Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  Farran, however, remained forever unrepentant. In 1978, for instance, he told Nicholas Bethell that “Fergusson was right in the basic principle that an underground war can only be fought by counter-terrorist forces who are prepared to mix with the enemy in its own environment. Small groups can counter other small groups.” These tactics are of course at the very heart of established counterinsurgency and counterterrorism practice. In one of the seminal books on the subject, Julian Paget, a British army officer who fought in many of these post–World War II campaigns (and whose father was the commander in chief of Middle East Command between 1944 and 1946), explains,

  Insurgents cannot be defeated by conventional warfare techniques, and a completely fresh approach is required …

  The task of the insurgents is made far easier if they are allowed to retain the initiative and to attack on their own terms. The Security Forces must therefore make every effort to move from the defensive … and to gain the initiative for themselves.61

  In Palestine, however, its application was seriously flawed. The squads’ fundamental weakness was that their experience and knowledge of irregular warfare were derived from fighting an entirely different type of underground warfare in a completely different setting—a fact noted by Montgomery himself when he visited Palestine in June 1947. In occupied Europe and Asia, these veterans of special units like the Commandos and the Chindits and the SAS and the SOE had fought against an unpopular, traditionally deployed military force that was regarded by the local population as a repressive army of occupation. In Palestine, however, the situation was reversed. British forces, including the Special Squads, were by this time widely regarded by the Yishuv as an unpopular, repressive occupation force. Further, they were arrayed against an amorphous body of underground fighters and not against traditionally organized and deployed armies.62

  In the haste to implement Fergusson’s scheme, these problems in the squads’ organization, training, and mission were ignored or dismissed or simply not considered to be serious enough to warrant concern. In this respect, the most important failure was both Fergusson’s and Farran’s inability to grasp the implications of special operations that have the potential to go awry. As the Canadian historian David Charters has cogently argued,

  The legitimacy of government rests upon rule of law, and the intention to restore and maintain law and order is the core of a proper counterinsurgency programme. The security forces, for their part, are bound to uphold the law. But special operations by their very nature are conducted in a legal and moral twilight zone; if control or discipline fails, they become merely a guise for counter-terror which reduces the government and the security forces to the status of criminals. Secret police methods make bad propaganda—if the cover is “blown,” and tactical victories may be squandered by a strategic defeat.63

  The Special Squads were a desperate, eleventh-hour attempt to turn the tide of battle in Palestine in the security force’s favor. They brought only controversy and ignominy to the Palestine government, which found itself in the invidious position of having to lie. “No authority,” the administration disingenuously declared in the public statement demanded by Attlee, “has ever been given for the employing of unorthodox methods against terrorists. No authority has ever been given for the use by any member of the police force of other than ordinary police methods in dealing with apprehending persons.” MacMillan in fact specifically cited “The Farran Case” in his overview of the final year of British rule, noting that it further poisoned relations with the Yishuv at an especially critical juncture of the mandate’s history.64

  But none of this seemed to harm either Fergusson or Farran, who each went on to distinguished careers in government and public service. The same afternoon that Farran was acquitted, Fergusson recounts that he was “invited to resign” from the police and told to leave Palestine within thirty-six hours for his own safety. He was gone the next morning. “I was turning my back on a disastrous episode,” Fergusson recounts in his memoir, “one on which I had embarked with high hopes of being effective. Far from doing any good, I had inadvertently done positive harm.” No matter. He subsequently fulfilled his ambition to command a battalion of his old regiment, then headed up intelligence at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe under General Dwight Eisenhower, and was director of psychological warfare during the abortive Suez Expedition of 1956. Fergusson retired from the army two years later, and shortly afterward he was able to carry on a family tradition by serving as governor-general of New Zealand. Upon his return to Scotland, he was successively chancellor of the University of St. Andrews, lord high commissioner of the Church of Scotland, and chairman of the British Council. Fergusson was ennobled by the queen in 1972 and styled himself Lord Ballantrae. He died in 1980.65

  Farran left the army in 1948 and worked briefly as a quarry master in Scotland and then in construction in Kenya and subsequently Rhodesia. During the 1950 general election he stood for Parliament as a Conservative candidate for a seat in England’s West Midlands but lost. Farran then accepted an offer from one of his wartime SAS commanders to serve in the Malayan Scouts, a special operations unit then being formed to fight communist terrorists in Malaya. The offer, however, was withdrawn a week later on orders from the commander in chief, Far East, given the potential embarrassment to Gurney as high commissioner for Malaya and Gray as the inspector general of the Malayan Police Service—posts both men had assumed immediately upon leaving Palestine. Farran married that year and then immigrated to Alberta, Canada, where he took up dairy farming. Farran also worked as a journalist and in 1954 founded a successful weekly newspaper. In 1961, he was elected to municipal government and a decade later to the provincial legislative assembly, eventually being appointed minister of telephones and utilities and, after that, solicitor general for Alberta. A lifelong, devout Catholic, Farran died in 2006.66

  That Farran could prosper unencumbered by the shadow of having been indicted for murder was largely because of the unstinting efforts of his lawyers to ensure that every copy of the notebook containing his alleged confession was promptly destroyed. Within days of his acquittal, Laurence Collins and Fearnley-Whittingstall had written to both the GOC and the judge advocate general on this matter and had obtained sworn affidavits of compliance. By December 1947 only two copies remained—much to the law firm’s immense consternation. One was in the custody of the chief secretary, and the other had been retained by the police. Gurney was especially resistant to the demand that the notebook be surrendered for destruction, arguing that regardless of the fact that the document had been ruled privileged, it remained part of a criminal investigation that had yet to be resolved. Incensed by the chief secretary’s response, Farran’s lawyers had written to Creech Jones, threatening to bring it up in Parliament and to sue the Colonial Office. Following months of legal wrangling and increasing pressure from Farran’s lawyers, the Colonial Office finally relented, and on April 24, 1948, in one of his last acts as high commissioner for Palestine, Cunningham provided a “Certificate of Destruction,” signed by a senior CID officer, attesting that there were no remaining copies of the notebook.67

  Indeed, the only misfortune that Farran seems to have subsequently suffered from the case was the death of his brother. From the time of Farran’s acquittal, Lehi had vowed to avenge Rubowitz’s death. In mid-October 1947 posters had begun to appear throughout Palestine warning that “Captain Farran’s time will come. We shall go after him to the end of the world.” About that same time Farran received two threatening letters at his family home in Wolverhampton on which was written the Hebrew word for revenge. “I’m not a bit scared of them,” Farran had bragged to reporters covering the award ceremony at the U.S. embassy at the end of that same month. Six months passed without incident until a parcel arrived with the morning mail addressed to “R. Farran.” Farran’s twenty-six-year-old brother, Rex, a draftsman employed by an aircraft manufacturer, opened the package, which contained a book of Shakespeare’s plays. Concealed
within its hollowed-out pages was a bomb that exploded, eviscerating Rex’s pelvis and groin and peppering his face and body with deadly shrapnel. The bomb had been constructed by Ya’acov Heruti, a twenty-year-old Lehi operative sent by Nathan Friedman-Yellin to London in October 1947 to assassinate Bevin and Barker. Farran was subsequently added to his target list. Lehi took credit for the bombing forty-eight hours later on May 5, vowing that next time it would get Roy. However, the following July, two members of the group told a New York Times reporter that Rex had actually been the target of the May attack. “We knew it would hurt Roy Farran more if we killed his brother. It would force him to live with his memory always. We meant to torture him.” Although Heruti disavowed this claim in a 2005 interview, the effect on Farran was doubtless the same.68

  The scandal surrounding Rubowitz’s disappearance was only one of the vexatious issues that the Palestine government and the Colonial Office had to contend with that spring. The other involved a request from the International Red Cross (IRC) to pay a second visit to a secret detention facility known as Camp 119 in Sambal, Eritrea, where some 250 Jewish terrorists were held. It will be recalled that in 1944 the Palestine administration had again invoked the Palestine (Defence) Order in Council to deport people without trial on mere suspicion of “complicity in terrorism” to a special prison camp in Eritrea. This intentional denial of habeas corpus was justified on the grounds that the information leading to these people’s arrests was so sensitive—derived from either human intelligence sources or signals intercepts—that it could not be divulged in court. Not wishing to risk acquittal on insufficient evidence, the Palestine administration, with the Colonial Office’s consent, had embraced the imprisonment-in-exile solution—and justified it by blaming the Yishuv, who, as one official explained, “in many cases could give evidence sufficient for a conviction, [but] won’t give it.” Evidentiary issues apart, the CID had found this legal provision to be an extraordinarily effective interrogation tool. Simply implying to a detainee suspected of involvement in terrorism that he would be sent “on a long trip by air” was often sufficient, one skilled interrogator claimed, to produce the desired flow of information.69

  As a result of intensive lobbying by Peter Bergson’s Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, in 1946 the Colonial Office had granted the IRC access to the camp. It was less keen to do so again. The main reason was that following an escape in January 1947 the British army had decided to move the remaining prisoners to a more secure facility in Gilgil, Kenya. Operation Malvolio, as the relocation was code-named, was secretly completed between February and March 1947. The authorities were thus reluctant both to reveal this to the IRC and especially to allow its inspectors to visit the new camp. The Colonial Office accordingly had solicited the advice of the Foreign Office, which gladly provided a justification to reject the visit request. Because the 1929 Geneva Convention applied only to prisoners of war and the detainees in Kenya were not POWs, the IRC had no jurisdiction over them or their treatment. Indeed, the Foreign Office concluded, the camp’s military jailers and the Palestine administration “were free to treat [the] suspected Jewish terrorists as they saw fit.”70

  Then, in May, a new problem had arisen over Kenya’s capacity to accommodate any additional detainees. A message from the governor, Sir Philip Mitchell, that only eight more suspects could be accepted at Gilgil had sent a frisson of alarm through both Government House and the Colonial Office given the high expectations that both had attached to Fergusson’s Special Squads. As events turned out, the anticipated surfeit of new terrorist suspects never materialized. But the discussions on this issue threw light on a troubling policy contradiction. “It is obviously necessary to deport those suspects from Palestine especially after the Acre jail attack,” a Colonial Office official named E. M. Fitzgerald had written to his colleague in the Middle East Department, William Allan Mathieson, on May 8. But, he asked, was it not “rather inconsistent to keep condemned terrorists still here but to move mere suspects 3,000 miles away”? No other official, however, appeared troubled by this incongruity, and in any event within days it was eclipsed by the unfolding scandal regarding Rubowitz’s disappearance and then the following month by a new set of death sentences imposed on three of the Irgun fighters captured following the Acre prison raid.71

  On June 16 a Jerusalem military court condemned Avshalom Habib, Meir Nakar, and Ya’acov Weiss to die by hanging. Amnon Mikhaloff and Nahman Zitterbaum escaped execution because they were minors and instead received sentences of fifteen years’ imprisonment each. The three defendants facing execution once more presented a demographic cross section of the Yishuv that captivated the press and was grist for the Irgun’s propagandists. They included two Sephardic Jews who had both been born in Palestine and an Ashkenazic immigrant. Habib and Nakar had lived in Jerusalem their entire lives, while Weiss hailed from Czechoslovakia and was a Holocaust survivor. Weiss’s parents and six brothers and sisters had all perished at Auschwitz. Only he and a sister survived. As the president of the court, a British army colonel, read the sentences, the defendants burst into song, joined by their families and other spectators, as the mournful sounds of “Ha-Tikva” filled the small courtroom. They continued to sing as the guards shackled their wrists and legs and led them away.72

  “We knew that if we did not save them, nobody would,” Begin later explained. The British had already been warned what to expect should the executions continue. After Gruner and his three comrades-in-arms were put to death, the Voice of Fighting Zion had announced that henceforth the Irgun would

  no longer be bound by the rules of war, which we imposed on ourselves as the liberation army of a civilized people.

  The law of retribution, of reprisals which is also the law of war, will be applied at every opportunity.

  Every battle unit of ours will be accompanied by a field court-martial, which will try every Briton who is part of the Occupation Army or the Occupation regime …

  There will be no appeal from the sentences passed. They will be executed on the spot, either by shooting or by hanging.

  Tremble, you murderers of prisoners.

  That this threat was taken seriously is evident in the new orders that the British military issued in anticipation of the trial’s outcome. All vehicles were now required to have an armed soldier riding shotgun, and officers and men on foot were instructed to be armed at all times and to walk in parties of no fewer than four persons.73

  These precautions proved necessary as the Irgun was already hunting for hostages. A plan was hatched to kidnap three military officers who regularly swam at a public pool in Ramat Gan and, while doing so, would be unarmed. On June 9, half a dozen Irgunists, brandishing revolvers and tommy guns, arrived at the appointed time to find no army officers present. Instead, they seized two British policemen. The authorities immediately demanded their release and called upon the mayors of Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, and Petah Tiqva to mobilize their respective communities’ assistance in locating the captives. Fearing the adverse repercussions to the Zionist cause given the impending arrival of yet another commission to examine Palestine’s political options, this one convened by the United Nations, the Haganah also publicly called upon the Yishuv to help find the two men. They were discovered unharmed twenty-four hours later when troops, acting on information obtained from their own sources, searched a Jewish settlement just up the coast from Ramat Gan.74

  The happy resolution of the latest Irgun hostage-taking episode nonetheless provided a fresh reminder of how vulnerable Britons were to abduction despite the plethora of security measures already in place. In the circumstances, the Palestine administration could only respond by adding a new layer of prohibitions to the restrictions previously imposed on the expatriate community’s daily existence. Henceforth, British civilians were forbidden to venture beyond the special security zones without military escort or, in exceptional circumstances, provided at least three persons in any group were armed. The extent of these additional secur
ity measures imposed on civilians and military personnel alike was immediately evident to Montgomery when he landed at Lydda Airport on June 21. The CIGS later described the route he took to Sarafand as “the most heavily guarded road [he] has ever seen.”75

  For the British authorities, the only bright spot in this increasingly melancholy picture was the Haganah’s growing inclination to take independent action against the terrorists. Shortly after the Acre raid, the Jewish Agency had finally caved in to government pressure and ordered the Haganah once more to commence operations against the Irgun. A special two-hundred-man task force had been created for this purpose, drawn entirely from regular Haganah units. This was because, unlike with the original Saison, members of the elite Palmach had refused to participate in the new campaign—which was generally far less popular than the previous iteration had been. Dubbed the Little Saison by the Irgun, it scored its first success on June 18 by foiling a potentially catastrophic attack on the local British military headquarters in Tel Aviv.76

  Situated within the special security zone adjacent to the Tel Aviv rail station, Citrus House—as the headquarters building was known—stood surrounded by concentric rings of barbed wire, pillboxes, high walls, and a heavily armed guard force. But the specialty of the Irgun’s operations chief was overcoming precisely such daunting obstacles. In this case, Paglin concluded, if a ground attack wasn’t possible, an alternative means of assault would have to be devised. His plan was brilliant in its simplicity. An Irgun operative posing as a potato merchant was sent to the neighborhood to inquire about leasing a cellar in which to store his produce. The ersatz merchant found exactly the place he was looking for in the basement of a building across the street from Citrus House. Thereafter, every morning a truck arrived to transport the sacks of potatoes stored in the basement to market. The sacks, however, contained not potatoes but dirt excavated from the forty-five-foot-long tunnel being dug by Irgun sappers toward Citrus House. Paglin’s intention was to pack the end of the tunnel with explosives once it was beneath the headquarters building and then blow it up. The publicity that would attend the Irgun’s ability to successfully target yet another bastion of British rule especially during the visit by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) would be enormous. But it was foiled when the Haganah learned of the plan and sent its own men to seal the tunnel with cement. An explosives expert was killed when he attempted to enter the booby-trapped passage. British troops immediately converged on the blast site. There, they found a message to the Irgun that had been written in chalk on the basement wall. “The Haganah was here. We want you by force not to carry out your evil intention. Signed Haganah.” Outside the building troops also found a truck loaded with bags of cement.77