELAS had
taken good care of them before handing them over to the British
Military Mission in the Peloponnese but ‘A’ had been shocked at the
kicking to death of a German prisoner following interrogation, while
‘B’ had witnessed an ELAS guerrilla, while requisitioning a mule, strik-
ing a peasant ‘viciously and repeatedly across the face with a whip’.126
Although there were some pretty eccentric views as to what the

British were up to in Greece circulating within OSS and, in particular,
within the R and A Branch, there was also some acute political report-
ing. A case in point is a letter written as early as December 1943 by
Charles Edson, a member of the R and A Branch in Cairo and, in civil-
ian life, a professor of Ancient History at the University of Wisconsin,
to Robert Wolff, the distinguished Byzantinist and Balkanologist, who
was head of the Balkan Section of R and A in Washington. Edson, who
appears not to have visited Greece during the occupation, believed
that the British had ‘tragically mismanaged the Greek situation’ and
was of the opinion that ‘the Englishmen in the [Middle East] theater
are Empire-builders . . . brave honourable men devoted to the Empire
and to what they conceive to be the Empire’s interests’. But after these
ritual incantations he went on to give a thoughtful analysis of the situ-
ation in Greece. He recognized that, inside Greece, EAM/ELAS was by
far the most dominant single factor but demonstrated a commendable
agnosticism in seeking to analyse its import. ‘But just what is it?’, he
wrote, ‘I do wish I knew. Its enemies, only a few of whom can justly be
called Fascists or Metaxists (many of them are in fact liberal demo-
crats), accuse it of out-and-out planning for the establishment of a
Communist regime in Greece. Other persons, free themselves of any
Leftist taint, hold that EAM is just what it says it is – a popular front
coalition aimed at ameliorating the lot of the conquered Greeks and
opposing the Germans – it aims merely to assure the establishment of
a post-war regime in accordance with the wishes of the Greek people’.
In his estimation both views were oversimplifications, particularly the
latter.
EAM/ELAS, Edson believed, had made and was making ‘a calculated
and determined effort to take over, nullify or destroy’ all other guer-
rilla groups and there seemed little doubt that ELAS, when it wanted
to, could wipe Zervas’ EDES out. Given that there was no such thing as
a royalist, let alone Metaxist, band in Greece, then it followed that
EAM/ELAS could not claim to be countering ‘a possible Royalist or
Fascist threat’. ‘It may be said that EAM feared that the republican
guerrilla groups would accept the King if the Allies insist. That this atti-
tude now exists is true, but it is directly due to the EAM/ELAS
operations against the other bands’. Edson regarded it as established,
although there were informed people who might not agree, that EAM
brought great (‘up to now usually moral’) pressure to get individuals to
‘join, cooperate with or aquiesce’. It did not tolerate hostile or
unfriendly criticism: ‘it does not in fact approve of free speech.
Persons, even those of demonstrated democratic views, who criticise

EAM tend to be denounced as Fascists and quislings’. He believed that
an aspect of EAM’s success that had been underestimated was the relief
work carried out through its subsidiary the Ethniki Allilengyi [National
Solidarity], its relief organization, which had gained it ‘appreciative
admirers and supporters’, although here again pressure could be
exerted on those in need of relief.
It was quite clear to Edson that EAM/ELAS was dominated by the
communist party. While he had little knowledge of the precise ideol-
ogy of the Greek communist party and had little time for ‘hairsplitting
metaphysical discussions concerning how Communist is a Greek
Communist’, the fact remained that the KKE was the farthest left of
any party inside Greece and that it controlled ‘by far the largest under-
ground movement and practically the only really important guerrilla
army’. That said, however, he had not encountered any real evidence
of contact between EAM and Russia although, without being able to
prove it, he felt a ‘moral certainty’ that there was some kind of contact.
In conclusion, he wrote that nothing that he had seen or learned of
the British since he had been in Cairo had caused him to believe that
‘we would be wise, or that it would be to our interest, to follow blindly
their south-east European policy (if they have one)’. To give them a
blank check would mean sooner or later accepting responsibility for
that policy and ‘one cannot anticipate how large and how serious that
responsibility may be’.127
Although much research remains to be done on the complex rela-
tions between SOE and OSS in respect of their activities in Greece, the
general outlines are clear. On the ground in occupied Greece, relations
between the two organizations appear to have been reasonably good.
Within OSS in the Middle East, however, there was a generally critical
attitude to British policy in Greece. A good number of OSS criticisms
of official British policy had substance, even if some eccentric views
existed as to the mainsprings of British policy. That relations between
SOE and OSS in Cairo should have been strained is scarcely surprising,
given the level of friction that existed among the intelligence, diplo-
matic and military authorities of both Britain and the United States.
OSS’s operatives shared in large measure the ingrained suspicions of
much of official America, for example, the State Department, at the
time of what they regarded as the sinister and imperialistic designs of
the British for the postwar world. Moreover, they were continually
confronted with evidence that SOE did not welcome the presence of
their American ‘cousins and allies’, not only in Greece but in the
Balkans in general. The irony inherent in the somewhat sancti-

monious attitudes adopted by the Americans in 1943 and 1944
vis-à-vis the British entanglement in Greece when contrasted with the
way in which they themselves became mired in Greek affairs in 1947
and subsequently, after London had yielded its traditional hegemony
in Greece to Washington, calls for no emphasis. After all, Moses Hadas
as late as the summer of 1944 had been arguing that ‘of all the Allied
powers America alone seems disinterested [sic] in the internal political
concerns of Greece . . .’.128
7
The Greek Government-in-Exile,
1941–44
Since its inception in the 1830s, Greece, to a greater or lesser extent,

has found herself in a dependent relationship towards the Great
Powers.1 Even if the ‘external factor’ has not always had such a deter-
mining influence on the course of Greece’s foreign relations and
domestic politics as is sometimes claimed, it is nonetheless undeniable
that there has been a consistent pattern of Great Power pressure on,
interference with, and intervention in Greek affairs. Some of the more
flagrant external interventions occurred with the British and French
occupation of Piraeus between 1854 and 1857 in an effort to neutral-
ize any Greek attempt to profit from the discomfiture of the Ottoman
Empire during the Crimean War; in the imposition of a naval blockade
in 1886, again to thwart Greek efforts to make any move in
Macedonia; in the establishment of an International Financial Control
Commission in the aftermath of Greece’s disastrous defeat in the
Greek–Turkish war of 1897; in the pressure exercised by the Entente
Powers on Greece during the First World War which culminated in the
departure of King Constantine I from Greece in June 1917; and, above
all, in the armed intervention by British troops on behalf of the
Papandreou government during the communist insurgency of
December 1944. A common factor in all these instances of interven-
tion was the leading role played by Great Britain. For Britain fulfilled
the role of Greece’s principal external patron from 1832 until 1947,
when her traditional hegemony was assumed by the United States
with the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine, by which the United
States undertook to support the efforts of ‘free peoples’ struggling to
resist subversion by armed minorities.
This chapter focuses on Anglo-Greek relations during the Second
World War and, in particular, on the relationship between the British
144
The Greek Government-in-Exile 145
authorities and the Greek government-in-exile. Somewhat paradoxi-

cally, given that Greece was under Axis occupation between 1941 and
1944, Britain’s involvement in Greek affairs reached a peak during this
period. During the inter-war years Britain had exercised considerable
influence in the country, although relations had been somewhat
soured by the judicial murder of six politicians and military leaders in
1922, in the wake of Greece’s disastrous campaign in Asia Minor, and
by problems over the repayment of Greece’s large external debts. It is
sometimes claimed that the British were primarily responsible for the
installation of the dictatorship of General Ioannis Metaxas in 1936 but
there is no evidence to substantiate such a view. Metaxas’ paternalist,
authoritarian regime aped a number of the external trappings of
German nazism and Italian fascism. But, despite his open admiration
for totalitarian forms of government, Metaxas showed no inclination
to sever Greece’s traditional British connection. Moreover, King
George II was a strong partisan of a pro-British foreign policy. In 1938,
indeed, Metaxas proposed a formal alliance with Great Britain. The
British government, anxious to avoid new commitments, declined the
offer, but in April 1939, a few days after the Italian occupation of
Albania, Britain and France did offer to guarantee Greece’s territorial
integrity, provided that she chose to resist aggression.
On the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939,
Metaxas sought to maintain a benevolent neutrality towards Britain
and turned a blind eye towards a series of increasingly blatant Italian
provocations. However, when Mussolini, piqued at Hitler’s failure to
consult his principal ally and seeking to pursue an independent
Mediterranean and Balkan policy, presented Greece with a humiliating
ultimatum on 28 October 1940, Metaxas’ response was immediate and
unequivocal: ‘This means war’. Within a few days the Greeks had not
only cleared the Italian invading forces from their territory but had
counterattacked across the border into southern Albania. From the
moment of the Italian attack, Winston Churchill had demonstrated
his willingness to go to the aid of Greece. Early in November he told
the war cabinet that Britain could not afford the stigma of allowing yet
another small nation, solemnly guaranteed by Britain, to fall to the
Axis. A small number of aircraft were despatched to Greece, despite a
certain reluctance on the part of the chiefs-of-staff. When in January
1941 Churchill offered to commit troops, Metaxas was reluctant to
accept for fear of provoking German intervention. After Metaxas’
death at the end of January, the Greek attitude changed in the face of
mounting evidence of Germany’s aggressive designs in the Balkans.
Greece now agreed to the despatch of a British (mainly Common-

wealth) expeditionary force, although its effective deployment was
critically impeded by a fatal misunderstanding that occurred at a top
level meeting in Athens on 22–23 February between Anthony Eden,
the British Foreign Secretary, Field-Marshal Sir John Dill, the Chief of
the Imperial General Staff, and General Archibald Wavell, the
Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, with King George II, his prime
minister, Alexander Koryzis, and General Papagos, the Greek
Commander-in-Chief.2 When the Germans launched their invasion of
Greece on 6 April 1941, the combined Greek and British forces were
able to put up little more than token resistance. Nor was the attempt
to hold Crete any more successful for, by the end of May 1941, the
whole of Greece was under tripartite German, Italian, and Bulgarian
occupation. The king of Greece and his government, now headed by
Emmanouil Tsouderos, following the suicide of Koryzis in the confu-
sion of the German advance, withdrew to Egypt. From Egypt they were
briefly evacuated to South Africa and thence to London, where they
arrived in September 1941.
The British had long attached considerable importance to Greece’s
strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean, straddling as it did
Britain’s sea communications with India, and to her vital supplies of
oil in the Middle East. A friendly postwar Greece was regarded as a
keystone of British policy in the eastern Mediterranean and it was held
in the Foreign Office that a constitutional monarchy was the form of
government most likely to ensure a Greece well disposed towards
Britain. Hence from the beginning considerable importance was
attached by the British authorities to the return of King George II to
his throne after liberation. It was also regarded as of considerable
importance to keep in being a government-in-exile, for this, together
with the king, was seen as the repository of constitutional legality and
continuity. The fact that the British authorities always attached
considerable importance to the physical existence of a government-in-
exile did not necessarily imply that they had a high opinion of the
individuals who constituted it. On the contrary, Harold Macmillan,
then minister resident in Italy, made a characteristic comment in his
diary for 21 August 1944 in noting that George Papandreou, then
prime minister of the exiled government, had accepted with alacrity
Churchill’s proposal that his government should move forthwith to
Italy from ‘the poisonous atmosphere of intrigue which reigns at
Cairo’. ‘All previous Greek Governments-in-exile’, he wrote, ‘have
been broken in the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel’.3
Macmillan’s dismissive attitude towards the Greek politicians-in-

exile was shared by British policy-makers at all levels. Churchill
himself wrote that the Greeks rivalled the Jews in being the ‘most
politically-minded race in the world’, who, ‘no matter how forlorn
their circumstances or how grave the peril to their country’, are
‘always divided into many parties, with many leaders who fight among
themselves with desperate vigour’.4 Rex Leeper, too, had no great
regard for the Greek politicians with whom he was in daily contact
after his appointment as ambassador to the government-in-exile in
March 1943, when King George II and his ministers moved from
London to Cairo. George Roussos, the deputy prime minister and a
leading Egyptian Venizelist (republican) politician, reminded Leeper
uncomfortably of Uriah Heep, while, as mentioned above, he
dismissed George Kartalis as ‘a frivolous character educated at the
London School of Economics’.5
In his memoir of his wartime experiences, When Greek Meets Greek,
in which he sometimes does less than justice to his own policies,
Leeper wrote that politics was the king of sports in Greece and that it
would be a mistake to imagine that the pre-war dictatorship of General
Metaxas aroused ‘anything like the fierce hostility throughout the
country that Greek politicians would have you think’. Indeed he was
not altogether surprised that King George had allowed Metaxas a free
hand in abrogating the constitution in 1936.6 Such attitudes were also
commonplace at lower levels of the decision-making process. Edward
Warner of the Southern Department of the Foreign Office, who was
subsequently to be an adviser on Greek affairs in turn to the Minister
of State, Middle East, and to Leeper, was inclined to write off ‘most of
the upper class Greeks as self-seeking Levantines . . . quite unworthy of
the rank and file’. In April 1943, Warner wrote from Cairo to Pierson
Dixon that ‘on the political side the mess is unbelievable. Wanted. A
strong man. We are back in what I imagine to have been the position
before the 4th August, 1936, and I very much sympathise with the
Monarch in letting Metaxas go ahead’.7 Dixon, incidentally, was one
of the few members of the Foreign Office with a sympathetic under-
standing of the Greeks but then his wife, Ismene, the daughter of S.C.
Atchley, translator to the British Legation in Athens, was half Greek.8
No doubt some of these remarks can, and should, be dismissed as
off-the-cuff comments of exasperated, overworked, and literally (in the
torrid and debilitating climate of Cairo) overheated politicians and
diplomats and need not be taken too seriously. But they recur in the
documents far too often to be dismissed altogether and such remarks
undoubtedly afford a revealing insight into the underlying assump-

tions and attitudes of British policy-makers in their dealings with the
Greek government-in-exile. Not to put too fine a point on it, the basic
attitude in British official circles was that the government was an irri-
tating and irrelevant nuisance but one that had perforce to be
tolerated. Yet, paradoxically, the Greek government-in-exile, unlike its
Polish and Yugoslav counterparts, and despite its many crises, was to
survive the war as an intact, if much reshuffled, entity and was to
return to its homeland recognized by the British government not only
as the repository of constitutional legality but with the support of
British troops prepared to back up its authority by force if necessary.
Churchill was prepared to abandon the Polish and Yugoslav govern-
ments-in-exile when confronted with the new military and political
realities in eastern Europe that emerged in the closing months of the
war; but this only increased his determination to install a non-
communist government in Athens on the country’s liberation. Indeed
from the time of the great governmental crisis of April 1944, occa-
sioned by the mutinies in the Greek armed forces in the Middle East,
Britain openly exercised what Rex Leeper termed her right of ‘friendly
intervention’ in Greek political affairs, a right taken for granted and
encouraged by non-communist Greek politicians. From then on, until
the United States in March 1947 assumed the hegemony over Greek
affairs traditionally exercised by Britain, the British government, as
C.M. Woodhouse has written, ‘appointed and dismissed Greek Prime
Ministers with the barest attention to constitutional formalities’.
Hector McNeil, Ernest Bevin’s minister of state at the Foreign Office,
once described Greece to Woodhouse as ‘an Egypt without a Cromer’.9
Before the April 1944 crisis, the degree of British influence exercised
over the government-in-exile had of course been considerable
although, initially at least, less forthright than Emmanouil Tsouderos,
its prime minister, would have wished. Dixon, recording a conversa-
tion in October 1941, wrote that Tsouderos ‘realised that at present
our attitude was one of “non-intervention” in Greek affairs. He hoped
that we should feel able to change this attitude, and take a more direct
part in advising the Greek Government on Greek affairs than we had
been willing to play up to now’. Curiously, Tsouderos further argued
that on account of the ‘intrigues and dissensions’ of the Greeks in
Egypt it was essential that an English official be assigned to advise him
on Greek affairs in both Egypt and Greece.10 The Greek government-
in-exile, then, was a classic example of a ‘penetrated’ political system,
on the margin of Greek affairs throughout most of the occupation but
eventually projected to the forefront of the Greek political stage by the

conjunction of Great Power politics in the later stages of the war.
Tsouderos arrived in Alexandria, with King George II of Greece and
Sir Michael Palairet, the British minister in Athens, at the end of May
1941, after being evacuated from Crete just before the island fell to
German parachute attack. Tsouderos was not a professional politician
and had become prime minister in unusual circumstances. A Cretan,
he had, as governor of the Bank of Greece, fallen foul of Metaxas and
been exiled. When Metaxas died at the end of January 1941, King
George II had replaced him by Alexander Koryzis, the governor of the
National Bank of Greece, who had been Metaxas’ minister of social
security from August 1936 to July 1939. Despite Koryzis’ reputation for
honesty, Palairet doubted whether he had sufficient drive to hold the
government together in the critical circumstances facing Greece and
saw him as the creature of two hard-line Metaxists, Maniadakis, the
minister responsible for internal security, and Diakos. Palairet, early in
February, urged on King George the need to broaden the government
by the inclusion of non-Metaxist politicians. The king replied some-
what ominously that the army would be unable to guarantee its
support if representatives of other political parties were brought into
the government.11 The Germans launched their lightning invasion of
Greece on 6th April and on the 18th of the same month Koryzis, faced
with defeatism in high political and military quarters and with the
prospect of imminent military defeat, shot himself.
Although Palairet had, two days earlier, once again urged on the
king the formation of a ‘real national government which would repre-
sent the whole of Greece in the eyes of Greeks who would be under
German domination’,12 the king still regarded any such move as
premature. Because of the rapidly deteriorating situation, the king
decided that he would henceforth preside over meetings of the minis-
terial council and asked the distinguished Venizelist general,
Alexander Mazarakis, to form a government as vice-president.
Mazarakis, however, withdrew from the post, as he refused to work
with Constantine Maniadakis, whose efficiency as Metaxas’ minister
of public order had rendered him extremely unpopular to the Greek
politikos kosmos (political world). At this critical juncture, however,
Maniadakis enjoyed not only the warm support of King George but of
the commanders of the British expeditionary force in Greece, who
relied on Metaxas’ security apparatus to prevent the disintegration of
all governmental authority in the face of the German onslaught.13
Following General Mazarakis’ withdrawal Tsouderos was sworn in as
prime minister on 21 April and on 23 April the government departed

for Crete. The new government contained a number of prominent
relics of the Metaxas dictatorship, including, besides Maniadakis,
Nikoloudis who, as minister for the press, had been responsible for
press censorship, and Dimitratos who, as minister of labour, had been
responsible for the implementation of Metaxas’ much resented
programme of compulsory arbitration of labour disputes.
Although Crete was believed to be impregnable, it soon fell victim to
operation Merkur, the German airborne invasion, and the government
was once again forced to flee to Egypt. Although he had scarcely had
time to exercise governmental authority within Greece, Tsouderos was
to remain as prime minister until April 1944.14 Besides the remnants of
the Greek armed forces that managed to evacuate to the Middle East,
there were also substantial and long-established Greek communities in
many of the cities of Egypt, particularly Cairo and Alexandria. These
Egyptian Greeks were predominantly Venizelist and anti-monarchist
in their political sympathies and, in a gesture at least partly directed at
them, a number of close associates of Metaxas, including Maniadakis
and Nikoloudis, resigned ministerial office on 2 June 1941. The impact
of this gesture was, however, weakened by their appointment forth-
with as envoys extraordinary and ministers plenipotentiary, and by the
retention in the government of a leading Metaxist, Dimitratos, as
deputy minister of labour. Tsouderos’ token gesture in the direction of
a purge of Metaxists certainly did little to appease the Venizelists, one
of whose stalwarts, Vyron Karapanayiotis, accused Tsouderos and the
king of continuing the regime of ‘The Fourth of August 1936’, as the
Metaxas dictatorship had been known. In a letter to Sophocles
Venizelos, the son of the great liberal statesman Eleftherios Venizelos,
and who regarded himself as the leader of the Liberals, he complained
that Maniadakis was ‘travelling with the luxurious entourage of an
Indian potentate in South America’.15
Moreover, the King of Greece tried to exact a quid pro quo for what
he regarded as his sacrifice of Maniadakis at British behest in the form
of the expulsion of a number of Greeks whom he regarded as polit-
ically undesirable.16 The Foreign Office’s involvement in the king’s
efforts to rid Egypt of the six alleged troublemakers was to occasion
endless trouble and embarrassment. The six, all leading republicans,
were in close contact with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the
wartime organization charged with fomenting resistance in occupied
Europe, and the British and proved for the most part to have im-
peccable records of pro-British sympathies. One of them, Vyron
Karapanayiotis, was to re-emerge as minister for the army in the exile

government in the aftermath of the March 1943 disturbances in the
Greek armed forces in the Middle East. Sir Orme Sargent, the deputy
permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, later conceded that it
had been a mistake to become involved in this particular royal
intrigue.17
The government-in-exile’s first sojourn in Egypt was of limited dura-
tion and in July 1941 the king and his government were moved to
South Africa, from where they travelled to London in September
1941.18 Here they were to remain until March 1943, when they moved
to Egypt. The British authorities remained concerned at the slow pace
of liberalization of the Tsouderos government. These doubts were re-
inforced by a memorandum of 23 September 1941 by E.G. Sebastian,
formerly consul general in Athens and now adviser on Greek affairs at
the British embassy in Cairo. This stressed that ‘Greeks of all shades of
opinion are agreed upon the necessity of Greek government to make
categorical statement without delay reinstating Constitution concern-
ing freedom of the press and individual rights, abolished by the
Metaxas regime. Majority of Greeks fail to understand why dictatorial
methods of Metaxas have not been repudiated and fear their continu-
ance after the war unless abolished now’. Warner in London agreed
with this analysis and with the recommendation that King George II
and the government establish their headquarters in the Middle East,
failing which ‘there will be a serious danger of our finding an anti-
Royalist government established in Greece when the country is
liberated’.19
Tsouderos, while aware of the need to broaden his government with
some politicians from Greece – Panayiotis Kanellopoulos and
Alexander Mylonas were among the names mentioned – complained
that Sebastian and his fellow adviser on Greek affairs, Thomas
Bowman, were simply reflecting the views of Greeks opposed to the
king and government. Tsouderos did, however, agree to promulgate,
on 28 October 1941, the anniversary of the Italian ultimatum to
Greece, a decree officially terminating the regime of ‘The Fourth of
August 1936’. However, news of this decree was not broadcast to
Greece until December and its general import was unclear. Dixon
reported that Tsouderos was hesitant to ‘dot the i’s’ for fear of giving a
lever to the ‘old gang politicians’, who might then reconstitute the
parliament dissolved in August 1936 and claim that this represented
the legal government of Greece.20 In the light of such half-measures
the British authorities remained unhappy about the slow pace at
which Tsouderos was liquidating the legacy of the Metaxas regime, a

dilatoriness which was playing into the hands of republican Greeks.
Further moves in this direction were made in early February 1942
when the suspension on 4 August 1936 of articles 5, 6, 10, 12, 14, 20
and 95 of the 1911 Constitution was declared null and void and
Dimitratos removed from the government.
His removal was the occasion of one of SOE Cairo’s major political
blunders in the early part of the war. This, besides provoking the fury
of the Tsouderos government, placed considerable strain on the
Foreign Office’s relations with SOE. SOE at this time controlled a ‘Black
Propaganda’ broadcasting station in Jerusalem, one of whose trans-
missions was known as the ‘Free Voice of Greece’. The Free Voice of
Greece sought rather ineffectually to maintain the fiction that it was
broadcasting clandestinely from within Greece. One obvious way of
getting round the problem of obtaining up-to-date material from
within Greece was to adopt an editorial line that differed radically
from that of the BBC broadcasting from London and to reflect views
and opinions as they were believed to exist in Greece rather than as
they were enunciated by the government-in-exile. Three days after
Dimitratos was eased out of the government on 4 February, the Free
Voice of Greece proclaimed that ‘the Greek Government continues the
Metaxas dictatorship in London. It continues as a travesty of Italian
and German fascism in London . . . while they [i.e. those fighting on
the Albanian front and Crete] died, the 4th of August continued in
London with Dimitratos and Nikoloudis the right hand man of
Metaxas . . . Papadakis of the fascist Neolaia and Maniadakis, murderer
of A. Michalakopoulos and thousands of others . . .’.21 Not surprisingly,
this kind of propaganda was altogether too ‘black’ for the Foreign
Office and for the more responsible elements in SOE Cairo, although
had Tsouderos and the king been less grudging in distancing them-
selves from the legacy of the Metaxas dictatorship, SOE would have
lacked the pretext for such a broadcast.
One apparent consequence of this episode was that Sebastian, now
the minister of state in the Middle East’s adviser on Greek affairs, was
shunted off to Gothenburg to be replaced by Edward Warner of the
Southern Department, who was less sympathetic to the cause of the
Greek republicans. The public image of the Tsouderos government
was, however, to receive a considerable boost with the arrival in Cairo
in May 1942 of Panayiotis Kanellopoulos, who had recently escaped
from Greece. The leader of the small Enotikon Komma (Unity Party),
and reckoned to be one of the rising stars in the Greek political
firmament, Kanellopoulos became deputy prime minister and minister

of war. As the bulk of the free Greek forces was in the Middle East,
Kanellopoulos remained in Cairo, with the rest of the government still
in London. At the same time Maniadakis was finally deprived of office
and the remaining Metaxists in the government were removed from
key jobs.
Diehard anti-Metaxists such as Sophocles Venizelos were still
unhappy about the political complexion of the Tsouderos govern-
ment,22 but the government could now reasonably be declared to be
free of Metaxist taint. New problems were, however, beginning to
confront the government and to occasion further friction between the
British ‘patron’ and her Greek ‘clients’. These were, in ascending order
of importance: the question of Greece’s postwar territorial settlement;
relations with the various resistance movements that began to get
under way during the winter of 1941–42; and the future of the monar-
chy, in the light of persistent reports of an overwhelming upsurge of
republican sentiment in Greece.
Even before the occupation of Greece, Britain had been confronted
with questions that had major implications for Greece’s post-war
boundaries. In April 1941, when the fall of mainland Greece appeared
imminent, King George asked the British minister in Athens, Palairet,
whether, if Crete fell, the Greek government might be evacuated to
Cyprus. Charalambos Simopoulos, the Greek minister in London,
stressed the importance attached by the Greek government, if they
should be driven from Greek territory, ‘that they should enjoy sover-
eignty in a part of Cyprus’. Eden and the chiefs of staff were agreeable
to such a move, though cautious about conceding sovereignty.23 The
Colonial Office, however, was strongly opposed to any such move for
fear of the stimulus it might give to enosist sentiment, particularly as
there were already strong convictions on the island that Cyprus would
be ceded to Greece after the war. As the officer administering the
government of Cyprus put it to the secretary of state for the colonies,
‘I feel bound to state that in the special circumstances of Cyprus pres-
ence of King and his Government here would render position of this
government almost impossible. All loyalties would be centred on King
of Greece who would be considered by most Cypriots as their King’.24
Immediately after the fall of Crete, Eden was fearful that the Germans
might follow up their victory in Crete with a strike against Cyprus and
secure a major propaganda coup by formally ceding sovereignty over
Cyprus to the Greek puppet government in Athens. To counter such a
move, he advocated to the War Cabinet that the British government
be prepared to issue a declaration to the effect that the British and

Greek governments were agreed to discuss the conditions under which
Greek sovereignty over the island would be recognized after the war.25
Once again, however, the Colonial Office, fearful of the precedent
such a declaration would create for Britain’s other colonial territories,
strongly objected to the proposal.
Soon after arriving in South Africa in July 1941, Tsouderos, in
conversation with the British high commissioner in Pretoria, had
alluded to Greece’s postwar territorial claims, which included adjust-
ments in Greece’s borders with Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, and
had hinted at Greek claims to Cyprus and the Dodecanese.26 Once the
government was established in London, Tsouderos again took up the
question of Greece’s postwar claims. The Foreign Office’s position was
succinctly stated in a brief prepared for a meeting between Eden and
Tsouderos on 5 December 1941, following a somewhat irredentist
speech made by Tsouderos to the Greek community in London, the
implications of which had alarmed the Southern Department.
Tsouderos had already been informed by His Majesty’s Government
that ‘in regard to Macedonia it would be most undesirable that any
question of territorial adjustment should be raised at this stage with
the Yugoslav government. In regard to the Dodecanese, Southern
Albania and Cyprus, they must make it plain that in their view it is
premature to raise at this stage questions of future territorial adjust-
ments after the war. They accordingly deprecate statements alluding,
even in veiled language, to Greek claims to these territories, which are
bound to create a false impression’.27 Needless to say, the Greek
government was reluctant to maintain such a low profile with regard
to future territorial claims and relations between the British govern-
ment and the Greeks were soured from time to time by questions of
Greece’s postwar settlement. A major crisis blew up after Eden’s state-
ment in December 1942 that the British government looked forward
to the re-establishment of Albanian independence. This was inter-
preted by the Greek government as prejudging the question of
Greece’s territorial claims in ‘Northern Epirus’, an extensive area of
southern Albania inhabited by Orthodox Christians, a significant
number of them ethnic Greeks, although Eden went out of his way
privately to reassure the Greeks that this was not so. Such was the
strength of feeling on the Greek side that Kanellopoulos was only with
difficulty persuaded not to resign over the issue.28 Had the campaign
succeeded to seize the Dodecanese at the time of the Italian surrender
in the autumn of 1943, the failure of which earned for General ‘Jumbo’
Wilson the Churchillian epithet ‘The Wizard of Cos’, then a major

Anglo-Greek crisis over sovereignty might have ensued. But rapid
German counter moves averted this possibility.
A more potent source of friction than the question of territorial
claims was the question of relations between the various British
authorities involved, on the one hand, and the Greek government, on
the other, with the various resistance movements active in Greece, the
most important of which was the communist-controlled National
Liberation Front (EAM). The fact, however, that the government-in-
exile, as did the British Foreign Office, consistently underrated the
potential of resistance in occupied Greece, not least because those
most actively involved in resistance activities for the most part were
no respecters of King George and his government, prevented this issue
from being the occasion of conflict that it might have been. There is a
curious identity, indeed, between the views of Tsouderos as to the
value, and indeed the justification, of resistance with those of the
Foreign Office. In a letter of 17 July 1943, written immediately after
the Animals operation, whose purpose was to delude the Germans
through large-scale guerrilla activity into expecting an invasion of
Greece rather than Sicily, Tsouderos wrote to Leeper that:
Today all your expenses for the secret warfare of the guerillas are in
vain and still more are our sacrifices in lives and material used for
these secret operations.
The profit you get out of these operations is small when
compared to your enormous financial expenses for this type of
warfare and to the reprisals taken by the enemy against us, by
executions, expulsions, setting fire to villages and towns, rape of
women etc. and all else that the enemy practices in revenge for the
relatively unimportant acts of sabotage of the guerilla groups.29
This kind of attitude accorded well with the Foreign office’s wish a
few months earlier to suspend SOE operations in Greece and engage in
a policy of what was termed ‘inactive sabotage’30 (whatever that might
be), a panic-stricken reaction to the news that Brigadier E.C.W. Myers,
the commander of the British Military Mission, had been engaging in
political discussions with the various factions within the Greek resist-
ance. Orme Sargent went even further and, in a minute written as late
as 23 January 1944, wrote that ‘the truth, of course, is that the whole
guerilla movement in Greece has been largely fiction created by SOE to
justify a vast expenditure of money and raw material in that country’.31
The British military authorities in the Middle East, the Chiefs of

Staff, and SOE placed a much higher value than did the Foreign Office
on the Greek resistance, particularly following the successful demoli-
tion of the Gorgopotamos viaduct, carrying the Athens–Salonica
railway, in November 1942. Fearful, however, of the lax security of the
government-in-exile (Tsouderos for a time was actually living in
Shepheard’s Hotel), the military and SOE kept the government-in-exile
almost completely in the dark about their activities in Greece.
Kanellopoulos was the only minister to be taken even partially into
British confidence over clandestine operations in Greece32 and the
government never appears officially to have been informed of the
decision to parachute Myers and his second-in-command, Colonel
C.M. Woodhouse, with a team of sappers, into Greece at the end of
September 1942 to blow up the Gorgopotamos viaduct, or of the
subsequent decision to order the Harling party to stay behind in Greece
and form a permanent liaison with the Greek resistance. The Greek
sources contain numerous references to the cavalier way in which the
government was treated by those British authorities with responsibil-
ity for sabotage and intelligence-gathering activities in Greece.
Sophocles Venizelos, at this time minister of marine and aviation, at a
meeting with Churchill towards the end of 1943, demanded that the
Greek government should have the initiative, in close co-operation
with the British, in any further activities in Greece. Otherwise, he
threatened, his continued membership of the government would be
impossible. According to Venizelos, Churchill promised to remedy the
situation,33 although there was no noticeable improvement in the
Greek government’s knowledge of, let alone control of, events in
Greece.
In 1942, in an attempt to pay at least lip-service to the notion of co-
operation between the British authorities and the Greek government,
an ‘Anglo-Greek Committee’ had been set up. This consisted of repre-
sentatives of the Greek government, the Foreign office, SOE, the
Political Warfare Executive, and the General Headquarters, Middle
East. In theory all activities related to resistance in Greece were
supposed to come under the aegis of this committee. In reality,
however, it was, in the words of George Taylor, a leading functionary
of SOE, ‘a complete farce because in order not to provoke tremendous
trouble from the Greek government, the Committee only discussed
plans in Greece which were acceptable to the Greek government and
mostly discussed quite mythical Royalist organisations, such as the Six
Colonels in Athens, which never had any real substance at all’.34 For a
time grandiose plans were elaborated to co-ordinate all resistance in

Greece in support of King George and the exile government through
this committee of six colonels, but after Colonel Woodhouse had
discovered that the committee was less interested in active resistance
than in plotting global strategy from Athens35 and after the shooting
of Major Ioannis Tsigantis, who had been sent into Greece to co-
ordinate these plans, the Anglo-Greek Committee faded into oblivion.
Ironically, however, although Tsouderos consistently underrated the
importance of the resistance within Greece and overrated the
manoeuvrings and intrigues of the politikos kosmos, or traditional polit-
ical establishment, his own downfall in April 1944 was the immediate
outcome of mutinies within the free Greek forces that were prompted
by sympathy for, but not directly instigated by, the communist led
resistance, EAM. Only in 1944 did the government-in-exile become
fully aware of the political potential of the resistance and only then
did it realize that the political running in Greece would be made by the
resistance rather than by cliques of politicians in Cairo or Athens.
The principal issue, however, which was to dominate relations
between the British and Greek governments was the future of the
monarchy in Greece. Greece, in Orme Sargent’s words ‘is and always
has been a vital British interest’.36 The conventional wisdom in the
Southern Department of the Foreign Office was that a politically stable
Greece, and hence one well disposed towards Britain, was best assured
by a regime of constitutional monarchy. Moreover, Britain’s support
for King George had been enhanced by his courageous behaviour at
the time of the Italian and German occupations. Added to this was the
strong personal rapport that developed between Churchill and the
anglicized King George II, who was a cousin of King George VI, had
passed the years of his exile in Brown’s Hotel in London, and habitu-
ally referred to his Greek subjects as ‘they’.
The underlying assumptions of Britain’s wartime policy towards
Greece were cogently summarized by Pierson Dixon of the Southern
Department to Henry Hopkinson in Cairo in a draft letter of 9
September 1942:
There is no question of imposing the King on the Greek people by

British bayonets. At the same time, we owe the King a great deal for
holding the nation together at the time of the German attack, and
it would probably suit British interests best that he should return to
his throne after the war. Furthermore, it is generally agreed that a
liberal constitutional monarchy is the regime which best suits the
modern Greeks and that the peculiar demagogic Greek tempera-

ment is not ideal for democracy in its most advanced forms.37
Unfortunately for the calculations of the Foreign Office, however,

there was a marked upsurge of anti-monarchical feeling in a Greece
experiencing the stress of tripartite German, Italian, and Bulgarian
occupation and, during the winter of 1941–42, the effects of an
appalling famine. The people’s bitterness and resentment was focused
on the king. It was felt that he had actively encouraged the dictator
Metaxas, who was viewed as the prime cause of all their miseries. As
early as July 1941, Lincoln MacVeagh, the United States ambassador in
Athens, was reporting back to Washington that ‘fiery Venizelists, like
Mr George Melas, Mr Papandreou and General Mazarakis, have urged
me to realize that the King can never come back, no matter what
happens, and have begged me to tell my government not to let the
British attempt to impose him on an unwilling country’.38
Information filtering out of Greece tended to confirm this view that
there was a rising tide of republicanism within the country. In a letter
of March 1942 to Sargent, Gladwyn Jebb, chief executive officer of
Hugh Dalton, who as minister of economic warfare had overall respon-
sibility for SOE, wrote that information reaching SOE in Cairo, which
in many respects was better-placed to assess the trend of opinion in
Greece than the Foreign Office, suggested that the gulf that had devel-
oped between the Greek King and his people might soon become
unbridgeable.39
The Foreign Office was certainly well aware, as Warner put it, ‘of the
somewhat precarious hold of the King on the affection of his
subjects’.40 To remedy this it embarked on a policy of ‘selling’ the king
and his government to the Greek people, although King George
himself was under the extraordinary impression that the Foreign
Office was ‘pro-Republican and anti-himself’, a view which he
expressed to the Director of Naval Intelligence in March 1942. At
about the same time a close woman friend of the king told Harold
Caccia of the Foreign Office that King George felt that if he failed to
return to Greece ‘the blame would very largely attach to the Foreign
Office and their agents’.41 King George was also deeply suspicious of
the BBC Greek Service and fought a long, but ultimately unsuccessful,
battle to secure the removal of his principal bugbear, G.N. Soteriadis,
a Venizelist stalwart. An official of the Political Intelligence
Department of the Foreign Office in a ‘very rough draft’ of the policy
to be adopted by the Greek Service wrote that ‘one of the chief tasks of
British propaganda is to do everything possible to enhance the prestige

of the King with the Greek people’. The Greek Service, however, put up
a vigorous fight to thwart Political Warfare Executive attempts to exer-
cise control over the content of its broadcasts to Greece.42
Whatever King George’s problems with the British authorities, imag-
inary in the case of the Foreign Office, actual in the case of the BBC,
he could count on the wholehearted support of Churchill, who, in
March 1943, issued a directive urging support for the king and the
government-in-exile. In April 1943 the king wrote to Churchill from
Cairo that this directive was ‘starting to produce excellent results and
will lead to an enormous improvement in conditions regarding Greek
affairs in this part of the world’.43 King George, however, was living in
a dream world and his position was increasingly under attack both
within and without Greece. Myers, the commander of the British mili-
tary mission to the Greek resistance, reported on the insistent demand
he had met in Greece that the king should agree to submit to a
plebiscite on the issue of the monarchy before returning to Greece on
liberation. The Foreign Office, however, was inclined to dismiss this as
an idea originating in ‘one or two self-interested groups of guerillas in
Greece, who cannot possibly claim to represent the general feelings of
the Greek people’.44 A crisis of discipline within the Greek armed
forces in the Middle East forced king and government to move from
London to Cairo in March 1943. Kanellopoulos resigned and a number
of leading Venizelists entered the government, including Vyron
Karapanayiotis, George Roussos and Sophocles Venizelos. By June
1943, the anomalous situation had developed that, out of a total of
nine ministers in the government, five were declared Venizelists, and
the remaining four of Venizelist background.45 These developments
were accompanied by increasingly insistent demands from the polit-
icians within Greece that the king should pledge that he would not
return to Greece unless summoned by the popular will. At the
beginning of May, a memorandum, signed by Th. Sophoulis, G.
Kaphandaris, George Papandreou, St. Gonatas, Petros Rallis, and
A. Mylonas, arrived in Cairo. This declared that it would be a
‘monstrous error’ for the king to return before a plebiscite.
In response to these various pressures the king issued a rather vague
declaration on 4 July 1943 that he would respect the will of the people
over the constitutional issue and guaranteed that general elections to
a constituent assembly would be held within six months of liberation.
This did little to appease his critics, however, and in August 1943 a
major political crisis blew up over his future. This was occasioned by
the unexpected arrival in Cairo in that month of six delegates of the

Greek resistance organizations. The Tsouderos government had not
been forewarned of their arrival, which precipitated a major crisis in
the affairs of the exile government and its relations with King George
II. The guerrilla delegation, which was accompanied by Brigadier
Myers, included four representatives of the communist-inspired
EAM/ELAS, and one each of the non-communist but also republican
National Republican Greek League (EDES) and National and Social
Liberation (EKKA). The arrival in Cairo of the six guerrilla delegates,
together with the fortuitous arrival of George Exindaris as a represen-
tative of the centre politicians in Athens, afforded a unique
opportunity during the occupation to bridge the large gulf that had
opened up between the resistance organizations in the Greek moun-
tains, the Greek politicians still in Athens, the government-in-exile
and the king in the Middle East, and the British authorities. Leeper
realized this at once and was anxious to form ‘an all-embracing coali-
tion government under the King’.46 The Foreign Office was far from
enthusiastic about this proposal, fearing that such a government
would be ‘overwhelmingly Republican if not communist’,47 where-
upon Leeper lost his enthusiasm for any such radical restructuring of
the government. Matters were further complicated by the declaration
of the six guerrillas, in which they were joined by Exindaris and
Kanellopoulos, as ‘representative of the greatest part of Greek public
opinion’, that the king should not return to Greece before the Greek
people had had the opportunity to pronounce on the form of the
constitution. On 19 August, Tsouderos and his cabinet also lent their
authority to this demand, which, they maintained, represented the
will ‘of the great majority of the Greek people’.48
While King George sought the advice of Churchill and Roosevelt,
meeting in conference in Quebec, Leeper made a clumsy attempt to
ship the guerrillas back to Greece against their will and before they had
completed their mission. This attempt was foiled at the last minute
and did little to diminish the atmosphere of crisis prevailing in Cairo.
This was further heightened when the guerrillas stepped up their
demands to include their holding of three portfolios in the govern-
ment, those of the interior, war, and justice, actually on Greek
territory. Leeper gave no encouragement to these demands and neither
did the Tsouderos government, which clearly recognized the threat
which this demand represented to its authority. Moreover, both
Churchill and Roosevelt backed up King George in his refusal to accede
to the demand that he commit himself to a plebiscite before returning.
Leeper, who had earlier advocated that the king make some conces-
sions over the constitutional issue, was further alarmed to hear from
Tsouderos early in September that the king was considering the for-
mation of a non-political government on the Yugoslav model. The
guerrilla delegation now returned to Greece in a thoroughly disgrun-
tled state of mind, and the warm expressions of support which the
king had received from Churchill, and to a lesser extent, Roosevelt,
lent plausibility to EAM’s claims that the British were preparing to foist
King George on the Greek people by force if necessary.
Within a few weeks of their return, civil war had broken out between
EAM/ELAS and EDES, partly as a consequence of the failure of the Cairo
mission. In an effort to cut the ground from under EAM/ELAS, Eden
proposed to the War Cabinet in mid-November that aid to EAM/ELAS,
which had been broken off on commencement of the internecine fight-
ing, should not be renewed. Instead, an effort was to be made to win
over what was believed to be the moderate rank and file of the commu-
nist-controlled resistance, which would then, together with the
resistance bands of Napoleon Zervas’s EDES, seek incorporation into
the Greek regular army. To facilitate such large-scale defections the
king was to declare publicly that he would not return to Greece until
invited to do so by a properly constituted and representative govern-
ment. Both Churchill and Eden favoured such a policy but the king,
backed by Roosevelt for reasons that are not fully clear, refused and the
whole plan foundered. The king did, however, somewhat amplify his
declaration of 4 July by stating on 8 November 1943 that, at the
moment of liberation, he would re-examine the question of the timing
of his return to Greece. This was interpreted by the Tsouderos govern-
ment as implying that the king would secure its agreement before
reaching a final decision.49 The king showed no great enthusiasm for a
scheme whereby Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens should be secretly
vested with the powers of regent, in readiness to assume power at the
moment of German withdrawal. The king’s stubborn inflexibility exas-
perated Eden, who, as mentioned above, minuted on 30 March 1944
that ‘I have had many dealings with the King in recent years and I fear
that I am forced increasingly to the conclusion that he is little, if any,
more to be relied upon in his records of opinions or events than the
Greeks he abuses so freely’. A few days later he wrote ‘the King is not
wise and he is obstinate. It is in my judgement increasingly unlikely
that he will ever return to Greece as King, and stay there’.50
Although King George’s obduracy prevented any radical new initia-
tives in British policy, an agreement was patched up between the
warring resistance groups by the Plaka agreement at the end of

February 1944. But hardly had a rather uneasy truce settled on the
resistance than EAM issued a direct challenge to the authority of the
Tsouderos government. This was the announcement, in mid-March, of
the creation of a Political Committee of National Liberation (PEEA),
whose function was to oversee the administration of those substantial
areas of free mountain Greece controlled by EAM/ELAS. Although
PEEA did not claim to be a provisional government, and indeed
repeated EAM’s earlier call to Tsouderos to begin negotiations for the
creation of a government of national unity, its creation represented a
clear challenge to the authority and legitimacy of the Tsouderos
government. That this was so was quickly appreciated by EAM’s
sympathizers within the Greek armed forces stationed in the Middle
East. These instigated large-scale mutinies at the end of March and
demanded the establishment of a government of national unity, based
on PEEA. Churchill ordered determined action to terminate the
mutinies, but they were not put down without provoking the severest
crisis in the government-in-exile of the whole wartime period.
Tsouderos resigned and, on his advice, King George appointed
Sophocles Venizelos prime minister on 14 April. Venizelos proved
totally ineffectual in the crisis and on 26 April he was replaced by
George Papandreou, recently arrived, like some deus ex machina, from
Greece. Papandreou, a prominent Liberal politician who had served
under Eleftherios Venizelos as minister of education, was also mili-
tantly anti-communist. Small wonder that Leeper called him ‘the man
of the hour . . . a breath of fresh air in the overcharged atmosphere of
Greek Cairo’.51
EAM joined Papandreou in denouncing the mutinies as harmful to
the Allied war effort and, together with PEEA, ELAS (the military arm
of EAM), and the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) accepted his invi-
tation to send delegates to a conference summoned in the Lebanon in
May to resolve the profound political crisis occasioned by the
mutinies. In all, 25 delegates, two of whom were communists, repre-
senting 17 political groups and resistance organizations, attended the
Lebanon Conference. Leeper was also in discreet attendance at a
neighbouring village, although his American counterpart, Lincoln
MacVeagh, declined Leeper’s invitation to accompany him for fear
that he compromise America’s established policy ‘which couples aloof-
ness from internal politics with interest in the welfare of the whole
nation’.52 Papandreou, an exceptionally agile politician, succeeded in
forcing the heavily outnumbered left-wing delegates to the Lebanon
conference onto the defensive and secured their adherence to the

Lebanon agreement of 20 May, the crucial clause of which provided
for the placing of all guerrilla formations, the likely arbiters of Greece’s
political future, under the command of the new Government of
National Unity that was to be formed under Papandreou’s premier-
ship. In a government of 20, 5 relatively insignificant posts were
reserved for EAM representatives.
It soon became clear, however, that the EAM Central Committee in
Greece was deeply unhappy about the concessions made by the left-
wing delegates at the Lebanon conference. It both refused to accept
the ministerial posts offered and stepped up its demands. The most
important of these were the retention of ELAS, by far the largest and
best equipped military force in Greece, in its existing form and, in a
smaller cabinet of 15, the ministries of the interior, justice, education,
labour, and public welfare, together with the under-secretaryship of
the army. Some of these posts, EAM further demanded, should be held
in ‘Free Mountain Greece’. Papandreou was under no illusions as to
the implications of these demands, if accepted, for the authority and
credibility of his government when it returned to Greece on liberation,
and a stalemate developed in relations between his new government
and EAM in Greece.
But, unknown to either Papandreou or the Greek left, an entirely
new factor had entered into the Greek political equation. This was the
agreement reached between Churchill and Stalin over spheres of influ-
ence in the Balkans. It would seem that the idea of formalizing a
trade-off of Russian predominance in Romania for British predomin-
ance in Greece was triggered by the conjunction of the April mutinies
in the Greek armed forces in Egypt with the Red Army’s push into
Bessarabia. Already in April 1944 Churchill was talking about giving
the Russians the lead in Romania and was clearly expecting a recipro-
cal facility in Greece. In mid-May Eden informed the War Cabinet that
he had formally put it to the Russians ‘that if they wished us to allow
them to take take the lead in Romania, that they should be prepared to
reciprocate by allowing His Majesty’s Government to do likewise in
Greece’. The Russians had agreed but had asked whether the Americans
approved.53 Roosevelt, against the opposition of his Secretary of State,
Cordell Hull, agreed to such an arrangement for an initial period of
three months. The arrangement was subsequently widened to
embrace, in addition to Romania and Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and
Hungary, and was regularized at Churchill’s meeting with Stalin in
Moscow in October 1944. At this meeting the ‘percentages agreement’
was formalized. Britain was to enjoy a 90 per cent preponderance in

Greece, while Russia’s interest was placed at 10 per cent. The figures
were precisely reversed in the case of Romania.54
This agreement overshadowed all subsequent developments in
Greece and, although there is no direct evidence in substantiation, it
is possible that it was advice given by Stalin and relayed by a Soviet
military mission which arrived at ELAS headquarters at the end of July
1944 that prompted EAM to drop its previous hard line and agree to
participate in Papandreou’s Government of National Unity. Such
advice would certainly have accorded with Soviet policy in the other
countries of eastern Europe. It is certainly an interesting coincidence
that this dramatic change of line on the part of EAM occurred within
a week of Colonel Popov’s arrival in the mountains. On the other hand
it is also possible that EAM was moved to enter the Papandreou
government not so much as a result of Russian instructions as by the
realization that Stalin was not much interested Greece. Entry into the
government may have seemed the only way of avoiding political isola-
tion. For whatever reason, six EAM nominees were duly sworn into the
government early in September 1944 and, as had been provided for in
the original Lebanon agreement, the commanders of ELAS and EDES
agreed at Caserta on 26 September to place their respective forces
under the command of the Papandreou government. Papandreou in
turn placed them, together with the Greek forces in the Middle East
and Italy, under the command of Lieutenant-General Ronald Scobie,
the commander of the small (considerably smaller than Churchill
himself would have wished) force that was to accompany the Greek
government back to Greek soil on the withdrawal of the Germans.
The Papandreou government that arrived on liberated Greek soil on
18 October, then, was a genuine coalition, recognized as the legitimate
government of Greece by the allies, in theoretical command of all mili-
tary formations in Greece and ultimately backed by the force of British
arms. Within less than two months its legitimacy was put to a severe
challenge in the communist insurgency of December 1944 and the
king, who had not returned with his government, was forced to accept
what he had long and bitterly fought against, the appointment of
Archbishop Damaskinos as regent. The reasons for this turn of events
lie outside the scope of this chapter. What must be stressed here is
that, thanks to high level horse-trading between Churchill and Stalin,
a dramatic change had been wrought, within the space of a few
months, in the fortunes of the Greek government-in-exile. An
insignificant and demoralized exile government, which the British
government had despised and kept in deliberate ignorance of many

aspects of British policy towards Greece, and one which commanded
little loyalty either inside or outside the country, had been trans-
formed from a rump of squabbling politicians into a national
government that was to enjoy, if only briefly, the illusion that it was a
government that was truly representative of the people of Greece.
Notes
1 Anglo-Greek Attitudes: an Introduction

1. An even more striking visual image of this troubled relationship is afforded
by the triptych of photographs taken by Dimitri Kessel, the Time-Life
photographer, of British troops bivouacked in the Acropolis Museum
during the December 1944 fighting and pictured resting their weaponry on
the archaic statuary, Ellada tou ’44, (Athens, 1994), p. 176.
2. The Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander
Cadogan, and Churchill’s assistant private secretary, John Colville, both
testified to the degree to which during December 1944 Churchill’s atten-
tion was focused on the Greek crisis, more or less to the exclusion of all
else, despite the critical state of the war elsewhere in Europe, David Dilks,
ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, O.M. 1938–1945 (London, 1971),
p. 688 and J.W. Wheeler-Bennett, ed., Action this Day, (London, 1968),
pp. 51–2. On Churchill’s consuming interest in Greek affairs during the
Second World War, see Thanasis D. Sfikas, ‘“The people at the top can do
these things which others can’t do”: Winston Churchill and the Greeks,
1940–45’, Journal of Contemporary History, XXVI (1991), pp. 307–31.
3. Public Record Office FO 371/29817, R9591.
4. Churchill had offered membership of the Commonwealth to the French at
the time of the fall of France.
5. FO 371/58678 R 3496, quoted in Heinz Richter, British Intervention in
Greece: from Varkiza to Civil War: February 1945 to August 1946 (London,
1986), pp. 423–5.
6. The complex history of Greece under German occupation is elucidated in
John Hondros, Occupation and Resistance: the Greek Agony 1941–1944
(London, 1983); Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: the Experience of
Occupation, 1941–1944 (London, 1993); Procopis Papastratis, British Policy
towards Greece during the Second World War 1941–1944 (Cambridge, 1984)
and C.M. Woodhouse, The Struggle for Greece, 1941–1949 (London, 1976).
7. British policy and resistance movements in Greece: report by Major D.J.
Wallace on his visit to Greece, 14 July–9 August, 1943, FO 371/37213,
R8419.
8. On 12 March 1947, Time not only paid ‘Historian Toynbee’ the accolade of
putting him on the cover of the magazine but declared, with characteristic
hyperbole, that he had ‘found history Ptolemaic and left it Copernican’,
William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: a Life (New York, 1989), p. 216.
9. In Experiences, a memoir which he wrote towards the end of his life, he
wrote that ‘the School’s role was to serve as a headquarters and as a rest-
house where one could recuperate during brief intervals between hiking
campaigns’ (London, 1969), p. 21.
10. XX1 (1985) v–xi, pp. 1–117.
11. Burrows’ enthusiasm for everything Greek is epitomised in this passage
166
Notes 167
from an article that appeared in the Contemporary Review for February 1919:
‘the Greek race is not decadent, not on the down grade, but on the up
grade – fertile, expressive, constantly expanding. It has at its head one of
the great men of the century [ie Venizelos], a man who fulfils in his own
person the ideals and aspirations of the race’. Not all members of the Greek
community in Britain were well disposed towards him, see, for instance, P.
Katapodes, Pseudophilhellenes: a Letter to E. Venizelos on the Duplicity of
Principal Burrows of King’s College (London, 1917). One happy outcome of
the publication of Politics and the Academy was an invitation to write the
entry on Burrows, a pioneeer in the development of area studies in British
universities, for The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons
(Oxford, 1993) ed. C.S. Nicholls, pp. 106–7.
12. In his letter of condolences to Burrows’ wife on learning of his death in
May 1920, Venizelos wrote that ‘I wish he could have been spared to visit
and see with his own eyes the “Greater Greece” for which he has worked
as few have. He would indeed have experienced the secret satisfaction of
knowing that he had not laboured in vain’, Venizelos Archive 267, Benaki
Museum, Athens.
13. According to Dimitri Kitsikis, George Glasgow consulted these papers in
the Legation when writing his Ronald Burrows: a Memoir (London 1924),
Propagande et pressions en politique internationale. La Grèce et ses revendica-
tions à la Conférence de la Paix (1919–1920), (Paris, 1963), p. 459. Professor
Kitsikis likewise made extensive use of the archives of the London Legation
in writing his book. Subsequent to the publication of my book, Dr Philip
Carabott kindly unearthed a number of documents in the archives of the
Greek Foreign Ministry bearing on the foundation of the chair and the
subsequent controversy. From these it is interesting to note that the chargé
d’affaires at the Greek Legation in London did not regard Toynbee as being
motivated by a ‘deeply rooted spirit of mishellenism or by fanatical
turcophilia’ but rather by an exaggerated wish to appear even handed,
despatch to the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 13 March 1923. Likewise,
A.A. Pallis, who headed the Greek Commission for the Welfare of Refugees
in Istanbul, considered Toynbee to be ‘the type of intellectual investigating
questions in a clearly objective spirit and free of fanaticism’. Rather than
being inspired by anti-Greek ideas, Toynbee considered Greece to be a
victim of the policies of the British prime minister, Lloyd George, who had
propelled Greece, for selfish reasons, into an adventure in Asia Minor that
was beyond her powers, despatch to the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Athens, 24 April 1923. Dimitrios Caclamanos, the Greek minister in
London, on the other hand, considered that Toynbee had been trans-
formed into ‘an apostle of anti-Greek propaganda’. While academic
freedom was a value that should be respected, it was difficult to accept that
a ‘professor of Byzantine and modern Greek history and literature should
metamorphose into a one-sided prosecutor of everything that is Greek and
counsel for the Turks’, Caclamanos to the Greek Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, 4 January 1924. Athos Romanos, the Greek minister in Paris, like-
wise regarded Toynbee as an ‘instrument of anti-Greek propaganda’,
Romanos to the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 30 March 1923.
14. Now that Boards of Studies have ceased to exist at the University of
168 Notes
London, the 100 year rule has been lifted and a 30 year rule applies.
Personnel files at King’s College remain subject to an 80 year rule, five
years longer than that applied by the Vatican, a notoriously secretive insti-
tution. Access can be granted earlier if the individual is dead and subject to
their not containing material likely to prove objectionable to members of
the family. It is characteristic that although the imbroglio over the Koraes
Chair caused major ructions in the Faculty of Arts in the College over a
period of several years, there is no mention of it in Gordon Huelin’s King’s
College London: a History Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the College,
published in 1978. In his A Centenary History of King’s College London
(London, 1928), F.J.C. Hearnshaw, without mentioning Toynbee by name,
did touch briefly on the controversy. Referring to the establishment of four
new departments in the College during the First World War (Slavonic,
Spanish, Portuguese and modern Greek) he observed that ‘the fact that
governments and politicians were interested in these modern linguistic
chairs had advantages in securing money and promises of money . . .
although the actual payment of foreign government grants proved to be
liable to frequent interruption by revolution or change of administration’.
Moreover, reliance on foreign subsidy had ‘the grave disadvantage that the
holder of these subsidized seats found his academic freedom compromised.
He was expected to teach what was agreeable to his patrons’, 466–7.
Additional information on the early years of the School of Slavonic Studies,
when it still formed a part of King’s College, is contained in my ‘Marcu
Beza and the Development of Romanian Studies in England’, in I.
Agrigoroaiei, G. Buzatu and V. Cristian, eds, Români in Istoria Universală,
IIIa (Jassy, 1988), pp. 351–65.
15. Inevitably, the controversy did not pass unnoticed in Turkey. Indeed, once
Toynbee’s resignation had become public knowledge, Yusuf Kemal the
Turkish minister in London, approached him with the offer of a teaching
position at the University of Istanbul, an offer in which Toynbee expressed
considerable interest in principle. Muallim Cevdet, a Turkish teacher, at
much the same time pointed to the way in which rich Greeks were
prepared to dig into their pockets to fund chairs in European capitals and
specifically referred to Toynbee’s problems in the Koraes Chair. He attrib-
uted the sympathy enjoyed by the Greek cause to Greek cultivation of
European scholars, ‘Rum mesai ilmiyesi’, in Mektep ve medrese (Istanbul,
1978), pp. 115–23, quoted in Pinelopi Stathi, ‘Skepseis enos Tourkou
daskalou gia ton Elliniko Philologiko Syllogo’, I kath’imas Anatoli. Periodiko
ekdosi tou Syndesmou tou en Athinais Megaloskholiton, II (1994), pp. 246–7.
Cevdet attributed greater power and authority to the famous Greek Literary
Association of Constantinople (O en Konstantinoupolei Ellinikos Philologikos
Syllogos) than to the Greek state itself, an exaggeration but one containing
a kernel of truth. In introducing in the Greek Parliament in 1917 (Law
1064 Peri khorigiseos pistoseos dia tin systathisomenin edran en to Panepistimio
tou Londinou) the bill providing for a yearly Greek government subsidy of
7500 gold drachmas, the Minister for Religious Affairs and Public
Education, Dimitrios Dingas, stressed that in addition to the general
motive of promoting philhellenic sentiment in England, there was ‘the
specific national reason’ that chairs of Slavic history and literature were
Notes 169
already in existence at the university, the implication being that one of the
purposes of the Koraes Chair was to counter Pan-Slav propaganda.
16. By 1933, one half of the School’s income derived from the Czechoslovak,
Polish and Yugoslav governments, I.W. Roberts, History of the School of
Slavonic and East European Studies 1915–1990 (London, 1991), p. 32. R.W.
Seton-Watson’s own chair, the Masaryk Chair of Central European History,
was funded by the Czechoslovak government, and when this subsidy dried
up as a consequence of the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, both
the Romanian and Yugoslav governments, independently of each other,
offered in 1940 to provide funding for the chair for the remaining years of
Seton-Watson’s tenure of it. These parallel approaches created what the
then director of the School, Professor William Rose, termed ‘a rather ludi-
crous, though for us all very gratifying, situation’, Rose to the Earl of
Onslow, 5 February 1940, PRO 371/2940. I am grateful to Maurice Pearton
for this reference. In the event, funding was forthcoming for Seton-
Watson’s chair from Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, but it is not clear whether
funds reached the School from the Romanian government for this purpose.
17. See also McNeill’s ‘Arnold Joseph Toynbee’, Proceedings of the British
Academy, LXIII (1977), pp. 441–69.
18. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (1916), reprinted by
Hodder and Stoughton.
19. As Toynbee was himself to write, for Greek peasants ‘Ancient Greece was
not, as it had been for me at Winchester, a city of refuge from which one
could keep the present-day world at bay’, Experiences, p. 28.
20. Arnold Toynbee, Naxos, 27 November 1911, to Edith Toynbee, Toynbee
Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
21. ‘The pliable, plastic, receptive Baboo of Bengal eagerly avails himself of this
system [of English education] partly from a servile wish to please the Sahib
logue, and partly from a desire to obtain a Government appointment’,
Fraser’s Magazine, (August 1873) 209, cited in Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell,
eds, Hobson-Jobson: a Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases,
and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive
(Calcutta 1896).
22. Arnold Toynbee, British School at Athens, to Edith Toynbee, 17 December
1911, Toynbee Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
23. Arnold Toynbee, Hotel d’Alemagne (sic) [sic], Olympia to Edith Toynbee,
25 February 1912, Toynbee Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
24. Arnold Toynbee, British School at Athens, to Edith Toynbee, 2 January
1912, Toynbee Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
25. Arnold Toynbee, Volos, to Edith Toynbee, 14 Jan 1912, Toynbee Papers,
Bodleian Library, Oxford.
26. Arnold Toynbee, Hotel d’Alemagne, to Edith Toynbee, 25 February 1912,
Toynbee Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
27. Arnold Toynbee, Naxos, to Edith Toynbee, 27 November 1911, Toynbee
28. Arnold Toynbee, Karyais, Mount Athos, to Edith Toynbee, 19 June 1912,
29. Arnold Toynbee, British School at Athens, to Edith Toynbee, 24 July 1912,
170 Notes
30. In the multi-volume A Study of History, on which his reputation as histori-

cal guru principally rested, Toynbee was to express regret at the way in
which ‘in the name of an alien ideal [nationalism] which had thus been
imported in an evil hour, the shot-silk fabric of a seamless Ottoman robe
was remorselessly plucked to pieces by cruel hands, and the broken threads
of each diverse national hue were then roughly rewoven into so many
separate rags to make a patchwork coat of many colours, in which the only
note of uniformity was a monotonously pervasive stain of blood’, VIII,
(London, 1954) 191, cited in Elie Kedourie, ‘The Chatham House Version’
in Elie Kedourie, ed., The Chatham House Version and other Middle Eastern
Studies, (London, 1970), p. 361.
31. Arnold Toynbee, Yerapetro, Crete, to Edith Toynbee, 17 March 1912,
32. Experiences, p. 35.
34. Arnold Toynbee, Corfu, to Edith Toynbee, 29 July 1912, Toynbee Papers,
Bodleian Library, Oxford.
36. Arnold Toynbee, British School at Athens, to Edith Toynbee, 8 March 1912,
37. Arnold Toynbee, British School at Athens, to Edith Toynbee, 8 March 1912,
38. Arnold Toynbee, 7th Division Headquarters, Greek Army of Asia Minor, 2
April 1921, to Edith Toynbee, Toynbee Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
39. Arnold Toynbee, Ushak, to Rosalind Toynbee, 4 February 1921, Toynbee
40. Arnold Toynbee, Smyrna, to Rosalind Toynbee, 26 January 1921, Toynbee
41. F.H. Marshall, ‘Some debts to Byzantinism’, an inaugural lecture delivered
on Monday, October 11th, 1926, p. xv.
42. On this controversy see, for example, Romilly Jenkins, Byzantium and
Byzantinism. Lectures in Memory of Louise Taft Semple (Cincinnati, 1963);
Cyril Mango, ‘Byzantinism and Romantic Hellenism’, Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXVIII (1965), pp. 29–43 and the review
article by Speros Vryonis, ‘Recent scholarship on continuity and disconti-
nuity of culture: classical Greeks, Byzantines, modern Greeks’, in Speros
Vryonis, ed., The ‘Past’ in Medieval and Modern Greek Culture (Malibu, CA,
1978), pp. 236–56.
43. Averil Cameron, The Use and Abuse of Byzantium: an Essay on Reception
(London, 1992), pp. 24, 5, 20.
44. Letter from Stanford Shaw, 14 March 1986. I already knew of the bomb
attack as, by coincidence, I had arrived in Los Angeles from Seattle to give
a lecture at UCLA on the day that it occurred, 4 October 1977, and still
retain a clipping from the Los Angeles Times of that day which recorded the
incident on its front page.
45. A lengthy review/précis of the book was published by Professor Cem
Cakmak of the Department of Public Administration of the Middle East
Notes 171
Technical University as ‘Arnold Toynbee ve bir kürsünün hikayesi’,

Mulkiyeliler Birliği Dergisi, 116, February 1990, pp. 19–23.
2 The British School at Athens and the Modern History of

Greece
1. The eight British archaeological schools and institutes in various part of
the word have also come under fire in the United Kingdom, dismissed by
their critics as remnants of a colonial past and as ‘expatriate dining clubs’.
See, for instance, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 17 June 1994.
2. Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair (London,
1986).
3. Ibid., pp. xvii, 342. The actual annual Treasury grant at this time amounted
to £500.
4. (London, 1941). Forster’s history was reprinted in 1957 in an edition
revised by Douglas Dakin.
5. Arnold Toynbee, Experiences (London, 1969), p. 4.
6. Ibid., 21 ff.
7. Annual of the British School at Athens, XVIII (1912), p. 317.
8. A Study of History (Oxford, 1954) X, 107. See Thomas Africa, ‘The final
Vision of Arnold Toynbee’, Historical Reflections, X (1983), p. 227.
9. Ibid., pp. 10, 134.
10. Experiences, p. 28.
11. Ibid., pp. 29, 26, 35. Toynbee’s encounter with his amateur klephts might
have had an altogether less happy outcome, for the Annual Report for
1924–1925 records a large turn out from the British School at the Anglican
Church in Athens for the funeral of a student of the American School who
had been fatally wounded by brigands whilst travelling in Acarnania: ‘an
event without parallel in the history of the foreign schools in Athens’,
p. 14.
12. William McNeill, Arnold Toynbee. A life (New York, 1989), pp. 41–2.
13. Experiences, pp. 35–6.
14. Ibid., pp. 37–9.
15. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916 (London,
1916).
16. George Glasgow, Ronald Burrows: a memoir (London, 1924), pp. 161–2.
17. Clogg, Politics, pp. 26–7.
18. A Study of History, X, p. 139.
19. It is interesting to note that Gennadius, in the deed of gift establishing the
Gennadius Library, envisaged special conditions of access for members of
the British, French and German Schools, together with professors of the
University of Athens and members of the Council of the Greek
Archaeological Society
20. Clogg, Politics, p. 29. One outcome of Scutt’s researches at the School was
a lengthy two-part article on ‘The Tsakonian dialect’, Annual of the British
School at Athens, XIX (1912–13); XX (1913–14), pp. 18–31. It is noteworthy
that more than half of the 1912–13 Annual was devoted to post-classical
topics.
21. Clogg, Politics, p. 36.
172 Notes
22. Ibid., p. 28.

23. Helen Waterhouse, The British School at Athens: the First Hundred Years
(London, 1986), p. 135; Toynbee, Experiences, p. 22.
24. (London, 1914), pp. 12, 13.
25. For a detailed listing of Dawkins’ voluminous writings, see Minas Alexiadis,
‘To ergo tou R.M. Dawkins: vivliographiki symvoli’, Deltio Kentrou
Mikrasiatikon Spoudon, V (1984–85), pp. 361–89.
26. Clogg, Politics, p. 26.
27. Waterhouse, The British School, p. 22.
28. Ibid., p. 24.
29. First Athenian Memories (London, 1931), pp. 196–7. In Greek Memories, first
published in 1932 and hastily withdrawn when its author was charged
under the Official Secrets Act, Mackenzie had revealed that the Passport
Control Office was a cover for secret service activity.
30. Piers Dixon, Double Diploma: the Life of Sir Pierson Dixon. Don and Diplomat
(London, 1969), p. 9.
31. Mackenzie, First Athenian Memories, pp. 194, 200–1.
33. Mackenzie, First Athenian Memories, p. 253. See also J.N.L. Myres, Commander
J.L. Myres, R.N.V.R.: the Blackbeard of the Aegean (London, 1980) passim.
34. See his The Wandering Scholar (London, 1925).
35. The war service of former students during the First World War is detailed
in the Annual, XXIII (1918–19), pp. viiii–xvi. A similar listing for the
Second World War is given in the Annual, XLII (1947), pp. ix–xv.
37. Ibid., p. 25. Myres seems also to have been involved with the Anglo-
Hellenic Educational Foundation that was established in London in 1918
with the aim of advising and assisting ‘in the foundation in Greece of
schools conducted on English principles’. In a talk to the Anglo-Hellenic
League in 1919 he mentioned educational experiments foreshadowed
under the catch-word of a ‘Greek Eton’, adding, apparently in all serious-
ness, that if such a foundation were to succeed in being either ‘Eton’ or
‘Greek’ then ‘its curriculum must be that of ancient Persia – to ride and to
shoot and to tell the truth’, Address by J.L. Myres to the Annual General
Meeting of the Anglo-Hellenic League on Friday. June 20 1919 (London, 1919).
Nothing appears to have come of this particular scheme either. On the
sometimes rather eccentric philhellenic circles in Britain during this period
see my ‘The “ingenious enthusiasm” of Dr. Burrows and the “unsatiated
hatred” of Professor Toynbee’, Modern Greek Studies Yearbook, IX (1993),
pp. 75–98, reprinted in the present volume.
39. In 1951 the School received a legacy of £500 from William Miller for the
upkeep of the garden, his dog being buried near the west wall, ibid., p. 69.
40. See Dilys Powell, The Villa Ariadne (London, 1973), 121 ff.
41. Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York, 1984),
p. 428.
42. For more detail on the involvement of British and American academics in
the affairs of occupied Greece see my paper ‘Distant cousins: SOE and OSS
at odds over Greece’ in the present volume.
Notes 173
43. Marion Saraphis (Pascoe) recalls that during her time at the School she
encountered complete indifference to the pre-war Metaxas dictatorship.
Some of its members, indeed, were of the view that Metaxas was what the
Greeks deserved. Marion Saraphi, O Stratigos Saraphis opos ton gnorisa
(Athens, 1990), p. 14.
44. Casson’s experiences on the Macedonian front during the First World War
are recounted in Steady Drummer (London, 1935).
45. Ellen Bosanquet, Robert Carr Bosanquet: Letters and Light Verse (Gloucester,
1938), 181 ff.
3 The ‘ingenious enthusiasm’ of Dr Burrows and the ‘unsatiated

hatred’ of Professor Toynbee
1. Scarcely six months after de Robeck wrote his dispatch, the mercurial
Greek statesman suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of a war-weary
electorate that had grown disillusioned with the arbitrariness and vindic-
tiveness of Venizelos’ henchman after he had returned to power in
anomalous circumstances in 1917.
2. This was presumably a reference to Venizelos’s Cretan origin.
3. Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, Ist Series, vol. xii (London,
1963), pp. 18–19.
4. (London, 1922; second edition with revised preface, 1923; US edition,
Boston, 1923).
5. G. Melas, The Turk as He is (Hove, 1922), pp. 44–5, 49.
6. Op. cit., pp. 63–4.
7. The story is told in considerable detail in Richard Clogg, Politics and the
Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair (London, 1986).
8. London, 1907.
9. George Glasgow, Ronald Burrows: a Memoir (London, 1924), p. 30.
10. See Clogg, Politics and the Academy, p. 1.
11. D.J. Cassavetti was the author of Hellas and the Balkan Wars (London,
1914).
12. Keith Sinclair, William Pember Reeves: New Zealand Fabian (Oxford, 1965),
pp. 328, 331, 321. Pember Reeves was the author, inter alia, of Mr. E.
Venizelos’s Great Speech on the Balkan Crisis and a Sketch of the Political Career
of the Great Man from the Pen of the Hon. W.P. Reeves, printed in London,
apparently in December 1912.
13. In a letter to Miss Wright of the Anglo-Romanian Society, 6 April 1919, file
269, King’s College, London, Archives.
14. D.J. Cassavetti to Helena Schilizzi, 14 July 1916; R.M. Burrows to Helena
Schilizzi, 13 July 1916, quoted in Clogg, Politics and the Academy, p. 8.
15. These are conveniently listed in Glasgow, Ronald Burrows . . ., pp. 284–6.
16. The New Europe was a journal published by Seton-Watson and others from
the College. The editorial assistant, George Glasgow, was to be Burrow’s
biographer and was subsequently to marry his widow. On the New Europe
group, which was tireless in its promotion of the principle of self-determi-
nation for the peoples of Eastern Europe, see Hugh and Christopher
Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe: R.W. Seton-Watson and the Last
Years of Austria-Hungary (London,1981).
174 Notes
17. J.A. Douglas was the author, inter alia, of Death’s Ride in Anatolia and
Armenia: a Sermon Preached at Southwark Cathedral, before the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, the Metropolitan of
Trebizond, the Archbishop of Syria . . . (London, 1920) and The Redemption of
Saint Sophia, an Historical and Political Account of the Subject (London, 1919).
18. On the lobbying over this issue, see Erik Goldstein, ‘Holy Wisdom and
British Foreign Policy, 1918–1922: the St. Sophia Redemption Agitation’,
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, XV (1991), pp. 36–64. As Goldstein
points out, the Crusade cannot be dismissed simply as a marginal pressure
group of ‘Near Eastern cranks’, for it numbered two future Foreign
Secretaries in its membership, p. 37.
19. Ronald Burrows, Give Back . . . Saint Sophia (London,1919), pp. 25–6, 15.
20. Clogg, Politics and the Academy, p. 20. Interestingly, a recording of
Venizelos’s speech at this meeting survives.
21. On the background to this affair, see C.M. Woodhouse, ‘The Offer of
Cyprus. October 1915’ in Greece and Great Britain during World War I
(Thessaloniki, 1985), pp. 77–89.
22. Glasgow, Ronald Burrows, p. 251.
23. Compton Mackenzie, Greek Memories (London, 1932, reprint 1987),
pp. 401–2. Mackenzie was perturbed to find that Burrows had been taken
in by a ‘thoroughly bad hat’ called Watney Hyde who had been acting as
correspondent of The Times on the Salonica front, pp. 369, 396.
24. Clogg, Politics and the Academy, p. 27.
25. Ernest Barker, Burrows’s successor as principal of King’s College, noted in
his memoirs how refreshing he found the encouragement of the serious
study of Eastern Europe at the College, Age and Youth: Memories of Three
Universities and Father of the Man (London, 1953), pp. 122–4, 114.
26. Masaryk recorded in his memoirs that, at the time, he thought his profes-
sorship at King’s College to be a ‘bothersome interruption’ to his work of
propaganda on behalf of an independent Czech and Slovak state, although
subsequently he realized that Seton-Watson and Burrows had advised him
well when they had urged him ‘so insistently to accept the appointment’.
He ‘esteemed highly’ Dr Burrows’s ‘manliness and devotion to his univer-
sity’, T.G. Masaryk, The Making of a State (London, 1927), pp. 95, 100, 147.
27. See Richard Clogg, ‘Marcu Beza and the development of Romanian Studies
in England’ in Românii in Istoria Universală (Jassy, 1988), pp. iii, 351–65. It
is interesting to note that, even at the height of the controversy between
the subscribers to the Koraes Chair and Toynbee, King’s College should
have felt no qualms in soliciting funding from the Romanian government
for the promotion of Romanian studies. But it should be noted that, in the
early 1920s, approximately one quarter of the School of Slavonic Studies’s
funding came from foreign governments. In 1940, by which time the
School, now the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, had become
an independent institution within London University and Seton-Watson
had suffered in the financial crash of 1929, both the Romanian and
Yugoslav governments offered the School funding for the maintenance of
the Masaryk Chair of Central European History, for as long as Seton-
Watson continued to hold it.
28. Cassavetti, Hellas and the Balkan Wars, pp. 263, 305–6. For a fictionalized,
Notes 175
and frequently hilarious, account of his experiences in the early 1930s as a

teacher at the Anargyreios Skholi on Spetses, which was run on such lines,
see Kenneth Matthews’s novel, Greek Salad (London, 1935).
29. See J.N.L. Myres, Commander J.L. Myres, R.N.V.R.: the Blackbeard of the
Aegean (London, 1980).
30. Address by J.L. Myres to the Annual General Meeting of the Anglo-Hellenic
League on Friday, June 20, 1919 (London, 1919).
31. Greece’s propaganda effort, particularly in Britain and France, during this
period is described in considerable detail in Dimitri Kitsikis, Propagande et
pressions en politique internationales. La Grèce et ses revendications à la
Conference de la Paix (1919–1920), (London, 1963).
32. Pember Reeves, An Appeal for the Liberation and Union of the Hellenic Race
(London, 1918).
33. Toynbee’s biographer, William McNeill, has unearthed evidence that
Toynbee had been found fit for military service by 1915 but used a
complaisant doctor to gain exemption from service. He postulates that
Toynbee’s guilty conscience in the matter subsequently weighed heavily
on him, Arnold Toynbee. A Life (New York, 1989), pp. 68–70.
34. On the activities of academics, including Toynbee, at Wellington House,
see Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany. British Academics
1914–1918 (Edinburgh, 1988), 167 ff.
35. A.J. Toynbee, The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks (New York, 1917), passim.
36. Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany and D.G. Hogarth, The
Balkans: a History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey (Oxford,
1915), pp. 232–33.
37. McNeill, Arnold Toynbee, pp. 41–2.
39. Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (London, 1933), p. 312.
41. A.J. Toynbee, The Place of Mediaeval and Modern Greece in History (London,
1919), p. 27.
43. Arnold Toynbee, Acquaintances (London, 1967), 240 ff.
44. Arnold Toynbee, Acquaintances, p. 246. On Toynbee and the Armenians,
see Lillian Etmekjian, Toynbee, Turks, and Armenians (Cambridge, Mass.,
1985).
46. Toynbee, Acquaintances, p. 245.
48. Toynbee Papers, Box 53, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
50. Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and other Middle-Eastern Studies
(London, 1970), p. 366.
51. Toynbee, The Western Question, pp. 269–70
52. Toynbee, The Western Question, p. xi.
176 Notes
4 The Special Operations Executive in Greece

1. See, for instance, The Memoirs of Lord Chandos (London, 1962), p. 239.
2. Spectator, 3 November, 1973. For criticism of SOE’s activities in Yugoslavia,
see also David Martin, Patriot or Traitor: the Case of General Mihailovich
(Stanford, 1978), 117 ff.
3. The Times Literary Supplement, 22 October, 1971. The journalist Drew
Pearson, in similar terms, described Colonel ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the
founder of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American counterpart
to SOE, of having recruited ‘one of the fanciest groups of dilettante
diplomats, Wall Street bankers, and amateur detectives ever seen in
Washington’, R. Harris Smith, OSS. The Secret History of America’s first
Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, 1972), p. 17. OSS was, in part at least,
the offspring of SOE and from Harris Smith’s book it is clear that it shared
many of the characteristics of its British prototype, namely a working
environment of endemic chaos and unorthodoxy, internal political
feuding, left- and right-wing factionalism and a deep-rooted and mutually
perceived suspicion of the State Department and military establishments.
4. Despite the widespread destruction of early records and periodic weeding,
there were some 350 box files at SOE headquarters in Cairo in October
1944, Report on S.O.E. Activities in Greece and the Islands of the Aegean Sea
(1945), p. 226.
5. The Apollo organization apparently numbered over 800 agents at its peak.
Ibid., p. 227.
6. This summary account of the Peltekis affair is based on Bickham Sweet-
Escott, Baker Street Irregular (London, 1965), pp. 221–2; Foreign Office
Archives, Public Record Office, London (hereafter FO) 371/43691, R 12747;
R 13235 and private information.
7. FO 371/43691, R 11844.
8. A good summary of the genesis of SOE is contained in M.R.D. Foot, S.O.E.
in France (London, 1966); and Foot, Resistance: an Analysis of European
Resistance to Nazism (London, 1976), pp. 137–41. Sweet-Escott’s Baker Street
Irregular is a well-informed and highly entertaining insider’s view of SOE.
9. This aspect of British strategic thinking is thoroughly analyzed in David
Stafford, ‘The Detonator Concept: British Strategy, SOE and European
Resistance after the Fall of France’, Journal of Contemporary History, X
(1975), pp. 185–217. A joint Planning Staff paper of December 5, 1941 (No.
73) called for the preparation and exploitation of ‘all forms of subversive
activities but specially the fostering of latent rebellion and sabotage of
communications including ports and shipping’, Report on S.O.E. Activities,
p. 40.
10. See, for instance, David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in
World War II (London, 1978) for a revealing account of the vicious infight-
ing between the Abwehr, the Sicherheitsdienst, and the Forschungsamt.
11. This appears not to have been an isolated incident of its kind. One SOE
operative in Greece was alarmed to hear ‘that several of our own British
troops with our Missions had gone completely pro-ELAS. One recalcitrant
sergeant had been shot dead by his SOE British officer for habitual drunk-
enness and gross disobedience to orders. He was also suspected of selling
Notes 177
arms to the ELAS through his women friends. The officer, who was moved
out of Greece, was later exonerated’, Donald Hamilton-Hill, S.O.E.
Assignment (London, 1973) p. 166. A member of the Harling party that
was parachuted into Greece in September 1942 to sabotage the
Athens–Thessaloniki railway was at one stage in danger of being shot for
insubordination.
12. A substantial number of these were recruited from the law firm of Slaughter
and May, which led to the jibe that SOE’s activities were ‘all May and no
Slaughter’.
13. It is perhaps worth noting in passing that while it is true that Britain had
a number of investments in Greece, and in particular had a vested interest
in the vexed question of Greece’s external debts, in the overall context of
British overseas investment these were insignificant. The British, for a
number of reasons, were anxious to retain their influence in postwar
Greece but desire to protect their investments cannot be considered as a
significant factor in determining policy.
14. Julian Amery’s wartime memoir, Approach March (London, 1973) gives a
graphic insight into the interlocking web of school, university, and family
connections that linked many of those who served with SOE or ancillary
organizations. Although in his early twenties, Amery, by virtue of the fact
that his father, Leo, was a cabinet minister, was able to gain a more or less
immediate entrée into influential circles wherever his wartime duties took
him and was able, when necessary, to ensure that his views became known
in the highest quarters. At one stage it was proposed that Amery should
accompany Myers on his return to Greece after visiting the Middle East and
London in August and September 1943, but when a veto was placed on
Myers’s return the proposal lapsed, 267–9. Elsewhere Amery is critical of
the ‘indecent, almost masochistic, glee’ with which SOE officials revelled
‘in the destruction of Chetniks and Zogists who were at least our friends’.
Sons of the Eagle: a Study in Guerilla War (London, 1948), p. 334.
15. FO 371/43681, R 3713.
16. For example, Peter Kemp, a highly enterprising B(ritish) L(iaison) O(fficer)
in Albania, who complains in No Colours No Crest (London, 1958) of being
barred from wearing the medals that he had been awarded for fighting
with Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. SOE in Greece had its
fair share of such types. See the comments of Colonel Donald Hamilton-
Hill, second-in-command of Foxforce (as the troops earmarked for the
liberation of Greece were code-named), ‘in fact, if the British troops in
Athens in October had been allowed by General Scobie to make a ruthless
clean-up of the ELAS the moment they arrived in Athens, the later troubles
– in our opinion – might not have been allowed to get out of hand. We in
Foxforce certainly had no illusions. Politics or no politics [my italics] we
would be keeping ‘our’ liberated areas clean of ELAS bandits’. S.O.E.
Assignment, p. 147.
17. On Frank Thompson see the memoir by T.J.T. (his mother) and E.P.T. (his
brother) There is a Spirit in Europe . . . (London, 1947) and Stowers Johnson,
Agents Extraordinary (London, 1975).
18. Sweet-Escott, pp. 197–8. One of the protagonists has written an account
of this exploit composed, as he disarmingly states, in a ‘spirit of
178 Notes
light-heartedness and twenty-two-year-old exuberance (almost bump-

tiousness)’, W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (London, 1950), p. 7.
19. This is of course a very broad generalization. Major Gerald K. Wines, for
instance, who in December 1943 succeeded Captain Winston Ehrgott as
the ranking US officer in the Allied Military Mission to the Greek
Resistance, was markedly hostile to ELAS, referring in his memoirs to Aris
Velouhiotis as ‘the Himmler of Elas’. A Lesson in Greek, p. 31, unpublished
(1948) in the Woodhouse Papers, Burrows Library, King’s College, London.
20. Smith, p. 51.
21. Section D had been created in 1938 ‘to investigate every possibility of
attacking potential enemies by means other than the operations of military
forces’, Foot, Resistance, p. 137.
22. The following account relies heavily on an account of SOE’s early activities
in Greece compiled by Pirie and on private information.
23. Dispatch dated 2 July, 1941, FO 371/29816, R 6962.
24. On the antagonism between SOE and PWE, see Charles Cruickshank, The
Fourth Arm: Psychological Warfare 1938–1945 (London, 1977), 17 ff.
25. MI9’s principal role was to arrange for the evacuation of Allied personnel
from occupied Europe. See, for instance, Airey Neave, Saturday at MI9
(London, 1969) and M.R.D. Foot and J.M. Langley, MI9: Escape and Evasion
1939–1945 (London, 1979).
26. See George Taylor’s remarks in Phyllis Auty and Richard Clogg, eds, British
Policy towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (London, 1975),
pp. 263–4.
27. FO 371/33I87, R 1490.
28. See Denys Hamson, We Fell Among Greeks (London, 1946).
29. C.M. Woodhouse, ‘Early British Contacts with the Greek Resistance in
1942’, Balkan Studies, XII (1971), pp. 347–63.
30. Cf. FO 371/3720l, R 2636, R 3348.
31. Cf. FO 371/37202, R 5306.
32. Report on S.O.E. Activities, p. 43.
33. Ibid., p. 32.
34. Auty and Clogg, 178ff. See also Chapter 5 of the present volume.
35. Despite his undoubted abilities, Keble was not a popular man. See, for
instance, the unflattering sketch by Xan Fielding (who does not mention
Keble by name): ‘a globe-shaped choleric little militarist did his best to
conceal his natural and professional shortcomings by a show of blood-
thirsty activity and total disregard for the agents in the field, whom he
treated like so many expendable commodities’, Hide and Seek. The Story of
a War-time Agent (London, 1954), p. 98.
[Since this chapter was originally published the voluminous records of
the Special Operations Executive relating to Greece have, after ‘weeding’,
been released to the Public Record Office.]
5 ‘Pearls from Swine’: the Foreign Office Papers, SOE and the
Greek Resistance
1. III (London, 1971), pp. 383–439.
2. Minute of 29 June 1941, FO 371/29840, R 6528.
Notes 179
3. Minute of 28 December 1941, FO 371/29842, 10665.

4. FO 37I/37196, R 3923. The Foreign Office seems never to have appreciated
the depth of bitterness felt by the Greeks for the Metaxas dictatorship.
Despite his experiences of war and post-war Greece, Sir Reginald Leeper
was still able to write in his memoirs that ‘it would be a mistake to imagine
that the Metaxas regime aroused anything like the fierce hostility through-
out the country that Greek politicians would have you think’, When Greek
meets Greek (London, 1950), p. 10.
5. Minute of 18 February 1942, FO 371/33156, R 1240.
6. FO 371/29909, R 8996.
7. FO 371/29910, R 9987.
8. FO 371/33171, R 1018.
9. FO 371/37196, R 4117.
10. FO 371/33187, R 1836, R 1994.
11. FO 371/33I87, R 2887.
12. FO 371/43684, R 5083.
13. FO 371/43684, R 5084.
14. ‘Early British contacts with the Greek Resistance’, Balkan Studies, XII
(1971), p. 354.
15. FO 371/33175, R 1793.
16. FO 371/33187, R 5354.
17. FO 371/33163, R 6961. I have been unable to trace a copy of Warner’s
actual report.
18. FO 371/33163, R 6961.
19. FO 371/33163, R 7640.
20. La Résistance grecque 1940–1944 (Paris, 1966), p. 156; The Kapetanios
Partisans and Civil War in Greece, 1943–1949 (London, 1972), p. 22;
Griechenland zwischen Revolution und Konterrevolution (1936–1946)
(Frankfurt, 1973), p. 258.
21. Political Warfare Executive directives for 30 October to 5 November, 20 to
27 November, 27 November to 4 December, 4 to 11 December, 11 to 18
December.
22. Warner’s emphasis. Minute of 5 February 1942, FO 371/33156, R 1269.
23. Minute of 31 December 1941, FO 371/2988, R 10898.
24. FO 371/37197, R 5657, Warner to Dixon, 20 June 1943, apropos SOE’s
proposal to spring the republican leader General Nikolaos Plastiras from
the south of France, where he had been in exile since 1933. Warner added
that he was horrified to learn that Ian Pirie ‘reigns supreme in Greek affairs
in Baker Street’.
25. FO 371/37208, R 11753.
26. FO 371/33163, R 7640.
27. FO 371/37199, R 83I4; 371/37206, R 10553.
28. FO 371/37206, R 10553.
29. FO 371/43676, R 1127.
30. FO 371/37201, R 654. Emmanouil Tsouderos shared Sargent’s low estimate
of the value of the resistance effort in Greece. In a letter of 17 July 1943 he
wrote to Leeper: ‘Today all your expenses for the secret warfare of the guer-
rillas are in vain and still more so are our sacrifices in lives and material
used for these secret operations.The profit you get out of these operations
180 Notes
is small when compared to your enormous financial expenses for this type
of warfare and to the reprisals taken by the enemy against us, by execu-
tions, expulsions, setting fire to villages and towns, rape of women etc. and
all else that the enemy practices in revenge for the relatively unimportant
acts of sabotage of the guerrilla groups’. Tsouderos Archive, file 10,
Gennadeion Library, Athens.
31. FO 371/37201, R 2050.
32. FO 371/372O1, R 2050.
33. FO 37I/37194, R 2226.
34. FO 37I/37201, R 2598.
35. Minute by Sir Alexander Cadogan, 6 April 1943, FO 371/37201 R 2636.
36. FO 371/37201, R 2636.
37. FO 371/37201, R 3348.
38. FO 371/33177, R 2657.
39. Minute of Dixon, 15 July 1943, FO 371/37203, R 5909.
40. FO 371/37203, R 5029.
41. Minute by D.S. Laskey, 16 June 1943, FO 371/37203, R 5192.
42. FO 371/37199, R 8314.
43. When Greek meets Greek, pp. 30–3; Greek Entanglement (London, 1955),
pp. 228–65; Eight Years Overseas, I939–1947 (London, 1948), pp. 166–8; O
Doureios Ippos (Athens, 1958), pp. 148–70.
44. Harling to Cairo, No. 50, 21 February 1943, SOE Records.
45. FO 371/37201, R 2050.
46. FO 371/372OI, R 2702.
47. Cairo to Keelrow, 6 May 1943, SOE Records.
48. FO 371/37196, R 4236.
49. FO 371/37202, R 4717.
50. FO 37I/37196, R 3456.
51. FO 371/37203, R 6555.
52. FO 371/137202, R 4504.
53. FO 371/37197, R 64I8.
54. Minute of 25 February 1944, FO 371/43680, R 3308.
55. FO 371/37202, R 4459.
56. FO 371/37202, R 4503.
57. When Greek meets Greek, p. 31.
58. FO 371/37204, R 7884.
59. FO 371/37204, R 7217.
60. Baker Street Irregular (London, 1965), p. 174.
61. FO 371/37204, R 7884. In his preliminary report on his mission, radioed
from within Greece, Wallace made the point that during the course of his
visit he had met only one genuine Royalist. FO 371/37204, R 8088.
62. When Greek meets Greek p. 32.
63. FO 371/37204, R 7884.
64. FO 371/37198, R 7515.
65. FO 371/37198, R 7514.
66. FO 371/37198, R 7515.
67. FO 371/37198, R 7516.
68. FO 371/37204, R 7548.
69. O Doureios Ippos, pp. 154, 155. There is a discrepancy between the accounts
Notes 181
of Pyromaglou and Leeper as to who was making the running over the
constitutional issue in Cairo. According to Pyromaglou (pp. 149–50, 160)
it was the non-Communist delegates, i.e. Kartalis, Tsirimokos and himself,
who were the most uncompromising. This was not, however, Leeper’s
reading of the situation. On 25 August he wrote to Sargent that
Pyromaglou, whom he considered to be much the ‘nicest’ of the delega-
tion, attached ‘far more importance to weakening the influence of EAM in
Greece than trying to exclude the King from returning there. In fact he,
like Zervas, will do anything we wish on this matter or on any other
matters’ (FO 371/37199, R 8314). One of the reasons why Leeper may have
got this impression was because Pyromaglou, at his first meeting with
Leeper, deliberately omitted any mention of the issue of the monarchy, as
he had previously been told by Wallace that Leeper had been fully
persuaded on the constitutional issue (Pyromaglou, 153). Leeper dismissed
Kartalis, the EKKA. representative, as ‘a frivolous character educated at the
London School of Economics’ (FO 371/4367, R 1860).
70. FO 371/37198, R 7758, R 78I9.
71. FO 371/37231, R 7894.
72. Greek Entanglement, p. 254.
73. FO 371/37198, R 7950.
74. Minute of 24 August 1943, FO 371/37198, R 7950.
75. FO 371/37198, R 7950. The views put forward by Leeper and Churchill are
a striking manifestation of the tendency, to which Colonel Woodhouse
has drawn has drawn attention, of the British government authorities ‘to
under-rate the importance of what went on in Greece, so long as tranquil-
lity was restored in exile’, Apple of Discord: a Survey of Recent Greek Politics in
their International Setting (London, 1948), p. 157.
76. FO 371/37204, R 7864, R 7884, R 8216,
77. FO 371/37204, R 7532. Pearson in his covering letter of 10 August wrote
that Wallace’s telegrams had been delayed owing to corruptions in trans-
mission. Further telegrams were forwarded on 11 August.
78. FO 371/37204, R 8088. Leeper, on learning from Wallace of the existence
of the telegrams, was understandably furious, particularly as he discovered
that some of them had been forwarded on to SOE London before he, in
Cairo, had had sight of them. When he taxed Glenconner about the
muddle, he was told that it was entirely due to a shortage of cipherers.
Telegram of 16 August 1943, FO 371/37204, R 7754.
79. FO 371/37199, R 8314.
80. FO 371/37204, R 8216.
81. FO 371/37204, R 8048.
82. FO 371/37199, R 8314.
83. FO 371/37213, R8419. This document was available to Sir Llewellyn
Woodward in writing his official history of British foreign policy.
According to Woodward, the Foreign Office regarded the Wallace report as
an extremely able piece of work. One of the recommendations contained
in the Wallace report may have been that Myers should not return to
Greece, for on 6 October Howard minuted that ‘Mr Leeper has all along
been against Brigadier Myers’ return to Greece; so for that matter has Major
Wallace. They base their objections on the fact that Myers is so committed
182 Notes
to the guerilla cause (and in particular to the Communist E.A.M.) that

nothing will change his views, – and that even if he were convinced and
wanted to change his policy, he would not now be able to do so’, FO
371/37205, R 9679.
84. FO 371/37199, R 8314.
85. FO 371/37198, R 7742.
86. FO 371/37199, R 8263.
87. FO 371/37199, R 8370.
88. FO 371/37199, R 8382.
89. FO 371/37205, R 9679. See note 83, above.
90. FO 371/37205, R 9679.
91. FO 371/37206, R 10831.
92. FO 371/37199, R 8314.
93. Baker Street Irregular, p. 173.
94. FO 371/37208, R 11753.
95. Eight Years Overseas, p. 169; Baker Street Irregular, p. 175. See also Sir Colin
Gubbins, ‘S.O.E. and the co-ordination of regular and irregular warfare’ in
M. Elliott-Bateman, The Fourth Dimension of Warfare (Manchester, 1970),
pp. 94–5.
96. FO 371/37208, R 11753.
97. FO 371/37206, R 10553.
98. FO 371/37208, R 12295.
99. Report on S.O.E. activities in Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea, Appendix
III, 10.
100.FO 371/37205, R 9785.
101.FO 371/37207, R 11098.
102.FO 371/37207, R 11673.
103.FO 371/37209, R 12642.
104.FO 371/37209, R 13188.
105.FO 371/37209, R 13431.
106.FO 371/37209, R 13431.
107.FO 371/37209, R 1342.
108.FO 371/37209, R 13478.
109.Baker Street Irregular, 196.
110.FO 371/43677, R 1687.
111.FO 371/43678, R 1940.
112.FO 371/43678, R 1940.
113.FO 371/43678, R 1940.
114.FO 371/43680, R 3308. See Churchill’s minute of 6 February 1944: ‘There
seems to be no limit to the baseness and treachery of E.L.A.S. and we ought
not to touch them with a barge pole’, FO 371/43678, R 1933.
115.FO 3 71/14368, R 3342.
116.Churchill, in a letter of 27 October 1941 to Tsouderos, referred to Greece’s
‘beloved constitutional monarchy’, Tsouderos Archive, file 19, Gennadeion
Library, Athens.
6 Distant Cousins: SOE and OSS at Odds over Greece

1. Quoted in Matthew Jones, Britain, the United States and the Mediterranean
Notes 183
War, 1942–44 (London, 1996), p. 13. Interestingly, Casey was himself an

Australian. I am grateful to Dr Lars Baerentzen and to Professor John
Iatrides for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
Some of the material in this chapter is incorporated in ‘“Cousins and
Allies”: British and American misunderstandings over Greece during the
Second World War’, Journal of Modern Hellenism, xiv (1997), pp. 105–18.
2. Baker Street Irregular (London, 1965), p. 145. Sweet-Escott was a prominent
functionary within SOE. His exceptionally readable memoir is indispensi-
ble to an understanding of the organization’s inner workings.
3. National Archives and Records Service, Washington, OSS Records RG 226
Entry 47 Box I.
4. For a brief comparative analysis of the role of the two organizations, see
M.R.D. Foot, ‘A comparison of SOE and OSS’ in K.G. Robertson, ed., British
and American Approaches to Intelligence (London, 1987), pp. 153–64. Jay
Jakub, Spies and Saboteurs: Anglo-American Collaboration and Rivalry in
Human Intelligence Collection and Special Operations, 1940–45 (London,
1999) affords an excellent analysis of the overall relationship between SOE
and OSS. Although he devotes a chapter to divergences in respect of the
‘Yugoslav morass’, Jakub has relatively little to say about the complexities
of the relations between the two organizations over policy in Greece.
André Gerolymatos, Guerrilla Warfare and Espionage in Greece 1940–1944
(New York, 1992) contains much interesting material on SOE’s activities in
Greece but very little on those of OSS. But see the same author’s ‘American
foreign policy toward Greece and the problem of intelligence, 1945–1947’,
Journal of Modern Hellenism, VII (1991), pp. 157–62. On OSS’s relations with
SOE over Yugoslavia, see Scott Anderson, ‘“With friends like these . . .” The
OSS and the British in Yugoslavia’, Intelligence and National Security, VIII
(1993), pp. 140–71. On the role of the OSS in Yugoslavia, see Kirk Ford, Jr,
OSS and the Yugoslav Resistance, 1943–1945 (College Station, Texas, 1992).
An indication of the riches contained in the OSS archives is given in Jurgen
Heideking and Christof Mauch, ‘Das Herman-Dossier. Helmut James Graf
von Moltke, die deutsche Emigration in Istanbul und der amerikanische
Geheimdienst Office of Strategic Services (OSS)’, Vierteljahreshefte für
Zeitgeschichte, XL (1992), pp. 567–623.
5. Characteristically, journalists have categorized as startling revelations facts
contained in newly-released files that have been in the public domain (not
to mention already readily accessible in the Public Record Office) for
decades, for example, that Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary,
was angry about ‘support given by SOE to communist resistance groups in
Greece’ or that King George of Greece accused SOE of undermining the
position of the Greek royal family. See, for instance, Richard Norton-Taylor
in The Guardian, 8 September 1994.
6. ‘Albania: new aspects, old documents’, East European Quarterly, XXVI
(1992), p. 31.
7. (New York, 1987), p. 559.
8. Eduard Mark, in arguing in his fascinating study ‘The OSS in Romania,
1944–45: an intelligence operation of the early Cold War’, that OSS spent
‘more time in Romania than in any other country of Eastern Europe or
Southeastern Europe’, save Yugoslavia, appears to have overlooked OSS’s
184 Notes
extensive involvement in Greek affairs, Intelligence and National Security, IX

(1994), p. 320. According to Gerolymatos, OSS deployed over 400 opera-
tives in Greece between September 1943 and November 1944, Guerrilla
Warfare and Espionage, p. 303.
9. On the British side these memoirs include Arthur Edmonds, With Greek
Guerrillas (Putararu, NZ, 1998); Nicholas Hammond, Venture into Greece:
with the Guerillas (London, 1983); Denys Hamson, We Fell among Greeks
(London, 1946); William Jordan, Conquest without Victory (London, 1969);
John Mulgan, Report on Experience (London, 1947); E.C.W. Myers, Greek
Entanglement (London, 1955; revised edition 1985); Michael Ward, Greek
Assignments: SOE 1943–1948 UNSCOB (Athens, 1992) and C.M Woodhouse,
Something Ventured (London, 1982). Also valuable is the memoir of an
S(ecret) I(intelligence) S(ervice) operative, Nigel Clive, A Greek Experience
1943–1948 (Salisbury, 1985). Costas Couvaras, OSS with the Central
Committee of EAM (San Francisco, 1982) is a rare memoir by an OSS opera-
tive relating to Greece, as is the manuscript account of Gerald K. Wines,
the first deputy commander of the Allied Military Mission to the Greek
resistance, A lesson in Greek [1948]. (Copy in the Liddell Hart Centre for
Military Archives, King’s College, London.) On OSS activities in the Evros
region, where the borders of Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria meet, see Angeliki
Laiou, ‘Andartes kai symmakhikes apostoles ston Germanokratoumeno
Evro: i martyria tou Alekou Georgiadi’ in Hagen Fleischer and Nikos
Svoronos, eds, Ellada 1936–1944. Diktatoria, Katokhi, Antistasi (Athens,
1989), pp. 303–26. Lars Baerentzen has conveniently annotated and
published a number of particularly influential reports by British operatives,
British Reports on Greece 1943–1944 by J.M. Stevens, C.M. Woodhouse and D.J.
Wallace (Copenhagen, 1982). There is no American equivalent of the near
contemporary analysis of the situation in occupied Greece by C.M.
Woodhouse, Brig. ‘Eddie’ Myers’ successor as commander of the British
Military Mission to the Greek Resistance, The Apple of Discord: a Study of
Recent Greek Politics in their International Setting (London nd [1948]). There
is at least one entertaining novel based on the activities of SOE and OSS in
Greece, Desmond Carolan, And Ruffians Leap (New York, nd), while
Woodhouse has published a collection of short stories with a resistance
background, One Omen (London, nd). For a critique of the value of the
British memoirs to the historian, see Ole Smith, ‘The Memoirs and Reports
of the British Liaison Officers in Greece, 1942–1944: Problems of Source
Value’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, XI (1984), pp. 9–32. For a brief
overview of SOE activities in Greece see Richard Clogg, ‘The Special
Operations Executive in Greece’ in John O. Iatrides, ed., Greece in the 1940s:
a Nation in Crisis (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1981), pp. 102–18, reprinted
in the present volume.
10. On the official Washington view of Greece during the period of the occu-
pation, see John O. Iatrides, ‘United States’ Attitudes towards Greece
during World War II’ in Louisa Laourda, ed., Meletimata sti mnimi Vasileiou
Laourda (Thessaloniki, 1975), pp. 599–625 and Lawrence Wittner,
‘American Policy Toward Greece during World War II’, Diplomatic History,
III (1979), pp. 129–47.
11. Baker Street Irregular, pp. 40–1.
Notes 185
12. Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, p. 61.

13. The expression is that of David Wallace who, in the summer of 1943, was
sent to report on the situation in occupied Greece on behalf of a Foreign
Office which believed that SOE was effectively pursuing its own foreign
policy in Greece, Wallace to Pierson Dixon of the Southern Department of
the Foreign Office, 27 August 1943, P(ublic) R(ecord) O(ffice) F(oreign)
O(ffice) 371/37199, R8317.
14. This crisis, which had major implications both for the future course of
resistance in Greece and for SOE itself, is discussed in some detail in my,
‘“Pearls from swine”: the Foreign Office papers, SOE and the Greek resis-
tance’ in Phyllis Auty and Richard Clogg eds, British Policy towards Wartime
Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (London, 1975), 178 ff, reprinted in the
present volume (Chapter 5).
15. On the British cultivation of Donovan before the US had entered the
Second World War, see Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill
Donovan (New York, 1984), 148 ff. Some OSS agents were trained by SOE at
its training school, known as Camp X, on Lake Ontario. On Camp X, see
David Stafford, Camp X: Canada’s School for Secret Agents, 1941–1945
(Toronto, 1988).
16. John A. Iatrides, ed., Ambassador MacVeagh reports: Greece, 1933–1947,
(Princeton, 1980), p. 281.
17. The academic input into the OSS and subsequently the CIA, and in partic-
ular the close connection of the Yale University History Department with
both organizations, is discussed in considerable, and fascinating, detail in
Winks, Cloak and Gown. The naivety of the assumption that a historian of
a given country would necessarily make a competent analyst of its current
politics was strikingly illustrated in the case of Conyers Read, an authority
on England under the Stuarts and one of the great panjandrums of the pre-
war Yale History Department. In September 1944, he detected ‘definite
indications’ of a trend in Britain towards Russia and away from the United
States and he opined that, in the event of a postwar electoral victory by the
Labour Party, then ‘the pro-Russian trend of British labor might eventuate
in a position in which the US as the exponent of a free economy might find
itself aligned against both Russia and England as the exponents of a
controlled economy . . .’, in which case Britain might seek Russian support
‘in a struggle against predatory capitalism’, OSS Records RG 226 Entry 37
Box 2.
18. Pendlebury, who had been curator of Knossos during the 1930s and had
been charged with building up networks for post-occupation resistance on
the island, was killed in circumstances that are still not wholly clear during
the battle for Crete in May 1941. See, for example, John Pendlebury in Crete;
comprising his ‘Travelling Hints’ and his ‘First Trip to Eastern Crete (1928)’
together with appreciations by Nicholas Hammond and T.J. Dunbabin and a
prefatory note by S.C. Roberts (Cambridge, 1948) and Dilys Powell, The Villa
Ariadne (London, 1973) 126 ff.
19. Other academics with a background in archaeology or the classics were also
harnessed to the war effort. Gerard Mackworth Young, the director of the
British School [of Archaeology] at Athens, was in charge of the Press Office
established by the British Legation in Athens on the outbreak of war in
186 Notes
September 1939, while David Wallace, a former student of the British

School where he had been studying Frankish military architecture in
Greece, served as press attaché. A.J.B. Wace, a former director of the British
School worked on Greek affairs for MI5, the counter-intelligence organiza-
tion, during the Second World War as he had during the First, when the
library of the British School had housed the Passport Control Office.
When, during the early summer of 1940, the Foreign Office had proposed
the establishment in Greece of a ‘shadow mission’, which would, inter alia,
prepare the ground for a regular military mission if and when Greece
entered the war, Sir Michael Palairet, the British minister, was dismissive of
military tasks being carried out by ‘ex-archaeologists’ without staff experi-
ence, John Koliopoulos, Greece and the British Connection (Oxford, 1977),
pp. 164–5.
20. Captain G.F. Else, ‘Report on activities of OSS Greece’, 31 January 1945,
OSS Records RG 226 Box 31. Young was based in Cairo, Sperling in
Istanbul, Caskey in Izmir, Daniel in Cyprus and Oliver in Bari. Homer
Thompson worked with Canadian Naval Intelligence.
21. Report submitted by Virginia Grace, 10 January 1945; Report by Lt John W.
Savage to Capt. Christian M. Freer, 10 January 1945, OSS Records RG 226
Box 3.
22. Reported submitted by Miss Virginia Grace, 10 January 1945, OSS Records
RG226 Box 3.
23. Cave Brown, The Last Hero, p. 428.
24. Compton Mackenzie, Greek Memories, (London, 1939), pp. 8–9. The publi-
cation in 1932 of the first edition of Greek Memories (which was a riposte to
Sir Basil Thomson’s The Allied Secret Service in Greece (London, 1931) led to
Mackenzie being prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in 1932 and to
the book being withdrawn on publication day for amendment. He wrought
his revenge in a highly entertaining novel, Water on the Brain (London,
1933). He had earlier written another novel based on his wartime experi-
ences in Greece, The Three Couriers (London, 1929). Unexpurgated copies
of Greek Memories are now collectors’ items, although University
Publications of America (Washington, 1987) has reprinted the original
text, with the passages that were excised at official behest helpfully high-
lighted. One of Mackenzie’s transgressions had been to reveal that the
Passport Control Office in British embassies and consulates was a cover for
intelligence activity. The Compton Mackenzie trial is discussed in H.
Montgomery Hyde, Crime has its Heroes (London, 1976), pp. 156–68.
Mackenzie’s Athenian exploits were regarded in some quarters as counter-
productive. Indeed, it is reported, not necessarily apocryphally, that when,
on Greece’s entry into the war in the summer of 1917 on the side of the
Entente, Mackenzie’s arch-rival, the German Baron Schenk, was obliged to
leave the country, he bade a public farewell to his well-wishers with the
cryptic remark that ‘I. . . leave the cause of the Central Powers in the best
possible hands – those of my dear friend Mr Compton Mackenzie’, J.M.
Cook, Greece in the 1930s: the Reminiscences of Professor J.M. Cook
(Edinburgh (privately printed), nd) p. 11.
25. Yiannis D. Stefanidis, ‘“Preaching to the converted”: the British propa-
ganda campaign in Greece, 1939–1941”’, I Ellada kai o polemos sta Valkania
Notes 187
(1940–41)/Greece and the war in the Balkans (1940–41), (Thessaloniki, 1992),

p. 189. Wrede, who gave a guided tour of the Acropolis to Field Marshal
von Brauchitsch when the latter visited Athens, wrote an enthusiastic
account of his activities on behalf of the Nazi Party in the Jahrbuch des
Auslands-Organisation der NSDAP, IV (1942), pp. 49–66, cited in Mark
Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece (London, 1993), pp. 6–7. Inter alia, he
complained that ‘the Führer, Volk and Army’ had been ‘most evilly
mocked’ in the Athenian press after the German invasion of Greece on 6
April 1941.
26. Minute of 6 July 1940, PRO FO 371/24922
27. Arthur Gould Lee, The Royal House of Greece (London, 1948), p. 81.
28. The British School at Athens lost three members during the Second World
War, all of them closely involved with Greek affairs. These were David
Wallace, Stanley Casson and J.D.S. Pendlebury. They are commemorated in
a memorial plaque in the entrance to the School.
29. The circumstances of Marion Pascoe’s first encounter with Sarafis when he
was a political exile during the pre-war Metaxas dictatorship and the
renewal of their friendship when he was once again in exile during the
post-occupation civil war are movingly recounted in her biographical
introduction to the English translation of Stephanos Sarafis, ELAS: Greek
Resistance Army (London, 1980). Her experience of the British School in
1938 was manifestly not a happy one. Not only did she encounter among
its members complete indifference to the Metaxas dictatorship but also the
view that it was no more than the Greeks deserved. Marion Saraphi, O
Stratigos Saraphis opos ton gnorisa (Athens, 1990), p. 14. On the involvement
of Students of the British School at Athens in Greek affairs in both World
Wars, see my own ‘The British School at Athens and the Modern History of
Greece’ in the Journal of Modern Hellenism, X (1993), pp. 91–109, reprinted
in the present volume (Chapter 2).
30. Captain G.F. Else, ‘Report on activities of OSS, Greece’, 31 January 1945,
OSS Records RG 226 Box 31. Characteristically, Else, having made mention
of Sperling, Caskey, Daniel, Oliver, Edson, Crosby and himself, declared
that ‘the bottom of the barrel had already been pretty well scraped of
Americans who knew Greek and Greece’. He seems to have forgotten about
Greek Americans. OSS likewise made extensive use of Americans of South
Slav descent in its Yugoslav operations, although towards the end of the
occupation Tito made it clear that American officers of Yugoslav descent
were no longer welcome, Ford (1992), p. 141.
31. Certainly Major Otto C. Doering, one of Donovan’s aides, in November
1943 enquired as to whether such an agreement had been entered into,
OSS Records RG 226 Box 39.
32. Arthur Kellas, Down to Earth (or Another Bloody Cock-up): a Parachute
Subaltern’s Story (Edinburgh, 1990), p. 169.
33. Venture into Greece, p. 160.
34. Patriots and Scoundrels: Behind Enemy Lines in Wartime Greece, 1943–44
(Melbourne, 1997), p. 150.
35. John Mulgan, ‘Report on work of Allied Military Mission in Area 3 Greece’,
1 November 1944.
36. Sgt Alfred J. Borgman, ‘A report on my duties in Greece from 4 June to
188 Notes
1 December 1944’, undated, PRO HS5/706.

37. Minutes of the Second Meeting of the SOE/OSS Committee held . . . Sunday
15th August 1943, PRO HS5/587.
38. OSS personnel in Greece as of 30 November 1944, OSS Records RG226 Box
6.
39. Halifax to Foreign Office, No. 4471, 19 August 1944, PRO Prem 3 212/2.
40. Churchill to Bedell Smith, 24 August 1944, Chain no. 193, PRO Prem 3
212/2. Bedell Smith replied on 26 August that he had forwarded the
message to Donovan, who had left England about an hour before he had
received it. He added that he had always been worried about Donovan’s
‘predilection for political intrigue, and have kept a firm hand on him when
I could, so he keeps away from me as much as possible’.
41. Churchill to Harry Hopkins, 24 August 1944. Chain no. 205, PRO Prem 3
212/2.
42. Beaverbrook to Churchill, 25 August 1944, Clasp 213, PRO Prem 3 212/2.
43. Brigadier K.V. Barker-Benfield, the commander of Force 133, as SOE in the
Middle East was by this time known, shared the widely held perception in
British official circles that ‘Greek-speaking Americans as a rule are violently
anti-British’, Cairo 14 August 1944 to Maj.-Gen. J.A. Baillon, PRO W(ar)
O(ffice) 1598. I am obliged to Dr Lars Baerentzen for this reference.
44. A.C. (Shan) Sedgwick of the New York Times had a curiously convoluted,
indeed one might say Byzantine, explanation for the antipathy towards
Britain displayed by many of his ‘newly naturalized fellow citizens’, among
them Poulos. In reality, they were expressing their antipathy towards their
adopted country. But if were they to criticize the US openly then someone
would say ‘Get the hell out and go back where you came from!’, Richard
Capell, Simiomata: a Greek Note book 1944–1945 (London, ?1946), p. 130.
45. Edward Warner, Cairo, to the British Ambassador in Rome, 21 August
1944, PRO Prem 3 212/2. Churchill was in Italy at this time, as was Leeper.
46. Rex Leeper to Orme Sargent, no. 645, 2 September 1944, PRO Prem 3
212/2. Some days earlier Leeper had written to Pierson Dixon of the
Southern Department of the Foreign Office that ‘OSS in Greece are: (a)
operational, (b) intelligence. In the case of (a) their officers form part of the
Allied Mission under Colonel Woodhouse; in case of (b) there is no such
control. It is here that the trouble occurs. Neither the American
Ambassador . . . nor the State Department have any control over OSS. Only
the President can call General Donovan to order’, Leeper to Dixon, 23
August 1944, PRO Prem 3 212/2.
47. Lord Halifax, Washington to Foreign Office, 9 September 1944, PRO Prem
3 212/2; FO 371/43692, R 14265. I owe this last reference to George
Alexander.
49. W. Stanley (‘Billy’) Moss, for instance, was only 21 when he took part in
the kidnapping of General Karl-Heinrich Kreipe on Crete in April 1944, one
of SOE’s less explicable operations. See his Ill Met by Moonlight (London,
1950). The Kreipe operation, planned in the Club de Chasse in Cairo, is an
example of the kinds of problems that could arise when youthful exuber-
ance was not held in check. The kidnapping was executed with
consummate bravery and skill but it nonetheless remains difficult to see
Notes 189
what military or political objective could have been served by such an

operation at such a late stage of the war, resulting as it did in very heavy
reprisals against the Cretan people. The original target of the operation,
General Müller, had been implicated in the policy of savage reprisals
against civilians but his successor Kreipe had not. Some wiser counsels
within SOE were strongly opposed to the operation. Indeed Sweet-Escott
made himself ‘exceedingly unpopular’ in trying to interdict the kidnap-
ping, so much so that he ran the risk of being court-martialled for
insubordination, Baker Street Irregular, p. 197; Marion Sarafis, ed., Greece:
From Resistance to Civil War (Nottingham, 1980), p. 118.
50. Clogg, SOE in Greece, pp. 108–9.
51. Franklin Lindsay, Beacons in the night: With the OSS and Tito’s Partisans in
Wartime Yugoslavia (Stanford, 1993), pp. 248, 341–2. On the role of
Klugman, see, for example, Ralph Bennett, William Deakin, David Hunt
and Peter Wilkinson, ‘Mihailović and Tito’, Intelligence and National
Security, X (1995), pp. 527–8. Lindsay himself, having been invited to dine
one evening in Maclean’s mess, was subsequently informed that he had
passed the test of social acceptability and that he would be invited back,
despite being a ‘colonial’. The memoir of Julian Amery, an SOE operative
whose father was also a member of Churchill’s cabinet, affords a useful
insight into the establishment connections of many SOE operatives. Amery
served in Albania, although at one stage it was proposed that he should
join Myers in Greece, Approach March (London, 1973), passim. See Peter
Wilkinson, Foreign Fields: the Story of an SOE Operative (London, 1997),
p. 141.
53. F. Bradley Smith, The Shadow Warriors. O.S.S. and the Origins of the C.I.A.
(New York, 1983), pp. 102–3.
54. The Spectator, 3 November 1973.
55. The Times Literary Supplement, 22 October 1971.
56. R. Harris Smith, The Secret History of America’s first Central Intelligence Agency
(Berkeley, 1972), p. 17.
57. Basil Davidson, Special Operations Europe: Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War
(London, 1980), p. 77.
58. Stevan Pavlowitch, ‘D.T. Hudson (1910–1995): a depressed witness of the
first civil war in Yugoslavia’, Tokovi Istorije, 1/2 (1995), p. 269.
59. Cave Brown, The Last Hero, p. 603. In lobbying Donovan for a job with
OSS, George Skouras had argued that ‘I know the history and modern polit-
ics of that nation [Greece] as well as I know my own children. I know their
way of thinking, their customs, their habits, and psychological reactions;
and [am] aware of their idiosyncracies, and speak their language fluently’.
R[odney] Y[oung], writing on 25 April 1944, to ‘Jack’ [Caskey] reported that
‘Uncle George Skouras’ was willing to afford Greek War Relief Association
cover to those collecting intelligence on behalf of OSS, OSS Records RG
226, Unnumbered Box Izmir Mission. George’s brother, the movie mogul
Spyros, who headed the Greek War Relief Association, was taken on by
Donovan as an adviser on Greek–American and Greek politics at a salary of
one dollar a year, which contrasted with the quarter of a million dollars
that he received as president of Twentieth Century Fox, Cave Brown, The
190 Notes
Last Hero, pp. 603–4; 596–7. By the time that he was nominally placed on
the OSS payroll, Donovan must presumably have rid himself of the fears
that Skouras had ‘fascist tendencies’ which he had expressed in a letter of
28 February 1942 to J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI. In turn, Donovan
seems to have based this estimate on a report, dated 20 February 1942,
from Benjamin Merritt to DeWitt Clinton Poole, head of the Foreign
Nationalities Branch of the S[ecret] I[ntelligence] section of OSS, OSS
Records RG 226, Entry 100, Box 51.
60. John Iatrides, ed., Ambassador MacVeagh Reports, p. 525.
61. The Kapetanios. Partisans and Civil War in Greece, 1943–1949 (London,
1972), p. 93.
62. Telegrams of 2 and 14 November 1943, US Department of State Archives,
868.01/407 A; 868.01/409.
63. See Clogg, ‘The Special Operations Executive in Greece’, 102ff.
64. Amoss had apparently worked with the YMCA in Greece between 1920 and
1927. A female secretary at the Greek Legation in Washington had nothing
but admiration for the ‘perfect gentleman, clean, honourable Mr Amoss,
who has been known to her and to the Legation for 20 years and about
whose love for Greece she cannot say enough’. If many of his business
undertakings had ended in failure then that had not been his fault. B.C. to
Allen W. Dulles, 25 March 1942, OSS Records RG 226 Entry 106 Box 13.
65. OSS Records RG 226 Box 3.
66. OSS Records RG 226 Entry 100 Box 51. See Cave Brown, The Last Hero,
pp. 292–3. In a letter of 9 January 1942 to DeWitt Clinton Poole, Amoss
characterized Bodosakis Athanasiadis as a ‘sort of [Sir Basil] Zaharoff’ [the
Greek arms dealer of sinister repute and legendary wealth], ‘a king maker
and breaker’ who had double-crossed both sides during the Spanish civil
war. He considered him ‘a man of extreme ability and no perceptible
conscience’, OSS Records RG 226 Entry 100 Box 51.
67. OSS Records RG 226, Box 30.
70. Conversation between Frank Wisner and David Bruce, recorded in C.A.
Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles (New York, 1969), p. 777, cited in Harris
Smith, OSS, p. 124. According to Cave Brown, Amoss had been dismissed
for having assisted in ‘the rearrangement of the Greek Cabinet to suit the
personal politics and finances of a powerful arms merchant’ [presumably
Bodosakis Athanasiadis], The Last Hero, p. 597. Harris Smith records that
after the war Amoss set up a private intelligence organization known as
‘The International Services of Information Foundation’. The organization
was embroiled in a bizarre plot to kidnap Stalin’s son in Moscow, p. 370.
72. On the R and A Branch, see Barry Katz, Foreign Intelligence. Research and
Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1989).
73. Baker Street Irregular, p. 129. This unwelcoming attitude appears to have
continued after the liberation of Greece for W.L. Langer, the head of R and
A in Washington, wrote on 1 November 1944 to Jay Seeley, at that time
acting head of the R and A Branch in Cairo, that ‘[R.L.] Wolff writes that
Notes 191
the British are being extremely reluctant in permitting Americans entry

into that country [Greece]’, OSS Records RG 226 Entry I Box 15.
74. Manuscript History of [OSS] Special Operations in the Middle East, 2, OSS
Records RG 266 Entry 99 Box 44.
76. Glenconner to Leeper, 18 May 1943, PRO HS5/587.
78. OSS Records RG 226 Box 15. For a report on McBaine’s activities between
June 1943 and May 1944 when he was OSS’s Chief Intelligence Officer in
the Middle East, see his Report on Field Activities, dated 3 August 1944,
79. Capt. G.F. Else, Report on activities of OSS, Greece, 31 January 1945, OSS
Records RG 226, Box 31.
80. The author of the History of [OSS] Secret Intelligence, Cairo makes refer-
ence to what is termed the ‘gratuitous generosity of ISLD’. McBaine
apparently received copies of all ISLD’s intelligence reports for forwarding
to Washington: ‘this arrangement on the part of ISLD was most unusual,
and is probably unique in the annals of cooperation between British and
American agencies . . . the terms of this gentlemen’s agreement were very
well kept’, OSS Records RG 226 Entry 99 Box 43. Whether ISLD was quite
as open-handed in practice as SI believed is not clear. Certainly OSS
appears seemingly not to have reciprocated this apparent generosity, as a
message dated 17 March 1945 makes clear: ‘our GAC series [is] designed to
prevent British customers from learning by means of simple enumeration
that they are not receiving all our reports. This [is] done to protect our
sources’, OSS Records RG 226 Entry 47 Box 1.
81. Jay Seeley to Richard Hartshorne of the Board of Analysts, 5 November
1943, OSS Records, RG 226 Entry 47 Box 2. At much the same time, Capt.
John I.B. McCulloch, the then head of the Research and Analysis Branch in
the Middle East, wrote to William Langer, who headed R and A operations
in Washington, that British intelligence ‘still far exceeds our own in
volume’, OSS Records RG 226, Entry 1 Box 15.
82. On 10 February 1944, Caskey in Izmir complained that Noel Rees, ISLD’s
representative in the city, had never passed on to him letters, photographs
and plans that had been brought out for him from Greece, OSS Records RG
226 Box 2. There was not only friction, refusal to co-operate and conceal-
ment of information in Izmir between ISLD and OSS but between ISLD and
other British organizations in the city. These included MI9, whose task was
assisting the escape of allied prisoners-of-war from occupied Europe. Sweet-
Escott speaks of ‘bitter inter-departmental warfare’ in the city, Baker Street
Irregular, p. 85. As J.L. C[askey] wrote from Izmir to Rodney [Young], letter
12, 25 August 1944, ‘. . . I have seen and heard plenty about the rows
between M1 6 [ISLD] and MO 4 [SOE] and MI 9 (your A Force, I take it). 106
[presumably Noel Rees] takes up most of our interviews with moans about
how the activities of the other services ruin his security, and he is undoubt-
edly right’, OSS Records RG 226 Unnumbered box Izmir Mission.
83. R.S. Young, Cairo, to Jack [Caskey], 1 June 1944, OSS Records RG 226 Box
1. When an OSS mission was infiltrated into Crete in June 1944, it was
clearly regarded with considerable suspicion by SOE operatives already on
192 Notes
the island, not least because it was accompanied by ‘a discarded ex-agent

of SOE who had become a well-known anti-British intriguer’. As Lt-Col T.J.
Dunbabin sardonically remarked in his Final Report on SOE Missions in Crete
1941–1945, ‘the object of this Mission was stated to be an inquiry into
industrial and economic conditions; as Crete had at this time neither
industries nor economics it may be doubted whether this was all’, N.A.
Kokonas, ed., The Cretan resistance 1941–1945: the official British report of
1945 together with comments by British officers who took part in the resistance
(Rethymnon, 1991), p. 82. On the 15th of the same month, June 1944, one
‘Highram’ wrote to Rodney [Young] that ‘this week stands out as the most
seriously anti-British week I have spent’. Similar frictions arose in relations
between SOE and OSS over Yugoslav affairs. One OSS operative, in report-
ing on a meeting with a representative of the Yugoslav partisans, wrote
that ‘our cousins arranged the meeting, which was held in their shop, but
they tactfully withdrew, probably to adjust the microphones in the next
room’, quoted in Anderson, ‘“With friends like these . . .”’, p. 140.
84. J.L. C[askey], Ankara, 18 June 1943 to Rodney [Young], OSS Records RG
226 Box 2.
85. Baker Street Irregular, pp. 73–4. Xan Fielding, who served with SOE in Crete,
relied on Arthur Read as his guide to ‘the departmental bickering, sectional
jealousies and personal strife’ reigning in SOE Cairo, Hide and Seek: the Story
of a War Time Agent (London, 1954), p. 97.
86. Hermione Ranfurly, To War with Whitaker: the Wartime Diaries of the
Countess of Ranfurly 1939–1945 (London, 1995), 73ff. According to Artemis
Cooper, Lady Ranfurly was particularly affronted by the behaviour of the
‘good-time Charlies’ in SOE’s Cairo headquarters although the evidence of
her own diary suggests that her own social life was scarcely an inactive one,
Cairo in the War 1939–1945 (London, 1995), p. 95.
87. Lars Baerentzen, ed., British Reports on Greece, p. xxxv. The report must have
been re-typed once it came into American possession, as its contains
American spellings.
88. J(oint) I(ntelligence) C(ommittee) A(rmy) M(iddle) E(ast) report, 1 July
1944, OSS Records, RG 226 L40424. Cf Baerentzen, British Reports on Greece,
p. 178.
89. OSS Records RG 226 L37857.
90. OSS Records RG 226 Entry 99 Box 44. The oldest, at 51, was Serge
Obolensky and the heaviest, apparently, Lt George Musulin, one of OSS’
Yugoslav operatives. The gruelling life of a liaison officer resulted in Wines
incurring a double hernia occasioned by scrambling over the Greek moun-
tains. According to his unpublished memoir, A Lesson in Greek (1948),
during his nearly seven-month stint in the mountains Wines lost 40
pounds in weight and six inches from his waistline, p. 207. Woodhouse, in
his preface to this memoir, pays fulsome tribute to Wines, lauding the
‘truly heroic tolerance of an American veteran of the first world war who
submitted himself in the second to the command of a foreign fledgling of
twenty-six’. Woodhouse makes the interesting point that the Allied
Military Mission in Greece was ‘the only completely integrated Anglo-
American unit in the Middle East Command’. The close relations that
developed between Woodhouse and Wines contrasted sharply with the
Notes 193
marginalization of the OSS operatives parachuted at much the same time

to join the BLOs at the headquarters of Tito and Mihailović in Yugoslavia.
Brig. C.D. Armstrong, the head of the British mission to Mihailović, told
his American counterpart, Lt-Col Albert Seitz, that ‘the mission was British
and whole show would remain a British show’, the Americans being in the
country solely ‘to give an Allied illusion to the Yugoslavs’, Ford, OSS and
the Yugoslav resistance, p. 20.
91. C.M. Woodhouse, History of the Allied Military Mission in Greece, MS Liddell
Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London, pp. 106, 188;
Jerry Wines, A Lesson in Greek, p. 39. Col Woodhouse has written that ‘the
only trouble with Jerry [Wines] was that he was too loyal: EAM could not
understand why he never disagreed with me, even when they got hold of
him alone. Wink Erhgott, on the other hand, suspected everything I did
and said. If I had suddenly dropped dead, he would have wondered, like
Talleyrand, why I did that’, Letter to the author of 5 July 1996.
92. Wines to Lieutenant-Colonel Paul West, Mortlake to Cairo, 30 May 1944,
PRO HS5/587.
93. Wines, A Lesson in Greek, p. 32.
94. Wines, A Lesson in Greek, p. 121.
95. Woodhouse, History of the AMM, p. 142.
96. Lieutenant-Colonel Paul West, Operation Feather 3, 25 October 1943, OSS
Records RG226 Box 39.
97. Woodhouse, History of the AMM, p. 134. Ehrgott was soon joined by Lt
Wallace Hughling of the 513th Squadron of the USAAF. He had been shot
down on 5 October 1943 after bombing Elefsina airfield near Athens.
Rather than be evacuated, he was, with Woodhouse’s permission, attached
to Ehrgott’s mission. The following month Lt Joel Hartmeister, who had
been shot down on 8 October likewise following a raid on Elefsina airfield,
joined the AMM, where he was assigned to relief work among the Italian
troops who had surrendered after the Italian armistice.
98. Woodhouse, Something Ventured, p. 71.
99. Michael Ward, Greek Assignments, p. 47. OSS had sent its first operative, Lt
Walter Mansfield, into Yugoslavia during the previous month, August
1943.
100.Wines, A Lesson in Greek, p. 50.
101.Ward, Greek Assignments, p. 175. No great feat of detection on the part of
the scholar is required to work out the identity of ‘Eric Butler’.
102.On 22 May 1944, Toulmin told Lincoln MacVeagh that Overlord would take
place between 2 and 5 June (the actual date was 6 June) and MacVeagh,
likewise demonstrating a curious laxity in matters of security, duly noted
the information in his diary, John Iatrides, ed., Ambassador MacVeagh
Reports, p. 525.
103.On the Russian Military Mission see, inter alia, Lars Baerentzen, ‘The arrival
of the Soviet Military Mission in July 1944 and KKE policy: a study of
chronology’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, XIII (1986), pp. 77–111. Much
remains unclear about the Mission, not least its instructions. Material
should be available in the former Soviet archives now that these are more
open to researchers. Preliminary enquiries made in Moscow during the
summer of 1992, however, yielded no result. Indeed, I was asked whether
194 Notes
the name of the leader of the Mission, Lt-Col Grigori Popov, might have
been a pseudonym as no material could be found under his name. The OSS
records add a curious detail to the still mysterious paraskinia, or things
behind the scenes, of the Popov mission. In a letter of 28 July 1944 from
Cairo to William Langer in Washington, Moses Hadas speculated that
arrangements for the reception in Greece of the Russian Mission might
have been made in Cairo, when a Russian mission en route from
Yugoslavia stayed at the same hotel as most of those leading figures,
including communists, summoned from Greece by the British authorities
to attend the Lebanon Conference in May 1944, which was convened to
try to establish a Government of National Unity, OSS Records RG 226 L
42556.
104.Hammond, Venture into Greece, p. 170.
105.Stephen B.L. Penrose, Jr, Cairo, to Whitney Shepardson, 12 August 1944,
106.Woodhouse, History of the AMM, p. 106.
107.Interview with Jay Seeley, 18 November 1984.
108.Couvaras, OSS with the Central Committee of EAM, p. 33.
109.Kermit Roosevelt, ed., The Secret War Report of the OSS (New York, 1976),
pp. 169–70.
110.In another letter to ‘Mort’, dated 22 August 1944, Couvaras wrote that ‘the
EAM is not as Communist as Tito’s armies or the Albanian partisans are. . . .
The EAM itself and the Communist party in particular do not teach
communism, and tell their members that they should not expect commu-
nism to come as a result of the war . . . but as a result of an evolutionary and
parliamentary process’, OSS Records RG 226 Box 42.
111.On Stott’s contacts, see Hagen Fleischer, ‘The Don Stott affair: ouvertures
for an Anglo-German local peace in Greece’ in Marion Sarafis, ed., Greece:
from Resistance to Civil War, pp. 91–107 and the same author’s Stemma kai
Swastika: i Ellada tis katokhis kai tis antistasis, II, (Athens, 1995), pp. 359–78.
112.Couvaras to ‘Mort’, 14 July 1944, OSS Records RG 226 Box 42.
113.Cave Brown, The Last Hero, p. 609.
114.Venture into Greece, p. 160.
115.OSS Records RG 226 Entry 1 Box 15. C.M. Woodhouse has written that
Waterhouse’s main vice was ‘making mischief, which he often did by
making silly judgements which he probably regretted, but which others
took seriously; and then he could not back away from them’, letter to the
author of 5 July 1996. On coming out of Greece in the summer of 1944,
Woodhouse was disconcerted to learn that Waterhouse was convinced that
his attitude both to the Resistance and to the Americans was ‘hopelessly
naive’. Solon Grigoriadis has contended that Waterhouse was the sinister
mastermind who on his secondment to Ambassador Leeper’s staff gave
direction to previously unco-ordinated British policy towards Greece but
adduces no evidence for this inherently improbable claim, Ellis Waterhouse:
o praktoras pou erthe apo tin omikhli . . . (Athens, 1987).
116.OSS Records RG 226 L 45259.
117.John Iatrides, ed., Ambassador MacVeagh Reports, p. 418; Lawrence Wittner,
American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949 (New York, 1982), p. 319.
118.OSS Records RG 226 Entry I Box 24.
Notes 195
119.C.M. Woodhouse has pointed out that, given that both his father and
grandfather had been Liberal politicians, then he can scarcely have been a
congenital Tory. He was aged 26 at the time.
120.Memorandum of 7 September 1944. OSS Records RG 226 Entry I Box 15.
The swingeing criticisms of Wines that were voiced gave rise to a certain
amount of angst on the part of Sherman Kent. In a hand-written note, he
urged that ‘Langer’s office, Wolff, and Schorske sh[oul]d be told for Jesus’s
sake not to circulate these memos in OSS till they’ve read them carefully.
Wines is an old OSS lad and a controversial figure’, OSS Records RG 226
Entry 47 Box 2. Lincoln MacVeagh, US ambassador to the Greek govern-
ment-in-exile, on meeting Wines in Cairo after he had been replaced as the
senior American liaison officer in Greece by Col West, found him to be ‘a
very sensible fellow’, adding that ‘in general, he agrees with Woodhouse’s
views on the situation’, 24 June 1944, Ambassador MacVeagh, p. 551.
121.OSS Records RG 226 Entry I Box 24.
122.Report of 16 September 1943, OSS Records RG 226 45749. Some circles
within OSS apparently had similar suspicions as to the motives underlying
British policy in Yugoslavia, Ford, OSS and the Yugoslav resistance, p. 65.
123.OSS Records RG 226 42028. Whatever may have been the interests of
British capital in the Middle East, the British financial interest in Greece
was insignificant. It is true that British interests controlled some two thirds
of total private foreign investment in Greece, but the actual amounts of
capital involved in relation to the sum of Britain’s overseas investments
were negligible. The principal source of British direct investment in Greece
was the Whitehall Securities Group which, through the Société Génerale
Hellénique, operated the Athens–Piraeus Electricity Company and the
Electric Transport Company. The total investment involved was some £4.5
million. A further £5 million of British capital was tied up in loans to the
Greek Mortgage Bank. Small amounts of British capital were also involved
in the Lake Copais Land Reclamation Scheme, the Anglo-Greek Magnesite
Company, the Ionian and Popular Bank, the Eastern Telegraph Company
and a few other concerns, Royal Institute of International Affairs, South-
Eastern Europe: a Political and Economic Survey (London, 1939), p. 164.
Bickham Sweet-Escott has described the British economic interest in
Greece as scarcely amounting to a peanut in the overall context of Britain’s
overseas investments. British interests in Greece were a fraction of those in
Iran and Egypt, Marion Sarafis, ed., Greece: From Resistance to Civil War,
p. 88. It is true, however, that a substantial proportion of Greece’s external
debt was held by British bondholders, and Greece’s default on the service
of these loans had been a constant irritant to Anglo-Greek relations in the
1930s.
124.25 March 1944, PRO FO 371/43681, R 3713.
125.Woodhouse, Something Ventured, p. 82.
126.Interview with two aviators back from the Peloponnese, OSS Records RG
226 Box 33.
127.In this letter of 11 December 1943, Edson complained that ‘from the
research point of view the situation here is maddening. There are masses of
information. But from the political aspect which interests you and me, the
whole problem is: who is right? It is like trying to write history with
196 Notes
voluminous sources which one is quite unable to control’, OSS Records RG

226 Entry 48 Box 2. Edson, an academic specialist on the history of ancient
Macedonia, inter alia, compiled for OSS use what he termed a guide to
‘Greek in one easy lesson’. He was the author of ‘Greece during the Second
World War’, Balkan Studies, VIII (1967), pp. 225–38.
128.Moses Hadas memorandum (‘Not to be shown to the British’) on ‘Greek
attitudes to the British’, 5 June 1944, OSS Records RG 226 XL991. In
commenting on the significance of the arrival of the Soviet Military
Mission in Greece in July 1944, Hadas had written that ‘aside from the
Americans who have thus far identified themselves with British policy, the
Russians are the only power concerned in Greek affairs whose interest can
appear in any degree idealistic, for considerations of Empire too clearly
revealed have tarnished the British reputation in Greece’, Moses Hadas to
William Langer, 28 July 1944, OSS Records RG226 L42556.
7 The Greek Government-in-Exile, 1941–44

1. This recurrent theme in Greece’s independent history is discussed in
Theodore A. Couloumbis, John A. Petropulos and Harry Psomiades, eds,
Foreign Interference in Greek Politics. An Historical Perspective (New York,
1976).
2. This episode and the whole course of Anglo-Greek relations between 1935
and 1941 is comprehensively and carefully analyzed in John Koliopoulos,
Greece and the British Connection 1935–1941 (Oxford, 1977).
3. The Blast of War: 1939–1945 (London, 1967), p. 563. Predictably, the
government’s move from Cairo to bleak quarters near Salerno was the
occasion of yet another crisis. Three prominent Liberals resigned, to be
replaced by three (right-wing) Populists, John O. Iatrides, Revolt in Athens:
the Greek Communist ‘Second Round’, 1944–45 (Princeton, 1972), p. 112.
4. The Second World War, V, Closing the Ring (London, 1952), p. 470.
5. FO 371/24367, R 1860.
6. Reginald Leeper, When Greek meets Greek (London, 1950), p. 10.
7. FO 371/29842, R 10665; 371/37196, R3923.
8. Piers Dixon, Double Diploma: the Life of Sir Pierson Dixon, Don and Diplomat
(London, 1968), p. 13.
9. C.M. Woodhouse, The Struggle for Greece (London, 1976), pp. 148–9.
10. FO 371/29817, R 9591.
11. FO 371/29839, R 883
12. FO 371/29818, R 4033.
13. Maniadakis had been the Special Operations Executive’s direct channel to
Metaxas in the crucial weeks before the dictator’s death. See Bickham
Sweet~Escott, Baker Street Irregular (London, 1965), pp. 61–2. While Palairet
was vainly trying to impress upon the king the urgency of bringing non-
Metaxist elements into the government, particularly in view of the
imminent departure of the government to the strongly Venizelist island of
Crete, SOE’s operatives in Greece, working against time to lay the founda-
tions of a post-occupation resistance network, were perforce in contact
almost exclusively with Venizelists and communists. This was to have
fateful consequences for future British policy in Greece.
Notes 197
14. Tsouderos’ apologia is contained in his Ellinikes Anomalies sti Mesi Anatoli
(Athens, 1945), supplemented by his Diplomatika Paraskinia 1941–1944
(Athens, 1950). Part of Tsouderos’ personal archive is accessible in the
Gennadeion Library in Athens, another part is deposited, less accessibly, in
the Genika Arkheia tou Kratous. Such of the records of the government-in-
exile as survive are contained in the archives of the Greek Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, which applies an intermittent 50 year rule. Other useful
accounts by participants in the government include those of Panayotis
Kanellopoulos, deputy prime minister and minister of war between May
1942 and March 1943, and a subsequent holder of ministerial office in
George Papandreou’s Government of National Unity; Ta Khronia tou
Megalou Polemou 1939–1944. Istoriki Anadromi kai Keimena, 2d edn.
(Athens, 1964), together with his more recent Istorika Dokimia I. Pos
ephthasame stin 21 Apriliou 1967. 2: 1940–1944 Ethniki Antistasi (Athens,
1975) and Imerologio 31 Martiou I 942–4 Ianouariou 1945 (Athens, 1977). See
also George Papandreou, I Apeleftherosis tis Ellados, 3rd edn. (Athens, n.d.).
Papandreou was prime minister between 26 April 1944 and 3 January 1945.
Elias Venezis, Emmanouil Tsouderos: o Prothypourgos tis Makhis tis Kritis
(Athens, 1966) and Grigorios Daphnis, Sophoklis Eleftheriou Venizelos
(Athens, 1970) are essentially works of piety but both contain much valu-
able documentation. Venizelos was minister of marine and aviation
between May 1943 and April 1944 and prime minister for 12 days at the
height of the April 1944 governmental crisis. V.P. Papadakis, Diplomatiki
istoria tou Ellinikou Polemou 1940–45 (Athens, 1956) makes use of Greek
government records, while Panayiotis Pipinelis, Georgios B (Athens, 1951),
is a life of King George by a close political adviser. Ai Ellinikai Kyverniseis
kai ta Proedria Voulis kai Gerousias, 1926–1959: Vivliothiki Voulis ton Ellinon
no. 1 (Athens, 1959) is an indispensable official record of government
changes. [Since this essay was originally printed the Tsouderos archive has
been published as Emmanouil I. Tsouderou Istoriko Arkheio 1941–44, 5 vols.
(Athens, 1990). Lena Divani, I politiki ton exoriston Ellinikon Kyverniseon
1941–44 (Athens, 1991) is a recent study of the government-in-exile.]
15. Daphnis, Sophoklis Eleftheriou Venizelos, p. 171.
16. FO 371/298I6, R 6962. Despatch of 2 July 1941 from Sir Miles Lampson, the
British Ambassador to Egypt, to Eden, enclosing a record of a conversation
between a member of his staff with King George and Tsouderos. Warner in
a minute rejected the suggestion that Maniadakis ‘was sacrificed at our
suggestion. Possibly M. Tsouderos made out to the King that we wanted to
get rid of him in order to overcome the King’s doubts about the wisdom of
this course’.
17. FO 371/29909, R 8996.
18. On 25 July 1941, A.H.L. Hardinge, King George VI’s private secretary,
informed the Foreign Office that the king had no objection to Crown
Prince Paul accompanying King George II to London provided ‘he does not
bring his wife [Frederica] who, although very anti-Nazi, is nevertheless
German, and whose presence here would obviously be undesirable, FO
371/29886, R 7201.
19. FO 371/29817, R 8633.
20. FO 371/29842, R 10918.
198 Notes
21. FO 371/33187, R 1490.

22. This was in part occasioned by Tsouderos’ reluctance to recognize
Venizelos as the head of the Liberal parataxis or camp. See Daphnis, 201 ff.
for details of an unedifying squabble over their respective past attitudes to
Metaxas.
23. FO 371/29839, R 3817; 371/29840, R 3991. Tsouderos, in a letter to Palairet
of 1 May 1941, went so far as to suggest that ‘it would be immensely appre-
ciated if the Island of Cyprus would be granted at this moment to King
George II as a personal present’, Tsouderos Archive, Gennadeion Library,
Athens, File 8.
24. FO 371/29820, R 4715.
25. Memorandum to War Cabinet of 31 May, 1941, WP (41) 18. Earlier in 1941
there had been inconclusive talk in the Foreign Office of the return of the
Elgin Marbles to Greece in the hope that such a gesture might to some
extent deflect Greek eyes from Cyprus, FO 371/29861, R 643.
26. FO 371/29817, R 8008.
27. FO 371/29838, R 10333.
28. Kanellopoulos, Ta Khronia tou Megalou Polemou, 5l ff.
29. Tsouderos Archive, File 10, Gennadeion Library, Athens.
30. FO 371/37202, R 5396.
31. FO 371/43676, R 1127.
32. Leeper, When Greek meets Greek, p. 12.
34. Phyllis Auty and Richard Clogg, eds, British Policy towards Wartime
Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (London, 1975), p. 263.
35. C.M. Woodhouse, Apple of Discord: a Survey of recent Greek Politics in their
International Setting (London, 1948), p. 37.
36. F0 371/37198, R 7742.
37. FO 371/33162, R 5766.
38. DSR, 868.00/1124 PS/LDP, quoted John O. Iatrides, ‘United States’ atti-
tudes towards Greece during World War II’ in Louisa Laourda, ed.,
Meletimata sti mnimi Vasileiou Laourda (Thessaloniki, 1975), p. 613.
39. FO 371/35161, R 1520.
40. FO 371/29840, R 6258.
41. FO 371/33187, R 1944, R 1836.
42. Asa Briggs, History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (London, 1970), III,
p. 461.
43. FO 371/37196, R 4117.
44. FO 371/37201, R 2050.
46. F0 371/37204, R 7884.
47. FO 371/37204, R 7548.
48. Komninos Pyromaglou, O Doureios Ippos (Athens, 1958), p. 154–5. I have
discussed this crucial episode at some length in my ‘Pearls from Swine: the
Foreign Office Papers, S.O.E. and the Greek Resistance’, in Auty and Clogg,
British Policy towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece, 181 ff.
This article is reprinted in the present volume as Chapter 5.
49. Daphnis, Sophoklis Eleftheriou Venizelos, pp. 257–9.
50. FO 371/43684, R 5084.
Notes 199
51. Leeper, When Greek meets Greek, p. 47.

52. MacVeagh had also turned down an earlier proposal by Leeper, made in
December 1943, for the establishment in Cairo of a joint US/British
committee on Greek affairs, Iatrides, ‘United States’ attitudes . . .’,
pp. 620–1. The attitude of detached aloofness adopted by the US adminis-
tration at this time contrasts sharply with the massive US involvement in
Greece after 1947.
53. Prem 3 211/16 WM(44) 65th. Conclusions.
54. Harold Nicolson records a significant conversation with Eden shortly after
the Moscow meeting. ‘“And what about the Balkans?” Eden had asked at
the first meeting. “Well”, replied Stalin, “I am interested in the Black Sea
countries and you are interested in the Mediterranean countries. You look
after Greece”’, Nigel Nicolson, ed., Harold Nicolson: the War Years
1939–1945. Volume II of Diaries and Letters (New York, 1967), p. 421.
Index
Abdul Hamid, Sultan 49 Blegen, Carl 112

Abwehr 123 Borgman, Sgt Alfred 115
Achmetaga 138 Bosanquet, R.C. 34
Action Committee 81 Bowman, Thomas 69
Affleck-Graves, Lt-Col D.A. 129 Boxshall, Major E. 63
Afyonkarahisar 51 Braila 133
Aidin 51 British Security Coordination 118
Airey, Lt-Col Terence 119 British (Allied) Military Mission to
Albania 27, 33, 74, 126, 145, 154 the Greek Resistance 85, 102,
Alexandria 34, 149–50 129–30, 132, 137, 140, 155
Ali Riza Bey 54–5 British Council 70
American School of Classical Studies British Embassy (Athens) 34
4, 31, 33–4, 112 British (Royal) Institute of
Amery, Julian 60 International Affairs (Chatham
Amoss, Col Ulius 121–4, 126 House) 26, 57
Anatolia College 133 British School [of Archaeology] at
Andrewes, Anthony 33, 66, 111 Athens (BSA) 4, 5, 19–21, 27,
Anglo-Greek Committee 73, 85, 29–30, 32-5, 112–13
156–7 Broneer, Oscar 112
Anglo-Hellenic Educational Bryce, Viscount 8, 48–9, 53, 55
Foundation 45, 47 Budge, Lt-Col Vincent A.P. 129
Anglo-Hellenic League 40–2, 44 Bulgaria 67, 126, 154, 163
Ankara 128 Burgess, Guy 119
Antiparos 73 Burn, A.R. 33–4
Apostles 68 Burrows, Professor Ronald. 5, 8,
Asia Minor (Anatolia) 27–8, 50, 52, 15–16, 24, 37, 39–45, 47, 51–2,
145 58
Asopos viaduct 11, 23 Bywater and Sotheby Chair of
Atchley, S.C. 30, 147 Byzantine and Modern Greek
Athanasiadis, Bodosakis 69, 123 Language and Literature 26, 47
Athens 68, 85, 110–11, 156–7, 160
Ayvalik (Ayvali) 51 Caccia, Harold 80
Caclamanos, Dimitrios 16
Bakirdzis, Col Euripides 70 Cadogan, Sir Alexander 85–6, 105
Balfour, A.J. 42 Cairo 60, 67, 71–3, 76, 81–2, 87–8,
Balliol College, Oxford 14, 47 92, 95–7, 101, 119, 124, 127–30,
Barker-Benfield, Brig. K.V. 129, 132 135, 137–8, 147, 151, 153, 157,
BBC Greek Service 73, 83, 158–9 159–60
Berry, Burton Y. 138 Cameron, Averil 17
Bessie, The Lady Headley 37 Camoens Chair of Portuguese 44
Bevin, Ernest 148 Campbell, John 35
Beza, Marcu 44 Canaris, Admiral 123
Bickford-Smith, R.A.H. 20, 22 Cappadocia 28
200
Index 201
Carson, Sir Edward 43 Dardanelles 50

Caserta 164 Davey, Brig. George 101
Casey, Richard 108 Davidson, Basil 60, 120
Caskey, J.L. 33, 112, 127 Dawkins, R.M. 20, 26, 28, 31
Cassavetti, D.J. 40, 44 Deakin, F.W.D. 60
Casson, Stanley 34, 111 Despotopoulos, Kostas 92, 130
Central Powers 42 Diakos, Ioannis 149
Cervantes Chair of Spanish 44 Dill, Field-Marshal Sir John 146
Chetniks 68 Dimitratos, Aristides 73–4, 122, 150,
Chiefs of Staff 64, 75–6, 85, 105, 152
145, 156 Director of Military Operations 91,
Churchill, Clementine 138, 140 98, 101
Churchill, Winston 1–2, 42, 60, Director of Naval Intelligence 80, 158
62–3, 89, 94–5, 99, 103, 106–7, Directorate of Finance and
110, 115–17, 120, 139, 145–6, Administration (SOE Cairo) 72
148, 157, 159–64 Directorate of Special Propaganda
Clutton, G.L. 118 (SOE Cairo) 72
Colonial Office 154 Directorate of Policy and Agents (SOE
Commander-in-Chief, Middle East Cairo) 72
68, 74, 76–8, 86, 95, 100, 103–4, Directorate of Special Operations
128, 146 (SOE Cairo) 72, 119
Committee of Union and Progress Dixon, Ismene 30, 147
54, 66 Dixon, Pierson 29, 70, 76, 79, 81–2,
Communist Party of Greece (KKE) 84, 87, 96–7, 147–8, 151, 157
81, 88, 142 Dodecanese. 66, 115–16, 154
Comprehensive Greek Project 121, Donovan, General William ‘Wild Bill’
123 111, 116, 119, 121, 123–6, 135
Constantinople (Istanbul) 41–2, 49, Douglas, Canon J.A. 41
52, 55, 138 Dow, Sterling 112
Constantine I, King of the Hellenes Dunbabin, Tom 111
31, 37, 144
Cook, J.M. 33, 111 EAM (National Liberation Front) 3,
Corinth Canal 73 33, 61–2, 66–2, 72, 75, 81–2,
Couvaras, Costas 124, 133–4 86–92, 94, 98–9, 102–3, 106–7,
Crete 11, 33, 67, 71–2, 79, 115–16, 109, 113, 117, 121, 123, 129–31,
127, 150, 153–4 133–4, 136, 138–42, 155, 160–2,
Crimean War 144 164
Crusade for the Redemption of Santa EAM Central Committee 87, 90, 133,
Sophia 41 163
Curzon, Lord 36, 42, 65 Eden, Anthony 1, 66, 71, 81, 84–5,
Cyprus 42, 153–4 93, 95, 99, 102–3, 106, 128, 140,
146, 153, 163
D Section of MI 6 (SIS) 63, 68–9, EDES (National Republican Greek
110–11, 121 League) 66, 82, 102–3, 135, 139,
Dalton, Hugh 158 141, 160–1
Damaskinos, Archbishop of Athens Edson, Charles F. 112, 141–2
and All Greece 1–2, 104, 161, Egypt 116, 146, 150–1
164 Ehrgott, Capt. Winston 130–1
Daniel, John F. 112 Eisenhower, Gen. Dwight 116
202 Index
EKKA (National and Social George VI 3, 157

Liberation) 160 George II, King of the Hellenes 1,
ELAS (Greek People’s Liberation 3–4, 77–81, 85, 89, 91–7, 99,
Army) 3, 33, 65, 67, 81–2, 90, 100–1, 107, 116, 123, 141,
100, 102–3, 105–7, 114, 116, 145–7, 149, 151, 153, 155,
121, 129, 130–1, 139–42, 160–2, 157–8, 160–2
164 German Archaeological Institute 33,
Electric Power and Traction 113
Company 66 Gibbon, Edward 22
Elliot, Sir Francis 12, 45 Gladstone, William 54–5
Else, G.F. 114 Glasgow, University of 26
Enotikon Komma (Unity Party) 152 Glenconner, Lord 76, 86, 88–91, 96,
Enver Pasha 49 100, 125–6, 138
Epirus 33 Goldberg, Arthur 124
EPON (United Panhellenic Youth Gomme, A.W. 20, 26, 34
Organisation) 131 Gonatas, Stylianos 159
Ethniki Allilengyi (National Solidarity) Gorgopotamos viaduct 75, 82–3, 85,
142 156
Ethniko Symvoulio (National Council) Grace, Virginia 33, 112
133 Granville, Lord 31
Euboea 66, 73, 116, 138 Gray, Eric 111
Eumorphopoulos, Nicholas 45, 47 Great Idea (Megali Idea) 46, 51
European Community 35 Greek Archaeological Service 122
Evans, Sir Arthur 39, 57 Greek Communist Party (KKE) 81,
Exindaris, Georgios 91–4, 138, 160 139
Greek Government of National Unity
Fallmerayer, Jacob Philipp 17, 38 163–4
Finlay, George 29 Greek Government-in-exile 79–80,
First Balkan War 11 88, 92, 95–6, 99–100, 105, 136,
Fisher, Admiral Lord Fisher of 138, 145–6, 148, 151, 152–3,
Silverstone 65 155, 157, 159–62, 164
Foot, M.R.D. 61 Greek General Staff 69
Forbes, Nevill 50 Greek Irregular Project 123
Force 133 (MO4) 101, 129, 132 Greek War Relief Association 121
Foreign Office 62, 64, 74–7, 79–81, Greek War Relief 34
83–8, 90, 93, 98, 100, 103, Greek-Turkish War of 1897 144
106–7, 156, 158–9 Grey, Sir Edward 42, 48
Forster, Edward S. 21, 34 Gubbins, Maj.-Gen. Sir Colin 77, 83
Frantz, Alison 112 Guenther, Col Gustav 125–6
Fraser, Hugh 120 Gythion 23, 47
Fraser, P.M. 33, 111
Frechtling, Louis 108 Hackett, Gen. Sir John 17
Free Voice of Greece 73, 152 Hadas, Moses 112, 135, 137, 143
French Archaeological School 113 Halliday, W.R. 28
Friends’ Ambulance Unit 34 Hambro, Sir Charles 76, 85, 101,
125–6
General Headquarters, Middle East Hamid Bey 55
62, 85–6, 156 Hammond, N.G.L. 33, 66, 90, 111,
Gennadius, Ioannis 5, 7, 24, 42 115, 132, 135
Index 203
Harling mission 74–5, 82, 107, 156 Kitto, H.D.F. 32

Harrison, Jane 39 Kleisura 44
Hasluck, F.W. 20, 26–7, 29 Klugman, James 119
Hasluck (née Hardie), Margaret 28–9 Knossos 57
Hayter, William 3 Kollender, Mortimer 134
Headlam-Morley, Sir James 56 Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and
Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly 128 Byzantine History, Language and
Heywood, Maj.-Gen. T.G.G. 34 Literature 4, 7–8, 14, 16–18, 24,
Hitler, Adolf 145 28, 37–8, 40, 44–5, 47–8, 52–4,
Hogarth, D.G. 31, 50 58
Hopkins, Harry 116 Koryskhades 133
Hopkinson, Henry 157 Koryzis, Alexander 70, 146, 149
Howard, Douglas 84, 97, 102, 140 Koutsoyiannopoulos, Lt-Cmdr Ch.
Hoxha, Enver 60, 120 70–2
Hubbard, Lt Arthur 100, 106 Kreipe, Gen. Karl 67
Hudson, D.T. 120 Kymi 73
Hull, Cordell 163
Huntington, Lt-Col Ellery 125–6 Labor Branch of OSS 124, 133–4
Huot, Maj. Louis 115 Lampson, Sir Miles 71
Langer, W.L. 135, 137
International Financial Control Larisa 131
Commission 144 Laskey, D.S. 63, 95, 104, 106, 139
Ionides, A.C. 40, 47 Lawson, J.C. 28, 31
ISLD (MI 6/SIS) in the Middle East Leaf, Walter 20
127–8 Lebanon Conference 162–3
Ithaca 133 Leeper, Reginald (Rex) 2, 62, 71, 76,
79, 83, 87–91, 93–104, 110, 117,
Jackson, John 6 125, 136, 147–8
Jebb, Gladwyn 158 Leigh Fermor, Patrick 67
Jenkins, Romilly 16–17, 32 Levidis, Capt. Alexandros 138
Jerusalem 73, 152 Lindsay, Franklin 119
Joint Operational Staff, Middle East London Greek Community 47
Command 76 London Committee of Unredeemed
Greeks 46–7
Kanellopoulos, Panayiotis 73, 85, 94, London School of Economics 40
151–4, 160
Kaphandaris, G. 159 Macedonia 12, 15, 27
Karapanayiotis, Vyron 80, 150, 159 Mackenzie, Compton 29, 30–1, 43
Kartalis, Georgios 92, 146 Mackenzie, W.J.M. 60
Karvounis, Nikos 133 Mackworth Young, Gerard 32
Kato Vezani 23, 47 Maclean, Brig. Fitzroy 119
Keble, Brig. C.M. 66, 76, 100–1 Macmillan, Harold 60, 120, 146
Kedourie, Elie 5, 18, 57 MacMullen, Lt-Col Robert 139
Kellas, Arthur 114 MacVeagh, Lincoln 111, 136, 158,
Keratsini 31 162
Khlomos, Mount 22 Manchester Guardian 14, 53, 55
King’s College, London 4–5, 7, 37, Manchester, University of 24, 39
39–41, 43, 47, 51 Mandakas, Gen. Emmanuel 69, 130
Kirk, Alexander 121 Manettas, Gen. 15
204 Index
Mango, Cyril 16–17 Mulgan, Maj. John 115, 135

Maniadakis, Constantine 69, 79, Murray, Gilbert. 8, 39
149–50, 152–3 Mussolini, Benito 145
Manning, Olivia 33 Mycenae 27
Marchetti, G. 47 Myers, Brig. E.C.W. 33, 66, 74–6,
Marinos, Lt Themi 74 83–91, 95–6, 98–100, 105–7,
Marshall, Professor F.H. 16 115, 155–6, 159–60
Masaryk, Thomas Garrigue 44 Mylonas, Alexander 151, 159
Mavrogordato, John 47 Myres, J.L. 26, 31, 45
Maxwell, Terence 71
Mazarakis (Ainian), Gen. Alexander National Archives and Records
70, 149, 158 Service 109
McBaine, Lt-Cmdr Turner 126 National Bands 88–9
McNeil, Hector 148 Nelson, Sir Frank 71
McNeill, William H. 7–8 Neolaia (Metaxist youth movement)
Melas, George 158 74, 152
Melas, Maj. G. 37–8 Neraida 90, 130
Mendere (Maiandros) river 51 Nicol, Donald 34
Menzies, Major B. 69 Nicolson, Harold 52
Mercouri, Melina 19, 112 Nikoloudis, Theologos 74, 150, 152
Merokovo conference 106 Noel-Baker, Francis 66, 138–40
Merritt, Benjamin 112 Noel-Baker, Philip 138, 140
Mesara 23 Northern Epirus 154
Metaxas, Gen. Ioannis Metaxas
69–70, 73–4, 79, 122, 145–6, O’Toole, Col L.E.D. 135
149–51 Odysseus (Gideon Angelopoulos) 72
MI (R) (War Office) 63, 68, 110 Office of the Coordinator of
MI 3 81 Information 111, 123, 128, 130
MI 5 33 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 4,
MI 9 73 33, 68, 108–13, 115–18, 120–7,
Michalakopoulos, A. 74, 152 129, 132, 133–4, 137–8, 141–2
Middle East Defence Committee 85 Oliver, J.F. 112
Mihailović, Draza 68, 119 Operation Merkur 150
Military (Joint General Headquarters) Operational Group (OSS) 114
Agreement 76, 86, 98 Ottoman Empire 36, 50, 144
Miller, William 26, 32, 35
Minister of State, Middle East 77, 82, Paget, Sir Bernard 63
86–7, 95–6, 108, 147, 157 Palairet, Sir Michael 70, 111, 149,
Ministry of Economic Warfare 110, 153
137, 158 Papadimitriou, Elli 70
Mistra 22 Papagos, General Alexandros 146
Mitford, T. Bruce 111 Papandreou, Andreas 19, 112
Mitrany, D. 50 Papandreou, Georgios 1, 61–2, 117,
MO (Morale Operations) (OSS) 124, 144, 146, 158–9, 162–4
127 Paris (Versailles) Peace Conference
Money-Coutts, Mercy 34 48, 52
Moscow 163 Pascoe, Marion 33, 114
Moss, W. Stanley 67 Passport Control Office 113
Mount Ida 51 Pawson, David 66, 72–4
Index 205
Payne, Humfry 32 Rhitsona 39

Pearson, Col J.S.A. 85–7, 97, 116 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 134
Pearson, Drew 115, 118 Riley, Athelstan 41
Peloponnese 140 Rizospastis 133
Peltekis, Yannis 61–3, 136 Robeck, Admiral Sir John de 36–8
Pember Reeves, William 40, 46 Romania 44, 163–4
Pendlebury, J.D.S. 33, 111 Rommel, Field-Marshal Erwin 61, 74
Penrose, Stephen 132 Roosevelt, President Franklin 94, 99,
‘Percentages’ agreement 163–4 116, 119, 122, 160–1
Pericles mission 133 Ross, Sir Denison 54–5
Pertouli 102 Roussos, George 147, 159
Philadelphia (Ala Shehr) 51 Roussos, Petros 92
Pindus 27 Russia 49, 74
Pinerolo Division 131 Russian Military Mission 132–3
Pioneer Corps 119
Piraeus 35, 144 Samarina 27
Pirie, Ian 68, 72, 74 Sarakatsanoi 35
Plaka 106, 162 Saraphis, Gen. Stephanos 33, 103,
Plastiras, Col Nikolaos 65, 70, 88 114
Political Committee of National Sargent, Sir Orme 2, 80, 84, 86, 88,
Liberation (PEEA) 117, 133, 162 90, 94–7, 99, 101, 104–5, 117,
Political Warfare Executive (PWE) 71, 151, 155, 157–8
83, 110–11, 124, 126, 156, 159 Schilizzi, Helena 44, 47
Political Intelligence Department School of Slavonic (and East
(Foreign Office) 47, 158 European) Studies, University of
Ponder, Maj. John 115 London 7, 43
Pontos 28 School of Oriental and African
Poole, DeWitt Clinton 123 Studies, University of London
Popov, Col Grigori 164 54
Potts, Capt. 30 Scobie, Lt-Gen Ronald 164
Poulos, Constantine 117 Scutt, C.A. 20
Powell, Dilys 32, 83 Sebastian, E. Graham 69, 151–2
Psaros, Col. Dimitrios 90 S(ecret) I(ntelligence) (OSS) 116–17,
Psychico 134 124, 126–8, 132
Public Record Office 109 Security Battalions 134
Pushkin, Alexander 8 Seeley, Jay 108, 127, 133, 136
Pylos 39 Selborne, Lord 62, 94
Pyromaglou, Komninos 87, 91–2, 98 Seton, Walter 45
Seton-Watson, Hugh 120
Quadrant Conference (Quebec) 99, Seton-Watson, R.W. 7, 41–3, 53, 58
160 Sèvres, Treaty of 36
Shaw, Stanford 17–18
Raiding Support Regiment 114 Shear, T. Leslie 112
Rallis, Dimitrios 55 Sheffield, University of 34
Rallis, Petros 159 Shepardson, Whitney 126
Red Crescent 55 Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo 156
R(esearch)and A(nalysis) Branch of Sheppard, Col Rufus 67, 84, 89–90
OSS 124, 130, 133, 135, 137, Sherrard, Philip 34
140–1 Sicily 76, 155
206 Index
Simopoulos, Charalambos 153 100, 105, 108, 110, 118, 120,

Sinclair, H.J. 68 125, 129
Six Colonels, the 156 Swiss Legation, Athens 34
Skouras, George 121 Swiss Red Cross 34
Skouras, Spyros 121
Slaughter and May 118 Talaat Pasha 49
Smith, Gen. Walter Bedell 116 Talbot Rice, David 66, 111
Smuts, Field Marshal Jan 99 Talbot, Sir Gerald 65
Smyrna (Izmir) 15, 36, 51–2, 65, 72, Tamplin, Col Guy 101, 121
127, 137 Taygetos 123
SO (1) (SOE) 63, 71, 110 Taylor, George 156
SO 2 (SOE) 63, 71, 110 Thessaloniki 11, 42, 74, 82, 85, 156
SO 3 (SOE) 110 Thessaly 27, 67, 84
SOE/OSS Committee 115, 125 Thompson, Frank 67
Solomos, Dionysios 32 Thompson, M.S. 27, 29
Sophoulis, Themistocles 159 Tito, Marshal 104, 106, 119
Soteriadis, G.N. 158 Tocra 131
South Africa 154 Toulmin, Col John 120, 132
Soviet Union 76 Toynbee, Arnold 5, 7–9, 12–16, 20–3,
S(pecial) O(perations) (OSS) 117, 27, 37, 39, 41, 46–58
124–9, 132 Toynbee, Rosalind 14, 55
Special Operations Mediterranean Toynbee, Veronica 8
(SOM) 129 Triandaphyllides, Helen 21
Special Operations Committee 62–4, Tsellos, Epaminondas 73
67, 84, 127 Tsigantes, Ioannis 73, 157
Special Operations Executive (SOE) Tsirimokos, Ilias 92
3, 4, 33–4, 60, 62, 65, 68, 70–6, Tsouderos, Emmanouil 2, 70, 73, 80,
78, 81–4, 87, 90, 95–8, 101, 106, 91–4, 96–7, 99, 100, 103, 105,
109–11, 114, 118, 120, 123–6, 117, 122, 138, 146, 148–51,
128–30, 132–3, 137–8, 140, 142, 154–6, 160–2
150, 152, 156, 158 Turkey 75
Sperling, Jerome 33, 112, 127 Tzimas, Andreas (Evmaios) 87, 91–2
Sphacteria 39
Stalin, Joseph 163–4 United Nations Relief and
Stawell, Maj.-Gen. W.A.M. 129 Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA)
Stettinius, Edward 121 34
Stevenson, 96 University of Wales at Cardiff 39
Stevens, Lt-Col 33, 128, 137 University College, London 45–6
Stimson, Henry L. 11 US Joint Chiefs of Staff 125–6
Stott, Capt. Don 134
Subscribers’ Committee (Koraes Varkiza agreement 2
Chair) 45–6 Vatikiotis, P.J. 18
Supreme Council (Paris Peace Veloukhiotis, Ares 82, 90, 130
Conference) 36 Venizelos, Eleftherios 5, 24, 31, 36,
Sutherland, Stewart 17 40, 42, 45, 47, 52–3, 65, 117,
Svolos, Alexandros 62 150, 162
SWE/PWE Policy Committee 76 Venizelos, Sophocles 117, 150, 153,
Swedish Red Cross 34 156, 159, 162
Sweet-Escott, Bickham 67, 71, 91, Vlakhopoulos, Gen. 15
Index 207
Volos 11 129–30, 132, 137

Vyazemsky, Prince Pyotr 8 Wingate, Col Robert 135
Wolff, Robert L. 141
Wace, A.J.B. 4, 20, 26–7, 29, 31–3 Woodhouse, Col C.M. 33, 66, 74–5,
Wallace, Maj. David 4, 32, 87–9, 81–2, 87, 102, 106, 111, 116,
91–2, 97–8,101, 111 128–9, 130, 132, 138, 140, 148,
War Cabinet 102, 153, 161, 163 156–7
Warner, Edward 79–83, 101, 116, Wrede, Landesgruppenleiter Dr
136, 147 Walter 113
Waterhouse, Ellis 136
Waterhouse, Helen 27 X-2 125
Wavell, Gen. Sir Archibald 69, 128,
146 Yalova 55–6
Welch, F.B. 29 Young, Rodney 33, 111, 122, 127
Wellington House 47–8 Young Turks 49
West, Lt-Col Paul 131–2 Yugoslavia 154, 163
Wickham Steed, H. 41
Wilson, Field Marshal Lord [Henry Zannas, Alexander 69
Maitland] 87, 101–2, 105, 155 Zervas, Gen. Napoleon 3, 85, 91, 98,
Wilson, President Woodrow 49 102–3, 106, 134, 141, 161
Wines, Maj. Gerald (‘Jerry’) 116,

Clogg SOE in Greece

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Clogg SOE in Greece

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Clogg SOE in Greece

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

St Antony’s Series

General Editor: Richard Clogg (1999– ), Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford

Recent titles include:

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,

First published in the United States of America 2000 by

1. Greece—Relations—Great Britain. 2. Great Britain—Relations—Greece. 3.

© Richard Clogg 2000

1 Anglo-Greek Attitudes: an Introduction 1

2 The British School at Athens and the Modern History

3 The ‘ingenious enthusiasm’ of Dr Burrows and

4 The Special Operations Executive in Greece 60

5 ‘Pearls from Swine’: the Foreign Office Papers, SOE

6 Distant Cousins: SOE and OSS at Odds over Greece 108

7 The Greek Government-in-Exile, 1941–44 144

The photograph on the dust jacket of this book is emblematic of the

elsewhere in Greece) until an armistice came into effect on 15 January

after a plebiscite, for membership of the British Commonwealth with

to make them available to me, his widow, Veronica, kindly allowed me

What is striking about the case of Toynbee, however, is both the

detected. Reading Greek newspapers put him in mind of Thucydides’

blinded by any misty sentiment – and when advocates of “compulsory

only railway line to the north and to the contested territory of

He declared his intention on his return to Britain to study ‘the dago

in Greece, he conceded that by Greek standards he was very rich.

particularly favourable impression on him. Generals Vlakhopoulos,

they appeared to question the physical and cultural continuity of the

The archaeological sites that proliferate throughout the Greek lands

the British School (sometimes referred to as the British School of

Helen Triandaphyllides, a graduate of the Arsakeion School, perhaps

possible intervals of rest . . . Mr Toynbee’s record for travel is a

deprived him of his father’s gold watch on the perennially valid

was published as an official government Blue Book.15 He also penned,

characteristic outburst, urging that the newly established department

attracted to new pastures at the British (subsequently Royal) Institute

of papers, edited by his wife Margaret (née Hardie, School Student in

critical winter of 1916–17 two rival governments came into existence

part of the Managing Committee.37 Wace, more realistically, suggested

Other former students were engaged in various forms of war work

(London, 1968) which he wrote together with another former student

On 9 March 1920, almost a year after the fateful Greek landing in

were due’, he wrote, ‘to the thunder of the Canons of Canterbury

– be it duty or devotion to her husband – views things through his eyes’

also, to an extent, as actors. I do not intend to rehearse the curious but

To show forth thy master power.

On becoming principal of King’s College in 1913, Burrows was able

Greek cause in England by means of the [Anglo-Hellenic] League’, for

l’Hellénisme les temoignages de la plus inestimable amitié, veut bien

and Seton-Watson were quick to exploit, in fostering a branch of study

committees that formed part of Greece’s propaganda effort at the

It is instructive to look at the composition of the London Committee

Office and later became a member of the British delegation at the

hopelessly unfit to govern, with any approach to justice, subject

well as dominion over subject peoples, must be taken from the

Toynbee’s wartime writings on the Near East were by no means limited

Greece will no longer have to accommodate her regime in the liber-

Warming to the theme he continued that

south-eastward, Aidin will be hers in the valley of the Mendere

Greece might plant her flag on the ‘Black Castle of Afiun

race prejudice’ as well as a determination ‘religiously [to] preach

It is noteworthy that whereas the Greek authorities placed few obsta-