Aaronsohn intended the letter to be shown to other American Jewish benefactors of the research station, many of whom did not consider themselves Zionists and were sure to be shocked by its contents. This may have been the reason for its oratorical, even somewhat histrionic tone as the scientist explained what he and his confederates felt they were fighting for: “Nobody can say we were doing it for the sake of vile money.… We are not doing it for honours either.… We do not do it for vengeance; we do it because we hope we are serving our Jewish cause.… We considered it our duty to do our share, and we are still foolish enough to believe in right and justice and recognition of the Cause we are serving.”
That was all well and good, but a loftiness unlikely to fully satisfy Basil Thomson. As the head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, Thomson had interviewed hundreds of would-be spies by the close of 1916, and interrogated many more who had proven to be German moles. Certainly neither the résumé nor the recent travels of the man brought into his office on October 25 were the stuff to inspire confidence.
Yet the longer Aaron Aaronsohn talked, the more Thomson was persuaded that here was the genuine article, a man anxious to help the British war effort—albeit for his own motives—and possessed of the skills and acumen to do so. It was not just Aaronsohn’s meticulously observed details of the Turkish war machine—a bit out of date now, perhaps, but Aaronsohn claimed to have a network in place to constantly update them—but his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of most every aspect of the region. For the detective, the decisive moment came when the topic turned to the British army’s current slow-motion advance across the Sinai Peninsula in prelude to their offensive into Palestine.
One key reason for that army’s glacial pace over the arid wasteland was the need to haul water all the way from Egypt. That had meant laying a pipeline, which had also necessitated the building of a railroad. According to Aaronsohn, Thomson recounted in his memoir, it all could have been avoided. “There is water right there in the desert, three hundred feet down,” he said. “All you have to do is drill for it.”
“How do you know that?” Thomson would recall asking.
Aaronsohn shrugged. “The rocks indicate it. And [first-century Jewish-Roman chronicler] Flavius Josephus corroborates it. He wrote that he could walk for a whole day south from Caesarea and never leave flourishing gardens.… Where there were gardens, there must have been water. Where is that water now?”
“And what can you do?” Thomson asked.
“If I were with the British army, I could show the engineers where to drill. I guarantee that they would find enough water for the army without having to bring a single drop from Cairo.”
Impressed, Thomson decided to pass Aaronsohn on to the central headquarters of the British military, the Imperial General Staff on Whitehall Street. There, a young major, Walter Gribbon, was detailed to further debrief the agronomist, a first step toward determining just what should be done with him. On October 28, three days after arriving in London, Aaronsohn wrote his brother Alexander and sister Rivka in New York. Along with great relief at finally reaching England—“for the past few nights I have slept in peace, untroubled by nightmares”—he admitted to a pang of regret:
“Here, I had the good fortune to meet eager ears and open minds. I have reason to believe that had our [British] friends been better informed sooner, they would have acted in consequence. Had I come earlier I should have probably served our cause better, spared our country some suffering, and rendered more efficient service to our friends.”
When he wrote those words, Aaronsohn didn’t know the half of it. On the previous day, as he was again being debriefed by Walter Gribbon, a friendly, slightly chubby man in his midthirties had come into the office to briefly sit in on the proceedings. During a break in Gribbon’s questioning, the visitor inquired after Aaronsohn’s views on Zionism, of where exactly he placed himself amid the galaxy of Jewish political thought. The visitor had listened intently and, before leaving, handed Aaronsohn a calling card, asking if he might be so good as to drop by the indicated address at 9:30 a.m. in three days’ time. Aaronsohn readily agreed. The address on the calling card was 30 Broadway Gate, the London residence of the MP from Hull Central, Sir Mark Sykes.
BY NOVEMBER 15, 1916, Brigadier General Gilbert Clayton faced a conundrum as old as the superior-subordinate relationship: how to sabotage the plans of his boss without revealing his own hand in the endeavor. Adding to Clayton’s difficulties on that day was that to come up with a feasible scheme, he urgently needed to speak with one of his own subordinates, Captain T. E. Lawrence. Unfortunately, Lawrence was quite unreachable, in transit somewhere along the thousand-mile stretch of desert and Nile River towns that lay between Khartoum and Cairo.
The problem was that, once again, Reginald Wingate was lobbying London for a large-scale military intervention in Arabia, and this time suggesting that both Lawrence and Sheikh Faisal were in favor of it. Until Lawrence resurfaced, there was no way of knowing what he might have said to Wingate, and thus no easy way to thwart the plan.
In whatever course he chose, however, Gilbert Clayton did have a distinct built-in advantage. That’s because within the maze of overlapping bureaucracies the British had created in wartime Egypt, no one was precisely sure where Clayton’s job duties began and where they ended. That uncertainty had stood the unassuming spymaster with the pencil-thin mustache in very good stead in past crises, and it was about to do so again.
At the war’s outset, Clayton had been the chief British intelligence officer in Cairo, a post that made him the overall supervisor of Lawrence and the other Intrusives who set up shop at the Savoy Hotel in late 1914. In turn, Clayton had answered to the chief British civil authority in Egypt, High Commissioner Henry McMahon. Keeping matters simple, all ultimately answered to the Foreign Office in London.
That neat chain of command had turned both murky and contentious when Egypt became the chief staging ground for British military operations against the Ottoman Empire, operations that fell under the aegis of the War Office. In the inevitable turf war between the resident administration and the incoming generals of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, those military intelligence units answerable to the War Office—Cairo was suddenly awash in them—saw little reason to tolerate a competing one answerable to the Foreign Office. Tensions had only grown worse when Clayton’s Intrusives were given a clearer mandate in early 1916 and institutionalized as the Arab Bureau. For months afterward, General Archibald Murray, the commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force—or EEF—tried unsuccessfully to wrest control of Clayton’s outfit from McMahon, before finally settling for a quasi-supervisory role.
But the battle for primacy in Cairo was actually a three-way fight, and just to keep things lively, this third contender was a thousand miles away in Khartoum. Reginald Wingate, the governor-general of the Sudan, was also the sirdar, or commander in chief, of the Egyptian army, a wholly different military force than Murray’s EEF. As might be predicted, none of these three men—McMahon, Murray, Wingate—liked each other very much, and joined to their intrigues against one another were the competing bureaucracies of London and British India, each with its own set of interests and allies and adversaries in the Egyptian capital. On top of this was the official indigenous Egyptian government that, though it was quite toothless, various British officials periodically felt the need to pretend to consult in order to maintain the appearance that the wishes of the actual inhabitants of Egypt somehow mattered.
Amid this impenetrable tangle, though, one name had a way of popping up with surprising regularity: Gilbert Clayton. By the autumn of 1916, the spymaster was simultaneously the head of the Arab Bureau (answerable to McMahon), the “Cairo Agent of the Sirdar” (Wingate), and the chief liaison officer between EEF (Murray) and the British Egyptian civilian administration (McMahon). In his spare time, he also directed an internal spying network that kept watch on both local dissident leaders and representatives of the
indigenous Egyptian government, a task simplified by the fact that the two were often one and the same. As Lawrence would later write of Clayton, “It was not easy to descry his influence. He was like water, or permeating oil, creeping silently and insistently through everything. It was not possible to say where Clayton was and was not, and how much really belonged to him.”
Paradoxically, considering the sabotage mission he was contemplating that November, of the various competitors, Gilbert Clayton was personally closest to Wingate. A trim man in his midfifties with a fine white mustache, Wingate was a legend in East Africa, having fought alongside Kitchener in the Mahdi War of the late 1890s, and then staying on to rule over British Sudan for the next seventeen years. For five of those years, Clayton had served as Wingate’s personal secretary in Khartoum, and he’d been deeply impressed by the man’s political acumen. The sirdar had also been one of the first British leaders in the region to appreciate the importance of the Arab Revolt in the summer of 1916, and had been tireless in promoting their cause to London.
The recurrent sticking point, however, was that nearly all of Wingate’s information on Arabia came either from the two Sudan hands he had sent there, Cyril Wilson and Alfred Parker, or from Colonel Édouard Brémond. From these three, the sirdar had heard a steady litany of the rebels’ incompetence, an unending drumbeat on the need for a large Allied force. This was a course that virtually everyone in the Arab Bureau strongly opposed, and it had been partly in hopes of bringing a new perspective to the matter that Clayton had arranged to send T. E. Lawrence on his fact-finding mission to the Hejaz in October. As Clayton had expected, the visit had convinced Lawrence that escalation would be folly—which was also why he had approved Lawrence’s detour to Khartoum in order to brief Wingate directly.
At first, that stratagem appeared to pay off. Lawrence had arrived in Khartoum on November 7, just days after Wingate’s first intervention request had been vetoed by the War Committee, and whatever Lawrence said to the sirdar seemed to greatly mollify him. Obviously impressed by Lawrence’s knowledge of the Arab world, and by his account of the defensive capabilities of Faisal’s troops, Wingate cabled Clayton that same day outlining a radically scaled-back plan: to urge Brémond to send his technical advisors on to the Hejaz but without the thousands of British troops as protection, and to give Faisal’s men the “moral and material support (aeroplanes, guns and machine guns) necessary to enable them to continue their defensive [sic] in hills.”
But if Clayton thought that settled the matter, he was soon set right. The next day, November 8, the French government had pressed the War Committee to reconsider its decision, stressing that while Brémond was anxious to send his advisors to Rabegh, “they cannot provide the kind of field force that British infantry would form. Sending these French units to Rabegh on their own would mean unnecessarily risking their sacrifice, thereby handing to the Turks the guns and machine guns intended for the Sherif’s army.”
In his own cable shortly afterward, Wingate had thrown his support to the Brémond/French argument anew, even if tempered somewhat by Lawrence’s influence. Since it was possible that Faisal might on his own block a Turkish advance toward Rabegh, as Lawrence maintained, Wingate suggested that a British brigade be readied for deployment but only sent ashore “at the last moment.” The sirdar further intimated that this was a course of action approved by the one British officer who had actually been to the war front, Captain Lawrence.
To Clayton, reading this cable in Cairo, it made little sense. Lawrence had surely been around the military long enough to know that a force readied for deployment would be deployed, bringing about the very situation—the implosion of the Arab Revolt—that he had warned against. How had Lawrence possibly acquiesced to this? It was a question with no immediate answer. Lawrence had left Khartoum on November 11, and would be incommunicado until he reached Cairo. In the meantime, the War Committee, under intense French pressure, was pondering its next move.
No record exists of what was said when Clayton finally sat Lawrence down in the Arab Bureau offices on November 16, and neither man was to detail that meeting in their later writing. From anecdotal evidence, it appears Lawrence either maintained that Wingate had somehow misunderstood him, or, if admitting to having agreed to Wingate’s plan, claimed he thought he was responding to a purely hypothetical scenario.
But if Lawrence did equivocate about his meetings with Wingate, there is another possible explanation. On November 6, the day before he had arrived in Khartoum, it was announced that Henry McMahon was being dismissed as Egyptian high commissioner, to be replaced by Reginald Wingate. That news put Lawrence in a nasty squeeze in Khartoum; he was not only sitting across from the biggest proescalationist in the British power structure, but the man about to become his overall boss. With this in mind, the most likely scenario is that Lawrence agreed with Wingate’s proposal to his face in Khartoum, in hopes that he could help in its scuttling once he got back to the more amenable climes of Cairo.
Certainly that was what he now set out to do. At the end of his meeting with Clayton on November 16, Lawrence returned to his office and quickly wrote up a new memorandum on the situation in the Hejaz, one so blunt and shorn of niceties that it left no room for misinterpretation. In terms of length, there is probably no document that more profoundly influenced the British war effort in Arabia than the four-page memorandum he handed to Gilbert Clayton the next day.
In that memo, Lawrence held up and then knocked down virtually every possible argument for a large Allied military presence in Arabia—and he did so by turning the escalationists’ own arguments against them. While it was true that the Arabs couldn’t defend Rabegh if the Turks broke through Faisal’s mountain defenses, he pointed out, neither could an Allied force held somewhere in reserve as Wingate proposed. That’s because, once through the mountains, the Turks would reach the port town in a mere four days, hardly time for even a fully readied force standing by in Egypt to be brought down and deployed.
This, then, left the argument of deploying now, while Faisal’s men still held the mountains, but the issue there was deep-rooted Arab distrust. “They are our very good friends while we respect their independence,” Lawrence wrote. “They are deeply grateful for the help we have given them, but they fear lest we may make it a claim upon them afterwards. We have appropriated too many Moslem countries for them to have any real trust in our disinterestedness and they are terribly afraid of an English occupation of Hejaz. If the British with or without the Sherif’s approval landed at Rabegh an armed force strong enough to … organize a position there, they would, I am convinced, say ‘we are betrayed’ and scatter to their tents.”
This was, of course, the same basic argument other antiescalationists had been making all along, but Lawrence was able to give it a wholly new twist by virtue of his firsthand look at the region. As he’d discovered in his trek to Faisal’s camp, there were other water sources in the mountains above Rabegh that, until then, no one had known about. If Arab resistance in those mountains collapsed—a collapse that, again, was sure to accompany an Allied escalation—the Turks could draw on those water sources to sidestep Rabegh altogether and continue on toward Mecca unimpeded. In this scenario, the port town would be transformed from vitally strategic to utterly superfluous.
But Lawrence wasn’t done yet. Recognizing that Colonel Brémond and his French superiors were the prime movers behind the escalation push—and were likely to continue that push no matter what the War Committee decided during this latest go-around—he set out to demolish their rationale for needing a British protection force for their technical unit in Rabegh. If the Turks did break through the mountains to advance on Rabegh, he pointed out, the Allies would still have four days’ notice before they got there. In that scenario, the Royal Navy would have more than enough time to evacuate two hundred French military advisors, but probably not enough time to also evacuate thousands of British troops and all their valuable war matériel. Remarkably, this
rather glaring hole in the French argument doesn’t seem to have been noticed by anyone previously.
Except, Lawrence maintained, the French plan had never been about defending Rabegh anyway. Rather, it was about safeguarding their imperialist designs in the Middle East by seeking to destroy the Arab Revolt from within: “They say, ‘Above all things the Arabs must not take Medina. This can be assured if an allied force landed at Rabegh. The tribal contingents will go home, and we will be the sole bulwark of the Sherif in Mecca. At the end of the war we give him Medina as his reward.’ This is of course a definite policy, agreeable to their larger schemes,” but the result, Lawrence contended, would be to leave, “the Franco-British force a disconsolate monument on the dusty beach at Rabegh.”
It was an astounding accusation to make against Britain’s closest ally, built as it was on an extrapolation—and a rather sweeping mischaracterization—of what Colonel Brémond had told Lawrence in Jeddah. But perhaps it was not so astounding to a British military leadership grown increasingly resentful and suspicious of their French allies. On the Western Front, the British were now doing a majority of the fighting—and dying—as a shattered and depleted French army tried to rebuild itself. Over the past five months, in a campaign meant to relieve pressure on the battered French garrison in Verdun, British general Douglas Haig had repeatedly and futilely hurled his army against the German trenchworks along the river Somme; the 400,000 British dead and wounded at the Somme were double that suffered by the French. On the more local front, surely any British commander privy to the manner in which the French had repeatedly blocked the Alexandretta plan, as well as their continuing ambivalence over the coming British offensive in Palestine—an ambivalence born of fears that success would take the British into regions the French were claiming for themselves in the postwar world—were prepared to accept most any charge of Gallic perfidy at face value. Of course, Lawrence’s accusation was also guaranteed to play well to the imperialist segment of the British government, eager to somehow keep France out of the Middle East altogether.
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