Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt

The First Modern Intelligence War

Polly A. Mohs

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134192533
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de Oriente Medio

Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt examines the use and exploitation of intelligence in formulating Britain's strategy for the Arab Revolt during the First World War. It also presents a radical re-examination of the achievements of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) as an intelligence officer and guerrilla leader.

Modern intelligence techniques such as Sigint, Imint and Humint were incorporated into strategic planning with greater expertise and consistency in Arabia than in any other theatre during the war, and their deployment as tactical support for the Arab forces was decisive. Using much previously unpublished material, this study shows conclusively how Britain's intelligence community in Arabia influenced the conduct of the Arab campaign, promoted a full-scale guerrilla war and thereby facilitated the Arab armies' march north into Syria, Palestine and the modern Middle East. Polly A. Mohs contributes to the unveiling of another hidden corner of the history of the Middle East and to a better understanding of the significance of intelligence in formulating strategic processes in the modern era.

Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, military history, Middle East history, British imperial history, guerrilla warfare and insurgency.

1
Setting the scene

British intelligence and an Arab insurrection, 1913–15

Contrary to the conventional view, the actual course of the British government’s alliance with the Hashemite Arab dynasty was not driven by the war’s military requirements, Great Power rivalry or even imperial war aims. Although Britain would declare war on Turkey in November 1914, the substance of British policy towards the Turkish government’s Arab territories would be contested throughout the conflict by departments and administrations from London to North Africa, from the Persian Gulf to the Indian subcontinent. An official definition of Britain’s commitments to the native Arab populations in particular would still be in dispute at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

The Arabs of the Arabian peninsula who would become the first army of rebellion in June 1916 were characterized only months earlier by Sir Arthur Nicolson, Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, as ‘a heap of scattered tribes with no cohesion and no organisation’.¹ Their transformation in London’s eyes into a valuable wartime ally of Great Britain was propelled by the British intelligence community based in Cairo. Whether it had been the government’s original intention or not, Cairo’s intelligence officers were positioning themselves to vie with the political assessments of Whitehall and the conventional military’s views, to influence Britain’s Arab policy. By the time the Sherif of Mecca launched his revolt in June 1916, the intelligence community was already pushing against the boundaries that separated official responsibilities for intelligence and formulation of policy.

British Egypt: redefining strategic security

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Turkestan (until its conquest by Russia in late nineteenth century) and Afghanistan acted as a geographical shield for Britain, protecting overland routes to India from the predations of Russian expansionism. After the turn of the century and the rise of German militarism, European governments re-evaluated their security priorities. Great Britain brokered new relationships with Russia and France, previously long-time rivals in the East. The ‘Entente Cordiale’ between Britain and France in 1904 brought about an end to the ‘Great Game’ with Russia, an ally of France. After Russia’s defeat by Japan in the 1904–5 war, Russian foreign policy began turning from the East and towards the Balkan territories. Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, was optimistic about the new Russian orientation.² The Treaty of St Petersburg in 1907 introduced Anglo-Russian cooperation on the Northwest frontier and officially ended their respective schemes inside Afghanistan and Tibet. It also divided Persia into British, Russian and neutral spheres of interest. Thus Britain’s historical interest in preserving the Ottoman Empire as a territorial buffer against Russia was, in theory, removed. But claims of a new benign international balance were less convincing in the outposts of the British Empire, particularly from the perspective of administrations in North Africa, the Middle East and India for whom the Great Game and threats of expansionist stratagems from Russia, France and soon Germany, far from defunct, continued in force.³

The Ottoman government itself was already in crisis long before the war. The despot Sultan-Caliph, Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909), jettisoned the constitution of 1876. He consistently underestimated the nationalist uprisings in his western territories and during the Russo-Turk war of 1877–8, lost the territories of Rumania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The country sank into financial turmoil.⁴ In an effort to buttress his public standing, he reached out to the empire’s largest disenfranchised minority group, the Arabs. His pro-Islamic policies endeared him to rural Arab communities but outraged secular reformist intellectuals.⁵In 1909 one of the leading opposition groups, the ‘Young Turks’, ousted Abdul Hamid from the Sultanate and installed his malleable brother, Muhammad V (1909–18). After the Tripolitanian War (1911–13) and the Balkan Wars (1912–13), which ended in further humiliating losses for the empire from the Aegean islands to all Turkish territories west of the Enos–Midia line, the Young Turks seized the capital and declared a new secular government for the country. They promised to rescue the economy, re-establish the suppressed constitution of 1876, modernize the army and navy (with German and British contributions, respectively) and restore the country’s national pride with a reformist government, ‘the Committee of Union and Progress’ (CUP).⁶

Despite their rhetoric, the Young Turks failed to reverse the empire’s decline. One of their more injudicious decisions was to renege on the restoration of the constitution, an act that would have protected the rights of all ethnic and religious groups. Instead, they instituted a progamme of Yeni-Turan or Pan-Turanism, which designated Turkish ethnicity and language as the dominant culture. Another key decision was to try to bolster national defence by forging alliances with stronger countries. Turkey’s northern borders were still vulnerable to Russia and its western border remained unfixed against a restive Serbia, Greece and the shifting Balkan jigsaw. Enver Pasha, one of the founders of the Young Turks and now Minister for War, convinced the rest of the CUP in 1913 that Constantinople should establish a closer relationship Germany. Germany had already offered generous material assistance and military officers for the training of the Ottoman army. In August 1914, Turkey signed a defensive alliance with Germany against Russia.⁷

The Ottoman Empire’s reorientation towards Germany instantly altered the security outlook of its neighbours, particularly that of British Egypt, which had been growing into a powerful hub of colonial and trade policy considerations. After taking control of the Suez Canal from the Egyptian government in 1904, the British Agency in Egypt had concentrated its policy around what it considered its two totems of imperial responsibility, the security of the canal and the holy places in Arabia, to which thousands of British Muslims travelled every year for the hajj, or pilgrimage. Its greatest concern with respect to both these investments now became the CUP’s deepening partnership with Germany.

Initiated in 1903, the Berlin–Baghdad railway project carried momentous ramifications for international transport and communication. There was substantial international controversy over the significance of Germany’s heavy involvement in the construction of the eastern branches. Abdul Hamid had granted Germany the construction rights for the railway from Constantinople to Baghdad and Basra, but under several conditions. Turkey wanted an extension built through Aleppo to Damascus, another tributary from Deraa to Haifa, and the rest of the mainline to continue southward from Damascus to Medina and Mecca. The Arabian portion of the railway was heralded as a symbol of modernization that would bring improved service for pilgrims at the Holy Places. But it quickly became clear that the railway’s parallel purpose would be to extend the government’s powers of taxation and conscription into the previously remote, autonomous tribal lands of inland Syria, Mesopotamia and the Arabian peninsula, and commandeer the prestigious and lucrative business of the hajj along the way.

In Egypt, the British Agency was quick to regard the Turco-German alliance as a strategic threat. As railway construction ensued, the agency envisioned how their neighbours would soon be able to mobilize German and Turkish troops against the Suez Canal and India. The Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) in London was persuaded by Egypt’s warnings. In 1913, the CID commissioned the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) to make a geographical survey of Palestine, the Lebanon and the Sinai–Negev region that would include intelligence on the railway’s construction.⁸ The resulting expedition employed three men who would soon be contributing their expertise with regional intelligence to Britain’s war effort in the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. S.F. Newcombe of the Royal Engineers led the expedition as chief topographer. C.L. Woolley and T.E. Lawrence, two precocious archaeologists working for the British Museum at Carchemish in Syria, assisted with the ground survey and provided the mission with its archaeological cover.⁹ The PEF’s intelligence activity and the attention of CID members, such as future Arab Bureau director, D.G. Hogarth, ensured that some degree of official notice remained fixed on the geostrategic concerns of Egypt during the years before the war.

Field Marshal Lord Kitchener was the British Agent and Consul-General in Egypt, and himself a contributor to the PEF’s survey of Western Palestine twenty-five years earlier. Kitchener, molded by over a decade of military and intelligence experience in the Sudan and Egypt, saw the changes occurring in the Ottoman Empire as a clear provocation to British interests. He considered the Arab territories on the other side of the Suez Canal to be a natural extension of Egyptian territory and a vital asset for British security around the eastern Mediterranean, the Canal and the Red Sea. Turkey’s collapse was assumed to be imminent, if not through outright war than by internal disintegration. The British Agency’s Oriental Secretary, Ronald Storrs, described Britain’s envisioned acquisition of Ottoman territories as a ‘North African or near-Eastern vice-royalty including Egypt and the Sudan and across the way from Aden to Alexandretta [that] would compare in interest and complexity, if not in actual size, with India itself.’¹⁰ The Arabic-speaking countries would turn their allegiance from Constantinople to Egypt, the Sultan’s Caliphate would be dissolved and – significantly – an Arab Caliphate ‘restored’ in Mecca under the protection of the British administration in Cairo.¹¹ Kitchener’s address to the War Committee in London eighteen months into the war still expressed this assessment of advantage in Britain’s becoming the protector of a future Arab ‘state’:

[It] is in our interests to see an Arab kingdom established in Arabia under the auspices of England, bounded on the north by the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, and containing within it the chief Mahommedan Holy Places, Mecca, Medina and Kerbela. In this eventuality the possession of Mesopotamia – as we already hold the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and Egypt – would secure all the approaches to the Mahommedan Holy Places. This, in [the British Empire’s] position as the greatest of Moslem States, would greatly enhance our prestige amongst the many millions of our Mahommedan subjects.¹²

Notwithstanding the grandeur of this vision, Cairo’s administration was beginning to approach the question of empire with some flexibility. In December 1914, the British Agency in Cairo (thereafter, the ‘Residency’) declared a Protectorate over Egypt, declining to annex the territory outright and thus diverging conspicuously from the example of India’s governors.¹³ The professional friction and territorial rivalry between Egypt and India, whose areas of control in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and Mesopotamia lay adjacent to each other and often overlapped, remained a feature throughout the war.

In August 1914 Kitchener was recalled to London to become Secretary of State for War. He was replaced in Egypt by (Acting Agent) Milne Cheetham, who held the position from 4 August to December 1914, when Sir Henry McMahon was appointed High Commissioner of Egypt. As the tumult of the war spread, the Anglo-Egyptian administration’s strategic outlook remained steady. Kitchener in London and the administration in Cairo initially hoped to join the strategic vision of the possible ‘near-Eastern vice-royalty’ with the larger British war effort against Turkey and Germany. Egypt’s intelligence departments played a central role in this project, revealing the actual condition of the Arab territories to the British authorities in Egypt, the Sudan, the Levant and London. What no one could have anticipated, however, was the manner in which Cairo’s intelligence community would outun Kitchener and London in their determination to formulate a policy for war against the Turks.

Schemes for subversion: Arab opportunities and British ambivalence

From late 1914 to mid-1916, the British Residency and key members of the intelligence community in Cairo under Brigadier-General Gilbert Clayton pursued a de facto policy of working with Arab activists to explore the possibilities for an armed nationalist movement or army mutiny against the Ottoman government. From early 1914, before the outbreak of war, a number of Arab representatives and Arab defectors from the Ottoman army, largely composed of conscripts, had made contact with the British authorities. They described their communities’ widespread resentment of Constantinople’s policies, and revealed the existence of dedicated covert revolutionary societies spanning the Arab professional classes of Syria and Mesopotamia, and the Arab divisions of the Ottoman army.

As the British government began to edge towards war with Germany and then Turkey, Cairo intelligence analysed the weaknesses of the Turkish army, militarily and politically.¹⁴ One of the most striking contributors to this evaluation was Aziz Ali al-Masri, an acclaimed former Ottoman commander who led a triumphant force of Senussi fighters against the Italian army in Libya in 1911, one of the few Ottoman victories in that theatre of war. Al-Masri, now in exile, visited the British Residency in Cairo in August 1914. In his debriefing with Captain Russell of Military Intelligence (with the British Force in Egypt), he confided the existence of al-’Ahd. Al-’Ahd, or ‘the Covenant’, was a secret society of Arab officers within the Ottoman army, founded by al-Masri in Constantinople in 1913.¹⁵ He described al-’Ahd’s programme for a revolution to form ‘a united Arabian state, independent of Turkey and every other power except England, whose tutelage and control of foreign affairs they invite’. He told Russell that al-’Ahd would consider an agreement with Britain in exchange for weapons and funding.¹⁶

Intelligence on a second powerful secret Arab society was also obtained from another human source, a young Turkish officer named Muhammed al-Faruqi who crossed over to the British lines at the Dardanelles. Al-Faruqi claimed to be a member of al-’Ahd and also of al-Fatat, also known as the ‘Young Arab Party’. Al-Fatat was an intensely secret, initially civilian nationalist society that was founded in Constantinople in 1909. Its headquarters later moved to Paris, Beirut and finally Damascus. After August 1914, al-Fatat was the Arabs’ shadowy sentinel keeping watch on the Turkish Fourth Army in Syria, into which many al-Fatat members had been conscripted. Al-Fatat’s manifesto called for the secession of the Arab territories from Ottoman control and the creation of an independent ‘Arab nation.’ Its policy was one of religious and ethnic inclusion under the arc of Arab nationhood.¹⁷

What British intelligence could not have known at this time was that the informants’ estimates of the membership in the societies were dramatically inflated, even if unwittingly. Clayton, head of military and civil intelligence in Egypt as well as chief of intelligence for the Sirdar at Khartoum, accepted al-Masri’s estimation in mid-1914 that membership for al-’Ahd in Mesopotamia reached as high as 15,000. Osmond Walrond (later with the Arab Bureau) was in communication with Syrian-Arab nationalists in Egypt in 191...

Índice

• Studies in intelligence series
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the scene
• 2 The outbreak of the Arab Revolt, May–November 1916
• 3 Arriving at a doctrine of guerrilla warfare, June–October 1916
• 4 Intelligence on trial
• 5 Reorientation
• 6 An unauthorized policy triumph
• Conclusion
• Glossary of names
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index