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edge. The Abwehr hand codes had been broken as early as December
1940; a year later the Abwehr ENIGMA was finally cracked; even earlier
in 1941, the RSHA VI hand cipher had also been solved. After that, there
were few German signals to and from the Middle East that escaped the
notice of Bletchley Park and Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Radio Intelligence
Section (RIS).^48 However, the following half-dozen narratives of these
‘local’ KONO initiatives, all of which failed, provide some lively reading.
(Narrative 8 [KONO]) Achat Khan. This former Iraqi police colonel,
a relative of Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji, crossed into Turkey with 1200 men
during the Anglo-Iraqi War. The entire Kurdish contingent was interned
by the Turks at Diyarbakir. There Achat Khan was contacted by Paul
Leverkuehn of KONO and agreed to work for the Abwehr, and possibly
even to go to Germany. In January 1942, Leverkuehn asked Werner
Eisenberg in Berlin to approve the recruitment, but he never received a
reply, and so contact with Khan was lost. A year later, when Gottfried
Müller attempted to find Khan in order to enlist his help with the planning
of Operation MAMMUT, he was informed by Leverkuehn that Khan had
probably returned to Kurdistan.^49
(Narrative 9 [KONO]) LIBERATORS. In the spring of 1942, Bay
Qassim persuaded an old friend, Abdullah Ahmed, an Iraqi who had gone
to Istanbul for medical treatment, to undertake a mission for the Abwehr
on his return to Baghdad. Ahmed not only agreed to send Qassim mes-
sages in secret ink, but also to organize a society called Ar Ratl al-Tahriri
al-Watani (National Liberation Column [RATL]), codenamed
LIBERATORS, which would supply Qassim with military and political
intelligence about Iraq, and would also undertake sabotage and terrorist
activities. Ultimately, RATL numbered among its membership govern-
ment officials and Iraqi army officers. At its head was a prominent Baghdad
physician, Dr. Nadjat Suleiman, whose clinic was used as a meeting place
for the group. In December 1942, after two failed attempts, the Abwehr
succeeded—with the connivance of a Wagons-Lits attendant (DOLEFUL),
who was actually a SIME double agent—in smuggling into Baghdad a
W/T set for the LIBERATORS. DSO Turkey had been warned in advance
that the set was on its way to Baghdad; however, the area liaison officer
(ALO) in Mosul had by then succeeded in penetrating the LIBERATORS
by means of a planted British-Iraqi agent (ZULU), who happened to be
the Mosul chief of the Iraqi police. ZULU kept DSO Iraq fully informed
of the group’s activities, including the fact that they could not get the
planted W/T set to work. During the summer of 1943, on the excuse that