Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan by William Dalrymple Read Free Book Online

immediately the importance of what the Shah had just told him: it was the first proof of what British intelligence had long feared: that the Russians were trying to establish themselves in Afghanistan by forging an alliance with Dost Mohammad and the Barakzais, and to assist them and the Persians in extinguishing the last bastion of Shah Shuja’s Sadozai dynasty in Herat. Rawlinson also realised he needed to get back to Teheran as quickly as possible with this information.
    Shortly afterwards, the Russians themselves arrived in the Persian camp. To the ordinary Persians of the army, the Russian officer ‘gave himself out to be a Musselman of the Soonee persuasion and declared his Musselman name to be Omar Beg. No one doubted in camp that he was actually a Musselman.’ Unaware that Rawlinson had discovered the truth about their mission, the officer, introduced now as ‘Captain Vitkevitch . . . addressed me at once in good French, and in allusion to our former meeting, merely observed with a smile that “it would not do to be too familiar with strangers in the desert”’. 12
    Later in life, Rawlinson would be famous for two things, firstly for deciphering cuneiform, and secondly, along with Arthur Conolly, for coining the phrase ‘the Great Game’. But now it was his skill as a rider which proved most useful. He was, after all, the son of a racehorse breeder in Newmarket and had grown up in the saddle; he was also a man of enormous physical strength: ‘six feet tall, with broad shoulders, strong limbs and excellent muscles and sinews’. 13
    That same night, Rawlinson headed straight back to Teheran, making the 800 miles across Persia in record time, and brought the news of the existence of the Russian delegation to Afghanistan to MacNeill on 1 November 1837. MacNeill in turn immediately sent an express messenger to Lord Palmerston in London and another to the new Governor General of India, Lord Auckland, in Calcutta. ‘The Russians have formally opened their diplomatic intercourse with Kabul,’ he wrote. ‘Captain Vicovich or Beekavitch, alias Omar Beg, a soonee Mahommedan subject of Russia, has been accredited, I am informed, as chargé d’affairs to Ameer Dost Mohammed Khan.’ In the despatch, MacNeill included Rawlinson’s detailed description of the officer, and added a few more details that his envoy had picked up in the Persian camp: ‘He called himself an aide de camp of the Emperor’s, but I understood that he was in reality an ADC of the Governor commanding at Orenburg . . . The year before last he was at Bokhara for some time, employed officially by the Russian Government. He learned his Persian and Jagatai Turkish at Orenburg and Bokhara.’ 14
    Rawlinson’s sighting of Vitkevitch seemed to validate all the over-heated fears of his boss, MacNeill, Lord Ellenborough and other British policymakers who had long feared that the Russians wanted to take over Afghanistan and use it as a base for attacking British India. Rawlinson’s description of Vitkevitch was immediately sent to intelligence officials at Peshawar, the Khyber Pass and the other crossing points to India in case the Russian was planning to continue on to British India, or enter into negotiations with Ranjit Singh.
    But the mysterious officer was not heading to India. His mission was to undermine British interests in Afghanistan and forge an alliance between the Tsar and Dost Mohammad.
     
     
     
    One or two of Rawlinson’s suppositions about the officer were correct, but most were mistaken. He was not a Muslim, nor was he a Russian, nor was he ADC to the Governor of the Russian frontier post of Orenburg, nor was his name at birth either Beekavitch or Vitkevitch. Instead the officer was in fact a Roman Catholic Polish nobleman born Jan Prosper Witkiewicz in Vilnius, today the capital of Lithuania.
    While still at the Krozach Gymnasium Jan had helped found a secret society called the Black Brothers, an underground