Fergusson’s mission got off to an unpromising start when he couldn’t locate Farran in Aleppo. Then, if we are to believe it, strictly by chance Fergusson spotted his errant subordinate on the street and followed him down an alley to a seedy hotel. Farran was extremely drunk and singularly displeased to see his commanding officer, whom he threatened to shoot. Several more drinks and hours later, Fergusson thought he had persuaded Farran to return to Palestine. But in the morning Farran changed his mind when the small plane they were traveling in was forced to land at Damascus because of a sandstorm. The Syrian authorities were delighted to welcome so distinguished a fugitive as their honored guest and set about trying to persuade Farran to accept a commission in their armed forces given his excellent work against the Jews. “Although I was prepared to fight the menace of aggressive Zionism,” he recalled, “I was not ready to train Arabs in terrorist methods, which might be directed at British troops” in Palestine. Farran thus declined the offer but happily hung about in Damascus in expectation that his request for political asylum would soon be granted.40
On June 9, with the Palestine government’s patience exhausted, the Chief Magistrate’s Court in Jerusalem issued a warrant for Farran’s arrest, and soon after an extradition request was duly submitted to the Syrian government. The British legation in Damascus, however, was skeptical that the Syrians would accede to the request. Accordingly, Fergusson returned to Syria yet again but was once more unsuccessful in luring Farran back to Palestine. Indeed, in the company of Syrian officials, whom Farran had insisted be present at their meeting, he berated Fergusson for being “pro-Jewish.” On June 13, Giles himself traveled to Damascus accompanied by Farran’s former commander in the Third Hussars, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Labouchere, who succeeded where everyone else had failed. “My duty as a regular soldier, who had taken an oath of allegiance to the King, was to return to face my accusers,” Farran recalled. “My very absence would be a tacit admission of guilt. Furthermore, [Labouchere] promised that many personal friends would help me to raise money for a proper defence.”41
Farran thus was back in Jerusalem in time for lunch on June 17. He was taken to the Allenby Barracks, a sprawling military cantonment south of the Old City along the Bethlehem Road, where two CID officers were waiting. Hadingham arrived a few hours later to formally charge Farran with premeditated murder and offer him the opportunity to provide a statement and also to sign the charge sheet. Farran declined to do either. The next day, he submitted his resignation from the Colonial Service and reverted to military status. This appears to have been a critical element in Farran’s decision to return to Palestine for trial because he would now be tried by court-martial rather than in a civilian court.42
Farran had also insisted on assuming complete responsibility for the incident; hence the three members of his squad who were present when Rubowitz was seized and then tortured and murdered were never indicted. Farran then retired to the small apartment he had been assigned in the married officers’ quarters to put in writing his version of the events of May 6 that would form part of the “summary of sworn evidence” to be presented at the court-martial. That same evening, he was escorted to the Kishle, the Turkish central police barracks just inside the Old City, facing David’s Citadel, where he was to undergo a police lineup before witnesses who had been present at Rubowitz’s abduction. Three witnesses identified Farran as the person who had seized the youth, while two others failed to do so. In any event, the three were later shown to be mistaken and the exercise was thus inconclusive.43
The gravity of his predicament was now beginning to sink in, and as a result the next day Farran was in a dark mood when Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Niven, the assistant adjutant general at Palestine headquarters, visited him. As Farran recalled in his memoir, “I was appalled by the relentlessness with which the Police were pursuing my case (a new feature in Palestine) and by the unwarranted accusations in some of the Jewish newspapers, which amounted to nothing less than libellous prejudgment.” Indeed, news accounts of Rubowitz’s disappearance and the Special Squads’ existence were now also appearing in British and American newspapers. A story published in the New York Herald Tribune by the acclaimed reporter Homer Bigart, for instance, alleged that followers of the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley had infiltrated the PPF and might also have been involved in Rubowitz’s disappearance.44
An internal Jewish Agency memorandum suggests that it was behind the interest suddenly showed by the U.S. press in the case. The Bigart story in particular appears to have attracted the attention of No. 10 Downing Street—as a barbed inquiry sent by Attlee to Creech Jones the following day concerning the Farran case reveals. Although the high commissioner hastened to assure London that there was no truth to the accusation, neither the prime minister nor the colonial secretary was pleased with the way that the entire matter had been handled. Attlee was especially perturbed that the Palestine government had yet to issue an official statement rebutting some of the more lurid accusations circulating in the press about the incident.45
That same day, Creech Jones sent a stinging rebuke to Cunningham, but before the Palestine government had time to issue the statement that the prime minister had requested, the “good name of British administration” was cast into disrepute again when that same evening Farran once more escaped from custody.46
The ease with which Farran was again able to flee Palestine has never been satisfactorily explained. His account in Winged Dagger is deliberately glib to the point of evasiveness, suggesting nothing more than the timely exploitation of a serendipitous opportunity in the best commando tradition. This was also the conclusion reached by the police court of inquiry, which found Farran’s two CID minders guilty of negligence rather than of any willful malfeasance. Nonetheless, both versions strain credulity since, at the height of the Jewish terrorist campaign the Allenby Barracks, given its critical location midway between the Jerusalem rail station and Government House, would almost certainly have been among the most secure military facilities in Palestine with all means of access and exit closely watched and tightly guarded.47
At the same time, the anomaly of the police having responsibility for an army officer, detained essentially under house arrest at a military facility, inevitably created a confusing situation that Farran was able to take advantage of. The police, for instance, had initially planned to imprison him at the police depot on Mount Scopus, as Farran was then a serving member of the PPF. But the deal that facilitated his return from Syria had stipulated that Farran would be tried in a military court as an army, not a police, officer. Accordingly, army headquarters in Jerusalem assumed responsibility for his confinement and arranged to have Farran brought to the Allenby Barracks, although his guard detail would consist of two plainclothes policemen. It was in the presence of one of these officers that Farran left his apartment at 8:15 on the evening of June 19, ostensibly to go for a stroll. They had only gone a few steps, when Farran suggested that they have a drink instead at the nearby officers’ mess. Both men were finishing their beers when a Royal Artillery lieutenant colonel came in and struck up a conversation. Assuming that Farran and his minder were both police officers given their civilian attire, this lieutenant colonel suggested that they all have supper together in the dining hall just down the corridor. The detective replied that sandwiches were waiting for them back at the apartment, but after chatting some more, the artillery officer repeated his invitation and left. Farran followed him, but not wishing to intrude, the detective remained behind. About twenty minutes later he went to check on Farran, who was now nowhere to be found. It was later surmised that he had stopped at the lavatory en route to the dining hall and had fled through a small window.48
In his memoir, Farran astonishingly claims that he then climbed a tree with a branch overhanging the well-defended camp’s barbed-wire perimeter fence, jumped to his freedom, and simply “wandered over the hills until I found friends” before wading across the Jordan River and crossing into Tran
s-Jordan. “I cannot go into more details about my ten days’ freedom, during which time I walked most of the way to the Hejaz and back,” Farran explained, “because it would mean that many kind Arab friends would be involved.” He decided to return to Palestine and surrender after hearing of reprisal attacks being carried out by Lehi against British troops. The group had taken credit—and specifically cited the Rubowitz case and Farran’s disappearance—for the simultaneous attacks carried out in Haifa and Tel Aviv on the night of June 28. An old friend of Farran’s had been killed and another seriously wounded in one of the incidents. “It was not worth it,” he wrote. So, the morning following the twin attacks, Farran presented himself to a sentry at the Allenby Barracks’ main gate and turned himself in.49
The preliminary hearing to consider the evidence against Farran was held at the Allenby Barracks on July 17. The presiding military officer heard testimony from five witnesses, including one of Rubowitz’s brothers and three persons who claimed to have seen the boy’s abduction. Farran appeared to pay only fleeting attention to the proceedings, preferring instead to ostentatiously consult the copy of the Bible that he had brought with him. His feigned disinterest was an indulgence purchased with some of the best legal representation that money could buy. A solicitor had been sent from the high-powered London law firm of Laurence Collins and Fearnley-Whittingstall to defend Farran. True to his word, Labouchere had established a fund to cover Farran’s legal fees. Word of the fund had spread quickly to England, where Farran’s wartime commanders had rallied to his support. Such SAS luminaries as Colonel Bill Stirling, brother of the SAS’s founder, David, and Major General Robert Laycock, chief of combined operations, had reached out to their vast network of friends and comrades-in-arms on Farran’s behalf. Palestine policemen also contributed, responding enthusiastically to the appeal organized by Raymond Cafferata, the hero of Hebron and later target of a Lehi assassination attempt, who was now in London running the PPF recruitment depot there.50
Throughout the hearing, Farran’s lawyer had been especially insistent that the prosecution’s “Exhibit B” be suppressed on grounds of attorney-client privilege. This was the notebook that Gray had told Gurney contained Farran’s “confession” and that Cunningham had described to Creech Jones as the “written statement found in Farran’s quarters at Allenby Barracks, Jerusalem, after his escape on 19th June, unsigned, but believed to be in Farran’s handwriting, [which] stated that he had killed Rubowitz.”51
Given its incendiary content, his lawyer’s vigorous effort to have the notebook declared inadmissible is not surprising. Indeed, as these and various other behind-the-scenes legal maneuvers continued throughout the summer, the Jewish Agency was becoming increasingly agitated about both the delay and the secretive adjudication process surrounding the case. Writing to Gurney, the president of the Vaad Le’umi, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, drew the chief secretary’s attention to the uncomfortable fact that, had a crime of this nature and in these circumstances been committed in the U.K., it would have been tried not in a military but in a civil court—a point that the judge advocate general at the War Office had coincidentally made just days before. But both Cunningham and MacMillan strongly opposed transferring Farran’s case to a civil court, whether in Britain or Palestine, and their view ultimately prevailed.52
Amid extraordinary security, Farran’s court-martial convened on October 1 at the military court for the district of Talbiya, not far from the street corner in Rehavia where Rubowitz had been abducted. The small courtroom, ringed by armed guards, could barely accommodate a crowd that included some thirty journalists, assorted military and police officers seated in the public gallery, members of the Rubowitz family, counsels for the prosecution and the defense, a judge advocate general sent by the War Office to advise the six army officers who sat in judgment on points of military law, and the defendant himself. When the court asked how he wished to plead, Farran answered, “Not guilty.”53
Because Rubowitz’s body had never been found, the case against Farran hinged on two pieces of circumstantial evidence: Fergusson’s recollection of what Farran had told him on the morning of May 7 and the notebook containing Farran’s alleged confession. The prosecution suffered an initial blow early the first day when the police officer who had taken possession of the gray trilby as evidence from one of Rubowitz’s brothers in May admitted that he could no longer discern the letters “F-A-R-A-N” on the sweatband, as in their place was now a large smudge mark. Additional blows followed in rapid succession. The officer responsible for the identification parade held at the Kishle in June testified that none of the witnesses had been able to identify Farran as having been present at the Rehavia street corner the night that Rubowitz disappeared. Then Fergusson was called to the stand. Invoking the right against self-incrimination, he refused to testify about his conversation with Farran on May 7 and was excused without further questioning. The day concluded with Farran’s lawyer arguing for the notebook’s exclusion as admissible evidence. Astonishingly, the prosecution never called Hadingham, the person who had actually conducted the murder investigation, to testify.54
The trial got off to another bad start the following morning when the court ruled that Farran’s confession was indeed privileged client-attorney communication and could not be introduced as evidence. With that, the prosecution’s case collapsed. In the words of Farran’s attorney, there was now not “a shred of evidence” against his client—a point conceded by the judge advocate general in his final instructions to the six-man tribunal. After a brief recess, the court reconvened shortly after 3:00 p.m. Its president, Brigadier Richard Maxwell, the commander of Jerusalem’s southern district, announced the acquittal verdict. The room burst into applause amid shouts of “Good show” from the soldiers and police officers attending. Farran was immediately whisked away in an armored car sandwiched between jeeps mounted with heavy machine guns manned by the Highland Light Infantry. He spent the night at a military base in Gaza under heavy guard before being flown the next morning to the Canal Zone to board a troopship bound for Liverpool.55
“When I landed at Liverpool on October 13th, a bewildering surprise awaited me,” Farran recalled. “I had imagined that my friends would never speak to me again, and here I was being received like a popular hero.” He lay low for two weeks in the Scottish countryside as a guest of Colonel Stirling before resurfacing in London at the American ambassador’s residence to receive the U.S. Legion of Merit for his wartime service in northern Italy. In February 1948, accompanied by his mother, Farran attended an investiture at Buckingham Palace, where King George decorated him with his Distinguished Service Order. “The King told me he was very glad the whole business was over,” Farran boasted to reporters afterward.56
For the rest of his life, Farran stuck to his story. He and his squad were “on the verge of dealing a crippling blow to the Stern Gang [when] the ‘Rubovitz Case’ burst.” In hopes of sabotaging this breakthrough and undermining the successes that Farran and his team were having, a shadowy Zionist conspiracy fed The Palestine Post stories about Rubowitz’s disappearance and a hat in which there was a name supposedly like Farran’s. “There was no evidence,” Farran always maintained, “but the ugly finger of suspicion was pointed at me.”57
In point of fact, the documents that he had found on Rubowitz—and that Gray had deemed sufficiently vital to delay the investigation into the youth’s disappearance—proved to be of little value. By the middle of June, the CID had identified everyone on the lists. It determined that only one of the forty-five persons was an active terrorist, and he was arrested. No charges were ever brought against any of the others, who were judged simply to have given some money to Lehi at one time or another.58
Regardless, Farran’s version of events persisted—effectively propagated by his best-selling memoir, which was published in April 1948, went through seven editions in two years, and by 1956 had sold some 300,000 copies. It gained new currency in the 1960s as a result of the publication o
f both a prizewinning essay in a British military journal and the memoirs of another prominent British soldier. The essay, written by Lieutenant Colonel Richard Clutterbuck, who would eventually rise to the rank of major general and subsequently become a respected academic and well-published authority on counterterrorism, claimed that Farran’s squad killed more terrorists in six weeks than an entire army battalion employed in more traditional cordon-and-search operations. Similarly, in his 1969 book, Colin Mitchell argued that “Roy Farran’s actions terrified the terrorists. But eventually they began to understand what was happening, identified Roy and were determined to put an end to his activities. To do this by force would have been difficult if not impossible, because the Farran team were as tough and experienced as any Jewish terrorists. They therefore snatched eagerly at what seemed like a scrap of evidence [that is, the gray trilby].”59
Neither source, however, can be considered completely unbiased, because both men became personally acquainted with Farran as his jailers. Clutterbuck had guarded him at the Allenby Barracks during the few weeks preceding Farran’s preliminary hearing on July 17, while Mitchell was actually locked into his cell with him for extended periods of time as part of the “elaborate arrangements” in force while Farran was imprisoned at Sarafand awaiting court-martial. He and his unit had also previously been deployed to support some of Farran’s counterterrorist operations in Jerusalem. It is therefore not entirely implausible that these two young officers were in thrall of this battle-hardened, much-decorated warrior-hero. Farran, in fact, is far more modest about his accomplishments in Palestine than either Clutterbuck or Mitchell. Winged Dagger is quite explicit about the operational frustrations and lack of progress Farran and his squad encountered. “For two months we worked night and day—watching, following, listening and occasionally making an arrest. We had limited successes, but nothing really big”—until the Rubowitz incident, he maintained, spoiled everything.60
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