Please note, the company referred to in this article is the original Television International Enterprises (TIE) and not Television International Enterprise Archives (TIEA) as ran by Phil Morris.
The hunt for missing episodes of Doctor Who has been a long and arduous one, but equally one fraught with dangers and threats. Phil Morris himself was kidnapped from an oil ring in 2006, has been shot at and more recently was in Jos, Nigeria, during a terror attack, presumably perpetrated by the Boko Haram militant group. But as deadly as these attacks are, they might pale in comparison to the activities of the original distributor of those now missing episodes, Television International Enterprise Ltd.
Formed by Rhodesia based war hero and Special Air Service (SAS) founder Colonel David Stirling in June 1959, Television International Enterprises was (at the latest by 1970) a cover for his other company - Watchguard, a clandestine mercenary unit with links to Britain’s SIS, reports suggesting that Stirling’s heart was never in TIE beyond it’s presumed effective uses in Africa. Operating out of the same offices as TIE in Slone Street, Knightbridge, Watchguard was an employment agency for ex-SAS officers and an overseas private security company in the vain of Blackwater, providing private security to heads of state throughout Africa.
At a meeting attended by Stirling, John Aspinall, Julian Amery, Billy McLean and then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Alex Douglas-Home, the ministers and Stirling agreed the need to ensure British interests in Africa were maintained as moves for independence from the British empire rumbled ever on. They persuaded then Prime Minister Harold MacMillain to ascent to the formation of a mercenary unit - The British Mercenary Organisation.
Meanwhile, Stirling, with his friend Colin Campbell, were engaged in the advancement of Television International Enterprises. TIE failed to win the contract for television in South Rhodesia, the government feeling that Stirling (who promoted African racial unity) was a political threat. October of 1962 however saw the opening of another TIE project, the new broadcasting station of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation and 11 more independent television stations would follow, including in places as diverse as Mauritius, Aden and their most successful in Hong Kong, the Chinese language HKTV, set-up as a rival to Rediffusion. Stirling believed in dominating the remains of the empire and the new commonwealth with British culture and the way of life, to educate “younger countries” through their new medium.
Meanwhile TIE acted as a distributor for extensive televisual material, Doctor Who being one of hundreds of shows from the BBC and others. Where all the material was concerned, TIE had exclusive rights to distribute the prints, meaning the BBC could do nothing to directly sell the material when the company ceased distribution in the mid-1970s. TIE distributed Doctor Who to particular hotspots around the world - Africa, the Middle East and Caribbean and had overseas offices in New York, Geneva, Paris and Amsterdam alongside local regional sales offices. The Middle-East office was located in Beirut, Lebanon and while there is no information as to where an African office might have been located, given Stirling’s links to Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe), one might speculate it could have been located there or in Kenya, the location of the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation.
Stirling believed that the Nasser-led invasion of Yemen in 1962 would increase the power of the Soviet Union in the region, threatening Aden and after setting up Rally Films in 1963, located between Television International Enterprises and an SIS safe house ran by Denis Rowley, the SIS and Foreign Office used the company during the war in Yemen, using the TIE offices and Rally Films as a base of operations for recruitment.
After the Suez fiasco, the British government believed they couldn’t be seen to be acting in Yemen, instead pouring their efforts into a MI6 backed guerrilla war in the country, supplying arms and between 50 and 500 mercenaries, recruited and controlled through Stirling in London and backed by Israeli Mossad equipment and intelligence, financed by Jordanian and Saudi money. British involvement in the Yemen Civil War ended in 1967, they still deny any official role in proceedings.
Following his involvement in Yemen and extensive travel throughout Africa, Stirling became convinced of the threat from Communist forces and set up Watchguard to protect friendly regimes from being overthrown in 1967. Given that TIE were allowing their offices to be used by mercenaries and MI6 as early as 1963, it maybe safe to speculate that the company was the official cover for Watchguard upon its formation, if not one of the covers used by the SIS as well, Stirling’s force advising on security and training teams in Sierra Leone and Zambia amongst others.
However, as the decade came to a close Watchguard turned from protection to offence and in 1970, at the behest of Libyan millionaire and Swiss exile Umara al-Shalhi, Watchguard accepted a $4m payment to overthrow Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi. Using TIE’s offices, word of mouth and contacts from the Yemen campaign, Watchguard planned an attack on the so-called “Tripoli Hilton” prison to free hundreds of Gaddafi’s political opponents. However by this time the winds of change had swept through the corridors of power and MI6 tipped off the CIA, who still had aspirations of allying with Gaddaffi in the fight against communism. The CIA in turn asked the Italian SID to terminate the operation which they dutifully did. It’s unknown what sort of effect the Libyan affair had on David Stirling’s standing but he ceased all activity with Watchguard as of 1972.
By 1974, TIE had merged with fellow distributor Lane Blackwell Ltd, the joint-venture becoming TIE-Blackwell Ltd. Less than a year later, in February 1975, this co-venture ended and Lane Blackwell went back to distributing programmes on their own. TIE reportedly continued distributing for at least another decade in a much-reduced capacity following a major restructuring and ceased trading entirely around 1987. Sir David Stirling died in November of 1990.
David Stirling is certainly not a name that anyone would associate with Doctor Who and indeed, he probably never saw an episode except upon documentation, yet thanks to TIE Doctor Who was taken to almost every corner of the globe, some of it being left behind for us to find decades later. His usage of TIE as a base of operations led to the British military effort in Yemen, a conflict whose reverberations are still felt today and had a profound effect upon the Cold War. David Stirling loved Africa, travelled extensively and got into a fair few scrapes along the way… We somehow think he might just approve of a man like Phil Morris.
