Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘Huj?’

  ‘Yes, Huj. I was a staff officer with Meinertzhagen.’

  ‘A staff officer with Meinertzhagen.’ Krag scratched his head, drank his drink, poured another. ‘One of the English Redeemers? The Redeemers of Zion?’

  ‘My name’s Ponting, Major Ponting. And you’re Major Krag, Erwin Krag.’

  ‘Er-win Krag,’ the man repeated. ‘Er-win Krag.’ He sounded as though he was trying it out for size.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Excuse me a moment.’ He nodded towards the Afrikaner barman who nodded back. The brandy bottle was almost empty.

  Ponting lit another cigarette and ordered another beer. A different girl came up. ‘Just-one-beer, baas.’ He told her he was busy, perhaps later. He noticed his own beer was almost finished and asked for another one. When the barman came back he said, ‘He’s a long time.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The gentleman I was talking to.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s coming back,’ he said. ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t think he likes talking. Not the sociable sort.’

  ‘But he hasn’t paid for his drink yet.’

  ‘He has. He always buys a full bottle at the beginning of the evening.’ The barman put the top back on the brandy and placed it on the shelf behind him. ‘He’ll finish it next time.’

  ‘How often do you see him?’

  ‘About once a month.’

  ‘And he always drinks alone.’

  ‘Not always.’ He nodded towards the girls.

  Ponting waited another hour, perhaps two, but Krag did not return. The barman said that the German managed a farm a hundred kilometres or so out of town, and he had heard he was soft on his kaffirs. He said he didn’t know his name. The girls called him ‘Baas’. They called all white men ‘Baas’.

  It was almost dawn when Ponting left the bar and by then all the young ladies had given up on him and were asleep, head down, at their tables. Back in his hotel an African woke him with coffee at 11 a.m., sent for the barber to shave him (for Ponting was still careful about his appearance) and helped get his things together. It was something they had done before, and the tip was always generous. Ponting had to get the noon express to Johannesburg. An air service had started but he liked aircraft no more than he had liked those wallowing monitors off Athlit.

  He sat in the restaurant car, drenched in sweat, trying to drown his hangover with more beer. It was Krag. It had to be. If it wasn’t Krag why did he run away? Could he have been mistaken? How long was it? Twenty-one years in a couple of months. And he had only seen him once. Couldn’t it just have been some Hans Nobody who didn’t much feel like a conversation with a drunken English stranger about Palestine?

  But what had he said? ‘One of the English Redeemers? The Redeemers of Zion?’ That’s what the Nili group and the other Zionists had called the British. Not many people knew that. But then the campaign had been written about from time to time. And a lot of Germans knew about Palestine. It was all part of this thing they had about the Jews.

  It would be at least six months before he could get back to Windhoek. In the meantime he wrote a light-hearted note to Meinertzhagen asking him to confirm that he had been seeing things. His old boss was away on one of his ornithological expeditions when it arrived and it was two months before he telegraphed a reply. It read: ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD.

  Ponting was quite pleased with it. He was right, of course. It probably wasn’t Krag, just some deeply perplexed German who had dredged up that bit about ‘English Redeemers’ from the depths of his own drunkenness. He really had to watch it. It wouldn’t do to go on bothering complete strangers in bars like this. And, to his own and everybody else’s amazement, he never took an alcoholic drink from that day forth.

  However, the tobacco habit was harder to kick. Ponting died in 1953 aged sixty-eight of lung cancer in Port Elizabeth, where he had made enough money to retire three years earlier.

  Four years later Meinertzhagen was made a Commander of the British Empire, an honour often given to retiring desk officers of the Secret Intelligence Service, although he does not appear to have done anything on behalf of his country since the Home Guard was stood down. Most of his latter years were spent writing various volumes of his rather suspect memoirs, usually in journal form. He never mentioned Daniel though there was much on Palestine, 1917.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Readers may be puzzled why a book set in Palestine does not mention the Palestinians as such. This is because, before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the initial division of the spoils between Britain and France, most of the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the territory between the Mediterranean, the Euphrates, the Taurus and the Arabian Desert called themselves Syrians. Thus a popular Victorian hymn refers to the Galilee as ‘the Syrian sea’.

  Much of this novel, particularly the way Meinertzhagen planted his disinformation, the death of Sarah Aaronsohn and the yeomanry charge at Huj, is based on real events. In his history of the Palestine campaign Colonel (later Field Marshal) Archibald Wavell, who was on General Allenby’s staff, revealed that the plans for the Turks’ Yilderim offensive did indeed come to his knowledge ‘at a very early stage’. General G. G. McDonough, head of Military Intelligence at the War Office from 1916 to 1919, went even further and in his own book insisted: ‘Allenby knew with certainty from his Intelligence of all the preparations and all the movements of his enemy.’

  The British campaign in Palestine in 1917 ended 500 years of Turkish occupation and led to the creation of the Jewish state. As a rule, retired intelligence chiefs tend to exaggerate their contribution to great events and McDonough may be no exception. But there is no doubt that there was a Jewish spy ring in Ottoman Palestine and that it believed a British victory would further the Zionist cause. Subsequent events may have disappointed them.

  Some of the historical characters that pass through my tale are well known. Others, such as the Aaronsohns, Bertha Vester and Richard Meinertzhagen, usually only make footnotes in the better known chronicles of those times though their suffering and accomplishments often deserve more. I have tried, in word and deed, to be faithful to them all. CS

  Let Us Do Evil

  Colin Smith

  Let us do evil that good may come.

  Romans, Chapter Three, Verse Eight

  Prologue

  Alma Shaab, British Mandate Palestine frontier with Vichy French Lebanon, April, 1941.

  ***

  It was not long after dusk. Lingering snows on the Hermon range had chilled the evening breeze and the grass already held the cool and uncertain flavour of night.

  Lang lay there, belly down and almost spread-eagled, pushing his face into it, willing the British patrol on the raised road above him to pass. The wire cutters dug into the little flesh he carried around his waist, a portent perhaps of pain yet to come but he dared not move, gripping the grass the way a torpedoed sailor clings to a raft.

  He could tell by the sound of the engine that it was one of Gothilf Wagner’s Specials. Wagner was a prominent Templer, a German protestant sect who, eighty years before, had bribed the Ottoman Turks to allow them into Palestine to await the Second Coming. Meanwhile, their progeny prospered.

  Wagner had grown rich making armoured cars for the Palestine Police and, until recently, was well looked after by its senior officers, never without an invitation to the Ramleh Vale Hunt ball. Now he had been wired into his own home with an armed sentry at the gate and in Jaffa his factory turned into a workshop for the Royal Army Service Corps. Soon he would be on the next draft to one of the Australian internment camps to which most of his brethren had already been shipped. Only the more prescient Nazis among them had ensured that they were well beyond British reach before war came.

  Nonetheless, the German’s imaginative hybrids continued to give loyal service to the Crown. To Lang’s ears this one sounded like the smaller of the two ope
n topped versions: a double layer of steel plate welded onto a Ford pick-up chassis with a Lewis machine gun in the back and a small, swivel mounted search light on the front passenger side. Its four-man crew would have just emerged from the cosy tobacco fug of the Tegart fort half a mile down the road, full of warm food and strong, sweet tea with a dash of rum in it for those who knew where to find it.

  Lang knew these forts, had been in them himself on nights like this, waiting for Orde Wingate to turn up with his maps and his grenades and his bad but enthusiastic Hebrew. And when he arrived, dark and dishevelled, they had all noted the disapproving glances of most of the other officers. Police and army alike, they detested Wingate’s Special Night Squads because they thought Major Wingate was a freak, certainly no gentleman, possibly even a Jew himself; this wasn’t true though he wouldn’t have minded. Above all they resented how good his men were, the body counts proved by dawn deliveries of Arab dead and the bounty money collected for the rebel rifles that accompanied them.

  The armoured car moved at no more than fifteen miles per hour while its commander played his searchlight on the tall barbed wire fence to the right of it. Occasionally, the light would skip across the road and sweep the ground where Lang was lying. When it did this he kept his eyes firmly shut. That way he would not be aware if the beam had chanced on him and panicked into a giveaway movement.

  Mostly they shone the light on the fence, looking for the holes that would indicate where someone had entered British Mandate Palestine from a Lebanon now controlled by the government Hitler had permitted to rule unoccupied France from the spa town of Vichy. Sometimes the culprits were Jews who had somehow smuggled themselves from Vichy France to Vichy Levant. At least, that’s what they said they were. Lang imagined he must be something of a pioneer: a Jew going in the opposite direction.

  The cicadas had stopped their din as the sun went down but now some nocturnal competitors in the insect world had taken over and were rattling the alarm, desperate to give him away. Long after it was out of sight he could still hear the Ford’s engine and catch the faint dance of its lights as it moved cautiously in and out of the bends where its top-heavy armour made it easy to roll the vehicle if you went into them too fast. Then all he could hear were the insects. He dashed across the road, tugging the wire cutters out of his waistband as he did so, and started to work on the lower strands of the fence.

  They were a good tool, rubber handled and a credit to Birmingham. But the wire was extraordinarily taut. When he got through the first strand the whole fence seemed to shudder. He hadn’t expected this. For a moment he imagined it rippling all the way down to the coast and every Tegart fort rushing out a patrol to see if the break was in its sector. He told himself to calm down. Only one person in the world knew that a strand had just been cut and that person was about to cut a second one. When he had done this he bent them back until he had enough room to crawl under. As he did so, it occurred to Lang that now there was no turning back; for better or for worse he had just chosen which way the rest of his life was going. Perhaps the way the lives of a lot of people were going.

  1 - Sunday Lunch at the Forsters

  It all began with some startling revelations about a lady’s underwear. Walter Calderwell brought them to the attention of the head of the Criminal Investigation Department in Jerusalem a few days after Sir Harold MacMichael, the High Commissioner, had declared that the police was now a military force and, should the Eighth Army ever be obliged to make a temporary withdrawal from neighbouring Egypt, would join them in the defence of the Palestine Mandate.

  More relevant, Calderwell made his report the morning after the Forsters’ Sunday lunch, or luncheon as Mrs Forster preferred to call it, which took place on 21 June 1942. Even if the meal had not led to the case that, rightly or wrongly, made Calderwell’s reputation he would never have forgotten the date. It was the day the Libyan port of Tobruk fell and Rommel’s panzers prepared to cross the frontier into Egypt’s western desert.

  At the time, nobody in Palestine, not even Sir Harold, was fully aware just how bad things were. And afterwards, Mrs Forster, a tall, angular woman whose husband was a senior engineer at the Palestine Water and Power Development Authority, was grateful that the censors had had the decency to sit on this latest disaster for forty-eight hours. In February a cocktail party at Government House had turned into a wake, or something rather gloomier, as news of the fall of Fortress Singapore to a bunch of bow-legged Asians had spread around the room like a contagious disease.

  But that Sunday, the midday news bulletin on the wireless still had Tobruk “bracing itself for another siege” and nobody doubted that General Klopper’s South Africans would do as well as the Australians did last time. There was no excuse for anyone to get drunk and behave badly. In this respect, Katie Forster always felt that Calderwell’s influence was particularly malevolent and her husband easily led.

  As it was, the men devoted far too much of the first part of the meal to talking among themselves about why the Eighth Army hadn’t got proper leadership and why Auchinleck hadn’t sacked poor General Ritchie, who she was sure was doing his best, and replace him with somebody they called Strafer Gott, apparently not a German but on our side. Mrs Forster couldn’t help wondering if some German ancestry explained why General Gott was supposed to be so good at fighting in the desert. At one point she had been going to say as much but you couldn’t get a word in edgeways and her lovely roast was going cold. It never ceased to amaze her how worked up men could get about things they could do so little about, always sticking their noses where they didn’t belong.

  Something Calderwell was only too happy to admit. When it was all over, he used to like to say that he had started sniffing it out by putting his nose into the knickers in question. When Katie Forster got to hear about this she was furious and told her husband that this is what happened when you invited Palestine policeman from “a certain background” into your home.

  Calderwell had been transferred to CID from the training team at Mount Scopus and with the move had come his long awaited promotion from First British Sergeant to Inspector and a small married quarter though the woman Calderwell had married had never left England and was unlikely to do so. After almost fifteen years in the Palestine Police he reckoned, war or no war, that this was about as far as he was going up the promotion ladder unless somebody planted a bomb in the bar of the King David Hotel where an entire wing had become offices shared by the Mandate Secretariat and its military’s top brass.

  As far as Mrs Forster was concerned any policeman below the rank of Acting Assistant Superintendent was “of a certain background” and no more eligible for a place at her table than they were for membership of the Jaffa Club. Her husband loyally agreed that Calderwell was “a bit of a bounder” and promised, with regret, not to invite him again for he had a weakness for those he considered men of action. In 1917 Calderwell, hardly out of his teens, had ridden into Palestine with Allenby’s cavalry and taken part in the yeomanry’s famous charge against the Austrian guns supporting the Turks at Huj. And last year in the Lebanon he had been one of the police volunteers who had driven the army’s requisitioned civilian transport, exchanging shots with Senegalese snipers hidden in the banana groves north of Tyre.

  For most of the time Vichy’s colonial troops had fought like tigers but it had ended in that rare thing: a British army victory. Within the Palestine Police the Lebanon Volunteers had become an elite. Membership of it had eased Calderwell into the lower commissioned ranks and other places not usually exposed to his flat vowelled Midlands’ accent. The Jaffa Club for instance. Mrs Forster shared with General Klopper an appalling ignorance that the enemy was already almost within the gates. For even as the Afrika Korps closed on Tobruk, the Club’s Committee, after agonising secret session, had decided to admit police inspectors even if some of them were very temporary gentlemen indeed.

  It was soon established that the knickers Calderwell had stuck his nose into belonged to the
Forsters’ cook-housekeeper Muna who was a Christian from a village in the Galilee. Muna was the mother of seven surviving children and a large lady who, as it happened, had come to underwear rather late in life and been presented with the bloomers in question by a favourite niece. Nor would they have been hanging there at all, desecrating the Sabbath, if it had not been for the failure of Mr Forster’s department to provide water for most of the city for the previous two days.

  This was said to be due to sabotage at one of the pumping stations. But even those who believed this rumour could not decide who was responsible. Was it the work of the fugitive Haj Amin el Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had been granted asylum in Berlin? Or was it those blasted Zionist fanatics in the Stern gang who had defied the Jewish Agency’s decision to co-operate with the British for the duration of the war? Ever since Superintendent Geoffrey Morton had discovered Avraham Stern hiding in a wardrobe and shot him dead as he ran for a window, and quite right too the murdering bastard, his disciples had redoubled their efforts to make Palestine, or Eretz Israel as they called it, as difficult for the British to rule as they possibly could.

  When Calderwell first became acquainted with Muna’s new bloomers - bloomers was a fair description for they had a capaciousness that was not a la mode - they were hanging on a line in the backyard of the Forster’s residence in the German Colony. This was a solid, red-roofed, sandstone bungalow with a tiled bathroom, chromium taps and exquisite sanitary arrangements. Until shortly after the outbreak of war it had been the home of one of the first Templer families to be shipped off to an Australian internment camp. After lunch Forster had assured them this was not without reason.

  “Like to see what we found when we were cleaning out the attic?” he had asked, rising from his place and picking something up from the top of the sideboard.