Enemy on the Euphrates Read online

  Sykes’s chief, O’Conor, a tall, languid Irish landowner and Britain’s ambassador in Istanbul (which the British persisted in calling Constantinople) since 1898, was rather fond of his earnest young attaché, a fellow Catholic, who seemed happy to relieve him of some of the more tedious diplomatic work. Moreover, in those years before the First World War, O’Conor and Sykes shared a certain affection for the old Ottoman Empire. This once-great multiethnic and multireligious super-state, with a population of 21 million (a third of whom were Arabs) distributed over thirty-three vilayets and stretching from the Balkans to the frontier with Persia, had long since become critically weakened by a combination of war, rebellion, debt and the economic penetration of European capitalism. It was debt in particular that was the Achilles heel of the Ottoman state. Failure to repay immense loans from European banks had resulted in the creation of a European-controlled Ottoman Public Debt Administration which syphoned off the empire’s taxes and customs duties. Britain was part of that organisation, but since the 1850s had also seen the Ottomans as a useful bulwark against tsarist Russia’s attempts to expand south and gain access to the Mediterranean. So in 1905, this affection for Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s ramshackle empire on the part of O’Conor and Sykes was also a reflection of Britain’s longstanding foreign policy.

  When Sykes made his telephone call to Sir Nicholas, the ambassador was ensconced aboard his yacht anchored in the Golden Horn, his preferred place of residence. However, in due course he received Sykes’s message and shortly afterwards asked the attaché to join him for dinner. After the meal Sykes was invited to outline the contents of the small notebook he had obtained from the German engineer and which he had meanwhile written up as a detailed memorandum. The ambassador was impressed and the following day, 15 October 1905, he dispatched Sykes’s document to the Foreign Office, with a covering note of his own and marked ‘SECRET’.1

  Ten days later, Mr Richard P. Maxwell, senior clerk in the Commercial Department of the Foreign Office, selected a dossier from the pile upon his desk and read the following:

  SECRET. From H.M. Ambassador in Constantinople. ‘Report on the Petroliferous Districts of the Vilayets of Baghdad, Mosul and Bitlis; prepared by Sir Mark Sykes, Hon. Attaché.

  The following accounts of the various Petroleum springs and asphalt deposits have been compiled from a report made to the Imperial Ottoman Government by an Engineer dispatched to the above mentioned Vilayets in 1901. The large map shows the distribution of the springs and deposits, the red Roman Numerals corresponding with the numbers scheduled in the following order. Where obtainable a large scale sketch has been appended to the verbal description showing the nature of the locality described.2

  Maxwell ploughed on,

  No. I, Bohtan. 30 Kilometres up the Bohtan river … No. II Sairt … No. III Zakho … No. VI Baba Gurgur … The Petroleum Springs of Baba Gurgur are among the richest and most workable in the Vilayet of Mosul. They are situated in the vicinity of Kirkuk, being about 6 miles from the town at the foot of the Shuan Hills. They cover an area of about half a hectare and owing to the great heat are constantly burning, the petroleum in this zone seems limited to an area of 25 hectares, but still the deposits [are] of great promise.3

  There followed descriptions of a further nine petroleum deposits, at the end of which the author had made the suggestion that they ‘could be worked by means of pipelines leading from the springs to the sea’.

  However, in a rather complacent letter to the ambassador of 25 October also classified ‘SECRET’, Maxwell merely commented that printing the report with or without the maps … ‘was hardly worthwhile, although it might be shown to D’Arcy if he would call to see it’. (William Knox D’Arcy’s company was currently exploring for oil in southern Persia.) Finally, the Foreign Office official added that Sykes ‘might be thanked for the trouble he has taken’.4

  In Istanbul Sir Nicholas must have read the reply with some irritation. This was not the first occasion on which the embassy had informed the Foreign Office about the existence of potentially rich oil deposits in northern Iraq. A year earlier, with rumours circulating that the sultan had recently awarded an oil concession to the German company planning to build the railway to Baghdad, he had sent the foreign secretary, the Marques of Lansdowne, a map of the oil-bearing districts obtained by the embassy secretary, also from German sources.

  On that occasion the foreign secretary had instructed O’Conor to pass the map on to the representative of the British D’Arcy Group who were showing interest in obtaining their own oil concession in Iraq. O’Conor had suggested to D’Arcy’s agent that the embassy might intervene with the sultan’s ministers using its diplomatic influence to expedite a favourable response. But D’Arcy’s representative had declined the offer, replying that diplomatic intervention might actually complicate his current negotiations with those same ministers. It had been a serious miscalculation: negotiations had subsequently broken down. And now the Foreign Office seemed to be losing interest in the matter altogether in spite of the fact that Sykes’s report had provided precise details of the different oil deposits which confirmed the veracity of that original map O’Conor had sent to London. There was no doubt about it: in the matter of oil concessions the Germans were stealing a march on Britain.

  Sykes must also have been frustrated by the Foreign Office’s rebuff to his intelligence-gathering efforts. But then, he knew there were those in Whitehall who regarded him as just an amateur, a ‘gentleman’ interloper among seasoned professionals. Indeed, in reality, his claim to expertise on matters pertaining to ‘the East’ was somewhat flimsy. Although Sykes had usually travelled on horseback on the eastern journeys of his youth, these had not been dangerous adventures of discovery like those of the great Victorian explorers of the Middle East, men like Sir Richard Burton, Charles Doughty or William Palgrave. He had usually been accompanied by a retinue of Turkish soldiery, guides and servants and was offered considerable hospitality at the various staging posts along his route. Between journeys Sykes had begun to study Arabic in a desultory way, tutored for a time by one of Britain’s foremost experts on both Persian and Arabic, Professor E.G. Browne of Cambridge University; but Sykes never mastered the Arabic script and what little he learned was transliterated into the Roman alphabet.5

  Although well received at the time, Sykes’s scholarly accomplishments in this area were rather meagre. They were confined to a travel book, Through Five Turkish Provinces, published in 1900, and another in 1904 entitled Dar-ul-Islam: A Record of a Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey. Sykes’s writing had a keen eye for the picaresque and exotic with flashes of real humour; but it also displayed a darker side where Sykes gave voice to his prejudices against Jews, Armenians and urban Arabs. The latter were denigrated as ‘cowardly’ as well as being ‘insolent and despicable’ and ‘vicious as far as their feeble bodies will admit’.6 Turks and Kurds, on the other hand, who from time to time massacred their wretched Armenian neighbours, Sykes regarded as ‘good, rugged fighters’. Nevertheless, in the company of his friends he was not averse to posing as an experienced orientalist, smoking a hubble-bubble and sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  So, when Ambassador O’Conor informed Sykes of the Foreign Office’s unenthusiastic response to the intelligence on potential Iraqi oil resources which he had gathered, Sykes must have been equally irritated; but he probably shrugged off the slight, his imagination already moving on to new enthusiasms – more horseback journeys to distant locations; more friendly encounters with cheerful bandoliered cut-throats; more amusing after-dinner anecdotes for his rich friends.

  Nevertheless, ten years later, with the strategic importance of oil better understood, Sykes’s attention would be drawn once again to the petroleum potential of Iraq, and by then, he himself would be occupying a far more influential position in the machinery of state. On the other hand he was never to see the day – 14 October 1927 – when the top of the number 1 well at Baba Gurgur, that ‘richest and most workable’ deposit cited in his report, blew out and the first major discovery of oil in Iraq was made.

  2

  Lieutenant Wilson’s First Mission

  One hundred and twenty miles inland and north-west from the head of the Arabian Gulf, and fifty miles upstream of the port of Basra, the great Mesopotamian rivers Tigris and Euphrates merge to form a broad navigable waterway known as the Shatt al-‘Arab. This immensely wide waterway then flows on, in a south-easterly direction, before emptying its coffee-coloured contents into the blue-green Gulf. Along its southern half the Shatt al-‘Arab forms the boundary between the Arab lands and the ancient civilisation of Persia. About halfway between Basra and the sea, on the Persian side, the Shatt al-‘Arab is joined by the River Karun which rises in Persia’s Bakhtiari mountains, thence curving southward through a broad alluvial plain before adding its turbid, reddish stream to those of the Tigris and Euphrates. Adjacent to the mouth of the Karun lies the tip of the forty-mile-long island of Abadan, separated only by a narrow waterway from the Persian mainland. In the early 1900s it was an almost featureless area of mud flats and a few date-palm gardens, occasionally subject to inundation, whose future economic and strategic importance could never have been remotely imagined by the Arab and Persian tribesmen who occasionally traversed its dreary landscape.

  About one hundred miles up the Karun lies the once small town of Ahwaz, capital of the Persian province of Arabistan (now Khuzistan), where the British maintained a strong consular presence in the years before the First World War under the watchful eye of the imperial government in India. It was to Ahwaz that Lieutenant Arnold T. Wilson of the 32nd Sikh Pioneers was ordered on 29 November 1907, accompanied by twenty Indian troopers of the 18th Bengal Lancers, ostensibly to reinforce
the guard of the Ahwaz consulate but in practice to protect the employees of the British Concession Syndicate drilling for oil in the foothills of the Zagros mountains, seventy miles to the north-east.

  Lieutenant Wilson was just twenty-three years old, one of seven children of a twice-married Rochdale clergyman. Educated at Clifton College and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he was a rather gauche and lonely young man who spent much of his leisure time avidly reading British imperial history. His greatly admired older half-brother, Edward, who had gone to South Africa to work for the British South Africa Company under the celebrated empire-builder Cecil Rhodes, was a formative influence on his political education and by his late teens Arnold had become a fervent imperialist. At Sandhurst he excelled in every field and at the end of his first year passed out First and was awarded the Kings Medal and Sword for General Proficiency and Military Engineering. Something of a prig, he didn’t make friends easily and could sometimes be unfeeling in his treatment of those he considered less able than himself. A competent horseman, he had little patience for a skittish or recalcitrant mount. One particular horse he describes to his parents as a ‘brute’ which ‘needed rough handling and a firm hand, which is more in my line than gentle handling’.1 It was a description of his attitude to rebellious independence which would later manifest itself on a grander scale.

  In 1903 Wilson had been commissioned with the 2nd Battalion of the Wiltshire Regiment and posted to Rawalpindi, a garrison town in Britain’s vast Indian Empire. However, he soon found life in a peacetime British regiment boring and chafed at what he considered his underemployment – something which did not seem to bother many of his fellow junior officers. An intelligent and ambitious individual, Wilson began to feel increasingly frustrated by the lack of opportunities to exhibit the knowledge and skills with which Sandhurst had furnished him and in December 1904 he transferred to an Indian regiment, the 32nd Sikh Pioneers, where opportunities for both promotion and adventure seemed more promising.

  Wilson also began to take an interest in army sanitation. Indeed, matters of health, general orderliness and ‘clean-living’ became something of an obsession with him. Wilson’s prescription for maintaining his own robust good health was a cold bath taken at sunrise. At the same time, his hitherto conventional Christianity was evolving into a more earnest dedication to Bible-reading. The hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ came to mean something intensely personal for this fourteen-stone, physically strong, self-confident and intensely patriotic young man. He remained, however, something of a loner. He had none of the social graces or accomplishments: he did not dance or play tennis, golf or bridge. He disliked games, although he forced himself to acquire some proficiency at football and hockey. He had little opportunity to be in the company of women and remained intensely shy of them.

  By 1907 Wilson had become interested in the political life of the Indian Empire and wrote a number of articles for various Anglo-Indian journals. He began to see his future as an officer of the Indian Political Service which administered almost every aspect of daily life throughout the subcontinent’s sprawling land mass. In September 1907 he presented himself to the Foreign Department of the government of India at Simla, where he was offered the first step on the ladder towards becoming a ‘Political’ – a six-month posting with the Intelligence Branch of the chief of staff. Only twenty-four hours after his appointment to ‘I’ Branch was confirmed, Wilson received an urgent telegram advising him that he was to be sent to south-west Persia on ‘special duties’.

  Persia was then in a state of political flux. The territories of this nominally sovereign state owed allegiance to a central government in Tehran ruled by the weak and corrupt Muzaffar ed-Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty, whose predecessor, Nasr ed-Din Shah, had compelled his reluctant harem to dress as Parisian ballet girls as part of a somewhat misconceived modernisation drive.2 Modernisation of a very different kind had arrived in 1901 when William Knox D’Arcy, an English millionaire who had made his fortune in Australian gold mines, acquired a concession from Muzaffar ed-Din Shah to search for oil in return for a down payment of £20,000, a further £20,000 in shares and 16 per cent of the net profits of any company formed to work the concession. The contract area covered half a million square miles and would last for sixty years.3

  Thereafter, reaction to the shah’s propensity for granting concessions to Europeans in return for payments which were squandered on royal extravagance led to demands for a curb on the shah’s powers and the establishment of the rule of law. In 1906, Muzaffar ed-Din was compelled to accept the setting-up of a constitutional council, the Majlis, by a revolution led by merchants, artisans and mullahs. But after his death the following year and a counter-revolution by his son Muhammad Ali Shah in 1908, the country became mired in civil war. Meanwhile, in 1907, an agreement between Britain and Russia carved Persia up into spheres of influence – for the Russians, the north including the capital, and for the British, the south, with a so-called ‘neutral zone’ in between. In practice, however, the southern parts of the neutral area, believed to contain valuable oil resources, became increasingly under the influence of the British zonal headquarters at Bushire on the Arabian Gulf.

  This was the political and social environment into which Lieutenant Wilson and his men headed on New Year’s Day 1908. Leaving Ahwaz, he and his men rode to Mamatayn, a few miles north of the town of Ram Hormuz and one of the two places where the Concession Syndicate’s Canadian drillers and their Persian labourers were hammering through layers of rock with simple percussion rigs in search of the so-far elusive oil.

  One can imagine the enthusiasm of this dedicated young soldier of the empire as he embarked on this, his first real independent mission in a land barely touched by European civilisation and largely under the control of the Bakhtiari khans, chieftains of a fiercely independent nomadic people who scorned any allegiance to Tehran. As he and his cavalry troopers rode through sweltering desert, fertile river basins and towering gorges cut through gypsum and limestone cliffs, the young lieutenant was elated by the scenery and wildlife, the unfamiliar trees and flowers and the frequent encounters with remnants of ancient civilisations. In his diary for March 1908 he notes, in particular, the ‘great beds of wild narcissus’ carpeting the hills and valleys. ‘My men, like Persians’, he records, ‘bend low to their stirrups to smell them as they ride slowly through,’ adding, ‘I can remember no time when my mind, and eyes and ears enjoyed during all my waking hours such a feast of beautiful and interesting things.’4

  Arriving at Mamatayn, one of the two places where the Concession Syndicate is drilling, in a narrow gorge smelling of hydrogen sulphide with sheer cliffs of gypsum overlaid with gravel, Wilson is welcomed into the camp by G.B. Reynolds, the manager of the company’s operations and a self-trained geologist who has previously been in the service of the Indian Public Works Department. The two men quickly become friends. Reynolds is the older man at fifty, but very active in body and mind. Like Wilson, he is accustomed to long journeys on horseback or mule; a successful autocrat in his dealing with both his Canadian roughnecks and the local Bakhtiaris – ‘a solid British oak’, as Wilson would later describe him.

  In the following months Wilson and his men patrol the rugged mountainous regions surrounding the oil company’s field of operations. The local Bakhtiari khans, whom he describes as ‘looking like stage assassins with Martini-Henry rifles and fifty or more cartridges and a knife or two’, are being paid £2,000 a year for ‘safeguarding’ the oil company’s property and plant. Wilson quickly recognises that this is little more than protection money. Nevertheless, he soon comes to like them and to envy their hardiness.

  One spring evening, while the Canadians, mistrustful of ‘dirty native food’, consume their canned European provisions and drink whisky to excess, Wilson and Reynolds share a meal of fresh local food: soup made from the bones of an old cow his cavalrymen have killed and eaten, chicken – boiled first and then grilled – stuffed with raisins, pistachio nuts and almonds and afterwards, dried figs, apricots, cherries and plums.