Spies in Arabia The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East priya satia 1 2008 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Satia, Priya. Spies in Arabia : the Great War and the cultural foundations of Britain’s covert empire in the Middle East / by Priya Satia. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-533141-7 1. Middle East—Foreign relations—Great Britain. 2. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Middle East. 3. Espionage—Great Britain. 4. Espionage—Middle East. 5. World War, 1914–1918—Secret service—Great Britain. I. Title. DS63.2.G7S28 2008 940.4'86410956—dc22 2007028405 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents Note on Arabic Spellings, xiii Reference Map, 2 Introduction, 3 Part I: War and Hope 1. The Foundations of Covert Empire, 23 2. The Cultural World of the Edwardian Agent, 59 3. The Failure of Empiricism and How the Agents Addressed It, 99 4. Cunning in War, 137 5. Imperial Expiation, 165 Part II: Peace and Terror 6. Offi cial Conspiracy Theories and the Wagers of Genius, 201 7. Air Control, 239 8. Covert Empire, 263 9. Seeing Like a Democracy, 287 Conclusion, 329 Notes, 339 Selected Bibliography, 409 Index, 443 Introduction I wonder why Arabia is the best-looking land, however you see it. I suppose it is the name that does it. —T. E. Lawrence, 1916 These gentlemen have formed a plan of geographical morality, by which the duties of men . . . are not to be governed by their relation to the great Governor of the Universe, or by their relation to mankind, but by climates, degrees of longitude, parallels, not of life, but of latitudes: as if, when you have crossed the equinoctial, all the virtues die . . .; as if there were a kind of baptism, like that practised by seamen, by which they unbaptize themselves of all that they learned in Europe, and after which a new order and system of things commenced. —Edmund Burke, 1788 At the start of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents fi rst began seriously to venture into the region they knew as “Arabia.” They were drawn there by two objectives: the desire to secure the land route to India and the hope of fi nding in a proverbially mystical and antique land the metaphysical certainty they no longer felt at home. These competing objects created a dilemma for them as agents: How were they to gather practical information and serve the British state in a region they were attracted to because of its legendary inscrutability and promise of escape from Britain? The agents’ grappling with this 3 4 introduction conundrum in the era of the Great War and the manifold consequences of the tactical and methodological choices they made form the subject of this book. This is a story about a state that could not see, that depended on equivocal agents groping blindly through a fog of cultural representations about the new region it sought to control and the unique epistemological and technological remedies they evolved to soothe their consciences and cure their blindness. Their work cast a long shadow over imperial statecraft and metropolitan culture in the twentieth century. How states see—or don’t see—is, in my view, a matter intricately bound up with cultural history; it may even be that all states are unseeing, or at least intensely myopic, without the benefi t of a cultural lens to bring into focus the otherwise elusive space and people they rule. In most instances, this is the lens that concentrates the illuminations of the Enlightenment into a shaft powerful enough to strip a place of all idiosyncrasy and opacity, rendering it universally intelligible, empirically graspable. There are other places, however, in which the modern state’s knowledge-gathering practices are refracted through differ- ent cultural lenses, places deemed beyond the domain of the universally acces- sible, rational, secular world—perhaps, in Edmund Burke’s terms above, those places beyond the equinoctial. Burke was writing about India in the era of the notorious trial of Governor-General Warren Hastings, but questioning the ways of the empire and the limits of universalism was again the fashion on the eve of the Great War, when the gaze of the British state had fallen intently upon the region known as the Middle East.1 The story of British intelligence- gathering in the Middle East reveals the extent to which cultural representa- tions mattered in the epistemological strategies the British state employed there and the extent to which the varying standards of the empire’s “geographi- cal morality” fl owed from epistemological principles. This is a story of a state so conscious of the particular illegibility of the terrain it sought to control that it forsook empiricism for intuition, with critical consequences for both Britain and the Middle East as the war and its violent aftermath unfolded in the region. I am interested in this book in piecing together the world of British intelli- gence in the Middle East. More importantly, however, I want to unpack the enduring fascination with Arabia as a spy-space which colored this British effort (and has perhaps even attracted readers to this book).2 My focus is on the formation and fallout of the cultural imagination that shaped agents’ approach and methods, rather than on the effi cacy of the information order as such— on thinking about intelligence and agents’ skills rather than on the agents’ actual abilities (a subject better left to intelligence experts).3 Nor is my purpose to hold British representations of Arab views up against the Arab reality but to introduction 5 demonstrate that the activities of the modern state are shaped by the cultural imagination.4 Indeed, given received wisdom about the power of European cultural rep- resentations of the Orient, the cultural formation of intelligence agents must lie at the heart of any effort to understand British intelligence-gathering in the Middle East. The cultural imagination mattered especially in a region conceived in its very essence as a space for the imagination. As it happens, the intelli- gence agents wandering in the Middle East were among those early-twentieth- century Britons questioning the reliability of sense perception at a time when what Weber famously called the “disenchantment of the world” had triggered an almost desperate interest in matters spiritual. These were not the obscure, anonymous intelligence workers of a later, more bureaucratic era, but social, political, and, in some cases, cultural elites emerging from a range of profes- sional backgrounds, from military to diplomatic to scholarly. As a community, they shared almost without exclusion an intense literary ambition—many were prolifi c—and social contact with the British cultural and political establish- ments. Their personal searches for spiritual and cultural redemption, coupled with their practical diffi culties in navigating desert topography, profoundly shaped their methods as agents, and their mixing with the worlds of letters and politics at home ensured that awareness of their work in the Middle East was diffuse. In a sense I am trying to bring the history of perceptions of the Orient together with the history of perception as such, for, the social world of Edwardian Britain ensured that imperial statecraft and metropolitan culture were mutu- ally infl uential. These agents’ most important methodological innovation was an intuitive intelligence epistemology modeled on their understanding of the “Arab mind.” Long immersion in the desert would, they thought, allow them to replicate the apparently intuitive knowledge-gathering and navigational practices of nomadic Arabs.5 The premium this modus operandi placed on “genius” guaranteed them an enormous infl uence over the planning and execution of the Middle East campaigns of the Great War and over the postwar administration of the British-controlled Middle East. In the infl uence of their tactical imagination and epistemological outlook, this book argues, lies the explanation for the grad- ual transformation of British intelligence-gathering in the region from the informal, even accidental, work of world-weary Edwardians to the paranoid pre- occupation of a brutal aerial surveillance regime after the war. If, as James Scott has recently urged, local knowledge can serve as an antidote to the impe- rialism of the modern state’s fl attening gaze, in this instance agents of the British state fetishized local knowledge as the foundation of a violent effort to render nomad terrain legible. Their story is a reminder that imperialism is a 6 introduction political relationship more than a perspective; intimacy does not make it go away.6 British intelligence in the Middle East was, in short, different from British intelligence projects in other parts of the world in this period. Certainly, British agents were also venturing into Germany, Japan, Persia, North America, India, and elsewhere. No other region, however, possessed such a combination of geopolitical cachet, cultural resonance, and utter unfamiliarity potent enough to indelibly mark intelligence practices and profoundly infl uence British popular and offi cial culture. The intuitive mode was also a radical departure from the dogged empiricism of earlier and contemporary efforts to gather information in other regions perceived as essentially deceptive and disorient- ing, such as India, Australia, the Poles, and central Africa. Furthermore, the peculiarities of British relations with the Ottoman Empire and of the political organization of that empire meant that the intelligence project was itself inter- ested in unique objects, as we shall see. Perhaps the most important evidence of the peculiarity of this intelligence project is Britons’ frequent remarking of the fact, a theme that runs throughout what follows.7 To be sure, the British were not the only Great Power spying on the Middle East in this period; their concern about improving their intelligence sources was partly intensifi ed by news of the exploits of Continental spies. An unsig- ned secret memorandum of 1909 among the papers of Vernon Kell, founder of the British Security Service (later MI5), urged the British state to emulate the German, French, Russian, and other foreign intelligence organizations in the lengths of deceit to which they were willing to go.8 That said, in the end, no other European country sent as many agents or made as large a cultural invest- ment in agents who went to Arabia. Nor did any other power eventually obtain a stranglehold over the region that allowed the logic of its intelligence system to play out in such dramatic ways. I am not making a claim for British cultural exceptionalism but for exceptional opportunity. Indeed, Germans shared many of the same cultural fascinations with the Middle East, but German withdrawal from the region after the war makes it a less useful case for exploring the rela- tionship between those fascinations and statecraft. Russia’s ultimate domina- tion of Persia and Central Asia make a Russian version of the story more promising, not least for the light it might shed on what, if anything, is excep- tional about the cultural fascinations with “Arabia” as opposed to the Middle East more broadly construed. The French story might also be usefully told, given the intensely brutal nature of postwar French rule in Syria, but the cul- tural signifi cance of French agents in the Middle East is less clear. They never made the kinds of claims Britons, Germans, and Russians did to a special sym- pathy with the inhabitants of the region, and in British eyes at least, they were introduction 7 remarkably “clumsy.” Historians, too, have called them “poor competitors”; in Edward Said’s succinct phrase: “There were no French Lawrences or Sykeses or Bells.”9 In short, the British story is the big story about European intelligence- gathering and colonial control in the Middle East in the twentieth century, but its usefulness in helping us understand empire is general. Thus, I am offering here a cultural history of the interwar British imperial state, of imperial information systems, the tactics of conquest, and the mecha- nisms of colonial rule, of how the colonial state sees, and the drastic steps it takes when it thinks it cannot see. Ultimately, as we shall see, the state that could not see became a state that could not be seen. The aerial surveillance regime in the Middle East was the ethereal outcropping of a style of imperial rule I call “covert empire.” The constitutional monarchies established in the British Middle Eastern mandates after the war are usually classed as instances of “indirect rule,” a style originally evolved in the Indian princely states.10 This book argues, however, that the British did not so much rule through these potentates as sideline them for all matters pertaining to “imperial security”—a highly elastic rubric—by creating a parallel state, entirely informal and in the hands of intelligence offi cers who held real executive power. This was a new form of imperial rule, invisible, barely existing on paper, designed for an increasingly anti-imperialist postwar world, both at home and abroad. This was more than a case of the (unsuccessful) application of old imperial ideas—orien- talist stereotypes, Indian experience, and so forth—in a new imperial space;11 certainly there are continuities with the past, but there is also a historical speci- fi city to British ideas about the Middle East and the style of imperial rule they underpinned. Racist constructions of Arabs go only so far in explaining the ori- gins of the covert state and its technological infrastructure of air control, both considerable departures in British imperial practice. The explanation lies, I think, in British ideas about the kind of place Arabia was, historically contin- gent ideas informed by the cultural concerns of early-twentieth-century Britain and generating a commitment to a particular epistemological framework for knowing and governing the Middle East. The Great War is the pivot of this story and must lie at the heart of any effort to understand the way affective knowledge informed state practice in the Middle East. It was the moment when the agents and their methods were bestowed with an offi cial legitimacy and began to extend their reach into the realms of military operations and colonial administration. In recounting the story of the agents’ growing infl uence within offi cial circles, and, increas- ingly, with the public at home, this book inevitably expands our understanding of the military, political, and cultural legacy of the war—which has for the most part been understandably but nevertheless narrowly focused on the Western 8 introduction front—and of Britain’s imperial project in the Middle East, of which we know very little beyond the apparently idiosyncratic popularity of Lawrence of Arabia.12 If intelligence agents were shaped by the cultural anxieties of British modernity, British modernity was itself touched by the shadow of the surveil- lance tactics applied in the Middle East. The state’s blindness was part of a wider contagion—as even the term, the “state,” refers not to a discrete entity, but to “a whole network of people and institutions,” a shifting organism whose assorted appendages are dispersed into the substrate of society.13 I argue in this book that the cultural fascinations of the Middle East and of the agents who made their mark in it ensured that at a time when Britain hungered for heroes, imperial confi dence, and the remains of a lost civilization, their traces could be found as much in contemporary literary modernism as in the romantic mili- tary tactics of the Middle Eastern theaters and the wartime turn to “develop- ment” as a means of reestablishing the constructive benevolence of the British Empire. Imperial expansion in and development of the Middle East helped blunt the sense of total rupture with the prewar past.14 In other words, in an increasingly mass democracy, how the state saw was a matter of public contention; the state’s growing invisibility in the Middle East was partly intended to evade this political fl ashpoint. Covert empire came into its own in the Middle East because a self-assertive mass democracy was coming into its own in Britain; in this sense, too, did it differ from the older paradigm of indirect rule. In a postwar political moment shaped by the campaign to assert democratic control over the state—to make the institutions of the state a mere administrative machinery manned by an actually governing citizenry—some segments of the British public were desperate to see what their state was up to in the land of imperial redemption. As they squinted at the desert horizon for evidence of their government’s good faith, a coarse critique of state secrecy gathering in their parched throats, they ensured not only that the state would twist into ever new shapes to avert and avoid their gaze, but that wider cultural perceptions of the Middle East would continue to shape its activity in the region. The point for my purposes is not whether ordinary Britons knew about or cared anything for their Middle Eastern empire but that there was a conversation about how much they knew, could know, should know—and why. Thus, despite conventional wisdom about the relative absence of a culture of paranoid politics in Britain,15 it was in fact doubly present: in the conspiracy thinking about “Eastern unrest” that underpinned the government’s obsessive surveillance of the Middle East and in the public’s growing suspicion of its gov- ernment’s covert imperial activity once the promise of an affordable develop- mental empire was proven false. In Britain, as on the Continent, political paranoia played a fundamental role in the unfolding of interwar violence—albeit