56
Once the defeated Iraqi rebels had disbanded and dispersed at the end
of May 1941, with some (the leaders) fleeing across the frontiers into
Persia, Turkey, and Syria, and others (the followers) slouching back to
their barracks, mostly humbled but seething with resentment, the various
agencies of British intelligence returned to the controls necessary to ensure
the nation’s peace and security. Sir Kinahan Cornwallis visited the various
camps in which British and American citizens had been interned to explain
the situation and the attitude that he wished to be adopted by the British
community.^32 At the end of June, an important conference was held at the
Baghdad embassy where various British and Indian naval and army brass,
including the commanding general Edward Quinan (1885–1960), sat
down with Cornwallis the ambassador and William Elphinston of CICI to
discuss ‘intelligence arrangements consequent upon the assumption of
military responsibility for Iraq by GHQ India.’ What emerged from this
top-level meeting was a new charter for CICI, which provided the British
security-intelligence authorities with the full terms of reference they sought
to establish and implement various security and counterintelligence poli-
cies, and to separate their competencies from those of various interested
parties, such as the FO, the British and Indian armed forces, and MI6.^33
Notes
- Weisung Nr. 30 (Directive No. 30) in Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s
War Directives 1939–1945 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2004), 122–5. - Francis Nicosia, Nazi Germany and the Arab World (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 277–8; Mohamed-Kamal El-Dessouki, ‘Hitler
und der Nahe Osten’ (Dr phil diss., Berlin, 1963), 134–5. It is refreshing
to read the antifascist East German treatment of the Anglo-Iraqi War by
Heinz Tillman, Deutschlands Araberpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin:
Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1965), for he is merciless in his just
criticism of the ‘German imperialists’ and all that they attempted in Iraq.
Otherwise, the following are the most dependable, though not always
unbiased, German sources on the Anglo-Iraqi War: Dietrich Eichholtz,
War for Oil: The Nazi Quest for an Oil Empire (Washington, DC: Potomac,
2012); Fritz Grobba, Männer und Mächte im Orient: 25 Jahre diploma-
tischer Tätigkeit im Orient (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1967); Jobst
Knigge, Deutsches Kriegsziel Irak: Der deutsche Griff auf den Nahen Osten
im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Über Kaukasus und Kairo zum Öl des Orients: Pläne
und Wirklichkeit (Hamburg: Kovac, 2007); Wilhelm Kohlhaas, ̌ Hitler-
Abenteuer im Irak: Ein Erlebnis-Bericht (Freiburg: Herder, 1989); Bernd