Joseph O'Neill - Blood-Dark Track

It seemed that the consul, as he boiled greengages into jam, organized soirées and battled with quartermasterly zeal for mince pies and Cypriot brandy, fell victim to a kind of diplomatic somnambulism; or, at any rate, was slow to wake up to the shadowy activities taking place before his eyes at the consulate. It was not long before he realized that Mersin was not as dead as it looked; and by August 1942 he was writing home, ‘It is really amazing how in my time at Mersin this place has changed from a complete backwater to — still a small place, but one busy with work, intrigue, visitors and all sorts of opposing forces.’ At the forefront of Norman Mayers’ mind, when he wrote these words, was the controversial detention by the British of a certain Mersin businessman, Nazim Gandour.

I discovered that the details of the Gandour affair were preserved in one of the small number of embassy and consular files concerned with wartime Turkey kept in the Public Records Office at Kew, in south-west London. The contents of the file — memoranda, letters, notations on minute sheets — provided a remarkable insight into the workings of the organization responsible for the arrest of Joseph Dakak.

The story began on 23 May 1942, when Norman Mayers wrote to the British embassy declaring himself to be ‘exceedingly troubled about the news that Gandour was arrested when he crossed the [Syrian] frontier with our visa over a fortnight ago’:

The indefiniteness of the whole matter, and the consciousness that Nazim Gandour has been the object of suspicion all that time that I have been in Mersin, without any proof being offered so far as I am concerned, arouses all my apprehension.…

Doran says that it is a question of espionage. I am not going to say that Gandour is innocent. I do not know him very well. But I do know that he is an exceedingly clever businessman who is closely connected with the timber and chrome business of the UKCC. His business affairs and his fortune are in our hands, and the majority of his relatives are in Syria and Egypt. If this man has done espionage for the Italians or Germans, he cannot have done it for pecuniary interest. I do not believe that he would work for our enemies out of political conviction. There remains only the possibility that he has been subjected to pressure by them. In the last connection I would say that Gandour is quick enough to take a lot of catching in that way.

The matter must be brought into the light, and it must be brought into the light quickly. That is the British way of doing things, don’t you agree?

Two days later, Mayers wrote again to the embassy:

You may ask what is worrying me so much in the matter. It is the fear that we have got hold of a man who is at least innocent of the serious charge of espionage; and the fear lest this whole inquiry be conducted on arbitrary lines. In the case of Gandour I can get nothing but ‘suspicions’ out of Doran, and I am beginning to think that there may be against him nothing more than suspicions.…

The embassy in Ankara did not share the consul’s anxieties. The minister, J.C. Sterndale Bennett, thought that Mayers was ‘getting altogether too worked up about this’, and the counsellor, A.K. Helm, did not ‘think we need be too tender-hearted about these Levantine traders. The profits are no doubt well worth the risk.’ Nevertheless, the embassy could not afford to brush off its man in Mersin, and the decision was taken to look into the matter. It was at this point that the trouble, and the dark farce, started — when the diplomats undertook the seemingly straightforward task of fathoming why was Gandour arrested. Wading into an apparently shallow pool of inquiry, they finally emerged soaked, mud-spattered, and spitting weeds.

On 27 May, the military attaché, Major-General Alan C. Arnold, reported the following to Sterndale Bennett:

With reference to the arrest of Nazim Gandour, British Security in Syria have considerable evidence that Nazim has been working for a considerable time for the Axis. This is confirmed by the Turkish Secret Service authorities who far from being horrified, as Mr Mayers suggests, have urged us to put an end to his activities. As I have frequently pointed out to Consuls, proof as known in peace time law courts can very rarely be produced against enemy agents in a neutral country. All that you can do is to take the sum total of evidence available and if it is sufficiently damning act. It is better that one innocent man in twenty should be interned rather than the lives of British sailors should be endangered.

Gandour’s particular line of country as far as I can remember was acting as intermediary between Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestine caique crews and the Axis agents in Mersin.… I am only passing on to you what I believe to be the views of Security second-hand and I will ask Lt.-Colonel Thomson [of SIME] to come and see you personally about it when he arrives tomorrow.

But Lietenant-Colonel Thomson was not able to help, and Arnold wrote to SIME in Beirut for further information. In response, he received a Secret letter dated 30 June 1942 from Colonel R.J. Maunsell (the head of SIME and the chief spycatcher in the Middle East) in Cairo. However, Maunsell’s letter was unilluminating. In the end, Helm could do no better than simply — and misleadingly — inform Norman Mayers that there existed ‘detailed evidence from the competent authorities regarding the reasons for the arrest of [Gandour].’

But as soon as Mayers had been swatted away, another problem presented itself: an Istanbul lawyer engaged by Gandour’s family, Miss Süreyya Agaoglu, travelled to Beirut to see the prisoner. The lawyer was ‘of considerable repute and persona grata with Turkey’s leading political figures, including the Prime Minister’ and, although not allowed to communicate with Gandour, was received with great courtesy in Beirut by Sir Patrick Coghill. Coghill informed her that Gandour was charged with having (1) sold wood to the UKCC at exorbitant prices; (2) passed on to the Axis information regarding UKCC transactions; (3) passed on to Axis sources information regarding British dealings in chrome; (4) sold to the Axis manufactured goods imported from Egypt. Coghill also suggested that her client’s predicament was, at bottom, down to two people in Mersin: Desmond Doran and Norman Mayers’ picnicking friend, William Rickards.

On 7 September 1942, Gandour’s lawyer had a lengthy interview in Ankara with the minister, Sterndale Bennett. She argued that, since she had received assurances from the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the Turkish authorities had submitted no evidence against Gandour, it was clear that information had been laid against Gandour by business enemies.

Sterndale Bennett was stumped by the wealth of detail amassed by the Turkish lawyer and was, he afterwards noted, ‘somewhat handicapped in discussing the case by the fact that it was a matter dealt with entirely by the military authorities [and by the fact that I am] not aware of the exact nature of the charges or the evidence’. The minister — who noted that the ‘Turkish authorities will, of course, never admit that they laid any information against Gandour’ — decided to take the advice of the military attaché, Arnold, on how best to proceed, although he acknowledged that ‘Colonel Maunsell or Sir P. Coghill alone will probably have detailed knowledge of the case’.

By now, things had descended into absurdity. Norman Mayers, it had become clear, relied on the diplomats in Ankara for his information; the diplomats (Sterndale Bennett, Helm, etc.) relied on briefings from their military attaché, Arnold; Arnold depended on ‘Security’ personages — Thomson and Maunsell — who relied on Coghill, who in turn relied on Doran, who himself relied on information produced by his local sources — Turkish sources and/or William Rickards — whose own sources were unknown. What passed as reliable intelligence was, in fact, an erratic pendulum of hearsay by which second- and third- and fourth-hand information of uncertain origin swung from Mersin A (Mayers) to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo to Beirut to Mersin B (Doran) and back again to Mersin A.