The Reckoning Page 24
Geoffrey Morton watched the fresh spate of outrages from behind a desk. Occasionally he would be wheeled out to assist in an operation or allowed to supervise a non-sensitive case such as the seizure of a large quantity of narcotics. Once, after a rare outing on an arms search, he sustained the only wound he would receive in the course of his career, shot through the shoulder and hand when a colleague’s gun went off by accident.
His frustration was apparent in a lengthy memo he wrote to his superiors on 15 March 1944. Morton’s duties involved giving lectures to the Jerusalem Flying Squad. As he admitted in his report, he used these occasions to offer trenchant criticism of what he saw as an overly cautious policy regarding the use of firearms when confronted with potential danger. In one recent talk he had drawn a comparison between the shooting of Inspector Green and Constable Ewer and an event on the same day when a Sergeant Albutt had shot and fatally wounded an innocent Jew, Zvi Amramoff, who failed to stop when ordered to do so. The deaths of Green and Ewer were ‘a tragic example of [a] failure to take necessary safety precautions’.11
Lehi had made it abundantly clear that they were prepared to shoot their way out of trouble rather than surrender meekly. Thus, when Sergeant Albutt encountered a man carrying suspicious-looking parcels who ran off when challenged, he was entirely right to open fire. ‘If he had taken the other course and the man had escaped,’ wrote Morton, ‘I, and I believe most other police officers who are acquainted with the history of these terrorist groups, would have said that Sergeant Albutt was wrong in not shooting and in fact that he had failed in his duty in not doing so.’ Morton hints that Albutt might be facing disciplinary proceedings as a result of the shooting. If so, Morton warned, ‘it is hardly necessary for me to point out the irreparable damage which will be done to the morale of the British police of all ranks if this matter should be allowed to be taken further.’
There is no record of how events unfolded. Morton’s tone, though, is that of a man who is reaching the limits of his endurance. Beneath the events he is addressing he seems to be mounting a passionate defence of his own conduct in the case of Avraham Stern. In his memoirs he writes of ‘a growing sense of frustration’, looking on ‘while my friends and comrades were killed one by one by terrorist organisations which seemed to be virtually immune from punishment’.12 Both he and Alex Shand suffered ‘from chronic nervous indigestion and were consuming vast quantities of stomach powder together’. After seven months back in Palestine he had had enough. He had told the Colonial Secretary that his continued stay in Palestine was conditional on the ‘prospect of a future solution’ and the situation undergoing ‘a radical change’. But no one was expecting a happy ending and, while radical change was in the air, it was all for the worse. Sometime early in 1944, around the period he was delivering his despairing lectures to the Flying Squad, he asked for a transfer to another colony. According to Morton’s memoir, the decision was in part due to Tom Wilkin. ‘Wilkie was a frequent visitor at the Hospice,’ he wrote. ‘But it wasn’t really to see me that he came. He used to try and get my wife by herself and say to her, “for God’s sake, get him out of here before it’s too late. He can’t stay here. They’re bound to get him if he does. You must get him away!”’
They left at the end of March, not a moment too soon. Lehi’s hatred of MacMichael, Morton and Wilkin was unabated. The High Commissioner’s time in Palestine was coming to an end. In July he sent his final dispatch to London reviewing past, present and future. It radiated pessimism. Nothing that had happened had persuaded him to change his opinion that ‘the continuance of Jewish immigration on any considerable scale … would be disastrous to our imperial interests, to the security of the Middle East, to the Arabs, whose fear of a Jewish deluge is not without justification, and to the Jews themselves, for whom a process of gradual percolation … offers a far brighter future than does the attempt to obtain by force what is not theirs to take nor ours to give.’13 The picture he painted was full of apocalyptic swirls. ‘As the end of the war draws nearer, both Jews and Arabs are intensifying their efforts to prepare for the day of reckoning which they see looming close ahead,’ he wrote. ‘Determination is becoming daily stiffer; the bidding is getting higher; leaders are becoming more deeply committed by slogans and pledges; arms are being collected …’ He had little to offer in the way of a solution, except a return to the old partition plan.
Lehi had continued its attempts to hasten Sir Harold’s own day of reckoning. On the afternoon of 8 August, MacMichael and his wife were driving on the Jerusalem to Jaffa road on their way to a farewell function when, three miles out of town, they were ambushed by a Lehi team. His aide-de-camp was shot through the lung and his driver through the neck. MacMichael himself was only slightly wounded and his wife escaped unharmed. The attackers were tracked to the nearby Jewish neighbourhood of Givat Shaul. When questioned, no one there had seen or heard anything. Their silence was the starkest demonstration of the sullen mood of the Yishuv and a taste of things to come. The authorities decided not to press the matter. The villagers were given a collective fine of five hundred pounds. It was not only the Arabs who pointed out the remarkable inconsistency of the official reaction. ‘During the Arab revolt you only had to suspect someone had harboured or helped a rebel and his house was blown up,’ recalled Ted Horne, who was serving with the Palestine Police at the time.14
Back in London, as they prepared for a new posting to Trinidad, the Mortons received some dreadful news. Tom Wilkin was dead. He had been transferred from Jaffa to Jerusalem in January and was living in a church hostel in St George’s Road on the northern edge of the city. Each day he walked the mile or so from his digs up the hill through the Orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim to CID headquarters in the Russian Compound. A Lehi team had been tracking his movements for weeks. On Friday, 29 September, after receiving the go-ahead from Yitzhak Shamir in Tel Aviv, they struck. The assassins were David Shomron and Yaacov Banai and the getaway car was driven by Yehoshua Cohen. Shomron was twenty years old and had never met Stern. ‘The fact that Yair was murdered turned him into a symbol for us,’ he said in May 2013, as he sipped coffee in a Jerusalem café.15
On the day, the pair ‘dressed up to look like two Englishmen’ in a ‘nice jacket and a hat’. At 7.45 a.m. they took up their positions on what is now Helena Hamalka Street, a narrow thoroughfare lined with handsome old stone villas that climbs steeply up to the Russian Compound. As Wilkin stepped out of the hostel, a lookout signalled to them by tossing his beret in the air. The pair paced nervously up and down the pavement until they saw Wilkin coming towards them. They walked to meet him. ‘Wilkin looked straight into my eyes,’ Shomron recalled. ‘He had one hand in his pocket – holding a pistol. In the other he was holding a briefcase.’ The killers and their victim passed each other. Then Banai and Shomron turned round. Banai, as the senior man, had claimed the honour of shooting first. But Shomron ‘started firing before him … at his back. He turned towards us and tried to pull out his pistol but didn’t manage it …’ The pair stood over him pouring eleven bullets into his body.
Wilkin was buried later that day at the Mount Zion cemetery, where fresh graves were being prepared daily. There was a huge turnout of fellow officers, the great and the good and their representatives. The bitterest tears were shed by a blonde, elegant woman who walked behind the coffin. Amid the pines, cypresses and oleander bushes, in the heat of the early autumn sun, Shoshana Borochov said farewell to her unlikely lover.16
FIFTEEN
‘Striking a Blow against the Falsification of History’
In the autumn of 1944, the names of Avraham Stern and Lehi echoed round the world. On 6 November 1944 two young Jews shot dead Lord Moyne, now the British Minister of State in the Middle East, and his driver, as he arrived for lunch at his residence in Cairo. The handgun was the same Nagant revolver that had been used to kill Tom Wilkin as well as four other policemen. Moyne had been sentenced to death for his role in the Struma affair and his percei
ved hostility to Zionism. The wider purpose was to force the demand for a Jewish state onto the international political agenda and let the world know that there would be no peace until it was satisfied. Moyne’s two killers, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Eliyahu Hakim, had never known Stern, yet when they spoke at their trial it was as if Yair himself were talking and they went to the gallows defiant martyrs.
The Yishuv was becoming inured to the underground’s violence, but by killing Moyne Lehi had gone too far and for a while the Zionist establishment and the Haganah turned on them and their Irgun allies, cooperating enthusiastically with the British as they hunted the extremists down. The collaboration came to an end in the summer of 1945 when the Labour Party won a landslide victory in the first general election in Britain for a decade. Traditionally, Labour had been friendly to Zionist aspirations and had promised an end to restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The new Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin soon made it clear that times had changed. He had been persuaded by his officials that a pro-Zionist policy would make enemies of all the Arabs and seriously undermine Britain’s position in a vital strategic area. The volte face was a severe shock to moderate Zionists who believed Labour could be relied upon to do the right thing. Avraham Stern’s assertion that the British were the enemies of the Jews rang truer than ever and, in November 1945, Lehi, the Irgun, the Haganah and their shock troops, the Palmach, joined together in a United Resistance Movement to fight them.
By then the Mortons were in Trinidad where Geoffrey was Superintendent of Police in Port of Spain. His life was far removed from the daily struggle being waged by his old comrades against assassination, intimidation and sabotage. Crime in Trinidad was old fashioned and there was not much of it. In between his duties he attended the races, went fishing and played bridge and tennis. The Mortons had decided against having children while they were in Palestine. Life was too dangerous. Trinidad was a good place to start a family and in 1946 Alice gave birth to a daughter, Penelope.
In the summer of 1947 the Mortons were eligible for a long leave. Few passenger ships stopped off in Trinidad but they were able to find berths on a Norwegian tanker, which was calling at Port of Spain en route to Venezuela, where they could pick up a liner to France. Shortly before their departure, Morton heard some disturbing news. ‘We had every reason to believe that we should be returning to Trinidad, but a fortnight or so before we were due to leave we were informed – through high official sources – that two members of the Stern Gang were on their way from France to Trinidad in order to avenge the death of their leader,’ he wrote in his memoir.1 The story was repeated some years later, when, around the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stern’s death, an Israeli newspaper carried an interview with a Lehi veteran who described how, after Morton’s departure from Palestine in 1944, orders were issued to track him down wherever he might be.2 The trail stayed cold until someone told a Lehi sympathizer in New York that he had met a policeman in Trinidad who revealed to him that he was the man who had shot Avraham Stern. An agent took a flight to South America that stopped over at Trinidad. There, he consulted the telephone directory and found Morton listed. A two-man Lehi team travelled by cargo boat to the island, reconnoitred the Mortons’ house and drew up an assassination plan. Two further agents were sent by ship to carry it out, but by the time they got there Morton had gone, the State of Israel had been proclaimed and Lehi disbanded.
The story contains many holes. The modus operandi seems hopelessly amateurish for an organization as efficient and ruthless as Lehi had become. They had killed Moyne without too much trouble and in April 1947 would show themselves capable of planting an enormous bomb in the Colonial Office in London, which failed to explode only because of a faulty timing device. Morton would have presented a far easier target. However, recently released files reveal there was substance to the tale. A letter from Sir Stephen Luke at the Colonial Office to a colleague dated 18 April 1946 reports a warning passed on by the Special Branch from a ‘Revisionist’ source passing through London that the Stern group had drawn up an assassination list. On it were Sir Harold MacMichael, now serving in the Far East, and a ‘Captain Morton, now believed to be in Jamaica or some other part of the West Indies’.3 The authorities took it seriously, for before the Mortons’ UK leave was up they were told they would not be returning to Trinidad, a decision that was taken, Morton wrote, ‘because of information about the proposed activities of the Stern Gang in the island’.4
He was offered a new job in Nyasaland, a long, landlocked slice of south-east Africa, which was by his own assessment ‘the backwater of the Colonial Service’.5 He accepted it philosophically as he had ‘no preconceived notions as to where I wanted to go next’. His time there was uneventful and rather enjoyable and he soon had two of the three Alecs − Stuart and Shand − who followed him into the service, for company. Unlike some of his colleagues, he liked Africans. He prided himself on his command of the local language, Chinyanja, and backed rapid promotion for outstanding local officers. He witnessed apartheid in South Africa, and detested it. It was, he wrote, ‘based on the premise that the worst white man is a superior being to the best black man’.6 By 1953 he had been promoted to Deputy Commissioner and he and Alice took stock of their situation. By now Penny had a brother, Geoffrey, born in October 1948, and it was time to think about their education. The local schools were inadequate and sending them to boarding school in England would cost money and mean they only saw them intermittently. Morton himself faced the dilemma that confronted every colonial policeman. He was forty-five years old: if he stayed on for another ten years, until the maximum retirement age, his pension would be better. However, he would probably have trouble finding another job and he ‘had no intention of putting my feet up on the mantelpiece at that age and waiting to die’.7 On the other hand, he wrote, ‘I loved my job and the responsibilities and problems that went with it; I had worked hard and gained for myself a good status and an adequate salary, and it seemed not unreasonable to expect that I might in the not-too-distant future be offered a force of my own to command.’
In the end, he decided to quit while he still had the prospect of another lease of working life. In July they left for home, sent on their way with a round of farewell parties and ceremonies, serenaded by the Police Band with a specially composed song called ‘Chisoni’ – ‘Great Sorrow’. So ended a career that had taken him from the backstreets of the Elephant and Castle to the Zomba Plateau, plunging him in and out of innumerable adventures and excitements along the way.
Of all the dramas he had lived through, none was as powerful as his struggle with Avraham Stern. For the remaining forty-six years of his life he would never be able to shake off the consequences of the reckoning in the flat in Mizrachi Bet Street. Back in England he settled the family in Leckhampton, close to Cheltenham, and found a job working as personnel manager with Heenan and Froude, a sizeable engineering company.
By now the dream of a Jewish state had become a reality. In 1947 the power that Morton had fought so hard to uphold admitted defeat. Britain was exhausted after the Second World War. The Palestine conflict was tiny in comparison, yet the prospect of an open-ended struggle against an indefatigable and remorseless opponent was too daunting to contemplate. The continued policy of turning away the traumatized remnants of European Jewry from the gates of Palestine had depleted the moral credit Britain had amassed in the war and created friction with its crucial ally, America. At home, the mood was all for cutting and running. In 1947 Britain handed over the problem to the newly formed United Nations and in December announced that its twenty-eight-year Mandate would end on midnight, 14 May, the following year. Not even the most ardent imperialist mourned its passing. As officials, soldiers and policemen hauled down the flag a mood of sorrow, bitterness and regret hung in the air. The whole thing, it seemed, had been, almost from the beginning, a gigantic and stupid mistake. In the process of departure some of the records documenting the work of Morton and his colleagues in countering the
endless trouble the stewardship of Palestine had brought them went up in smoke. What was left behind was seized by the Haganah and, together with the papers that had been secretly copied by the organization’s numerous Jewish agents inside the CID, placed in its archives. The information they yield provides much of the material for this book.
The Mandate was replaced by a UN proposal to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish Agency accepted the plan. The Arab Higher Committee did not. As the countdown to departure continued the Haganah, Palmach, Irgun and Lehi battled with the Arabs. The day before the Mandate expired, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel. The announcement sparked an invasion by Egyptian, Syrian, Transjordanian and Iraqi forces. The subsequent year-long war ended in victory for Israel and its admission as a member of the United Nations. It did not, of course, bring peace.
When the dust settled, the victors sat down to write their accounts of the epic journey to statehood. Among them was Menachem Begin, by now the founder and leader of a right-wing political party called Herut. As commander of the Irgun, Begin had become the man the British feared and hated most, with a price of ten thousand pounds on his head. It was Begin who had been behind the deadliest action of the war against the Mandate forces. On 22 July 1946 his men planted bombs packed into milk churns in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where the Mandate secretariat and military and CID offices were housed. The explosion brought down half of the southern wing of the hotel and killed ninety-one people, including forty-one Arabs, twenty-eight British and seventeen Jews.