Empires of Intelligence – Reopening the Mustafa Saghir File

A bibiiophile’s blog

This is the second in a series of blogs that focuses on Muslims of the Subcontinent who served in the Empire’s intelligence networks as police detectives, SIS agents or willing informants. It delves into organisational structures and modus operandi. The title  refers to the many centres of intelligence gathering and direction in the decades when the Raj was at its zenith. An earlier blog was on Detective Munshi Azizuddin, click here.

Mustafa Saghir (also spelt Sagir) was a British spy who infiltrated Mustafa Kamal Pasha’s resistance movement in Angora [modern Ankara]. He was caught, interrogated and executed in May 1921.

In reopening the  Mustafa Saghir file, there is an opportunity to reflect on the historiography of  the closing days of the Osmanli Devlet and the Nationalist resistance to British, French and Italian occupation in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. (1914-18). Sultan-Khalifa Mehmed VI Vahideddin  is portrayed as pliant to British interests, with Ataturk (Mustafa Kamal Pasha)  placed at centre stage in the struggle to redeem Turkish honour. In this Turkish State-framed narrative, Mustafa Kamal was such an impediment to British interests that the SIS considered assassination, with Saghir their agent given license to kill in 1921.  Turkish and Indian Muslim journalistic and academic sources have taken Saghir’s confession at the Nationalists’ Court of Independence in Angora unquestioningly, even though it had a fantastical vein. This blog  offers  a more nuanced reading of the life and death of Mustafa Saghir. Some peripheral information is also provided for additional context.

The coverage of the trial in the British and French press, 1921

The British public were first made aware of a possible spy involvement in Turkey when a news item appeared in the Morning Post  on 23 May 1921,

“From Our Correspondent, Constantinople [. . .]

The Angora Government refuses to answer the repeated telegrams of the British High Commissioner demanding the release of British subjects imprisoned or detained by it [. . .] forty of the released Malta deportees have already arrived here, but nevertheless Angora gives  no sign of fulfilling its side of the bargain.

Not only so, but as if to emphasise the rejection of all Bekir Samy’s conventions, the Kemalist Government has begun the trial of an Indian Mohammedan, one of those detained British subjects, before a so-called Court of Independence, corresponding to the Bolshevik Chresvitchaika. He is charged with being a British spy sent to Angora by the Foreign Office and the British Army Intelligence Department here to work for the overthrow of the Kemalist movement by stirring up revolts and assassinating Kemal [. . .] I have had access to first-hand official reports of the opening of the trial [. . . ].”

The ‘first-hand’ source is most likely to have been the French journalist Madame  Berthe Georges Gaulis – herself possibly linked to French Intelligence –  an ardent admirer of Mustafa Kamal. She was in Angora in April-May 2021, and filed a report for the Parisian evening newspaper L’Istransigeant,

“The Court was crowded. The prisoner gave his name as Moustafa Segir, and said that he was of Indian parentage, and that his age was thirty-three. He added that he was formerly a British Consul in Persia. His defence was that he had come to Angora under British instructions, to work for an amicable feeling on the part of the Kemalists towards Britain. Asked whether Earl Curzon had given him his instructions, he answered, “Yes, in part.”

Documents said to have been handed by the prisoner to the British Intelligence Department here were brought up, containing details concerning Kemal, where Kemal lived, and what was the number and speed of Kemal’s motorcar. A Turkish associate of the prisoner, giving evidence, detailed other general instructions, such as the finding out of the relations between the Bolsheviks and the Kemalists, what divisions existed in the Angora Parliament, and how to profit thereby; whether the majority were for war or peace by negotiation, and how far the Kemalist majority was really hostile to Britain.

The President of the Court asked him who was really behind him, and to this he replied that in the Foreign Office in London there were two currents of  policy, one which aimed at avoiding a widening the breach between Britain and Turkey, while the other was militarist , and aimed at strengthening Greece and wiping out Turkey. He was in touch with the former group. Despite the desire to maintain amicable Anglo-Turkish relations, it was also part of the policy of this group to stamp out the Kemalist movement. In this it was working with the Sultan, the Imperial Court, and the Turkish Liberal Party at Constantinople.”

An Angora paper, commenting on the prisoner’s evidence, says that, though he has not yet fully confessed, it is clear that he was  spy of the British, aiming at the overthrow of the Kemalist movement by engineering assassinations and revolts.”

In a separate despatch in L’Intransigeant, Madame Berthe conveyed the atmosphere in the court room,

“So many names, figures, and facts gathered by this breathless, silent crowd that squeezes onto ladders, fills every opening, and flows back to within a few centimetres of the prisoner, whom they will not touch, whom they will not insult. An unforgettable lesson in European political science for these attentive listeners.

This, the secret agents of England caught every day in Anatolia, in Angora itself, the horrors committed during the recent Greek offensive—this is enough, one might say, to permanently collapse European prestige. But the Pasha  [Mustafa Kamal] is there; a gesture from him can still suffice to unleash the storm or to stop it. He is still the sole master, and in this consuming city where everyone burns through their vital energy without counting, where one grows old in a few months, it is enough to utter his name for the eyes of the hardest to soften and the eyes of the inscrutable to light up. The worst resentment against the English intrigue stems from this perpetual effort to assassinate him.”

Dr Esat Arslan’s essay ‘1921 Yılı Yarısanda Türk, Fransız, İtalyan Yakınlaşması Karşısında İngiliz Politakası ve Mustafa Sagır Olayı’. reproduces a news item published in Hakimyeti Milliye Gazetesi on 25 May 1921,

“A large crowd was raining curses down upon this British detective who had targeted the Islamic world. The spy Mustafa Sagir, who had come to Ankara for highly treacherous plotting, was hanged yesterday morning at half past four in Karaoğlan Square, in accordance with the decision rendered by the Independence Court. A large crowd had gathered in Karaoğlan since dawn, and the erected gallows announced the execution of Mustafa Sagir. Mustafa Sagir had been brought to the Police Department at half past two, and the present imam performed the religious last rites for him.

After this, Mustafa Sagir requested a pen and paper, wrote a short letter to the British Consul in Istanbul, and expressed his wish for his suitcase in the prison to be sent to the consul. Following this, Mustafa Sagir put on a white shirt and was brought to Karaoğlan Street under the guard of the gendarmes. When he arrived in front of the gallows, he was told that the court’s verdict would be read to him, and the ruling was recited aloud. After the reading, Mustafa Sagir said nothing and resolutely stepped up onto the table. Two minutes later, his body—having paid the price for all his sins—was swinging lifelessly. The people dispersed, raining curses down upon both him and those who had driven him to this life.”

The British press did not report Saghir’s execution till 31 May. The Morning Star framed it as an example of Nationalist violence,

For good measure, the news item concluded, “Meanwhile the Kemalist Commander-in-Chief has issued a proclamation that all Greek Ottoman subjects taken prisoner in the forthcoming offensive shall be summarily executed.”

The Islamic News, the London weekly edited by Abdul Qayum Malik and published by the Islamic Information Bureau, in its issue of 9 June 1921 ran a news item headed “Wages of Treachery—The Trial of Mustafa Saghir, A British Indian Spy”. It included Saghir’s first-person account most likely obtained from journalist contacts in the Muslim press in India,

“Just before completing my Oxford course, I [Mustafa Sagir] was invited to see the Secretary of State for India, before whom I pledged blind loyalty to the British and Indian Governments, and to carry out without question any order that was given to me. I returned to Oxford to complete my studies, and then proceeded to Cairo, apparently to study Arabic, but really to watch the Egyptian Nationalist movement. I then went to Persia on political business, and then returned to London. I was now attached to the Political Section of the Foreign Office, Turkey-Persia,-Afghanistan and India branch. In August 1914, I was sent to India, whence I returned to Switzerland [. . .] The accused then explained the reason why he was entrusted with the delicate and dangerous mission of assassinating Ghazi Mustapha Kamal Pasha was that he brilliantly organised the assassination of the late Emir of Afghanistan [. . .]”.

There were to be no further references in the British mainstream press, presumably because of a D Notice, the system instituted after the 1911 Official Secrets Act to prevent publication of information deemed a threat to national security . The Islamic News faced the consequences as explained in Friendships in the Square, “the Home Government of India took action a few days later [. . . who proposed] that the Islamic News should be excluded from India by means of a notification under the Sea Customs Act [. . .] . The Islamic Information Bureau was not deterred and the Islamic News continued publication under the name Muslim Standard .

Several accounts of the case were published in Turkey in 2021 to mark the centenary of the episode. These include, for example, Casustur Casus by Sabahattin Özel, that has drawn on Turkish archives for the early Nationalist period and gives much credence to Mustafa Kamal’s persipacity. It takes its title from Mustafa Kamal Pasha’s comment on Saghir: “O sırada Ankara’da Anadolu’da Yenigün gazetesini çıkaran Yunus Nadi Bey, Mustafa Kemal Paşa’ya Mustafa Sagir hakkında ne düşündüğünü sorunca, Paşa kısık sesle ‘Casustur casus’ demişti.” (When Yunus Nadi Bey—who was publishing the Yenigün newspaper in Ankara at the time—asked Mustafa Kemal Pasha what he thought of Mustafa Sagir, the Pasha replied in a low voice, ‘He is a spy—a spy’.”)

Some historical context, and introducing spy master John Goldolphin Bennett

Mustafa Saghir’s story unfolds at a particular juncture in Turkish history. By October 1918, it was clear that Germany and its ally Ottoman Turkey were heading to defeat in the Great War of 1914-1918.  The Ottoman leadership under the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, also referred to as the ‘Young Turks’) fled from Constantinople. There were soon British warships in the Bosphorus and a British and French Army of Occupation with headquarters in the Capital. The Sultan-Khalifa Mehmed VI Vahideddin in the Yildiz Palace was left with the choice of  either accepting the hegemony of the British, French and Italian victors, or resisting.

In early 1919, under British benign gaze, Greek troops landed in Izmir and began extending eastwards, committing massive atrocities along the way. The  All-India Khilafat Committee was formed in 1919 to mobilise Indian Muslim public opinion in defence of Ottoman Turkey’s interests during the Paris Peace Conferences. The Khilafatists were committed to preserving the authority of Sultan-Khalifa Vehideddin, in the jaziratul Arab and European Ottoman provinces. The movement’s prominent leader Muhammad Ali Jauhar was approached by Saghir around April 1920 in an attempt to inveigle his way into Khilafatist circles.

According to Ottoman historian Ryan Gingeras, the early nationalist resistance came not from the Sultan-Khalifa in Yildiz Palace, but from an underground movement of CUP supporters, the Karakol, that rejected the Ottoman surrender.

The hero of the Gallipoli Campaign, Mustafa Kamal, had yet to reveal his hand. Whether sensing that Mustafa Kamal was the leader who could mobilise further resistance and redeem Ottoman honour or not, Vahededdin approved his appointment to oversee an army inspectorate headquarters  in Erzurum. With this sanction,  Mustafa Kamal was able to leave the capital city and proceed to the Black Sea port of Samsun in May 1919.

In these days of crisis and uncertainty, the Allies’ Occupation forces in Constantinople  were in mutual  rivalry to establish their own spheres of influence. The British, under General Milne (and later General Harrington), succeeded in obtaining overall control. However, the British garrison was limited in numbers and short of political intelligence. Army volunteers were recruited in Britain, and those with aptitude given crash courses in Turkish at the School of Oriental Studies (founded in 1916, later  renamed SOAS). One such officer was twenty-one year old Captain John Godolphin Bennett, a veteran of the Western Front with experience in Signals work. He took up a post in February 1919 in Constantinople army headquarters with responsibility for liaising with the Turkish War Office. His responsibilities soon widened to include Intelligence work, as revealed in his memoir, Witness,

“My work at the War Office required me to read, write and speak Turkish all day long and I made rapid progress [. . .] I was left to deal alone to deal with full generals, lieutenant general and staff officers of all ranks, to give permits to staff officers to leave the restricted area of Istanbul [. . .] as neither the French nor the Italian liaison officers could speak Turkish, my office was constantly crowded with officers wanting problems settled – including that many had to be referred to our allies. Within a few weeks I had a host of friends […] .”

Bennett’s Intelligence competence came to play in May 1919, when he queried  the permission given by the Allied Commissioners  for Turkish staff officers, including General Mustafa Kamal, to leave Constantinople “to make sure the Turkish army kept out of the conflict [with the Greeks].” Bennett then adds,

“when I read the list, I recognised the names of thirty-five of the most active generals and staff colonels in the Turkish army {. . . ] I did not like to give the visas [. . .] I decided to take the list to G.H. Q. and ask for instructions. I said to the staff officer on duty that it looked to me more like a war-making than peace-making mission. I was told to wait while the British High Commissioner was consulted. After about an hour I was called in and instructed to go back and issue the visas. “Mustafa Kamal Pasha, I was told, ‘has the complete confidence of the Sultan’.” 

Mustafa Kamal later defied instructions from Vahededdin’s  Grand Vizier to return.  He resigned his commission as Brigadier General and, with Karakol backing,  joined the liberation struggle in a leadership role.

The Allied H.Q. was soon to have another reason to rue for not taking their  young intelligence officer’s advice. Bennet had misgivings about the wisdom of the decision to dismantle the Chamber of Deputies in Constantinople in March 1920,

“the decision was taken to arrest all the deputies and intern them in Malta. I received a very secret notification of this decision, which was to be carried out, not by the Allied Police, but by Army detachments in uniform. All the houses of members of parliament were to be surrounded [. . .] the absurdity of this procedure was obvious to me, if to no one else. I reported to the Intelligence Staff that the very construction of Turkish houses, with their Selamlik and Haremlik, would make it easy for every deputy to walk quietly out by the secret entrance with which every harem is provided and leave the Army looking foolish.”

However, orders were orders, and Bennett was able to call on the resources of the Armenian Secret Society,

“the dreaded Dashnuk Zatun. At least three hundred members of the Dashnuk must have been mobilised [. . .] by nightfall, eighty-five deputies were under lock and key and our face saved. I was sent for to H.Q. and congratulated. I was told that I might even get a decoration – but I believe everyone wanted to forget the episode as quickly as possible. I myself felt very bad about it all. The entire move had been a tragic mistake. The forty-odd deputies who avoided arrest went straight to Ankara and set up a provisional Turkish Parliament [. . .]”.

Bennett was promoted  head of the Military Intelligence ‘B’ office in Constantinople with rank of staff colonel,

 “I began to get good results: chiefly because so many people would drop in to gossip and enable me to get a good feeling of the day-to-day changes in the temper of the great sprawling city with its population of one and a quarter million and its half dozen races and religious groups. The intensity with which I worked can be gauged from the fact that at the end of twelve months the numbered reports personally written by me well over a thousand.”

It was a high risk job and S.R. Sonyel in his book ‘Mustafa Kamal and the Turkish National Movement’, notes that Topkapılı Canbaz Mehmet Bey, associated wıth the  Karakol,  attempted to assassinate  Bennett in November 1920, “at whose hands many a Nationalist had suffered.” Bennet was wounded but survived.

Bennett was the centre of a spider’s web of Intelligence gathering and direction, but now with a priority to establish the strength of the opposition to the Sultan-Khalifa. Moreover, the limited British army contingents in Constantinople were not enough to withstand a Nationalist attack. Bennett described his schedule in Witness, “the night hours were devoted to seeing very secret agents, morning and evening to reading and writing reports, and odd hours to hearing valuable gossip.”

Polat Safi’s recent work drawing on the archives of Milli Istihbarat Teşkilatı (MIT, National Intelligence Organisation) conveys the extent of this spiders’ web,

“[. . .] before long the Karakol movement [Cemiyeti]  was infiltrated by the British. It all began when a young Indian named Nizamuddin, known for political activism in the National Struggle became a close companion of Esat (Işık) Pasha, the ophthalmologist who was fighting against the occupiers in Istanbul. As his close friend, Nizamuddin was in contact with almost everyone in Istanbul who was resisting the occupation. One of the Pasha’s close friends was Kara Vasıf, who was privy to many of the Karakol movement’s secrets, including its charter. Aware of everything that was going on, Nizamuddin, after a while, got in touch with Mirajuddin, the Indian head of the British Intelligence Branch for Indian Affairs among the occupying British. Mirajeddin, in turn, before long gained Esat Pasha’s trust claiming specially authorization of the Indian Central Khilafat Committee [Hindistan’dakı İslam Halefet Komiıte] established to provide support to the Ottoman High State [Osmanlı Devlet]. In this way, British Intelligence learned both about the organization of the Karakol Association and the comings and goings of civilians and soldiers at Esat Pasha’s house [. . .] Perhaps partly for this reason [. . .]  when Istanbul was occupied [under Martial Law]  on 16 March 1920, it was not difficult for the Allied forces to capture the leaders of the Karakol Society and send them to Malta [. . .] However, it was during this process that it came to light that Nizamuddin had been working for the British, and he was subsequently tracked by Turkish intelligence agents for a long time. In fact, this surveillance would also contribute to the capture of the notorious spy Mustafa Sagir.”

A file in the National Archives of India for 1921 includes a record of an article in the Bombay Times written by Jauhar. He was in London in May 1920 as a member of the Khilafatist delegation that met Prime Minister Lloyd George. It was an attempt to pressure the British government to preserve intact the spiritual and temporal authority of the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph of Islam. At the time, Jauhar recollected being approached by a fellow Indian Muslim – most likely Mustafa Saghir,

The Saghir episode in serving wider Nationalist and British interests

The Mustafa Saghir episode did tarnish the reputation of Indian Muslims in Nationalist circles. The trial and execution served a broader Nationalist agenda of linking the Indian Khilafatists and the office of Sultan-Khalifa with treachery.

The Angora Parliament abolished the office of sultan in November 1922. After Sultan Vahededdin left Constantinople on a British gunship, Abdülmecid II took office of Khalifa. Ryan Gingeras notes that very soon

“Kemal’s allies [in the National Assembly] accused Abdülmecid of seeking to revive the power of the Ottoman royal family [. . .]. As proof of these charges, critics pointed to his relationship with disaffected politicians. ‘If at any time a Caliph takes it into his head to interfere with the destiny of this country’, Prime Minister Ismet Inönü declared, ‘we will shall not fail to cut his head off’.”

It was the language that Robespierre may have used when calling for the execution of Louis XVI during the eighteenth century French revolution: that era’s anti-royalist and anti-clerical trend permeated Kemalist thinking.

When in November 1923 two prominent Indian Muslims, Syed Ameer Ali and the Aga Khan, appealed to the Nationalists  on behalf of Indian Muslims for preservation of the Caliphate, this was rudely dismissed. The biography, Grey Wolf, An Intimate Study of a Dictator, by H. C. Armstrong, paints a graphic scene,

“He [Aga Khan] is,” said Mustafa Kamal, a special agent of the English.” To work up the agitation was easy. England, the crafty, subtle enemy, who failed to destroy Turkey with the Greeks, was at her intrigues again, using Indian Muslims and the Aga Khan to back the Caliph and split the Turks into two camps. [. . .] when some of the deputies spoke of the diplomatic value of the Caliphate to Turkey, the House [Angora Assembly] howled them down. In the silence that followed, Mustafa Kamal turned to them. “was it not,” he said, “for the Caliphate, for Islam, for the priests and such-like cattle , that for centuries the Turkish peasant has fought and died in every climate? It is time that Turkey looks to herself, ignores Indians and Arabs, rids herself of her contacts with them, rids herself of the leadership of Islam [. . .]”.

Khalifa Abdul Majid II was pushed into exile in March 1924. The Intelligence officer in Constantinople John Bennett was also on his way out. His commitment to the job had burnt him out and left him empty. He was often recalled to London to advise the Foreign Office and army generals, “by this time I was past caring much for the views of the higher authority. I felt singularly ill, and did not realise that my trouble was mainly fatigue and strain”, he discloses in Witness.

The Saghir scandal also served Mustafa Kamal’s interest in purging Karokal members and sympathisers, as noted by S.R. Sonyel,

“He [Sagir] pretended that he was running away from British surveillance in Istanbul. He first went to Greece and Bulgaria from where he arrived on the Black Sea shore of Turkey on his way to Ankara. Sagir obtained Karakol’s seal of approval from agents who were at large in Bulgaria. Once in Ankara, he claimed that he was going to transfer 2.5 million pounds sterling which had been raised by Muslims in India [. . .] the endorsement of Sagir’s mission to Ankara by members of Karakol constituted an irredeemable mistake [. . .]”.

The Saghir episode also served the British policy interest of discrediting the Khilafatist movement in Indian popular opinion. This was part of a campaign to sow suspicion of the Khilafatists’ financial dealings through dirty tricks, as for example, in this letter from Malcolm Hailey, Governor of Punjab, to confidante Valentine Chirol in July 1924,

Image acknowledgment: India Office Records, The British Library, [Shelfmark MSS Eur E 220/6A]

The “action of Angora” is possibly a reference to the way the Nationalists responded to the approach by Ameer Ali and the Aga Khan in support of the office of Khalifa.

The British view of Mustafa Kamal Pasha, 1920-1923

The British Prime Minister was a committed Hellenophile; his foreign secretary Lord Curzon less so, but a believer in ‘the victor takes the spoils’. The Greek incursion into Anatolia had tacit British support. The Sultan-Khalifa’s Imperial cabinet  included influential pro-British ministers like the Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha. At the first ‘Conference of London’ held in February-April 1920, the victors – Britain, France, Italy – agreed on the conditions to be imposed on Ottoman Turkey, such as control of the Straits and settlements for Greece in Smyrna (Izmir) and Thrace. These terms formed the basis of the Treaty of Sèvres. Constantinople at first stalled, but then accepted its terms in August 1920. Mustafa Kamal  and the Angora Parliament rejected it outright

The Nationalists gained confidence because of the success against the Greeks at the Second Battle of  İnönü in March-April 1921. A letter from Frank Rattigan Counsellor at the British High Commission in Constantinople to Robert Vansittart in the Foreign Office archives, sent in April, expressed disappointment with this  outcome, because  he had hoped “for a stalemate between the Greeks and Turks which would have had the inevitable effect of rendering both sides more reasonable  and have thus enabled us to impose on them a fair solution [. . .].” Rattigan added, “ I presume we intend to remain firm and wlll not truckle to these swashbuckers.”  

The Treaty of Sèvres was renegotiated with the Nationalists, leading to the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923. However, the reason the British Government found it expedient to discard Sèvres was the pressure of the very same Indian Khilafatist Muslims so denigrated by Mustafa Kamal.

For the British elite in the early 1920s, Communism was the enemy No.1 internally and externally. Peter Clark in his account of the period in The Men of 1924, Britain’s First Labour Government, notes that when the Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald planned to visit Petrograd, he was placed “under surveillance of the Police and two detectives were assigned to keep an eye on him. Peter Clark explains, “the Red Bogey – a suspicion that Labour was identical to Bolshevism – was a theme of the mostly right-wing national press”. So the moves of the Bolsheviks to support the Angora Nationalists in 1921 rang alarm bells in Whitehall. Hakki Kahveci’s Mühürlü Vagon reveals some factors underlying a Turkish-Russian friendship, “Lenin’s maternal grandmother was a Kalmyk Turk, and “before the Battle of Sakarya [ . . . ] there were two generals that Lenin sent to Angora. These were none other than Voroshilov, who was of Ukrainian-Karaite Turk origin, and the Bishkek-born Kyrgyz general Frunze”.

Mustafa Kamal was a thorn in the flesh for British ambitions for post-Great War Turkey. However, whether this required his assassination is a moot point. It would have led to an explosion of Muslim anger in India – Ghazi Mustafa Kamal was their hero. The Khilafatists’ alliance with the Indian National Congress was already causing consternation in Raj circles.  Moreover, it was Enver Pasha, the former Ottoman Minister of War and Mustafa Kamal’s rival, who had the closer connections with the Bolsheviks. Enver had also developed links with Central Asian Muslims. An uprising under him could then stretch to Afghanistan, right at the Subcontinent’s border. By all accounts, it served British policy interests better in 1921 to leave Mustafa Kamal in place, however much insufferable, as the Nationalist leader rather than the Pan-Islamist Enver Pasha. This puts a question mark on whether British Intelligence really gave Mustafa Saghir license to kill in 1921.

The enigmas continue

A file in the National Archives of India relevant to the Mustafa Saghir saga brings to light new aspects of the Mustafa Saghir story, while also prompting fresh enigmas. This file has not featured in past tellings of the story. Some extracts are presented here, and once some further crosschecking has been done a more complete essay will be published with full archival references Insha Allah.

Saghir began to feature again in British Intelligence files in 1924-25 as result of a letter addressed to the Foreign Secretary in London sent by a relative living in Moradabad, UP. It contained a request,

“[. . .]  As you already know Mirza Saghir Beg alias Mustafa Saghir was a member of our family. On his education the entire resources of the family were spent in the hope that on completion of his education he will relieve the financial stringency of the family but as ill luck would have it, he was hanged by Angora Government  in the performance of his duties entrusted to him by the British Government. We are deeply grateful to the Government that it has been pleased to sanction £700 to the surviving members of Saghir Beg & they are thus to a certain extent relieved from monetary distress.”

The letter was not an appeal for further financial support – £700 in 1921 was a most generous allocation – but a request for “a certificate, containing a brief record of the services rendered by Dr. Saghir Beg & recognition thereof.” It was not an appeal that could be shrugged off, particularly as the sender was a retired inspector in the Raj’s Police service. The request  placed British officials in a dilemma. The aforementioned  Col. Cecil Kaye in a handwritten note in the files advised that such a certificate should not be granted, though,

“ [. . .] there is no doubt, of course, that he was employed by the British authorities, but his final journey to Angora, was, in fact, undertaken against their advice: and it was really as much as to secure his own objects, and to try out a scheme, which, if it was  certainly pro-British, was in further of what, a good Muslim and a strong pro-Turk, he was convinced would be to the advantage of Islam and Turkey, that he disregarded that advice.”

But whose advice? This comes to light in further internal correspondence from Col. Kaye,

So Saghir was employed by the Secret Information Service, but “in Angora [. . .] contrary to the advice of the officers of that organisation”.

Mustafa Saghir’s statements during his interrogation at Angora and at the Independence Court’s trial included some fantastical statements, for example childhood in England, education at Oxford and role in organising the assassination of the King of Afghanistan. The trial’s record of his early life is contradicted in the relative’s letter of 1924 that stated Saghir’s education was funded by his family.  King  Habibullah of Afghanistan was found dead in the course of a hunting trip in 1919, but all the historic records point to family animosities. What is consistent is Saghir’s statement of being sent to Switzerland sometime after 1914, that matches Jauhar’s recollection of receiving a letter from him  “from Geneva” in 1920.

There is the possibility that British Intelligence officials were careful to use wording that would retain “plausible deniability” but as noted earlier in the blog, there would have been few benefits of a state-sponsored assassination of Mustafa Kamal Pasha in 1921. In the file note, Col. Kaye adds, that Saghir “was tortured to extract a confession”, though how this information reached his ears is unspecified.

The British Intelligence version portrays Saghir as their spy but who pursued an agenda of his own making. Perhaps he was sincere in being both pro-British and pro-Turkish. Perhaps he did take to heart the Imperial Court-aligned şeyhülislam’s decree that Mustafa Kamal Pasha and his Nationalist supporters were apostates.

Two Afternotes

Abdul Qayum Malik, the editor of the Islamic News, was later to write a ‘faction’ about an agent he named Murtaza, the British Secret Service’s Agent ‘Number Seventy-Three’. The essay conveyed the scene of Mustafa Saghir’s undoing. One of the characters involved is Dr Numan Bey,  perhaps modelled on Esat Pasha in Polat Safi’s real account of espionage networks referred to earlier. The scene begins with the Nationalist Minister of Interior summoning Numan Bey,

“Have you discovered anything, “ anxiously enquired the Doctor.

“Yes, everything, “ briefly answered the Minister. “Your bosom friend is a most dangerous and a very clever spy.” He handed him a sheet of paper written in the form of a letter on one side, and on the other covered with the most valuable information of which he greatest of secret enquiry agents could make a scoop. It contained the partially correct surmises as to the subject of the secret [parliamentary] session of the other day, detailed information of the growing strength of the Nationalist army, and points about the physical disposition of the country of which the Nationalist capital was the centre [. . .] the information set down in concealed ink is of the utmost importance. [. . .] our duty is clear; the writer deserves to be watched with greatest possible circumspection and skill”.

The novelette later describes the spy’s arrest in possession of the revolver he intended to use in Mustafa Kamal’s assassination.

Why did Abdul Qayum Malik refer to ‘Agent 73’ – because ‘Mustafa’ has 7 letters, and ‘Beg’ (as in the relative’s letter of 1924) has 3 letters?

* * *

John Bennett while still in post in Constantinople was drawn close to the Imperial family, particularly Prince Sabaheddin, nephew of the Sultan-Khalifa and a leader of the Liberal Party opposed to the CUP. In Witness, Bennet writes that the Prince “took it upon himself to fill gaps in my education. He gave me books to read – and moreover obliged me to read them by discussing them the following week. One of the first was Edouard Schuré‘s Les Grands Initiés, which astonished me by the suggestion that all religions are the same in their origin and that the contradictions between them are due only to our imperfect understanding.”

Once the Imperial family was in exile in Europe in straitened financial circumstances, Bennett did much to ensure compensation for their properties in Turkey. He also pursued a syncretic sufi path that took him to Gurdjieff, various other sages and later the Subud. He founded the Coombe Springs spiritual retreat in Surrey in 1946. He died in 1974.

Among his favourite poems were these Turkish couplets by Fuzuli,

Dost bi perva, felek bi rahm, devran bi sukyun

Derd çok, hemderd yok, dusmen kavi, tali zubun

Sayei ümıd za’il, afitab-i-zevk kerim

Rütbeyi idbar ali, paye-i-tedbir dun.

[Friends do not share my feeling, the sky does not hear my plaint, the rolling spheres are never still.

My sorrows are many and none to share them, foes are mighty, fate daunts my will.

The shadow of hope for that sweet expected dawn grows longer,

The rank of my aspiration is lofty; meagre and wretched, alas my skill.]

Jamil Sherif, 28 September 2026