Enemy on the Euphrates (11 page)

Sir Llewellyn stated that HM Government had three principal economic and commercial objectives in the Asiatic territories of the Ottoman Empire: firstly, obtaining a free and open market for British manufactures; secondly, the acquisition of secure sources of food supplies and raw materials; and thirdly, to create a field for the employment of British capital and an outlet for the surplus population of Britain’s Indian Empire. The first of these desiderata implied ensuring that neither the Turks nor Britain’s allies should, in occupation of portions of the Ottoman Empire which they might retain or acquire, be allowed to impose any tariff barriers which would obstruct British trade. The second objective should be based on the recognition that Iraq was of particular interest to Britain as it could be an important source of foodstuffs when major irrigation works were carried out and of oil resources when they were developed. Both the oil and irrigation possibilities fell mainly within the Baghdad vilayet, Llewellyn Smith stated, and so ‘they must clearly be included within a British controlled area’.
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However, although he believed that British interests in Upper Iraq were not as great as in Baghdad and Basra, Llewellyn Smith added that ‘an important oil region lies in the Mosul Vilayet … and it therefore
seems desirable that Mosul too should fall within the British sphere of influence.’

The following day the committee reconvened and under the direction of its chairman moved on to discuss the strategic implications of the economic interests which had formed the principal topic of the previous day’s deliberations. De Bunsen opened the session by stating that, in his view, if Basra was going to be incorporated into the British possessions – and the government of India now seemed determined that this should be so – then it would also be necessary to control the Baghdad vilayet. Baghdad must not fall into the hands of any other power or its possession by a potential enemy would threaten Britain’s position at Basra and the head of the Gulf. To this, the representative of the India Office, Sir T.W. Holderness, agreed, adding that British control up to a line north of Baghdad, from Hit on the Euphrates to Tikrit on the Tigris, should be sufficient and would almost certainly satisfy the government of India.

In fact, the views of the government of India itself were already set out in two telegrams from the viceroy to the secretary of state for India, received in February and March and now placed before the Committee.
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In the first, Lord Hardinge had asked,

How far the safety of the oilfields in the upper valley of the Karun river could be permanently secured if the Vilayet of Baghdad were to remain under foreign and possibly hostile control?
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adding,

It is assumed that the administration of the Vilayet, when it comes definitely under British rule, will be carried out by the government of India.

However, in a further telegram in March, the viceroy somewhat modified his remarks about the future administration of Baghdad, stating,

Our interests are at Abadan and in Karun Valley by (
sic
) the oil works
… it is essential that for this and other reasons we should remain in permanent occupation of Basra Vilayet and that on political, economic and religious grounds, the Baghdad Vilayet should also be ceded by Turkey and a native administration under our protection and control established there.
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But Llewellyn Smith thought control of Basra and Baghdad alone was insufficient. If Britain was going to become involved in negotiations with the French on the future of ‘Turkey-in-Asia’, as was probably inevitable, it would be necessary to ask for something more. Britain, he argued, must also have Mosul. Only by taking the line of defence up to this mountainous northern area would it be possible to construct a strategically sound defensive position in the event of future hostilities with either the remnants of Ottoman power or one of Britain’s current allies. And he concluded by saying, ‘May I also remind you gentlemen, that it must not be forgotten that there is a valuable oil region in the Vilayet of Mosul.’
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Sykes agreed. ‘If the Baghdad Vilayet is to be incorporated it will be necessary as well to take the Vilayet of Mosul.’ Major General C.E. Callwell of the War Office also threw his weight behind the demand for Mosul: in his opinion the ‘Hit–Tikrit line would be unsuitable as a defensive position.’ However, he added a further consideration. If Britain was going to control all three of the Iraqi vilayets this newly acquired addition to the empire would have to have an outlet to the Mediterranean, either at Haifa in Palestine or further north at Alexandretta.

Admiral Sir H.B. Jackson added that, whereas he had no objection to including Mosul in the list of desirable acquisitions, he felt obliged to say that from the Admiralty point of view the essential thing was to control the vilayets of Basra and Baghdad. ‘Both these Vilayet
s
are of first importance owing to the oil supplies which the Admiralty draws through those regions.’
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By the time the third meeting of the committee was convened on Thursday 15 April it had become clear that the observations which a number of members had already made in relation to the question of oil resources called for a more detailed exposition of the subject
than any of the permanent appointees – even Sykes – could offer. Sir Maurice De Bunsen therefore opened the meeting by reminding the committee, ‘It is known that there are extremely rich oil deposits in Mesopotamia and in view of our commitment as regards the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, it is important to know what steps we should take to safeguard those interests.’
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De Bunsen therefore informed the committee that he had invited Rear Admiral Sir Edmond Slade, reputed to be the country’s leading oil expert, to address the meeting. Slade had led the Admiralty’s investigating commission which spent three months in Persia between October 1913 and January 1914 studying the operations of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and which had declared the company’s concession to be potentially of great value and capable of supplying the Royal Navy’s requirements for a long time. Behind his bluff, grey-bearded nautical exterior he possessed a shrewd analytical mind with a personal fascination for the facts and figures of fuel logistics and the emerging geopolitics of oil. It had been Slade who had urged the government to obtain some form of control over Anglo-Persian, paving the way for Churchill’s dramatic move to partially nationalise the company.
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Subsequently, Slade had been chosen as one of the two government-appointed directors on the board of Anglo-Persian and at the beginning of hostilities in the East it was Slade who had strongly urged the defence of the Abadan refinery and Anglo-Persian’s pipelines.
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So when the admiral took his place at the table and began his exposition the committee members would have listened to him very attentively indeed. Slade explained to the committee that there were,

large deposits of oil throughout Asiatic Turkey. A strip of oil-bearing regions is known to run from the southern extremity of Arabia along the west coast of the Persian Gulf, through the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates and so on to the northern coast of Asia Minor almost to the European end.

If the Eastern possessions of the Ottoman Empire were partitioned, Slade argued,

it would be sufficient if we secured the Vilayet of Mosul as that district comprises some very rich oil-bearing lands, connecting with the Persian oil fields, which it is essential we should control to prevent undue competition with the Anglo-Persian Concessions.
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Now here was a consideration which had not, as yet, entered the minds of the committee – it was not, apparently, just a question of acquiring access to Iraqi oil in order to supplement Britain’s military oil requirements currently being developed in Persia, but given the apparent abundance of oil in ‘Asiatic Turkey’ to which the admiral had alluded, it was also a matter of preventing any other power – or company – acquiring oil resources in Iraq, developing them, and undermining the monopoly which the partnership of state and private interests had obtained in Persia and at Abadan. Oil was going to become a major world commodity and when production of that commodity began to take on the scale that he envisaged, Slade, for one, had no intention of allowing competition from other large oil companies (and here, both he and the committee members most probably thought of Shell) to force down prices and undermine the returns on the heavy investment which not only British taxpayers but also British capitalists had made in southern Persia.

Slade concluded his presentation by urging that once the Iraqi oilfields were acquired it would be necessary to ‘connect the fields by a pipeline with the Mediterranean’ and Haifa was again mentioned as a possible oil terminal. De Bunsen then expressed his satisfaction that ‘Admiral Slade’s views as to our requirements in regard to oil practically coincide with the views that the Committee has taken in regard to the inclusion of the Mosul Vilayet in the territory to be acquired by us.’

Although this was the first time they had met, as the deliberations of the De Bunsen Committee proceeded, Sykes and the thirty-eight-year-old secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defence, Lieutenant Colonel Hankey, became close friends. They met, they dined, they discussed. It wasn’t just their similarity in ages: Hankey as well as Sykes was an ‘Easterner’. It was Hankey who, on Boxing Day 1914, had issued a memorandum to the War Council proposing a major attack on
Turkey. Contrary to the views of the majority of the British general staff, Hankey argued that ‘no increase in men would enable us to break the front in the West’, urging that victory was only to be obtained in the Eastern theatre of operations.
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And by now, Hankey had won the enthusiastic support of both Churchill and Kitchener: the assault on the Ottoman Empire had begun. Moreover, of all the members of the De Bunsen Committee, it was Hankey who seems to have paid closest attention to the repeated mention of oil in the Mosul vilayet. Three years later it would be Hankey who turned all his subtle intelligence and guile to the task of ensuring that Mosul and its oil remained firmly in the grasp of the British Empire when the war ended.

By the time of the fourth meeting of the committee on 17 April, the rest of its members had become duly impressed by Sykes’s seemingly comprehensive knowledge of Turkey-in-Asia, its peoples, geography and resources. No doubt interspersing his detailed factual observations with amusing anecdotes based on his travels, Sykes began to introduce his own schemes for dividing up the conquered Ottoman Empire. The first of these called for the Allies to partition all but Turkish Anatolia among themselves with Russia receiving a northern, France a central and Britain a southern part of the Asian provinces. As an alternative he proposed keeping the area ‘nominally independent but under effective European Control’ within Allied ‘zones of political and commercial interest’. Both of these schemes – ‘partition’ and ‘zones of interest’ – would involve the construction of a British-controlled railway stretching over a thousand miles from a new British Mediterranean port, probably at Haifa in Palestine, to the Euphrates. However, the Foreign Office, under Sir Edward Grey, a high temple of self-regarding moral rectitude, worried that the discussion might be developing along far too imperialistic lines. So the committee found itself unable to reach a consensus on either of Sykes’s proposals.

At the next meeting, a month later, Sykes came up with yet another scheme for ensuring that Britain’s ‘desiderata’ in Asiatic Turkey were achieved. After the Turks were defeated, their Asian territories should be ‘devolved’ into five historical and ethnographical ayalets: Anatolia,
Armenia, Syria, Palestine and Iraq. In theory these ayalets would remain provinces owing formal allegiance to a reformed – and much weakened – Ottoman Empire. In practice they would enjoy considerable powers of self-determination, albeit guided by foreign ‘advisors’. In the event it was this scheme which the committee decided to recommend in its report published on 25 June 1915.

The report began by first considering the ‘direct partition’ option and, reflecting the discussion during the committee’s first three meetings, it stressed that if partition were to take place, oil would be a major determining factor in deciding the territories Britain would wish to acquire. The report stated:

Acquisition of Baghdad would guard the chain of oil wells along the Turko-Persian frontier, in the development of which the British Government has an interest. And oil makes it commercially desirable for us to carry our control on to Mosul in the vicinity of which are valuable wells, possession of which by another would be prejudicial to our own interests.
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The problem with outright partition, however, was that achieving it might involve prolonging the war in the East as well as changing its character: no longer would Britain be able to claim that the war was merely against the German-dominated clique in Istanbul. And there would inevitably be problems with Britain’s allies as to precisely which parts of Turkey-in-Asia would be allocated to which nation. Specifying particular ‘zones of interest’ would be preferable to partition, but might still raise some of the same problems. In the end the committee decided to recommend Sykes’s scheme of ‘devolution’. Its principal advantage was its flexibility and the fact that in the longer term it could be just as advantageous to Britain as the alternatives.

According to the ‘devolution’ scheme, while a reformed Ottoman government, probably based in the Anatolian ayalet, would be responsible for foreign affairs, the higher courts of justice and certain types of taxation, the individual ayalets would have extensive powers devolved to them: responsibility for agriculture and irrigation, the lower
courts of justice, education, roads, the command of regional militia and police and, crucially from the oil perspective, the right to issue mineral concessions. Although each ayalet would have an imperial governor general, his powers would be strongly circumscribed by the fact that each ayalet would elect its own parliament, which in turn would appoint a cabinet of ‘Heads of Departments’. Moreover, provision would be made ‘to enable the Heads of Departments to employ foreign advisors without reference to the Imperial Government’. This last requirement, coupled with the fact that the five ayalets specified in the scheme were virtually coextensive with those envisaged in both the ‘partition’ and ‘zones of interest’ options, meant that, depending on circumstances, the devolved ayalets could easily be transformed into either of those two alternatives. This advantage of flexibility was explicitly stated in the concluding section of the report.