Part 10 (1/2)

Bremond had enjoyed much better luck in his approach to Reginald Wingate. Indeed, the Sudan governor-general was a perfect British foil for the Frenchman, a fervent believer in the importance of the Arab rebellion, but just as fervently convinced that the rebels could never carry the day on their own. Along with Bremond's counsel, Wingate's conviction on this point was constantly reinforced by the two political officers he had sent to Arabia, Wilson and Parker, both of whom believed the revolt would soon collapse if foreign troops didn't come in. Of course, it was easy enough for Wingate to lobby for such a move, since he didn't have the soldiers to send; instead, they would have to be taken off Murray in Egypt. The way Bremond figured it, with Wingate as an ally it was simply a matter of waiting for the next Arab setback, at which point they could join forces and, sidestepping Murray, appeal directly to London for a military deployment.

Bremond didn't have to wait long. In fact, an opportunity had presented itself in those same few days that Lawrence was stranded in Yenbo. In late October, news had come in of a large Turkish force closing on Rabegh. The report had sown panic among the Arab forces in the foothills above that vital port town, triggering a stampede toward the coast. Seeing their opening, Wingate and Bremond had moved quickly. Wingate fired off a cable to London urging that an Anglo-French force be readied to land at Rabegh. Following Wingate's lead, Bremond had a note pa.s.sed to the British Foreign Office announcing that while he was fully prepared to speed his idled soldiers and artillery guns to Rabegh's relief, it would be ”highly imprudent” to do so ”unless they could be protected by a sufficient escort to secure their not falling into enemy hands.” As for just what size ”escort” the French colonel was looking for, Wingate provided his government with the specifics: a minimum of six battalions, or some six thousand British soldiers.

Faced with such an urgent appeal, the British War Committee came close to approving the proposal, and probably would have if not for the strenuous objections of General Murray, the man on the hook for supplying those six thousand troops. On November 2, the War Committee had declined to order any deployments out of Egypt, but instead suggested that Bremond and Wingate rustle up whatever soldiers they could under their commands and rush them to Rabegh-a suggestion that obviously led the coescalationists right back to square one.

If disappointed by London's decision, Bremond was surely heartened by a new bit of information that came in that same day. As Alfred Parker in Rabegh reported, there was no Turkish force closing on that town, and there never had been; rather, the entire crisis had been sparked by an erroneous rumor. The embarra.s.sing episode, Parker acidly noted, ”proves that Rabegh force could not stand for a moment if threatened.... I consider best solution would be British Govt. [War Committee] to reconsider their decision and land brigade at Rabegh.”

That was music to Bremond's ears, and he could be confident that a new chance to lobby the War Committee would soon present itself; after all, if the rebels had been put to flight by a rumor, what was going to happen when the Turks launched a bona fide attack?

It was at this precise juncture, however, that T. E. Lawrence reappeared in Jeddah.

As Lawrence expounded over dinner at the French mission, from the time he had spent with Ali in Rabegh and Faisal in Hamra, he was now convinced that any Allied military presence in Arabia should be an absolutely minimal one; Hussein's rebels would gladly receive weapons and military training from Christian ”infidel” advisors, whether they were French or British, but anything more expansive was sure to fuel fears of a European takeover and cause the revolt's destruction from within.

This was an a.n.a.lysis upon which reasonable men could disagree-and Bremond did disagree, strenuously-but what truly stunned him was Lawrence's further contention that, quite aside from the religious issue, such a force was altogether unnecessary. In his view, the strength of the Arab fighters was as a defensive force, and commanding as they did the narrow gorges and defiles that stood between Medina and the coast, their position was all but impregnable to any conceivable approach a Turkish army might make. So long as the Arabs held those heights-and it was hard to see how they might ever be dislodged given that the terrain was completely unsuited to the Turks' advantage in artillery and airplanes-Rabegh was perfectly safe.

Bremond was too polite a host to point out that this a.s.sertion was being made by a man who had observed the rebels in the field for all of one day, but he surely asked how this view squared with the recent rebel stampede above Rabegh; apparently the Arabs didn't share in the belief of their positions' impregnability if they were willing to abandon them on a rumor. It was perhaps in reply to this line of questioning that Lawrence made a further a.s.sertion: it had been Ali's men who had panicked at Rabegh, not Faisal's, and it was Faisal who was the true leader of the revolt.

Even more than Lawrence's other opinions, it was this declaration that flabbergasted Bremond. The colonel had yet to meet Faisal, but nothing he'd heard suggested Hussein's third son as either a natural or decisive leader; instead, as Bremond would shortly report to Paris, ”[Faisal] talks a lot but says nothing. He acts little and does nothing.”

But from a French perspective, the thought of promoting Faisal's leaders.h.i.+p was also alarming. By all accounts, he was far more distrusting of the European allies than his older brothers. There was also the matter of his long dalliance with the pro-independence Arab conspirators in Syria. Even if Djemal Pasha had hunted down many of those conspirators, no doubt parts of the network still existed, and for a France eager to keep the Arab Revolt well away from Syria, there could be no prospect more worrisome than the ascent of Faisal.

Bremond might have been tempted to write Lawrence off as a particularly irksome dinner guest, his bold a.s.sertions those of a naf infused with a sense of self-importance, save for a couple of details. One was his manner. He stated his views with utter and unshakable confidence, a confidence bordering on the impertinent when it came to military protocol; no matter the seniority or rank of those who disagreed with him, the army captain with the icy blue eyes refused to back down. Another was the effect he'd had on Admiral Wemyss. Whatever the admiral's views on a deployment to Arabia had been previously, it was clear he was much impressed by Lawrence, and now held very similar opinions; in fact, Wemyss was planning to accompany Lawrence to Khartoum so that they might make their case to Wingate jointly. Not surprisingly, it made edouard Bremond extremely apprehensive of what might happen once these two came into contact with the man who up until then had been his closest British ally.

After that dinner in Jeddah, Colonel Bremond disparagingly remarked that Lawrence had become a ”va.s.sal” of Faisal. As he got to know Lawrence better in the months ahead, however, Bremond would conclude he'd had it the wrong way around, that the una.s.suming little British captain had a selfish, even sinister, motive in promoting Faisal. If a British brigade was put ash.o.r.e in Arabia, a proper military command structure would be established, one that would leave no role for an inexperienced desk officer like Captain Lawrence. Absent that intervention, it would be up to Hussein's sons to carry the day, and in the soft and hesitant figure of Faisal, Bremond deduced, Lawrence had found a man he might bend to his will, allowing him to become the unseen kingmaker of Arabia.

ON THE SAME day that Lawrence set out for Faisal's camp in the mountains, October 22, a most curious drama had unfolded in northern Scotland. It began when a Scandinavian-American Line pa.s.senger s.h.i.+p, the Oskar II, put in at the coal refueling station in the Orkney Islands town of Kirkwall.

Although the Oskar II was transiting between two neutral countries-she was out of Denmark and bound for New York City-the Orkneys were an extremely sensitive area for the British military, the site of their main wartime naval base in the harbor known as Scapa Flow. Always on the lookout for spies or saboteurs, a team of British police inspectors boarded the Swedish-registered s.h.i.+p for a routine check of the pa.s.sports and luggage of its pa.s.sengers. On that day, they found someone of great interest. He was a stout forty-one-year-old Ottoman citizen who had recently crossed into neutral Denmark from Germany.

Detaining the man on deck in plain view of other pa.s.sengers, the inspectors made a thorough search of his cabin; as they subsequently informed the Oskar II captain in the presence of gawking pa.s.sengers, they found it ”full of German stuff.” Taken off the s.h.i.+p in a police launch, the man was held that night under guard at a Kirkwall hotel, then transferred the next day to the Scottish mainland. Brought to London, by the morning of October 25 he was undergoing questioning by Basil Thomson, the head of Scotland Yard's Criminal Investigation Department, and the official in charge of tracking subversives and spies in wartime Britain.

It wasn't until the Oskar II reached New York City that the British detention of Aaron Aaronsohn became publicly known. It immediately caused a stir in certain circles, especially within the American Zionist community and among those agricultural scientists who had come to know Aaronsohn during his extended prewar visits to the United States. For members of both these groups, it seemed utterly inconceivable that the Jewish agronomist might be an agent for the Central Powers, the accusation implicit in his detention at Kirkwall. On the other hand, there was the disquieting fact that he had chosen to remain in Ottoman-ruled Palestine at the war's outbreak, even as many other Jewish emigres had fled to neutral nations or British-ruled Egypt. Then there was the highly suspicious nature of his journey across war-torn central Europe to reach Denmark. Certainly that trip could not have been made without the approval of high officials in both the Turkish and German governments.

At least one of Aaronsohn's fellow pa.s.sengers on the Oskar II fervently believed in his innocence. A German Jewish socialite named Olga Bernhardt, she had become very friendly with the agronomist during the voyage from Copenhagen, and she sought to publicize his plight once she reached America. That effort badly backfired when, apparently alerted by Bernhardt, the New York Evening Post instead characterized Aaronsohn's detention as that of a dangerous Turkish spy. With that, any campaign within the American scientific or Jewish communities to win his release quickly fizzled.

Which actually suited Aaron Aaronsohn just fine. That's because his ”arrest” at Kirkwall had been an elaborate charade. He was a spy, or at least he very much wanted to be, but for the other side in the conflict, and his removal from the Oskar II with its theatric touches-placing him under guard in public view, the semipublic announcement of what had been found in his luggage-was tailored to throw German and Turkish counterintelligence agents off the scent and protect his spy ring back in Palestine. This couldn't have been achieved by Aaronsohn simply falling from view. Instead, he needed the Germans and Turks to ”know” that his intention had been to go to America, that the British had grabbed their ”dangerous Turkish spy” off the decks of the Oskar II quite by chance. To this end, the portrait rendered of him by the Evening Post was just a bonus. As Aaronsohn noted in his diary that night in his Kirkwall hotel room, ”The game is in play.”

It was very much a marathon game. It had been well over three months since Aaronsohn had left Palestine with Djemal Pasha's vesika, or travel permit, in hand. First, there had been a monthlong delay in Constantinople as he negotiated the bureaucratic maze to obtain the doc.u.mentation needed for his further pa.s.sage to Vienna. From the Austrian capital, it had been a simple matter to continue on to Berlin, but then came another monthlong delay as he tried to figure out the crossing into neutral Denmark. The scientist had finally achieved that in mid-September, but then more hurdles: first, making contact with British counterintelligence agents, then convincing them his incredible story was true.

The British spy handlers in Denmark may not have been thoroughly a.s.sured on this last point, but after some hesitation, they decided it would be Scotland Yard's problem to sort out. In mid-October, they arranged to put Aaronsohn on board the Oskar II, sailing from Copenhagen harbor on the nineteenth, while further arranging his detention in Kirkwall in three days' time. Thus the British were finally about to ”bring in from the cold” a would-be spy who had spent over a year desperately trying to get their attention.

As he waited for the Oskar II to sail, Aaronsohn was acutely aware that he was about to cross a point of no return, that whatever happened next, his former life as a simple scientist in Palestine was gone forever. In Copenhagen, he wrote several coded letters that, through intermediaries, he hoped would reach his coconspirators back in Athlit; in them, he wrote with happy antic.i.p.ation about his imminent departure for New York-for the benefit of German and Turkish counterintelligence agents-but used certain words and phrases to indicate that his real destination was Britain.

He also wrote a very long letter to Judge Julian Mack, one of the American benefactors of the Athlit research station, in which he laid bare his reasons for the dangerous path he was now taking. In what was part confession-indeed, this was how Aaronsohn would later describe it-and part manifesto, he wrote out an anguished narrative of what had occurred in Palestine over the previous two years, how it had inexorably brought him to the point where he was prepared to betray the nation that had given his family refuge. ”Would I have left the country and openly taken service on the English side,” he wrote, ”it would already have been bad enough. My character, my standing would be impaired. But I did worse. I stood where I was, I organized a whole movement, I became connected with the Intelligence Office, as people who are afraid of words call it. I do not like mincing words. Put it clearly, and I became a Spy.”

Aaronsohn intended the letter to be shown to other American Jewish benefactors of the research station, many of whom did not consider themselves Zionists and were sure to be shocked by its contents. This may have been the reason for its oratorical, even somewhat histrionic tone as the scientist explained what he and his confederates felt they were fighting for: ”n.o.body can say we were doing it for the sake of vile money.... We are not doing it for honours either.... We do not do it for vengeance; we do it because we hope we are serving our Jewish cause.... We considered it our duty to do our share, and we are still foolish enough to believe in right and justice and recognition of the Cause we are serving.”

That was all well and good, but a loftiness unlikely to fully satisfy Basil Thomson. As the head of Scotland Yard's Criminal Investigation Department, Thomson had interviewed hundreds of would-be spies by the close of 1916, and interrogated many more who had proven to be German moles. Certainly neither the resume nor the recent travels of the man brought into his office on October 25 were the stuff to inspire confidence.

Yet the longer Aaron Aaronsohn talked, the more Thomson was persuaded that here was the genuine article, a man anxious to help the British war effort-albeit for his own motives-and possessed of the skills and ac.u.men to do so. It was not just Aaronsohn's meticulously observed details of the Turkish war machine-a bit out of date now, perhaps, but Aaronsohn claimed to have a network in place to constantly update them-but his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of most every aspect of the region. For the detective, the decisive moment came when the topic turned to the British army's current slow-motion advance across the Sinai Peninsula in prelude to their offensive into Palestine.

One key reason for that army's glacial pace over the arid wasteland was the need to haul water all the way from Egypt. That had meant laying a pipeline, which had also necessitated the building of a railroad. According to Aaronsohn, Thomson recounted in his memoir, it all could have been avoided. ”There is water right there in the desert, three hundred feet down,” he said. ”All you have to do is drill for it.”

”How do you know that?” Thomson would recall asking.

Aaronsohn shrugged. ”The rocks indicate it. And [first-century Jewish-Roman chronicler] Flavius Josephus corroborates it. He wrote that he could walk for a whole day south from Caesarea and never leave flouris.h.i.+ng gardens.... Where there were gardens, there must have been water. Where is that water now?”

”And what can you do?” Thomson asked.

”If I were with the British army, I could show the engineers where to drill. I guarantee that they would find enough water for the army without having to bring a single drop from Cairo.”

Impressed, Thomson decided to pa.s.s Aaronsohn on to the central headquarters of the British military, the Imperial General Staff on Whitehall Street. There, a young major, Walter Gribbon, was detailed to further debrief the agronomist, a first step toward determining just what should be done with him. On October 28, three days after arriving in London, Aaronsohn wrote his brother Alexander and sister Rivka in New York. Along with great relief at finally reaching England-”for the past few nights I have slept in peace, untroubled by nightmares”-he admitted to a pang of regret: ”Here, I had the good fortune to meet eager ears and open minds. I have reason to believe that had our [British] friends been better informed sooner, they would have acted in consequence. Had I come earlier I should have probably served our cause better, spared our country some suffering, and rendered more efficient service to our friends.”

When he wrote those words, Aaronsohn didn't know the half of it. On the previous day, as he was again being debriefed by Walter Gribbon, a friendly, slightly chubby man in his midthirties had come into the office to briefly sit in on the proceedings. During a break in Gribbon's questioning, the visitor inquired after Aaronsohn's views on Zionism, of where exactly he placed himself amid the galaxy of Jewish political thought. The visitor had listened intently and, before leaving, handed Aaronsohn a calling card, asking if he might be so good as to drop by the indicated address at 9:30 a.m. in three days' time. Aaronsohn readily agreed. The address on the calling card was 30 Broadway Gate, the London residence of the MP from Hull Central, Sir Mark Sykes.

BY NOVEMBER 15, 1916, Brigadier General Gilbert Clayton faced a conundrum as old as the superior-subordinate relations.h.i.+p: how to sabotage the plans of his boss without revealing his own hand in the endeavor. Adding to Clayton's difficulties on that day was that to come up with a feasible scheme, he urgently needed to speak with one of his own subordinates, Captain T. E. Lawrence. Unfortunately, Lawrence was quite unreachable, in transit somewhere along the thousand-mile stretch of desert and Nile River towns that lay between Khartoum and Cairo.

The problem was that, once again, Reginald Wingate was lobbying London for a large-scale military intervention in Arabia, and this time suggesting that both Lawrence and Sheikh Faisal were in favor of it. Until Lawrence resurfaced, there was no way of knowing what he might have said to Wingate, and thus no easy way to thwart the plan.

In whatever course he chose, however, Gilbert Clayton did have a distinct built-in advantage. That's because within the maze of overlapping bureaucracies the British had created in wartime Egypt, no one was precisely sure where Clayton's job duties began and where they ended. That uncertainty had stood the una.s.suming spymaster with the pencil-thin mustache in very good stead in past crises, and it was about to do so again.

At the war's outset, Clayton had been the chief British intelligence officer in Cairo, a post that made him the overall supervisor of Lawrence and the other Intrusives who set up shop at the Savoy Hotel in late 1914. In turn, Clayton had answered to the chief British civil authority in Egypt, High Commissioner Henry McMahon. Keeping matters simple, all ultimately answered to the Foreign Office in London.

That neat chain of command had turned both murky and contentious when Egypt became the chief staging ground for British military operations against the Ottoman Empire, operations that fell under the aegis of the War Office. In the inevitable turf war between the resident administration and the incoming generals of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, those military intelligence units answerable to the War Office-Cairo was suddenly awash in them-saw little reason to tolerate a competing one answerable to the Foreign Office. Tensions had only grown worse when Clayton's Intrusives were given a clearer mandate in early 1916 and inst.i.tutionalized as the Arab Bureau. For months afterward, General Archibald Murray, the commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force-or EEF-tried unsuccessfully to wrest control of Clayton's outfit from McMahon, before finally settling for a quasi-supervisory role.

But the battle for primacy in Cairo was actually a three-way fight, and just to keep things lively, this third contender was a thousand miles away in Khartoum. Reginald Wingate, the governor-general of the Sudan, was also the sirdar, or commander in chief, of the Egyptian army, a wholly different military force than Murray's EEF. As might be predicted, none of these three men-McMahon, Murray, Wingate-liked each other very much, and joined to their intrigues against one another were the competing bureaucracies of London and British India, each with its own set of interests and allies and adversaries in the Egyptian capital. On top of this was the official indigenous Egyptian government that, though it was quite toothless, various British officials periodically felt the need to pretend to consult in order to maintain the appearance that the wishes of the actual inhabitants of Egypt somehow mattered.

Amid this impenetrable tangle, though, one name had a way of popping up with surprising regularity: Gilbert Clayton. By the autumn of 1916, the spymaster was simultaneously the head of the Arab Bureau (answerable to McMahon), the ”Cairo Agent of the Sirdar” (Wingate), and the chief liaison officer between EEF (Murray) and the British Egyptian civilian administration (McMahon). In his spare time, he also directed an internal spying network that kept watch on both local dissident leaders and representatives of the indigenous Egyptian government, a task simplified by the fact that the two were often one and the same. As Lawrence would later write of Clayton, ”It was not easy to descry his influence. He was like water, or permeating oil, creeping silently and insistently through everything. It was not possible to say where Clayton was and was not, and how much really belonged to him.”

Paradoxically, considering the sabotage mission he was contemplating that November, of the various compet.i.tors, Gilbert Clayton was personally closest to Wingate. A trim man in his midfifties with a fine white mustache, Wingate was a legend in East Africa, having fought alongside Kitchener in the Mahdi War of the late 1890s, and then staying on to rule over British Sudan for the next seventeen years. For five of those years, Clayton had served as Wingate's personal secretary in Khartoum, and he'd been deeply impressed by the man's political ac.u.men. The sirdar had also been one of the first British leaders in the region to appreciate the importance of the Arab Revolt in the summer of 1916, and had been tireless in promoting their cause to London.

The recurrent sticking point, however, was that nearly all of Wingate's information on Arabia came either from the two Sudan hands he had sent there, Cyril Wilson and Alfred Parker, or from Colonel edouard Bremond. From these three, the sirdar had heard a steady litany of the rebels' incompetence, an unending drumbeat on the need for a large Allied force. This was a course that virtually everyone in the Arab Bureau strongly opposed, and it had been partly in hopes of bringing a new perspective to the matter that Clayton had arranged to send T. E. Lawrence on his fact-finding mission to the Hejaz in October. As Clayton had expected, the visit had convinced Lawrence that escalation would be folly-which was also why he had approved Lawrence's detour to Khartoum in order to brief Wingate directly.

At first, that stratagem appeared to pay off. Lawrence had arrived in Khartoum on November 7, just days after Wingate's first intervention request had been vetoed by the War Committee, and whatever Lawrence said to the sirdar seemed to greatly mollify him. Obviously impressed by Lawrence's knowledge of the Arab world, and by his account of the defensive capabilities of Faisal's troops, Wingate cabled Clayton that same day outlining a radically scaled-back plan: to urge Bremond to send his technical advisors on to the Hejaz but without the thousands of British troops as protection, and to give Faisal's men the ”moral and material support (aeroplanes, guns and machine guns) necessary to enable them to continue their defensive [sic] in hills.”

But if Clayton thought that settled the matter, he was soon set right. The next day, November 8, the French government had pressed the War Committee to reconsider its decision, stressing that while Bremond was anxious to send his advisors to Rabegh, ”they cannot provide the kind of field force that British infantry would form. Sending these French units to Rabegh on their own would mean unnecessarily risking their sacrifice, thereby handing to the Turks the guns and machine guns intended for the Sherif's army.”

In his own cable shortly afterward, Wingate had thrown his support to the Bremond/French argument anew, even if tempered somewhat by Lawrence's influence. Since it was possible that Faisal might on his own block a Turkish advance toward Rabegh, as Lawrence maintained, Wingate suggested that a British brigade be readied for deployment but only sent ash.o.r.e ”at the last moment.” The sirdar further intimated that this was a course of action approved by the one British officer who had actually been to the war front, Captain Lawrence.

To Clayton, reading this cable in Cairo, it made little sense. Lawrence had surely been around the military long enough to know that a force readied for deployment would be deployed, bringing about the very situation-the implosion of the Arab Revolt-that he had warned against. How had Lawrence possibly acquiesced to this? It was a question with no immediate answer. Lawrence had left Khartoum on November 11, and would be incommunicado until he reached Cairo. In the meantime, the War Committee, under intense French pressure, was pondering its next move.

No record exists of what was said when Clayton finally sat Lawrence down in the Arab Bureau offices on November 16, and neither man was to detail that meeting in their later writing. From anecdotal evidence, it appears Lawrence either maintained that Wingate had somehow misunderstood him, or, if admitting to having agreed to Wingate's plan, claimed he thought he was responding to a purely hypothetical scenario.

But if Lawrence did equivocate about his meetings with Wingate, there is another possible explanation. On November 6, the day before he had arrived in Khartoum, it was announced that Henry McMahon was being dismissed as Egyptian high commissioner, to be replaced by Reginald Wingate. That news put Lawrence in a nasty squeeze in Khartoum; he was not only sitting across from the biggest proescalationist in the British power structure, but the man about to become his overall boss. With this in mind, the most likely scenario is that Lawrence agreed with Wingate's proposal to his face in Khartoum, in hopes that he could help in its scuttling once he got back to the more amenable climes of Cairo.

Certainly that was what he now set out to do. At the end of his meeting with Clayton on November 16, Lawrence returned to his office and quickly wrote up a new memorandum on the situation in the Hejaz, one so blunt and shorn of niceties that it left no room for misinterpretation. In terms of length, there is probably no doc.u.ment that more profoundly influenced the British war effort in Arabia than the four-page memorandum he handed to Gilbert Clayton the next day.

In that memo, Lawrence held up and then knocked down virtually every possible argument for a large Allied military presence in Arabia-and he did so by turning the escalationists' own arguments against them. While it was true that the Arabs couldn't defend Rabegh if the Turks broke through Faisal's mountain defenses, he pointed out, neither could an Allied force held somewhere in reserve as Wingate proposed. That's because, once through the mountains, the Turks would reach the port town in a mere four days, hardly time for even a fully readied force standing by in Egypt to be brought down and deployed.