The Foreign Office brings its school for spies back home

One of the last bastions of Britain’s imperial tradition, where diplomats, spies, and businessmen mingled together is closing down after 30 years.

Officially, the Foreign Office’s Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (Mecas) is transferring its operations to London, to escape the violence in Lebanon. But in practice, diplomats, students and local villagers all acknowledge that it is the end of the school as it was first conceived: to teach the Arabic language and Arab studies in a primarily Arab environment.

Mecas, dubbed the British Spy School by the late Lebanese Leftist leader Kamal Jumblatt, has had a chequered history. Its base has been moved once, and evacuated four times. Its alumni, who have gone on to make their names in a variety of fields, include George Blake, the spy, Ross Stainton, the chief executive of British Airways, and a host of ambassadors and Foreign Office officials.

Since 1950, it has been situated in the small hill village of Chemlane, 15 miles from Beirut, and set amid olive groves. Its primary job was to train British diplomats for service in the Arab world through a series of high pressure courses. But in the process it created something of an elite corps, so that, as one senior British diplomat put it, “our foreign service was run by the graduates of Chemlane.”

To begin with, Mecas also took in army students and the odd businessman, but as it expanded it took in students from the old and new Commonwealth, as well as considerable numbers of Japanese diplomats and US businessmen. 

It was originally established in Jerusalem in 1945 when Palestine was still under British mandate. But with the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and the creation of the new Israeli state, it was evacuated to Jordan and then, after a year or so, moved on to Chemlane.

Its first director was Bertran Thomas, whose explorations of Saudi Arabia by camel included the first known crossing of the Rub al Quali, the Empty Quarter (thus thwarting a suggestion of T. E. Lawrence that the RAF should use a dirigible airship to make the first traverse of the great south-eastern Saudi desert).

Ironically Kim Philby, the son of another great Arabist and explorer, H. St John Philby, helped give Mecas in the early 1960s its reputation as a spy school. Philby, although a journalist in Beirut and in no way attached to the school itself, was sucked into the orbit of Mecas, along with a host of other expatriates who turned up for lectures and parties at the school house.

The school’s reputation in this connection prompted Kamal Jumblatt to demand its closure, a demand which the British and Lebanese Governments successfully resisted.It was while George Blake was a student at the school that the Lebanese Deuxieme Bureau became suspicious that he was not the ordinary British diplomat learning Arabic that he appeared to be.

Now the villagers of Chemlane are urging the Lebanese Government to keep the school open. It will mean a great loss to the village, both in rents from students and in taxes paid by the school.

The decision to shut down was made under heavy Foreign Office pressure. Security considerations had cut down the number of pupils from around 60 to 33. Some of the higher course students, who had been here for most of the past 14 months, found it difficult to work under the conditions in Lebanon.

“Frustration was building up among students forbidden to move around freely in the country,” said Sir Peter Wakefield, the British Ambassador, himself an ex-Mecas pupil. Sir Peter met his wife while attending the school in the early 1950s, and still keeps a house in Chemlane. His order to close the school is a swan-song to his three years as Ambassador in Beirut.