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doubtless many of his friends—viewed as a mariage de convenance, while
Stark obviously had higher hopes. They would separate in 1952.
When the men and women of the Baghdad Set finally disbanded and
left Iraq, few of them remained in the Middle East, and even fewer contin-
ued to work in the secret world. Those who did are, of course, harder to
trace than those who preferred the open air. Nigel Clive served in MI6
until 1969, even returning to Baghdad as head of station in 1950–1956.
There is no proof beyond hearsay; however, it seems likely that Hanbury
Dawson-Shepherd resigned his RAF commission to join MI5 or possibly
MI6 after the war.^11 While maintaining a secure base for his family in
Cyprus, he travelled widely throughout the Middle East under what must
have been ideal cover for an SIS officer: as the regional representative of
an international paint company. On 22 July 1946, Dawson-Shepherd
attended a meeting at British military HQ located at the King David Hotel
in Jerusalem. Around noon, he took a trip to the toilet in another part of
the building, thus narrowly escaping the massive explosion that claimed
nearly 100 lives. One of Dawson-Shepherd’s daughters even recalls his
talking about spending time in Cornwall or the West Country somewhere,
trying to follow up leads on people who were believed to be spying for the
Russians. But otherwise he and his wife, who was also in intelligence dur-
ing the war, were reluctant to talk about their clandestine pasts because of
the Official Secrets Act. Dawson-Shepherd’s children tried to get him to
write some things down but with no success. However, his son does
remember his father’s saying that the only meat they had had to eat during
the siege of Habbaniya had been bully beef, and that he hoped never to
have to eat bully beef again.^12 As for Hanbury Dawson-Shepherd’s boss,
Chokra Wood, he returned in 1944 to his prewar job as house governor at
the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH). There he lived in one
of the outbuildings and toiled with great dedication to enlarge and
improve the badly run-down physical plant of the RNOH. He achieved
much, and so, after his death in 1961, an entire ‘Colonel Wood Ward’ was
dedicated to his memory.^13 It is said that Aidan Philip joined MI6 soon
after the war, after first running the Sharq al-Adna (Near East Broadcasting
Service [NEBS]) station in Jaffa for a year, which he handed over to Teddy
Hodgkin in 1945.^14 There is no corroboration for this; however, in
London after the war, Seton Lloyd came across Philip in charge of a most
peculiar bookshop which had no books, but which published a weekly
intelligence summary for ex-pats abroad. It all looked like a perfect MI6
front. According to Lloyd, Philip seemed ‘dottier than ever.’^15 Hodgkin