TE Lawrence is probably the UK’s best-known Middle East expert, a man whose adventures in the region during the First World War were immortalised in the 1962 Oscar-winning epic Lawrence of Arabia.
As well as being portrayed with distinction on the silver screen, Lawrence, whose involvement in the Arab uprising against Ottoman rule is the stuff of legend, has been the focus of countless books, among them Lawrence and the Arabs, Guerrilla Leader and Lawrence of Arabia’s War.
But for all his celebrity, Lawrence was just one of many British military intelligence specialists in the region during the First World War.
To co-ordinate their work – which had been the responsibility of no fewer then 18 intelligence agencies – in 1916 the British formed a unit called the Arab Bureau based at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo. The bureau features far less prominently than Lawrence in the popular imagination, but a new book by Irish-British scholar Dr Eamonn Gearon puts it in the spotlight.
The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain’s Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit was published in the UK this year and will be released in the US in April.
“Not many people had looked at the organisation for which he [Lawrence] worked,” Dr Gearon told The National. “Effectively there was a big shadow cast by Lawrence that put everybody else in the shade.”
Dr Gearon pored over countless documents, many in Arabic, in his research, which earned him a doctorate from the University of Oxford.
Division of rule
Among the figures to play a key role in the setting up of the bureau was Sir Mark Sykes, a British intelligence officer later notorious for the 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty, which partitioned parts of the Ottoman Empire into spheres of influence to be controlled by the UK or France.
As well as co-ordinating the work of the intelligence agencies operating in the region, the bureau produced and distributed propaganda. Among the literature it commissioned was a book-length rallying cry for Arab nationalism, Thawrat Al-Arab, which translates as The Arab Revolt.
It was written by a Lebanese journalist, As‘ad Daghir, and published in 1916 just six months after the uprising against Ottoman rule began.
Dr Gearon unearthed a copy of the “250-page Arabic propaganda text”, as he describes it, in the Middle East Centre Library at St Antony’s College in Oxford, and came to realise that it was an undiscovered gem.
“It had been completely overlooked in English-language scholarship, in Arabic scholarship, in French, German, Italian – nobody had ever referenced this book. It’s a godsend for a researcher,” he said.
The print run was a modest 500 copies, but the book was distributed across the region, except to places still under Ottoman rule, and its influence increased when it was later reprinted in Arabic newspapers.
Dr Gearon has produced the first English-language translation and this will be released this year in the UK as The Arab Revolt: The Lost Chronicle from Lawrence of Arabia’s Intelligence War.
The main lesson that Dr Gearon has taken away from his years researching the Arab Bureau is “just how revolutionary” the organisation was, as many of its ideas about how intelligence should be done are, or should be, common practice now. Chief among these is that a deep cultural understanding of the region in which you are deployed is important to operational capability.
Understanding the territory
“We think about wars like the Iraq war of 2003 and how it was a bit of a mess, not least because there was no plan for what comes next, but also because there was no understanding of Iraq, or very little,” Dr Gearon said.
“I know that the administration consulted with Middle Eastern scholars, but those that agreed with the administration were listened to and those that didn’t agree were ignored.
“It’s not unique to the Iraq War, it happens throughout human history that we want to silo ourselves, but for the Arab Bureau, understanding the place in which they were operating was absolutely critical, central to everything they did.”
The bureau’s role in co-ordinating the work of intelligence organisations offered a contrast, Dr Gearon suggested, to the reported failures of major US agencies to share information in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks.
Another lesson the bureau offers is that bringing a diverse group of people together is useful. While almost all members were white men, they came from a variety of professional backgrounds – they included researchers, archaeologists, translators and writers – all offering their talents to support the bureau.
While Dr Gearon highlights the bureau’s successes, he is keen to point out that he is not suggesting that the region functioned more effectively when countries such as the UK and France held huge influence. “That’s not the point at all,” he said. “It’s really just recognising that the work that was done at the that particular time has implications for intelligence practices today.”
Stage is set
Dr Gearon’s interest in the Middle East stems from childhood, when he was mesmerised by Lawrence of Arabia and heard tales from his father about being stationed in Egypt in the army in the 1950s. He even picked up a little “army Arabic”.
In the mid-1990s, after graduating in theology, Dr Gearon himself went to Egypt and began improving his language skills.
“I was just captivated and immediately started learning Arabic, casually, just on the streets talking to people,” he said. “That was my love affair with the Middle East, where it began – just going there and meeting people on their own terms.”
Although currently based in England, where he was born to an Irish family, Dr Gearon, 55, has spent much of the past three decades living in the Middle East and has enjoyed extended periods in every country except Algeria and Iran.
He has devised and taught on diplomatic training programmes for the British and American governments, lectured on cruise ships and written other books, including The Sahara: A Cultural History.
A current project is a solo show, Lawrence of Arabia and ME (where ME stands for the Middle East) that he will perform at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August.
“The show’s tremendous fun, combining modern Middle East history and comedy, and which I hope will help dispel some misconceptions about the region and its peoples,” he said. “Who knows, after Edinburgh, I'd love to take it on the road to the UAE and beyond.”
Dr Gearon is also working on a memoir, Lawrence of Arabia: A Love Story, that will describe his own love affair with the Middle East. Beyond that, he hopes to write a popular book about Arabic.
“A lot of the audiences I talk to now on for instance cruise ships or general audiences find it absolutely fascinating,” he said. “The one thing I have to get over is that Arabic is not as difficult as people say. Anybody can learn Arabic, I firmly believe that, to whatever level.
“Whether you want to read it or not, whether you want to have conversations, it’s not impossible. There are 400 million people who grew up learning this language. I think spreading a deeper understanding of the language and the people is kind of a lifelong goal for me.”
