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In despair, Prince Abdul Illah tried the last shot in his locker, a counter-coup which was promptly squelched by the Basra garrison, then lit out for the sanctuary of Trans-Jordan in an R.A.F. plane.
At week's end all was desperately tense along the Tigris and Euphrates. In Trans-Jordan's capital city of Amman, Prince Abdul Illah sulked, conferred with General Nuri Es-Said. In Bagdad, El-Gailani played a close-to-the-chest hand of international poker, King Feisal played in the palace gardens beside the Tigris, Sherif Sharaf read the Koran. In London a weary Foreign Office profanely hoped that, since Britain could spare none of her armed forces to police Iraq, a diplomatic miracle might come to pass in the able brain of Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, the new Ambassador to Iraq and a longtime inner-circle political adviser to the Iraq Government.
* Coincidentally or otherwise, 800 miles away in Ankara was Germany's oldest fifth columnist of them all, stumble-plotting Ambassador to Turkey Franz von Papen.