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but also to target the Russians.^53 To enhance his security, Allen was not to
be exposed to Joe Upton, the chief OSS agent in Tehran,^54 though this
later became necessary simply to ensure that Allen was regularly paid. The
records show that, to resolve the problem of inadequate cover, he man-
aged to get a job in Tehran with the US economic advisory mission to the
Persian government, the Millspaugh Mission, which with one stroke
removed him from the scrutiny of inquisitive US diplomats in Baghdad
and Tehran, and of Soviet counterintelligence (NKVD). Allen may indeed
have obtained this ideal cover position unaided, as the files suggest.
However, it seems suspiciously convenient that Archie Crawford’s brother
just happened to be head of the cereals and bread section of the Millspaugh
Mission, the very department which Tom Allen used as his cover.
Because Allen was required to work in lawless tribal areas within Red
Army territory, his was dangerous work, and he constantly needed to find
plausible reasons for travelling to bandit-infested, Soviet-occupied areas
where most mission officers would never venture. Here his special relation-
ship with J. Forrest Crawford became useful, even though Allen was pos-
sibly not exposed to him as OSS. Even so, Crawford ensured that he was
sent to the Kurdish northwest and had a relatively undemanding advisory
position, which left him with plenty of time to do his important espionage
work.^55 It was not until April–May 1944 that Allen finally received permis-
sion from the Soviet authorities to enter and reside in Tabriz. For the final
year of the war, from this unique location behind the Russian lines, Allen
was able to report directly to Baghdad and Cairo on a sealed, Soviet-
controlled region, describing exactly the kinds of things Washington
needed to know, as Archie Crawford put it: ‘economic and political stuff,
tribes, Russian moves and tendencies, government difficulties, suspicious
characters, arms smuggling—the range is almost infinite.’^56 At OSS
Research and Analysis (R&A) in Washington, nothing short of excitement
greeted Allen’s valuable despatches, which came out of the Soviet zone of
northern Persia in a steady stream and well past V-Day into 1946. Gone
was the time when OSS had the Nazis in their sights; now they were draw-
ing a bead on Stalin, and Tom Allen was their man on the front line.
The fourth OSS agent in Iraq, a Kurdish expert, remains a mystery
man. All we know of ‘Robert Craig’ is that he was an American employee
of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) based in Kirkuk, who was recruited
by OSS in the field as early as October 1942. With IPC as his cover,
‘Craig’ operated more or less independently of Baghdad, merely using Art
Dayton, with whom he also had telephone contact, as the clearing-house