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fled to Turkey, Sami Shawkat elected to remain in Iraq, where he pro-
ceeded with chameleon-like pragmatism to resurrect his friendship with
Nuri as-Said and, incredibly, to become director of education once again.
It was said that his relationship with the prime minister not only kept Sami
from internment himself, but also enabled him to protect numerous
pro- Nazi agitators from internment and to find government positions for
them. We know far less about Saib Shawkat’s activities before he went into
exile; unlike his brother Sami, he remained a practising physician despite
his political involvement. However, we do know that Saib Shawkat was
associated even more closely than Sami with Fritz Grobba and the German
legation. Functioning as secretary of the Palestine Defence Committee,
Saib appeared to CICI for some curious reason to have been deeply solici-
tous for the ex-Mufti’s welfare from the moment al-Husayni arrived in
Iraq in 1939.^42 But Saib’s principal legacy is that he actively influenced and
diverted the course of Iraqi history by establishing the Muthanna Club in
1935, which after a brief caesura between 1941 and 1945 was resurrected
as the Hizb al-Istiqlal al-Iraqi (Iraqi Independence Party), whose rightist
pan-Arab activities—in alliance with other popular parties further to the
centre and left—ultimately contributed to the bloody overthrow of the
Hashemite monarchy in 1958.
Wood and Dawson-Shepherd were presented briefly with a unique
security problem on 12 January 1943, when a significant group of Iraqi
army personnel arrived in Baghdad from Basra who had departed Iraq in
March 1940, in many cases taking their fascist sympathies with them, and
had thus been totally insulated from the political and military upheavals
in Iraq, not to mention the war situation, during the intervening three
years. These were the 15 officers and NCOs of the Iraqi military mission
to the Yemen, who now found themselves back in a totally different Iraq
from the one they had left. According to a well-informed source, every
member of the mission except the commanding officer, Ismail Safwat,
had become infected during their three-year absence with fascism and, to
a lesser extent, Nazism. The 2i/c, Mohammed Hassan, and a subaltern
named Saif-ud-Din Said were described as ‘rabidly pro-fascist,’ with Said
even said to be strongly anti-Hashemite and anti-British. In the end,
there was really little that DSO could do about their anachronistic hearts
and minds, so they carded them all and allowed them to return to their
units. The Iraqi CID then warned the appropriate authorities that the
disaffected former members of the mission should be kept under close
surveillance.^43