© The Author(s) 2019 115
A. O’Sullivan, The Baghdad Set,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15183-6_6
CHAPTER 6
The Moon Palace
Like most of the other Air Force intelligence officers, he had never
piloted a plane in his life, but had been put into a khaki shirt and
shorts, with the thin blue stripes of an officer on his shoulder tabs when
war came, as the only available cloak to intelligence activity.
—Somerset de ChairSince 1920, when he had graduated from the Sandhurst of India—
Wellington Cadet College in the Nilgiri Hills—Edwin Kyme ‘Chokra’
Wood (1900–1961) had been a scout of a special kind: a career officer in
one of India’s most famous regiments, The Corps of Guides (Cavalry),
whose traditional role on the Northwest Frontier resembled that of Baden-
Powell’s scouts during the Boer War, namely reconnaissance and intelli-
gence gathering. Even when the Guides Cavalry^1 arrived in Iraq in 1941
as part of 18th Indian Infantry Brigade, they were still a reconnaissance
unit. By then mechanized and equipped with ACV-IP Mark 1 ‘Tatanagar’
armoured cars, they participated in Operation COUNTENANCE, the
Anglo-Soviet invasion of Persia. Four years earlier, Chokra Wood had
actually retired as a major to the UK, where he had become a senior hos-
pital administrator.^2 However, answering the call of duty as soon as war
Somerset de Chair, The Golden Carpet (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945), 45.