Book excerpt: Ultimately these cross purposes brought disaster, pulling a fatally weak and woefully unprepared Ottoman state into a global war, and unleashing vicious, internal ethnic repression that brought it defeat and dismemberment. The diaries and official reports of German spy and propagandist Curt Prufer - translated here into English in their entirety for the first time - chronicle the complexities of the fragile Ottoman-German alliance from the perspective of a participant. Much like fellow soldier-scholar T.E. Lawrence, Prufer and his colleagues tried to steal the loyalties of the Muslim subjects of the opposing sides. The book explores these episodes of sabotage, subversion and subterfuge - from managing spies to preparing for the attack on the Suez Canal in 1915 - and in the process sheds light onto the ways World War I played out across the Middle East. Complemented throughout by in-depth and meticulously researched footnotes, this primary source collection is an invaluable addition to the extant corpus of late Ottoman and World War I historical documents.