Lawrence In Arabia Part 17

Perhaps one reason for this, Yale concluded, was that there seemed little agreement among British Jews over just what arrangement they hoped for. Some of those in the Zionist community argued for nothing less than a Jewish nation in Palestine, others merely for a guarantee of increased immigration, while some anti-Zionist leaders fiercely denounced the movement as a dangerous new tool for Jewish marginalization, a handy weapon for anti-Semites to question the loyalty of Jews to the nations of their birth. In trying to sort through the controversy, it seemed plain to Yale that the British government was contemplating some sort of overture in connection with the Jews and Palestine, but that precisely what that would be had not yet been decided.

After two weeks, Yale felt he had gleaned all he could in London, and was anxious to get on to Cairo. First, though, there was someone he very much wanted to talk with in Paris, a Zionist leader whose name had come up often in recent days, and who had just arrived in France from Egypt: Aaron Aaronsohn.

IT IS AN enduring myth about the battle for Arabia: the fantasy of the "clean war," of Arab warriors, stirred after centuries of crus.h.i.+ng subjugation, rallying to the cry of freedom; of those same warriors bravely charging down sand dunes to fall upon their hapless and cruel oppressors.

Contrary to the charge of his detractors, T. E. Lawrence actually played a minimal role in creating this myth. Far more it stemmed from the need of a shattered postwar public to find even a trace of grandeur in a war so utterly grotesque. There was not a lot of material to work with from the Western Front, where countless thousands had simply vanished in puffs, atomized by artillery, or been entombed forever beneath its mud. By contrast, Arabia was all berobed warriors and charging camels and flapping banners, a touch of medieval pageantry amid the inglorious slaughter. That image and the need for it dimmed under the weight of a second, even more horrific world war, but then David Lean's 1962 film resurrected it for a new generation.

Lawrence's greatest contribution to the literature of war was that, despite his open advocacy for the Arab cause, fidelity to the truth compelled him to try to convey what it was really like. As he made clear in Seven Pillars, while many Arabs joined the fight out of a sincere desire to be rid of the Turks, sincerity was helped along by British gold and the prospect of bountiful loot. On the battlefield, the rebels' enemies were not just Turks but fellow Arabs, warriors from tribes that had missed out on the British gold or taken that of the Turks, clans with whom they had blood feuds or who were freelancers out scouting for loot themselves.

Nor did that battlefield bear much resemblance to the scenery of popular imagination. Instead of the picturesque expanses of sand dunes often a.s.sociated with the region, much of the Arabian and Syrian deserts consist of dreary gravel plains and barren stone mountains, similar in many respects to the less picturesque corners of Utah or Arizona. In traversing this terrain, Lawrence and his Arab allies survived on a diet of mutton, camel meat, and bread in good times, raw flour in the less good. These meals were chased down with water often drawn from brackish springs or algae-covered ponds, or from wells contaminated by the Turks with rotting animal corpses. Seeking out shade to escape the withering heat of midday often meant encountering that strange and cruel phenomenon common to deserts the world over, great swarms of biting black flies.

But of all the components to the myth, perhaps the most erroneous is the notion of a "clean war." On this most severe of landscapes, the badly wounded on both sides were often left behind to die, the lucky ones dispatched with a bullet to the head. Subsisting on whatever was left over once their captors had their fill, prisoners died in droves from hunger and thirst-when the victors bothered to take prisoners at all. And in contrast to the clearly delineated death zones of the Western Front, this was a battlefield on which combatants and civilians were intermingled, where the completely innocent could suddenly find themselves caught amid the bullets and knives.

It was early on the afternoon of September 19 when the ten-car train rounded the bend from the south. Lawrence waited until the train's second engine had started over the short bridge, and then he detonated his fifty-pound gelignite mine. Instantly, a plume of black smoke shot a hundred feet into the air and billowed out to either side at least as far. Once the report of the explosion and the screech of ripping metal died away, there came a brief, eerie silence. Then the killing began in earnest.

To complement the Arab warriors he intended to recruit along the way, Lawrence had brought along from Aqaba two fellow Western officers-a Briton he nicknamed "Stokes" for the Stokes trench mortar he carried, an Australian nicknamed "Lewis" for the two Lewis machine guns in his care-and they had pre-positioned themselves and their weapons on a rocky ledge just three hundred yards from the bridge. As the smoke cleared, it was revealed that only the train's engines and lead carriage had fallen into the culvert below the collapsed bridge, the remaining seven carriages sitting upright and immobile on the tracks. Rows of Turkish soldiers sat on the roofs of these carriages, and they were now mowed down by the Lewis machine guns, "swept off the top like bales of cotton."

Starting to recover from their shock, a number of Turks scrambled for the relative shelter of the culvert under the bridge. The first mortar that Stokes fired at them went a little wide. After he adjusted the weapon's elevating screw, his second sh.e.l.l dropped directly in their midst. The sudden carnage there, Lawrence noted in his official report, caused the survivors to panic and race "towards some rough country 200 yards N.E. of the line. On their way there the Lewis gun[s] killed all but about twenty of them."

With Turkish resistance rapidly collapsing, the Arab fighters-just over one hundred men-dashed forward to begin their looting. Anxious to check on the damage to the engines, Lawrence scrambled down from his perch to join them.

Reaching the train, he discovered it had been carrying a mixed cargo, that along with the soldiers, several of its carriages were filled with civilians. Some of these were the families of Turkish officers returning to Damascus, others simple refugees. "To one side stood thirty or forty hysterical women," Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars, "unveiled, tearing their clothes and hair, shrieking themselves distracted. The Arabs, without regard to them, went on wrecking [their] household goods, looting their absolute fill." Spotting Lawrence, the women fell on him to beg for mercy. They were soon joined by their husbands, who "seized my feet in a very agony of terror of instant death. A Turk so broken down was a nasty spectacle; I kicked them off as well as I could with bare feet, and finally broke free."

On his way to the train engines, Lawrence checked on the one carriage that had tumbled into the ravine. He found it had been a medical car, the wounded and ill laid out on stretchers for the journey, but all were now bunched in a b.l.o.o.d.y tangled heap at the bottom of the upended wagon. "One of those yet alive deliriously cried out the word 'typhus.' So I wedged shut the door and left them there, alone."

He was only slightly more helpful to a group of Austrian military advisors who had been on the train, and "who appealed to me quietly in Turkish for quarter." Intent on finis.h.i.+ng up his demolition work, Lawrence left them under an Arab guard; moments later, the Austrians were killed, "all but two or three," as the result of some dispute.

In his official report on the engagement below Mudowarra, Lawrence estimated the number of Turkish dead at about seventy, at a cost of one Arab fighter. He lamented that amid the pandemonium, he'd had to rush his vandalism to the first train engine, and feared it was still capable of repair. "The conditions were not helpful to good work." He made no mention of dead civilians in the report, although considering the fusillade of bullets fired into the unarmored train in the first few minutes of the battle, their number must have been considerable. Similarly, he offered no explanation for the discrepancy between the ninety Turkish soldiers taken prisoner and the sixty-eight ultimately delivered to Aqaba.

For most who experience it, combat triggers a contradictory duel of emotions: horror at its gruesomeness, exhilaration at its unmitigated thrill. Reconciling these dueling reactions is probably more difficult for the soldier than for the civilian given the element of braggadocio that exists within his fraternity, and he is likely to be more candid about the complexity of his feelings-to the degree that candor is even possible-with a nonsoldier.

Upon his return to Aqaba from Mudowarra, Lawrence wrote to a military colleague, Walter Stirling. In the letter, he recounted the train attack in gleeful detail, noting the "beautiful shots" of the Stokes gun that had killed twelve Turks on the spot, and how his own share of the loot was "a superfine red Baluch prayer-rug." He continued, "I hope this sounds the fun it is. The only pity is the sweat to work [the Arabs] up, and the wild scramble while it lasts. It's the most amateurish, Buffalo-Billy sort of performance, and the only people who do it well are the Bedouin."

The day before, September 24, a seemingly very different Lawrence had written to his old friend Edward Leeds at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford: "I hope when the nightmare ends that I will wake up and become alive again. This killing and killing of Turks is horrible. When you charge in at the finish and find them all over the place in bits, and still alive many of them, and you know that you have done hundreds in the same way before, and must do hundreds more if you can."

If Lawrence was already having difficulty reconciling this psychic divide, it was about to get worse.

Chapter 15.

To the Flame I only hope and trust TEL will get back safe. He is out and up against it at this moment. If he comes through, it is a V[ictoria] C[Cross]-if not-well, I don't care to think about it!

DAVID HOGARTH TO HIS WIFE, NOVEMBER 11, 1917.

They had met several times before in Palestine. Back then, Aaron Aaronsohn had been an eminent scientist, a pioneer in the field of agronomy, and William Yale the regional representative of the Standard Oil Company of New York. Now, in late September 1917, both had added considerably to their resumes, Aaronsohn a leader in the international Zionist movement, Yale a special agent for the U.S. State Department. But what Yale didn't know about Aaron Aaronsohn-at least not yet-was that he was also the mastermind of one of the most extensive spy rings in the Middle East. And what Aaronsohn didn't know about William Yale was that, his vague job t.i.tle aside, he too was essentially a spy. As might be expected, all this lent their meeting in Paris on September 25 a certain circ.u.mspect quality.

Since arriving in the French capital four days earlier, Aaronsohn had been trying to get a sense of where matters stood with the Zionist cause before moving on to London. To that end, he'd first sought out his old benefactor, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who he knew was playing a key behind-the-scenes role in the ongoing discussions with the French and British governments. He'd come away disappointed.

"He listened very interestedly all the time I spoke to him," Aaronsohn would inform his brother Alex in a letter, "and asked me questions which I answered, but he would not let me touch on certain subjects, did not wish to speak about them, so that it was impossible for me to learn from him what I wished to know.... He feels, as we all do, that if Great Britain would only rule over our land, we could obtain great things, but as nothing certain is known [yet], he cannot allow himself to speak."

He'd had far better luck when Mark Sykes showed up in town. The two had a long meeting on September 23, followed by another the next morning. "He told me everything," Aaronsohn told his brother, "and showed me what a lot of enemies we have. Most of the opponents [are] from among our own people, and that is dangerous to our organization."

Evidently, one reason Sykes had sought out Aaronsohn in Paris was to play peacemaker. The British War Cabinet was once again taking up the debate over supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and it was vital that the leading Zionists speak with one voice. That meant ending the ongoing friction between Aaronsohn and Chaim Weizmann's English Zionist Federation; as Sykes explained, Aaronsohn's angry letters to Weizmann of mid-September had been "like a thorn in the latter's eye."

Which frankly suited Aaronsohn just fine. As he haughtily told his brother, "Mark Sykes begs me to make peace with them and wants me to promise not to quarrel. He says that I should listen to Weizmann and to Sokolow. I told him that I was not going to London to quarrel, only to tell them their mistakes and to show them the way to do things properly. If they accept, well and good; if not I will go my own way."

William Yale may have gleaned something of this rift within the Zionist camp from his own interviews in London, but it likely was mere background noise to the more overt struggle between the British Zionists and anti-Zionists, and between the competing camps within the British government. If in seeking out Aaronsohn in Paris, Yale hoped for edification on all this, he didn't get it. As he noted in his diary that night-and would eventually report back to Leland Harrison in Was.h.i.+ngton-Aaronsohn "does not wish to see Jewish autonomy or a Jewish state at this time, saying that nothing would be more harm [sic] to the Zionists than that. [Rather,] he wishes to see either English, American or International government control of Palestine." What's more, Yale could report, after seeing to his business in London, Aaronsohn intended to continue on to the United States to call on his influential American Jewish contacts to press the point. What made this rather baffling was that while in London, Yale had met with one of Aaronsohn's closest allies, a businessman named Jack Mosseri. Even while extolling Aaronsohn's clear-eyed insights on the matter, Mosseri was advocating the establishment of an outright Jewish government in Palestine, and the adoption of Hebrew as its official language. Following his meetings in Paris, Yale left for Cairo undoubtedly even more confused about where things stood on the Zionist question than before.

But he also left with something else. Either oblivious to Yale's job responsibilities or just a peculiarly credulous sort, Aaronsohn had entrusted his American visitor with a letter to be delivered to his brother Alex, now back in Cairo. Other than the rudimentary safeguard of being written in Hebrew, the letter was not encrypted in any way, and it was in this highly indiscreet dispatch that Aaronsohn detailed his meetings with Edmond de Rothschild and Mark Sykes and outlined all he knew of the current status of British-Zionist negotiations in London.

The spy chief hadn't ended there, though. Along with listing by name "our friends" in the British military hierarchy in Cairo who should be kept abreast of developments, Aaronsohn instructed his younger brother to put Georges-Picot, the French political agent who was on his way to Egypt, under surveillance. "Pascal," he wrote, referring to his chief a.s.sistant in Cairo, "will tell you how we can watch his movements." Aaronsohn had even imparted some advice to his brother about William Yale: "Get as pally as you can with him and watch him, for you will be able to get information from him which you need, especially about happenings in Egypt."

All of this might have been of tremendous interest both to Yale and to the agency he now represented. While the American government had been apprised of Britain's deliberations on the Jewish homeland question, no one from President Wilson on down was aware of the contentiousness it had sp.a.w.ned there-and they certainly didn't know of the behind-the-scenes role being played by Mark Sykes. But if Aaron Aaronsohn was shockingly careless in handing such a doc.u.ment to William Yale, he was also lucky. In his role as an intelligence agent, Yale fully intended to open and translate the letter before pa.s.sing it on to Alex Aaronsohn, but, new to the spy game, he apparently didn't appreciate that these matters tended to be time-sensitive. By the time he got around to having Aaronsohn's letter translated and sent on to the State Department, it would be mid-December. By then, most of the explosive information he'd had in his possession for nearly three months would be rendered moot.

WITH THE AIRPLANE still a rarity in the Middle East in 1917, the one sent to collect Major Lawrence from Aqaba on the morning of October 12 was a clue to the importance being placed on his mission. Another was the ident.i.ty of those waiting for him at the military field headquarters outside El Arish: Generals Allenby and Clayton, as well as Lawrence's old mentor from Oxford, David Hogarth, now the t.i.tular head of the Arab Bureau. Lawrence had barely alit from the ninety-minute flight-in 1917, a plane's cruising speed was barely over one hundred miles per hour-before learning why he'd been summoned.

At very long last, a date had been set for Allenby's offensive against the Turkish line: October 28, or just a little more than two weeks away. It would take very different form from Archibald Murray's two failed attempts. In hopes of convincing the Turks that was not the case, the British would conduct a preliminary three-day bombardment of Gaza-the cla.s.sic World War I prelude to a frontal a.s.sault-but then strike at the far more lightly defended town of Beersheva, thirty miles to the east. Once in possession of Beersheva and its vital water wells, the British would then push north and west, severing Gaza's supply lines to the Palestine interior. If all went accordingly, the Turkish army entrenched at Gaza would either be surrounded or forced to withdraw to avoid being trapped. The question for Lawrence was how the Arab rebels might a.s.sist in this great effort.

That was a question with no easy answer, because the very cleverness of the Beersheva scheme derived from its modesty. In a corner of the world where access to water was a general's first tactical consideration, one of the chief reasons for Murray's unimaginative frontal a.s.saults at Gaza had been the need to quickly get his army to the water sources that lay behind the Turkish lines. Of course, this imperative had also made Murray's efforts all-or-nothing propositions-no lolling about on a desert battlefield in hopes of incremental gains-that he had lost. By contrast, once in control of Beersheva's water wells, Allenby's army had the luxury of closing on Gaza at a methodical pace; operational plans called for an offensive stretched out over at least a week. The downside-and this was where the modesty aspect played out-was that the deliberateness of the British advance would also give the Turks time to regroup. Allenby obviously hoped for more, but in all probability a successful offensive meant gaining a toehold in southwestern Palestine and little else; no race up the coastline, no dash for Jerusalem.

Consequently, it was very difficult to see what role the Arabs might play. If their contribution was to be in shutting down the Turkish supply line into Palestine, the logical place for them to strike was the rail junction town of Deraa in central Syria; from there, a railroad spur ran west off the Hejaz Railway and served as the Turks' princ.i.p.al lifeline in and out of the battle zone. Furthermore, from his June intelligence foray across Syria, Lawrence knew there were thousands of tribesmen in the Deraa region ready to join the revolt. On the other hand, any large-scale operation at Deraa would be to invite the tribesmen's slaughter if the British army advanced no farther than their Palestinian toehold 120 miles to the southwest.

Nor was there much the Arab rebels ma.s.sed in Aqaba could do. Frankly-even though Lawrence was probably less than frank with his questioners at El Arish on this score-the situation there was a mess. For well over two months, the forces gathered there had been awaiting word on when the British army would finally strike at southern Palestine, the cue for their own foray into the Syrian heartland, and this wait had led to a spiraling logistical nightmare. With thousands of prospective warriors idling away in the port, an ever-greater amount of supplies had needed to be s.h.i.+pped in from Egypt to equip and feed them-as well as ever more British gold to keep them paid-which in turn had drawn in even more recruits. The situation had grown so bad that by early October, transport s.h.i.+ps were being devoted to hauling in Egyptian forage just to feed the camels and horses, the hills around Aqaba having been stripped bare. As if matters weren't grim enough, a recent cholera outbreak had now brought the entire supply system to a virtual standstill as quarantining procedures were introduced.

But probably even more deleterious was the effect this holding-pattern existence was having on morale in Aqaba, for a sense of gloom had now begun to permeate the rebel ranks. With no one was this more evident than in Faisal himself. As the delay in pus.h.i.+ng north extended, he had sunk into a deepening depression, convinced that the chance to wrest Syria for the Arab cause was slipping away. In his more bitter moments, he even accused the British of imposing this inaction deliberately, a maneuver to hand Syria to the French, and while the harried Major Joyce bore the brunt of Faisal's complaints, Lawrence had frequently been compelled to lend his soothing influence in meetings with the emir. To maintain the notion that some progress was being made, and perhaps also to at least temporarily escape the unhappy town, Lawrence had continued his raiding forays over the mountains-he'd just returned from another train attack when the summons to El Arish came-but it was all very pale stuff when set against the grand vision he had laid out in Cairo three months earlier.

Yet for political reasons-and maybe personal ones too-Lawrence felt it was vital that the Arabs contribute in some way to the upcoming offensive. And so in El Arish he came up a new plan.

If not by an attack on Deraa itself, there was another place where the railroad spur into Palestine could potentially be severed. It lay fifteen miles to the west of Deraa, where the line pa.s.sed over a number of high bridges as it navigated the rugged Yarmuk gorge; if just one of those bridges could be destroyed, the effect would be the same. The further advantage to such an operation was that it could be conducted very much along the lines of the "traditional" train attack, a hit-and-run mission by a small and highly mobile Arab force.

There the similarities ended, however. The Yarmuk gorge was over two hundred miles from Aqaba, and in a comparatively densely populated region. On such a mission, any force coming from Aqaba would be negotiating an alien landscape, constant prey to Turkish army patrols and Turkish-allied local tribes. Those dangers would only multiply if they actually succeeded in the mission. As they tried to make their escape, the one certainty was that the raiders would be completely on their own, far beyond the reach of either the British or fellow rebels to come to their aid.

To these concerns, Lawrence offered a refinement: he would do it himself. Just as he'd done in taking Aqaba, he would set out with a small, handpicked force, one hopefully resourceful and un.o.btrusive enough to avoid detection, and he would recruit whomever else he needed along the way. After the operation, the local recruits could melt back into their villages as those in Lawrence's party scattered in search of safe haven.

To most who heard it in El Arish, Lawrence's idea seemed less a battle plan than a suicide mission. Moreover, these were men to whom Lawrence was not some faceless soldier, but a friend, a protege, a young man they admired. Weighing against this, though, were the exigencies of war.

By mid-October 1917, the Entente war effort lay everywhere in tatters. Over the previous summer, the French army had been riven by mutinies, with entire regiments refusing to march into their trenchwork slaughter pens; while that crisis had now abated, the army of France remained a shaken, traumatized force. On the Eastern Front, the Germans had smashed yet another Russian offensive, a last desperate gamble by the dying Kerensky regime; before the end of that month of October, the Bolsheviks would seize power and sue for peace with Germany. On the Southern Front, the Italians had recently failed in their tenth and eleventh offensives against the Austrians in the Isonzo valley, and were about to experience a colossal collapse in the battle of Caporetto. Since July 31, the British commander on the Western Front, Douglas Haig, had been building on his reputation for callous butchery by persisting with an offensive even more futile than his previous outing at the Somme. By the time the battle of Pa.s.schendaele was finally called off in early November, the seventy thousand British soldiers who had perished in its mud fields would equate to one dead man for every two inches of ground gained.

Amid all this, just how much value could be put on the life of one more man-even of an "almost indispensable" one, as Gilbert Clayton had described Lawrence a year earlier-if he might in some small way advance the war effort? If Lawrence was brave or foolish or deluded enough to chance Yarmuk, certainly no one at headquarters was going to try to talk him out of it. Upon being briefed on the plan, General Allenby instructed that it be carried out on the night of November 5, 6, or 7.

ACCORDING TO POPULAR folklore, the agent of their destruction was a pigeon.

Since the early days of the war, the British had employed carrier pigeons to relay messages on the Western Front, and in the summer of 1917 someone in Cairo hit on the same idea as a way to maintain contact with the NILI operatives in Palestine. On paper, the notion had a lot going for it. It would help eliminate the need for the perilous and trouble-p.r.o.ne spy-s.h.i.+p runs from Egypt-with almost eerie regularity, these voyages had a way of coinciding with bad storms-as well as the risk to operational security inherent in face-to-face contact between spies and spy handlers. Carrier pigeons might also mean that crucial intelligence would reach British lines much faster. Between the difficulty in getting informants' reports to Athlit, and then the wait for the s.h.i.+p, the information Cairo received from NILI was often five or six weeks out of date.

The pigeons had proved something of a dud, though. On a test run in July, only one of the six birds released made it the one hundred miles to the British headquarters in the Sinai. Nevertheless, on August 30, Sarah Aaronsohn had turned to the method out of desperation. By then, the Managem hadn't put in at Athlit for nearly a month (little did Sarah Aaronsohn know that, apparently, the main reason for this inactivity was a British refusal to increase the pay of the man who made the swim from s.h.i.+p to sh.o.r.e to 30 a month); anxious to reestablish contact, she inserted her coded messages into tiny metal capsules, attached these to the legs of several pigeons, and set the birds loose. For insurance, she sent off two more pigeons four days later.

Sarah had always been leery of the system, and when she went down to the sea for a swim on the morning of September 4, her doubts were confirmed; perched atop a nearby water tank was one of the birds she'd released the day before, the telltale capsule still attached to its leg. Sure enough, rumors soon began circulating that a Turkish commander in Jaffa had intercepted a message-carrying pigeon, and even though Turkish authorities apparently couldn't break the code or pinpoint the bird's origin, they were now convinced that a spy ring was operating somewhere along the Palestine coast.

Then, in mid-September, came news of the arrest of Naaman Belkind in the Sinai. NILI's chief operative in southern Palestine, Belkind had been caught trying to cross over to the British lines. Suspected of being a spy, he was first tortured for information in Beersheva, then transferred to Damascus to undergo more elaborate interrogation. With Belkind's capture, Sarah Aaronsohn and other NILI agents feared it was only a matter of time before their network was exposed and the Turks came for them. So did those other residents of Zichron Yaakov who'd long been suspicious of the goings-on in town and in nearby Athlit. On September 18, the settlement's governing committee summoned Sarah Aaronsohn to a meeting where she was confronted over her traife, or "unclean," work.

"Today we don't want to hear any more explanations from you," they reportedly told her. "Only one word, the right answer: your promise to stop this work, which has gone beyond all bounds.... If you want to work at espionage, leave the territory and the lands of the Jews and go and work in some distant land."

It was amid this tightening peril that the Managem finally returned on September 22. Apprised of the situation on land, British authorities swiftly arranged for a British merchant s.h.i.+p docked in Cyprus, one large enough to evacuate as many residents of Zichron Yaakov as wished to leave, to make for Palestine. That s.h.i.+p appeared off the coast of the Jewish colony on the night of September 25.

In the interim, however, Sarah Aaronsohn and her confederates appeared to recover their resolve. Part of it may have stemmed from a belief that Belkind wouldn't break-after all, it had been nearly two weeks since his capture and the Turks still hadn't come for them-but even more was concern of what would happen to the far-flung NILI agents if those at its headquarters suddenly disappeared. As it was, only two people, a mother and her young son, went out on the rescue s.h.i.+p. To the suggestions of her lieutenants that she go out as well, Aaronsohn was adamant: "I want to be the last, not the first, to leave." Instead, Sarah would wait for the next visit of the Managem, arranged for October 12, during which she would gauge the state of things.

But it seems the NILI operatives hadn't considered another possible explanation for the la.s.situde of Turkish authorities, a rather ironic one under the circ.u.mstances. Both the Turks and their German allies remained stung by the tremendous propaganda victory the Allies had achieved with their talk of the Jewish "purge" in Jaffa back in May. The Germans were also well aware that the British government was considering calling for a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a way to win the international Zionist community to its side; indeed, the Germans were now rather desperately trying to come up with a counterformula to appeal to the Zionists. As a result, and even as reports of a Jewish spy ring in Palestine circulated in Constantinople and Berlin-because, in fact, Naaman Belkind had talked-the Germans were sternly warning their Turkish allies to be absolutely certain they had their culprits before making a move. All well and good to round up a crowd of Arabs or Turks and put them to the bastinado, but in the autumn of 1917, the Germans counseled, the Jews in Palestine needed to be treated with a little more finesse.

Then, at the end of September, the Turks were apparently handed the last piece of the puzzle-and responsibility for this didn't fall to an errant pigeon or Naaman Belkind, but to the British spy runners themselves. According to the postwar account of a Turkish intelligence chief in Syria, it came when two Arab spies were caught on the Palestinian coast. Under torture, the men offered that they had been put ash.o.r.e from a British spy s.h.i.+p, and that they'd traveled on that s.h.i.+p in the company of Jewish spies. Those spies had been dropped off first, in the vicinity of the agricultural research station at Athlit.

For greater protection, Sarah Aaronsohn and her chief lieutenant, Joseph Lishansky, had recently moved into Zichron Yaakov, eight miles down the road from Athlit. They were there when, late on the night of October 2, the settlement was surrounded by Turkish soldiers. The roundup began the following morning, the soldiers and secret police, having already ransacked Athlit, working off a list of dozens of names. Among the first to be detained was Sarah Aaronsohn, along with her father, Ephraim, and brother Zvi. Managing a quick escape was the "ringleader" the Turks most hoped to catch, Joseph Lishansky; with their 1917 chauvinism, it apparently never occurred to them that the true ringleader might be a woman.

The paradox of having to take special care with members of the Jewish community lest German wrath be incurred was to now take perverse form and would turn the Turkish operation in Zichron Yaakov into a kind of slow-motion horror show. On that first day of "questioning," Sarah Aaronsohn's father and brother were severely beaten in front of her, the soldiers demanding to be told Lishansky's whereabouts, but she herself wasn't touched. Matters turned a good deal uglier the next morning. Ephraim and Zvi Aaronsohn, along with a number of other detained men, were led to the central square, where they were tied up and repeatedly whipped in an attempt to get those still in hiding to surrender. Struck by her icy defiance of the previous day, the Turks targeted Sarah for especially brutal treatment. Tied to the gatepost of her family's home on Zichron's main street, she was whipped and beaten with flexible batons, or bastinados. Still, she would reveal nothing, reportedly even taunting her torturers until she fell into unconsciousness.

One by one, those on the Turks' wanted list who were hiding began turning themselves in, tormented by the cries of their relatives. Or they were betrayed by others, for as the terror extended, a kind of group psychosis seized Zichron Yaakov. "For those who had long opposed NILI's activities," wrote one historian, "it was a time to prove their loyalty to the Turks and to settle old debts. As the Turks rounded up more men for the bastinado, four hysterical viragos ran through the streets, loudly rejoicing as each new victim was put under the Turkish whips, even falling upon the arrested men with blows and shouted abuse."

With still no sign of Lishansky, the authorities raised the stakes even higher. Summoning the settlement's governing committee, the Turkish commander threatened to lay waste to the village unless Lishansky was handed over. To reinforce the point, he announced that the following morning all those detained-some seventy in all-were to be transported to the main police station in Nazareth for further "questioning." Joining them would be seventeen Zichron elders chosen at random, to be released if Lishansky was surrendered, to share in the general unpleasantries if not. By that afternoon, Zichron residents were taking the settlement apart in search of Lishansky, while the governing committee posted a reward for his capture.

The ordeal reached its grim denouement the next day, Friday, October 5. As the captives were being loaded for transport to Nazareth, a bloodied and battered Sarah Aaronsohn asked permission to change into clean clothes for the journey. Led to her family home, she was allowed to step into a bathroom unattended, where she hastily wrote out a last note of instructions to those NILI operatives who remained. Then she withdrew a revolver she had secreted in a cubbyhole in antic.i.p.ation of just such a situation and shot herself in the mouth.

Even this did not end the torment of Sarah Aaronsohn. While the bullet destroyed her mouth and severed her spinal cord, it missed her brain. For four days, she lingered in agony, attended to by German Catholic nuns, before finally expiring on the morning of October 9. By Jewish tradition, she was buried that same day in the Zichron cemetery, her death shroud a swatch of mosquito netting taken from her family home. She was twenty-seven years old.

On the night of October 12, three days after Sarah's death, the Managem reappeared off the coast of Athlit as scheduled. On board was Alex Aaronsohn, who was overseeing the Cairo office while Aaron was in Europe. He carried a message that had been forwarded by his brother.

On October 1, Aaron Aaronsohn had arrived in London from Paris. There, he had finally met Chaim Weizmann and quickly forged at least a temporary rapprochement with the Zionist Federation leader. Central to that rapprochement was Weizmann's recognition of the vital role NILI was playing in the Zionist cause, an appreciation he had expressed in a telegram to be disseminated to the NILI operatives: "We are doing our best to make sure that Palestine [will be] Jewish under British protection. Your heroic stand encourages our strenuous efforts. Our hopes are great. Be strong and of good courage until the redemption of Israel."

It was this message that Alex Aaronsohn carried ash.o.r.e with him that night at Athlit, but no one was there.

A CHANGE HAD come over Lawrence, a kind of quiet despondency. David Hogarth, his old mentor, had noticed it at the El Arish headquarters in mid-October. "He is not well," Hogarth wrote an Arab Bureau colleague afterward, "and talks rather hopelessly about the Arab future he once believed in."

Others had detected the change even earlier, including Lawrence himself. "I'm not going to last out this game much longer," he had confided to his friend Edward Leeds after the train attack at Mudowarra in September. "Nerves going and temper wearing thin, and one wants an unlimited account of both."

This new element of emotional fragility seemed to accelerate in the days after his meetings in El Arish. One who would bear unique eyewitness to it was a man named George Lloyd. Another of the aristocratic "Amateurs" who had found themselves in the Middle East during the war, Lloyd was a handsome, Cambridge-educated baronet and Conservative member of Parliament who had been recruited to Stewart Newcombe's military intelligence unit in Cairo in late 1914. Lloyd had soon chafed under Newcombe's austere leaders.h.i.+p and arranged a transfer, but not before forming a friends.h.i.+p with a coworker nine years his junior in the small office, T. E. Lawrence.

As with so many other British aristocrats during the war, Lloyd had floated between job t.i.tles and a.s.signments with rather dizzying regularity-stints with military command staffs in the field interspersed with the deskbound duties of parliamentary committees-but at least some of those a.s.signments periodically returned him to the Middle East. With a background in banking, in the autumn of 1916, he had been brought down to study the financial status of King Hussein's regime in the wake of the Arab Revolt. His comprehensive report on the Hejaz economy-it essentially didn't have one-had included a d.a.m.ning a.n.a.lysis of edouard Bremond's scheme to create the Ottoman French bank, and been instrumental in its scuttling.

By the autumn of 1917, however, Lloyd was marooned at a back-base office shuffling paper and anxious to return to the field. At the end of September he had written to Gilbert Clayton, listing those areas where he thought he might be of some service. In particular, he remembered his old colleague in the Cairo military intelligence office, who was now something of a legend. "I think I could be still more useful in a personal way to Lawrence," Lloyd wrote. "He is overworked and must be overstrained. If he is to remain in the field at his most responsible job, I do think he must have true companions.h.i.+p and relief of some other white man congenial to him. I could never in any way attempt to take the lead in that job. I am not even remotely qualified. But in his curious way, [Lawrence] has rather an addiction to me, and if he liked to have me with him to accompany him on his 'stunts,' I believe my presence might help to keep him going."

Its racialist note aside, the request was a rather extraordinary one, an aristocrat and sitting member of Parliament effectively asking to play Sancho Panza to Lawrence's Don Quixote. Clayton seized on the offer, and arranged Lloyd's immediate recall. He was waiting in Aqaba when Lawrence returned from El Arish on October 15.

For several days, the two friends caught up with each other as Lawrence laid plans for his imminent trek to Yarmuk. As Lloyd observed, those plans had a decidedly ad hoc nature. Along with just a very tiny cadre of Arab warriors, Lawrence would leave Aqaba with an Indian army machine-gun unit and one British officer, a demolitions expert named Lieutenant Wood, who was on semi-invalid status after having been shot in the head on the Western Front. Avoiding populated areas on the long trip north, Lawrence would then recruit his local operatives from among the clans of eastern Syria, and join them to followers of Abd el Kader, an Algerian exile who had been with the Arab Revolt since its inception and whose kinsmen lived in the Yarmuk area. After the attack, the local recruits would melt away, while those from Aqaba would scatter before their inevitable Turkish pursuers. It was further arranged that Lloyd would accompany Lawrence for at least the first few, safer days of the journey.

On October 20, Lloyd sent Clayton a cable outlining these plans, as well as his own first impressions of the situation in Aqaba. His breezy tone abruptly s.h.i.+fted in a postscript he marked "Private": "Lawrence is quite fit, but much oppressed by the risk and magnitude of the job before him. He opened his heart to me last night and told me that he felt there was so much for him still to do in this world, places to dig, peoples to help, that it seemed horrible to have it all cut off, as he feels it will be, for he feels that, while he may do the [Yarmuk] job, he has little or no chance of getting away himself. I tried to cheer him up, but of course it is true."

It was an unusually heartfelt message to be exchanged between two men for the times, let alone included in a military cable, and it may have been that George Lloyd hoped it would cause Clayton to cancel the operation. If so, he was soon set right. Allowing that he too was "very anxious" about his subordinate, Clayton replied that Lawrence's burdened mood was rather to be expected considering the mission before him. "He has a lion's heart, but even so, this strain must be very great," Clayton acknowledged. "Well, he is doing a great work and, as soon as may be, we must pull him out and not risk him further-but the time is not yet, as he is wanted just now."

TO AS MUCH pomp and ceremony as a war-ravaged nation could manage, the Young Turk regime put on a decorous reception for Abbas Hilmi II, the erstwhile khedive of Egypt. Along with bunting and a ceremonial guard, a host of dignitaries were on hand to greet the t.i.tular Ottoman sovereign of Egypt as his train pulled into Constantinople's Sirkeci station one afternoon in late October. Among those in attendance was an old friend and coconspirator of Abbas's, Dr. Curt Prfer. Picking up where they had left off, the lives of the German spymaster and the pretender to the Egyptian throne were about to become entwined in intrigue once again.

When the Turks came into the war on the side of the Central Powers, the British had deposed Abbas-the "wicked little khedive," in Kitchener's memorable phrase-and cast him into a wandering exile, one that had eventually landed him in Switzerland. But Abbas was a born schemer, and in Switzerland he had a lot of time on his hands. Over the next three years, he had tirelessly negotiated with both sides in the conflict in hopes of regaining his throne in the postwar era, and it was a measure of his catholic approach to plotting that each side was very much aware of his dealings with the other. The Young Turk leaders.h.i.+p in Constantinople had never had much use for Abbas at the best of times, and his artless carryings-on in Switzerland did little to endear them to his cause; indeed, they had spurned his every advance.

By 1916, however, the Germans had taken a rather different view of Abbas Hilmi. Whether born of a desire to stand by an old friend or-rather more likely-operating under the delusion that Abbas actually represented some const.i.tuency other than himself, the Germans had steadily come to regard the deposed khedive as their future power broker in Egypt once victory was achieved. After persistently encouraging Abbas and the Constantinople regime to reconcile, their efforts had finally come to fruition with Abbas's arrival in the Ottoman capital that October.

Over the next few months, Prfer and the ex-khedive saw a great deal of each other, and together they formulated plans for the future of Egypt, one in which Abbas would be restored to his former splendor with the aid of his German friend. So close were the two men, and so important did Berlin consider their future Egyptian stakeholder, that Prfer would soon virtually become Abbas's personal handler. It was an alliance that over the next year would take on the tinge of the bizarre, the spectacle of two men constructing a castle-in-the-sky fantasy even as the real world burned down around them.

THEY SET OUT on the evening of October 24, and very quickly George Lloyd appreciated what so enthralled Lawrence with these journeys into the desert interior, the sensation of pa.s.sing into an otherworldly place where time stood still. "The view up the pa.s.s was magnificent," Lloyd wrote in his diary from that night, "400 feet of jagged towering basalt and granite rock on either side of us, and the moon s.h.i.+ning in our faces." The Arab sheikh accompanying them, he noted, "rode ahead of us with two or three Biasha slaves and looked like some modern Saladin out to meet a crusade."

For the first few days, the journey north was easy, and as they wended their way through the spectacular landscape of the Wadi Rumm mountains, the two friends talked Middle Eastern strategies and concocted fanciful plans for a grand tour of Arabia after the war. "We would defy Victorian sentiment and have a retinue of slaves," Lloyd recounted, "and would have one camel to carry books only, and we would go to Jauf and Boreida and talk desert politics all day." Lawrence felt so at ease that he even talked a bit about his family and upbringing in Oxford, the happy days he had spent in Carchemish. For Lloyd, long accustomed to his friend's taciturn nature, the fact that Lawrence "talks very well" came as something of a surprise.

Already, though, disquieting elements were beginning to attach to the trip. One took the form of Abd el Kader, the Algerian exile who promised to lead Lawrence to his kinsmen in the Yarmuk region, but who frequently clashed with other members of the traveling party. Another was the personality of the British demolitions expert, Lieutenant Wood. After getting lost in the darkness on his first night out, the lieutenant had remained unhappy and aloof, rarely engaging with his countrymen except to complain about the rigors of the journey. It increased Lloyd's apprehensions because, due to yet another foulup in the supply pipeline from Egypt, Lawrence would have to perform some extremely risky improvisations at the target site, and would need to rely on Wood to step in should anything go wrong.

Back at El Arish, Lawrence had asked Clayton for a thousand yards of a newly developed lightweight two-strand electric cable, to be used in connecting the gelignite mine he would attach to the Yarmuk bridge to its electric detonator; such a length would allow the demolition team to be well away from the bridge when they blew it up, as well as provide a reserve for any secondary acts of mayhem that might present themselves. Instead, just five hundred yards of the old single-strand cable had been delivered to Aqaba. Since this line needed to be doubled over, it placed Lawrence a maximum of 250 yards away from the blast. Further, there was a good chance he'd be trying to set his charge while being shot at. Although Lawrence hoped he could go about attaching the explosives to the under-girders of the bridge unnoticed by the Turkish guards above, the standby plan was for others in the raiding party to distract the Turks in a firefight from the surrounding hills. Should Lawrence become a casualty in the process-a not unlikely prospect-Wood was expected to take over the operation.

But all this supposed a sufficient raiding party could even be raised, because what Lawrence was already discovering was a p.r.o.nounced reluctance among prospective recruits to sign on. Lloyd later wrote to Clayton that "anyone who can hold up a train and enable the Arabs to sack it commands temporarily their allegiance," and this was one of the keys to his friend's success. "To them he is Lawrence, the arch looter, the super-raider, the real leader of the right and only kind of ghazzu [warfare], and he never forgets that this is a large part of his claim to sovereignty over them." With those Lawrence approached to join the Yarmuk mission, however, interest very quickly died off once he explained that his target was not a train but a bridge.

There was another matter, too. Among his fellow British officers, Lawrence had gained the reputation of being a veritable "Indian scout," possessed of an uncanny ability to navigate his way through the desert. As George Lloyd was discovering, this wasn't exactly true. On two separate occasions, they had become lost during night treks, and Lawrence's insistence during the second incident that they merely needed to follow Orion to recover their way had instead led them directly toward a Turkish encampment. All these factors considered, Lloyd wrote Clayton, "I hope his chances are really much better than would appear at first sight."

Actually, they were potentially far worse than even Lloyd imagined. Shortly before leaving Aqaba, Lawrence had been warned that Abd el Kader was a traitor and now in the pay of the Turks. Lawrence hadn't thought to share that warning with Lloyd. Perhaps this was because the source was Lawrence's old antagonist in the Hejaz, edouard Bremond.

In fact, the French colonel had undergone a profound transformation in recent months, especially in his view of the Arab Revolt. This may have stemmed from his finally being informed of the Sykes-Picot pact that ensured French control of Syria, or from a recognition that what he couldn't thwart he needed to embrace. Whatever the cause, by the autumn of 1917, the imperialist Bremond had curbed his obstructionist approach to British initiatives in the region and become energetic in trying to get French weaponry and financial subsidies to the Arabs. Lawrence was surely aware of this transformation in his old adversary, but, whether still held by an abiding belief in French treachery or determined to press on no matter the ever-mounting signs of peril, he had chosen to ignore Bremond's warning about Abd el Kader. If Bremond was wrong about anything, however, it may have only been the vintage of the Algerian's betrayal; as far back as November 1914, Curt Prfer had met Abd el Kader and reported on his fidelity to the German-Turkish cause.

To ignore such a litany of bad omens suggested a kind of fatalistic resignation on Lawrence's part, as if he now saw himself on a mission where his own life simply didn't much matter. Lloyd saw indications of this during their journey north. At some point, Lawrence expounded that since the Arabs had never been privy to Sykes-Picot, they could hardly be bound to it; instead, by seizing Syria, they might create their own destiny. It was for this cause, Lawrence confided, that he was now risking his life-or, as Lloyd jotted in his handwritten notes of that remarkable conversation, "L not working for HMG [His Majesty's Government] but for Sherif [Hussein]."

On the evening of October 28, four days after leaving Aqaba, the two friends sat down to discuss what came next. They were rapidly approaching the true danger zone, the point of no return, and Lloyd's apprehensions over Lawrence's "stunt" had only deepened. As he'd done several times previously, Lloyd offered to stay on. Lawrence thanked him, but explained that "he felt that any additional individual who was not an expert at the actual demolition only added to his own risk." He then offered a more poignant reason for sending Lloyd back, a wish rooted in the recognition that he might soon die: "He would like me to go home to England," Lloyd noted in his diary, "for he felt that there was a risk that all his work would be ruined politically in Whitehall and he thought I could save this."

The next afternoon the two friends parted, Lloyd turning back toward Aqaba, Lawrence continuing on for Yarmuk.

UPON FINALLY REACHING Cairo in late October 1917, William Yale checked in with the American diplomat who was to act as his liaison. This turned out to be a rather f.e.c.kless young fellow named Charles Knabenshue, who held the ambiguous t.i.tle of charge to the United States' Diplomatic Agency. Given the all-pervasive British intelligence network in Cairo, the two quickly concluded that Yale should present himself to the British authorities more or less overtly; "otherwise," Knabenshue informed the State Department, "his independent activities would certainly become known to them through their agents and thus excite unfavorable suspicion." Consequently, the two Americans asked for an audience with the British high commissioner to Egypt, Reginald Wingate, at his earliest convenience. Most convenient, it turned out, was the very next day. Donning their best summer suits, Yale and Knabenshue set out for the white stone mansion on the banks of the Nile that served as the British Residency.

For Reginald Wingate, having another State Department official wandering about Cairo presented something of a mixed prospect. On the one hand, with the United States now joined to the Allied war effort, British officials had an obligation to build the bonds of trust and solidarity even in those arenas, like the Middle East, where the Americans did not intend to militarily engage. Additionally, the high commissioner had his own ulterior motive for playing nice with the Americans. As he contemplated the deepening political mora.s.s into which Great Britain was sliding in the region, its secret deals with the French and the Arabs now about to be complemented by a pledge to the Zionists, Wingate increasingly saw the United States as a potential rescuer from the muddle. Indeed, just days before Yale's arrival in Cairo, Wingate had posited to a rather startled Knabenshue that perhaps the Palestine deck of cards should be shuffled once again, that instead of Arab or French or international or Zionist or even British control in the postwar world, maybe the Americans would like to step in there and have a go at things. Wingate could rely on Knabenshue to relay such feelers to the State Department in a positive light-the diplomat was married to an Englishwoman and was an ardent Anglophile-but maybe Yale could serve as a useful seconding voice.

On the other hand, if forced to deal with another State Department official, Wingate and every other Briton in Cairo aware of the man's background undoubtedly wished that it not be William Yale. Part of it stemmed from the antipathy with which British officials at all levels regarded Yale's former employer, Standard Oil of New York. Time and again in the early days of the war, Socony tankers had been caught trying to elude the British naval blockade to supply oil to the Germans, a practice finally curtailed less through diplomatic appeals than by the British seizure of Socony s.h.i.+ps. But only curtailed; just that summer, with the United States now officially at war with Germany, the Socony representative in Brazil had been caught red-handed selling oil to German front companies. In defending his actions, the man had blandly explained that business was business, and that if he didn't sell to the enemy, his compet.i.tors surely would. That William Yale came out of such a cold-blooded corporate culture did little to inspire British confidence.

Nor, of course, did Yale's specific service to that corporation. As the British in Cairo were well aware, the former Socony representative had just spent over two years living as a protected neutral in the heart of enemy territory, and even if London might be grateful for the intelligence Yale had pa.s.sed on based on his tenure there, that grat.i.tude was far more muted at the actual war front. In particular, British war planners in Cairo couldn't quite forget that much of the best highway in enemy-held Palestine, the Jerusalem-to-Beersheva road that served as the Turks' crucial supply lifeline to the Gaza front where British forces had twice foundered, had actually been built by Standard Oil back in 1914, nor that William Yale had been a supervisor on that project.

All this taken together, Wingate found himself in a bit of a quandary when, shortly after their first amicable meeting, Yale came back to him with a bold request. From somewhere, the State Department agent had learned of the existence of the Arab Bulletin, the weekly compendium of raw and top-secret intelligence gathered by the Arab Bureau from across the Middle East. So sensitive was the Bulletin that its distribution was limited to fewer than thirty of the seniormost political and military officials of the British Empire, along with just three representatives of Allied governments. William Yale now wanted access to it as well.

After careful consideration, Wingate acceded to the request, but only after imposing a typically British precondition. Yale could peruse the Bulletin for his own edification, but, on his word of honor, he was to never directly quote from it in any of his dispatches to the State Department.

No doubt such a gentlemanly arrangement worked just fine among the refined diplomatic cla.s.ses of Europe, but in hindsight, the high commissioner might have wanted to more fully entertain his prejudices about William Yale's background; he had just given access to Britain's most time-sensitive secrets in the Middle East to a former employee of one of the most predatory corporations in human history, and William Yale didn't so much intend to quote from the Bulletin as to mine from it wholesale.