I took a look at the post-war Foreign Office Lists. Wright served as acting consul in Mersin from 1943 to 1945 and afterwards went on to a distinguished diplomatic career, serving as ambassador in Addis Ababa and Tehran. Could it be that he was still alive? I turned to Who’s Who 1996. There he was: Sir Denis Arthur Hepworth Wright (born 1911), an Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and the author of two books on Anglo-Persian relations. I immediately wrote to him. Three days later, a reply arrived inviting me to visit him; and the following weekend, on 17 February 1996, I drove up to Haddenham, Buckinghamshire.
Haddenham, I discovered, was a large village swollen by modern estates, but its old centre was an extraordinarily idyllic spot where a church with a tower overlooked a pond inhabited by white ducks and a pair of swans. A narrow lane led down from the pond to the ancient low-lying house where Denis Wright lived with his wife, Iona. I was met by a straightforward, initially gruff man – ‘What are you writing, exactly? A novel, or a proper book?’ – who, even in his mid-eighties, was tall and athletic. Wright still wrote and regularly travelled abroad with Iona to places like Russia and Greece. He straightaway led me upstairs to his study and asked me how I had got hold of his name. I recounted what my grandmother had said about the assistance he had given her. ‘I remember your grandmother very well,’ Wright said, much to my surprise. He turned towards his desk and pointed at some volumes. ‘This is what I’ve got.’ There were carefully bound typescripts of his letters home from Mersin; a typed and bound and footnoted autobiography; essays on the politics of wartime Turkey; and albums of carefully annotated photographs and cuttings. As a personal documentary record of wartime Mersin, these papers almost certainly had no equal.
Mersin’s significance in the Second World War, Sir Denis told me, arose out of the wider political situation in Turkey. By a series of non-aggression and friendship treaties, mutual assistance pacts, trade agreements and non-committal manoeuvres, the Turkish Republic, led by President Ismet Inönü, adroitly managed to maintain its neutrality. It wasn’t an easy thing to pull off. Churchill, in particular, had a ‘bee in his bonnet’ about securing Turkish participation in the war – in Wright’s view, this would have been a generally counterproductive development that would have achieved nothing for Turkey other than the destruction of its major cities. Turkey’s diplomatic skill was such that it not only resisted the strong pressure exerted by the Axis and the Allies but also managed to take the benefit of Allied offers to strengthen its military infrastructure – offers to build roads and airfields, and to supply aircraft, tanks, armoured cars, AA guns and training teams. These projects gave rise to a problem: how to ship the necessary materials into the country? With the Italians in Rhodes and the Dodecanese and the Germans in control of Bulgaria and mainland Greece, Turkey’s main ports, Istanbul and Izmir, were within range of Axis aircraft. And so two points of entry into Turkey were identified as safe from the threat of air attacks: the sister ports of Iskenderun and Mersin. It didn’t matter that Mersin did not have a proper harbour and that vessels had to anchor half a mile or so offshore and discharge their cargo into lighters; large quantities of military and other essential equipment were nevertheless shipped in, usually from Alexandria, usually in Greek ships, and usually in secret.
It is a little-known fact, Wright said, that one of the undercover infrastructural projects was based near Mersin. As Axis forces advanced in south-east Europe, the danger arose that they might invade Turkey on their way through to Syria and the oilfields of the Middle East. In response to this threat, the Allies drew up contingency plans with Turkey whereby the line would be held in the Taurus Mountains and reinforcements from Syria and Egypt would be quickly sent up by rail and road. Thus, in July 1941, a party of around forty men of the British Royal Engineers set up camp just outside Mersin with the task of blasting a tank-friendly road through the Taurus Mountains and improving the roads and bridges that connected Mersin, Tarsus and Iskenderun. To keep the operations in ostensible accordance with the neutral status of the host country, the construction party wore civilian clothing and held itself out as Messrs. Braithwaite & Co., Civil Engineers and Contractors of London. There were other sensitive Allied operations in Mersin. These included the exportation, mainly to the United States, of Turkish chrome – vital for manufacturing armaments – and the shipment of timber and railway sleepers from the Findikpinar forest in the Taurus Mountains to the British in the Middle East. Such mercantile activities were overseen by the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation (UKCC), a wartime corporate vehicle for the United Kingdom. The UKCC, Wright said, was represented in the consular staff in Mersin, as were a number of key Whitehall ministries – the Admiralty, the War Office, the Ministry of War Transport, the Ministry of Economic Warfare. The consulate also housed agents of SIME (Security Intelligence Middle East) and MI6. These agents, and indeed practically all British military personnel working in Turkey, entered the country from Syria, on the Taurus Express.
This last fact was confirmed to me by an old friend of Denis Wright named Bill Henderson. In 1941, Henderson, an architect in the Royal Engineers, was posted as a junior staff officer to Ankara, where his duties included meeting soldiers (dressed as civilians) disembarking from the Taurus Express at six in the morning. In 1942, when Henderson was transferred to Cilicia to work on the Taurus road, he discovered that the British had German counterparts in the vicinity, who were undertaking huge water supply and irrigation schemes around Mersin under pre-war contracts. On one occasion, Henderson recalled, his Turkish foreman got hold of surveying equipment from helpful Germans. ‘All that cloak-and-dagger stuff and all those false identities were something of a charade,’ Henderson said. ‘Everybody knew what was going on.’
Everybody, in this context, meant the German diplomatic and intelligence corps, which was headed by the Reich’s ambassador, Franz von Papen – the Chancellor of Germany for a brief time in 1932 and then Vice-Chancellor in Hitler’s first government from January 1933 to the summer of 1934. The principle objectives of the Germans were, first, to ensure that Turkey did not join the Allies, and, second, to monitor and if possible influence the military situation in the Middle East. Paul Leverkuehn, the Chief of the Istanbul Station of the Abwehr from July 1941–44, considered that his most important task was to guard against the risk of Turkish entry into the war on the Allied side. The strength and distribution of the British and Free French forces in Syria and Iraq was, accordingly, of vital interest to German intelligence. Arab observers along the frontiers with Turkey carried out reconnaissance, and travellers to and from Egypt, which continued to trade with Turkey, were also a rich source of information. Agents of intelligence organizations – Abwehr, Sicherheitsdienst and Auslandsorganization – operated from German consulates. There was no German consulate in Mersin, where the Axis powers were represented by an Italian consulate headed by an aristocrat named Aloisi. The Italians, Wright said, engaged a man to swim out and attach limpet mines to the hulls of Allied merchantmen moored in the waters off Mersin. In the event, they only damaged one ship.
British counter-espionage was largely in the hands of SIME agents. One of these was C.T.C. Taylor, SIME’s man in Adana. Taylor wrote in his unpublished autobiography:
The enemy had a considerable number of sympathizers among the Arabs, many of whom remained faithful to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had fled to, and was operating from, Germany, and Italian Levantine families with members on either side of the [Turkish-Syrian] frontier. My organization’s job was to spot enemy agents, or their various forms of communication and propaganda, and prevent them from penetrating far into territory held by us …
[The frontier with Syria] was the chief route for agents and propaganda amongst the Arabs and Egyptians. In Adana the leading German agent was Paula Koch, who had been matron of the hospital in Aleppo before the war and who became most annoyed, I learned, when I christened her the Mata Hari of World War II. She had a milk-brother and informer, Joseph Ayvazian,
who owned a hotel and restaurant up in the hills above Iskenderun at Soğuk Oluk.
Taylor arrived in Turkey in January 1942. On the Taurus Express to Istanbul, he bumped into another SIME agent, an Irish aristocrat from West Cork, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Patrick Coghill, Bt. Coghill had arrived in Turkey on a control espionage job for Colonel R.J. Maunsell, the head of SIME, who was based in Cairo. In Istanbul, Coghill reported to Lieutenant-Colonel Guy Thomson (‘a disappointed, venomous man’ Coghill thought), who gave him the job of vice-consul at the British consulate at Adana. Coghill’s mission was to find out how the enemy got its people across the Turkish border into Syria, and to tip off the British forces in Syria as to where and when enemy agents might be picked up. He was greatly assisted by the Turkish authorities, whom he found much more inclined towards the Allies than the Axis, specifically, Coghill enjoyed privileged contacts with the Turkish secret police. The secret police – under the direct and personal control of the prime minister, not the cabinet – supplied the Allies with information they could not obtain for themselves, such as complete lists of passengers leaving the country by rail or by air. In a stab at maintaining neutrality, information was also passed on by the Turks to the Axis powers, but this intelligence was not, both Coghill and Taylor thought, of the same quality as that supplied to the Allies.
Sir Patrick Coghill’s short spell in Adana led him to conclude that there were two classes of spies travelling to and from Syria: a riff-raff of smugglers, whose stories were unreliable; and high-up agents who, like Joseph Dakak, travelled with neutral passports on the Taurus Express.
After three weeks in Jerusalem, Joseph Dakak obtained an export licence from the authorities in Palestine and concluded a contract with a local merchant for the supply to Mersin of two hundred tonnes of lemons. With his return visas in his pocket, he set off on the train home, to Turkey.
He was arrested at Rasnakura, on the Palestine–Syria border.
That same night he was taken to Haifa, and the next day, back to Jerusalem, where he was registered by the Palestine CID (Criminal Investigation Department). The commander of the detention centre was an English sergeant-major. He took Dakak’s wedding ring and another ring, saying that these would be returned later; they never were.
My grandfather was held in Jerusalem for seventeen days. The food was terrible – ‘not fit,’ he complained in his testimony, ‘for even the worst of murderers.’ There was nowhere to sit or sleep: the choice was between standing and lying down on bare cement. He repeatedly asked to see the Turkish consul and was repeatedly told that he could do so tomorrow. He was shown a warrant signed by the police chief of Jerusalem, Arthur Giles, which stated that he was held in custody ‘on suspicion’ pursuant to section 17(a) of some Act.
There were eight other detainees in this prison, most of whom were Jews. Only later, my grandfather wrote, did he realize that they were all spies and that their primary concern was to find out whether he, Dakak, was connected to Jewish anarchists.
I was startled to read this. What possible reason could there be to suspect Joseph Dakak, a Turk of Arab origins, of supporting the Zionist underground in Palestine? The allegation went unexplained, because here Part I of the testimony came to an end and Part II, called In Beirut, began.
On the seventeenth day of his detention in Jerusalem, Dakak was told that he was being taken to the Turkish border. But the following day, 8 May 1942, he was driven instead to the military prison of the Free French in Beirut. Technically, he remained in British custody.
Dakak was taken to a cell occupied by eight others. Among them he recognized a Mersin millionaire called Nazim Gandour. Gandour – a Muslim of Lebanese, not Turkish, nationality – hadn’t shaved in four days. He had been arrested at the Syrian border by Desmond Doran, the British passport officer, who had travelled on the train with him. Gandour said that his visa had been inscribed with unusual numerals to alert the Syrian authorities that he should be arrested. ‘You see?’ Gandour said to Dakak, ‘your passport has the same stamp.’ Gandour said that Doran was an evil man who had corrupted quite a few people in Mersin, including certain Turkish police officers. ‘Doran’s the one behind all this,’ he said.
The food at the Beirut prison was dreadful. One day Gandour – who enjoyed the unique privilege of a mattress and pillow apparently provided by his family – returned from a meeting with the prison governors and said to Dakak, ‘Don’t worry. From now on, I’ll be receiving food prepared by my family, and I’ll give you some.’ And after that day three kinds of mezes (appetizers) and abundant quantities of fruit and baklava arrived at the prison. My grandfather wrote: ‘It was well known in Mersin that I very often ate baklava; and in this way Gandour tried to gain my confidence.’
Because he suffered from stomach disorders, Dakak asked Gandour whether he might be able to get hold of some plain boiled potatoes. Gandour was able to oblige. One day, however, the potatoes tasted a little strange, and soon Dakak was seized by intense stomach pain, vomiting and diarrhoea; his heart started beating rapidly and he broke out into a drenching sweat. My grandfather’s agony continued for three days. A doctor from Aleppo who was locked up with him took his pulse and diagnosed an upset stomach; but as he lay ill, Dakak remembered the incident with the oranges in Jerusalem and everything became clear to him: he had been poisoned, and all his fellow inmates, who had not eaten the potatoes but nevertheless had pretended to vomit, were in the pay of the English.
I didn’t know what to make of this. Was it possible that all of my grandfather’s cell-mates were informers?
The leader of this ring of stooges, my grandfather asserted, was Nazim Gandour. Every Saturday morning, when the prisoners were let out to air their blankets, Gandour’s parents would be present a little distance away, play-acting: the mother carried a handkerchief and constantly wiped away tears. Gandour, meanwhile, questioned Dakak about the prominent people of Mersin and about the likelihood of the Germans invading Syria via Rhodes and Cyprus. ‘Not having powers of divination,’ my grandfather noted, ‘there was no way I could possibly answer him.’
‘This charade lasted for a month and a half,’ my grandfather wrote.
All the while, the prisoners circulated terrifying stories about the English: how suspects were made to disappear, how their bodies were hacked up and dumped in the sea. There wasn’t a machination, my grandfather wrote, that wasn’t used to terrorize him and impress on him that he, too, could meet with this fate. On one occasion he overheard an Armenian sergeant in the neighbouring cell loudly declaring that he had worked as a butcher in Adana during the French occupation.
A few days after the poisoning incident, my grandfather continued, a pretext was used to transfer him to a cell in a building used for criminals convicted of serious crimes. Wary of the food, Dakak did not eat anything. He did, however, accept a glass of water that an Armenian orderly had filled up. After taking a mouthful, Dakak registered a strange sensation. His lips and his tongue began to swell and burn, and his breath began to rasp in his chest. He poured away the remaining water.
An hour or so later, my grandfather heard a conversation in the adjoining cell. Two men were giving instructions to the guard. ‘At four in the morning, a car will come. That’s when his time will be up. You’ll put him into a sack and load him into the car. Once on the road, you’ll shoot him twice in the head and finish off the job the poison started. Make sure you run the engine to muffle the sound of gunfire. Once you’ve chopped him up, throw the pieces into the sea off a cliff between Beirut and Tripoli.’ The guard sobbed loudly and cried out, ‘How can you ask me to do such a thing?’
My grandfather snapped. In his pocket was a small metal blade he kept for cleaning his nails. He cut himself with the blade, slashing his skin in twenty-five places. The blade was blunt and he used his teeth to tear his veins further open. With his blood, he smeared on the wall, ‘I AM INNOCENT.’
At five in the morning, a passing soldier noticed the blood and the semi-conscious priso
ner. Soon more soldiers arrived and carried my grandfather to a room where his wounds were roughly bandaged. Instead of taking him to a hospital, they returned him to his old cell with Nazim Gandour and his cronies and laid him down on the bare ground with just two blankets.
Dakak was very weak. The spies in the cell tried to take advantage of his condition by gathering around him and asking questions about photographs they thrust before his face. Unable to take it any more, Dakak eventually cried out, ‘I know who you are! I know that you’re all working for the Intelligence Service!’ At that, they stopped their interrogation.
But that same night Dakak awoke to find Gandour and two others looming nearby; and one hurriedly pocketed a gadget the size of a magnifying glass. ‘As you’d been sleeping for so long,’ Gandour bluffed, ‘we thought we’d wake you up.’ ‘I later realized,’ my grandfather wrote, ‘that they’d drugged me in order to extract revelations from me. It wasn’t the first or the last time,’ my grandfather asserted, ‘that this tactic was used on me.’
Three days after Joseph Dakak cut open his veins, he was forcibly removed from his cell and driven to a place called the Prison of the Sands (Prison des Sables). Two guards accompanied him. One said, ‘The day after tomorrow, we’re taking you out to sea and we’re not going to waste more than two bullets on you.’
Upon arrival at the Prison of the Sands, Dakak spent half an hour in the infirmary. In spite of his injuries and loss of blood, he was placed alone in a cell equipped only with a pillow and two blankets. Once more, he had no choice but to sleep on the ground.
He was watched day and night. Anybody approaching the cell would be told to move on. From time to time the guard would look through the peephole and whisper, ‘There’s no escape’. After three days, my grandfather – confused, broken in spirit and not really conscious of his actions, he wrote – tried to hang himself from the door using a pyjama belt. The guard quickly realized what was happening and entered the cell to put a stop to it. The next morning, Dakak mutilated himself again, reopening his wounds with a rusty piece of metal ripped from the bottom of the door. On seeing the blood, the guard removed Dakak from the cell. The prisoner’s wounds were bandaged and he was taken to a cell in another building.
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