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Part I![]()
1 Great Britain’s covert political action in the Middle East during and after World War II
On October 19, 1944, General Charles de Gaulle, head of the French Provisional Government, sent Georges Bidault, his Foreign Minister, a note together with several secret British and Syrian documents obtained by the French intelligence services in Beirut and Damascus. The documents revealed that British agents were secretly scheming to evict France from the Levant and incorporate its mandated territories of Syria and Lebanon into Great Britain’s sphere of influence. The documents related to attempts by General Edward Spears, the British Minister in Syria and Lebanon, to pressure Shukri al-Quwatli, the Syrian President, into upholding secret pledges he had made two years earlier to integrate Syria into a Hashemite Greater Syria under Britain’s hegemony.1 This plot had been hatched in August, just before the Arab Preparatory Conference was due to convene in Alexandria. Authorized by Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State resident in the Middle East, it was implemented by Brigadier Iltyd Clayton, his adviser on Arab affairs and head of the Political Intelligence Centre Middle East (PICME) in Cairo, who traveled to Beirut to put it into effect. Their scheme was in sharp contrast to negotiations taking place in London between Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, and René Massigli, the Commissioner for Foreign Affairs on the French Committee, in which Eden reiterated that his government had no ambitions over Syria and Lebanon and reaffirmed Britain’s recognition of France’s right to conclude treaties with the two Levant states, similar to its own treaty with Iraq. During the negotiations, Massigli was informed that General Spears, France’s bitter opponent, would be ending his term in December that year.2
De Gaulle viewed the British and Syrian documents as confirmation of allegations he had been making since July 1941 – when British and Free French forces had taken Syria and Lebanon from Vichy – of Britain’s duplicity towards France in the Levant despite his agreement with Oliver Lyttelton, the Minister of State in Cairo at the time. Although Winston Churchill and Eden acknowledged Free France’s predominance in the Levant, de Gaulle believed that the British leaders and their representatives in the Middle East were exploiting France’s weakness after its defeat in June 1940 to realize their old ambitions of forcing it out of the Levant and dominating the entire Middle East. He was convinced that General Spears, who was leading the campaign to evict France from Syria and Lebanon, had received the tacit approval of his mentor and friend, Churchill himself. Churchill’s ultimatum on May 30, 1945, at the height of the Syrian crisis, and his secret instructions to General Sir Bernard Paget, Commander of the Allied Forces in the Middle East – obtained by the French intelligence services (docs.97-9) – convinced de Gaulle that Churchill was seeking not only to oust France from the Levant, but also to humiliate him personally and force him to resign as head of the French provisional government.3 Paradoxically, less than two months later, Churchill was defeated by the Labour Party in the general election, while de Gaulle won the French general election in October, only to resign three months later.
Despite de Gaulle’s allegations, Bidault made a clear distinction between the policies applied from London by Eden, and later on by Ernest Bevin, and that of the British establishment in the Middle East. He argued that securing Britain’s support for the restoration of France’s status in Europe was crucial and therefore it should refrain from a confrontation in the Middle East. But he too was unwilling to relinquish France’s traditional position there, deeming it essential for its control of North Africa. He sought an Anglo-French agreement to ensure his country’s standing in the Levant, especially in Lebanon. But his efforts were only partly successful, as British agents continued and even intensified their subversive activities against France in the Middle East and North Africa. While serving as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister in the Fourth Republic in the second half of the 1940s, Bidault fought Britain with its own weapon – covert action.4
The decade of World War II and the early years of the Cold War (1939-1949) was a formative period for the Middle East. The struggle by local nationalist movements for independence from Britain and France intensified as the two colonial Powers sought to retain their standing. Britain initially faced a military threat from the Axis Powers, followed by Soviet attempts to penetrate the region, as well as an economic challenge from the United States. Syria and Lebanon finally secured independence from France; Egypt resumed its long struggle to force Britain to abide by pledges made during the war to revise the 1936 treaty, withdraw its forces and unite Egypt with Sudan; and Saudi Arabia solidified its economic and strategic ties with the United States. The inter-Arab system took shape and in March 1945 the Arab League was formed. But the Arab world was deeply divided over Iraq’s and Transjordan’s attempts to integrate Syria in a Greater Syria and an Iraqi-led Hashemite confederation. The state of Israel was established following a bitter struggle by the Zionist movement that brought an end to the British Mandate in Palestine, and after the ensuing war against the Palestinians and the Arab states. World War II also hastened social and economic change, as a new generation of radical Arab nationalists seeking social and political reforms began to take over, initially in Syria, where army officers deposed the old nationalist elites in several coups in 1949, and then in Egypt in 1952.
It is therefore understandable why this period in the history of the modern Middle East is one of the most studied. Yet the full facts on Britain’s policy in the region are lacking and major issues remain controversial. Britain’s part in evicting France from Syria and Lebanon has only recently been elucidated with the discovery of secret Syrian and British documents in French archives, but its role in the formation of the Arab League, the Greater Syria and Fertile Crescent schemes and the 1948 war in Palestine remains unresolved. Scholars studying Britain’s retreat from the Middle East continue to debate the causes of its rapid decline despite emerging from the war as the dominant power in the region. Various explanations have been put forward, including Britain’s post-war economic weakness, the Labour government’s decolonization policy, the intense opposition of local nationalist movements, the Soviet strategic challenge and the failure of its policy in Palestine. Historians describe Britain’s Middle East policy in those years as suffering from a lack of coherency and consistency, exacerbated by disagreement between the Labour government and its Chiefs of Staff (COS) against the backdrop of the escalating Cold War. Although these factors did play a part, the premise of this study is that British vacillation was also the result of a “parallel policy” when, alongside Whitehall’s Middle East policy applied from London, a more secretive “regional” policy was implemented in the field by a small but influential group of British Arabists serving as diplomats, intelligence agents and military officers, who used controversial methods to retain their country’s hegemony in the Middle East. But while Whitehall policy is well documented, there are few traces in the archives of this region-based secretive and controversial strategy. In this regard it is worth quoting Jon Kimche, a British journalist and one of the more critical and shrewd observers of Britain’s Arab Middle East policy:
The decisive feature of these years was the existence of this close cooperation, this “Club” of the British Middle East: it embraced officials at the Foreign Office, the Middle East embassies and legations and most of their staff, the Palestine Government, the oil companies and especially ex-officials and ex-officers who had served in the Middle East from Lawrence onward; they, with a select list of travelers, explorers, writers and journalists, constituted “The Club.” It was “The Club” that created the political and press climate in the Middle East and in London; it fathered, formed and sponsored British policy in the Middle East. And in the years that followed the war, from 1945 until 1949, it was “The Club” that prepared the ground for a series of unexampled and humiliating defeats for British policy and the frustration of many sincere hopes in British leadership. The members of “The Club” were, in the event, as blinkered as any monk of the Middle Ages, who sought to blot out ancient truths with blobs of ink and prejudice.5
Kimche was not alone in making such claims concerning the role of the “experts” or “Arabists” – the “people in the field” – in shaping Britain’s Middle East policy during and after World War II. William Roger Louis, in his seminal study of Britain’s Middle East policy under the Labour government, described Brigadier Iltyd Clayton, a prominent member of “The Club,” as the “eminence grise of British imperialism in the Middle East.”6 Elie Kedourie, who examined the influence wielded by the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) and its director, Arnold Toynbee, on Britain’s pan-Arab policy during and after the war, pointed out the close ties between the Institute in London and its branch in Cairo headed by Clayton.7 The role of General Spears, another notorious member of “The Club,” in ousting France from Syria and Lebanon and exacerbating the tension between Churchill and de Gaulle in the Levant has been examined in numerous studies.8
An analysis of the role of the “agents in the field,” especially Arabist intelligence officers, in shaping Britain’s Middle East policy in the two world wars reveals that while there is extensive research on the role of individuals such as T.E. Lawrence, Mark Sykes, Gertrude Bell and Gilbert Clayton, as well as the Arab Bureau during and after World War I, few studies explore the role of intelligence officers and secret services on its policy there during and after World War II. Yet at this time, intelligence agents and organizations and a small group of British Arabists turned the Middle East into a playground for British covert operations using intelligence, especially covert political action (CPA) and clandestine diplomacy (CD), to conduct regional-based policy, often without London’s knowledge or sanction. In fact, they followed their World War I and inter-war predecessors, as Priya Satia observed: “The Middle East was now a land in which British diplomats, technocrats, administrators and academics were the ubiquitous minions of covert empire; they could do as they pleased.”9 But unlike their colorful World War I colleagues, they acted mainly in the shadows and hence their role is less known. Moreover, after the failure of their policy in 1948, they became involved in a large scale cover-up and the writing of an alternative historiography.10
The term “Arabists” used in this work is more limited than Kimche’s definition of “The Club,” and refers to a smaller group of British officials who were using covert intelligence methods. Some were veterans of World War I, who now held high-ranking positions in the British administration, the military and intelligence systems. Others had fought with Lawrence in the Arab Revolt and returned to active duty when the new war broke out. There were intelligence officers, such as Brigadier Iltyd Clayton, Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Stirling and Dame Freya Stark; diplomats, such as Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, the Ambassador in Iraq, Sir Alec Kirkbride, the Minister in Amman and Sir Walter Smart, the Oriental Secretary in the British Embassy in Cairo; and military officers such as Brigadier John Bagot Glubb. Although they cannot be regarded as Arabists, General Spears and Miles Lampson (later Lord Killearn), Ambassador to Egypt, are included in this group. Another category comprised retired officials, such as Colonel Stewart Newcombe and Sir Ronald Storrs, the former governor of Jerusalem, who continued to be active in the Arabist lobby in London. Only with the discovery of the British and Syrian documents have their methods of influencing policy makers in London and Cairo become apparent.11
Leslie McLoughlin, a former instructor in the Foreign Office’s Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS), or the “spy school,” as it was better known in Lebanon – one of whose founders was Brigadier Clayton – defines “Arabist” as “anyone with the knowledge of Arabic which is relevant to his or her principal activities and, which, to a greater or lesser extent, defines the individual’s identity.”12 McLoughlin’s definition, based on language knowledge, is somewhat limited for our purposes. General Spears, for example, had no command of Arabic language or culture, yet his goals and the methods he used to attain them made him a leading member of the Arabist circles. Furthermore, understanding language and culture did not necessarily imply, as McLoughlin claims, love and respect for that particular culture. Arab leaders who were in touch with British Arabists often complained of their rude and arrogant behavior (doc.340). In this regard, it is worth quoting Kaplan’s observation:
Whatever the individual traits of the British Arabists, they all operated against a backdrop of imperialism. It was the advantages of power and privilege that imperialism offered that allowed these British men and women to work out their personalities and fantasies upon such an exotic stage. Their myriad eccentricities notwithstanding ... [they] were ... British government agents, and thus it was the mechanics of imperial power that primarily concerned them.13
In the 1940s, most of the Arabists, especially the veterans of World War I, lived in the past, in the heyday of British imperialism in the Middle East, overlooking the radical social and political changes that had taken place in the quarter century since then, the rising nationalism and the growing challenge from the two new Great Powers. With an imperial cast of mind, they were committed to ensuring the survival of the British Empire in the region, either formally or informally. Churchill’s love for and commitment to the idea of the British Empire served as justification for them to commit unacceptable and morally questionable acts against any forces they considered a threat to the Empire, whether friend or foe. This was particularly true of General Spears, Churchill’s admirer, who wholeheartedly adopted the Arabists’ agenda of the importance of the Middle East for Britain as a Great Power. In this regard, their wartime efforts to safeguard the Empire reinforced Britain’s reluctant post-war decolonization of the Middle East. They could not come to terms with the painful reality that, despite its remarkable victory against the Axis Powers, post-war Britain was no longer a Great Power, but a weak, economically exhausted, declining empire, unable to compete with the United States and the Soviet Union. They regarded their country’s control of the Middle East as vital for its strategic interests, for maintaining the Empire, and for post-war economic recovery, and were determined to prevent it from slipping away from Britain’s grip. Neither the hostility of the Arab nationalists, the repugnance of the international community, led by the United States, to British imperialism, nor the Labour government’s declared decolonization, swayed them from their imperial designs. Quite the opposite – they intended, as the British and Syrian documents attest, to exploit the defeats of France and Italy, Britain’s two rival colonial Powers, in order to expand their country’s holdings to include the French and Italian territories in Syria and Lebanon as well as in Libya and French North Africa (docs.376, 384, 387). They were influential in shaping Britain’s post-war Middle East policy and enjoyed the backing of the strong military establishment, intelligence organizations, business circles in the City of London and the influential Chatham House. The members of this lobby, who voiced their views in The Times and The Economist, came from military and civilian circles, each with their own interests, but all tried to pressure the government and mobilize public opinion to ensure that Britain would continue to hold the Middle...
