Joseph O'Neill - Blood-Dark Track

This last fact was confirmed to me by an old friend of Denis Wright named Bill Henderson. In 1941, Henderson, an architect in the Royal Engineers, was posted as a junior staff officer to Ankara, where his duties included meeting soldiers (dressed as civilians) disembarking from the Taurus Express at six in the morning. In 1942, when Henderson was transferred to Cilicia to work on the Taurus road, he discovered that the British had German counterparts in the vicinity, who were undertaking huge water supply and irrigation schemes around Mersin under pre-war contracts. On one occasion, Henderson recalled, his Turkish foreman got hold of surveying equipment from helpful Germans. ‘All that cloak-and-dagger stuff and all those false identities were something of a charade,’ Henderson said. ‘Everybody knew what was going on.’

Everybody, in this context, meant the German diplomatic and intelligence corps, which was headed by the Reich’s ambassador, Franz von Papen — the Chancellor of Germany for a brief time in 1932 and then Vice-Chancellor in Hitler’s first government from January 1933 to the summer of 1934. The principle objectives of the Germans were, first, to ensure that Turkey did not join the Allies, and, second, to monitor and if possible influence the military situation in the Middle East. Paul Leverkuehn, the Chief of the Istanbul Station of the Abwehr from July 1941–44, considered that his most important task was to guard against the risk of Turkish entry into the war on the Allied side. The strength and distribution of the British and Free French forces in Syria and Iraq was, accordingly, of vital interest to German intelligence. Arab observers along the frontiers with Turkey carried out reconnaissance, and travellers to and from Egypt, which continued to trade with Turkey, were also a rich source of information. Agents of intelligence organizations — Abwehr, Sicherheitsdienst and Auslandsorganization — operated from German consulates. There was no German consulate in Mersin, where the Axis powers were represented by an Italian consulate headed by an aristocrat named Aloisi. The Italians, Wright said, engaged a man to swim out and attach limpet mines to the hulls of Allied merchantmen moored in the waters off Mersin. In the event, they only damaged one ship.

British counter-espionage was largely in the hands of SIME agents. One of these was C.T.C. Taylor, SIME’s man in Adana. Taylor wrote in his unpublished autobiography:

The enemy had a considerable number of sympathizers among the Arabs, many of whom remained faithful to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had fled to, and was operating from, Germany, and Italian Levantine families with members on either side of the [Turkish-Syrian] frontier. My organization’s job was to spot enemy agents, or their various forms of communication and propaganda, and prevent them from penetrating far into territory held by us …

[The frontier with Syria] was the chief route for agents and propaganda amongst the Arabs and Egyptians. In Adana the leading German agent was Paula Koch, who had been matron of the hospital in Aleppo before the war and who became most annoyed, I learned, when I christened her the Mata Hari of World War II. She had a milk-brother and informer, Joseph Ayvazian, who owned a hotel and restaurant up in the hills above Iskenderun at Soğuk Oluk.

Taylor arrived in Turkey in January 1942. On the Taurus Express to Istanbul, he bumped into another SIME agent, an Irish aristocrat from West Cork, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Patrick Coghill, Bt. Coghill had arrived in Turkey on a control espionage job for Colonel R.J. Maunsell, the head of SIME, who was based in Cairo. In Istanbul, Coghill reported to Lieutenant-Colonel Guy Thomson (‘a disappointed, venomous man’ Coghill thought), who gave him the job of vice-consul at the British consulate at Adana. Coghill’s mission was to find out how the enemy got its people across the Turkish border into Syria, and to tip off the British forces in Syria as to where and when enemy agents might be picked up. He was greatly assisted by the Turkish authorities, whom he found much more inclined towards the Allies than the Axis, specifically, Coghill enjoyed privileged contacts with the Turkish secret police. The secret police — under the direct and personal control of the prime minister, not the cabinet — supplied the Allies with information they could not obtain for themselves, such as complete lists of passengers leaving the country by rail or by air. In a stab at maintaining neutrality, information was also passed on by the Turks to the Axis powers, but this intelligence was not, both Coghill and Taylor thought, of the same quality as that supplied to the Allies.

Sir Patrick Coghill’s short spell in Adana led him to conclude that there were two classes of spies travelling to and from Syria: a riff-raff of smugglers, whose stories were unreliable; and high-up agents who, like Joseph Dakak, travelled with neutral passports on the Taurus Express.

After three weeks in Jerusalem, Joseph Dakak obtained an export licence from the authorities in Palestine and concluded a contract with a local merchant for the supply to Mersin of two hundred tonnes of lemons. With his return visas in his pocket, he set off on the train home, to Turkey.

He was arrested at Rasnakura, on the Palestine — Syria border.

That same night he was taken to Haifa, and the next day, back to Jerusalem, where he was registered by the Palestine CID (Criminal Investigation Department). The commander of the detention centre was an English sergeant-major. He took Dakak’s wedding ring and another ring, saying that these would be returned later; they never were.

My grandfather was held in Jerusalem for seventeen days. The food was terrible — ‘not fit,’ he complained in his testimony, ‘for even the worst of murderers.’ There was nowhere to sit or sleep: the choice was between standing and lying down on bare cement. He repeatedly asked to see the Turkish consul and was repeatedly told that he could do so tomorrow. He was shown a warrant signed by the police chief of Jerusalem, Arthur Giles, which stated that he was held in custody ‘on suspicion’ pursuant to section 17(a) of some Act.

There were eight other detainees in this prison, most of whom were Jews. Only later, my grandfather wrote, did he realize that they were all spies and that their primary concern was to find out whether he, Dakak, was connected to Jewish anarchists.

I was startled to read this. What possible reason could there be to suspect Joseph Dakak, a Turk of Arab origins, of supporting the Zionist underground in Palestine? The allegation went unexplained, because here Part I of the testimony came to an end and Part II, called In Beirut , began.

On the seventeenth day of his detention in Jerusalem, Dakak was told that he was being taken to the Turkish border. But the following day, 8 May 1942, he was driven instead to the military prison of the Free French in Beirut. Technically, he remained in British custody.

Dakak was taken to a cell occupied by eight others. Among them he recognized a Mersin millionaire called Nazim Gandour. Gandour — a Muslim of Lebanese, not Turkish, nationality — hadn’t shaved in four days. He had been arrested at the Syrian border by Desmond Doran, the British passport officer, who had travelled on the train with him. Gandour said that his visa had been inscribed with unusual numerals to alert the Syrian authorities that he should be arrested. ‘You see?’ Gandour said to Dakak, ‘your passport has the same stamp.’ Gandour said that Doran was an evil man who had corrupted quite a few people in Mersin, including certain Turkish police officers. ‘Doran’s the one behind all this,’ he said.

The food at the Beirut prison was dreadful. One day Gandour — who enjoyed the unique privilege of a mattress and pillow apparently provided by his family — returned from a meeting with the prison governors and said to Dakak, ‘Don’t worry. From now on, I’ll be receiving food prepared by my family, and I’ll give you some.’ And after that day three kinds of mezes (appetizers) and abundant quantities of fruit and baklava arrived at the prison. My grandfather wrote: ‘It was well known in Mersin that I very often ate baklava; and in this way Gandour tried to gain my confidence.’