Lawrence In Arabia Part 10

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.

This, then, left the argument of deploying now, while Faisal's men still held the mountains, but the issue there was deep-rooted Arab distrust. "They are our very good friends while we respect their independence," Lawrence wrote. "They are deeply grateful for the help we have given them, but they fear lest we may make it a claim upon them afterwards. We have appropriated too many Moslem countries for them to have any real trust in our disinterestedness and they are terribly afraid of an English occupation of Hejaz. If the British with or without the Sherif's approval landed at Rabegh an armed force strong enough to ... organize a position there, they would, I am convinced, say 'we are betrayed' and scatter to their tents."

This was, of course, the same basic argument other antiescalationists had been making all along, but Lawrence was able to give it a wholly new twist by virtue of his firsthand look at the region. As he'd discovered in his trek to Faisal's camp, there were other water sources in the mountains above Rabegh that, until then, no one had known about. If Arab resistance in those mountains collapsed-a collapse that, again, was sure to accompany an Allied escalation-the Turks could draw on those water sources to sidestep Rabegh altogether and continue on toward Mecca unimpeded. In this scenario, the port town would be transformed from vitally strategic to utterly superfluous.

But Lawrence wasn't done yet. Recognizing that Colonel Bremond and his French superiors were the prime movers behind the escalation push-and were likely to continue that push no matter what the War Committee decided during this latest go-around-he set out to demolish their rationale for needing a British protection force for their technical unit in Rabegh. If the Turks did break through the mountains to advance on Rabegh, he pointed out, the Allies would still have four days' notice before they got there. In that scenario, the Royal Navy would have more than enough time to evacuate two hundred French military advisors, but probably not enough time to also evacuate thousands of British troops and all their valuable war materiel. Remarkably, this rather glaring hole in the French argument doesn't seem to have been noticed by anyone previously.

Except, Lawrence maintained, the French plan had never been about defending Rabegh anyway. Rather, it was about safeguarding their imperialist designs in the Middle East by seeking to destroy the Arab Revolt from within: "They say, 'Above all things the Arabs must not take Medina. This can be a.s.sured if an allied force landed at Rabegh. The tribal contingents will go home, and we will be the sole bulwark of the Sherif in Mecca. At the end of the war we give him Medina as his reward.' This is of course a definite policy, agreeable to their larger schemes," but the result, Lawrence contended, would be to leave, "the Franco-British force a disconsolate monument on the dusty beach at Rabegh."

It was an astounding accusation to make against Britain's closest ally, built as it was on an extrapolation-and a rather sweeping mischaracterization-of what Colonel Bremond had told Lawrence in Jeddah. But perhaps it was not so astounding to a British military leaders.h.i.+p grown increasingly resentful and suspicious of their French allies. On the Western Front, the British were now doing a majority of the fighting-and dying-as a shattered and depleted French army tried to rebuild itself. Over the past five months, in a campaign meant to relieve pressure on the battered French garrison in Verdun, British general Douglas Haig had repeatedly and futilely hurled his army against the German trenchworks along the river Somme; the 400,000 British dead and wounded at the Somme were double that suffered by the French. On the more local front, surely any British commander privy to the manner in which the French had repeatedly blocked the Alexandretta plan, as well as their continuing ambivalence over the coming British offensive in Palestine-an ambivalence born of fears that success would take the British into regions the French were claiming for themselves in the postwar world-were prepared to accept most any charge of Gallic perfidy at face value. Of course, Lawrence's accusation was also guaranteed to play well to the imperialist segment of the British government, eager to somehow keep France out of the Middle East altogether.

The effect of Lawrence's memo, then, was to transform the question of an Allied troop deployment to Arabia from its military context and propel it into the political. To wit, those in the British power structure favoring escalation might actually be unwitting dupes of a cleverly constructed French trap, one designed to both sabotage the Arab Revolt and, by the diversion of British troops to Arabia, hobble the offensive in Palestine. By the autumn of 1916, it was hard to conceive of any accusation more injurious to a British officer's reputation than that of useful fool to the French, but however obliquely, this was essentially the charge Lawrence was laying before Reginald Wingate.

But what to do with such an incendiary doc.u.ment? This was the new dilemma facing Gilbert Clayton on the morning of November 17. As Lawrence was attached to the Arab Bureau, standard procedure called for Clayton to first forward the memo to the bureau's overseer, Henry McMahon. That, however, would have been preaching to the choir, and as McMahon was already on his way out as high commissioner, anything he might do with the doc.u.ment could have only muted effect. Conversely, Clayton had the option of sending it to Reginald Wingate in hopes that the sirdar might finally see the error of his escalationist ways and change course-except Lawrence had been so derisive of the standby-force plan that the man who had auth.o.r.ed it was bound to get his back up.

When it comes to political infighting, though, sometimes one's bitterest enemy can be turned into a temporary ally. Ever since arriving in Cairo, General Archibald Murray had set out to control or neuter Gilbert Clayton and his Arab Bureau in any way he could. In a fit of pique after failing to have the bureau put under his command, Murray had gone so far as to order his own intelligence units not to cooperate with Clayton's outfit. Of more immediate interest to Clayton on November 17, however, was Murray's implacable opposition to sending troops to Arabia. He'd made his feelings on the topic clear at an interagency conference in September.

"There is no good telling me that you only want this and that," he'd railed at Wingate's deputy, Cyril Wilson. "From the experience of war, and experience of recent campaigns, it is absolutely clear that you start and you grow. You start with a brigade, that brigade wants some artillery, then aeroplanes and camels. Then comes a request that the force be moved to another point about ten miles [away], which it is absolutely essential to hold. So the campaign grows."

With all this in mind, it apparently occurred to Clayton that Archibald Murray might be just the man who'd know what to do with Lawrence's memo.

For the EEF commander, that four-page report must have arrived like a rare gift. Here was not only a precis that dismantled the intervention argument on its merits, but, as an added windfall, hinted darkly that it was all a French plot. He ordered that its author be immediately brought to his office.

Archibald Murray was a famously nervous man. During a pivotal moment in the opening days of the war, he had fainted away from the unrelenting tension, an episode that spurred shocked whispers throughout the British high command and probably contributed to Murray's demotion from army chief of staff, the number two position in the military hierarchy, in 1915. His transfer to Egypt hadn't seemed to improve matters, as Lawrence discovered when, answering Murray's summons to headquarters that day, he was intercepted by Murray's deputy, General Lynden-Bell. As Lawrence recounted, "I was astonished when, as I came in, [Bell] jumped to his feet, leaped forward, and gripped me by the shoulder, hissing, 'Now you're not to frighten him; don't you forget what I say!' " The task before Lawrence, Bell instructed, was to give Murray "a rea.s.suring picture of affairs, and yet not a rosy picture, since they could not afford excursions either way."

Lawrence seems to have managed this delicate balancing act when finally set before Murray. And despite Murray's reputation for jumpiness, it soon became clear that when it came to bureaucratic knifework, he had a pretty steady hand himself. Shortly after Lawrence left his office, he fired off a cable to Wingate: "I have just seen Lawrence on his return from visiting Faisal, and his opinion, in which I understand you and Faisal concur, is so strongly against the dispatch of white troops to Arabia that I venture to suggest for your consideration that the CIGS [Chief of Imperial General Staff William Robertson] should at once be informed."

Perhaps this request for Wingate's "consideration" was intended as rhetorical flourish, for Murray had actually sent Lawrence's memo to Robertson fifteen minutes earlier. As for Wingate concurring with Lawrence's views, that would be a hard matter for Wingate to judge since Murray didn't bother sending him a copy of the memo.

In London, Lawrence's report played to great effect, and was quickly circulated through the upper reaches of both the Foreign and War Offices. As usually happens in such cases, those who agreed with the report burnished the resume of its author to lend authority to his a.s.sertions. On November 19, General Robertson, himself no fan of intervention in Arabia, forwarded the memo to the cabinet while describing its author as a man "said to have an intimate knowledge of the Turks and the Arabs."

To those in the cabinet unfamiliar with the intricacies of Arabian policy, perhaps the memorandum's most persuasive aspect was its anti-French tilt. Interestingly, one official who tried to counter that effect was Mark Sykes. "Captain Lawrence's statement in regard to the French att.i.tude to the Arabs," he complained to the Foreign Office, "and his reference to their larger schemes of policy, must be the result of some misunderstanding, either by Captain Lawrence of the French, or by the French officers of their own Government's intentions, as it seems in no way to fit in with anything said or thought here or in Paris."

His was a lonely voice, however, and little match for the antiescalation/anti-French officials who now had their own "expert" in the field to tout. Henry McMahon joined his efforts to that campaign in a cable to Charles Hardinge, the permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office. Noting that he'd always feared that an Allied intervention in Arabia would corrode Arab morale, McMahon wrote that Lawrence, "whom I knew to be a very shrewd observer, has confirmed my opinion on this point. He has moreover told me, as doubtless you will hear from the Sirdar [Wingate], that the French hold the same view, and it is with this very object that they are magnifying the dangers of the present situation and advocating action at Rabegh. Colonel Bremond even went so far in a moment of confidence as to tell Lawrence that the French object was to thus disintegrate Arab effort.... It is as well to remember this in any proposals that the French may now or hereafter make in regard to our joint a.s.sistance to the Sherif."

Amid the tumult, Lawrence even saw his stock rise among those regular army staff officers in Cairo who had previously held both him and the Arab Bureau in contempt. "They began to be polite to me," he wrote, "and to say that I was observant, with a pungent style, and character."

In the face of such an onslaught, the War Committee quietly shelved the Rabegh proposal anew, but not before a rather humorous last act. It wasn't until November 21, four days after Lawrence's memo reached London, that Reginald Wingate finally saw the a.n.a.lysis with which he supposedly fully concurred. After his angry cable demanding to know why he'd been kept out of the loop, the War Committee mildly rebuked Murray for failing to first solicit Wingate's opinion, suggesting that "there is apparently lack of co-ordination in [this] matter."

Murray begged to differ. "I have always taken special care to keep Sirdar fully informed of all I am doing," he cabled London back, "and as far as I know we are working in the closest touch. You may rely on me in this matter. As regards Lawrence's report. As Lawrence had just come to me after spending several days with the Sirdar I naturally understood he was fully in possession of Lawrence's news. In fact Lawrence informed me to this effect."

A PERSONALITY TIC of Aaron Aaronsohn's was to keep constant track of the exercise he got in a day-the time spent bicycling, or the miles walked-and to note it in his diary. It may have been born of his long and only intermittently successful campaign to keep his weight down, but the long walks he took during his stay in London served an additional purpose: a way to distract himself from the maddening inertia of the British government. As he noted in his diary for November 11, 1916, a day in which he had covered some twelve miles, "If I brooded continually over the situation, it would be enough to drive me mad. What slowness in decisions! It will soon be two months since I have left Berlin, and after all nothing of consequence has been done to discover [sic] the Athlit people."

Certainly the scientist had done his part. In the nearly three weeks he'd been in London, he had compiled two long reports for his British hosts, one chronicling the plight of the Armenians in Syria, the other on conditions inside Palestine. This second report, running to forty-six pages, provided the British with probably their most comprehensive look inside any corner of the Ottoman Empire since the war had begun. Along with a thorough rundown of the political and economic situation of the region, Aaronsohn detailed the health and medical crises facing it, the condition of its roads and railways, and meticulously listed the location and size of most every Turkish garrison guarding the Syrian coast. He even noted how many gendarmes currently policed Beirut, and what weapons they carried.

Nevertheless, Aaronsohn continued to be shuttled from office to office, ministry to ministry, repeatedly asked to tell his whole story over from the beginning. From no quarter, it seemed, was any effort being made toward returning him to the war theater, let alone trying to establish contact with his spy network back in Palestine.

Part of the issue was surely simple bureaucratic inept.i.tude, but perhaps joined to this was a kind of collective disbelief on British officials' part at what they'd been handed. Then as now, intelligence agents were accustomed to getting small slivers of information from a wide variety of sources and trying to fit those slivers together to form a portrait; it was very unusual, even suspicious, to be handed all of it in one fell swoop. Contributing to this was an element of blithe anti-Semitism that permeated the British government at the time-as it did most European governments-which provided as a starting point that a Jew wasn't to be completely trusted until he proved himself worthy. In the arena of espionage, that created a paradox hard to rise out of. In an eleven-page a.n.a.lysis of Aaronsohn's Palestine report, an intelligence officer with the War Trade Intelligence Department conceded that the information was "very correct" wherever it could be verified, but also noted the informant was a Zionist and "of the Romanian type of Jew." That description apparently validated the agent's conclusion: "Of course we do not know the object of his visit to this country, but he might be just as observant of things here as he has been in Turkey and a purveyor of information of the conditions in England if he should get back to Turkey."

Naturally, all this was quite invisible to Aaronsohn. Instead, as the interminable delay in London dragged on, the scientist increasingly fretted that perhaps the problem stemmed from the conversation he'd had at 30 Broadway Gate on October 30.

Answering that invitation to call on Mark Sykes, Aaronsohn had appeared at the London townhouse promptly at 9:30. Repairing to the exquisitely furnished study, the two men had soon been joined by a third. This was Gerald FitzMaurice, the former dragoman to the British emba.s.sy in Constantinople and now one of Sykes's key allies in the British power structure. While Aaronsohn provided few details of what the three discussed during their ninety-minute conversation-"we talk of Zionism," he noted in his diary-he'd initially thought it had gone very well. Weeks later, though, with his London stay reaching the one-month mark, he fell to second-guessing. "I was probably too open with them," he wrote on November 24, "and they took it as a ruse. Or they are distracted or turning a blind eye. Or maybe they saw it as naivete on my part."

In fact, Aaronsohn's apprehensions couldn't have been more misplaced. Even if he kept it fairly discreet, Mark Sykes could be counted among a small but influential group of British statesmen who had begun turning their thoughts to the creation of a Jewish enclave in Palestine. What's more, in Aaron Aaronsohn he saw a man who might play a signal role in bringing that idea to fruition.

Part of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correct a nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new pa.s.sion and urgency with the ma.s.sacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protect its religious minority populations. At war's end, the Christian and Jewish Holy Land of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades made right.

But it was not just religiosity; Sykes also saw a potentially huge political advantage in this. The Jews were an influential but deeply factionalized presence throughout the Western world, with most either staying neutral or siding with the Central Powers so far in the war. A chief cause was the inclusion of the notoriously anti-Semitic czarist Russia in the Entente; even many British Jews could barely bring themselves to support an alliance that included the despised regime in Petrograd. By the Entente's coming out in strong support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Sykes believed, it would inevitably turn the opinion of international Jewry toward its side. In turn, the advocacy of American Jews-a small but powerful const.i.tuency-might finally provide the spur for bringing the United States into the war.

This idea had already been promoted by a British statesman far more powerful than Mark Sykes. In March 1915, the home secretary, Herbert Samuel, had put to the cabinet that Palestine be made a British protectorate at war's end, and Jewish emigration actively encouraged toward the eventual creation of a majority-Jewish enclave. That resolution had been quickly and quietly shot down by the cabinet-the potential ramifications of such a momentous course of action were too far-reaching to countenance-but the notion had lingered on. When put in charge of has.h.i.+ng out an agreement with Georges-Picot on a framework for the postwar Middle East, Mark Sykes had taken it up again.

Immediately a potential obstacle presented itself. In his correspondence with Emir Hussein, Henry McMahon had specifically listed all those territories to be excluded from Arab sovereignty or subject to later negotiation, but nowhere had he mentioned-let alone made a claim for-Palestine. A strict reading of that correspondence, therefore, could only lead to the conclusion that Palestine was to be part of the independent Arab nation. That was not such a big obstacle as far as Mark Sykes was concerned; since he and Georges-Picot were ignoring most other promises made to Hussein as they carved the Middle East into imperial spheres, what was the harm in adding Palestine to the mix? In the draft version of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that Syrian province had been penciled in to fall under the "international administration" of Britain, France, and Russia.

But even this arrangement wouldn't bring about the British-protected Jewish state that Sykes envisioned, nor could it possibly be a harmonious one. As he conceded in a March 1916 cable to George Buchanan, the British amba.s.sador to Russia, "Arab Christians and Moslems alike would fight in the matter to the last man against Jewish Dominion in Palestine." At the same time, the Jews were stoutly opposed to an international administration there, while the French and Russians would most certainly oppose a solely British one. To break the logjam, Sykes informed Buchanan, he'd bandied about a new idea with Georges-Picot.

A peculiar signature of Sykes's "solutions" was a kind of quasi-scientific notion that fantastic intricacy might lead to ultimate simplicity, as if the world were a motor vehicle in which, once its myriad moving parts were properly aligned, all would hum along nicely. So it was with his new idea for Palestine. Invoking Herbert Samuel's cabinet resolution of a year before, he proposed that Palestine be put under a British protectorate; that Emir Hussein appoint one of his sons as the sultan of an independent Palestine; that Britain and France jointly act as the sultanate's guarantor; while simultaneously a "privileged chartered company" be established for the purpose of buying up land for Jewish colonization. "I regret complicated problem requires complex settlement," Sykes concluded to Buchanan, "but under above France gets a position in Palestine, Russian demands are satisfied, Arabs have a Prince, Zionists get const.i.tutional position and have British protection, which I understand they desire."

But lest the champagne be uncorked too soon, Sykes's neat formula elided some inconvenient realities. First, Samuel's proposal of the previous year had been rejected out of hand by the cabinet. Second, Sykes had floated his plan without clearing it with any of his superiors-and floated it to the chief French negotiator deciding the future composition of the Middle East, no less. The day after Sykes's cable to Buchanan had reached his desk, Foreign Secretary Edward Grey wrote a withering rebuke, ordering Sykes to "obliterate from his memory that the Samuel's Cabinet memorandum made any mention of a British Protectorate.... I told Mr. Samuel at the time that a British Protectorate was quite out of the question and Sir M. Sykes should never mention the subject without making this clear."

That slapdown may have led to greater discretion on Sykes's part, but it certainly didn't cool his ardor for thinking creatively when it came to Palestine. Through the spring and summer of 1916, he held a series of private discussions with Moses Gaster, a leader of the British Zionist movement, to keep the ideas percolating. It was when he met Aaron Aaronsohn, however, that his pa.s.sions returned to full flourish. According to Sykes's biographer, Roger Adelson, "If Rabbi Gaster a few months before had provided Sykes with the grace-note of Zionism in Europe, here was Aaronsohn who had actually played the trumpet in Palestine. Sykes liked the sound of it."

Zionist historian Isaiah Friedman was more specific: "How deeply Sir Mark Sykes was impressed by Aaronsohn can be gathered from the confident and close relations which later developed between them." Citing other British wartime officials who would soon be heavily influenced by Aaronsohn's views, Friedman argued that "it would be reasonable to suppose that it was he who was the decisive influence in Sykes's conversion to Zionism."

Indeed, even if he second-guessed it as his days in London dragged on, Aaronsohn's diary entry on the Broadway Gate meeting alluded to the alliance that was already taking form. "FitzMaurice is in favour of the 'fait accompli' in Palestine," he jotted, meaning a Jewish homeland, "[but] the Allies are not yet in agreement.... [Sykes] hopes we will succeed in altering the English viewpoint, 'but it requires work.' "

Where Aaronsohn would contribute to that work was in Cairo. On November 24, the same day that he worried in his diary over the impression he might have made on Sykes, the scientist began packing for the s.h.i.+p that would take him to Egypt. There he would join forces with British military intelligence and try to reactivate his long-dormant spy ring. In Egypt Aaronsohn would also eventually reunite with Mark Sykes. Together, they would concoct a scheme that was to help dramatically reshape the British government's view on the creation of a British-protected Jewish homeland in Palestine.

DESPITE THE FUROR his November 17 memo had sp.a.w.ned, with Lawrence's brief sojourn to the Hejaz at an end, there were no plans to send him back. To the contrary, Gilbert Clayton intended to put his literary skills and fluency in Arabic to use in a new desk job in Cairo, heading up the Arab Bureau's fledgling propaganda department. That Lawrence was to escape this mundane fate was due to the intercession of a most unlikely patron: Reginald Wingate.

Shortly after learning he would be taking over from McMahon in Cairo, and thus in direct charge of the Hejaz operation, Wingate had pet.i.tioned for an expanded roster of advisors and intelligence officers to serve in Arabia; of most pressing concern was to attach a liaison officer to Faisal in the mountains above Rabegh. The logical choice to head up this British military mission, all agreed, was Lawrence's t.i.tular supervisor at the Arab Bureau, Stewart Newcombe. But with Newcombe on a.s.signment in Europe until sometime in December, Wingate urged that someone else be sent as his temporary stand-in, and he quite naturally thought of the impressive young captain who had just visited him in Khartoum. On November 12, the day after Lawrence left the Sudanese capital, Wingate cabled Clayton in Cairo suggesting that Lawrence be sent back to Yenbo to manage things until Newcombe arrived. Clayton, thinking of the propaganda department he wanted Lawrence to head, tried to deflect the request, but Wingate wouldn't take no for an answer.

"Pending Newcombe's arrival," he reiterated on November 14, "I wish Lawrence to proceed to Yenbo by first possible opportunity. It is vitally important to have an officer of his exceptional knowledge of Arabs in close touch with Faisal [at this] critical juncture." He then rea.s.sured Clayton this was to be only a temporary measure, and that Lawrence would be returned to Cairo once Newcombe came on the scene. Under such pressure, Clayton had no choice but to relent.

Of course, all this occurred before Lawrence wrote his incendiary memorandum taking direct aim at Wingate's plans in Arabia. By the time Wingate saw that memo, his lavish praise of Lawrence was already a matter of record, as was his insistence that Lawrence return to Yenbo. Even if Wingate wished to punish the young captain for his temerity, there was now no graceful way to do it.

But excelling at bureaucratic infighting is not simply about coming out on top. True mastery comes with the ability to so cover one's tracks as to appear utterly blameless, and this was a game Clayton and Lawrence played with consummate skill. Before the month of November was over, Colonel Bremond would receive a stern telegram from the commander in chief of the French armed forces, Marshal Joseph Joffre. After obliquely referring to an "agreement" worked out with the British-the Sykes-Picot pact-Joffre rebuked Bremond for ever suggesting that France wished to prevent an Arab capture of Medina. "The already known state of mind of the British and the Sherif could lead to the belief that we are trying to renege on the arrangements made and could have serious consequences for the development of our plans in the Levant. It is important, therefore, that your att.i.tude does not lend itself to such an interpretation."

The sandbagging of Reginald Wingate was even more impressive, however. On November 23, as the tempest over Lawrence's memorandum continued to rage, Clayton sent a "private" cable to Wingate in Khartoum suggesting that all blame for the controversy rested with Murray. Perhaps calculating that the bad blood between the sirdar and the EEF commander meant the particulars would never get sorted out, Clayton went so far as to suggest that it was Murray who had compelled Lawrence to write the offending report.

Evidently, Wingate had a p.r.o.nounced nave streak: "I have no doubt that Lawrence has done all this in perfectly good faith," he wrote Cyril Wilson on the same day he received Clayton's cable, "but he appears to me to be a visionary and his amateur soldiering has evidently given him an exaggerated idea of the soundness of his views on purely military matters." Clearly alluding to Murray, he went on, "I am princ.i.p.ally annoyed in all this matter, not so much on account of the apparent want of straightness on the part of certain people who should be above that sort of thing, but on account of the huge loss of time when I am working at very high pressure."

Either Wingate never did figure out the extent to which he had been played by Clayton and Lawrence, or he was an unusually forgiving man; in just eight months, he would spearhead the effort to award Lawrence the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military honor, for valor in the field.

But not everyone was so quick to ascribe the best of intentions to the upstart army captain. One who took a far more jaundiced view was Cyril Wilson, the British official who had most closely observed Lawrence in Arabia, and would serve as Lawrence's direct superior officer upon his return. Wilson argued strongly against that return on even a temporary basis, and when presented with a fait accompli let Gilbert Clayton know his feelings. "Lawrence wants kicking," he wrote the Arab Bureau head, "and kicking hard at that; then he would improve. At present I look upon him as a b.u.mptious young a.s.s who spoils his undoubted knowledge of Syrian Arabs etc. by making himself out to be the only authority on war, engineering, running [His Majesty's] s.h.i.+ps and everything else. He put every single person's back up I've met, from the Admiral down to the most junior fellow on the Red Sea."

Of all the deceptions put to paper about the events of that November, however, surely the most brazen was one Lawrence penned about himself. It concerned that day toward the end of the month when he was summoned to Clayton's office and told he was being sent back to Arabia as a temporary liaison officer to Faisal ibn Hussein. According to Lawrence's account in Seven Pillars, "I urged my complete unfitness for the job."