by James Srodes
So despite her fatigue and alarm at how NILI had deteriorated, Sarah threw herself into trying to set things right. She made effective use of the gold and won a grudging reprieve from the Yishuv by letting them take charge of much of the money and distribute it. She also sent Josef traveling to revive the network and the flow of current intelligence.
This began NILI’s most productive time. The courier ship now came on a dependable schedule, but the most current data on troop movements were entrusted to the homing pigeons that were often launched six at a time with capsules of enciphered messages in Hebrew script. Replacements were regularly brought ashore with each ship visit, and Sarah and Liova spent hours encoding and transcribing as soon as the intelligence arrived.
By this time General Murray had been recalled to Britain, loaded with promotions and medals. On June 27, his replacement, General Edmund Allenby, arrived, and one of the first people he asked to see was Aaron Aaronsohn.
Allenby was the very idea of a fighting general, to Prime Minister Lloyd George. A veteran cavalry officer, Allenby had risen in notoriety and criticism at Western Front battles at Ypres and the Somme. His strategy was always to counterattack whenever the Germans launched an offensive. His casualty lists were horrendous and his troops called him “Bloody Bull” for erupting into a towering rage at any miscarriage of his orders. But his soldiers fought for him because he paid special attention to their support and care whenever they were not on the attack.
Before he sailed for Cairo he had been given Aaron’s original report plus the more recent memos that Clayton’s aides had drafted. In the first week of July, Lawrence and a band of Howeitat captured Aqaba and added to the rekindling of optimism in Cairo. So which strategy would this new commander choose? Faced with the Arab–Zionist division of opinion within his command, Allenby broke the impasse by choosing both strategies. The Arab uprising would be used to distract the Turks at Gaza, while the real attack would begin where Aaron had advised, against Beersheba on the eastern flank. As a condition to taking the command, he had won grudging assent from London for a fresh supply of troops and heavy weapons that would be siphoned away from France.
Allenby had promised Lloyd George to meet his demand to capture Jerusalem by Christmas, and he did not intend to fail.
CHAPTER TEN
The Net Closes
July–December 1917
Lawrence in a posed costume, ca. 1919
Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, Cairo, 1917
The net began to close on Sarah and NILI, even as General Allenby moved his headquarters in Cairo closer to the front in early August. The new commander firmly believed in personally overseeing the build-up for the all-out attack on Gaza based on Aaron’s strategy. The whole region from Cairo to Beirut was in ferment in the late summer of 1917. The commanders of the opposing armies were braced for what would be the final struggle. In the Jewish settlements of Palestine there was the heightened despair that even if they survived the carnage of the impending battle, the threat of starvation could destroy them just the same.
More than anyone else, Sarah was operating at stress levels that could not be sustained for long. Bouts of malarial fever and malnutrition had sapped her strength. The workload was crushing. She now had two dozen full-time agents and a network of roughly twice that number of auxiliaries—sources of occasional but often vitally important intelligence. Spread from Damascus to Jerusalem, most of the full-time agents were former Gideonites and personal loyalists. The others often held positions of trust—and thus of equal danger—as civilian workers for the Turkish government or armed forces: clerks, telephone operators, physicians. These required a steady infusion of money to compensate for the risks they took. While the NILI needed no bribes, they had expenses, too.
The simple logistics of getting intelligence from its source—a code clerk at Turkish headquarters in Damascus—back to Athlit, and from there to Cairo, was an increasing nightmare for Sarah and Josef Lishansky. Travel by railroad was expensive and the roads were in an advancing stage of decay because of the Turks’ movement of heavy artillery back and forth, and their neglect of any maintenance.
Most worrying was the increase in Turkish patrols, and reports Sarah received that there had been inquiries by the authorities suspicious of a spy ring operating among the Jews. NILI had other problems. While both the British and French operated independent spy operations throughout Syria–Palestine, these were uncoordinated and only occasionally fruitful. Yet they left footprints that aroused suspicions of the Turks. Only NILI was still completely undetected—but not for much longer.
Sarah reported to Aaron, “We are under increasing surveillance. Patrols stop travelers everywhere and more often now bribes do not work and there are more arrests. But we continue.”
Djamal Pasha’s chief of counterintelligence, Colonel Aziz Bek, had become so alarmed at the specter of a Jewish spy plot that could turn into their version of the Arab Revolt, that he moved the headquarters of his counterintelligence corps from Damascus to Jerusalem that summer. He had evidence that the army’s band of coast watchers were worse than useless drunkards who rarely patrolled, despite frequent reports of strange ships at anchor offshore in the dark of night.
He had a personal motive as well as his official duty: He despised Djamal Pasha for his ineptitude and greed, and also for his dissolute taste for Jewish women. He had received reports that Djamal had even propositioned a woman named Sarah Aaronsohn when she stayed at the Fast Hotel in Jerusalem earlier that summer. He had known both Aaron and Sarah when they visited Djamal and attended social gatherings in Damascus earlier in the war. He resented their influence with his commander. Since Aaron was reported to have vanished, he made a note to investigate the sister further.
Meanwhile the pressure on Sarah and NILI to deliver an increasing flow of real-time intelligence grew exponentially, as General Allenby and his new cadre of commanders pushed to complete plans and position their troops for the final assault on Gaza and the vital coast road running northward. The schedule was to attack early in September. The plan was based on one Aaron had been arguing for since his arrival in Cairo in 1916. The capture of Beersheba with its vast underground reservoirs on the far eastern flank of the Turkish positions was to be followed by a quick capture of successive villages, where in Biblical times there had been ample subsurface wells that the engineers could drill and pump back into existence.
Water was every bit as vital to the British offensive as firepower. Most of the troops of the Australian and New Zealand forces that were to attack the eastern flank were mounted, and virtually all of the artillery and support vehicles were horse-drawn. While the ANZAC troopers were jokingly said to exist on their beer rations, the animals could not. Aaron spent much of July on scouting missions with ANZAC engineers spotting where the likely wells and springs could be found, while Allenby rushed into constructing a water filtration plant capable of purifying six hundred thousand gallons of water a day and a pipeline to carry water from the Nile all the way to the forward British lines. Once the force pushed ahead on the attack, it would be up to Aaron’s wells to carry them across the desert so they could flank the Turkish positions at Gaza. Aaron also advised bringing sufficient pipes to bring fresh water to Jerusalem whose supplies had been ruined by Turkish mismanagement.
To the horror of the Arab Bureau staff and Arabists at headquarters, Aaron also was advising Allenby and his political strategists about how the Jews of Palestine could be an important part of the British administration of the region after the Turks were forced out. Since the Arabists (with explicit permission of the Lloyd George government) had promised both Sharif Hussein of Mecca (and it was hoped, Medina) and Ibn Saud, chief of the Wahhabi Arabs of Riyadh, that each would be the sovereign over all of Syria–Palestine, the idea of sharing any of the region with the Jews was unthinkable.
“Aaronsohn is running HQ these days,” complained an irritated Captain Edmonds in a letter to a friend. Lawrence was more than irritated when
he arrived in Cairo in August flush with his success at Aqaba. Newly promoted to captain, Lawrence was affronted to learn there was now a new plan for the administration of Palestine that rivaled his own. Aaron recorded their first of many confrontations in his diary on August 12.
I had a chat with Captain Lawrence this morning. Our interview was devoid of amenity. He has been too successful at an early age—and is infatuated with himself. He gave me a lesson on our colonies—the mentality of the people—the feelings (sentiment) of the Arabs, etc., etc. As I was listening to him I could almost imagine that I was attending a conference by a scientific anti-Semitic Prussian speaking English. I am afraid the German spirit has taken deeper root in the minds of pastors and archaeologists.
One would gather from the above interview that nothing can be done in Judea and Samaria where Faisal will never gain access. There might be something to do in Galilea. But Lawrence will conduct his investigation by his own methods in order to learn of the mentality of the Jews in Galilean colonies. If they are in favor of the Arabs they will be spared, otherwise they will have their throats cut. He is still at the age where people do not doubt themselves—happy young man! He is plainly hostile to us. He must be of missionary breed.
While Aaron was well aware that Sarah and NILI were in increasing danger, he was so preoccupied with expanding his influence with Allenby and the ascendant Zionists on the staff, that all he did in those final weeks of summer was urge Sarah to board the Managem as soon as possible and come to Cairo. That she could not and would not do. It would be a betrayal of the other NILI agents and put her remaining family members in peril, not to mention threaten Zichron Ya’akov as well.
All the while Sarah was handling an ever-increasing demand by the British for more detailed and more current intelligence on where the Turkish and German troops were being moved, and the location of new fortifications. NILI produced a huge volume of vital data in response, astonishing given the logistical obstacles in their path.
On several occasions their reports of new construction for trench lines and artillery emplacements allowed British bombers to destroy the projects. Before long, Sarah’s operatives had provided Allenby with what is known as an order of battle—a list of every German and Turkish unit, the number of effective troops in each unit, the amount and kinds of weapons, and numbers and types of artillery, as well as the names of the regimental commanders and their exact positions and what their orders were. No general ever went on the attack with a better grasp of his enemy and his strength.
Even in her time of triumph Sarah’s life began to unravel. She was continually vexed by Josef Lishansky’s growing instability. She suspected he was pilfering sums of the aid money he was supposed to be distributing to communities in dire need of support, and spending it on showy new suits and neckties. He was already an anathema to his former Ha-Shomer compatriots, although she firmly believed him innocent of accusations that he had murdered an Arab. The result was that Josef could no longer risk traveling about the region gathering intelligence from the operatives in the field. He was effectively confined to Zichron Ya’akov and, finally, his presence there began to cause problems.
To her alarm, her brother Zvi believed the Ha-Shomer charges and, worse, believed Josef had murdered Absalom as well. Zvi had a longstanding complaint: Aaron, Absalom, and Alexander had implemented the NILI ring without consulting him. And he was infuriated that Sarah had not turned to him to be second in command of NILI, even though he had been only a part-time operative from the start. He put them all in danger by passing on his suspicions to the childlike Naaman Belkind, who was deeply devoted to his cousin Absalom and increasingly suspicious at his disappearance.
Naaman had produced a great deal of good intelligence from his southern vantage point at Rishon-le-Zion. But he treated the task as a game and took reckless risks. He used the village’s wine supplies to curry favor with German and even Turkish officers, and made deliveries as far as the headquarters at Beersheba where he openly asked suspicious questions. For the moment, the officers treated him as a naïve and sometimes annoying clown—but one still welcome for the wine he freely dispensed.
Zvi finally became convinced that NILI under Sarah and Josef endangered the family as well as the community. While Ephraim had known about what his children were doing, Zvi convinced him that the risks were now too great. In August, as their fears grew, a Zichron village council sent some elders to them, and later demanded to see Sarah.
When Sarah met with the elders, they informed her that her conduct with the married Lishansky was scandalous in itself. They also were convinced that she and Lishansky engaged in dangerous spying for the British and put the whole community, indeed all of the Jewish settlements, in extreme peril. Had she not seen with her own eyes what the Turks did to the Armenians? Did she not see her home village jammed with refugees from Djamal Pasha’s expulsion of Jews from Jaffa and Tel Aviv? Did she really believe these British were going to liberate Palestine from the Turks—and even if it were true, at what cost?
Believing that Allenby’s attack was days away, Sarah stalled for time. Without admitting anything, she agreed that she and Josef would stop staying in the house on Founders Street and stay out at Athlit. Moreover, she vaguely promised to begin scaling back some of her activities. She needed time, she said, for were they not aware that she had been distributing a great deal of needed relief money, much of it going into their own hands? Grumbling, the elders went away but not before ominously warning her that if she did not stop spying, they might denounce her to the Turks. As it turned out, the threat was more than ominous.
Then, toward the end of August, a series of actions by the British began to fatally undermine the safety of Sarah and the entire NILI network. There is a suspicion among some early historians of the Aaronsohn saga that some of those mistakes were intentionally undertaken by Aaron’s enemies among the Arabists at the Savoy headquarters. A more charitable, but just as unprovable, interpretation is that the British were so preoccupied with the run-up to the Third Battle of Gaza that they got careless. The consequences were fatal nonetheless.
First, there was a security failure regarding the gold sovereign coins delivered by the Managem in heavy leather sacks. Sarah had long ago handed over the forty thousand French francs to the central council of the Yishuv and its Ha-Shomer force for distribution to the starving Jewish villages that needed to buy food and pay bribes to their increasingly rapacious Arab neighbors. The British gold to support NILI operations amounted to a few hundred pounds a month—paltry when compared to the hundreds of thousands of pounds Lawrence and others were paying to Hussein and Saud—but it was vital. For one thing, it kept the elders of Zichron Ya’akov from taking any action that would disrupt flow of aid to them.
The British and French had maintained a tight blockade of the Syria–Palestine coast since early 1915, therefore basic security protocol demanded that no gold given to Sarah should show mint marks later than 1914. But Colonel Bek’s operatives began picking up sovereign coins minted in 1916, and that could only mean that the enemy was operating a more formidable spy operation in his territory than had been suspected.
Then there were the pigeons. For Sarah the pigeons had been a nuisance from the start. Scarce materials had to be used to build a dovecote as specified in the army manual that came with the first shipment. Even scarcer grain had to be supplied to feed the birds, and workers had to be diverted to keep the birds clean and fed. While Allenby’s army used radio telegraphs and had an extensive field telephone system connected to headquarters, the final maneuvers and scouting made increasing use of their own pigeons to connect with more distant outposts.
In those final weeks when the demand for information rose exponentially, the replacement birds provided the Athlit station were clearly not well trained. Some refused to leave the dovecote at all. Others flew a short distance and returned. Some just disappeared.
One morning in early September, the Moudir, the chief of police for
Caesarea just south of Athlit, rose early and after prayers and a cup of tea he followed his custom and went into his garden in his robe to feed and admire his flock of homing pigeons. He was extremely proud of his birds but that morning he noticed a strange pigeon had landed at the coop to feed.
Curious, he picked up the bird and saw it had a small rubber capsule fixed to one leg. He removed it and prying it open, found a tightly wound ribbon of fragile paper. As he unrolled it he saw it was a series of Hebrew letters that he suspected at once of being some kind of cipher he could not translate. He sent it at once to Colonel Aziz Bek, and when his staff could not unscramble the message it was rushed by courier to Constantinople. While the message could not be deciphered there either, Bek got immediate and explicit orders—find the Jewish spy ring operating so blatantly in his jurisdiction, and do it at once.
The spymasters of the EMSIB in Cairo began to get sloppy with their own network of spies in the area. Two young Christian Palestinians were immediately rounded up after being put ashore north of Haifa. A Jesuit priest was denounced and arrested in possession of some of the later mint sovereigns. Tortured, they all quickly admitted their spying, and further confirmed that there was yet another spy ring operated by Jews farther south. Bek’s focus narrowed, and he flooded the area between Haifa and Caesarea with his own agents and mounted gendarmerie who went from village to village to question terrified residents.
Sarah was soon aware of these disasters, and her letters to Aaron reflected her growing fears that the Turks were closing in on her and NILI. As a precaution, she destroyed the remaining pigeons and buried them. She also began to hide her caches of gold and documents—either by burying them near the station or in one of the caves that dotted the Carmel mountain range.