Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  Accompanied only by the family’s loyal Arab driver Abu Farid, Sarah took the carriage and went first to an important railroad junction at Afula, thirty miles east of Athlit. She sought out a Jewish physician, Dr. Moshe Neiman, who had been drafted into the Turkish Army as a medical officer. Neiman had started out as the pharmacist in the tiny clinic in Zichron Ya’akov many years earlier, and he had remained a friend of the Aaronsohn family. He remembered Sarah as a young girl and was taken aback by the assertive woman who now tried to recruit him into the spy group. He at first tried to delay by saying he wanted to talk to Aaron, but Sarah asserted that she now was in charge of the spy group and she challenged him to take the same risks. It was his duty to inspect all new Turkish and German troops arriving to strengthen the battle lines around Beersheba. He also treated the wounded who were brought back. He had heard the Turks boast of the looting they had inflicted on the Jewish settlements and he had suffered the scorn of the German officers, so he cautiously agreed to pass on information of troop units, their condition, and the weapons and equipment moving through the rail junction to various sectors. After stopping at a coffee bar run by another agent, Sarah and Neiman moved on to Nazareth where the group had operatives who had unaccountably fallen silent. One of the agents had been caught lurking around an army supply depot and was so badly beaten that his wife forbade him to take further risks. Others had been alarmed at a large number of German soldiers who had recently been stationed there; they were more suspicious than the Turks and more likely to shoot suspects out of hand. Sarah managed to convince several agents to resume cautious reporting before she returned home.

  To go farther away from Athlit was impossible. A woman traveling alone, and a Jewish woman at that, faced grave risks even with an Arab escort. Then, too, Athlit could not run itself without supervision, and suspicious neighbors in Zichron Ya’akov closely watched her coming and going. The pressure of time was building on Sarah as well. Aaron had been gone since July, when he set out for Constantinople. She had to believe that he had reached London by now and that quite possibly he had gotten to Cairo, where reunited with Absalom and Josef, they all would be busy hastening the day when the British would finally liberate Palestine from the Turkish yoke. When Aaron finally did return to Athlit she had to be ready with a trove of up-to-the-minute intelligence.

  Aaron’s usual abrupt temper was near to exploding in the first weeks after his arrival in Egypt in mid-December, 1916. He had arrived in an ill-concealed fury at the waste of time imposed upon him by chance and the stubborn plodding of various bureaucrats—Turkish, German, and, lastly, British. In July he had left for Constantinople, where he wasted nearly six weeks just getting his exit visas. It had taken more than a month after he journeyed to Berlin to convince German scientists and then officials that his theories on sesame oil as a source of both food additive and lubricant were worth pursuing. Then another month was wasted in Copenhagen until his clandestine escape could be set in motion.

  Back in October while Sarah and Absalom were confined to their fruitless watch at Athlit, Aaron at last embarked on his six-day trip across the North Sea. He made himself conspicuous by appearing in the ship’s public lounges and walking briskly on the outside decks taking vigorous exercise. As was his habit, he struck up acquaintances with many of the young women aboard; he was a manly figure of some celebrity and had a bachelor’s taste for romantic flirtations. One attractive, more mature lady especially caught his eye. Her name was Olga Bernhardt and she was traveling on an American passport. Once she learned that Aaron was a Turkish citizen, she confided she was a German by birth and archly hinted that she had many contacts in New York who were sympathetic to the Kaiser and Germany and its Turkish ally. It was clear to Aaron that if she was not officially a spy she surely could contact many of the German agents operating in America. She would be a credible witness to the scenario that would be played out in Kirkwall in a few days’ time.

  Finally, on October 16, the Oskar II anchored in Kirkwall, Scotland, and British military police boarded for a routine check of the passenger lists and their documents. When the inspectors came to Aaron, they abruptly took him below to the cabin where he had berthed and shortly afterward surprised the other passengers by escorting him and his luggage to the gangway. The liner’s captain was informed that they had found Aaron’s bags “full of German stuff” and that he was under arrest. As he was being led ashore, Olga Bernhardt tried to protest what was clearly a violation of American neutrality. She called after him that she would see that the American public was made aware of this arrest of an internationally famous scientist and consultant to the U.S. government. She was as good as her word, and the day she arrived in New York she gave a heated interview, which was prominently published in the Evening Post newspaper. The article was duly reported home by both the German and Turkish legations and Aaron’s cover was preserved. That he was supposedly in custody in Britain was of small matter to both governments; Djamal Pasha may have regretted losing the agricultural expertise he had depended upon, but he was just as pleased to be rid of that vexing Jew who had demanded so much of him. The important point was that no suspicion had fallen on Sarah or the other spies.

  What happened next to Aaron was the stuff of a boys’ adventure novel. The British inspectors put him in the care of a kindly sergeant-major at the Kirkwall barracks, and a guard was assigned to accompany him to a nearby hotel for refreshment. He spent the night in the barracks guard house. In the morning two army officers accompanied him on an express train to London where he was taken at once to Scotland Yard. In a bit of comedy, the party arrived after most officials had gone home for the day, so Aaron was told to come back the next morning and turned loose to find a room for the night. London at that time was in a total blackout because of German zeppelin raids terrifying the city, so the darkened streets were largely empty as Aaron wandered about looking for a place to eat and then a hotel that had a room.

  While Admiral Hall’s counterespionage department had organized Aaron’s defection into Britain, the overall Naval Intelligence hierarchy had to be convinced of his bona fides. After he arrived at Scotland Yard the next day he was subjected to a four-hour questioning by a Sir Basil Thompson, who doubled duty as head of the Yard’s famed Criminal Investigation Division (CID) and since the war’s start as deputy to the overall head of Naval Intelligence. It took five more days of idleness before Aaron was brought in for a second round of questioning. Even then he had no opportunity to display his trove of desert maps and data on the state of the Turkish Army.

  Britain was in crisis that autumn of 1916. The debacle at Gallipoli the year before had been added to the gloom over the muddy stalemate in France. The other British ally, Tsarist Russia, was floundering on the brink of revolution. Public reaction at home to the institution of mandatory conscription was resentful, and the shaky coalition Asquith government was clearly sliding into a vote of no confidence in Parliament.

  What this meant for war planners both in the Foreign Office civil service and on the British General Staff was that a top-to-bottom change in leadership and strategy was imminent. It behooved the bureaucracy to start the process of a new strategy before a new set of political leaders could preempt their power. One of the politicians whose opinions now became important for them to consider was the current Minister of War, the wily and dynamic David Lloyd George. Despite being in Asquith’s cabinet, Lloyd George had been vocal in his criticism of the sluggish prosecution of the government’s war efforts. He had vaulted to power in 1915, when the press and public were outraged to learn that the British artillery in France was running low on shells. As Minister of Munitions, he had dramatically boosted production and was promoted to the War Ministry in July 1916, where he made headlines by rejecting President Wilson’s offer to mediate a brokered peace between the combatants, saying, “The fight must be to the finish.”

  Not only did this mean that when Lloyd George was asked to form a new government, as was likely, the field
commanders in France would be pressed for a more aggressive strategy to break the bloody stalemate in the trenches. It also meant a new emphasis would be pressed for an all-out effort against the Turks, not in the north at the Dardanelles, but along the static Egyptian front stretching from Palestine into the far desert regions rimming that strategic artery along the Suez Canal. And indeed, in December 1916, two days after Lloyd George became Prime Minister in a coalition government of his Liberals and the Conservatives, he tasked British High Command with increased aggressiveness in France as well as with the capture of Jerusalem and an all-out offensive against the Turks in Palestine. “Jerusalem by Christmas” of the next year became the order of the day.

  Lloyd George always had more than one reason for everything he did. While he was too much of a skeptic to be one of the evangelicals who saw the establishment of Zion as a prerequisite to the Second Coming of the Christian Messiah, he had developed a sympathy for a Jewish state in Palestine well before he reached power. As a young attorney in London, his firm had represented numerous clients who were Zionists, and with the start of the war Chaim Weizmann had become a close personal adviser on war production policies. He also shared with most of Britain’s political elite at the time a dim view of the region’s Arab leadership as a dependable partner in securing the Empire’s access to the potential oil wealth of the region. Palestine’s Jews, however, were another matter.

  For once, fortune and coincidence tilted in Aaron’s favor. The navy’s spy masters suddenly were ordered to send Aaron to the Foreign Office where, to his surprise, he was greeted by Lord Eustace Percy, an old friend from his time in Washington when he visited the House of Truth boardinghouse headquarters of elite young American Progressives. Percy was about to become the chief foreign policy adviser to Arthur Balfour, who was made Foreign Secretary in the new Lloyd George government. Even more surprising, the principal foreign policy adviser to the new Prime Minister himself was to be another House of Truth alumnus, Philip Kerr.

  Both friends could vouch for Aaron’s credentials as a celebrated man of science; they also shared with the new government a commitment to a more aggressive military program in the Middle East in general and on the Palestine front in particular. Again Aaron’s luck held, for on October 26, he was finally passed on to the War Office and directed to see a young army major named Walter Gribbon, who was in charge of its intelligence section for the Middle East. Gribbon was probably the only army officer in London at the time who knew just how deficient the state of knowledge was at General Murray’s headquarters in Cairo. There were no accurate maps of Palestine in general or of the Gaza desert rimming the Turkish fortifications. The state of the Turkish Fourth Army was vastly overestimated. Gribbon had been an intelligence officer at the brigade level in the Mesopotamian sector and had been seriously injured in a raid to spy on the enemy fortifications. After being brought back to England to recover, he was put in charge of this newly created section where there was very little dependable information to work with, and pressure was building from senior commanders for authoritative guidance.

  Suddenly here was Aaron Aaronsohn, who could be vouched for by Weizmann as a distinguished scientist and who apparently had a stash of accurate maps and intelligence about the state of the Turkish Fourth Army. More tantalizing, he talked about how he had already organized a group of Jewish spies prepared to deliver even more up-to-date information about Turkish defenses and future plans for another Ottoman attack. Gribbon was a rarity on several counts. Anti-Semitism was only one of the entrenched bigotries of European and American cultures in those days and it was at its most virulent among the British officer class, which viewed Jews, along with Indians, Africans, and other ethnic groups within their empire as, at best, “wogs” (worthy Oriental gentlemen) or, as Rudyard Kipling warned, “the white man’s burden.”

  Gribbon was comparatively free of anti-Jewish prejudice and was one of a growing number of headquarters strategy planners who had a dim view of the current wishful thinking that the Arab Revolt in the desert regions would blossom into an effective force against the Turks. But at General Murray’s command center in Cairo, an Arab uprising was still supported as a case of having to make do with any available resources to protect the Suez Canal at all costs; ousting the Turks from Syria–Palestine was still a secondary issue.

  One has a certain sympathy for Murray. In the past two years his troop strength had been siphoned off for the disaster at Gallipoli, and the capture of another thirteen thousand British and Indian troops at Kutal Amara had panicked him. The final months of 1916 had been devoted to occasional probes of Turkish positions in the desert to determine if another attack was coming. In the meantime, the British pushed construction of a railroad that ran alongside the canal so Murray could shift his forces more quickly. They also kept extending an elaborate water pipeline system from inside Egypt to the front. Despite a number of mechanized vehicles his army was still heavily dependent on horse-drawn transport and mounted cavalry; both horses and men could not hope to fight in the desert without a dependable supply of water.

  What so excited Gribbon and other planners who saw Aaron’s intelligence trove was that his hand-drawn maps clearly proved the British did not have to be tied to a water pipe supply if and when they attacked the heavily fortified enemy positions along the coastal road. Aaron showed them that the Bedouin for years had preserved a series of primitive wells that tapped into the plentiful water table that had made much of the region such a garden spot in Biblical times and that lay not too far beneath the surface. A British attack force need only take along fairly basic drills and pumps and cross the Gaza waste in safety. And that clearly meant a successful flanking attack could bypass the coast, capture the oasis city of Beersheba, and the Turkish front would by necessity collapse in on itself. Jerusalem by next Christmas was no longer just the new Prime Minister’s fantasy.

  With Aaron’s help, Gribbon edited his notes of their conversations and the intelligence documents he had been handed and turned them into a thirty-one-page report that was then passed up the line to senior policymakers. The memorandum caused a stir that had fortunate consequences on another front. Aaron was sent to meet with one of the true historic forces in the entire postwar history of the Middle East—a deputy to Foreign Minister-to-be Arthur Balfour named Mark Sykes. Wily, devious, and something of an intellectual renegade, Sykes had traveled widely in the region and was the authority on what could and could not be done to wrest the huge province from Ottoman hands. One of the most closely held secrets in high government circles was that back in early May 1916, Sykes had brokered with French diplomat François Georges-Picot the infamous Sykes–Picot agreement that portioned out shares of Syria–Palestine and its mineral riches between the two powers. The pact blithely ignored the promises of a postwar Arab national state made by British emissaries from the Cairo military headquarters to the leaders of the various tribal factions.

  Sykes was both a devout Roman Catholic and a typical upper-class anti-Semite who thought of Jews only as a distasteful presence in the seedy world of international finance. This new arrival named Aaron Aaronsohn was something else, however, and Sykes had the wit to recognize it. After a brief meeting at the Foreign Ministry, Sykes invited him to dinner for what turned into a series of conversations that changed his attitude, not to Jews generally but to the prospect that a loyal Jewish community in Syria–Palestine (under a British mandate, of course) might prove crucial to imperial control of its share of the land once the war was won. Not only would a Jewish state of the kind advocated by Aaron be a more plausible alternative to one controlled by Arabs, Sykes also realized it would draw the international support of leading Zionists in Europe and America and be an effective buffer against any French encroachment. This change in attitude on his part had an important impact on two counts that Aaron could only guess at. The inevitable slow pace of the bureaucratic process at the War Office was speeded up by Sykes’s interest, and the Gribbon-edited report was sent
at once to General Murray’s planners in Cairo, where it created an approving stir.

  Not so fortunately, Aaron’s improved status brought him into contact and conflict with Chaim Weizmann, now both an intimate adviser to the Prime Minister and also the London head of the World Zionist Organization. Based in neutral Denmark, the WZO had steadfastly insisted on protecting its postwar status by refusing to side with either the Central Powers or the Allies. Weizmann walked a delicate line then. He was an important adviser in Britain’s war production efforts and yet he would not be seen publicly as taking sides. He knew that Aaronsohn had very important critics back in Palestine among the WZO leaders there, particularly on matters of getting and distributing the vital financial aid from America necessary to keep the impoverished settlements alive. And now, in their meetings in London, Weizmann was angered when Aaron not only insisted on continuing to solicit money from American Zionists but also demanded the WZO provide him with funds to support his spying operations. The idea of being caught funding spies inside Palestine outraged nearly all of the Zionist officials and led to a long-running and vexing dispute between the two men that would last beyond the war. Nor, it must be said, was Weizmann happy to see Aaron elevated to any importance as a Jewish spokesman in British eyes, and Aaron’s brusque manner annoyed him. His annoyance increased considerably in 1917 when he was called as an adviser to help in the drafting of Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour’s famed declaration of Britain’s pledge for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and found Sykes citing Aaron’s advice on specific boundaries.