The Professionalization of the Rival National Intelligence Services in the Middle East During World War One
Panel 197, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 24 at 10:30 am
Panel Description
Much novel and exciting archive-based work has recently been published on the professionalization of the British and other Military Intelligence Service in the Middle East during the First World War. Gone are the old assumptions based on the idea that intelligence was solely the business of spies, agents and desert reconnaissance. Gone too is the view put about after the war by General Edmund Allenby and others that the Ottomans (and their German partners) were easily hood-winked by superior British powers of deception. In its place has come a series of well-documented analyses and evaluations of a service which, from the on-set of the war between the Allies and the Ottomans was marked by the use of Signals Intelligence, wireless and telegraph intercepts and aerial photography, collected and presented in such a way as to make it of immediate battle-field use to military planners.
Yet little of the new literature seems to be known to historians of the modern Middle East, partly because the field of Military Intelligence as been conducted within the larger study of British and French, etc. national military history, partly because most of it has been presented and reviewed in specialist journals remote from our own field. By the same token, there are aspects of the significant intelligence activities of key local players, like the Port Said-based French Jesuit Priest turned intelligence office, Pere Jaussen, knowledge of which is confined to only a few, mostly French, Middle East historians.
Hence the aim of the panel is to bring together a group of the new historians of the military intelligence activities of the British, the French, the Ottomans and the Germans to present their work, and then to exchange ideas, with their colleagues in Middle East studies.
The level of professionalisation of the German and Ottoman intelligence services by the outbreak of war in 1914 was highly different. The German intelligence service (Section IIIb of the German General Staff) had only been founded a couple of years before the war and therefore more or less had to “learn by doing.” The Ottomans, in contrast, had a number of professional intelligence services, the most important of which were the Directorate of General Security (Emniyet-i Umumiye Müdürlü?ü) and the Te?kilat-i Mahsusa. The fascinating field of Ottoman and German intelligence in the Middle East is, however, still rather understudied, mostly due to a lack of sources (which in the German case were largely destroyed, and are largely inaccessible in Turkey due to political considerations).
It could be argued that as far as the German intelligence service was concerned, no professionalisation took place in the Middle East. The official German intelligence service was pre-occupied with the European adversaries of Germany and did not manage to establish intelligence networks in the Ottoman Empire. The “Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient (Intelligence Office for the East)” was an organisation founded by Max Freiherr von Oppenheim at the periphery of the German Foreign Office and employed a curious (if interesting) mix of academics, journalists, diplomats, missionaries and largely self-styled “specialists for oriental affairs”). It had only weak contacts to the German government and military leadership. German field agents in the Middle East were mostly amateurs recruited for specific missions.
The Ottomans, in contrast, had several professional institutions dealing with intelligence matters. Security police forces were headed and coordinated by the Directorate for General Security (Emniyet-i Umumiye Müdürlü?ü). Another intelligence service was the Te?kilat-i Mahsusa, which had been founded in 1911 and dealt with espionage, counter-espionage and propaganda both within and without the Ottoman Empire. It has also been accused of having been directly involved in the Armenian Genocide.
The Ottoman intelligence services contributed greatly to securing the general internal cohesion of the Ottoman Empire throughout the war. It could also be argued that they, particularly the Te?kilat-i Mahsusa, were predecessors of the clandestine organisations, which became so important during the Turkish national struggle after the end of World War I.
This paper focuses on a discrete group whose occupation it was to identify and categorize perceived threats to French imperial control in North Africa and Syria. These were the providers of intelligence to governmental authorities about internal social conditions within French-held territories in the Maghreb and the Syrian Levant. It is divided into two parts. The first reviews the nature, composition, and role of these intelligence providers. The second considers a series of examples from the World War I era and after, illustrating how intelligence provision was organised and acted upon, sometimes with success, sometimes without. Taken together, these case studies suggest that intelligence provision may help us understand late colonial states as ‘intelligence states’ in which effective exploitation of political information became increasingly critical to the survival of colonial rule in North African and Middle Eastern territories in the early twentieth century.
