Whatever the motive, Ambassador Spring-Rice was sufficiently intrigued by his young visitor to ask that Yale drop off at the embassy a copy of his report on conditions in Syria. This Yale did the very next day, along with a two-page addendum noting the location of all principal German military installations in Jerusalem, with those locations further pinpointed on a map.
If Yale’s Syria report had failed to interest American officials, the British reaction was quite different. The ambassador thought enough of it to rush a copy directly to Foreign Secretary Balfour, which drew an equally swift response from London; provided William Yale could obtain a draft waiver from the U.S. War Department, the secret cable instructed, Spring-Rice was to offer the twenty-nine-year-old oilman a lieutenant’s commission in the British army, “with view to subsequent employment as intelligence officer to Egypt. His information is sure to be of value. Please take necessary action and wire result.”
The required War Department waiver should have been little more than a formality now that the United States and Great Britain were wartime allies. But it was not, it turned out, such a formality in William Yale’s case. That’s because after languishing apparently unread at the State Department for over a month, his Syria report had finally landed on the desk of someone intrigued by its contents. That person was a man named Leland Harrison, the special assistant to the secretary of state, but that title didn’t begin to convey the actual power he wielded.
The thirty-four-year-old Harrison enjoyed a similar Yankee blueblood background to Yale’s. After being educated at Eton and Harvard, he’d joined the U.S. diplomatic corps and held a succession of posts at some of the most important American overseas missions. His swift rise had been cemented when Secretary of State Robert Lansing brought him to Washington in 1915, where Harrison quickly gained a reputation as Lansing’s most trusted lieutenant.
Both fierce Anglophiles, Lansing and Harrison had shared a deepening disenchantment with Woodrow Wilson’s commitment to American neutrality in the war. Another source of Lansing’s favor for Harrison was undoubtedly his subordinate’s profound sense of discretion. One State Department staffer would say of Leland Harrison that “he was positively the most mysterious and secret man I have ever known.… He was almost a human sphinx, and when he did talk, his voice was so low that I had to strain my ears to catch the words.”
Where this became significant was that prior to American entry in the war, Lansing had acted as the leader of a virtual shadow government within the Wilson administration, a secretive cabal that quietly maneuvered for intervention on the side of the Entente. Just how secretive was indicated by Lansing’s creation of something called the Bureau of Secret Intelligence in 1916. In hopes of uncovering evidence of German treachery that would make the argument for intervention irresistible, the bureau’s special agents spied on diplomats and businessmen from the Central Powers residing in the United States, an activity that obviously undercut Wilson’s public vow of impartiality and would have infuriated other branches of government had they been told. But they weren’t told. Instead, Lansing had used State Department discretionary funds to create the bureau, enabling it to operate without the approval or even the knowledge of Congress or most of the rest of Wilson’s cabinet. Pulling Leland Harrison from the Latin American division, Lansing had placed his young protégé in charge of this “extra-legal” new office, tasked to overseeing “the collection and examination of all information of a secret nature.”
While this element of conspiracy within the State Department had been somewhat mooted by American entry into the war, it provided Harrison with a precedent when, upon reading William Yale’s Syria report, it occurred to him that it might be very useful for the United States to have its own source of intelligence in the Middle East. The snag was that such an enterprise fell out of the purview of the existing domestic intelligence agencies and, with the United States not at war with Turkey, beyond the scope of the army intelligence division as well. The solution was to bring Yale in under the umbrella of the Bureau of Secret Intelligence; to that end, he was summoned to the State Department in early August.
At that meeting, Harrison put forward a remarkable proposition: Yale would return to the Middle East as a “special agent” for the State Department. At a salary of $2,000 a year plus expenses, his mission would be to monitor and report on whatever was happening that might be of interest to the American government—or, perhaps more accurately, of interest to Leland Harrison. From his base in Cairo, Yale would send weekly dispatches through the American embassy’s diplomatic pouch to Washington, where they would be routed exclusively to Harrison’s attention. Unsurprisingly, Yale quickly accepted the offer. On August 14, and under Secretary Lansing’s signature, he was named the State Department’s special agent for the Middle East.
After a brief trip home to see his family in Alder Creek, on August 29 Yale boarded USS New York in New York harbor for another transatlantic crossing. En route to Cairo, he was to stop off in London and Paris to take a sounding of those British and French officials most directly involved with Middle Eastern affairs. As Harrison cabled to the American ambassador in London, “[Yale] is to keep us informed of the Near Eastern situation and, should the occasion arise, may be sent on trips for special investigation work. He is favorably known to the British authorities, who offered him a commission. Please do what you can to put him in touch with the right authorities.”
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to fully grasp the utter provincialism of the United States as it entered World War I in 1917. Not only was its standing army one-twentieth the size of Germany’s, but it was dwarfed in size by even some of Europe’s smallest actors, including Romania, Bulgaria, and Portugal. In 1917, the entire Washington headquarters staff of the State Department fit into one wing of a six-story building adjacent to the White House, a structure it shared with the command staff of both the Departments of Navy and Army.
Those examples notwithstanding, perhaps more remarkable is this: for most of the remainder of the war, the American intelligence mission in the Middle East—a mission that would include the analysis of battlefield strategies and regional political currents, the interviewing of future heads of state, and the gathering of secrets against governments both friendly and hostile—would be conducted by a single twenty-nine-year-old man with no military, diplomatic, or intelligence training. To these deficiencies, William Yale could actually think of a few more: “I lacked a historical knowledge of the background of the problems I was studying. I had no philosophy of history, no method of interpretation, and very little understanding of the fundamental nature and function of the [regional] economic and social system.”
Not that any of this caused him undue anxiety. An exemplar of the American can-do spirit, William Yale also held to the belief, quite common among his countrymen, that ignorance and lack of experience could actually bestow an advantage, might serve as the wellspring for “originality and boldness.” If so, he promised to be a formidable force in the Middle East.
AARON AARONSOHN AND T. E. Lawrence had first crossed paths on February 1, 1917. That encounter made little impression on either man, save a quick note in Aaronsohn’s diary that he’d found Captain “Laurens” knowledgeable but conceited. Their next meeting, on August 12 of that year, was one both would remember for a long time. In the interim, each had become a personality to reckon with in Cairo, Lawrence for his exploits in Arabia, Aaronsohn for his contribution to the British war effort through his NILI spy ring. Of course, both had also gained reputations for being outspoken in their views on the future of the Middle East. Their talk at the Arab Bureau offices quickly degenerated into mutual hostility.
Lawrence may have been alerted to the tone their conversation would take by an incendiary paper Aaronsohn had penned a few weeks earlier. By August 1917, with the specter of official British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine inching closer to reality, even the more radical leaders of international Zion
ism had adopted the soothing language of conciliation: whatever the future political framework in Palestine, they stressed, the Jews would live in peaceful coexistence with their Arab and Christian neighbors, the fight against Turkish oppression a cause they all shared.
No such placating words were forthcoming from Aaron Aaronsohn. In his position paper, soon to be excerpted in the Arab Bulletin, the agronomist inveighed against the “squalid, superstitious, ignorant” Palestinian serfs known as the fellaheen, freely acknowledged that at times they had been forcibly removed from the land by Jewish settlers—and would be again if he had his way. As to the accusation that Jews kept themselves apart from their Arab neighbors, Aaronsohn not only confirmed the charge, but wrote, “We are glad of it. From national, cultural, educational, technical and mere hygienic points of view, this policy has had to be strictly adhered to; otherwise the whole Jewish Renaissance movement would fail.” As a cautionary tale, he pointed to the alleged educational shortcomings in the assimilationist Jewish settlement of Rosh Pinah, which he attributed to the “unavoidably degrading effect that continued contact with the uneducated fellaheen had on the Jewish youth.”
Surely most upsetting to the mainstream Zionist leaders and their British supporters, however, were his comments on the Arab Revolt. In paving the way for official support for a Jewish homeland, and in anticipation of Arab resistance to the idea, British officials from Mark Sykes on down had been energetically coaxing the Zionists to voice their solidarity with the Arab cause. Chaim Weizmann had led this chorus from London, but in Cairo, no one had given Aaronsohn the playsheet.
“[The Palestinian Jews] have no interest, and still less confidence, in the Arab Revolt,” he wrote. “They are not in a position to take up arms against the Turk, and they would hesitate to join the Arabs, even if they were in a position to do it. So far as we know the Arabs, the man among them who will withstand a bribe is still to be born.… In order to help to defeat the Turk, [the Jews] will readily join the British forces, but it is doubtful whether they will ever trust the Arabs.”
Hardly words to delight T. E. Lawrence, the self-appointed defender of that revolt in the West, but at their meeting, Aaronsohn seemed almost to go out of his way to provoke Lawrence further. The ultimate future of Palestine, he explained, was not a British protectorate in which a Jewish minority would be protected, but a de facto Jewish nation. This would be achieved both politically and economically, with Zionists simply buying up all the land between Gaza and Haifa and forcing the fellaheen from the land. Lawrence’s response was equally blunt. The Jews in Palestine had two choices, he told the agronomist: either coexist with the Arab majority or see their throats cut.
“It was an interview without any evidence of friendliness,” Aaronsohn noted in his diary with considerable understatement. “Lawrence had too much success at too early an age. He has a very high estimation of himself. He is lecturing me on our colonies, on the spirit of the people, on the feelings of the Arabs, and we would do well in being assimilated by them, etc. While listening to him I could almost imagine that I was attending the lecture of a Prussian scientific anti-Semite expressing himself in English.… He is openly against us. He must be of missionary stock.”
But Lawrence was only the latest addition to the roster of people irritating Aaron Aaronsohn just then. Despite the peacemaking efforts of various British officers, a three-month-old feud with the anti-Zionist Jewish Committee in Alexandria raged unabated, and the agronomist was still being virtually ignored by Chaim Weizmann’s Zionist Federation in London. So infuriated was Aaronsohn at the lack of respect being shown him from London that just days after his encounter with Lawrence, he wrote two long letters to Weizmann complaining of his treatment and, once again, threatening to disband NILI. When he repeated this threat to Reginald Wingate, it sparked another worried cable to the Foreign Office.
“It might help matters if Mr. Aaronsohn were to receive without delay the support for which he has asked,” Wingate wrote Secretary Balfour on August 20. “An additional reason for not alienating him, and one which may perhaps appeal to you, is that the military authorities attach importance to retaining the use of the organization which he has created in Palestine. He is in a position to destroy this organization, and there is little doubt that, in his present frame of mind, he will be tempted to do so unless some concession is made to his views. How far his difference with the Zionists in England is due to questions of principle and how far to wounded susceptibilities I am unable to tell.”
Shortly afterward, while riding his bicycle through the streets of Cairo one evening, Aaronsohn came up with a new idea: if the British Zionists wouldn’t clarify matters with him, then he would go to Britain and force them to. When he put this plan to his British handlers, they readily concurred, no doubt relieved at the prospect of placing some distance between the NILI network and its potentially destructive creator. On September 13, Aaronsohn left Egypt bound for Marseilles.
But consumed by his myriad squabbles, as well as his need for recognition, it seems to have only fitfully occurred to the scientist that he was engaging in extremely risky behavior for someone who headed a clandestine spy ring. He also appeared to have quite forgotten the cover story designed to keep his family and coconspirators in Palestine safe, that as far as Ottoman authorities knew, he’d been lifted off a boat en route to the United States and was presumably cooling his heels in a British internment camp. Instead, Aaronsohn’s name had now appeared in an array of official reports circulating between Cairo, London, and Paris. Worse, through both his dealings with British officials in Cairo and his continuing spat with the Jewish Committee in Alexandria, an ever-growing circle of people in Egypt were aware of NILI’s existence. Even if none of these would deliberately harm the spy ring, how much longer before word of it finally reached Berlin or Constantinople?
Certainly, Aaron Aaronsohn’s own family hadn’t helped matters. During his New York exile, his younger brother Alex had written of his escape from Turkey in an article for the Atlantic Monthly magazine; by August 1917, that article had been converted into a book, With the Turks in Palestine, which was now available in Cairo bookstores. Among Jewish settlements in Palestine, it was now an open secret that some sort of intelligence network was operating out of Athlit—and Sarah Aaronsohn’s very conspicuous travels in the region gave many a good idea of exactly who was involved. Indeed, in July a delegation of Palestinian Jewish leaders had called on Sarah to demand she immediately stop her “activities,” an ultimatum she had angrily spurned.
But if only because they were supposed to be professionals at such things, by far the greatest blame for the situation attached to those British officials tasked to manage the spy ring. Their cavalier manner bordered on the criminal. It was they who had come up with the idea of using the NILI network to distribute both British propaganda materials and relief funds for Jewish refugees, and while Aaronsohn had ultimately vetoed the first proposal, he had relented on the latter. As a result, when the first installment of aid went ashore at Athlit in mid-July in the form of gold sovereign coins, NILI operatives were no longer just exporters of intelligence but now importers of contraband gold, doubling their risk of detection. Most astounding of all, the British had repeatedly violated the most basic rule of running spies, which is to make sure one cell has no contact with another. By August 1917, the once-small fleet of spy ships operating out of Port Said had been steadily whittled down to the point where a single vessel, the Managem, was now conducting all missions. Out of necessity, this meant the Managem was transporting operatives of Britain’s different intelligence networks in Palestine on the same voyages, neatly ensuring that if one spy was caught or defected, he or she was in a position to unmask everyone else.
Ultimately, it all spoke to the same personality flaw that had plagued the British in their war against the Turks from the outset, one shared in this instance by the Aaronsohns: hubris, contempt for one’s enemy. And just as had occurred so many times since 1914,
they would all soon have reason to regret it. On September 13, the same day Aaronsohn set sail for Europe, Turkish authorities in Palestine caught their first NILI spy.
IT WAS THE SORT of store-clerk work Lawrence enjoyed the least. By late August, the process of converting Aqaba from a sleepy fishing port into the forward staging ground for the Arab Revolt was well under way, with a daily stream of British ships disgorging mountains of supplies. Those ships also brought in thousands of fighters—Muslim recruits from Egypt, Arab warriors from Faisal’s old base at Wejh—where they were joined by a surge of new tribal recruits coming in from the surrounding mountains. Since his return from Cairo on August 17, Lawrence’s days in Aqaba had been spent dealing with the inevitable logistical foul-ups, and in trying to help bring some degree of order to the place. But perhaps such mundane duties helped distract from the larger problems at hand, for already the heady optimism and accelerated plans sparked by Aqaba’s capture six weeks earlier had become a thing of the past.
As might have been foreseen, General Allenby’s ambitious goal of launching his Palestine offensive by mid-September had been pushed back due to a host of delays in getting his army fully reequipped; planners in Cairo were now talking of a launch date no earlier than late October. Which maybe was just as well from Lawrence’s perspective, since the Arabs were woefully unprepared too.
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