he hidden and the unknown often evince human curiosity. Smoke of secrecy shrouding the art of spying makes the lives of spies all the more interesting. It is a world about which one can only speculate but cannot be sure unless revealed by an insider. Not all or even most spies write about their lives. The ‘Most Secret Agent of empire (Reginald Teague – Jones, master spy of the Great Game)” is a biography by Taline Ter Minassian (translated by Tom Rees) that has been researched from the private papers that the spy handed over to the India office in 1973, much before his death in 1988 at the age of 93. ‘
Reginald Teague – Jones served the British Raj in its heyday and developed spying networks particularly in the countries that constituted the arena of the Great Game, a term coined by Arthur Conolly but popularised by Rudyard Kipling and it meant the struggle between the Russian and British empires to carve out their spheres of influence in Persia, Afghanistan and Central Asia. As an intelligence officer he conducted spying missions in Russia, the North-West Frontier in today’s Pakistan, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Constantinople, Iraq and Persia till the mid- 1920s but disappeared from the world to be seen in 1922 after the Bolshevik government in Moscow, who looked upon him as the ‘personification of British imperialism’ accused him of killing twenty-two Soviet commissars in Baku forcing him to undertake only under cover missions till his retirement in the early 1950s.
As a spy he was able to observe and comment on the happenings around him first hand. During his posting with the Frontier Constabulary (FC) that was responsible for maintaining order in the tribal territories, he realised that the British Indian Government did not sanction enough money to develop the frontier outposts therefore their overall structures were in such pathetic conditions that even “the government of a third rate South American state would scorn to house their mules.” The different areas of the subcontinent presented unique challenges to the British colonists so in the words of the British foreign secretary Sir harcourt Butler, the Raj appointed “lean and keen men on the Frontier, and fat and good-natured men in the states.”
World War I provided an opportunity to the German empire to strike at the British strength in the Muslim world. The German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II desired that Germany “must tear off england’s pacific and Christian mask… Our Consuls in Turkey and India must raise the whole Muslim world against this crafty and deceitful nation of shopkeepers; england must at least lose India, even if it costs us all our blood.” The Kaiser won over the Ottoman Caliph who declared a holy war against the Allies and to win over the ruler of Afghanistan against the Anglo-Russian entente, he promised, “I wish to see the independence of the Muslim peoples… and my Government will support them.” To the Persians, the Germans reminded that there was a common historical link as the oldest name of Germany was ‘Cyrmanie’ which was derived from Cyrus, the first Persian emperor and that the German emperor Wilhelm II was actually ‘haji Vilem’ who had accepted Islam. To follow the propaganda with practical efforts the German government sent to the Persian Gulf their star agent Wilhelm Wassmuss, who is known in the spy world as the ‘German Lawrence of Arabia’ and so threatening were his subversive activities that Teague-Jones was sent a personal letter by General Kirkpatrick, the Chief of General Staff at Simla, ordering him to capture Wassmuss “dead or alive” but so smart was the ‘German Lawrence’ that Jones could only capture Bruggmann, the right hand man of Wassmuss and an atlas with Wassmuss’s signature on it.
Through the life story of this spy we are also informed that the Soviets engineered unsuccessful coups in Angora and Batum to oust Mustafa Kemal Pasha and bring in enver Pasha. The Russian allegations that Jones was involved in the killing of their Commissars forced him to go underground. his disappearance also coincided with the budgetary crisis that compelled Britain to slash bureaucracy due to which Jones was made an unofficial agent who was paid out of private intelligence service funds and launched on the world scene with a brand new identity of Ronald Sinclair.
With the new identity of Ronald Sinclair, Teague- Jones travelled as an eccentric imperial traveller traversing India, Mideast, east Africa and South east Asia reporting political matters to the Delhi Intelligence Bureau (DIB), strategic issues to the Secret Service in London and the commercial affairs to the Board of Trade in england. his new role though less dangerous was equally adventurous. In a Model A Ford which he christened as ‘Zobeida’, he travelled all alone from Beirut to Bombay. On the way in Tehran, he met a Jewish dealer trading in Manchester cotton goods, who was living with a beautiful Iranian mistress whom he had saved from stoning on the charges of adultery. So enamoured was he with her beauty that to save her and himself from the wrath of the clerics for their scandalous relationship because the marriage between a Jew male and a Muslim woman was inconceivable that he publicly renounced his faith, converted to Islam and married the mistress under the Islamic law.
The Second World War brought another twist in his tempestuous life. As the war created more employment positions, the British government employed Jones as an official spy who was now paid by the state and not through the private intelligence funds anymore. In the new status, he served as the British Consul in New York from 1944 to ’50 looking after the Indian, Jewish and Communist affairs. In New York, Teague- Jones alias Ronald Sinclair was involved in the creation of British Security Coordination located in Manhattan to coordinate the activities of MI6, the Political Warfare executive and the Special Operations. his earlier career in the Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) in the subcontinent had enabled him to closely work with MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
When the first Kashmir war erupted between Pakistan and India in (1947-’48), it seems the Pakistan government contacted the former IPI officers for advice because in Jones’ papers there is a letter from the Pakistani ambassador in New York, MAh Ispahani, thanking him for “his love and sympathy for the citizens of Pakistan” and stating that he “would always be glad to seek his assistance.” The author opines that Jones was involved in some way in the negotiations between Pakistan and India in September 1948 that eventuality culminated in the UN sponsored ceasefire in January 1949. The author is not sure whether Jones with his (IPI) background was in any way consulted when the new intelligence set up was created in Pakistan but the relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan did attract him in the twilight years of his career. Keeping in view the roller-coaster type of relations between the two neighbours and as to where these two countries stand today, Jones’ private conversation with an Afghan official decades back seems quite relevant even today in which that Afghan official said:
“Thank God, we have at last reached a settlement with the Russians. Now we are in a position to play a strong hand in the east… the British held the Khyber but it never belonged to them. It is ours by right, and we shall take it. But we shall not stop at Jamrud or even Peshawar.”
“how far will you go? (asked Teague- Jones)
“To the Indus anyway.”
“And will you stop there?”
“Allah knows. We crossed it before and after all it is only a river.” (p240)
Remember! These were the Afghan intentions when no one had even heard of the Pashtunistan stunt which Jones felt the Afghans raised at the instigation of Soviet Russia after Khrushchev had doled them a loan of $100 million.