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from Iraq to the UK until July 1944.^15 Brian Giffey had in fact been
abruptly and unusually dismissed from SIS in February—on the spot in
Baghdad and without prior recall to London (contrary to accepted proto-
col)—though he was fortunate in subsequently being promoted to lieu-
tenant colonel, rejoining his regiment, and finding a new military role in
occupied Germany with the Public Safety Branch of the Allied Control
Commission. However, the reason for Giffey’s sudden dismissal from Six,
which must have been highly significant, remains unknown. Tina Tamman
has tried hard to document it, but has been unable to find any conclusive
evidence. She has nevertheless advanced some interesting theories, includ-
ing the possibility that either Cornwallis or Kim Philby engineered Giffey’s
dismissal for a host of conceivable reasons, such as disagreement over the
Kurds, over the Persian Gulf, over Iraqi corruption, over Turkey; or most
intriguingly the possible threat posed to Philby as a Soviet agent by Giffey’s
Estonian networks and his manifest anticommunism. It certainly appears
from Dr. Tamman’s work that the Giffeys were not embraced by the
Baghdad Set. Nor did they socialize with the embassy staff, preferring the
company of the British consul and his wife, who was a New Zealander and
therefore, like Anni Giffey, something of an outsider.^16
In the summer of 1944, a London-based SIS officer named Harry
Steptoe was despatched on a tour to investigate the problem of commu-
nist activity in what was described as ‘the Mediterranean Region,’ which
in this case included North Africa, the Levant, the Middle East, Turkey,
and southern Italy.^17 Perhaps Steptoe’s appearance in Baghdad was pre-
cipitated by whatever Brian Giffey might have disclosed to Six about the
leftist politics of the Baghdad Set when he was sacked. Giffey, who lived
with his wife at Stewart Perowne’s bungalow, maintained (seriously) that
Perowne was a Stalinist.^18 Steptoe’s somewhat paranoid trip report was
later found among the material sent by Kim Philby to Moscow during the
war. In his autobiography, Philby describes Steptoe as a ‘near mental case’
and says that his Mediterranean tour to spread the gospel of Section IX
was an unqualified disaster, partly because his secretiveness had led the
field officers he visited to question his credentials. Seeing him as a liability,
on Steptoe’s return to London, Philby swiftly engineered his dismissal
from the service. The damage done by Steptoe on his whirlwind tour
meant that Philby had to make his own way to the region in early 1945,
to patch things up with the various heads of station and to get Section IX
working properly again.^19 Steptoe’s alarming comments on SIS Baghdad
station were rendered cryptic by the fact that he referred to MI6 officers