Lawrence In Arabia Part 16

Lawrence, as noted, minimized the importance of that trek. Indeed, the few details he ever provided on it were in an obliquely worded four-page report he wrote immediately upon his arrival in Cairo. Ever the strategist, however, he evidently realized that in the official reaction to his Syrian adventure, he had been handed a powerful instrument to further his goals. He deftly wielded that instrument when brought before the new EEF commander, General Edmund Allenby.

Given the elaborate decorum that existed within the British military of 1917, it's hard to imagine a more incongruous meeting than the one that took place at the Cairo General Headquarters on the afternoon of July 12. Nicknamed "b.l.o.o.d.y Bull" for his explosive temper, Edmund Allenby was a towering man with the physique of a boxer gone slightly to seed, an intimidating presence even when not clad in his general's dress uniform. On the opposite side of his desk sat the wraithlike Captain T. E. Lawrence, perhaps 135 pounds when healthy but now reduced to less than a hundred by the rigors of his desert exploits, dressed in a white Arab robe and turban and, by his own account (though it seems improbable), shoeless; Lawrence's uniform had been destroyed by moths during his long absence from Cairo, so he would claim, and he had yet to find time to replace it.

Lawrence surely knew something of Allenby's war record, including that it was a somewhat checkered one. During the British withdrawal at the battle of Mons in August 1914, Allenby had ordered his cavalry regiment to stand their ground before a much larger advancing German force, thereby enabling the rest of the beleaguered army to make an orderly retreat. Coincidentally, it was during that same battle that Archibald Murray, then the chief of the Imperial General Staff and monitoring the British retreat from a central command post, had fainted away from the tension. Much more recently, however, Allenby's star had been eclipsed at the battle of Arras, where he was criticized for being slow to take advantage of breaches in the German line to drive his men forward-a relative point, perhaps, in an engagement that saw the British advance less than two miles at the cost of 150,000 casualties.

As with Murray, then, Allenby's transfer to Egypt was meant as a demotion, but where this had induced a kind of crippling caution in Murray, Lawrence sensed it might spur something very different in Allenby. In the general's office that afternoon, he proceeded to paint a wondrously ambitious portrait of what the Arab rebels now stood poised to achieve. So long as Aqaba was quickly bolstered as the chief staging point, he explained, the Arabs could at last take their fight into the Syrian heartland. And not in any small way; in Lawrence's telling, there was now the opportunity to set the whole region aflame.

To complement the threadbare report on his Syrian spying mission, Lawrence had made a little hand-drawn map to ill.u.s.trate his plan to the general. It depicted no fewer than seven prospective Arab forces attacking the Turks across the length of Syria, as far west as the Lebanon coast and as far north as the cities of Homs and Hama, one hundred miles above Damascus. While he cautioned in his cover note that "there is little hope of things working out just as planned," if even some aspects of Lawrence's blueprint came to fruition, the bulk of Turkish forces deployed across northern and eastern Syria would find themselves stranded, unable to advance or even to easily retreat.

There was a catch, though. For this grand Arab uprising to succeed, Lawrence told Allenby, it required a simultaneous British army breakthrough in southern Palestine. Once that had been achieved, the two forces could move north in lethal tandem, the Arab irregulars shutting down the Hejaz Railway and marooning the Turks in their garrison towns in eastern Syria, while the British army, their inland flank protected by the Arabs' actions, advanced up the western coastal shelf. In Lawrence's plotting, even the quick capture of Damascus and Jerusalem were within the realm of possibility.

But there was another small catch. The fighters who would serve as the crucial linchpin to this Arab strike force, the Bedouin of eastern Syria, traditionally trekked farther east in autumn in search of better forage for their camels, effectively leaving the war theater. To make use of these essential warriors, Lawrence explained, action would have to commence no later than mid-September, or in about two months' time.

It's not altogether clear how much of this extravagant vision Lawrence himself actually believed. Even if flushed by his recent triumph at Aqaba, he was surely still too much the pragmatist to imagine that all the inertia and tribal squabbling that forever shadowed the Arab Revolt would somehow now melt away. He'd also undoubtedly had enough experience with the British military to know that haste was not its strong suit. Most likely, in putting forward his grandiose scheme he saw the chance to win over the new British commander in chief-unschooled in the sluggish pace with which events moved in the region, eager to redeem his soldier's reputation in the wake of Arras-to his own vision of a joint Arab-British liberation of Syria. It was a vision Allenby would have to embrace or reject quickly, of course, since Lawrence had also set a ticking clock.

But if there was an element of bluff in all this, who could possibly catch him out? T. E. Lawrence was now a celebrity in Cairo, the magical manager of Arab tribes, as well as the only British officer to have personally taken the pulse of their potential fifth columnists inside Syria. Even if he knew those prospective collaborators were nowhere near ready to rise up in two months, it's not as if anyone else knew. Instead, so long as the almost inevitable delay tripped up the British timetable, his secret knowledge of Arab unpreparedness would remain safe, and in the meantime he would have forged an alliance-and a mutual dependency-that couldn't be broken.

In Seven Pillars, Lawrence all but admitted to this game: "Allenby could not make out how much [of me] was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and I left him unhelped to solve it."

And it was a performance that succeeded brilliantly. At the end of their meeting, the general raised his chin and announced, "Well, I will do for you what I can."

If he kept it low-key with Lawrence, Allenby let his enthusiasm be known to his superiors, including General William Robertson, chief of the Imperial General Staff and the overall coordinator of the British war effort. "The advantages offered by Arab co-operation on lines proposed by Captain Lawrence," he cabled Robertson on July 19, "are, in my opinion, of such importance that no effort should be spared to reap full benefit therefrom.... If successfully carried out, such a movement, in conjunction with [British] offensive operations in Palestine, may cause a collapse of the Turkish campaigns in the Hejaz and in Syria and produce far-reaching results, both political as well as military." So vital did Allenby view the scheme that he pa.s.sed on Lawrence's concern of losing the eastern Bedouin to their autumn grazing grounds should there be a delay. "I therefore ought to be prepared to undertake such operations as may be possible with the force at my disposal by the middle of September."

Even Robertson, a committed "Westerner" loath to entertain ambitious plans in the East, was quickly sold on the idea; at the culmination of a flurry of cables between Cairo and London that July, he promised to immediately send Allenby as many as fifty thousand more troops for his upcoming Palestine offensive. It all marked an astounding turnaround in fortunes for the Arab Revolt. Just two months earlier, the rebels had been regarded as little more than a sideshow nuisance by Archibald Murray; now they were setting the timetable for the next British offensive in Palestine.

But the newly strengthened Arab-British alliance also signaled a change on the political front, one that General Allenby may not have appreciated or cared about, but that T. E. Lawrence most certainly did. Until recently, British planners had been pondering strategies to minimize the Arab rebels' role in Syria out of deference to their French allies. Now, by signing on to Allenby's plan-which really meant Lawrence's plan-the British military was setting on a course that completely ignored French concerns, and would eventually cast the whole framework of Sykes-Picot in doubt.

That was all a bit in the future, however, and in the interim, praise for Lawrence's exploits continued to come in from all quarters. Though he was found to be ineligible to receive the Victoria Cross (one of its stipulations is that the heroic deed must be observed by a fellow Briton), he was soon promoted to major, as well as named a Companion of the Order of the Bath, one of the highest levels in the British chivalric system available to junior military officers.

Amid his newfound celebrity, in early August Lawrence was asked to jot down his insights on working with Arabs for those British officers being sent for duty in the Hejaz, to share his secrets of success in a realm where so many others had come to crus.h.i.+ng despair. The result was a short treatise he ent.i.tled Twenty-Seven Articles. Some of his recommendations were commonsense, while others must have seemed rather exotic to his pupils. "A slave brought up in the Hejaz is the best servant," he advised, "but there are rules against British subjects owning them, so they will have to be lent to you. In any case, take with you an Ageyli [tribesman] or two when you go up country. They are the most efficient couriers in Arabia, and understand camels."

Above all, Lawrence counseled his readers to shuck their English ways, to so totally immerse themselves in the local environment as to know its "families, clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells, hills and roads."

Within the parochial British military culture of 1917, Twenty-Seven Articles had the force of revelation-and indeed, the tract continues to have profound influence today. Amid the American military "surge" in Iraq in 2006, the U.S. commander in chief, General David Petraeus, ordered his senior officers to read Twenty-Seven Articles so that they might gain clues on winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Presumably skipped over was Lawrence's opening admonition that his advice applied strictly to Bedouin-about 2 percent of the Iraqi population-and that interacting with Arab townspeople "require[s] totally different treatment."

AARON AARONSOHN AND Captain Ian Smith had never been close. From their first meeting, Smith, the EMSIB (Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau) liaison to the spy s.h.i.+ps operating out of Port Said, had made little attempt to hide his low regard for the Jewish spy ring in Palestine. From that inauspicious beginning, Smith-"always an idiot" in the agronomist's estimation-had seemed to go out of his way to slight Aaronsohn and his confederates in ways large and small, as if it were the British who were doing a great favor to the Jewish spies rather than the reverse.

No amount of past insults, however, quite prepared Aaronsohn for those of July 1. Evidently irritated that Aaronsohn had complained of his shabby treatment to an officer in the Arab Bureau, Smith acidly told the NILI ringleader that his spies in Palestine "are no good. The work can be done much better by others."

Making the episode especially galling was that it came at a time when the British were piling on NILI's workload at every turn-and in ways that went far beyond intelligence gathering. In the wake of the sacking-of-Jaffa story in May, an international relief effort had gone up to raise funds for its Jewish victims. To the obvious question of how such funds might reach the needy within Palestine, someone in the British hierarchy hit on the just as obvious answer: the NILI network. And so long as the NILI operatives were distributing relief funds across Palestine, why not propaganda materials as well? And how about in their spare time, they also carry out sabotage attacks? At the beginning of June, plans had been drawn up to smuggle explosives ash.o.r.e at Athlit so that a NILI team might blow up a crucial railroad bridge in the Jordan valley; toward that goal, Aaronsohn's chief lieutenant in Egypt, Liova Schneersohn, was now undergoing demolition training at a British army testing ground on the Cairo outskirts.

Aaronsohn had reluctantly agreed to each of these new demands put on his organization, seeing it as the price to be paid for British favor, but it made the insult from Ian Smith simply too much to bear. As he informed his allies in the Arab Bureau the day after that confrontation, since EMSIB apparently now had other and better operatives in Palestine, "I no longer had the right to endanger my people in continuing the work." Therefore, he was shutting down NILI.

Because it wasn't as if Aaronsohn lacked other reasons to feel grossly underappreciated that summer. At the core was the continuing mystery of just what his status was in Cairo, of where he and his organization fit into the larger scheme of things. In his meetings with Mark Sykes in April and May, Aaronsohn had learned that the British politician was working closely with two leaders of the English Zionist Federation, Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, in London. In fact, during his time in Cairo, Sykes had urged Weizmann to come out to Egypt to spearhead the Zionist effort there but, in lieu of that, to appoint Aaronsohn as his local "representative." Aaronsohn had gone along with the plan out of deference to Sykes, even though he was quite at odds with the milder brand of Zionism of Weizmann and Sokolow-but then he had received absolutely no communication from either man since. So vague had his status remained, and so futile his own efforts to receive guidance from the Zionist Federation that, just days before his run-in with Smith, he had asked Gilbert Clayton to take the matter up with Mark Sykes. Even this, though, had yielded nothing.

Thus out of the loop, Aaronsohn also remained quite unaware that his cherished Zionist cause was actually making great strides in London-and largely through the efforts of the tireless if uncommunicative Chaim Weizmann.

The campaign to prod the British government into a public declaration in support of a Jewish homeland had recently undergone a major overhaul. At one time, Weizmann had stressed the effect that such a declaration would have on American Zionists, causing them to add their influential voice to those calling for an end to American neutrality and intervention on the side of the Entente; obviously, that argument had lost much of its l.u.s.ter with the United States' entry into the war. Also headed toward oblivion that summer was the parallel contention that such a declaration would spur Russian Jews to rally to the prowar government of Alexander Kerensky; with the chaos in Russia deepening by the day, Kerensky's problems were now far beyond the point where Jewish support might make much difference. In early June, though, Weizmann had found a potent new argument courtesy of the Central Powers.

As Weizmann explained in a June 12 meeting with Robert Cecil, the British a.s.sistant secretary of state for foreign affairs, for many months he had been hearing rumors that the German government was trying to enlist leaders of the German Jewish community to act as intermediaries for a prospective peace deal. Weizmann had long dismissed these rumors, but recently they had gained great credence; in fact, he told Cecil, he had heard that German Jewish leaders were now actively considering such a role, provided the kaiser's regime met their demand for a Jewish state in Palestine. This the German government was evidently contemplating, judging by the recent and unprecedented spate of articles in the German press in support of a Jewish homeland.

To the degree that any of this was substantially true, the message was plain-that if the British didn't play the Jewish-homeland card soon, the Germans surely would-and Robert Cecil was a quick pupil. The day after his meeting with Weizmann, he sent a confidential memorandum to his superior, Lord Charles Hardinge. "There can be no doubt that a complete change of front on the part of the German Government has taken place," Cecil wrote, "and that orders have been given to treat Zionism as an important political factor in the policy of the Central Empires." The purpose of that change, in his estimation, was to influence the opinion of international Jewry "and to utilize it in the interests of German propaganda against the Entente."

In hopes of averting this potentially calamitous outcome, Cecil explained, his recent visitor had put forward a helpful suggestion. "Dr. Weizmann concluded by urging very strongly that it was desirable from every point of view that His Majesty's Government should give an open expression of their sympathy with, and support of, Zionist aims, and should publicly recognize the justice of Jewish claims on Palestine."

With alarm bells over a possible German-sponsored Jewish state reverberating through the British Foreign Office that June, this was a suggestion that an increasing number of senior British officials were ready to heed.

If all this remained unknown to Aaron Aaronsohn, it was also unknown to those Arab Bureau officials who scrambled to put out the fire sparked by Captain Smith's comments of July 1. Instead, they were just trying to save Britain's most important spy network in Palestine from shutting down.

As part of a renewed effort to show Aaronsohn respect, Smith was forced to apologize for his comments, and the agronomist was soon given an audience with the new EEF commander in chief, Edmund Allenby. Their meeting took place on the morning of July 17, just five days after Allenby's discussions with T. E. Lawrence. In a leisurely conversation, Aaronsohn filled in the general on a variety of topics regarding Palestine, everything from its agricultural conditions to the fighting abilities of its Turkish garrison, and even provided character sketches of Djemal Pasha-"very much inclined to plot, and clever at it"-and the German commander in Syria. "The [commander in chief] listened with interest," Aaronsohn noted, "and questioned me intelligently, 'to the point.' He made an excellent impression on me."

In the afterglow of that meeting with Allenby, Aaronsohn may have felt he had at long last "arrived" with the British in Cairo. Then again, he'd felt that at various other times over the preceding seven months. The problem was, with the British forever striving to keep all options open, reluctant to ever give anyone either a positive or negative straight answer, there really was no such thing as having "arrived," the hearty embrace avoided for the cautious pat on the back. This was compounded in Aaronsohn's case by the new machinations in London over a possible declaration of support for a Jewish homeland, a generalized anxiety within much of the British government over where that might lead. As a result, the goal was to keep Aaronsohn happy but in limbo, to maintain that fine balance between encouraging his efforts and remaining circ.u.mspect as to their ultimate reward.

Fortunately, the British could rely on a man with considerable skill at such things, Reginald Wingate. "I gather," Wingate wrote a senior Foreign Office diplomat on July 23 upon learning of the government's latest tentative overture to the British Zionists, "that the matter is by no means decided, and that you wish me to keep Aaronsohn satisfied without telling him anything very definite. This has been done."

ON JULY 16, the captain of the British troops.h.i.+p HMS Dufferin was told to stand by at Port Suez in order to transport an important official down the Red Sea coast to Jeddah. The next morning, the s.h.i.+p's crew caught first sight of their distinguished guest when twenty-eight-year-old T. E. Lawrence sauntered up the gangway. It was a long way from the day, eight months earlier, when Lawrence had walked up another naval s.h.i.+p's gangway in Yenbo harbor only to be soundly rebuked for his unkempt uniform and insolent manner.

One measure of how greatly his stock had risen in the wake of Aqaba was the mission he was undertaking to Jeddah. In his discussions with Generals Allenby and Clayton, Lawrence had emphatically-and perhaps quite exaggeratedly-told of the abiding esteem with which the Syrians held Faisal ibn Hussein; they saw him as the Arabs' overall military commander, he had explained, and it was under his banner that they would rise in revolt. As with most everything else Lawrence stated in Cairo that July, his superiors had little way of either confirming or refuting this a.s.sertion, it simply becoming part of the narrative of what lay in store once the battle for Syria was joined.

From this, Lawrence saw the opening to go one better: to fully coordinate the joint Arab-British offensive in Syria-and, not coincidentally, to permanently weld the fortunes of the Arab cause to those of the British army-why not place Faisal and his forces directly under Allenby's military command? Lawrence had gained quick approval of this idea in Cairo, but there remained a huge potential roadblock: King Hussein. With his reputation for irascibility, along with his jealous efforts to control the rebel movement, it seemed highly likely the Hejazi king would reject the suggestion out of hand. Then again, he might just listen to Faisal's most trusted British advisor and the "hero of Aqaba." In short order, Lawrence found himself aboard the Dufferin bound for a meeting with Hussein.

But the mission to Jeddah was only the most visible sign of the young captain's new and profound influence over British policy in the region. Behind the scenes, Lawrence had already laid the groundwork for a dramatic restructuring of the British military presence in Arabia, one tailored to his specifications. As he rather immodestly explained in Seven Pillars, he had put the argument to Gilbert Clayton thus: "Aqaba had been taken on my plan by my effort. There was much more I felt inclined to do-and capable of doing-if he thought I had earned the right to be my own master."

During their week together in Cairo, Clayton had agreed to most of his subordinate's suggestions. With the war in the Hejaz essentially over-though the Turks still controlled Medina, they had now lost all offensive capability-the long and futile campaign to block the Hejaz Railway at El Ula could be brought to a merciful end. For the same reason, the main rebel base at Wejh was now to be virtually shuttered, with both its Arab forces and British logistics officers brought up to Aqaba. a.s.suming the role of de facto general, Lawrence plotted out the future deployments of those Arab armies to remain in the Hejaz, and worked up a list of the British army personnel to be retained, rea.s.signed, or let go. Clayton had drawn the line, however, on Lawrence's bold proposal that he be given overall command at Aqaba, pointing out that having a junior officer order about his superiors just wasn't the British way. Instead, they jointly settled on one of Cyril Wilson's deputies, Major Pierce Joyce, for the Aqaba post, an easygoing and unambitious officer unlikely to get in Lawrence's way.

Nothing, however, more exemplified Lawrence's changed status than his reunion with Colonel Wilson in Jeddah. After Lawrence's first visit to Arabia eight months earlier, Wilson had angrily commented to Clayton that the arrogant junior officer "wants kicking, and kicking hard," and had tried to prevent his return to Arabia on even a temporary basis. By July 1917, however, the colonel had come to see Lawrence, now in the process of being promoted to major, as both an ally and probably the most important British field officer operating in the Hejaz.

Just prior to Lawrence's arrival in Jeddah, Wilson had received a memorandum from Clayton outlining the sweeping personnel changes being contemplated for the region, pointedly noting that he had come to these ideas in consultation with Captain Lawrence. This detail made one feature of the memorandum all the more striking: pushed aside was Stewart Newcombe, still the officially designated head of the British military mission to the Hejaz.

Far more than to anyone else, it was to Stewart Newcombe that Lawrence owed his position in the Middle East. But in Lawrence's cold-eyed view, war was war, and whatever sense of grat.i.tude he felt for his mentor couldn't stand in the way of its conduct. Newcombe had endured a contentious tenure in the Hejaz, never quite adjusting to the Arabs' mysterious approach to war-making, and in myriad reports had complained bitterly of their lack of discipline and reliability. As Lawrence explained to Cyril Wilson upon his arrival in Jeddah, it had been decided that Newcombe would now be taken off the front and relegated to a rearguard role, effectively demoted. A surprised Wilson quickly acquiesced.

That same evening, Lawrence and Wilson met with King Hussein. It was Lawrence's first audience with the king, and he found him both charming and personable. That a.s.sessment may have been helped by Hussein's quick acceptance of the proposal to place Faisal and his army under Allenby's direct command.

A very different matter arose the following morning when Hussein summoned Lawrence to his Jeddah palace for a private meeting. With uncharacteristic bluntness, the king brought the conversation to a topic that had become something of a personal obsession: his meetings back in May with Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot.

While the controversy over what had or had not been agreed to at those meetings continued to find small echo in certain branches of the British government, its import had been diminished by the pace and urgency of other events. Surely adding to its waning effect was the polite tone adopted by dissident eyewitnesses like Cyril Wilson, with his couched language alluding to "possible misunderstandings." It was not at all the tone Lawrence would adopt, and what had taken Wilson many discursive pages to relate, he did in less than one: "The main points," he cabled Clayton after his second meeting with Hussein, "are that he had altogether refused to permit any French annexation of Beirut and the Lebanon.... He is extremely pleased to have trapped M. Picot into the admission that France will be satisfied in Syria with the [same] position Great Britain desires in Iraq.... In conclusion the Sherif remarked on the shortness and informality of conversations, the absence of written doc.u.ments and the fact that the only change in the situation caused by the meeting was the French renunciation of the ideas of annexation, permanent occupation, or suzerainty of any part of Syria."

Whether due to its brevity or the new celebrity of its author, within days that report was finding its way onto the desks of the seniormost officials of the British government. It had the effect of instantly resurrecting the debate over Britain's web of conflicting promises in the Middle East-as well as Mark Sykes's singular role in spinning that web.

But Lawrence's mission to Arabia was not quite done. While he was still in Jeddah, word came from Cairo that according to a reliable informant, Lawrence's chief partner in the Aqaba campaign, Auda Abu Tayi, was now secretly negotiating with the Turks to switch sides. Lawrence's immediate reaction was defensive-he suggested that perhaps it was actually a ruse on Auda's part to lull the Turks into inaction-but he evidently had less confidence in that theory than he let on. Within hours, he was on board a s.h.i.+p bound for Aqaba and a face-to-face confrontation with Auda.

Trekking inland on a fast camel, Lawrence found the Howeitat chieftain along with his two chief lieutenants, both also named by the informant as prospective traitors, in a tent outside the village of Guweira. For many hours they pa.s.sed as reunited friends, until Lawrence invited Auda and one of the other conspirators to join him for a walk. Once they were alone, he challenged the two men with what he had been told. "They were anxious to know how I had learnt of their secret dealings," Lawrence recounted, "and how much more I knew. We were on a slippery ledge."

Indeed, a ledge that conceivably could have been fatal for Lawrence. Instead, drawing on his extraordinary skill in knowing how to converse with Arabs in even these minefield circ.u.mstances, he put on an elaborate performance-sympathy, flattery, and ridicule all fused into one-to first disarm and then win the men back to the rebel side. Once returned to Aqaba, Lawrence cabled Cairo that the business with Auda amounted to little more than a misunderstanding, that all was now "absolutely satisfactory."

As Lawrence later admitted, he frequently shaved the facts in what he pa.s.sed on to Cairo about the Arab Revolt and its leaders, but suggested it was really to everyone's benefit. "Since [British] Egypt kept us alive by stinting herself, we must reduce impolitic truth to keep her confident and ourselves a legend. The crowd wanted book-heroes."

And like any good performer, Lawrence gave the crowd what they wanted.

ONCE THE MATTER of his Welsh ancestry got sorted out, William Yale and the British amba.s.sador to the United States settled down to business.

In all likelihood, Yale had rather low expectations of what Cecil Spring-Rice might be able to provide him by way of job prospects. After all, the British already had an extensive intelligence apparatus devoted to the Middle East. But William Yale was canny enough to realize he had something to offer that very few others did: an oil connection. Over the previous four years, he had canva.s.sed vast stretches of Palestine looking for potential oil deposits for Standard Oil of New York. Through office memoranda, he also knew where else across the Ottoman Empire his company had sought or obtained concessions. In the postwar world, who was to know if the occupying power in these regions would recognize the Socony concessions? Certainly if that occupying power had already publicly stated that future oil exploration and extraction was to be regarded as a matter of national security-a power like Great Britain, for instance-it seemed entirely possible it might toss out Socony's claims in favor of development by one of its own national syndicates. If so, having someone on board who had seen the preexisting maps and geological surveys could save a lot of time and trouble.

Whatever the motive, Amba.s.sador Spring-Rice was sufficiently intrigued by his young visitor to ask that Yale drop off at the emba.s.sy a copy of his report on conditions in Syria. This Yale did the very next day, along with a two-page addendum noting the location of all princ.i.p.al German military installations in Jerusalem, with those locations further pinpointed on a map.

If Yale's Syria report had failed to interest American officials, the British reaction was quite different. The amba.s.sador thought enough of it to rush a copy directly to Foreign Secretary Balfour, which drew an equally swift response from London; provided William Yale could obtain a draft waiver from the U.S. War Department, the secret cable instructed, Spring-Rice was to offer the twenty-nine-year-old oilman a lieutenant's commission in the British army, "with view to subsequent employment as intelligence officer to Egypt. His information is sure to be of value. Please take necessary action and wire result."

The required War Department waiver should have been little more than a formality now that the United States and Great Britain were wartime allies. But it was not, it turned out, such a formality in William Yale's case. That's because after languis.h.i.+ng apparently unread at the State Department for over a month, his Syria report had finally landed on the desk of someone intrigued by its contents. That person was a man named Leland Harrison, the special a.s.sistant to the secretary of state, but that t.i.tle didn't begin to convey the actual power he wielded.

The thirty-four-year-old Harrison enjoyed a similar Yankee blueblood background to Yale's. After being educated at Eton and Harvard, he'd joined the U.S. diplomatic corps and held a succession of posts at some of the most important American overseas missions. His swift rise had been cemented when Secretary of State Robert Lansing brought him to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1915, where Harrison quickly gained a reputation as Lansing's most trusted lieutenant.

Both fierce Anglophiles, Lansing and Harrison had shared a deepening disenchantment with Woodrow Wilson's commitment to American neutrality in the war. Another source of Lansing's favor for Harrison was undoubtedly his subordinate's profound sense of discretion. One State Department staffer would say of Leland Harrison that "he was positively the most mysterious and secret man I have ever known.... He was almost a human sphinx, and when he did talk, his voice was so low that I had to strain my ears to catch the words."

Where this became significant was that prior to American entry in the war, Lansing had acted as the leader of a virtual shadow government within the Wilson administration, a secretive cabal that quietly maneuvered for intervention on the side of the Entente. Just how secretive was indicated by Lansing's creation of something called the Bureau of Secret Intelligence in 1916. In hopes of uncovering evidence of German treachery that would make the argument for intervention irresistible, the bureau's special agents spied on diplomats and businessmen from the Central Powers residing in the United States, an activity that obviously undercut Wilson's public vow of impartiality and would have infuriated other branches of government had they been told. But they weren't told. Instead, Lansing had used State Department discretionary funds to create the bureau, enabling it to operate without the approval or even the knowledge of Congress or most of the rest of Wilson's cabinet. Pulling Leland Harrison from the Latin American division, Lansing had placed his young protege in charge of this "extra-legal" new office, tasked to overseeing "the collection and examination of all information of a secret nature."

While this element of conspiracy within the State Department had been somewhat mooted by American entry into the war, it provided Harrison with a precedent when, upon reading William Yale's Syria report, it occurred to him that it might be very useful for the United States to have its own source of intelligence in the Middle East. The snag was that such an enterprise fell out of the purview of the existing domestic intelligence agencies and, with the United States not at war with Turkey, beyond the scope of the army intelligence division as well. The solution was to bring Yale in under the umbrella of the Bureau of Secret Intelligence; to that end, he was summoned to the State Department in early August.

At that meeting, Harrison put forward a remarkable proposition: Yale would return to the Middle East as a "special agent" for the State Department. At a salary of $2,000 a year plus expenses, his mission would be to monitor and report on whatever was happening that might be of interest to the American government-or, perhaps more accurately, of interest to Leland Harrison. From his base in Cairo, Yale would send weekly dispatches through the American emba.s.sy's diplomatic pouch to Was.h.i.+ngton, where they would be routed exclusively to Harrison's attention. Unsurprisingly, Yale quickly accepted the offer. On August 14, and under Secretary Lansing's signature, he was named the State Department's special agent for the Middle East.

After a brief trip home to see his family in Alder Creek, on August 29 Yale boarded USS New York in New York harbor for another transatlantic crossing. En route to Cairo, he was to stop off in London and Paris to take a sounding of those British and French officials most directly involved with Middle Eastern affairs. As Harrison cabled to the American amba.s.sador in London, "[Yale] is to keep us informed of the Near Eastern situation and, should the occasion arise, may be sent on trips for special investigation work. He is favorably known to the British authorities, who offered him a commission. Please do what you can to put him in touch with the right authorities."

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to fully grasp the utter provincialism of the United States as it entered World War I in 1917. Not only was its standing army one-twentieth the size of Germany's, but it was dwarfed in size by even some of Europe's smallest actors, including Romania, Bulgaria, and Portugal. In 1917, the entire Was.h.i.+ngton headquarters staff of the State Department fit into one wing of a six-story building adjacent to the White House, a structure it shared with the command staff of both the Departments of Navy and Army.

Those examples notwithstanding, perhaps more remarkable is this: for most of the remainder of the war, the American intelligence mission in the Middle East-a mission that would include the a.n.a.lysis of battlefield strategies and regional political currents, the interviewing of future heads of state, and the gathering of secrets against governments both friendly and hostile-would be conducted by a single twenty-nine-year-old man with no military, diplomatic, or intelligence training. To these deficiencies, William Yale could actually think of a few more: "I lacked a historical knowledge of the background of the problems I was studying. I had no philosophy of history, no method of interpretation, and very little understanding of the fundamental nature and function of the [regional] economic and social system."

Not that any of this caused him undue anxiety. An exemplar of the American can-do spirit, William Yale also held to the belief, quite common among his countrymen, that ignorance and lack of experience could actually bestow an advantage, might serve as the wellspring for "originality and boldness." If so, he promised to be a formidable force in the Middle East.

AARON AARONSOHN AND T. E. Lawrence had first crossed paths on February 1, 1917. That encounter made little impression on either man, save a quick note in Aaronsohn's diary that he'd found Captain "Laurens" knowledgeable but conceited. Their next meeting, on August 12 of that year, was one both would remember for a long time. In the interim, each had become a personality to reckon with in Cairo, Lawrence for his exploits in Arabia, Aaronsohn for his contribution to the British war effort through his NILI spy ring. Of course, both had also gained reputations for being outspoken in their views on the future of the Middle East. Their talk at the Arab Bureau offices quickly degenerated into mutual hostility.

Lawrence may have been alerted to the tone their conversation would take by an incendiary paper Aaronsohn had penned a few weeks earlier. By August 1917, with the specter of official British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine inching closer to reality, even the more radical leaders of international Zionism had adopted the soothing language of conciliation: whatever the future political framework in Palestine, they stressed, the Jews would live in peaceful coexistence with their Arab and Christian neighbors, the fight against Turkish oppression a cause they all shared.

No such placating words were forthcoming from Aaron Aaronsohn. In his position paper, soon to be excerpted in the Arab Bulletin, the agronomist inveighed against the "squalid, superst.i.tious, ignorant" Palestinian serfs known as the fellaheen, freely acknowledged that at times they had been forcibly removed from the land by Jewish settlers-and would be again if he had his way. As to the accusation that Jews kept themselves apart from their Arab neighbors, Aaronsohn not only confirmed the charge, but wrote, "We are glad of it. From national, cultural, educational, technical and mere hygienic points of view, this policy has had to be strictly adhered to; otherwise the whole Jewish Renaissance movement would fail." As a cautionary tale, he pointed to the alleged educational shortcomings in the a.s.similationist Jewish settlement of Rosh Pinah, which he attributed to the "unavoidably degrading effect that continued contact with the uneducated fellaheen had on the Jewish youth."

Surely most upsetting to the mainstream Zionist leaders and their British supporters, however, were his comments on the Arab Revolt. In paving the way for official support for a Jewish homeland, and in antic.i.p.ation of Arab resistance to the idea, British officials from Mark Sykes on down had been energetically coaxing the Zionists to voice their solidarity with the Arab cause. Chaim Weizmann had led this chorus from London, but in Cairo, no one had given Aaronsohn the playsheet.

"[The Palestinian Jews] have no interest, and still less confidence, in the Arab Revolt," he wrote. "They are not in a position to take up arms against the Turk, and they would hesitate to join the Arabs, even if they were in a position to do it. So far as we know the Arabs, the man among them who will withstand a bribe is still to be born.... In order to help to defeat the Turk, [the Jews] will readily join the British forces, but it is doubtful whether they will ever trust the Arabs."

Hardly words to delight T. E. Lawrence, the self-appointed defender of that revolt in the West, but at their meeting, Aaronsohn seemed almost to go out of his way to provoke Lawrence further. The ultimate future of Palestine, he explained, was not a British protectorate in which a Jewish minority would be protected, but a de facto Jewish nation. This would be achieved both politically and economically, with Zionists simply buying up all the land between Gaza and Haifa and forcing the fellaheen from the land. Lawrence's response was equally blunt. The Jews in Palestine had two choices, he told the agronomist: either coexist with the Arab majority or see their throats cut.

"It was an interview without any evidence of friendliness," Aaronsohn noted in his diary with considerable understatement. "Lawrence had too much success at too early an age. He has a very high estimation of himself. He is lecturing me on our colonies, on the spirit of the people, on the feelings of the Arabs, and we would do well in being a.s.similated by them, etc. While listening to him I could almost imagine that I was attending the lecture of a Prussian scientific anti-Semite expressing himself in English.... He is openly against us. He must be of missionary stock."

But Lawrence was only the latest addition to the roster of people irritating Aaron Aaronsohn just then. Despite the peacemaking efforts of various British officers, a three-month-old feud with the anti-Zionist Jewish Committee in Alexandria raged unabated, and the agronomist was still being virtually ignored by Chaim Weizmann's Zionist Federation in London. So infuriated was Aaronsohn at the lack of respect being shown him from London that just days after his encounter with Lawrence, he wrote two long letters to Weizmann complaining of his treatment and, once again, threatening to disband NILI. When he repeated this threat to Reginald Wingate, it sparked another worried cable to the Foreign Office.

"It might help matters if Mr. Aaronsohn were to receive without delay the support for which he has asked," Wingate wrote Secretary Balfour on August 20. "An additional reason for not alienating him, and one which may perhaps appeal to you, is that the military authorities attach importance to retaining the use of the organization which he has created in Palestine. He is in a position to destroy this organization, and there is little doubt that, in his present frame of mind, he will be tempted to do so unless some concession is made to his views. How far his difference with the Zionists in England is due to questions of principle and how far to wounded susceptibilities I am unable to tell."

Shortly afterward, while riding his bicycle through the streets of Cairo one evening, Aaronsohn came up with a new idea: if the British Zionists wouldn't clarify matters with him, then he would go to Britain and force them to. When he put this plan to his British handlers, they readily concurred, no doubt relieved at the prospect of placing some distance between the NILI network and its potentially destructive creator. On September 13, Aaronsohn left Egypt bound for Ma.r.s.eilles.

But consumed by his myriad squabbles, as well as his need for recognition, it seems to have only fitfully occurred to the scientist that he was engaging in extremely risky behavior for someone who headed a clandestine spy ring. He also appeared to have quite forgotten the cover story designed to keep his family and coconspirators in Palestine safe, that as far as Ottoman authorities knew, he'd been lifted off a boat en route to the United States and was presumably cooling his heels in a British internment camp. Instead, Aaronsohn's name had now appeared in an array of official reports circulating between Cairo, London, and Paris. Worse, through both his dealings with British officials in Cairo and his continuing spat with the Jewish Committee in Alexandria, an ever-growing circle of people in Egypt were aware of NILI's existence. Even if none of these would deliberately harm the spy ring, how much longer before word of it finally reached Berlin or Constantinople?

Certainly, Aaron Aaronsohn's own family hadn't helped matters. During his New York exile, his younger brother Alex had written of his escape from Turkey in an article for the Atlantic Monthly magazine; by August 1917, that article had been converted into a book, With the Turks in Palestine, which was now available in Cairo bookstores. Among Jewish settlements in Palestine, it was now an open secret that some sort of intelligence network was operating out of Athlit-and Sarah Aaronsohn's very conspicuous travels in the region gave many a good idea of exactly who was involved. Indeed, in July a delegation of Palestinian Jewish leaders had called on Sarah to demand she immediately stop her "activities," an ultimatum she had angrily spurned.

But if only because they were supposed to be professionals at such things, by far the greatest blame for the situation attached to those British officials tasked to manage the spy ring. Their cavalier manner bordered on the criminal. It was they who had come up with the idea of using the NILI network to distribute both British propaganda materials and relief funds for Jewish refugees, and while Aaronsohn had ultimately vetoed the first proposal, he had relented on the latter. As a result, when the first installment of aid went ash.o.r.e at Athlit in mid-July in the form of gold sovereign coins, NILI operatives were no longer just exporters of intelligence but now importers of contraband gold, doubling their risk of detection. Most astounding of all, the British had repeatedly violated the most basic rule of running spies, which is to make sure one cell has no contact with another. By August 1917, the once-small fleet of spy s.h.i.+ps operating out of Port Said had been steadily whittled down to the point where a single vessel, the Managem, was now conducting all missions. Out of necessity, this meant the Managem was transporting operatives of Britain's different intelligence networks in Palestine on the same voyages, neatly ensuring that if one spy was caught or defected, he or she was in a position to unmask everyone else.

Ultimately, it all spoke to the same personality flaw that had plagued the British in their war against the Turks from the outset, one shared in this instance by the Aaronsohns: hubris, contempt for one's enemy. And just as had occurred so many times since 1914, they would all soon have reason to regret it. On September 13, the same day Aaronsohn set sail for Europe, Turkish authorities in Palestine caught their first NILI spy.

IT WAS THE SORT of store-clerk work Lawrence enjoyed the least. By late August, the process of converting Aqaba from a sleepy fis.h.i.+ng port into the forward staging ground for the Arab Revolt was well under way, with a daily stream of British s.h.i.+ps disgorging mountains of supplies. Those s.h.i.+ps also brought in thousands of fighters-Muslim recruits from Egypt, Arab warriors from Faisal's old base at Wejh-where they were joined by a surge of new tribal recruits coming in from the surrounding mountains. Since his return from Cairo on August 17, Lawrence's days in Aqaba had been spent dealing with the inevitable logistical foul-ups, and in trying to help bring some degree of order to the place. But perhaps such mundane duties helped distract from the larger problems at hand, for already the heady optimism and accelerated plans sparked by Aqaba's capture six weeks earlier had become a thing of the past.

As might have been foreseen, General Allenby's ambitious goal of launching his Palestine offensive by mid-September had been pushed back due to a host of delays in getting his army fully reequipped; planners in Cairo were now talking of a launch date no earlier than late October. Which maybe was just as well from Lawrence's perspective, since the Arabs were woefully unprepared too.

At the same time, Lawrence was living the old proverb of success having a thousand fathers. Exacerbated by its proximity to Cairo, Aqaba was now plagued by that most noxious of bureaucratic envoys, the advisor, each determined to prove his worth by coming up with his own list of dubious recommendations. In late August, a newly arrived intelligence officer, taken aback by the lack of professionalism among the Arab troops, urged on Cairo the immediate dispatch of the Imperial Camel Corps, an elite British camel cavalry force. Lawrence was forced to take time from his other duties to undermine the plan. "One squabble between a [Camel Corps] trooper and an Arab," he wrote Clayton on August 27, "or an incident with Bedouin women, would bring on general hostilities." Politic enough to concede some of the intelligence officer's other points, he closed on a dismissive note. "I don't think that any [report] of the Arab situation will be of much use to you unless its author can see for himself the difference between a national rising and a [military] campaign."

Coincidentally, when Clayton received that note, he was already considering doing a little field research of his own. On September 1, he arrived in Aqaba from Cairo, marking his first visit to the war front that had consumed his energies for over a year.

As always, it seemed the general had something of a hidden agenda to his visit. Over a month earlier, he'd received a curious letter from Mark Sykes in London. Clayton had seen no reason to share its contents with Lawrence during his subordinate's recent stay in Cairo-the two had been in daily contact at the Arab Bureau throughout the second week of August-but for reasons known only to him, he had brought the letter to Aqaba for that purpose.

When Sykes had returned to London from his Middle East sojourn that summer, it had been to a radically altered political landscape. As Entente leaders were learning to their shock and dismay, President Woodrow Wilson's talk about making "the world safe for democracy" had been more than just sanctimonious rhetoric; the price for American intervention in the war was to be self-determination for oppressed peoples, and the annulment of the maze of secret pacts between governments-in effect, the beginning of the end of the imperial era. It was a measure of just how desperate Great Britain and France had become-between them, they had suffered some five million casualties in three years of war-that formerly voraciously acquisitive politicians in both capitals were now scrambling to learn the strange vocabulary of "non-annexation" and "autonomy."

Few were more adroit at executing this about-face than Mark Sykes. With astonis.h.i.+ng speed, the politician had refas.h.i.+oned himself an enlightened postimperial statesman, a champion of self-determination. The best course in the Middle East, Sykes now argued, was for both Britain and France to renounce any imperialist claims whatsoever, since it was clear, as he informed Gilbert Clayton in his letter of July 22, that "colonialism is madness." In its place, what he envisioned was a kind of political finis.h.i.+ng school administered by the Western powers, a period in which the benighted races of the Middle East might be instructed in Western values and systems and then sent on their merry way. Lest anyone find all this jarring coming from the coauthor of the most infamous imperial pact in modern history, Sykes had a handy solution; as he advised the War Cabinet in mid-July, henceforth all references to the Sykes-Picot Agreement should be discarded in favor of "the Anglo-French-Arab Agreement."

Not everyone was impressed by Sykes's new incarnation. Over time, a growing consensus in the Foreign Office leaders.h.i.+p held that Britain had cut a very bad deal in Sykes-Picot, and blame had naturally affixed to its poorly supervised coauthor; as War Cabinet member George Curzon commented, "[Sykes] appears to think that the way to get rid of suspicion is always to recognize what the other party claims and to give up, when asked, our claims." Confidence in Sykes was further eroded by the continuing controversy over his and Picot's purported accord with King Hussein in May, and by his leaders.h.i.+p role in promulgating the sacking-of-Jaffa story, now viewed by many as a backdoor scheme to prod the government into fully supporting the Zionist camp. Matters came to a head in early July when Arthur Nicolson, the under secretary of state for foreign affairs, had sought to unravel for the War Cabinet precisely what other commitments the government had made in the Middle East over the previous two years, and how those might square with its promises to King Hussein. All but calling Sykes a liar-"it is a little difficult to be sure that the papers in the Department represent the whole of what actually pa.s.sed"-Nicolson urged that "the opinion of Sir Mark Sykes should be invited before the matter is pursued further, as he alone will be able to state with authority how far any evasion or modification of our engagements to [Hussein] are likely to be resented by Arab opinion."

In the face of such criticism, Sykes a.s.sumed a petulant, defensive crouch. Curiously, he also focused on a particular junior British army officer as a source of his troubles: Captain T. E. Lawrence. In a self-pitying note to Secretary Balfour's secretary on July 20, Sykes presented his two years of toil on Middle Eastern affairs as an exercise in thankless self-sacrifice. "Hitherto the work has been fairly successful, but I have had to contend, as you know, with many difficulties: the prejudices of the past both British and French, the mutual suspicions and susceptibilities of out-of-date minds, the anti-British policy of Bremond, the anti-French att.i.tude of Lawrence."

But perhaps this focus wasn't so curious after all. Only a handful of people grasped the full tapestry of contradictions and half-truths Sykes had woven in the Middle East, but most of these-men like Gilbert Clayton and Reginald Wingate-were too much servants of the system to ever fully confront him; if things did blow up, they would keep their grumbling to a minimum and look for ways to muddle through. But then there was Lawrence, the nonclub member who wouldn't hesitate in shaming Sykes if given the platform-and in the wake of his triumph at Aqaba, he increasingly had that platform.

In addition, Lawrence now had the ability to seriously damage the diplomatic framework Sykes had spent two years building. Imperfect though it was, it protected British interests in the region while giving a little bit of something to most everyone else. Now, with Lawrence's de facto military alliance with Allenby joined to his long-standing determination to wrest Syria from France, and quite suddenly the little captain was elevated from nuisance to formidable threat. It was apparently in hopes of neutralizing that threat, through both flattery and thinly veiled condescension, that Sykes devoted a portion of his July 22 letter to Clayton. It was that same letter Clayton brought with him to Aqaba to show Lawrence.

"Lawrence's move is splendid and I want him knighted," Sykes had written in reference to Aqaba's capture. "Tell him [that] now that he is a great man he must behave as such and be broad in his views. Ten years' tutelage under the Entente and the Arabs will be a nation. Complete independence [now] means Persia, poverty and chaos. Let him consider this, as he hopes for the people he is fighting for."

Combined with all he knew of Sykes's past machinations, and coming so close on the heels of his confrontation with Aaronsohn in Cairo, Lawrence could not stomach the letter's patronizing tone. Perhaps also it touched a chord of ego; if not a "great man," Lawrence was now most certainly his own, and he wasn't about to be dictated to by Mark Sykes. In a scathing seven-page letter to the politician, couched as an earnest request for guidance, he methodically held up each of Sykes's schemes to scrutiny before exposing their gaping holes: "What have you promised the Zionists, and what is their programme? I saw Aaronsohn in Cairo, and he said at once the Jews intended to acquire the land-rights of all Palestine from Gaza to Haifa, and have practical autonomy within. Is this acquisition to be by fair purchase or by forced sale and expropriation? ... Do the Jews propose the complete expulsion of the Arab peasantry, or their reduction to a day-labourer cla.s.s?"

He then turned to the matter of French "help" to the Arabs in developing Syria, the canard that Sykes had tried to foist on Hussein at Jeddah. "The Arabs can put their revolt through without French help, and therefore are disinclined to pay a price only to be made known to them in the future.... The Sherif will succeed, given time and a continuance of our help, [and] he will take by his own efforts (don't a.s.sume virtue for the mules and cartridges we supply him; the hands and heads are his) the sphere we allotted to our foreign-advised 'independent Syria,' and will expect to keep it without imposed foreign advisors. As he takes this sphere of his, he will also take parts of the other spheres not properly allotted to an Arab state [under Sykes-Picot]. His t.i.tle to them will be a fairly strong one-that of conquest by means of the local inhabitants-and what are the two Powers going to do about it?"

At the letter's close, Lawrence a.s.sumed a slightly more conciliatory tone, recognizing the realpolitik reality that "we may have to sell our small friends in pay for our big friends," but pointed out that, contrary to Sykes's perpetually sunny p.r.o.nouncements, "we are in rather a hole. Please tell me what, in your opinion, are the actual measures by which we will find a way out?"

The letter was perhaps the most searing indictment ever penned of Sykes's actions in the Middle East, but it was one the politician would never see. On September 7, with Clayton having returned to Cairo from his Aqaba visit, Lawrence routed the letter through his office for onward transmission to London; upon reading its contents, however, Clayton thought better of it. As he explained in a note to Lawrence, he didn't wish to provide Sykes with anything that "may raise him to activity," especially now that the increasingly discredited Sykes-Picot Agreement seemed headed for oblivion. "It is in fact dead," Clayton wrote, "and if we wait quietly, this fact will soon be realized. It was never a very workable instrument and it is now almost a lifeless monument."

In this appraisal, Gilbert Clayton couldn't have been more wrong, but Lawrence wasn't in a position to argue the point. In what was becoming something of a pattern between them, by the time Clayton sent his note, Lawrence had already set off for the interior and a new strike against the Turks.

WILLIAM YALE FIRST sensed something amiss when, checking into London's Savoy Hotel on September 7, he noticed the abundance of "painted ladies" circulating through its lobby. As he sadly noted in his diary the following day, it appeared the once-grand old hotel had become "to all intents and purposes a house of a.s.signation."

The puritanical Yale had little time to dwell on the squalidness of his surroundings, however, for he was to stay very busy in London. Through Leland Harrison's helpful cable to the American amba.s.sador, the new special agent gained quick entree to many of the top British officials involved in Middle Eastern affairs. Amid these meetings, Yale was flattered to discover that his Syria report had been hailed as one of the most incisive doc.u.ments to emerge from that vital corner of enemy territory, circulated and studied at some of the highest levels of the British political and military leaders.h.i.+p; he was happy to meet with debriefers from various intelligence units, and to provide them with whatever further details he could.

Rather soon, though, Yale's attention turned away from trying to gain a broad view of the Middle Eastern situation-from his own experience in the region, he knew that any truly useful insights were likely to be found in Cairo-and toward a particular aspect of it: the British government's growing flirtation with the Jewish Zionist community.

His curiosity was piqued by a peculiar story circulating in British newspapers that told of an unnamed Jewish chemist who had supposedly given the government "certain secrets" pertaining to the manufacture of explosives. "This Jewish chemist," Yale wrote in his diary on September 12, "who, when asked what reward he desired, replied that personally he wished nothing, but that he was a Jew and that he wished that in a Peace Conference the Allies would give special consideration to the question of the Jews in Palestine." According to the newspaper accounts, the British government had secretly promised the scientist to do so.

Even if Yale didn't yet have the name of the chemist-it was Chaim Weizmann, of course-what he found intriguing was that the government had made no public attempt to deny or diminish the account, which strongly suggested it was true. Over his next week in London, the new American intelligence operative sounded out an array of officials on just what British policy might be in regard to the Jews in Palestine, only to receive an array of conflicting responses.