MECAS - the British ‘Spy School’ of Shemlan

Conceived with the genuine intention of building bridges between the British officer and governing class and the people of the Arab World, the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) was founded by noted Arabist Bertram Thomas - the author of the seminal Arabia Felix, a friend of TE Lawrence's and very much a member of the 'Middle East gang' of prominent arabists connected with, among other things, Military Intelligence (the MI in MI5 and MI6). Storrs, Lawrence, Wingate, Thomas, Stark, Bell - these names trip off the tongue, but they were a highly influential little bunch of interconnected people swimming in a sandy-bottomed pond of finite size.

It's this connection with intelligence that's so hard to shake, right from the very conception of MECAS. While it may have had lofty aims, there was a whiff of sulphur connected to figures such as Thomas and his contemporary, Harry St John Bridger Philby - father of the notorious 'Kim' Philby, a man who has been connected with MECAS although it appears the connection was tenuous at best. Philby lived in Beirut for a time working for The Economist (and spying) and was said to have socialised with MECAS students. He never did study at the school. Apparently he spent most of his time in Beirut in a state of wretched drunkedness, which anyone who knows the pleasures of Hamra Street would quite understand.

If Philby wasn’t part of MECAS, George Blake was. And Blake was one of the most notorious spies of the Cold War.

It was Blake who was to give the Centre a high profile student to justify Kamal Jumblatt’s assertion that MECAS was ‘A school for spies’. Blake, born George Behar in 1922, died on Boxing Day 2020, living in exile in Moscow. He is said to have betrayed over 400 British spies in his remarkable career as a Soviet double agent - a career that ended with his in camera trial and subsequent 42-year prison sentence. The sentence was notably long, the judge finding him guilty on three separate counts of spying and handing out three maximum sentences. Newspapers at the time claimed the sentence represented a year for every British spy killed as a result of Blake's many betrayals but, fun though it sounds, it appears the claim was editorial embellishment.

A highly resourceful man who had enjoyed a remarkable career with the Dutch resistance in the war, Blake conspired to escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in October 1966 and fled to Moscow via East Germany.

But as far as the Lebanese were concerned, it just went to prove what they’d always suspected. Up there in Shemlan, was The British Spy School. And people on the mountain still call it that – even though the Centre has long been closed and its building converted to house an orphanage. The legend lives on.

It's actually how I first found the MECAS building in Shemlan. We were looking for the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, but understanding dawned on the puzzled face of the man we asked for directions when we asked after MECAS, "Oh, you mean the British spy school!" he cried.

Books about MECAS

There have been a number of books written about MECAS and Shemlan, including Duncan Campbell Smith’s The Arabists of Shemlan: MECAS memoirs 1944-78, which is great fun. A second volume of memoirs has also been published, Envoys to the Arab World. James Craig is one of the editors of that second volume but also wrote Shemlan: A History of the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies.

Duncan Campbell-Smith was kind enough to give his views and valuable feedback on Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, as did former MECAS student and latterly Centre Director Leslie McLoughlin who was very sniffy indeed about the idea that Jason might have carried on with one of the local girls. Other students at the Centre thought it a wholly plausible idea, in at least one instance based on their own experiences!

The original school building gave way to this purpose-built school in the 1960s in what was, arguably, MECAS’ heyday.

These days it’s the Shemlan Social Institution, which offers facilities to children with learning needs.

Remembering MECAS

MECAS was originally established in Jerusalem and subsequently moved to Lebanon after 1947 (via a short stay in Zarqa in Jordan) following the 1946 bombing of the St David Hotel by Zionist terrorists. It stayed in Shemlan until 1978, when the final students were forced out by the Lebanse Civil War which, by then, had been raging for over a year.

Its methods are pretty much those described in Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy - students were given ‘word cards’ with vocabulary to memorise and enjoyed life up in the balmy mountain air - with in-house bar ‘Thatchers’ to amuse them when they weren’t biffing off to one of the nearby villages to a ‘do’ in some hotel or other. Then there was, of course, Beirut itself or even, over the hill and far away, Damascus.

Diplomats tended to take the ‘long course’ while there was always a smattering of ‘commercials’ taking the ‘short course’. The village itself would have been amused to death by these quaint and exotic Brits in their midst, it’s a tiny little place and home to five families - and has been for hundreds of years. It’s a mixed Christian and Druze village, home to Philip Hitti, author of the much-respected ‘History of the Arabs’ and it is of course home to The Cliffhouse restaurant. And there its claims to fame end - it is otherwise unexceptional in every way. Well, apart from being in my book…