Blood-Dark Track by Joseph O'Neill

Author:Joseph O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307742650
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-05T10:00:00+00:00

Joseph Dakak, with Tayara

In his testimony, Joseph gave a very specific – and, I thought, entirely credible – account of his reasons for going to Jerusalem. But he was at a loss to explain his dealings with Hilmi Bey and the Husseini family, portraying himself – a worldly, well-informed and socially adept man – as a maladroit innocent who had feebly been sucked into political conversations he didn’t want to have, louche company he didn’t want to keep and, ultimately, the meshes of a vast, mysterious net of injustice he was powerless to escape. It was true that the testimony had been written when Joseph was in a profoundly confused and desperate state, and true, also, that it remained unclear what acts of espionage, specifically, he was supposed to have committed. Nonetheless, it did not look good for my grandfather; and it was obvious why British intelligence might have formed suspicions about him. Which brought me to a question I hoped Sir Denis Wright might be able to answer: who were the people in British intelligence in Mersin in 1942?

Wright proved to be amazingly helpful. ‘There was a whole mob of curious characters at the consulate,’ he said. ‘The Consular Shipping Adviser, a secretive fellow called Piggott, was the Admiralty’s man, responsible for naval intelligence; Geoffrey Maltass was the Ministry of War Transport’s man; Arthur Maltass, Geoffrey’s cousin, acted for the Ministry of Economic Warfare; Captain Gerald Calvert, whose family owned an estate in Troy, was agent called Geoffrey Williams; and there was Desmond Doran, the Passport Control Officer and MI6 agent.’ Williams and Doran sent their Secret reports back to their respective bosses in Istanbul – Lieutenant-Colonel Guy Thomson and Colonel Harold Gibson. ‘Doran had left for Egypt by the time I came on the scene,’ Wright said. ‘I knew him slightly from Rumania, where he was posted before Mersin. He was blown up by the Stern Gang in the end,’ Wright added with no visible sadness, ‘in Palestine.’ Wright didn’t know Olga Catton or the secret policemen Hilmi Bey or Osman Emre Bey (the man who had pestered my grandfather for money to fund his lawsuit). Arthur Maltass, on the other hand, he knew well. ‘When I came to Mersin, Maltass had taken over the MI6 function from Doran, who was his friend. Maltass was a slippery, effeminate sort of fellow, charming in his own way, I suppose; a homosexual. Before the war he ran a boarding house in London. He was posted to Mersin because it was believed that he spoke Turkish, which he didn’t.’ Wright added, ‘He was an Anglo-Greek from Izmir – a Levantine, not pukka British. The Turks contemptuously referred to him as tatli su Ingiliz – literally, sweet-water Englishman. His English had an unmistakable accent.’

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