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SOE’s staybehind and resistance plans. Six special-ops officers destined for
deployment in Kurdistan came to South Gate to learn Kurdish: Paul
Bathgate (D/H.238), V. Virkow (D/H.239, formerly of G[R]),^30
E.H. Gwynn (D/H.240), J.T. Harrington (D/H.252), Thomas F. Lane
(D/H.256), and Charles St George Maydwell (D/H.261). Of the ten W/T
sets that Bishop dispersed around the country, he sent eight to the north—
one for each of the six above officers—retaining two reserve sets in Baghdad.
He also established an additional munitions dump at Mosul, with others
under consideration. Bishop and John Chapman, who was a Kurdish affairs
specialist, drew up a detailed Kurdish guerrilla plan (the PLUM scheme)
which included the use of Kurdish Iraqi army officers who agreed to per-
suade their Kurdish troops to desert the Iraqi army and fight the German
invaders.^31
Having upgraded their language skills, the six SOE officers were finally
sent up to Kurdistan where they were placed at the disposal of the land
settlement officer for northern Iraq, Wallace Adelbert Lyon (1892–1977),
who was an Indian Army colonel and therefore appreciative of the military
aspects of their mission. Three of them (probably Bathgate, Virkov, and
Gwynn) had been specially trained in the use of explosives and appear to
have been designated as staybehind agents. They were immediately
dubbed ‘the three musketeers’ by Lyon and were given every opportunity
by him to perfect their linguistic ability and make friends with the various
tribal chiefs, whose cooperation would be needed in the event of a British
withdrawal.^32 Also contributing to this effort were two other Kurdish spe-
cialists tasked with leading the Turkish, Persian, and Iraqi Kurds in revolt:
Terence Bruce Mitford (1905–1978) (D/H.45) and John C.A. ‘Johnny’
Johnson (1906–1966) (D/H.302). Mitford raised and led an indepen-
dent force of Turkish-Kurd commandos (Force KALPAK), whose task was
to mount a counterinvasion of Turkey and fight a guerrilla campaign in
the Taurus Mountains. In Aleppo, they were fully trained by Mitford in
communications sabotage. Meanwhile, the highly mobile Johnson pre-
pared to raise the Kurdish tribes that straddle the Iraqi–Persian border and
fight a guerrilla campaign in the Zagros Mountains.^33
In August 1942, Pat Domvile, whose main interest was in Basra and the
Arab south, filed a comprehensive status report surveying SOE’s postoc-
cupational plans for the entire country in which he made certain plain
truths clear to Cairo and London. Unless the British government were
prepared to acknowledge formally its support for the Kurds’ minimum
political aspirations, and to provide the southern Arabs with some