Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  Nor did he discuss the Germans, whose presence at the Curragh was barely recorded in the reminiscences of Irish internees. To a degree, this was an understandable hiatus – after all, the men had plenty to say, and plenty that needed to be said, about their own day-to-day experiences, and it might have been that they were simply according themselves a natural historical priority. Even so, given the proximity at the Curragh of the two national groups – separated only by a trench, they were within shouting distance of each other – and the extraordinary dimensions of the world war, it seemed wrong-headed to relate the story of the internment without meaningful reference to the events occurring beyond the Irish encampment’s barbed wire: the very events, in fact, that were the cause of the men’s internment. It was remarkable how republican discourse, although influenced by the transnational principles of socialism and Roman Catholicism, was impermeable to ulterior narratives. Of course, there was an obvious reason for the non-appearance of the German internees or, for that matter, the Second World War, in the movement’s self-history: these subjects raised the issue of the IRA’s complicity with Nazi Germany.

  I had no reliable idea of where Jim O’Neill stood on the IRA dealings with Nazi Germany, which very few, if any, Cork volunteers knew much about. But in the course of a conversation about Ardkitt in the old days, Grandma said to me, unprompted, ‘During the Second World War, we didn’t know how bad the Germans were; we saw it only after, on the screens, and heard it on the radio. What Hitler did … Oh, my God, what he did.’ Grandma was sitting in the front room with clasped hands, next to the photograph of her husband aged around fifty: with his smiling, chiselled face, and his white shirt, dark tie, cardigan, and checked tweed jacket, my grandfather was the very image of the hard, handsome IRA man. ‘At the time,’ Grandma said, ‘anyone that was beating the English, we were for them. We thought that way. But how wrong we were. How wrong we were.’

  Jim O’ Neill

  5

  Something very wrong must have happened to make my life take so false and unnatural a turn.

  Thomas Mann, Letter to the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Bonn, 1937

  One evening in 1939 before the outbreak of the war, the Hittitologist John Garstang and his wife were having dinner at the Ankara Palace Hotel, in Ankara, when Franz von Papen, the recently appointed ambassador of the Third Reich to Turkey, walked into the restaurant surrounded by animated and fawning officials. The group sat at a table in full view of the Garstangs. Mrs Garstang, an excitable, disapproving Frenchwoman from Carcassonne, looked on with increasing fury as Papen was toasted and congratulated by his fellow diners. Eventually unable to restrain herself any longer, she strode across to Papen’s table and, wagging a finger at his face, berated him and the regime he represented. The famously suave Papen took the reproof with a smile. He had been in, and extracted himself from, far stickier situations before.

  John Garstang, a small, elderly, burly man with a full beard, did not pay much attention to the German diplomat. Garstang took no real interest in politics. He was absorbed, to the exclusion of almost everything else, by the Hittites. He didn’t care for card-games or tea parties, and his preferred conversation – over breakfast, lunch and dinner – was archaeology. His principal diversion was methodically to practise his golf swing with the iron he always brought on his digs. Occasionally, however, the extra-Hittite world had to be reckoned with. In 1907, the year he travelled on horseback through north-east Turkey in search of Hittite monuments, Garstang’s application for a dig was frustrated by the Kaiser, who personally procured the relevant permits from the Sultan for the German orientalist Hugo Winckler. Another setback for the Englishman occurred in 1936, when the Arab Revolt obliged him and his young nephew, O.R. Gurney, to flee their dig at Jericho and escape, via Syria, to Turkey. Forced to look for something new to do, John Garstang arrived in Mersin in December 1936 to prospect for sites. He stayed at the Toros Hotel and befriended its owner, a refined and helpful man with an enthusiasm for antique civilizations. In the winter seasons of 1937–9, Garstang dug in Mersin at the ancient mound of earth called Yümüktepe, which was situated alongside the Soğuk Su (Cold Water) river that trickles through Mersin; then the world war intruded and he was forced to drop the expedition until 1946. That year, Garstang met O.R. Gurney off the boat in Bootle, Liverpool; when the two met (Professor Gurney told me with a mild smile when I saw him at his Oxford home) without pause Garstang began to talk about his latest research in Hittite geography, not once inquiring where his nephew had been for seven years.

  And yet, for all of his preoccupation with work, John Garstang was distressed and embarrassed when he learned, on his return to Mersin in 1946, of Joseph Dakak’s experiences at the hands of the British; and he urged his Turkish friend to seek redress. On 9 April 1947, Garstang wrote to my grandfather from Ankara, stating that, as promised, he had spoken to the British embassy and had been heard out with some sympathy. The upshot was that Monsieur Dakak was invited to write to the Head of Chancery at the embassy. ‘Be brief, polite and direct,’ Garstang advised, ‘and don’t discuss the matter with anyone.’

  As a consequence, my grandfather wrote the following letter (in English), dated 15 April 1947:

  Sir

  1. I left Mersin on the 24th March 1942 with a Turkish passport and British visa for Palestine in order to buy lemons.

  2. After spending three weeks in Palestine and having arranged my business, I was arrested on my exit in Nakura and brought back to Jerusalem where I was detained as a suspect.

  3. After spending various periods in several prisons in Palestine and Beirut I was returned in April 1943 to a special detention camp in the monastery of Emwas (between Ramleh and Jerusalem) where I remained until the middle of September 1945, 4½ months after the official declaration of the end of war in Europe and the Middle East.

  4. Each time I was interrogated I requested that I should be returned to Turkey or given a trial in order that I could prove my innocence, but the answer received on each occasion was that the investigations had not finished.

  5. My sympathies are and always have been for the Allies and if I had been pro Axis it is quite certain I would not have applied for a visa for Palestine.

  6. All the investigations made against me during the 3½ years of my detention proved nothing. With the result I was returned to Turkey which proves my innocence.

  7. Previous to my leaving Turkey and being detained I was the owner of an Export and Import office, part owner of Günes and Korum Cinemas, owner of Toros Hotel and Restaurant; but as a consequence of my detention and having no one to look after my various business undertakings, my wife had to 1. Liquidate my Export and Import Office. 2. Close the restaurant at the Toros Hotel. 3. Cancel my partnership in the working of the Günes and Korum Cinemas. Only the Toros Hotel was left to my wife to run and as the income from this was not sufficient to support my wife and three children also to have money sent to me in detention through the British Consulate in Mersin, my savings had to be used.

  8. As a consequence of my detention, and my emotions as an innocent man, has left me nervous and also with a weak heart which has disabled me for the rest of my life and which makes it necessary for me to see specialists in Istanbul from time to time.

  9. Although my losses are much larger and such questions as mental suffering, loss of health could not be compensated by any amount, I estimate the very lowest and reasonable amount for the losses described in paragraph 7 at £5,000, but I leave it to your judgement and consideration to assess an amount which you may consider has been actually lost owing to my wrongful detention and I am sure you will deal with this on traditional British lines and see that I am justly compensated for the losses I have had.

  I am Sir,

  Yours obedient servant.

  This letter, together with Garstang’s letter and a very few other papers, turned up in my grandfather’s old safe in the Toros Hotel in the spring of 1996. I was impressed by the c
larity and conciseness of my grandfather’s letter to the British embassy and, one or two shaky moments aside, by his grasp of English, which extended to a feel for legal phraseology and tone; and I caught a glimpse not only of the appealingly adaptable intelligence for which he was remembered but also of a less commemorated streak of courage. By an act of will, the spooked narrator of the testimony had been discarded and replaced by a self-possessed, measured complainant who made the best of a not very strong case: because, for all of the claim’s careful assertiveness, its central proposition – that the claimant’s innocence was demonstrable from his repatriation – was, of course, flawed.

  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.