A trail of spies

On Monday, the Chouf Cedar Reserve dedicated a 6 km hiking trail to King Charles III to commemorate his coronation in 2023. If that were not enough, there is another trail dedicated by his mother the late Queen Elizabeth II in 2016. Who knew?

Well we shouldn’t be too surprised. Historically, the British like the Chouf. For most of the 20th century the Ambassador kept a summer residence in Abey. The British government decided to sell it in 2001 (reportedly to Walid Jumblatt) but not before the body of Lady Hester Stanhope was the famous 19th century British traveller, adventurer and erstwhile spy, was exhumed from a corner of the garden. Her remains were cremated and her ashes were scattered in the village of Joun, 10 km east of Sidon, where she lived for three years before her death in 1839.

The Levant has always been a British espionage hub. T.E. Lawrence, AKA Lawrence of Arabia, who learned Arabic in Beirut, famously liaised with the Arab tribes against the Ottomans in World War I, while the traveller, archaeologist and spy, Gertrude Bell, a modern day (and more effective Hester Stanhope) helped create modern Iraq and the installation of King Faisal.

But, possibly due to its sui generis character Lebanon, and Beirut in particular, has always had a particularly strong lure for British schemers and intelligence operatives be they the spies or the spied-on.

Three years after the death of Hester Stanhope, another compatriot showed up in what is now Lebanon. The Englishman, Colonel Charles Churchill, lived among the Druze and wrote Mount Lebanon: A Ten Years’ Residence from 1842 to 1852, a three volume work in which promised to explain “the manners, customs, and religion of its inhabitants with a full and correct account of the Druze religion”. It was from Lebanon that he plotted with the British Jewish aristocrat, banker and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, to create a blueprint for a Jewish homeland in Ottoman territories.

A century after Charles Churchill left his mark in the Chouf, another British army officer, General Sir Edward Spears, the minister to Syria and Lebanon during World War II, was hopelessly bedazzled by the Lebanese singer and wartime triple agent, Emira Amal Al Atrash, AKA Asmahan. His infatuation became so obvious that he was nearly recalled back to Britain. In his memoirs he wrote of the Druze princess, “she was and will always be to me one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her eyes were as green and immense as the colour of the sea you cross on the way to paradise...Later, I was to learn that she had a glorious voice…she bowled over British officers with the speed and accuracy of a machine gun. Naturally enough she needed money and spent it as a rain cloud scatters water.” When Asmahan died in a car crash in Egypt in 1944, Spears is said to have laid a wreath at the crash site.

Three years later in 1947, the Chouf village of Shemlan became the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, an Arabic language school run by the British until it was closed in 1978 due to the civil war. Given the Lebanese predisposition to paranoia and suspicion of the foreigner, it became known as the ‘spy school’, a nickname given extra credence by the fact that in the early 60s George Blake, the British double agent, studied Arabic there just before he was unmasked.  

But Blake is not as famous as Kim Philby, Britain’s most notorious traitor who defected to the Soviet Union in January 1963 from Beirut, where Philby, then working for both MI6 and as a correspondent for The Observer and The Economist. Confronted by his old friend and fellow MI6 agent, Nicholas Elliot, he knew it was time to disappear, or do a ‘fade’ as spies call it. He sailed into exile aboard a Russian cargo ship docked in the Lebanese capital. He died in Moscow in 1987.

Philby’s name is forever associated with the glamour of post-independence Beirut, spending his time gathering and dispensing intelligence in the bar (he was by most accounts a heroic drinker) at the St Georges Hotel. It was a meeting point for bankers, journalists, diplomats, oil men and spies and no doubt inspired a trio of 60s spy movies. In “Where the Spies are”, the quintessentially English David Niven played ‘our man in Beirut’, staying at the Alcazar Hotel (which became a branch of HSBC opposite the ST Georges). In “Twenty Four Hours to Kill”, released in the same year, Mickey Rooney met a sticky end amid the ruins of Baalbek, and in 1972 Richard Roundtree and Chuck Connors chased the KGB around Parliament Square in “Embassy”. Fabulous stuff!