Stern’s stand had left him high and dry. He could take some comfort from the fact that he was now undisputed boss of a band of dedicated followers – albeit a very small one. On the other hand, his defection had cut him off from the Revisionist movement’s considerable resources. He and his followers were virtually friendless and without money. Before he went to jail, Stern had lived a comfortable life, travelling widely and mixing often with rich and powerful people who were impressed by his intelligence, his charm and the romantic aura generated by his burning sense of purpose. His prison stint had been no great ordeal. Indeed his experience of hardship was almost entirely imaginary, distilled in his concept of the ‘anonymous soldier’ – alone, hunted, certain only of the inevitable rendezvous with death. From now on, these fantasies would become increasingly real.
A glimpse of the dismal circumstances in which the Stern faithful lived was provided by Yaacov Polani. Polani was born in Slonim in Poland and from childhood ‘had adventurous inclinations’.1 The Jews of the town were assimilationists who ‘put my back up and I always wanted to annoy them’. He emigrated with his family to Palestine in 1922. His father bought a farm in Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv. Yaacov got a job packing oranges. Some fellow workers were in the Irgun and talked him into joining. He attended a basic training course at nearby Kfar Saba, run by Hanoch Strelitz, and was later sent to Poland to one of the training camps overseen by Stern.
When the split came, Polani was acting commander of the Irgun in Herzliya. While most stayed with the Irgun, he and a few others joined up with Stern. ‘We had no money or means of existence,’ he told the police after being arrested in 1942. ‘I was in a difficult position as I was regarded as responsible in the eyes of my men. I demanded help from Stern but got nothing from him.’ Strelitz, who along with Binyamin Zeroni, the Jerusalem jailbreaker, had sided with Stern, was not much more use. When Polani met him in the street and told him of his troubles, Strelitz replied ‘don’t worry me with such matters. Let those who complain go to hell. There are more important things to worry about.’ Polani and his men ‘led the life of dogs’. The coffers were empty. He was paid only one pound a week to live on and could eat only once a day. It was no better for the leaders. Stern himself ‘received a very small salary, no more than that of a ghaffir (watchman)’.
Nelly Langsfelder, who had arrived in Palestine from Vienna two years before, joined the Irgun then sided with Stern in the split, remembered living on a diet of falafel, oranges and bananas. One of her duties was to stick up posters denouncing the government and urging young Jewish men not to join the British forces. The posters were immediately torn down by the police or the Haganah, whose men were now filling the ranks of the military. She and her companions took to handing out leaflets in the streets. They thought of distributing them inside cinemas but had to give up the idea ‘because we didn’t have the money to buy tickets’.2
Since releasing Stern from captivity, the police had been keeping half an eye on him. They were aware of the schism with Raziel and the subsequent formation of what they were beginning to call the ‘Stern group’. The Chief Secretary was starting to take an interest. Battershill had moved on to govern Cyprus, and not a moment too soon. His job was getting him down. ‘One works all day and half the night and gets nowhere in the long run,’ he reflected. ‘One is tempted to say, How long O Lord how long?’3 The new man was John Stuart Macpherson, who had previously served in Nigeria and came to the multiple problems of Palestine with new eyes. In September 1940 he wrote to the Inspector General of the Palestine Police, Alan Saunders, asking whether he intended to rearrest Stern and the four other Irgun men who had gone to prison with him.4 Saunders joined the force at its birth in 1920 and, apart from a twenty-month stint in Nigeria, had served with it ever since. He had been given command in 1937 and was respected by his peers in the administration and the men under him for his shrewd grasp of Palestine’s affairs. The police chief gave a relaxed reply. ‘There is no doubt that the responsible leaders of the Revisionist Party have been genuinely exercised over the formation of this group and are making every effort to suppress it,’ he wrote. ‘They claim that its influence is now practically negligible and that it will shortly dissolve altogether.’ In the circumstances he took the view that ‘the arrest of the five persons referred to … is not desirable at present’.5
Three days after writing this, Saunders was forced to change his mind. Stern’s dire financial situation had driven him to desperate measures. He had decided to start robbing banks. Even for someone so adept at finding pure justifications for dubious acts, the decision was an uncomfortable one. Yaacov Levstein recorded ‘Yair’ telling him, ‘I know that a bank robbery, even for a good cause, is something our men find very difficult to bring themselves to do. It is not our usual way of operating … but we have no choice.’
Levstein was authorized to set up two bank jobs in Jerusalem, where he was now the group’s commander. One failed – for reasons not disclosed. The other, at the Japhet Bank, succeeded but the haul, Stern informed him, was ‘just not enough’. They had to ‘go after the big money’.6
The next target was a large branch of one of the Mandate’s main banks, the Anglo-Palestine, on Tel Aviv’s busy Ben Yehuda Street. The heist was to go ahead on Monday, 16 September 1940, but before it did the war made a sudden and shocking appearance. The Italian air force had already launched raids on the oil facilities and port at Haifa. There was nothing of strategic interest in Tel Aviv and the expectation had been that its inhabitants were in no great danger. At four o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, 9 September, air raid sirens sounded. Moments later bombs exploded in the city centre and an Arab village to the north-east, dropped by aircraft flying from bases on the islands of Rhodes and Leros. The raid lasted only a few minutes but the death toll would reach 137. Geoffrey Morton was in his office at the time and ‘had a good view of the whole show’. He went immediately to the scene and ‘found the ARP personnel and Fire Brigade already on the job and doing excellent work’. Australian soldiers also ‘got down to it with a will’ and Morton was impressed by the calm of the victims. ‘The injured bore their hurts with great fortitude and waited quietly to be evacuated,’ he noted in his weekly report.7
Avraham Stern was with Roni at the latest of their endless succession of digs, a one-room flat in a block of flats at 57 Pinsker Street near the city centre, when the alarm sounded. They ran to the stairwell just as a bomb landed in the yard outside, blowing in the entrance. Stern crouched over his wife to shield her from the blast. She was hit in the head by a piece of metal and he was peppered with flying debris which was later picked out by a doctor friend from Warsaw. The experience would do nothing to dent his enthusiasm for cutting a deal with the Italians.
If anything, the raid was further proof that Britain was on its last legs. Two days before, London had come under intense bombardment from the Luftwaffe for the first time since the start of the Battle of Britain. Even to the empire’s friends, it seemed that the end might not be far off. On the same day as Tel Aviv was attacked, a strange ceremony took place at Rachel’s Tomb, a Jewish holy site in Bethlehem. A procession led by the Chief Rabbi and including the Jerusalem District Commissioner Edward Keith-Roach walked seven times around the shrine, uttering prayers for British victory and the health of the King, the Queen, Sir Harold MacMichael and Mr Keith-Roach himself.8
Britain’s difficulties were encouraging. Without the wherewithal to sustain his men, though, he was unable to exploit the situation. As the citizens of Tel Aviv resumed normal life, preparations for the robbery began. Stern kept aloof from the practicalities and would certainly not be coshing any cashiers. Yehoshua Zettler, a twenty-four-year-old whose family home in Kfar Saba had been destroyed by Arabs in rioting in 1921 and who had taken part in the attatck on Bir Adas in which five innocent Arabs were killed, was put in charge of the operation. He was nicknamed ‘the Farmer’ and in Polani’s opinion a ‘rough and uneducated’ character, and ‘like an Arab’. Binyamin Zeroni was responsible for the planning. Somewhat to his annoyance, Yaacov Levstein was hauled in from Jerusalem to act as Zettler’s deputy, even though his area of expertise was explosives rather than armed robbery. They would be joined in the ‘assault group’ by Eliyahu Giladi; bold and energetic, he was considered too wild even for his comrades who would eventually kill him for putting the organization in danger. Moshe Moldovsky, leader of the Bir Adas raid, was charged with guarding the bank door once the raid began. Avraham Amper, the originator of the military training camps in Poland, and Zelig Zak, a recently arrived Polish émigré currently working in a British Army canteen, would be stationed on a nearby rooftop, armed with ‘noise bombs’ to divert attention from the robbery when the action started. Shmuel Kaplan, who earned his living as a driver, was designated wheelman of the getaway car. Another team member, Max Goldman, would follow on a motorbike. In order to confuse pursuers, the car would stop at an opportune moment, and one of the team would alight with the loot, climb onto the back of the bike and zoom off in a different direction.
The morning of 16 September was another of those long, hot days of flawless blue skies and harsh, flat sunlight that stretch from March to November in the Holy Land. At 12.20 p.m., the staff of the Anglo-Palestine Bank on Ben Yehuda Street were preparing to pull down the shutters and head for home or the cool and shade of one of the little cafés in the streets nearby that slope westwards down to the sea. They scarcely noticed three young men who walked in separately, to join a handful of other customers standing at the counters. According to Levstein’s account, ‘we tipped our hats as we entered, as if we were greeting those inside’. This action released hidden masks, pulled down over their faces by small lead weights. They drew their guns and ‘the Farmer’ stepped forward ‘and announced in a deep, steady voice: “We are confiscating funds for the Hebrew Underground, to fight for national liberation. Stand up quietly and raise your hands, turn to the wall and lean against it and follow my orders. Anyone who interferes with the Hebrew underground is risking his life.”’
To reinforce the point, Amper and Zak’s ‘noise bombs’ now began to explode outside. The safe door was open. Levstein then ‘jumped on the counter. The cashier bent down, and I skipped over him toward the safe … I took a thin cloth bag out of my pocket and began to throw in the money.’ There was lots of it, large, white banknotes covered in seals and crests and copperplate script which crackled agreeably in his eager hands. When the bag was full he vaulted back over the counter and the team retreated through a side door and into the alleyway which led out the back to a side street, where Kaplan was waiting in a Mercedes saloon. Zettler was the last one out. Levstein said that, as ‘the Farmer’ left, he hung a package on the doorknob and told the cowering clerks that it was a bomb which would explode if anyone tried to open the door. His account gives the impression that the operation was carried out as considerately as the circumstances allowed. The victims told a different story. Once inside the bank the ‘assault team’ had loosed off a volley of shots into the ceiling, leaving the staff in no doubt that they were dealing with desperate men.
The getaway was similarly noisy. As they drove away, Moldovsky ‘suddenly took out his gun and started shooting at a youth walking outside’. The boy dropped to the pavement, unharmed, but the racket alerted a taxi driver who bravely gave chase. Zettler leaned out of the window and opened fire, smashing a hole in the pursuer’s windscreen. The have-a-go hero veered away and, once they reached a quiet stretch of road, Kaplan pulled up. Levstein, clutching the money, hopped out and onto the pillion of Goldman’s motorbike, which had pulled up behind. In his haste, he spilled some notes from the satchel but Goldman yelled at him to leave them and they sped away.
They took a roundabout route to the rendezvous, a room in an apartment block at 36 Bilu Street, just off Rothschild Boulevard. There a man and a young woman were waiting for them. They took the cash and packed it into the back of a large, framed picture. It was big money, just as Stern had hoped: 4300 pounds in used notes. Then they set off to deliver it to him. Everything, it seemed, had gone remarkably well.9
The Anglo-Palestine Bank robbery was to be a turning point in Avraham Stern’s story. He now had the cash to pay followers, fund further operations and buy weapons. There was even enough left over to finance a clandestine newspaper, Bamachteret (In the Underground). But the scale and daring of the operation had transformed the status of the Stern band in the eyes of the Mandate authorities. They were no longer a nuisance the Revisionists could be left to deal with in their own fashion. They were a menace to law and order. As Stern’s ambitions became clearer, they would soon also be seen as a threat to the British war effort.
The sense of satisfaction at the way the raid had gone did not last long. The planning had been quite thorough but there were several amateurish loose ends that the police were quick to pounce upon. As Max Goldman weaved the bike through the backstreets, someone had made a note of its number plate. When the police checked they found it was registered in the name of one Yehoshua Zettler. By the end of the day he was in police custody.10 The team members did not linger long at the rendezvous and quickly went their separate ways. Even so, it seems someone tipped off the police for the Tel Aviv police raided the Bilu Street apartment block that afternoon. Geoffrey Morton was with them. ‘We visited a house in which a pistol was found and also a black mask and a quantity of clothing soaked in perspiration,’ he noted. It did not take long to discover that the room was rented in the name of Shmuel Kaplan (‘a known Revisionist terrorist’) and by the end of the day he, too, was in a police cell.
The robbery had taken place on Morton’s patch. He was not, however, given charge of the investigation. Instead, Assistant Superintendent Solomon Soffer was brought in from Jerusalem to head the inquiry. Soffer was one of the longest-serving Jewish officers in the Palestine Police CID and since the early 1930s had built up a reputation for zeal and efficiency combating drug smuggling, counterfeiting and fraud. He had proved equally effective fighting political subversion.
His arrival did not seem to bother Morton who recorded that he ‘discussed all aspects with him’ and ‘decided to strike off Wilkin to work on the case with him’.11 This can hardly have been welcome news to Tom Wilkin who had already had to suffer Soffer horning in on his turf and co-opting some of his most valuable contacts. His antipathy to him was by now obvious. ‘The Wilkin−Soffer hate is well known,’ noted Giles Bey in a report.
The story of their rivalry was revealed by Soffer in a lengthy memo to Giles that gives an idea of the complexity of the relationships between police and the underground. No one was precisely who they seemed to be, all loyalties were elastic and nothing was to be taken for granted. In May, Soffer had gone to Tel Aviv to investigate undisclosed crimes. On his travels round the cafés, bars and restaurants where servants of the Mandate mixed with the local population his curiosity had been piqued by a man called David Rosenthal whom he noticed ‘associating with several police officers’. Rosenthal, a Polish Jew, ‘was only too glad to offer them drinks etc. He was always dressed well and frequented all the notorious cafés. I made inquiries as to the source of his income but no one could satisfy me with the correct information.’12
Soffer ‘decided to make friends with him, which advantage he seized immediately’. Very soon the amiable Mr Rosenthal offered to introduce him to someone very special, ‘a person who is (in his words) – the almighty’. This man could ‘abduct, detain persons, get rid of them etc. I elucidated that from him that the person is one of the heads of the IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi).’
When the introduction took place a few days later, Soffer learned the identity of the mystery man. It was none other than Ephraim Ilin, host of Tel Aviv’s most interesting parties and, although not a commander, a very good friend of the Irgun. The first meeting was rather an anti-climax. Ilin* was ‘not very talkative’ and both men took ‘care not to divulge names of persons responsible for detailed activities’.
One thing the pair did let slip was that they were ‘very close friends of Inspector Wilkins [sic] and that they assist him [in] his work, especially against Nazis and communists’. Soffer quizzed Wilkin about them, who admitted he ‘knows their affiliation with the IZL and benefits [from] the most important information from them’.
Ilin’s initial caution did not last. Before long he was in touch with Soffer, suggesting they might be able to help each other out. He had a friend, currently detained by the authorities under the emergency regulations, who was a ‘very important figure in the IZL’. If Soffer would arrange his early release Ilin could organize all sorts of favours. He could supply any number of young men to tail suspected criminals. Furthermore, he could ‘arrange for the kidnapping of criminals and force confessions from them’. If this was not enough, the Irgun was prepared to pay up to six hundred pounds for his freedom. The name of the man was Avraham Stern.
The approach came to nothing. Soffer returned to Jerusalem and, at the end of June, Stern was released. Soffer saw no more of the shady pair until the late summer, when he ran into David Rosenthal in Jerusalem. They went for a coffee and Rosenthal could not resist telling him that more robberies were planned to get money ‘to purchase arms for the defence of the country on the occasion of any outbreak by the Arabs or the Jews, in case the British forces are defeated by the enemies, or in case the British Government will favour the Arabs politically after the end of the war’.
Soffer reported the conversation to Giles. It may be that, having delivered the warning about the likelihood of future robberies, he was the obvious choice to lead the investigation when Rosenthal’s tip turned out to be true. When he arrived in Jerusalem to begin the search for the perpetrators of the Anglo-Palestine job his first act was to try to get in touch with Ilin and Rosenthal. If anyone knew where to reach them it was Tom Wilkin. He turned out to be most unhelpful. Soffer described how he ‘asked Inspector Wilkins [sic] among other things to get in touch with these two gentlemen and see what information they may have about this case. The said Inspector Wilkins brought me no results …’
Soffer, though, was quite capable of making progress on his own. Under his questioning, Shmuel Kaplan, in whose room Zettler, Zeroni and co. had gathered after the Anglo-Palestine heist and who had since been arrested, had come up with an extraordinary proposal. If Soffer freed him for a day, he would contact the perpetrators and try to persuade them to surrender. Surprisingly, Soffer agreed. ‘On 26 September I let Kaplan go before noon,’ he informed Giles. ‘Between 1800 and 1900 hours he phoned me that he wants an extension of time as he arranged an appointment of those concerned at a late hour.’ Soffer consented once again, and also promised Kaplan that he would not be followed. They agreed to meet up at midnight. For a bank robber, Kaplan seems to have been a man of unusual probity for instead of disappearing he kept his word and turned up at the rendezvous. He appeared rather crestfallen. His contacts had now changed their minds and had refused to meet him. No reason was given, but their attitude was hardly surprising given the likelihood that they would be walking into a police trap. ‘Kaplan felt very much upset about it believing that the party will probably consider him a traitor,’ Soffer reported. The detective ‘formed the impression’ that one of the people Kaplan had hoped to meet was Stern.
After Zettler and Kaplan there were no more arrests.13 Stern’s trail was cooling fast. On 18 October, Giles ordered one of his senior officers to approach David Raziel to see if he could help them track down his former friend. The meeting took place in the Arab National restaurant in East Jerusalem. The unnamed officer described how he started off talking about the government’s concern at the recent activities of the Stern group. As well as robbing banks they were ‘also said to have attempted to establish contact with the Italians’, though he admitted that ‘how true this latter point was I could not tell’.14 However, the government had decided that ‘the continued existence of this group was not in its interests, and we are anxious to trace Stern and certain of his followers’. The officer pointed out that the Revisionist movement and the Irgun were now supposed to be on Britain’s side and should therefore be morally obliged to oppose Stern and his men. However, their leaders had ‘not openly denounced them as traitors to the Revisionist movement’.
Raziel accepted that the Stern group was operating against both the Revisionists’ and the government’s interests. However, he ‘regretted he could not help us to find Stern. Even if I produced evidence of the alleged Italian connection … he could not denounce a member or an ex-member of the Irgun.’ Raziel seemed eager not to appear too unhelpful and threw the policeman a comforting rumour. It appeared that Eliahu Golomb, the leader of the Haganah in Tel Aviv, ‘had planned to arrest Stern and a few others and keep them in some remote … colony to cool their heels for a spell. He thought something of the kind might have happened already.’
Whether or not Golomb, a tough pragmatist and a founder of the Haganah who had tried to build better relations with the Irgun, ever contemplated such a plan, it did not come to fruition. Anyway, it would no longer be enough to satisfy the British. All the Mandate security services now had the Stern group in their sights. On 25 October, Giles Bey received a handwritten letter from a senior officer at British Forces headquarters in Palestine. The writer – whose signature is indecipherable – said that, as it now seemed unlikely that the group would be put away on criminal charges, the emergency regulations should be used to round them up.15 According to an internal CID memo, the Jewish Agency and ‘a responsible Revisionist leader’ were of the same opinion. A wanted list was drawn up with thirty-seven names on it; at the head of it was Stern, who was said to have ‘disappeared’ and was last reported to be in Metula, a village on the Lebanese border. On 6 November the police swooped, raiding a number of addresses and capturing fourteen of those on the wanted list. The accuracy of the intelligence suggested that someone inside the organization had supplied the information.16
The round-up was prompted in part by the fact that intelligence reports were starting to put flesh on the bones of the rumours of Stern’s pro-Italian activities. ‘Information from a very large number of reliable sources has consistently affirmed that the Stern group’s policy was to ingratiate themselves with the Italians with the idea that should the Italians invade the country they would be backed as the dominant Jewish party,’ reported Harry Rice, Giles’s deputy at the CID, on 8 November 1940.17 This was a sensational claim. The full story of Stern’s international intrigues would turn out to be even more extraordinary.
* Soffer spells it ‘Eylan’ in his report. Hebrew and Arabic names were phonetically transcribed and often appear in different forms in official documents.