The Reckoning Read online

  Three days after the Svorais moved in Stern turned up for a meeting at the flat. He arrived carrying a large suitcase. Asked by Moshe what it contained, Stern replied: ‘this is my folding bed.’ The man who had charmed Polish ministers and officials and wowed professors with his brilliance had been reduced to the status of a vagrant. Svorai insisted that, despite the obvious dangers, Stern should move in with them. He resisted briefly before submitting and that evening unfolded his camp bed for the first time in the Svorais’ tiny dwelling. To nosy neighbours he would be introduced as ‘Mr Azaria’.14

  Despite all evidence to the contrary, Stern believed that if his fellow Jews only understood what he was trying to say they would rally to his cause. Even though the eyes of not only the British but also their enemies in the Haganah and the Irgun were upon them, the group still managed to distribute leaflets and even to transmit two broadcasts. They were beamed out hurriedly from the apartments of two staunch female supporters, Nelly Langsfelder and Julie Elazar.

  The first broadcast was written by Stern and delivered by Moshe Svorai. It declared that the war raging all around was not a contest between democracy and totalitarianism but a struggle between two malevolent forces and had nothing to do with furthering Jewish national interests. It was ‘a war between Gog and Magog’.15 The second was read by Stern himself, the first and last time he spoke over the airwaves. It was a diatribe against his former Revisionist comrades whom he derided as being an ‘absurd copy’ of the left-wing Mapai and the Jewish Agency. He ended with a call to arms: ‘Hebrew Youth! Do you want the nation to be redeemed? Do you wish for the conquest of the homeland? Are you ready to lay down your life for the resurrection of the Hebrew kingdom? Join the war of the underground army of battling Zion whose flag will one day fly over the walls of liberated Jerusalem!’ The chasm between rhetoric and reality was vividly illustrated by the fact that, as soon as the broadcast was over, Stern and his helpers had to scuttle away, lugging the transmitter with them, when a police van was spotted next to the building.16

  The time for words had passed. On 18 January, Stern called a meeting of his lieutenants. They gathered at a flat at 30 Dizengoff Street, the closest thing they had to a safe house. Dizengoff was one of Tel Aviv’s busiest thoroughfares, swinging in from the east then bisecting the city from south to north, but the house was on a quiet, residential stretch at the eastern end. It had been rented by Zelig Zak, who in the meantime had been picked up but managed to escape while being transferred from the Jaffa lock-up to Mazra’a camp. Present at the meeting were Svorai, Levstein and Tzelnik and the talk was all of killing. There was a new name on Stern’s hit list: Binyamin Zeroni. The taint of suspicion had clung to him ever since his miraculous escape from Jerusalem police headquarters following the assassination of Cairns and Barker. Moshe Rothstein had also planted doubts about where Zeroni’s real loyalties lay. Zeroni’s personal attacks on Stern and the imputation of cowardice, contained in the charge that he never went on operations, had settled the question once and for all. The four men agreed that he should be executed for treason.

  They also decided to begin planning the assassination of a British official, Oliver Lyttleton, who, as Minister of State in Cairo, was the senior political figure in the region. According to Yitzhak Shamir, Stern had entertained the idea for some time. It had been ‘born one spring evening in 1941’ at a meeting in Tel Aviv. ‘It was part of his total concept of how we should fight, not just the British in Palestine but the British Empire as such: to try to put out of action the people who made policy and moved the pieces on the Palestine board.’17 Even though Lyttleton was in Egypt, Stern claimed to be in contact with Jewish soldiers in the British Army there who would be prepared to help. The main business of the day, though, concerned Morton and Wilkin. Levstein brought the group up to date on how his plans were progressing: all, it seemed, was going very well. The date for the assassination was set for two days’ time – Tuesday, 20 January.

  Levstein would later describe the plan in gloating detail. His testimony is invariably coloured by the compulsion to present the police in the worst possible light, but there is no reason to doubt the technical specifics of the operation, which match those of police reports. He ‘started with the assumption that Morton’s desire to capture [our] members outweighed any considerations of personal safety on his part. Besides, I knew that he used to get personally involved in his operations.’

  On this premise, Levstein laid his trap. One of his team would explode a small bomb in his room so the neighbours could hear it (in fact witnesses said two small detonations were subsequently heard). He would scatter a trail of chicken blood inside the apartment and on the stairs outside, giving the impression that a bomb-maker had injured himself while constructing a device. The explosion would automatically alert the police. ‘I knew the news would immediately reach Morton at the CID headquarters in Tel Aviv, and he would come over to apprehend the wounded person and use him to find out about the rest of the organization.’

  On arrival, Morton and his colleagues would see the blood trail and follow it up to its apparent point of origin. Then the real bomb would go off. The site chosen for the attempt was at 8 Yael Street, a three-storey building in a tree-shaded residential road lined with Bauhaus-style apartment houses, just behind Dizengoff Circle. Two of Stern’s supporters rented a room there, a breeze-block and tile construction perched on the roof, similar to the Svorai residence in Mizrachi Bet Street.

  Levstein spent several days preparing. ‘I rested during the day, and at night I would go out to 8 Yael Street where I was going to lay the trap for the British brutes.’ The bomb would be hidden inside the room on the roof. Inside it, next to the door, was ‘a chest where I hid 55 pounds of blasting gelatin [gelignite], the best explosive we had at the time. I put it inside a well-sealed tin box. Inside the explosives I attached five detonators, connected in a row, each inside a primer made of exploding cotton or TNT to increase the explosion … Around the explosives I put 33 pounds of nails of all kinds.’ As a finishing touch, the shrapnel was ‘soaked in salicylic and sulphatic acid, to aggravate the wounds’.

  The bomb would be detonated by remote control via a command cable, disguised as a radio aerial that ran from the rooftop across to 13 Zamenhoff Street, a house in the road behind. The roof there was rather higher than that of 8 Yael Street. From this vantage point, the man charged with triggering the bomb would have a clear view of anyone arriving to investigate the initial, ‘come-on’ explosion, and know exactly the best time to press the bell-push that would send a battery-powered electric current racing down the two thin wires to spark an almighty blast.

  Levstein’s plan did not end there. He decided to plant a second bomb to catch Morton and Wilkin. The reasons he gave for doing so are confused and contradictory, as will be seen later. This one was buried by Levstein the night before the attack in a flowerbed next to the path that led from the gateway of 8 Yael Street to the house. The command wire ran over the fence to 10 Yael Street next door and up a drainpipe to the roof where the second operator would be stationed.18

  The two men he chose for the job were individuals he calls ‘Baruch’ and ‘Yehoshua’. Baruch was ‘an old and devoted member’ who ‘had all the qualifications for the job’. His true identity is unclear.19 Yehoshua, who ‘from the day he joined the underground as a child became a legend of self-sacrifice, devotion and courage’, was Yehoshua Cohen, a nineteen-year-old Palestinian-born farmer’s son. He would gain notoriety six years later as the man who fired the shots that killed the UN envoy to Palestine, Folke Bernadotte.

  Baruch was posted on the roof of 13 Zamenhoff Street, and Cohen at 10 Yael Street. Levstein claimed that both were given very firm instructions. ‘I told them in no uncertain terms that the trap was intended for Morton and Wilkin,’ he wrote. ‘If those two did not show up it was not to be used.’ Baruch said he had once been questioned by the detectives and ‘there was no way he could fail to identify them’.20

 
If all went according to Levstein’s meticulous plan, the Stern group were poised for their greatest coup yet. First would come the minor explosions that would raise the alarm and bring Morton and Wilkin running to the scene. They would climb to the roof whereupon Baruch would judge the right moment to press the button and send them to their doom. What, then, was the purpose of the second bomb, buried in the flowerbed? Levstein would write many years afterwards that he planted it ‘so that in case Morton and Wilkin survived the bomb on the roof they would be trapped by the one I … put on the [pathway] from the street to the door of the building’.21 But in the next sentence he gives another explanation. He had ‘no doubt’ that they would come to Yael Street as soon as they heard news of the initial small decoy explosion. But if by any chance they did not, they would ‘surely come after the main bomb on the roof went off’. This makes no sense. He claimed he had given strict instructions to Baruch not to press the trigger unless he was certain he was blowing up Morton and Wilkin. If the pair failed to show up there would be no ‘main bomb’ explosion. It seems more likely that Levstein realized there was no guarantee that Morton and Wilkin would be first on the scene. The bomb he had planted on the roof might therefore claim some unintended victims. But the two policemen would surely come hotfoot once news of the big blast reached them. The bomb in the pathway would give him another chance to kill the right men.

  On the technical side, Levstein’s plan worked brilliantly. According to Morton’s report, ‘at approximately 9 a.m. on 20.1.42 an explosion occurred in a small room on the roof of No. 8 Yael Street, Tel Aviv. Some five minutes later a further small explosion occurred.’ The inhabitants of the house thought an air raid had begun and ran down to the bomb shelter. As they emerged a crowd of people were gathered in the street looking up to where smoke was pouring from the windows of the rooftop flat. At this point a patrolling policeman turned up and went with the landlady up the stairs to the roof. He ordered her to lock the door and then descended to await reinforcements.

  Meanwhile, a member of the public had reported the explosions to Tel Aviv police headquarters. The senior officer there was a deputy superintendent called Solomon Schiff, the highest-ranking Jewish member of the Palestine Police Force. Schiff was forty-five years old. He had been born in Kishinev, the scene of the great pogrom that inspired the poem the young Avraham Stern had recited to the students of the Jerusalem Gymnasium. After his family moved to Palestine he served in the Jewish Legion in the First World War and joined the PPF in 1923, shortly after its formation. He appeared to be a devoted servant of the Mandate. Three months before, he, his wife Rachel, his seventeen-year-old daughter Akiva and eleven-year-old son Yosef had all become naturalized British citizens.22

  Schiff’s first act upon hearing the news was to call Morton at CID headquarters to tell him about the explosions. Morton recalled later that he wanted to know ‘could I go along there with him to see what it was all about?’ Morton was, for the moment, otherwise engaged. ‘As it happened, the weekly Area Security Meeting, attended by the District Commissioner, the Brigade Commander and his staff officer, was then in progress in my office,’ he wrote. ‘I felt that I could not very well walk out and leave them, and the matter did not seem urgent enough to warrant breaking up the meeting.’ He therefore ‘told Schiff that I would be along as soon as I could, suggesting that he should go ahead without me’.23

  Schiff had already dispatched a party of men to the scene, led by a Jewish officer, Inspector Ze’ev Dichter. With him went a British inspector, George Turton, who had just been transferred to the area and had reported for his first day’s work that morning. Schiff put the phone down and together with his deputy, Inspector Nahum Goldman, drove the half a mile or so to the scene. On arrival Schiff found the street full of children from a school in Zamenhoff Street. When the first blasts were heard their teachers had hurried them off to the air raid shelter. They had now re-emerged and were hanging around to watch the developing drama.

  Schiff led the party into the house and up the stairs to the roof. They opened the door and walked across the reinforced concrete to the apartment. The door was locked. Schiff ordered it to be forced open. When this was done they all stood back. Schiff led from the front. He took the first step through the door, followed by Goldman, Turton and Dichter. As soon as Dichter crossed the threshold, Morton reported, ‘there was a violent explosion and all four walls of the room, which were of concrete blocks, were blown completely away and the roof of reinforced concrete collapsed’.

  Schiff was ‘blown through the wall and landed in the garden below and died instantly’. A mattress in the room floated down to land next to him. The rest of the furniture was ‘blown to pieces’. Turton and Goldman lay trapped beneath the rubble. Dichter was hurled across the roof, where only the parapet saved him from sharing Schiff’s fate. Two Jewish constables, who had gone onto the roof but had not entered the room, escaped with minor injuries. Goldman was taken to the Hadassah Hospital where he died at 5.30 the following morning. Turton went to the Assuta private hospital where both his legs were amputated. He died at ten o’clock that night. Dichter eventually recovered.

  The blast finally brought at least one of its intended victims to the scene. Morton and a party of CID detectives raced to Yael Street and began to poke around in the debris of twisted reinforcing rods and shattered concrete while a police photographer snapped the scene. The pictures show Morton in sports jacket, flannels and trilby, notebook in pocket, peering below a great chunk of concrete for clues. The hunt soon turned up the second bomb, buried just below the surface of the flowerbed at the entrance. Why had Yehoshua Cohen not detonated it when Morton arrived? Later he would let it be known that he had been inhibited by the presence of so many innocent bystanders. His story seems to stand up. Morton reported that occupants of 10 Yael Street who rushed up to the roof after the big explosion spoke of seeing a man there who ‘warned the people to keep away as there might be a second explosion’. They ‘observed that this man was holding something in his hand which he took pains to conceal from the occupants of the house’. Both he and Baruch were able to slip away in the confusion.

  In his report Morton was sure that the ‘infernal machine’, as the police and press referred to such bombs, was not aimed specifically at him. Though there was ‘no doubt whatever that this outrage was deliberately planned and executed with the intention of killing some senior police officers … it is difficult to believe that it was intended for any one particular person.’ Rather, it would appear that ‘the intent was to intimidate the police and terrorise the public in order that no future action should be taken against the gang who perpetrated it nor justice done to those of them who are already in custody’.24

  Stern and his men had pulled off the most spectacular act of violence against the British that Palestine had yet seen. They had failed, though, to break free of the pursuing Furies. They tried to make the best of the bodged job. A leaflet, written in a grandiose style that indicated the hand of Yair, was rushed out to ‘clarify’ the event to the Yishuv. The justification started with a denunciation of Britain’s refusal to allow ‘refugees from the death camps’ to enter Palestine, and urged readers to wake up to the fact that ‘the Mandate government is the enemy of Zionism’.25

  As the instrument of an oppressive ruler the police were thus fair game, be they British or Jewish. The British, at least, were ‘doing their duty’. But ‘a Jew who hands his fellow Jews who fight for the freedom of their people over to the enemy, is betraying his national duty. He is a traitor and an enemy of Israel.’

  The leaflet went on to libel the dead men. Schiff was ‘a man who served the foreign rulers with his club’, beating anti-British demonstrators and assaulting prisoners. Turton was ‘the executioner of Shlomo Ben-Yosef’, a reference to the fact that he apparently had been present when the Irgun’s first martyr was hanged in Acre prison in 1938. It did not mention that Turton had also won the King’s Police Medal for Gallantry, for defending single-
handed a train carrying Jews from a strongly armed Arab gang.

  Schiff was buried on the afternoon that he died in a coffin draped with the Union Flag and the blue and white colours of Zionism. The ceremony took place at the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery on the eastern edge of Tel Aviv. All the pomp that the Mandate could muster was on display to mourn its faithful Jewish servant. ‘A long file of wreath bearers − followed by a party of constables carrying rifles headed the procession,’ reported the Palestine Post. At its head was ‘the officer’s grey charger, with his riding boots thrown over the empty saddle’.26

  The following day it was Goldman’s turn. He was forty-two years old and left a wife and three daughters aged sixteen, thirteen and three. At a service in Tel Aviv’s Great Synagogue a rabbi quoted David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan from the Second Book of Samuel: ‘They were pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided.’27

  Schiff’s British colleagues looked on, uncomprehending and angry. ‘I couldn’t understand why Schiff and Turton, who only a year before had been decorated for rescuing Jews under fire [should be killed],’ said Alec Ternent, a CID officer in Jaffa. He heard mutterings of ‘Jewish bastards’.28

  But the official voices of the Yishuv were also united in bafflement and outrage at the killings. The head of the Jewish Agency’s political department, Moshe Shertok, led the chorus, expressing the ‘utter horror’ felt at the crime. He went on: ‘The Jewish Agency will wholeheartedly support whatever effective measures may be taken in order to track down the murderous gang and free Palestine and the Yishuv from the nightmare of hold-ups and assassinations.’29