Scobie’s War

Abstract

Christmas 1941: Greene was on a small cargo ship in the North Atlantic drinking champagne, taking his turn on submarine watch and completing British Dramatists. His sister Elisabeth, who had been with the Foreign Office since 1938, had recruited him into the Secret Service and he was bound for West Africa to work in Section V (counter-espionage) of MI6. His boss in the Iberian subsection was Kim Philby. Among his immediate colleagues were Rodney Dennys, who married his sister later in the war, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and Malcolm Muggeridge, who was posted to Lourenço Marques (as Greené s character Davis in The Human Factor (1978) would later wish to be), and who became so unnerved by his tasks there that he once tried to drown himself in the Indian Ocean. Philby said that Muggeridge and Greene ‘added to the gaiety of the service.’¹ Section V was headquartered in St Albans; the Iberian subsection worked mostly in Spain and Portugal and had agents dispatched as far as Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa and Sierra Leone in West Africa. Its main responsibility was to monitor shipping in and around the Straits of Gibraltar where the movement of British ships was an important target of German espionage.