Penrose to Shepardson, 27 July 1944, Folder 7, Box 5, Series 8 (OSS),
Penrose Papers, Whitman College and Northwest Archives [WCNA],
Walla Walla, WA [PP].
In American service slang, the secret intelligence (SI) branch of OSS went
by the nickname ‘Oh So Secret.’ However, another version—‘Oh So
Social’—was applied to the service as a whole, attributable to Donovan’s
preferred recruitment of New England friends and Ivy League intellectuals
in the early days of the service. See Ladislas Farago, Burn after Reading:
The Espionage History of World War II (New York: Pinnacle, 1972),
219–20.
Cf. a contemporary British view of America and the Middle East by
H.A.R. Gibb, ‘The Middle East in American Opinion,’ in Rosie Llewellyn-
Jones, ed., ‘A Small Room in Clarges Street’: Secret War-Time Lectures at
the Royal Central Asian Society, 1942–1944 (Brighton: Sussex Academic
Press, 2014), 20–35.
Sending a clear message to the Nazis during his visit to Baghdad, Donovan
bluntly informed the ex-Mufti that the Americans had one idea which was
to help Great Britain to win the war. Anything which did not further that
idea, and still more anything which hindered it, would be frowned upon.
Newton to FO, 14 February 1941, FO 371/27098, The National
Archives, Kew, Surrey [TNA]; Gerald de Gaury, Three Kings in Baghdad,
1921–1958 (London: Hutchinson, 1961), 116–17; Jay Jakub, Spies and
Saboteurs: Anglo-American Collaboration and Rivalry in Human
Intelligence Collection and Special Operations, 1940–45 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1999), 14–15.
For much more about Steve ‘Binks’ Penrose, see Adrian O’Sullivan,
Espionage and Counterintelligence in Occupied Persia (Iran): The Success of
the Allied Secret Services (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) [ECOP],
27 passim; Hugh Wilford, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists
and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2013),
35–6, 41.
See Appendix B. ‘Robert Craig’ was a cover name. Agents of Near East
Section SI usually had at least two cover names: (1) an animal code name
for operational purposes and (2) a fictitious first name/family name com-
bination for reporting purposes (sometimes used singly). Reverse con-
struction of agents’ true identities is a formidable task, for OSS regarded
cover as absolutely sacred and took great pains to protect it at all costs.
After many years of investigation, two rare instances of careless reporting
enabled me to identify Dayton and Hoff from en clair mentions of their
relatives; Allen’s identity was found buried deep within a secondary source.
‘Robert Craig’ remains a mystery. On CICI distribution lists I also found
