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the earliest mention of an unidentified group of men operating undercover
in Baghdad dates from June 1941 in the immediate aftermath of the
Anglo-Iraqi War. The picture is painted by a young Household Cavalry
officer, Somerset Struben De Chair (1911–1995), who was then serving
as the brigade intelligence officer of KINGCOL, the flying column that
had shortly before crossed the desert from Palestine to relieve RAF
Habbaniya. While on the lookout for local intelligence in Baghdad, the
newly arrived de Chair came across a mysterious ‘gang’ of ‘amateurs,’
newly released from Iraqi internment, who had installed themselves in a
flat on the east bank of the Tigris behind an armour-plated door. One of
them, a somewhat eccentric doctor, had apparently been telling everybody
in Baghdad, most unprofessionally, that he was ‘in the British Secret
Service.’ In due course, de Chair was introduced by the doctor to a young
man named ‘GD,’ who had an Indian clerk who apparently knew the
names of all the German, Italian, and Russian agents in Baghdad. ‘GD,’
who seems to have been in charge, gave de Chair a key to the secret flat,
inviting him to use it as a refuge whenever he needed. During a quick visit
to the flat some days later, de Chair met another young man, a school-
teacher named ‘W,’ and asked the Indian clerk for a complete list of all
enemy agents in the Baghdad area. This he duly received with an impres-
sive reference number at the top. And that is all we know of this curious
‘gang’ from the pen of Somerset de Chair. Though cryptic and uncor-
roborated, his description of the group strongly suggests that their flat was
indeed the local SIS station and that they were officers of His Majesty’s
Secret Intelligence Service.^2
During the May campaign, travelling across the desert from Transjordan
with de Chair and the men of KINGCOL were ‘Glubb’s Girls,’ the fierce
Bedouin warriors of the Transjordanian Arab Legion commanded by John
Bagot Glubb (1897–1986), yet another Middle Eastern personality with
shadowy political connections suggestive of some kind of relationship with
MI6. Most people are familiar with the Lawrence-like public image of
Glubb the desert soldier: a jovial little man in tropical army uniform sport-
ing a jaunty yellow or red-and-white keffiyah, usually worn ‘flaps-up.’ But
nowadays most seem to have forgotten how intelligent and enormously
influential Glubb Pasha was, how hugely popular with his men, and how
prolific and marvellous a writer. The trouble is that, whenever one reads
him (or of him), one is never quite sure if one is seeing things through
Glubb’s eyes or through the eyes of British intelligence, or, to be more
precise, those of MI6. As might be expected, there is no incontrovertible