During the war Wheatley had met Colonel Leslie “Sherry” Sheridan, “a cloak-and-dagger chap with whom I had numerous friendly dealings”. Sheridan had been a Fleet Street journalist and then a barrister, but the war transformed his life and brought him a senior role in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the controversial organisation responsible for “ungentlemanly warfare”1, or propaganda, subversion and sabotage.
Such things were traditionally despised by the military establishment, but in 1940, with Europe under German occupation, the time had come to consider them. The SOE’s brief, in Churchill’s phrase, was “to set Europe ablaze”, and its methods necessarily involved “varying degrees of illegal or unethical methods, which would violate normal peacetime morality and would not only be improper but often criminal; untruths, deceptions, bribery, forgeries of passports, permits or currencies, acts of violence, mayhem and murder.”
The SOE was formed from the remains of two earlier clandestine organisations; the black propaganda unit known as ‘Electra House’, and the sabotage branch, section “D”, for Destruction, of the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS or MI6. Before long, it had a global network of agents under Sheridan’s direction: “Starting in the Balkans and using his widespread contacts with Fleet Street journalists and foreign correspondents, Sheridan built up a network of agents that, by 1941, covered the principal neutral capitals of the world.”
Agents were often placed under the ‘cover’ of being Fleet Street foreign correspondents, while others worked for Sheridan’s own brainchild, a supposedly commercial “news agency” set up in 1940 called Britanova Ltd, with offices just off the Strand in Norfolk Street.
When the war ended there was no going back to Fleet Street or the Bar for Sheridan, although his new career would still be concerned with mass communications and winning arguments. In 1946, in partnership with another ex-SOE man, Sheridan set himself up with an office at 47 Essex Street, again just off the Strand, as a practitioner of public relations.
Meanwhile the Cold War was getting under way. In 1946 Churchill spoke of an ‘Iron Curtain’ coming down across Europe (a phrase echoed in Wheatley’s Cold War thriller title Curtain of Fear). The following year British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin found himself swamped by a wave of Soviet propaganda at the United Nations, and this was also the era of Soviet front organisations such as the ‘World Federation of Trades Unions’ and the ‘World Peace Council’.
The Foreign Office needed to respond, so a new unit called the Information and Research Department was founded to organise anti-Communist publicity. The name was deliberately bureaucratic and bland: “It should be noted that the name of this department is intended as a disguise for the true nature of its work, which must remain strictly confidential”2
There has been a certain amount of paranoia on the Left about the operations of the IRD, but its aims were entirely reasonable. “I think the work we were doing was a good thing”, IRD officer Celia Kirwan has said, “because people were misinformed about Communism in those days in a big way. And it was about time they got the record right.” The IRD sought to alert people to the reality of the Gulag and the Soviet forced labour camps, and to show that life in Stalin’s Russia was not all it was cracked up to be. In that respect the IRD hardly deserved to be controversial (as a well informed individual of Establishment sympathies said to the present writer, “Oh, they just told people socks were badly made in Bulgaria, that sort of thing”.) The IRD was, nevertheless, instrumental in bringing down the Sukarno regime in Indonesia, and by the end of its existence there were concerns that its operations had exceeded its remit, both abroad and on the domestic front.
*
The Islamic religion was looking like a spent force in an increasingly modern world; nobody in 1948 would have predicted the revival of Islam by the end of the twentieth century. The IRD, however, decided to sponsor its resurgence as a Cold War strategy, bolstering it up to act as a Middle Eastern bulwark against the influence of the atheistic Soviet Union.
To this end the IRD planted articles in the Arab press such as ‘The Life Giving Principles of Islam are a Sound Basis for a New Pattern of Life’ by Zahid Hussein, planted in the Egyptian press by IRD Cairo. However, the problem with British-originated propaganda was that it tended to be pitched at too high a level for the local readership. In December 1949 the IRD had planted ‘Moscow Attacks the Koran’ and other articles in the Persian press, but the British Embassy complained that the material was too intellectual for the “earthy press of Persia”. Or in the words of IRD Baghdad, in the Minutes of a Meeting of Information Officers in March 1948, ‘ “Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses, and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed.”(Mein Kampf )’
The breakthrough came with the idea of publishing pulp fiction, as minuted by IRD Cairo in February 1950:
19. Among the pamphlets and books, the following categories might be used for carrying propaganda …
b. The paper-backed novelette, dealing normally with sex or crime themes. This is apparently the staple diet of the half-educated effendi.
It was with this half-educated effendi in mind that IRD Cairo wrote, in a March 1950 memo marked ‘Secret’, that “IRD would arrange the production of drafts in English of short love or detective novels, or thrillers, embodying anti-Communist propaganda but following their local counterparts as closely as possible … the IRD, Cairo, would arrange for the drafts to be re-written in Arabic by local hacks …”. In June, however, in a document marked ‘Top Secret’, a more senior figure replied
The task suggested … is not, I think, a very feasible one. Mr.Sheridan has already seen an example of the sort of short story commissioned by the more lurid press, and I am sure the IRD could not begin to compete at that level of pornography.
Sherry Sheridan had meanwhile become an early and key member of the IRD in London (and had supervised the production of Orwell’s Animal Farm as an anti-Communist comic strip for the Islamic world; it was particularly viable in this respect because the evil animals were pigs).
Using his PR office as a front, Sheridan rushed about in a succession of meetings and lunches with journalists and other opinion shapers at various restaurants and clubs, and he would lunch with Wheatley at the Hungaria Restaurant and the Savile Club.
Sheridan asked Wheatley to write a propaganda romance for the Middle Eastern world. Sheridan was luckier than he knew with Wheatley, given the Orientalist strain in Wheatley’s psyche from his earlier years. Wheatley owned a number of books that he thought of as being about Islam (he catalogued them under this heading) including James Elroy Flecker’s Hassan, Norman Penzer’s The Harem, four or five illustrated editions of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, E.Powys Mather’s Red Wise, and a copy of The Qur’an.
Wheatley – and probably the Foreign Office men themselves – would have been familiar with the idea of Islam holding the balance of power in the Middle East from John Buchan’s 1916 thriller Greenmantle; it was one of Wheatley’s favourite books, and his copy was inscribed to him by Buchan. In it – and this much was historically true, oddly enough – Kaiser William has proclaimed a Holy War, calling himself Hadji Mohammed Guilliamo and claiming that the Hohenzollerns are descended from the Prophet Mohammed3.
The British are forced to take counter-measures. Buchan’s Sir Walter Bullivant – the man who sends Richard Hannay on his missions, and seems to be the model for Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust in the Gregory Sallust books – muses:
The ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back number, and that Krupp guns are the new gods. Yet – I don’t know. I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number.
Wheatley’s instructions, probably from Sheridan himself, were imaginative and detailed. In two typed sheets headed NOVEL FOR THE MIDDLE EAST, the Foreign Office specified the setting and four chief characters: the Heroine (“a beautiful Islamic girl”), the Hero, and the Villain, a Russian Embassy official who runs a spy ring (“Inter alia he has on his staff a number of loose, flaunting women imported from Russia, who treat the local inhabitants with arrogance”). There was a particular cultural sensitivity in the fourth character, the Sage:
– venerable old gentleman, possibly father of hero, who gives good advice, and maintains (but not at too great length) the importance of the good life, the necessity of following the customs and practices of Islam, and their complete incompatibility with Communism. The old gentleman should, it is thought, have a hard life, being continually robbed, beaten up and so on, at the instigation of the Russian official; but right, of course, will triumph in the end.
Overall, there should be “a fairly continuous suggestion of sex, but nothing actually pornographic, i.e. the reader should see people going into the bedrooms, but should not follow them in.”
Wheatley rose to the task magnificently. Ayesha, sales-girl in Souliman’s scent shop, is eighteen “and in the full flower of her beauty”, whether sitting in a simple cotton frock under the date palm behind her mother’s house, or wearing “traditional costume” at work with “filmy Turkish trousers caught tight with bangles at the ankles” (Wheatley doesn’t actually say where this costume is traditional; perhaps Seragliostan) and of course a yashmak, revealing just her beautiful eyes. It was the proviso she could work veiled that secured her now-dead father’s consent to her taking a job, because he was a “strict Mohammedan and old-fashioned in his views.”
Ayesha has been noticed by Sergius Razoff, a high ranking official in the Soviet secret police. He wants her to be his mistress, and warns her that when the Communists come to power in the near future, in a planned coup, she will be his for the taking. This sounds strange and alien to Ayesha:
In Islamic countries, through centuries of convention, women have always enjoyed a special protection, and to Ayesha it seemed almost impossible to visualise a state of things in which an official, however powerful, could take a woman against her will …
It is all the more alien because she finds Razoff repulsive, with his “flat Mongol face and small dark eyes that peered avidly at her, seeking, she felt with repulsion, to strip her of her garments. The thought of being embraced by him made her shudder.”
Ayesha loves Selim, handsome and clever son of the scent shop owner. He is university educated and runs the laboratory where the perfumes are made. Ayesha wants to get an education so she can work in the scent lab with Selim: “Prostrating herself, she begged Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate, would hearken to a maiden’s prayer.” – and in due course she does get to work there. Ayesha’s devout Mohammedan father, meanwhile, has been “a strong supporter of the movement to found an Arab league as the best means of maintaining the independence of the Islamic countries from encroachment by Jews, the Western Powers, and Soviet Russia alike …”
An Armenian named Melkon gives Ayesha a lift in his newly acquired car, but he tells her “my new master is both rich and generous” and drives her to the Russian compound against her will, where his new master Razoff is waiting: “At the thought of brutal hands upon her shrinking flesh, and his flat Mongol face, hot and leering, within a few inches of her own, a shudder ran through her.” Ayesha struggles to escape. Melkon says “You spawn of Iblis!” – the Devil in Islam – and produces a knife: “Were it not that I mean to produce you to my master in good shape, I would slit you across the face with this in payment for that bite you gave me.”
She was a highly imaginative girl, and had been brought up on the immemorial romances that for a thousand generations have been the literary treasure of the Arabian lands. Ever since she had been old enough to understand anything of life, she had dreamed girlish dreams of a happy marriage. Even if there were no longer Caliphs in Baghdad, and princes no longer sought adventure disguised as poor princes to the Holy Cities, there were still their modern equivalent in the handsome, cultured sons of rich merchants – young men like Selim. It had been her highest ambition to unveil ceremoniously and give herself joyfully, as a bride, to such a one. But beyond that small stout door in the wall lay the very antithesis of all such dreams, and an hour of horror that would render them for ever unrealisable.
Just as Melkon is dragging her through the door Wheatley suspends the action, cliff-hanger style, and treats readers to a chapter on Selim and his progressive beliefs. He debates the pros and cons of Marxism, revolution and reform with his friends, one of whom, Hassan, says “To play with Moscow is to play with fire … if we had a Communist Government here, what is to prevent it inviting Soviet troops to march in on the excuse of maintaining order. No thank you!”
Ayesha has meanwhile stabbed Melkon with his own knife. Terrified, she feels doubly culpable because she accepted the lift, but she still hopes to get away with the murder. Somehow she finds enough calm to discuss politics with Selim, and asks him if he has ever met anyone who has lived under Soviet rule and escaped. This is the cue to introduce the Sage, her Uncle Ishak: “Old Ishak was completely bald; his face was covered with a thousand wrinkles …”
“Young sir,” Ishak says to Selim,
your generation makes a mock of Holy Things and its ears are deaf to the voice of truth and wisdom. It would be profitless for me to weary you with the tale of my sufferings, for Iblis, the accursed, has befogged the understanding of all such young men as yourself. You would go from here only with cynical laughter in your heart, judging me a dotard who seeks refuge in lies to excuse the failure he has made of his life. It is far better that you should employ yourself in converse with my niece, while admiring her physical perfections, for that is surely the true purpose which has led you to honour us with your presence.
“Oh uncle!” protests Ayesha, turning crimson. Ishak’s eyes lose their dullness and glint with a sudden light as he continues:
Then be warned by me. Repent in time and return to Islam. Above all, have no truck with Communists, for it is such as they who are referred to in the Koran where it says “For these are the fellows of the fire, and they shall burn therein for aye.”
“But what it would really interest me to know [says Selim] is why you consider that Communism is necessarily evil.”
“Because it destroys the soul. It teaches men to deny their God and robs them of their individuality.” […] “Red is the symbol of the fire, and these are the fellows of the fire. For Allah sees all, and even as it is written in the Holy Book, they shall burn therein for aye.”
While a discussion of ‘equality’, educational brainwashing, and the realities of Russian life is going on – and Ishak describes what happened to the family carpet business under Bolshevism – Razoff suddenly arrives. He threatens to send Ishak back to Dagestan, draws a gun on Selim, and announces Ayesha is “as succulent a morsel as I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been stationed here … you will kindly regard her as my property.”
“You must be crazy to think that you are on such an easy wicket,” says Selim, “Praise be to Allah the Communists haven’t a hope of getting a clear majority.” But Razoff has the upper hand because he knows Ayesha murdered Melkon, and she sees her future all too clearly:
He might not even stop at blackmailing her into becoming his concubine. Even if she let him have his way with her, rather than face exposure, her degradation might not end at that. When he had tired of her, he would be able to renew his threats and force her to prostitute herself in order to get him information, as she had heard it said he did with the Russian secretaries on his staff.
The thought of such a prospect made her flesh creep.
Razoff announces he is taking her straight back to his villa in his car, where
I shall first strip you naked, so that not only I, but all my people, can have a good look at you. I shall then proceed to the full enjoyment of your charms at my leisure. When I have done with you I shall give you over to my men to do as they like with you. Finally, I shall hand you over to a Chinese eunuch who is an expert in devising measures to make pig-headed people talk. After half an hour with him you will be screaming yourself hoarse to be allowed to tell me what you have done with that letter. How do you like the idea of being the central figure in such a programme?
“You beast! You inhuman brute!” sobs Ayesha, “May Allah be the witness to your persecution of me! May he repay you for it by casting your soul to Iblis, so that it will forever burn among the damned.” “I don’t give a fig for Allah,” says Razoff, “and I’ve no time to waste in talking mythology.”
Things look bad, but Wheatley has more snakes and ladders in store. Selim has managed to escape and summon the police. Safe from Razoff, Ayesha is now rejected by Selim because he thinks she was Melkon’s mistress. She still has Razoff’s letter, letting slip the plan for the Communist coup d’etat, but she will implicate herself in the murder if she reveals how she came by it.
For a quarter of an hour she wrestled in torment with her soul. She was convinced that to produce the letter would bring about her own death; but if she did not, her country would be given over to the Godless inhuman Molochs of Moscow. The people would be enslaved: in the months to come countless women would suffer the degrading fate with which Razoff had threatened her; Selim, and every man likely to give trouble to the new Soviet masters, would be shot. Yes – Selim would be shot.
So she tells Selim everything, and the planned coup and Razoff’s plans for women are made public (he had told her “under Soviet rule every woman had to submit to any official who took a fancy to her”). “Allah, what a scoop!” exclaims a journalist. Ayesha has saved her country.
Now there is only the murder to worry about, and at this point Wheatley searched his Koran to find a passage he remembered dimly from years earlier, and the white-haired magistrate declares
Is it not written in Chapter 24 of the Koran, that even a slave girl shall not be compelled to prostitute herself. We have before us an honest woman who, under extreme provocation, did what she has done in defence of her chastity. I find no case to send to a higher court.
Sobbing with joy, Ayesha walks into the street with Selim and their friends and families. It is election day, but now the Communists have no chance, thanks to Ayesha’s revelation. Quoting Razoff’s letter, a newspaper headline reads “COMMUNIST PLOT TO SEIZE GOVERNMENT” and another “PROMINENT SOVIET CITIZEN STATES ALL WOMEN PROPERTY OF OFFICIALS UNDER COMMUNISM.”
Communism is defeated, and boy and girl live happily ever after.
Sheridan was well pleased with Wheatley’s effort, particularly his adroit use of the Koran. In his typically all-out, Manichaean, black-or-white fashion, Wheatley entitled the book Of Vice and Virtue. It was published in Beirut in 1953, with the Arabic title changed to Ayesha.
*
Wheatley was always keen to evade the tax man. Indeed, his pre-war Fascist friend W.H.Tayleur – now another public relations consultant – wrote in a mid-Fifties letter that Wheatley’s request to be paid (for a proposed advertising campaign selling razor blades) with a greenhouse was just not practicable. His clients might be able to put something portable through their books as an expense, from a TV set to a motor car, but the greenhouse was taking creative accountancy too far.
For Vice and Virtue, the agreement was that Wheatley should be paid in cash. “It was … suggested that for such an operation the use of Secret Funds was fully justified, and these would be tax free”. Wheatley went to 47 Essex Street for his money, but he had been seized with anxiety about carrying a large sum in notes, in case something should happen on the street. Like the old SOE man that he was, Sheridan took Wheatley’s security arrangements in his stride (what they really needed was item ns.306 in the SOE quartermaster’s catalogue of Special Devices, the Calico Money Belt). After putting several hundreds of pounds worth of notes into Wheatley’s trouser pockets – several thousand by today’s values – he pinned them shut with safety pins, and Wheatley walked away down Essex Street with the money safely trousered.
Wheatley professed himself unable to discuss Vice and Virtue in his lifetime; perhaps partly to foster a certain image of himself, but also from a real sense that he had entered into something clandestine with the IRD. He wrote to a bibliographer in 1972
… in fact I [would not have] allowed it to be mentioned at all in the Hutchinson’s pamphlet, but for the fact that it is now a long time since I wrote it. I am, however, still uncertain that I may not get into trouble from the Foreign Office by having done so, as the whole thing was a highly confidential business and I certainly cannot allow any particulars about it to be printed.
In due course he had his typescript bound by Sangorski and Sutcliffe in blue morocco leather, with Pro Rege et Patria, For King and Country, stamped on the cover.
*
Under the umbrella of the nuclear stand-off, Wheatley was very conscious that Cold War was an ideas war. As Gifford Hillary argues in The Ka of Gifford Hillary, “as for destroyers, cruisers, and other conventional craft I’ll admit that they have a certain use in a cold war, for showing the flag in foreign ports; but if we spent the cost of their upkeep in radio programmes for the Arab and Asiatic nations, aimed at countering Soviet propaganda, we would get infinitely better value for our money.”
Working with the given premise that “communism is only a cloak for the most sinister imperialism the world has ever seen”, the IRD had a complex task in the Middle East. They had to be careful not to push Western-style ‘democracy’, which might be unsuitable for the Arab world and prove destabilising; they had to be careful not to mention Communism too much, which might have the effect of publicising it; and yet they had to emphasise the threat of Russia, and its Godlessness. And at the same time, to their credit, they resolved to avoid Islamic fundamentalism, reminding themselves in a memo “Don’t back reaction”. Wheatley’s book was as good a contribution to the struggle as could be expected and, like a number of his books, it is notable for a strong female character in the decisive role.
Wheatley and Sheridan remained friends until Sheridan’s death in 1964. Sheridan spent the latter half of his life as a professional Cold Warrior of great flair and integrity, and he was the case officer for George Orwell’s 1949 denunciation of a list of people whom he considered to be “crypto-Communists and fellow travellers.”
As for the IRD, it was finally closed down in 1978. Its hawkish hard line and apparent autonomy had become a cause for concern; “a frequent complaint from the more detente-minded in Whitehall was ‘We have one foreign policy, IRD has another.’ ” There were also concerns that despite being a part of the Foreign Office, the IRD had taken an over-keen interest in domestic affairs, particularly the Trades Union movement, and was producing propaganda material with unacknowledged ‘spin’ for the home market.
This was what Wheatley did for four decades: Vice and Virtue is only part of his propaganda career, and the anti-Communism of his post-war books follows the IRD agenda. The IRD had stressed that Nazism and Communism should be closely equated (and even tried to gain credibility for the term “Communazis”) which is part of the message in Jugg, and again in The Satanist, where a character named Lothar is an old Nazi, Communist and Satanist all in one. Wheatley no doubt held these opinions independently, although they may have been reinforced and sharpened over lunches – and by the IRD journal of comment, The Interpreter, which Sheridan was regularly sending to him.
Of Wheatley’s eight occult novels, seven have a distinct propaganda function. As we have seen, The Devil Rides Out was an early Appeasement novel, written to prevent war with Nazi Germany, and Strange Conflict was written for the war effort. An anti-Communist line then goes through Jugg, To The Devil – A Daughter, The Ka of Gifford Hillary and The Satanist, with increasing attention being paid to the menace of Trade Unionism, and in Gateway to Hell Wheatley turns his attention to the Black Power movement.
It is fitting that Wheatley’s occult novels should be propaganda vehicles, since propaganda and magic both involve the manipulation of reality by means of words and images. The propagandist and the magician are both interested in changing consciousness, within an idea-led, thought-driven view of the world.
Wheatley had spent formative years in the propaganda-conscious period between the wars. It was in the Thirties that Captain J.F.C. Fuller – tank expert, occultist, and a friend of both Crowley and Hitler – told readers of the Occult Review that magic remained a “formidable weapon under the name of ‘propaganda’ ”, and added “Is not Dr.Goebbels a magician?”
*
By now, Wheatley was in many respects a member of the Establishment. He had certainly had “a good war”, and he was close to senior officers in the Army and Air Force, as well as several members of the peerage. He had worked near Churchill, and he had close links with MI5 and other intelligence organisations.
There was, however, another establishment that would never really accept him, and that was the literary establishment. This was a club he could not join so easily, and it has to be said his name might sit oddly with the likes of C.P.Snow or Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Wheatley had had his disappointing experience with the PEN Club, some years earlier, but now the time seemed ripe for him to try to enter the Royal Society of Literature.
1 It was originally founded under the auspices of the ‘Ministry of Economic Warfare’, widely known as the “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”, a description of Churchill’s. It remains controversial because despite the bravery of its operatives, and the deaths that many of them met after being captured, civilians were caught up in its activities (in the derailing of trains, for example).
2 FO 1110 / 383. In the event this draft explanation was not used, and a more anodyne definition was substituted.
3 As Queen Elizabeth II is said to be, via the Moorish Kings of Spain.