Just as he had threatened to do many times with the Zionist Commission, Aaronsohn resolved to quit Paris altogether, and was only stayed when the Zionist leadership that had so recently snubbed him contritely beseeched his help in drawing the proposed boundary map for Palestine. “I hate the way they work,” Aaronsohn jotted afterward in his diary with a note of put-upon triumph. “Give important missions to people and at the last minute realize nothing was done because they didn’t let experts do it.” The map Aaronsohn drew up was a Zionist’s dream, one that, if adopted, would have extended the borders of Palestine to the outskirts of Damascus, not so much making Palestine an enclave alongside a greater Syria than transforming Syria into a virtual rump state of a greater Palestine.
On the morning of May 15, 1919, Aaronsohn was preparing to return to Paris and the peace conference after a quick visit to London. At Kenley airfield south of London, however, he discovered his flight had been delayed due to thick ground fog. By 11:30, he was just about to give up and return to London when, amid a partial clearing of the skies, the pilot of a much smaller plane, a two-seater de Havilland making a mail run to Paris, offered to give him a lift. At about 1 p.m., a French fishing boat captain working the waters off the Calais coast heard a plane flying low overhead, invisible in the thick fog, then the sound of a crash. Searching through the mist, the fisherman found scattered mail floating on the calm sea, but nothing else. Neither the body of the de Havilland pilot nor of Aaron Aaronsohn was ever recovered. Since by rabbinical law a funeral can’t be held without a body, on the evening of May 17 Aaronsohn’s friends and colleagues gathered in Paris for an “observance” of his life and contribution to the Zionist cause.
As for Aaronsohn’s colleague and sometime adversary in the Zionist cause, Chaim Weizmann, he would not only live to see the creation of the state of Israel, but serve as its first president until his death in 1952. He was joined in postwar Palestine by his rebellious younger sister Minna. For her services to the Central Powers war effort, Minna was included in a prisoner exchange between Germany and Russia in the last days of World War I. Managing yet another escape, this time from the chaos of postwar Germany, she returned to Jerusalem, where she worked for the health service of the Zionist women’s organization, Hadassah.
Djemal Pasha continued his adventurous life in the postwar era, if only briefly. Having escaped from Constantinople along with his two co-pashas, Talaat and Enver, aboard a German torpedo boat in the last days of the war, Djemal wandered the battlegrounds of Central Asia, falling in and out of alliances with a bewildering array of factions. His luck finally ran out in July 1922 when he and an aide were gunned down in the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia. Claiming credit for the assassination was a shadowy Armenian nationalist organization that had vowed to liquidate those responsible for the Armenian slaughters of 1915–16, and which had earlier assassinated Talaat Pasha in Berlin. The following month, Enver, the last of the Three Pashas and Djemal’s coadventurer in the Caucasus, also passed from the scene, shot in a Russian Red Army ambush in Tajikistan.
IN HIS ROLE as one of America’s Middle Eastern experts at the Paris Peace Conference, William Yale did not limit his attention to the matter of peace in the region. At the same time, and perhaps mindful that one day he would have to find a new job, he sought to quietly promote the interests of his former employer, Standard Oil of New York, with the American delegation. Between President Wilson’s stout defense of the “Open Door” free trade policy and a series of events that had occurred in Palestine in the summer of 1918, Yale had a good pretext for doing so.
While serving as the American military liaison at Allenby’s headquarters that summer, Yale had been summoned by General Arthur Money, the British chief administrator of Palestine, who demanded that he hand over Socony’s Palestine oilfield maps. When Yale refused, protesting that Money should take up the issue with Standard headquarters, the general opted for the simpler course of breaking into the old Socony office in Jerusalem and taking them. In a series of memoranda to the American peace delegates, Yale darkly warned of where these strong-arm tactics might lead, especially if the oil-hungry British were allowed free rein in their mandate territories of Palestine and Iraq. Those delegates were duly alarmed; largely at Yale’s instigation, the American campaign to force the British to honor Socony’s Palestine concessions would become a major source of friction between the two countries for the next several years.
Except that Socony was apparently playing something of a shell game in Palestine, fiercely fighting to protect its “strike” at Kornub in order to establish a precedent for demanding equal access to the known oilfields in British-controlled Iraq. When that access was finally ceded in 1924, Standard Oil abruptly dropped all its concessions in Palestine. Scurrying into the breach, a British oil company hastily conducted its own tests at Kornub, only to find what Yale’s geologist partner, Rudolf McGovern, had found in 1914: iron tailings. Despite the periodic release of optimistic industry reports to the contrary, no commercially viable oil deposits have ever been found at Kornub.
After quitting the Paris Peace Conference in disgust in late 1919, Yale returned to the United States with hopes of being rehired by Socony. Whether due to his past impolitic remarks in the halls of 26 Broadway or because he had become too high profile in the ongoing oil battles with Britain, that effort failed. With his family’s fortune long since dwindled away and jobs scarce in the deepening American postwar recession, Yale signed on with an American trading firm and went back to Cairo. On the way, he stopped off in England and married Edith Hanna, a British nurse he had met in Jerusalem before the war.
For several years, Yale juggled a number of different part-time positions in Cairo, even as he continued to prospect for oil on his own. By May 1922, he felt he’d made a strike on the British-controlled Farasan Island off the coast of Yemen. As he told a senior Socony official, the British were keeping the oil find a secret, but if a Socony geologist was sent out, Yale knew a way for them to sneak onto the island. When that offer wasn’t pursued, Yale returned to the United States, where he took up the unlikely vocation of chicken farmer in rural New Hampshire as he worked toward getting his master’s degree in education. By 1928, he had been hired by the University of New Hampshire as an assistant professor of history.
A prodigious if not particularly gifted writer, Yale supplemented his professor’s income with articles and essays about the Middle East. These efforts gradually achieved wider recognition—he published in both the Atlantic Monthly and the Christian Science Monitor—which led to visiting lectureships and invitations to university symposia. Just as when he had lived in the region, Yale’s views on the Middle East oscillated wildly over the years, so that his 1923 call for a campaign to “smash the debasing tyranny of Islamism, which for centuries has corrupted the minds and souls and bodies of countless millions of Orientals,” was neatly offset by a later screed against “the exploitive nature of Jewish nationalistic imperialism,” which he charged was modeled on the “German fascist pattern.”
Despite such rhetoric, Yale was sufficiently well regarded as an expert in the field to be appointed to the State Department’s Office of Postwar Planning as a Middle Eastern specialist during World War II. That position, in turn, led to his appointment as an assistant secretary to the Committee on Trusteeship at the first postwar United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945. Yale’s particular area of focus was on the proposed political realignment of the Arab world through a dismantling of the discredited colonial mandate system in favor of U.N. trusteeship. It must have felt very much like déjà vu, for, just as with the King-Crane Commission of twenty-six years earlier, none of the committee’s recommendations for the Middle East would be acted upon.
Returned to civilian life, Yale resumed teaching history at the University of New Hampshire, and then at Boston University until his retirement in 1967. He died in a nursing home in Derry, New Hampshire, in February 1975, at the age of eighty-seven.
FRO
M THE OTHER side of the Middle Eastern intelligence battlefield, Curt Prüfer had a rather more colorful postwar career. Indeed, while no individual can truly personify the history of a nation, it would be hard to find a more remarkable exemplar through which to view events in Germany between the two world wars.
In 1919, Prüfer was quickly drawn to one of the most poisonous myths to take root in defeated Germany, the so-called stab-in-the-back conspiracy. According to this myth, Germany hadn’t lost the war on the battlefield, but rather had been betrayed from within. Chief among these internal traitors were Germany’s liberal political parties—in a case of astoundingly poor timing, a coalition of leftist parties took control of the government just two days before the armistice—and international Jewry, seduced by the promises of the Balfour Declaration into throwing their allegiance to the Allied cause. It was a myth ultimately put to devastating use by Adolf Hitler, but it found an adherent in Curt Prüfer far earlier; according to biographer Donald McKale, even as the impoverished Prüfer accepted financial support from a Jewish foreign ministry coworker in the lean early postwar years, he railed against the Jews in his diary with growing vehemence.
In fact, though, due to the unfinished business of the Paris Peace Conference, a strong argument could be made that Germany hadn’t truly been defeated at all; instead, the Allies had created perhaps the best possible breeding ground for future conflict by simultaneously burdening their former enemy with crushing war reparation debts and leaving her ruling apparatus largely intact. It enabled German officials, Curt Prüfer among them, to quickly begin rebuilding the alliances and networks of influence that had helped lead to war to begin with. One of Prüfer’s first tasks for the foreign ministry in the postwar era was to help a number of Germany’s former partners in the Middle East—Egyptian nationalists, leaders of the Young Turk movement, pro-German Arabs—to escape retribution and resettle within the former Central Powers. Of course, this meant Germany now had a recruitment pool of malcontents for fomenting unrest in the future.
Even before the war was over, Prüfer had seen a new way forward for that campaign, if only Germany learned from its past mistakes. “Our propaganda suffered,” he wrote the foreign ministry on November 2, 1918, “because during the war we wanted to make up in urgency what we had neglected in peace.… With weepy accusations against our enemies, with longwinded recitals on our success, and inwardly untrue protestations of friendship for Islam, we tried to win sympathy from people who stood far from us spiritually.” The next time around, Prüfer urged, Germany “must seek less to educate, than to please.”
Amid the musical-chairs politics of the postwar Middle East, Prüfer soon had opportunity to get back into the mischief-making game. In the autumn of 1921, he was linked to a new scheme by the ever-determined Abbas Hilmi to overthrow the British regime in Egypt. A few months later, Prüfer was in Rome visiting with Chaim Weizmann. If aware that his visitor had once seduced his younger sister into spying for Germany, Weizmann apparently had bigger things on his mind; as he opined to Prüfer, since the French were clearly to blame for the British backing away from the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Zionists and Germans now needed to work together against France. It was an idea with which the virulently anti-Semitic but ever opportunistic Prüfer undoubtedly heartily concurred. For these and other activities, the British government finally put Prüfer on an enemies blacklist, with the MI5 security agency maintaining an investigative file on him that would never be closed.
By the late 1920s, though, a certain equilibrium had settled into Prüfer’s life. Having divorced his long-estranged first wife, the American Frances Pinkham, he married a much younger German woman who in 1930 bore him a son. He also continued to rise through the foreign ministry ranks, eventually becoming deputy director of its vitally important Abteilung (Department) III, the division dealing with both Anglo-American and Middle Eastern affairs. He was still in that position when Adolf Hitler came to power in July 1933.
Even though he shared Hitler’s dream of a resurgent Germany, Prüfer, like many German conservatives, initially viewed the upstart Nazis as useful fools, rough-around-the-edges hooligans who could be utilized but controlled by the more respectable establishment. By 1936, Prüfer had sufficiently recovered from that misapprehension and his initial distaste to become personnel director of Hitler’s foreign ministry and, a year later, to officially join the Nazi Party. In September 1939, with Germany having just ignited World War II with its invasion of Poland, Prüfer left for South America to serve as Hitler’s ambassador to Brazil.
His three years in Brazil marked a kind of personal high point. At last Prüfer had achieved the status within the German diplomatic community that he had sought as far back as 1911. What’s more, by developing a close friendship with Brazil’s dictator, he helped forestall that immensely rich country from joining the war on the side of the Allies despite a treaty commitment with the Americans to do so. But alas, old habits die hard. In the summer of 1942, Prüfer was directly linked to a German espionage ring operating in Brazil and ordered from the country. If disappointed by this turn of events, the ambassador could at least be pleased by the timing; just five days after he and his family sailed for home, Brazil joined the Allies in the war and a warrant was issued for his arrest (he was eventually sentenced in absentia to twenty-five years for espionage).
Curiously trusting for a propaganda expert, Prüfer had apparently accepted Nazi pronouncements about imminent victory at face value, so he was shocked to return to a Europe where the war was turning inexorably against Germany. For a year, he stuck it out in Berlin, even as he moved his wife and child to a home he had bought in a smaller city to escape the incessant Allied air raids. “All this is terrible for me to witness,” he wrote in July 1943, “not only because I have always been a person who is very attached to his homeland and always will be, but also because I was sincerely converted to some of the beautiful ideas of National Socialism.”
Beautiful ideas aside, this natural-born survivor also had the instinct to find a way out. In September 1943, Prüfer led his family across the border into neutral Switzerland, where, much as in 1918, he remained until Germany’s fall. The difference between his return in 1918 and that of 1945 was that this time the Allies weren’t going to allow German militarists another reprise. The home Prüfer had purchased in Baden Baden, it turned out, had been confiscated from a Jewish family, and was taken away from him. The former ambassador was also put through the American “de-nazification” investigation process, where he was cleared of war crimes even as many of his immediate superiors in the foreign ministry were sent to Nuremberg. The British might have had more desire to catch up to the man who had been their nemesis for three decades, but they too lost interest when in October 1945 it was reported the always frail Prüfer was either dead or dying of tuberculosis.
But maybe not quite. Three years later, a sharp-eyed British intelligence officer in New Delhi noted a curious little item in the Daily Telegraph of India relating to the future training of Indian diplomats at Delhi University. “Students will be under the supervision of Dr. Pruffer,” the article noted, “a former German diplomat who left his country on the advent of the Nazi regime.”
From a bit of sleuthing, it was eventually determined that the anti-Nazi “Pruffer” and the pro-Nazi Prüfer were one and the same. Much as had occurred in Cairo nearly forty years earlier, the British moved to deny Prüfer his coveted academic position, and he eventually returned to Germany. He finally died there—for real this time—in early 1959, at the age of seventy-seven. In a fitting irony, his only child, Olaf, with whom the failed former Oriental scholar had long been estranged, would eventually immigrate to the United States and become a renowned archaeologist.
OF ALL THE spies and intelligence agents who dueled with each another in the Middle East during World War I, the one most determined to divorce himself from the region in its aftermath was T. E. Lawrence. As he wrote a friend during his 1921 service for Wi
nston Churchill at the Colonial Office, “the Arabs are like a page I have turned over, and sequels are rotten things.”
In early 1922, with that service ending, Lawrence petitioned the head of the Royal Air Force for permission to join the force. There were several curious details to this request. Due both to his celebrity and former military rank, Lawrence might easily have entered the RAF as a senior officer, but instead he specifically requested to come in “with the ranks,” meaning as an ordinary private. Also, he was no longer T. E. Lawrence; as he informed the RAF chief, his new name was John Hume Ross.
Making his petition especially puzzling was that Lawrence had always been openly contemptuous of military culture. As he would write in Seven Pillars, the military uniform “walled its bearers from ordinary life, was sign that they had sold their wills and bodies to the State, and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary.… The soldier assigned his owner the twenty-four hours’ use of his body, and sole conduct of his mind and passions.”
But perhaps it was not so puzzling after all. In Arabia, Lawrence had exerted life-and-death control over thousands, had cobbled together a cause and an army as he went along. All the while, he had been tormented by a sense of his own fraudulence, the awareness that the men who fought and died at his side were almost certain to be betrayed in the end. As he would suggest in Seven Pillars, and state quite explicitly in letters to friends, after Arabia he never wanted to be in a position of responsibility again.
Joined to this was a desire for anonymity, to leave behind who and what he had been. Lawrence displayed this desire most overtly in the decision to change his name—first to John Hume Ross and then to Thomas Edward Shaw—but it took more subtle form, a kind of psychological washing of the hands. In the one very short mention of the Cairo Conference in Seven Pillars, Lawrence wrote that Churchill “made straight all the tangle” in the Middle East, fulfilling Britain’s promises to the Arabs “in letter and spirit (where humanly possible) without sacrificing any interest of our Empire or any interest of the peoples concerned.” Knowing the full extent of those promises, and writing at a time when his cherished Syria remained under French control, Lawrence couldn’t possibly have believed his own assertion. Similarly, considering all that is contained in its pages, it’s very hard to regard the subtitle to Seven Pillars—“A Triumph”—as anything but self-mockery.
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