The Reckoning Read online

  It was not just the establishment that was appalled by the killings. The draping of twin flags on Schiff’s coffin was no mere gesture. Some years later, Efrem Dekel, the head of the Haganah’s intelligence department, revealed that Schiff had been a long-standing sympathizer who on at least one occasion had deliberately dragged his heels to give members the chance to move an arms cache in advance of a raid. Nahum Goldman had been helping them since his earliest days in the police, ‘passing on bits of information of interest to the Haganah’ and taking ‘special pains to send warning of impending searches for arms in Jewish villages’. He ‘regarded this as the duty of a Jewish policeman and carried out this duty to the day of his death’.30

  If Morton was right and Stern had really hoped that the bomb blast at 8 Yael Street would ‘intimidate the police and terrorise the public’, his gamble had gone terribly wrong. From now on, every hand in Palestine would be against him.

  NINE

  ‘Al-Ta’Amod!’

  One week after the killing of the three policemen a special meeting of the District Security Committee was held in Geoffrey Morton’s office at CID headquarters in Jaffa. The seniority of those present indicated the importance of the subject under discussion. They included the chief of police, Alan Saunders, the head of the CID, Giles Bey, and a representative of the Chief Secretary, all of whom had come down from Jerusalem. Also in the room were the military commander of the area, the District Commissioner and Captain C. H. Wybrow, the Area Security Officer.

  There was only one topic on the agenda − ‘The Yael Street Bomb Outrage’ − and conversation was brisk and to the point. The military commander started by asking ‘what measures were being contemplated’ in response to the crime. Saunders replied that the police proposed a ‘general round up of the group’ and assured him that ‘every means would be taken to secure the perpetrators …’1 The District Commissioner intervened to insist on clarification that ‘the general cleanup referred to the Stern Group and not the IZL [Irgun] generally’. Saunders confirmed that this was the case.

  The ‘S. of P.’ (Morton) then entered the discussion. He produced some leaflets which had been distributed ‘admitting various crimes including the recent assassinations’ which he took to be the work of the Stern group and not the Irgun.

  It was now that Wybrow – who ran a rival intelligence network to Morton’s – dropped a bombshell. The reason for the District Commissioner’s concern not to lump the Irgun in with the Stern group became clear. In this matter at least, it seemed that the Irgun were firmly with the British. Indeed, relations were so good that they appeared to be offering to bring their British friends the head of their number one enemy in Palestine. Wybrow told the meeting that ‘information was forthcoming from IZL and Jewry generally that Stern could be liquidated and would be liquidated provided that [those] promising to do so could be given a safe conduct …’ He added that he ‘hoped to be able to determine the whereabouts of Stern shortly’.

  It was a remarkable offer but Saunders was having none of it. The record states: ‘The IGP (Saunders) said that if information on Stern’s whereabouts could be obtained, the police would liquidate him and there would be no occasion for Jewry to undertake this task.’ The discussion was deemed sensitive enough for those present to agree that ‘a formal record of this meeting should not be published’.

  Why the sensitivity? What was meant by ‘liquidate’? In the context of what Wybrow said, it seems clear that the Irgun were proposing to kill Stern. Otherwise why would they be seeking safe passage for their men? From Saunders’ mouth the word is more ambiguous. It crops up in other security apparatus documents as a term for ‘shutting down’ or ‘rounding up’ and is not necessarily as dramatic as it sounds. However, Saunders was an articulate man whose reports are models of clarity and precision. In saying that it was the job of the police to ‘liquidate’ Stern, he does not make clear that he is employing the word in a different sense from the one in which it has just been used, one that did not imply an extra-judicial killing. In the light of what was to come, the word undoubtedly has a sinister ring.

  The meeting had been convened to get results. That very afternoon the call for action was answered with a resounding success. At 3.30 p.m. Morton had a tip-off from ‘a Jewish source’ that on the day of the Yael Street bombing two men had sublet a room in a flat on the third floor of 30 Dizengoff Street and had not left it since. The main tenants of the three-room flat were a married couple. The informant added that the lodgers received visits from ‘other suspicious characters’.2 The information set Morton’s bloodhound nose twitching. ‘There was no positive information to connect them with the Stern Gang,’ he wrote, ‘but the circumstances were so unusual that I felt sure (for once) that this was what we were looking for.’3

  There were few detectives around when the information came in but Morton decided that ‘there was no alternative but to go and investigate in person and without delay’. A light presence was anyway an advantage, for ‘any elaborate police activity might have resulted in the escape of the men and would certainly have brought half Tel Aviv to the scene to watch and to hinder’. In his memoir Morton admitted to some misgivings before setting off. How did he know that he was not being lured into another Yael Street trap? He claimed later that the informant’s interest in possible reward money persuaded him this was not the case.4 Nonetheless, he wrote, ‘I must admit quite frankly that I did not relish my task one bit. Stern had proclaimed on many occasions that he and his followers would never be captured alive, but would blow themselves up, taking as many policemen as possible with them.’5

  Morton would repeat this claim in connection with the death of Avraham Stern. Though Stern’s literary output was full of bloody imagery and declarations of his willingness – indeed, yearning – to die for the cause, there is no record of him having ever once (let alone ‘on many occasions’) issued a public threat of the sort that Morton describes. Throughout his life he had shown an aversion to living out the fantasies that permeate his poems. His men, by contrast, were up for any risk and willing to draw a gun and shoot their way out of trouble when cornered – as Yehoshua Becker had demonstrated only a few weeks before. Where Morton got the idea that Stern and his group were determined, if the worst came to the worst, to go out in a blaze of suicidal glory remains a mystery.

  Morton arrived outside 30 Dizengoff Street at 4 p.m. He instructed three men to form a loose cordon round the house and climbed the stairs to the top floor. With him were Sergeants Ken ‘Busty’ Woodward and Daniel ‘Happy’ Day. According to his memoir – which chimes in most details with his official report delivered the day after the event – Morton rang the bell on the door of the flat on the right. ‘After a moment’s delay the door was opened by a woman who was apparently expecting to see an acquaintance, for there was a smile on her face and her mouth was opening to speak – until she saw who was there,’ he wrote. Immediately ‘the smile froze, her jaw dropped, her eyes nearly popped out of her head, and an instant later she turned and fled down the corridor behind her into a room at the far end’.

  The details given by the informer were precise. The men were holed up behind the first door on the left off the corridor. Morton ‘drew the gun from the pocket of my raincoat and, with my left hand, gently turned the handle of the door. To my great surprise, it gave under my grasp.’ He pushed it open and stepped inside. He had taken the inhabitants completely by surprise. According to his contemporaneous report, ‘one man was lying on the bed facing me, whom I immediately recognised to be Zelig Zak, a known member of the Stern gang who escaped from custody recently, and two on the bed to the left, all were fully dressed’.

  ‘I said to them “Don’t stand up!” (in Hebrew, al-ta’amod!) They ignored my order and started to rise. I again ordered them to stay where they were, but they immediately jumped up and I saw one of the two men on the far bed grab at an overcoat which was lying on the stool beside the bed. I shot him. As I did so the other two sprang tow
ards me and knowing them to be dangerous men and believing that they were armed, I shot them also.

  ‘I fired altogether seven shots into the room, but I am not able to remember how many I fired at each man. I fired only long enough to ensure that they were disabled and could not shoot me or members of my party.’6

  In the space of a few seconds the room had been turned into a shambles, puddled with blood and reeking of burnt gunpowder. The noise of the explosions from Morton’s pistol would have been literally deafening in the enclosed space. It faded away to be replaced by the groaning and cursing of the injured. Zelig Zak lay on one bed, severely wounded. Avraham Amper, Stern’s old comrade from the Polish training camps, was sprawled on another. The third man, Moshe Svorai, was on the floor, shot through the shoulder, thigh and jaw.

  Morton shoved another clip into his pistol and ordered a search of the room. According to his report, when Woodward delved into the pocket of the man who had reached for his overcoat (it was Svorai), ‘I saw him find, in one of the outer pockets thereof, an automatic pistol.’ Morton then ‘observed Sgt. Day open a drawer in a small cupboard, beside the bed on which Zelig Zak was lying and saw that it contained two hand-grenades’. At that point he ‘heard firing from the garden below, where I had posted members of my party to prevent any escape’.

  The shooting was coming from the gun of Constable Alec Ternent. Ternent was twenty-four years old. He had been brought up in a tough part of Birkenhead where his father was a commercial traveller. He spent several years in the Liverpool Scottish battalion of the Territorial Army which gave him a taste for service life. He arrived in Palestine at the age of nineteen and for the last year or so had been based in Jaffa, latterly working in the CID alongside Morton. He was greatly impressed by him. ‘Morton was completely fearless and one of the few men I have met in my life who I would follow anywhere,’ he testified in middle age. ‘He inspired a tremendous amount of confidence in all his subordinates.’ He was clever as well as brave and could ‘come straight from some shoot-up or other nasty incident, take off his tie and dictate the most succinct and really brilliant report’.7

  Ternent had taken up his post on a pathway that ran along the side of 30 Dizengoff Street, pistol at the ready. Morton had instructed him and the other officers manning the cordon that ‘under no circumstances should they allow anybody to escape from the house’.8 It was a typical, white, cement-skimmed Bauhaus-style detached apartment building. The path was flanked by flowerbeds planted with shrubs and flowers. As he stood there he heard shots coming from the top floor. Then there was another noise – the sound of a latch being opened. He looked up to see a man clambering through a small window and reaching out to grab a vine that climbed conveniently up the wall. ‘I was amazed,’ he remembered later. ‘Through my head [ran the thought] is he a killer escaping? Is he one who’s managed to elude the net?’ All he had heard was firing: ‘How could I tell who’d shot who?’ He had no doubt that the man was guilty of something for when the raid began ‘anybody who was innocent, reading his Bible or the HaBoker [a newspaper], would have stayed put’.

  The man began lowering himself using the creeper and the adjacent downpipe as handholds. He half turned and Ternent saw he was ‘rather pasty’ – a result perhaps of long weeks spent hiding indoors – and had ‘darkish hair’. When he had descended a few feet Ternent shouted at him in Hebrew not to move. The man, though, ‘maintained a grip with one hand and moved … the other’. Ternent assumed that he was reaching for a gun. ‘I didn’t give him a chance,’ he said. He fired four times and the man ‘half fell, half sort of crashed down the vines’ to the ground. It was Yaacov Levstein, who had been in the lavatory when Morton and his men burst through the door.

  Soon afterwards more police turned up, led by Tom Wilkin. At some point an ambulance arrived and the wounded were given first aid by medics from the Magen David Adom, the Jewish equivalent of the Red Cross. The least badly wounded was Levstein, who had received a flesh wound in the rump from one of Ternent’s shots. When a request was made to remove the injured men Morton denied it. ‘I refused to allow them to be transported other than to the Government Hospital in the Government Ambulance and under a strong Police escort, and this was eventually done,’ he stated in his report.

  Before they were driven away, Morton took Ternent to one side to hear his account of what had happened. Morton was ‘acting like a father … [taking] me by the hand and saying “good show”’.9 While they were talking an important visitor arrived − Alan Saunders, who had earlier been at the special meeting of the District Security Committee, called to plan the elimination of the Stern gang. Morton marched over to him and came to attention. Saunders can hardly have dared hope for such dramatic results so soon. At a stroke, Morton had neutralized Stern’s explosives wizard (Levstein), his bodyguard and all-round enforcer (Zak), his most devoted disciple, intelligence chief and newly appointed Tel Aviv commander (Svorai) and his old and trusted comrade from Polish days (Amper).

  What had they all been doing together under the same roof at such a dangerous time? In his memoir Levstein maintains that the flat in Dizengoff Street was ‘chosen because it was considered one of the safest places in Tel Aviv … and the police could not possibly know who was using it’. He admits, though, that this was a rash assumption to make. ‘Since the attack on Yael Street a witch hunt had been unleashed against [us],’ he wrote. ‘The British knew it was the right time to liquidate the fighting underground. Public leaders, the press, and even the man on the street, were caught up in the British propaganda …’ Furthermore, Zak, whose picture had been widely distributed since his escape from the train to Mazra’a, had ‘rented the apartment from a family unknown to us, a cardinal sin in the underground’.

  Despite the obvious risks it was decided to use the room to hold a weapons and explosives training session on Tuesday, 27 January. The instructor was Levstein, who was currently operating out of Jerusalem. He arrived early in the morning and class began soon after. Amper, Zak and Svorai listened as Levstein explained the workings of a hand grenade and the rudiments of laying charges. The session lasted until mid-afternoon. As they did not dare go out in daylight, they relaxed, waiting for nightfall. Levstein wrote that Svorai lay on the bed in the corner of the room reading the memoirs of one of the Russian socialist revolutionaries whose modus operandi they were now imitating. Zelig Zak ‘was stretched out on a cot to read a newspaper, and Amper sat on a chair next to the window and told me about his adventures when he escaped from Poland through Russia and Turkey …’ Levstein left the room to go to the lavatory so his highly coloured rendition of what happened after his departure comes second-hand.10

  Moshe Svorai gave several accounts of the event, which are by and large consistent. He related that he had put down his book and was sitting on one of the two couches in the room talking to Amper when ‘Morton broke in holding a pistol’. The policeman then shouted in Hebrew, ‘Who murdered Schiff?’11 Then, rather than telling them not to get up, as Morton claimed, he said the policeman ordered them to raise their hands. ‘We indeed got up, we raised our hands and he started shooting at us,’ he said, ‘first at Zelig, then at Amper and then at me.’ He saw someone picking up his coat, in order, he alleged, to plant a pistol in it. He also maintained that when the Jewish medics arrived the police ‘did not allow them to approach us’ and they lay there for two hours before they were treated. Svorai and Levstein would maintain stoutly for the rest of their lives that the three men in the room offered no resistance to Morton, Woodward and Day. They had nothing to resist them with, as they had no guns, and the weaponry that was found there had been planted by Wilkin. The charge that the wounded were denied first aid would also be repeated many times.

  Morton never wavered from his account, which was backed up in court by Sergeant Woodward when Svorai and Levstein went on trial. Nor did he express the slightest doubt that he had acted well within the law. Under cross-examination at the trial of Svorai and Levstein, he gave cool
, confident answers to the lawyer for the defence:

  Counsel: What were your instructions to the police?

  Morton: To use all means to prevent the escape of the suspects.

  Counsel: What were they?

  Morton: All means.

  Counsel: Did you give permission to shoot?

  Morton: No, I did not say it.

  Counsel: In accordance with the Police Ordinance, is it allowed to shoot anybody to prevent his escape, or when he shows an attempt to escape?

  Morton: According to the ordinance it is not permitted but this was a special case.

  The President of the Court: In what way was it special?

  Morton: The people were suspected.

  Counsel: Is it allowed to shoot anybody who is suspected?

  Morton: I wanted to prevent losses amongst the police party.

  Counsel: Is it allowed for a policeman to kill anybody if he does not like him?

  Morton: I am a police officer and I did my duty.12

  Morton clearly believed that he had little to fear from accusations that he had exceeded that duty and the circumstances allowed him to take no chances whatsoever. In his report he states baldly that ‘on searching the flat it was observed that the door of the lavatory was locked and that the key was on the inside. I called to whoever was inside to come out and receiving no reply fired four shots through the wooden door.’ The fact that he felt no need to justify this action suggests that, indeed, ‘this was a special case’.

  When asked about it much later, Alec Ternent did not try to hide his intentions when he aimed his gun at Levstein. ‘He was the first person I ever fired at in anger in my life and I meant to kill him,’ he said. ‘I meant to shoot to kill [and] it was a bad aim when it hit him in the arse.’13 Morton was careful in his report to stress that Ternent had his backing. ‘I desire to add,’ he wrote, ‘that I gave the Police personnel implicit [sic] instructions that under no circumstances should they allow anybody to escape from the house and B/C [British Constable] Ternent was carrying out these implicit instructions when he shot and wounded Yaacov Levstein.’