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The Invention of Cultural Intelligence

Cover photo for the book The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain’s Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit by Eamonn Gearon

Many years ago, Eamonn Gearon returned from an epic camel journey across North Africa. He nearly died along the way, surviving in isolation until finally rescued by a radio crew. Having known solitude in difficult places myself, I understood the psychological weight of such experience.

A few years later, I shared a long hike with Gearon outside London, just the two of us, not far from where Graham Greene spent part of his childhood—a fitting landscape, perhaps, in which to discuss private conscience and personal loyalties.

Stimulating company, Gearon is one of those rare people who seem at once amused by life and deeply serious about it. The very first sentence of his new book—The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain’s Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit—shows this: “Academic monographs are often seen as boring—as is the word ‘monograph’—mainly because many of them are.”

The cover image—taken in Aqaba—also serves a narrative function. A group of enigmatic British figures, including T. E. Lawrence, stand outside a canvas tent beneath a harsh desert light. Though likely posed, it captures the Bureau’s essential ambiguity: British officers attempting not merely to move through the Arab world, but imaginatively to inhabit it.

Their clothing suggests an uneasy fusion of Bedouin dress and early-twentieth-century expeditionary costume. Loose desert robes in sandy browns and ochres are paired with scarves, keffiyeh-style wraps and layered head coverings concealing much of the face. Anyone familiar with the Middle Eastern deserts understands how quickly such garments cease to appear theatrical and become practical.

I mention this not just to acknowledge my potential bias, but to show that despite Gearon’s Oxford doctoral research and clean prose, he also knows physically the world he describes. He is also a relative outsider. As the Arabic proverb quoted later puts it: “Ask the........

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