David Sterling was basically a fraud.
I think he was probably a case of the “right man at the time” He wasn’t the first guy in the military to come up with the idea of “behind enemy lines actions” but he was convincing, recruited well, the desert was the ideal test bed, and largely (with a few false starts) it worked.
In most other scenarios (just a quick glance over his post war “career” will attest) he was a terrible human being, but the war gave him an outlet which he grasped.