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broke out, he was recommissioned and rejoined the Guides in 1939. At
some point during this period, probably after reaching Iraq or Persia,
Wood came to the attention of Raymond Maunsell (1903–1976), the
head of Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME)—the Cairo branch of
MI5—who personally recruited him, obtained his secondment to SIME
for intelligence work, and made him a full colonel. Chokra Wood was then
40 years of age. One visitor to Baghdad came away with the following
positive impression of the effectiveness of the Combined Intelligence
Centre Iraq and Persia (CICI) organization that Wood had established:
‘Wood was not a Middle East expert, but he was an excellent and experi-
enced administrator and had plenty of expertise on his staff. His organiza-
tion had an air of purpose and discipline about it which was noticeably
lacking in most of the other mushrooming intelligence and propaganda
organizations which I encountered in the Middle East and India.’^3
Chokra Wood’s deputy, Hanbury Knollys Dawson-Shepherd
(1914–1997), an RAFVR squadron leader (later wing commander),
belonged to a younger generation and came from very different roots.
Dawson-Shepherd’s father was a Scottish agriculturalist who was working
in Palestine as a Foreign Office (FO) irrigation officer when his son was
born in Egypt.^4 Dawson-Shepherd was educated at Stowe, where he may
have known Nigel Clive (they were only a year apart), and attended
London University for a while without graduating.^5 Instead, it was per-
haps only natural that in his early 20s he should have been attracted by
Palestine Police recruiting slogans which declared: ‘Get into a Crack Force
and Earn £20 a Month and All Found ...!’^6 Along with other well- educated
young ‘gentlemen,’ he signed up as a constable and served in Palestine for
two years before joining the Royal Air Force as an officer cadet in 1938.
The extent to which Dawson-Shepherd’s police background led him to a
career in air intelligence is unclear. Once his career path had been deter-
mined, however, it is not surprising that his evident potential should have
led to his deployment to RAF Habbaniya, given his fluent Arabic and his
first-hand knowledge of Palestine and the Levant, of Arab and Jewish
issues, and of the politics of bad actors like the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, all
of which were highly significant factors in the state of regional politics as
the Middle East was about to be drawn into a worldwide conflict among
the major European powers. Together, Chokra Wood and Hanbury
Dawson-Shepherd ran British security intelligence in Iraq for most of the
war, between 1941 and 1944, when Wood retired and passed the baton of
responsibility for CICI to E.P.J. Ryan, the Tenth Army G2 (Fig. 6.1).^7