Editor’s note: WorldNetDaily international correspondent Anthony
C. LoBaido recently completed the second leg of his journey following in
the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia. The trek involved traveling from
Amman, Jordan, to the Dead Sea, then south to the Red Sea and finally
eastward to the Iraqi border.
*Read LoBaido’s first report, “The
real Lawrence of Arabia.
In this revealing sequel, LoBaido covers the “master plan” of Lawrence and Sir Winston Churchill to create the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan — and explores their plans to utilize biochemical warfare against Iraq/Mesopotamia.
WADI RUM, Jordan — T.E. Lawrence is best known to most Americans from the epic 1962 Hollywood classic,
“Lawrence of Arabia.” Yet the story of Lawrence goes far beyond the accepted screen legend. In fact, the Englishman led a multi-faceted life as an archaeologist, medieval scholar, special forces soldier, warlord, intelligence operative, diplomat, adviser to Churchill, best-selling author and inventor.
It is not widely known that Lawrence, along with Sir Winston Churchill, created the nation of Trans Jordan as though from thin air. The creation of Trans Jordan involved parallel events in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), which set in motion a chain of events that has repercussions to this very day in the Middle East, including the bombings carried out by the U.S. and UK against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Like many Englishmen sired in a cold and rainy climate, Lawrence caught an immediate fancy for the desert. As a child, he had studied the lives and ideals of the Crusaders and the knights. While planning the military strategies he would use to win the war for the British in the Middle East during World War I, Lawrence sought to “put straight the strategic ideas given me by the Crusaders and the first Arab conquest.”
He spent a large portion of his time in Trans Jordan during World War I. As such, retracing the steps of Lawrence of Arabia through modern Jordan — however short a journey (about a five-hour drive from Amman to Aqaba) — was an exhausting endeavor that left this correspondent frightfully ill and considerably grayer.
Retracing the maverick journey of Lawrence and his Arab soldiers through Jordan was by no means a singular route. Rather, it was an elaborate web stretching from the Jordan River to the borders of Israel and Iraq. It is a route which also involved following in the hallowed steps of Moses, the Magi, John the Baptist and even Jesus Christ himself. It was an incredible pilgrimage that involved travel on foot and via camel, horseback, train, car and airplane.
This writer set out on the trek armed only with a Minolta camera, super telephoto and wide-angle lenses and a 1936 copy of Lawrence’s’ Oxford thesis, “The influence of the Crusades on European military architecture to the end of the 12th century.” The work acts as a guide to follow Lawrence on his grand journey to analyze Crusader castles in Lebanon, Syria and other points in the region. Eventually, the book would lead to Lawrence’s Crusader castle headquarters at Azruk on the road to Baghdad.
Lawrence’s popular legend
One is compelled to ask why Lawrence has become the most romantic figure in the sweeping history of the British Empire. To begin, World War I was a bloody and horrible affair that took the lives of Europe’s finest sons. Using Civil War-era military tactics against modern machine guns, biochemical weapons and airplanes was a surefire recipe for blood-soaked trenches and front-page headlines.
Although Lawrence’s war in the desert was merely a peripheral shimmer of the greater battle raging in the Middle East — which in turn was merely a side show of the war in Europe — Lawrence and his brave Arab guerrilla forces quickly became the darlings of the British and international Anglophile public. Theirs was an ancient battle, pitting men with swords on horses against the high-tech weaponry of the Ottoman Empire. This clash pitted the bravery and human spirit of the Arabs against the machines of the Turks. Lawrence carried out a glorious and adventurous campaign that seemed titillating and romantic to the British public — especially when compared to the blood and guts spilled out across the battlefield at Verdun.
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| This medieval Crusader castle east of Amman, Jordan was headquarters for Lawrence and his Arab army. |
Describing one particular ambush that he and his Arab soldiers carried out against the Turks, Lawrence wrote, “It is the most amateurish, Buffalo-Billy sort of performance, and the only people who do it well are the Bedouin. Only you will think it heaven, because there aren’t any returns, or orders, or superiors, or inferiors, no doctors, no accounts, no meals and no drinks.”
And while this matinee match-up made for good journalism, it was also the first, last, best and only way for England to carry out the war. The French, along with some British military officials, wanted to send in French Foreign Legion troops alongside French and British regulars to confront the Turks in the Middle East. This would have led the Arabs to disengage from the battle, as they would have been angry to have so many infidels marching across their lands. As such, it would be up to England to send enough gold bullion, weapons, advisers and foodstuffs to keep the Arab irregulars equipped to take on the Turks.
Lawrence, midwife of guerrilla warfare
Lawrence’s decision to adopt guerrilla tactics in the war against the Turks was no accident. His angel and mentor, D.G. Hogarth — a professor at Oxford — had schooled Lawrence in the same tactics used by the Roman Gen. Procopius.
And although he has been compared to the French Emperor Napoleon, Lawrence may well indeed be best remembered as one of the pioneers of modern guerrilla warfare. It should be recalled that the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), which raged in South Africa, was the first modern guerrilla campaign. Churchill was made famous as a journalist in that war and no doubt studied the tactics of the Afrikaners/Boers in their battle against the British.
Willem Ratte, a special forces leader who has been called “the finest soldier in the history of the South African Defense Force,” told this writer that the Boers had perfected the idea of guerrilla warfare, especially in regard to “blowing up trains and railway lines with dynamite.”
So successful were the Boers that the British had no choice “but to raise a copycat unit called the Bushveld Carboniers, led by the legendary Australian horseman Breaker Morant,” added Ratte.
Speaking of his strategy and tactics, Lawrence wrote in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” that he and his Arab soldiers were “an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas.”
The game is afoot
Lawrence came to Arabia on Oct. 16, 1916, landing at Jeddah, west of Mecca. It was there that he began raising the Arab army that would lead the revolt of the Arabs under Grand Sherif Hussein, a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. Hussein ruled over Mecca and the province of Hejaz in what is today modern day Saudi Arabia. The following week, Lawrence began his recruitment of all four of Hussein’s sons to the British cause. They were Feisal (the man Lawrence considered to be the strongest of the four and who would become the first King of Mesopotamia/Iraq), Ali, Zeid and Abdullah, who would go on to become the first King of Trans Jordan.
The war in the Middle East theater was essentially Lawrence’s to win or lose and the trust that the British Empire’s leaders placed in Lawrence was mind-boggling. For example, when a British expedition in Mesopotamia was captured by a Turkish garrison, Lawrence was authorized to offer one million pounds in gold bullion for their release. During the negotiations, Lawrence had to deal with Turkish Gen. Khalil Pasha, the man who had prosecuted the horrendous massacre of 1.5 million Armenians at Malasgend.
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| WorldNetDaily’s Anthony LoBaido at the Hejaz Railway lines, which Lawrence blew up in his guerilla attacks on Turkish supply lines. |
In March of 1917, Lawrence began launching guerilla raids on the Hejaz railway that stretched from Damascus to Medina. Copying the lessons given to the British during the Anglo-Boer War, Lawrence and his Arab soldiers dynamited the Hejaz rail lines and took a number of supply trains.
Along the way, Lawrence took on many functions as the Arabs began to accept him as one of their own. He rode a camel like them, ate like them and adopted all of their habits. The British officer even dressed like an Arab.
“If you can wear Arab [clothing] when with the tribes you will acquire their trust and intimacy to a degree impossible in uniform,” he often told his fellow officers.
Lawrence even served as a sort of supreme court judge for the nomadic raiders. For example, writing in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” about a certain week-long raid, Lawrence explained, “There came to a head, and were settled, twelve cases of assault with weapons, four camel-liftings, one marriage, two thefts, a divorce, fourteen feuds, two evil eyes and a bewitchment.”
However, even as he grew closer to his Arab partisans, Lawrence knew he was lying to them in regard to British promises of independence. Later, writing in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” he confessed, “I could see that if we won the war, the promises to the Arabs were dead paper. Had I been an honorable adviser, I would have sent my men home and not let them risk their lives for such stuff. [I] risked the fraud on my conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose.”
In early May of 1917, Lawrence split with the forces of Feisal and hooked up instead with the tribal warlord Sherif Auda Abu Tayi of the Howeitat tribe. At this time, Lawrence carried with him — through 200 miles of privation across one of the world’s harshest deserts — over 20,000 pieces of gold in his saddlebags. Make no mistake, gold was an indispensable part of Lawrence’s guerilla machine. He needed gold to buy the loyalty of the Arabs to the British cause.
The Arabs looked up to Lawrence in no small part because of the enormous amount of gold he carried with him. They further felt that Lawrence must have been an extremely important and powerful Englishmen if his superiors trusted him with so much gold.
There are those who claim that England’s gold was the main reason Lawrence met with such success among the Arabs. Sir Reginald Wingate was the man who personally supplied Lawrence with a good deal of gold. After Lawrence passed away in 1935, Wingate wrote, “There can be no question of [Lawrence’s] personal pluck, gallantry and resources, but the money with which I was able to supply him in such large quantities had much more to do with the success of the Arab operation than is realized.”
And it was a lack of gold that almost led Lawrence to resign from His Majesty’s Armed Forces. In February of 1917, Emir Zeid (the youthful brother of Feisal) misappropriated 30,000 sovereigns Lawrence had given him to purchase the loyalty of the local Arab tribes for upcoming raids. This breech of confidence had left Lawrence bereft of funds needed to buy off more Arab mercenaries. As such, Lawrence actually traveled to the British headquarters in Palestine and handed in his resignation.
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| The awe-inspiring Seven Pillars of Wisdom near Wadi Rum served as a base for Lawrence of Arabia to mount guerilla raids on the Turks. |
Of course, the higher-ups would not even consider Lawrence’s request. Rather, the British military complex merely loaded him up with gold once again, “like the three wise men themselves,” said a 90-year-old Arab Bedouin tribal elder interviewed by WorldNetDaily at Wadi Rum. The elder had fought with Lawrence and Abu Tayi in their guerilla campaign. In the Wadi as Sirhan, near the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence and Abu Tayi plotted a daring raid on the Turkish forces at the Red Sea port of Aqaba. The port was a major strategic gateway for the Turks to conduct mine laying and take aim at the British-controlled Suez Canal — the gateway to Britain’s crown jewel of India.
The area around the Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the place where many of the scenes of the film Lawrence of Arabia were filmed. It is dominated by towering sandstone formations formed over the millennia by the sun, wind and desert heat.
Today, the “Beau Geste” Jordanian Desert Camel Corps guard the region from their fort at Wadi Rum. They find company from nomadic Bedouin tribes who are always happy to share their mint tea and cardamom coffee in their black tents or beside a roaring campfire under the stars. This writer recently reciprocated with several bags of Ruffles potato chips. While the Bedouins enjoyed eating the chips, their goats seemed to enjoy consuming the empty bags even more so.
Wadi Rum carries a magical quality in the hearts and minds of the Arab people. Their holy book, the Koran, contains a story stating that this deserty, barren landscape was once a lush garden. But, when men came to believe that nature rather than God had created the paradise, God changed it to a barren wilderness in a single night as a punishment for their unbelief.
Speaking of his initial sortie into Wadi Rum, Lawrence wrote, “Our little caravan grew self-conscious and fell dead quiet, afraid and ashamed to flaunt its smallness in the presence of the stupendous hills.”
Lawrence and his band of 500 Arab raiders stormed out of the desert on June 19, 1917. On July 2, they took down the Turks guarding the main mountain pass to Aqaba at Aba el Lissan. During this charge, Lawrence accidentally shot his own camel in the head while riding it. He was sent flying in the air and subsequently left unconscious upon hitting the ground.
When he awoke, the battle was over. More than 300 Turkish soldiers had been killed. Over 150 were taken prisoner. The Arab raiders had lost only two men. It was now not a matter of “if” but of “when” Aqaba would fall.
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| The Port at Aqaba on the Red Sea. Lawrence and his desert raiders captured the port from the Turks and sealed their place in history. |
Aqaba fell on July 6, 1917. It was one of a series of ten major raids carried out by Lawrence and his Arab special forces that would carry them through Petra and Amman and finally into Damascus, Syria, where they routed the Turks in the final phase of their campaign. Along the way, Lawrence earned the Distinguished Service Order for planning the Tafileh counterattack. At Tafileh, Lawrence, his Arab special forces and a few Gurkhas from Nepal overcame 900 Turkish officers and regular troops. The Turks had tried to retake the village from Feisal’s younger brother, Zied, and 300 Arab loyalists.
The birth of many nations
Independence from the British and French colonialists was to come in drips and drabs for the Arabs — Yemen in 1918, Egypt in 1922, Iraq and Saudi Arabia in 1932, Lebanon in 1943 and Syria in 1946.
The Creation of Trans Jordan (which achieved full independence in 1946) was the culmination of a complex scheme of Lawrence and Churchill. The two men had sought to provide land, a king and a kingdom for most or all of the Arab tribes in the region after World War I — including a homeland for the Jews in Israel.
Yet the creation of Trans Jordan as a nation cannot be understood without an analysis of Britain’s dealings with her neighbor Iraq in that time. Biochemical war was considered an option even from the outset.
After World War I, Britain’s occupation of Mesopotamia was not going well. A memorandum from the office of Sir Winston Churchill on Feb. 19, 1920, speaks of these difficulties in Iraq. As such, the roots of America’s and England’s war with Iraq, Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox find their true genesis.
“The General Staff profess themselves unable to garrison Mesopotamia. The original estimate provided 21-and-a-half million Pounds for the purpose, which is considered to be more than the country is worth.” (This was obviously before British Petroleum had completed its inventory of the nation’s oil reserves.)
“Secretary of State has had to cut this sum down, with the result that the General Staff now propose a complete evacuation. He wishes to know whether you are prepared to take on Mesopotamia. It would entail the provision of some kind of asphyxiating bombs calculated to cause disablement of some kind but not death for use in preliminary operations against turbulent tribes.”
A little more than a week after this memorandum, Churchill, at this time the head of the Colonial Office, asked the Royal Air Force to finalize operational plans to subdue the revolt in Mesopotamia. Churchill was unsure if Iraq could even be governed. Lawrence, who would be brought back into Churchill’s fold as an adviser on Arab affairs in the newly created “Middle East Department,” weighed in that Mesopotamia should be “a native state with English advisers only.”
As such, Feisal was offered the throne of Mesopotamia. The offer was nothing more than a consolation prize. Feisal, who had marched with Lawrence into Syria at the end of World War I, thought he could — with the backing of Jewish financiers — declare a kingdom in Syria. The French would not have it. French Foreign Legion troops drove Feisal and his Arab warriors out of Syria in July of 1920.
Yet the British did not know if Feisal would be elected King by the people of Mesopotamia so Churchill and Lawrence ordered the kidnapping of Feisal’s main opponent in the upcoming election, Sayid Taleband, and sent him on a “vacation” to Ceylon until after the election.
Feisal won almost 97 percent of the vote.
But Hussein’s son, Abdullah, who was to be the first king of Trans Jordan, was not privy to Lawrence and Churchill’s plans. Abdullah had stormed into Amman and promised to liberate Syria from the French and install Feisal as King in Damascus.
The French, who had taken Syria for emotional reasons — their ties to the Crusades — were afraid of Abdullah. Lawrence loathed the French and hated the idea, as he wrote, “of atheistic and agnostic France in the Holy Land.” Lawrence also had a personal rivalry and hatred for French Commander Ed Bremond, who had vast designs for France in the Middle East.
Lawrence and Churchill were awash with problems in Jordan at this time. First, they needed to restrain Abdullah from attacking Syria. Second, they needed a ruler in Trans Jordan who would accept a border with British-controlled Palestine that reached across the Jordan River onto Trans Jordanian territory. Third, they did not want Trans Jordan to be used as a base for anti-Zionists that might attack a future Israel. Lawrence had believed that the Jews and Arabs must both be given homelands in the Middle East simultaneously as a key to Middle East peace. Finally, Lawrence and Churchill sought a ruler who would not be too powerful so as to challenge their machinations, as well as one who would be totally reliant on the UK to stay in power.
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| Lawrence was a keen archaeologist who worked on various digs like this one at Jerash, the largest and best-preserved Roman city left on Earth. |
By October of 1921, Lawrence had taken over Trans Jordan as the main British representative in the territory. He began negotiations with Abdullah on the Hejaz Treaty. During these negotiations, Lawrence told Abdullah a very large lie. He actually told the Arab leader that he would be able to invade Syria in six months time.
As Abdullah recalls it, “He said to me, ‘You are well-known for sacrificing your personal ambitions for your country, so stay here [in Trans Jordan]. If you succeed, you will achieve the unity of Syria in six months. God willing, we will visit you in Damascus to offer our congratulations.”
Lawrence told Abdullah that if he failed to cooperate he “might well lose everything.”
The Hejaz Treaty was signed in December of that year. Abdullah was made the king of Trans Jordan and his wish to be made a British officer was accepted. Abdullah expressed major concerns over Palestine and pushed for an Arab Emir who would rule over both Palestine and Jordan. The British said no, explaining that England was looking towards a different political system for the Jews.
Abdullah wanted to know if this system would, in the near future, turn out the Palestinians. The British assured him that would not happen. The two sides, however, could not agree. As a compromise, Churchill offered Abdullah a six-month temporary rule in Trans Jordan — complete with gold bullion and troops to quell anti-French and anti-Jewish dissidents. This was a ruse, however. Churchill knew full well, as did Abdullah, that he would rule Trans Jordan for as long as he should live.
The British could not get Sherif Hussein — the father of Abdullah and Feisal — to go along with their plans, no matter what the payoff Churchill offered. And that payoff was great. Abdullah was offered 5,000 pounds per month. Sherif Hussein and his main political enemy, Ibn Saud, were both offered 100,000 pounds per year in arrears to go along with the “Master Plan.”
To gain access to his money, however, Churchill wanted Hussein to agree to sign the Treaty of Versailles, “including acceptance of the mandatory principle and the disposal of the Arab countries.”
Hussein wanted no part of it. In fact, he wanted England to completely withdraw from Palestine. Lawrence negotiated tooth and nail with Hussein. There were threats and tears and more payoffs. When Lawrence handed Hussein a large sum of gold, Hussein immediately spent it on ten airplanes.
Lawrence was then told to tell Hussein that the Prince of Wales would come to visit him at Jeddah and invite the Sherif to come live in England — with a compensation package of 5,000 pounds per month. During this time (the summer of 1921), however, it was Abdullah who wanted to resign from the throne in Jordan and go live in England.
It seems that an assassination attempt on a top French military commander in Syria was being blamed on assassins based in Trans Jordan. Abdullah was pressured by the British to turn over the would-be assassins to the French. Abdullah, of course, refused and instead wanted to resign his post. Using his masterful diplomatic skills in the role that suited him best, Lawrence told the French that they would receive no suspects in the assassination attempt. He then convinced Abdullah not to abdicate the throne of Trans Jordan.
The nation of Jordan had been born, cemented and saved all in one conversation.
Hussein eventually empowered Abdullah to negotiate on his behalf a final settlement on the Versailles Treaty. Abdullah signed a deal with Lawrence, who sent it on to Hussein for ratification, but the father never added his signature.
Two years went by. It was 1924, and the British were tired of waiting. They abandoned Hussein to Ibn Saud and his Saudi tribes. Ibn Saud’s forces attacked Sherif Hussein without mercy — the very same man who had raised the initial Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the first place. They drove Hussein from power in Mecca in 1924 and sent him into exile in Cyprus. In Nicosia, Hussein received from the British Empire the honor of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath.
King Hussein had a heart attack in 1930. He moved back to Amman, Trans Jordan, to be near his children in his final year. He passed away in 1931. Feisal ruled in Iraq until 1933. His family stayed on the throne till 1958, when his grandson, Feisal II, was assassinated.
Abdullah ruled until 1951. He was assassinated by a loyal believer of the ex-mufti of Jerusalem, Jaj Amin el Husseini, who believed Abdullah had betrayed the interests of Palestinians in the Holy Land vis-à-vis his deal with the British. The recently deceased King Hussein of Jordan was at his side when Abdullah was assassinated. Had Jordan’s first king pressed his case on how Britain would administer a future Zion, he may well have continued on the throne for the rest of his natural life.
Lawrence, having been brought back into the Colonial Office by Churchill to renegotiate a settlement with the Arabs, believed he had, at least in part, made amends for his past lies.
He wrote, “So we were quit of the war time Eastern adventure with clean hands.” He then rejoined the Royal Air Force under an assumed name of John Hume Ross and entered the British military’s top photography school.
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| The Jordanian flag flies high over Aqaba. |
Many might wonder why this journalist engendered to follow in the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia through Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. To be perfectly honest, I feel a certain kinship with the man.
He was a maverick who lived outside of society. He shared many of my own interests, like Roman and medieval archaeology, special forces soldiering and photography. He also worked with native peoples who did not share his race, culture or religion — as this writer has done in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Zululand and many other nations. He was also a scholar keen to study both the Bible and foreign languages.
Yet perhaps the main reason, in the end, why I sought to follow in Lawrence’s steps is that his story is not a part of the official curriculum in Jordan’s primary or secondary schools, nor in its universities. In my travels through Jordan, I was constantly amazed that while many Jordanians had heard of Lawrence, none, it seemed, knew any of the details of his life’s work in the Middle East. As a point in fact, T.E. Lawrence must be acknowledged as the George Washington of Jordan.
As for the future, Jordan appears to be in capable hands. The new King Abdullah, named for his grandfather, is an Oxford-educated man who once served as the leader of the nation’s elite special forces. His interests are varied — he has even appeared as an actor on the hit television show Star Trek Voyager — and the king has expressed an interest in developing Jordan’s oil, high-tech and tourism industries.
There will likely come a day when the king, along with his beautiful wife, Rania, will sit down to tell their children the story of Lawrence of Arabia. And, warts and all, this story will ultimately show that while the British may have once boasted a strong thirst to acquire desert outposts for their Empire, ultimately, it is the Arabs who still maintain a soft spot in their hearts for the imperfect British colonialists like Churchill and Lawrence.
For the finest ideals of the Knights Templar and the British Empire can best find their mirror images in the gallantry and courageous spirit of Saladin and Sherif Hussein’s brave sons who fought at the right hand of Sir Lawrence in a grand quest for freedom for the Arab people.
Related stories:
Jordan: Modernity meets the ancient
