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fleeing from Vienna to Yugoslavia with his parents, where he continued to
be pursued by the Nazis, Le Mang finally decided to move to Persia, where
he could find work as an engineer in railway construction. After a period
spent in Istanbul coping with great financial difficulty, Le Mang finally
reached Tehran during the summer of 1935, with the help of one of his
former Leipzig professors now living in Turkey. In Tehran, Le Mang held
down various engineering jobs but was finally forced to flee to Iraq because
his refusal to join the highly organized Nazi movement there, which was
obligatory for German ex-pats, led to threats against his parents and family
in Germany. Having left his passport behind in Persia, Le Mang was found
guilty by the Iraqis of illegal entry and of contravening the Iraqi residence
law. He was sentenced by an Iraqi court to a term of hard labour and was
then interned. Walther Le Mang died in Baghdad aged 37 on 20 May
1945 and lies buried in the family plot in Munich (Giesing). The details of
his tragic early death are unknown; however, someone, perhaps Hans
Hoff, ensured that his remains were repatriated, and perhaps even that in
the last two years of his life, Le Mang found sanity and felt relatively
unthreatened.^20
Less than a year after arriving in Iraq, Art Dayton was able to report to
Penrose that he and Hoff had been working very closely, happily, and
constructively with CICI. ‘We are interchanging certain phases of political
intelligence with them,’ he wrote, ‘always crediting respective sources
when we do, to prevent duplicate confirmation. They have called us in on
numerous security problems and as a rule leave entirely in our hands parts
of most major jobs.’^21 Dayton then went on to outline no fewer than 13
separate cases that he and Hoff were working on with Wood and Dawson-
Shepherd. ‘Don’t give us hell for doing it!’ Dayton implored Cairo. ‘To us
it’s a lot nearer to helping win the war than just being “watchdogs”.’^22
The LIBERATORS case was a major job: it concerned a German spy
ring rounded up by CICI in the early autumn of 1943. Art Dayton sat in
on most—and conducted some—of the subsequent CICI interrogations.
By late December, they had finished the questioning after obtaining full
confessions from some and failing to break others. All in all, with the
exception of one Iraqi, the subjects were a poor-quality group of low intel-
ligence. They had succeeded in doing little or no damage; they had sent
three espionage reports to Paul Leverkuehn’s Abwehr outstation (KONO);
they had imported a W/T set, but had failed to get it working; and they
had been paid no more than a few hundred pounds for their efforts.
Dayton formed a clear opinion as to what the German initiative had really