Page 183 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

THE ARAB BUREAU i63
to Admiral Pcirsc again to suggest that Mansell shall work
with you. He is a very able fellow ... I shall feel happy if he is
working in your office, because I am not going to send you a
rotter ...I had a delightful letter from Miss Bell. She is
evidently perfectly happy in Cairo.

With that letter Sykes enclosed a draft of the proposed functions
of an ‘Arabian Bureau’. They were: first, to harmonise British
political activity in the north-east of the Arabian peninsula, and
to keep the Foreign and India Offices, the Admiralty, War Office
and Government of India simultaneously informed of the general
tendency of German and Turkish policies. Second, to co-ordinate
propaganda in favour of Great Britain among non-Indian
Muslims, ‘without clashing with the susceptibilities of Indian
Muslims and the Entente powers.’ The head of the Bureau was to
be Sir Mark Sykes and his deputy, Lt-Col. Parker. An officer was
to be appointed to tour the Persian Gulf and visit prisoners of
war in India, and to transmit any information gleaned through
the Chief Political Officer in Mesopotamia, Sir Percy Cox. On
December 28th Sykes again telegraphed to Clayton: ‘In my view
and Fitzgerald’s FO should run Bureau at least nominally ... The
WO, FO and IO are slow and the Admiralty has barged in and
seized me and the Bureau ... The Admiralty want to annex the
Bureau as part of their network and keep me in an office in
London ... The merit of the Admiralty is that it alone achieves
anything, has large funds and does things.’ At the same time
Sykes wrote: ‘Basra: when we have settled into our stride try
and gently get a giver and receiver.’ Native agents were to be
recruited in Karak, Mecca, Madina, Damascus and the Hauran
desert. The Bureau men in Cairo had already formed themselves
into an organisation with its own office and telegraphic address —
appropriately enough they chose the code name ‘Intrusive’—and
were in the process of establishing their own espionage network
separately from that of new G.O.C.-in-Chief, General Sir
Archibald Murray, who so far knew little of these proceedings,
though he was suspicious and by no means happy with what was
going on around him.
On January 1st, 1916 the Foreign Office cabled Clayton, still
officially the military intelligence chief under Murray: ‘Do you
consider any existing organisation would be hampered by
Bureau?’ Clayton replied, through the Resident McMahon, that
M