Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  Disconsolate, Rivka and Alexander managed to book passage to Cyprus in early September and went through the frustration of getting to America, where they would seek aid from their backers in the Zionist movement. There was little hope that they could slip back into Palestine. They were marooned for weeks until they could get money from America for their passage to New York.

  Once they reached New York the brother and sister faced daunting prospects. Even though Alex and Aaron had made many friends during earlier trips, the mood in America in 1915 was overwhelmingly against the United States having any involvement with either side in the horrifying struggle being waged in the trenches of France. Friends like Felix Frankfurter and others from the House of Truth circle would back President Wilson’s reelection campaign in 1916, which promised, “He kept us out of War.”

  America’s Jewish community was sharply divided. Many of the wealthier class had been skeptical of the Zionist movement from the start; they had assimilated, and demands for a separate Jewish state looked provocative and doubtful. Moreover, many American Jews had family and business ties in Germany or Austria–Hungary and few had any affinity for the British. These doubters along with large Irish and German voting blocs were the base of Wilson’s Democrat party. And after all, if a Zionist leader like Chaim Weizmann refused to publicly side with the Allies lest he jeopardize his patrons among the Central Powers, why should they get involved? Turkey’s murderous atrocities against the Armenians was deplored and the plight of Palestine’s Jewish settlements was concerning, but what could one do?

  Alex turned to his considerable journalistic skills and throughout 1915 churned out articles for leading publications that sought to fuel outrage against the Turkish genocide of the Armenians and accuse the Germans of supporting the rampage. British press baron Lord Northcliffe, owner of the influential Daily Mail, had become head of Britain’s propaganda ministry. He commissioned Alex to collect the articles and edited them into book form for distribution not only in Britain and the United States, but in foreign language editions that circulated elsewhere in continental Europe, including a clandestine issue inside Germany. With the Turks in Palestine, which recounted Alex’s brutal experience in the Turkish Army along with the extermination of Christians, Jews, and the Armenians, was a best-seller.

  All throughout 1915 Sarah languished in Constantinople. She had no way of knowing that Alex and Rivka were headed to America or that, in a characteristic burst of impatience, Absalom had defied Aaron and set out for Cairo as well, arriving there just six days after Alex and Rivka had sailed away in failure.

  Finally, in the late autumn of 1915, during one of Chaim’s lengthy business trips to Berlin, Sarah had had enough. A man from Zichron Ya’akov was going home and agreed to travel with her as protection. She managed to bribe her way to obtain the needed exit papers and train tickets to journey home. She left a letter for Chaim promising to return, then set out. It was a hellish three-week journey just to get to Haifa. Even when trains had once run on time, it was a lengthy trip. But now the journey was disrupted by delays and cancellations that required travel in carts over mountainous paths to reach connections.

  Along the way Sarah was stunned to see whole villages that once belonged to Armenian farmers completely destroyed with piles of corpses stacked along the rail lines. What she was witness to was the first modern genocide of an estimated million and a half Armenian men, women, and children, a crime still not acknowledged by Turkey’s government.

  Turkish troops stopped the trains to search for targeted ethnic victims, who were dragged outside and shot within sight of the other passengers before the trains were allowed to continue. When she had to travel through mountain villages in a cart or carriage, she encountered Armenians survivors near starvation who told her horrible tales of rape and massacre. She arrived home in mid-December in exhausted shock.

  She faced even greater alarm when she understood the peril the Jewish settlements had come under in her absence.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Success and Setback

  1915–1917

  Absalom Feinberg, ca. 1915

  Absalom Feinberg became increasingly restless through the summer of 1915, after Alexander and Rivka had sailed for Cairo. He was forced to stay in hiding, usually in the mountain caves between Zichron Ya’akov and the desert. He missed Rivka, and now Sarah’s letters had stopped arriving from Constantinople.

  He most hated being forced into idleness. Whenever he managed to slip into the relative safety of the Athlit station he found Aaron absent, either overseeing his campaign against the locusts or organizing another branch of the Gideonite spy group within the Ottoman armies. Not aware that Alexander and Rivka had been stymied at British Army headquarters and would shortly leave, Absalom tried to join them in Cairo. By luck, through the Gideonite network operating in the port town of Tyre, he learned that a small French warship would pause offshore to unload support for its own sparse spy network before proceeding to Port Said in Egypt for refueling. He managed to slip aboard. He arrived six days after Alexander and Rivka had sailed for Cyprus.

  Absalom had better luck than they in Egypt. Instead of trying to make contact in Cairo, he found a relative who had migrated to Egypt at the outbreak of the war and then joined the famed Zionist Mule Corps, which the British had raised among Jewish refugees there to support the fight at Gallipoli. The cousin, who was back in Egypt recovering from wounds from the battle, had made friends with one of Hogarth’s younger pet archaeologists named Leonard Woolley. From 1911 through 1913, Woolley and T.E. Lawrence had spent seasons digging at the vast Mesopotamian abandoned city of Carchemish, near enough to the site staked out by Gertrude Bell to cause squabbles. Woolley had been made a Royal Navy lieutenant and installed in their separate intelligence headquarters at Port Said. Instead of renewing the offer of the Gideonite intelligence to skeptical British Army planners in Cairo, Absalom made his offer to Woolley. When Absalom revealed what the network was capable of doing, the young lieutenant eagerly passed him up the chain of command where the senior Navy staff responded with a guarded interest that was at least more willing than the Cairo planners.

  Absalom was so excited by even the cautious welcome he received, he failed to pay as much attention as he should have to the warnings Woolley and others made. There would be contact made with Athlit and the information would certainly be of interest. But it was made clear enough, if Absalom had listened closely, that an all-out liberating invasion of the Palestine coast was not immediately on the agenda. It had already been decided that the Allies would challenge Turkey at what seemed a far more strategic objective. The freedom of a handful of Jewish villages had no place in that agenda.

  If British strategy appears muddled in the early conduct of World War I, especially in the Middle Eastern theater, it is largely because the British political elite were themselves in turmoil. In the autumn and winter months of 1914–1915, the Liberal Party government led by Herbert Asquith in London still toyed with their attempts, and those of the French, to bribe the three Pashas to stay out of an alliance with Germany and then later to drop out of that alliance. Other than that, the immediate goal for the Middle East was to hang onto control of Egypt and the Suez Canal as a vital supply route so troops from across the Empire could be rushed to France where the war was to be won or lost.

  At first neither Aaron at Athlit nor Absalom in Egypt grasped what the ongoing debacle meant for their hopes of a liberated Palestine. They still clung to the notion that Palestine was a soft target where the British could come ashore almost anywhere along the long largely unfortified coastline and catch the Turks off-guard. In his enthusiasm for the friendly treatment he received from Woolley, Absalom ignored the implications in the questions he was asked. Could the Gideonites establish a network of coast watchers to help enforce the Allied blockade? Of course they could. Would Absalom help organize a regular schedule of transfers of all the Gideonite information about Turkish naval plans, especially any news about t
he Turkish battleships that were penned up at Constantinople? Certainly. And would the Gideonite intelligence on the Ottoman armies also be handed over to the navy, a real finger in the eye of the army staff in the ongoing inter-service rivalry? Again, Absalom enthusiastically agreed.

  A hastily organized system of contacts was arranged where a British ship would pause in its blockade patrolling on nights of the full moon, and look for a signal from the Athlit station—open shutters on the station’s seaside windows—and send a boat ashore to transfer funds and new orders in exchange for sacks of intelligence documents. In return, Woolley promised that the NILI organization would be provided with the logistics needed for a proper stream of communications. Code books and, vitally important, a small supply of British gold sovereign coins were supplied to support the spy operations but also provide aid to the straitened villagers of Zichron and other communities where Aaron had friendly relations. The last aid money from America, a generous contribution of $5,000, had come in November the year before the Allied blockade, and Turkish censorship had shut down the flow.

  One can only imagine how triumphant Absalom felt when, two months after his arrival in Egypt, he was dropped off on November 8 onto the beach below the Athlit station in the dead of night with his gold and a list of specific intelligence questions for the network. He surprised Aaron at the station and swaggered just a bit with his tale of how he had been able to do what Alexander had failed to accomplish. They quickly organized the coast watchers the British wanted, and assembled an impressive set of intelligence documents about the Ottoman armies that could not fail to impress their new patrons.

  For the final weeks of 1915, the spy network flourished and a steady stream of information flowed back to Athlit. But neither Absalom nor his navy handlers had the foresight to anticipate how to keep the contacts open if unforeseen changes were to occur. It was inevitable that the British blockade schedules would be changed. The ship that was the communications link, a motorized yacht named the Managem, had been seized at the start of the war and was also put to use scouting along the Palestinian coast for Turkish warships. The captain was bitterly resentful about having the added duty of heaving-to so close to the shore whenever the moon was bright enough, and then waiting while messengers were rowed in and back to him on what seemed a risky enterprise at best. There was the danger of mines that the Turks had scattered without pattern along the shoreline, as well as the risk of artillery fire if they were spotted. So when navy signals were changed, the messenger sent ashore was warned not to wait, and once ashore he panicked and was rowed back without making contact. The old signal system between ship and shore no longer functioned and the Managem’s captain was in no mood to double-check if the message had been received. Aaron and Absalom were alarmed when they stood on full moon nights watching the Managem pass by without responding. What had happened? Had Woolley doubted Absalom or had the navy operation been cancelled by the Arab Bureau?

  At the end of December Absalom’s impatience got the better of him. He resolved to go to Egypt once more to reestablish contacts. This time he would slip across the Gaza desert to a British outpost on the Suez side. He could use his Turkish uniform and passes as a locust inspector to get by the Ottoman guard posts and then rely on his skills to avoid the fierce Bedouin tribes roaming the wasteland beyond.

  Despite Aaron’s express orders to stay put, he set out—unaware that at that same time, Sarah was on her arduous return to Zichron Ya’akov from Constantinople and her marriage. Riding a camel and dressed in a Turkish officer’s uniform, Absalom skirted the formidable Turkish police desert outpost at the oasis town of Beersheba and was within sight of British forward positions at Katia when a Bedouin band recognized him and dragged him back to the authorities. On his way to captivity Absalom managed to tear off his officer rank buttons and swallow the small paper packet of intelligence.

  Once in custody, Absalom tried to convince the Turkish gendarmes that he was a locust inspector under the mandate of no less than Djamal Pasha. The fact that he was caught far away in the desert reaches well beyond the infestation could not plausibly be explained, but he stuck to his tale. The German officers stationed at the outpost wanted to hang him at once but the Turks were uncertain. That he had official credentials in his possession worried them, so they turned to the only remedy they knew; they alternated harsh beatings with periods of intense questioning followed by periods of isolation.

  The Turks, also true to form, could be bribed. Getting free was impossible, but it was customary to allow prisoners to obtain supplies of food from relatives to supplement the starvation rations that Turkish prisons provided. So Absalom used the money he had to pay for a message to reach a cousin in southern Palestine to come to his aid. Instead, the message went to a former Gideonite friend of Absalom named Josef Lishansky who lived in the southernmost Jewish settlement of Ruhama. Like Absalom, Lishansky had become an acquaintance of the Bedouin and so had free passage into the desert as far as Beersheba. He arrived with loaves of bread for Absalom and more money for the jailers to guarantee free access to the prisoner. He was able to leave the prison with new letters for Absalom’s cousin and for Aaron, explaining his peril but promising to stick to his story even though it cast some suspicion on Aaron; that could not be helped.

  Lishansky finally made contact with Absalom’s cousin Naaman Belkind, who lived in the oldest of the Rothschild villages, a southern wine-producing competitor of Zichron called Rishon-le-Zion. Naaman supervised the wine cellars there and was the Gideonite’s operations chief in south Palestine. He was a genial personality and had used generous gifts of wine to the Turkish officers stationed at Rishon to establish friendships and gather crucial information for Athlit to put into its ciphered trove for the British. Naaman easily recruited Josef into the ranks of the Gideonites and relied on him to keep Absalom supplied with food and encouragement, while he set off for Athlit to inform Aaron.

  Time was crucial. The Turks could at any time lose patience trying to extract information from Absalom, and hang him. Aaron knew that a direct appeal to Djamal Pasha would be abruptly rejected. But a delegation of village elders had been summoned to Damascus by the governor on agriculture matters; Aaron inserted himself in the group. As expected, Djamal gave brief attention to the Jewish complaints and asked Aaron to prepare a survey of the problem. Aaron said he was unable to do the work because the Germans had jailed his secretary Feinberg in Beersheba and were about to hang him. Djamal had come to despise the Germans both because of their insulting attitude toward him, and because they were under the control of Enver Pasha as Minister of War and could not be countermanded when they gave orders. He could not free Absalom by direct decree so he sent a telegram to Constantinople asking Enver to direct that Absalom be brought to trial at once so he could return to a vital task back in Palestine. Three weeks after he was caught, the Turks in Beersheba finally gave up and set him free.

  In the meantime, Sarah had arrived unexpectedly in Zichron Ya’akov but Aaron had deliberately not told her that Absalom was in prison or that the Gideonites had been set to spying. Although she sensed something was amiss, at first she did not press matters. She was relieved to be home at last from her frightful journey and to be reunited with her lonely father and the familiar surroundings of her home on Founders Street.

  Aaron and others could not help noticing a change in Sarah’s personality. She had always matched her brothers in the strength of her character and her determination. Now the atrocities she had seen on her journey and the harsh realities faced by the Jewish settlements in Palestine had ignited a fire in her soul. She now matched Absalom’s fervor and militancy. Coincidentally, Aaron too was undergoing his own change in outlook.

  Then, suddenly, Absalom was back, bearded, bruised, and scrawny from his ordeal but bouncing and full of irrepressible good humor about how he had tricked the Turks. He too was overjoyed to see Sarah, and he and Aaron finally told her about the decision to begin spying in earnest for the Briti
sh. She also was stunned to learn that Alexander and Rivka were now in America. The three shared the frustrations they faced with the British and the perils of increasingly rapacious Turkish soldiers. Djamal’s army had attempted yet another attack on Suez and been more soundly repulsed than the year before. The starving and badly demoralized common soldiers stumbled back through Palestine as an unruly mob taking revenge on Jewish villages along the way. The German officers who should have tried to restrain them instead clearly urged the Turks on to even more brutal reprisals.

  This realization of an active German encouragement against the Jewish community brought a change in Aaron’s early strategy of trying to win concessions and protection from Djamal Pasha, even as he sought to serve the British. Now there could be no going back. As Sarah recounted the horrors she had seen as she traveled and the deliberate extermination of the Armenians, Absalom ramped up his own militancy. Now it was not just a matter of escaping the Ottoman yoke. The real goal was the defeat of Germany and all the Central Powers. Only with a complete British victory, in the Middle East as well as on the Western Front, would Eretz Israel ever become a reality.

  In the early weeks of 1916, Aaron was prodded further by an increased flow of intelligence coming from both Naaman Belkind and Josef Lishansky in the south. Something had to be done to reestablish contact with the British. Absalom once more insisted that he was the one to get to Lieutenant Woolley in Port Said. This time, instead of braving the perils of the desert, he would attempt the longer, and perhaps surer, route of leaving Turkey by way of the Balkans, specifically trying to reach Romania—which was still neutral—and then to Cyprus on his way to Egypt. Armed with letters from Aaron, he set out for Constantinople in March to win the necessary exit visas and travel permits.