The Arab Bulletin

The Arab Bulletin. R.L. Bidwell, ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Archive Editions, 1986.

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At the beginning of the Great War in the Middle East, Britain lacked a centralized intelligence collection agency for information coming from the Ottoman Empire. Hence the Arab Bureau was created in Cairo in January of 1916. To disseminate its intelligence the Bureau created The Arab Bulletin, which was published from 1916-1920 and exists now in four bound volumes of intelligence summaries. A ten-volume supplement called Military Handbooks of Arabia consists of detailed maps, and tribal and individual biographies.[2] Both sets are part of the Cambridge University Press, Archive Editions. In the Arab Bulletin, the origins of many of the region’s current instabilities can be found in the reports about restive tribes, dynasties, and leaders. Even today, the content, methodology, analysis, and writing style of the Arab Bulletin are relevant. In essence the Bulletin is a fourteen volume master class in the use of intelligence and hybrid warfare in immediate and long term strategy. It is amazing that the Arab Bulletin still exists. Each original edition was limited to only thirty copies to be circulated among chosen military and diplomatic officials. The Bulletin came with instructions that it never be quoted even in other secret documents. T.E. Lawrence was the only officer who wrote comprehensively about his work with the Bureau, and some of his work is suspect. In addition the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service has a traditional reluctance to release any past information about clandestine activities. This makes the Arab Bulletin and its supplement all the more valuable.

The Great War in the Middle East was tremendously complex and diverse. The Ottoman Empire fought on eight fronts. Britain fought counterinsurgencies against the Senoussi in Libya and Sudan, a conventional war in Palestine and Mesopotamia, while supporting the Arab insurgency in Hejaz and Syria. Multiple demands and conflicts had to be dealt with within those forces to keep them fighting the Ottomans instead of each other. Relevant lessons abound in the Arab Bulletin for the historian, hybrid warrior, strategist, and intelligence or foreign policy expert. As Mohs observed:

In the end however, it was not the politicians, and civil servants in London nor even the local military commanders who exercised the most influence over decisions in the Arabian campaign. The most effective strategy for addressing the Anglo-Turk conflict was delivered by the intelligence officers on the ground. Their commitment to ensuring that accurate political and military information took precedence over cultural myths and institutional ideologies stands as a lesson for decision-makers in any era.[3]

The social science approach that informs analytical tradecraft, dominates the modern American approach to how intelligence is organized and viewed. The Bulletin, shows the British model of the time as strongly influenced by an historical approach to intelligence. This approach views history as unique, bespoke events from which heuristics are developed abductively to respond with an opponent. The historical approach emphasizes a balanced narrative of fine detail, like how many engines are needed to run from Ma’an to Medina, contrasted with broad scholarly reports like, “The Nature of the Caliphate.”[4] A combination of both models in the interdisciplinary approach to intelligence would seem a prudent consideration in the 21st century.

The Bureau expressed Britain’s strategy of power projection through the use of influence and information built upon a program of diplomacy, spheres of influence, buffer states, and, when necessary, various forms of direct intervention. Power projection was not politically popular in Britain, when it had high costs in lives and treasure and appeared to achieve little. Members of the Bureau saw themselves as advocates of a small footprint strategy that Chris Bayly describes as “constructing an empire of information to control an empire of opinion.”[5] This goal was not always reached. A much misunderstood aspect of intelligence work is its aspirational nature. No intelligence is perfect. Intelligence assessments and the resulting policies exhibit the biases of people and the context—a fish cannot see the water in which it swims. Further the responses themselves change the context. By connecting the dots, you also move them. In The Arab Bulletin the British struggle to cultivate connections with local people, allowing a line of policy that if it did not directly follow British desires, at least did not disrupt them. Suggesting direction is easier than direct rule. The approach was not perfect, but it created enormous leverage given the Bureau’s size compared to its reach. The Arab Bureau represented an entire front in the war with the Ottoman’s without one regular British army unit present. Lessons learned from The Arab Bulletin might have saved the United States twenty years of Potemkin army building in Afghanistan with less military involvement and greater influence. The result may not have been perfect, but it would have been functional.

The Bulletin is an example of all that makes decision makers queasy about intelligence organizations—their need to engage uncertainty requires inherent institutional ambiguity. Intelligence agencies are Protean critters that organize around change itself to stay relevant. The Arab Bureau’s nebulous mandate allowed it to expand quickly from an intelligence clearing house in 1916 to guiding the regular and irregular forces of the Arab Northern Army in 1917. The Bureau creatively engaged its ambiguity, filling gaps higher level policy makers could not see or were ill prepared to use. The Bulletin reveals an obscure intelligence agency created on the spur of the moment becoming a pervasive advocate of long term British interests in the Middle East. Bureau agents were disciples of a new form of power projection that was nuanced, confrontational, and pragmatic, yet still effective. They worked with local people to avoid burdensome commitments. The policy was diffuse, convoluted, and sufficiently ambiguous to allow freedom of action in the face of change. Arbu walked a tightrope between competing parties and interests—support the Arab insurgency, manage the competing tribes, the Islamic concerns which would affect the Empire, not provoke the government of India, overcome bureaucratic inertia, and plug information gaps to secure sponsors for their actions.

Although unstated, the Bureau staff regarded itself as a semi-autonomous policy-making arm of the governments of Cairo, London, and Simla. It dealt with contending stakeholders: Cairo Residency, Sudan Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, India Government, the War Office, and the Foreign Office, each of which wanted their own way. D.G. Hogarth, the editor, said The Arab Bulletin had three goals. The first was to provide definitive intelligence summaries on the Arab Revolt and other Arab speaking countries. The second was to provide authoritative appreciation of the political questions. Lastly, the Bulletin sought to preserve and record geographical, scientific, and historical data and older lost facts from Arab speaking lands which might help to explain the actual situation.[6] The composition of the Bureau’s staff was the driving force behind its product and actions. The biographies in Volume 1 show that of the twenty members of Bureau, ten were career military or diplomatic staff, and university educated area experts. All were Arabists familiar with the culture, language, local tribes, and leaders. They shared a common understanding of the long term value of the policies they pursued. The Arab Bulletin reveals an eclectic, sophisticated, and nuanced view of wartime events and what those might lead to after the war.

The Arab Bulletin’s broad content is exciting for the historian, intelligence, and national security specialist. The reports include:

 The enormous variety of The Arab Bulletin and its supplement is difficult to condense, but the unity of its purpose is clear in the reading.

As a series of intelligence summaries, the Bulletin makes up the broad background of other works about British intelligence in the Middle East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Bulletin is referenced in The Illicit Adventure by H.V.F. Winstone, an early history of British intelligence in Arabia from 1898-1926.[7] More contemporary histories on the value of intelligence in strategic and military operations like Polly Mohs’ Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt and Sheffy’s British Military Intelligence in the Palestine Campaign also draw heavily on the resources found in The Arab Bulletin.[8,9]

The Arab Bulletin is like an Impressionist painting; focus on the detail of the individual splashes of color, and you will miss the overall picture. Those with an intelligence background will appreciate the analyst’s craft and zest for local knowledge, while others will enjoy the historic and strategic insights. Since the Bulletin can go for many pages before reporting on a person or event again, the index in each volume is very helpful. Keep in mind these are intelligence summaries for a limited audience and full of all the biases of the agents of the period, which are revealing in and of themselves. One distressing point is that the sources are not mentioned. For example, you wonder how the Bureau got verbatim discussions of high level Ottoman policy decisions. For now only SIS knows. But whatever the Bulletin’s faults, being poorly written isn’t one of them. As its editor D.G. Hogarth explained:

Since it was as easy to write in decent English as in bad, and much more agreeable, The Arab Bulletin had from the first a literary tinge not always present in Intelligence Summaries.[10]

The Bulletin is a reminder that good intelligence summaries can be written by erudite scholars without requiring a secret decoder ring to understand them.

The Bulletin shows how intelligence is the loaded tactical dice of strategy. How you think about strategy, decides whether you waste yourself fighting or directing the minds of others. The United States needs to maintain a broad influence, at less expense, where foreign involvement has high international and domestic political costs. The Arab Bulletin reminds us that war is the accumulation of many little things. Failure, like success, requires advanced planning. Success and failure appear as salient events because we lack the observational acuity to see the compounding effects of the everyday. The Bulletin reminds us that both failure and success are there in the everyday details if we have the wit to see them. The Bulletin is an important read for anyone interested in how intelligence is identified, collected, and applied to make decisions in war and the war between wars. The Arab Bulletin addresses the perennial problems that intelligence faces, how British intelligence dealt with them and how that response informed immediate and long-term British strategy. It is a reminder not only of failures and successes but also that in the real world obstacles are the exception rather than the rule. We can learn from all three in seeing ways to turn the problems themselves into solutions to the strategic issues of the 21st century.

Michael Barr is a military historian, speculator, and high stress performance improvement educator. He has 50 years of experience training and teaching in close quarter control and combat. He is the director of Ronin Research and the Ronin Aikijujutsu Association and is working on a book about the martial teachings of Miyamoto Musashi and their relevance to 21st century military problems.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Michael Herman, Intelligence: Power in Peace and War, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1996, 25.

[2] Military Handbooks of Arabia 1913-1917, Archive Edition, Cambridge University Press, Vols. 1-10, Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire, UK, 1988.

[3] Mohs, Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt, 3-4.

[4] Arab Bulletin, Vol.2, 285.

[5] C.A.Bayly, Empire and Information Gathering and Social Communication in India: 1780-1870, Cambridge University Press, 1996, 3-6, 365.

[6]  The Arab Bulletin, Archive Edition, Cambridge University Press, Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire, UK, 1986, Vol.3, 276-277.

[7] H.V.F. Winstone, The Illicit Adventure: British Political and Military Intelligence in the Middle East 1898-1926, Jonathan Cape Ltd. London, 1982.

[8] Polly Mohs, Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt, Routledge, London, 2008.

[9] Yigal Sheffy, British Military Intelligence in the Palestine Campaign 1914-1918. Routledge, London, 2013.

[10] Arab Bulletin, Vol. 3, 275-276.