Thessaloniki, Greece was given to him as a debut assignment, where he served as vice consul. Soon afterward he went to Paris, where he studied Arabic, Amharic, French, and Turkish at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, but by 1933 he was back in the Middle East with a posting in Baghdad. Four years later he was posted in Tehran, where he had his first child, James S. Moose, III.[1] In 1942 he had his second child, Eleanor Duncan Wood Moose (Lady Whittome).