Betcha you never heard of her. Sounds like a joke, but it isn’t.
The story of a British intelligence agent who rigged an election, installed a king loyal to the British, drew new borders—and gave us today’s ungovernable country: Iraq.
Quote: “It was a hundred years ago, a few months before the outbreak of World War I. Baghdad was under a regime loyal to the Ottoman Turks. The Turkish authorities in Constantinople had reluctantly given the persistent woman permission to embark on her desert odyssey, believing her to be an archaeologist and Arab scholar, as well as being a species of lunatic English explorer that they had seen before. She was, in fact, a spy and her British masters had told her that if she got into trouble they would disclaim responsibility for her. As much as anyone can be, Gertrude Bell could be said to have devised the country that nobody can make work as a country for very long—no more so than now.”
This diminutive Englishwoman lived an extraordinary life. Her adventures are the stuff of novels: she rode with bandits; braved desert shamaals; was captured by Bedouins; and sojourned in a harem. Winston Churchill in 1921 invited Bell to the Cairo Conference to “determine the future of Mesopotamia”. The more famous T.E. Lawrence was her protégée. In the Bernese Alps at Gstaad, Switzerland, there’s even a mountain named in her honor — the 8600 foot Gertrudspitze.
