It must have been very bewildering for his friends and family. Yet he possessed an infinite charm and often revealed a warm nature which made it easy for his friends to overlook his eccentricities. Many, then and later, wondered whether he had ever really outgrown his schooldays.
PART TWO
INTELLIGENCE OFFICER
December 1914–June 1916
I
War and Duty
‘It promises to be good fun’ was Lawrence’s reaction to his first few days on the staff of the intelligence section at General Headquarters in Cairo. Rooms at the Savoy Hotel had been commandeered for offices and were being filled by a company of regular soldiers, exconsuls, travellers, a former journalist and archaeologists like Lawrence. All knew something about the Middle East, its peoples, politics, economy, topography and languages. Rich in ideas and experience, the band of professionals and amateurs was commanded by two capable officers, Colonel Gilbert (‘Bertie’) Clayton, the Director of Intelligence, and his assistant, Major Newcombe.
Lawrence was doubly fortunate since both were highly intelligent, flexible–minded officers who came to respect his talents and overlook his quirkiness. Newcombe was already known to him from the Sinai survey earlier in the year and, as the war progressed, their friendship deepened through a shared loathing for the Turks and a common sympathy for the Arab cause. Lawrence was further blessed with a sympathetic commanding officer. Thirteen years Lawrence’s senior, Clayton was an imaginative soldier whose charm, sound sense and cleverness impressed all who worked with him. Lawrence recalled him as ‘a man with whom independent men could bear’ for his mind was open to unorthodox ideas and he was never a stickler for those niceties of military decorum which Lawrence overlooked. In time, the men became friends and Lawrence visited Clayton’s house, where his willingness to play won him the affection of Clayton’s young family. Their parents sometimes found his antiauthoritarian postures too much, but Mrs Clayton was always firm. Lawrence took her reprimands like a chastened schoolboy.1
Clayton was a professional intelligence officer who, before the war, had managed the internal security section of the British-controlled Egyptian army. He also represented the interests of the Governor–General of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate, and confidentially reported Egyptian affairs to him. Ability and experience made Clayton the natural choice to take charge of all the army’s intelligence services under the local commander, General Sir John (‘Conkie’) Maxwell. Clayton was indispensable to Maxwell and his successors, Generals Sir Archibald Murray and Sir Edmund Allenby. By 1916, Clayton had been promoted to brigadier-general and Lawrence sensed the quiet power of his hidden hand. Clayton, he wrote later, ‘was like water, or permeating oil, creeping silently and insistently through everything.... He never visibly led; but his ideas were abreast of those who did.’ Clayton prevailed because he was a permanent official whose breadth of local knowledge was wider than that of the transitory generals and proconsuls he served. For Lawrence, Clayton was an influential patron and useful ally, the more so since the junior officer accepted many of the assumptions and doctrines of his superior.
The web of personal connections and competing influences which enmeshed the rulers of the British empire, the inner mysteries of intelligence and the high priests who presided over them were scarcely known to Lawrence in 1914. His ignorance was such that with greenhorn brashness he assured Hogarth that before his and his brother officers’ irruption into the Savoy Hotel, ‘There wasn’t an intelligence department ... and they thought that all was well without it.’ This was nonsense. The department was over six weeks old when Lawrence arrived and already had agents in the field in Palestine and Syria.2 Nevertheless, Lawrence could have been forgiven his innocence in such matters. Intelligence-gathering bureaucracies were still a novelty in Britain, where MI5 and MI6 were in their infancy, the offspring of pre–war spy scares and the need to have skeletal organisations in readiness for a war against Germany.
They ordered things differently in Egypt. There, as in India, the smooth operation of imperial government demanded far-reaching and omniscient intelligence agencies. Lawrence was soon aware of this need. In the streets he was conscious of ‘the most burning dislike’ of the Cairenes for their British masters. He wore the uniform of an alien power which had deposed the Khedive Abbas Hilmi, replaced him with a puppet, and dragged Egypt into the war against her people’s will. On his desk he saw intelligence reports which revealed that Turkish and German officers in Syria confidently predicted that the Egyptians would turn on their overlords the moment the first Ottoman soldier appeared on the banks of the Suez Canal. Turco-German agents encouraged Egyptian nationalist revolutionaries, ran a network of saboteurs and paid tale–bearers who spread inflammatory rumours in the streets and bazaars. Clayton’s secret war against subversion was unending, but he was always a move ahead of his adversaries. Yet in the spring of 1916 he still feared that the enemy’s underground was strong and capable of stirring up revolutionary disorders of the kind which had just been seen in Ireland.3 Lawrence played no part in counter–subversionary activities, although he was intrigued and amused by the backstairs entries and exits of Clayton’s informers, who came to the Savoy Hotel to trade revelations of anti-British plots for cash.
‘Our Intelligence,’ Lawrence boasted to Hogarth, ‘has a capital “I”, and is a very superior sort of thing.’ He was attached for general duties to Cairo’s Section 1a, which was run by Newcombe and was solely concerned with information about the enemy; spy–catching and sniffing out subversion was 1b’s responsibility. Lawrence’s unit existed to tell those who shaped strategy and commanded armies what they needed to know about the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. Lawrence’s duties were cynically summed up by another intelligence officer, Compton Mackenzie, in his novel Extremes Meet (1928):
A good agent tells you that a lack of coffee and contraceptives among the Turks will make them sue for peace in less than a month. The fighting arms ... are always thirsting for an intellectual tonic. That is what the secret service is intended to provide. That, and a little mild mental recreation from the stern realities of war.
There was much truth in this. Arab, Greek, Armenian and Jewish field agents, all animated by a passionate hatred for the Turks, never missed a chance to relay information which suggested that their enemies were in deep trouble. This was what they wanted to believe. It was also, they thought, what their controllers liked to hear and so intelligence assessments were often unrealistically optimistic.
Intelligence officers like Lawrence were assigned to collect information from every available source, including spies, assess it and compile reports which were circulated to those for whom it would be useful. Recipients of Cairo’s analyses included Lieutenant-General Sir George Macdonogh, who was Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office, General Maxwell and his staff, the British High Commission in Egypt, the Admiralty and the Foreign Office. As the scope of the war widened, Cairo circulated its reports to commanders in the Western Desert, Iraq; the Dardanelles and Salonika, and to Major Marsh, the British intelligence officer attached to Russian forces on the Caucasus front.
Lawrence’s department quickly expanded. A special unit, commanded by Kitchener’s nephew, Colonel A.C.Parker, was based at Ismailia to handle the canal sector and Sinai. By January 1915, the Athens bureau had been set up in neutral Greece under ‘R’ (Major Louis Samson, a former consul in Adrianople), to which Compton Mackenzie of Naval Intelligence was attached. The breaking of German wireless codes required new specialist sections to man listening stations in Egypt and Cyprus, which were set up in March 1916. These in turn grew when, in October 1916, Turkish codes had been cracked. By the end of the war, Cairo’s Military Intelligence had a staff of over 700.4
Other intelligence agencies flourished alongside the army’s. The British High Commission had its own intelligence department which ran a network of native spies, some of whom were giving the army information on gun-runners during the 19
15-16 campaign in the Western Desert. The Royal Navy had its own Middle East intelligence section under the Commander-in-Chief East Indies which ran its own agents and was responsible for landing them and the army’s agents on the Palestinian and Lebanese coastlines. In January 1915, when Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, passed control of naval operations in Syrian waters to the local French commander, Admiral D’Artigi de Fourneir, a special French intelligence unit came into being. In October 1915, the French occupied Arwad Island, a mile off Tripoli, which became the forward base for the Agence des Affaires de Syrie. Like the British, the French were busy creating a network of spies, recruited largely from Lebanese and Armenian exiles, who were regularly put ashore and picked up by warships.5
Second-Lieutenant Lawrence was, therefore, part of a machine whose several working parts were expected to function in harmony, each backing and helping the other. In terms of his immediate duties, Lawrence was throughout 1915 a jack-of-all-trades in intelligence. His time and his talents were disposed wherever Newcombe needed them. Most of his assignments were humdrum and boredom came easily, as he told his family in June:
I got a letter yesterday asking for more details of what I am doing. Well, drawing, and overseeing the drawing of maps: overseeing printing and packing of the same: sitting in an office coding and decoding telegrams, interviewing prisoners, writing reports, and giving information from 9a.m. till 7p.m. After that feed and read, and then go to bed. I’m sick of pens, ink and paper: and have no wish to send off another telegram.
Lawrence’s brief experience with Newcombe’s survey party had marked him out for duties with the cartographic section under Commander L.B. Weldon, a professional surveyor who had worked in Sinai. Less than a month after Lawrence’s arrival in Cairo, Newcombe detached Weldon for propaganda work with the Arabs of northern Sinai. He was also attached as a liaison officer to the Anne Rickmers, a captured German merchantman turned seaplane-carrier from which reconnaissance and surveying flights were made over Palestine and Syria. It may have been at Weldon’s suggestion that Lawrence made a survey flight over Sinai in one of these machines, probably a Henri Farman on loan from the French.6 (Lawrence seems to have made no impression on Weldon, who did not mention him in his account of his adventures, ‘Hard Lying’: The Eastern Mediterranean, 1914-1919 (1925).) While Weldon had an exciting time at sea, Lawrence was left in uneasy harness with the professional map-makers of the Egyptian Government Survey under Ernest Dowson. Together they had to draw accurate charts of Sinai, of the Dardanelles hinterland and of Syria.
Production was marked by a series of squabbles. Lawrence’s tactless suggestion that he alone knew the correct way of rendering Arabic place-names into English and his advice on how they could best do their jobs tried the patience of his colleagues. Dowson remembered the interloper’s flippancy. Some maps of Cilicia were found to lack indications of high ground, and Lawrence, when asked what ought to be done, answered, ‘Oh, do let us have some hills. It would be such fun to have some hills.’ The amendments were catastrophic. Such whimsies and the demands of the Gallipoli campaign hindered production of the Sinai maps. When, in the summer of 1916, General Murray was planning his advance into that region, he complained, ‘I am surprisingly short of topographical information.’ A systematic aerial survey had to be made hurriedly by the Royal Flying Corps and Murray had to get a map of Aqaba from the Royal Navy, which confounds theories that Lawrence’s visit there in January 1914 had been to draw a map for Military Intelligence.7
When Lawrence was not overseeing the making and distribution of maps, he was busy gathering, sorting and collating information about the enemy. This was published in a daily mimeographed bulletin which was edited by Newcombe. From April 1915, he alternated with his brother officers, M.S. MacDonnell, Philip Graves and Kinahan Cornwallis, as a stand-in editor when Newcombe was away. What he put together was a ragbag of intelligence material made up of statistics, memoranda, background surveys and analyses and snippets of information from every conceivable source, reliable or not.
Lawrence’s own contributions included pieces on the condition and deployment of Turkish army units. Overall responsibility for the regular reports on the Turkish army had rested since November 1914 with Philip Graves, a butterfly collector who had travelled extensively in the Middle East and had been The Times correspondent in Turkey. His first report opened with a diffidence rare among his colleagues, for he cautioned readers that it was the work of an author ‘whose only military knowledge is derived from reading and service in public school and later University Volunteer Corps’.8 Graves had, in fact, seen the Turkish army in action during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and soon became a master in his field.
Graves’s authoritative articles on the Turkish army appeared in the bulletin under his own name. Other contributions were usually anonymous, although Newcombe’s survey of the hostile Beduin sheiks of Sinai, which was based on his own experience and the reports of a spy, was signed.9 Lawrence’s specialism was the people and topography of Syria and he claimed that his knowledge was unequalled, or so he later told Robert Graves (who was Philip’s younger half-brother). Syrian notes updating the 1911 official army handbook of the region appeared regularly and may well have been processed by Lawrence. Certainly much raw intelligence out of Syria was coming his way and he mentioned it in his letters home. His parents, who were familiar with pre-war Syria from their son’s exhaustive letters, learned during 1915 about shortages of sugar and paraffin and the effects of conscription, which had sent many men from the Jerablus district to the Gallipoli front.
In one of his few post-war revelations about this period of his life, Lawrence claimed that he often ornamented his routine reports with vivid asides and sharply drawn vignettes of personalities. This habit irritated some of his superiors, although Sir Mark Sykes at the Foreign Office enjoyed his flourishes and urged his colleagues to read his Hejaz report of January 1917 ‘for the sake of its local colour’.10 Lawrence must therefore have been the author of a piece on men and women of importance in Syria which appeared, unsigned, in GHQ Cairo’s Intelligence Bulletin in August 1915.11 Herr Foellner, the local director of the Berlin-Baghdad railway, was rendered as a ‘pale, fish-like man, very timid and crooked in his ways’. The portrait of Madame Koch, an amateur archaeologist and collector of antiquities who had crossed Lawrence’s path in 1912, ended with a comment that she fancied herself as the mistress of a salon. To this end, ‘Her daughters helped her greatly for a time, but one got married suddenly, and the other one is plain.’ Lawrence was also fond of historical analogies and so tribal sheiks would be likened to medieval German robber barons, which was probably an exact comparison.
Lawrence handled raw material which had come from spies. During November 1914, Clayton had hired agents who crossed Sinai into Turkish territory and found out what they could about garrison strengths, troop movements and the location of German officers, who were regarded by the British as the mainstays of the Turkish army. One spy, sent into southern Palestine on 1 November, returned with vivid details which suggested that he had studied his quarry at close quarters. ‘Many [Turkish infantrymen] had not changed their underclothes for the last two months or more,’ he reported. ‘They are in a filthy state and stink badly when they march in a strut.’12
However unwholesome, these men were expected to attack the canal, and so the network of agents in Palestine and Syria had to be extended in order to discover as much as possible about the projected invasion. On his arrival, Newcombe had taken charge of the recruitment of agents and ran what Lawrence called ‘a gang of most offensive spies’. They included ‘Egyptian Boy’, who kept an eye on anti-British Egyptian exiles in Damascus, and a resourceful Lebanese commercial traveller, Serkis Awad. He watched and listened during his business trips and mixed in the same circles as Jamal Pasha, the Governor of Syria.13 Agent ‘Maurice’, a wealthy Damascene, also had influential contacts among senior Turkish officials which enabled him to travel to Athens and neutral S
witzerland where, in December 1916, he was keeping the deposed Khedive Abbas Hilmi and his French mistress under surveillance.14
Venal neutrals were tempted into British service by the sovereigns doled out in the Savoy Hotel. Among them were hashish smugglers, professionally adept at dodging the authorities and disregarding frontiers. They were hired to discover the whereabouts of Austrian and German U-boats, which they did at the same time as running fuel and victuals to them in return for German cash. Early in 1915 GHQ intelligence in Cairo boasted that it had recruited the entire eastern Mediterranean dope–peddling community, although a year later a few were taking German fees in return for laying mines on roads near the Canal.15 Private Rolls met one of these characters, Ali the Smuggler, in the Western Desert. ‘All our agents,’ he found, ‘were low characters from the mingled fringes of East and West,’ since ‘Arabs look upon spying as a dirty trade, especially on their own race in the interests of aliens.’16
Lawrence not only handled information collected by such men; he was, at least once, responsible for the recruitment of a spy. The agent in question, Charles Boutargy, an Armenian refugee from Haifa, recalled being passed to Lawrence after applying to Clayton for an interpreter’s job early in 1915.17 Lawrence offered him sovereigns in return for undertaking a mission in Haifa, where he was to draw his father into British service. This enterprise flopped, but Boutargy was retained by Military Intelligence, which despatched him to travel around the eastern Mediterranean in steamers keeping his ears open for gossip.
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