In his own recollection of that meeting, Lawrence conceded his failure to make a good first impression on Ginger Boyle but was more inclined to attribute the problem to genetics. “Red-haired men,” he pointed out, “are seldom patient.”
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Édouard Brémond had taken little notice of the quiet British army captain who attended his dinner at the French mission on October 16. There was little reason he should have. The French colonel’s principal guests that evening had been his British counterpart in Jeddah, Cyril Wilson, and the visiting Oriental secretary for Egypt, Ronald Storrs, a gregarious and witty table companion. By contrast, Captain Lawrence had been so slight in stature and so youthful in face that, in his ill-fitting uniform, he might easily have been mistaken for an adolescent playing at soldier. Brémond had ample reason to revisit that assessment when Lawrence returned to the French mission dining hall at the beginning of November. At that dinner, the unassuming young officer of three weeks before was loquacious, even commandeering of the conversation, and Brémond was aghast at what he was saying.
When HMS Suva had turned into Yenbo bay on October 31, Lawrence had assumed he would soon be on his way back to Cairo. Instead, Cyril Wilson’s deputy in the Hejaz, Colonel Alfred Parker, had come up on the Suva to hear firsthand what Lawrence had found at Faisal’s camp. Impressed by his insights, Parker had suggested that Lawrence first make for Khartoum in order to confer with Reginald Wingate, the governor-general of the Sudan and one of the most important British officials involved in Arabian affairs. As a result, the Suva had carried Lawrence two hundred miles back down the coast to Jeddah, where a second ship was readied to take him on the short hop across the Red Sea to the Sudan. Testament to the sudden interest in his mission, this second ship, HMS Euryalus, was the flagship of the Red Sea fleet and under the personal direction of the fleet commander, Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss.
Hearing of all this, Colonel Brémond was also keen to learn what the young army captain had observed in Faisal’s camp and, perhaps even more, just what he intended to tell Reginald Wingate. This had prompted his invitation to Lawrence and Wemyss to be his dinner guests in Jeddah. At that gathering, it soon became clear that most every opinion Captain Lawrence had formed ran directly counter to what the French colonel was trying to achieve in Arabia.
Since setting up shop in Jeddah in early September, Brémond had lobbied for a greatly expanded Allied military presence in the Hejaz. Certainly part of his argument had root in his very low opinion of the fighting capability of Hussein’s rebels. Time and again, he had proposed that the two hundred French technical advisors who were under his command and currently sitting idle in Egypt be brought down to Rabegh, where they might start transforming the Arabs into a credible fighting force. Of course, such a small force would be completely vulnerable in the event of a Turkish attack on that port town, Brémond argued, so he further proposed that a sizable contingent of British soldiers—at least a brigade, perhaps two—be brought from Egypt to secure the area and provide protection. If the French colonel had his way, the Western military presence in the Hejaz would be expanded from a tiny handful of men—himself, Wilson, and Parker, the few British logistics officers scattered along the shoreline—to anywhere between three thousand and ten thousand.
Left unspoken in this proposition was how it neatly dovetailed with France’s—or at least Colonel Brémond’s—hidden agenda. With a large force of Allied troops on the ground, it would be that much easier to monitor and control events, and to prevent the Arab Revolt from spreading north into Syria. Even better, with an absolutely minimal French investment, its two hundred soldiers alongside Britain’s thousands, France would achieve a physical military presence in the Middle East, and further stake its claim to being a joint and equal partner with Britain in the region.
Even without grasping Brémond’s ulterior motives, the commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Cairo, General Archibald Murray, had given the idea a frosty reception. Tasked to launch an offensive into southern Palestine on the far side of the Sinai Peninsula, and with his army already being periodically poached by Western Front commanders looking for fresh bodies to fling against the Germans in France, Murray was adamantly opposed to parting with any more of his men for the “sideshow” in Arabia.
Brémond had enjoyed much better luck in his approach to Reginald Wingate. Indeed, the Sudan governor-general was a perfect British foil for the Frenchman, a fervent believer in the importance of the Arab rebellion, but just as fervently convinced that the rebels could never carry the day on their own. Along with Brémond’s counsel, Wingate’s conviction on this point was constantly reinforced by the two political officers he had sent to Arabia, Wilson and Parker, both of whom believed the revolt would soon collapse if foreign troops didn’t come in. Of course, it was easy enough for Wingate to lobby for such a move, since he didn’t have the soldiers to send; instead, they would have to be taken off Murray in Egypt. The way Brémond figured it, with Wingate as an ally it was simply a matter of waiting for the next Arab setback, at which point they could join forces and, sidestepping Murray, appeal directly to London for a military deployment.
Brémond didn’t have to wait long. In fact, an opportunity had presented itself in those same few days that Lawrence was stranded in Yenbo. In late October, news had come in of a large Turkish force closing on Rabegh. The report had sown panic among the Arab forces in the foothills above that vital port town, triggering a stampede toward the coast. Seeing their opening, Wingate and Brémond had moved quickly. Wingate fired off a cable to London urging that an Anglo-French force be readied to land at Rabegh. Following Wingate’s lead, Brémond had a note passed to the British Foreign Office announcing that while he was fully prepared to speed his idled soldiers and artillery guns to Rabegh’s relief, it would be “highly imprudent” to do so “unless they could be protected by a sufficient escort to secure their not falling into enemy hands.” As for just what size “escort” the French colonel was looking for, Wingate provided his government with the specifics: a minimum of six battalions, or some six thousand British soldiers.
Faced with such an urgent appeal, the British War Committee came close to approving the proposal, and probably would have if not for the strenuous objections of General Murray, the man on the hook for supplying those six thousand troops. On November 2, the War Committee had declined to order any deployments out of Egypt, but instead suggested that Brémond and Wingate rustle up whatever soldiers they could under their commands and rush them to Rabegh—a suggestion that obviously led the coescalationists right back to square one.
If disappointed by London’s decision, Brémond was surely heartened by a new bit of information that came in that same day. As Alfred Parker in Rabegh reported, there was no Turkish force closing on that town, and there never had been; rather, the entire crisis had been sparked by an erroneous rumor. The embarrassing episode, Parker acidly noted, “proves that Rabegh force could not stand for a moment if threatened.… I consider best solution would be British Govt. [War Committee] to reconsider their decision and land brigade at Rabegh.”
That was music to Brémond’s ears, and he could be confident that a new chance to lobby the War Committee would soon present itself; after all, if the rebels had been put to flight by a rumor, what was going to happen when the Turks launched a bona fide attack?
It was at this precise juncture, however, that T. E. Lawrence reappeared in Jeddah.
As Lawrence expounded over dinner at the French mission, from the time he had spent with Ali in Rabegh and Faisal in Hamra, he was now convinced that any Allied military presence in Arabia should be an absolutely minimal one; Hussein’s rebels would gladly receive weapons and military training from Christian “infidel” advisors, whether they were French or British, but anything more expansive was sure to fuel fears of a European takeover and cause the revolt’s destruction from within.
This was an analysis upon which reasonable men could disagree—and Brémond did disagre
e, strenuously—but what truly stunned him was Lawrence’s further contention that, quite aside from the religious issue, such a force was altogether unnecessary. In his view, the strength of the Arab fighters was as a defensive force, and commanding as they did the narrow gorges and defiles that stood between Medina and the coast, their position was all but impregnable to any conceivable approach a Turkish army might make. So long as the Arabs held those heights—and it was hard to see how they might ever be dislodged given that the terrain was completely unsuited to the Turks’ advantage in artillery and airplanes—Rabegh was perfectly safe.
Brémond was too polite a host to point out that this assertion was being made by a man who had observed the rebels in the field for all of one day, but he surely asked how this view squared with the recent rebel stampede above Rabegh; apparently the Arabs didn’t share in the belief of their positions’ impregnability if they were willing to abandon them on a rumor. It was perhaps in reply to this line of questioning that Lawrence made a further assertion: it had been Ali’s men who had panicked at Rabegh, not Faisal’s, and it was Faisal who was the true leader of the revolt.
Even more than Lawrence’s other opinions, it was this declaration that flabbergasted Brémond. The colonel had yet to meet Faisal, but nothing he’d heard suggested Hussein’s third son as either a natural or decisive leader; instead, as Brémond would shortly report to Paris, “[Faisal] talks a lot but says nothing. He acts little and does nothing.”
But from a French perspective, the thought of promoting Faisal’s leadership was also alarming. By all accounts, he was far more distrusting of the European allies than his older brothers. There was also the matter of his long dalliance with the pro-independence Arab conspirators in Syria. Even if Djemal Pasha had hunted down many of those conspirators, no doubt parts of the network still existed, and for a France eager to keep the Arab Revolt well away from Syria, there could be no prospect more worrisome than the ascent of Faisal.
Brémond might have been tempted to write Lawrence off as a particularly irksome dinner guest, his bold assertions those of a naïf infused with a sense of self-importance, save for a couple of details. One was his manner. He stated his views with utter and unshakable confidence, a confidence bordering on the impertinent when it came to military protocol; no matter the seniority or rank of those who disagreed with him, the army captain with the icy blue eyes refused to back down. Another was the effect he’d had on Admiral Wemyss. Whatever the admiral’s views on a deployment to Arabia had been previously, it was clear he was much impressed by Lawrence, and now held very similar opinions; in fact, Wemyss was planning to accompany Lawrence to Khartoum so that they might make their case to Wingate jointly. Not surprisingly, it made Édouard Brémond extremely apprehensive of what might happen once these two came into contact with the man who up until then had been his closest British ally.
After that dinner in Jeddah, Colonel Brémond disparagingly remarked that Lawrence had become a “vassal” of Faisal. As he got to know Lawrence better in the months ahead, however, Brémond would conclude he’d had it the wrong way around, that the unassuming little British captain had a selfish, even sinister, motive in promoting Faisal. If a British brigade was put ashore in Arabia, a proper military command structure would be established, one that would leave no role for an inexperienced desk officer like Captain Lawrence. Absent that intervention, it would be up to Hussein’s sons to carry the day, and in the soft and hesitant figure of Faisal, Brémond deduced, Lawrence had found a man he might bend to his will, allowing him to become the unseen kingmaker of Arabia.
· · ·
ON THE SAME day that Lawrence set out for Faisal’s camp in the mountains, October 22, a most curious drama had unfolded in northern Scotland. It began when a Scandinavian-American Line passenger ship, the Oskar II, put in at the coal refueling station in the Orkney Islands town of Kirkwall.
Although the Oskar II was transiting between two neutral countries—she was out of Denmark and bound for New York City—the Orkneys were an extremely sensitive area for the British military, the site of their main wartime naval base in the harbor known as Scapa Flow. Always on the lookout for spies or saboteurs, a team of British police inspectors boarded the Swedish-registered ship for a routine check of the passports and luggage of its passengers. On that day, they found someone of great interest. He was a stout forty-one-year-old Ottoman citizen who had recently crossed into neutral Denmark from Germany.
Detaining the man on deck in plain view of other passengers, the inspectors made a thorough search of his cabin; as they subsequently informed the Oskar II captain in the presence of gawking passengers, they found it “full of German stuff.” Taken off the ship in a police launch, the man was held that night under guard at a Kirkwall hotel, then transferred the next day to the Scottish mainland. Brought to London, by the morning of October 25 he was undergoing questioning by Basil Thomson, the head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, and the official in charge of tracking subversives and spies in wartime Britain.
It wasn’t until the Oskar II reached New York City that the British detention of Aaron Aaronsohn became publicly known. It immediately caused a stir in certain circles, especially within the American Zionist community and among those agricultural scientists who had come to know Aaronsohn during his extended prewar visits to the United States. For members of both these groups, it seemed utterly inconceivable that the Jewish agronomist might be an agent for the Central Powers, the accusation implicit in his detention at Kirkwall. On the other hand, there was the disquieting fact that he had chosen to remain in Ottoman-ruled Palestine at the war’s outbreak, even as many other Jewish émigrés had fled to neutral nations or British-ruled Egypt. Then there was the highly suspicious nature of his journey across war-torn central Europe to reach Denmark. Certainly that trip could not have been made without the approval of high officials in both the Turkish and German governments.
At least one of Aaronsohn’s fellow passengers on the Oskar II fervently believed in his innocence. A German Jewish socialite named Olga Bernhardt, she had become very friendly with the agronomist during the voyage from Copenhagen, and she sought to publicize his plight once she reached America. That effort badly backfired when, apparently alerted by Bernhardt, the New York Evening Post instead characterized Aaronsohn’s detention as that of a dangerous Turkish spy. With that, any campaign within the American scientific or Jewish communities to win his release quickly fizzled.
Which actually suited Aaron Aaronsohn just fine. That’s because his “arrest” at Kirkwall had been an elaborate charade. He was a spy, or at least he very much wanted to be, but for the other side in the conflict, and his removal from the Oskar II with its theatric touches—placing him under guard in public view, the semipublic announcement of what had been found in his luggage—was tailored to throw German and Turkish counterintelligence agents off the scent and protect his spy ring back in Palestine. This couldn’t have been achieved by Aaronsohn simply falling from view. Instead, he needed the Germans and Turks to “know” that his intention had been to go to America, that the British had grabbed their “dangerous Turkish spy” off the decks of the Oskar II quite by chance. To this end, the portrait rendered of him by the Evening Post was just a bonus. As Aaronsohn noted in his diary that night in his Kirkwall hotel room, “The game is in play.”
It was very much a marathon game. It had been well over three months since Aaronsohn had left Palestine with Djemal Pasha’s vesika, or travel permit, in hand. First, there had been a monthlong delay in Constantinople as he negotiated the bureaucratic maze to obtain the documentation needed for his further passage to Vienna. From the Austrian capital, it had been a simple matter to continue on to Berlin, but then came another monthlong delay as he tried to figure out the crossing into neutral Denmark. The scientist had finally achieved that in mid-September, but then more hurdles: first, making contact with British counterintelligence agents, then convincing them his incredible story was
true.
The British spy handlers in Denmark may not have been thoroughly assured on this last point, but after some hesitation, they decided it would be Scotland Yard’s problem to sort out. In mid-October, they arranged to put Aaronsohn on board the Oskar II, sailing from Copenhagen harbor on the nineteenth, while further arranging his detention in Kirkwall in three days’ time. Thus the British were finally about to “bring in from the cold” a would-be spy who had spent over a year desperately trying to get their attention.
As he waited for the Oskar II to sail, Aaronsohn was acutely aware that he was about to cross a point of no return, that whatever happened next, his former life as a simple scientist in Palestine was gone forever. In Copenhagen, he wrote several coded letters that, through intermediaries, he hoped would reach his coconspirators back in Athlit; in them, he wrote with happy anticipation about his imminent departure for New York—for the benefit of German and Turkish counterintelligence agents—but used certain words and phrases to indicate that his real destination was Britain.
He also wrote a very long letter to Judge Julian Mack, one of the American benefactors of the Athlit research station, in which he laid bare his reasons for the dangerous path he was now taking. In what was part confession—indeed, this was how Aaronsohn would later describe it—and part manifesto, he wrote out an anguished narrative of what had occurred in Palestine over the previous two years, how it had inexorably brought him to the point where he was prepared to betray the nation that had given his family refuge. “Would I have left the country and openly taken service on the English side,” he wrote, “it would already have been bad enough. My character, my standing would be impaired. But I did worse. I stood where I was, I organized a whole movement, I became connected with the Intelligence Office, as people who are afraid of words call it. I do not like mincing words. Put it clearly, and I became a Spy.”
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