control of Middle East Command, the post responsible for the overall conduct of the campaign in the North African desert. Four operations were designed to create a diversion from Rommel's attempt on El Alamein: attacks on Benghazi (Operation Bigamy), Tobruk, Barce, and the Jalo oasis. These all started out from Kufra, an oasis 800 miles inland. Maclean's convoy drove to the Gebel across the Sand Sea at its narrowest point, Zighen, and made it there undetected, although "bazaar gossip" from an Arab spy indicated that the enemy expected an imminent attack. When Maclean's group reached the outskirts of Benghazi, they were ambushed and had to retreat. Axis planes repeatedly bombed them, destroying many of the vehicles and most of their supplies. Thus began a painful limp of days and nights over the desert towards Jalo, without even knowing whether that oasis was in Allied hands. They existed on rations of "a cup of water and a tablespoon of bully beef a day.... We found ourselves looking forward to the evening meal with painful fixity". When they got to that oasis, they found a battle going on between the Italian defenders and the Sudan Defence Force, and despite their offers to help, they received orders from GHQ to abandon the assault. Some days later they made it back to Kufra. The arrest of the Persian general In September 1942 Maclean was ordered to Baghdad, where General Wilson, the new head of Persia and Iraq Command, wanted his advice about starting something like the SAS in Persia, should that country fall to the Germans. He proceeded there to recruit volunteers, passing through many of the places he had seen in peacetime four years earlier: Kermanshah, Hamadan, Kazvin, Teheran. He was soon diverted to a more urgent task. General Joseph Baillon, the Chief of Staff, and Reader Bullard, the minister (i.e., ambassador, as above), summoned him to Teheran. They were concerned about the influence of Fazlollah Zahedi, the general in charge of the Persian forces in the Isfahan area, who, their intelligence told them, was stockpiling grain, liaising with German agents, and preparing an uprising. Baillon and Bullard asked Maclean to remove Zahidi alive and without creating a fuss. He devised a Trojan horse plan: he and a senior officer would call on Zahidi to pay their respects, and then arrest him "at the point of a pistol" within his walled and guarded