In the face of this ultimatum, a compromise was reached: Aaronsohn could go along on the boat, but would not be allowed ashore. In his stead, couriers would be sent in on a launch under the cover of darkness carrying instructions from him, as well as some of his small personal items that his confederates might recognize, thus convincing them the instructions were genuine. Allowing sufficient time for contact to be made, the launch would then go back in to retrieve the couriers off the beach. Time would be short, however, since the spy ship obviously needed to be well over the horizon and gone from sight before sunrise.
As at most every other stage of this star-crossed venture, now entering its seventeenth month, there was to be a snag. With Aaronsohn on board, the spy ship, a small converted trawler named the Goeland, slipped out of Port Said on Christmas Eve, and reached the coast off Athlit by the following afternoon. Aaronsohn made out someone waving a black cloth from the second-floor balcony of the research station, an identification that might have been more definitive had anyone on the ship’s crew thought to bring along a decent pair of binoculars. Waiting for the cover of nightfall to make contact, the Goeland then headed out to the open sea, only to sail directly into a strong squall, a typical occurrence in the eastern Mediterranean at that time of year. Consequently, it was nearly 2 a.m. before the seas had calmed enough to allow it to return to Athlit and release the launch with the two couriers on board, one carrying Aaronsohn’s instructions to his conspirators, the other his monogrammed penknife and special magnifying glass. No sooner had the launch disappeared into the darkness than the storm kicked back up.
Within the hour, the launch returned with troubling news. With the surf too rough to make a beach landing, the couriers had been instructed to swim the last little distance to shore. And with dawn fast approaching—already they could see a bivouac fire to the north, presumably that of a Turkish shore patrol—there was now no time to go back in to collect them; the couriers would have to fend for themselves. Throttling up its engines, the Goeland headed out to open waters once more. For Aaronsohn, it was one more maddening experience to join all the others; he had at last glimpsed Athlit again, but had no way of knowing for certain if successful contact had been made.
His mood improved when in early January he was finally permitted to leave Alexandria for Cairo. Taking a room at the Continental Hotel, he made the rounds of the different officials in the Arab Bureau, and at last began finding a receptive audience. Chief among these was another aristocratic Amateur and member of Parliament, a thirty-one-year-old Oxford graduate recently arrived in Cairo named William Ormsby-Gore. If not quite up to Mark Sykes’s overachiever status, Ormsby-Gore was also a great dabbler over an eclectic array of interests, including the notion of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine—a cause with special resonance since he had recently converted to Judaism. In the months ahead, he and Sykes would emerge as two of the most important figures in the British power structure pushing for the creation of such a Jewish homeland, and one of their primary vehicles in furthering that cause would be Aaron Aaronsohn.
In the meantime, though, Ormsby-Gore sought to bolster the agronomist’s flagging spirits however he could. Under his urging, another spy ship was sent to make contact with Athlit in mid-January; alas, this mission, too, ran into bad weather, and was aborted even before the Palestine coast had been reached. Ormsby-Gore also passed Aaronsohn along to two other members of the Arab Bureau, Philip Graves and Major Windham Deedes, who shared the MP’s belief in the enormous benefits that might be derived by activating the scientist’s intelligence network. These sympathizers managed to insert a portion of an Aaronsohn report on the Jewish colonies in Palestine into the Arab Bulletin, including the pointed comment that the Zionists’ greatest desire was “for autonomy through the benevolence of a friendly protecting power,” marking one of the very few times a non-British correspondent gained a hearing in the intelligence compendium. Still, it reflected how far the agronomist remained from the inner circle of power in Cairo that he could imagine Windham Deedes as being “in charge of the Intelligence Service,” as he noted in his diary, rather than cued to his true status as a mere midlevel analyst.
Slowly but surely, then, Aaronsohn finally began making some headway, but as he well knew, “slowly” was his enemy. That became manifestly clear on January 25. As he was returning to his room at the Continental Hotel that afternoon, he spotted his erstwhile liaison, Captain Edmonds, lounging near the staircase; he noted that the young officer seemed “mysterious in attitude.”
“You are the very man I am looking for,” Edmonds said. “You must go immediately to Port Said. One of your men came across the desert.” It was shocking news to Aaronsohn, but, true to form, Edmonds refused to provide any details other than the man’s name: Joseph Lishansky.
“Is he wounded I wonder?” Aaronsohn wrote in his diary before rushing off to Port Said. “Why do they send me to him instead of sending him here? These gentlemen are so uselessly and so unfortunately mysterious!”
As he discovered in Port Said, his apprehensions were exactly right—Lishansky was wounded—but the story got much worse from there. Having despaired of ever hearing from Aaronsohn, and with the situation in Palestine growing ever more bleak, in mid-December Lishansky and Absalom Feinberg had decided to make another attempt to reach Egypt overland; in a cruel twist of fate, they had set off from Athlit just days before the Goeland couriers had come ashore with Aaronsohn’s instructions. After a harrowing journey across the Sinai no-man’s-land, the two men had been nearly to the British lines when they were spotted by a band of Bedouin raiders. In the ensuing gunfight, Lishansky escaped with relatively minor wounds, but Feinberg had been shot in the back and was presumably dead.
The news shattered Aaronsohn; Feinberg was not only his deputy at Athlit, but his closest friend. “So Absa, the brave, was shot by vile, rapacious Bedouins,” he lamented in his diary; “he fell dying into the hands of those whom he despised most.”
There was little time for grieving, however, for Aaronsohn instantly appreciated the new problem Feinberg’s apparent death raised: if the Turks found and identified his body, they would surely set to tearing Athlit apart and rounding up his associates. Rushing back to Cairo, Aaronsohn went in frantic search of his newfound friends in the Arab Bureau, and found Windham Deedes.
The frustrations of nearly two years came out in a torrent. Amid tears, he blamed Feinberg’s death on the incompetence and cynicism of the British war machine, and warned that his death was a mere harbinger of the many to come if the Turks uncovered his spy ring—as now seemed highly likely. “I spoke with fire and sorrow,” Aaronsohn noted in his diary. “[Deedes] listened to me kindly.… He assured me that in future there would be no more humiliation and distrust and that everything would go well.”
True to Deedes’s word, a spy ship was immediately readied to make another run to Athlit. This time, Aaronsohn distinctly saw signals from the research station’s balcony, and a launch was cast off to take his messages ashore. In an eerie reprise of the earlier voyage, however, another storm descended at just that moment, compelling the launch to stay offshore and a lone courier to swim the last stretch to the beach. After a tense hour’s wait, the swimmer reappeared on the shore with two men from Athlit, but by now the storm was raging; unable to swim out to the launch, this courier, too, was left behind.
More bad news soon followed. Guided by Lishansky’s description of the attack, a Bedouin tracker was sent out into the Sinai in search of Absalom Feinberg. He found nothing. “So our brave Knight is dead!” Aaronsohn wrote in his diary. “Without even confessing it to myself, I had entertained a wild hope that he had survived. But now, we can do nothing except to complete the work for which he gave his life.”
But this, too, was hardly a consoling thought to Aaron Aaronsohn. With Absalom Feinberg now dead and his brother Alex in America, the full burden and peril of operating the spy ring would fall squarely on the only person left in Palestine whom t
he scientist implicitly trusted: his twenty-seven-year-old sister Sarah.
IN SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM, Lawrence described the Arab army that left Um Lejj for the march on Wejh on January 18 in exalted terms. Coming just a little over a month since the debacle above Yenbo, Faisal now stood at the head of a force of some ten thousand warriors drawn from a half-dozen different tribes and many more clans. Lawrence underscored the importance of that moment by invoking the words of a young sheikh of the Beidawi tribe, Abd el Karim, as he gazed over the sea of tent encampments:
“He called me out to look, and swept his arm round, saying half-sadly, ‘We are no longer Arabs but a People.’ He was half-proud too, for the advance on Wejh was their biggest effort, the first time in memory that the manhood of a tribe, with transport, arms and food for [covering] two hundred miles, had left its district and marched into another’s territory without the hope of plunder or the stimulus of blood feud.”
Perhaps, but born of such high purpose, it must have been rather anticlimactic when Faisal’s forces cleared the dunes south of Wejh a week later to find the port town already a shattered, smoking ruin. It was an embarrassing sight for Faisal ibn Hussein, and only slightly less so for that British member of his entourage who had become his greatest supporter.
By the timetable worked out with senior British officers at Um Lejj, Faisal’s men were supposed to have reached Wejh fully two days earlier. At that point, a coordinated land-and-sea operation was to be launched, with Faisal’s forces closing from the landward side while the British naval flotilla waiting offshore would ferry ashore the some 550 Arab fighters they had transported up from Yenbo.
But as the British armada maneuvered into position leading up to H-Hour on January 23, Faisal’s army had been nowhere to be seen. That night, the commander of the British fleet, Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, decided that, for “sanitary reasons” alone, he simply had to put the Arab warriors on his ships ashore. Following a brief bombardment on the morning of January 24, the shipborne Arab fighters had been ferried into Wejh under the command of two British officers.
The ensuing battle was a chaotic and fitful affair, one that lasted most of that day and left some twenty of the Arab fighters dead. No doubt contributing to its slow pace—the Turkish garrison of two hundred was outnumbered nearly three to one and demoralized—was the Arab habit of breaking off their attacks to loot and ransack whatever new buildings they occupied. One of the British officers in charge of the ground operation, Captain Norman Bray, was shocked by the rebels’ behavior, noting in his battle report that the result of their freebooting ways was a town “ransacked from roof to floor.” This was the scene that Faisal and Lawrence rode into the following day.
For his part, Lawrence struggled mightily to put the very best gloss on matters, offering in his own report a number of unconvincing explanations to account for their delay in reaching Wejh. Lawrence’s reflexively contrarian response to criticisms of the Arabs by his British comrades was nothing new. Back on the night of December 11, when Turkish forces had approached the outskirts of Yenbo, a British pilot had unsparingly described the panic that gripped Faisal’s forces within the town. His account stood in marked contrast to Lawrence’s own version of events. “The garrison was called out about 10 PM by means of criers sent round the streets,” he reported. “The men all turned out without visible excitement, and proceeded to their posts round the town wall without making a noise, or firing a shot.”
The easiest explanation for this divergence of accounts was that the pilot had actually been in Yenbo at the time, whereas Lawrence had not; earlier that same day, he had left Yenbo by ship, a detail left obscure in his report.
This variance in viewpoints also extended to the figure of Faisal ibn Hussein. In his December report, that same British pilot had reported that Faisal “is easily frightened and lives in constant dread of a Turkish advance, though he seems to conceal that fear from his army.” Another British officer, Major Charles Vickery, caustically commented after observing Faisal’s force in Wejh that “it is not known how far other Sherifial leaders interest themselves in the training of their troops, but certainly Sherif Faisal ignores it.” Most appalling to British officers had been Faisal’s decision to take up quarters on a British warship in Yenbo harbor during those dark December days when a Turkish attack seemed imminent, leaving his men onshore to fend for themselves.
All of this, of course, stood at great odds to Lawrence’s own analysis; as he’d said of Faisal even during the grim interlude in Nakhl Mubarak, “he is magnificent.” It also revealed something quite remarkable: after just three months in the field, Lawrence was not only the chief booster of Faisal and the Arabs, but their most determined apologist.
Among those who noticed this was Faisal himself. Knowing that Lawrence was now scheduled to return to Cairo—and probably having seen enough of the hard-nosed Newcombe during the march up from Um Lejj to realize theirs would be a less congenial relationship—Faisal sent off a secret cable to Cyril Wilson in Jeddah on the same day that he reached Wejh. As Wilson relayed to Gilbert Clayton in Cairo, Faisal “is most anxious that Lawrence should not return to Cairo, as he has given such very great assistance.”
Confronted by this direct request from Faisal, Clayton found it quite impossible to find a way to refuse. Within days, the paperwork was readied to make Lawrence’s posting to the Hejaz permanent. At last, Lawrence was to be free: free of his desk at the Savoy Hotel, free, ultimately, to remake the war in Arabia to his own image.
Chapter 11
A Mist of Deceits
A man might clearly destroy himself, but it was repugnant that the innocence and the ideals of the Arabs should enlist in my sordid service for me to destroy. We needed to win the war, and their inspiration had proved the best tool out here. The effort should have been its own reward—might yet be for the deceived—but we, the masters, had promised them results in our false contract, and that was bargaining with life.
T. E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM
With the taking of Wejh, the setbacks and embarrassments that had plagued the Arab rebel cause in recent months were being consigned to history. Lawrence made every effort to hasten the process of forgetfulness along.
After that town’s capture in late January 1917, he was briefly brought back to Cairo in preparation for his return to Arabia on a permanent basis. In the Egyptian capital, he kept up a wearying pace. Along with catching up on his long-neglected reports and making additions to The Handbook of the Hejaz, a primer the Arab Bureau was compiling to help familiarize British officers being dispatched there, Lawrence shuttled between the offices of the British military leadership to provide them with firsthand accounts of what was occurring across the Red Sea. With all, he presented a very optimistic view of where matters stood—he even managed to concoct plausible-sounding excuses for Faisal’s late arrival to Wejh—and insisted there was a newfound fortitude and enthusiasm for battle among the western Arabian tribes. His assessment stood in marked contrast to those of other British officers present at Wejh, but success has a way of choosing winners in such disagreements.
“The circle of Arab well-wishers was now strangely increased,” Lawrence archly recalled. “In the army, our shares rose as we showed profits. [General] Lynden-Bell stood firmly our friend and swore that method was coming out of the Arab madness. Sir Archibald Murray realized with a sudden shock that more Turkish troops were fighting the Arabs than were fighting him, and began to remember how he had always favored the Arab revolt.”
Perhaps none were so pleased as Lawrence’s superior, General Gilbert Clayton. To be sure, Faisal’s insistence that Lawrence stay on as his permanent liaison necessitated a bit of bureaucratic reconfiguring—Clayton needed to ensure that neither Cyril Wilson in Jeddah nor Stewart Newcombe, the recently arrived head of the British military mission, felt infringed upon—but these were trivial matters when set against the achievement: after all the distrust that had marked Arab-British relations over the pr
evious two years, suspicions that had remained despite the ministrations of generals and senior diplomats, the chief Arab field commander now regarded a lowly British officer as his most indispensable advisor.
So hectic was Lawrence’s pace in Cairo that he apparently took little notice of a visitor to the Arab Bureau offices on the morning of February 1, 1917. It had been just a few days since Aaron Aaronsohn learned of the death of his chief spying partner, Absalom Feinberg, in the Sinai desert, and he was now being treated with a kind of contrite respect within the British military intelligence apparatus; he’d come to the Savoy Hotel that morning to lend his advice to a British officer compiling a dossier on the Palestine political situation. While Lawrence made no record of their brief conversation, Aaronsohn was sufficiently struck by it to make note in his diary that night. “At the Arab Bureau there was a young 2nd lieutenant (Laurens),” he wrote, “an archaeologist—very well informed on Palestine questions—but rather conceited.”
Perhaps one reason Lawrence forgot about his first encounter with Aaronsohn—they would meet again, and to far greater consequence—was that just two days later a chain of events began that would fundamentally transform his mission in the Middle East. It started on the morning of February 3, with a visit to the Savoy Hotel by his nemesis, Colonel Édouard Brémond.
CUNNING AND RESOURCEFULNESS are characteristics that generally well serve a military officer. If judged by those traits alone, Édouard Brémond should not have been a mere colonel in the French armed forces, but a field marshal.
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