Blood-Dark Track (17 page)

Olga continued to behave like a long-lost friend. She organized a session of
concain
in Dakak’s honour (‘Maybe,’ my grandfather speculated, ‘she knew that I often played this card-game in Mersin’). The game was spoiled, my grandfather recorded, by Olga and Mustapha’s incessant talk of politics – tirades against the English, advocacy of the Arab movement, praise of the Germans. Turkey, they pronounced, had done well not to declare war on Germany and
not to allow itself to become the pawn of the English. It would be better still, they said, if the Turks opened the way for the Germans to come down through Turkey and Syria to the aid of the Palestinians.

Every time Joseph Dakak tried to change the subject, Olga and her husband returned to it. This state of affairs continued for the remainder of Dakak’s stay at the Modern Hotel. For twenty days, Arab nationalists – all friends of Olga, all pro-German – gathered in the evening and spoke against the English and in favour of the Mufti, who at that time was in Germany.

In his account, my grandfather did not spell out but certainly knew the essential facts of the Mufti’s situation. Amin el-Husseini received the life appointment of Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 from Ronald Storrs, the Governor of Jerusalem. If Storrs believed that the responsibilities of office would moderate el-Husseini’s political stance, he was wrong. The Mufti became the leading figure in the Palestinian anti-Zionist movement and was instrumental in the Arab rebellion of 1936. In 1937, facing arrest and imprisonment, he escaped to Beirut, where he continued his political activities. In 1939, he relocated to Iraq and set up a shadow Palestinian government in Baghdad. Then, in May 1941, after participating in the failed uprising against the British in Iraq, the Mufti was forced to go on the run to Teheran. In September 1941, after British and Soviet troops entered Iran and installed Mohammed Reza as Shah, the Mufti disappeared yet again, by now with a bounty of £25,000 on his head. Refused entry into Turkey, he somehow resurfaced in Italy in October 1941. The following month he was in Berlin, where he quickly assumed responsibility for notoriously virulent propaganda broadcasts to the Middle East.

At a certain point in his testimony, my grandfather suddenly veered to the subject of oranges: it was his habit, he said, always to keep a bowl of these by his bedside at the Modern Hotel. One night, he discarded an orange that had a strange and unpleasant taste. He tried a second orange but it, too, was inedible. Three more oranges were sampled and they all had the same foul taste. That night, Dakak fell violently ill. Suffering from severe stomach pain,
diarrhoea and wind, his heart kicking in his chest, he vomited all night. By morning he was exhausted, and he spent the whole day in bed. The following day his stomach ache persisted and he asked Mustapha Husseini to take him to a doctor. Husseini took him to a Dr Dajani, whose surgery was only a hundred metres away. ‘Dr Dajani speaks German very well,’ Husseini said as he escorted my grandfather to the doctor. ‘He studied in Germany.’ It was Dr Dajani’s opinion that Dakak had caught a cold and he prescribed pills for stomach ache. ‘Unfortunately,’ my grandfather wrote, ‘not yet understanding the cause of my problems, I didn’t mention the oranges to the doctor. And yet it certainly was my first poisoning.’

My grandfather explained this dramatic statement by relating the following incident. One evening, Olga was playing cards with some Greek soldiers who had checked into the Modern Hotel. She called Dakak over to her table. ‘Have you heard the latest?’ she said. ‘Turkey has entered the war.’ ‘I hope that isn’t true,’ a Greek colonel said anxiously. ‘It’ll mean an end to the food parcels I send from Istanbul to my parents in Greece. They’ll starve to death.’ Dakak didn’t get excited. ‘Let’s wait for the official news tomorrow,’ he said; and sure enough, the next day saw no report of any Turkish declaration of war. The whole episode, my grandfather asserted, had been Olga’s attempt to trick him into revealing (by his reaction to the bogus news) whether Turkey would enter the war – and, if so, on whose side.

It was here that my aunt Amy’s first chunk of translation came to an end, and here, too, that I realized that I was lost – lost in the intricate, cryptic place into which the testimony had dropped me, a zone in which Arab conspirators, Greek soldiers, Turkish secret policemen, Levantine businessmen, British consular officials and German sympathizers loomed and drifted. What was the connection between the events in Mersin (dealings with the British consulate; conversations with the chief of the secret police; an attempted extortion) and Jerusalem (poisonous oranges; Palestinian intrigues)? What linked Olga Catton at the Toros Hotel to Olga Husseini at the Modern Hotel? And what was the significance of the peripheral figures – pro-German Dr Saliba, the inquisitive
stranger on the Jerusalem train, German-speaking Dr Dajani, cousin Alida? Were we to understand that Alida’s son Rico – who had, after all, advised my grandfather to stay at the Modern Hotel – was somehow in collusion with Olga Husseini’s crowd? And with whom was that crowd in cahoots? I assumed that, as I continued to read the testimony, express answers to these questions would be forthcoming. But they weren’t. It was as if my grandfather never succeeded in gaining a clear perspective on the blurred circumstances leading up to his imprisonment, and that, like a moth that has flown into treacle, he remained forever stuck in the opaque, viscous events he described. Certainly, he never satisfactorily answered the unspoken, anguished questions his story raised: What was behind my downfall? What did I do to deserve this?

I
t was my mother who brought up the name Wright. Mr Wright, she said, had been the British consul in Mersin during the war, and occasionally Mamie Dakad had fondly mentioned that this monsieur had assisted her in the matter of her interned husband. ‘Mr Wright was a young man at the time,’ my mother said. ‘You never know, he might still be alive.’

So in February 1996 – only a few days, incidentally, after a massive explosion in the London Docklands had brought the seventeen-month-old IRA ceasefire to an abrupt and fatal end – I consulted the
Diplomatic and Consular Year Book
of 1943. I saw that D.A.H. Wright, Vice-Consul in Trebizond, assumed duty as Vice-Consul at Mersin on 5 May 1943, in succession to Norman Mayers.

I took a look at the post-war Foreign Office Lists. Wright served as acting consul in Mersin from 1943 to 1945 and afterwards went on to a distinguished diplomatic career, serving as ambassador in Addis Ababa and Tehran. Could it be that he was still alive? I turned to
Who’s Who 1996
. There he was: Sir Denis Arthur Hepworth Wright (born 1911), an Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and the author of two books on Anglo-Persian relations. I immediately wrote to him. Three days later, a reply arrived inviting me to visit him; and the following weekend, on 17 February 1996, I drove up to Haddenham, Buckinghamshire.

Haddenham, I discovered, was a large village swollen by modern estates, but its old centre was an extraordinarily idyllic spot where a church with a tower overlooked a pond inhabited by white ducks and a pair of swans. A narrow lane led down from the pond to the ancient low-lying house where Denis Wright lived with his wife, Iona. I was met by a straightforward, initially gruff man – ‘What are you writing, exactly? A novel, or a proper book?’ – who, even in his mid-eighties, was tall and athletic. Wright still wrote and regularly travelled abroad with Iona to places like Russia and Greece. He straightaway led me upstairs to his study and asked me how I had got hold of his name. I recounted what my grandmother had said about the assistance he had given her. ‘I remember your grandmother very well,’ Wright said, much to my surprise. He turned towards his desk and pointed at some volumes. ‘This is what I’ve got.’ There were carefully bound typescripts of his letters home from Mersin; a typed and bound and footnoted autobiography; essays on the politics of wartime Turkey; and albums of carefully annotated photographs and cuttings. As a personal documentary record of wartime Mersin, these papers almost certainly had no equal.

Mersin’s significance in the Second World War, Sir Denis told me, arose out of the wider political situation in Turkey. By a series of non-aggression and friendship treaties, mutual assistance pacts, trade agreements and non-committal manoeuvres, the Turkish Republic, led by President Ismet Inönü, adroitly managed to maintain its neutrality. It wasn’t an easy thing to pull off. Churchill, in particular, had a ‘bee in his bonnet’ about securing Turkish participation in the war – in Wright’s view, this would have been a generally counterproductive development that would have achieved nothing for Turkey other than the destruction of its major cities. Turkey’s diplomatic skill was such that it not only resisted the strong pressure exerted by the Axis and the Allies but also managed to take the benefit of Allied offers to strengthen its military infrastructure – offers to build roads and airfields, and to supply aircraft, tanks, armoured cars, AA guns and training teams. These projects gave rise to a problem: how to ship the necessary materials into the country? With the Italians in Rhodes and the Dodecanese and the
Germans in control of Bulgaria and mainland Greece, Turkey’s main ports, Istanbul and Izmir, were within range of Axis aircraft. And so two points of entry into Turkey were identified as safe from the threat of air attacks: the sister ports of Iskenderun and Mersin. It didn’t matter that Mersin did not have a proper harbour and that vessels had to anchor half a mile or so offshore and discharge their cargo into lighters; large quantities of military and other essential equipment were nevertheless shipped in, usually from Alexandria, usually in Greek ships, and usually in secret.

It is a little-known fact, Wright said, that one of the undercover infrastructural projects was based near Mersin. As Axis forces advanced in south-east Europe, the danger arose that they might invade Turkey on their way through to Syria and the oilfields of the Middle East. In response to this threat, the Allies drew up contingency plans with Turkey whereby the line would be held in the Taurus Mountains and reinforcements from Syria and Egypt would be quickly sent up by rail and road. Thus, in July 1941, a party of around forty men of the British Royal Engineers set up camp just outside Mersin with the task of blasting a tank-friendly road through the Taurus Mountains and improving the roads and bridges that connected Mersin, Tarsus and Iskenderun. To keep the operations in ostensible accordance with the neutral status of the host country, the construction party wore civilian clothing and held itself out as Messrs. Braithwaite & Co., Civil Engineers and Contractors of London. There were other sensitive Allied operations in Mersin. These included the exportation, mainly to the United States, of Turkish chrome – vital for manufacturing armaments – and the shipment of timber and railway sleepers from the Findikpinar forest in the Taurus Mountains to the British in the Middle East. Such mercantile activities were overseen by the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation (UKCC), a wartime corporate vehicle for the United Kingdom. The UKCC, Wright said, was represented in the consular staff in Mersin, as were a number of key Whitehall ministries – the Admiralty, the War Office, the Ministry of War Transport, the Ministry of Economic Warfare. The consulate also housed agents of SIME (Security
Intelligence Middle East) and MI6. These agents, and indeed practically all British military personnel working in Turkey, entered the country from Syria, on the Taurus Express.

This last fact was confirmed to me by an old friend of Denis Wright named Bill Henderson. In 1941, Henderson, an architect in the Royal Engineers, was posted as a junior staff officer to Ankara, where his duties included meeting soldiers (dressed as civilians) disembarking from the Taurus Express at six in the morning. In 1942, when Henderson was transferred to Cilicia to work on the Taurus road, he discovered that the British had German counterparts in the vicinity, who were undertaking huge water supply and irrigation schemes around Mersin under pre-war contracts. On one occasion, Henderson recalled, his Turkish foreman got hold of surveying equipment from helpful Germans. ‘All that cloak-and-dagger stuff and all those false identities were something of a charade,’ Henderson said. ‘Everybody knew what was going on.’

Everybody, in this context, meant the German diplomatic and intelligence corps, which was headed by the Reich’s ambassador, Franz von Papen – the Chancellor of Germany for a brief time in 1932 and then Vice-Chancellor in Hitler’s first government from January 1933 to the summer of 1934. The principle objectives of the Germans were, first, to ensure that Turkey did not join the Allies, and, second, to monitor and if possible influence the military situation in the Middle East. Paul Leverkuehn, the Chief of the Istanbul Station of the Abwehr from July 1941–44, considered that his most important task was to guard against the risk of Turkish entry into the war on the Allied side. The strength and distribution of the British and Free French forces in Syria and Iraq was, accordingly, of vital interest to German intelligence. Arab observers along the frontiers with Turkey carried out reconnaissance, and travellers to and from Egypt, which continued to trade with Turkey, were also a rich source of information. Agents of intelligence organizations – Abwehr, Sicherheitsdienst and Auslandsorganization – operated from German consulates. There was no German consulate in Mersin, where the Axis powers were represented by an Italian consulate headed by an aristocrat named Aloisi. The Italians, Wright
said, engaged a man to swim out and attach limpet mines to the hulls of Allied merchantmen moored in the waters off Mersin. In the event, they only damaged one ship.

British counter-espionage was largely in the hands of SIME agents. One of these was C.T.C. Taylor, SIME’s man in Adana. Taylor wrote in his unpublished autobiography:

The enemy had a considerable number of sympathizers among the Arabs, many of whom remained faithful to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had fled to, and was operating from, Germany, and Italian Levantine families with members on either side of the [Turkish-Syrian] frontier. My organization’s job was to spot enemy agents, or their various forms of communication and propaganda, and prevent them from penetrating far into territory held by us …