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Iraqi-American relations, a matter which Henderson clearly felt was up to
the legation, not OSS.
Steve Penrose seemed to understand that the minister had a valid point.
However, he also felt that Dayton, Hoff, Allen, and ‘Craig’ were simply
too talented as agents to be restricted to purely reportorial duties and
should perhaps be given some role in public affairs. Hoff was under the
impression that Henderson had been told by State that the sole function
of OSS field agents was to report intelligence on Iraq. Hoff felt that
Henderson was acting in accordance with what he believed to be a direc-
tive governing his relations with OSS personnel. Penrose was aware that
Henderson personally read every word of every cable, report, or letter sent
through the diplomatic bag, and that he even sometimes asked Dayton to
eliminate parts of OSS communications, which was ‘very much too bad,’
but Penrose could see no way out of the situation.^49 He even seriously
explored the possibility of establishing a secure, independent W/T com-
munications network throughout the Middle East that would enable OSS
to bypass State completely. Penrose described his proposal as a ‘somewhat
ticklish matter.’ ‘I foresee,’ he continued, ‘that we will probably run into
opposition from the State Department, and the idea would certainly pro-
voke loud screams from our cousins [CICI]. The latter have been drowned
out on other occasions, but the former can be very sticky.’^50 The matter
was ultimately resolved by arranging with the military attachés in Baghdad
and Tehran to route OSS communications through them rather than
through State. This was achieved by enclosing OSS items in a sealed mili-
tary pouch within the State Department bag: a solution that should per-
haps have been arrived at much earlier in the war. However, when this
system broke down because of State’s interference after about a year of
smooth operation, CICI kindly agreed to facilitate the transmission of
sealed OSS documents between Baghdad and Cairo via secure British
channels. Working alone in northern Persia without the knowledge of the
Tehran OSS agents, and communicating with Cairo via Dayton in
Baghdad, Tom Allen made his own similar sealed-pouch arrangements
with the Tehran military attaché (Fig. 10.1).
Fortunately, this third OSS man in Iraq, the Reverend Thomas B.W.
Allen, a Presbyterian pastor from Montana, was able to fly under the State
Department’s radar.^51 Allen was the son of a missionary to the Assyrian
and Chaldean minority, and he had grown up mostly in West Azerbaijan
province. Thus he had been uniquely familiar since childhood with the
languages and cultures of the Assyrians, Kurds, and even the Yezidis; and