While waiting for the result of his Foreign Office exams, Rodd visited Trebartha Hall in Cornwall and went walking on the local moors. He wrote to Irene of the impact they had on him, indicating that earlier holidays in Cornwall had inspired his love of nature:

This suggests that while the desert had begun to stir Rodd's imagination, it also reinforced in him feelings about the outdoor life that had existed before 1914. In having a common love of the Sahara and south-west England, Rodd was similar to Ralph Bagnold. Bagnold was drawn to the landscapes of both Dartmoor and Egypt, as he explained in his memoirs: ‘Egypt fascinated me from the start, just as Dartmoor had done when I was a boy. Both had the strange aura induced by the physical presence of the remote past and also great, bare, trackless expanses where the careless might well get lost.’

When Rodd joined the Foreign Office, Hardinge was permanent undersecretary. He was succeeded in November 1920 by the tough-minded Eyre Crowe, a German specialist who had organised the blockade against Germany during the First World War. Rodd's first position was chargé d’affairs in Rome – a posting that he called a ‘compliment’ to his father. It was a role that consolidated his interest in North Africa, for the remit of his work involved monitoring Libya. The summer of 1919 found him reading about the nomads of Tripolitania. During the following year, he worked on the section of the embassy's annual report on the Italian colonies, which covered developments in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. He visited Tunis and Tripoli in January 1920 and then returned the following month, this time taking in the main coastal cities of Libya and venturing south to some of the towns of the interior.

When the First World War broke out on 4 August 1914, Rodd immediately wanted to enlist – although his mother was not enthusiastic. Three days later, he applied for a commission in the Royal Field Artillery (RFA) through the Officers’ Training Corps at Oxford and was accepted. In the period 4–8 August, over eight thousand men enlisted, while over a hundred thousand had joined up by 22 August. Why exactly Rodd wanted to enlist, after only a year at Balliol, is not clear. But his wish to enlist immediately indicates, if not necessarily support for the war in an abstract sense, a strong wish to be involved in it. Patriotic instincts seem a good explanation for this. But there were probably other factors at work too. It may be that he simply did not want to stand aside while his peers were suffering and dying. An alternative explanation is that he thought war meant adventure; he always wanted to have a full experience of what life had to offer. There is also evidence to suggest that he wanted to enhance his profile among his contemporaries. In March 1915, he wrote to Jeanne Malcolm – daughter of the actress Lily Langtry and a good family friend: ‘It will be a grand thing to come home with a war to your credit especially at my age.’

Rodd's first task was to do a three-week gunnery course at Shoeburyness. This experience exposed him to a different social circle than he was used to. He found a sense of camaraderie there among the new soldiers that remained with him long afterwards: ‘Those days were some of the most wonderful. We who knew nothing about soldiering were set down to train men who knew even less.’ It was a matter of pride for Rodd that he had been among the first one hundred thousand to enlist: ‘We were the first Hundred Thousand and knew it […] Officers and men are now trained under less romantic conditions though they cannot be keener or have more Esprit de Corps than we had.’ Rodd was soon plunged into a position of leadership in 48th Brigade, 14th Division. A few weeks after starting, he reported to his father: ‘So far I have got on very well. I am the sole officer in charge of the ammunition column to the brigade.

Rodd was born on 25 October 1895, at 10 Curzon Street, London. He came from a family shaped by empire. He was very conscious of this – he was always proud of his ancestral lineage. Importantly, from a geographical point of view, he was descended from James Rennell (1742–1830) – he was Rennell's great, great grandson. A cartographer who became surveyor-general of the East India Company, Rennell was responsible for creating a number of early maps of India. He also knew Africa well. He was elected an honorary member of the African Association in 1792 after he had compiled a map of the northern part of the continent, and he later produced maps of the routes taken in Africa by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park. Like Rodd, he had an interest in camels – he wrote an article on the rate of travelling as performed by camels. He was also an early pioneer of the discipline of oceanography. Although he died before the founding of the RGS, he helped to promote its idea, and he was recognised in 1930 as one of its founders. Clements Markham – president of the RGS (1893–1905) and an influential promoter of geography – called him the ‘first great English geographer’; he also emphasised the breadth of his qualifications, in the context of the fact that geographers had to be ‘many-sided’ in their abilities. Rodd was always proud of Rennell's legacy and, like Markham, thought of geography as a multifaceted discipline.

Empire and exploration were also evident on Rodd's mother's side of the family. His mother was Lilias Georgina Guthrie (1864–1951), a daughter of James Alexander Guthrie, the fourth Baron of Craigie. Her grandfather on her mother's side was James Stirling (1791–1865), a Scottish naval officer who was the first governor of Western Australia; he was the founder of the Swan River colony and the settlements of Perth and Fremantle. One of his brothers, Edward Stirling (1797–1873), a civil servant with the East India Company, was one of the first Europeans to explore northern Afghanistan. The Guthries had strong army connections. One of Lilias's sisters, Violet, married Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, an officer who rose to the rank of major-general and was, in 1915, general officer commanding (GOC) of the 46th Division at the Battle of Loos; they lived at Highcliffe Castle on the Dorset coast.

Fierce, restless and with a rich portfolio of interests, Francis Rodd was always looking for a new project to feed an insatiable curiosity for life. Different worlds intersected in a career packed with activity, sometimes combining easily and at other times jostling with each other for attention. The two world wars in a variety of ways gave shape and purpose to his life, with military intelligence and military government being important areas of focus. In between the conflicts, and after the Second World War, much of his time was devoted to geography and banking. Along the way, he made friends with Lawrence of Arabia, talked with Benito Mussolini, spent time with Charles de Gaulle and fell out with Anthony Eden. He inhabited that privileged echelon of British society satirised by novelist Nancy Mitford – his sister-in-law. The high point of his career came in 1943 when he was given the task of heading the first military government in Allied-occupied Europe – he was chief civil affairs officer in the organisation known as AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories). He proved a controversial figure. He had obvious leadership skills and a good knowledge of Italy, but some thought him difficult or eccentric, and there were those on the left who feared that his pre-war business activities had brought him too close to the Italian regime. Nowadays he is little known. This book is a study of his life, with particular reference to his involvement in geography, banking, intelligence and military government, and his political convictions and religious beliefs.

Rodd first came to public attention for his travels to the south-central Sahara in the 1920s. He had been at Eton and Oxford before the outbreak of the First World War, after which he spent a year on the Western Front. Wartime duties in Italy, North Africa and the Middle East followed. An interest in the desert was awakened in these years, which then found expression in expeditions he made to the Aïr mountains in the French colony of Niger in 1922 and 1927. An outcome of the first of these was a study of the culture and history of the Tuareg, People of the Veil (1926), his most influential work. For his journeys and publications, he was awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in 1929.

The war in Africa saw some major developments in late 1940. Italy had joined the Axis powers with an ambition to dominate the Mediterranean. It seized British Somaliland in August 1940 and then invaded Egypt from Libya the following month. But by the end of the year, the momentum had shifted. On 6 December 1940, Italian-run Cyrenaica fell to Wavell's forces. Wavell telegraphed the War Office asking for guidance on the administration of occupied Italian colonies. The fall of Eritrea and Ethiopia in April 1941 expanded the set of challenges confronting him. Initially, the British government considered the possibility of permitting the continuance of Italian rule in Eritrea and Somalia, and even thought of returning Eritrea to Italian rule after the war. But the rapid collapse of Italian rule in Cyrenaica and Italian East Africa meant that other plans had to be considered. For the time being, Wavell suggested that military government be established in the Italian colonies, with Cyrenaica, Eritrea and Somalia being administered on a ‘care and maintenance basis’ in line with the Hague Convention of 1907. Ethiopia was a special case because of the return to the country of its emperor Haile Selassie.

Some of these questions were discussed at a meeting at the War Office on 30 January 1941. The meeting was chaired by Frederick Bovenschen, soon to be permanent undersecretary at the War Office, and attended by representatives of the Foreign, Colonial and India Offices. At the meeting and a War Cabinet meeting three weeks later, it was decided that the newly conquered territories should be administered by the War Office. The Foreign Office did not have experience of this kind of work, and to give responsibility to the Colonial Office would imply that the new territories might be incorporated into the empire. An interdepartmental committee was set up in March to give advice on these matters to the Secretary of State for War. The work itself was assigned to the Directorate of Military Operations – which was part of the general staff. The Directorate was designated MO11. The plan was to use the form of military government adopted by Allenby in Palestine during the First World War, which was for the commander-in-chief to govern through political officers especially appointed for the work.

While he was working at the Foreign Office between 1919 and 1924, Rodd showed an interest in economic questions. In 1920, when he was at the Legation in Bulgaria, he wrote the section of the annual report covering commercial, financial and economic affairs. A year later, he drafted the whole report, pending the appointment of a new minister in place of Dering. The material on commercial and financial matters from this report was then published in a slightly different form as a pamphlet for the Department of Overseas Trade. The information in these reports was penned in a style that was to become characteristic of Rodd's later writings: comprehensive, detailed and essentially factual in character. This was typical of Foreign Office documents; it was expected that people would keep their own opinions from intruding into official reports and papers. Rodd was made second secretary in Sofia in December 1921. His sympathy for the Tuareg suggests he had an ability to empathise with subject peoples. By contrast, there was a more dismissive aspect to his attitude to Bulgaria. He reported to Harold Nicolson at the Foreign Office: ‘From one point of view Bulgaria is of course entirely unimportant, except in so far as peace or war is concerned, in the same way as Czechoslovakia or Switzerland. They do not matter to the British Empire as a whole. Yet each of these funny little people might matter as much as Greece is conceived to matter.’ Ironically, Rodd was trying to convey the idea that small nations like Bulgaria were significant. But his tone was patronising and arrogant.

Rodd left the Foreign Office at the end of June 1924. The immediate reason seems to have been a change in policy in regard to promotions that meant Rodd went down the list in the queue for advancement. But he had also come to dislike the atmosphere. In a summary of his thinking written in 1923 for a friend, Maurice Ingram – who had entered the Foreign Office in the same year as he did – Rodd complained that the whole institution was like an elementary school or servant's hall where close loyalty of a ‘rather pernicious variety’ tended to protect inefficiency. He warned of people becoming ‘robots’ in the office, observing that a ‘machine’ would never make a man.

Rodd left for West Africa in June 1940 with a position in military intelligence. His active involvement in intelligence can be traced to November 1938 – at that time he was accepted into the Officers’ Emergency Reserve and earmarked for intelligence duties. A few months later, he was called in to the War Office for a chat with Gerald Templer, a lieutenant-colonel in military intelligence responsible for training the intelligence corps. Templer was answerable to Major-General Frederick Beaumont-Nesbitt, deputy director of military intelligence from August 1938 to September 1939, and thereafter director until December 1940, following the division of the Directorate of Military Operations and Intelligence into two sections. Another former Etonian, Beaumont-Nesbitt had been married to one of Rodd's cousins, Cecilia Bingham. Templer, supported by Beaumont-Nesbitt, was eager to develop plans for irregular warfare. On this, he kept in close contact with MI(R), a unit within Section D of the Secret Service, based at Station XII at Aston House near Knebworth, also working on clandestine operations. From spring 1939, MI(R) was headed by Major J. C. F. Holland, a strong supporter of covert operations. It included Holland's friend Major Colin Gubbins, author of The Art of Guerilla Warfare (1939) and The Partisan Leader's Handbook (1939) – pamphlets with which Rodd was familiar – and subsequently a key figure in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) set up in July 1940 under the umbrella of the MEW. The history of the Arab revolt was influential in these circles. Holland put Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom on the essential reading list for all MI(R) personnel.

Following the meeting with Templer, Rodd and Haslam went on a visit to West Africa, which included visits to the Gold Coast and Nigeria. In the Gold Coast, Rodd and Haslam were received at the highest level; on arrival in Accra, they lunched with the governor Arnold Hudson at Christiansborg Castle. They also visited Achimota College, a school for educating young Africans that impressed Rodd hugely. ‘It is one of the really good pieces of work in Africa and makes up for a lot of the sordidness of colonial life especially among Europeans especially on the G. Coast’, he reported to Mary.

Rodd's life in banking up until this point suggests a man who enjoyed working at the interface of finance and politics. At the end of the decade, an opportunity arose which gave him a further chance to work in this area, with particular reference to British relations with Italy. In summer 1939, he joined the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW), this while remaining a director at Morgan Grenfell. This ministry was formally established following the outbreak of war, with Ronald Cross as its first minister and Frederick Leith-Ross its first director general, and with a remit that had much in common with the Ministry of Blockade during the First World War. Its more immediate roots went back to the winter of 1929–30, when the Committee of Imperial Defence set up a small staff to study the economic preparedness of foreign countries to make war. Just over a year later, in 1931, the Industrial Intelligence Centre was set up, headed by Desmond Morton; Morton and his team shaped many of the ideas on which plans for economic warfare were developed, and they formed the nucleus of the Intelligence Department at the MEW. The culture of the Department was more ‘pugnacious’ than the Foreign Office, to which it was effectively subordinate. The foreign secretary, initially Lord Halifax, represented the MEW in the War Cabinet.

Rodd's involvement with the MEW did not come out of the blue. One family friend recorded that already in 1938 he and some former colleagues from the Foreign Office had been part of a ‘cadre’ for a government department being planned for enforcing contraband control in the event of war. Rodd was one of the earliest to join the MEW: he and four others were the first to move into its first premises. Rodd was formally offered a role at the MEW on 14 July. He was assigned to the Intelligence Department, initially as a temporary assistant. To begin with, the Ministry sought to make use of his knowledge of Scandinavia – arising out of work he had done with the Nordic countries during his time at the Bank of England. But not surprisingly, in view of his knowledge of Italy, he was immediately drawn into issues connected with that country. After the war broke out, he became the MEW's chief negotiator with Italy.