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the mission, deliberately abandoning Rasul and Fellah without telling
them of his decision. The latter two were ultimately sent to Maadi for
thorough interrogation by SIME; they were then returned to Baghdad to
stand trial before the Iraqi courts. As for Karradi and Jifani, though there
were occasional sightings, they had still not been found when the war
ended five months later.^81 The undertaking had been an utter failure and
waste of German resources.
Such were the 16 covert operational threats posed by Germany from
the fall of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in the spring of 1941 to the end of the war
in the spring of 1945. Before Stalingrad, British intelligence in Iraq expe-
rienced moments of great anxiety under the threat of imminent invasion
from all points of the compass. Even during the German summer offensive
of 1943, in the light of major Abwehr and RSHA VI initiatives launched
against Iraq (MAMMUT) and Persia (FRANZ, ANTON), there was sig-
nificant cause for concern, since the Germans had clearly shifted their
planning priorities from preoccupational subversion to sabotage, great
and small. Conversely, at other times there appeared to be no German
activity at all, other than occasional pinpricks initiated by Paul Leverkuehn’s
Abwehr outstation in Istanbul, which could easily have lulled CICI into a
false sense of security. But this was never the case. For Wood and Dawson-
Shepherd continuously faced strategic problems of magnitude that over-
rode whatever tactical moves might have been contemplated by the
German clandestine services. CICI could not afford to relax their vigilance
towards such issues as pan-Arab and Zionist activities; the aspirations of
the Iraqi minorities, not least the Kurds, who accounted for one-fifth of
Iraq’s population; and the friction among the Allies as they prepared for a
new world order in which Germany and Japan would have no voice but
might leave a dangerous vacuum.
Von Bülow’s vision of German colonial glory proved to be as substan-
tial as a desert mirage. One cannot, of course, ‘demand’ an empire; to
acquire one intended to last a thousand years takes resources of enormous
magnitude, far greater than even Hitler (or the Kaiser) could muster.
German operational intelligence in Iraq failed not simply because of local,
tactical blunders, but because of the devastating impact of Hitler’s many
strategic misjudgements far from Iraq: failure at El Alamein, failure at
Stalingrad, failure in the Caucasus, failure to control the Mediterranean,
failure to win over the Turks, but above all the distracted Führer’s failure
in 1941 to give Middle East operations priority over Operation
BARBAROSSA. What resulted was the fall of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, and