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intelligence champions beyond compare.^1 In the Middle East what placed
the British secret services in an intelligence league of their own was their
combined experience and colonial know-how. So, even after a year in the
region, when compiling an important training manual on reporting tech-
niques for field agents, the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Cairo
was still compelled to rely heavily on Inter-Services Liaison Department
(ISLD/MI6) training procedures.^2 American secret intelligence (OSS-SI)
and counterintelligence (OSS X-2) came late to Iraq, which meant that as
neophytes both branches of OSS^3 had to tread carefully in the
Mesopotamian region to which British intelligence had long ago staked its
claim, ever since the days of Gertrude Bell and the end of Ottoman rule.^4
Though the head of OSS, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, had toured the Middle
East and had visited Baghdad as early in the war as February 1941,^5 it was
not until after Pearl Harbor that he was in a position to establish a perma-
nent OSS bureau in Cairo, headed for most of its brief history by a former
Boston banker and friend, John G. Toulmin. The Near East Section of
OSS-SI was then swiftly moulded, forged, and developed in the field by a
former American University of Beirut (AUB) professor, Stephen B.L.
Penrose Jr. (1908–1954), who arrived in Cairo on 15 May 1943.^6 Within
a year Steve Penrose had built up operations from scratch in Egypt,
Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan,
and Turkey, in addition to placing four OSS secret agents in Iraq. These
talented men were Arthur R. Dayton (BUFFALO or ‘Walter Donor’
[NE20]), Dr. Hans Hoff (BUNNY or ‘Henry Ibsen’ [NE22]), Rev.
Thomas B.W. Allen (KANGAROO or ‘Calvin Warne’ [NE16]), and an
unidentified fourth agent: ‘Robert Craig’ (IBEX [NE14B]).^7
Under commercial cover with the export division of US Steel,^8 Arthur
Dayton, former vice-president of a California export business, and origi-
nally from New Jersey with a Rutgers degree,^9 functioned as chief agent
and administrative officer for Iraq, acting as a local cutout and clearing-
house for all OSS communications between Baghdad and Cairo (signals,
reports, correspondence, and movements). Unusually for an American
secret agent, it seems that Art Dayton may have done some scouting for
Washington before the creation of the Office of the Coordinator of
Information (COI) in July 1941 and OSS a year later. Indeed, his nomad-
ism is what may have caught the attention of Donovan, himself a major
global scout during the interwar years, in his initial search for capable
varsity men with a well-informed worldview to staff his fledgling agency.
As an export executive, described by one unidentified source as ‘a hustler,’