by Alec Waugh
‘And you would go up to Mosul and join the train there. How would you know the number of your compartment?’
‘The signature on the postcard would give me the number of the compartment, with the letters changed into figures.’
‘I see. That meant that you would have to arrange your own transport to Mosul.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they leave you any money for that?’
‘Twenty-five dinars.’
‘That was a good deal more than your ticket would have cost.’
‘There would be a number of expenses. It might be very inconvenient for me.’
‘Was that all the money you received?’
‘Yes.’
‘Agents do not ordinarily work for nothing.’
‘I did not think of myself as an agent. I wanted the Germans to win the war. I wanted to help them win it.’
Was he speaking the truth, Reid wondered. He might be. And he could have expected to be rewarded when the Germans had won the war.
‘Did you only have this one interview with the Germans?’ asked Forester.
‘Only that one.’
‘What rather surprises me is that so much could have been arranged within so short a time. Sending down a wireless transmitter is an elaborate operation. Within an hour the whole thing appears to have been set up.’
‘There was no time for delay. The Germans were leaving that afternoon. The city was in an uproar. You remember the way it was.’
‘That is exactly what I do not remember. I was confined, a virtual prisoner, with all the other Britons, inside the Embassy.’
He chuckled as he said it, and Hassun chuckled too. There was a friendly feeling in the room. It was difficult to believe that that college professor, a man in background and training very similar to himself, was a prisoner, facing a sentence that was death in wartime.
‘I see,’ said Forester. ‘And then what happened next? You saw about the recruiting of your two partners. Did you have any difficulty about that?’
‘No, I knew who would be the likeliest of my friends to join with me.’
‘You had no difficulty in persuading them?’
Hassun shook his head. ‘They thought it an adventure. We constituted ourselves a club. You know how keen the Arabs are on forming clubs?’
‘What did you call your club?’
‘The Wireless Club.’
‘Now that was in May 1941. It was not till April 1943 that you got that postcard. Were you surprised at the long delay?’
‘I was at first. Then a good deal began to happen. The war in Russia was lasting longer than we expected, then America came in. We expected to get that card in the summer of 1942, when the Germans were advancing on the Canal. But after Alamein, when the war started to go badly for the Germans, we began to think that the Germans had lost interest in Iraq.’
And that was a pretty sound appreciation of the situation, Reid reflected. It had not occurred to Hassun that it was at that point that the Germans had begun to worry about Allied intentions on the Turkish frontier.
‘How did you feel when you got this postcard?’ Forester was asking.
‘I was surprised.’
‘You must have wondered whether it was worth while answering it.’
‘We did. We discussed it for a long time.’
‘You couldn’t have still believed that Germany was going to win the war?’
‘No, we had ceased to believe that.’
‘Then why did you answer the card?’
‘We thought it would be an adventure.’
How frivolous can you get, thought Reid. To brand yourself as a spy, to risk your life, to imperil your children’s future, simply because you yourself were bored. For that was what it amounted to, that need for an adventure. Did politicians recognize how powerful an influence upon human affairs was exercised by boredom? There was nothing too silly for people to do when they were bored. The Romans were wise with their formula of “bread and circuses”. Keep the proletariat fed and entertained and they would spare the senators.
‘So you sent off that postcard,’ Forester was continuing, ‘and a little later you got the message telling you on which day you should go to Mosul. We know what happened next. You found that black suitcase in your compartment; you took it with you when you left the train; you caught a taxi and you went straight home with it. Then I suppose the Wireless Club met and you opened the suitcase.’
‘Yes.’
‘There was the set inside it and instructions, I suppose?’
‘There was a sheet of paper telling us what wavelength to use and at what time to use it.’
‘So you started transmitting on that wavelength?’
‘We tried to, but we couldn’t make it work.’
‘I thought Barroud was an expert?’
‘So did we. So did he. It was a great disappointment.’
‘What did you do then?’
‘We dropped the wireless set in the Tigris.’
‘You did what?’
‘What use was it to us? We could not sell it. It was dangerous to keep it. We were certain by then that the Germans could not win the war. What else was there we could do?’
Farrar would chuckle when he read about this, Reid thought. On the surface it proved that if British Intelligence had taken over the set, British experts with those instructions could have contacted the Germans in Ankara. Farrar would have his laugh all right. ‘Well, Prof.,’ he would say, ‘I hope you learnt a lot about the bad boys of Baghdad with your operation censorship. I question if it did much for the war effort.’
The interrogation had lasted for five hours. It was now half past two. ‘I’m afraid you’ve missed your lunch,’ said Forester.
‘Well, yes, I have.’
‘Sorry. I forget that people lunch. My wife makes me up a sandwich, that’s enough for me. I work Iraqi hours; seven to two o’clock, and then a little longer. Would you like to share my sandwich?’
‘I’d like a whisky.’
‘Sorry, I can’t manage that. They’re Moslems, you know. They wouldn’t like the smell of liquor in an office. It’s bad enough smuggling in coffee during Ramadan. Come on, you’d better share my sandwich.’
It was a small sandwich, but a good one. ‘What happens now?’ Reid asked.
‘What do you think should happen now?’
‘Are you going to arrest the other two?’
‘We might have them up for questioning. But what have they done to be arrested for? They didn’t contact the Germans. They haven’t been paid any money by the Germans. At least, we can’t prove they have. I suspect that Hassun was given considerably more than twenty-five dinars, and that they got their share. But we have no evidence of that. They didn’t go to Mosul to collect the set. We’ll have them up and make them talk. But there isn’t much that we can do to them.’
‘What about Hassun himself?’
Forester shrugged. ‘I’m not sure that he wouldn’t be doing more good at liberty, teaching school, than costing the country money in a gaol. It’s for the Iraqis to decide. It’s their country and he’s one of theirs. But they usually take my advice. I’d be for letting him free. He can’t do any harm. I’m not one for punishment for its own sake.’
‘The whole thing’s been rather a disappointment, hasn’t it?’
Forester shook his head. ‘From your point of view, perhaps. But not from mine. You fellows think that you have to justify your existence by trapping spies. The more the merrier. But the more thieves and murderers that I plank behind bars, the more dissatisfied I am. I want a nice quiet law-abiding country where a citizen can sleep well o’nights. This whole case has been most reassuring for me. It has set my mind at rest. If that’s the best the Germans can do, we don’t have to worry.’
‘But are you sure that that is the best that they could do?’
‘I’m inclined to think so. Planting a wireless transmitter in an enemy country is a major operation. Yet look what a cas
ual amateurish job they made of it. They only cooked it up at the last moment. If they had a genuine subversive organization at work here, they wouldn’t have needed to attempt anything so improvised. You know yourself how carefully we had worked out a scorched earth policy in case the Germans broke through in ‘42. We had a whole underground army of saboteurs waiting to make nuisances of themselves. We would have provided the Germans with a constant and very unpleasant headache. When you compose your Intelligence summary, our rounding up of this “Wireless Club” may look a rather pitiful fiasco, but I, on the other hand, shall be forwarding to my bosses—the Iraqi authorities—a highly enthusiastic report. ‘We have no need to fear any trouble from enemy agents. In this case a nil report is a positive report.’ So you see, my friend...’
Reid saw his point. He supposed that his disappointment was that of the small boy who had hoped to play Red Indians. The trip to Mosul and the arrest of Hassun had been in so many ways the most dramatic things that had ever happened to him, yet now at the end of it all, they had proved damp squibs. Though equally if there had been no wireless set and if he had followed Farrar’s advice—and very likely Farrar had been right—Farrar himself might not in his irritation, in his need to assert himself, have embarked on the devious project against which Mallet had warned him, that had so nearly involved Aziz, and had involved Gustave—in what precisely had it involved Gustave?—the project that Farrar was now describing as of such high importance, in the deception programme. So much turned on chance. How could a man call himself the master of his fate when that fate is decided by forces over which he has no control, by people whom he has never met, of whose existence he is unaware? Would he himself have decided on the arrest of Hassun if he had not intercepted that letter stamped with lipstick? How astonished Hassun would have been a month ago could he have known that his future, even his life, was dependent on the amatory caprice of an English girl in Cairo.
‘There is one thing.’ he said. ‘I would like, if you would let me, to have a talk with Hassun alone.’
‘By all means, my dear fellow, by all means. Where would you like to see him? Here or in your office?’
‘In mine.’
It would be more casual there; it might be easier to make Hassun talk, surrounded by British men in uniform. Hassun would feel he was in a foreign country; one tended to relax abroad; to be confidential, in a way that one didn’t when one was surrounded with familiar objects.
Hassun was brought up in the afternoon. He looked around him with curiosity. He was probably surprised, Reid thought, by the bareness of the room, by its lack of furniture, by its ‘in the field’ conditions.
Reid rose as Hassun came in; he did not want to create the atmosphere of a cross-examination. ‘I’m afraid that these chairs aren’t very comfortable,’ he said. ‘Think of us as Bedouins, always on the move—though I imagine that a Bedouin’s tent would be much more comfortable than a G.H.Q. office, with its cushions and its carpets. I’ve never been in a Bedouin tent. That’s one of the worst things about being a soldier, on a campaign; one never sees the real life of the country, only the towns; in the same way that a sailor only sees the coastline and the sea. I’d like to live with the tribes for a little.’
‘I’ve never lived with the tribes,’ said Hassun. ‘I’m a townsman too.’
‘I want to go south to Nasseriyah. I think I shall take a leave down there.’
They compared notes on the few sections of Iraq that both had seen. It surprised Reid that Hassun should have seen so little of his own country. ‘But then after all,’ he said, ‘in England I haven’t been north of the Thames so very often.’
He asked Hassun if he had ever been to England, so many Iraqis had. Hassun shook his head. He had gone to the A.U.B. That was as near as he had got to Europe.
‘Perhaps if you had come to England, you wouldn’t feel so resentful against the English.’
Hassun smiled; a rather contemptuous smile. But he made no answer.
‘I was surprised that you should have been so anxious for the Germans to win the war. Why should you prefer them to us?’
‘They have done us no damage.’
‘Do you think we have?’
‘You made us promises during the First War which you did not keep.’
It was the familiar argument that he had heard a dozen times. Reid had no wish to bring up the counter arguments. He wanted to find out what Hassun thought; whether Hassun, who was an educated man, had anything fresh to say.
‘We made mistakes,’ Reid said. ‘We made bad mistakes, but at that peace conference there were all those politicians who had to satisfy the voters who had put them into power. If they gave way over one point, they felt they had to stand firm on another. And the trouble was that very few of the men at the top knew anything about the Middle East.’
‘That may be an explanation; it is hardly an excuse.’
‘At any rate we freed you from the Turks.’
‘Did anyone ask you to free us from the Turks? They were our co-religionists.’
‘There was a great deal of feeling here against the Turks.’
‘There was a great deal of feeling throughout the Ottoman Empire against the tyranny and incompetence of the rulers in Constantinople. The Turks themselves were sick of their own rulers. But that doesn’t mean that we wanted our affairs to be managed by Europeans. Hussein and Hussein’s sons were glad to follow you because they thought that you would make them kings in their own right; they thought that they would be independent sovereigns. That is what you promised them. But you did not keep your promises. You fooled them and we despise them for having let you fool them. We cannot respect their judgement.’
This was more the kind of thing that Reid had wanted to hear; or rather it was on an issue of this kind that he wanted to hear Hassun’s opinion.
‘Is that why you were ready to back Rashid Ali?’ he asked.
‘That is one of the reasons. Feisal and his family either did not realize that they had been fooled by you, in which case they were stupid; or admitted the fact that they had been betrayed and accepted their servitude, which was base in them. Feisal in his time and Abdul Illa now in his are lackeys of your economic policies. You in Britain want our oil, you keep your lackeys in power, with your arms and money. That is why we hate Abdul Illa. That is why we hate Nuri Said.’
‘How do you feel about the young king?’
‘He will always be his uncle’s puppet. There will be no health in this country as long as it is run by the Hashimites.’
‘Do many Iraqis share your views?’
‘More and more are coming to.’
‘I can understand your dislike of the English. I do not see why you should prefer the Germans. It was because of the Germans that Turkey was involved in the First War.’
‘That was not the Germans’ fault. The Turkish leaders were incompetent. They followed what they believed to be their own interests; to their own disaster and their own country’s.’
‘Do you think if Germany had won the First War and the Ottoman Empire had survived, you would be better off here in Iraq now?’
‘We would not have an alien Jewish state imposed upon the Arab world.’
Now, thought Reid, now at last we’re reaching something.
‘You think that the creation of Palestine was a great mistake?’ he asked.
‘It was more than a mistake. It was a crime. In the Ottoman days less than ten per cent of the population there was Jewish. It was a small minority, and it lived there happily, as the small Jewish minority lived happily here in Baghdad. But when you turn a minority into a majority, when you impose on the Arabs a completely alien race with a different religion, with different standards, with a different way of living, the two cannot live together side by side. Would you like it if the Americans who in this war are saving you from the Germans decided that as part of their recompense, your county of Cornwall should be turned into an independent Jewish state as a step towards the solution
of the Jewish Problem?’
Reid did not answer that. There was no answer to it. And anyhow the analogy was false.
‘Would you in the last analysis,’ he asked, ‘consider that it was Hitler’s anti-Semitism that made you want the Germans to win the war?’
Hassun pondered that question. Then he nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose in the last analysis I should.’
‘But you can’t approve of what he is doing now—with his mass murder in the concentration camps?’
There was a pause: then suddenly there came into Hassun’s face an expression that once or twice already he had noticed in Arab eyes and on Arab lips. It was a smile, curiously compounded of humour, innocence and malice: there was something furtive in it and something brazen. ‘There is an Arab proverb,’ he said.’ “To kill one’s neighbour is a crime, but the destruction of an entire people is a thing to be considered.” ’
It was three months later; Operation Wireless Set was about to be wound up. Shabibi and Captain Barroud had been cross-examined. The interrogation had produced very little. Hassun had been released. Reid had decided to devote a special summary to the case. He wanted to keep separate the various issues it had raised; there had been the rival claims of Farrar’s deception programme and his own security programme. He set out the claims of each side, dispassionately, as a chairman would. He then set out the concrete results that had been obtained from Cairo’s acceptance of his own point of view. He explained why Forester was satisfied with the results of the whole operation. Finally he tabulated Hassun’s reasons for having accepted the German proposition. This he regarded as the most important part of the whole summary because it explained why there was so strong a feeling in Iraq against both the British and the Hashimite dynasty which British bayonets had placed and maintained in power. The summary would have a very small distribution list, but it would reach the British Embassy: it would be registered in the Chancery files. It might contain nothing of which the Embassy was not perfectly aware already. But on the other hand, it might co-ordinate a number of separate, well-known facts in a sufficiently challenging form to attract attention. It might be, if the dark days came as he was beginning to fear they might, that someone turning up this report would understand the better how they had come about and so be put on guard against their consequences. His merit as a historian lay, he knew, in his ability to arrange and co-ordinate stray facts so that the reader could discern a pattern in the succession of seemingly irrelevant events that comprised the sum of day-to-day existence. As he read over the final proof of his report, he felt that here was his main, perhaps his only contribution if not to the war effort, at least to the confusion that would follow afterwards. This was the justification of his three years in the Middle East, and as he put his signature at the foot, he felt that his own work, as a soldier, had really ended here. What followed would be supplementary; he remembered reading an essay by a novelist on the technique of fiction, that had argued that the climax of a novel should come four-fifths of the way through its length; with the last fifth constituting a rounding off. This for him was that peak moment. The war in Europe could scarcely last another year; the Second Front was open and the Germans were in full retreat. The Russians were pouring westward. The Middle East had been a backwater for several months; there would soon be no need for Paiforce to supply aid to Russia. The Centre would concentrate on political security, protecting British economic interests. He would be working at half pressure; twice as hard as he had worked as a staff captain in the Ministry of Mines, but with nothing like the concentrated energy he had expended during his year in Beirut, and his two years here. It should be a rather pleasant time; a time for reflection, for planning out his future. In a year’s time he would have to make decisions but there was nothing he could do about that now. His personal life was in as much of a backwater as the Middle East itself. It was agreeable to speculate on the various possibilities that awaited him, with the world lying all before him where to choose. So he brooded, as he sat at his desk, waiting for his report to come back from the typist’s room.