68
Besides, Cornwallis had no doubt instructed Perowne to keep Bishop’s
buccaneers at arm’s length.
By the end of July 1941, CICI provided an estimate of the political atti-
tude of the population—what we would call a ‘national poll’ today. The
rural population, comprising 70 per cent of the whole, had become almost
completely uninterested in politics. At the time of the Rashid Ali coup, they
had prudently shown sympathy with the rebels, but two months later, they
were disposed to be friendly towards the British. By far the most influential
section of the population had been the 15 per cent who lived in Baghdad,
Basra, and Mosul. Of these, two-thirds had been actively pro- Gaylani, while
the remaining third had dared not show their pro-British sympathies. Now,
after the armistice, the urban population could be broken down into three
roughly equal groups: (1) still pro-rebel; (2) waiting for future events to
determine their attitude; and (3) openly pro-British.^13 This then was the
context of political opinion in which Freya Stark began her work of persua-
sion by means of the Ikhwan, in which Adrian Bishop’s SOE team propa-
gated their black propaganda and other sinister means of coercion, and in
which Stewart Perowne and Christopher Holme sought to improve public
relations between His Britannic Majesty’s Government and the Iraqi nation
by means of white propaganda and other forms of overt publicity.
Before coming to Iraq in March 1941, Freya Stark had spent eight
months in Cairo. Not unnaturally, considering her Italian roots and her
bilingualism, she had first focussed her attention as a propaganda officer
not on the Arabs but on the many thousands of Italians in Egypt, whether
recently captured prisoners-of-war or members of an older diaspora.
Within both groups, there had lurked a significant, malignant fascist ele-
ment which had had to be countered. Initially, though officially repre-
senting MOI, she had preserved a lingering association with Section D of
the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) by working with former members
Cudbert Thornhill and Christopher Sykes at SOE headquarters on an
Italian prisoners’ scheme. It was during her previous posting in Aden,
close to neutral Yemen—considered vulnerable to Italian fascist
influence—that Freya had first conceived the notion of recruiting antifas-
cist Italian prisoners-of-war to spread, even unconsciously, pro-British
and anti-Mussolini ideas. Because of her native Italian, Stark had been
brought in to help with the interrogation of a captured Italian submari-
ner. So successful was she in getting the young officer to talk that two
Italian submarines were subsequently sunk on the strength of the intelli-
gence that Stark had extracted from him, apparently with little difficulty.^14