135
This all happened around the time of the battle of Stalingrad, which
would prove to be the most significant event, greater even than the defeat
of Rommel, for the course of the war east of Suez and south of Turkey and
the Caucasus. The year 1943 marked a turning point not just in Allied and
Axis military strategy, but also in the Middle East security situation and in
the policies adopted by the German secret services targeting the region.
The Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS went on the defensive and began their
long retreat from the Soviet steppes that would end two years later at the
Armageddon of Berlin. Paradoxically, Germany’s foreign-intelligence ser-
vices—the Abwehr and (especially) RSHA VI—found it appropriate to go
on the offensive.^44 They abruptly switched their operational priorities from
subversion to sabotage. This paradox is easily understood, however, when
one recognizes that Nazi subversion had been designed to soften countries
up in readiness for German military invasion—an invasion that now would
never come. Sabotage, on the other hand, could damage the Soviet war
effort and Stalin’s postwar prospects in the Middle East. The Germans
therefore planned and launched a number of bold but botched penetra-
tions of the Middle East, one of which occurred in Iraq in June 1943.^45
Wood and Dawson-Shepherd (and Joe Spencer in Tehran) were not slow
to recognize that the security situation in the region had now entered a
new phase (Fig. 6.2).^46
Largely thanks to signals intelligence (SIGINT) decrypts (known in the
Middle East as TRIANGLE), CICI realized that in the first half of 1943
the Abwehr in Berlin, and more specifically the Kriegsorganisation Nahost
(Near East War Organization [KONO]) in Istanbul, had begun showing
an increased interest in Iraq. At the same time, CICI were concerned at
the growing indifference of the Iraqi government, born of complacency,
towards the management of its security problems. While the police were
perhaps less complacent than any other department, they were failed con-
stantly by their superiors at the interior ministry, who simply could not
grasp the requirements of security work and the need—created by their
own inadequacy—to support the efforts of those who did understand. For
instance, when the war situation in the Middle East looked favourable to
the Germans, the Iraqi government was fairly cooperative in rounding up
suspects and taking steps to prevent organized assistance to the Axis in the
event of invasion. Now, however, it seemed as if pro-German Iraqis were
no longer regarded as enemies of the state because, without Nazi support,
they seemed harmless. For example, 104 pro-Axis internees had recently
been released, including several with ‘black’ security records, yet repressive
THE MOON PALACE