In fact and in fiction, the spy is the indispensable person of our time. Yet their activity poses a deadly threat to the open society…
…The OSS and the early CIA inherited some of MI6’s snob appeal. Though tarnished by various scandals- in England above all by the Philby case- the secret service hero still keeps a stiff upper lip socially. James Bond is no longer received in Society as John Buchan’s or Erskine Childer’s heroes were- where is there a society to be received into? – but he is thoroughly at home in cafe society, and even though what E. Howard Hunt’s Peter Ward called his “Cape Codding” sounds a trifle unconvincing, preliminary research indicated that he did order his riding boots from the right suburb of Buenos Aires. His plumbing tool come from a first-class supplier, too.
—Certainly one of the more unusual sights at the peace conference called to redraw the map of the world after the First World War was the member of the British delegation walking around Versailles in Arab robes. It was at the Paris Peace Conference from January to June 1919 that T.E. Lawrence would push forward his campaign for Hashemite Kingdoms.
After the end of the World War I, T.E. Lawrence harbored an overriding political goal: overturning the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement through which Britain and France, allies in the war, had arranged to carve up the Near East after war. France would be granted Syria and Lebanon, Britain would rule Mesopotamia and Palestine. The Arabs, with whom Lawrence had fought and to whose cause he was dedicated, would get full control of nothing.
Lawrence’s military success during the war had won him a hearing in Britain. —click image for source…
The First World War vastly enhanced the secret agent’s heroic stature and romantic prestige, but nowhere, except on the revolutionary front in Russia, did it add much of anything to the already well-established image of the patriot-ready-to-die-as-an-unsung-hero, the master of ruse and disguise, the Great Gamesman, and the aristocrat by association. T.E. Lawrence was easily the most romantic incarnation of the ideal, but if Lawrence’s guerrilla campaign in the desert was an epic, it was more a military than a secret society epic; and though the brooding sense of betrayal and self-betrayal that hangs over his Seven Pillars of Wisdom reflects a typical secret agent’s Weltschmerz, it is likewise that of every adventurous dreamer who sees his dream come halfway true.
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