The Mule on the Minaret

by Alec Waugh

  ‘You are looking wonderful,’ he said.

  ‘I’m feeling wonderful.’

  Jealousy stabbed at him. He longed to question her, but knew he mustn’t. If she had anything to say, then she would tell him. He tried to put himself in her position. She had come here on her guard. As she drove that morning from her office she must have thought, ‘This is going to be one of the most awkward two hours of my life. He will imagine that we are going to pick up the threads where we left them. I don’t want to hurt him. I shall have to be tactful, diplomatic. What a strain.’ Well, he could spare her that. And maybe, just for that, she would be grateful to him, until the story closed.

  He asked her about the work. Was it more interesting here in a G.H.Q.? She shrugged. ‘It’s a circle with a larger radius, but what’s most fascinating for me, anyhow at the moment, is seeing how our Beirut problems appear in the Cairo office. I get all your reports, of course, and I think of you and Nigel drafting them, and then discussing them, and then that staff-sergeant putting it on the machine. It makes me nostalgic. But what’s really entertaining is to see how certain things that seemed very important to us in Beirut don’t seem so important here, and vice versa.’

  ‘Can you give me an example?’

  ‘That Turkish student. You put in so much work on him and they’re not very excited over him; whereas they rate that cousin of Annabelle’s very highly.’

  ‘Can you explain why?’

  She hesitated. ‘It’s the new policy. You’ll hear all about that tomorrow. Michael Stallard’s here.’

  ‘Michael Stallard?’

  ‘The controller. Don’t you remember? He got you in our show.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Stallard. That lunch at Ajalami’s. The prelude to so much. Stallard. An idea came to him suddenly. ‘Do you remember a Major Johnson?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘He was one of those Spears Missionaries who were sent out by mistake. He’s at a loose end here in Cairo. He was a contemporary of mine at Sandhurst. I was wondering if there was a possible vacancy for him with you. Stallard would be the best man to ask, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘I’d say so. He likes you.’

  They talked easily, cosily; they might have been cousins, enjoying a family gossip. She was completely self-composed, but then she always had been. What was she thinking behind that mask? Was she wondering how she could maintain this calm, uncontroversial level? Like the heroine of a Victorian novel, hoping to avoid a proposal that she had no intention of accepting?

  ‘How long are you staying here?’ she asked.

  ‘A week.’

  ‘That’s fine. Did you hear that there’s a cocktail party on Tuesday evening?’

  ‘Yes, I heard.’

  ‘Have you seen a programme of the conference?’

  ‘I haven’t, no.’

  ‘I thought you might not have. I’ve brought along a copy. Your address is tomorrow afternoon. I fixed that. I thought you’d like to get it over early, so that you could relax and enjoy the rest of it.’

  ‘That was very thoughtful of you.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to hearing what you have to tell us.’

  ‘It’ll be familiar ground to you.’

  ‘Something new must have happened since I left. Besides, I want to hear you lecture. I never have, you know. I’ve always wanted to.’

  It was almost the first thing that she had said to him. He recalled the tone of voice in which she had said it, recalled the light in her eyes and the way her lips had parted; recalled it with an over-powering sense of loss. Maybe he would never see that light in her eyes again, never hear that tone in her voice. She looked exactly the same, sitting beside him at a banquette table, her elbow rested on it, a glass of red wine cradled between her hands. But he was seeing only the shell, the surface; the Diana that her relatives knew and her acquaintances. The essential, the inner Diana had disappeared. He had taken the miracle of her for granted. He had not realized that she was the outcome of her mood and now that her mood had changed, she had become no different for him from what she had been all her adult life to a hundred others. Would he ever again see the Diana he had known in those enchanted days?

  The meal moved to its close. He glanced at his watch. Twenty to three. Time hadn’t dawdled this time as it had at Sa’ad’s.

  ‘When’s the Brazilian Minister calling for you?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s not. I’ll have to take a taxi.’

  He was about to offer to drive her back, but checked; he did not want to sit beside her in that enclosed proximity.

  ‘I’ll give myself an industrious afternoon, working on that lecture.’

  ‘You do that. I don’t want to be disappointed and I don’t want them to be. I’ve sung your praises till they’re bored with me.’

  He walked out on to the terrace with her. A small bare-footed boy ran forward. ‘Taxi! Taxi!’ She turned and they faced each other. He held out his hand.

  ‘This has been fun,’ he said. She did not reply. She looked at him, very directly; almost questioningly, as though she wanted him to say something, something that would make things easier for her. He did not. He felt that by his silence he had gained not only a tactical but a strategic point.

  She was sitting in the third row of the conference-room. There was an audience of about a hundred. Representatives had come from the various D.S.O. (Defence Security Office) organizations in the Middle East. There were a number of staff officers from G.H.Q. Middle East, also a few from H.Q. Eighth Army. He was relieved that Diana was sitting close. It meant that he did not need to look at her. He always addressed himself to someone in the back two rows. He knew that if his voice was pitched to the back of the hall he would be audible in the middle rows. If he became conscious of personalities in the front row he might not be heard at the back. And it was his practice while the chairman was introducing him to search the back two rows for a sympathetic face. If Diana had been at the back he could not have helped but be aware of her right through his address. As it was, he would only have to look at her three or four times during the half-hour that had been allotted him.

  He rose to his feet with the self-confidence that came from long familiarity with the handling of an audience. He explained how the problems that had faced his organization in Lebanon and Syria were basically different from those which were presented to the D.S.O.s in Egypt, Cyprus, Palestine and Iraq. He reminded them of the difference between M.I.6 and M.I.5. ‘M.I.5—and all our organizations are branches of M.I.5—is concerned with defensive security and it operates in those countries which are British colonies or are a part of the British Raj. It is counter-espionage, but it works through the local police which it controls or supervises. M.I.6, on the other hand, is counter-espionage, working in foreign countries. It cannot work openly with the police. It directs activities into enemy territory. Its representatives run the danger of being arrested as spies.

  ‘This difference between M.I.5 and M.I.6 explains the difference between our work in Lebanon and Syria, and that with which so many of you are concerned. In Palestine, Egypt, Cyprus and Iraq, M.I.5 was already firmly established in 1939. In Syria and the Lebanon it was not, because they were a French mandate. M.I.6 was operating there clandestinely. France was an ally, and a suspicious ally. Fifteen months ago, therefore, when the campaign against the Vichy French was concluded we had no existing network of agents through whom we could conduct our operations. We only had a few, a very few M.I.6 representatives. We had to start from scratch. During the last year we have, therefore, been busy building up that network.’

  He described the methods of recruitment that they had adopted, and the results that those methods had achieved. ‘Our work,’ he concluded, ‘has been exploratory. We now feel ourselves in a position to take a more active part in the bureau’s work. We very much hope that during this conference we shall receive some guidance as to what that part should be. We do feel that ours could be important because
of the proximity of Turkey. We and Iraq have a common frontier with Turkey. In the interests of our own security, we have to take cognizance of what the enemy are plotting against us in Turkey. We have to send agents across the frontier. In that respect our work at times overlaps the boundary between M.I.5 and M.I.6. We are hoping to receive guidance on this point.’

  His talk ended twenty-nine minutes after it had begun. He was accustomed to finishing what he had to say within the time allotted him. He did not have, as one of the speakers had that morning, to hurry his last sentences. As he finished he looked down at Diana; she made a sign of silent hand-clapping. Her smile was warm. Well, anyhow, we’re friends, he thought.

  Stallard came up to him afterwards. ‘That was excellent. I knew it would be. But I didn’t guess that it would be so good. You’re the right man in the right job. I can see that. Wish we’d known about you earlier. By the way, I think it’s time you put a crown up. It won’t make any difference to you financially. You’re already drawing more than a major’s pay, but if you don’t go up after you’ve been in a show a year, people may think you’re not any good. Security can defeat its own ends in that way. Besides, it’s high time Nigel had a crown up and you two must keep level pegging. I’m going to be run off my feet these next three days, but let’s have a quiet dinner on Friday, after the last meeting. You can? That’s fine. In the meantime, is there anything on your mind?’

  Reid thought quickly. He had Johnson very much upon his mind. His first instinct was to leave Johnson till the Friday; but he wanted to enjoy that dinner. He wanted to hear about London and discuss mutual friends. He did not want to have to employ diplomacy. He wanted to let the talk flow spontaneously. Best deal with Johnson now.

  ‘As a matter of fact, there is,’ he said. ‘There’s a man who came out in the same convoy that I did. A Sandhurst contemporary of mine.’ He explained the position in which Johnson found himself. Stallard frowned.

  ‘Would he be any good at our kind of work?’

  ‘On the administrative side he would. He knows his way about regulations. He could wangle allowances and cars; that kind of thing.’

  ‘I see.’ He paused, reflecting. ‘You’ve nothing for him in Syria?’

  ‘It’s a very small organization.’

  ‘And here in Cairo they’ve got more bodies than they can really use. Their establishment needs cutting down. The only opening I can see is in Paiforce—the new Persia and Iraq command. We are extending ourselves there.’ He explained briefly the situation. ‘Iraq has been an independent country for ten years, but we had certain treaty rights there: an Air Force station, thirty miles from Baghdad at Habbaniya; we had technical advisers and a military mission. We had an intelligence organization, an Air Force one, and when the Rashid Ali revolution came along, it was India—the Tenth Army—that took over. It was all very tentative; we waited to see which way the cat would jump, too many irons in too many fires, but now with Persia under our control, America in the war and a kind of condominium arranged in Tehran with the Russians, Paiforce is going to grow. Yes, I think we could manage with a regular army officer in administration. Johnson, you say. Tell him to ring me any morning between nine and ten. I’ll do my best for him, and I look forward to Friday. I won’t ask anybody else. At the Mohamet Ali Club, eight-thirty.’

  Relax and enjoy the peace of it, she had said. He did just that; as far as he could, that was to say. He had made his contribution to the conference, now he could accept ‘the glow of after-battle wine.’ Cairo had much to offer: golf at the Gezira Club; Groppi’s pastries and iced coffee; Martinis at the Turf Club and the knowledge that at any moment he might be running into someone he had known for half a lifetime. There was also the sense of victory in the air. The Eighth Army was sweeping past Benghazi on the way to Tripoli. After three years, first of stalemate and then defeat, the tide had turned; and it was from Cairo that the direction came. Cairo made fun of itself, talked of the ‘gaberdine swine’; wrote Ballades, ‘Up the Gezira, up the Continental’; yet Cairo was the dynamo that drove the war machine. Cairo in the late autumn of 1942 was the most dramatic city in the world. Its atmosphere was contagious, and yet all the time Reid had a sense for himself, of profound unreality. Beirut without Diana. And it was not simply being without Diana during a few weeks. It was Beirut without her permanently, where not only the office, the work in it, the files, but every street and every restaurant in it reminded him of her. He had to reconstruct a life without her, but how could he do that when her ghost was at his side at every crossroads. It was more than he could take. At the moment he was too dazed to know what was happening. He would come out of that daze, but when he did, it must be somewhere that held no memories.

  The Friday came and Stallard rose to address the final session.

  ‘In my speech of welcome, I was very brief,’ he said. ‘I wanted to hear what you all had to say. I didn’t want, at the start, to impose London’s point of view on yours. I knew that I had more to learn from you than you could possibly have to learn from me. The man on the spot knows best. I have been very impressed with the appreciations you have each of you made of your particular situations and problems. In particular I was impressed by the distinction that Major Reid drew between his position in Syria and the Lebanon and the position of other branches in Palestine, Cyprus, Egypt. He presented an admirable over-all picture of the security situation here in Middle East. But that does not mean that I have not learnt a great deal from every one of you, and we in London will be enormously helped by the deliberations of this conference. I hope that you will find us in the future, I won’t say more sympathetic—we have always been that, I hope—but more intuitive in our approach to and in our assessment of your problems. As I said, I have learnt more from you than you could possibly learn from me. At the same time there is something I can give you, and that is a global picture of this war; or rather I can show you the part that Middle East fills in the global picture of the war. The war is directed from Washington and London. That you must bear in mind. Even though at the moment Middle East is the most active area in the war, it is only a part of the war; it is a preparation for the major campaigns that will be launched later on in Europe. Middle East will then play, I will not say a subsidiary role, but at least an ancillary role in the main strategy. But for the next six months at least it is the Middle East that will make the headlines, and by next spring the Axis should have been driven out of North Africa. I do not think that there is any doubt they will be. We have, for the first time, an immense superiority in men and in material; and the inexhaustible resources of America are now being tapped. Winston has said, “This is not the beginning of the end; but it is the end of the beginning.” A new war is beginning and in that new war our security forces will have a new role.

  ‘Major Reid said very pertinently that in Syria and Lebanon a network had been finally created, but that he was not yet clear as to the best use to make of it. He presented this fact modestly in support of his contention that the other offices had a long start of him. But all of you are in the same boat really. You have each of you a network and you have to put it to a different use. We are now on the attack. We have ceased to be on the defensive. We are no longer protecting ourselves against attack. We no longer need to consider the danger of being overrun by an invasion. During the last two years we have given a great deal of time to the organization of a scorched earth policy and the creation of guerrilla bands to harrass back areas and L. of C. There is no longer any need for that. We are no longer trying to discover the enemy’s intentions. We are trying to conceal our intentions from him, to mislead him and to misinform him. In one sense our need for internal security is the greater. We must conceal the presence and the movements of troops. Our order of battle is even more important than it was a year ago. We have to be on our guard against sabotage, particularly in Paiforce where we have the oilfields of Kirkuk and the refinery of Abadan. There must be no relaxation in postal censorship. At the same time we must not c
onfine ourselves to the defensive. We must be active. We must not only conceal our intentions from the enemy, we must mislead him as to our intentions. Deception. That is our motto for the immediate future. Get the enemy guessing and keep him guessing. We have the initiative. He must never know where we are going to strike. Will Turkey join us and will we launch an attack through the Balkans? Where shall we open the second front or the third front: in Italy, in Greece, in the South of France? As long as the enemy is uncertain of our plans he will have to disperse his troops. His defences will be thinly held.

  ‘That indeed, gentlemen, is the chief message that I bring to you. Do not relax conventional security, but make deception your middle name.’

  For several weeks now the roof garden of the Mohamet Ali Club had been closed. The days were warm but it was chilly in the evening. The high-ceilinged dining-room was ornate with Edwardian decoration. Only a few high ranking British officers were members; it was patronized by Embassy officials, Egyptian notables, and a sprinkling of French refugees. Apart from the uniforms there was no sign that a war was being fought a few hundred miles away. Stallard studied the menu for several minutes. ‘You order what you like. I’m looking for what I can’t get in England. Anyhow, we’ll have champagne; that goes with anything.’