Classicists and Intelligence Services

[Quintius Clavus]

I heard it from Eric Birley, himself, that his work tracing Roman units using officers' career information led to his being recruited by British intelligence to do the same with news stories and other pieces of information about German officers during WWII and thus helping to locate German units. I am sure he did other things for them as well. He also talked about his one trip to the Pentagon in Washington DC during the War. The conversation was in 1978.

[mcbishop]

I heard it from Eric Birley, himself, that his work tracing Roman units using officers' career information led to his being recruited by British intelligence to do the same with news stories and other pieces of information about German officers during WWII and thus helping to locate German units. I am sure he did other things for them as well. He also talked about his one trip to the Pentagon in Washington DC during the War. The conversation was in 1978.

It turns out there is quite a detailed account of Birley's activities in Hunter Davies' book A Walk Along the Wall (ed.3, 1984) and the trip to the Pentagon is mentioned there. Apparently he was given 50 German officers and 300 tons of captured documents to check what he knew; it seems he was pretty accurate and knew more than the German officers about the German army (middle management, eh!).

What intrigued me in Davies' account of Birley's work was the mention of his card index of auxiliary units. He in fact inherited just such an index from Len Cheesman (who had been killed in 1915 at Gallipoli) and Tony Birley very kindly lent it to me to copy a few years ago in connection with a Cheesman project Phil Freeman and I are working on. This formed the core of the appendices (and, of course, the discursive text) of Cheesman's book.

So perhaps we could include Len Cheesman as having a contributory role.

Mike Bishop

[Jona Lendering]

An interesting piece on "warrior scholars" here.

[Medicus matt]

I don't think Lawrence was ever a member of the intelligence services. He was on the Intelligence Staff in the Cairo office of the GOC (because he spoke arabic, had good knowledge of Arabian geography and was a good cartographer) but that's not the same thing.
Nor, I would argue, was he a classicist. He was educated in the classics, as was any schoolboy who received a similar education at that time, but his passion was early medieval archaeology, with a particlar interest in Crusade-era castles.

The most infamous intelligence operatives (in the UK anyway) are Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Mclain and Cairncross, none of whom were Classicists or ancient historians.

[Caballo]

"The most infamous intelligence operatives (in the UK anyway) are Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Mclain and Cairncross, none of whom were Classicists or ancient historians' - clearly not recruiting classicists was where we went wrong here. That and recruiting from Cambridge....

[mcbishop]

I don't think Lawrence was ever a member of the intelligence services. He was on the Intelligence Staff in the Cairo office of the GOC (because he spoke arabic, had good knowledge of Arabian geography and was a good cartographer) but that's not the same thing.
Nor, I would argue, was he a classicist. He was educated in the classics, as was any schoolboy who received a similar education at that time, but his passion was early medieval archaeology, with a particlar interest in Crusade-era castles.

He read history at Oxford and crossed over into archaeology, through his field studies on medieval castles in France and the Levant, but also as Woolley's sidekick at Carchemish. So, not a classicist per se, but he did work in the Intelligence Department in 1916 in Cairo writing a report on 'The Politics of Mecca' so, despite his claim to have just answered the telephone, he was rather more of a spook than is usually acknowledged, although probably not as much as Gertie Bell (who was intelligence personified).

Mike Bishop

[JEaton]

The late Sir Ronald Syme could possibly be added to this list of Classicists who had links with the intelligence services. Syme left Oxford during the Second World War to take up a Chair in Philology in Istanbul. He returned to Oxford at the end of the conflict. Although Syme refused to comment on his wartime activities, the balance of probability would seem to suggest that he was involved in some sort of covert activity in Turkey, and that the Chair in Philology was his 'cover'.

[Tarbicus]

Enoch Powell.

Not a classicist, but an historian; Correlli Barnett.