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...disappeared 1919.
ON MORNING of 16 October 1916, at the height of World War I, British military author-ities in the port of Kirkwall, Scotland, arrested a 40-year-old, barrel-chested Palestinian Jew named Aaron Aaronsohn. A subject of the Ottoman Empire, Aaronsohn-an internationally renowned scientist-was seized from the Oskar II, a Scandinavian-American ship en route from Copenhagen to New York City, and accused of espionage. From Kirkwall, Aaronsohn was taken by train to London where he was interrogated, both at Scotland Yard and at the War Office. As it happened, he was indeed a spy--a spy for the British. The incident at Kirkwall was an elaborate ruse, designed to fool the enemy Turks into thinking Aaronsohn might have been their agent.
History has an exquisite sense of irony. That very same day, indeed almost at the same hour, a boat carrying a diminutive, 26-year-old British intelligence officer named Thomas Edward Lawrence docked at the Arabian port of Jeddah. The future Lawrence of Arabia was encoute to his first fateful meeting with Prince Feisal, third son of the Sharif of Mecca, Ibn Ali Husayn. Their encounter would lead to an extraordinary mission: to help Feisal unite the rag-tag, feuding Bedouin tribes of the Hejaz and to mount an insurrection against their longtime masters, the Turks.
A ARONSOHN and Lawrence: it is arguable that no two men did more to affect the fortunes of the war in the Middle East--and its thorny aftermath.
Lawrence's exploits, of course, are legendary--although they may have had more to do with legend than reality. Leading a series of guerrilla raids on enemy lines, el Aurens, as the Arabs called him, frustrated Turkish attempts to supply and ultimately hold the southern theatre, east of the port of Aqaba. More critically, he is widely credited with giving eloquent voice to the Arab impulse for nation-hood and independence--a voice that continues to resonate almost a century later.
Aaronsohn, on the other hand, has largely and undeservedly disappeared from the pages of history. At the time of his detention in Kirkwall, the war against the Turks and the Germans was going anything but well. Two of the Entente powers--Great Britain and France--were taking horrendous casualties on the Western Front, while the third, czarist Russia, was embroiled in a gathering domestic political crisis that would lead, in only a few months, to out--right revolution. In the east, on the heels of the British disaster at Gallipoli in 1915 (141,000 Allied soldiers lost), the Turkish army was busily fortifying the...
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