Article | Intelligence gathering in the Eastern Mediterranean (1908-18)

Mavi Boncuk |

Harry Pirie-Gordon: Historical research, journalism and intelligence gathering in the Eastern Mediterranean (1908-18) Author: David W. J. Gill
DOI: 10.1080/02684520601046382
Published in: Intelligence and National Security, Volume 21, Issue 6 December 2006 , pages 1045 - 1059

Abstract
British scholars were active in the Levant during the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. Harry Pirie-Gordon toured medieval castles in the region during the spring of 1908 under the auspices of the British School at Athens; T.E. Lawrence used his maps in the following year. Pirie-Gordon continued to travel widely in the Near East as a member of the Foreign Department of The Timesand was involved with the survey of the Syrian coastline around Alexandretta. He was commissioned in the RNVR in 1914 and took part in the raid by HMS Doris on Alexandretta. Pirie-Gordon served in an intelligence capacity at Gallipoli before returning to Cairo to work with David Hogarth. In 1916 he was involved with the occupation of Makronisi (Long Island) [1] in the Gulf of Smyrna. Later that year he took charge of the EMSIB operation at Salonica until its purge in early 1917. Pirie-Gordon returned to the Arab Bureau in Cairo and took part in the Palestine campaign.

[1] Long Island (Long Island, now called Cheustan island in the bay in front of the Turkish city of Izmir / Smyrna)

Name given by British forces to a small Turkish island in the Gulf of Izmir now known as Cheustan. Long Island produced an interim emissions authorized in May 1916 during the British occupation. (These are now List by Stanley Gibbons catalog English ed.) un'inaccessibile Today the island is a military zone, but in the last years of the Ottoman Empire belonged to a wealthy English family, the Whitall. When the Turks allied with the Austro-Germans in World War I, the head of the family went into exile, but later his knowledge allowed the British to reclaim the island by the Turks in 1915 and block Smyrna (Izmir), the main port of the Turks to Asia Minor. Long Island was occupied in the spring of 1916 by a British force and a legion composed of Greeks of the Aegean Levantine coast. Lieutenant Commander Harry Pirie-Gordon was appointed civil administrator in April 1916 and authorized a series of stamps for Long Island. SourceThe first three tax stamps were overprinted GRI Turks POSTAGE (on the right) with extra pounds. GRI means "Georgius Rex Imperator". The tax had been requisitioned in a post office during a raid in Syria in December 1914 and Pirie-Gordon was brought with them for 18 months waiting to find a good way to use them. SOURCE

See also: Captain Larkin and the Turks: The Strategic Impact of the Operations of HMS Doris in Early 1915 by EDWARD J. ERICKSON