Middle Eastern Studies

ISSN: 0026-3206 (Print) 1743-7881 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmes20

The Clandestine Lives of Colonel David Smiley:

code name ‘Grin’

Saul Kelly

To cite this article: Saul Kelly (2020) The Clandestine Lives of Colonel David Smiley: code name
‘Grin’, Middle Eastern Studies, 56:4, 690-691, DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2020.1754203

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2020.1754203

Published online: 23 Apr 2020.

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690 BOOK REVIEWS

ß 2020 Ug ur Derin

https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2020.1753185

The Clandestine Lives of Colonel David Smiley: code name ‘Grin’, by Clive Jones,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 364 pp., £85.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-
4744-4115-5

David Smiley is a well-known figure to those interested in irregular warfare or British special
operations during the Second World War and the Cold War in the Balkans and the Middle East.
He was one of ‘the three musketeers’, along with Julian Amery and Neil (‘Billy’) McLean, who pur-
sued semi-independent policies and ‘active measures’ in support of British interests, as they saw
them, from Albania to Arabia. Their highly dramatic activities have been documented in their
own memoirs: Smiley’s Arabian Assignment (London, 1975), Albanian Assignment (London, 1984)
and Irregular Regular (Norwich, 1994) and Amery’s Sons of the Eagle (London, 1984) and
Approach March (London, 1973). Their exploits have been analysed by a later generation of
authors, including Clive Jones in his Britain and the Yemen Civil War 1962–1965 (Brighton, 2004
and 2010). Jones based some of the latter book on interviews with Smiley in London and the lat-
ter’s private papers. Given Smiley’s active military career it was a natural follow-on for Jones to
write Clandestine Lives. The result is an enthralling study of Smiley’s repeated role in British spe-
cial operations during and after the Second World War. This was due partly to his own desire for
‘action’ rather than garrison duty as a professional soldier in ‘the Blues’ (the Royal Horse Guards)
and partly to his friendships with Amery and McLean. Whereas the latter two were motivated
primarily by political and strategic considerations, Smiley was far more interested in the military
side of operations, blowing ‘things’ up rather than politicking with guerrilla leaders. He had his
chance from 1943–44 in Albania with the SOE (Special Operations Executive), where that organ-
isation (under the Ministry of Economic Warfare rather than the Foreign Office, p.69) sent in
British Liaison Officers (BLOs) to train and support the Communist partisans under Enver Hoxha
and the Zogists under Abas Kupi to fight the Axis forces. Unfortunately, as in Yugoslavia and
Greece and despite the best efforts of Smiley and the other BLOs, these factions spent as much
time fighting each other as they did the Germans and the Italians. The BLOs were also split
between ‘the three musketeers’ who wanted to support the Zogists, the adherents of the exiled
King Zog, and Brigadier Edmund ‘Trotsky’ Davies and Major Alan Palmer, who favoured the parti-
sans. Smiley, Amery and McLean also suspected pro-Communist staff officers in the Albanian sec-
tion of SOE headquarters in Cairo and later Bari of allocating more military support to the
partisans than to the Zogists and the nationalists. The answer at the time and since has been
that, as in Yugoslavia, the British needed to support whoever was more effective in fighting
the Axis. In doing so, however, the British government created difficulties for themselves in the
Balkans from 1944 onwards, as they tried and, with exception of Greece, failed to halt the
Communist takeover of the Balkans.
Smiley’s suspicion of being undermined if not betrayed by his own side continued after the
war, when he was involved with a clandestine and failed attempt (codenamed Operation
Valuable) in 1949–50 by SIS (the Secret Intelligence Service) to insert agents into Hoxha’s Albania
to undermine the regime. Smiley always blamed Kim Philby, then the British liaison officer for
SIS with the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) in Washington DC, for betraying this operation to
his Russian handlers. But, as Jones shows, the culprit was probably an Albanian refugee, one
Cako, who had been recruited by the Italians and the Americans for a separate operation in
Albania. He had been captured by the Albanian intelligence service, turned and made to
 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 691

broadcast false messages and reports to his handlers in Rome (much like the Abwehr deception
of SOE in the Englandspiel operation during the Second World War). He had also deceived
Smiley and his teams of Albanians, named the ‘Pixies’ because of their diminutive height, who
had been instructed to make contact with Cako and were then promptly rounded up by the
Albanian security services.
Smiley’s hard-won expertise in supporting irregular operations in Albania came in useful not
only in Thailand, where he ended the war in 1945, but in Oman in the late 1950s. Appointed to
command the Sultan’s Armed Forces in their eventually successful counter-insurgency operations,
with the help of the SAS (Special Air Service) against the Imamate rebellion in the Jabal Akhdar,
supported by Saudi Arabia and ARAMCO, Smiley achieved the ‘apogee’ of his career, in the view
of Clive Jones. He may have won the war in Oman but he was ‘cheesed off’ with the lack of sup-
port from the British commanders in Aden and Bahrain, and the Sultan’s adviser, Patrick
Waterfield, which was embodied in their failure to recognise his services with the award of deco-
rations. All the Sultan gave him was a brass coffee pot!
While Julian Amery had been responsible for recruiting Smiley for Oman, it was Billy McLean
who involved him in the Yemen civil war, which broke out following the overthrow of the
Imam in 1962 by republican army officers. Even though he was in his late forties, Smiley was
just about fit enough to endure the harsh conditions of the Yemeni mountains to help organ-
ise military support (arms and European mercenaries) to the Royalist groups fighting the
Nasser-backed republicans. As in Albania, Smiley found it frustrating trying to organise an
effective, co-ordinated cutting of Egyptian communication routes. The Yemenis, like the
Albanians, were too undisciplined and too subject to tribal politics to conduct irregular opera-
tions. Despite this the inadequacies of the Egyptian military effort in the Yemen meant that
the Royalists, and their British and Saudi backers, had ‘won the war’ by 1965. It was the
announcement by the Labour government in 1966 of its imminent withdrawal from Aden
which gave heart to Nasser, who instead of pulling out his troops from Yemen reinforced them
so he could take the credit for driving the British from south Arabia. In the event his defeat in
the 1967 war with Israel forced him to withdraw his forces from Yemen the month before the
British left Aden. It was the Russians who benefitted from the Egyptian and British withdrawals
from south Arabia, giving the requisite military support to the republicans to enable them to
defeat the Royalists. By 1968 there was little point in Smiley remaining in the Yemen. He drew
parallels with his time in the Balkans, writing later of ‘the enthusiasm, the excitement, the
hardship, the danger – the final disappointment; the wheel had turned full circle, back to
Albania’ (p.316).
Clive Jones has written a fascinating account of a regular/irregular soldier who was involved
with some of the key British special operations in the Balkans and Arabia from 1943 to 1968.
Smiley, with his obvious code-name ‘Grin’, was a no-nonsense man, who was modest about his
remarkable exploits in the best tradition of the British Army.

Saul Kelly
Defence Studies Department, King’s College, London, UK
saul.kelly@kcl.ac.uk

ß 2020 Saul Kelly

https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2020.1754203