6/11/2023 0 Comments Eminent persians pdf download4 Although Zahedi was in clandestine contact with the Germans, and his arrest removed a significant security threat, there was no security-intelligence (CICI/DSO) involvement in Operation PONGO. According to Maclean, who planned the Persian operation himself without any formal sanction by SOE, to whom the task would normally have fallen, he was given a free hand by Sir Reader Bullard and Jumbo Wilson’s chief-of-staff, Joseph Baillon, in the matter of the arrest of the powerful southern Persian malcontent Fazlollah Zahedi, governor-general of Isfahan (see Figure 8.1): ‘Only two conditions were made: I was to take him alive and I was to do so without creating a disturbance.’ 3 According to Jumbo Wilson, the decision to arrest Zahedi was his and achieved its goal: ‘the possibility of others being treated in a like manner put a complete damper on any further activities of the plotters’. In the absence of any reported offensive SOE actions - so-called ‘bangs’ - on Persian soil between 19, mention needs to be made here of a unique PAIFORCE covert operation (codenamed PONGO) which marked the special-operations debut of Fitzroy Maclean, who would subsequently distinguish himself as a prominent SOE commander (D/H178) 2 with Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia.
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