A Peace to End all Peace (5 page)

As viewed in old photographs, Deedes looked an oddity in the oriental surroundings in which service in the Gendarmerie placed him. Small, painfully thin, and light-complexioned, he did not blend into the Ottoman landscape. Ascetic and deeply Christian, he had little use for sleep, rest, or food. He worked fifteen hours a day, indifferent to comfort and careless of danger; nobody could have been more unlike the Turkish officers who, if European accounts were to be believed, were in many cases corrupt and cowardly. He made a success of his challenging assignment, and won popularity with the Turks.

Deedes was an unknown figure when he entered the Gendarmerie in 1910. Four years later he had achieved such high standing that he was co-opted by the leading figure in the new Ottoman government to help run the Ministry of the Interior. By the time of his thirty-first birthday in 1914, Deedes, who had learned to speak Turkish fluently, was one of the few Englishmen who understood Turkish affairs. Yet his government did not make real use of his experience and knowledge. One of the continuous themes of the years to come was that Deedes was a Cassandra: his government chose to disregard his warnings and to ignore his accurate analyses of Turkish political motives.

The minister under whom Deedes served in the Ottoman government in 1914 was Mehmed Talaat. Most of what the British government thought it knew at the time about Talaat and about the political party that Talaat led was erroneous; and at least some of it could have been corrected by Deedes. But the British embassy in Constantinople believed that it knew the truth about Ottoman politics already, and therefore that it did not have to inquire further.

IV

Mehmed Talaat, the Minister of the Interior and the leader of the largest faction within the governing political party, was a figure whom British diplomats did not regard as a gentleman. They believed that he lacked race and breeding; they scornfully reported that he was of gypsy origin. He had thick black hair, heavy black eyebrows, a hawk-like nose, and what one of the few sympathetic British observers described as “a light in his eyes, rarely seen in men but sometimes in animals at dusk.”
⁷

Talaat was the single most important figure in Turkish politics. He was very much a self-made man. Little is known of his origins and background except that they were humble. He began life as a minor employee of the Post and Telegraph Office and is believed to have been a
Bektashi
, that is, a member of the largest of the Turkish Dervish orders. (The Dervishes were Moslem religious brotherhoods.) He is believed to have joined a Freemason lodge, is known to have organized a secret political society, and to have been imprisoned for a time for his underground activities.

Joining a secret organization was a common activity in the Ottoman Empire of Talaat’s youth. Under the autocratic Sultan Abdul Hamid, who reigned from 1876 to 1909, open political activity was dangerous. The Sultan, who suspended the constitution and disbanded Parliament, was intolerant of dissent and employed a secret police force to deal with it. The political life of the empire was driven underground, where secret societies proliferated. The earliest ones took their inspiration from nineteenth-century European revolutionary groups, especially the Italian
carbonari
, and organized themselves into cells of a handful of members, only one of whom, typically, would know a member of another cell. Many of them, including the forerunner of the Young Turkey Party, were founded by university and military academy students. The army, too, was an especially fertile breeding ground for such societies; its younger members were shamed by their empire’s disastrous showing on one battlefield after another.

Abdul Hamid’s police forces succeeded in smashing the secret societies in Constantinople and elsewhere. Beyond their grasp, however, was Salonika, the bustling and un-Turkish Macedonian port in what is now Greece. Salonika is where a number of the secret societies established their headquarters, developing close relationships with members of the Ottoman Third Army, which had its headquarters there. The disorder and disintegration with which the Third Army had to deal in Macedonia—a frontier region of the empire—in itself was a formative experience that helped the secret societies to enlist recruits within the ranks of the army.

Talaat, who lived and worked in Salonika, was one of the founders of one such secret society which eventually became the principal faction within a merged group that called itself the Committee of Union and Progress—the C.U.P. as it will be called hereafter. It was known, too, as the Young Turkey Party, and later its members were called the Young Turks. Upon joining it, initiates swore an oath on the Koran and a gun. Djemal Bey, a staff officer who later played a major role in Middle Eastern politics, was Talaat’s initial recruit among the leadership of the Third Army.

One day in 1908 a junior army officer named Enver, who was stationed in Salonika and who had also joined Talaat’s group, was ordered to return to Constantinople. Afraid that his membership had been discovered by the secret police, he slipped out of Salonika and took to the hills, to which another Young Turkey army colleague had already escaped. Then another army officer followed his example, taking troops and ammunition with him. The Sultan sent troops against them, but the troops joined the rebels. There was a spontaneous combustion of a bloodless revolution in Salonika: the C.U.P. took control. The Young Turks seized control of the Telegraph Office—it may have been no coincidence that Talaat was one of its officials—and established contact with C.U.P. cells that honeycombed the army and the empire. When the smoke had cleared the constitution had been restored, parliamentary and party politics had resumed, and the following year the Sultan abdicated in favor of his brother.

The old politicians took office, while the Young Turks remained in the background. But the C.U.P. had become a force with which to reckon, and not merely because of its strong representation in the officer corps of the army. In a disorganized society, the strength of the C.U.P. was that it had branches everywhere, criss-crossing the empire.

The leaders of the successful uprising at first enjoyed a good-enough press in the western world so that in common parlance “Young Turks” came to mean any brash group of young people with dynamic ideas who rebel against an outmoded leadership. They were viewed with sympathy by the Foreign Office in London, but were disliked and disdained in the British embassy in Constantinople. The ambassador, Sir Gerard Lowther, seems to have fallen completely under the influence of Gerald FitzMaurice, his First Dragoman, or official interpreter and adviser on oriental affairs; and FitzMaurice detested the C.U.P. almost from the very outset.

FitzMaurice’s interpretation of the events of 1908 was colored by the fact that they had occurred in Salonika, about half of whose 130,000 inhabitants were either Jews or Dunmehs (members of a Jewish sect that had converted to Islam in the seventeenth century). Salonika was also a city in which there were Freemason lodges. Emmanuel Carasso (or Karasu), a Jewish lawyer, had founded an Italian Freemason lodge in which he apparently allowed Talaat’s secret society to meet when it was in hiding from the Sultan’s secret police. FitzMaurice concluded that the C.U.P. was a Latin-influenced international Jewish Freemason conspiracy; and Lowther duly reported this to the Foreign Office in London. Lowther referred to the C.U.P. as “the Jew Committee of Union and Progress.”
⁸

FitzMaurice later conducted an investigation of the C.U.P., the results of which were reflected in a confidential report sent by Lowther under his own name on 29 May 1910, to the official head of the Foreign Office, Sir Charles Hardinge. In his report, Lowther pointed out that “
liberté, égalité, fraternité
” (liberty, equality, fraternity), words drawn from the French Revolution, were both the slogan of the Italian Freemasons (hence Karasu’s lodge) and of the Young Turkey movement. The Young Turks, he claimed, were “imitating the French Revolution and its godless and levelling methods. The developments of the French Revolution led to antagonism between England and France, and should the Turkish revolution develop on the same lines, it may find itself similarly in antagonism with British ideals and interests.”
⁹

In his detailed report of more than 5,000 words, Lowther alleged that Jews had taken over a Freemason network (“The Oriental Jew is an adept at manipulating occult forces…”) and through it had taken control of the Ottoman Empire. Amongst the ringleaders of the Jewish Freemason conspiracy, according to Lowther, was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Oscar Straus, whose brothers owned the New York department stores Macy’s and Abraham & Straus.

The danger to England, wrote Lowther, is that “The Jew hates Russia and its Government, and the fact that England is now friendly to Russia has the effect of making the Jew to a certain extent anti-British…a consideration to which the Germans are, I think, alive.”
¹⁰
Indeed, Lowther concluded, “I have reason to believe that my German colleague is aware of the extent to which Jewish and Latin Masonry inspires the Committee, and that he has confidentially kept his Government informed as to this feature of Young Turkey politics.”
¹¹

However, when the 288-man Ottoman Parliament was elected in 1908, only four Jews were elected to it, and when the C.U.P. created a Central Committee in 1909, Karasu was not elected to membership on it, nor did he ever rise to a leadership position either in the party or in the government; he was never the influential figure that foreigners supposed him to be. As deputies in Parliament, Karasu and the three other Jews bent over backwards to prove that they were Turks first and Jews only second; indeed, they supported the C.U.P.’s measures against Zionist settlement in Palestine.
^*
Lowther explained this away by claiming that the new goal of Zionism was to create a Jewish homeland not in Palestine but instead in a section of what is now Iraq.

The FitzMaurice and Lowther report won wide acceptance among British officials and led the British government into at least three profound misconceptions that had important consequences.

The first of these concerned the inner workings of the C.U.P. FitzMaurice and Lowther misled their government into believing that the Young Turks were controlled by two men. Talaat and Djavid (“who is a Crypto-Jew”) were, according to FitzMaurice and Lowther, “the official manifestations of the occult power of the Committee. They are the only members of the Cabinet who really count, and are also the apex of Freemasonry in Turkey.”
¹²
In fact the C.U.P. was split into factions—factions with which the British government could have intrigued, had it known that they existed.
¹³
It was an ironic coincidence that Djavid, whom FitzMaurice and Lowther feared as a Crypto-Jew, was the leader of the pro-British faction; but FitzMaurice and Lowther did not know that.

A second misconception was that a group of Jews wielded political power in the Ottoman Empire—or indeed anywhere else in the world at that time. A few years later FitzMaurice drew an obvious conclusion from his misconception: that the world war (in which Britain was by then engaged) could be won by buying the support of this powerful group. Its support could be bought, he decided, by promising to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine (he had by then determined that the Zionist movement desired to return to Zion, not to Iraq). This reasoning helped to persuade the Foreign Office that it ought to pledge British support to the Zionist program—which it eventually did in 1917.

FitzMaurice’s misinformation led to yet another conclusion with important consequences: that the Young Turk leaders were foreigners, not Turks, and that they served foreign interests. This was the opposite of the truth, and led British observers to miscalculate what the Young Turk government would do. In fact, as even FitzMaurice and Lowther saw, a principal failing of the C.U.P. was its Turkish chauvinism. It discriminated against Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, and others. Its strength was that it was opposed to all foreign interests; its anti-European bias attracted wide popular support.

The British government never learned that Lowther and FitzMaurice had supplied it with a warped view of Ottoman politics. John Buchan, who became wartime Director of Information for the British government, described the C.U.P. leaders as “a collection of Jews and gipsies,” pictured the Ottoman government as the tool of world Jewry, and called Enver Pasha “a Polish adventurer”—confusing him with another Turkish officer whose name was similar and whose father was Polish though not Jewish.
¹⁴

V

The years after 1908 proved to be a disaster for the Ottoman Empire, in a war against Italy and in another against a Balkan coalition; and, in 1913, it was in the process of losing a second Balkan War when the C.U.P. suddenly seized control of the government. Young Enver—the same officer who had precipitated the events of 1908 in Salonika—impetuously led a raid on the Sublime Porte; his raiding party killed the Minister of War. Enver and his friends took office; he was promoted to a field command in which he covered himself with glory, and on 4 January 1914, he took over the War Ministry for himself. Thirty-one years old, Enver married the niece of the Sultan, moved into a palace, and became the center of attention in Turkish politics.

Djemal Pasha became Military Governor of Constantinople, and in that position consolidated the C.U.P.’s hold on the seat of government. Halil Bey, President of the Chamber of Deputies, also assumed an important role, as did Mehmed Djavid, an economics teacher who was appointed Minister of Finance. Talaat, the principal C.U.P. leader, became Minister of the Interior and the real leader of the government. The courtly Prince Said Halim provided respectability as Grand Vizier and Foreign Minister.