What were the limits and possibilities of Arab nationalism in 1960s Iraq? What role did economic expertise play in the struggle to realize Arab nationalist aspirations? And what do debates about economic policy and doctrine in 1960s Iraq tell us about processes of postcolonial state formation? This paper adopts a “social biographical” approach to analyzing these questions. It contends that the life history of a single individual can illuminate larger patterns and dynamics of world history. By analyzing where a particular individual sits within in a larger social structure and then tracing the trajectory of their life history, we have the opportunity to think anew about the relationship between structure and agency – and about the relationship between contingency and determinism in history. In this case, I examine the intersection of two social biographies to illuminate the limits and possibilities of political action in a postcolonial context. The paper follows the rise, and ultimate overthrow, of Dr. Khair el-Din Haseeb, the Governor of Iraq’s Central Bank and the Director of Iraq’s Economic Organization (1964-68). Based on oral history interviews with Dr. Haseeb, I trace his rise from humble Mosuli origins in the late 1920s, to the pinnacle of Iraqi state power in the 1960s, with a particular focus on how his political and moral values were formed. I pay special attention to his years of education at the London School of Economics and then Cambridge in the 1950s, and argue that the expertise that he developed in these years made him a significant threat to the interests of the Iraq Petroleum Company – a conglomerate of Western corporations. It was this expertise, and this threat, that brought him into contact and conflict with Dr. Edith Penrose, a US-born economist at the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies who specialized in the political economy of Iraqi oil. Drawing on memoirs and declassified US government records, I trace Dr. Penrose’s rise to global prominence and suggest that despite her outward appearance as a disinterested scholar, she was in fact in the employ of British intelligence, and that in this capacity she conspired with Iraqi conservatives to bring about the July 1968 coup d’état that overthrew Haseeb and opened the door to a Ba’thist regime.