The Reckoning Read online

  In the eyes of his enemies Begin was a murderer, yet in his account of the struggle it was the British who had blood on their hands. The book was called The Revolt and in it he made plain his admiration for Avraham Stern, and his conviction that the British had shot him out of hand. He wrote that British detectives had ‘foully murdered the unarmed … Stern’. The book was published in Britain in 1951, while Morton was still in Nyasaland. News of its claims filtered through to him early the following year. Although he was not mentioned by name Morton’s reaction was swift and dramatic. He sought the opinion of one of Britain’s most effective advocates, Helenus Milmo, a former MI5 man and a member of the prosecution team at the Nuremberg Trials in post-war Germany. In Milmo’s view, Begin’s words constituted ‘an infamous charge against a British official, acting in the course of his duty’.8 He recommended an ‘action for damages for libel … should be brought against the publishers, printers and author in respect of it’. Of course Morton would have to clear it with the Colonial Office first, but the lawyer did not ‘for one moment believe that [they] would be in any way obstructive or other than helpful’.

  So it turned out. No objections were raised and the case was heard later that year in the High Court. It seems Milmo decided there was no chance of dragging Begin over from Israel so the defendants in the case were the publisher WH Allen, and their printers. Both parties collapsed immediately and issued profuse apologies. Morton was paid ‘a substantial sum by way of damages’ as well as his legal costs. In addition, a statement was read out by counsel in open court, reiterating the publisher’s ‘profound regret that they should … unknowingly have been responsible for the publication of a libel upon Mr Morton which … is as unwarranted as it was cruel’.9

  The outcome seemed to serve as a rebuttal of a story that, in Israel, had come to be accepted as the truth. Almost every Jew, of whatever political stripe, believed Begin’s version of events – that after capture an unarmed Stern had been shot in cold blood. In his statements to the court Milmo had repeated the original story that had been reiterated by the British authorities on numerous occasions and maintained ever since. In the initial ‘statement of claim’ Stern is said to have ‘attempted to escape and whilst so doing was shot and killed by the plaintiff [Morton] acting in the course of his duty’. The version given out in court reads: ‘after capture Stern made a dash for liberty, in the course of which he was shot dead by the plaintiff in the course of his duty.’

  The successful libel action seemed to validate the official story. But within a few years of the action, a different version of events appeared. Surprisingly, it was provided by Geoffrey Morton himself.

  In his first report, written within twenty-four hours of the incident, Morton had described Stern sitting on a settee in the living room of the flat and exchanging his slippers for walking shoes, as instructed. Then, ‘just as he finished lacing his shoes, he leapt towards the window opposite’, whereupon he was shot ‘practically simultaneously’ by Morton himself and Constable Hancock.

  The revised account appeared in Morton’s autobiography, Just the Job, published in 1957, four years after the High Court action. It is a well-written, wry and entertaining account of an adventurous career. By choosing to write it, he was positively embracing publicity. The decision was an affirmation of his pride in his record in the colonial police and evidence that he had nothing whatsoever to hide. Much of the action takes place in Palestine, but the incident for which he was best known takes up relatively little space. The few paragraphs he devotes to it, though, offer a significantly different interpretation of events from the one enshrined in the public record.

  Fifteen years on, Morton was answering an obvious question arising from the original accounts. Why was it necessary to shoot a man who had no chance of escape? Here at last was an explanation. Morton repeated that after bending down to tie his shoelaces Stern ‘suddenly dived under the gun of the policeman who was covering him and made a mad rush towards the open window leading on to the flat roof’.10 He went on to explain the thought processes that raced through his mind at that moment.

  ‘Although, as far as we knew, Stern had in the past directed the activities of his gang only from a safe distance, leaving his subordinates to do the actual dirty work on his behalf, I had no reason to disbelieve his oft-repeated threat to blow up himself and his captors at the same time if he were ever cornered to be an idle boast. The elaborate arrangements made at 8 Yael Street were an example of what they were capable of doing in this direction.

  ‘Stern could not possibly have got away, for the house was surrounded and he knew it. What, then, was his object? I could only conclude that he had some infernal machine rigged up and that he was making a desperate attempt to reach it.

  ‘None of the police in the room could get to the window before him, so, in order to prevent another shambles, I shot him dead. We did not find a hidden bomb, but that doesn’t mean to say there wasn’t one. In fact we did not look too closely, for without knowing its secret we might well have achieved the very effect we were trying to avoid.’

  This explanation attracted no comment during or after publication. In the coming years, it would serve as the basis for Morton’s case in three more libel actions he brought against authors who repeated the claim that he had shot Stern in cold blood. In 1964 he sued an American writer, Gerold Frank, his British publisher Jonathan Cape, and their printers over passages in The Deed, a history of the Moyne assassination and the exploits of the Jewish underground. In the error-strewn text ‘Captain’ Morton was accused of torturing several of Stern’s men, of killing him while his hands were manacled behind his back and allowing his body, wrapped in a bloody blanket, to be kicked down the stairs to the street. Frank also claimed that Morton, sensing an ambush, had sent Solly Schiff to his death rather than lead the raid on Yael Street himself. Once again, when confronted with the writ, the publishers folded. Once again ‘a substantial sum in damages’ was paid as well as Morton’s costs and a comprehensive apology issued.

  The two actions brought Geoffrey Morton £2944 for the injury to his reputation. In 1968, The Terrorists, by French author Roland Gaucher, was published in Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg. It repeated almost verbatim the claims made in the Frank book. The action came before the High Court early in 1972. On this occasion the publisher contested Morton’s claim, arguing not that the allegations were true but that the offending passages did not bear the meaning that the plaintiff attributed to them. Morton was called to give evidence and he made the most of the occasion. He gave a full account of his service career and detailed his commendations and awards. The accusation of torture clearly rankled. ‘I never tortured prisoners and never allowed any of my officers to torture prisoners,’ he declared. ‘I regarded torture as a singularly pointless and fruitless exercise.’11

  He went on to describe how he arrived at Mizrachi Bet Street to find Tova Svorai in hysterics and Stern sitting on a settee, ‘with an inspector covering him’. He reminded the jury that ‘Stern had always boasted he would never be taken alive and that, if cornered, he would blow himself up and the police with him’. He described once more how Stern had made a sudden dash for the window and repeated his fear that he ‘might have some secret device which, by pressing a button or piece of wall or window would blow us all up’. He ‘therefore shot him. I fired three shots. It was only on the third shot that he dropped.’

  He said he had searched his conscience ‘many times over this incident’, but he concluded: ‘I know of no other way in which I could have stopped him without, I thought, putting the lives of myself … and my men in jeopardy.’

  Morton’s testimony bowled the jury over. Secker & Warburg’s counsel made no move to contest it. This time he was awarded £4000 in damages, nearly twice the average annual salary at the time. Mr Justice Lawson’s summing up must have been pleasing to his ears. By bringing his action, the judge said, Morton was ‘striking a blow against the falsification of history’.

>   Despite this victory, the story would not go away. Nine years later Morton felt compelled to bring a fourth action, this time against Weidenfeld & Nicolson for a passage in a biography of David Ben-Gurion that claimed Stern was ‘murdered by the British’. In a statement he prepared for the court he gave the fullest account to date of the story. Once again he made much of the suicidal threats he said had been issued by Stern. ‘In his broadcasts and in his literature [he] frequently warned that neither he nor his men would ever allow themselves to be taken alive, and if they were ever cornered they would blow themselves up and take with them as many policemen as they possibly could. Knowing his great skill in the setting of booby-traps and in the use of explosives generally, this was not a threat we could take lightly.’12

  Turning to the events of 12 February 1942, he described how, after getting the tip-off from Sergeant Daly about Moshe Svorai’s reference to the ‘guest’ at 8 Mizrachi Bet Street, ‘I quickly organised a party of police under Inspector Tom Wilkin to go and investigate, following on myself as soon as I had received an important phone call from my chief in Jerusalem, for which I had been told to stand by.’

  At the flat Wilkin had found Tova Svorai and ‘also, hidden in a wardrobe behind the lady’s clothes, Abraham Stern himself’. Tova Svorai ‘and another woman who had arrived from somewhere … [were] screaming their heads off and struggling with policemen who were trying to control them. Stern was sitting on a settee by the door and facing an open window leading onto a flat roof. A police officer was covering him with his revolver.

  ‘As the women were being taken resisting and screaming to the top of the stairs I directed Stern to do up his shoe laces. He bent down and did so, and as he finished he made a sudden dive under the arm holding the gun, knocking it up, and sprang for the window.

  ‘We all fully expected that, as he had so often threatened, if he were cornered Stern would have the means already prepared to kill himself and us with him. This could be motivated in many ways – by pressing a button, perhaps, or even a certain spot on any part of the room, or even by stamping on a certain spot on the floor. Of course the device and the means of setting it off could have been outside the window towards which he sprang.

  ‘I knew he could not escape – and of course he knew it also. I therefore had to make a snap decision, with the awareness of his great skill in the use of explosives and of the need to protect my personnel and myself. I therefore opened fire and shot him dead, just as he reached the window.’

  Morton had come to the conclusion that ‘Stern was the architect of his own destruction … I have always had the feeling that he always intended it to happen in some such way. But for his threats and his great skill I should never have opened fire in such circumstances. But we were all living with this threat, and past demonstrations of his efficiency, in our minds.’ He finished by declaring: ‘I have never fired a gun of any kind since that incident.’ The action dragged on for two and a half years but ended in an apology from the publishers and an award of £3000 in damages plus costs.13

  The passages in the books were essentially repetitions of the hearsay that had done the rounds of the Jews of Palestine in the weeks after the shooting and had taken on the status of established fact. It seems to have emanated, initially at least, from the word of Tova Svorai and the crowd of bystanders who had gathered in Mizrachi Bet Street to watch the drama unfold. They, of course, did not witness the finale. None of the authors seems to have troubled to seek out the evidence of those who did.

  When Morton launched his action against Gerold Frank and Jonathan Cape in 1964, the publishers took some steps to see if the claims in the book could be substantiated. Max Seligman, the genial fox of the Israeli bar, was put on the case. Seligman was on remarkably good terms with his old adversaries – indeed, he had been a guest that year at the annual reunion dinner of the Palestine Police Old Comrades Association in London. He used his contacts to seek testimony from Morton’s former colleagues that would discredit Morton’s story and enable his clients to claim justification as their defence. Among those he contacted was John Fforde, who had worked with Morton in Jaffa and had gone on to a long and successful career in the colonial police service. ‘All the ex-officers of the Force to whom I have spoken in London and in Israel tell me that, despite the official statement which was issued at the time, it was common knowledge that Morton had deliberately murdered Stern who was handcuffed and in police custody at the time,’ Seligman wrote.14 ‘It is understandable that Morton might not wish to admit to the murder, but you will doubtless agree that it is manifestly unfair that he should profit financially from it.’

  Seligman now wanted to know whether Fforde could provide ‘any information from your personal knowledge and if so, would you be prepared to give it, if required, on Affidavit?’ The lawyer received a polite but unhelpful response. ‘I am quite unable to confirm the allegation that [Stern] was handcuffed and in police custody at the time, and that he was deliberately murdered,’ Fforde replied. He added that ‘it was news to me that this is supposed to have been common knowledge …’ He sent a copy of his reply to Morton, with whom he kept up an affectionate correspondence, swapping family news and commiserating about the trials of advancing age.

  Several more of Morton’s intimates were approached from another quarter. In the late 1970s Binyamin Gepner, an Israeli author and publisher, began an exhaustive research project chronicling the deeds of the Jewish underground. Gepner had inside knowledge. He was a former Lehi man himself. He also had some credibility with the British. During the war he had thrown in his lot with them and joined a daredevil outfit called ‘A’ Force, operating behind enemy lines in the Balkans, where he won a Military Medal, before rejoining the underground.15 Gepner was commendably anxious to hear the other side of the story and appealed through the pages of the Palestine Police Old Comrades Association newsletter for information. The events he was interested in were now a generation distant. Time had softened old enmities. Curiosity, and a courtesy that seems to have come naturally to many of the old campaigners, impelled a surprising number to cooperate. Among them were Alec Stuart, Alec Ternent and Alex Shand, all of whom knew Geoffrey Morton very well. Like Seligman, Gepner was keen to extract from them an admission that their old boss was guilty of shooting Stern out of hand. None of them would oblige. Instead, Gepner was treated to a recital from Shand of Morton’s virtues. ‘He was a very efficient man, [with] a tremendous lot of energy,’ he said. ‘Above all else he was strictly honest in everything that he did.’16 Alec Ternent thought him ‘completely fearless and one of the few men I have met in my life who I would follow anywhere’. As for any misconduct on Morton’s part, ‘I never saw him do it, I never heard of him doing it.’ That applied to the circumstances of Stern’s killing. ‘I have every faith in the officer who pulled the trigger,’ said Ternent. ‘If he [said] he felt something awful was going to happen, then something awful was going to happen.’

  At one point on the tape an exasperated Gepner snaps: ‘You have blindly followed Morton’s version as if you had learned the book by heart!’ After three visits to Britain he failed to persuade anyone to confirm the charge he laid against Geoffrey Morton. His list of interviewees did not include another veteran of the old days in Jaffa, Sergeant Bernard Stamp, who had been in the room when Stern was shot. Stamp, though, had something on his mind. As the end of his life approached, he decided the time had come to share it.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘It’s Nothing Like the Truth’

  One sunny spring weekend in the late 1970s a journalist called Ilana Tsur gave a bar mitzvah party for her nephew in the garden of her villa near Tel Aviv. The celebration brought together far-flung members of her family, many of whom had not seen each other for decades. Among them was her uncle, a tall, erect man with a military bearing who was married to her mother’s sister Fay. The couple had travelled from Hull in the north of England to be there. As Ilana ferried drinks and plates to tables set out under the trees sh
e heard the Englishman mention a name she recognized. ‘I heard the word “Morton,”’ she remembered. ‘It kept coming up − “Morton, Morton, Morton.”’1 Ilana was intrigued. She knew her country’s history and the events of 1942.When she had a moment she asked her mother, Henia, why Uncle Bernard was talking about the policeman who shot Avraham Stern. ‘My mother took me to one side and explained that he had been with him at the time. I was amazed. I later learned that it had been a family secret – a skeleton in the cupboard.’

  Her journalist’s pulse quickened. Ilana was a reporter for Israeli state radio and she had just stumbled on a historical scoop. People were still fascinated by the controversy over the shooting of Avraham Stern. Here, sitting in her garden, was Bernard Stamp, late of the Palestine Police, who was in a position to give an independent account of what had really happened in the rooftop room in Mizrachi Bet Street on the day Stern died. When the hubbub of the party subsided she approached him with an idea. Stern had a son, Yair, born five months after his father’s death, who was also a journalist at the radio station. If Yair agreed, would Bernard be willing to be interviewed alongside him at the scene of the shooting?

  ‘He was shocked at the idea,’ Ilana recalled. ‘Even after all these years he was scared that Lehi were after him.’

  The lives of Bernard and Fay had been defined by the coup de foudre that struck when they first set eyes on each other on Tel Aviv’s Gordon Beach in the days before the war. After her strictly observant father, David, had failed to prevent the match he cut off all contact with his daughter and ordered his wife to do the same. Though they were reconciled before his death he never saw Fay again. By falling for a Jewish girl, Bernard had created difficulties for himself with his superiors. The – not unreasonable – supposition was that pressure would be put on him by anti-British elements. ‘He was … told that if he married my mother it would ruin his career and there would be no more promotion,’ said his son Dan.2