Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  Copyright © 2016 by James Srodes

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Srodes, James, author.

  Title: Spies in Palestine: love, betrayal, and the heroic life of Sarah Aaronsohn / James Srodes.

  Description: Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016040205 |

  Subjects: LCSH: Aaronsohn, Sarah. | Aaronson family. | Aaronsohn, Aaron, 1876-1919. | NILI (Organization: Palestine) | Zionists--Palestine--Biography.

  Classification: LCC DS125.3.A864 S66 2016 | DDC 940.4/865694092 [B] --dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040205

  Cover design by Kelly Winton

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  Photographs courtesy of the Beit Aaronsohn Museum, Zichron Ya’akove, Israel

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  ebook ISBN 9781619028722

  For Cecile

  My Love Endures

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE: Who was Sarah Aaronsohn?

  CHAPTER TWO: Friends in America

  CHAPTER THREE: The Three Pashas

  CHAPTER FOUR: Love and War

  CHAPTER FIVE: Plagues of War and Locusts

  CHAPTER SIX: Success and Setback

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Sarah Takes Command

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Sarah Gets Her Orders and NILI Gets Its Name

  CHAPTER NINE: Sarah and NILI Make a Difference

  CHAPTER TEN: The Net Closes

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Twenty years ago I was deep in the files of what was then known as the British Public Records Office, now their National Archives, in the London suburb of Kew. As part of my research for a biography of Allen W. Dulles, the architect of and longest-serving director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, I was looking through pre–World War I records for the first reference British intelligence service had for Dulles at the start of his lifelong career as a spy.

  While British historical records are among the most meticulous, every archive has occasional documents that end up misfiled. To my surprise I found such a misplaced document. It was what was called a “minute,” dated 1920, a memorandum that circulated among various government agencies. In those glory days of the Empire’s bureaucracy, a “minute” was a large yellow document, fully eighteen by twelve inches, that had a three-inch space the length of the left-hand side where relevant civil servants had to sign their initials showing they had read it, as well as providing space for them to comment.

  This document had started with the War Office, then been approved by the Foreign Office, and was finally emerging from the British Treasury for action. It appropriated ten thousand pounds (hundreds of thousands of today’s dollars) to be spent by the British High Commission that ruled postwar Palestine to rebuild an agricultural experiment station at a coastal village called Athlit. It noted that the Turkish Army had destroyed the station in the waning days of World War I in reprisal against the Palestinian Jews who had operated the station and who had provided intelligence vital to the British victory in that region.

  What caught my eye was a handwritten comment in the margins by one of the civil servants who had passed on the minute. It said, “Considering our moral responsibility for the unhappy fate of the ‘A Organization,’ this is the least we could do.” At a time when the British Empire’s servants recognized few moral imperatives other than the advancement of the British flag and British commerce, this struck me as odd and so I made a note of it, put it away, and forgot about it.

  As often happens, this first sighting of the “A Organization” led to other references over the years and brought me to the story of Sarah Aaronsohn, the remarkable young woman who put her life in peril to direct a spy operation that led to a dramatic British victory over the Ottoman allies of Germany’s Kaiser. Part of the story that seized my imagination was the back story of how in those earliest days of the return of Jews from Europe to their Biblical homeland, there was a brief window of opportunity for a peaceful alliance of mutual interests with their indigenous Arab neighbors. Like most true stories, it is one of romance and loss as well as triumph, that is richer than any fictional tale. In Sarah’s story we also see choices being made that set in motion the sad events we see in that unhappy region today.

  Every biographer stands on the shoulders of the writers who went before him. I am no exception and freely thank the authors of the many histories of the First World War fought in the Middle East and of the lives of the principal characters—the Aaronsohn family, T.E. Lawrence, the Ottoman rulers, and the British and American political figures who groped through the fog of war and national ambitions.

  It is an important caution for the reader that not all histories, and certainly not all biographies, on this topic are in agreement. Contradictions of fact, disagreements over interpretation, and individual motives of the historians themselves can confuse. One of the tantalizing puzzles of the Sarah Aaronsohn story is the widely believed romance with T.E. Lawrence—the fabled Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence himself may have believed it was so. My task then was to navigate through these contradictions, mix in my new research, and apply my own interpretation of a vastly different time and people and tell the best story of Sarah Aaronsohn’s life that I could.

  —James Srodes

  Washington, DC

  May 2016

  PROLOGUE

  A Knock at the Door

  October 2–9, 1917

  For the Jews settled along the Mediterranean shores of the land known as Syria–Palestine, the final days of September 1917 should have been a time of plentiful harvests, family celebrations, and the sustaining observances of the season’s important religious holidays. But not in 1917. The once unimaginable carnage of the Great War was entering its third year with no end in sight. Too soon the war that began in 1914 turned to no purpose except to impel more young lives into the maw of a monstrous killing machine that stretched from France to the Arabian Gulf.

  Now after two years of starvation, there was a new threat of a genocidal pogrom by the Ottoman Turkish government. Many of those settlers who had clustered in Jaffa and Tel Aviv had been driven into the countryside, where they overwhelmed the already strapped network of thirty farm villages that stretched from Metula on the border of Lebanon in the north to Rishon-le-Zion near Gaza in the south.

  The town of Zichron Ya’akov, just south of Haifa, had been one of the more prosperous of these Jewish settlements. Founded in the late 1880s, it now boasted sturdy stone houses of European design that lined the paved streets. From a few dozen pioneer families at its start, Zichron Ya’akov’s population had swelled to more than a thousand Jewish residents as well as several hundred Arab workmen and their families who lived on the outskirts. It boasted a two-story synagogue plus a large communal barn normally filled with the combined harvests of the community, and a modern hotel that attracted wealthy travelers who paused there during the journey between Haifa and Jerusalem in the south.

  But that prosperity had vanished once the war in Europe had begun and
, now, an added terror gripped the townspeople. After months of rumor and suspicion it was clear that one of their own leading families was sending detailed reports about the Turkish Army to the British forces poised on the east bank of the Suez Canal. Turkish intelligence had recently found evidence of the spy ring in the area, and if they discovered the Zichron Ya’akov plotters there would be no wasted effort sorting out the innocent from the guilty; the entire community might be exterminated.

  Despite their anxiety, the villagers struggled to go on with their rituals of the season and their religion. This was the start of the Hebrew lunar calendar month of Tishri that marked four of the most holy periods for the observant. First came the two days of the New Year observance, Rosh Hashanah. The next ten days were the Days of Repentance, a period of acknowledging wrongs committed in the previous year. At the end of that came Yom Kippur, a Day of Atonement spent fasting and praying in the synagogue.

  Then, on October 1, came the ten days of Sukkot, a time when families gathered to remember the forty-year journey when Moses led his people out of slavery in Egypt as recounted in Exodus. Often referred to as the Feast of Booths, the observance required each family gathering to construct a temporary hut covered with leafy vegetation or palm fronds. There meals would be eaten and prayers of praise and remembrance would be offered. Normally it would be a time of joy. The harvest should have been gathered by then, and in between the times of prayer there would be dancing and song, and the young people of the village could relax and cast appraising glances at likely marriage prospects.

  Syria–Palestine had endured more than war. In 1915 a Biblical plague of locusts devoured almost every living plant and proved fatal to livestock. In that year and in the two that followed, the twenty thousand–man force that was the Ottoman Fourth Army of Turks and Germans now occupying the province had routinely pillaged the Jewish farms of scant reserves of grain and seized nearly all the livestock to support their successive campaigns to capture the Suez Canal and drive the British from Egypt.

  In a bitter irony, when the Ottoman offensives of 1915 and 1916 ended in defeat, Turkish officials fixed the blame on the Jews themselves. Beginning in the summer of 1917 Jewish residents of Jaffa and Tel Aviv were expelled into the countryside. The people of Zichron Ya’akov, already pressed to the limits of endurance, were terrified that the Turkish suspicions of Jewish subversion would be justified if the spies among them were discovered.

  The Aaronsohn family was to blame, even their friends were forced to admit that. It had become apparent to everyone in the community that something dangerous had been going on for more than a year. Strangers had been seen at the sprawling compound of the family’s patriarch, Ephraim Aaronsohn, on Founders Street. And at the agricultural experiment station founded by the eldest son Aaron ten miles away at the tiny coastal hamlet of Athlit, there were rumors that a British ship could be spotted at anchor offshore at night. Most of the gossip focused on Sarah, the older of Ephraim’s daughters, whose behavior in recent months had been suspicious—indeed some said scandalous. She clearly was up to no good.

  In truth, the Aaronsohns had never been popular in Zichron Ya’akov. They had been prominent and influential, but their prosperity and prominence caused offended feelings among some of the other early settlers. This was despite the fact that Ephraim had been one of the first pioneer families to arrive in Palestine in the 1880s. And Aaron had become an international celebrity for his discoveries on improving the impoverished soil of the region. As a teenager he had become a protégé of the powerful French Baron Edmond de Rothschild and had been a conduit of much of the charitable subsidies that flowed into the village from the baron and from wealthy Jews in the United States. That influence and Aaron’s habit of allocating most of the funds only to those who backed his schemes added resentment to the envy that had long simmered below the surface among many villagers.

  But now Aaron, as well as three other siblings, had vanished. Some said they were in America living in luxury. Others said they were in Cairo with the British plotting an insurrection against the Turks that would get everyone killed. This had left Sarah in charge of both the family home and the strange goings-on at Athlit. Earlier in September the village elders had become so alarmed at the suspicious activity that a delegation had warned her to either cease spying or face reprisals—even denunciation to the Turks. She had not denied the accusations but merely had asked for time to respond.

  Now it seemed it was too late for the spies to disband and be rescued by the British. Patrols of watchmen along the beach had been doubled. Mounted Ottoman gendarmerie had been searching the passes through the hills to the south and the desert vastness beyond. The Kaimakan, the chief magistrate of Haifa, had been going from village to village demanding information about treason among the Jews.

  But Zichron Ya’akov clung to its customs. On the first day of Sukkot one of the prominent families invited everyone to an afternoon celebration of their son’s marriage betrothal. Sarah went to the festivities, to represent the Aaronsohn family and to show her neighbors that she was unafraid of the threats. While the party was not nearly as lavish as it might have been in more prosperous times, everyone put on a cheerful face once the music and dancing began.

  Some of the celebrants noticed that Sarah suddenly was called outside by one of the Arab workers from the Athlit station. Turkish police had been to his nearby village looking for spies and specifically asked about her by name. Without taking leave of her hosts, she quickly saddled her horse and hurried to Athlit. She spent the rest of the day burning incriminating documents, including the final intelligence reports she had hoped to send to Cairo when the British ship made its next visit. She also dismissed all the experiment station’s Arab workers, telling them to return to their villages and, if questioned, deny all knowledge of the spy ring’s activities.

  As evening approached, she made her way back to her father’s home, which was a compound of three buildings that fronted on the main thoroughfare, Founders Street. She felt a twinge of guilt for not having prepared the ritual Sukkot meal for the start of this important holy period. But the house was dark and empty. There was no sign of her father Ephraim or brother Zvi. Before she could speculate why they had not begun to build the small hut out of palm fronds for the observance, there was a pounding on the door and shouts for her to open it.

  There in the gathering darkness stood a Turkish sergeant of the gendarmerie and several others in uniforms. The sergeant demanded to know if she was the daughter of Ephraim Aaronsohn and when she said she was, they grabbed her roughly by the arms and half-dragged her out of the house toward the street. Her protests and demands to know what was going on were met with stolid silence.

  On most days Founders Street was busy with local farmers and merchants and with travelers pausing on journeys between Haifa and Jerusalem to stay at the town’s hotel. Evenings normally also saw neighbors strolling up and down, pausing at gates to visit with each other. But not now. The afternoon party had quickly broken up at the approach of the Turkish police. All the houses were now shuttered, not a glimmer of lamplight could be seen within. Zichron Ya’akov was holding its breath in fear of attracting a glance from the Turks.

  At the far end of Founders Street stood a large house that had been commandeered as a jail and interrogation center for suspects. That night Sarah found Turkish soldiers crowding into the front room, where a long table had been set in a circle of lighted lamps.

  Sarah recognized the two officers at the table: one was the Kaimakan, the chief magistrate from Haifa. The other was the gendarmerie sefi, the head of the militarized police force for the area. Both were sitting stiffly, trying to maintain the dignity of their offices while conveying deadly menace to her. After a glance at some papers on the desk, the magistrate asked her sharply, “Are you the Jewess Abraham?”

  Sarah replied calmly that Abraham was the name of her husband in Constantinople but that since she had returned home to her family she was known here in Zi
chron Ya’akov as Sarah Aaronsohn.

  This drew a sly smirk from the policeman as if he had trapped her in an admission. “Then I bring greetings to you from Colonel Bek who says to tell Sarah Aaronsohn that he had long suspected her and her family of being traitors to the government and spies for the enemy British.”

  This was an unwelcome disclosure. Colonel Aziz Bek was the head of the counterintelligence service of the Turkish Fourth Army that was challenging the British on the battle lines that fronted the Suez Canal. Bek had been chief of police in Constantinople when Sarah had lived there. He was dreaded for having a razor-sharp mind and an animalistic cruelty in dealing with suspects.

  Sarah judged that if Colonel Bek had already singled out the Aaronsohn family, then the two local officials confronting her in the makeshift interrogation center were on no mere fishing expedition. The time left to the spy operation known as NILI that she had directed over these few perilous months would now be numbered in hours, not days.

  Before she could respond, the police chief nodded to the soldiers who had arrested her. She was half-carried to the rear to an empty room. As she was hurried past other rooms she could only glimpse the huddled forms of men lying in the dim light of the enclosures. One face leaped out at her as she was rushed by: it appeared to be one of her brothers, Zvi, but she must be mistaken. His face was so bruised and distorted; his staring eyes did not show that he recognized her.

  Her horror grew when two soldiers appeared from another room with her father between them. Ephraim was dazed and helpless. She was abruptly returned to the front room where she protested to the two Turkish officials, but they paid no attention. Ephraim was held limply upright by his two captors as the Kaimakan began to shout at him that he knew all about the secret spy organization the old man was directing on behalf of the British enemy. He knew that the spy group called itself the NILI, whatever that might mean. Who were their agents? the policeman demanded. What information about the Ottoman armies in Palestine had the NILI given the British? What plans did the British have to invade Palestine, and when?