Newspaper foreign editors used to know that the person who understood best the heart of an overseas beat was a foreign correspondent's wife; a good one would be worldly in public affairs, yet make daily connections with the realities of a place. Among the sharpest was Molly Izzard, who has died aged 84; her years traipsing around with her husband Ralph, particularly in the Middle East, were the basis of her own writing career, which culminated in a controversial biography of Freya Stark.
Born in Cornwall, Izzard was a traveller from the start. Her parents were separated; her father was based in India, where she lived until his death in an accident. She was patchily educated at convents in Cherbourg and Darjeeling, at a boarding school in Clackmannanshire, and a finishing school in Genoa, before gallivanting off among aristocrats in prewar Hungary. She returned to Britain before the second world war to join the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.
The Fanys were a recruiting pool for the intelligence services, and Molly was a catch. She continued to imply that her duties had been merely a little light chauffeuring until the 1990s, when she told a Channel 4 documentary that she had, in fact, been one of "His Majesty's pornographers" - the unofficial name for those who served in the Political Warfare Executive.
"Ill-ease, suspicion, spitefulness, that's what we cultivated," was how she described her employment in Sefton Delmer's department of dirty tricks. This was headquartered in the Rookery, Apsley Guise, Bedfordshire, where the housekeeper served French cuisine - local venison and wild mushrooms - to a band of black propagandists working on subversive broadcasts from simulated German radio stations, handbooks for Wehrmacht desertion, and leaflets, dropped by the RAF, detailing sexual allegations in the Nazi high command.
It was during these years that Molly met her future husband Ralph Izzard, then an intelligence operative. They married in postwar Delhi, by which time he had returned to journalism as a foreign correspondent - he was in India to cover the partition crisis, and for a failed search, in 1948, for a monster lizard, the buru, in a remote Assamese valley.
When Ralph moved to cover the Middle East for the Daily Mail, the couple lived in Egypt, then transferred to Beirut, conveniently adjacent to trouble brewing in Cairo, Nicosia, Iran, Iraq and the Gulf. Their weekend explorations with their two sons and two daughters lengthened into a 300-mile camping expedition through the Lebanese mountains with their cook as interpreter and two donkeys for transport.
Molly wrote her first book, Smelling The Breezes (1959), about the trek, and her second, A Private Life (1963), about bringing up a family among the alarms of the 1952 Egyptian revolution and the end of British rule in Cyprus in 1960. She was interested in the process of decolonisation, and travelled more widely to research it.
In 1979, she published The Gulf: Arabia's Western Approaches, about the rise of Bahrain, Kuwait and the emirates in a region where the Anglo oil companies were losing their hold, where Iraq and Iran were jostling for supremacy and Saudi Arabia was contorted with internal contradictions.
She noticed matters that had subtle, longterm effects on national identity - especially education, explaining how almost all the senior generation of wealthy Arab bourgeoisie had been sent to the American University of Beirut, which bonded them with the "power and pervasiveness of the old-boy network of the English public schools" - unlike the Bedouin-affiliated ruling families, who were politically trained by British advisers.
She was just as resistant to being impressed by the subject of her last work, a 1993 biography of Freya Stark. This was, wrote Jonathan Keates "a curiosity within its genre - disturbing".
Molly had met the 86-year-old Stark, realising, as she grew closer to the venerable traveller, that her accounts of her life were invented. This provoked Molly into an investigation described as "mercilessly candid", "an impressive piece of character deconstruction", "a great unmasking" and "disdainful, even disliking" of Stark. True, Molly said: the more she revealed, the less she liked Stark.
She did, however, admire "the eccentric apparition whose singularity absolved her from conformity" and respect Stark's feeling for ordinary people's private worlds. But Molly traced Stark's unshakable belief in the affection of Iraqis and Egyptians for Britain to her own need for love and acceptance. And, having been taught Delmer's principle of efficient propaganda - "Accuracy first; we must never lie by accident" - she regarded bleakly Stark's Arabic Brotherhood of Freedom, a secret wartime, pro-British organisation.
The Murray family (whose firm had commissioned the biography) demanded changes in the manuscript, as it showed Stark - also a John Murray author - to be fallible, if not a fantasist. Izzard refused to delete a word; in the end, the book was published by Hodder and Stoughton, and certainly cultivated much ill-ease among Stark devotees.
Her husband died in 1991; their children survive her.
· Molly Izzard, writer, born August 1 1919; died February 4 2004