Joseph O'Neill - Blood-Dark Track

We hereby confirm that, with effect from 7 March 1930, you shall be retained by ourselves for the monthly fee of 150 Turkish liras. As soon as your travel papers are in order, you shall travel from Mersina to Malatya, where you shall report to our construction manager, Herr Dipl. Ing. Lender. Your retainer shall take effect as soon as you receive instructions from him. Your appointment shall be terminable without notice.

Expenses incurred in travelling to and from Malatya-Mersina shall be reimbursed by ourselves.

Here was confirmation that Joseph had acted as a German agent — for commercial purposes, at any rate. There was nothing odd about this, particularly as, in the run-up to the Second World War, Germany was by far Turkey’s greatest trading partner. But long-standing German construction works around Mersin continued during the war and, just as Braithwaite & Co. had been used by the British as a cover, German corporations must have served the Reich, which gave rise to the possibility that the nature of Joseph Dakak’s assistance to these corporations might also have shifted. This was, after all, a man who retained an affection for German culture after having travelled to Germany in 1934, when an intense and ritualized romantic nationalism flooded the country and when, in August, a plebiscite upon the death of President Paul von Hindenburg resulted in 38 million Germans voting for, and only four and a half million voting against, the consolidation of the offices of president, chancellor and commander-in-chief of the armed forces in the fulminating, maniacally anti-Semitic person of Adolf Hitler. Who was to say that my grandfather had not been swept along, or at least doused, by this historic surge?

The summer of that year — 1934 — saw another, less dramatic change in the political landscape which Joseph Dakak probably registered: the resignation by Franz von Papen of the office of Vice-Chancellor of the Reich. An arch-conservative Westphalian aristocrat, Papen had served without particular distinction in the Prussian Landtag for eleven years and, according to the French ambassador in Berlin, ‘enjoyed the peculiarity of being taken seriously by neither his friends nor his enemies’; but in June 1932, in the aftermath of the resignation of Heinrich Brüning, he suddenly found himself, at Hindenburg’s invitation, Chancellor of Germany. Papen lasted until December 1932, when he was succeeded by General Kurt von Schleicher. Then, on 30 January 1933, Hindenburg withdrew his support from Schleicher and authorized the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of the Reich and Franz von Papen (who was not a member of the Nazi party) as Vice-Chancellor. Papen remained in office until July 1934, when he accepted a job as a special envoy to Austria, where his brief was to manage and exploit the flux created by the recent assassination of the Austrian Chancellor by Austrian Nazis. Papen remained Hitler’s man in Vienna until March 1938, the month of the Anschluss . In April 1939, he began his stint as the Reich’s ambassador to Turkey. His arrival would certainly have been noted by Joseph Dakak; and my grandfather would have been very excited to learn — at some time in 1939 or 1940, going by Salvator Avigdor’s recollection — of the former Chancellor’s decision to pay a visit to Mersin and to stay, in the company of his wife, at the Toros Hotel.

The distinguished visitors would have received a warm and appropriate welcome. My grandfather would have gone to great pains to ensure that all was to the satisfaction of Herr and Frau von Papen, and no doubt he put himself personally at their service. It would not, I guessed, have taken Papen very long to ascertain that Monsieur Dakak was remarkably capable and well-informed and well-situated, and that an attempt ought in due course to be made to secure his discreet co-operation on a range of matters. Espionage, it so happened, was something of a Papen speciality. In the Great War, as Germany’s military attaché in the United States, he set up a comprehensive network of agents to inform him of shipping schedules and cargoes leaving America. He forged passports and, to prevent the Allies from receiving American armaments, he incorporated a company to buy up all the hydraulic presses on the market. He authorized acts of sabotage that included attempts to blow up the locks of the Welland Canal in Canada to delay the arrival of Canadian troops in France. He encouraged Roger Casement, who visited the United States, in his plans of armed rebellion in Ireland. So disruptive were Papen’s activities that eventually, in December 1915, he was expelled from the United States. Thirty years later, Papen oversaw the activities of Cicero, the Albanian valet to the British ambassador Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen and perhaps the most spectacularly successful spy of the Second World War: from October 1943 to March 1944, Cicero supplied the Germans — at a price of up to £15,000 per film of 36 negatives — with photographs of his master’s Secret and Top Secret papers, which included minutes of the Teheran Conference held in November 1943 by Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt.

Of course, my grandfather was not to know any of this as he sat on the terrace of the Toros Hotel with the Papens, making small talk about archaeology, perhaps, or the Great War, in which the two gentlemen had served alongside the Ottoman forces, or about Germany or Berlin. Even if Joseph had always sympathized with the Allies (as he claimed in his letter to the British embassy), there was no sign that he was equipped, as Mrs Garstang was, with the kind of ideological aversion to Nazi Germany that was probably required to keep in perspective Papen’s enormously flattering attentions. Papen was not only invested with the charisma of a man touched by history and fame, he was also quick-witted and personable and winning — sufficiently winning, in fact, to have persuaded both Hitler and a very doubtful President Hindenburg of the merits of installing a Hitler — Papen government.

To cap it all, the ambassador was a first-class horseman — good enough to have had excelled in the steeplechase as a youthful Herrenreiter . His best-known photographic portrait showed him with his horse in the Zoological Gardens, Berlin. A tall, slender man with a greying moustache and eyes set close to a long, upturned nose, he stood with one hand rubbing the animal’s head and the other clutching a crop. He wore a cap, a bow-tie, a jacket with matching breeches, shining knee-length leather boots, white gloves, and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. In this get-up he bore an odd resemblance to another immaculate, gloved, whip-carrying horseman I had seen: Joseph Dakak. Was this him? Was Franz von Papen, with his private charm and public accomplishment, Joseph’s idealized self made flesh? It was, at any rate, easy to imagine a polite exchange, in German or French, in which the hotelier humbly put his filly at the disposal of the chivalrous German — just as he put his young bookkeeper, Salvator Avigdor, at the Papens’ disposal to act as a guide on their jaunt west of Mersin. I wondered if it had occurred to Joseph how this act of hospitality might look to others. True, a drive to the ancient, tiny port of Silifke, the site of a notable Byzantine castle, would traverse an archaeological and sightseeing paradise; but — assuming Papen’s visit occurred in wartime, which was not certain: it could well have taken place in the summer of 1939 — the route was also of strategic interest. The state of the road, the accessibility of the shoreline to shipping and landing crafts, the presence or absence of any construction workers or troops, the general lay of the land, these were all useful things to know. My grandfather might have openly assisted Papen in a valuable reconnaissance exercise.

Was this simple guilelessness or something more sinister? The question also arose in relation to the occasion, in late 1941, when Joseph light-heartedly asked Hilmi Bey, the chief of the political police in Mersin, if Olga Catton and her friend Togo Makzoumé were working for British intelligence. What possible business was this of Joseph Dakak? Was my grandfather being idly inquisitive, or was he pressing the police chief out of a real need for the information? Either way, he was acting with a recklessness that was completely inconsistent with the prudence that had been generally attributed to him. Joseph Dakak’s three-week-long fraternization with the Arab nationalists at the Modern Hotel was also strikingly suspect — on a par, in terms of giving an impression of his political sympathies, with travelling to Cork and hanging out night after night with the Lynches and O’Neills at Tomás Ashe Hall. There was something else. On 21 June 1940, the Mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini, wrote to Franz von Papen from Baghdad seeking to establish friendly relations. The contact proved fruitful, and very soon after he arrived in Berlin in November 1941, the Mufti established an espionage and sabotage network that covered Turkey and Palestine. His agents worked in close contact with German intelligence, operating in Iskenderun, Antakya, Adana, Diyarbekir — and Mersin. In Istanbul, meanwhile, Paul Leverkuehn, the Abwehr chief, established contact in Istanbul with Musa Husseini, the Mufti’s nephew and heir-presumptive (and not to be confused with the nephew whom Joseph Dakak met, Mustapha Husseini), with a view to obtaining intelligence about troop movements in Syria and Mesopotamia. What more likely German — Arab conduit of information could there have been than a Syrian with strong German connections and an inability to mind his own business travelling on the Taurus Express from Turkey to Palestine?