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against whom Chokra Wood and Hanbury Dawson-Shepherd had con-
stantly pitted their wits for four years, was no Nazi either. After the war, he
served as a Christian Democrat member of the Bundestag (West German
parliament) and later the European Parliament, until his death in 1970.
With the SS, however, it was a different story. While the intelligence
professionals of the Baghdad Set might have looked upon their gentle-
manly Abwehr opponents with a certain social Sympathie, they would have
found absolutely nothing in common with the ideologues of RSHA VI,
whose core values were fundamentally criminal and deeply antisocial. In
their relentless pursuit of antibolshevism and antisemitism, the doctrinaire
Nazi amateurs of RSHA VI belied the human in human intelligence, and
in the case of Iraq they aided and abetted one of the most inhumane, divi-
sive, and destructive personalities of the twentieth century: Amin al-
Husayni, the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem. When, with pre-mission SS support,
he deployed his four Arab Bureau (AB) parachutists to northern Iraq in
December 1944, it had nothing to do with Hitler’s war. He knew exactly
what he was doing: creating a malicious terrorist cell designed only to
spawn more antisemitic killer cells. Today we would say that Operation
TEL AFAR, though a grandiose lunatic scheme for so late in the war, was
unquestionably a precursor or paradigm of the asymmetrical warfare to be
waged in Palestine and subsequently all over the Middle East after the
war.^25 But the ex-Mufti was never known for his prescience. His vision was
always distinctly myopic and limited to his own vain political ambitions. In
his cynicism, he could not possibly have seen any innovative strategic value
in the operation, nor could he have cared less about the ultimate fate of
those whom he recruited to execute it. With TEL AFAR, al-Husayni was
really only interested in killing as many Jews as he could and in raising hell
with the British in Palestine, to facilitate his own path to political power.
Fortunately, his wasted years in German exile had so marginalized his rel-
evance to postwar Palestine and the Middle East in general that the TEL
AFAR mission proved to be the ex-Mufti’s terrorist swan song.
The operation was, of course, as much of a failure as al-Husayni’s
derailed political career, which quickly lost all currency after the war. It
could perhaps have been very different for him, had he prolonged the pro-
British stance he had adopted in 1921–1936, and had he chosen to resist
the Balfour Declaration and Zionist immigration reasonably. Instead, the
ex-Mufti rashly embraced extremism in the form of the Golden Square
and Rashid Ali—with whom he later quarrelled and struggled in exile.
Once in Germany, he also propagated vicious antisemitism in the German
EPILOGUE: THE BAGHDAD SET