Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  Sarah was deputized to oversee the operations at Athlit while Aaron was away fighting a second season of locust infestations. He also continued courting Djamal in Damascus. What was intended as a temporary delegation by Aaron turned into an extended stay in the provincial capital when a horse-riding accident injured his leg and confined him to a bed in a hotel with a serious infection. Now it was up to Sarah to receive the agent reports and transfer them into the enciphered forms that would be loaded into waterproof leather bags in the event that the Managem ever stopped for a delivery.

  Hardly had Absalom sent a telegram announcing that he had received permission to go to Romania than a miracle occurred at Athlit. Lieutenant Woolley had finally realized that the silence from the Athlit group could only be explained by their failure to get the new signal system information. He set out from Port Said in a small coastal schooner, pausing offshore near Athlit and putting a messenger ashore with a new set of instructions and encouragement to restart the flow of information from the network. Again, it was a close call. The messenger was a stranger to the neighborhood but managed to scramble up the slope to one of the garden beds. Then the dogs that Aaron had set out to warn of intruders began barking and the messenger was afraid to go farther to the house. In a panic he wedged the packet containing the letter and a set of new instructions from Woolley into the crossbar of a plow standing in the garden. Then he fled back to the rowboat just offshore and back to the schooner.

  There was another stroke of luck. Aaron, still recovering, had managed to return from Damascus a few days earlier. The next morning as he walked through the garden beds near the station, he spotted the packet affixed to the plow before any of the Arab workers saw it. Aaron quickly dashed off a telegram to Absalom to abandon his journey through the Balkans and return to Zichron Ya’akov at once. Woolley’s message put everything right. A new code and cipher system was included, along with an encouraging message that the navy chiefs in Port Said were eager for whatever intelligence they could provide. When Aaron had something to hand over, he was to hang dark-colored blankets from the station windows that faced the sea. The Managem would proceed up the coast on its blockade duties and then pause the next night for the transfers of Gideonite intelligence and new queries.

  As so often happened in the Aaronsohn saga, fortune suddenly took a turn for the worse. They had no way of knowing that Lieutenant Woolley would never make it back to Port Said. As he continued up the coast to the port city of Alexandretta to contact naval intelligence sources, the small vessel was torpedoed by a Turkish cruiser and sunk. He was captured by the Turks and held prisoner for the rest of the war. No one in the Port Said headquarters bothered to restart the contacts.

  Disturbing news came from Turkish newspapers a few weeks later. While Djamal Pasha’s second offensive had failed in January, a reorganized force in April had trapped thirteen thousand British and Indian troops at Kutal Amara in the desert and forced them to surrender. With the survivors of the Gallipoli disaster still being ministered to, there now was no prospect that General Murray would undertake an attack across the Suez into Palestine.

  During May and June, Aaron, Sarah, and Absalom fretted under the renewed isolation from their British contacts. Meanwhile, life among the Jewish settlements—indeed all of Syria–Palestine—grew more dire. The efforts to control the second locust infestation had met with slightly better results, but crops that were supposed to tide the population through the winter were clearly not sufficient, while the demands of Turkish authorities for greater contributions grew. Finally, Aaron made one of his typically bold decisions. Rather than try to reach the British in Cairo he would go to the source of ultimate authority, the British government in London.

  This was a far riskier venture but to the three comrades it made sense. The Asquith government in London had been replaced by one led by the more dynamic, albeit erratic, David Lloyd George, and a coalition of forces that had pledged a far more vigorous prosecution of the war—both on the Western Front and in the Middle East. General Murray, it was rumored in the Turkish press, was on his way out, to be replaced by a commander that Lloyd George demanded “have more dash.”

  Moreover, Aaron was well aware that Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the powerful Zionist Movement in Europe, had great influence with the new Prime Minister and his senior ministers. Weizmann was a research chemist in Britain who used the name of Charles Weizmann on his many chemical patents. At the outbreak of the war, he donated to the government a formula for creating acetone, a crucial ingredient for the British war industries. Now he was the head of the government’s commission on wartime research developments and had been instrumental in convincing Lloyd George that expanded efforts to knock the Turks out of the war were crucial. Later, of course, as Chaim Weizmann he would become the first president of the new state of Israel. But that was still to come; for the moment, Aaron counted on winning Weizmann’s support for the Cairo command to make full use of the Gideonites.

  Aaron was too large a figure (literally) to adopt the disguises that had enabled Alexander and Absalom to slip out of any Palestinian port city. His own prominence as a community leader and quasi-official of Djamal Pasha would mean his unexplained disappearance would soon be spotted and the reprisals against the occupants of Athlit and Zichron Ya’akov would be swift and horrible.

  The scientific illiteracy of Turkish officials offered Aaron a way out. The Allied blockade and the unavoidable destructiveness of modern war meant the Turks were desperate for oil and lubricants of all kinds. Whether it was transport vehicles, artillery and machine guns, or ordinary rifles, the wear of battle and the pervasive corrosion of desert sand meant that the Turkish war machine needed oil. They had been reduced to trying to fabricate alternatives from the oils of the poisonous castor bean, but it was unsatisfactory as a substitute and insufficient in supply.

  But, Aaron argued to Djamal, Syria–Palestine abounded in sesame, indeed sesame oil was already being pressed as a cooking additive. As an industrial lubricant it was useless, but the Turks could not know that and Djamal was desperate for a new source. Could Aaron devise such a conversion? Not at once, was Aaron’s studied reply, but he knew of identical experiments at a prestigious Swedish institute where he had contacts. If he could just get permission to go there and confer with his Swedish colleagues and use their far more modern equipment, he was sure something would come of it.

  In mid-July 1916, Djamal relented and Aaron set out for Constantinople with letters from the Pasha urging permits and authority to let him travel through the heart of the Central Powers and reach the neutral haven of Sweden. From there, passage to London would be easy. But once in Constantinople, Aaron found that Enver Pasha and his minions were intrigued but still suspicious. Instead of Sweden, Aaron was ordered to go to Berlin. Once there Aaron was to test his theories about sesame before his former mentors in the German scientific hierarchy. The German commanders advising Enver were determined to keep Aaron close since Germany too was starved of oils for food as well as lubricants.

  Once in Berlin, Aaron duly underwent interviews with senior German scientists, including his old mentor Otto Warburg, who were initially skeptical since their own experiments with alternatives to petroleum-based fuels had been frustrating. But Aaron was at his best when he was arguing about science and he used his forceful personality as well as his scientific reputation to at least conditionally silence doubters. Besides, the Germans were well aware of the Swedish experiments and were not about to be caught lagging. After six weeks, in late August, Aaron was given permission to go to Sweden by way of neutral Copenhagen. He would be closely watched, he knew that. Also, both the Germans and Turks knew he had left family behind in Palestine; what better hostages to ensure he would return home if his theories proved correct?

  Before he left Berlin, Aaron visited a woman friend from Palestine, a cousin of Naaman Belkind, who was studying there. She would serve as the conduit to get a message back to Absalom and Sarah, who were waiting i
mpatiently at Athlit. Once he got to Copenhagen, Aaron used the delays in getting Swedish visas to enter that country to evade his German shadows and make his first contact with the British consul.

  British officials are congenitally suspicious of strangers who show up offering intelligence schemes that seem too good to be true. So it was with Sir Robert Paget, the consul there, who politely declined to help Aaron get to Britain through any subterfuge about him going to America. But diplomats are civil servants and prudently he notified his superiors in the Foreign Office. To his surprise he got an instant response from an Admiral Reginald Hall, ordering him to find some clandestine way of getting Aaronsohn into the country without jeopardizing his cover as a Turkish citizen. “Blinker” Hall (so-called because one of his eyes twitched) was the head of a secret department known as NID, which was Britain’s counterespionage service. Then Aaron produced a telegram from the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (prompted by David Fairchild) stating that Aaron was an accredited consultant to the department and was urgently needed in Washington to help with food production.

  Since the United States was still a neutral nation, Sir Robert and the London intelligence officials saw a way to get Aaron out of Copenhagen and into London without alerting the Germans or the Turks to his intentions. Passenger liners still sailed nonstop to America and were allowed to pass through the deadly blockades of both the Allies and Central Powers—even with the necessity of pausing at a coaling station in the remote Orkney Islands at the northernmost tip of Scotland to refuel for the long haul across the Atlantic. British officials routinely boarded such ships for inspections of passenger documents and cargo, since the Orkneys also included the huge port of Scapa Flow where the Royal Navy’s High Seas Fleet was berthed. But since passengers had American visas or passports, the Germans did not object lest they further provoke the Wilson Administration.

  There remained some problems. The only liner scheduled to embark from Copenhagen at the moment was a Scandinavian–American liner that was fully booked with the last remnants of American expatriates desperate to get home. But luck intervened. Two of the ticketed passengers were a pair of American rabbis who were returning after supervising a charity’s supplies to relieve the starvation the Germans had wreaked on Belgium a year earlier. They knew of Aaron and agreed to let him share their cabin for the six-day trip from Denmark to Scotland. Meanwhile, Hall and his agency were busy with strategizing to get Aaron off the ship once it stopped at the coaling station at Kirkwall.

  Finally on October 16, 1916, after nearly a month of delays, Aaron boarded the Oskar II and steamed away from Europe. Before he left, he sent a telegram to Naaman Belkind’s cousin in Berlin to pass on to Sarah and Absalom at Athlit. There is uncertainty as to the exact language, or perhaps the telegram was garbled in translation on its way. The message was clearly meant to be read by both German and Turkish intelligence, and on its surface it merely said that Aaron had grown frustrated sitting in Copenhagen trying to get a visa to enter Sweden. He had changed his mind and would go to neutral America instead. There, he added, his friends at the U.S. Department of Agriculture would certainly be more cooperative in his sesame experiments.

  Instead of taking the hint that he was on his way to London at last, Sarah and Absalom were confused and alarmed. They wondered if Aaron had given up trying to win British support and had gone on to seek aid in America. Neither of them could suppress a fear that he had become disheartened with the cause they fought for and had joined Alexander and Rivka to sit out the war in safety and ease.

  The confusion and fear that Aaron had abandoned them gripped both Sarah and Absalom at a vulnerable time. They spent hours of isolation in the upper room of the station keeping a constant watch for any sign that the British wanted to resume contact. Their conversations grew more personal and then dangerously intense. Sarah poured out her sorrow at the loveless marriage she had made. There was no question of a divorce. But there was no question either that she would ever go back to Constantinople. Before he had left Athlit the summer before, Aaron had written to Chaim to stop demanding her return or threatening to come retrieve her. In his turn, Absalom confessed that his proposal to Rivka had been a mistake. It was Sarah he had loved from the start and it was Sarah whom he loved still, now even more than ever. His only excuse was that the four-way relationship that linked him with Aaron, Sarah, and Rivka had confused him into thinking one was interchangeable with the other. He was wrong. Sarah was the only one he truly loved.

  Sarah gave way to her isolation, her fatigue, her fear, and her own inner passion. Shy confessions of affection blended easily into professions of love. Tentative kisses and hugs became more intimate as the winter nights became longer and lonelier. Finally there came the caresses of love itself with its exhilaration and release. For a few weeks at the end of that year the two lovers enjoyed each other without shame or restraint. There were moments when the two even dreamed of a life together after the clouds of war had been blown away by liberation. Rivka and the rest of the family would understand, and they could live a long life of joy and promise in the new land they had helped to create.

  The euphoria of new love, of course, could not last. The constant threats of discovery by the Turks and suspicion of their neighbors in Zichron Ya’akov grew frightening. A delegation of village elders had summoned Sarah to a meeting and demanded that whatever was going on at the Athlit station cease at once. Djamal Pasha had suddenly ordered the entire Jewish community of the city of Jaffa and its suburb of Tel Aviv to be expelled and their property seized under the pretext that there were saboteurs at work there. Other Jewish neighborhoods in the main port cities also were being brutalized and the refugees fled by the hundreds to any relatives they had in the more remote settler farm villages. Zichron Ya’akov was jammed with these destitute exiles; thousands more had been driven out to primitive camps in the desert, where famine and exposure were certain.

  Did Sarah want such a catastrophe to be visited upon them, the elders demanded? If she did not promise to disband the spy group rumor said she was running, the elders told her they had no choice but to denounce her to Colonel Bek and his torturers. Sarah refused to admit what her spy band was doing but said, instead, she needed time to make changes in the workers at the station and perhaps then their suspicions would abate. Since the elders were not exactly certain what was going on, they grumbled but finally gave her time.

  The flow of intelligence was creating a backlog of information that was time-sensitive. Yet how were the British to learn of it? Against her better judgement and against her own emotional intuition, she finally gave in to Absalom’s own frustration at being idle. He would go again to Cairo and seek out Woolley and rebuild the contacts to allow the intelligence flow to finally help hasten British liberation.

  While Sarah refused to admit her fears, Absalom’s impatience got the better of him. He would not wait. So once again he would try to cross the Sinai to reach British outposts. This time his cousin Josef Lishansky, who had been the group’s man on the southernmost border of Palestine, insisted on accompanying him. He had recently come to Athlit to play a more active role, but now argued that he knew the desert passes to British outposts better than Absalom. As he and Josef organized their journey, Absalom wrote a letter to Lieutenant Woolley in the belief that he was still in Port Said. If a ship did come after he left, it could warn Woolley of his arrival.

  The letter said, “I have made up my mind, whatever may happen, that I shall try to cross the desert in order to reach you. . . .

  “I have to run my last course, and I wish you to note that I am doing this in service to His Majesty George V, King of England, whom I have already crowned in my thoughts as King of Eretz Israel and Mesopotamia. . . . I wish you testify to this in order that it may be said to my comrades here, to those who tomorrow will be your comrades in arms. . . .”

  After planning the route that seemed safest, and securing camels sturdy enough to endure the trek, the pair set out in mid-January
of the New Year.

  With his flair for the dramatic, Absalom had left Sarah a poem on the table of the station’s room where they had found happiness:

  If we shall fall before we reach our goal.

  If we should not be privileged to see

  Our people safe returned to the ancestral home

  A nation proud and strong and free

  Then to our sons and daughters we bequeath

  Our places in the ranks of liberty.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sarah Takes Command

  January–March 1917

  Sarah, ca. spring 1917

  As the war staggered into the new year of 1917, Sarah’s sense of isolation brought the added strain of unexpected criticism about the spy band’s activities from her neighbors and even from within her own family.

  It was bad enough that Absalom and Josef Lishansky had disappeared into the desert, and the silence was ominous. There was no way of knowing their fate, and an added vexation was the fact that Alexander and Rivka had also vanished into a world of wealthy friends in New York. Another brother, Shmuel, had migrated to America before the war as well. The remaining brother, Zvi, became more active in the spy group’s activities in the area around Zichron Ya’akov, but he also began to complain that he should take command and that Sarah should step aside. Absalom’s cousin Naaman Belkind had come north to Athlit to work more directly, but he was young and prone to the same reckless enthusiasm as Absalom. Nor did he stay for long because he was needed at the winery at Rishon-le-Zion.

  So Sarah relied upon herself. This transformation of Sarah Aaronsohn became complete, and she more than any of the men in her life truly became, as some later called her, the Flame of Israel. Aaron had gathered the first dozens of spies (mostly Gideonites), and Sarah now set out to recruit new sources of intelligence. The original Gideonite band had operated under the guise of fighting the locust infestations of the two past years in largely rural areas. Now Sarah singled out men and women whose occupations gave them special vantage points to report on specific Turkish regiments, the supply depots that supported them, and the state of the rapidly deteriorating network of railroads and bridges by which Djamal’s army would maneuver if he mounted another attack on the British.