32
proprietary union flag was ever planted in Iraq; no territorial stake claimed;
no indigenous population exploited. During the interwar years, including
the period of the British Mandate (1921–1932), the British did not swarm
over Iraq, as the Germans did in the late 1930s, briefly. Instead, they
decided on a policy of indirect or ‘semicolonial’ rule. They merely sta-
tioned some troops there, stood solidly behind the throne of the royal
Hashemite house they had created, built some strategic aerodromes at
great expense, trained a fine battalion of Assyrian levies to defend them,
and established absolute control of the air.^3 They did not, as has been
falsely alleged, use chemical weapons against the Iraqi tribes.^4 Apart from
the oil concessions, which the Arabs were only too eager to grant, British
interest in Iraq was not about Iraq. It was about securing the vital lines of
communication between Europe and India, the Far East, and Australasia.
As Freya Stark wrote after the war: ‘The important thing to notice is
that—to a British view—the Arab world is a region of transit ... there is no
British interest in Arabia as such; but it is a vital region from the fact that
it lies between Asia and the Mediterranean, right across the highways of
the Commonwealth.’^5
In Iraq, from the moment the ink had dried on the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty
of 1930, intelligence and counterintelligence operations were the exclu-
sive responsibility of the Royal Air Force (RAF). Throughout the 1930s,
the ‘Brylcreem boys’^6 remained the only British boots-on-the-ground in
the region: initially at Rowanduz in Kurdistan and later at Lake Habbaniya,
about 90 km west of Baghdad. The enormous Habbaniya cantonment,
built at great expense and luxurious even by European standards, became
the prominent symbol of British power and influence in a country which
Britain had created and where Britain had many friends, but also where, in
the spring of 1941, pro-Nazi forces threatened the continued existence of
the RAF base, including its intelligence establishment, with a mili-
tary siege.^7
From 1932 onwards, Fritz Konrad Ferdinand Grobba (1886–1973),
the German minister to Baghdad, acting on instructions from Berlin, had
set himself to the dissemination of pro-German propaganda.^8 To help him
in his endeavours, a local Nazi party was formed which recruited members
from among German nationals living in Iraq. In the commercial field,
German firms were induced to open branches in Iraq employing large
German staffs who also acted as Nazi agents. Between 1935 and 1938, the
volume of German trade with Iraq doubled. On the cultural side, every
effort was made to promote the teaching of German and Nazi ideology. A