By 1916, however, the Germans had taken a rather different view of Abbas Hilmi. Whether born of a desire to stand by an old friend or—rather more likely—operating under the delusion that Abbas actually represented some constituency other than himself, the Germans had steadily come to regard the deposed khedive as their future power broker in Egypt once victory was achieved. After persistently encouraging Abbas and the Constantinople regime to reconcile, their efforts had finally come to fruition with Abbas’s arrival in the Ottoman capital that October.
Over the next few months, Prüfer and the ex-khedive saw a great deal of each other, and together they formulated plans for the future of Egypt, one in which Abbas would be restored to his former splendor with the aid of his German friend. So close were the two men, and so important did Berlin consider their future Egyptian stakeholder, that Prüfer would soon virtually become Abbas’s personal handler. It was an alliance that over the next year would take on the tinge of the bizarre, the spectacle of two men constructing a castle-in-the-sky fantasy even as the real world burned down around them.
THEY SET OUT on the evening of October 24, and very quickly George Lloyd appreciated what so enthralled Lawrence with these journeys into the desert interior, the sensation of passing into an otherworldly place where time stood still. “The view up the pass was magnificent,” Lloyd wrote in his diary from that night, “400 feet of jagged towering basalt and granite rock on either side of us, and the moon shining in our faces.” The Arab sheikh accompanying them, he noted, “rode ahead of us with two or three Biasha slaves and looked like some modern Saladin out to meet a crusade.”
For the first few days, the journey north was easy, and as they wended their way through the spectacular landscape of the Wadi Rumm mountains, the two friends talked Middle Eastern strategies and concocted fanciful plans for a grand tour of Arabia after the war. “We would defy Victorian sentiment and have a retinue of slaves,” Lloyd recounted, “and would have one camel to carry books only, and we would go to Jauf and Boreida and talk desert politics all day.” Lawrence felt so at ease that he even talked a bit about his family and upbringing in Oxford, the happy days he had spent in Carchemish. For Lloyd, long accustomed to his friend’s taciturn nature, the fact that Lawrence “talks very well” came as something of a surprise.
Already, though, disquieting elements were beginning to attach to the trip. One took the form of Abd el Kader, the Algerian exile who promised to lead Lawrence to his kinsmen in the Yarmuk region, but who frequently clashed with other members of the traveling party. Another was the personality of the British demolitions expert, Lieutenant Wood. After getting lost in the darkness on his first night out, the lieutenant had remained unhappy and aloof, rarely engaging with his countrymen except to complain about the rigors of the journey. It increased Lloyd’s apprehensions because, due to yet another foul‑up in the supply pipeline from Egypt, Lawrence would have to perform some extremely risky improvisations at the target site, and would need to rely on Wood to step in should anything go wrong.
Back at El Arish, Lawrence had asked Clayton for a thousand yards of a newly developed lightweight two-strand electric cable, to be used in connecting the gelignite mine he would attach to the Yarmuk bridge to its electric detonator; such a length would allow the demolition team to be well away from the bridge when they blew it up, as well as provide a reserve for any secondary acts of mayhem that might present themselves. Instead, just five hundred yards of the old single-strand cable had been delivered to Aqaba. Since this line needed to be doubled over, it placed Lawrence a maximum of 250 yards away from the blast. Further, there was a good chance he’d be trying to set his charge while being shot at. Although Lawrence hoped he could go about attaching the explosives to the under-girders of the bridge unnoticed by the Turkish guards above, the standby plan was for others in the raiding party to distract the Turks in a firefight from the surrounding hills. Should Lawrence become a casualty in the process—a not unlikely prospect—Wood was expected to take over the operation.
But all this supposed a sufficient raiding party could even be raised, because what Lawrence was already discovering was a pronounced reluctance among prospective recruits to sign on. Lloyd later wrote to Clayton that “anyone who can hold up a train and enable the Arabs to sack it commands temporarily their allegiance,” and this was one of the keys to his friend’s success. “To them he is Lawrence, the arch looter, the super-raider, the real leader of the right and only kind of ghazzu [warfare], and he never forgets that this is a large part of his claim to sovereignty over them.” With those Lawrence approached to join the Yarmuk mission, however, interest very quickly died off once he explained that his target was not a train but a bridge.
There was another matter, too. Among his fellow British officers, Lawrence had gained the reputation of being a veritable “Indian scout,” possessed of an uncanny ability to navigate his way through the desert. As George Lloyd was discovering, this wasn’t exactly true. On two separate occasions, they had become lost during night treks, and Lawrence’s insistence during the second incident that they merely needed to follow Orion to recover their way had instead led them directly toward a Turkish encampment. All these factors considered, Lloyd wrote Clayton, “I hope his chances are really much better than would appear at first sight.”
Actually, they were potentially far worse than even Lloyd imagined. Shortly before leaving Aqaba, Lawrence had been warned that Abd el Kader was a traitor and now in the pay of the Turks. Lawrence hadn’t thought to share that warning with Lloyd. Perhaps this was because the source was Lawrence’s old antagonist in the Hejaz, Édouard Brémond.
In fact, the French colonel had undergone a profound transformation in recent months, especially in his view of the Arab Revolt. This may have stemmed from his finally being informed of the Sykes-Picot pact that ensured French control of Syria, or from a recognition that what he couldn’t thwart he needed to embrace. Whatever the cause, by the autumn of 1917, the imperialist Brémond had curbed his obstructionist approach to British initiatives in the region and become energetic in trying to get French weaponry and financial subsidies to the Arabs. Lawrence was surely aware of this transformation in his old adversary, but, whether still held by an abiding belief in French treachery or determined to press on no matter the ever-mounting signs of peril, he had chosen to ignore Brémond’s warning about Abd el Kader. If Brémond was wrong about anything, however, it may have only been the vintage of the Algerian’s betrayal; as far back as November 1914, Curt Prüfer had met Abd el Kader and reported on his fidelity to the German-Turkish cause.
To ignore such a litany of bad omens suggested a kind of fatalistic resignation on Lawrence’s part, as if he now saw himself on a mission where his own life simply didn’t much matter. Lloyd saw indications of this during their journey north. At some point, Lawrence expounded that since the Arabs had never been privy to Sykes-Picot, they could hardly be bound to it; instead, by seizing Syria, they might create their own destiny. It was for this cause, Lawrence confided, that he was now risking his life—or, as Lloyd jotted in his handwritten notes of that remarkable conversation, “L not working for HMG [His Majesty’s Government] but for Sherif [Hussein].”
On the evening of October 28, four days after leaving Aqaba, the two friends sat down to discuss what came next. They were rapidly approaching the true danger zone, the point of no return, and Lloyd’s apprehensions over Lawrence’s “stunt” had only deepened. As he’d done several times previously, Lloyd offered to stay on. Lawrence thanked him, but explained that “he felt that any additional individual who was not an expert at the actual demolition only added to his own risk.” He then offered a more poignant reason for sending Lloyd back, a wish rooted in the recognition that he might soon die: “He would like me to go home to England,” Lloyd noted in his diary, “for he felt that there was a risk that all his work would be ruined politically in Whitehall and he thought I could save this.”
The next afternoon the
two friends parted, Lloyd turning back toward Aqaba, Lawrence continuing on for Yarmuk.
UPON FINALLY REACHING Cairo in late October 1917, William Yale checked in with the American diplomat who was to act as his liaison. This turned out to be a rather feckless young fellow named Charles Knabenshue, who held the ambiguous title of chargé to the United States’ Diplomatic Agency. Given the all-pervasive British intelligence network in Cairo, the two quickly concluded that Yale should present himself to the British authorities more or less overtly; “otherwise,” Knabenshue informed the State Department, “his independent activities would certainly become known to them through their agents and thus excite unfavorable suspicion.” Consequently, the two Americans asked for an audience with the British high commissioner to Egypt, Reginald Wingate, at his earliest convenience. Most convenient, it turned out, was the very next day. Donning their best summer suits, Yale and Knabenshue set out for the white stone mansion on the banks of the Nile that served as the British Residency.
For Reginald Wingate, having another State Department official wandering about Cairo presented something of a mixed prospect. On the one hand, with the United States now joined to the Allied war effort, British officials had an obligation to build the bonds of trust and solidarity even in those arenas, like the Middle East, where the Americans did not intend to militarily engage. Additionally, the high commissioner had his own ulterior motive for playing nice with the Americans. As he contemplated the deepening political morass into which Great Britain was sliding in the region, its secret deals with the French and the Arabs now about to be complemented by a pledge to the Zionists, Wingate increasingly saw the United States as a potential rescuer from the muddle. Indeed, just days before Yale’s arrival in Cairo, Wingate had posited to a rather startled Knabenshue that perhaps the Palestine deck of cards should be shuffled once again, that instead of Arab or French or international or Zionist or even British control in the postwar world, maybe the Americans would like to step in there and have a go at things. Wingate could rely on Knabenshue to relay such feelers to the State Department in a positive light—the diplomat was married to an Englishwoman and was an ardent Anglophile—but maybe Yale could serve as a useful seconding voice.
On the other hand, if forced to deal with another State Department official, Wingate and every other Briton in Cairo aware of the man’s background undoubtedly wished that it not be William Yale. Part of it stemmed from the antipathy with which British officials at all levels regarded Yale’s former employer, Standard Oil of New York. Time and again in the early days of the war, Socony tankers had been caught trying to elude the British naval blockade to supply oil to the Germans, a practice finally curtailed less through diplomatic appeals than by the British seizure of Socony ships. But only curtailed; just that summer, with the United States now officially at war with Germany, the Socony representative in Brazil had been caught red-handed selling oil to German front companies. In defending his actions, the man had blandly explained that business was business, and that if he didn’t sell to the enemy, his competitors surely would. That William Yale came out of such a cold-blooded corporate culture did little to inspire British confidence.
Nor, of course, did Yale’s specific service to that corporation. As the British in Cairo were well aware, the former Socony representative had just spent over two years living as a protected neutral in the heart of enemy territory, and even if London might be grateful for the intelligence Yale had passed on based on his tenure there, that gratitude was far more muted at the actual war front. In particular, British war planners in Cairo couldn’t quite forget that much of the best highway in enemy-held Palestine, the Jerusalem-to-Beersheva road that served as the Turks’ crucial supply lifeline to the Gaza front where British forces had twice foundered, had actually been built by Standard Oil back in 1914, nor that William Yale had been a supervisor on that project.
All this taken together, Wingate found himself in a bit of a quandary when, shortly after their first amicable meeting, Yale came back to him with a bold request. From somewhere, the State Department agent had learned of the existence of the Arab Bulletin, the weekly compendium of raw and top-secret intelligence gathered by the Arab Bureau from across the Middle East. So sensitive was the Bulletin that its distribution was limited to fewer than thirty of the seniormost political and military officials of the British Empire, along with just three representatives of Allied governments. William Yale now wanted access to it as well.
After careful consideration, Wingate acceded to the request, but only after imposing a typically British precondition. Yale could peruse the Bulletin for his own edification, but, on his word of honor, he was to never directly quote from it in any of his dispatches to the State Department.
No doubt such a gentlemanly arrangement worked just fine among the refined diplomatic classes of Europe, but in hindsight, the high commissioner might have wanted to more fully entertain his prejudices about William Yale’s background; he had just given access to Britain’s most time-sensitive secrets in the Middle East to a former employee of one of the most predatory corporations in human history, and William Yale didn’t so much intend to quote from the Bulletin as to mine from it wholesale.
In his memoir, Yale justified that intent by a nice turn of circular logic: “The information the British gave me was not given to me personally, for I was but an agent of the United States government, and if I performed the function I was employed for by the government, I must transmit to the State Department what news I acquired.… The officials of other governments must understand such to be the case, hence any condition imposed by them has no validity. In consequence, I had no hesitancy in quoting these statements in the Arab Bulletin which I judged to be necessary.”
While conceding the possibility of a gap in such logic—after all, for foreign officials to “understand” his situation, it rather depended on their being informed of it—Yale had a handy excuse for this, too; if his finely calibrated American moral compass had somehow been sent askew, it was surely due to the fact that “I had been living and dealing with European and Oriental officials for four years.”
But there was something else about the young American special agent that Reginald Wingate didn’t apprehend. William Yale wasn’t actually a former employee of Socony at all. Rather, he was officially “on leave” from that corporation, a status that allowed him to continue to draw half his prewar salary. And even if British officials in Cairo were to ever grow suspicious of such a link, they were unlikely to uncover it, since Yale had arranged for his Socony checks to be issued to his mother and deposited in New York. In the months ahead, as he read through the Arab Bulletin and whatever other classified British intelligence came his way, Yale kept a careful lookout for any references to oil.
ON THE AFTERNOON of October 31, 1917, Aaron Aaronsohn and Chaim Weizmann waited in an antechamber of the British cabinet’s conference room in Whitehall. They had been invited there by Mark Sykes for the honor of being the first to learn the result of the British leadership’s latest deliberations on “the Zionist question.”
At long last, the doors to the inner sanctum swung open, and a beaming Mark Sykes emerged. “Dr. Weizmann,” he announced, “it’s a boy.”
The two Zionist leaders were then brought into the cabinet conference room to meet Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, and the other members of the government who had just then approved the wording of a statement on the future status of Jewish settlement in Palestine six months in the making. Testament to both that tortuous process and to the deep reservations many senior British officials still harbored on the issue was the curious manner in which the statement would now be delivered: a scribbled, seemingly off-the-cuff note of a mere three sentences from Secretary Balfour to British financier Walter Rothschild.
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour,” the salient clause read, “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their
best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.”
That handwritten note would soon become known as the Balfour Declaration, and from it would grow a controversy that continues to haunt the world to this day. For Aaron Aaronsohn, however, it was a first step toward his dream of a reconstituted Israel, the cause for which he and so many of his compatriots in Palestine had sacrificed so much. Aaronsohn was yet to know the full extent of those sacrifices, however. On that day of celebration at Whitehall, neither he nor anyone else outside Palestine had learned of the ugly events that had occurred at Zichron Yaakov three weeks earlier.
FOR GILBERT CLAYTON and David Hogarth and a handful of other British officers in Egypt that early November, a nagging concern began to intrude on their ebullient moods: where was Lawrence?
General Allenby’s offensive had gone off like clockwork. Catching the Turkish forces around Beersheva off guard, the British cavalry had stormed into that desert town on the morning of October 31 and then pressed on. By November 7, the Turkish garrison at Gaza, their lines of reinforcement cut and in imminent danger of being encircled, had abandoned their trenchworks and begun a hasty withdrawal twenty miles up the coast. Bad weather prevented the British from pressing their advantage, but they had now finally pierced the first and strongest defensive wall of Palestine.
Yet as the days passed and the afterglow of that victory began to fade, those at El Arish who had been involved in the strategic planning with Lawrence grew increasingly troubled by the enduring silence from Yarmuk. As Gilbert Clayton confided to George Lloyd, now back in Aqaba, on November 12, “I am very anxious for news of Lawrence.”
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