ABSTRACT
A detailed account of SOE in the Middle East is a prominent omission from the collection of studies on SOE during the Second World War.1 This is surprising given the importance of the region to Britain and the fact that some records were released, with a helpful guide, in 1994.2 The most complete account to date is contained in William Mackenzie’s in-house history of the SOE, which contains two chapters on SOE in the Middle East.3 These are concerned mainly with organisational matters but there is some information on operations. Mackenzie was necessarily restricted by space in the amount of detail he could include on SOE in the Middle East, the fact that he wrote the narrative remarkably quickly after the war and that he could not access all SOE material. As far as the Middle East chapters were concerned, he depended on the narratives of the section dealing with the Arab World, certain series and branch files, the demi-official correspondence of Lord Selborne (Minister of Economic Warfare, responsible for SOE from February 1942 to May 1945), those reminiscences published at the time, interviews with SOE staff, and some Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff papers in the Cabinet Office. The papers of other departments, such as the Foreign Office, are referred to only when the originals or copies appeared in the SOE archives. His narrative is written primarily from the point of view of SOE. As Mackenzie pointed out, the SOE section narratives, though primary sources, ‘vary enormously in quality and in the number of references they give’.4 This applies particularly to the ‘History of SOE in the Arab World’ which, though written by an SOE official in Cairo (AW/100) in September 1945 was ‘very disappointing, chiefly no doubt because it was written entirely from memory, as all documents referring to S.O.E. Arab World activities were burned at the time of El Alamein’5 (a reference to ‘the great bonfire’ at General Headquarters Middle East in Cairo as Rommel approached El Alamein in June 1942). Also the ‘History of SOE in the Arab World’ was only concerned with the period up to El Alamein as subsequent activities to the end of hostilities were thought by AW/100 to be of a subversive nature too secret to be embodied in one single document. When AW/100 was asked to include post-Alamein material, he refused on grounds of security and also stated that no detailed records were kept as SOE Field Commanders were instructed to destroy any incriminating documents
as soon as was practicable. Therefore, it was doubted whether this ‘secret history’ of SOE operations in the Middle East, as opposed to the open history which he had produced, could ever be written.6
