The Meinertzhagen Mystery

by Brian Garfield

Tall, handsome, charming, Col. Richard Meinertzhangen was an acclaimed British war hero, a secret agent, and a dean of international ornithology. His exploits inspired three biographies, his life has been the basis for movies, and Jerusalem dedicated a city square to his memory. Meinertzhagen was trusted by Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion, T. E. Lawrence, Elspeth Huxley, and a great many others. But he bamboozled them all. Meinertzhagen was a fraud. Many of the adventures recorded in his celebrated diaries were imaginary, including a meeting with Hitler while he had a loaded pistol in his pocket, an attempt to rescue the Russian royal family in 1918, and a shoot-out with Arabs in Haifa when he was seventy years old. While he truly was a key player in Middle Eastern events after World War I and represented Zionism's interests in negotiations with Germany in the 1930, he also set up Nazi front organizations in England, committed a half-century of m