4
And how wondrously diverse were the roles these participants played
and how varied the covert spaces they inhabited. Imagine planning officers
in crisp tropical service dress coolly sipping their pink gins and chota pegs
before dinner on the front terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, while
swapping the latest inter- and intraservice gossip or initiating schemes to
further the interests of their operational causes. Such operatives were a
world away from officers in the field, sweating it out perhaps in the super-
heated hell of life under canvas in western, southern, or northern Iraq:
coping with creepy-crawlies and swarming flies, surviving on army rations,
learning how to find shade behind a jeep or even a telegraph pole,^12 strug-
gling perhaps with a temperamental W/T set. The former had little more
to concern themselves with than their hush-hush careers and their next
best political trick. The latter on the other hand could be in serious danger
with every personal contact or chance remark. Their relative safety
depended much upon the opacity of their cover and the nature of their
work. Propaganda officers under embassy cover in Baghdad were arguably
at less risk than sabotage officers in Kurdistan preparing tribesmen to resist
a German invasion. On the Persia and Iraq Force (PAIFORCE) war estab-
lishment, 337 people worked to ensure the security of the territory and
polity of the two nation-states of Persia (Iran) and Iraq. There were
defence security officers (DSOs), assistant defence security officers
(ADSOs), area liaison officers (ALOs), SOs, IOs, PAs, APAs, and DAPAs—
some 75 officers, 30 other ranks, and 232 civilians—all performing diverse
tasks under widely varying conditions.^13 But, whether under diplomatic,
consular, commercial, professional, or service cover, no operatives in Iraq
or Persia could ever be entirely sure of their own safety. Not after the
tragic Monck-Mason affair^14 and the brutal murder of poor Pilot Officer
Jones^15 ; not after the atrocious Harris/Griffiths murders in Luristan^16 ; and
certainly not with malevolent former supporters of Rashid Ali and the ex-
Mufti lurking everywhere, especially in the Iraqi army, still peevishly nurs-
ing their grievances over their defeat by British forces. There is no safety
in numbers in the secret world: spies never come in battalions. Intelligence
gathering is usually a lonely business dependent upon multiple individual
instances of conditional trust and pragmatic response. The plethora of
competing agencies in Cairo offered neither solace nor protection to the
lone area liaison officer (ALO), underresourced and possibly incommuni-
cado, in some provincial outpost beyond Baghdad in early 1942, with the
triumphant Nazi armies bearing down on Transcaucasia and with unpre-
dictable locals all around.