Christopher Montague Woodhouse

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Christopher Montague Woodhouse (born May 11, 1917 - February 13, 2001 ), called Monty Woodhouse, later Lord Terrington of Huddersfield, was a British secret agent and politician.

Life

Monty Woodhouse was the third son of Baron Terrington. He studied classical languages at Oxford , where he was a student of Isaiah Berlin . After completing his studies in the summer of 1939, he traveled to Italy and Greece , where he arrived just before the start of World War II . He joined the British Army and was posted to Greece as a liaison officer. After the invasion of the Wehrmacht in 1941, he first went to Crete and, after the attack on Crete, to the Middle East. In September 1942 he returned as an agent of the SOE secret service to train and support resistance fighters in the occupied country. He let himself be dropped with the parachute and organized the first spectacular action of the Greek resistance with fighters from ELAS and EDES to blow up the railway bridge at Gorgopotamos . As a result, he tried to coordinate and support the actions of the rival resistance groups - with British support mainly benefiting the anti-communist EDES. Woodhouse remained in Greece as a British diplomat until May 1946 after the end of the war.

In the years that followed, Woodhouse wrote books on Byzantine and modern Greek history.

In the early 1950s, Woodhouse worked for the British secret service in Iran . He supported royalist tendencies in Persian politics. In collaboration with the CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt junior, he participated in Operation Ajax in 1953 . Their goal, the overthrow of the Iranian government under Mohammed Mossadegh , which was nationalizing the Iranian oil fields, was achieved.

In 1950 Woodhouse was elected to the British Parliament as a candidate for the Conservative Party as a member of the Oxford constituency.

Fonts (selection)

  • The Apple of Discord: A survey of recent Greek politics in their international setting . Hutchinson, London 1948.
  • The Battle of Navarino. Dufour Editions, Chester Springs, Pa. 1965.
  • The Philhellenes . Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 1971.
  • Capodistria: the founder of Greek independence. Oxford University Press, London 1973.
  • Kapodistrias and the Philiki Etairia, 1814–21 (PDF), in: Richard Clogg (Ed.), The struggle for Greek independence - essays to mark the 150th anniversary of the Greek War of independence . Macmillan, London 1973, ISBN 0-333-14701-4 , pp. 104-134.
  • The Struggle for Greece, 1941-1949. MacGibbon, Hart-Davis 1976, C. Hurst, London 2002 (repr.). ISBN 1-85065-487-5 , excerpts online .
  • Karamanlis: The Restorer of Greek Democracy. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1982.
  • Something Ventured. Granada Publishing, London 1982. - (autobiography)
  • The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels. Granada Publishing, London 1985.
  • George Gemistos Plethon. The Last of the Hellenes. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1986, ISBN 0-19-824767-2
  • Modern Greece: A Short History. Faber & Faber, London 1991.
  • Rhigas Velestinlis. The Proto-Martyr of the Greek Revolution. Denise Harvey Publications, Limni 1995, ISBN 960-7120-08-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Fisk: With Sten guns and sovereigns Britain and US saved Iran's throne for the Shah . In: The Independent , March 15, 1971
  2. ↑ Stephen Kinzer : Overthrow - America's Century of Regime Change from Haiti to Iraq . P. 117 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Woodhouse, Christopher Montague
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Woodhouse, Monty; Lord Terrington of Huddersfield
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British secret agent and politician, member of the House of Commons
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1917
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 2001