The Baghdad Set_ Iraq through the Eyes of British Intelligence, 1941–45

© The Author(s) 2019 181
A. O’Sullivan, The Baghdad Set,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15183-6_9

CHAPTER 9

A Place in the Shade

We wish to throw no one into the shade, but we demand our own place

in the sun.

—Bernhard von Bülow

Collect around you men on whom you can depend at the time of the

inevitable final defeat.

—Werner Eisenberg

During the period 1941–1945, from the safe distance of Berlin, the
Germans planned—and in one case executed—at least seven covert initia-
tives that targeted Iraq, including Iraqi, Persian, and Syrian Kurdistan,
where the international frontiers were generally ignored by the Kurds
themselves.^1 Most of these operations were planned by the subversion-
and- sabotage branch of the German armed-forces intelligence service
known as Abwehr II Orient (Abw II OR): the department at Abwehr HQ
in Berlin responsible for Middle Eastern countries including Iraq among
others. Here the Iraq desk was headed until 1944 by an eminent lawyer,

Bernhard von Bülow, Fürst Bülows Reden nebst urkundlichen Beiträgen zu seiner
Politik, vol. 3 (Berlin: Reimer, 1909), 7.
SCI 12th Army Group Munich to CO X-2 Germany, 11 July 1945, Record
Group 263, Entry ZZ18, Box 35, National Archives and Records
Administration, College Park, MD [NARA].