Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  Stern was now presented with three new problems. First, the killings defied the group’s lofty revolutionary aspirations as a self-proclaimed “covenant of freedom fighters.” They were now condemned in the Hebrew-language press as common thieves and fifth columnists. Second, the continued hemorrhaging of personnel because of arrests was taking its toll as the group contracted from a high of fewer than a hundred men to only a few dozen. Moreover, this meant that more junior fighters, with considerably less experience and maturity, were increasingly thrust into command responsibilities. Finally, Stern was well known, in the words of a CID analysis, to “never desert a member of his group in trouble.” Hence, in addition to engaging a lawyer for the two men, he instructed his followers to systematically intimidate any potential witnesses, threatening them and their families with death. This did little to improve Stern’s or his organization’s already negative reputation within the Yishuv. In frustration, he decided it was time for the group to take decisive action by targeting the heart of the British intelligence apparatus in Tel Aviv—the CID.32

  Stern’s plan was to decapitate police antiterrorist operations in the city by eliminating Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton, the Lydda district CID commander, whose remit covered the country’s major population hub—including Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Rehovot, Ramle, and Ramat Gan—and Inspector Tom Wilkin, his deputy. Wilkin was an especially high-priority target for Stern. Among the few British police officers fluent in both Hebrew and Yiddish, Wilkin was the PPF’s leading expert on Jewish affairs, possessing “an awesome fund of information (including names and addresses) about the network of the Jewish undergrounds.” The idea was to use a small explosion in a rooftop storage shed to lure Morton and Wilkin to investigate what would appear to be a Stern Group bomb factory. Upon their arrival, a spotter positioned on an adjacent, though slightly higher, rooftop overlooking the apartment would use a command wire to detonate a larger explosion—killing both police officers. Still another explosive device would be secreted in a flower bed by the walkway to the apartment that would serve either as a backup in the event the second bomb did not detonate or to kill additional police arriving at the scene. Three years earlier the Irgun had successfully set a similar trap to kill Cairns and Barker, the Jerusalem CID’s top antiterrorist officers.33

  Around 9:00 a.m. on January 20, the police received an anonymous tip that there had been two explosions in a room on the roof of 8 Yael Street in Tel Aviv. Morton was busy and instructed another senior officer, Deputy Superintendent Solomon Schiff, to go immediately to the building. Morton said that he would follow as soon as his meeting ended. Schiff left with another Jewish police officer, Inspector Nahum Goldman. Both men were accompanied by a Jewish constable named Dichter and a British policeman, E. T. Turton, who had recently transferred to Tel Aviv from the Acre prison, where he had served as hangman and had been responsible for Ben-Yosef’s execution four years earlier. The four men went up to the roof, where they found the door to the shed locked. They forced open the door, and just as Dichter entered, a tremendous explosion occurred. Schiff was blown through the wall and landed in the garden below, dying instantly. Turton and Goldman were trapped beneath the rubble, and Dichter was writhing in agony—the force of the blast having thrown him to the other side of the roof. Goldman died in the hospital early the following morning and Turton a week later. Only Dichter survived. The police discovered the third bomb, buried in the flower bed, containing twenty-nine sticks of gelignite, and safely defused it. The deaths were all the more cruel because Schiff and Goldman were popular and well liked both by their fellow officers and by the Jewish community as well.34

  The Yishuv was horrified. Stern’s followers had now murdered five persons within a week—four of whom were Jews. Within twenty-four hours, Shertok had written to Major Alan Saunders, the PPF’s inspector general, to express the Jewish Agency’s sorrow over the incident. Praising Schiff as one of the PPF’s “bravest” and most “gallant” officers, Shertok pledged the agency’s “wholehearted … support [for] whatever effective measures may be taken in order to track down the murderous gang and free Palestine and the Yishuv from this nightmare of holdups and assassinations.” On January 26, the Vaad Le’umi passed a resolution condemning the attack and its perpetrators that also denounced Stern and his followers as a “lunatic band,” a collection of “madmen,” and a “gang of senseless criminals [who have] set out to create a reign of terror in this country.” A delegation of the Yishuv’s most senior leaders—including the Vaad Le’umi chairman, the mayor of Tel Aviv, and the chairman of the League of Local Councils—called on the chief secretary, Sir John MacPherson, to offer the Yishuv’s unstinting cooperation in eliminating the terrorist group. According to Heller, the Haganah started to round up and detain Stern’s followers. Interestingly, the official Zionist institutions also sought to use the murders as a pretext to goad the government to take action against their rivals in the Revisionist Party and the Irgun, falsely pointing the finger at their alleged responsibility for the recent violence.35

  “For the first time,” though, Morton observed, “the Government took Abraham Stern seriously.” On January 27 the police offered £2,200 in reward money for information leading to Stern’s arrest and the five members of his group believed to have been involved with the bombing. Stern alone had a £1,000 bounty on his head. Wanted posters appeared on walls and lampposts throughout Palestine, and quarter-page advertisements offering rewards for their arrest were prominently featured in major national newspapers like The Palestine Post. These outreach efforts quickly bore fruit. Tips began pouring into the police, and within the week four of the six persons wanted in connection with the Yael Street bombing were in police custody. Each had resisted arrest and was consequently shot; two of them died. One lead flowed from another as the roundup of Stern’s followers continued. At the end of the month a police raid on the group’s information office resulted in the seizure of a treasured duplicating machine and assorted literature.36

  The police were now closing in on Stern himself. He was forced to adopt a furtive and peripatetic existence: never staying in the same place more than once, often sleeping in the rough in stairwells and alleys, carrying with him at all times a small suitcase containing a collapsible cot and a few clothes. But he also remained completely unapologetic for everything that had happened during those few weeks of heightened violence. Stern’s propagandists explained in pamphlets and broadsheets pasted on walls as well as over their clandestine radio station that because of the group’s small size the two members involved in the courier’s robbery had no choice but to open fire and try to evade capture. They justified the Yael Street murders of the CID’s Jewish “hirelings” on the grounds that the police routinely tortured arrested group members. One of the organization’s Saturday evening radio broadcasts from its secret transmitter desperately sought to rally the Yishuv:

  Neither the kindness of other people nor the world’s conscience will grant us the homeland. Hebrew weapons will conquer her from the hands of foreigners …

  Go to war for your great and persecuted people, be one of the anonymous soldiers.37

  Meanwhile, the CID was keeping close watch on Moshe Svorai and Ya’acov Levstein, the two Stern Group members convalescing in a prison hospital after having been shot in a police raid on January 27. A British sergeant in charge of their guard detail happened to speak excellent Hebrew and had offered his services to the CID. A plan was concocted whereby the sergeant would solicit a bribe in return for acting as an intermediary between the two prisoners and their friends and families. On February 11 a note sent by Svorai to his wife via Mrs. Levstein made reference to an unnamed “guest.” Then, the following morning, this sergeant overheard Svorai give Levstein’s mother his address: “No. 8 Mizrahi B. Street—on the roof.” Word was immediately passed to the CID, which rushed to the apartment—a small, two-room flat on the roof.38

  Stern and Svorai’s wife, Tova, were just finishing breakfast when they
heard a light knock on the door. As always when a visitor called, Stern hid in the bedroom closet. Tova opened the door to find Wilkin and several policemen. Wilkin explained that they had come to collect some clothes for her husband, who was being moved that day from the hospital to prison. Tova went to gather the garments. Glancing around the room, Wilkin spotted a man’s hat and some handwritten papers on a table in what appeared to be a man’s penmanship. A search of the premises was therefore initiated. Morton breathlessly describes what happened next: “This tough gang leader, master-mind of terrorism, organizer of mass murder and of assassinations by the dozen, arch-enemy of Britain and the war effort, this would-be Quisling, was found hiding in the wardrobe under the petticoats of his hostess.” Morton was summoned to the apartment and arrived soon after with several other detectives. Accounts of what happened next diverge. In his memoir, Morton recounts how Stern bent to tie a shoelace and then “suddenly dived under the gun of the policeman who was covering him and made a mad rush towards the open window leading to the flat roof.” The CID commander explains that on numerous occasions Stern had reportedly boasted that he would never be taken alive—a point supported by American intelligence analysts in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s forerunner. Morton shot him dead. The official PPF report prepared by Saunders largely dovetails with Morton’s recollection. Accounts from Jewish sources, however, paint a very different picture and have long argued that Stern was deliberately executed. Both in his memoir and in interviews with historians and journalists after, Morton always maintained that Stern’s killing was entirely justified. Indeed, the coroner’s inquest returned a judgment of justifiable homicide—“killed while attempting to escape.” And, moreover, Morton won three libel suits against publishers of books claiming otherwise.39

  Stern was buried that same afternoon at a local cemetery. His legacy to this day remains as mixed as it is controversial. For Friedman-Yellin, who would eventually succeed him as one of the group’s leaders, Stern courageously charted the only possible course for Jewry on the eve of the Holocaust. But, according to Bernard Joseph, who was successively legal adviser to the Jewish Agency and head of its political department, Stern would likely have been forgotten if not for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. “Stern’s ideas were totally crazy … If he’d been tried for murder and executed according to law, he wouldn’t be commemorated now as a martyr.” Efraim Dekel, who headed the Haganah’s intelligence service, avers that Stern’s death “was not a very good way for a leader of a guerrilla group to die, being dragged out of a cupboard … He was more of a poet than a fighter.” Indeed, among the handwritten papers Stern had been working on in Svorai’s apartment, the police found two poems he had composed—one praising those who “die for the fatherland.”40

  It had been only eighteen months since Raziel and Stern had parted company. Yet in that time the leadership and fortunes of both the Irgun and its more radical splinter had changed dramatically. In the weeks following Stern’s death, the police arrested more than twenty of his most loyal followers, effectively neutralizing the organization. For very different reasons, the Irgun had similarly fallen into desuetude. Raziel’s resumption of command following Stern’s departure had failed to still the discontent welling within the organization. By December 1940, Raziel had had enough of the internecine squabbling and second-guessing of his leadership and resigned for the second time. But the remaining Irgun commanders could not agree on a successor. Hence, lacking both direction and a clear mission, the Irgun effectively ceased to function as an organized entity. Its activities, such as they were, appeared more in service to the CID than in pursuit of any demonstrable revolutionary ideal. The Irgun thus needed a mission to reclaim its purpose and focus. Just such an opportunity was presented to the group by British military intelligence in Cairo early in 1941.41

  The war at this time was not going well for Britain, and its vital strategic position in the Middle East appeared threatened from all directions. In these dire circumstances, active British military cooperation with the Yishuv was resurrected. The Haganah created in May 1941 a new unit called the Palmach (the acronym for Plugot Mahatz, or Strike Force) that would soon undertake clandestine operations on behalf of Britain against Vichy forces in Lebanon and Syria. In addition, covert British military organizations such as the Special Operations Executive (SOE)—charged by Churchill with setting “Europe ablaze”—turned to the Yishuv’s population of recent European émigrés for agents who could be recruited and infiltrated back into their occupied homelands for intelligence gathering and subversive operations. SOE headquarters in London sent A. W. Lawrence (brother of the famous Lawrence of Arabia) to Palestine to assess the prospects for cooperation along these lines. His report painted a glowing picture of the possibilities. Working closely with the Jewish Agency to identify potential operatives, Lawrence approvingly described his encounters with “honourable fanatics who will stick at nothing. Physically and mentally tough, highly disciplined and used to guerilla warfare. No better human material could exist for our purpose.”42

  SOE, accordingly, established three secret facilities in Palestine: a special training school, known as STS 102, in a monastery on Mount Carmel in Haifa; a parachute training facility outside Nazareth; and a pre-deployment holding camp in a crusader fortress near Athlit. STS 102 was specifically charged with providing instruction in “unarmed combat, demolitions, pistol and knife fighting, map reading, etc., etc. and to instruct special parties of Allied troops in these subjects ‘on sound English lines.’ ”43

  It was into this new world of clandestine special operations that the Irgun and Raziel were drawn. In January 1941, British military intelligence headquarters for the Middle East summoned Yitzhak Berman, an Irgun liaison officer with British intelligence and future member of Israel’s Knesset and a minister of energy and infrastructure, to a meeting in Cairo. An agreement was concluded, with Raziel’s approval, whereby small teams of Irgunists would be infiltrated into North Africa, the Balkans, and southern Italy in support of British military operations. Soon after, the first Irgun operatives were given two months of training by their new mentors and were delivered via submarine to North Africa. For various reasons, none of the missions succeeded. Another opportunity for the Irgun to prove itself, however, arose in Iraq. Following the coup there, the Germans had deployed a Luftwaffe bomber wing at an airfield just outside Baghdad.44

  On May 13, British intelligence headquarters in Cairo again approached Berman, asking whether the Irgun could, at short notice, mount a vital sabotage operation. Its mission would be to destroy the German bombers’ fuel supply. Raziel enthusiastically agreed. “If we succeed in this activity,” he confided to his deputy, Ya’acov Meridor, “additional appeals for bolder actions will come and then it might be possible to put on the British conditions which will coordinate our political views.” Raziel added as a condition of the Irgun’s acceptance of the mission that the team be allowed to kidnap the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, as well. Ever since his arrival in Baghdad nearly two years before, Haj Amin had been a constant thorn in Britain’s side. He had organized a secret committee of Arab leaders from Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Trans-Jordan with himself at its head. Its purpose was to inflame popular opinion in those countries against Britain and thereby orchestrate a mass uprising that would ultimately produce a united Arab nation. Accordingly, for at least a year discussions at the highest levels of the British government and military had inconclusively considered whether the mufti should be abducted or assassinated. When presented with the Irgun’s proposal, the British had offered neither their approval nor their discouragement. In short, Meridor recalled, “we understood that they would not resist the kidnapping plan.”45

  Raziel insisted on leading the operation himself. He selected Meridor and two young Irgunists named Ya’acov Aharoni and Ya’acov Tarzi to accompany him. They would depart for Iraq on Sunday, May 18. Raziel spent the Sabbath in Jerusalem with his wife, Shoshana. H
e left early the next morning, telling her that he had Irgun business in Tel Aviv to attend to and would return shortly. Raziel and the other men met in Tel Aviv and were driven to an RAF base in southern Palestine. There, they were given false documentation with assumed names and put on board a cargo flight to the besieged British air base at Habbaniyya, Iraq. They carried with them some forty kilograms of dynamite, along with detonators, fuses, and other equipment from the Irgun’s stores. Upon landing in Habbaniyya, however, they learned that their mission had changed. Instead of sabotaging the Luftwaffe fuel depot outside Baghdad, they were ordered to assist in gathering intelligence behind the enemy lines encircling the British airfield. On May 20, the Irgun group split into two teams. Raziel and Tarzi—accompanied by a British army major and a noncommissioned officer as driver—left to conduct their reconnaissance, which passed without incident. They were heading back to the base when they heard a plane overhead. Raziel had just asked Tarzi for a cigarette. Before Tarzi had time to reach for the matches, however, the plane, a German fighter-bomber, was on top of them. “The whole world blew up,” Tarzi recalled in an interview published in Ma’ariv twenty years later: “A bomb exploded on the roof of the car. I sat next to Raziel, and I saw his face dripping with blood. I was in shock. I didn’t know if I was coming or going. Where the major had been sitting was a mound of flesh. His head was gone, and the sergeant’s legs were removed. On the roof of the car was a big hole.” Raziel was killed instantly.46

  Two days later, the British attacked Baghdad and deposed Iraq’s pro-Axis Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. Al-Husseini escaped to Turkey and thence made his way to Rome and Berlin, where he became an active Nazi collaborator and propagandist, helping to recruit Muslim volunteers from the Balkans to serve in Wehrmacht and Waffen SS units. Rashid Ali similarly sought sanctuary in Berlin, where he too availed himself to his Nazi hosts. Meanwhile, Meridor and the other two Irgunists returned to Palestine.47