Blood-Dark Track (26 page)

I called up Amy and asked if she knew anything about this letter. Amy told me what she had learned from Pierre: that,
contrary to Garstang’s advice, her father decided to notify the Turkish authorities of his proposed request for compensation because he simply didn’t dare proceed without their assent. When the authorities advised him to drop the matter, Joseph complied, and the letter of claim to the British embassy was never posted. ‘What about the testimony?’ I asked. ‘Was that ever mailed to the powers that be?’ Amy didn’t know, and neither did anyone else. Joseph, it was said, was very cautious with officialdom. When Ginette Salendre (the daughter of his sister, Radié) visited Mersin shortly after the war and became friendly with a woman archaeologist who was
mal vue
on account of her subversively liberal views, Joseph was anxious and disapproving. ‘Be careful,’ he said to Ginette, ‘they could make trouble for me.’ He took pains to stay on the good side of the mayors and governors and steered clear of non-conformist types. According to my family, Joseph, for all his commercial boldness and authoritarianism and social gravitas, had a timorous nature. He went around in fear of illness, of contamination of his food, of the authorities, of things turning out badly. He was a
froussard
, in the word used fondly, and with noticeable unanimity, by Ginette, Amy and Pierre to describe him – and to explain why, in their view, he could never have been involved in espionage, an offence that was, after all, punishable in Turkey by death. My grandmother had once said the same thing to my mother: she was convinced of her husband’s innocence because he simply would have been too frightened to become involved in anything.

This assessment of my grandfather was unverifiable and, of course, potentially wishful. Nevertheless, Joseph Dakak’s temperamental frailty was perfectly evident from his testimony; and it seemed pretty unlikely that he would have been able to tolerate the stresses of double-dealing. But not all spies were thieves of top secret information acting under extreme pressure. Take, for example, a man with the job of keeping an eye on the number and kind of vessels anchoring in the roads of Mersin; such an agent would be dealing in sensitive but non-secret information available to anyone with a view of the nautical horizon – the kind of view, it so
happened, that could be enjoyed from a south-facing window of the Toros Hotel.

It became clear to me that Joseph Dakak was amazingly well-placed and well-qualified to act as a German spy. First, like Joseph Ayvazian, the German agent in Iskenderun, he was a hotelier and restaurateur, which gave him excellent access to the people and news that passed through the town. Second, from the autumn of 1941 he operated an import–export business – Nazim Gandour’s line of work – an enterprise capable of lending a sheen of commercial legitimacy to inquiries concerning the movement of goods and people in and out of the country. Third, he spoke German, was fond of Germans (and German-speakers: Walther Ülrich’s letter from Weissenfels established that my grandfather was friends with Gioskun Parker, the Austrian rumoured to be a German agent in Mersin) and had a long history of working with Germans. Relevant, here, were two further documents from my grandfather’s safe. The first, in the stationery of the
Gesellschaft für den Bau von Eisenbahnen in der Türkei
, was in French, and provided detail about a well-known but sketchy episode in my grandfather’s life:

Belemedik, 15 February 1919

We certify that Mr Joseph Dakak has worked as a bookkeeper for Office of the Central Magazine of the 1st Division for the Construction of the Baghdad Railway from 5 September 1916 to 15 February 1919.

During his time with us, Mr Dakak has always been equal to his responsibilities and we can only commend his zeal and application to his work.

Mr Dakak leaves us of his own accord, free of all obligations, by reason of which we present him with this certificate.

Signed: the Chief Magaziner and the Chief Engineer of the 1st Division

Belemedik, I knew, was high up in the Taurus Mountains and
was the site of a grave of 43 German and Austrian soldiers, a nurse, and an English corporal who had all died between 1914 and 1918. Two and a half hazardous years in the wilderness, alongside hundreds of men and camels and mules labouring in snow and heat to blast rocks and shift rubble and lay sleepers, had been Joseph’s first real experience of work and the adult world. It would inevitably have been an unforgettable and formative time and, judging from the reference he received, was one in which the teenager struck up a good relationship with his German bosses. My grandfather’s sense of solidarity with and admiration for Germans – his Germanophilia, some said – later stood him in good stead professionally. Also preserved in the safe was a letter written in German on the notepaper of Lenz & Co., a construction company with offices in Kurfürstenstrasse, Berlin, and Istanbul. The letter, dated 10 March 1930, was addressed to Herr Josef Dakak, Mersina:

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?