The Reckoning Read online

  Old comrades from the Middle East press corps have helped in significant ways. They include Ian Black, Charles Richards, Don Macintyre and Jim Muir. Roger Boyes pointed me in the direction of some interesting Foreign Office documents and Robin Gedye translated passages of Otto von Hentig’s memoir.

  I would like to thank Tim Harris, Uri Avnery, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles and Edward Fitzgerald QC for reading and commenting on the manuscript. The errors of fact and perhaps judgement that remain are mine, all mine.

  I would like to pay special tribute to my friend and collaborator on the Israeli end of this venture, Ben Lynfield. Ben’s gentle, courteous efficiency made the task so much easier. He is a great interpreter of a famously complicated place and whatever understanding I have of it owes much to his wisdom. Thank you.

  At HarperCollins Arabella Pike has been her usual fantastic self, supported brilliantly by Steve Guise. A special thank you too, to Richard Collins for his meticulous editing. The picture research has been handled with great energy and enthusiasm by Sarah Hopper with much appreciated help from Esther Hecht in Jerusalem.

  Finally to Henrietta and Honor – as always, my gratitude and love.

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. See Chapter 11 for source notes of this account.

  Chapter 1

  1. M. W. Daly, ‘Sir Harold Alfred MacMichael’, Dictionary of National Biography.

  2. Papers of Sir Harold MacMichael [hereafter MacMichael Papers], Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford University.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Palestine Post, 4 March 1938.

  5. MacMichael Papers.

  6. M. W. Daly. Empire on the Nile, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986, p. 273.

  7. Papers of Sir William Battershill [hereafter Battershill Papers], Rhodes House Library, Oxford University.

  8. Palestine Post, 4 March 1938.

  9. Ibid., 6 March 1938.

  10. Ibid., 4 March 1938.

  Chapter 2

  1. Geoffrey Morton, Just the Job, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1957, pp. 48−52.

  2. G. J. Morton Private Papers [hereafter Morton Papers].

  3. Class reports, St Olave’s Grammar School Library.

  4. The Olavian, vol. XXI, no. 1, p. 114.

  5. Class reports, St Olave’s Grammar School Library.

  6. Imperial War Museum [hereafter IWM] Sound Archive 12960.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Morton, op. cit., pp. 14−16.

  9. Ibid., p. 17.

  10. IWM Sound Archive 12960.

  11. Morton, op. cit., p. 19.

  12. Ibid., p. 20.

  13. Palestine Post, 12 April 1938.

  14. Morton Papers.

  15. Morton, op. cit., p. 61.

  16. Eastern Evening News, 13 April 1938.

  17. Palestine Post, 14 April 1938.

  18. Morton, op. cit., p. 63.

  19. Ibid., p. 2.

  20. David Ben-Gurion, Recollections, edited by Thomas R. Bransten, Macdonald, 1970, p. 36.

  21. Howard Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to our Time, pp. 25−266.

  22. The National Archives [herafter TNA] FO 1093/330.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Palestine Post, 15 November 1937.

  25. Morton, op. cit., p. 62.

  26. Morton, op. cit., p. 62.

  27. Morton Papers.

  28. ‘The Irgun’, Wikipedia, p. 5.

  Chapter 3

  1. Avraham Stern, Letters to Roni, edited by Aharon Amir, Yair, Tel Aviv, 2000, p. 182 (in Hebrew).

  2. But then there are few plaques or monuments relating to any aspect of Suwalki’s twentieth-century history. Perhaps it is too painful and contentious for anyone to want to remember.

  3. Interview with Yair Stern, Jerusalem, 14 October 2012.

  4. Leslie Sherer, Memories of Suwalk, Independent Suwalk and Vicinity Benevolent Association Yearbook, 1990.

  5. Shmuel Abramsky, Study of Suwalk Jewry, Jewish Community Book – Suwalk and Vicinity, Yair-Avraham Stern Publishing House, Tel Aviv, 1989, p. 15.

  6. Quoted in Abramsky, ibid., p. 19.

  7. Interview with Yair Stern, Jerusalem, 14 October 2012.

  8. Interview with Amira Stern, Tel Aviv, 28 February 2013.

  9. This and many other details of Stern’s early life in the following passage can be found in Ada Amichal-Yevin’s exhaustively researched In Purple: The Life of Yair – Abraham Stern, Hadar, Tel Aviv, 1986, p. 13 (translated from the Hebrew by Ben Lynfield).

  10. Interview with Yair Stern, Jerusalem, 14 October 2012.

  11. In My Blood Live Forever: Letters of Avraham Stern, Yair, Tel Aviv, 1979, p. 228 (translated from the Hebrew by Zev Golan).

  12. Complete Poetic Works of Hayyim Nachman Bialik, vol. I, edited by Israel Efos, New York, 1948, pp. 129−43.

  13. Interview with Yair Stern, Jerusalem, 14 October 2012.

  14. Quoted in Zev Golan, Stern: The Man and His Gang, Yair, Tel Aviv, 2011, p. 15.

  15. Ibid., p. 16.

  16. Ibid., p. 17.

  17. Quoted in Golan, op. cit., p. 29.

  18. Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang, Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940−49, Frank Cass, London, 1995, p. 19.

  19. Amichal-Yevin, op cit., p. 87.

  20. Ibid., p. 91.

  21. Yair Stern interview, Jerusalem, 14 October 2012. The detail of wild flowers blooming late in January seems to suggest some sentimental myth-making is at work here but in fact spring can come that early in Israel.

  22. Amichal-Yevin, op cit., p. 120.

  23. Ibid., p. 91.

  24. Eliav, Wanted, pp. 62−4.

  25. Haganah Archives, Tel Aviv [hereafter HA] 47/7.

  Chapter 4

  1. Amichal-Yevin, op. cit., p. 150.

  2. Binyamin Gepner, interview with Sir Richard Catling, late 1970s.

  3. Ibid.

  4. www.genforum.genealogy.com

  5. Details of the affair are taken from Ram Oren, Red Days, Keshet, 2006 (in Hebrew), a fictionalized account of Wilkin and Borochov’s romance.

  6. Binyamin Gepner, interview with Sir Richard Catling, Lehi Museum Archives [hereafter LMA], Tel Aviv.

  7. Eliav, Wanted, p. 41.

  8. Quoted in Golan, Stern: The Man and His Gang, p. 28.

  9. HA 47/77.

  10. Manchester Guardian, 24 May 1939.

  11. Palestine Post, 18 May 1939.

  12. Palestine Post, 19 May 1939.

  13. Quoted in Amichal-Yevin, op. cit., p. 141.

  14. HA 47/7.

  15. Amichal-Yevin, op. cit., pp. 151−4.

  16. Ehud Ein-Gil, ‘Punish Those Responsible’, Ha’aretz, 13 January 2009. The article is based on The Birth of an Underground Organization by Professor Yehuda Lapidot.

  17. HA 47/59.

  18. Quoted in Amichal-Yevin, op. cit., p. 154.

  19. Eliav, op. cit., p. 72.

  20. HA 47/59. Levstein/Eliav would later claim that the attack was aimed equally at British officials and Arab dignitaries who frequented the Rex. Eliav, op. cit., p. 67.

  21. Translation attached to CID weekly intelligence report, HA 47/88.

  22. Translation attached to CID weekly intelligence report, HA 47/87.

  23. HA 47/89.

  24. HA 47/77.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Eliav, op. cit., p. 77.

  27. Ibid., p. 78.

  28. Battershill Papers.

  29. HA 47/59.

  30. Interview with Uri Avnery, Tel Aviv, 28 February 2013.

  31. Morris Gilbert, ‘Jewish IRA Fights for Sovereign Palestine’, 13 July 1939.

  32. HA 47/59.

  33. Eliav, op. cit., pp. 87−94.

  34. Telephone interview with Edward Horne, 2 June 2013.

  35. Binyamin Gepner, interview with Sir Richard Catling, LMA.

  36. Telephone interview with Edward Horne, 2 June 2013.

  37. According to Levstein’s son, Danny Eliav, Zeroni held his father at least partly
responsible for his sufferings. Shortly before the arrest, Levstein had borrowed Zeroni’s car for a raid on a British arms dump and had not covered the number plates. The vehicle had been seen and the registration circulated. ‘Zeroni came over to my father and he blamed him for all the torture he had from Cairns’, he told me in Jerusalem in October 2012.

  38. Eliav, op. cit., pp. 95−7.

  39. Palestine Post, 27 August 1939.

  40. Ibid., 28 August 1939.

  Chapter 5

  1. The Colonial Police Medal for Gallantry and the first ever awarded, according to Morton.

  2. Morton, Just the Job, p. 110.

  3. Ibid., p. 108

  4. Private Papers of Alice Morton.

  5. Morton, op. cit., p. 108.

  6. Morton Papers.

  7. Interview with Dan Stamp, London, 28 September 2013.

  8. Morton, op. cit., p. 118

  9. Nicholas Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, André Deutsch, London, 1979, pp. 72−4.

  10. Ibid., p. 99.

  11. Morton Papers.

  12. TNA FO 1093/330.

  13. Morton, op. cit., p. 121.

  14. Eliav, Wanted, p. 112.

  15. Ibid., p. 113.

  16. Ibid., p. 114.

  17. Quoted in Amichal-Yevin, In Purple: The Life of Yair – Abraham Stern, p. 217.

  18. Stern, Letters to Roni, ed. Amir, p. 126.

  19. Quoted in Heller, The Stern Gang, Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940−49, pp. 70−75.

  20. Interview with Uri Avnery, Tel Aviv, 28 February 2013.

  21. See Heller, op cit., p. 75, for a fuller expression of this philosophy.

  22. Quoted in Golan, Stern: The Man and His Gang, p. 33.

  Chapter 6

  1. HA 47/7.

  2. Baruch Nadel, interview with Nelly Langsfelder, Tel Aviv, 31 March 1976, Jabotinsky Institute Archives, Tel Aviv [hereafter JIA].

  3. Quoted in Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, Abacus, London, 2012, p. 442.

  4. He may have been acting in response to pressure from the Jewish Agency and the Haganah following a long-running dispute resulting from a raid on an arms dump in Herzliya earlier in the year, for which IZL members were blamed.

  5. HA 47/7.

  6. Eliav, Wanted, p. 129.

  7. Weekly Police Report, Morton Papers.

  8. Palestine Post, 10 September 1940.

  9. Eliav, op cit., pp. 130−33.

  10. Palestine Post, 17 September 1940.

  11. Weekly Police Report, Morton Papers.

  12. HA 47/2 for this and subsequent quotes pp. 102–104.

  13. Soffer, though, persisted with his enquiries, as is clear from his report cited above. Despite Wilkin’s reluctance to cooperate, Soffer managed to renew his acquaintance with Ilin and pressed him for information about the robbery. Ilin stalled at first, then suddenly invited him to dinner and then lunch at the San Remo restaurant in Tel Aviv. Bluff came high on the menu, with both men prodding and pushing for a weak spot. Ilin did not mind admitting that Stern and Zeroni had organized the robbery as he was sure that the police had no solid evidence against them. Soffer countered that, on the contrary, the police had a lot. He claimed – untruthfully – that he had ‘brought 20 detectives with me from Jerusalem and that they will not return until they arrest every one of the persons wanted’.

  On Tuesday, 1 October, five days after the lunch, Soffer met Ilin and Rosenthal in Jerusalem where, despite his earlier bluster, he had returned. Ilin took Soffer to one side. He had a proposition for him from the perpetrators of the robbery. He ‘hinted that to avoid trouble and fear of being constantly followed … they would rather pay a good sum of money to the police to put the file aside and not to extend the investigations to other corners’. Soffer decided it was time to up the ante. ‘I told [Ilin] that I don’t believe a word of what he said and that I am convinced he cannot get in touch with these persons as they do not trust him or David any more who are known spies of the police.’ This challenge ‘excited him very much and he protested. Then he said: “All right Mr Soffer, we shall be in your house on Saturday and you can see whether they have confidence in me or not.”’

  In fact they turned up on Friday, just as the Soffers were about to sit down to their Shabbat supper. The hospitable policeman offered his guests a glass of wine and ‘after receiving some refreshment [Ilin] requested to speak to me alone’. They moved into another room where Ilin told him that ‘the offenders’ would never surrender and it would be a ‘dangerous undertaking’ for Soffer to persist with his investigation. He suggested that it was his duty as a Jew to ‘close the case like other hundreds of cases and be with my family in Jerusalem’.

  Ilin now got down to business. ‘He told me that he got in touch with the persons responsible for the robbery (would not mention names) and that they have offered and have given him 150 pounds to give it to me to close the case.’ At this point he ‘pulled out some notes from his pocket and said I have brought 50 pounds for you now’. Another fifty would come later. Ilin proposed to keep the rest for himself to pay doctors’ bills following a bad car smash in Haifa.

  Soffer joked that the money had perhaps come from the Anglo-Palestine Bank. He then confessed himself surprised and somewhat shocked by the approach. He had assumed that Ilin had come to ‘give him a good report on the case’ or to offer to ‘persuade the offenders to surrender to the police and stand trial if they are really national heroes’. Ilin merely repeated the offer. The detective felt it was time to change tack.

  ‘I then decided for the sake of progress of my case to adopt a different attitude and I told him that one should expect a better sum of money for dropping such a case and that I will reconsider.’ Ilin took back the fifty pounds and said he would try to increase the offer. They agreed to meet again in Tel Aviv. Before he left Ilin indulged in a little indiscreet bragging, designed, it seems, to undermine his host’s loyalty to his employers. He informed Soffer that the IZL had paid agents inside the police force and as a result ‘received copies of all secret reports’. Their left-wing rivals in the Histadrut (the powerful Jewish workers’ federation) also spent a lot of money on spying and had gone so far as to ‘compel a Jewish girl to sleep with an army captain to get his secrets’. Among the beneficiaries of the Histadrut slush fund was the late Inspector Cairns. Indeed, one of the reasons for his assassination was that ‘he was bribed by the Histadrut and delivered many police secrets to them and as such he was fighting the Revisionists’.

  The implication was that Soffer had better decide which side he was on. David Rosenthal had already delivered a similar message during the chance meeting in Jerusalem when he had told him, ‘they know those officers who assist the Histadrut and that their time will come, and those officers who assist the IZL … will be specially considered’. Immediately after the Shabbat eve encounter Soffer faithfully set off for police headquarters in the Russian Compound and gave a verbal report to Giles Bey, who requested the full written version which is quoted in the text.

  14. HA 47/60.

  15. HA 47/1.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid.

  Chapter 7

  1. HA 47/10.

  2. Eliav, Wanted, p. 145.

  3. Ibid., p. 142.

  4. Werner Otto von Hentig, Mein Leben Eine Dienstreise, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1962, pp. 338−9.

  5. ‘Seven Days’ section, Yedioth Ahronoth, 15 July 1983.

  6. See Heller, The Stern Gang, Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940−49, ch. 4, for a full study.

  7. Ibid., p. 86.

  8. Eliav, op cit., p. 147.

  9. Lubentchik’s role in the story ended there. He decided to stay on in Lebanon and, when British forces swept in to drive out the Vichyites in the early summer of 1941, he was picked up and packed off to Mazra’a. Later he was moved to a detention camp in Africa where he fell ill and died.

  10. Amichal-Yevin, In Purple: The Life of Yair – Abraham Stern, pp. 224−5. The friend was Yitzhak
Tselnik.

  11. Quoted in Heller, op cit., p. 87.

  12. Interview with Yair Stern, Jerusalem, 14 October 2012.

  13. Dr Kasriel Eilender, ‘A Brief History of the Jews in Suwalki’, www.kehilalinks.jewishgen.org. About 1700 Jews were murdered in a forest near Łomazy in August 1942 by the SS, abetted by Police Battalion 101, a formation of ‘ordinary men’ from Hamburg whose activities helped give the lie to the notion that only dedicated Nazis were involved in mass killings of Jews.

  14. US Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia article ‘Polish Refugees in Lithuania – Unexpected Rescue 1940−1941’, www.ushmm.org

  15. Yair Stern says she entered Palestine on forged documents arranged by his father’s contacts in Kovno.

  16. Quoted in Heller, op cit., p. 83.

  17. HA 47/11.

  18. HA 47/3.

  19. Memorandum from unnamed ‘British Inspector’ at Tulkarm, 2 July 1941, HA 47/4.

  20. HA 47/11.

  21. HA 47/7.

  22. ‘Life in the Lehi’: interview with Moshe Svorai, www.eretzisraelforever.net

  23. Testimony of Moshe Svorai, quoted in Amichal-Yevin, op. cit., p. 193.

  24. HA 47/7.

  25. HA 47/3.

  26. HA 47/2.

  27. HA 47/11.

  28. Golan, Stern: The Man and His Gang, p. 33.

  29. Heller, op. cit, pp. 87−8.

  30. Papers of Alec Bowden Stuart, Imperial War Museum Documents Department 19259. This report is dated 10 December 1942 but it seems clear that these sentiments were already widespread a year earlier.

  31. Quoted in Amichal-Yevin, op. cit., p. 236.

  32. Quoted in Golan, op. cit., p. 34.

  33. Quoted in Amichal-Yevin, op. cit., p. 273.

  34. HA 47/4.

  35. Eliav, op. cit., p. 147.

  36. Ibid., pp. 246−50.

  37. Eliav, op. cit., p. 149.

  Chapter 8

  1. The Attorney General v Nissim Reuven and Yehoshua Becker, 6 March 1942, Morton Papers.

  2. Palestine Post, 11 January 1942.

  3. Eliav, Wanted, p. 150.

  4. Amichal-Yevin, In Purple: The Life of Yair – Abraham Stern, pp. 266−7.

  5. Yitzhak Shamir, Summing Up, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994, p. 35.

  6. Eliav, op. cit., p. 15. When Levstein made these allegations in 1984, Morton was still alive. He did not challenge them, but given his proven determination to defend his reputation in the courts it seems unlikely the book, published in New York, ever came to his attention and there is no mention of it in his papers.