For more fainthearted men, the idea of accepting medals from the Ottoman regime at that particular juncture might have given pause. The expatriate community in Constantinople was by then awash in reports of what was being done to the Armenians, fresh accounts almost daily of the inhabitants of yet another village being slaughtered, of hundreds or thousands more being starved or beaten to death during their marches into exile. But the men of Socony hadn’t attained their positions by mixing morality with business, or by pandering to whatever humanitarian concern was currently in vogue. On July 28, the three senior officers of its Constantinople branch—William Bemis, Oscar Gunkel, and Lucien I. Thomas—were ushered into Dolmabahçe Palace for an audience with the sultan. At that ceremony, the Socony officials were awarded the Order of the Osmanieh, one of the highest civilian awards given by the Ottoman Empire, for their “numerous humanitarian services.”
IN MID-JULY 1915, T. E. Lawrence sat down to answer a letter he had recently received from his closest sibling, his younger brother Will. At that time, Will was undergoing training at the Cambridge Barracks in Portsmouth to serve as an aerial observer for the Royal Flying Corps.
Given Lawrence’s almost pathological reticence to express intimacy, it must have been especially difficult for him to turn to what had been the thrust of Will’s letter to him: the death in May of their younger brother, Frank. “Frank’s death was, as you say, a shock because it was so unexpected,” he wrote. “I don’t think one can regret it overmuch, because it is a very good way to take, after all. The hugeness of this war has made one change one’s perspective, I think, and I for one can hardly see details at all.”
In closing, though, Lawrence struck a softer, almost plaintive tone. “I wonder when it will all end and peace follow? All the relief I get [is] in The Greek Anthology, Heredia, Morris and a few others. Do you?”
In July 1915, the war was not yet even a quarter done; there were still more than three years of slaughter and ruin ahead. But the seeds for Lawrence’s own dramatic role in that conflict were just then being sown. Those seeds were born of two seemingly disparate events: the arrival in Cairo of a strange letter secreted out of Mecca, and the crossing of an enigmatic twenty-four-year-old man over the torn and shell-pitted no-man’s-land of Gallipoli.
BY THE MIDSUMMER of 1915 on Gallipoli, so many men were dying in such a confined space—in some spots, the opposing trenchlines were less than thirty yards apart—that informal truces began to be called in order to gather up the dead. The arrangements were usually worked out by local commanders, so that at a specified time grave-digging parties from both sides would step out into no-man’s-land and begin their ghastly work.
This certainly appeared to be the intent of the Ottoman lieutenant who, on the morning of August 20, climbed from his army’s forward trench and, under the cover of a white flag, started across no-man’s-land. Instead, upon reaching the British line, the young officer announced to his startled hosts that he wished to surrender.
Following standard procedure, the man was bound and blindfolded and passed down through the Med-Ex trenchworks to regimental headquarters. If standard procedure had continued to be followed, he would have been interrogated there by an intelligence officer, then sent on to the central prisoner-of-war stockade before eventual transfer to a POW camp in Cyprus or Egypt. But there was nothing at all standard about this prisoner. His name was Mohammed al-Faroki, and despite his unassuming appearance—he was just twenty-four and very slight—the story he told was so remarkable that successive British officers felt their superiors needed to hear it.
He claimed to be a member of a secret military society called al-Ahd (the Awakening), comprised largely of Arab officers like himself, that had been waiting in vain for months for the right conditions to stage a revolt against their Turkish overseers. Rumors of shadowy fifth-column networks inside the Ottoman Empire had become rather commonplace by that summer, but what was different about Faroki was that he supplied a list of his alleged al-Ahd coconspirators, most of them high-ranking officers, complete with details on which units they commanded and where they were currently deployed.
Testament to the importance given the lieutenant’s claims, on August 25, General Ian Hamilton, the overall commander of the Gallipoli campaign, fired off a report to War Secretary Kitchener himself. Deciding that the intelligence unit in Cairo was best equipped to judge the truthfulness of the lieutenant’s story, London ordered Faroki put on board a warship bound for Egypt.
At least initially, neither Gilbert Clayton, the overall commander of the British military intelligence unit in Cairo, nor any of his subordinates knew quite what to make of the young man brought to their Savoy Hotel offices on September 10. Their attention was piqued, however, when Faroki suggested the British had squandered a profound military opportunity by not going ashore at Alexandretta in the spring of 1915.
According to Faroki, not only had Alexandretta been guarded primarily by Arab-conscript units at the time, with many of their commanders committed al-Ahd members, but these units had even carefully sabotaged the city’s defensive fortifications in anticipation of an imminent British landing force. Those efforts had come to naught, obviously, when the British instead launched their disastrous Gallipoli campaign. That wasn’t the worst of it, however. Once Gallipoli started, Djemal Pasha had swiftly sent the Arab units in Alexandretta to the battlefront; as a result, Faroki explained, many of the would-be conspirators of al-Ahd now lay dead on the Gallipoli hillsides, killed by the very “enemy” they had hoped to join.
Up to this point, much of Faroki’s story was easy enough to verify. The founder of al-Ahd, a man named Abdul Aziz al-Masri, was living in exile in Cairo, and he was brought in to vouch for Faroki’s bona fides. As for his claim that Alexandretta had been guarded by troops anxious to mutiny, this was precisely what Lawrence had ascertained from his interviews with Ottoman prisoners and had stressed in his lobbying for a landing there. But Faroki had more to tell. A lot more.
For some time, he claimed, he had served as a kind of liaison between al-Ahd and another Arab secret society, al-Fatat, in Damascus. From this linking, al-Ahd had learned of the covert negotiations between al-Fatat and Emir Hussein in Mecca toward staging a joint uprising against the Turks. In the process, al-Ahd had also learned of the secret correspondence between Emir Hussein and the British in Cairo. The upshot of all this was that, if armed and supported by Britain, both Arab secret societies, the civilian al-Fatat and the military al-Ahd, were now prepared to join Emir Hussein in revolt against the Turks.
Such a partnership would come with a price, though: British recognition of an independent Arab nation encompassing virtually the entire Arab world, from Iraq in the east to Syria in the west and extending down to the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. The precise parameters of this Arab nation were open to some limited negotiation—the would-be rebels recognized Britain’s colonial claim to Aden and its commercial interests in southern Iraq—but the one absolute precondition was that the French were not to have a controlling presence anywhere. If all that was agreed to, Faroki explained, then the British could have their revolution in the heart of the Ottoman world.
It was here that the young lieutenant’s story began to strain credulity. Obviously, Faroki had learned of the secret correspondence between Emir Hussein and Ronald Storrs from somewhere, but apparently no one in the Cairo military intelligence unit had even heard of al-Fatat. As for Faroki’s assertion that this cell spoke for a vast network of anti-Ottoman conspirators in Syria, Lawrence, given his long familiarity with the Syrian political scene, was probably in the best position to gauge that claim’s veracity, but nothing he had gleaned either before or during the war suggested that such an extensive network existed. Even if it did, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Arab society was likely to find the notion of the progressive military and intellectual castes of Syria and Iraq joining in alliance with the archconservative Emir Hussein in Mecca a bit far-fetched.
Except for
one thing. Just weeks before Faroki came across at Gallipoli, Hussein had ended an eight-month silence and finally sent a new message to Ronald Storrs. Absent from this letter was Hussein’s earlier ambivalence, as well as his sense of proportion. Now he purported to speak for “the whole of the Arab nation,” and his demands for cooperation with the British had ballooned beyond mere noninterference in the Hejaz, to British recognition of independence for practically the entire Arab world.
So grandiose did Storrs find Hussein’s demands—he acidly commented that they were “far more than he has the right, the hope, or the power to expect”—that he and Henry McMahon, the new British high commissioner for Egypt, decided that the best response was to simply ignore them altogether. This had been done in McMahon’s reply to Hussein, sent shortly before Faroki’s appearance.
Everything changed, though, when the specifics of Hussein’s July letter were matched up against Faroki’s September statements, for what was immediately apparent was that their stipulations and territorial demands almost precisely matched. Viewed in this light, Hussein’s vague reference to “the whole of the Arab nation” took on a very different meaning, perhaps not delusions of grandeur by the Hejazi emir but rather an allusion to his secret partnership with the al-Fatat and al-Ahd conspirators. It suddenly occurred to British officials in Cairo that they might have seriously underestimated Hussein, that far more than potentially triggering an insurrection in a remote corner of the Ottoman Empire, the enigmatic old man in Mecca just might hold the key to the entire Middle Eastern theater of the war.
But there was still more. With his customary opaqueness, Hussein had introduced the specter of a ticking clock in his last missive, saying that Britain had thirty days from the receipt of his letter to accept or reject his terms, beyond which the Arabs “reserve to themselves complete freedom of action.” Storrs and McMahon had paid little attention to this veiled threat at the time, but as Mohammed al-Faroki now informed them, this ultimatum was the result of a tantalizing offer recently made to Hussein by Djemal Pasha: full Arab independence in the postwar era, provided the Arabs lent wholehearted support to the Turkish-German war effort in the meantime.
The choice before the British, then, could not have appeared more stark: come to an agreement with Hussein and his coconspirators that might paralyze the Ottoman Empire from within, or, conversely, watch Hussein and the Arabs make their peace with Constantinople, a peace that would undoubtedly result in a reinvigorated call to jihad against the Allies, and just might be the spark to finally set the Muslim populations of their colonies aflame. With Prime Minister Asquith and his cabinet kept fully apprised, British diplomats in London and Cairo scrambled to send off a new and far more respectful message to the emir in Mecca. Thus began one of history’s most controversial exchanges of secret messages, the so-called McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the ramifications of which would soon embroil the British government—as well as its future agent in Arabia, T. E. Lawrence—in a complex web of misunderstandings, conflicting promises, and deceit.
In the short term, the revelations of Mohammed al-Faroki enabled Lawrence to return to the goal that had consumed him ever since arriving in Cairo nine months earlier: a British landing at Alexandretta.
FROM THE ATHLIT promontory on clear days, Aaron Aaronsohn and Absalom Feinberg could easily make out the British and French warships that trolled the Palestinian coastline, imposing their blockade. It would be off one of these warships, they’d assumed, that they would eventually receive a message from Alex in Cairo—perhaps delivered by Alex himself. As the days and weeks passed, however, their confidence in this wavered.
After nearly a month with no word, Aaronsohn and Feinberg settled on a risky backup plan. If the wait lasted much longer, Feinberg would take one of the small fishing boats that plied the coast, head straight out for one of the blockade ships, and try to talk his way on board. In mid-August, though, word came that the blockade was being tightened, the Allied warships now given license to destroy on sight any vessel they deemed suspicious; since this criterion surely attached to a strange vessel trying to make an approach, it rendered the backup plan less a risky venture than a suicidal one. Then came more bad news. In late August, it was announced (erroneously, it would turn out) that the refugee boatlift was coming to an end, that USS Des Moines would be making just one more call at Haifa harbor on August 30. When that American warship sailed over the horizon, the conspirators believed, so too would their last best chance to make contact with the British.
To Feinberg’s urging that he go out on the ship, Aaronsohn stoutly refused. Instead, it was Feinberg, in disguise and carrying a forged Russian passport, who talked his way aboard the Des Moines. A week later, he found himself on the docks of Alexandria, Egypt.
Feinberg had just one contact in Egypt, but it turned out to be a good one: a young Christian Arab originally from Haifa who was now working as a courier for the British naval intelligence headquarters at Port Said. In Port Said, Feinberg tracked down his old friend, who quickly arranged a meeting with one of the unit’s intelligence officers. That officer happened to be T. E. Lawrence’s old partner at Carchemish as well as on the Zin expedition, Leonard Woolley.
What Feinberg didn’t know—could not have known—was that Alex Aaronsohn had in fact made contact with British intelligence in Egypt. After a series of rebuffs, he’d finally gained an audience with a senior member of the military intelligence staff in Cairo on August 18. That officer had been T. E. Lawrence’s other partner on the Zin expedition, Captain Stewart Newcombe. But that meeting had not gone at all well. Newcombe had taken a wary view of Alex Aaronsohn from the start, and that wariness only deepened when the earnest twenty-six-year-old began detailing the Jewish spy network supposedly standing by in Palestine to aid the British. It had been just two months since Minna Weizmann, Curt Prüfer’s protégée, was unmasked as a spy, and British intelligence agents in Egypt were now alerted to the German scheme of employing Jewish refugees from Palestine as conduits. But perhaps what most aroused Newcombe’s suspicion was that Alex Aaronsohn appeared to want nothing tangible in return for his services. As a senior intelligence officer, Newcombe was constantly besieged by self-proclaimed spies who, in return for their “valuable information,” wanted money or weapons or help with legal problems; it simply didn’t gibe that Alex Aaronsohn was offering up this purported treasure trove of information out of the goodness of his heart. As a result, and in what was surely one of the greatest miscalculations of his intelligence career, Newcombe had not only rebuffed Aaronsohn’s offer, but ordered him from the country. Of course, Alex had no way of communicating any of this to his brother anxiously waiting back in Palestine; on September 3, just three days before Absalom Feinberg arrived in Alexandria, Alex and his sister Rivka had gone out of that same harbor on a ship bound for New York.
But Feinberg was to have much better luck with Leonard Woolley. Implicitly trusting the intense young man who had been brought before him, Woolley devised a system whereby a British spy ship might periodically troll past the research station in Athlit. Through a prearranged series of codes, the conspirators would signal out to the spy ship when there was information to be collected, and under the cover of darkness, either a small boat or a swimmer would be sent ashore to retrieve it.
There was only one way to both establish the coding system and test the efficacy of this plan: by sneaking Feinberg back into Palestine aboard one of the spy ships. After concluding his arrangements with Woolley, Feinberg waited for the right conditions—a calm sea, a moonless night—for his voyage home.
ONE PERSON WHO knew nothing of Newcombe’s and Woolley’s dealings with the would-be spies from Palestine that late summer was their former Zin expedition partner, T. E. Lawrence. This was partly due to the compartmentalization policy adhered to by British intelligence in Egypt, and partly to Lawrence’s intense focus on one issue: a British landing at Alexandretta. By mid-October, the last pieces of that plan appeared to be falling into place
, and the letter he penned to his parents strived for that delicate balance between excitement and sufficient obliqueness to get past the military censors:
“There is going to be a rather busy winter in the Levant,” he wrote. “I am pleased on the whole with things. They have gone against us so far that our Government has become more reasonable, and the final settlement out here, though it will take long, will I think, be very satisfactory. We have to thank our [past] failures for that.”
For Lawrence, the most excruciating aspect of Faroki’s story was his description of the situation that had existed in Alexandretta in the winter of 1915, carrying as it did the suggestion that a British landing force might have practically strolled ashore there. Obviously, circumstances were much changed now, the al-Ahd-dominated military units long since moved elsewhere, but in the autumn of 1915, Lawrence and other advocates of an Alexandretta landing could point to several new factors that made their argument nearly as compelling.
Having sat out the first year of the war, Bulgaria had finally come in on the side of the Central Powers in late September. This meant the enemy now had an unbroken land route and rail line connecting Germany to Turkey, allowing for the quick and easy transfer of troops and weaponry. At the same time, British war planners, finally accepting Gallipoli for the fiasco it had been all along, were quietly drawing up plans for a withdrawal. Taken together, these two developments meant British Egypt was likely to be targeted anew, and by a much-better-equipped enemy. To hamper such an offensive, taking control of the Alexandretta Basin would not merely disrupt the enemy’s main supply line, but sever it—and if that action did in fact spark a regional Arab uprising, the Turks would have a whole new set of problems to deal with.
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