Once again, Lawrence was most certainly informed of this cable, but he still didn’t respond. Instead, on May 27, with Weizmann’s arrival in Aqaba imminent, he found reason to depart on another reconnaissance mission to the north, conveniently falling out of easy communication until Weizmann had come and gone.
In his absence, the meeting between Faisal and the British Zionist leader took place on the afternoon of June 4. It was an amicable and pleasant enough encounter, with Weizmann ostentatiously donning an Arab headdress for the occasion, even as Faisal avoided committing himself to anything of much substance, arguing that ultimate authority lay with his father in Mecca, and that matters in Syria remained far too unsettled to start getting into specifics. Still, Weizmann was very satisfied by the talk, as were British officials. As Clayton would report to the Foreign Office after receiving a detailed report of the meeting, “In my opinion, the interview has had excellent results in promoting mutual sympathy and understanding between Weizmann and Faisal. Both are frank and open in their dealings, and a personal interview such as has now taken place can result in nothing but the good.”
That assessment was unlikely to be shared by Lawrence, who returned to Aqaba from his reconnaissance mission on June 8, four days after the Faisal-Weizmann meeting. To him, this British-imposed concord could only provide more ammunition to Faisal’s—and by extension Hussein’s—rivals in the Arab world.
But again, there was little to do about it. The British weren’t going to walk back from Balfour. Any pressure the Americans might bring to bear in pursuit of Wilson’s Fourteen Points plan wouldn’t come until a peace conference, their influence on Middle Eastern affairs in the meantime resting somewhere between nil and nonexistent. As for the Arabs striking out on their own, the mounts of the Imperial Camel Corps had yet to be delivered, and even when they were, it would be some time before they had sufficiently acclimated to the Syrian landscape for large-scale operations. Of course, there was one more possibility: a rapprochement with the Turks. By coincidence, Faisal had received another secret message from General Mehmet Djemal just two days before Weizmann showed up in Aqaba.
In fact, Faisal’s flirtation with the Turkish general was not unknown to senior British officials. Back in late March, a spy had given Reginald Wingate a copy of Faisal’s note to Mehmet Djemal outlining his terms for negotiations. “It is difficult to say how much importance should be attached to this correspondence,” Wingate informed the Foreign Office, “and it would be inadvisable to enquire directly from Emir Faisal as to his motives.… [But] it confirms my suspicion that Sharif leaders, depressed by general military situation and doubt of Allies’ policies in Palestine and Syria, are putting out feelers to ascertain Turkish official opinion about future of Arab countries.”
To their credit, those Foreign Office officials apprised of this news reacted with a refreshing lack of hypocrisy. After all, several pointed out, Britain was unofficially negotiating with some half dozen Turkish emissaries in Switzerland, so it would be a bit unseemly for them to take umbrage at others doing so. Instead, and at Mark Sykes’s first suggestion, they set themselves to the task of neutralizing the threat in gentlemanly fashion: by bestowing Faisal with a medal. Over the next several months, a host of senior British officials weighed in on the debate over just what commendation might sufficiently impress the Arab rebel leader to ensure his loyalty.
Curiously, one of Faisal’s strongest defenders had been Gilbert Clayton, who hastened to inform the Foreign Office in early April that the charge of treachery against Faisal appeared based on a misunderstanding, that the thrust of his overture to Mehmet Djemal seemed actually directed at an Arab-Turk reconciliation in the postwar era. Nonetheless, Clayton had urged, London should avail herself of this opportunity “to cement the Arab Alliance with Great Britain by all possible means.” Those means included recognizing Faisal’s authority in all territories east of the Jordan River, and compelling the French “to give an authoritative statement” relinquishing her claims to greater Syria. But perhaps Clayton’s generous view of Faisal’s actions wasn’t so curious given his source; as Clayton noted to the Foreign Office, he had been provided this interpretation—and perhaps his list of recommendations, too—by Major T. E. Lawrence.
The precise role Lawrence played in the secret negotiations between Faisal and the Turks has never been made clear; much like the timing of his disclosure to Faisal about Sykes-Picot, Lawrence seemed to appreciate that he was on very delicate legal ground, and gave vague and contradictory answers on the matter to his early biographers. What is clear is that he saw in those negotiations a powerful potential weapon to use against his government, a reminder that should the Arabs be betrayed, they had somewhere else to go.
“At the present day,” Mehmet Djemal’s new letter of June 2 began, “the Ottoman government, the mightiest representative of Islam, has obtained supremacy over the greatest enemies of the Mohammedan religion. I am persuaded that I am honoring the Prophet’s name by inviting His most excellent and noble grandson [Faisal] to participate in the protection of Islam for, by ensuring the supremacy of the Turkish army, a safe and happy life will be obtained for all true believers.” The general had closed by proposing a meeting with Faisal in four days’ time, during which “I feel sure that we shall be able to fulfill the wishes of all Arabs.”
Faisal didn’t take up the offer of a face-to-face meeting, but did send another reply. In that unsigned letter, he again proposed that all Turkish troops below Amman be withdrawn, and further suggested that Syria’s future relationship with Turkey be modeled along the lines of the loose federation existing between Austria and Hungary. If that still left matters a bit vague, Faisal’s other preconditions didn’t: all Arab soldiers in the Turkish army were to be released for service in the Arab army, and “if the Arab and Turkish Armies fight side by side against the enemy, the Arab Army is to be under its own Commander.” This was no longer talk of a mere rapprochement—and certainly not one in the postwar era—but rather of an Arab-Turkish military alliance against the Allies. By best evidence, Faisal sent his offer to Mehmet Djemal from Aqaba no later than June 10. For the two days preceding, he had been joined in Aqaba by T. E. Lawrence. It wasn’t until that same day of June 10 that Lawrence boarded SS Arethusa in Aqaba harbor, bound for Cairo and more consultations with the British military hierarchy.
The mark of a master strategist is his or her utter adaptability to circumstance, the pursuit of advantage divorced from sentiment. Whether or not Lawrence had a hand in writing Faisal’s latest note to Mehmet Djemal, just days later he went into conference with the man he’d managed to avoid meeting in Aqaba: Chaim Weizmann.
By all accounts, those talks were very cordial. Weizmann was certainly keyed to the fact that it was upon this mid-ranking British officer that the success or failure of his appeal to the Arab Revolt leaders largely rested. And as one gamesman to another, Lawrence was surely impressed by the Zionist leader’s agility in navigating the political minefield of Palestine, the considerable success he’d had in calming Arab concerns with one set of talking points while galvanizing the Jewish population to Zionism with another. Perhaps not surprisingly, the two master strategists soon found their way to common ground.
It was a common ground rooted in mutual dependence. To gain a “national home” in Palestine, the Jews obviously needed the British to win the war, which also meant they needed to support the Arab Revolt. In his meeting with Faisal, Weizmann had offered to employ the international Zionist movement in promotion of the cause of Arab independence, and with Lawrence in Ramleh, Weizmann got more specific: that promotion could also extend to funds and military training for the Arabs to fight the Turks. For his part, Lawrence saw a potentially pivotal role the Zionists might play in a postwar Syria. As he noted in a secret June 16 report on his meeting with Weizmann, “as soon as Faisal is in possession of [greater Syria], the [landowner] effendi class, the educated class, the Christians and the foreign elements will turn against h
im.… If the British and American Jews, securely established under British colors in Palestine, chose this moment to offer to the Arab State in Syria help … Sherif Faisal would be compelled to accept.” With that help, Faisal could “dispense with” his domestic opposition. Better yet, given the Zionists’ deep-rooted suspicions of the French, Faisal would have a ready ally in neutralizing them as well.
That was all in the future, though. In the interim, Lawrence counseled the Foreign Office, the Arabs should neither seek nor accept Zionist aid, nor should Weizmann be given the meeting he urgently sought, an audience with King Hussein.
Lawrence’s apparent conversion on the Zionist issue had a gladdening effect on his superiors, even if there was a marked limit to that conversion. Whether due to naiveté or studied wishful thinking, most British officials in the region who had dealt with Chaim Weizmann over the past three months had taken at face value his soothing vision of a Jewish community in Palestine living in political and economic harmony with the Arab majority. As one schemer sitting across the table from another, however, Lawrence saw through this almost immediately. As he noted in his June 16 report, “Dr. Weizmann hopes for a completely Jewish Palestine in fifty years, and a Jewish Palestine, under a British façade, for the moment.”
Lawrence would only be wrong about the timetable; it was to be just thirty years until the British façade fell away and the state of Israel created, with Chaim Weizmann installed as its first president.
AS HIS TIME in Cairo extended, William Yale chafed under two enduring frustrations. The first was looking for any sign that his government was actually paying attention to events in the Middle East. Every Monday since late October 1917, he had been sending his long dispatches to Leland Harrison at the State Department, and hearing nothing back save for a handful of terse cables. Even his appeals for guidance—were his reports boring his readers? did the secretary want him to pursue another line of inquiry?—were met with silence.
Yale’s second frustration was more personal, his inability to gain British permission to visit the war front. In their meeting of early March, T. E. Lawrence had invited him to visit the Arab rebel base at Aqaba, but Yale’s request to that end had vanished somewhere in the British bureaucratic ether. With the Zionist Commission preparing to embark on its fact-finding mission to Palestine, Yale had petitioned to accompany it, only to be told by Gilbert Clayton that “there might be some difficulty” with the plan. He had even broached the idea of attaching himself to a delegation of the American Red Cross Commission; alas, that nongovernmental organization hadn’t warmed to the prospect of providing cover for an American intelligence agent. Really the only way to Palestine, Reginald Wingate patiently explained to the American embassy, was for Yale to be classified as a military liaison officer and accredited to General Allenby’s staff—which, since Yale wasn’t in the military and never had been, was a diplomatic way of keeping him right where he was, sitting in Cairo.
Rather by default, then, Yale had focused his energies on what was arguably the more important task before him: getting the Wilson administration to realize what was at stake in the region. This was easier said than done, for despite Wilson’s high-minded Fourteen Points proclamation, from what Yale could determine, “our government had no policy. It was fighting, ostensibly, for nebulous ideals, little realizing that events are determined not at peace conferences, but by actions during hostilities preceding the peacemaking process.… The ‘deus ex machina’ of international affairs is not he who waits to act at some dramatic crisis, but he who consistently acts in ways which are constantly determining the course of events. President Wilson and his advisors never seemed to realize this simple truism.”
The bitter paradox in this situation—and the source of Yale’s frustration—was that by the late spring of 1918, most of the interested parties in the Middle East were clamoring for the Americans to determine events. As early as October 1917, Reginald Wingate had floated to an American diplomat the proposition that the United States take over the “mandate” of Palestinian rule in the postwar world, an idea that had continued to gain currency at the British Foreign Office. If to rather different ends, the hope of spurring American involvement had clearly been the subtext of Lawrence’s emphasis during his meeting with Yale on the Arabs’ high regard for the United States. Chaim Weizmann and the Zionists made no secret that, barring a British mandate, they’d be quite happy with an American one. Even the more imperialist-minded politicians of Britain and France and Italy appeared increasingly willing to accept a broad American role in the region since, barring their gaining of new lands, the most desirable outcome was that their European “friends” not gain any either.
To Yale, however, the truly decisive factor was the burgeoning pro-American sentiment of the Arabs. While undoubtedly sparked by the promises contained in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, this attitude was also a fairly logical result of contemplating the morass of claims waiting to envelop the region in the postwar era. Yale’s old friend Suleiman Bey Nassif fairly typified these concerns. A moderate Arab Christian, Nassif, even as he had reconciled to an expanded Jewish presence in Syria, remained deeply suspicious of British intentions, leery of King Hussein’s pan-Arab nation, and adamantly opposed to French designs. The best, perhaps only way out of this mess, Nassif explained to Yale, was for the Americans—nonimperialist, idealistic, far enough away to be minimally irritating—to step into the breach.
Yale wholeheartedly agreed, but looking for the right button to push with the Wilson administration was a grinding task; at one point, he even tried for base economic self-interest, pointing out to Harrison that “it is a well-known fact that certain American oil interests have recently obtained from the Ottoman Government extensive properties in Palestine,” one of the rare instances, presumably, when an intelligence agent was moved to inform on his own prior activities.
Finally, in late April, after months of extolling America’s standing in the region to the State Department, Yale decided to act. It came after he met a man named Faris Nimr, a leader of the Syrian exile community in Cairo and the editor in chief of the hugely influential Egyptian newspaper al-Mokattam. As Yale explained to Leland Harrison, ever since the United States had joined the war, Nimr and a small cabal of like-minded Syrian exiles had looked to it as their homeland’s potential savior. “Quietly these few men have been spreading the idea of a sort of protectorate over Syria by the United States among the Syrians in Egypt, endeavoring to do this as secretly as possible that neither the British nor the French might become aware of it. This is an idea that appeals to both Christian and to Moslem.… It is stated by these ardent partisans of America that all the factions and all the parties among the Syrians would not only unite on the question of aid from the United States, but would rejoice if such were possible.”
While waiting for Harrison’s response to this message, Yale received a bit of gladdening news from Washington on another matter. It had been decided to send a second special agent out to the Middle East, and once that man arrived in Egypt, it would be arranged for Yale to go on to Palestine. The name of his Cairo replacement, William Brewster, was very familiar to Yale; Brewster had been the Standard Oil representative in Aleppo at the same time that Yale worked for them in Jerusalem. Thus, while doubling the size of their intelligence network in the Middle East, the American government had ensured it remained within the Standard Oil recruiting pool.
With Brewster en route, Yale was hastily appointed a captain in something called “the National Army”; perhaps not wishing to appear churlish after their months of stonewalling, British authorities declined to inquire just what this curious entity might be—the official name of the American army en route to Europe was the American Expeditionary Force—and instead congratulated the American agent on his military appointment.
“As soon as Cairo tailors could make uniforms for me,” Yale recounted, “I began to prepare myself to be a soldier among soldiers. I had very little military training [actually non
e] and knew nothing about military matters and etiquette. For days I walked the side streets of Cairo in my new uniform, practicing saluting on passing British Tommies. When they began to salute me automatically, with no smirks on their faces, I knew I was on the way to being a soldier.”
It was all in preparation for an occasion the newly minted captain rather dreaded, his formal presentation to General Allenby. In mid-July, Yale and the new American consul to Egypt, Hampson Gary, took advantage of a brief home visit by Allenby to make the journey up to his office in Alexandria. “When we entered Allenby’s study,” Yale recalled, “I did not know whether or not to salute the General. I wondered whether I should stand at attention or sit down. The worry was needless, for General Allenby paid as much attention to me as though I was not there.”
The climactic moment came when Allenby abruptly turned in Yale’s direction and, in his practiced stentorian voice, boomed, “Well, Captain Yale, what are you going to do at my headquarters?”
“I am going to continue my political work, General Allenby,” he replied.
Wrong answer. “Captain Yale,” the general bellowed, “if the United States government wishes to send a butcher to my headquarters, that’s their privilege, [but] you will remember when you are attached to my forces, you are a soldier!” Chastened, the American visitors soon beat a retreat, with Yale convinced that “Allenby had classed me, a former Standard Oil man, as one of those lower forms of life who engage in trade.”
The next day, Yale boarded a troop train for Palestine and his new billet at the British army headquarters at Bir-es-Salem, about ten miles east of Jaffa. He found reserved for him there a small tent, a cot, a writing table, and a canvas washbasin and bath. Also awaiting him was that peculiar feature of the European military officer class of 1918, the batman, or personal valet. Among British officers, the most coveted batmen were Indian army soldiers drawn from units specifically trained for the task, but possibly in retaliation for his importune reply to Allenby, Yale’s was a grizzled old Scotsman.
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