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the regicidal 14 July Revolution: ‘What a horrible place Iraq seems to be
now. But to have helped to keep up a comparatively decent—and peaceful
and friendly—administration in an Arab country for forty years in spite of
the Balfour Declaration must be reckoned a success for British policy.’^27
More controversially, British policy had even ensured that the demands of
the Kurds and the Assyrians that had at times threatened to fragment the
Iraqi nation were restrained and contained.
Freya Stark, the doyenne of the Baghdad Set, has, of course, expressed
these things better than anyone. In retrospect she wrote of the Iraqis:
‘They asked for freedom, but with it they needed experience and help, and
to wash our hands and give freedom alone was not enough. Management
they disliked, but without counsel they were lost.’^28 So, as the war drew
down, the British intelligencers in Baghdad witnessed the encroaching
twilight of their ‘covert empire’ with resignation rather than regret. They
had truly done their best for Iraq, but now they could only watch as the
opportunistic Russians began to circle the Kurds ominously like a political
wolf pack on the prowl. They watched the no less opportunistic Americans,
many of whom had originally come to the region chanting the mantra of
Wilsonian self-determination, now busily chasing down commercial
opportunities, shipping routes, and oil-exploration rights with unseemly
gusto. As dancers whose dance was done, about to exit stage left and right,
the members of the Baghdad Set, whether still in Iraq or now in other
parts of the world, witnessed with satisfaction the end of Hitlerian fascism
and gazed with curiosity upon the opening steps of a colossal ballet of
global repositioning that would soon metamorphize into a flat-
out Cold War.
In the decades since the unmasking of the Cambridge spies, much has
been written of the relationship between social class in Britain and the
intelligence community, generally in the larger context of the predomi-
nant role of the upper and upper-middle classes in the making and main-
tenance of the British Empire. The hallmark of such historical snapshots—far
too many to cite here—is that they tend to see this institutionalized rela-
tionship as having been dysfunctional, inimical, or merely quaint.^29 In Iraq
during the Second World War, however, there existed a working intelli-
gence community that was neither anachronistic nor treacherous. It was
defined and operated by a close-knit group of privileged and gifted expa-
triates whose shared social manners, values, and activities performed an
important supportive role underpinning their clandestine occupations.
Their common reference points eased the burden of their overseas service
EPILOGUE: THE BAGHDAD SET