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(MOFA). Intelligence centres in Iraq, India, Palestine, and Egypt possessed
books of agent personality sheets, known as ‘MOFA histories.’ These sheets
originated from CICI and were distributed to the various centres, which
were called ‘MOFA holders.’ When a known agent moved into the area of a
MOFA holder, it was the task of that holder to keep the agent under strict
observation, and to forward any information about the agent’s activities to
CICI. Such information was then compared with other reports received and
finally distributed on an amendment slip to the various MOFA centres for
attachment to the personality sheet of the agent in question. The aim of this
robust system was to ensure that any information obtained by CICI concern-
ing the activities of suspects might at once be made available to persons inside
and outside Iraq who were likely to need it for reference purposes.^28 Being
essentially an international system, each agent was assigned a national code
followed by a unique numerical identifier (e.g. MOFA-IRQ/217 or MOFA-
SYR/21).^29 It is the MOFA list that provides the historian with a trove of
some of the personalities that CICI had to contend with in wartime Iraq.
Not all of them proved to be malign. However, until their suspect political
loyalties and motivations could be resolved by the evidence of their activi-
ties—clandestine or overt, positive or negative, within Iraq or elsewhere—
these individuals were traced, surveilled, and recorded systematically.
As a perfect example of the kind of nomadic individual whom the
dynamic MOFA monitoring system was capable of tracking, David Hall
(1876–1971) (MOFA ABYS/1) was an international person of interest
to CICI whose movements and activities early in the war suggested that
he might be (or become) a serious security threat. Though—as a Christian
Ethiopian-German—obviously in sympathy with German national inter-
ests, Hall seems to have had a pragmatic, ambivalent attitude to Nazism
that must have been difficult for British security officers to measure. Hall
belonged to a dynastic Ethiopian missionary family descended from
Polish Germans who had intermarried during the mid- nineteenth cen-
tury with Ethiopian and mixed-race women. By 1874, driven from
Ethiopia by the fortunes of war, the Hall family had settled in Palestine.
There they became related by marriage to their Jaffa neighbours, the
Ustinovs: a marriage which would beget the legendary Baron Jona ‘Klop’
Ustinov (1892–1962) of MI5 and his son Sir Peter Ustinov (1921–
2004), the renowned actor. It was in Jaffa that David Hall was born, two
years after the family’s arrival in the Levant, but he returned to Addis
Ababa after the Great War and established the import–export agency
Hall & Co in 1922, representing several major German firms. David Hall