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to increase during a shutdown.^24 The only feasible solution was to treat
the Zakho area as a protected zone for the duration of any stoppage and
temporarily suspend all entry into it. Then the Mosul-Zakho road could
be cut, as well as the telephone and telegraph links between the two loca-
tions. Another problem was that both 71 FSS and 401 FSS were severely
undermanned for such a major undertaking.^25 For this reason, the FSO
sincerely hoped that the maximum number of westbound trains would be
stopped before leaving Mosul, or even Baghdad. Then all 71 FSS and 401
FSS personnel stationed at Tel Kotchek could be temporarily diverted
from railway duty and deployed to the road crossings.^26
Of course, PAIFORCE had a maritime border in Lower Mesopotamia
to secure besides the land frontiers shared by Iraq with Turkey, Syria,
Transjordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Persia. Though the entire Iraqi
coastline between Umm Qasr and Fao (al-Faw) consisted of barely 50 km
of inaccessible marshlands, the expanding port of Basra and the shores of
the Shatt al-Arab, with their shipping, vital oil installations, port facilities,
and railway infrastructure, formed a vulnerable target of enormous signifi-
cance and extent. The littoral zone of the Persian Gulf itself was Iraq’s soft
underbelly, though most of its expanse impinged on Persian, rather than
Iraqi, territory. According to the Naval Intelligence Division (NID), the
northern (Persian) and southern (Arabian) shores of the Gulf did not
belong to Iraq, yet the strategic position of the nation very much depended
on the gulf-head as a sea and air corridor, and British interests in Iraq were
interwoven with those in the Persian Gulf.^27 In January 1943, alarming
reports of suspected Japanese submarine activity in the Gulf reached the
desk of Chokra Wood at CICI in Baghdad. However, the 19 field security
sections at his disposal were not sufficient in number to allow a special FSS
unit to be detached as ‘boots on the ground’ for a security mission on the
Persian Gulf coast.^28 Wood may also have realized that, while more than
capable of performing effective investigatory and surveillance functions,
the lightly armed men of the FSS were not a suitable fighting force to
oppose Japanese troops on the beaches. He was therefore forced to look
beyond the Intelligence Corps for a solution, and he found it with SOE.
It had all begun in late November 1942 when mysterious lights were
seen at night flashing what could have been Morse signals out to sea from
a small village near RAF Jask, located on the Persian coast at the eastern
entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, about 350 km SE of Bandar Abbas, the
convoy assembly point. As control of the Mediterranean gradually returned
to the Allies and the Suez Canal became more secure, Allied convoys
BORDER SECURITY AND BOOTS ON THE GROUND