Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  Of course, my grandfather was not to know any of this as he sat on the terrace of the Toros Hotel with the Papens, making small talk about archaeology, perhaps, or the Great War, in which the two gentlemen had served alongside the Ottoman forces, or about Germany or Berlin. Even if Joseph had always sympathized with the Allies (as he claimed in his letter to the British embassy), there was no sign that he was equipped, as Mrs Garstang was, with the kind of ideological aversion to Nazi Germany that was probably required to keep in perspective Papen’s enormously flattering attentions. Papen was not only invested with the charisma of a man touched by history and fame, he was also quick-witted and personable and winning – sufficiently winning, in fact, to have persuaded both Hitler and a very doubtful President Hindenburg of the merits of installing a Hitler–Papen government.

  To cap it all, the ambassador was a first-class horseman – good enough to have had excelled in the steeplechase as a youthful Herrenreiter. His best-known photographic portrait showed him with his horse in the Zoological Gardens, Berlin. A tall, slender man with a greying moustache and eyes set close to a long, upturned nose, he stood with one hand rubbing the animal’s head and the other clutching a crop. He wore a cap, a bow-tie, a jacket with matching breeches, shining knee-length leather boots, white gloves, and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. In this get-up he bore an odd resemblance to another immaculate, gloved, whip-carrying horseman I had seen: Joseph Dakak. Was this him? Was Franz von Papen, with his private charm and public accomplishment, Joseph’s idealized self made flesh? It was, at any rate, easy to imagine a polite exchange, in German or French, in which the hotelier humbly put his filly at the disposal of the chivalrous German – just as he put his young bookkeeper, Salvator Avigdor, at the Papens’ disposal to act as a guide on their jaunt west of Mersin. I wondered if it had occurred to Joseph how this act of hospitality might look to others. True, a drive to the ancient, tiny port of Silifke, the site of a notable Byzantine castle, would traverse an archaeological and sightseeing paradise; but – assuming Papen’s visit occurred in wartime, which was not certain: it could well have taken place in the summer of 1939 – the route was also of strategic interest. The state of the road, the accessibility of the shoreline to shipping and landing crafts, the presence or absence of any construction workers or troops, the general lay of the land, these were all useful things to know. My grandfather might have openly assisted Papen in a valuable reconnaissance exercise.

  Was this simple guilelessness or something more sinister? The question also arose in relation to the occasion, in late 1941, when Joseph light-heartedly asked Hilmi Bey, the chief of the political police in Mersin, if Olga Catton and her friend Togo Makzoumé were working for British intelligence. What possible business was this of Joseph Dakak? Was my grandfather being idly inquisitive, or was he pressing the police chief out of a real need for the information? Either way, he was acting with a recklessness that was completely inconsistent with the prudence that had been generally attributed to him. Joseph Dakak’s three-week-long fraternization with the Arab nationalists at the Modern Hotel was also strikingly suspect – on a par, in terms of giving an impression of his political sympathies, with travelling to Cork and hanging out night after night with the Lynches and O’Neills at Tomás Ashe Hall. There was something else. On 21 June 1940, the Mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini, wrote to Franz von Papen from Baghdad seeking to establish friendly relations. The contact proved fruitful, and very soon after he arrived in Berlin in November 1941, the Mufti established an espionage and sabotage network that covered Turkey and Palestine. His agents worked in close contact with German intelligence, operating in Iskenderun, Antakya, Adana, Diyarbekir – and Mersin. In Istanbul, meanwhile, Paul Leverkuehn, the Abwehr chief, established contact in Istanbul with Musa Husseini, the Mufti’s nephew and heir-presumptive (and not to be confused with the nephew whom Joseph Dakak met, Mustapha Husseini), with a view to obtaining intelligence about troop movements in Syria and Mesopotamia. What more likely German–Arab conduit of information could there have been than a Syrian with strong German connections and an inability to mind his own business travelling on the Taurus Express from Turkey to Palestine?

  Joseph Dakak, with Tayara

  In his testimony, Joseph gave a very specific – and, I thought, entirely credible – account of his reasons for going to Jerusalem. But he was at a loss to explain his dealings with Hilmi Bey and the Husseini family, portraying himself – a worldly, well-informed and socially adept man – as a maladroit innocent who had feebly been sucked into political conversations he didn’t want to have, louche company he didn’t want to keep and, ultimately, the meshes of a vast, mysterious net of injustice he was powerless to escape. It was true that the testimony had been written when Joseph was in a profoundly confused and desperate state, and true, also, that it remained unclear what acts of espionage, specifically, he was supposed to have committed. Nonetheless, it did not look good for my grandfather; and it was obvious why British intelligence might have formed suspicions about him. Which brought me to a question I hoped Sir Denis Wright might be able to answer: who were the people in British intelligence in Mersin in 1942?

  Wright proved to be amazingly helpful. ‘There was a whole mob of curious characters at the consulate,’ he said. ‘The Consular Shipping Adviser, a secretive fellow called Piggott, was the Admiralty’s man, responsible for naval intelligence; Geoffrey Maltass was the Ministry of War Transport’s man; Arthur Maltass, Geoffrey’s cousin, acted for the Ministry of Economic Warfare; Captain Gerald Calvert, whose family owned an estate in Troy, was agent called Geoffrey Williams; and there was Desmond Doran, the Passport Control Officer and MI6 agent.’ Williams and Doran sent their Secret reports back to their respective bosses in Istanbul – Lieutenant-Colonel Guy Thomson and Colonel Harold Gibson. ‘Doran had left for Egypt by the time I came on the scene,’ Wright said. ‘I knew him slightly from Rumania, where he was posted before Mersin. He was blown up by the Stern Gang in the end,’ Wright added with no visible sadness, ‘in Palestine.’ Wright didn’t know Olga Catton or the secret policemen Hilmi Bey or Osman Emre Bey (the man who had pestered my grandfather for money to fund his lawsuit). Arthur Maltass, on the other hand, he knew well. ‘When I came to Mersin, Maltass had taken over the MI6 function from Doran, who was his friend. Maltass was a slippery, effeminate sort of fellow, charming in his own way, I suppose; a homosexual. Before the war he ran a boarding house in London. He was posted to Mersin because it was believed that he spoke Turkish, which he didn’t.’ Wright added, ‘He was an Anglo-Greek from Izmir – a Levantine, not pukka British. The Turks contemptuously referred to him as tatli su Ingiliz – literally, sweet-water Englishman. His English had an unmistakable accent.’

  Denis Wright (centre, standing) surrounded by his consulate staff in Mersin. Arthur Maltass (wearing a tie) stands next to him.

  As a Foreign Office man, the consul was not responsible for overseeing the intelligence agents. However, although Wright was ‘not a clandestine chap at all’, his work in Trabzon had put him in good standing with the intelligence chiefs in Istanbul, and they let their men in Mersin know that they could count on Wright’s co-operation. As a result, the agents showed Denis Wright the Secret and Confidential reports which went to Istanbul each week. Wright wasn’t impressed. The reports struck him as superficial, gossipy and very much alike. ‘It soon became clear to me’ Wright said, ‘that the separate reports sent by Maltass, Williams (the SIME man) and Piggott (naval intelligence), which appeared to be mutually corroborative, in fact nearly all flowed from a common source: William Rickards, the Lloyd’s agent in Mersin, and his cousin.’

  I knew of William Rickards. He was Olga Catton’s brother and a well-known member of my family’s Mersin circle.

  Wright continued, ‘Rickards was about fifty years old, I would say, and lived with his widowed mother and sister, Dosia Grigsby. The Rickards family was the only British family native to Mersin,’ Wright said. ‘I remember they owned a valuable
collection of the works of Richard Burton. William Rickards was a slippery piece of work at the best of times – a homosexual, it was said, but I wouldn’t know about that. He was greatly disliked by the Syrian fraternity, and a great gossip. His reports were full of stuff about who was sleeping with whom, but nothing of substance.’

  Denis Wright acted quickly. In a Secret and Personal letter dated 29 June 1943, he wrote to Maltass’ MI6 boss, Harold Gibson, ‘Mersin is, as you probably know, a hotbed of malicious gossip and I have been very much disturbed to find how much of this gossip is passed on as reliable information.’ In order to ‘sift fact from fiction’, Wright requested and was granted authority to vet Maltass’ reports before they were sent to Istanbul for redistribution; and the transmission of unreliable information out of Mersin was immediately reduced. Which brought me to a question I had never directly posed before.

  ‘What about Joseph Dakad? Are you aware of any evidence that he was a spy?’

  ‘I have no proof about Dakad,’ Wright said. ‘He got put in the bag before I got there, and I never got involved. There were, I remember, very strong feelings.’ He paused, thinking back to half a century before. ‘Dakad may easily have been the victim of Byzantine goings on. Maltass may have been a nigger in the woodpile,’ Wright said unselfconsciously, ‘and I’m sure that Rickards was gunning for his enemies and feeding Doran with information which Doran took at face value. And it may be that Rickards, who kept in with the Turks, had information planted on him by Turkish authorities, who had no use for the Syrians and were quite capable of planting material about people they didn’t like. I sensed this straight away; one has certain antennae.’

  Unsure what Wright meant exactly, I did not immediately follow up on this last observation about Turkish antipathy for ‘Syrians’, his persistent, and unsettling, term for the Mersin Christians. Instead, I rang my mother in The Hague and spoke to her about William Rickards. My mother – who came to know Rickards when he was 60 – remembered him as a very English man who spoke French and Turkish with an English accent. She was genuinely taken aback at the notion that he was unpopular. ‘I never heard my father say anything bad about him,’ she said, ‘and in fact he and my mother were great friends with William’s youngest sister, Rosie, and her husband, Riri Levante.’

  At my mother’s suggestion, I paid a visit to William Rickards’ nephew, Patrick Grigsby. Patrick was Dosia Rickards’ son and had spent his earliest years with his widowed mother in his uncle’s house in Mersin. Nowadays he lived with his wife Beryl in a large redbrick Victorian house in Sutton Coldfield, a town near Birmingham. He had extraordinarily bushy grey eyebrows, a broad flat nose, and, even though he’d left Mersin at the age of 14 for school in Istanbul and afterwards made his life in England, retained that distinctively rich Levantine accent. He had recently sold up his small business of importing and distributing mechanical parts and was now semi-retired. We shared a strangely similar Irish–Turkish ancestry: his mother, Theodosia Rickards, was from Mersin and his father, a master mariner named Henry Grigsby, was from Cork. (Patrick, born in December 1931, had no memory of Henry, who drowned at sea off Haifa in 1933.) Like all of his generation, he remembered Mersin of the ’thirties and ’forties as a leisurely, intimate ‘paradise’ of orange groves and beaches and gardens where he played with Fonda Tahintzi and Roger Vadim, the future filmmaker, who was the son of the French consul, Plemianikov. As a young child, Patrick said, he and his mother were invited by Joseph Dakak to the curtain-raiser at the Günes Cinema, Walt Disney’s cartoon Who Killed Cock Robin? This struck me as uncanny: there was a famous scene in Sabotage, Hitchcock’s 1936 adaptation of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, in which the secret agent Verloc, a cinema proprietor, screened exactly the same film.

  Patrick told me that his grandfather Henry Rickards, a general’s son, arrived in Mersin in the 1880s and invested his gold in the Mersin–Adana railway. Henry married Maryam, a sixteen-year-old Syrian from a humble family of builders who was girlish enough to attend school on the morning of her wedding. Horrified by a union that was inappropriate in every respect, the Rickards family cut off Henry. Even so, he managed to live comfortably on the income from his investments and to educate his four children in France and England. Henry Rickards died from pneumonia in 1939. ‘He wasn’t the sort of person I would like,’ Patrick Grigsby said. ‘He was a disciplinarian and a very strong Presbyterian – very English, very much the product of the Empire.’

  From what I was told by Patrick Grigsby and others I spoke to, it was clear that, like his father Henry, William Rickards was a difficult, inflexible, eccentric man. Every morning he went for a constitutional walk with a Panama hat on his head and an English newspaper under his arm, striding without acknowledgement past acquaintances he came across. The walk was followed by a cold shower and a fruit juice. Lunch, taken at noon on the dot, was followed by a sieste, for which he would don blue pyjamas. Then he would have another cold shower and present himself at the dinner table to be fed by the women of the family. He never did anything for himself; domestic work was for women, whom he regarded as mindless, chattering cretins. At 9 p.m. – no later – he would go to bed. He adhered strictly to this routine. Like his father Henry, William disliked work and lived off the proceeds of family properties. He was an intensely self-absorbed man who embraced with great seriousness a succession of belief systems: he joined the Fabian Society and the Freemason Brotherhood (he was the grand master of the Nicosia Lodge), and finally he was drawn to the mystical and contemplative practices of Mevlana, with their emphasis on tolerance, simplicity, love and charity. Perhaps this accounted for William’s frugality – when he died, his worldly possessions amounted to a chamber-pot, a safe with some money, a cupboard, and a bed – and for his philanthropy: he paid for the education of nephews, nieces, and poor Turkish children. Otherwise, he had difficulty in translating his spiritual principles into action. William Rickards’ unfeeling and anguished disposition was perhaps rooted in his experiences of the Great War. He served as a volunteer at Ypres and Passchendaele, in Belgium, from 1914 to 1918. ‘It must have affected him all his life,’ Patrick Grigsby said.

  Patrick did not know that his uncle had been a British informer during the Second World War or, for that matter, that he’d held the Lloyd’s agency in Mersin. He knew of Arthur Maltass, though, and remembered him clearly. ‘Maltass was a likeable individual. He dressed immaculately, like the actor Edward Everett Horton, who played diplomats and butlers. His dinner table, I remember, would be laid with flowers. He was fantastical about his background and went to great lengths to impress. He would say that his parents were titled and living in England with servants and stately homes. I remember he told a story about his father asking the butler about the absence of cruet at the table. “Can you see anything missing, Roberts?” “No, sir,” Roberts said. “Well, get a ladder.” Roberts got a ladder. “Now, climb the ladder and have another look”.’

  Patrick remembered Desmond Doran, too, as a tall, sandy-haired, handsome man. It was news to Patrick that his aunt Olga Catton had been Doran’s lover, but he wasn’t surprised, because Olga loved the company of men and had led a notoriously tangled amorous career. Wherever she went, it seemed, she got into a passionate, ill-starred romance. After nursing college in Whitechapel, London, she was employed in 1933 as a nurse-companion to a girl who’d been paralysed in a riding accident. The girl’s family were landed gentry and Olga, by her own account, mixed in grand circles, received a proposal from the Duke of Bedford, and fell in love with the son of the house, who later died in the North African desert. It was during this time in England that Olga looked into her origins and learned that the Rickards family had a coat of arms – a tower with, appropriately enough, a Saracen’s head. But when she visited the Rickards’ London home, her aunts refused to acknowledge the existence of their brother Henry or the kinship of this woman with a strange accent. Olga was turned away at the door.

  By the time she returned to Turkey in 1939, Olga
Rickards had acquired a taste for the grand life and a streak of snobbery and racism that led her to look down on Turks and Jews (‘I hate Jews,’ she’d hiss) and Arabs, her mother’s people. She had a disastrously short-lived marriage with John Catton, Britain’s Honorary Consul in Mersin, bore a daughter, and had her affaire with Doran. After her wartime service commanding a women’s internment camp, Olga took a job as the matron of an English boarding school for girls – Tolmers, near St Albans – so that her daughter might be educated there. In 1958, Olga arranged for my mother, who was then eighteen, to spend some months at Tolmers. ‘I taught French conversation and took A-level courses in English and History,’ my mother said. ‘I used to watch TV with Olga in the evenings. She was always nice to me.’ My mother added, ‘She was a single mother. She always had to fend for herself and daughter.’