Arab Bureau

The Arab Bureau was a section of the Cairo Intelligence Department during the First World War. According to a Committee of Imperial Defence paper from 7 January 1916, the Arab Bureau was established to "harmonise British political activity in the Near East...[and] keep the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Committee of Defence, the War Office, the Admiralty, and Government of India simultaneously informed of the general tendency of Germano-Turkish Policy."

It was constituted on the initiative of Mark Sykes who, in December 1915, reported to London that, in a recent tour of the Middle East from Egypt to India, he had discovered that the German and Turkish Governments were widely distributing anti-British wartime propaganda that countered British imperialism. Sykes was concerned because British command posts in the Middle East were generally uncooperative and thus far unable to produce counterpropaganda. Sykes proposed the creation of a London office under his auspices to gather, filter, and distribute intelligence on the German and Turkish Middle East policy and "co-ordinate propaganda in favour of Great Britain among non-Indian Moslems."

Sykes' proposal was welcomed by Gilbert Clayton, the director of civilian and military intelligence in Egypt and Sudan. Clayton believed that such an office might not only discover and counter enemy propaganda but be capable of overseeing a wider collection of political and military information regarding the Middle East and in turn produce easily understood reports to inform policymaking in Cairo and London toward the Ottoman Arab territories.

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