In the autumn of 1920 Major N.N.E. Bray, a special intelligence officer attached to the Political Department at the India Office, wrote (in one case in conjunction with the War Office) three major reports on the causes of unrest in Mesopotamia, where a rebellion of substantial proportions, costing tens of thousands of lives, had recently broken out. The conclusions drawn therein, based almost entirely on information collected by British intelligence, were from the British point of view disturbing. For in Bray's view the unrest in Mesopotamia was the product not only of local discontent and faults in the administration, recently established, but also of a wideranging conspiracy, originating in Berlin and Moscow.' With the publication of Masayuki Yamauchi's The Green Crescent under the Red Star: Enver Pasha in Soviet Russia, 1919-22 and other recent studies, it now becomes possible to check the evidence presented by Bray, in support of his thesis, and test the validity of his conclusions.2 The results are surprising. While much, but by no means all, of the material contained in Bray's reports proves reasonably accurate, the conclusions drawn, though at first sight valid, must be considered, with the advantage of hindsight, misleading. Bray's interest in questions concerning the external causes of sedition in the British Empire in Asia appears to have originated in remarks made by Sir Charles Cleveland, Head of the India secret service, at a a meeting, chaired by Field Marshal Lord Nicholson, Chief of Staff of the British Army, held at the military headquarters building, Simla, in 1911. At that meeting, supposedly called to review the question of expenditure on the army in India, but in fact mainly concerned with the threat posed to British authority in the subcontinent by the rising tide of nationalism in the area, Cleveland so Bray, who attended the meeting, later recalled had remarked that in India they did not only have to deal with political agitation, but also with sedition, fostered in baffling secrecy. Unrest was spreading like a hidden fire. Suppressed in one place it immediately broke out in another. 'These outbreaks are interconnected, highly organised and my impression ... is that they are controlled by one great intellect, but whose?