It was, of course, precisely this flippant attitude, one Lawrence seemed determined to flaunt both in his correspondence and in person, that so incensed his military superiors. But his defiance of soldierly protocol also underscored a deeper truth: Lawrence was fundamentally not of them, and was becoming less so all the time.
In just four months in the war theater, he had watched as Britain’s best hope for an early victory over the Turks was shelved for no better reason than politics and institutional inertia; in its place, the “great thinkers” had come up with Gallipoli. From what the Oxford scholar had seen, military culture was a world of hidebound careerists looking for a knighthood or their next medal, and of underlings loath to question the powerful, with countless thousands dying as a result.
What’s more, by dint of his position in the Cairo military intelligence unit, Lawrence was uniquely positioned to know the truth behind the lies and propaganda on an ongoing basis. Every day he saw the raw battlefield reports coming into the Savoy Hotel from the various war theaters, and these told a tale of staggering incompetence and callousness: of soldiers ordered to stay in formation as they advanced over open ground toward enemy machine-gun nests; of hundreds dying to capture and lose and capture again a single village, a single hillock. Certainly a select group of other junior-ranked men had access to this information too—generals’ aides and officers in similar military intelligence units in the various war theaters—but most of these were aspirants to the system, willing cogs in the vast, dumb meat-grinding machinery that none dared acknowledge as such.
THE GERMAN MILITARY mission in Jerusalem was housed in the Hospice for Russian Pilgrims, in the pleasant and orderly neighborhood just north of the Old City known as the Russian Compound. It was there that Curt Prüfer could often be found through the late winter of 1915, poring over intelligence cables and calculating his next move.
With a bit of distance from the event, the disillusionment he’d felt for the concept of holy war in the immediate aftermath of the Suez assault had eased somewhat. He recognized that with the Turkish forces getting no farther than the canal’s banks, the idea remained an essentially untested one. He also recognized that despite that first setback, British Egypt could not be left alone, that so long as it existed, it posed the primary threat to the German-Turkish alliance in the Middle East. So a new assault was necessary, this time supported by far greater firepower, including German artillery and aircraft, as well as far better military intelligence, an apparatus that could provide details on what the British on the far side of the canal were planning, where their troops were deployed.
The problem was, Prüfer’s own extensive intelligence network inside Egypt had also fallen victim to the Suez assault. In the first days of the war, he’d been able to use his Egyptian contacts to compile a comprehensive view of the enemy’s preparations; in one memorable November 1914 report, he’d written of British defenseworks in the future tense—that is, of enemy installations still in the construction or planning stage. All that had been shut down in the run‑up to Suez. As Prüfer reported to his superiors in late February, his own “bitter, practical experience” at the canal showed that most of the Bedouin and Egyptians he’d hastily recruited as replacement spies had been worthless, prone to “leaving honor and patriotism high and dry in the face of the temptations of the circling British agents who are not at all stingy with [gold] sovereigns.” Germany might conceivably follow the British example and buy its way to a new informant network inside Egypt, Prüfer pointed out, but that would leave it dependent on whatever unverifiable intelligence these paid agents passed on, “functioning with these people” rather than actually managing them. In pondering this dilemma, the intelligence officer hit upon a rather shrewd idea: Jewish spies.
That idea’s genesis may have stemmed from the company Prüfer was keeping at the time. Her name was Minna Weizmann, a dynamic and very pretty Jewish émigré in her mid-twenties from the town of Motal in White Russia (modern-day Belarus). From a prominent and highly educated family, Weizmann had embraced socialism from an early age, and had seized her chance to escape the hated czarist regime while at medical school in Berlin; in 1913, she’d immigrated to Palestine, becoming one of the few women physicians in Syria. It had been in Jerusalem in early 1914 that she and Curt Prüfer, recently resigned from the German embassy in Cairo, first met.
Although details of their relationship are sketchy, fragmentary evidence suggests the union was a special one for both. A rumor finding its way into German intelligence reports held that on the eve of Prüfer’s departure for the Suez offensive in January, Weizmann had spent the night in his Jerusalem hotel room, behavior so scandalous for the time as to be ruinous for any woman not a prostitute. For his part, there are indications that Weizmann was a good deal more than just another amorous conquest for the ever-roving Prüfer; his wartime diaries contain several references to “my dear Fanny,” Weizmann’s nickname, signs of an affection rather absent in the few mentions of his American wife, Frances Pinkham, who is usually referred to merely as “Fr.”
But if the bond with Minna Weizmann was true love, it was a love Curt Prüfer was willing to put to a higher purpose.
When Turkey came into the war, there were tens of thousands of Russian Jews scattered across Syrian Palestine who, like Minna Weizmann, still retained Russian citizenship. Constantinople had quickly given these now “belligerent nationals” a stark choice: become Ottoman citizens or face deportation or internal exile. In response, thousands of the émigrés had surrendered their Russian passports in favor of Ottoman ones, while thousands more had crowded into packed ships at Jaffa harbor in search of a new home. In March 1915, this exodus from Palestine was continuing—warships from the neutral United States were now complementing merchant vessels—and where most of these refugees were ending up was in British Egypt. As Prüfer pointed out in a proposal he sent to both Djemal Pasha and Max von Oppenheim, establishing a successful spy network in Egypt required “people who can be introduced into the country without suspicion, and have the necessary astuteness and sang-froid. We can find a number of such people amongst the Jewish population in this country.”
Giving this spy ring its reliability, in Prüfer’s estimation, would be the Russian Jews’ abiding hatred of the anti-Semitic czarist regime. Operating on the premise that the friend of one’s enemy is the enemy, he reasoned there might be many members of this community in Palestine who would jump at the chance to work against czarist Russian interests by striking at her ally in the region, British Egypt. Best of all, as Russian passport holders, these spies could simply join the ongoing refugee boatlift to Egypt without arousing suspicion.
But if it was already a feat to insert intelligence operatives into an enemy country in wartime, that still left the question of how to get them or their information out. Here Prüfer’s scheme was truly clever. In March 1915, Italy remained a neutral nation (it would join the Triple Entente that May), and there was regular ship traffic between Italian ports and Egypt. Rather than try to communicate with or return to Turkey, Prüfer’s spies would transit to Italy and pass their information on to the German embassy in Rome. At that point, they could either make for Turkey overland or, if their cover remained intact, return to Egypt for another round of intelligence gathering.
Warming to his topic, Prüfer further directed that the operatives should be divided into two cells, one composed of men, the other of women. Both cells “will try to steal relevant [British] documents or make copies of them. They will also try to get friendly with people who might be able to supply such information.” Lest there be any confusion over what “friendly” meant, Prüfer spelled it out. “Above all, the women agents—who must be young and not without charms—should try to get into relationships with influential people who may, in a moment of weakness borne of intimacy, let escape information that could be useful to us.”
His proposal received an enthusiastic response from Oppenheim, as well as from Ambassador von Wangenhe
im in Constantinople, and in early April Prüfer began his recruitment drive. In short order, he’d managed to procure the services of two Jewish émigrés, Isaac Cohn and Moses Rothschild, who were leaving Palestine for Egypt. While Rothschild made contact with a German spy nest at Shepheard’s Hotel, the favored lodging and watering hole of the British high command in Cairo, Cohn undertook an extensive tour of the British coastal defenses in Alexandria and along the Suez Canal.
The spymaster clearly took his new enterprise very seriously and as a true patriot was ready to let whatever affections he felt for Minna Weizmann be trumped by those he held for the kaiser. In early May 1915, Weizmann made the crossing to Egypt as the newest member of Prüfer’s spy ring. She probably needed little in the way of persuading; as both a Jew and a socialist, she might as well have been wearing a czarist bull’s-eye on her back, and here was the chance for both adventure and revenge.
Initially, Weizmann did very well in her new vocation, her hospital work and the novelty of being a female physician giving her entrée to the upper echelons of British Cairo society. Her luck didn’t hold, however. Under the cover of accompanying a badly wounded French soldier home, she managed to reach Italy, but there was observed meeting with the German ambassador in Rome. Unmasked, she was hauled back to Egypt, where she faced a decidedly grim future: internment in a British prisoner-of-war camp at the very least, and possibly execution. Instead, Weizmann’s considerable charms combined with old-fashioned chivalry produced a far more pleasant outcome. As related by a Swiss woman who crossed paths with Minna that August and heard her story, “she was so beloved in Cairo and Alexandria, and held in such respect that people gave her unwavering denial [of being a spy] credence.” Ironically, even the czar’s consul in Cairo vouched for Minna’s innocence and arranged for her safe passage back to Russia. It was while staying at a hotel in Romania, in transit to the homeland she had escaped from two years earlier, that Weizmann desperately reached out to the Swiss woman.
“She revealed everything to me,” Hilla Steinbach-Schuh explained to a German official, “and fervently begged me to inform the German embassy in Constantinople of her deportation, especially that Herr Prüfer should be advised of this.”
But the remarkably tender treatment shown Minna Weizmann—she would not only survive the war, but eventually return to Palestine to work for the medical service of the Zionist women’s organization, Hadassah—may have also stemmed from her lineage. Her older brother was Chaim Weizmann, a renowned chemist who had immigrated to Great Britain in 1904 and who in 1915 was already working closely with the British munitions industry to improve their war-making capability; Chaim would go on to become the first president of the state of Israel, while Minna’s nephew Ezer would serve as its seventh. That lineage may also explain why Minna has been largely excised from the history books, and even from the Weizmann family’s memory (Chaim made not a single reference to his sister in his memoirs); for “the first family of Israel” to count among its members someone who not only spied for Germany but whose spymaster lover went on to become a senior Nazi diplomat is surely one of those awkward family stories best left untold.
Even before learning of Minna Weizmann’s fate, however, Curt Prüfer had seen his fledgling Egyptian spy ring largely shut down, a result of Italy’s joining the Triple Entente in May and the consequent severing of the German embassy “ratline.” Still, Prüfer’s bold initiative had greatly impressed his superiors in both the military and intelligence spheres. As Lieutenant Colonel Kress von Kressenstein, the commander of German forces in Palestine, informed Berlin, “Curt Prüfer is indispensable as the leader of the intelligence service.”
ON MAY 9, 1915, T. E. Lawrence’s younger brother, twenty-two-year- old Frank, stationed in the Arras sector of the Western Front, was doing repair work on a forward trench in preparation for an assault when he was struck by three shrapnel fragments from a German artillery shell. Whether it was true or not, for soldiers routinely dissemble about such things, Frank’s commanding officer reported in his condolence letter to the Lawrence parents that their son had died instantly.
The news shattered Sarah Lawrence. By most accounts, Frank had been her favorite child, and since being shipped off to France in February he had written her long, discursive letters filled with descriptions of the foibles of military life and his everyday existence at the front.
T. E. Lawrence learned of Frank’s death in a telegram from his parents in mid-May. For whatever reason, he waited to respond until he had received more information from his father through the mail. It wasn’t until June 4 that he finally scribbled out a hasty note to his parents on a telegram form:
I haven’t written since I got your wire as I was waiting for details. Today I got Father’s two letters. They are very comfortable reading, and I hope that when I die there will be nothing more to regret. The only thing I feel a little is that there was no need, surely, to go into mourning for him? I cannot see any cause at all. In any case, to die for one’s country is a sort of privilege. Mother and you will find it more painful and harder to live for it than he did to die, but I think that at this time, it is one’s duty to show no signs that would distress others, and to appear bereaved is surely under this condemnation.
So please, keep a brave face to the world. We cannot all go fighting, but we can do that, which is in the same kind. N[ed].
Perhaps the note’s most interesting aspect, beyond its startling coldness, was Lawrence’s invocation of a kind of puerile patriotism that he had long derided. In any event, Sarah Lawrence was hardly in the mood to adhere to this stiff advice from her son. Shortly after, she wrote Ned another letter, in which she evidently (evidently because this letter has never been found) upbraided him for not expressing his love for her in her hour of grief. If Sarah Lawrence hoped this would stir a softening in her second son, she was to be disappointed:
Poor Dear Mother,
I got your letter this morning, and it has grieved me very much. You will never never understand any of us after we are grown up a little. Don’t you ever feel that we love you without our telling you so? I feel such a contemptible worm for having to write this way about things. If you only knew that if one thinks deeply about anything, one would rather die than say anything about it. You know, men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it has come.
There, put that aside, and bear a brave face to the world about Frank. In a time of such fearful stress in our country it is one’s duty to watch very carefully lest one of the weaker ones be offended; and you know, we were always the stronger, and if they see you broken down they will all grow fearful about their ones at the front.
Lawrence next wrote his parents about a week later; he made no reference to Frank—indeed, he rarely mentioned him by name in any subsequent correspondence—and instead spent the bulk of the brief note describing the weather just then in Cairo.
DJEMAL PASHA WAS in a much-improved mood by early June 1915. He had good reason to be. When the Allied forces had come ashore at Gallipoli on April 25, it largely mooted the possibility of a landing somewhere in Syria. Better yet, with both sides pouring more men and matériel into that narrow strip of battlefield, the Syrian governor had been provided with the means to be rid of the more troublesome military units in his zone. In response to Constantinople’s urgent call for reinforcements, Djemal had immediately begun dispatching his Arab-dominated regiments in northern Syria to Gallipoli, replacing them with newly mustered Turkish formations from the Anatolian interior—utterly green soldiers, perhaps, but at least their loyalty could be relied upon. And of course, the removal of the potentially mutinous Arab troops meant that the schemes of the French consulate plotters, and whatever other separatist-minded Arab traitors might be skulking about, were now far less dangerous.
There had also been good news in regard to the troublesome Hussein family in the Hejaz. Building on the lavish treatment he had bestowed upon Faisal in J
erusalem and Damascus, Djemal had sent word to Constantinople that the charm offensive should continue once the young sheikh reached the Ottoman capital. That directive had been followed; in early May, the offending Medina civilian governor was transferred, allowing Faisal and Enver Pasha to fashion an accord that suggested a full rapprochement between the Young Turks and the irksome Hussein in Mecca. That was certainly the estimation of Max von Oppenheim, who had two long meetings with Faisal in Constantinople, and of Djemal himself when Faisal returned to Syria in late May. In an emotional address before Djemal’s senior military staff at the German Hospice, Hussein’s son had professed his undying loyalty to both the empire and the cause of pan-Islamic jihad.
There had even been some progress with the locust plague. Certainly the ravages of that infestation would be sorely felt in the autumn harvest, but through the energetic efforts of the Jewish scientist Aaron Aaronsohn and his modern trenching techniques, it appeared that full-scale catastrophe had been averted.
Yet amid this brighter outlook, a new crisis had engulfed the empire—or rather, an old one had erupted anew.
Within the Ottoman court, the Christian Armenians of Anatolia had long been regarded as potential fifth columnists for Christian invaders—and especially for its Russian archenemies—and for just as long the Armenians had suffered periodic massacres at the hands of their Turkish and Kurdish Muslim neighbors. The most recent bout of slaughter, in the 1890s, had led to the deaths of at least fifty thousand Armenians in a matter of days.
This historical animus had been rekindled by the regime’s call to jihad against the “Christian enemies” in November 1914. The Armenians—ethnically and linguistically apart, as well as numerous enough to pose a plausible threat—were uniquely vulnerable to a spark that might set off a new wave of anti-Armenian fury. That spark had come with a Russian offensive into eastern Anatolia, when the Armenians became the perfect scapegoats for explaining away Turkish setbacks on the battlefield. Thus the stage was set: in the rhetoric of the Constantinople regime, and in the minds of many of its Turkish and Kurdish subjects, the some two million Armenians of Anatolia were now the enemy within.
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