What was Tangier's "International Zone" spy era?

Tangier's 'International Zone' is one of my favourite stories to tell, because it explains why this one Moroccan city has such a strange, glamorous, faintly disreputable mystique. Between 1923 and 1956, Tangier was not governed like the rest of Morocco. While France and Spain divided most of the country into protectorates, Tangier was carved out as a special 'international zone,' jointly administered by a committee of foreign powers — at various points France, Spain, Britain, Italy, and others — under a shared and notoriously loose arrangement.

That peculiar status had a magnetic effect. With multiple flags, slack regulation, no income tax, free currency exchange, and overlapping jurisdictions where no single authority really controlled everything, Tangier became a haven for everyone who needed somewhere ambiguous to operate. Spies and diplomats traded secrets in its cafés, smugglers worked its port, fortunes were moved through its banks, and exiles and adventurers of every nationality washed up on its shores. During and after the Second World War it was a genuine nest of espionage, a real-life Casablanca-of-the-movies in a way Casablanca itself never was.

It also drew an extraordinary creative crowd, which is the legacy you can still trace today. The American writer Paul Bowles settled here and made it his lifelong home; the Beat writers William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg passed through, and Burroughs wrote much of 'Naked Lunch' in Tangier. Painters like Matisse had found inspiration in its light decades earlier. The Café Hafa, perched above the sea, and the old hotels and the legendary bars are real places you can still sit in, looking at the same view across the strait toward Spain.

The zone ended in 1956 when Morocco regained independence and Tangier was reintegrated into the country, and the city quietened for some decades. I love walking guests through the medina and the Ville Nouvelle with this history in mind — pointing out the faded grand hotels and the café terraces where the intrigue played out. Tangier has been heavily revitalised in recent years, but its cosmopolitan, slightly conspiratorial soul is a direct inheritance from those decades as nobody's city and everybody's.