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in the evening, so too the besieged residents of the Baghdad embassy
usually dressed formally for dinner with the ambassador. When Nigel Clive
was recruited by MI6 in Cairo, the first official order he was given was to
buy a dinner jacket before leaving for Baghdad.^1 This was fortunate, as he
was billeted with Freya Stark, with whom he experienced the endless
round of cocktail parties and black-tie dinners on which Stark thrived, and
where she relaxed with such prominent friends as Nuri as-Said, Jumbo
Wilson, and Ken Cornwallis. There were, of course, days and evenings
spent at South Gate too, with morning rides before breakfast, picnics,
swims in the Tigris, golf, tennis, and even the occasional meet of the Royal
Haditha Hunt, with hounds supplied by Stewart Perowne.^2 Yet these
events were more than just a series of proxy rituals. They constituted a
process whereby investing in the alien covert spaces that the British were
compelled to inhabit as professionals in the field became somehow a
shared, almost familial, experience.
Because the secret world of wartime Baghdad was an inherently social
arena, one would think it might have led to an imaginative drama or two,
possibly even to a satirical filmic treatment—interesting ‘British’ personali-
ties in a menacing alien world, confined and concentrated within a nar-
rowly defined sociocultural ‘spyscape,’ under duress and constrained to
preserve the British way of doing things against all odds: stiff upper lip,
and all that. Yet, though entirely authentic in their contemporary context,
such situations, attitudes, and behaviours of these few wartime expatriates
would probably be regarded as altogether too Chekhovian or Cowardesque
for a postmodern public. One might even have expected at least one mod-
ern German filmmaker to have snatched the film and television rights to
the few published accounts of the exploits of such conflicted antiheroes as
Fritz Grobba, Paul Leverkuehn, or the ex-Mufti, whom Freya Stark once
described as a ‘just-fallen Lucifer,’^3 but this has not been the case. All three
could even be the subject of a single integrated epic. Not even Leverkuehn’s
heroic young protégé in Istanbul, the aristocratic resister/defector Erich
Vermehren, cousin of Adam von Trott zu Solz and Franz von Papen, has
attracted the attention of producers. His ruthless postdefection exploita-
tion by Kim Philby could alone furnish enough material for a tense
historical psychodrama.^4 Of course, it is common knowledge that modern
Germans, not least those in popular film and television, have been notori-
ously reluctant to engage with their Nazi past and the odious personae they
might then have to resurrect and cinematize. Yet, in the case of Grobba
and Leverkuehn at least, such ‘colonial’ enterprises as the military mission
EPILOGUE: THE BAGHDAD SET