CHAPTER 25
AT THE END OF OCTOBER 1917 the door to a third option for the Middle East remained ajar, even as Chaim Weizmann strained every nerve to close it by dragging the War Cabinet toward Zionism, even as T. E. Lawrence and George Lloyd rode their camels north from Aqaba and the great desert raider confided his dream of an independent Arab kingdom. The war ground on, mercilessly, bloodily, with no end in sight, nor even, despite growing war-weariness in every belligerent power, the likelihood of compromise between the main antagonists.
But many Turks continued to ponder the possibility of breaking free from Germany and negotiating a separate peace with Britain and her allies. The Ottoman leaders themselves were full of distrust for one another, Enver on one side, Talaat and Djemal on the other, intriguing constantly, and they played for high stakes, perhaps even for life itself. In autumn 1917 both Turkish camps made a move; or rather between them they made several moves, which cracked open the door a little wider to that alternative future in which the Ottomans would continue to perform a Middle Eastern role. British officials made sure that neither Weizmann nor Hussein heard anything about them.
At this point both the partisans of Enver and the partisans of Talaat had high hopes of mounting an Ottoman counteroffensive in Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, they simultaneously had a desperate foreboding that whichever side won the war, Turkey already had lost it. So independently of each other, both camps wanted to talk to Britain. They realized that the Allies intended to carve up the empire after the war, although they did not yet know the details. They certainly knew that Britain had held out promises to Jews and Arabs. They thought, however, that perhaps they could forestall some of them. What they did not realize was that important people in Britain also wanted to deal. At a time when Germany seemed as powerful and impregnable as ever, “we are watching1 all the time for an opportunity to detach Turkey,” wrote Lord Hardinge a few days after the War Cabinet approved the Balfour Declaration. Had they known it, Zionists might have hesitated before celebrating “the most momentous occasion in the history of Judaism for the last 1,800 years,” as Lord Rothschild would put it on December 9.
In late 1917 Talaat’s proxies approached their British enemy on a variety of fronts. At the end of October, Charlton Giraud, a French national with extensive business interests in Smyrna, where he made his home, appeared at the British consulate in Athens. He had been dispatched2 by Rahmi Bey, the liberal Ottoman vali of Smyrna, ostensibly to discuss an exchange of interned Allied and Turkish civilians. Soon, however, it became apparent that he had a more important mission. Giraud reported to A. T. Waugh, British attaché at the Athens legation, that Rahmi Bey “would welcome3 an understanding with us … The main obstacle … is Enver, who is committed to the Germans. But for him Rahmi might be able to win over Talaat and Djemal, the only other men who count.” Rahmi Bey would not have acted without Talaat’s implicit consent. The latter was fishing: The vali of Smyrna was his rod, Giraud was his lure.
Waugh approached the bait warily. He and a subordinate who also interviewed the Frenchman deemed Rahmi’s indirect advances “only of a kind4 which might be expected in similar circumstances from any oriental of his class, and one of the objects of which may be to gauge the Allies’ general condition from their readiness to negotiate.” Yet ultimately, despite such suspicions, they concluded, as the British ambassador to Greece, Lord Granville, put it, “this is an opportunity which might be seized.”
Meanwhile Talaat was fishing in Switzerland. Here he dangled bait before two old hands, Dr. Parodi and Sir Horace Rumbold. This pair knew something about pourparlers with dissident Turks. In early November they happened to be helping arrange a meeting in Zurich regarding treatment and exchange of Allied and Turkish prisoners of war. Now they passed along the news that the Turks wished to take advantage of this conference on neutral ground to meet secretly with British delegates to discuss broader issues—that is, a separate peace. Rumbold also reported5 that the same Dr. Noureddin who had met with Aubrey Herbert in Interlaken the previous July had broken silence, was optimistic about “the project,” and intended to return to Switzerland soon.
During the second and third weeks of November 1917, Lloyd George’s War Cabinet engaged in serious deliberations about these signals emanating from Turkey. Balfour argued that Rahmi Bey’s twitch6 upon the line merely indicated how Turkey would approach Britain when circumstances finally compelled her to do so. He advised that Britain not bite. Alfred Milner disagreed: “The time has come7 when we must rely upon diplomacy as well as upon arms in order to detach Turkey … There is a growing party in Turkey which is very anxious for peace … notably Talaat and Djemal.” Then came word via Switzerland of the additional approaches; this tipped the balance. The War Cabinet began discussing specifically what terms to offer the Ottomans. Recall Dr. Weizmann’s reaction when he learned of J. R. Pilling’s trip to Switzerland to speak with Turks about a compromise peace. Recall his fury when he heard of Aubrey Herbert’s similar mission and how decisively he responded to Henry Morgenthau’s intended journey. It is safe to bet that five months later, had he known the War Cabinet was debating Talaat’s overtures, he would have reacted with comparable outrage. Such knowledge probably would have stopped Zionists celebrating the Balfour Declaration in their tracks.
The War Cabinet attempted to define its negotiating position. Ministers agreed that Britain and her allies must have permanent free passage through the Dardanelles Strait into the Sea of Marmara and thence into the Black Sea. In return Turkey should receive financial aid and protection from Germany if necessary; also that the state of Turkey itself should not be dismembered and should be allowed to keep Constantinople as its capital. (Russia had renounced her claim to that city after the February Revolution.) What to do about the rest of the Ottoman Empire proved a much more difficult subject.
Milner had supported Zionism in the War Cabinet and was an architect of the Balfour Declaration. Nevertheless, two weeks later, when he learned of Rahmi Bey’s approach, he argued that Britain should persuade the Ottomans they “could now get out of the war … without the loss of what still remains to them of Europe and of Asia Minor.” What did this mean for Palestine? Milner explained further during ensuing War Cabinet discussions. France and Italy would have to relinquish their territorial ambitions in the Middle East, at least partially. Britain could concede titular power over some of the lands occupied by her troops. The Turkish flag could be allowed to fly over Mesopotamia, over Syria—over Palestine!
Lord Curzon responded furiously: “I ask how far8 our own pledges and commitments will enable us to make any concession, even that of a purely ostensible or nominal sovereignty, to the Turks in respect of the Asiatic possessions which we have in part or in whole lopped off from her. Almost in the same week that we have pledged ourselves, if successful, to secure Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people, are we to contemplate leaving the Turkish flag flying over Jerusalem?”
Mark Sykes, likewise outraged, weighed in with yet another powerfully argued paper prepared at the request of War Cabinet secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey. “We are pledged9 to Zionism, Armenian liberation, and Arabian independence,” he wrote. These should be Britain’s “only desiderata.” As for the question of the flag, “it is impossible to ask Armenians and the King of Hejaz to accept Turkish suzerainty, symbolized by a flag which connotes the old doctrine of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.” He did not mention the Zionists, but surely the Ottoman flag offended them too. Sykes concluded: “This is not palatable reading for those who desire easy and swift things.”
Perhaps it was not, yet Milner digested it and prevailed. The War Cabinet arranged for A. T. Waugh and another intelligence officer, C. E. Heathcote-Smith, who had known Rahmi Bey before the war, to sound out the vali of Smyrna. They could meet with him ostensibly to discuss an exchange of interned civilians. The War Cabinet also empowered a British delegate to the Zurich conference on prisoners of war to speak about a separate peace with Turkish representatives there. Ironically they chose the man whom Marmaduke Pickthall had first approached at the Foreign Office back in 1916, Thomas Legh (the second Baron Newton), a Conservative MP and an assistant under secretary of state for foreign affairs. Unlike Waugh10 and Heathcote-Smith, who were instructed merely to get Rahmi Bey talking, Lord Newton was told that while he must not initiate discussions about peace, he could outline what he understood the British position would be if formal talks took place. This included the Ottoman flag over Palestine.
Then everything changed. At a meeting on December 2, the date on which Zionists celebrated the Balfour Declaration in London at the Opera House, Rahmi Bey explained that earth-shaking news had just arrived from the Eastern Front, news that significantly reduced his country’s interest in a separate peace. “This is the most favorable11 moment of the war for Turkey,” Heathcote-Smith reported Rahmi Bey as saying, although “I got the impression that it was Talaat rather than Rahmi who was talking.” Thevalicontinued: “We had only one real enemy and this was Russia. Russia today is offering an armistice and peace on the basis of the freedom of nationalities.” German military might had prevailed in the East after all. It could save the Ottoman Empire yet. Why then discuss a separate peace with Great Britain? Turkish interest in that subject would revive only if she again feared imminent defeat. In the meantime Rahmi Bey was happy to leave open the channel of communication.
Discussions in Switzerland developed along different lines from those in Greece because they began later in December and took place over a more protracted period of time. By then Britain had recouped the loss of Russia, to a certain extent, with victories in Palestine, culminating for the moment in Allenby’s entrance into Jerusalem on December 11. Zionists cheered these victories, not realizing that they revived to a degree Turkish interest in reaching a settlement.
In Switzerland, Newton made contact, through Sir Horace Rumbold, with two Turks already stationed there. Rumbold thought little of them. The first belonged to the Ottoman legation but “the fact that he is12 known to be Anglophil would probably cause any communications made by him through his Minister to the Turkish Government to be discounted.” The second, whose brother was the wakil, or general factotum, of a former grand vizier, suffered from the same lack of credibility. He received his Egyptian pension from British officials in Berne. Nevertheless one or the other or possibly a third Turk altogether (for no name is mentioned) had expressed a “strong desire” to meet the British emissary when he should arrive. Lord Newton agreed to a conference. There he followed instructions, stating only what he thought British policy toward Turkey would be. In reply the “Agent, who is believed13 to be in the confidence of Talaat, stated that large section of Turks would recommend anything which would free them from Enver and German domination … He is considering advisability of proceeding to Turkey and personally communicating our views to Talaat.”
Newton also made contact with a Turkish delegate to the conference on prisoners of war, Mouktar Bey, former Ottoman ambassador to Berlin, who was, according to Rumbold, “the only important Turk from our point of view.” What then transpired cannot quite be pieced together. Mouktar Bey had reason to be cautious. Of the five Ottoman delegates to the conference, three had been chosen by Talaat, two by Enver: “Needless to say, they watched each other very carefully.” Mouktar quickly realized that a German and a Turkish spy were tracking him. The German had booked a room next to his at the hotel in Zurich. Nevertheless he managed to get a telegram to Talaat. He reported that “Lord Newton had given [me] to understand that England would be quite ready to come to an arrangement with Turkey if the latter would embark on pourparlers for a separate peace.” How do we know this? “We get all the details about Mouktar’s proceedings from his friend Hakki Halid Bey,” Rumbold reported smugly to Lord Balfour.
Lord Newton, however,14 denied he had made any such declaration to the Turk. Perhaps then Mouktar was making it up in order to impress his master. Or conceivably he was reporting his interpretation of something said to him by Dr. Parodi, for we know that they talked too. At any rate, and despite the waxing and waning and perhaps waxing again of Turkey’s interest in a separate peace, British interest remained strong. Not surprisingly, the next move appears to have come from her.
For some months the War Cabinet had been contemplating trying to detach Austria too from the Central Powers. Just as it had been receiving feelers from Talaat, it had been receiving them from Count Albert von Mensdorff, Austria’s prewar ambassador in London. Amazingly, Horace15 Rumbold relayed these overtures too; really, he did occupy the center of the spider’s web. And just as the War Cabinet debated how to respond to the Turks, so it considered what to do about Austria. In mid-December, at the same time as Lord Newton was conducting his negotiations with Mouktar Bey, the South African Jan Smuts, who was the War Cabinet’s newest addition, made a secret journey to Geneva to talk matters over with the count, who likewise traveled there incognito. Their discussions proved unproductive. Mensdorff aimed at a general peace; Smuts aimed at separating Austria from Germany. But while in Switzerland Smuts and a second Briton, Phillip Kerr, private secretary to Lloyd George and a future British ambassador to Washington, spoke with Turks too.
Again we cannot be precise about what was said or even to whom, but we do know that afterward Kerr and Rumbold arranged for Dr. Parodi to “cause a communication in the following sense to be made unofficially and verbally to Mouktar Bey.” Then they laid out the terms we have seen Milner outline in mid-November at the War Cabinet, except apparently in one respect. Kerr first submitted the instructions for Parodi to his superior, Smuts. The latter made a single alteration: “to include Palestine16 in the area over which the Allies might be willing to allow the Turkish flag to fly.” So he was a Milnerite too. Like Milner, he had supported authorization of the Balfour Declaration the previous month. The Zionists thought him a strong supporter.
Two days before Smuts amended Kerr’s instructions for Parodi, Foreign Office mandarins debated how far British agents might go to reassure Turks, and specifically what should be said regarding the Turkish flag in Palestine. They must have had before them the memorandum in which Milner first argued for the separate peace. “I trust that17 the language regarding Palestine may be modified,” Sir Ronald Graham urged. “To agree to any form of Turkish suzerainty over Palestine would be regarded by the Zionist Jews as a complete betrayal and alienate all their sympathies from us. Dr. Weizmann, for instance, would drop the whole scheme at once.” Lord Hardinge, who was prepared to revise Sykes-Picot, as we have seen, nevertheless found Graham’s warning persuasive. “I doubt the wisdom of saying so much to Mouktar Bey,” he cautioned Balfour. The foreign secretary concurred too as he made clear in a cable to Rumbold.
In other words, the War Cabinet and the Foreign Office came to contradictory conclusions on this crucial matter. Moreover apparently they gave out contradictory instructions. On March 21, 1918, while Parodi remained engaged in talks with Mouktar Bey, Rumbold received a wire from Balfour18 drawing attention to a telegram he had “sent at the end19 of December”—obviously the one referred to above—“in which the Foreign Office state that His Majesty’s Government could not grant the Turkish flag in Palestine.” Likely Balfour sent this reminder because he wanted to change the instructions Smuts and Kerr had issued a few months earlier. Possibly confirming this, in August 1918, in a letter to the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, who was serving as the government’s minister of information, Balfour explained the instructions “we” had given to Lord Newton and to Rumbold and Dr. Parodi the previous winter. “We thought20 it of great importance that the Turkish flag should not be flown in either Palestine or Syria.” Who “we” refers to must remain ambiguous, but clearly it did not mean Milner or Smuts or perhaps even the War Cabinet. It may have meant the Foreign Office. What view Prime Minister Lloyd George took of this apparent disagreement, we will discover in our next section.
But first: Mouktar and Parodi continued their clandestine meetings. Britain continued to take them seriously. On February 6, 1918, before Balfour reminded Rumbold of the Foreign Office position with regard to Palestine and the Turkish flag, he telegrammed Parodi to inform Mouktar that if Talaat sent a Turkish representative to discuss peace terms, “my Government will21 be ready to send negotiators of equal authority to meet him.” Whether in these prospective negotiations Britain would have promised to let Turkey fly her flag over Palestine remains a moot point. Mouktar Bey returned to Constantinople at the end of March. Neither Rumbold nor Parodi heard from him again. Perhaps Talaat Pasha had concluded that a separate peace with Britain was not in Turkey’s interest after all.
But Turkey’s most serious effort to reach an understanding with Great Britain at this point in the war had not come from Talaat Pasha anyway. It had come from Enver.
“Abdul Kerim will22 arrive [in Geneva] next week and I will be there to meet him,” Basil Zaharoff wrote to Sir Vincent Caillard on November 18, 1917. This latest approach from the emissary of Enver Pasha did not take the arms dealer by surprise. Only two days23previously he had returned to Paris from London, where he had spent more than a month at the request of Lloyd George. The two men met24 for breakfast shortly after November 6. (The precise date cannot be ascertained.) Still, some time before Rahmi Bey sent Charlton Giraud to Athens and Mouktar Bey to Switzerland, the prime minister predicted to Zaharoff that a new overture from Enver would also be forthcoming.
Zaharoff had kept two million American dollars of Britain’s money in one of his bank accounts. Lloyd George instructed him to pay it next time he saw Abdul Kerim. Risking this relatively small amount as an earnest of Britain’s good intentions would be worth it, said the prime minister. He also outlined what Britain’s attitude should be toward the Ottoman Empire’s Middle Eastern possessions. Anticipating Milner’s position at the War Cabinet, he envisioned “Egyptian conditions”25 for most of them. It will be recalled that until 1914 Egypt remained nominally under Turkish rule, although in fact Britain exercised there what historians have called a “veiled protectorate.” Up until the war, then, the Turkish flag continued to fly in Egypt. Lloyd George saw “no difficulty” in allowing it to go on flying if that would ease Turkey toward a separate peace. This would have been about a week after publication of the Balfour Declaration.
Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Party leader and chancellor of the exchequer, knew what Lloyd George contemplated. As chancellor he would be responsible for arranging the much larger payment to Enver, $10 million, that Abdul Kerim had mentioned to Zaharoff the previous July. There is no evidence that anyone else in the War Cabinet discussed or even knew about it. On the British side the only men involved, so far as the evidence shows, were the prime minister and chancellor, the prime minister’s principal private secretary J. T. Davies, the intelligence officer Brewis, and Caillard and Zaharoff.
Zaharoff set out to meet Abdul Kerim. The two men arrived in Geneva almost simultaneously on about November 20. It quickly became apparent that the Turk was fishing, not prepared to negotiate serious matters, for with much regret and “using a very coarse26expression,” he turned down the bribe that Zaharoff immediately offered. He could not accept it, he explained, because Enver had told him not to without consulting him first. So now he did. “The moment he gets a reply he will communicate with me,” reported the arms merchant in a letter to Caillard, “and I will pay into the Banque Suisse et Française and then your people will have to consult the experts as to the Turkish lines to be withdrawn so that I can meet Enver with a program.” Zaharoff returned to Paris and discovered the prime minister was in the city attending an Allied council. “I have just sat with your Chairman at breakfast for half an hour. Lloyd George ‘took written notes of my statement on which he paid me a great compliment … He is a lovely chappie.’”
The expected summons from Abdul Kerim to another meeting arrived less than a week later. Zaharoff needed to know what would be Britain’s negotiating position with regard to Constantinople, Armenia, and the Middle East, including Palestine, now that Russia was out of the war. “No time should be lost in seeing the Chairman” to ascertain the position, he exhorted Caillard. But he was not in too much of a hurry to remind his friend that he still wanted “chocolate,” as he called it—that is to say, an English title. “If the previous27 Chairman’s letter to me about ‘critical time’ and my present work merit recognition, I shall be proud, very proud.”
Lloyd George lay sick in bed with influenza. He could not see Caillard but wrote out for him directions for Zaharoff. They contained no reference to “chocolate,” and they represented the prime minister’s “‘personal opinion’”28 only, Caillard warned, “the special board [War Cabinet] not having been consulted … (but you know the weight the Chairman carries with his Board).” Pace Curzon, Sykes, Balfour, and the Foreign Office, the instructions regarding Palestine remained unchanged: “Mesopotamia and Palestine must be run on Egyptian lines; the flag, you observe, remains untouched.” This does seem to indicate again that 10 Downing Street and the Foreign Office took opposite positions on the issue that Zionists would have found critical.
Zaharoff embarked upon his journeys once more. When he met Abdul Kerim in Switzerland for the fourth time on Wednesday, December 12, “I did not go one29 iota from your letter. He took notes as I repeated item per item.” The Turk reported what was obvious already, that Enver was willing to talk and would accept the bribe. So this time Zaharoff really did pay into the Crédit Suisse et Française $500,000 for the envoy and $1,500,000 for his chief. The two men went to dinner. Imagine a first-class hotel dining room in neutral Switzerland at the height of World War I: bone china, silver cutlery, crystal goblets and snifters, dinner jackets, the hum of conversation in a variety of languages. Zaharoff made sure that the champagne and brandy flowed copiously. In this incongruous setting Abdul Kerim described conditions in Turkey and relations among the leaders of the Central Powers. He let his tongue wag. Enver and Talaat were at daggers drawn, he said, siding with his own boss and again introducing the possibility of poison: “I myself will give Talaat his coffee.” He was drunk and under tremendous pressure. He let his ugly side show. “He [Abdul Kerim] only had to lift a finger and I [Zaharoff] would be arrested as a spy conspiring in a neutral country against friendly belligerents at the instigation of the Allies,” Zaharoff reports him saying. “I laughed it out [but] it makes me think.”
Enver had instructed Zaharoff to meet him at Lucerne during January 25–31. “Send me30 full instructions,” Zaharoff told Caillard, “about the Turks withdrawing to a certain line and our paying a certain sum, and then withdrawing to another fixed line and our again paying and finally opening the Straits.” He then headed off to Monte Carlo to recover his health, for he suffered from a debilitating skin condition.
At 10 Downing Street on January 9 at three-thirty in the afternoon, Lloyd George’s secretary, Davies, handed to Caillard for transmission to Zaharoff the precise negotiating instructions that the arms merchant had requested. They read as follows:
We should be31 prepared to pay the sum of ten million dollars to secure a permanent safe passage through the Dardanelles and Sea of Marmora. This would entail the evacuation of the forts and defenses in the Dardanelles and on the islands of the Sea of Marmora and their occupation by British forces. When the above is secured we will endeavor to obtain the revictualling of Constantinople from Southern Russia through the Bosphorus, which would have to be opened.
The second paragraph remained as before.
It is agreed32 that in the event of all Turkish troops in PALESTINE and on the HEJAZ Railway being withdrawn North of the railway line from HAIFA to DERAA a sum of $2,000,000 will be paid and the following guarantees will be given:
1. The Turkish forces will not be molested while carrying out the withdrawal.
2. PALESTINE will not be annexed or incorporated in the British Empire.
A few days earlier Lloyd George had delivered a famous speech to a conference of the Labour Party in which he defined Britain’s war aims. With regard to Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, he said: “Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine are in our judgment entitled to a recognition of their separate national conditions. What the exact form of that recognition … should be need not here be discussed.” Caillard flagged this immediately: “You did not mention33 that Mesopotamia, Palestine &c. would remain under the Turkish flag, although not under Turkish Administration. It would, I think, be effective if I instructed Zaharoff from you to confirm this.” Lloyd George provided the reassurances, and Caillard sent them on to Zaharoff: “Please explain34 to them [the Turks] that your previous communication concerning the retainment of their flag in those districts to be placed under the system of ‘conseils judiciaires’ (Egyptian model as a general illustration) has been confirmed … It is considered desirable you should do this, as the Chairman (consulted) agrees because that particular point about the flag was not mentioned in the Chairman’s speech.”
This exchange is important because it shows Lloyd George yet again contradicting the Foreign Office position that Balfour had cabled to Rumbold a few weeks earlier.
To make things as clear as possible in an extraordinarily murky situation: In late December 1917 Smuts instructed Dr. Parodi to tell Mouktar Bey, Talaat’s emissary, that part of a larger arrangement for peace between Britain and the Ottomans would include provision for Turkey to continue to fly her flag over Palestine. The Foreign Office warned against this course. Balfour sent a countermanding telegram to Rumbold also in December 1917 and reiterated its message in March 1918, and referred to it yet again in the letter to Beaverbrook in August 1918. In mid-January 1918, however, Lloyd George repeated the Smuts position to Zaharoff. He should tell Abdul Kerim and Enver Pasha that the Turkish flag could continue to fly over Palestine. As far as can be told, Balfour did not know about this. He sent no countermanding telegrams. Anyway, one doubts that a British foreign secretary can ever countermand a prime minister. Really, we have come upon a mystifying thicket of contradictory orders and instructions. One thing, however, is clear: In July 1917 Weizmann and his colleagues had judged any discussion of peace with Turkey out of bounds. Had they known that Lloyd George proposed to accept any form of Ottoman suzerainty in Palestine, they would have deemed it a gross betrayal. So would have the Arabs.
Zaharoff embarked upon an extraordinary journey from Monte Carlo to Geneva on January 23, 1918. His skin remained bad, and a personal physician accompanied him. He rented an entire saloon car of the train for the price of twenty-four first-class tickets. Upon crossing into Italy, however, soldiers invaded the carriage, driving him and his doctor into the corridor. They stole his food and cutlery and then his money. “We were four days35 and four nights getting to the Swiss frontier, hardly any food except sometimes soldiers’ rations, no bed, no wash, etc. etc., and useless complaining to officers.” When they reached the border, Swiss authorities searched him: “(I had not a single paper with me, and had learnt my instructions from your Chairman by heart).” They forced him and the doctor to strip naked and took their clothing into another room to examine. Then they noticed Zaharoff’s skin condition. A quarantine doctor sent him to bed in a local hospital: “God, what a bed, what a place!”
Zaharoff deduced that the Swiss border authorities had recognized his name and were stalling while awaiting instructions from their superiors. When eventually they allowed him to continue his journey, he noticed that Swiss detectives were following him.
More extraordinary than the journey were the meetings that followed. Zaharoff arrived in Geneva on January 27, two days late. Abdul Kerim greeted him with the news that Enver was on his way from Lucerne. The three would meet next day. When Enver arrived, however, he refused to meet Zaharoff face-to-face, “claiming that all his movements were being always watched by the inquisitive Swiss; that A.K. was badly suspected of intriguing with me [Zaharoff], that the Swiss were more Niémtze (German) than the Germans.” As a result, “I did not see E. but A.K. kept going backwards and forwards as a sort of telephone.” Is it possible that either Zaharoff or Abdul Kerim lied about Enver’s presence? Probably not: Zaharoff was too experienced to be fooled by Abdul Kerim; Lloyd George was too experienced to be fooled by Zaharoff. The prime minister never renounced the arms merchant; in fact, he saw to it that he received his “chocolate” after the war. It seems that Enver had come to Geneva to speak, however indirectly, with the representative of Lloyd George.
So: Abdul Kerim shuttled back and forth, whether between hotels or even possibly between rooms in the same hotel, we do not know. It quickly became apparent that the news he carried was disappointing for Britain. At the last moment Enver had developed cold feet. He would pay back most of his share of the bribe, five million French francs, into Zaharoff’s Paris account. When the arms dealer arrived home, he found that the payment had been made. Abdul Kerim, however, did not return his share. He feared to contradict his chief, but to Zaharoff he said “he would not part with one piaster; he had honestly done his share, and if E. was now backing out, through fear, it was not his fault.”
Through Abdul Kerim, Enver told Zaharoff that six months earlier he and Talaat had wanted to make a separate peace with Britain, “but when Russia and Rumania began crumbling Talaat sold him—‘but that is my affair.’” Zaharoff had heard Abdul Kerim twice allude to poison in Talaat’s coffee. Here was another veiled threat. He did not believe everything the Turks told him, but “E. certainly means to do away with Talaat in some way or other.”
All that afternoon Abdul Kerim padded back and forth between the two men. At one point he reported to Zaharoff that Enver said the war would be decided “by the Americans putting or not their whole heart in it, and quickly.” At another, through his intermediary, he lamented to Zaharoff that “if the Germans won this War Turkey would become Germany’s vassal.” At still another he promised to help the Allies by arranging “for the Turkish Armies in Palestine and on the Hejaz Railway to be withdrawn north of the Railway line from Haifa to Deraa.” This suggests that Zaharoff at least broached the terms Britain was willing to offer for a separate peace, in which case the British government really did propose a continuing Ottoman presence, with flag flying, in Palestine, nearly three months after the Balfour Declaration was made public.
So Enver Pasha, architect of the Young Turk regime and of the disastrous Ottoman-German wartime alliance, parleyed with Basil Zaharoff, the infamous “merchant of death.” Between them shuttled Abdul Kerim, Enver’s not-so-faithful aide—he twice that day warned Zaharoff to beware: “He [Enver] is a traitor. Do not believe him. He will sell you. For him there is nothing in this great world but himself.” The day finally ended, perhaps on this note. Zaharoff may have hoped for more clarity during a second round of discussion. But “next morning I found that E. and A.K. had taken French leave.” He caught the next train for France. “I have given my heart and soul to this scheme and its failure has quite broken me up,” he informed Caillard.
Britain and Turkey would make no separate peace during World War I. The two countries never were in sync. When one seemed willing to make a deal, the other found reason to pull back. Abdul Kerim contacted Zaharoff again in August 1918. The arms dealer entrained for Geneva yet again. When he got there, “the time to deal had arrived,” Abdul Kerim reported Enver saying. He added: “When you meet E—you should have $25,000,000.” Zaharoff backed off. “I replied that I would do nothing of the sort, but that if a definite proposal was made, I would see what it was worth to me in dollars … A.K. said I was a fool.” Then the erstwhile intermediary went freelance. He asked what Zaharoff would pay for verbatim reports of all the Central Powers’ war councils at which Turkish delegates were present. “On my replying that such reports might be interesting, he said, ‘Man, they are worth millions, very many millions.’”
Once perhaps they would have been, but Zaharoff’s record of this meeting reveals why that was no longer the case. “I purposely stayed with him 5 days and 4 nights so as to induce him to talk over his brandy, without my appearing to be questioning him.” Abdul Kerim described breakdown among the Central Powers. At the last war council, Austrian, Turkish, and Bulgarian delegates had criticized the Germans. Hindenburg and Luden-dorff threw the blame on each other. The Kaiser “abused his Austrian Ally with strong language.” At this same meeting “the Turkish General Izzet Pasha Schishman had spat at King Ferdinand [of Bulgaria], and if anything the Pasha was applauded.” No wonder England turned a deaf ear to Enver this time. The quarreling among her opponents reflected the fact that the tide of the war had turned finally in her favor.
When it had flowed the other way, British attitudes had been very different. Then Lloyd George was prepared to risk much for a separate peace with Turkey, not merely many millions of dollars but Arab and Zionist goodwill as well. Jewish and Arab nationalists would have recoiled in horror at the sight of a Turkish flag flying over Syria, Mesopotamia, or Palestine, no matter that Ottomans had no administrative control. Lloyd George must have calculated that they would accept the situation in the end. He rode the Arab horse and the Zionist horse and the separate-peace-with-Turkey horse too, and those were only the horses in the southeastern stable. That the horses pulled in different directions demonstrates the extraordinary skill of the rider.
Had Enver Pasha kept the bribe given him in December 1917 and taken Turkey out of the war, however, could Lloyd George have continued to ride the Zionists? Would we today term the Balfour Declaration a great Zionist triumph and a foundation stone of modern Israel? Or rather would we lump it among other beautiful phrases and promises made by wartime leaders intent upon persuading men to fight: “covenants openly arrived at,” “war to end war,” “no annexations or indemnities”? Not to discount the genius of Weizmann or the greatness of Balfour, but the famous declaration bearing the foreign secretary’s name seems to have just missed the side track. And the genius of Lloyd George notwithstanding, what might have happened then is anybody’s guess.