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Stalingrad.^38 Between mid-January and early May 1943, Force KALPAK
had conducted extremely thorough investigations and had concluded that
Axis submarines had indeed visited the Gulf of Oman, where they had
attacked Allied shipping, which had been defended by the navy and the
RAF. But enemy attacks and reconnaissance activities were a far cry from
actual beach landings, of which there existed no proof whatsoever.^39 One
somehow suspects that Mitford’s band of brigands probably returned to
Baghdad from their mission disappointed not to have found any enemy to
‘eliminate,’ but little did they know that before long they would be land-
ing with the Special Air Service (SAS) in Sicily, with plenty of hard fighting
ahead in Italy and the Greek islands.
The FSS paradigm, including an airborne capability, proved so opera-
tionally effective that its successes soon came to the attention of other
Allied forces, especially the generals of the free forces of the occupied pow-
ers engaged in creating new units from scratch and integrating them with
other Allied formations. As the Free Poles who had migrated from the
Soviet Union assembled and trained their forces in Iraq and Persia in prep-
aration for deployment to the European theatre, they adopted many orga-
nizational practices favoured by the British Army, including the formation
of field security sections modelled on those of the Intelligence Corps, hav-
ing been encouraged by SIME, CICI, and others to conform to British
security-intelligence methods. Clearly, once these Polish formations had
been established and had begun to contribute to the Allied intelligence
effort, there was a need to set up some kind of permanent security liaison
between the Free Poles and CICI (in conjunction with GSI PAIFORCE
on the purely military-intelligence side), covering both political and mili-
tary intelligence and counterintelligence. To this end, around the time of
the strategic German defeat at Stalingrad, SIME created the role of British
Security Intelligence Liaison Officer (BSILO) to the Free Polish Forces.
By the end of 1942, three Free Polish FSS had already been deployed, a
further four were being organized and trained, and a Polish security officer
had been attached to CICI.^40 One of the advantages of close liaison with
the Poles was their linguistic ability, which soon became apparent. Besides
Polish, most Free Polish FSS members could also speak Russian and
German, which brought them into contact particularly with German-
speaking Iraqis of interest with whom the British FSS would not normally
have communicated, but who could now be carded.^41
Overall, the archived history of the FSS of the Intelligence Corps in the
PAIFORCE theatre shows that they constituted a vital element in the