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closed, immediately easing the security situation that CICI had to deal
with. For the previous two years, the Abwehr had found it increasingly
difficult to maintain an espionage organization in Iraq. Their only para-
chute expedition (MAMMUT) had been rounded up before achieving
anything; two attempts to establish W/T communication between
Baghdad and Istanbul had proved unsuccessful; and in recent months the
Kriegsorganisation Nahost (KONO)^15 had been forced to rely more and
more for any intelligence upon a few chance contacts with compliant
CIWL personnel. When CICI had then prohibited the entry of CIWL
train staff from Turkey, the Abwehr had lost even its alternative courier
service. Naturally, DSO Iraq assumed that the Germans, having antici-
pated the possibility of the Turks’ breaking off diplomatic relations with
them, had prepared a network of cells to keep them informed about affairs
in the Middle East. Such cells would probably be directed from the
Japanese and Hungarian legations; however, they would then have to con-
tend with the Turkish intelligence services and police, who would now be
working against them. If KONO had found it almost impossible to oper-
ate an espionage organization in Iraq when they were firmly established in
neutral Turkey, they would find it even more difficult to operate land-
based espionage or sabotage operations across two or more frontiers and
from distant centres like Athens, Budapest, and the Nazi-occupied Greek
islands.^16
This is not to say that the general easing of the security situation in the
latter half of 1944 meant that Turkey no longer presented a problem for
CICI, for various reasons, such as: (1) there still remained a number of
Germans and Italian fascists in Turkey whom the Turks had not expelled;
(2) Turkey had not broken off diplomatic relations with Hungary, which
posed a possible proxy threat; (3) German agents might be inserted in the
guise of refugees; and (4) anti-British Iraqis with the right of entry might
return from Turkey. By September 1944, however, CICI deemed the situ-
ation secure enough to allow for the lifting of the three-month ban on
trans-border work by CIWL train staff.^17
As the war drew to a close, the FSS at Tel Kotchek experienced a new
challenge: the arrival at the border crossing of officials of the newly estab-
lished Syrian Sureté. At first, having no experience at all in frontier con-
trol, they had to be trained from scratch by the FSS. Then they attempted
to supplant the FSS in the matter of train control on the grounds that it
was purely out of courtesy that the British had been allowed to operate at
Tel Kotchek in the first place. The Syrians’ method of searching travellers