The main Protestant missionary propaganda was, or course, religious. James Levi Barton, the leader of the relief organization, wrote "[Armenians] are suffering for no fault of their own, but because their lot was cast in a land where no Christian power was able to protect and because, forsooth, they would not remove the Lord Jesus Christ from their altars and put Mohammed in his place."

The fact that the Turks had been running what was called Armenia for eight hundred years and the Armenians were still there would seem to argue against that. Of course the propagandists didn't bother with that sort of explanation. To us today these kinds of things are crude and unbelievable, and I imagine you would probably be laughing if you didn't think this was a serious topic. But Americans especially, and many other people in the world, including most people in Britain, knew little of Turks or of Muslims in general. Such descriptions of Turks would have seemed perfectly reasonable to them.

The most important factor about the missionaries as far as I am concerned is that they did not hesitate to lie, most of these lies being lies of omission. For example, there were two major books written about the rebellion of the Armenians in the city of Van, one by a missionary named Ussher, another by a missionary named Knapp. The Knapp book was excerpted in the Bryce Report. To the missionaries, no Turks or Kurds ever died in Van, except for four sentences in the three hundred and fifty-page book written by Ussher in which he stated that Armenians sometimes took revenge against the Muslims. Ussher mitigated that by stating that these were people who deserved to die.

The fact is that Armenians had slaughtered every Muslim man, woman, and child they caught in the city of Van. They rounded up the Kurds in surrounding villages and killed them in the great natural bowl at Zeve. If the missionaries missed that, they must have been both blind and hiding in the basement. Yet you read all the missionary literature and the only people who died were Armenians. This makes one wonder what happened to all those dead Muslims. They must have committed suicide.

This campaign, the missionary campaign, was a great success. It gained a hundred and sixteen million dollars, which, if you calculate it in modem money, was the most successful private charity campaign in American history. Posters in public buildings, sermons in churches, door-to-door campaigns, pamphlets, press releases--it was the biggest such campaign ever seen in America. It has never been superseded in its scope or in the amount of money that was spent or that was taken in. Leading every one of the missionaries' pleas to charity was an attack on Turks.

There was complete cooperation between the missionaries and the British Propaganda Bureau. They sent materials to Toynbee; in turn the missionaries distributed Wellington House propaganda material. For example, three thousand copies of Toynbee's Armenian atrocities were distributed in America by the missionary relief organizations. The United States Government forwarded missionary materials on using government distribution systems. The government gave secret documents to the missionaries, who extracted sections from them. These eventually made their way to Toynbee with the statement, "Under no circumstances reveal source."

The missionary establishment leaders most involved in providing propaganda to Toynbee were lames Barton and William Rockwell. Barton had been a missionary in Anatolia. He was a Congregational minister and the head of the American Board of Commissioners For Foreign Missions, the largest of the American missionary groups. He had become the head of the main relief organization, the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. William Rockwell was also a minister, at Columbia Theological Seminary, I believe a Presbyterian. He was the Chief Propagandist of the American Committee. They were joined as Toynbee's prime sources by a gentlemen in Switzerland, Léopold Favre, who had published the first of the World War I Armenian atrocity books, Quelcques, Documents sur le sort des Asmeniens en l915. And, of course, there was Boghos Nubar Pasha who had been the Prime Minister of Egypt and was now the head of what was called The Armenian National Delegation, of which he had named himself head. He was a well-known Armenian apologist.

Barton, Rockwell, Favre, Nubar, all these people provided materials to Toynbee, read the manuscripts, suggested emendations, and read the proofs. At one point Nubar wrote to Toynbee conceming one document, "Drop the phrases that make Turks look good." Which Toynbee then did. The original source of nearly all the documents were the missionaries and the Armenians. And I think you can probably see that these were the two least reliable sources one can imagine.

The Blue Book, as it is called, was a collection of letters, pamphlets and articles with an introduction by Bryce. This introduction was a summary of Armenian history with a view to excoriating the Turks. In the doctunents in the Blue Book, many of the sources were not identified. This, it was alleged, was because of the need to protect them, which could indeed have been reasonable. They were called: A,B,C,X,F or words were used, such as, "a traveller" or "a foreign resident." Place names were disguised.

Now, unless one knows who those people were, their documents do indeed make the Armenian case. When you do know their identities, the picture changes. Years ago in the Public Record Office I found a small booklet that was printed for private circulation within the Foreign Office. Others have also seen it. The booklet identifies the authors of all the contributors to the book, at least all of those who were known to Toynbee.. Also, Toynbee's papers on the construction of the Blue Book (which I think he must have illegally taken away from Wellington House) are now available in the PRO. I have them all on microfilm from the PRO.

The booklet and Toynbee's records show an interesting story, one that is duplicitous, to say the least. Toynbee and Wellington House may indeed have been trying to protect sources. But it also must be faced that they did not say who the sources were because the truth of their deception would have been obvious if they had. Instead, Bryce wote, "All possible somces were seen" and "The respondents do not know each other." This was an outright lie. Some of the authors were missionaries who had compared notes before they wrote. In his letters, Toynbee remarked how similar the accounts seemed. He found that the authors had read other the pieces of others or had spoken to other authors before writing. Yet the Blue Book stated that because the accounts were completely independent the similarity of their stoties proved that they were true! The similarities avowedly proved their reliability.

Waiting that the authors did not know each other was more than disingenuous, since sometimes they were the same people entered under different names, so they must have known each other fairly well. My favorite example is one Professor Xenides. He was a professor at the American missionary college in Mersovan. Three quotes from him were used. In the first two quotes he was identified a: "a professor at the College of X." He actually was a professor at a college in which all the student were Armenians, and he himself was a Greek. Now it mi~ t have helped readers to evaluate his writings if this had been identified, but it is easy to understand why it wasn't. He also was the source of another completely separate statement in which he was identified as "a traveller not of Armenian nationality." "Chat was true. He was a Greek and he was a traveller, because he was teaching some miles away from his home. He was, according to the Blue Book, two different people, perhaps with a split personality. I think it is undoubtedly true that Professor Xenides number one did indeed agree with Professor Xenides number two.

The missionaries who heard things --they almost never actually saw the things they reported--were sometimes described only as "American travellers." Indeed, if you believe this book you will find that there were an incredible number of American travellers going through Anatolia during this period of the First World War. They were in fact all missionaries, or their wives, or their sisters. They were described as travellers. Readers reading this would have thought these were travellers from America, but indeed they were not. . A number of authors were listed only as "An Authoritative Source." This included the Armenian Patriarch, described only as "An Authoritative Source."

The Largest group of authors were American missionaries, fifty-nine out of a hundred and fifty. Next came individual Armenians, fifty-two. Many times only the name of these Armenian contributors was known, to Toynbee, not who they were or any information on their bona fides, only their name. Many times not even that was known, because they were identified only as "An Armenian."

Many of the contributors reported what they heard; very few reported what they saw. Seven documents--this is really is amazing -seven documents were forwarded by the Dashnak party, the sworn enemies of the Ottomans. This was the party of revolutionaries who were most responsible for the rebellion in Van, the ones who had attempted to take that area and many other areas from the Turks and the Muslims and those who persecuted the Muslims of the East. Other articles were provided by newspapers, including Dashnak and other newspapers sympathetic to the Armenian Cause. Documents were also forwarded by Armenian political representatives. Describing all these people as X, Y, and Z hides much. Many of the authors were unknown. For many others, only the name of the one who had forwarded the quotation, such as an American Consul, were known. Toynbee did not know who had actually written it. One source, known to Toynbee only as the wife of an American missionary, was a woman who had never left her mission station. She was reported as a "refugee." Now, where she was a refugee from I am not sure. Maybe she had left her husband once. I do not know.

Toynbee wrote to Bryce, "I do not know the real authorship of thirty-four, twenty-three percent, of the documents." But these unknown writers appeared in the book in exactly the same way as the known. I must add that Toynbee did indeed try to find who these people were. He wrote to Barton trying to and the names of sources Barton had forwarded. Barton said he did not know. Not only did he not I have the names, he had never seen the original letters and did not know how he could get them. Where Barton did give some information it often was sketchy: "It is written by a citizen of a friendly power." "A statement forwarded by a United States consul." "Statement by an American official unnamed."

Rockwell, the man who was the lead propagandist, wrote that he had himself published many of the stories he had forwarded to Toynbee. He had no idea who the authors of some of the stories were, but they seemed like good stories. Favre did the same thing. He knew some identities, not others. The Dashnak Party, when asked about the statements they had forwarded, said they did not know the identities of any of the respondents. None of them. Of course Toynbee used them all anyway. He didn't know their identities, so he called them A,B,C, "A Traveller," whatever, and he used them all.

This is the book that has been brought into the House of Lords as an honest representation of what happened in World War One. Now, excuse me if I become upset when I think of these things. It is astounding. The major problem is not that so much of what was written was untrue. The major problem is that the other side was never told. No Turk ever died; no Armenian ever killed. No mention of Chetté bands, of Armenian members of Ottoman Parliament joining Russians and leading armed bands against Turks, of murders of Ottoman officials, of cutting of Ottoman supply and communications lines, of attempts to capture Ottoman cities, of mass murder in Van, of the forced migration of more than a million Muslims forced to flee by the Russians and Armenians. Yet Bryce stated, "All possible sources were seen."

As intended, the propaganda was most effective in America. The British had destroyed the cable from Germany to America, and so only very unsatisfactory radio communication, which was in its infancy at the time, could bring out the German side of the story. The British censors controlled all the news that was sent to the United States. Newspapers sympathetic to Germany were punished by not letting their reporters go to the front, by keeping news from them and giving it to their opponents. And so even the Chicago Tribune and other anti-British papers eventually came around. The German and the Ottoman side were simply never heard.

The amazing thing is there was an extensive British propaganda machine in the United States which was never known by the public during the war. Sir Gilbert Parker, a Canadian who had been an MP in England and who wrote romantic novels, was a gentleman well known in America. He had married a rich American and lived in the United States. Parker ran the British propaganda organization in the United States. It was always a secret, although it was obviously well-known to the United States government. It distributed materials all over the United States. All were forwarded as if they had been sent by private citizens, never by the British government. How many people were fooled'? We will never know, but it is definitely true that no one ever published the fact that there was a propaganda bureau in America or that Parker had anything to do with it. That information only came out long after the war was over.