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in an inhospitable climate and facilitated their operational efficiency as
members of the British secret services and the diplomatic corps. What
needs to be remembered is that Iraq was not a British colony, and that
these operatives were not run-of-the-mill colonial administrators. They
happened to be an exceptionally talented cohort of highly educated,
mostly progressive intellectuals who, when faced with wartime challenges
that none of them could ever have foreseen, responded with extraordinary
courage, pragmatism, and inventiveness. The intensely social, benign
nature of the working environment that they created for themselves in
Baghdad enhanced the quality of the work they did as intelligence, coun-
terintelligence, security, sabotage, and propaganda specialists.
The success that they achieved against the malign influence of Nazism
speaks for itself. In the sphere of secret operations targeting Iraq the Nazis
had absolutely no success. Most, if not all, of the self-inflicted causes of
Germany’s failure have been exposed in this book, which clearly shows
them not to have been limited to any specific area of German strategy,
policy, planning, or execution, nor to any specific German clandestine
organization or competency. On the contrary, Nazi secret warfare failed
utterly in Iraq (and Persia) because of general, systemic flaws at every level
of their initiatives. Yet, the Nazis also failed because of the resistance that
the British secret services, hugely advantaged by their access to ULTRA,
mounted against them. This was the result for which the Baghdad opera-
tives strove clandestinely for four years of very hard work under the aegis
of a bewildering array of service acronyms—CICI, SIME, SOE, ISLD,
MOI, PWE, FSS—and under all sorts of complex cover. Fortunately we
know from their archived memoirs, diaries, and correspondence how these
few gifted individuals continued to prosper after the war, and how their
friendships endured, no doubt fortified by their intimate experience of a
shared covert space—of wartime Iraq, of clandestine operational achieve-
ments, and of a social human-intelligence community that was unique—
the Baghdad Set.^30
Notes
- Nigel Clive, A Greek Experience, 1943–1948 (Wilton: Michael Russell,
1985), 19. - Seton Lloyd, The Interval: A Life in Near Eastern Archaeology (Faringdon:
Lloyd Collon, 1986), 108. See also John Frost, A Drop Too Many (London:
Buchan & Enright, 1982), 6–9.