Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  According to eyewitness accounts, a boy, later identified as Rubowitz, was seen running down Haran (now Aharon) Street chased by a burly, fair-haired man. In a desperate effort to elude his pursuer, Rubowitz darted onto Ussishkin Street, but at the corner of Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael Street the man caught him. A dark sedan quickly pulled over from which a second man emerged to help bundle the still-struggling Rubowitz into the backseat. The scene was observed by two schoolboys playing nearby. A third boy, fifteen-year-old Meir Cohen, brazenly approached one of the men and asked what was going on. He was brusquely told “in perfect English” to mind his own business by the man who claimed to be a police officer. Cohen, however, persisted and asked to see some identification. The man produced an identity card, stamped in bold letters “Palestine Police,” and then, waving a revolver in the youth’s face, told him to leave or risk being shot. At that moment he heard a cry in Hebrew from the back of the car. “I’m from the Rubowitz family,” the abducted boy shouted, as he was struck repeatedly in the head in order to silence him. The car then sped away, but not before several onlookers recorded its license plate—number 993. The two schoolboys returned to their game and only then noticed a gray felt trilby hat that had been knocked from the head of one of the men during the scuffle and inadvertently left behind. The boys picked it up and brought it with them to their lesson at a nearby synagogue, where it was placed on top of a cupboard by another student and, for the moment, forgotten.23

  The following morning, Rubowitz’s brothers reported Alexander’s disappearance to the police. The desk officer at the Mustashfa police station, near the family’s home in the Mea Shearim district, told them that there was no record of anyone by that name having been arrested. With their parents now sick with worry, the brothers returned to the station daily, where further inquiries directed to the CID similarly failed to produce any new information on Alexander’s disappearance. On May 8 the family placed missing-person notices in Palestine’s Hebrew-language newspapers that included Alexander’s description. And the next day Ha’aretz published a brief article under the headline “Abducted or Arrested?” However, it was not until May 12, when a photograph of Alexander appeared in Yediot Ahronot, that both Meir Cohen and the two boys who had found the gray trilby hat realized that the missing teenager was the same person they saw being shoved into a dark sedan. The two boys presented themselves in person at the Rubowitzes’ home, while Cohen appears to have delivered an unsigned, typed letter to the family relating his version of the previous week’s events. Upon hearing the two boys’ account of the incident, Alexander’s brothers hurried to the synagogue, where a caretaker gave them the hat. Inspecting it, they were able to discern a name embossed on the soiled sweatband that appeared to read “FAR-AN” or “FARKAN.” The brothers brought the hat to the Mustashfa police station, where it was sent to the notoriously incompetent CID laboratory for analysis. Chemical tests failed to shed any new light on the identity of its owner, concluding only that it belonged to someone named either “FAR?AN” or “FARSAN.” When questioned by an attorney whom the family had hired, the police denied that anyone named “FARAN,” “FARKHAN,” or “FARSAN” was on the PPF’s rolls. Inquiries made to the army via the military chaplain on the family’s behalf similarly failed to produce anyone with those names serving in Palestine.24

  On May 22, however, The Palestine Post published an account of Alexander’s unexplained disappearance that directly implicated the police. Citing three eyewitness reports of the abduction and details about the gray hat left behind with the name “Farkan” or “Farrkan” on the sweatband, it reported, “The C.I.D. are stated to have told the boy’s family that they think his abductors were British, but also state that he is not held in any police prison or lock-up.” The following day, the newspaper received a letter for Mrs. Rubowitz from someone who claimed to have had a passing acquaintance with the family some years before. The anonymous writer, who signed the letter with an X, wrote,

  that ink spreads, blotches, etc., and that the name is not FARKAN or FARRKAN, but after the first “R” there is a further “R” which should read “FARRAN” …

  The C.I.D. are right to have stated that the abductors were British, but are not right in saying that they do not know who the person is or do not know the person.

  I would frankly tell you, this man is a Deputy Superintendent of Police, in the Criminal Investigation Department, and is often seen wearing civilian clothes …

  Believe me what I say is true.25

  More than half a century later, the release of declassified documents by the British National Archives conclusively establishes Farran’s role in Rubowitz’s disappearance. These materials substantiate the allegations leveled at the time by the Jewish Agency on the family’s behalf. Working from fragmentary information and an unnamed “reliable source,” the agency was able to piece together a remarkably accurate depiction of what occurred. A letter sent by Golda Meyerson to Cunningham on June 23, 1947, correctly asserts that Rubowitz “was taken down the deserted Jericho Road, ‘grilled’ and tortured for about an hour. Finally Rubowitz succumbed to the torture and died on the spot. The policemen tried to get rid of the body, and finally handed it to some Bedouin in the neighbourhood and asked them to dispose of it. The men returned to their duties in Jerusalem.” The agency’s account, however, is on less solid ground with respect to certain details. For example, the gray trilby is incorrectly described as a police beret “on which the letters F R A N were legible.” And the claim that Farran waited a week before informing Fergusson of the incident is also inaccurate. He had in fact done so the following morning.26

  All the sordid details of the Rubowitz case are contained in the official police investigation conducted by Superintendent K. P. Hadingham, among the PPF’s most highly regarded officers. On June 2, Arthur Giles, the acting inspector general while Gray was back in the U.K., had ordered Hadingham to take charge of the investigation—and to begin by interviewing Fergusson, whose statement essentially corresponds with the Jewish Agency’s version of the abduction and alleged murder. According to Hadingham’s report, Fergusson stated

  that on the 7th May, 1947, Mr. R. A. Farran, D.S.P. [District Superintendent Police], had come to him and told him that on the previous evening British Police members of his squad who had been on special duty in Jerusalem watching for illegal pamphleteers came to him and told him that they had arrested a youth in possession of illegal pamphlets. That he (Farran) had, with others of his squad, taken the youth by car down the Jericho road for further questioning and had gone further than he should in trying to make the youth talk. That he (Farran) had killed the youth by bashing his head in with a stone and that knife wounds had been added to the body after death. That the dead youth’s clothing had been removed and burned and that the body had been left unburied somewhere in the open country off the Jericho Road.27

  Armed with this information, Hadingham was able to confirm that at 9:20 p.m. on May 6 an unmarked police sedan with the license plate M. 491 passed through a military checkpoint on the Jericho Road, east of Jerusalem, headed toward the Dead Sea. The same vehicle was stopped returning to Jerusalem at a minute before midnight. On both occasions, the name of the driver listed in the checkpoint’s log was “FARRAND.” It is believed that the previously reported license plate, denoting a civilian vehicle, was a fake and had been swapped with the proper police tags once Farran and his men left Rehavia.28

  The PPF’s “Notes for Interrogating Officers” provided explicit guidance for how interrogations were to be conducted. The expectation implicit throughout the document is that a suspect was to be brought immediately to either a police station or some other designated government facility. In addition to performing such routine tasks as photographing the suspect, taking his or her fingerprints, and properly recording various personal details, the arresting officer was required to complete a specific form documenting each interrogation session—“correctly and in detail”—as well as provide a spec
ific recommendation whether to release or hold the suspect.29

  Amassing such data is at the foundation of both good police investigatory work and established intelligence collection procedures. According to Hadingham’s report, it is clear that none of these prescribed steps were followed nor were any details concerning Rubowitz recorded. Instead, a young boy was spirited out of the city and brought in the dark of night to an isolated olive grove in the Judaean desert near Wadi Kelt. There, his four captors tied him to a tree and tortured him for at least an hour. Throughout the ordeal, Rubowitz remained silent, refusing to divulge any information about either his confederates or the organization to which they belonged. Whether the blow that Farran allegedly struck to the boy’s head with a rock was a coup de grâce or a futile attempt at further intimidation is not known. No autopsy was ever performed because Rubowitz’s body to this day has never been found.30

  Farran, alas, was not alone in failing to follow proper police procedure. Although Fergusson reported the matter to Richard Catling—the head of the CID’s Jewish section and one of his few friends on the force—only hours after hearing Farran’s account of the previous night’s incident, Catling did nothing. Any illusion that Rubowitz’s continued disappearance would go unnoticed was shattered less than seventy-two hours later when, on May 10, Ha’aretz carried a story about the boy’s abduction. Fergusson now decided to inform Gray. Rather than calling on him at PPF headquarters during normal office hours, Fergusson turned up at the inspector general’s living quarters late that same night. Despite having presumably been informed of a murder confession made by an officer under his command, as well as of serial violations of standard police procedure, Gray also did nothing. “I merely expressed my displeasure,” he wrote in a letter of explanation sent to Gurney some six weeks later, “and informed Col. Fergusson that I would consider the matter and discuss it with [Catling].” The inspector general justified this decision on the grounds that documents found on Rubowitz contained the names of some forty-five Lehi operatives. This information, Gray was convinced, “might well have caused a break up of the Stern Gang in Jerusalem”—a claim Farran also repeats in his memoir. Accordingly, arresting or even suspending Farran from duty, he told the chief secretary, might have alerted the terrorists and thus compromised a potential major intelligence coup.31

  On May 11, Gray told Catling to focus on the documents and forget about the missing-person report filed by Rubowitz’s brothers. Two days later, however, Catling came to the inspector general with news of both the Rubowitz family’s persistent inquiries and the missing-person notices that had begun to appear in the Hebrew-language press. Gray repeated his previous instructions, fully aware that the police were still telling the increasingly distraught family that they had no knowledge of Alexander’s disappearance.32

  Desperation thus rode roughshod over legality, much less common decency. The PPF knew that they were already losing their war on terrorism and were now threatened by a scandal of their own making. “I instructed [Catling] that normal police position was to be taken in respect of any evidence from this or other sources,” Gray explained to Gurney. In other words, he ordered the acting head of the CID to stonewall the family and anyone else inquiring about the missing teenager. The inspector general justified his decision on the grounds that two British constables had been killed in Jerusalem the previous evening. “The arrest of a British Police officer following this incident,” he argued, “would have had, in my opinion, a disastrous effect on the morale of the Force … In these circumstances, I felt that I was justified in delaying formal criminal proceedings.”33

  The affair took a new turn on May 14, when Farran informed Fergusson that he had lent a gray trilby with his name in it to one of his men who had only just informed him that the hat had been lost in the scuffle to subdue Rubowitz. The same hat was of course then being examined by forensic experts at the CID laboratory. But because the laboratory personnel remained clueless about the existence of someone named Farran on the PPF’s roster given the Special Squads’ clandestine nature, no connection was made. Repeated chemical tests on the sweatband, Hadingham subsequently reported, had failed to discern the missing middle letter or shed any light on the owner’s name. But the article that appeared the following week in The Palestine Post, coupled with the anonymous letter to the Rubowitz family that it had prompted, ensured that Farran’s name would eventually be linked to the youth’s abduction. Accordingly, that same day Gray washed his hands of the case. The inspector general later informed Gurney that he had instructed his deputy, Arthur Giles, to “go into it in detail and to take such action as he considered correct.”34

  Giles had until recently been in charge of the CID. Popular and highly respected throughout the force, he had been the favored internal candidate to succeed Rymer-Jones as inspector general—until the Colonial Office had decided that it wanted a military officer running the police. Both this snub and the attendant ascendance of the commando element and mind-set to the PPF’s most senior ranks weighed heavily on Giles and his fellow officers. This was why Catling was one of the few people in the PPF whom Fergusson could approach about the Rubowitz incident.35

  Shortly after Gray departed for London on May 28, Giles went to Gurney and described what had transpired on the night of May 6—and everything that had occurred since. It took the chief secretary less than a day to order the acting inspector general “to proceed with the case as an ordinary criminal offence with the object of bringing Farran and any other accused to trial.” It was at this point that Giles asked Hadingham to undertake the investigation—and to start by interviewing Fergusson. Within hours, the weeks of prevarication and foot-dragging ended. After reading Hadingham’s report, Giles went straight to the acting attorney general for Palestine and the permanent undersecretary for police and judicial affairs, who agreed that Farran should be placed under arrest the following day and charged with murder.36

  “On the evening of the 2nd June a friend tipped me off about certain decisions reached at a Government conference. They had decided to try me for murder,” Farran wrote in his memoir. He was shocked. A “person could not be brought to trial on such slender evidence,” Farran recalled thinking at the time. “Everything I had ever done had been reported to the Government, who had chosen to allow me to continue my activities against the terrorists without pause until the beginning of June. So far as I knew there was no change in my mandate, which was a carte blanche, as before.” As Farran saw it, he was the victim of a Zionist conspiracy to discredit Britain on the eve of the arrival of the special United Nations fact-finding committee in Palestine. The spineless Palestine government, he was convinced, would gleefully seize this opportunity to sacrifice him, “thus demonstrating British impartiality to the world.” And he, one of the most decorated British soldiers of the recent war, would be thrown to the wolves despite having an “unshakable alibi” of dining, while in disguise as an Arab, with three other Arabs in a completely different part of Jerusalem when the “alleged kidnapping” (Farran’s words) had taken place. In the circumstances, Farran concluded that he had no option but to flee Palestine and seek refuge in Syria, where he could defend himself at a safe distance using the local British consul as intermediary.37

  Farran had indeed left nothing to chance. “As soon as this foul wind had begun to blow,” his memoir recounts, he had taken the precaution of obtaining £100 cash. An unmarked CID car with a powerful V-8 engine was conveniently sitting outside Fergusson’s quarters, where Farran was staying. Without a second thought, he swapped out the vehicle’s license plates for a pair of fake ones he happened to have with him and then drove as fast as he could away from Jerusalem. A quick detour brought him to the Special Squads’ base in Jenin, where Farran explained to his men what was happening. Two of the squad agreed to accompany him, and within an hour they had crossed into Jordan and by nightfall were in Damascus.38

  Meanwhile, all hell had broken loose in Jerusalem. Earlier that day, Fergusson had g
one to Haifa to personally brief McGregor and explain why all Special Squads operations were being suspended. When he returned, Fergusson found Farran gone and an urgent summons from Giles waiting. The acting inspector general was in no mood for Fergusson’s explanations or excuses. It rapidly became clear that Giles would not allow him to travel to Syria to try to persuade Farran to return to Palestine. Fergusson now considered his options. He had been invited to dine with the Weizmanns in Rehovot that evening but decided instead to bypass the police chain of command and appeal directly to the chief secretary. A small dinner party was just finishing at Gurney’s residence in the nearby Jerusalem neighborhood of Qatamon when Fergusson arrived. “I know you’ve come to talk shop, and I can guess what it’s about,” the imperturbable chief secretary told him, “but there’s no hurry.” He and his guests were about to watch a film; whatever Fergusson wished to discuss could wait until after. His mind preoccupied with other matters, Fergusson sat in silence until the film ended, Gurney’s guests departed, and the two men could finally talk. The chief secretary consented to Fergusson’s scheme and gave him forty-eight hours to retrieve Farran, who was now in Aleppo and threatening to cross into Turkey, which did not have an extradition treaty with Britain. Presented the following morning with this fait accompli, Giles had no choice but to agree—but bluntly informed Fergusson that the Special Squads’ experiment was over and that the units were to be immediately disbanded.39