It was, of course, precisely this flippant att.i.tude, one Lawrence seemed determined to flaunt both in his correspondence and in person, that so incensed his military superiors. But his defiance of soldierly protocol also underscored a deeper truth: Lawrence was fundamentally not of them, and was becoming less so all the time.
In just four months in the war theater, he had watched as Britain"s best hope for an early victory over the Turks was shelved for no better reason than politics and inst.i.tutional inertia; in its place, the "great thinkers" had come up with Gallipoli. From what the Oxford scholar had seen, military culture was a world of hidebound careerists looking for a knighthood or their next medal, and of underlings loath to question the powerful, with countless thousands dying as a result.
What"s more, by dint of his position in the Cairo military intelligence unit, Lawrence was uniquely positioned to know the truth behind the lies and propaganda on an ongoing basis. Every day he saw the raw battlefield reports coming into the Savoy Hotel from the various war theaters, and these told a tale of staggering incompetence and callousness: of soldiers ordered to stay in formation as they advanced over open ground toward enemy machine-gun nests; of hundreds dying to capture and lose and capture again a single village, a single hillock. Certainly a select group of other junior-ranked men had access to this information too-generals" aides and officers in similar military intelligence units in the various war theaters-but most of these were aspirants to the system, willing cogs in the vast, dumb meat-grinding machinery that none dared acknowledge as such.
THE GERMAN MILITARY mission in Jerusalem was housed in the Hospice for Russian Pilgrims, in the pleasant and orderly neighborhood just north of the Old City known as the Russian Compound. It was there that Curt Prfer could often be found through the late winter of 1915, poring over intelligence cables and calculating his next move.
With a bit of distance from the event, the disillusionment he"d felt for the concept of holy war in the immediate aftermath of the Suez a.s.sault had eased somewhat. He recognized that with the Turkish forces getting no farther than the ca.n.a.l"s banks, the idea remained an essentially untested one. He also recognized that despite that first setback, British Egypt could not be left alone, that so long as it existed, it posed the primary threat to the German-Turkish alliance in the Middle East. So a new a.s.sault was necessary, this time supported by far greater firepower, including German artillery and aircraft, as well as far better military intelligence, an apparatus that could provide details on what the British on the far side of the ca.n.a.l were planning, where their troops were deployed.
The problem was, Prfer"s own extensive intelligence network inside Egypt had also fallen victim to the Suez a.s.sault. In the first days of the war, he"d been able to use his Egyptian contacts to compile a comprehensive view of the enemy"s preparations; in one memorable November 1914 report, he"d written of British defenseworks in the future tense-that is, of enemy installations still in the construction or planning stage. All that had been shut down in the runup to Suez. As Prfer reported to his superiors in late February, his own "bitter, practical experience" at the ca.n.a.l showed that most of the Bedouin and Egyptians he"d hastily recruited as replacement spies had been worthless, p.r.o.ne to "leaving honor and patriotism high and dry in the face of the temptations of the circling British agents who are not at all stingy with [gold] sovereigns." Germany might conceivably follow the British example and buy its way to a new informant network inside Egypt, Prfer pointed out, but that would leave it dependent on whatever unverifiable intelligence these paid agents pa.s.sed on, "functioning with these people" rather than actually managing them. In pondering this dilemma, the intelligence officer hit upon a rather shrewd idea: Jewish spies.
That idea"s genesis may have stemmed from the company Prfer was keeping at the time. Her name was Minna Weizmann, a dynamic and very pretty Jewish emigre in her mid-twenties from the town of Motal in White Russia (modern-day Belarus). From a prominent and highly educated family, Weizmann had embraced socialism from an early age, and had seized her chance to escape the hated czarist regime while at medical school in Berlin; in 1913, she"d immigrated to Palestine, becoming one of the few women physicians in Syria. It had been in Jerusalem in early 1914 that she and Curt Prfer, recently resigned from the German emba.s.sy in Cairo, first met.
Although details of their relationship are sketchy, fragmentary evidence suggests the union was a special one for both. A rumor finding its way into German intelligence reports held that on the eve of Prfer"s departure for the Suez offensive in January, Weizmann had spent the night in his Jerusalem hotel room, behavior so scandalous for the time as to be ruinous for any woman not a prost.i.tute. For his part, there are indications that Weizmann was a good deal more than just another amorous conquest for the ever-roving Prfer; his wartime diaries contain several references to "my dear f.a.n.n.y," Weizmann"s nickname, signs of an affection rather absent in the few mentions of his American wife, Frances Pinkham, who is usually referred to merely as "Fr."
But if the bond with Minna Weizmann was true love, it was a love Curt Prfer was willing to put to a higher purpose.
When Turkey came into the war, there were tens of thousands of Russian Jews scattered across Syrian Palestine who, like Minna Weizmann, still retained Russian citizenship. Constantinople had quickly given these now "belligerent nationals" a stark choice: become Ottoman citizens or face deportation or internal exile. In response, thousands of the emigres had surrendered their Russian pa.s.sports in favor of Ottoman ones, while thousands more had crowded into packed ships at Jaffa harbor in search of a new home. In March 1915, this exodus from Palestine was continuing-warships from the neutral United States were now complementing merchant vessels-and where most of these refugees were ending up was in British Egypt. As Prfer pointed out in a proposal he sent to both Djemal Pasha and Max von Oppenheim, establishing a successful spy network in Egypt required "people who can be introduced into the country without suspicion, and have the necessary astuteness and sang-froid. We can find a number of such people amongst the Jewish population in this country."
Giving this spy ring its reliability, in Prfer"s estimation, would be the Russian Jews" abiding hatred of the anti-Semitic czarist regime. Operating on the premise that the friend of one"s enemy is the enemy, he reasoned there might be many members of this community in Palestine who would jump at the chance to work against czarist Russian interests by striking at her ally in the region, British Egypt. Best of all, as Russian pa.s.sport holders, these spies could simply join the ongoing refugee boatlift to Egypt without arousing suspicion.
But if it was already a feat to insert intelligence operatives into an enemy country in wartime, that still left the question of how to get them or their information out. Here Prfer"s scheme was truly clever. In March 1915, Italy remained a neutral nation (it would join the Triple Entente that May), and there was regular ship traffic between Italian ports and Egypt. Rather than try to communicate with or return to Turkey, Prfer"s spies would transit to Italy and pa.s.s their information on to the German emba.s.sy in Rome. At that point, they could either make for Turkey overland or, if their cover remained intact, return to Egypt for another round of intelligence gathering.
Warming to his topic, Prfer further directed that the operatives should be divided into two cells, one composed of men, the other of women. Both cells "will try to steal relevant [British] doc.u.ments or make copies of them. They will also try to get friendly with people who might be able to supply such information." Lest there be any confusion over what "friendly" meant, Prfer spelled it out. "Above all, the women agents-who must be young and not without charms-should try to get into relationships with influential people who may, in a moment of weakness borne of intimacy, let escape information that could be useful to us."
His proposal received an enthusiastic response from Oppenheim, as well as from Amba.s.sador von w.a.n.genheim in Constantinople, and in early April Prfer began his recruitment drive. In short order, he"d managed to procure the services of two Jewish emigres, Isaac Cohn and Moses Rothschild, who were leaving Palestine for Egypt. While Rothschild made contact with a German spy nest at Shepheard"s Hotel, the favored lodging and watering hole of the British high command in Cairo, Cohn undertook an extensive tour of the British coastal defenses in Alexandria and along the Suez Ca.n.a.l.
The spymaster clearly took his new enterprise very seriously and as a true patriot was ready to let whatever affections he felt for Minna Weizmann be trumped by those he held for the kaiser. In early May 1915, Weizmann made the crossing to Egypt as the newest member of Prfer"s spy ring. She probably needed little in the way of persuading; as both a Jew and a socialist, she might as well have been wearing a czarist bull"s-eye on her back, and here was the chance for both adventure and revenge.
Initially, Weizmann did very well in her new vocation, her hospital work and the novelty of being a female physician giving her entree to the upper echelons of British Cairo society. Her luck didn"t hold, however. Under the cover of accompanying a badly wounded French soldier home, she managed to reach Italy, but there was observed meeting with the German amba.s.sador in Rome. Unmasked, she was hauled back to Egypt, where she faced a decidedly grim future: internment in a British prisoner-of-war camp at the very least, and possibly execution. Instead, Weizmann"s considerable charms combined with old-fashioned chivalry produced a far more pleasant outcome. As related by a Swiss woman who crossed paths with Minna that August and heard her story, "she was so beloved in Cairo and Alexandria, and held in such respect that people gave her unwavering denial [of being a spy] credence." Ironically, even the czar"s consul in Cairo vouched for Minna"s innocence and arranged for her safe pa.s.sage back to Russia. It was while staying at a hotel in Romania, in transit to the homeland she had escaped from two years earlier, that Weizmann desperately reached out to the Swiss woman.
"She revealed everything to me," Hilla Steinbach-Schuh explained to a German official, "and fervently begged me to inform the German emba.s.sy in Constantinople of her deportation, especially that Herr Prfer should be advised of this."
But the remarkably tender treatment shown Minna Weizmann-she would not only survive the war, but eventually return to Palestine to work for the medical service of the Zionist women"s organization, Hada.s.sah-may have also stemmed from her lineage. Her older brother was Chaim Weizmann, a renowned chemist who had immigrated to Great Britain in 1904 and who in 1915 was already working closely with the British munitions industry to improve their war-making capability; Chaim would go on to become the first president of the state of Israel, while Minna"s nephew Ezer would serve as its seventh. That lineage may also explain why Minna has been largely excised from the history books, and even from the Weizmann family"s memory (Chaim made not a single reference to his sister in his memoirs); for "the first family of Israel" to count among its members someone who not only spied for Germany but whose spymaster lover went on to become a senior n.a.z.i diplomat is surely one of those awkward family stories best left untold.
Even before learning of Minna Weizmann"s fate, however, Curt Prfer had seen his fledgling Egyptian spy ring largely shut down, a result of Italy"s joining the Triple Entente in May and the consequent severing of the German emba.s.sy "ratline." Still, Prfer"s bold initiative had greatly impressed his superiors in both the military and intelligence spheres. As Lieutenant Colonel Kress von Kressenstein, the commander of German forces in Palestine, informed Berlin, "Curt Prfer is indispensable as the leader of the intelligence service."
ON MAY 9, 1915, T. E. Lawrence"s younger brother, twenty-two-year- old Frank, stationed in the Arras sector of the Western Front, was doing repair work on a forward trench in preparation for an a.s.sault when he was struck by three shrapnel fragments from a German artillery sh.e.l.l. Whether it was true or not, for soldiers routinely dissemble about such things, Frank"s commanding officer reported in his condolence letter to the Lawrence parents that their son had died instantly.
The news shattered Sarah Lawrence. By most accounts, Frank had been her favorite child, and since being shipped off to France in February he had written her long, discursive letters filled with descriptions of the foibles of military life and his everyday existence at the front.
T. E. Lawrence learned of Frank"s death in a telegram from his parents in mid-May. For whatever reason, he waited to respond until he had received more information from his father through the mail. It wasn"t until June 4 that he finally scribbled out a hasty note to his parents on a telegram form: I haven"t written since I got your wire as I was waiting for details. Today I got Father"s two letters. They are very comfortable reading, and I hope that when I die there will be nothing more to regret. The only thing I feel a little is that there was no need, surely, to go into mourning for him? I cannot see any cause at all. In any case, to die for one"s country is a sort of privilege. Mother and you will find it more painful and harder to live for it than he did to die, but I think that at this time, it is one"s duty to show no signs that would distress others, and to appear bereaved is surely under this condemnation.
So please, keep a brave face to the world. We cannot all go fighting, but we can do that, which is in the same kind. N[ed].
Perhaps the note"s most interesting aspect, beyond its startling coldness, was Lawrence"s invocation of a kind of puerile patriotism that he had long derided. In any event, Sarah Lawrence was hardly in the mood to adhere to this stiff advice from her son. Shortly after, she wrote Ned another letter, in which she evidently (evidently because this letter has never been found) upbraided him for not expressing his love for her in her hour of grief. If Sarah Lawrence hoped this would stir a softening in her second son, she was to be disappointed: Poor Dear Mother, I got your letter this morning, and it has grieved me very much. You will never never understand any of us after we are grown up a little. Don"t you ever feel that we love you without our telling you so? I feel such a contemptible worm for having to write this way about things. If you only knew that if one thinks deeply about anything, one would rather die than say anything about it. You know, men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it has come.
There, put that aside, and bear a brave face to the world about Frank. In a time of such fearful stress in our country it is one"s duty to watch very carefully lest one of the weaker ones be offended; and you know, we were always the stronger, and if they see you broken down they will all grow fearful about their ones at the front.
Lawrence next wrote his parents about a week later; he made no reference to Frank-indeed, he rarely mentioned him by name in any subsequent correspondence-and instead spent the bulk of the brief note describing the weather just then in Cairo.
DJEMAL PASHA WAS in a much-improved mood by early June 1915. He had good reason to be. When the Allied forces had come ash.o.r.e at Gallipoli on April 25, it largely mooted the possibility of a landing somewhere in Syria. Better yet, with both sides pouring more men and materiel into that narrow strip of battlefield, the Syrian governor had been provided with the means to be rid of the more troublesome military units in his zone. In response to Constantinople"s urgent call for reinforcements, Djemal had immediately begun dispatching his Arab-dominated regiments in northern Syria to Gallipoli, replacing them with newly mustered Turkish formations from the Anatolian interior-utterly green soldiers, perhaps, but at least their loyalty could be relied upon. And of course, the removal of the potentially mutinous Arab troops meant that the schemes of the French consulate plotters, and whatever other separatist-minded Arab traitors might be skulking about, were now far less dangerous.
There had also been good news in regard to the troublesome Hussein family in the Hejaz. Building on the lavish treatment he had bestowed upon Faisal in Jerusalem and Damascus, Djemal had sent word to Constantinople that the charm offensive should continue once the young sheikh reached the Ottoman capital. That directive had been followed; in early May, the offending Medina civilian governor was transferred, allowing Faisal and Enver Pasha to fashion an accord that suggested a full rapprochement between the Young Turks and the irksome Hussein in Mecca. That was certainly the estimation of Max von Oppenheim, who had two long meetings with Faisal in Constantinople, and of Djemal himself when Faisal returned to Syria in late May. In an emotional address before Djemal"s senior military staff at the German Hospice, Hussein"s son had professed his undying loyalty to both the empire and the cause of pan-Islamic jihad.
There had even been some progress with the locust plague. Certainly the ravages of that infestation would be sorely felt in the autumn harvest, but through the energetic efforts of the Jewish scientist Aaron Aaronsohn and his modern trenching techniques, it appeared that full-scale catastrophe had been averted.
Yet amid this brighter outlook, a new crisis had engulfed the empire-or rather, an old one had erupted anew.
Within the Ottoman court, the Christian Armenians of Anatolia had long been regarded as potential fifth columnists for Christian invaders-and especially for its Russian archenemies-and for just as long the Armenians had suffered periodic ma.s.sacres at the hands of their Turkish and Kurdish Muslim neighbors. The most recent bout of slaughter, in the 1890s, had led to the deaths of at least fifty thousand Armenians in a matter of days.
This historical animus had been rekindled by the regime"s call to jihad against the "Christian enemies" in November 1914. The Armenians-ethnically and linguistically apart, as well as numerous enough to pose a plausible threat-were uniquely vulnerable to a spark that might set off a new wave of anti-Armenian fury. That spark had come with a Russian offensive into eastern Anatolia, when the Armenians became the perfect scapegoats for explaining away Turkish setbacks on the battlefield. Thus the stage was set: in the rhetoric of the Constantinople regime, and in the minds of many of its Turkish and Kurdish subjects, the some two million Armenians of Anatolia were now the enemy within.
On April 24, on the eve of the Allied landings at Gallipoli, Interior Minister Talaat had ordered the arrest of hundreds of Armenian civic leaders in Constantinople, and simultaneously instructed the governors of those provinces with a substantial Armenian population to immediately close down on all Armenian "revolutionary and political organizations" and arrest their leaders. This directive, carrying the suggestion that a credible Armenian secessionist movement actually existed, had terrible consequences; in the eyes of many government officials in the hinterlands, all Armenians were the enemy. Within days of Talaat"s directive, tens of thousands of ordinary Armenian civilians were being pulled from their homes, to be force-marched to some unspecified "relocation zone" elsewhere, or in many cases simply butchered where they stood.
Given the porousness of Turkey"s frontiers, as well as the presence of Western mission schools throughout the empire, reports had soon started coming into Constantinople telling of ma.s.sacres of Armenians across the breadth of Anatolia, of corpses lining the routes of their forced marches into the countryside. As the horror stories multiplied, on May 24, the foreign ministers of the Triple Entente issued a proclamation vowing that the Young Turk leadership would be held responsible for "these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization."
Constantinople"s response was one of defiance; three days after the Entente proclamation, the Turkish cabinet approved the "Provisional Law of Relocation." Without specifically citing the Armenians, the law stated that the army was now "authorized and compelled to crush in the most severe way" any sign of resistance or aggression among the population. To do so, it had the power "to transfer and relocate the populations of villages and towns, either individually or collectively, in response to military needs, or in response to any signs of treachery or betrayal." As for where this potentially vast sea of internal deportees might be sent, Talaat and Enver had already selected a spot: gathered up from across Anatolia, most would be herded down to the barren reaches of northern Syria. The insanity inherent in this scheme, of uprooting a vast population and casting it into a land already devastated by the deprivations of war, would play out to obscene result: by best estimate, some 800,000 of the Armenian deportees were to perish-starved, shot, or beaten to death-en route.
The consensus among historians is that Djemal Pasha stood very much apart from his Young Turk coleaders in his response to the expulsions. In June, the first survivors of the death marches began to trickle into the north Syrian city of Aleppo, a way station toward their intended destination, the "relocation zone" of Deir al-Zour some one hundred miles to the east. Visiting Aleppo, Djemal Pasha was horrified by what he saw. Reiterating a March decree that commanded his army to protect the Armenians, he lobbied Constantinople to impose the order on military units where it really mattered, in Anatolia. That plea was ignored.
Getting no satisfaction from Constantinople, Djemal allowed thousands of Armenians to remain in Aleppo rather than continue their death march, and despite the deepening hunger and food shortages spreading through Syria, he ordered an increase of government food aid to the refugees. Testament to his love of order and regulations, he issued a rash of new edicts directing that the army regulate and maintain the food supply for the Armenians, that cars and horses be procured for their transportation, even that each refugee be given a financial allowance. But implicit in the stacks of doc.u.ments that the Syrian governor signed in his office each day was the notion that his regime actually had the wherewithal to carry out these initiatives, never mind that all evidence-evidence that started just outside Djemal"s office windows and stretched to the farthest corners of his realm-argued otherwise. It was as if he fancied himself the administrator of a canton of peacetime Switzerland, rather than of a poor and highly fractured region the size of Italy that was being ravaged by war, hunger, and disease. In the face of the Armenian crisis, as with so many other problems that came his way, Djemal responded with a mixture of bl.u.s.ter, threats, and pleas, and when none of that worked, he simply averted his gaze. By September, with the crisis worsening, he issued a new edict, making it a criminal offense to photograph the Armenians.
SOMETHING UNEXPECTED HAPPENED to Aaron Aaronsohn in the Palestinian village of Katra, when an elderly Arab man approached him with the words "zatna mamnounin"-"we are grateful to you." As the agronomist noted in his diary that evening, "the Arabs did not speak that way to Jews only twenty years ago. The job I undertake is a hard one indeed, but to compel the natives to declare, even if they are false in their hearts, zatna mamnounin to the Jews, for them to realize they are helpless in such calamities if we don"t help them out, that is already worthwhile."
As the head of Djemal"s locust eradication program, Aaronsohn traveled the length of the Syrian plague zone that spring of 1915, giving public lectures and holding field workshops on how best to combat the pestilence. At his urging, Djemal Pasha decreed that every man, woman, and child was to collect six rotels, about forty pounds, of locust eggs for destruction or face an exorbitant fine.
But even for a man of unflagging energy, there were times when the enormity of the task cast Aaronsohn into despair. Despite all the eradication efforts, the swarms continued to expand-at least one was credibly measured at one mile wide and seven miles long-as did the scope of their destruction. Ever more of lowland Judea, normally a verdant green at that time of year, became a study in brown: mile after mile of orchards stripped bare of both fruit and leaf, fields so devoid of vegetation they appeared set in winter fallow.
As crises everywhere have a tendency to do, the locust plague also laid bare the inequalities and deficiencies of Syrian society. Despite the extraordinary powers given him by Djemal, the response Aaronsohn typically encountered among local bureaucrats and military officers he tried to enlist to the eradication effort fell somewhere between uninterest and defiance. In Jaffa, he had been compelled to shame the kaimmakam, or local governor, into attending his public lecture, only to watch the man pointedly leave the auditorium halfway through. The old man in the village of Katra notwithstanding, the far more common response in Arab villages was resignation; to them, the locusts were djesh Allah, or "G.o.d"s army," and it was futile, perhaps even sacrilegious, to resist it. Also laid bare was officialdom"s resentment of the Jewish colonists, which was always simmering just beneath the surface. Ottoman tax officials were punctilious in handing out fines for insufficient egg collection in Jewish villages, while those same shortfalls-and in many cases complete inactivity-in Arab villages were ignored. In a particularly outrageous case, Aaronsohn reported, shortly after all the plowhorses in the Jewish settlement of Petah Tikvah had been taken away under the war requisitions statute, their owners were fined under the locust eradication statute for failing to plow their fields. Time and again, he threatened to resign from his inspector-general position in disgust, only to receive new a.s.surances from Djemal that the problems and inequities would be addressed, that a new day of harmony and collective effort was just around the corner.
At least part of Aaronsohn"s discontent, however, was rooted in the deeply personal, a change that had come over him during his travels through Palestine. For the first time, he had begun to question the Ottoman Empire"s ability to survive-or, perhaps more accurately, the ability of the Jewish community to survive in her thrall. It went far beyond the petty hara.s.sments and corruption he had witnessed. At most every Jewish settlement he"d visited, he had been approached by frightened residents who told of growing tension with their Arab neighbors, of overt threats from local officials brandishing weapons.
The warning signs didn"t attach solely to the Jews. In April, Aaronsohn had dispatched his brother Alex to Lebanon, both to see if the locusts had reached there and to check on their youngest sister, Rivka, who had been hustled off to Beirut during those tense days when the Turkish army was searching for Zichron"s arms cache. Under the terms of the Capitulations, Christian-dominated Lebanon had always enjoyed a great measure of freedom from Constantinople, and had become a proud and prosperous Francophile enclave in Syria; as Alex reported back, even though Lebanon had escaped the locusts, it was now a sad and broken place, with Turkish soldiers everywhere and even the normally haughty Beirutis living in dread of what might come next. By early June came the most alarming reports yet, dark rumors about the ma.s.sacre of Armenians in Anatolia. It was just around this time that Aaronsohn"s brooding led him to two interlocking conclusions: the Jews in Palestine had to break with the Ottoman Empire. To achieve that break, they had to actively work for its downfall.
The agronomist was undoubtedly helped in reaching this conclusion by his a.s.sistant at Athlit, Absalom Feinberg, a twenty-six-year-old firebrand who was engaged to Aaronsohn"s sister Rivka. In his home village of Hadera, a Jewish colony just ten miles south of Zichron, Feinberg had formed a local chapter of the Gideonites, the paramilitary organization that both protected Jewish settlements and launched reprisal raids against their perceived Arab enemies. It was an activity well suited to his political outlook, for to Feinberg the Arab-Jewish struggle in Palestine was a contest between "culture and savagery," and there was little doubt which role the Arabs fulfilled. "I have lived among them all my life," he would write, "and it would be difficult to sway me from my opinion that there is no more cowardly, hypocritical, and false race than this one."
But if there was one "race" Feinberg detested even more than the Arab, it was the Turk, and ever since arriving at Athlit he had preached to Aaron Aaronsohn the gospel of revolt, on the need for the Jews of Palestine to rise up and throw off the Turkish yoke.
Aaronsohn, fourteen years Feinberg"s senior, may have laughed off his a.s.sistant"s fiery oratory as the pa.s.sion of youth, but a turning point of sorts had been reached that previous January when Feinberg and twelve other Hadera residents were arrested on the spurious charge of spying for the British. Managing to escape, Feinberg had made straight for Aaronsohn.
To win the release of the Hadera men, the agronomist contemplated taking the path he had trod so often before-working his network of contacts in the Ottoman bureaucracy, dispensing bribes where needed-but this time Feinberg would have none of it. "Our worst enemy is the Turk," he told Aaronsohn. "Now that the hour of his downfall has struck, can we stand by and do nothing? The Turks are right to suspect us. They know the ruin they are planning for us. Anyone without a rabbit"s heart would be proud to spy against them if it would help to bring the English."
Certainly, Feinberg"s views hadn"t softened during the long days and weeks he had spent with Aaronsohn on the locust eradication campaign. Instead, by that June, it was the agronomist who had been converted.
As for how to work against the Turks-which by extension meant helping the British-the answer was fairly obvious. Over the course of the locust eradication effort, Aaronsohn and his various a.s.sistants had covered the length of Palestine, and the scientist now had a stack of reports on his desk detailing local conditions and resources for much of the region. The lists of available resources had quite naturally included the size and location of army camps, supply depots, and gasoline storage facilities, all vital information for a large-scale civic campaign but also for an enemy army. More specifically, these reports and Aaronsohn"s own travels confirmed that the Turkish army was concentrated in just a few towns and cities in Palestine, that virtually the entire coastline had been left undefended save for a few motley crews of local gendarmes and rural militia. The British clearly didn"t know this or they might have stormed ash.o.r.e long ago, and this was the most crucial intelligence that Aaronsohn could provide them, a detailed, mile-by-mile report on the opposition to be faced-or more accurately, not to be faced-along the length of Palestine"s coast.
As to the question of getting word to the British that a spy ring was waiting to be at their service in Palestine, the answer was even more obvious. In Beirut and Haifa, American warships were continuing to evacuate "neutrals" who wanted to leave the Ottoman Empire, and both port cities boasted thriving black markets in forged doc.u.ments. While nothing in Syria was easy anymore, getting a messenger on board one of the Egypt-bound evacuation ships was little more than a matter of money and luck.
For Aaronsohn, it was also clear who this messenger should be. Twice in the opening days of the war, his brother Alex had run afoul of the Ottoman authorities, and he was now locked in a dangerous feud with a local functionary. Furthermore, Alex spoke flawless English, courtesy of a three-year residence in New York. So it was that in mid-July 1915 Alex Aaronsohn boarded USS Des Moines in Beirut"s harbor. Joining him was his "wife," Rivka Aaronsohn. Once past the American warship"s first port of call, the Greek island of Rhodes, the couple would continue on to Egypt, where Alex would make straight for the British military intelligence office in Cairo.
THE TRIP DOWN had been a delight: two weeks on a first-cla.s.s train surrounded by beautiful scenery, broken here and there by stopovers in exquisitely picturesque Anatolian towns. Best of all, William Yale had fallen into the company of Abdul Rahman Pasha al-Yusuf, a member of the Turkish parliament and one of the wealthiest n.o.blemen of Damascus, and been accorded lavish hospitality as the pasha"s temporary "adopted son." In fact, just about the only disagreeable moments on the entire journey had been the bedbugs at the hotel in Eskisehir and the sight of the starving Armenian refugees ma.s.sed along the rail siding in Tarsus. "It was a sad sight to see the poor people," Yale blandly recalled, "uprooted from their homes, going to an unknown destination, the shadow of a great tragedy looming over them." If the American oilman felt any moral uneasiness about his or his company"s role in collaborating with the regime that was orchestrating this tragedy, he kept it to himself; William Yale had a delicate task to perform.
After just a few days in the Syrian capital, he took reluctant leave of the pasha to continue on to Jerusalem, where his first order of business was to arrange a meeting with Djemal Pasha. With a haste rather out of character for the Ottoman government, he soon received a summons to the German Hospice on the Mount of Olives.
As his horse-drawn carriage climbed the steep cobblestoned road up the mount on the appointed day, Yale found himself growing increasingly nervous. "I practiced the salaams and salutations I had learned on the trip from Constantinople," he wrote, "and wondered whether they were the proper ones to use for such a powerful person as Djemal."
Yale"s anxiety was more than just a case of starstruck jitters. He had come to Jerusalem to secure concessionary rights to a half million acres of Palestine for Standard Oil, and as he well knew, the success or failure of that enterprise rested on his meeting with the Syrian governor. He wasn"t at all sure how it might go.
Pa.s.sing through the wrought-iron gates of the German Hospice, Yale"s horse carriage drew to a stop before the main entrance of the magnificent building, where liveried sentries stepped forward to help him down. With his papers and maps, the American oilman was ushered into the ornate main hall, then down a long stone corridor to the anteroom of Djemal"s inner sanctum.
As Yale waited there, he fell into conversation with one of the governor"s young aides, a naval attache who spoke English. Welcoming this distraction from his anxiety, Yale became so engrossed in their talk that he took little notice of those coming and going from the room, including the short uniformed man with the close-cropped black beard who eventually emerged from a side door. It wasn"t until this man strode briskly up to the receptionist"s desk, hopped up on one corner of it, and fixed him with an intent stare that Yale realized it was Djemal Pasha.
"Well, Mr. Yale," he said in elegant French, "get your maps and papers out and show me what you want."
Djemal"s informality had the effect of instantly dissolving Yale"s nervousness-but also of filling him with a sudden regret. At the last minute, he had decided that asking for the entire half million acres that Standard wanted in Palestine was simply too audacious a request to make at this first meeting with the governor, so Yale had brought only half his maps to the German Hospice. These he quickly spread upon the receptionist desk and pointed out a broad swath of central Judea. Djemal looked on, but judging by the impatient nodding of his head, he wasn"t keen on hearing a lot of details. After just a few moments he straightened and gave another curt nod. "Tell me what you need and I"ll issue the necessary orders at once."
It was only at that instant, Yale would later contend, that he grasped the gulf of understanding that stood between him and the Syrian governor. If there was oil in Palestine, Djemal Pasha naturally wanted it found and quickly tapped so that his transport trucks could move and his armies could fight their war. But Standard had no intention of doing that. Instead, Yale had come to Palestine merely to buy up concessions and put dibs on the region for Standard in the postwar era.
"As I look back on it now," Yale recounted some twenty years later, "I regret that I didn"t tell him the truth."
But he didn"t. Instead, with Djemal Pasha"s support, Yale quickly obtained the necessary official papers and organized a field expedition. In short order, and with Turkish soldiers and local officials ensuring the full compliance of tribal sheikhs, he had nailed down the mineral concessionary rights to some quarter million acres of central Palestine. His Socony superiors back in Constantinople were understandably thrilled with the news, but apparently so was the Turkish leadership. First, Standard had helped them skirt the British naval blockade by smuggling oil in from Bulgaria, and now Standard was taking the further step-or so the Turks thought-of helping them develop their own oil resources. In late July, the regime resolved to show their grat.i.tude to their friends in Socony"s Constantinople office in the time-honored tradition of empires everywhere: the bestowing of medals.
For more fainthearted men, the idea of accepting medals from the Ottoman regime at that particular juncture might have given pause. The expatriate community in Constantinople was by then awash in reports of what was being done to the Armenians, fresh accounts almost daily of the inhabitants of yet another village being slaughtered, of hundreds or thousands more being starved or beaten to death during their marches into exile. But the men of Socony hadn"t attained their positions by mixing morality with business, or by pandering to whatever humanitarian concern was currently in vogue. On July 28, the three senior officers of its Constantinople branch-William Bemis, Oscar Gunkel, and Lucien I. Thomas-were ushered into Dolmabahce Palace for an audience with the sultan. At that ceremony, the Socony officials were awarded the Order of the Osmanieh, one of the highest civilian awards given by the Ottoman Empire, for their "numerous humanitarian services."
IN MID-JULY 1915, T. E. Lawrence sat down to answer a letter he had recently received from his closest sibling, his younger brother Will. At that time, Will was undergoing training at the Cambridge Barracks in Portsmouth to serve as an aerial observer for the Royal Flying Corps.
Given Lawrence"s almost pathological reticence to express intimacy, it must have been especially difficult for him to turn to what had been the thrust of Will"s letter to him: the death in May of their younger brother, Frank. "Frank"s death was, as you say, a shock because it was so unexpected," he wrote. "I don"t think one can regret it overmuch, because it is a very good way to take, after all. The hugeness of this war has made one change one"s perspective, I think, and I for one can hardly see details at all."
In closing, though, Lawrence struck a softer, almost plaintive tone. "I wonder when it will all end and peace follow? All the relief I get [is] in The Greek Anthology, Heredia, Morris and a few others. Do you?"
In July 1915, the war was not yet even a quarter done; there were still more than three years of slaughter and ruin ahead. But the seeds for Lawrence"s own dramatic role in that conflict were just then being sown. Those seeds were born of two seemingly disparate events: the arrival in Cairo of a strange letter secreted out of Mecca, and the crossing of an enigmatic twenty-four-year-old man over the torn and sh.e.l.l-pitted no-man"s-land of Gallipoli.
BY THE MIDSUMMER of 1915 on Gallipoli, so many men were dying in such a confined s.p.a.ce-in some spots, the opposing trenchlines were less than thirty yards apart-that informal truces began to be called in order to gather up the dead. The arrangements were usually worked out by local commanders, so that at a specified time grave-digging parties from both sides would step out into no-man"s-land and begin their ghastly work.
This certainly appeared to be the intent of the Ottoman lieutenant who, on the morning of August 20, climbed from his army"s forward trench and, under the cover of a white flag, started across no-man"s-land. Instead, upon reaching the British line, the young officer announced to his startled hosts that he wished to surrender.
Following standard procedure, the man was bound and blindfolded and pa.s.sed down through the Med-Ex trenchworks to regimental headquarters. If standard procedure had continued to be followed, he would have been interrogated there by an intelligence officer, then sent on to the central prisoner-of-war stockade before eventual transfer to a POW camp in Cyprus or Egypt. But there was nothing at all standard about this prisoner. His name was Mohammed al-Faroki, and despite his una.s.suming appearance-he was just twenty-four and very slight-the story he told was so remarkable that successive British officers felt their superiors needed to hear it.
He claimed to be a member of a secret military society called al-Ahd (the Awakening), comprised largely of Arab officers like himself, that had been waiting in vain for months for the right conditions to stage a revolt against their Turkish overseers. Rumors of shadowy fifth-column networks inside the Ottoman Empire had become rather commonplace by that summer, but what was different about Faroki was that he supplied a list of his alleged al-Ahd coconspirators, most of them high-ranking officers, complete with details on which units they commanded and where they were currently deployed.
Testament to the importance given the lieutenant"s claims, on August 25, General Ian Hamilton, the overall commander of the Gallipoli campaign, fired off a report to War Secretary Kitchener himself. Deciding that the intelligence unit in Cairo was best equipped to judge the truthfulness of the lieutenant"s story, London ordered Faroki put on board a warship bound for Egypt.
At least initially, neither Gilbert Clayton, the overall commander of the British military intelligence unit in Cairo, nor any of his subordinates knew quite what to make of the young man brought to their Savoy Hotel offices on September 10. Their attention was piqued, however, when Faroki suggested the British had squandered a profound military opportunity by not going ash.o.r.e at Alexandretta in the spring of 1915.
According to Faroki, not only had Alexandretta been guarded primarily by Arab-conscript units at the time, with many of their commanders committed al-Ahd members, but these units had even carefully sabotaged the city"s defensive fortifications in antic.i.p.ation of an imminent British landing force. Those efforts had come to naught, obviously, when the British instead launched their disastrous Gallipoli campaign. That wasn"t the worst of it, however. Once Gallipoli started, Djemal Pasha had swiftly sent the Arab units in Alexandretta to the battlefront; as a result, Faroki explained, many of the would-be conspirators of al-Ahd now lay dead on the Gallipoli hillsides, killed by the very "enemy" they had hoped to join.
Up to this point, much of Faroki"s story was easy enough to verify. The founder of al-Ahd, a man named Abdul Aziz al-Masri, was living in exile in Cairo, and he was brought in to vouch for Faroki"s bona fides. As for his claim that Alexandretta had been guarded by troops anxious to mutiny, this was precisely what Lawrence had ascertained from his interviews with Ottoman prisoners and had stressed in his lobbying for a landing there. But Faroki had more to tell. A lot more.
For some time, he claimed, he had served as a kind of liaison between al-Ahd and another Arab secret society, al-Fatat, in Damascus. From this linking, al-Ahd had learned of the covert negotiations between al-Fatat and Emir Hussein in Mecca toward staging a joint uprising against the Turks. In the process, al-Ahd had also learned of the secret correspondence between Emir Hussein and the British in Cairo. The upshot of all this was that, if armed and supported by Britain, both Arab secret societies, the civilian al-Fatat and the military al-Ahd, were now prepared to join Emir Hussein in revolt against the Turks.
Such a partnership would come with a price, though: British recognition of an independent Arab nation encompa.s.sing virtually the entire Arab world, from Iraq in the east to Syria in the west and extending down to the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. The precise parameters of this Arab nation were open to some limited negotiation-the would-be rebels recognized Britain"s colonial claim to Aden and its commercial interests in southern Iraq-but the one absolute precondition was that the French were not to have a controlling presence anywhere. If all that was agreed to, Faroki explained, then the British could have their revolution in the heart of the Ottoman world.
It was here that the young lieutenant"s story began to strain credulity. Obviously, Faroki had learned of the secret correspondence between Emir Hussein and Ronald Storrs from somewhere, but apparently no one in the Cairo military intelligence unit had even heard of al-Fatat. As for Faroki"s a.s.sertion that this cell spoke for a vast network of anti-Ottoman conspirators in Syria, Lawrence, given his long familiarity with the Syrian political scene, was probably in the best position to gauge that claim"s veracity, but nothing he had gleaned either before or during the war suggested that such an extensive network existed. Even if it did, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Arab society was likely to find the notion of the progressive military and intellectual castes of Syria and Iraq joining in alliance with the archconservative Emir Hussein in Mecca a bit far-fetched.
Except for one thing. Just weeks before Faroki came across at Gallipoli, Hussein had ended an eight-month silence and finally sent a new message to Ronald Storrs. Absent from this letter was Hussein"s earlier ambivalence, as well as his sense of proportion. Now he purported to speak for "the whole of the Arab nation," and his demands for cooperation with the British had ballooned beyond mere noninterference in the Hejaz, to British recognition of independence for practically the entire Arab world.
So grandiose did Storrs find Hussein"s demands-he acidly commented that they were "far more than he has the right, the hope, or the power to expect"-that he and Henry McMahon, the new British high commissioner for Egypt, decided that the best response was to simply ignore them altogether. This had been done in McMahon"s reply to Hussein, sent shortly before Faroki"s appearance.
Everything changed, though, when the specifics of Hussein"s July letter were matched up against Faroki"s September statements, for what was immediately apparent was that their stipulations and territorial demands almost precisely matched. Viewed in this light, Hussein"s vague reference to "the whole of the Arab nation" took on a very different meaning, perhaps not delusions of grandeur by the Hejazi emir but rather an allusion to his secret partnership with the al-Fatat and al-Ahd conspirators. It suddenly occurred to British officials in Cairo that they might have seriously underestimated Hussein, that far more than potentially triggering an insurrection in a remote corner of the Ottoman Empire, the enigmatic old man in Mecca just might hold the key to the entire Middle Eastern theater of the war.
But there was still more. With his customary opaqueness, Hussein had introduced the specter of a ticking clock in his last missive, saying that Britain had thirty days from the receipt of his letter to accept or reject his terms, beyond which the Arabs "reserve to themselves complete freedom of action." Storrs and McMahon had paid little attention to this veiled threat at the time, but as Mohammed al-Faroki now informed them, this ultimatum was the result of a tantalizing offer recently made to Hussein by Djemal Pasha: full Arab independence in the postwar era, provided the Arabs lent wholehearted support to the Turkish-German war effort in the meantime.
The choice before the British, then, could not have appeared more stark: come to an agreement with Hussein and his coconspirators that might paralyze the Ottoman Empire from within, or, conversely, watch Hussein and the Arabs make their peace with Constantinople, a peace that would undoubtedly result in a reinvigorated call to jihad against the Allies, and just might be the spark to finally set the Muslim populations of their colonies aflame. With Prime Minister Asquith and his cabinet kept fully apprised, British diplomats in London and Cairo scrambled to send off a new and far more respectful message to the emir in Mecca. Thus began one of history"s most controversial exchanges of secret messages, the so-called McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the ramifications of which would soon embroil the British government-as well as its future agent in Arabia, T. E. Lawrence-in a complex web of misunderstandings, conflicting promises, and deceit.
In the short term, the revelations of Mohammed al-Faroki enabled Lawrence to return to the goal that had consumed him ever since arriving in Cairo nine months earlier: a British landing at Alexandretta.
FROM THE ATHLIT promontory on clear days, Aaron Aaronsohn and Absalom Feinberg could easily make out the British and French warships that trolled the Palestinian coastline, imposing their blockade. It would be off one of these warships, they"d a.s.sumed, that they would eventually receive a message from Alex in Cairo-perhaps delivered by Alex himself. As the days and weeks pa.s.sed, however, their confidence in this wavered.
After nearly a month with no word, Aaronsohn and Feinberg settled on a risky backup plan. If the wait lasted much longer, Feinberg would take one of the small fishing boats that plied the coast, head straight out for one of the blockade ships, and try to talk his way on board. In mid-August, though, word came that the blockade was being tightened, the Allied warships now given license to destroy on sight any vessel they deemed suspicious; since this criterion surely attached to a strange vessel trying to make an approach, it rendered the backup plan less a risky venture than a suicidal one. Then came more bad news. In late August, it was announced (erroneously, it would turn out) that the refugee boatlift was coming to an end, that USS Des Moines would be making just one more call at Haifa harbor on August 30. When that American warship sailed over the horizon, the conspirators believed, so too would their last best chance to make contact with the British.
To Feinberg"s urging that he go out on the ship, Aaronsohn stoutly refused. Instead, it was Feinberg, in disguise and carrying a forged Russian pa.s.sport, who talked his way aboard the Des Moines. A week later, he found himself on the docks of Alexandria, Egypt.
Feinberg had just one contact in Egypt, but it turned out to be a good one: a young Christian Arab originally from Haifa who was now working as a courier for the British naval intelligence headquarters at Port Said. In Port Said, Feinberg tracked down his old friend, who quickly arranged a meeting with one of the unit"s intelligence officers. That officer happened to be T. E. Lawrence"s old partner at Carchemish as well as on the Zin expedition, Leonard Woolley.
What Feinberg didn"t know-could not have known-was that Alex Aaronsohn had in fact made contact with British intelligence in Egypt. After a series of rebuffs, he"d finally gained an audience with a senior member of the military intelligence staff in Cairo on August 18. That officer had been T. E. Lawrence"s other partner on the Zin expedition, Captain Stewart Newcombe. But that meeting had not gone at all well. Newcombe had taken a wary view of Alex Aaronsohn from the start, and that wariness only deepened when the earnest twenty-six-year-old began detailing the Jewish spy network supposedly standing by in Palestine to aid the British. It had been just two months since Minna Weizmann, Curt Prfer"s protegee, was unmasked as a spy, and British intelligence agents in Egypt were now alerted to the German scheme of employing Jewish refugees from Palestine as conduits. But perhaps what most aroused Newcombe"s suspicion was that Alex Aaronsohn appeared to want nothing tangible in return for his services. As a senior intelligence officer, Newcombe was constantly besieged by self-proclaimed spies who, in return for their "valuable information," wanted money or weapons or help with legal problems; it simply didn"t gibe that Alex Aaronsohn was offering up this purported treasure trove of information out of the goodness of his heart. As a result, and in what was surely one of the greatest miscalculations of his intelligence career, Newcombe had not only rebuffed Aaronsohn"s offer, but ordered him from the country. Of course, Alex had no way of communicating any of this to his brother anxiously waiting back in Palestine; on September 3, just three days before Absalom Feinberg arrived in Alexandria, Alex and his sister Rivka had gone out of that same harbor on a ship bound for New York.
But Feinberg was to have much better luck with Leonard Woolley. Implicitly trusting the intense young man who had been brought before him, Woolley devised a system whereby a British spy ship might periodically troll past the research station in Athlit. Through a prearranged series of codes, the conspirators would signal out to the spy ship when there was information to be collected, and under the cover of darkness, either a small boat or a swimmer would be sent ash.o.r.e to retrieve it.
There was only one way to both establish the coding system and test the efficacy of this plan: by sneaking Feinberg back into Palestine aboard one of the spy ships. After concluding his arrangements with Woolley, Feinberg waited for the right conditions-a calm sea, a moonless night-for his voyage home.
ONE PERSON WHO knew nothing of Newcombe"s and Woolley"s dealings with the would-be spies from Palestine that late summer was their former Zin expedition partner, T. E. Lawrence. This was partly due to the compartmentalization policy adhered to by British intelligence in Egypt, and partly to Lawrence"s intense focus on one issue: a British landing at Alexandretta. By mid-October, the last pieces of that plan appeared to be falling into place, and the letter he penned to his parents strived for that delicate balance between excitement and sufficient obliqueness to get past the military censors: "There is going to be a rather busy winter in the Levant," he wrote. "I am pleased on the whole with things. They have gone against us so far that our Government has become more reasonable, and the final settlement out here, though it will take long, will I think, be very satisfactory. We have to thank our [past] failures for that."
For Lawrence, the most excruciating aspect of Faroki"s story was his description of the situation that had existed in Alexandretta in the winter of 1915, carrying as it did the suggestion that a British landing force might have practically strolled ash.o.r.e there. Obviously, circ.u.mstances were much changed now, the al-Ahd-dominated military units long since moved elsewhere, but in the autumn of 1915, Lawrence and other advocates of an Alexandretta landing could point to several new factors that made their argument nearly as compelling.
Having sat out the first year of the war, Bulgaria had finally come in on the side of the Central Powers in late September. This meant the enemy now had an unbroken land route and rail line connecting Germany to Turkey, allowing for the quick and easy transfer of troops and weaponry. At the same time, British war planners, finally accepting Gallipoli for the fiasco it had been all along, were quietly drawing up plans for a withdrawal. Taken together, these two developments meant British Egypt was likely to be targeted anew, and by a much-better-equipped enemy. To hamper such an offensive, taking control of the Alexandretta Basin would not merely disrupt the enemy"s main supply line, but sever it-and if that action did in fact spark a regional Arab uprising, the Turks would have a whole new set of problems to deal with.
Another new factor argued for Alexandretta, one for which the mercurial personality of Djemal Pasha could be thanked. In tacit opposition to his co-pashas in Constantinople, Djemal had given refuge to at least eighty thousand Armenian survivors of the Anatolian killing fields, and had organized many of the Armenian men into labor battalions. These refugees and labor battalions were concentrated in the Alexandretta region-some eight thousand had been put to work on the railroad tunnels being cut through the Ama.n.u.s and Taurus Mountains-and even if they might be grateful to the pasha who had at least temporarily saved their lives, this Armenian population would most certainly regard arriving British soldiers as liberators and rush to their side. Attending that, of course, would be the public relations coup-an aspect of war Lawrence was always sensitive to-of Britain freeing untold thousands of Christian Armenians from servitude or death.
Through the strenuous lobbying of Lawrence and other members of the Cairo military intelligence staff, by late October the two most important British officials in Egypt-High Commissioner Henry McMahon and Major General John Maxwell, commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force-had been won over to the revived Alexandretta scheme. Better yet, these two men were about to hold a summit meeting with a visiting Lord Kitchener to decide the future course of the war in the eastern Mediterranean. The stars were finally aligning, so much so that Lawrence felt confident the seemingly impregnable walls of military idiocy were about to be breached.
"Things are boiling over this weekend," Lawrence wrote to a friend on November 4, on the eve of the Kitchener summit meeting, "and we have never been so busy before! This is a good omen, and a thing to make one very content."
The meeting between Kitchener, McMahon, and Maxwell took place on a ship off the Aegean island of Mudros on November 10 and 11. After an initial reluctance, the war secretary, too, came to embrace the Alexandretta plan, and fired off a cable to the prime minister urging its immediate approval.
But in London the idea had a more mixed reception. Amid the continuing carnage on the Western Front, the British high command was already struggling to find enough new men to throw into that meat grinder, and the notion of siphoning off materiel and soldiers-the revised Alexandretta plan now called for as many as 100,000 troops-was a difficult sell. Additionally, the misadventure at Gallipoli was hardly an advertis.e.m.e.nt for the wisdom of new amphibious landings on the Ottoman Front. In a flurry of cables pa.s.sed between Kitchener"s ship and various ministries in London, a debate ensued.
At this crucial moment, a French liaison officer attached to Kitchener"s shipboard retinue decided the matter, firing off a cable to Paris alerting his government to the British deliberations.