T.E.Lawrence’s military achievements in Arabia were exceptional, and there can be no doubt he enjoyed and courted fame, as he was to do again at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 where – often wearing Arab headdress – he helped to hammer out the multifarious agreements that shaped the Middle-East of the inter-war years. And by courting fame – and then very publicly shying away from it – Lawrence cleverly wove a web of ambiguity and mystery around his actions that only a truly gifted secret intelligence agent can do.

For three years, between 1910 and 1913, Lawrence,  and fellow spy Leonard Woolley (like Lawrence an Oxford academic), spied on the construction of the Berlin to Baghdad railway (they also produced a lengthy academic report on the results of a genuine archaeological dig they used as cover), using a brand new camera with a huge telephoto lens. But Lawrence (an Arabic speaker) would also dress as an Arab and mingle with the  labourers, at the same time listening to the conversations of the German military engineers. All of this enabled him to send extremely detailed reports back to his spymasters in Oxford.

Lawrence’s espionage work was so highly thought of that, in 1914, at the outbreak of World War One, he was immediately transferred (although he was still officially a civilian) into a branch of military intelligence (M04), and then, after being quickly commissioned in the Army, into the Arab Bureau in Cairo.

In those early years of the war Lawrence undertook many perilous operations to discover land routes to such strategically important places as the Turkish controlled port of Aqaba, where, in 1917, he and few hundred Arab irregulars, led by Audu Abu Tayi (played wonderfully by Anthony Quinn in David Lean’s film), successfully attacked and took control of the port. It was not (as Lean suggests in his film) an intutive action, but a detailed military operation planned by Lawrence as far back as 1913.

The American journalist and film maker, Lowell Thomas, accompanied Lawrence on several of his exploits, creating an extra layer of mystery and myth (Lowell coined the term ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ in 1918) to the young soldier spy’s growing reputation. In 1925 Lowell published his book ‘With Lawrence in Arabia’, which became a huge best-seller. Lowell also toured the world with a lantern slide show and lecture about Lawrence (which Lawrence went to see several times), which again proved hugely successful.

Lowell’s book and lantern slide show was perfect cover for Lawrence to use as one of many layers of deceit for his secret intelligence activities after the war, and for what later became his literary masterpiece, ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’.