In the circumstances, both Cunningham’s and Gray’s attention returned to what had historically been the Achilles’ heel of governance and policing in Palestine: the lack of intelligence. The paucity of Hebrew linguists and skilled detectives had almost completely undermined the CID’s effectiveness; its military counterparts were little better. The “intelligence section” at army headquarters, for instance, in the spring of 1947 consisted of only five young and inexperienced officers. Moreover, even at this late stage in the conflict, intelligence was relegated to a distinctly secondary priority by the headquarters’ general staff.3
The Acre operation provided a stunning illustration of the poor intelligence capabilities and inadequate security procedures that characterized the Palestine garrison—and were ruthlessly exploited by the terrorists. The Irgun, for example, had assembled from around the country an array of stolen or disguised military vehicles without attracting any notice. According to Gyles Isham, army trucks that went missing were regarded as a sure indication that some major terrorist operation was in the works. Yet, in this instance, it apparently failed to arouse any alarm. The Irgun had also perfectly attired the raiding party in correct British military kit and battle dress and had provided them with the requisite bona fide identity documents and movement orders, thereby enabling the terrorists to travel unhindered along the length of Palestine’s coastal highway.4
Accordingly, if the army and the police were to make any headway against the terrorists, they required actionable intelligence—timely information whose immediate exploitation can rob one’s opponent of the initiative and decisively turn the tide of battle. Gray intuitively understood this from his wartime service leading 45 Commando Royal Marines. This elite special operations unit came ashore at Normandy and then fought its way across northwestern Europe into the heart of Nazi Germany. While visiting London in October 1946 to discuss with Colonial Office officials the PPF’s chronic recruitment difficulties, the inspector general therefore sought the advice and assistance of members of the intelligence and security services. He needed their help to identify veterans of elite, specialized units who had operated behind enemy lines during World War II, such as the Special Air Service and the Special Operations Executive, who might be interested in serving in the PPF as undercover counterterrorist operatives. One of the first people he approached was Colonel Bernard Fergusson.5
“It could be said that Fergusson once seen was never forgotten,” his obituarist wrote. Charming, literate, tall, and powerfully built with a posh accent, clipped mustache, and monocle jammed into his right eye socket, he cut a memorable figure. Descended from a long line of distinguished Scots soldier-statesmen, the younger Fergusson had attended Eton before graduating from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in 1930. He joined the Black Watch the following year. In 1937, at the height of the Arab Rebellion, Fergusson was sent with his battalion to Palestine. Assigned brigade intelligence officer, he worked closely with the police and also made the acquaintance at military headquarters in Jerusalem of a “grim, unsmiling” major named Orde Wingate, whose unconventional ideas about countering terrorism and insurgency dovetailed with Fergusson’s own. He then taught at Sandhurst, and shortly after World War II began, the future Lord Ballantrae was assigned to the Middle East Command’s headquarters in Cairo and subsequently to the Joint Planning Staff’s general headquarters in Delhi. He was reunited in 1942 with Wingate, now a major general commanding the Chindits special operations force in Burma, renowned for employing guerrilla warfare tactics to disrupt the Japanese army’s lines of communication. Like Gray, Fergusson had earned a Distinguished Service Order, second only to the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest honor for bravery in battle, while leading a Chindit column. Later, he became director of a jungle warfare training school beneath the Himalayan Mountains and subsequently was put in charge of military operations at Combined Operations Headquarters in London. He unsuccessfully stood for Parliament as a Conservative candidate in the July 1945 general election and thereafter produced in quick succession two books recounting his wartime experiences.6
In the fall of 1946, Fergusson was thirty-five years old and at loose ends. An offer earlier in the year to succeed Rymer-Jones as PPF inspector general had fallen through when the War Office refused to allow him to take a leave of absence. Fergusson was about to return to command a Black Watch battalion in India when Gray offered him the post of assistant inspector general in charge of the Police Mobile Force. Although Fergusson was initially reluctant to accept a position two steps down from the top one he had previously been offered, Gray presented him with an irresistible option. “I understood that although my nominal job would be to run the P.M.F.,” Fergusson recalled in his autobiography, “I would in fact have a specific responsibility for all anti-terrorist activities. Now this as a job,” he enthused, “did sound extremely interesting.” The intervention of Lieutenant General Frederick “Boy” Browning, an old friend and colleague, who was now military secretary at the War Office, granted Fergusson the secondment to the police that earlier eluded him. “I was under no illusion: I knew I was going to a thankless and tricky job,” the newly minted assistant inspector general of police recalled, “but it was to be a problem which constituted a challenge, in a country I loved, and with a Force that I admired.” His appointment took effect on December 10, 1946, and following two weeks’ embarkation leave Fergusson departed by air for Palestine.7
Upon landing at Lydda, Fergusson went straight to police headquarters, where Gray was waiting with some embarrassing news. Only a few weeks earlier, Wickham had submitted his report recommending the PMF’s disbandment. Bereft of the job he had come to Palestine for, Fergusson was tempted to cable Browning and head off to India, but Gray was insistent that he stay and promised to create a new position for him. They agreed that Fergusson would now become assistant inspector general for operations and training—with the same counterterrorism remit as before.8
At Gray’s request, his first task was to conduct a thorough study of current police counterterrorism operations and methods. Fergusson was profoundly troubled by what he found. “The Palestine Police had changed considerably, and not for the better, since I had first known it nine years earlier.” The force had been denuded of manpower and was also far less competent than Fergusson had recalled. Moreover, unlike the Arab Rebellion, the Jewish uprising was an urban, not a rural, phenomenon. “The terrorists’ planning was much more subtle,” he noted, “and their techniques more sophisticated.” The army and the police were thoroughly unsuited to the complicated task of discovering the terrorists’ urban lairs and forcing them from hiding. Intelligence was less plentiful than it had been during the Arab Rebellion. “Now we got very few tips indeed, and from what little we got it was difficult to make deductions,” Fergusson explained.9
Some three months of inquiry and observation had failed to inspire any new or novel thoughts on how to tackle the problem, and meanwhile terrorist attacks were increasing both in skill and in number. “I seemed to lack and my colleagues seemed to lack,” Fergusson later reflected, “the sort of intuitive thinking that was inspiring our opponents. I tried to translate into the urban and suburban areas of Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv the kind of ideas that my subordinates had dreamed up for me in the jungles of Burma; but all I got was the sort of echo you might expect in an empty squash-court.”10
Normal policing and existing countermeasures, Fergusson believed, had not succeeded in containing, much less eliminating, terrorism—and never would. Something new was required—a conclusion now shared by Cunningham and Montgomery as well as Gray. “I have always been clear that the best method of dealing with terrorists is to kill them,” the high commissioner had told Creech Jones as Palestine had drifted deeper into lawlessness the previous November. Montgomery had similarly despaired of conventional military approaches applied to counterterrorism and instead argued that it was no longer possible to eliminate terrorism in Palestine “without employing very ruthles
s measures.”11
According to the PPF’s official history, Gray was also convinced that “the terrorists must be flushed from their cellars in Tel Aviv and elsewhere; then … harassed, pursued and given no rest until arrested or shot in action against the security forces.” Mulling over the various options, Fergusson had an epiphany. “It seemed to me, baffled as I was,” he recounts in his memoir, “that we needed people with experience of terrorism or something closely allied to it: people who would foresee the sort of plan that might occur to the imagination of terrorists: people, in short, who had been something like terrorists themselves: not to terrorise or to repay in kind, but to anticipate and to give would-be raiders a bloody nose as they came in to raid.”12
Fergusson’s idea was essentially to revive the PPF’s mixed British and Arab Search and Seek squads, also known as Q Patrols, that had effectively fought Arab terrorists during the 1936–39 rebellion. These units’ mission had been to force the Arab rebels into the open, where they would be more easily engaged in battle and killed or arrested. This time, however, these units would comprise Britons only: drawn from the PPF’s British section and led by officers skilled in unconventional warfare who had served with elite special forces units during the war. The fact that these units would lack the social, cultural, and linguistic knowledge provided by local police officers that was critical to the Q Patrols’ success does not appear to have been regarded by Fergusson as a serious impediment. Indeed, according to the PPF’s official historian, Edward Horne, their mission remained the same: to “disappear into the Jewish areas, as previous squads had disappeared into Arab areas a decade earlier.”13
With Gray’s blessing and Cunningham’s backing, Fergusson returned to London in February 1947. The ostensible reason for his visit was to oversee the purchase of new police cars. But his real purpose was to obtain permission from the Colonial and War Offices to recruit up to four regular army officers for the new police unit. He was specifically hoping to recruit officers who had served with distinction in elite wartime units such as the SAS or the SOE that had fought alongside indigenous European resistance movements against the Nazis. “There is in the Army a small number of officers who have both technical and psychological knowledge of terrorism,” Fergusson’s memorandum to the War Office explained, “having themselves been engaged in similar operations on what may be termed the terrorist side in countries occupied by the enemy in the late war.” The men whom Fergusson had in mind were “exceptionally qualified; and rather than accept officers with inferior qualifications,” he declared, “I will accept none. In this event, the project will fall to the ground, since it will be of no value unless the standard of training and operation is really high.”14
Both the Colonial Office and the War Office responded with alacrity. Fergusson was able to obtain the services of three of the four men he requested. The first two arrived in Palestine on March 17, 1947. They were Alastair “Angus” McGregor, an SAS and MI6 veteran who had previously served in Palestine, and Roy Farran, among the most highly decorated soldiers of the war, who had fought in Egypt, Crete, Sicily, Italy, France, and Greece as both a conventional soldier and a special operator behind enemy lines with the SAS. Farran also had firsthand experience of conditions in Palestine as a result of his tour of duty as second-in-command of the Third Hussars during 1945 and 1946. Both men had served together during the war in the Second SAS. They had also been students of Fergusson’s at Sandhurst, and each was trained and thoroughly versed in close-quarters battle. “Alastair and Roy had operated behind enemy lines with great success,” Fergusson later explained, “and I thought that their minds would work like terrorists’ minds.” They were each given wide latitude both geographically and operationally to accomplish their mission. McGregor was assigned the northern half of Palestine, with responsibility for Haifa, and Farran was given the south, which included Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and the coastal plain.15
“In Jerusalem Police HQ the brief was explained to us,” Farran recalled in his memoir. “We would each have full power to operate as we pleased within our specific areas. We were to advise on defence against the terrorists and to take an active part in hunting the dissidents … It was to all intents and purposes a carte blanche.” He and McGregor had two weeks to recruit ten men each from the British police in their respective areas of operations and another two weeks to train them. There was no shortage of former SAS operators already serving in the PPF or military in postwar Palestine, and Farran was able to find five SAS veterans and two former commandos for his unit. Farran and McGregor trained their respective squads at a special, secret, cordoned-off area of the PMF depot at Jenin that Fergusson had allocated for their exclusive use. Although both units would be deployed primarily in Palestine’s cities, no special training or attention was devoted to the unique operational and intelligence requirements of urban counterterrorism. As Fergusson himself admits, this was a mistake. “If I had been just a trifle more ruthless, I could have done that, by commandeering a length of street in Jenin; but I didn’t,” he later regretted.16
Farran took special care to ensure that his men could “put six rounds in a playing-card at fifteen yards” and that they were skilled in close-quarters combat. After two weeks, he was satisfied and thought them ready for action. But so myopic and cursory a period of instruction was clearly inadequate—as would shortly become all too tragically evident.17
Frank Kitson, whose own extensive experience of counterterrorist special operations spanned the gamut of Britain’s subsequent postwar campaigns in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Muscat and Oman, and Northern Ireland, has written of the importance of extensive training if special operations units are to function effectively. He cites the necessity of “attuning men’s minds to cope with the environment of this sort of war.” Kitson argues, “It involves explaining the fundamental nature of subversion and insurgency with particular reference to the way in which force can be employed to achieve political ends, and the way in which political considerations affect the use of force.” In this respect, Farran’s preoccupation with his men’s marksmanship was clearly at the expense of familiarizing them with their operational environment and providing the additional training needed for them to execute the intelligence-gathering dimension of their mission. Indeed, Farran’s wartime experience in the SAS had never involved these types of covert operations. As M. R. D. Foot, the renowned historian of British special operations during World War II, observed of Farran’s exploits in France, “Though romantic, [they] were more cavalry than clandestine warfare.”18
Although Farran could boast that his unit so closely resembled “any party of Jewish youths from a kibbutz” that when they drove through Arab villages they were “hissed,” the truth of the matter was that their charade could only go so far given the severe limitation on their ability to gather intelligence. This particular shortcoming was exacerbated further by the fact that both Farran’s and McGregor’s squads were entirely outside the normal police channels of command and communication. Hence, they were unable to benefit from any intelligence, advice, or assistance provided by the CID or the uniformed police. Fergusson recognized this problem and, accordingly, emphasized the squads’ independent counterterrorist/commando strike force function. Even so, this still ignored the squads’ main weakness: that of obtaining the intelligence necessary for them to carry out their mission.19
Farran, however, remained completely aloof to any of these concerns and smugly complacent about his and his unit’s unique capabilities—especially in comparison to the regular police and their plainclothes counterparts in the CID. The former he derided for cowering behind heavily sandbagged fortresses and the latter for possessing “about as much information as would fill a thimble.” To his mind, “police methods were so amateurish that even to a non-policeman they were wince-making.” Worse still, Farran believed, this was all part and parcel of the Palestine government’s weak-kneed, casualty-averse policy that was designed “to avoid ‘provoking’ the Jews.”
Indeed, in Winged Dagger, Farran depicts the approach to dealing with terrorism before his arrival as “Don’t let’s be cruel to the Jews … Only a few are naughty, and in the end, provided that we are nice to them, they will all forget how much they hate us and come forward with information.” Farran, however, had a different approach to obtaining such information, as the incident that occurred on the evening of May 6, 1947, vividly demonstrates.20
Tension was running high throughout the country as a result of the raid on Acre prison that had taken place just forty-eight hours earlier. The pressure on the security forces for a breakthrough in the war against terrorism as well as on those tasked with acquiring the intelligence to facilitate it was doubtless intense as Farran and three subordinates set out on patrol in Jerusalem that evening. Driving a battered but specially outfitted six-seater sedan complete with souped-up engine, they hoped to come across a member of either the Irgun or Lehi, who would then be searched and interrogated and thereby persuaded to reveal information vital to the counterterrorist effort.21
Some time before 8:00 p.m., they spotted a teenage boy named Alexander Rubowitz. It is not known what specifically attracted their attention to the tall, lanky sixteen-year-old. Described as “quiet, delicate and shy” by his family, he was the antithesis of the hardened and cunning, streetwise terrorist that the British authorities usually associated with the Irgun and even more so with Lehi. Because they aroused less suspicion, Lehi regularly turned to its more youthful enthusiasts for a variety of low-level, yet undeniably risky, underground tasks such as distributing propaganda, pasting posters and announcements to walls, carrying messages, and on occasion transferring weapons from one location to another. Not only were these youths more expendable to the organization than the small number of seasoned fighters in its ranks, but as minors they faced less severe punishment—and could not be charged with capital offenses—if they were caught. Whatever the reason, Farran and his men’s instincts that night were correct. Rubowitz was in fact a devoted Lehi activist known by the nom de guerre Chaim who had already been expelled from two schools for his extremism and, moreover, was a graduate of Lehi’s commanders and firearms training courses. He was sufficiently well thought of by his superiors to have been appointed leader of a ten-person cell responsible for affixing Lehi posters to the walls of the city’s Jewish neighborhoods.22
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