Nigel Clive
in the SIS
Sir, – In his review of Target Italy by
Roderick Bailey (July 18), James
Pettifer implies that Nigel Clive,
“who moved smoothly from underground
work in Greece to a Cold
War career in SIS”, was initially
employed by Special Operations
Executive (SOE).
On the contrary, Clive was an
SIS man from the start. One of his
party pieces, never to be forgotten
by those who witnessed it, was his
dramatic rendering of the circumstances
in which his SIS predecessor
in Greece in 1943, an
alleged Greek-American called
Costa Lawrence, was shot dead by
an SOE officer, an Irishman named
Spike Moran. Pettifer remarks on
wartime British inter-agency rivalries,
though this was perhaps taking
things to extremes.
KEITH JEFFERY
School of History and
Anthropology,
Queen’s University, Belfast.