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Dorian Cooke (Read 4375 times)
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Dorian Cooke
Oct 10th, 2005, 9:19am
 
This is taken from The Times:

Dorian Cooke

December 25, 1916 - September 18, 2005

Wartime MI6 operative who was a liaison with Tito's Partisans and later headed the Yugoslav section at the BBC


DORIAN COOKE had a long and varied career: as a liaison officer in wartime Yugoslavia, as a veteran of the BBC World Service, where he headed its Yugoslav section during a difficult period of transition, and also as a poet and translator from Croatian into English.

The son of a colonial civil servant, he gained an arts degree at Leeds University in 1938. Unable to find a job in Britain, he travelled the following year to Zagreb, then part of Yugoslavia, where he made a living as an English teacher to Croats, including Jews, who desperately hoped to get to Britain, fearing a Nazi invasion.

When the Germans did invade, in April 1941, Cooke managed to escape and eventually reached Cairo. There he was recruited by MI6 because of his fluency in Serbo-Croat; and, in 1943, he was sent to the Yugoslav island of Hvar in the Adriatic on a mission headed by Fitzroy Maclean to make contact with Tito’s partisans. This earned him appointment as MBE and it was here that he met his future wife, Ruza, whom he married a year later. In 1945 Cooke became head of the Yugoslav section at Bush House, a post which he held for some 15 years.

It was a time of gradual rapprochement between Yugoslavia and the West following Tito’s break with Moscow. But it was also a period of serious political strain for the section, some of whose staff were bitterly anti-Tito. Tensions came to a head after an agreement between the British and Yugoslav governments in 1953, which allowed the BBC to recruit some of its staff from inside Yugoslavia. The arrivals were highly unwelcome to some of the émigré staff and matters were made worse by the suspicion that these recruits included Titoist police informers.

Cooke became the target of an ugly, émigré-inspired campaign, which, at one time, even included death threats. The section became the target of press attacks, partly spurred by these same groups, suggesting that its broadcasts were “soft” on communism. Although the BBC management totally rejected the accusations, it nevertheless moved Cooke from his post and he spent the rest of his career in the English Service of Bush House.

Many people felt that he was the victim of a great injustice — since the tensions between the staff were the result of decisions taken at a high level, for which Cooke bore no responsibility. Cooke was not, however, interested only in politics. Probably the real love of his life was poetry: he was a friend of Dylan Thomas, whom he met before the Second World War. Cooke wrote poetry himself, he produced poetry readings and plays on the BBC Third Programme and translated books from Croatian into English.

He is survived by his wife and three children.

Dorian Cooke, former head of the BBC World Service Yugoslav section, was born on December 25, 1916. He died September 18, 2005, aged 88.
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