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to Iraq and the Abwehr outstation in Istanbul might provide soft entry-
points into some dramatic, though relatively noncontroversial, aspects of
Third Reich history. Not so with the ex-Mufti of course. With him writers,
producers, and directors would have to face full-frontal nastiness and
meanness of spirit on a truly epic scale. But since 1945, there has been
almost no thoughtful, nonpropagandistic exploration of wartime German
HUMINT on the large or small screen, so perhaps we should expect none
in the twenty-first century, especially now that filmmakers everywhere
seem to be preoccupied with SIGINT, cryptography, and special forces to
the exclusion of any other clandestine enterprises. Instead, we have to
contend with the tiresome proliferation of superficial television documen-
taries about ‘Nazi secrets’—secret weapons, secret tunnels, secret loot,
secret agendas, secret deals, secret ratlines to South America—padded
with tired stock footage of screaming Stukas; speeding tanks; massive artil-
lery barrages; and robotic, goose-stepping blackshirts. The monstrous tri-
umvirate—Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich—is forever at centre-screen, while
the Third Reich hegemony is replicated in endless melodramatic varia-
tions. Meanwhile, the substantive secret world of more subtle, nuanced
personalities like Wilhelm Canaris and Walter Schellenberg, or Hans Oster
and Erwin Lahousen, remains elusive and neglected.^5 As for the personali-
ties of the Baghdad Set, especially when besieged in the embassy in May
1941, their mis en scène was about as theatrical as it could be. Once the
personalities have become familiar, it is easy to envisage them as the cast of
an integrated social drama: the eminent ambassador (Cornwallis), the
famous author (Stark), the brilliant roué (Bishop), the brooding eccentric
(Holt), the jolly optimist (Hope-Gill), the genial Scottish doctor
(Sinderson), and so on. The greatest challenge, as with all portrayals of the
Second World War by generations that have no memory of it, would
undoubtedly be the avoidance of anachronism and cliché.
It is significant, of course, that many of the Baghdad Set had shared
pasts: public school, Oxford and Cambridge, the Great War in Flanders or
the Middle East. A number of them were Old Etonians; Ken Cornwallis
and Stewart Perowne were both Old Haileyburians; Nigel Clive and
Hanbury Dawson-Shepherd, Old Stoics. Quite a few had been up at
Oxford; only Perowne and Adrian Bishop were Cambridge graduates.
Freya Stark, Peggy Drower, Aidan Philip, and Hanbury Dawson-Shepherd
had all studied at London colleges. Clive had known Maurice Bowra at
Oxford and through him probably Bishop, who frequently visited Bowra
at Wadham. Being the same age, Clive may also have known Teddy