Adding to Yale’s frustration in this area was the peculiarly British approach to avoiding confrontation, its officials quick to cede ground when necessary, graciously inert when it wasn’t. The American special agent had an early taste of this when, shortly after the fall of Jerusalem, he learned that the British had imprisoned Zaki Bey, the city’s former Ottoman military governor and the man who had been instrumental in securing Yale’s escape from Palestine. In high dudgeon, Yale stormed into the offices of the relevant British officials and told them of the many favors Zaki Bey had performed for the expatriate community in Jerusalem. He also mentioned that Zaki Bey was a close friend of the former U.S. consul to Palestine, Otis Glazebrook, who in turn was close friends with Woodrow Wilson. “I told them if Zaki Bey was not released on parole, I would take the matter up with Washington and have it brought to the President’s attention.”
In the face of such a naked threat, the officials of most powers would have either meekly acquiesced or gotten their backs up, but the British did one better. A few days later, Yale was given Zaki Bey’s release papers and “kindly requested” to deliver them personally to the prison where he was being held, thereby allowing for an emotional reunion of the two friends at the prison gates. “When the British decide to do anything,” Yale noted somewhat peevishly, “they do it ungrudgingly and so gracefully that one feels under real obligation to them.”
Marooned in the Egyptian capital, the thirty-year-old Yale focused his energies on trying to make sense of the multisided battle for primacy in the region. One of these struggles was of fairly long standing—the snarl of claims over the future dispensation of greater Syria—but this had now been joined, courtesy of the Balfour Declaration, by an equally acrimonious debate centered on Palestine.
Lending a certain air of unreality to these contests, as well as to Yale’s earnest pondering of them, was that by the end of 1917 the Allied war effort had never looked so bleak. In the western Russian city of Brest-Litovsk, German and Russian Bolshevik negotiators were hammering out the final details of Russia’s formal withdrawal from the war, and already hundreds of thousands of German soldiers had been transferred from the Eastern Front to the Western. For British and French commanders nervously watching this buildup in France, it was a sure sign the Germans were planning a massive spring offensive against their depleted armies, one intended to deliver a knockout blow to the Allies before the slowly arriving American armies could take to the field in a significant way. The Russian collapse had even emboldened the Turks, with War Minister Enver now scheming not only to recover that portion of northeastern Turkey previously occupied by the czar’s armies, but also to carry his advantage into the Turkic regions of the Caucasus conquered by Russia in the nineteenth century. In light of all this, the constant bickering in Cairo over the future spoils of war seemed more than a tad premature.
Nevertheless, Yale dutifully stayed to the task before him. In each of his “Monday reports” to Leland Harrison at the State Department, he strived to bring clarity to another facet of the Middle Eastern morass by outlining the views of whatever officials or religious figures or causists he had met with during the previous week, and by mining the Arab Bulletin for pertinent background information. As might be expected, though, instead of clarity, these voluminous reports with their welter of opposing viewpoints tended to only render the situation more incomprehensible—or at least so it would seem judging by the utter silence emanating from Leland Harrison.
It appears this earnest search for insight also had the effect of delaying the special agent’s discovery of the one simple truth to be found amid the thicket: no one else knew what was really going on either. Yale finally began to cotton to this in late December, after a meeting between General Clayton and a group of Syrian exile leaders in Cairo. To the Syrians’ deepening fears that the Balfour Declaration meant a Jewish state was to be imposed in Palestine, Clayton stoutly insisted this wasn’t so, that all the declaration’s “national home” phrasing meant was that Jews would be allowed to emigrate, and to share politically and economically in the region’s future to the same degree as everyone else. This assurance from one of the highest-ranking British officials in Egypt had a profoundly calming effect on the Syrian delegation. “On the strength of what they were told by General Clayton,” Yale reported to the State Department, “the Syrians are considering the advisability of abandoning for the present their opposition to the Jews, and talk even of cooperating with the Zionists.”
Except that immediately after that meeting, Yale fell into conversation with Clayton’s chief deputy at the Arab Bureau, who readily confessed that neither he nor the general had any idea what the “national home” phrasing actually meant.
In seeking to unravel the Middle East, William Yale would be neither the first nor the last observer to conclude that perhaps his most accurate assessment had come at very first glance, before he had been sullied by “knowledge.” As he had reported to Harrison in just his third Monday report back in November, “the truth seems to be that Downing Street has no definite policy and have given their agents no clear program to work out.” As a result, those agents were adopting an “attitude of more or less sympathy with all the varied interests,” or simply telling everyone what they hoped to hear.
But finally, the struggling intelligence agent stumbled upon something that seemed to clear away much of the obfuscation. It occurred in late February 1918 when, reading through a back issue of the Arab Bulletin, he came across an essay entitled “Syria: The Raw Material.”
In just eight pages of terse and wonderfully opinionated prose, the essayist had methodically delineated the myriad fissures that divided and subdivided that country, fissures that extended beyond tribal and ethnic and religious fault lines to even produce rivalries between cities and towns. Completely shorn of wishful thinking, that dangerous proclivity of bureaucratic essayists everywhere, the writer instead painted a stark picture of the problems awaiting any outsider who might attempt to impose their will there. Of particular interest to Yale, in light of the debate then roiling Cairo, was how the writer “in a few words suggests the bitterness which exists in southern Palestine against the Zionists. This bitterness of feeling is shared alike by Moslems and Christians, and recent developments tend only to aggravate the natural hatred of the Palestinians for those Jews who come to Palestine declaring the country to be theirs.”
What made this essay all the more remarkable was that it had appeared in the Arab Bulletin in March 1917, fully eight months before the Balfour Declaration, and, according to a prefatory note, had actually been written two years prior to that. And something else caught William Yale’s eye. Its author was already known to him. It was the same man who had humiliated him at Beersheva in January 1914, and who had debriefed him in Cairo at the war’s outbreak: British army major T. E. Lawrence.
In fact, without apparently realizing it, Yale had already alerted the State Department to T. E. Lawrence and his exploits. Back in November 1917, while composing a report on the history of the Arab Revolt, Yale had sufficiently picked up on stories circulating through Cairo at the time to write of “a young British officer who, with the Bedouins, organizes raids against the Hedjaz RR [railroad] and strives to win the Bedouins over to the side of the Sherif and British.” In February 1918, after stumbling upon Lawrence’s old report, the American intelligence agent took the unprecedented step of asking Reginald Wingate for permission to copy out the essay in its entirety for transmission to the State Department. He also resolved to meet with Lawrence the next time he passed through Cairo.
IN THE SAME week that William Yale was transmitting Lawrence’s old Syria report to the State Department, Lawrence was endeavoring to have himself removed from the Syrian war theater altogether. The cause was a very costly error in judgment, blame for which could be placed squarely at Lawrence’s door—or so he half hoped.
The seed had been planted a month earlier. On the eve of the battle for Tafileh, Lawrence had sent
Gilbert Clayton an urgent request for £30,000 worth of gold (about $6 million in its modern equivalent) for the Arab force gathered on the Moab Plateau under the leadership of Faisal’s younger brother Zeid. Without those funds, Lawrence warned, Zeid’s followers would soon begin to melt away; with them, the rebels could advance north against the mountain strongholds of Kerak and Madeba, then sweep down to meet the vanguard of the British army in the Jordan valley. In one determined drive, the rebels would finally establish a direct land link to their British advisors and suppliers in Palestine, while the eastern flank of General Allenby’s army would be secured against Turkish attack.
Testament to both the importance of the Moab Plateau campaign and Lawrence’s reputation for punctiliousness in financial matters—he rarely exaggerated his needs—Clayton scrambled to gather up the gold in Egypt and rush it to Aqaba. A few days after the Turkish assault on Tafileh was repelled, Lawrence had personally come down to meet the gold caravan at the rebels’ new forward base camp in Guweira, some thirty-five miles northeast of Aqaba. Anxious to get back to the Tafileh front as soon as possible, he had then taken as much of the gold as he and his two escorts on fleet camels could manage—about £6,000 worth—and set off ahead of the slower-moving caravan.
They rode directly into a winter blizzard, one that turned the Tafileh-Guweira run from an easy day-and-a-half jaunt into a grinding three-day ordeal. Driven by blind impatience, Lawrence abandoned his slower-moving escorts after two days and, laden down with all their gold, forged ahead alone. That proved to be a nearly fatal mistake when he and his mount became stranded in a waist-deep snowdrift, one that took hours of digging by hand to escape. Of course, the delays Lawrence experienced on his prized camel were likely to be only worse for those coming behind, putting even greater distance between him and the rest of the gold caravan.
At last reaching Tafileh on February 11, Lawrence discovered to his disgust that Zeid had done nothing in his absence to prepare for the push north. Instead, as he wrote to Clayton the next day, Hussein’s youngest son had “hummed and hawed, and threw away his chance.… These Arabs are the most ghastly material to build into a design.”
In light of that withering assessment, Lawrence’s subsequent actions were close to inexplicable. Eager to scout the terrain over which the rebels would soon advance, he decided to personally conduct an extended reconnaissance of the northern countryside even as the gold caravan remained strung out along the Guweira-Tafileh path. What’s more, he chose to take the only other Western officer in Tafileh, a young British lieutenant named Alec Kirkbride, with him. In departing, he put the twenty-one-year-old Zeid in charge of safeguarding the incoming gold, with instructions to “spend what was necessary for current expenses until my return.”
For six days, Lawrence and Kirkbride scouted the country to the north and west, ranging as far as the eastern slopes of the Jordan valley above Jericho. When they returned to Tafileh on February 18, Lawrence was in high spirits. With the gold shipment now arrived, the campaign to clear the Moab Plateau and link up with the British at the Dead Sea appeared an easy prospect, one he estimated could be accomplished within a month. When he began outlining this to Zeid, however, he detected a peculiar discomfort in the young man’s demeanor.
“But that will need a lot of money,” Zeid finally interjected.
“Not at all,” Lawrence replied, “our funds in hand will cover it, and more.”
It was then that King Hussein’s youngest son embarrassedly admitted he had already spent all the money.
Lawrence initially thought Zeid was joking, but was soon set right. As the Guweira gold caravan had drifted into Tafileh over the preceding days, Zeid’s lieutenants and tribal allies, all owed back wages, had fallen upon it as if on a cash cow. Even worse, most of the gold had apparently been distributed to units that, for tribal reasons, wouldn’t be participating in the push north, while those units Lawrence was counting on as his vanguard were shortchanged. “I was aghast,” he recounted, “for this meant the complete ruin of my plans and hopes, the collapse of our effort to keep faith with Allenby.”
He also didn’t truly believe Zeid. As Lawrence soon learned, the last caravan stragglers had reached Tafileh just the day before, barely leaving time for the gold to be counted, let alone distributed. In a rage, Lawrence stormed off to his tent. “All night I thought over what could be done,” he wrote, “but found a blank, and when morning came could only send word to Zeid that, if he would not return the money, I must go away.”
Instead, Zeid only managed to produce a hastily scribbled “supposed” accounting of where the gold had gone. True to his word, that afternoon Lawrence saddled up his camel and, in the company of just four escorts, set out for General Allenby’s headquarters in southern Palestine, one hundred miles to the west. Once there, he intended to ask to be relieved of his command, “to beg Allenby to find me some smaller part elsewhere.”
If this was presented as an issue of personal honor, there was clearly another impulse at work in Lawrence. In Zeid’s incompetence (or dishonesty) the young British major suddenly saw the opportunity for a kind of personal deliverance, a release from the onus of leadership that weighed so heavily upon him.
This was not at all a new burden. Five months earlier, Lawrence had confided to his friend Edward Leeds that his nerves were going and that he “was not going to last out this game much longer”—and that had been before his nearly suicidal mission to Yarmuk, his ghastly Deraa ordeal, and the hideous slaughter at Tafileh. His growing exhaustion had even registered in his most recent letter to Gilbert Clayton on the eve of the missing gold episode. “I am getting shy of adventures,” he had written his superior on February 12. “I’m in an extraordinary position just now vis-à-vis the sherifs and the tribes, and sooner or later must go bust. I do my best to keep in the background but cannot, and some day everybody will combine and down me. It is impossible for a foreigner to run another people of their own free will indefinitely, and my innings has been a fairly long one.”
As he would later note in Seven Pillars, added to this were the simple rigors and dangers of his duty. “For a year and a half I had been in motion, riding a thousand miles each month upon camels, with added nervous hours in crazy aeroplanes or rushing across country in powerful cars. In my last five actions, I had been hit, and my body so dreaded further pain that now I had to force myself under fire.”
There were precious few signs this torment might soon end; much the opposite, in fact. When Lawrence had left Oxford for the war, his brother Arnold had been a fourteen-year-old schoolboy. In recent months, Lawrence had taken to counseling his brother on the skills he would need—familiarity with Arabic, the ability to drive a range of motor vehicles—if Arnold hoped to be assigned to the Middle East for his upcoming military service.
But quite beyond these burdens was the psychic toll that came with living a lie, “the rankling fraudulence which had to be my mind’s habit: that pretense to lead the national uprising of another race, the daily posturing in alien dress, preaching in alien speech,” upholding a promise that Lawrence increasingly realized was almost sure to be broken. In this, the slaughter at Tafileh had shorn him of the “last gloss” of wishful thinking. “To be charged against my conceit were the causeless and ineffectual deaths of those twenty Arabs and seven hundred Turks in Wadi Hesa. My will had gone, and I feared longer to be alone.”
Except none of it mattered. As Lawrence discovered upon reaching Allenby’s headquarters at Ramleh on February 22, not only was deliverance out of the question, but a new mission had already been planned for him. Indeed, so vital was Lawrence to this new scheme that for nearly a week an airplane had been making repeated sorties over Tafileh valley, dropping flyers ordering that he immediately make for headquarters. (The pilot, it would eventually be determined, had leafleted the wrong valley.)
True to pattern, dramatic events had occurred on the world stage during Lawrence’s latest absence. While bracing for the Germans’ coming
offensive on the Western Front, Allied planners had desperately scoured their maps in search of some spot on the global battlefield where a preemptive thrust might distract or dilute the German military colossus building in France. In mid-February, General Allenby had been informed that task was falling to him. As soon as possible, he was to launch an all-out strike at the Syrian heartland, with Damascus as the ultimate objective. The Arab rebels would be called upon to play a crucial role in that strike, which was why headquarters had been so anxious to speak with their chief liaison to the Arabs, Major Lawrence.
But then the stakes were raised even further. In the city of Brest- Litovsk, German peace negotiators had presented their Russian counter parts with terms so staggeringly punitive that it had caused the Bolshevik delegation, led by Leon Trotsky, to pack up and go home. That breakdown in talks may have been just what Berlin was looking for; on February 18, just four days before Lawrence’s arrival at Ramleh, German armies had begun steamrolling through western Russia, their advance limited only by how much ground their troops could cover in a day. So complete was the Russian collapse that on February 25 its leaders swiftly acceded to German terms even more retributive than those it had rejected a week earlier. For those Allied commanders nervously waiting on the Western Front, it meant Germany was now free to shuttle even more of its soldiers and weaponry to France, that the last small obstacle to the approaching German offensive had been removed.
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