Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Read online

  This was a plausible excuse at that time, in view of the close relationship between Moscow and Berlin. The same justification for Turkish neutrality was maintained, even when that close relationship was sundered by the German invasion of Russia.

  By the summer of 1939 it was already clear that war was imminent. I was asked to serve on an advisory committee for the Foreign Office to prepare reports on the various problems of the Middle East. But obviously this was something very temporary. I wrote to the War Office to offer my services and they wrote back fixing an appointment for me to be interviewed by an officer of the intelligence department. I went to the War Office and was duly interviewed. He asked the usual questions and some unusual questions and then said he thought they could find a job for me and they would be in touch. A little while passed, not very long, and then I was asked to come again for a second interview in which I was told they had decided to accept me and that I would be sent in January to an OCTU (an officer cadet training unit) in the cavalry. I blurted out, “Cavalry, you mean horses?” He nodded yes and I said, “But this is 1939. Who uses cavalry these days?” He gave me a look and said, “Have you ever heard of Lawrence of Arabia?” “Of course,” I said. “Well, would he have been able to accomplish what he did if he hadn’t been able to ride? We want you to learn to ride properly.” I protested that I had never ridden a horse in my life. He said, “So much the better. Then you won’t have any bad habits to get rid of.”

  This was in September 1939, and my call-up was for January 1940, so I thought I’d better do something about this. I hunted around and found a livery stable in Buckinghamshire which was run by a former cavalryman and asked him to teach me to ride cavalry style. So I spent my weekends during the winter of 1939–40 careering around Buckinghamshire on horseback, holding the reins in my left hand and brandishing an imaginary gun or saber in my right hand. I was determined to be prepared for cavalry officer training.

  Unfortunately my boss, Professor Ralph Turner, the director of the School of Oriental and African Studies, wasn’t having any of it. He was very determined that SOAS should make its own contribution to the war effort as a collective body. He stopped all our call-ups and volunteering and everything else to make sure that he could retain the entire academic faculty of the school. To my great annoyance and disappointment my call-up to the cavalry was canceled and I continued to teach at the school which in the meantime had moved to Cambridge. We spent the academic year 1939–40 at Christ’s College in Cambridge, enjoying the hospitality of that institution. Later in the year, my call-up finally caught up with me, only this time it wasn’t horses but mechanized cavalry. I did my basic training as a trooper in a tank regiment.

  Either because of my aptitude for languages or my ineptitude with tanks, I was transferred from the tank corps to the intelligence corps at the end of 1940 or the beginning of 1941. I spent the rest of the war doing jobs which, bound by the Official Secrets Act, I am still not at liberty to discuss in any detail.

  When I was transferred to the intelligence corps this was so secret that I wasn’t even told where I was going, nor could I have an address for any mail to be sent to me. I was given a railway ticket which took me to Euston Station in London. There I had to report to the military office where I was told to report to Waterloo Station. I went to Waterloo Station where I reported and was given a ticket to go to Winchester. In Winchester I was met at the station and taken to my new abode. You can imagine that with all this secrecy I was worried about my mail. I needn’t have bothered. My mail arrived from the tank regiment with the new address written on the envelope.

  In Winchester I completed the basic intelligence training and then was kept waiting until they found a suitable assignment for me. This was made more difficult by the fact that I had failed an important component of intelligence training, the motorcycle rough-riding course. I had never ridden a motorcycle before and had to take a special course to fulfill this requirement. I passed the road test but failed the rough stuff, climbing up and down a hillside amid trees and bushes. I therefore had to wait for an assignment that did not involve this requirement. This excluded me from battlefield intelligence but left many other possibilities.

  While I was there they didn’t want me to waste my time and they saw from my records that I was a lecturer at the university. They said, “Oh, you teach? Then you can teach.” I was immediately attached to the training staff.

  One of the things which had to be taught was a subject known in official jargon as O&A, which means organization and administration. Recruits in intelligence usually knew precious little about anything military. They needed intensive training in military matters and I was ordered to do this in a three-week course. In the university we get bored if we do the same course every year. Imagine doing the same course every three weeks! My job was to describe the structure of the British Army in general, and its intelligence corps in particular, to these recruits.

  In order to be accepted by intelligence, you had to meet two requirements. You had to have at least two generations of British birth and you had to have a mastery of a foreign language. These two are rarely combined in one person, and the people there fell into some recognizable categories. Probably the largest was the children of mixed marriages. The two generations didn’t have to be on both sides (we’re not talking about Nazi race laws) so many had one English parent and one foreign parent, and grew up using two languages. Another category was schoolmasters—teachers, particularly of French and to a lesser extent of German. And the third, very large category was people from the colonies, particularly the colonies in Europe—Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus—and to some extent from some of the Asian colonies, especially Hong Kong and Singapore. They were British by birth and descent since they were imperial subjects, and they usually had another language, their local language. What nobody bothered to find out was how well they knew English.

  The most common language among our trainees was Greek, thanks to the numerous Cypriots who were transferred to us. The second commonest was Maltese. In addition, surprisingly, there were some whose registered language was French—British subjects from the Seychelles Islands which had been colonized by the French but which became British during the Napoleonic Wars. The rather aristocratic white settler population in these islands by now had several generations of British descent, but remained very French by language, culture and in some measure loyalty. This gave rise to questions with some of them—were they supporters of de Gaulle or of Vichy?

  What all of these different groups had in common was that they had a native language other than English and this sometimes gave rise to problems.

  I remember particularly that when the Germans invaded Greece we had a sudden need for intelligence personnel with a knowledge of Greek. Someone at headquarters went through the files and found quite a number of soldiers in the British Army with a knowledge of Greek who were all immediately shipped off to Winchester for training. They were without exception Cypriot Greeks, impeccably British by birth and descent with an excellent knowledge of Greek but often their English was very limited. A large proportion of them were waiters. One or two were headwaiters and at that time I picked up that the Greek for headwaiter is archi-garsoni. On one occasion a department head to whom we sent our trained intelligence personnel sent a message saying, “Send me more waiters and fewer schoolmasters.”

  My class of Greeks was quite raucous and keeping order was challenging. We had NCO’s from the Guards to maintain military discipline. We began each day with a roll call and of course having an ordinary English sergeant from the Guards reading the list of names like Pappadopoulos and Athanasacopoulos, one after another, degenerated into high farce.

  I tried to liven up my courses with an occasional wisecrack, not thinking, in my youthful folly, that being disrespectful to the army and its intelligence to an audience of aspiring spooks was not wise. I should have got into trouble, and I found out later why I didn’t. My boss, Major Jennings Bramley, of blessed memory, had
written one short line in my file that said, “His sense of humor should not be taken as seditious.”

  Eventually I was posted to Bletchley Park, where I spent a couple of months doing decoding. During my stay there I made use of my knowledge of languages and developed some new skills in how to play with languages. Toward the end of 1941 I was transferred to another branch of the service based in London. The phrase we were instructed to use was “attached to a department of the Foreign Office.” You have to be known to be doing something and that was the official formula. Actually we were a branch of MI6 and when, as an innocent beginner in intelligence, I asked what the difference was between MI6 and the more famous MI5, I was told, “The job of MI5 is to stop others from doing to us what MI6 is doing to them.” Much of my work was summarizing and/or translating texts, mostly from Arabic. Some were in codes or ciphers. What was interesting were the methods by which the texts were obtained. Some of the texts were fascinating, many were not. For much of the time it was just a desk job.

  One of my lifelong friendships began through a meeting with a colleague in the service. Like me, Arthur Hatto was a young academic; his field was German studies, and he specialized in medieval German poetry, particularly in the medieval German epics. As a German speaker he was immediately needed and he was recruited into another branch of MI6. One day out of the blue he called and asked if he could come and see me. Of course I agreed. He came to my office and explained that he was tracking a Syrian who had been recruited into the German espionage service and about whom he knew through his German sources. Was there any way in which I could help him? It so happened that I had become aware of the same Syrian from my Arab sources and we were able to compare notes and combine our information to good effect.

  My final posting during the war was in London and I spent the greater part of the blitz years living, working and, more remarkably, sleeping in London. In the early stages of the blitz I went to shelters in the underground stations but I soon got tired of this and decided to stay in my bed and take my chances. One can get used to anything!

  Forty years later I was on a visit to Israel when Saddam Hussein started sending Scud missiles into the country, a few of which exploded in the Tel Aviv area. I had been invited to a dinner party in Tel Aviv at that time and turned up at my hostess’s home at the appointed time, to her utter astonishment. All her other guests had canceled and she assumed I would do the same though I had not called to say so. She started to praise my courage and determination and in all honesty I had to disclaim any particular heroism. I pointed out that the whole Scud episode would have amounted to a rather quiet evening during the London blitz. We had got used to living our lives in much worse conditions than that.

  Ascertaining What They Were Doing

  When war broke out in 1939 the only Arab state that was completely independent and free from any kind of imperial control, domination or presence was Saudi Arabia. The Saudis at that time had two embassies abroad—one in London, one in Paris. Curiously, neither of the ambassadors was a Saudi. The ambassador in London, Hafiz Wahba, was an Egyptian; the ambassador in Paris, Fuad Hamza, was a Syrian. Presumably the one was chosen for his skill and experience in speaking English and dealing with Englishmen; the other for his corresponding skill and experience with French and Frenchmen.

  At the time of the French collapse and surrender, we were very much concerned about the position of the Saudi Embassy in Paris. Since the French government had surrendered and had in effect become a German satellite, we asked the Saudis to close down their embassy in Paris. They refused, and instead moved it to Vichy where it remained in contact with the German satellite French government based in that city.

  The Saudi Embassy in Vichy now became a place of major concern and importance to us. More specifically, it became a major place of contact between the Arab world and the Axis. There were other places of contact, notably Ankara in neutral Turkey, where the German ambassador, Franz von Papen, was able to maintain an extensive network of communications in the Arab world. But the Saudi Embassy in Vichy was of particular interest. We found ways of keeping informed about what was going on there, and more particularly about the contacts between the Saudis and the Germans. We were especially interested in the activities of Dr. Fritz Grobba, a leading Arab expert in the service of the Third Reich. He entered into extensive and detailed contacts with the Saudi Embassy in Vichy and through them with the Arab world in general.

  We monitored the embassy’s correspondence and telephone calls. Ambassador Fuad Hamza reported to the Saudi foreign minister who was based in Jedda, the only place in Saudi Arabia where foreigners were allowed to be resident and where, therefore, the embassies accredited to the Saudi government were based. The foreign minister, in Jedda, communicated with King Ibn Saud, in Riyad, entirely by telephone. They didn’t realize how vulnerable telephone conversations were, and were often surprised at the degree of intimate knowledge that we had of what they were doing, even of what they were thinking.

  For several years of my life I began my day’s work by reading the previous day’s transcripts of telephone conversations and written messages between various people. Because of this experience during the war I developed and still retain an almost neurotic fear of telephone conversations and therefore am extremely reluctant to discuss anything of significance on the telephone.

  Dealings with other Arab governments during the war were sometimes quite complicated. King Farouk of Egypt demanded that as a friend and ally he was entitled to know of our military plans and insisted that we provide him with full details. We didn’t trust him, and concocted a totally false plan and gave it to him. When we captured the Italian headquarters in North Africa, we found a copy of this plan. At that time Italy was, of course, a member of the Axis and a German ally.

  When the French surrendered to the Germans in 1940, most of the French overseas empire was beyond their reach and the governors of the colonies were free to choose between Vichy or de Gaulle in London. The overwhelming majority chose Vichy, including the French-mandated territory of Syria-Lebanon. Under Vichy rule, Syria-Lebanon was wide open to Nazi infiltration and became a Nazi base in the heart of the Arab Middle East. The Germans established themselves there and played a very important role.

  From Syria the Germans extended their activities into Iraq where they were able to set up a pro-Nazi regime, headed by the famous, or notorious, Rashid Ali. We felt it was imperative that we do something about that. We dealt first with Iraq. A brief military campaign was sufficient to overthrow the regime of Rashid Ali, who fled to Syria and later to Berlin, where he joined his friend the Mufti of Jerusalem as Hitler’s guest. Then, with the aid of the Free French who provided us with a cover of legitimacy, we invaded Syria and Lebanon, defeated the “Vichyssois” and established a new Free French regime there. It was in that campaign that Moshe Dayan, who was serving as a volunteer with the British forces, lost one of his eyes. After the departure of the Vichy people, a new regime was established in Syria-Lebanon under French authority but controlled by the de Gaulle center in London.

  I was in Syria about that time and one of my most vivid impressions was of the violent hostility, even contempt, of the Syrians for the French. Like other Arabs they disliked all the imperial powers, but they found the continued French presence particularly humiliating. The rival imperialists were seen as the British and later the Americans on one side, and the Germans and later the Soviets on the other. The French, regardless of whether they were loyal to Vichy or de Gaulle, were seen as the servants of either the Germans or the British. What made them particularly angry was when de Gaulle’s Free French, being short of troops, brought Senegalese battalions of the French colonial army into Syria. That was the supreme and ultimate insult. The Syrians protested, “Now we are being ruled not just by the servants of the imperialists, but by the slaves of the servants of the imperialists!” A poster was put up in Damascus at that time showing a black Senegalese soldier with a French kepi and a French uniform an
d a knife between his teeth saying, “Je viens te civiliser!” (“I come to civilize you!”)

  A Message for Downing Street

  Intercepting and decoding messages is a very important part of the intelligence world. During the war, reading mail and more particularly reading telegrams became a crucial part of our intelligence operations. This applied not only to enemies but also to neutrals and sometimes even to those who were, officially at least, classified as friends. In 1929 U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson said in horror that gentlemen do not read other people’s mail. Nevertheless, we did so extensively during the war and these exchanges were an absolutely invaluable source of information.

  Teleprinters were much used in those days and once when I was on night duty, the teleprinter at the back of the office started clattering. What came through was an intercepted message in German. I should explain that one of our main sources of Axis information was the Japanese Embassy in Berlin. There was no overland contact between Germany and Japan; all their communications had to go by radio and the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, General Oshima, was an invaluable source of information about what was happening in Germany. Our superb code breakers had broken the code and were reading and translating the stuff, but for some reason, this didn’t come through that channel but through one of our German channels. What came through that night was the text, in German, of a German-Japanese treaty of alliance against Britain and the United States. Even though this was just before Pearl Harbor I realized this was an important document and immediately worked to translate it from German into English and then I forwarded it by teleprinter to the Prime Minister’s office at 10 Downing Street. I don’t know what happened to it after that.