Eamonn Gearon, "The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit" (Hurst, 2026)

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**Nicholas Gordon** (1:20)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast and in partnership with The New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around, and about the Asia Pacific region.
Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the slightly fictionalized work based on the life of T. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War. Lawrence is part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region, as Britain fought the Ottoman Empire for control of the Middle East. Chastened by their intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Cotillamara, the British tried to do something unthinkable, actually learn how local communities operated and ensure that propaganda was culturally authentic. It's the subject of the Arab Bureau, the story of Britain's most ingenious intelligence unit, a new book from Eamonn Gearon, which he calls the first in-depth investigation into what this intelligence agency actually did. Eamonn is a global historian specializing in the Middle East and North Africa and the history of intelligence whose books also include The Arab Revolt. His doctoral research uncovered previously unknown Arabic documents, which shed new light on British intelligence work in the region. Eamonn, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about your book.
What exactly is the Arab Bureau? Where did it sit in the British imperial bureaucracy of the time?

**Eamonn Gearon** (2:40)
Thank you so much, Nicholas. Thanks for the invitation to join you.
I mean, there's a short answer and a long answer as in so many things in life. So the short answer is that the Arab Bureau was a relatively small unit of British military intelligence that was formed in Cairo in 1916 and operated. Its operations were out of Cairo for four years after 1916 So that's interesting, right? Because we're halfway through the First World War before this specialized unit of British military intelligence is established. It was established to try and make sense of the Arab world for the British and allied war effort. They were based in a few rooms at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo, which sounds glamorous perhaps, but it was just that the whole of Cairo was basically the military occupation at that time, and that was the only space they had available.
To put some flesh on the bones of that answer, it was a branch of the Foreign Office. So the HQ was in Whitehall, England, but it was based in Egypt for the whole of its period and worked hand-in-hand with local, to say, British-controlled Egyptian military intelligence.
It was both perhaps a help and a hindrance that this ambiguity existed. They were left alone to their own devices for a lot of the time, but also then they received a lot of interference locally, both from the British authorities in Egypt, but also their main rivals. You might think their main rivals were the Germans and German allies, but actually it was the government in British India, because the government in British India and the military in British-controlled India already had their intelligence units working in most of the Middle East, not Egypt, not in North Africa, but certainly in the Arabian Peninsula. The Indian government didn't like this idea of having rivals set up, these Johnny-come-latelys now operating out of Cairo. The Bureau is set up as an attempt to be a sort of clearinghouse, a one-stop shop where all of the political, military, tribal, cultural intelligence about all the Arab lands could be gathered, brought together. Reports could be created and then circulated out to everybody who needed it. This was done through their secret in-house journal, which was called the Arab Bulletin. The Arab Bulletin has been published in full, 114 parts from 1916 through to 1920 So that's who they were. I would say that we may have forgotten about them all together, were it not for two things. One, an increased interest in intelligence history in recent decades. Military history, I think, doesn't really go out of fashion, but intelligence history is growing into itself and becoming more and more specialized. I'm pleased to have a very small contribution to make with this book. The other reason, of course, that the Arab Bureau is not completely forgotten is that one of its most famous members, its most famous member, I should say, was T.