During the First World War, British intelligence officers shaped Britain’s commitments to the Hashemites, France, and the Zionists. Infamous for their violent consequences, these seemingly conflicting promises represented wartime strategies to help defeat the Ottoman Empire and Germany. Intelligence records shed light upon Britain’s greatest triumphs and blunders as it reshaped the region into its current form. Since the outbreak of the war, prominent Arab nationalists and Islamists – all members of secret societies – were rebuffed after attempting to persuade British officers to support Arab independence. They sought liberation from the Ottomans, and independence. Britain only began to seriously consider its first major commitment in the Middle East in mid-1915. The gap between the first Anglo-Arab overtures in October 1914 and the beginning of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence is key to understanding the expectations of British decision makers. This paper examines why, during the first year of the war, Anglo-Arab overtures largely failed. Complicating this story, days after the Ottoman entry to the war, the Minister for War, Lord Kitchener, offered Sherif Hussein an Arab caliphate based in Hejaz, to rival that of the Ottoman sultan. Simultaneously, the Arab movements began to send emissaries to the British headquarters in Egypt in order to negotiate an Anglo-Arab alliance. Four of these overtures failed, but still influenced the McMahon-Hussein correspondence which eventually did succeed in creating a military partnership between Britain and the Hashemites, as the latter led a revolt against the Ottomans. The details of these initial negotiations help to explain why British assessments misconstrued the motivations and capabilities of their Arab interlocutors. Britain’s understanding of Arab movements, and of pan-Islam’s relationship with nationalism, was conditioned by circumstances produced by the war. The war divided friends and colleagues between pro-British and pro-Ottoman loyalties. The nationalists who approached British officers during 1914-15 exaggerated the unity of purpose across the Arab world, and misrepresented the capabilities and interests of the movement. British officers never anticipated the violent hatred which they faced in the years immediately following the First World War, and were slow to appreciate it cause. This was a consequence of their wartime assessments of the Arab movements. Conflict emerged largely because the war had created conditions which disguised the complex nationalist-Islamist networks in the region. Conditions favourable to the Anglo-Arab alliance and its particular vision for an Arab kingdom proved to be temporary.