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becomes a white-hot metallic shaft boring into one’s skull and scorching
one’s flesh. By embracing these adversities as they did each other’s com-
pany, by sharing them socially, they rendered such things normal—as
much part of their British routine as Freya Stark’s tea parties—and thus
relatively tolerable. Of course, subjective opinions of Baghdad life varied.
Some were enchanted by it; others, repelled. Some, like the Giffeys for
instance, even changed their minds about Baghdad. On her first visit, Anni
Giffey had found it dirty and smelly, but after a year or so she and Brian
had grown to love the place.^20 Certainly, by Western standards, most of
the Arab areas of Baghdad were filthy, crowded, and squalid, with no
redeeming architectural or topographical features such as were to be found
in Persian cities.^21 Most members of the Baghdad Set, however, lived on
the favoured west bank of the Tigris or in upscale communities like
Alwiyah, where Freya Stark’s cosy bungalow was located, and they soon
grew to tolerate the city’s less pleasant aspects.
Some of the Abwehr professionals who opposed them also had shared
reference points. Many were as socially privileged and as well-educated as
their British adversaries. Some were even Anglophiles, like Erich
Vermehren, who had won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, or Paul
Leverkuehn, who had studied at Edinburgh, lived in New York and
Washington before the war, and was a close friend of Bill Donovan’s. Yet
they were dissimilar inasmuch as few of the officers at Abwehr HQ in
Berlin, apart from a handful of German Palestinians, had ever travelled to
the orient in which they specialized, certainly no further south or east than
Istanbul. However, the Abwehr, for all its inefficiencies and many other
flaws, was renowned for its solid esprit de corps. Most of ‘Canaris’s men’
shared the Allies’ hatred of fascism and sought to confound Hitler’s cause
despite the great risks they ran in doing so. They chose loyally to follow
the examples set not by the Nazi leaders but by their intransigent Amtschef
and his gallant chief of staff, Hans Oster,^22 who daily risked their necks,
and then the branch chiefs, Piekenbrock, Lahousen, and Bentivegni, all
three professional soldiers—nationalists, not National Socialists—who in
the last years of the war wisely preferred the hazards of mortal combat on
the Russian front to almost certain death in Germany at the hands of the
Gestapo.^23 Of Canaris’s main subordinates, the Austrian intelligencer
Erwin Lahousen of Abw II was perhaps the most obdurate resister, his
final act being to give evidence as a witness for the prosecution, not the
defence, at Nuremberg, before retiring to a quiet life in the Tyrolean
Alps.^24 Canaris’s representative in Turkey, Paul Leverkuehn, the adversary