Amid all this, just how much value could be put on the life of one more man—even of an “almost indispensable” one, as Gilbert Clayton had described Lawrence a year earlier—if he might in some small way advance the war effort? If Lawrence was brave or foolish or deluded enough to chance Yarmuk, certainly no one at headquarters was going to try to talk him out of it. Upon being briefed on the plan, General Allenby instructed that it be carried out on the night of November 5, 6, or 7.
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ACCORDING TO POPULAR folklore, the agent of their destruction was a pigeon.
Since the early days of the war, the British had employed carrier pigeons to relay messages on the Western Front, and in the summer of 1917 someone in Cairo hit on the same idea as a way to maintain contact with the NILI operatives in Palestine. On paper, the notion had a lot going for it. It would help eliminate the need for the perilous and trouble-prone spy-ship runs from Egypt—with almost eerie regularity, these voyages had a way of coinciding with bad storms—as well as the risk to operational security inherent in face-to-face contact between spies and spy handlers. Carrier pigeons might also mean that crucial intelligence would reach British lines much faster. Between the difficulty in getting informants’ reports to Athlit, and then the wait for the ship, the information Cairo received from NILI was often five or six weeks out of date.
The pigeons had proved something of a dud, though. On a test run in July, only one of the six birds released made it the one hundred miles to the British headquarters in the Sinai. Nevertheless, on August 30, Sarah Aaronsohn had turned to the method out of desperation. By then, the Managem hadn’t put in at Athlit for nearly a month (little did Sarah Aaronsohn know that, apparently, the main reason for this inactivity was a British refusal to increase the pay of the man who made the swim from ship to shore to £30 a month); anxious to reestablish contact, she inserted her coded messages into tiny metal capsules, attached these to the legs of several pigeons, and set the birds loose. For insurance, she sent off two more pigeons four days later.
Sarah had always been leery of the system, and when she went down to the sea for a swim on the morning of September 4, her doubts were confirmed; perched atop a nearby water tank was one of the birds she’d released the day before, the telltale capsule still attached to its leg. Sure enough, rumors soon began circulating that a Turkish commander in Jaffa had intercepted a message-carrying pigeon, and even though Turkish authorities apparently couldn’t break the code or pinpoint the bird’s origin, they were now convinced that a spy ring was operating somewhere along the Palestine coast.
Then, in mid-September, came news of the arrest of Naaman Belkind in the Sinai. NILI’s chief operative in southern Palestine, Belkind had been caught trying to cross over to the British lines. Suspected of being a spy, he was first tortured for information in Beersheva, then transferred to Damascus to undergo more elaborate interrogation. With Belkind’s capture, Sarah Aaronsohn and other NILI agents feared it was only a matter of time before their network was exposed and the Turks came for them. So did those other residents of Zichron Yaakov who’d long been suspicious of the goings-on in town and in nearby Athlit. On September 18, the settlement’s governing committee summoned Sarah Aaronsohn to a meeting where she was confronted over her traife, or “unclean,” work.
“Today we don’t want to hear any more explanations from you,” they reportedly told her. “Only one word, the right answer: your promise to stop this work, which has gone beyond all bounds.… If you want to work at espionage, leave the territory and the lands of the Jews and go and work in some distant land.”
It was amid this tightening peril that the Managem finally returned on September 22. Apprised of the situation on land, British authorities swiftly arranged for a British merchant ship docked in Cyprus, one large enough to evacuate as many residents of Zichron Yaakov as wished to leave, to make for Palestine. That ship appeared off the coast of the Jewish colony on the night of September 25.
In the interim, however, Sarah Aaronsohn and her confederates appeared to recover their resolve. Part of it may have stemmed from a belief that Belkind wouldn’t break—after all, it had been nearly two weeks since his capture and the Turks still hadn’t come for them—but even more was concern of what would happen to the far-flung NILI agents if those at its headquarters suddenly disappeared. As it was, only two people, a mother and her young son, went out on the rescue ship. To the suggestions of her lieutenants that she go out as well, Aaronsohn was adamant: “I want to be the last, not the first, to leave.” Instead, Sarah would wait for the next visit of the Managem, arranged for October 12, during which she would gauge the state of things.
But it seems the NILI operatives hadn’t considered another possible explanation for the lassitude of Turkish authorities, a rather ironic one under the circumstances. Both the Turks and their German allies remained stung by the tremendous propaganda victory the Allies had achieved with their talk of the Jewish “purge” in Jaffa back in May. The Germans were also well aware that the British government was considering calling for a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a way to win the international Zionist community to its side; indeed, the Germans were now rather desperately trying to come up with a counterformula to appeal to the Zionists. As a result, and even as reports of a Jewish spy ring in Palestine circulated in Constantinople and Berlin—because, in fact, Naaman Belkind had talked—the Germans were sternly warning their Turkish allies to be absolutely certain they had their culprits before making a move. All well and good to round up a crowd of Arabs or Turks and put them to the bastinado, but in the autumn of 1917, the Germans counseled, the Jews in Palestine needed to be treated with a little more finesse.
Then, at the end of September, the Turks were apparently handed the last piece of the puzzle—and responsibility for this didn’t fall to an errant pigeon or Naaman Belkind, but to the British spy runners themselves. According to the postwar account of a Turkish intelligence chief in Syria, it came when two Arab spies were caught on the Palestinian coast. Under torture, the men offered that they had been put ashore from a British spy ship, and that they’d traveled on that ship in the company of Jewish spies. Those spies had been dropped off first, in the vicinity of the agricultural research station at Athlit.
For greater protection, Sarah Aaronsohn and her chief lieutenant, Joseph Lishansky, had recently moved into Zichron Yaakov, eight miles down the road from Athlit. They were there when, late on the night of October 2, the settlement was surrounded by Turkish soldiers. The roundup began the following morning, the soldiers and secret police, having already ransacked Athlit, working off a list of dozens of names. Among the first to be detained was Sarah Aaronsohn, along with her father, Ephraim, and brother Zvi. Managing a quick escape was the “ringleader” the Turks most hoped to catch, Joseph Lishansky; with their 1917 chauvinism, it apparently never occurred to them that the true ringleader might be a woman.
The paradox of having to take special care with members of the Jewish community lest German wrath be incurred was to now take perverse form and would turn the Turkish operation in Zichron Yaakov into a kind of slow-motion horror show. On that first day of “questioning,” Sarah Aaronsohn’s father and brother were severely beaten in front of her, the soldiers demanding to be told Lishansky’s whereabouts, but she herself wasn’t touched. Matters turned a good deal uglier the next morning. Ephraim and Zvi Aaronsohn, along with a number of other detained men, were led to the central square, where they were tied up and repeatedly whipped in an attempt to get those still in hiding to surrender. Struck by her icy defiance of the previous day, the Turks targeted Sarah for especially brutal treatment. Tied to the gatepost of her family’s home on Zichron’s main street, she was whipped and beaten with flexible batons, or bastinados. Still, she would reveal nothing, reportedly even taunting her torturers until she fell into unconsciousness.
One by one, those on the Turks’ wanted list who were hiding began turning themselves in, tormented by the cries of their
relatives. Or they were betrayed by others, for as the terror extended, a kind of group psychosis seized Zichron Yaakov. “For those who had long opposed NILI’s activities,” wrote one historian, “it was a time to prove their loyalty to the Turks and to settle old debts. As the Turks rounded up more men for the bastinado, four hysterical viragos ran through the streets, loudly rejoicing as each new victim was put under the Turkish whips, even falling upon the arrested men with blows and shouted abuse.”
With still no sign of Lishansky, the authorities raised the stakes even higher. Summoning the settlement’s governing committee, the Turkish commander threatened to lay waste to the village unless Lishansky was handed over. To reinforce the point, he announced that the following morning all those detained—some seventy in all—were to be transported to the main police station in Nazareth for further “questioning.” Joining them would be seventeen Zichron elders chosen at random, to be released if Lishansky was surrendered, to share in the general unpleasantries if not. By that afternoon, Zichron residents were taking the settlement apart in search of Lishansky, while the governing committee posted a reward for his capture.
The ordeal reached its grim denouement the next day, Friday, October 5. As the captives were being loaded for transport to Nazareth, a bloodied and battered Sarah Aaronsohn asked permission to change into clean clothes for the journey. Led to her family home, she was allowed to step into a bathroom unattended, where she hastily wrote out a last note of instructions to those NILI operatives who remained. Then she withdrew a revolver she had secreted in a cubbyhole in anticipation of just such a situation and shot herself in the mouth.
Even this did not end the torment of Sarah Aaronsohn. While the bullet destroyed her mouth and severed her spinal cord, it missed her brain. For four days, she lingered in agony, attended to by German Catholic nuns, before finally expiring on the morning of October 9. By Jewish tradition, she was buried that same day in the Zichron cemetery, her death shroud a swatch of mosquito netting taken from her family home. She was twenty-seven years old.
On the night of October 12, three days after Sarah’s death, the Managem reappeared off the coast of Athlit as scheduled. On board was Alex Aaronsohn, who was overseeing the Cairo office while Aaron was in Europe. He carried a message that had been forwarded by his brother.
On October 1, Aaron Aaronsohn had arrived in London from Paris. There, he had finally met Chaim Weizmann and quickly forged at least a temporary rapprochement with the Zionist Federation leader. Central to that rapprochement was Weizmann’s recognition of the vital role NILI was playing in the Zionist cause, an appreciation he had expressed in a telegram to be disseminated to the NILI operatives: “We are doing our best to make sure that Palestine [will be] Jewish under British protection. Your heroic stand encourages our strenuous efforts. Our hopes are great. Be strong and of good courage until the redemption of Israel.”
It was this message that Alex Aaronsohn carried ashore with him that night at Athlit, but no one was there.
A CHANGE HAD come over Lawrence, a kind of quiet despondency. David Hogarth, his old mentor, had noticed it at the El Arish headquarters in mid-October. “He is not well,” Hogarth wrote an Arab Bureau colleague afterward, “and talks rather hopelessly about the Arab future he once believed in.”
Others had detected the change even earlier, including Lawrence himself. “I’m not going to last out this game much longer,” he had confided to his friend Edward Leeds after the train attack at Mudowarra in September. “Nerves going and temper wearing thin, and one wants an unlimited account of both.”
This new element of emotional fragility seemed to accelerate in the days after his meetings in El Arish. One who would bear unique eyewitness to it was a man named George Lloyd. Another of the aristocratic “Amateurs” who had found themselves in the Middle East during the war, Lloyd was a handsome, Cambridge-educated baronet and Conservative member of Parliament who had been recruited to Stewart Newcombe’s military intelligence unit in Cairo in late 1914. Lloyd had soon chafed under Newcombe’s austere leadership and arranged a transfer, but not before forming a friendship with a coworker nine years his junior in the small office, T. E. Lawrence.
As with so many other British aristocrats during the war, Lloyd had floated between job titles and assignments with rather dizzying regularity—stints with military command staffs in the field interspersed with the deskbound duties of parliamentary committees—but at least some of those assignments periodically returned him to the Middle East. With a background in banking, in the autumn of 1916, he had been brought down to study the financial status of King Hussein’s regime in the wake of the Arab Revolt. His comprehensive report on the Hejaz economy—it essentially didn’t have one—had included a damning analysis of Édouard Brémond’s scheme to create the Ottoman French bank, and been instrumental in its scuttling.
By the autumn of 1917, however, Lloyd was marooned at a back-base office shuffling paper and anxious to return to the field. At the end of September he had written to Gilbert Clayton, listing those areas where he thought he might be of some service. In particular, he remembered his old colleague in the Cairo military intelligence office, who was now something of a legend. “I think I could be still more useful in a personal way to Lawrence,” Lloyd wrote. “He is overworked and must be overstrained. If he is to remain in the field at his most responsible job, I do think he must have true companionship and relief of some other white man congenial to him. I could never in any way attempt to take the lead in that job. I am not even remotely qualified. But in his curious way, [Lawrence] has rather an addiction to me, and if he liked to have me with him to accompany him on his ‘stunts,’ I believe my presence might help to keep him going.”
Its racialist note aside, the request was a rather extraordinary one, an aristocrat and sitting member of Parliament effectively asking to play Sancho Panza to Lawrence’s Don Quixote. Clayton seized on the offer, and arranged Lloyd’s immediate recall. He was waiting in Aqaba when Lawrence returned from El Arish on October 15.
For several days, the two friends caught up with each other as Lawrence laid plans for his imminent trek to Yarmuk. As Lloyd observed, those plans had a decidedly ad hoc nature. Along with just a very tiny cadre of Arab warriors, Lawrence would leave Aqaba with an Indian army machine-gun unit and one British officer, a demolitions expert named Lieutenant Wood, who was on semi-invalid status after having been shot in the head on the Western Front. Avoiding populated areas on the long trip north, Lawrence would then recruit his local operatives from among the clans of eastern Syria, and join them to followers of Abd el Kader, an Algerian exile who had been with the Arab Revolt since its inception and whose kinsmen lived in the Yarmuk area. After the attack, the local recruits would melt away, while those from Aqaba would scatter before their inevitable Turkish pursuers. It was further arranged that Lloyd would accompany Lawrence for at least the first few, safer days of the journey.
On October 20, Lloyd sent Clayton a cable outlining these plans, as well as his own first impressions of the situation in Aqaba. His breezy tone abruptly shifted in a postscript he marked “Private”: “Lawrence is quite fit, but much oppressed by the risk and magnitude of the job before him. He opened his heart to me last night and told me that he felt there was so much for him still to do in this world, places to dig, peoples to help, that it seemed horrible to have it all cut off, as he feels it will be, for he feels that, while he may do the [Yarmuk] job, he has little or no chance of getting away himself. I tried to cheer him up, but of course it is true.”
It was an unusually heartfelt message to be exchanged between two men for the times, let alone included in a military cable, and it may have been that George Lloyd hoped it would cause Clayton to cancel the operation. If so, he was soon set right. Allowing that he too was “very anxious” about his subordinate, Clayton replied that Lawrence’s burdened mood was rather to be expected considering the mission before him. “He has a lion’s heart, but even so, this strain mu
st be very great,” Clayton acknowledged. “Well, he is doing a great work and, as soon as may be, we must pull him out and not risk him further—but the time is not yet, as he is wanted just now.”
TO AS MUCH pomp and ceremony as a war-ravaged nation could manage, the Young Turk regime put on a decorous reception for Abbas Hilmi II, the erstwhile khedive of Egypt. Along with bunting and a ceremonial guard, a host of dignitaries were on hand to greet the titular Ottoman sovereign of Egypt as his train pulled into Constantinople’s Sirkeci station one afternoon in late October. Among those in attendance was an old friend and coconspirator of Abbas’s, Dr. Curt Prüfer. Picking up where they had left off, the lives of the German spymaster and the pretender to the Egyptian throne were about to become entwined in intrigue once again.
When the Turks came into the war on the side of the Central Powers, the British had deposed Abbas—the “wicked little khedive,” in Kitchener’s memorable phrase—and cast him into a wandering exile, one that had eventually landed him in Switzerland. But Abbas was a born schemer, and in Switzerland he had a lot of time on his hands. Over the next three years, he had tirelessly negotiated with both sides in the conflict in hopes of regaining his throne in the postwar era, and it was a measure of his catholic approach to plotting that each side was very much aware of his dealings with the other. The Young Turk leadership in Constantinople had never had much use for Abbas at the best of times, and his artless carryings-on in Switzerland did little to endear them to his cause; indeed, they had spurned his every advance.
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