Second, and as the episode at Buckingham Palace attests, this was an experience that left him utterly changed, unrecognizable in certain respects even to himself. Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know, and as an architect of momentous events, Lawrence would be uniquely haunted by what he saw and did during the Great Loot.
Chapter 1
Playboys in the Holy Land
I consider this new crisis that has emerged to be a blessing. I believe that it is the Turks’ ultimate duty either to live like an honorable nation or to exit the stage of history gloriously.
DJEMAL PASHA, GOVERNOR OF SYRIA, ON TURKEY’S ENTRY INTO WORLD WAR I, NOVEMBER 2, 1914
The storm began as a mild weather disturbance, one fairly common for that time of year. For several days in early January 1914, a hot dry breeze had come off the Sahara Desert to pass over the winter-cooled waters of the eastern Mediterranean. By the morning of the ninth, this convergence had spawned a strong southwesterly wind, one that grew in intensity as it made landfall over southern Palestine. By the time it approached Beersheva, a small village on the edge of the Zin Desert some twenty-five miles inland, this wind threatened to trigger a khamsin, or sandstorm.
For the inexperienced, being caught out in the desert during a khamsin can be unsettling. While it shares some of the properties of a severe thunderstorm—the same drop in barometric pressure beforehand, the same prelude of buffeting wind—the fact that sand is falling rather than water means visibility can rapidly drop to just a few feet, and the constant raking of sand against the body, coating the nose and mouth and collecting in every crevice of clothing, can induce a feeling of suffocation. In the grip of this sensation, the mind can easily seize upon the worst idea—to journey on, to attempt to fight one’s way out of the storm. Men routinely become lost and die acting on this impulse.
But the three young British men waiting in Beersheva that afternoon were not inexperienced. They had lingered an extra day in the village— a lonely outpost of perhaps eight hundred inhabitants best known as a watering hole for passing camel caravans—in expectation of the arrival of an expedition party led by two Americans. By dusk, however, there was still no sign of the Americans, and what had earlier appeared no more threatening than a dull brown haze in the west had now formed up into a mile-high wall of approaching sand. Shortly after dark, the khamsin rolled in.
Throughout that night, the storm raged. In the small house the British men shared, sand spattered against the shuttered windows like driven rain, and all their efforts to seal the place couldn’t prevent them and everything else inside from becoming coated in a fine layer of desert dust. By dawn, the winds had abated somewhat, enough that the risen sun appeared as a pale silvery orb in the eastern sky.
The khamsin finally died off in early afternoon, allowing the residents of Beersheva to emerge from their homes and tents and move about. It was then that the Britons received some news of the Americans. Apparently caught out by the impending storm, they had drawn camp the previous evening in the desert just a few miles east of town. The three men saddled their camels and made for the American camp.
Considering the surrounding desolation, the opulence they found there made for a rather bizarre spectacle. Along with a couple of horse-drawn carts hauling silage for the party’s herd of pack animals were several more to carry its larger “field furniture.” Now that the khamsin had passed, the native orderlies were busily breaking camp, including dismantling the two very fine and spacious Bell tents—undoubtedly purchased from one of the better expedition outfitters in London or New York—that were the habitations of the two young Americans leading the expedition. These men, both in their midtwenties and clad in Western field suits and bowler hats, were named William Yale and Rudolf McGovern. As they explained to their British visitors, they were in southern Palestine as part of a Grand Tour of the Holy Land, an adventure that when the sandstorm hit had become a bit more than they bargained for.
But there was something about the Americans that didn’t quite add up. Although they were well dressed and obviously traveling in high style, there was little about the men—McGovern small and reserved, Yale barrel-chested with a boxer’s rough-hewn face—that suggested them as either natural traveling companions or likely candidates for a pilgrimage tour of biblical sites. Then there was their demeanor. Encountering other foreigners in this lonely corner of Syria was such a novelty that it tended to induce a kind of instant camaraderie, but there was none of this with Yale and McGovern. To the contrary, the Americans appeared flustered, even perturbed, by the arrival of the Britons, and it seemed that only the dictates of desert hospitality compelled Yale—clearly the dominant personality of the two—to invite their guests into the main dining tent and to dispatch one of their camp followers to prepare tea.
But if the Americans seemed peculiar, William Yale had precisely the same reaction to his British visitors. The oldest—and the leader of the group, in Yale’s estimation—was a dark-haired, hawk-faced man in his midthirties clad in a well-worn British army uniform. His companions were in civilian dress and quite a bit younger, one in his midtwenties perhaps, while the third appeared to be a mere teenager. Most puzzling to Yale, the two older men barely spoke. Instead, it was the “teenager” who commandeered the conversation in the tent and chattered like a magpie. He was very slight and slender, with a heavy-featured face that Yale found almost repellent, but his most arresting feature was his eyes; they were light blue and piercingly intense.
The young visitor explained that he and his companions were in the region to conduct an archaeological survey of biblical-era ruins for a British organization called the Palestine Exploration Fund. He then proceeded to regale his American hosts with stories of his own adventures in the Near East, stories so voluble and engaging that it took Yale quite some time to realize they masked a kind of interrogation.
“His chatter was sprinkled with a stream of questions—seemingly quite innocent questions—about us and our plans. He assumed that we were tourists traveling in grand style to see the famous ruins of the Sinai and Palestine. It was not until after our visitors had left that we realized that this seemingly inexperienced, youthful enthusiast had most successfully pumped us dry.”
It would be some time before he knew it, but William Yale had just had his first encounter with Thomas Edward Lawrence, soon to become better known as Lawrence of Arabia. It would also be some time before he learned that Lawrence had only feigned interest in the Americans’ Holy Land tour in order to toy with them, that he had known all along their story was false.
In reality, William Yale and Rudolf McGovern were agents of the Standard Oil Company of New York, and they were in Palestine on a secret mission in search of oil. Under orders from Standard headquarters, they had spent the previous three months posing as wealthy young men of leisure—“playboys,” in the parlance of the day—on the Holy Land tourist circuit. While upholding that cover story, they had quietly slipped off to excavate along the Dead Sea and to take geological soundings in the Judean foothills.
But if the playboy tale had held the ring of plausibility during their earlier wanderings—at least Judea had ruins and the Dead Sea figured prominently in the Bible—it became rather suspect once they veered off for the forlorn outpost of Beersheva. It was downright laughable when considering Yale and McGovern’s ultimate destination: a desolate massif of stone rising up out of the desert some twenty miles southeast of Beersheva known as Kornub.
In fact, it was not the khamsin but the growing improbability of their cover story that had kept the Americans out of Beersheva the night before. As they had approached the village, the oilmen had been alerted to the presence of the three Britons. Anxious to avoid a meeting and the awkward questions likely to arise, they had chosen to pitch camp in the desert instead, with the intention of slipping into Beersheva at first light, quickly gathering up supplies for their onward journey, and stealing away before being detected. The slow-moving khamsin had obviously
put an end to that plan, and as he’d waited out the storm that morning, Yale had feared it was only a matter of time before the foreigners in Beersheva learned of their desert campsite and put in an appearance—an apprehension confirmed when the three men rode up.
But what Yale also couldn’t have known was that his efforts at concealment were quite pointless, that this seemingly impromptu meeting in the desert was anything but. The previous day, Lawrence and his colleagues on the archaeological expedition had received a cable from the British consulate in Jerusalem alerting them to the presence of the American oilmen in the area, and they had lingered in Beersheva for the express purpose of intercepting Yale and McGovern and learning what they were up to.
If this seemed an odd mission for an archaeological survey team to undertake, there was rather more to that story, too. Although it was technically true that Lawrence and Leonard Woolley—the other civilian in the tent, and a respected archaeologist—were in southern Palestine in search of biblical ruins, that project was merely a fig leaf for a far more sensitive one, an elaborate covert operation being run by the British military. Ottoman government officials certainly knew of the Palestine Exploration Fund survey in the Zin Desert—they had approved it, after all—but they knew nothing of the five British military survey teams operating under the PEF banner who at that very moment were scattered across the desert quietly mapping the Ottoman Empire’s southwestern frontier. Overseeing that covert operation was the uniformed third visitor to the American camp, Captain Stewart Francis Newcombe of the Royal Engineers.
What had taken place outside Beersheva, then, was a rather complex game of bluff, one in which one side had rummaged about for the truth behind the other’s fiction, even as it sought to uphold its own framework of fiction.
LAWRENCE AND YALE weren’t the only young foreigners with suspect agendas wandering about the Holy Land that mid-January. Just fifty miles to the north of Beersheva, in the city of Jerusalem, a thirty-three-year-old German scholar named Curt Prüfer was also plotting his future.
In Prüfer’s physical appearance were few clues to suggest him as an intriguing figure. Quite to the contrary. The German stood just five foot eight, with narrow, sloping shoulders, and his thin thatch of brownish blond hair framed a bland, thin face most noteworthy for its lack of distinguishing characteristics, the sort of face that naturally blends into a crowd. Adding to this air of innocuousness was Prüfer’s voice. He spoke in a permanent soft, feathery whisper, as if he’d spent his entire life in a library, although this condition was actually the result of a botched throat operation in childhood that had scarred his vocal cords. To many who met the young German scholar, his modest frame together with that voice conveyed an aura of effeminacy, an estimation likely to be fortified should they happen to learn the subject of the dissertation that had earned him his doctorate: a learned study on the Egyptian dramatic form known as shadow plays. In mid-January 1914, Prüfer was waiting in Jerusalem for the arrival of a friend, a Bavarian landscape painter of middling repute, with whom he’d made plans to conduct an extended tour of the Upper Nile aboard a luxury dhow.
But just as with the men gathered in the tent outside Beersheva, there was an altogether different side to Dr. Curt Prüfer. For the previous several years, he had served as the Oriental secretary to the German embassy in Cairo, a position ideally suited to both his appearance and demeanor. Removed from the policymaking deliberations of the senior diplomatic staff, the Oriental secretary was tasked to quietly keep tabs on the social and political undercurrents of the country, to maintain a low profile and report back. In that capacity, Prüfer’s life in Cairo had been a never-ending social whirl, a perpetual roster of meetings and teas and dinners with Egypt’s most prominent journalists, businessmen, and politicians.
His social circle had included more controversial figures, too. With Germany vying with its rival, Great Britain, for influence in the region, Prüfer had surreptitiously cultivated alliances with a wide array of Egyptian dissidents seeking to end British control of their homeland: nationalists, royalists, religious zealots. Fluent in Arabic as well as a half dozen other languages, in 1911 the German Oriental secretary had traveled across Egypt and Syria disguised as a Bedouin to foment anti-British sentiment among the tribes. The following year, he had attempted to recruit Egyptian mujahideen to join their Arab brethren in Libya against an invading Italian army.
In these varied efforts, Curt Prüfer had eventually fallen foul of the first rule of his position: to stay in the background. Alerted to his agent provocateur activities, the British secret police in Egypt had quietly compiled a lengthy dossier on the Oriental secretary, and bided their time on when to use it. When finally they did, Prüfer was effectively persona non grata. After enduring the ignominy for as long as he could, he had tendered his resignation from the German diplomatic service in late 1913. It was this that had brought him to Jerusalem that January. Once his friend, the artist Richard von Below, arrived from Germany, the two would depart for Egypt and their luxury cruise up the Nile. That journey was scheduled to last some five months, and while von Below painted, Prüfer intended to busy himself composing travelogue articles for magazines back in Germany, along with updating entries for the famous German travel guide, Baedeker’s. It was to mark something of a return to Prüfer’s academic roots, his extended foray into the messy arena of international politics consigned to the past.
Or maybe not. Maybe his spying activities were just put on hiatus, for on his upcoming cruise, Curt Prüfer would be traveling along the very lifeline of British-ruled Egypt, would be given the opportunity to glimpse firsthand its defensive fortifications and port facilities, to quietly take the pulse of Egyptian public opinion. And while it might appear that the exposed and disgraced former Oriental secretary was sailing into an unsettled future that January of 1914, he now held at least one conviction that gave his life a strong sense of direction: it was the British who had destroyed his diplomatic career; it was the British upon whom he would take his revenge.
Toward achieving this, he could draw on another rather surprising aspect of his personality. His aura of innocuousness notwithstanding, Curt Prüfer was a consummate charmer, and had a reputation as a notorious seducer of women. In Cairo, whatever affections he felt for his wife, a doughty American woman thirteen years his senior, had been shared between a string of mistresses. Since arriving in Jerusalem, he had taken up with a young and beautiful Russian Jewish émigré doctor named Minna Weizmann, better known to her friends and family as Fanny. In just a little over a year’s time, as Germany’s counterintelligence chief in wartime Syria, Prüfer would come up with the idea of recruiting Jewish émigrés to infiltrate British-held Egypt and spy for the Fatherland. Among the first spies Prüfer would send into enemy territory would be his lover, Fanny Weizmann.
· · ·
JUST SEVENTY MILES to the north of Jerusalem that January, there was another man about to embark on a double life. His name was Aaron Aaronsohn. A thirty-eight-year-old Jewish émigré from Romania, Aaronsohn was already recognized as one of the preeminent agricultural scientists, or agronomists, in the Middle East, a reputation cemented by his 1906 discovery of the genetic forebear to wheat. With funding from American Jewish philanthropists, in 1909 he had established the Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station outside the village of Athlit, and for the past five years had tirelessly experimented with all manner of plants and trees in hopes of returning the arid Palestinian region of Syria to the verdant garden it had once been.
This ambition had a political component. A committed Zionist, as early as 1911 Aaronsohn had begun to articulate a scheme whereby a vast swath of Palestine might be wrested away from the Ottoman Empire and reconstituted as a Jewish homeland. Other Zionists had expressed this vision before, of course, but it was Aaronsohn, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the region’s flora and soil conditions and aquifers, who first appreciated how it might practically be accomplished, how the Jewish diaspora might return to i
ts ancestral homeland and prosper by making the desert bloom.
In the near future, Aaronsohn would perceive the chance to bring this dream closer to fruition, and he would seize it. Under the cover of advising the local government on agricultural matters, he would establish an extensive spy ring across the breadth of Palestine, and provide the Ottomans’ British enemies with some of their most invaluable battlefield intelligence. The agronomist would then go on to play a signal role in promoting the cause of a Jewish homeland in the capitals of Europe. Somewhat ironically, his chief confederate in that endeavor would be the older brother of Curt Prüfer’s lover-spy, Fanny Weizmann, and the future first president of Israel: Chaim Weizmann.
THE LURE OF the East: whether to conquer or explore or exploit, it has exerted its pull on the West for a thousand years. That lure brought wave after wave of Christian Crusaders to the Near East over a three-hundred-year span in the Middle Ages. More recently, it brought a conquering French general with pharaonic fantasies named Napoleon Bonaparte to Egypt in the 1790s, Europe’s greatest archaeologists in the 1830s, and hordes of Western oil barons, wildcatters, and con men to the shores of the Caspian Sea in the 1870s. For a similar variety of reasons, in the early years of the twentieth century it brought together four young men of adventure: Thomas Edward Lawrence, William Yale, Curt Prüfer, and Aaron Aaronsohn.
At the time, the regions these men traveled were still a part of the Ottoman Empire, one of the greatest imperial powers the world had ever known. From its birthplace in a tiny corner of the mountainous region of Anatolia in modern-day Turkey, that empire had steadily expanded until by the early 1600s it encompassed an area rivaling that of the Roman imperium at its height: from the gates of Vienna in the north to the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, from the shores of the western Mediterranean clear across to the port of Basra in modern-day Iraq.
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