Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  Churchill concluded the lunch by noting that “nothing would happen until after the war with Germany and perhaps not until the general election was held in 1945.” Nevertheless, the prime minister also told Weizmann that he saw “no harm in making known what he had said about waiting till the end of the German war.” Before parting, Churchill urged the Zionist leader to visit Lord Moyne in Cairo soon. The minister of state, he explained, “had changed and developed in the past two years.”57

  Weizmann left the meeting contented. He was convinced, as he subsequently wrote to the Jewish Agency’s representative in Washington, that “in the next six months we can so prepare the ground as to ensure our success.”58

  CHAPTER 9

  The Deed

  Eliahu Hakim was a good boy. At least his parents thought so. When they asked him to quit smoking, he did. And when they asked him to abandon his budding career as a terrorist, he complied. But, like most teenagers, he promised his parents one thing but did another. In 1943, at the age of eighteen, Hakim reluctantly acceded to their demand that he enlist in the British army. His parents mistakenly breathed a sigh of relief when he departed for training in Egypt, hoping he would now be far away from Lehi’s reach and influence. Hakim detested serving in the military of a country that deprived the Jews of their national home and occupied their land. He was already plotting to desert and rejoin Lehi when he received word from Yezernitzky to remain in place and render the group a critical service by smuggling arms from Egypt to Palestine. Hakim excelled at this task, defying the efforts of the British military police by coolly ferrying weapons-filled suitcases on the troop trains that regularly crisscrossed the Sinai desert.1

  Hakim was an atypical Lehi fighter. Whereas most members of the group were Ashkenazi Jews who hailed from Central or Eastern Europe, Hakim was Sephardim and had emigrated with his family as a child from Beirut. Moreover, where most Lehi recruits were from working-class or at best middle-class backgrounds, Hakim’s parents were rather well-off. An ardent adherent to Jabotinsky’s assertive Zionist ideology, he first joined the Irgun in 1941 but subsequently gravitated to the more extremist Lehi the following year. His drifting from one organization to the other and then from soldier to deserter had aroused Yezernitzky’s distrust and skepticism of this seemingly impetuous youth. But Hakim’s success and sangfroid as a smuggler greatly impressed the Lehi operations chief. In December 1943, Hakim was ordered to leave the British army and devote himself completely to Lehi. His brother, Menachem, noticed something markedly different in his younger sibling. “He became serious; overnight he grew up.”2

  Hakim was assigned to an operational unit commanded by Joshua Cohen, the group’s similarly young but already highly accomplished field officer. Cohen’s assessment of Hakim was uncharacteristically effusive. Yezernitzky agreed, and Hakim was soon actively involved in all manner of Lehi operations. He participated in two of the attempts on MacMichael’s life, including the abortive attack outside Givat Shaul. He was ordered back to Cairo in early September—masquerading as a British soldier named Moshe Cohen, complete with the requisite false papers. Hakim was not told anything at all about his mission, but was instead given a piece of paper with a name and a Cairo phone number scribbled beneath it.3

  Hakim arrived in Cairo on September 14, 1944. As instructed, he made contact with a young Jewish woman from Palestine serving in the ATS, the British army’s Auxiliary Territorial Service—the World War II equivalent of the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Corps. Her name was Nadja Hess. She in turn introduced him to Raphael Sadovsky, a twenty-nine-year-old Egyptian Jew from an established Cairo family. Although he earned his living as a mathematics and language teacher at a local school, he was in fact a key figure in a conspiratorial cell of seventeen persons that Lehi had established in Egypt. Eight were serving in various arms of the British military there, including four other women in the ATS. The cell’s leader was a Polish Jew named Joseph Sitner. Sitner had entered Palestine illegally in 1938 and subsequently came to the CID’s attention as a member of the Irgun. This resulted in his arrest and imprisonment under the emergency regulations invoked during the Arab Rebellion. After three months in detention, Sitner was released. He immediately reimmersed himself in Irgun, Betar, and Revisionist Party activities. Following the split with the Irgun, Sitner joined Lehi. Astonishingly, despite being well-known to British authorities as a troublemaker, in 1942 Sitner had been allowed to enlist in the RAF. He was posted to Alexandria, where he was assigned to RAF headquarters as a clerk. It was the perfect cover for Sitner’s activities on behalf of Lehi. In early August 1944 he met with Yezernitzky and was told to commence preparations for an important operation—the assassination of the minister of state resident in the Middle East, Lord Moyne.4

  The idea to target the apex of British officialdom for the entire region had originated with Stern. He had envisioned a stunning one-two punch that would eliminate first the high commissioner and then the minister responsible for the entire region and thus convey an unmistakable message of Jewish resistance and opprobrium. Stern had begun planning such an operation in 1941, but before Lehi could act, an Australian diplomat became the first minister of state resident in the Middle East. Because the group “had no quarrel with Australia,” Yezernitzky said, the ambitious sequential assassination plan was shelved. It was revived shortly after Moyne arrived in Cairo in January 1944 and finalized that July. The intention remained to kill MacMichael and then Moyne. Lehi was “looking for an act to shock the world,” Yezernitzky had told Sitner. But the group’s long-standing rivalry and competition with the Irgun figured as prominently as its animus toward Britain in the decision to pursue these two targets. The failed attack on MacMichael had created additional pressure to succeed in murdering Moyne.5

  On September 18, 1944, Hakim met with Sitner, Sadovsky, and two female members of the Lehi cell, Ruth Grossbard and Yaffa Greenberg, at the fashionable Astra Café located on what is today Tahrir Square. Over coffee, they discussed how Hakim—accompanied by one of the ATS women in order to appear as a love-struck couple exploring the city—would conduct a thorough reconnaissance of Moyne’s residence and office, as well as the route his chauffeured car followed daily. They would focus special attention on the time between 12:30 and 1:30 p.m., when the minister of state returned to his residence for lunch.6

  The plan that eventually emerged was to shoot Moyne and not use a bomb as originally intended. But this created two new problems. First, Hakim would require a weapon, and, second, another gunman would be needed both to cover him and to intervene in the event of trouble. At the end of September, a Lehi agent arrived in Palestine with two pistols—a revolver and an automatic. Hakim chose the revolver. It was a Russian-manufactured seven-shot Nagant 7.62-mm revolver—the standard sidearm of tsarist-era military and police and later of the Red Army and Soviet intelligence and law enforcement officers. Sadovsky would recall that he often saw Hakim meticulously cleaning and oiling the Nagant, which was renowned for firing a cleaner cartridge than most revolvers and, if well cared for and kept in good working order, would greatly reduce the chances of misfire because of any fouling of the handgun’s mechanism.7

  This same handgun had become something of a talisman for the terrorists who wielded it. The pistol had first come to the attention of the Palestine Police Force as the murder weapon used by the Irgun to gun down an Arab notable on a Jerusalem street in 1937. The same weapon had then passed into Lehi’s hands, where it was implicated in the shootings of no fewer than five British police officers over the preceding eighteen months. Among its victims was Tom Wilkin, who had been murdered only a day or two before Hakim himself took possession of the Nagant—thus accounting for its delayed arrival in Egypt.8

  Hakim continued to monitor Moyne’s daily movements, paying special attention to the route that the minister of state’s limousine daily traveled just past noon across the Kasr El Nil Bridge to his Zamalek residence. Everything seemed to be falling nicely into place. However, unbekn
ownst to the cell, British intelligence was aware of Lehi’s presence in Egypt and keeping tabs on suspected Jewish terrorists serving in HM Forces there. It suspected that Lehi was plotting another attempt on MacMichael’s life while he and his family were passing through Cairo. Sitner’s frequent trips between Ismailia, Alexandria, Cairo, Tel Aviv, and Haifa had accordingly aroused their suspicions, and on October 2 he was spotted being led away by British military police.9

  Yaffa Greenberg happened to be returning to Ismailia from leave when she stopped at the Ha-Tikva canteen in Alexandria, a popular gathering spot for Jewish service personnel. There, she overheard a conversation about Sitner’s arrest. Fearing the worst, Greenberg left immediately for Cairo. She stopped to collect Sadovsky at his house before proceeding to a café where Hakim was waiting. But when they arrived, Hakim insisted that they go instead to the famous Maison Groppi. Sadovsky protested. Hakim was under strict orders from Sitner to lie low and specifically to “eat at small, out-of-the-way Arab restaurants.” Groppi’s salon de thé, popular among the British military, was anything but that.10

  Hakim, however, was set on Groppi’s. Sadovsky argued that this was also the second time that Hakim had gone there—a clear violation of his security instructions. But Hakim was as intoxicated by Groppi’s heady atmosphere as was the rest of Cairo and ignored Sadovsky’s remonstrations. Hakim at least had the good sense to request a corner table. He calmly took in the news about Sitner’s arrest and then told Sadovsky he should leave immediately for Alexandria to verify the story and, if possible, contact Sitner.11

  Sadovsky headed for the Ha-Tikva canteen, where the manager confirmed that an airman fitting Sitner’s description had indeed been arrested. The following morning, a distraught Sadovsky was standing on the platform waiting for the train back to Cairo when he was stunned to see Sitner himself. Neither said a word, but they went their separate ways and then made sure to find seats facing each other on the train. The two men appeared to strike up a casual conversation, which the sound of the rails, engine, and rush of air from the open windows rendered inaudible to anyone who might be listening. Three days earlier, Sitner explained, he had been relaxing on his base when a soldier found him and said that the military police were looking for him. Alarmed, Sitner rushed back to his tent, where he gathered all the incriminating documents he could quickly grab. He set fire to all but the most sensitive ones. These he tore into tiny pieces and swallowed. He then casually presented himself to the waiting policemen and was taken away to a detention facility for questioning.12

  In the course of a thirteen-hour interrogation session, Sitner was accused of plotting to bomb a forthcoming meeting of the Arab League in Alexandria. He repeatedly denied the charges and was released three days later because of lack of evidence. What Sitner did not know was that the Jewish Agency had provided British intelligence with information about the alleged plot. He was then transferred to another base and placed under surveillance. Sitner also told Sadovsky that he was expecting an important letter from Lehi headquarters. Accordingly, he needed Sadovsky to communicate a coded message to Yezernitzky that simply said, “Fellah was sick, he was sent to another place for convalesance [sic]”—meaning that Sitner had been arrested, had been transferred from Alexandria, and was being watched. Upon arriving back in Cairo, Sadovsky approached a girlfriend serving in the ATS who was not a member of the Lehi cell and asked her to pass the message to Greenberg, who duly transmitted it to Lehi headquarters in Palestine. Hakim listened to Sadovsky’s account later that evening with great satisfaction. His mission had not been compromised, and the authorities, though worrisomely aware of the cell’s existence, clearly had no clue of its real target.13

  Nothing further happened until October 20 with the arrival in Cairo of another young Lehi operative from Palestine: a twenty-three-year-old sabra (Jewish person born in Palestine and Israel) named Eliahu Bet-Zuri, who carried with him instructions and money.14

  Bet-Zuri shared with Hakim an involvement with militant Zionism that stretched back to his childhood. Born in Tel Aviv shortly after the 1921 riots, he grew up listening to his parents’ accounts of the disturbances. At age ten or eleven, Bet-Zuri was already serving as a runner for the local Haganah detachment, carrying food, ammunition, and messages between the defense forces’ guard posts in that city. In 1937, at the height of the Arab Rebellion, and aged only fifteen, Bet-Zuri was formally inducted into the Irgun. He was assigned to an Irgun cell led by Yezernitzky and progressed rapidly into an adept fighter. On one occasion, however, he and Yezernitzky were badly burned when a bomb they were planting exploded before they could make their getaway. Bet-Zuri regarded the scars left on his legs from the explosion with immense pride.15

  By 1943, Bet-Zuri had left the Irgun and with two friends had formed his own terrorist group. An ambitious plan to assassinate MacMichael went nowhere, and a chance encounter at the Tel Aviv bus station changed his life. Bet-Zuri was waiting to board a bus when he heard an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, wearing the typical long black coat and hat and full beard, calling his name. It took a startled Bet-Zuri a few seconds to realize that the rabbi was Yezernitzky in disguise. Yezernitzky had just escaped from prison and was methodically rebuilding Stern’s organization. He persuaded Bet-Zuri to join the group, and Bet-Zuri, like Hakim, was assigned to a training unit under Joshua Cohen. Cohen had nothing but praise for Bet-Zuri too. Upon completion of the course, Bet-Zuri was ordered to Jerusalem, where he affected the mien of a foppish young Englishman as a cover for his new vocation as full-time terrorist. He subsequently helped facilitate the mass escape of Lehi prisoners from Latrun in November 1943 and was also the operative designated to detonate the explosives that would have killed MacMichael while the high commissioner attended Sunday services at St. George’s Cathedral the following February. Bet-Zuri had begged Yezernitzky to be sent on the mission to assassinate Moyne. And, disguised as a British soldier, in late November he left for Cairo.16

  On Friday evening, October 20, Hakim waited in Cairo’s Carmel Oriental Wine Shop per the secret instructions he had previously received. At 7:00 p.m., he had been told, a man would enter the shop and go up to the counter. Hakim should approach this man and offer him a cigarette. If he accepted it and said, “Thank you. My name is Zebulum”—Bet-Zuri’s underground name in Lehi—Hakim was to reply, “It is a pleasure. My name is Benny,” his own Lehi nom de guerre. The two men spent the rest of the month planning the assassination and debating whether to strike by day or night, at which venue—office or residence—and how best to effect their escape. On this last point, Yezernitzky had been explicit. “This is not a suicide action,” he stressed to Bet-Zuri. “You are to make a reasonable plan for retreat and escape.”17

  By the end of October, the two Eliahus had agreed to a plan whereby they would shoot Moyne as he arrived home for lunch. They would escape on rented bicycles—disappearing into busy downtown Cairo by riding across the Bulak Bridge. They had ruled out either stealing or renting a motorcycle or a car as too risky. Fleeing on foot from the sedate environs of Zamalek was completely impractical. On November 1, Bet-Zuri and Hakim asked Sadovsky to direct them to a nearby shop where they could hire two bicycles. Sadovsky later saw them riding down a Cairo street together.18

  Back in Palestine, Yezernitzky had received a coded message from Bet-Zuri that greatly troubled him. “We should be finished with Uncle Jacques within two weeks,” the letter read. Yezernitzky worried that the two Eliahus’ enthusiasm for their mission had gotten the better of them and that they were carelessly rushing ahead with the attack. But there was nothing at this stage Yezernitzky could do given the time lag in communications between the Egyptian cell and Lehi headquarters.19

  Having finalized their plan, the two would-be assassins thereafter passed the time playing backgammon at various cafés. On Saturday evening, November 4, Bet-Zuri assured Sadovsky that the operation he and Hakim had devised was foolproof. He put the chance of being arrested at no more than 2 percent—the same odds
, Bet-Zuri confidently observed, of “being killed through a flowers-vase falling on his head while walking in the street.” They arranged to meet again the next night.20

  When Sadovsky arrived at the Café Américain, Hakim and Bet-Zuri were again immersed in a game of backgammon. The three men then sat together chatting. Suddenly Bet-Zuri declared to Sadovsky that he and Hakim “will finish the job to-morrow and after to-morrow we will be home.” As Sadovsky had to rush off to another engagement, the three men agreed to meet later that night at another café. Hakim and Bet-Zuri then explained that the assassination would take place between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. the next day when Moyne returned to his residence. Special arrangements were in place to spirit both men out of Egypt disguised as British soldiers. Their schedule was very tight, Bet-Zuri explained, because they had to be at a rendezvous point outside the city within only a couple of hours of the killing.21

  On Monday morning, November 6, 1944, Hakim and Bet-Zuri left the small apartment that they rented from an elderly, Yiddish-speaking Jewish couple and biked through Cairo’s streets to Gezira Island. They arrived before noon at No. 4 Sharia Gabalaya—Moyne’s residence—and lay in wait. Hakim was armed with the Nagant revolver, while Bet-Zuri carried a 1916 Parabellum 9-mm Luger automatic pistol—the second handgun in the consignment sent from Palestine at the end of September. It too had an infamous pedigree, having been used by a Lehi gunman in the shooting death of a Jewish police officer near Tel Aviv eight months before. In the event of any trouble, both men had also stuffed several hand grenades into their pockets.22