The Reckoning Page 14
The emergency council brought together Stern and his two deputies and six or seven area commanders. It lasted more than a week and took place in a succession of hideaways in Tel Aviv. Stern spoke first, reiterating his determination to carry on trying to cut a deal with the Germans while at the same time launching a wave of actions that would boost the group’s standing in the eyes of the Yishuv. After Stern, it was Strelitz’s turn.
He rejected everything that Stern said. It was pointless to talk of operations when they had no resources to sustain them. The correct course was to reunite with the Irgun and seek ‘rehabilitation’ with the rest of Jewish Palestine. The measured tone of the opening exchanges soon broke down into quarrels and threats. Yaacov Levstein, whose loyalty to Yair would never waver, rounded on Strelitz for his perceived treachery and barked that he deserved ‘to be shot in the head’.
Stern retained his habitual, dreamy calm but it was no protection against the verbal lashing that ensued when Zeroni unloaded months of harboured resentment. He insisted that Stern should abandon all ideas of an alliance with the Axis. Furthermore, he declared that if there were to be any more operations, he would be in overall charge of them. ‘I told Yair that since you were never a fighter and you have no idea about actions, you can’t order me about when I lead them,’ he remembered.36 Stern would not agree. In Zeroni’s opinion, he was ‘jealous of Raziel’ and wanted to appear a man of action and not a mere thinker. Stern’s failure to pull a trigger or plant a bomb also rankled with Strelitz, who threw at him the charge that he had ‘never been out on an operation’. To a man who styled himself Yair after a great Hebrew warrior, the accusation must have burned like acid.
For the rest of those present, though, Stern’s authority held firm. After three days it was clear that Strelitz and Zeroni had failed to win over the area commanders and the pair left, eventually to rejoin the Irgun. The final parting was ugly. As Zeroni flounced out he offered a prophetic warning to Stern: ‘You won’t hold your own for long. The British will get you.’
Stern was now commanding a rump of a rump. They had no money and no friends. The might of the British Empire, the sentiments of the Yishuv and their former comrades in the Revisionist movement were now ranged against them. Their numbers were pathetically small: Haifa and Jerusalem had about twenty to thirty members, Tel Aviv thirty to fifty and the surrounding area perhaps another thirty. The founder members of this tiny club nonetheless felt the warm glow of exclusivity. The showdown, said Levstein, had ‘raised our morale, deepened our conviction that we had chosen the right way in our struggle for national liberation, and restored our faith in the leadership’.37
It was time to resume the fight. Stern’s determination to seal a pact with the Nazis was undiminished and in December Nathan Yellin-Mor, his old journalist colleague from Warsaw days, was dispatched on what was to prove another doomed mission. At home, there were two urgent goals. One was to raise money through another major bank raid. The second, according to Levstein, was to liquidate their enemies in the CID. Geoffrey Morton’s name was at the top of the list.
EIGHT
A ‘Trap for the British Brutes’
Just after 8.30 on the morning of Friday, 9 January 1942, a middle-aged accountant called Zvi Kopstein was waiting at a bus stop on Ahad Ha’am Street in the centre of Tel Aviv. Tucked under his arm was a brown leather satchel containing nearly eleven hundred pounds in notes and silver coin. Kopstein had picked up the money a few minutes before from the nearby Hapoalim Bank. It was the week’s wages for the staff of the Hamashbir Hamerkazi cooperative store where he was chief cashier.
The streets were full of people and there were plenty of witnesses to what happened next. Two men closed in on Kopstein and clubbed him over the head with a length of rubber-covered piping. They snatched the satchel and ran off in the direction of Rothschild Boulevard. Kopstein was only dazed. He staggered to his feet and ran after his attackers, shouting at passers-by to stop them. The response was impressive. ‘Many people joined in the chase,’ he said in evidence later. ‘There was a hue and cry.’1
As they fled the robbers were joined by a third man to whom they passed the loot. He broke away and disappeared. The crowd were hard on the heels of the other two, who turned and fired at least one pistol shot over their pursuers’ heads. The chase continued along Lilienblum Street, parallel to Rothschild Boulevard. Outside the Eden cinema, the pair split up. One of them, a nineteen-year-old called Nissim Reuven, made off in the direction of Jaffa. He was headed off by two Jewish policemen from a nearby station who fired a shot at him. Reuven threw down his revolver and, calling out ‘Enough’, surrendered.
The other robber, Yehoshua Becker, ducked into a store room at the side of the Eden cinema. Two policemen who had joined the hunt, a Jewish constable called Schleimer and a British constable named Stoodley, saw him and followed him in. Stoodley was armed with a Smith & Wesson .45 revolver. Becker was crouching behind a packing case. There was an exchange of shots and Stoodley withdrew and took cover by a bomb shelter. Becker ran out, fired several times in his direction and made off again, pursued by a crowd. A quarter of a mile further on he turned into an alleyway. The soft sand underfoot slowed him down and his pursuers caught up with him. They were laying into him when the police arrived, saving him from further punishment.2 Becker’s wild firing had failed to hit any policemen, but he succeeded in killing two passers-by. Abraham Ben Abraham, forty, a porter at the nearby bus terminus, died instantly from a shot to the head. Eighteen-year-old Matitiahu Federman, a railway worker, expired shortly after being brought in to the Hadassah Hospital with a bullet in his chest.
The wages snatch was dramatic proof that, despite numerous setbacks, Avraham Stern’s new organization meant business. Immediately after the defections of Strelitz and Zeroni, Stern had announced a plan of action. According to Yaacov Levstein, the first priority was to raise funds ‘to finance our arms purchases, caches, hiding places and general operation’. With the proceeds of the robbery, that first aim had been achieved. Stern decided it was now time ‘to move on to the second stage’, namely to ‘liquidate our direct enemy, the CID’.3
That meant Geoffrey Morton and Tom Wilkin. The task of killing them was put in Levstein’s capable hands. Both men had known for some time that they were high on the Stern group’s hit list. The proposal to assassinate them appears to have originated with Moshe Moldovsky during one of the eternal discussions about tactics and plans that took place in Mazra’a.4 Since the spring of 1941 the two detectives had formed the spearhead of the drive against the Jewish underground. The raid on the Svorai apartment in May was led by Wilkin and directed by Morton. In December they followed up this coup with another successful operation which was obviously based on inside intelligence. On 2 December, detectives raided a flat in Tel Aviv where Yehoshua Zettler, who had been on the run since escaping from the early round-up, was holed up. As well as capturing ‘the Farmer’, they also scooped up another five of Stern’s men, including Yitzhak Yezernitzky, soon to be Yitzhak Shamir (and hereafter referred to by that name).
The decision to kill prominent police officers required some justification. To avoid further alienating the Yishuv, Stern needed to be able to present the deed as an act of retribution. That was how the killing of Cairns was explained. The victim had been portrayed as a torturer (though no such claim was made against Barker who died with him) and his assassination therefore an act of revolutionary justice. The Stern group would subsequently try to present Morton and Wilkin in a similarly lurid light. The pair were depicted as a diabolical partnership, with Wilkin’s guile and knowledge complementing Morton’s ruthlessness and energy. Shamir, a hard man to impress, underwent interrogation by Wilkin and marvelled at his ‘awesome fund of information … about the network of the Jewish undergrounds’.5 Levstein was equally respectful of his enemy. Wilkin was ‘the most cunning of the lot’. He was ‘extremely cautious’ and ‘preferred to resort to deception’. He ‘told people he was sympatheti
c to our national aspirations … in reality he was Morton’s right-arm man, his brain and his memory without whom the damage done by Morton might not have been so great’. Morton, he claimed, had won his numerous decorations ‘because of his cold-blooded murderous traits of character. He used to murder his victims without bringing them to trial. He had killed several Arabs in this manner, and more than once during his searches for arms in the kibbutzim, some kibbutz members were murdered.’6 No evidence was produced for these allegations, because there was none to offer. In Morton’s career to date he had shot only one man dead, an Arab multiple murderer called Ali Husni Siksik. He had been in a party of three policemen who tracked him down to a village near Tel Aviv in February 1941. Siksik had been discovered in a grain store and tried to open fire with an automatic pistol but his gun jammed. So, too, did Morton’s .32 Mauser. Fortunately, he managed to clear the blockage, before Siksik did the same, and put two bullets in him. Morton did mount weapons searches at kibbutzim, but there is nothing to suggest that any of these ever resulted in bloodshed.
Morton and Wilkin’s real offence was that they were extremely good at their jobs. Wilkin had a deep and subtle knowledge of the workings not just of the Stern group but also the Irgun and Haganah, with whom he cooperated closely. He was notorious for his reluctance to share this intelligence too widely. He seems to have made an exception with Morton, however, who had also cultivated his own sources, and this joint fund of knowledge underpinned their campaign. Unless these two were removed, the group was in danger of being whittled away to nothing by their relentless sleuthing. There were now only a handful of men left on whom Stern could rely. Among them was Moshe Svorai who had made a dramatic reappearance in Tel Aviv. At the end of November he had been taken from Mazra’a to Tel Aviv for dental treatment. When his guards stopped for coffee he asked to go to the toilet and promptly disappeared. The initiative was against Stern’s wishes. He had been planning a mass breakout by his forty or so supporters held in Mazra’a and vetoed the idea of individual escapes for fear of prompting the authorities to tighten security at the camp. Nonetheless, the return of his most devoted disciple must have been very welcome at a time when there was little other good news.
With the capture of Becker and Reuven the need to deal with Morton and Wilkin became even more acute. Before an assassination plan was hatched, Stern felt a duty to do what he could to save the lives of the two robbers who, if convicted, faced death by hanging. Becker and Reuven pleaded not guilty and built their defence on a series of what the presiding judge described as ‘astonishing’ coincidences.
The case against them was not quite as straightforward as it seemed. The money had disappeared and was never recovered. A conviction required witnesses to stick by their testimonies and to repeat them in court. Given the dire warnings issued regularly by the Stern group as to what would happen to anyone who collaborated with the police against them, it could not be taken for granted that witnesses would speak out. The public knew very well that the threats were in deadly earnest. A few months before, acting on information provided by the unfortunate Arieh Mechachem, the police had arrested one Elihahu Moldovan, a nineteen-year-old who had arrived illegally from Czechoslovakia three years previously. He was found with a Nagant 7.62 seven-shot revolver − the Belgian-designed, Russian-manufactured handgun favoured by the Stern group, Russian revolutionaries and the Soviet secret police − and sentenced to six months in prison. A month later, on 16 November 1941, a young Jewish detective called Soffiof, who worked with Morton and was present at the arrest, was shot dead in Rehovot while returning from a trip to the cinema with his wife and child. Pamphlets distributed by the Stern group soon afterwards said the killing was ‘a warning to all professional and amateur informers who hand over the fighters for Israel’s liberty to the police’.7
Morton assumed from the outset that witnesses would be threatened. ‘Because of the difficulties inherent in getting members of the public to give evidence against gangsters of this kind, the first thing we had to do was to collect up all our witnesses and keep them until the trial in a place where they could not be got at and intimidated,’ he wrote.8
Stern was to discover that the task of dissuading the public from cooperating would not be easy. As Morton pointed out, ‘the offence could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as either patriotic or political’. The shooting of the bystanders had resulted in a wave of indignation in Tel Aviv. Both the victims were Jews, one a blameless young man, the other a convert to Judaism who left four orphaned children and a pregnant widow. Even the robbers’ counsel seemed anxious to disassociate himself from his clients. During the committal proceedings Max Seligman, the Jewish underground’s attorney of choice, declared that he had ‘been the object of criticism and even threats … for having agreed to defend the accused and asked the Court to endorse the fact that it was not possible for him to withdraw’.9 As it turned out the witnesses stuck to their stories. Both men were eventually convicted and Becker sentenced to death by hanging. Much to Morton’s annoyance, however, his sentence would subsequently be reviewed in the light of political sensitivities.
Seligman was not quite as blameless as his outburst suggested. He was well acquainted with Stern who, after the arrests of Becker and Reuven, sent him a message requesting a meeting. The rendezvous took place at midnight near the Tel Aviv zoo. While the two men talked, Avraham Amper and Zelig Zak, both armed with pistols, watched from a distance for any unwelcome arrivals. Seligman agreed to represent the robbers. When Stern asked whether it might be a good idea to kill Constable Stoodley, the Crown’s main witness to the shooting of the passers-by, Seligman counselled against it. Stoodley had already given his account and if he were to be killed there would be no chance of unpicking his evidence in cross-examination.10
Stern’s recklessness was growing by the day and he was now willing to countenance the riskiest actions. If he could not reach out to terrorize individual witnesses he could try to cow the Yishuv in general. At the same time he would remove the threat posed by the men whom he had come to regard as his greatest immediate enemies.
The decision to kill Morton and Wilkin was Stern’s characteristic reaction to his now desperate situation. A less determined man might have concluded that the odds were so stacked against him that his only choice was to surrender. Yair was different. He still had a handful of followers and some deadly resources. The way out was to pull off a spectacular act of violence which, he believed, would transform the situation in his favour. It was clear that time was running out. He was, as an old friend and former mentor, Abba Achimeir, remembered, ‘living like a hunted animal who spends his days in his lair and only ventures out at night’.11 By now he was changing addresses constantly, moving between the few friends who were prepared to give him refuge. Roni was assumed to be under police surveillance, so visiting her was an invitation to arrest. One of those who sheltered Stern described how he would arrive at his flat in the early hours of the morning, and ‘knock quietly on the door. We would open up and without a word he would collapse on the bed and fall asleep immediately.’12 Then, before dawn, ‘he would slip away, even without us noticing it and without eating anything’. He carried a small bag containing the Tanakh (the Hebrew bible) and phylacteries, the ritual items that Orthodox Jews use for morning prayer, including a box with sacred texts, strapped to the head. Sometimes when there was nowhere to go he would doss down in a bomb shelter.
It was the faithful Svorais who eventually rescued Stern from his vagabond existence. At the end of December, Zelig Zak heard of a small flat that might suit the couple, who had a small daughter, Herut. The apartment had originally been a laundry room and it sat on the roof of a newish but already quite dilapidated block at 8 Mizrachi Bet Street in the Florentin area of Tel Aviv. It was named after David Florentin, who bought the land in the 1920s to build homes for his fellow Greek Jews, many of whom were destitute as a result of a huge fire that had devastated Thessalonika. By the mid-1930s
the ground floors of many buildings had been turned into workshops and stores. The narrow streets of Florentin attracted the poorer of Palestine’s new immigrants drawn there by the prospect of work. The block-long terraces of apartment buildings also offered advantages to those outside the law. Uri Avnery, who had rejected Stern’s leadership during the power struggle with Raziel, had a flat there, and appreciated the fact that in the event of a police raid you could run along the roof and escape ‘down any stairs you wanted’.13 Only half a mile away to the south lay Jaffa. And standing imposingly on the main road that ran between the Arab town and Tel Aviv was the newly built three-storey reinforced concrete headquarters of the CID where Morton and Wilkin had their offices.
As Moshe Svorai had just escaped from prison, it was left to Zak to arrange the rental with the landlord. He turned up with Tova, whom he introduced as his sister, married to a man named ‘Bloch’. He explained that she was sick and would be spending most of her time indoors. Her husband was a long-distance lorry driver supplying British Army depots, which would account for his frequent absences. The landlord swallowed the story and on New Year’s Day 1942 the family moved in. The flat was discreetly situated. It was reached by six flights of stairs, fifty-nine steps in all, the staircase running from a front door that opened directly onto the street. The family would be living in a space that measured a mere twenty-eight square yards. Within the flimsy walls were contained a small entrance hall, a cramped living room that doubled as a bedroom, a galley kitchen and a toilet-cum-shower room with plumbing so temperamental that the lavatory flooded every time the shower was turned on. There was one small window in the hall on the left as you entered and another in the kitchen. A larger double window was set into the back wall of the living room. It measured about three feet wide by four and a half feet high and looked out over the flat roof of the block at the residents’ washing flapping in the Mediterranean breeze.