A Peace to End all Peace (59 page)

General Ironside eyed the Persian Cossacks as a vehicle for the accomplishment of his program. The Persian element in it was large and the Russian group was small: 6,000 Persian soldiers and 237 Persian officers, versus 56 Russian officers and 66 noncommissioned officers.
¹²
The Russian commander, Starosselski, was in a vulnerable position: after scoring initial successes against the Persian Socialist Republic, he had failed dismally.

Ironside promptly arranged to have Starosselski dismissed; later he also arranged for Starosselski’s replacement to be sent away. In their place, Ironside put Reza Khan, a tough, bullet-headed Persian colonel whom Ironside later described as “the most manly Persian” he had met.
¹³

Aware of War Office plans to complete the evacuation of British forces from Persia in 1921, Ironside went about arranging for Reza Khan to rule the country as Britain departed. On 12 February 1921 Ironside told Reza Khan that the remaining British forces would not oppose him if he carried out a
coup d’état
, so long as he would agree—as he did—not to depose the British-subsidized monarch, Ahmed Shah.
^*

On 15 February Ironside met with the Shah but failed to persuade him to appoint Reza Khan to a position of power; so, on 21 February, Reza Khan marched into Teheran at the head of 3,000 Cossacks and seized power, installing himself as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. “So far so good,” Ironside commented when he heard the news. “I fancy that all the people think that I engineered the coup d’état. I suppose I did, strictly speaking.”
¹⁴

In fact, Ironside’s role in these events was quite unknown, and remained unknown until discovered and revealed by an American scholar more than half a century later.
¹⁵
In London—where officials were unaware of Ironside’s involvement—the course of events in Persia was greeted first with puzzlement and then with dismay. On 26 February 1921, only five days after achieving power, the new government in Teheran formally repudiated the Anglo-Persian Agreement. The same day it directed the Persian diplomatic representative in Moscow to sign a treaty (its first treaty since taking office) with Soviet Russia. The twin events of 26 February marked a revolution in Persia’s position, as the country turned from British protection against Russia to Russian protection against Britain. These events occurred just as Russia also signed a treaty with Moslem Afghanistan, and only a month before the final conclusion of Russia’s treaty with Kemalist Turkey. In Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan—the three crucial countries that Britain had been disputing in the Great Game with Russia for more than a century—the new rulers had each negotiated a treaty with Moscow as his first move in foreign policy. Moreover, Kemalist Turkey’s first treaty with an Islamic nation was concluded with Afghanistan; it was negotiated in Moscow with Russia’s encouragement. All of Moscow’s new Islamic protégés were joining hands under Russia’s aegis against Britain. By their terms, the treaties were directed against imperialism, and their language left little doubt that it was British imperialism that they meant. Again, British officials were left with a sense that the many revolts against Britain in the East were linked together.

Lord Curzon, who in 1918 had said that “the great power from whom we have most to fear in future is France,” claimed in 1920 that “the Russian menace in the East is incomparably greater than anything else that has happened in my time to the British Empire.”
¹⁶
It was not that Russia was particularly powerful; war, revolution, and civil war had taken too great a toll for that to be true. Rather it was that the Bolsheviks were seen to be inspiring dangerous forces everywhere in the East. With Russian encouragement, Djemal Pasha, Enver’s colleague in the Young Turk government, went out to Afghanistan in 1920 to serve as a military adviser; and his mission illuminated what the British government most feared. The C.U.P., the continued influence of Germany even in defeat, pan-Islam, Bolshevism, Russia—all had come together and were poised to swoop down upon the British Empire at its greatest points of vulnerability.

Thus the Soviets were supporting Persian nationalism against Britain. They were doing so because Kamenev believed that bringing pressure to bear on the British position in Persia might help rebel groups in neighboring Iraq to resist British rule in that country. Meanwhile Soviet-supported Turkish nationalism, led by Kemal and inspired (the British believed) by the Young Turkey movement, threatened to tear up the peace treaty that Lloyd George had imposed upon the Ottoman Empire. At the time Arab rioters in Egypt and Palestine had taken to the streets, and Ibn Saud in Arabia and Feisal in Syria had taken to the field with their armies, to contest the dispositions that Britain had made of their destinies. For Britain—flat on her back economically, and in no position to cope with foreign disturbances—the Middle Eastern troubles were overwhelming, and looked as though they had been purposefully incited by a dedicated enemy: Soviet Russia.

I

It was true that the Soviets encouraged Persian nationalism, supported Turkish nationalism, and sought to aid rebellion in Iraq; but the Russians had not inspired—and did not direct—any of these movements. The growing British conviction that Bolshevik Russia was involved in a far-reaching international conspiracy that had
incited
rebellion throughout the Middle East was a delusion. What had occurred was a series of uncoordinated uprisings, many of them spontaneous, that were rooted in individual, local circumstances. Although the Soviets tried to make use of these local movements, neither Bolshevism nor Bolsheviks played any significant role in them. Yet there was an edge of truth to the British perception that Britain had moved into conflict with the new Russian state and that the Bolsheviks—hoping to exploit local opposition to British rule—viewed the Middle East as a theater of operations in that conflict.

Among British and other Allied officials, it had been a common belief that aiding the German war effort was not a mere incidental effect of the Bolshevik
coup d’état
, but its driving purpose. The Germans, urged on by Alexander Helphand, had financed the Bolsheviks and had sent Lenin back to lead them. It may have been a matter of indifference to Lenin whether the achievement of his program helped or harmed either of the contending capitalist alliances; but to many Allied officials at the time, the evidence of German financial involvement demonstrated that helping Germany was Lenin’s desire and his intention. Such officials therefore viewed Bolsheviks as enemy agents, and regarded the Bolsheviks’ communist theories as mere camouflage, or propaganda, or as an irrelevance. In turn, this view of Bolshevism fitted in with suspicions that had been formed and harbored by British officials, especially in the Middle East, since long before the war—suspicions that placed German-inspired Bolshevism in the context of an older conspiracy theory: a pro-German international Jewish plot.

Confirmation that Jews were pro-German seemed to be provided by events in the Ottoman Empire in the early part of the twentieth century. As seen earlier (see pages 41–3), Gerald FitzMaurice had reported to his government that the Young Turks were tools in Jewish hands; and though FitzMaurice’s report, as historians now know, was false, it was believed at the time to be true. When the C.U.P., once in power, moved the Ottoman Empire into the German orbit, its policy was seen as an example of the effectiveness of the Jewish alliance with Germany.

The Middle Eastern old hands who subscribed to this view—men like Wingate and Clayton—believed that Islam was a weapon that could be wielded at will by the Sultan-Caliph of Constantinople. When the supposedly Jewish Young Turks took control of the Sublime Porte, British officialdom therefore assumed that Islam, as well as the Ottoman Empire and the pan-Turkish movement, had passed into the hands of the German-Jewish combine.

It was in this context that the second Russian Revolution was seen by British officials as the latest manifestation of a bigger conspiracy. Jews were prominent among the Bolshevik leaders; so the Bolshevik seizure of power was viewed by many within the British government as not merely German-inspired but as Jewish-directed.

When the uprisings in the Middle East after the war occurred, it was natural for British officials to explain that they formed part of a sinister design woven by the long-time conspirators. Bolshevism and international finance, pan-Arabs and pan-Turks, Islam and Russia were pictured by British Intelligence as agents of international Jewry and Prussian Germany, the managing partners of the great conspiracy. In the mind of British officialdom, bitter enemies such as Enver and Kemal were playing on the same side; and so, they believed, were Arabs and Jews.

British officials of course were aware that significant numbers of Palestinian Arab Moslems, reacting against Zionist colonization, expressed violent anti-Jewish feelings; but this observation did not necessarily negate their view that Islam was controlled by Jewry. Islam, in the sense that Britons feared it, was the pull and power of the Caliph, whom they viewed as a pawn moved by Britain’s adversaries—a view that, oddly, they continued to hold even after the Sultan-Caliph became their virtual prisoner in Constantinople. As they saw it, it was evident that Arabs could not govern themselves; so that the question came down to whether the Arabic-speaking Middle East should be governed by Germans and Jews, acting through the agency of Turks, or whether it should be governed by Britain. The appeal of British government, they felt, was that it was decent and honest; the appeal of Britain’s adversaries was that Turkish government was Moslem government. Islam was thus being used, as was Bolshevism, and as were Turks and Russians, by a cabal of Jewish financiers and Prussian generals to the detriment of Britain.

While in the clear light of history this conspiracy theory seems absurd to the point of lunacy, it was believed either in whole or in part by large numbers of otherwise sane, well-balanced, and reasonably well-informed British officials. Moreover, it could be supported by one actual piece of evidence: the career of Alexander Helphand. Helphand
was
a Jew who conspired to help Germany and to destroy the Russian Empire. He
was
closely associated with the Young Turk regime in Constantinople. He
did
play a significant role in selecting Lenin and in sending him into Russia to foment a Bolshevik revolt with a view to helping Germany win the war. He
did
continue to weave his conspiratorial webs after the war. He was what Wingate and Clayton believed a Jew to be: rich, subversive, and pro-German.

Against this background, the trend of British Intelligence assessments in the immediate postwar years appears less irrational than would otherwise be the case. On 5 May 1919, only half a year after the armistices had brought hostilities in the First World War to an end, a British intelligence agent filed a report with the Arab Bureau based on extensive conversations with Young Turk leaders who had found safety in Switzerland. According to the Arab Bureau’s intelligence operative, the Allied victory had not brought enemy anti-British agitation to an end. On the contrary, the work of the wartime Pan-Islamic Propaganda Bureau in Berlin was being continued in India, Egypt, Turkey, Persia, and elsewhere with the goal of inciting “The Revolt of Islam.” “The Eastern enemies of Great Britain have united with avowed object of overthrowing British rule in the E
AST
,” he reported. “They can rely upon the support of Germany and of the Russian Bolsheviks…”
¹
The intermediary between the Middle Eastern rebels and the Bolsheviks, the report continued, was Alexander Helphand.

The eruption of violence in Mesopotamia the following year elicited other intelligence reports along similar lines, notably from Major N. N. E. Bray, a special intelligence officer attached to the Political Department of the India Office. It was Bray whose chart of the alleged conspiracy was circulated to the Cabinet at the end of the summer of 1920 (see page 453). Bray argued that in Mesopotamia, “both the Nationalist and Pan-Islamist movements derive their inspiration from Berlin—through Switzerland and Moscow. The situation is further complicated with Italian, French and Bolshevist intrigues.”
²

Bray urged the government to track down the secret “comparatively small central organization” at the center of the far-reaching international conspiracy.
³
Since it did not exist, it was never found. Nonetheless the preponderant opinion within the government, at least for a time, was that the rebellions breaking out in Britain’s Middle Eastern domains were the result of coordinated hostile forces from outside. Within the Foreign Office there were several officials who argued that the source of the various Middle Eastern troubles was to be located within the Middle Eastern countries themselves; but these officials represented a minority point of view.

In fact there was an outside force linked to every one of the outbreaks of violence in the Middle East, but it was the one force whose presence remained invisible to British officialdom. It was Britain herself. In a region of the globe whose inhabitants were known especially to dislike foreigners, and in a predominantly Moslem world which could abide being ruled by almost anybody except non-Moslems, a foreign Christian country ought to have expected to encounter hostility when it attempted to impose its own rule. The shadows that accompanied the British rulers wherever they went in the Middle East were in fact their own.

What Britain faced in the Middle East was a long and perhaps endless series of individual and often spontaneous local rebellions against her authority. The rebellions were not directed
by
foreigners; they were directed
against
foreigners. Perhaps if the British Empire had maintained its million-man army of occupation in the Middle East, the region’s inhabitants might have resigned themselves to the inevitability of British rule and to the uselessness of attempting to defy it; but once Britain had demobilized her army, the string of revolts in the Middle East became predictable. The agents of British policy in the Middle East, however, continued to blame their troubles—as Kitchener and his colleagues had blamed all their Middle Eastern failures since 1908—on the supposedly Jewish-controlled, German-influenced Young Turk leadership and its international ramifications, chief among which were Islam and now Bolshevism in a line that ran from Enver through Alexander Helphand to Lenin.

II

A sensationalist exposé was published in London for the first time in 1920 that purported to disclose the origins of this worldwide conspiracy. Entitled
The Jewish Peril
, the book was an English translation of the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
. A French translation was published in Paris at the same time. The
Protocols
purported to be a record of meetings held by Jews and Freemasons at the end of the nineteenth century in which they plotted to overthrow capitalism and Christianity and to establish a world state under their joint rule.

The
Protocols
had originally appeared in Russia, in a newspaper in 1903 and in book form in 1905, and had allegedly been discovered by Sergei Nilus, a Czarist official. They attracted little attention until the Russian revolutions of 1917, when it was widely remarked that many of the Bolshevik leaders were Jews and that communist doctrine bore a certain resemblance to that described in the
Protocols
. Therefore there were those in London and Paris in 1920 who accepted Nilus’s revelations as genuine. As such, the
Protocols
explained—among other things—the mysterious revolts against Britain everywhere in the East.

It was not until the summer of 1921—a year after they appeared in London and Paris—that the
Protocols
were proven to be a forgery by Philip Graves, Constantinople correspondent of
The Times
, who revealed that they had been concocted by the Czarist secret police. The police had not even bothered to compose the forged documents themselves; they had plagiarized them, as Graves was informed by a White Russian refugee named Michael Raslovleff (whose name was not revealed until 1978). Raslovleff, who parted with the information only because of a “very urgent need of money,” showed Graves that whole sections of the
Protocols
were paraphrased from a satire on Napoleon III written by a French lawyer and published in Geneva (1864) and Brussels (1865).
⁴
It was an obscure work, of which few copies were still in existence; Raslovleff showed Graves the copy he had bought from a former Russian secret police official, and
The Times
in London found a copy in the British Museum. Raslovleff said that if the work had not been so rare, somebody would have recognized the
Protocols
as a plagiarism immediately upon their publication. (Subsequently it has been learned that passages in the
Protocols
were plagiarized from other books as well, including a fantasy novel published at about the same time as the French satire.)

III

For the important body of British opinion represented by
The Times
, those responsible for Britain’s setbacks in the Middle East were not foreign conspirators but British officials—British Arabophiles chief among them. Particularly alarmed by the uprisings in Iraq, a special Middle Eastern correspondent of
The Times
filed a dispatch, published on 20 September 1920, in which he wrote that “My conviction, based on careful study, is that the Arab Bureau at Cairo, the G.H.Q. at Cairo, and our Occupied Enemy Territories Administrations in Palestine and last year in Syria, bear a heavy load of responsibility for the present waste of British lives and money in Mesopotamia.” He charged that “British Pan-Arab propaganda is one of the most serious existing dangers to the world’s peace.” Putting aside the few British officials who genuinely believed in Arab independence, he denounced the “extremely dangerous officials who have no great belief in the Arabs’ own capacity for government, but an intense belief in our Imperial Mission” to run Arab affairs behind a façade of nominal Arab independence. He did not mention Wingate, Clayton, or Hogarth by name, but the description fitted them; and they, in his account, and not the Bolsheviks, were the cause of the disorders throughout the Middle East.

In a leading article the next day,
The Times
denounced the Arab Bureau’s long-held belief in an Arab confederation of the Middle East presided over by King Hussein: “…the delusive dream of a huge Arabian Federation should no longer be entertained in any official quarter.” A year later, on 27 September 1921,
The Times
rejected the Arab Bureau’s old notion of a special British mission in the Moslem world. Discerning a common theme in the many Moslem Middle Eastern revolts against European Christian rule,
The Times
was of the opinion that “The problem is far too big for any one European nation to cope with alone…”