The Centre for Statecraft & National Security is excited to host Dr Eamonn Gearon for a talk on his book, The Arab Bureau: Britain’s Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit.

More than a century before “influence operations” entered the vocabulary of modern conflict, the Arab Bureau in Cairo was practising them. Established in 1916 to coordinate British intelligence and policy in the Middle East, the Arab Bureau combined battlefield intelligence, political analysis and Arabic-language propaganda in support of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Eamonn examines how this small unit, whose members included T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, fought a war of words as well as weapons, and what its successes and failures tell us about information, insurgency and the unintended consequences of foreign intervention. Drawing on archival and previously untranslated Arabic sources, the talk offers lessons that remain uncomfortably relevant.

About the Speaker:

Dr Eamonn Gearon is a historian, author and lecturer who has spent thirty years living and working across the Middle East and North Africa. He holds a DPhil from Oxford and has taught at Oxford, Johns Hopkins-SAIS, and the American University in Cairo. He delivers diplomatic training for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, has four lecture series with The Great Courses, and is a former foreign correspondent. A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Historical Society, his books include The Sahara: A Cultural History and The Arab Bureau (Hurst, 2026).

To register to attend, please click here.