83
the Defence Security Office [DSO] Iraq) in his clandestine work.^49 The
curious thing about Sereni is that, as far as one can tell, he never mentioned
Freya Stark, nor did she ever mention him, though they had both worked
with Cudbert Thornhill and Christopher Sykes in Cairo, and they were
both simultaneously active in Baghdad, quite apart from their shared
Italian roots. Did they fall out? Did they never even encounter each other?
One wonders too how Sereni could possibly have avoided at least social
contact with Aidan Philip and the rest of Stark’s leftist, intellectual, SOE
friends at South Gate. They would have had much in common beyond
Marxism. After all, Philip and Teddy Hodgkin were in constant touch
with Palestine, and they were closely connected to the Sharq al-Adna
(Near East Broadcasting Service [NEBS]) station run by SOE in Jaffa.^50
Or is the record commendably blank because of good security and pru-
dent application of the need-to-know principle to relationships connected
with the extraordinarily sensitive Palestinian situation? Anyway, whether
familiar with the Baghdad Set or not, once back in Palestine in late May
1943, Sereni reported to SOE, who provided him with new cover as a
captain in the Pioneer Corps and set him to work organizing and training
a force of 250 Jewish Brigade parachutists for deployment in occupied
Europe, which ultimately became known as the Jewish Parachutists of
Mandate Palestine. On 15 May 1944, though exempt from active opera-
tional deployment, he was dropped at his own insistence into northern
Italy as one of six Palestinian Jews and was the only one captured by the
Germans. Enzo Sereni was executed at Dachau concentration camp on 18
November 1944. Today his heroic sacrifice is celebrated: the ‘Netzer
Sereni’ kibbutz, originally founded by Buchenwald survivors in the Shfela,
is named after him, as are many streets in Israel.^51
During the year or so after the signing of the armistice, continuous
efforts were made by CICI, in conjunction with the Iraqi CID, to monitor
and record the activities of persistent Nazis among the Iraqi population
and various Palestinians and Syrians, most of whom had been disciples of
the ex-Mufti before he deserted them in May 1941. On 1 July 1942, the
Iraqi authorities launched a drive against Axis sympathizers, largely but
not entirely on the basis of intelligence acquired by DSO Iraq. It was
hoped that a large proportion of those considered dangerous by DSO, and
whose names had been submitted by Sir Kinahan Cornwallis to the Iraqi
government, would be interned. Initially, the results were good. In the
first week of July alone, 33 arrests were made in Baghdad and 5 in Mosul.
Unfortunately, though a few important personalities were included among
RESTORING THE PEACE