200
of lack of material evidence and the risk of blowing a valuable CICI agent,
Mukhtar could not be arrested.^61 Ultimately, Khidir’s correspondent
Mudhaffar Zainal moved to Germany, a fact which DSO felt constituted
circumstantial evidence of his clandestine association with the Abwehr.^62
Khidir was sentenced to two years’ rigorous imprisonment and two years’
police surveillance; Mukhtar was acquitted.^63
In 1940, an Anglo-Turkish security bureau was established in Istanbul
by SIME known as the Kuchuk Bureau (Küçük Büro), where officers from
DSO Turkey and the Turkish secret service collaborated on anti-Axis
counterintelligence operations targeting KONO. The Kuchuk Bureau was
initially set up for SIME by a peacetime Shell employee from Royal Navy
security, W. Wolfson, who had formerly served in the Imperial Russian and
US navies, and who was proficiently multilingual. The Bureau was then
run until late 1943 by another multilingual Russia expert, Charles Douglas
Roberts (Intelligence Corps), formerly DSO Syria, who received the OBE
for his counterintelligence work in Turkey and would ultimately succeed
Raymond Maunsell as head of SIME in July 1944. SIME’s close coopera-
tion with the Turkish secret service guarded the only feasible entry by land
into the Middle East.^64 However, while the Turkish president had ordered
the Turkish secret service to cooperate fully with the British, it is thought
that he had simultaneously ordered the Turkish police to cooperate with
the Germans.^65 During the war, a couple of counterintelligence operations
were conducted by CICI which targeted hostile activities that could not
be clearly identified as having originated with Leverkuehn’s KONO orga-
nization in Istanbul or any other enemy centre, but that definitely ema-
nated from Turkey, possibly from Turkish intelligence. To put it plainly, as
long as neutral Turkey sat on the fence between the Allies and the Axis,
the Turkish secret service could not be entirely trusted.
(Narrative 14 [TIS]) DODGERS. For seven months, beginning in
December 1943, DSO Iraq had kept under observation an espionage
organization which had been smuggling military and political intelligence
about Iraq to an accommodation address in Diyarbakir (Turkish Kurdistan).
The information was conveyed by means of highly skilled secret-ink-
written letters and channelled via two socially prominent agents who may
or may not have been exposed to each other: Gaydan Fikri and Mustafa
Yusuf. Fikri was the owner of the electricity concession in Shahraban
(Miqdadiyah) and handled mostly political information. Yusuf, an elderly
former Ottoman officer, was a man of wealth and influence whose infor-
mation concerned mostly military matters, such as troop movements and