Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  Not to speak, and indeed he was not allowed to speak, of the black arts being taught to Haganah volunteers by those odd balls from Special Operations Executive up on Haifa’s Mount Carmel. He had been informed that their curriculum included the use of the knife and garrotte, new types of explosives and silenced weapons that killed with a phtt in the dark. Indeed, one of his tasks for today was to reply to a note he had received from Inspector General Alan Saunders, the officer commanding the Palestine Police. Saunders was outraged that two armed and well known Jewish terrorists picked up as they tried to drive though a police roadblock outside Haifa claimed to be on some sort of SOE training exercise and that an officer from the Mount Carmel establishment who had turned up at the police station to vouch for them had been less than polite to his men who had been doing no more than diligently performing their duties.

  “Surely contingency plans against a possible German occupation of Palestine must be weighed against the very real dangers of training and arming known enemies of this Administration in skills that may one day be used against us?” Saunders had concluded.

  The Inspector General knew very well that MacMichael could not have agreed more. The letter was no more than an official rendering of a conversation they had had over a gin-and-fizz at government house. The High Commissioner would forward it to all interested parties but he knew that anything that could be claimed to contribute to the war effort, however nebulous, would always take precedence. The future was on hold.

  This business of the Jewish home guard battalions, for instance, was more baloney. Everybody knew that by the time they were recruited and trained the Germans would either have won Palestine or been chased back to their bases in Libya. There was talk that their formation would allow British battalions to be deployed elsewhere. But General Auchinleck was not short of infantry. On the contrary, he knew that the Commander of the British forces in the Middle East felt he had too much. What he needed was more tanks and artillery. Sir Harold was going to have to see Auchinleck shortly and he was not looking forward to it for the meeting would be at his notoriously Spartan headquarters a few miles to the east of El Alamein. Major Nicholl, who had recently visited it to discuss contingency plans to pay troops evacuated to Palestine in Mandate pounds rather than deluging its economy with devalued Egyptian script, had provided a graphic description of its horrors. The stench of the outdoor latrines, the miasma of flies gluing themselves to the sand basted food or trying very hard to enter your brain by way of ears and nostrils. Auchinleck apparently had this obsession about the staff not being more comfortable than the men in the field. Overnight visitors were expected to roll themselves in a couple of blankets and sleep under the stars as he did.

  Even so, he admired the craggy Scot, who didn’t? The Auk as he was known was one of those men’s men who radiated confidence, put fresh backbone into the jellified, made the brave braver. After the loss of Tobruk he had finally sacked Ritchie, his fellow Scot. But instead of replacing him with Strafer Gott, as everybody expected, he had gone up into the desert, into the Blue as the fighting men called it, to take command of the Eighth Army himself. Yet he still remained Commander-in-Chief Middle East. This meant that, while the Wehrmacht continued to consume the Ukraine like a Combine harvester, he had to pay the security of the Persian oil fields just as much attention as he did upsetting Rommel’s plans to be photographed with the Sphinx. And all this was quite apart from keeping a weather eye on events in Jerusalem, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad. Just as well he had those broad shoulders.

  But it was no good expecting the Auk to find the time to come to Jerusalem at present. If he wanted to try and win his support against these pressures to raise a Jewish Home Guard then he would have to go to Eighth Army headquarters in person. It occurred to Sir Harold that perhaps he should take Arthur Davison with him.

  The M15 man would make a good case against arming the Jews and being Indian Army himself he would probably get on well with the Auk. Might even know him. Small world, Indian army. It would also give him a chance to have a little chat with Davison. Saunders had been complaining that he had been overstepping the mark recently, tried to entrap a Hun nun - one of several at large in Jerusalem just as British nuns were in the Vatican - with some agent provocateur nonsense. That sort of thing simply wouldn’t do. Next thing you knew the Papal Nuncio would be kicking up a fuss. Palestine’s senior policeman had seemed quite shocked to discover that MI5 could be so duplicitous. He hadn’t actually said he thought we left that sort of thing to foreigners but then he hadn’t needed to.

  The High Commissioner went through the rest of his mail. Most of it had been opened by his staff including a scruffy manila envelope on which his name and address was hand written in neat black ink capitals. It contained quite a large piece of paper which was mostly taken up by a large head and shoulders photograph of himself above which were the familiar words in Hebrew with the exclamation mark to the left of the first word and then, below his portrait, their translation into English.

  “Murder!” it said. “Sir Harold MacMichael Known as High Commissioner for Palestine. Wanted for Murder of 800 refugees drowned in the Black Sea on the boat Struma.”

  This was the first one Sir Harold had received for almost a week. Back in February just after the Struma went down he sometimes got a dozen a day. They were thought to be the work of the Stern Gang or its supporters. They were as determined to kill him as they were Geoffrey Morton, the police inspector who had captured Avraham Stern unarmed hiding in a wardrobe then shot him dead. “I thought he was about to set off some infernal machine,” Morton had offered by way of explanation. The rotundness of the language used in police reports never ceased to amaze Sir Harold. He felt the same pen could have been reporting Fenian outrages in 19th century Manchester. It was the argot of the late Victorian lower middle class punctuated with a waxed moustache.

  But the police took these threats seriously and who could blame them? Morton never travelled anywhere without three bodyguards, at least two of them armed with tommy-guns. They had even mined the route he drove to work with his wife who had got herself a teaching job at the Jaffa High School for Girls. Sixty sticks of gelignite and two socks full of rusty nails had been packed into a pipe and tunnelled beneath the road from one of the drainage ditches running alomgside it. Its tarmacadam surface was undisturbed and they ran a lead from the pipe into a nearby orange grove where they waited to detonate it electronically. Clever stuff except they had buried the mine too deep. Morton and his party had all stepped out of the wreckage lathered in dust and broken glass but suffering no more than burst eardrums.

  Mrs Morton, plucky little thing, had even gone on to instruct the Arab girls waiting in her classroom. Had they succeeded with Morton, the terrorists had intended to go much further than symbolic gestures. The road bomb was to be the first of a double hit. They had had the appalling idea of placing mines in the cemetery where the Mortons would have been buried had the original bomb achieved the crucial amount of upwards lift. It would have been inconceivable for him not to be among the mourners. Lady MacMichael would have been there too. So would most of his senior staff.

  “And they’re not going to stop trying either,” his Inspector General of Police had warned him. “You can count on that.”

  He sometimes wondered what the Americans would have made of the Stern Gang blowing up senior administrators in a League of Nations’ Mandate ruled by their principal ally? Would the U.S. government have welcomed the excuse to start rounding up its fundraisers in New York? And what would have happened here in Palestine? Not much he thought. They certainly would not be able to react like the Germans did after Heydrich was assassinated. There would have been no collective punishments, no Lidices.

  They had gone a short way, a very short way, down that path during the Arab revolt and the League of Nations, who had been the landlords of Palestine almost ever since Allenby pushed the Turks out, had come down on them like a ton of bricks. It had happened after eight Ara
b men had died of heat exhaustion when the army had herded all the males of a village into a temporary barbed wire cage while they searched their houses for arms after an ambush nearby. Regrettable, of course. The army had taken casualties but they should have provided water. Nowadays field hospitals in the desert made sure wounded Germans and Italians had water and the enemy reciprocated. Perhaps it was a genuine oversight. Whatever the reason it certainly did not compare with the revenge the Germans had exacted in Czechoslovakia.

  For a moment Sir Harold tried to imagine what the reaction of the Palestine Police would be if, after the next terrorist outrage, he ordered them to surround a kibbutzim, extract all its male residents between sixteen and sixty and shoot them. He has this awful feeling that some of them might just do it.

  The High Commissioner unlocked a drawer and removed his diary. Saunders had advised him not to leave details of his appointments lying about. “Don’t make it easy for them. There are places where everybody knows you have to show your face, the King’s birthday service at St George’s, that sort of thing. There are other engagements that are not immediately apparent, inspecting the Jaffa fire brigade for instance. The less we have to worry about the places where your attendance is not anticipated the more we can concentrate on looking after you on those occasions where it is.”

  The trouble was the police were so under strength. When war broke out three years ago many of the army reservists among them had been anxious to return to their units, convinced that Palestine was going to be a backwater. Saunders had turned their resignations down and found himself with a mutiny on his hands. For a few weeks some of the best men in the force had been pacing cells in Acre jail. The indigenous criminal classes could hardly believe their luck.

  Palestine had not remained a backwater for long and nobody wanted to go back to the army now. If anything, it was the other way around. The police were beginning to take a few transfers from the services but they were still desperately short handed. Unlike Morton Sir Harold only had one bodyguard and he doubled as a chauffeur although Nicholl often carried revolver when they were out. Even Hermione had started to take pistol coaching with a police sharpshooter. He sometimes carried a small automatic himself but the only person who knew this was his wife. At times he almost willed something to happen just to enjoy the look on Major Nichol’s face when he produced it.

  He was willing to take Saunders’ advice about keeping his diary under lock and key but determined not to become too obsessive about security. Jessica, the new girl down at the Secretariat at the King David sent up a typed list of the day’s agreed appointments and outside engagements for himself and his wife the night before.

  At 9.30 that morning he was due to see two representatives from the Jewish Agency to talk about the Home Guard question among other things. Then at eleven he was receiving the Spanish Consulate General, the neutral diplomat representing the interests of the Reich in Palestine, for the continuing negotiations on the exchange of German internees, most of them Templers, with Jews holding British Mandate of Palestine passports who had been trapped in Germany by the start of hostilities. Most of them had been visiting relatives.

  The exchange was due to take place through Turkey. But there was a hitch because the German authorities had apparently mislaid several of the Palestinian Jews on the list who had last been heard of when they were gathered at a holding centre of some kind near Krakow. Sir Harold rather relished this revealing breakdown of the much vaunted German efficiency. He intended to make it quite clear to the Spaniard, who was obviously not enjoying his role one little bit, that the deal was off until the Boche found them. Losing people indeed.

  At noon he was seeing a gentleman from the Red Crescent to discuss hospital and convalescent arrangements for Muslim wounded that were coming back from some of 4th Indian Division’s infantry battalions which had blunted Rommel’s advance just before El Alamein. The Red Cross would also be present. As Auchinleck’s battle in the desert continued the hospitals in Palestine were filling up with wounded who would previously have remained in Alexandria which was now being bombed a lot and no longer regarded as a relatively safe rear area. Everybody wanted more space; more locally hired auxiliary nurses, priority on the trains. A lot of these matters were no longer really in his hands. All he could do was put their case to the army.

  After lunch he had a meeting with an Inspector Calderwell, something Saunders had arranged so that he could have a first hand report of these parachute landings in the Galilee. It was all a bit disturbing though it was hard to believe that the Mufti’s agents would really succeed in stirring up another Arab revolt. They had got such a bloody hiding last time and the army were not likely to pull any punches now that Tobruk had gone and half the Egyptian staff at Shepheard’s Hotel were learning German, or so he’d been told. He made a mental note that he must really have a long chat with Davison about it; try to persuade him to keep his eye on that particular ball rather than sleuthing the nunneries for some improbable Mata Hari.

  After his meeting with Calderwell he had been invited to watch a field craft display staged by a battalion that had just arrived in Palestine and was doing its desert training in the Mandate. It was from a fresh division that had been sent to the Middle East with the intention of eventually replacing the remaining Australians who were supposed to go home soon to help keep the Yellow Peril at bay. Not too soon he hoped because by all accounts the Australians were some of the best troops between Rommel and Palestine though there was probably not a barman from Haifa to Heliopolis who would not be glad to see the back of them. And the Japs had bombed Darwin again yesterday.

  The battalion was at Sarafand about halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and less than an hour’s drive away. Photographers and news film cameramen would be present. No doubt cinema audiences all over the Empire would shortly be informed that these were action shots of British troops repelling the Hun at bayonet point.

  It was definitely going to be one of his busier days. It had occurred to him last night that one way he could make more time for himself was to see if the policeman Calderwell could be persuaded to come down to Sarafand with him, chat in the car? He had asked Jessica to drop him a note and walk round to the Russian Compound with it. Saunders didn’t approve of him making these sort of arrangements over the telephone and Hermione had enough on her plate. Then he hoped to be back in Jerusalem for an early supper because at 7.30 he and Lady MacMichael were expected at the theatre. The Police Players, who weren’t bad for amateurs, were presenting Night Must Fall at the YMCA’s auditorium. Proceeds to the Merchant Seaman’s Fund. Drinks afterwards at the King David across the road. Unless you were High Commissioner and must ration your exposure to the petitioning throng. Then you had to go home to bed like a good boy and take your nightcap there. Otherwise it was Piggy in the Middle.

  12 - A Demonstration

  After the first explosion some of the infantry dived for cover behind the abandoned tank with the sagging gun barrel and its tracks and sprockets all chewed up. Their own equipment was as fresh as they were with the seventeen studs they had cobbled onto their boot soles still shining from the last time they bashed a barracks’ square. And there were other clues to their greenness: the unchipped desert paint on their soup plate helmets; the ideal squareness of their canvas small packs which still spoke of the cardboard used to stiffen them during countless barrack room kit inspections.

  To enhance their warrior appearance bayonets had been fixed to their Lee-Enfields. This bothered the sergeant who knew how easily seventeen inches of cold steel could go astray. Hawkins in particular worried him, a lolloping butcher’s boy more accustomed to chopping than sticking, accident prone and excitable with it. There was another explosion, closer this time and a small stone pinged off the sergeant’s helmet, scratching its new paint.

  “Fuckin liberty,” said the NCO, a regular with twelve years service in and not yet thirty. He was more annoyed than scared but he did crouch a little further below the hull
of the tank, watching the reddish brown dust cloud the last bang had raised slowly disperse. Most of his ten-man section was now close to the ground. He noted with approval that the Bren gun team had set the light machine gun up on its bipod, the gunner in the textbook prone position with his number two lying on the left-hand side of the weapon ready to pass him the fresh magazine he held.

  Hawkins was close by, down on one knee with his rifle safely upright in his right hand and its butt in the sand. The boy caught the sergeant’s eye and gave him a thumb’s up with his left hand just like he’d seen other soldiers do in Picture Post or at the cinema watching a newsreel before the main feature. But the NCO knew a Jonah when he saw one and spoilt it for him by responding with an unprintable scowl. He was working on having him transferred to the motor pool. To his amazement he had discovered that the uncoordinated Hawkins could drive, apparently part of his duties at the butcher’s shop had been making deliveries.

  The sergeant became aware of a movement behind him. He half turned and saw a bulky figure running towards him who appeared to be wearing war paint. “Great movie we’re shooting here,” said Malley who had several pieces of white sticking plaster across his nose. The sergeant had been wondering when the photographer would get to work.

  He was about to ask him if he would like the Bren gun team to come forward a bit when an ear splitting crack took his words away. He had heard that these Aussie battle school sappers were famously heavy on the gun cotton, always trying to get the Poms to shit themselves but he hadn’t expected this. It wasn’t exactly Dunkirk but it was getting close. He pointed to the Bren and watched as the photographer ran back a few yards and crouched behind them.