Enemy on the Euphrates Read Online Free

small package to Sykes which he quickly slipped inside his jacket pocket and in return – so we might reasonably surmise – an equally small package containing a sum of money was passed to the German engineer. Back at the embassy, Sir Mark unwrapped the package and checked the contents of the small notebook which it contained. Satisfied that the material he had been promised was actually there, he telephoned the British ambassador, Sir Nicholas R. O’Conor, to arrange an appointment with him at the ambassador’s earliest convenience.
    Sir Mark Sykes was no ordinary junior embassy official. He was the only son of Sir Tatton Sykes, an extremely wealthy landowning grandee with estates in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Over the previous ten years he had travelled widely in the territories of the Ottoman Empire and had gained the reputation of being an expert on ‘the East’. Over the next ten years he would become, successively, the Conservative Member for the parliamentary constituency of Hull Central, the commander of theYorkshire Territorial Army Battalion and the personal representative of the war minister, Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener of Khartoum, in all matters pertaining to British strategic and commercial interests in the Middle East. By 1916 he would be the government advisor whose opinions, ideals and prejudices were the most influential factor shaping the British Empire’s war aims in the struggle against the Ottoman Empire.
    Sykes’s chief, O’Conor, a tall, languid Irish landowner and Britain’s ambassador in Istanbul (which the British persisted in calling Constantinople) since 1898, was rather fond of his earnest young attaché, a fellow Catholic, who seemed happy to relieve him of some of the more tedious diplomatic work. Moreover, in those years before the First World War, O’Conor and Sykes shared a certain affection for the old Ottoman Empire. This once-great multiethnic and multireligious super-state, with a population of 21 million (a third of whom were Arabs) distributed over thirty-three vilayets and stretching from the Balkans to the frontier with Persia, had long since become critically weakened by a combination of war, rebellion, debt and the economic penetration of European capitalism. It was debt in particular that was the Achilles heel of the Ottoman state. Failure to repay immense loans from European banks had resulted in the creation of a European-controlled Ottoman Public Debt Administration which syphoned off the empire’s taxes and customs duties. Britain was part of that organisation, but since the 1850s had also seen the Ottomans as a useful bulwark against tsarist Russia’s attempts to expand south and gain access to the Mediterranean. So in 1905, this affection for Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s ramshackle empire on the part of O’Conor and Sykes was also a reflection of Britain’s longstanding foreign policy.
    When Sykes made his telephone call to Sir Nicholas, the ambassador was ensconced aboard his yacht anchored in the Golden Horn, his preferred place of residence. However, in due course he received Sykes’s message and shortly afterwards asked the attaché to join him for dinner. After the meal Sykes was invited to outline the contents of the small notebook he had obtained from the German engineer and which he hadmeanwhile written up as a detailed memorandum. The ambassador was impressed and the following day, 15 October 1905, he dispatched Sykes’s document to the Foreign Office, with a covering note of his own and marked ‘SECRET’. 1
    Ten days later, Mr Richard P. Maxwell, senior clerk in the Commercial Department of the Foreign Office, selected a dossier from the pile upon his desk and read the following:
    SECRET. From H.M. Ambassador in Constantinople. ‘Report on the Petroliferous Districts of the Vilayets of Baghdad, Mosul and Bitlis; prepared by Sir Mark Sykes, Hon. Attaché.
    The following accounts of the various Petroleum springs and asphalt deposits have been