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been all about: a planted British-Iraqi counterintelligence agent had man-
aged to dupe some weak-minded, money-hungry young men into form-
ing a pro-German, but utterly disorganized, group. They were turned
over to the Iraqi authorities and were put on trial on 29 January 1944,
defended by no fewer than 11 of Iraq’s top defence lawyers, including two
former cabinet ministers.^23 With such a powerful defence team, it is not
surprising that the trial resulted in adjournment because of a legal techni-
cality. Consequently, seven suspects were interned but never sentenced;
two, against whom there was little evidence, were released on bail.^24
Archie S. Crawford, who succeeded Steve Penrose as chief of Near East
Section OSS-SI in January 1944, has left us with the following positive
evaluation of Art Dayton and his work: ‘Roughly fifty percent of the
energy of the ... section is applied in keeping up with the ... successful
energy of this amazing man. For a period of many months cables arrived
almost daily in Washington and in Cairo with keenly observed and up-to-
the-minute intelligence scoops from Baghdad. Not only were officials of
our government beaten by days in the reporting of material, [but] they
were corrected for the mistakes they had made. Other agencies found
themselves calling our organization whenever their copy of the “daily
cable” was delayed. Eighty-four subsources are shared with [Hoff]. Liaison
with [the] British security organization in his area [has] been so firmly
established that this representative, in addition to a full job done in politi-
cal and economic reporting, has been and [still] is successfully engaged in
helping the British to ferret out Axis espionage rings in Iraq, the story of
which cannot yet in security be told.’^25 One particular example serves to
illustrate the high quality of Dayton’s product. In September 1943, he
sent Cairo a ‘highly important’ policy document on Palestine which he
had apparently obtained from a senior Foreign Office (FO) representative,
and which Archie Crawford felt was ‘practically a blueprint of British plans
in the whole Middle East area.’^26 When Art Dayton put in a rare appear-
ance at Cairo HQ, he was treated like a film star: ‘the message centre
downstairs were a-dither to see the famous “Donor” who sent so many
cables, and such long ones, that our code room is overworked.’^27 One
month after Dayton’s visit, Lewis Leary wrote to Washington: ‘He had
them all hopping when he was here; they still react to the sound of
his name.’^28
Art Dayton’s partner in Baghdad was already a celebrity before he
arrived, at least in the academic sphere of clinical psychotherapy. Trading
on his reputation and earlier experience as professor of neurology and
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