Julian Haddon, arrived in town on 15 September.33
Tropical diseases were always threatening. The insect-borne diseases included dengue (which Zimmermann caught), yellow fever (hopefully protected by vaccination), and malaria (although you could take atabrine to prevent it, most people decided to use mosquito netting at night). And there was diarrheal disease, known as dysentery, which could be from amoebae (lingering and bad) or bacteria (even worse).
Through all of this, AZ was being observed by Clarence Macy, the hardboiled but wise American consul in Karachi, who AZ met for the first time on 15 August and who he saw at least twice after that, but prior to the trip to the NWFP. Macy was in frequent contact with J. R. Harris, the British intelligence officer who received the message on 26 October, asking for an American at the ALUSLO to go to the NWFP. AZ had made a lot of new friends, and he had not made any enemies. Charles Thayer in Kabul probably gave him the nod to make the trip.
AZ was sent to Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), on a courier mission on 29 October—only three days after Harris received the message from IB Quetta. His courier mission was surely just a cover; he must have been there to be briefed by Navy intelligence on what to look for and how to comport himself on the NWFP. He stayed in Colombo for two nights and a day with a Lieutenant Commander B. W. Goldsborough. He wrote to his wife that Goldsborough was from Baltimore, and that he “knew the right people.” Indeed he did; Brice Worthington Goldsborough II was the son of Phillips Lee Goldsborough, who was governor of Maryland in 1911, and later a U.S. senator. Ceylon had just been designated as the headquarters of the new South East Asia Command (SEAC), and the supreme commander of SEAC, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was moving his staff from Delhi to Kandy, in the interior of Ceylon. AZ would visit Kandy later, but this trip was just to visit Navy intelligence in Colombo. He left on Friday 29 October via Ahmedabad, Bombay, Hyderabad, to Colombo; and he retraced his route, going back to Bombay and then to Karachi, where he arrived on Tuesday 2 November. He saw another ALUSLO, Lieutenant Al Payne, presumably passing on information orally to him, on both trips through Bombay.
The purpose of the trip on the NWFP was stated in the message from IB Quetta, to make “it clear to the American Legation in Kabul what are our frontier problems and our ideas and policy in dealing with them and the Afghans.”34 This was restated with little change by AZ when he sent his typed report to his family: “The trip had been already instigated by the Military Attaché to Kabul (Maj. Enders) to give him an opportunity to see what was on the other side of the fence.”35 But there were many more things that AZ and Enders were looking for. Some of these would be details that provided depth to the main goal, but others were quite different. They may not have been told about some things to watch for, but as good intelligence officers they would be on the lookout for whatever they could see.
Zimmermann was added to balance Enders. Those who had heard Enders speak, and those who had read his books, knew he could tell a good story, but his story was often very selective. It was hard to know if Enders was telling the truth, and he often exaggerated. Zimmermann, on the other hand, though not always an interesting writer, would be inclined to tell it as he saw it, not as he wished it to be.
The Governor: Cunningham
The trip would have been impossible if the governor of the NWFP, Sir George Cunningham, had not approved it. He knew the tribes along the border were quiet at that time, in November 1943, so he was willing to allow the Americans to join Bromhead on his tour.
Sir George Cunningham was born on 23 March 1888, third son of the late James Cunningham and Anna Sandeman, at Broughty Ferry in Forfarshire, now called Angus. His parents later had another son and a daughter. His father was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, and received an honorary LLD from St. Andrews.36
Cunningham was a good student and was even better at sports at Fettes College, Edinburgh, and later at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was president of the Junior Common Room and captained the Oxford University rugby team that defeated Cambridge by a record score. He entered the Indian Civil Service and left Scotland on 26 October 1911, and except for home leaves on regular occasions, he remained in India for his entire career until he retired in 1946.37
Cunningham was posted to Lahore and paid his first visit to the NWFP in the winter of 1913–14; he returned to the NWFP at the end of October 1914 on appointment to the Foreign and Political Department of the government of India. He received the word of his transfer to the NWFP and immediately rode thirty-six miles on horseback to headquarters at Peshawar. He left for Kohat a few days later. It was his first assignment to the tribal territory. The so-called Durand Line of 1893 separated Afghanistan from British India, and it left a depth of tribal territory of about forty miles.
In May 1918 he took a “most memorable tour” to Malakand and Dir, and over the Lowari Pass to Chitral. In his diary, he wrote that he saw yellow crocus, hyacinth, and saxifrage, and in Chitral he had this remarkable experience:
On the left of the road the ground rises in terraces, and along the edge of each terrace were rows of the Mehtar’s men, each man with his musket. There must have been three or four thousand of them. . . . We came first to an open expanse of grass where a body guard of the Scouts, Rajputs, and Bodyguard were drawn up. Then horsemen galloped past the popinjay—four little gourds hung from a pole, about 30 feet from the ground—firing their enormous jezails [rifle, Pashtun] as they passed underneath. . . . We passed between heavy iron doors and under an arched entrance and found ourselves in the outer courtyard of the Mehtar’s fort. . . . Due north, thirty miles away, Tirich Mir, like a frosted cathedral, towers to heaven!38
Cunningham’s two brothers were killed in service in World War I. He was assistant commissioner in Tank, NWFP, in December 1918, and he was involved in negotiations in the brief war with Afghanistan in 1918–19, as he spent two months traveling between Peshawar and the Khyber Pass. He then went home on leave, and returned in the summer of 1920, posted to Kohat, and was in Peshawar in January to be invested with the OBE.
He was involved with the tour early in March 1921 of the Prince of Wales, for which he was officer in charge of the press. Then the viceroy came to visit Kohat and was to be given a picnic lunch “under the trees,” where there were no trees, at an altitude of six thousand feet.39 There were other duties and complicated arrangements in the Kurram Valley and Thal, and in North Waziristan in Bannu, Razmak, Wana, and Jandola. He went home again on leave in the spring of 1925. When he returned, he was for a short time stationed in Kabul as the counselor to the British legation. He was then appointed private secretary to the viceroy, 1926–31, Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax), who set a good model for him in his later postings. During this time, he met and married, in 1929, Kathleen Mary Adair, of Tullow, County Carlow. He went home on leave again until 1932, and was a member of executive council, NWFP, from 1932 to 1936. He was on home leave again, and returned to be governor of the NWFP until he retired. He had accumulated more honors and was knighted just before he took over the governorship.
His tenure was marked with many jirgas (councils) and much travel, especially in the two Waziristan agencies. On the same morning he took the oath of office he traveled to Bannu to discuss the issue of the faqir (also spelled fakir; Muslim mendicant) of Ipi, who had “just appeared on the scene, who would be a constant source of trouble for the next ten years.”40 In 1939 Cunningham traveled to Kaniguram for a jirga, and to Razmak, Ladha, and Wana, all of which are places that were seen by the travelers in December 1943. In 1940 he went to Bannu and Ramzak, and Miram Shah and Mir Ali, and Kohat—sometimes on horseback and sometimes by airplane. He frequently walked about and showed great courage.
Propaganda in support of Pakistan first came to Cunningham’s attention in 1941. At that time, it “was not expected to be a separate dominion [but would be] a Northern Muslim State strong enough to claim a half share with the Hindus in a Federal Government.” The northern territories were unusually peaceful, and one of the few times he mentions them was
