Just after eight o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 22 April 1942, the Deputy Inspector General of the Palestine Police, Michael ‘Mac’ McConnell, stepped out of the front door of his house in the Jerusalem suburbs and walked round to the garage. Spring was well advanced, birds were singing in the trees and the dawn freshness was already wilting under the brassy Palestinian sun. As the veteran policeman, who had served in the force since its earliest days, backed his car out of the garage his servant stood in the drive to see him off. When McConnell drove away an object fell from underneath the vehicle. The servant walked over and picked it up. It exploded instantly, blowing off both his hands. He died soon afterwards.
Three hours later a little boy was playing by the side of the road near the home of McConnell’s boss, Alan Saunders. An unusual object caught his eye. A policeman happened to be passing and the child pointed it out to him. What the policeman saw was a zinc box, attached to a long wire. The wire stretched for a hundred yards across a neighbouring field and terminated in an electric switch. Later examination revealed that the box contained seventy-three ‘fingers’ of gelignite, wired to detonators and packed around with six pounds of iron rivets.
Someone, it seemed, was trying to decapitate the high command of the Palestine Police and it was not difficult to guess who. The Public Information Officer informed the local newspapers that ‘the bomb was similar to those used by the murderers of Inspectors Schiff, Turton and Goldman in Tel Aviv’.1 Stern’s master bomber Yaacov Levstein was safely behind bars. It seemed he had left behind a team of adepts to carry on his work.
Nine days later, at 8.15 a.m. on Friday, 1 May, Geoffrey Morton opened the door of his American saloon car parked outside the bungalow in Sarona and slid his large frame behind the wheel. His wife, Alice, got in beside him. They were joined in the back by Sergeants Alec Stuart and Alex Shand, each carrying a Thompson sub-machine gun. The precaution was clearly justified. Not only had remnants of the band tried to kill the chief of police and his deputy, they had already made what appeared to be one abortive attempt on Morton’s life. Morton’s journey to his headquarters took him past an orange grove surrounded by a stone wall on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. A few weeks previously, he wrote, ‘a sharp-eyed police patrol noticed that the cement surrounding one of the big stones which formed the wall had been carefully chipped out and that the stone could now be quickly removed from inside the wall. The implications were pretty sinister …’2 Since then the route had been kept under surveillance – but not very efficiently, as Morton and his passengers were soon to find out.
In the back seat Alex Shand was scanning his side of the road for anything suspicious. ‘Suddenly there was an explosion … the car was rocked from one side of the road to the other.’ He jumped out and saw ‘a great hole in the road. It was obvious it had been set off by remote control some hundred yards away.’ His first reaction was ‘great anger … I think I was the only one who spoke. I said “you bastards!”’3
The car was destroyed. By a miracle, nobody had been hurt. The Mortons appeared extraordinarily composed. As is sometimes the case with narrow escapes from death, the grim scene quickly morphed into bizarre comedy. Shand remembered an Arab taxi driving up and Alec Stuart ordering it to stop. He jumped into the front seat and in doing so put his foot through a mandolin. ‘He got his foot stuck in this thing and he was kicking it off in the road. I thought it was a very funny sight.’
A police car picked them up and took the party to Jaffa, where Alice insisted on carrying on with her duties at the High School for Girls. ‘After I had cleaned her up a bit, my wife taught all the morning with a splitting headache,’ Morton recorded proudly.4 Everyone had heard the explosion and initially thought it was an enemy air raid. Alice, displaying the coolness that would sustain her throughout her adventurous life with Geoffrey, did not enlighten them and they only learned the true story when they read it in the next day’s newspapers.
The investigation soon established that the bomb had been dug into a camel track that ran along the side of the road – planting it in the tarmac would have been too conspicuous. The command wire ran into an orange grove over a hundred yards away. The bomb was funnel-shaped to direct the blast. It was made of about sixty sticks of gelignite, packed with iron rivets and tamped inside a length of drainpipe. Human error had saved the Mortons and their bodyguards. Shand believed that if the operator had ‘pressed the plunger when [the bomb] was in line with the front wheel, the full force of the explosion would have hit the centre of the car. As it happened they hit the rear. It happened to be a slope-backed car … and it didn’t get the full force of the explosion. That was our luck.’5
This bore all the hallmarks of a job by Stern’s men. But which ones exactly and what was their strategy? In Jerusalem, the hunt for the perpetrators of the McConnell bomb outrage produced quick results. The day after the attempt a ‘trusted source’ gave the names of six Stern followers in the city. Two of those named were picked up in a raid, along with another who had not been on the list, a Turkish-born waiter named Nissim Bachmaris, who worked at the Palatin café. Under Dick Catling’s patient interrogation, Bachmaris’s denials of any involvement with the group broke down and he started to gush information. He led them to a house in Givat Shaul, a new quarter still under construction in the north-west of the city, where Moshe Bar Giora, who had been involved in the attack, and another man were living. A search produced bomb-making materials. An ambush was laid and late on the evening of Thursday, 30 April, two men were seen approaching the house. When challenged they ran off. One was shot and wounded in the thigh, the other was captured. The wounded man was identified as Ezra Sharoni. The other was Bar Giora. The combined operations had been very effective. ‘There is little doubt that these arrests broke the back of the organisation in Jerusalem,’ Alan Saunders concluded.6
In Tel Aviv, events moved equally swiftly. In the early hours of the morning after the attempt on Morton, the police picked up a man named Yosef Nikolaievski wandering shoeless in the north of the city. When questioned he at first claimed he had been taking a nocturnal dip in the nearby Yarkon river. After questioning by Alec Stuart, Alex Shand and Tom Wilkin, he eventually provided a very different explanation. He was, he confessed, a long-standing follower of Avraham Stern. Four days before, in his room in Tel Hai Street, he and five others had built a pipe bomb packed with rivets and seventy pieces of gelignite. He identified one of the men as Yehoshua Cohen, who had been on the neighbouring roof of 8 Yael Street when Schiff and the others were killed. The job took all day. That evening Nikolaievski delivered the bomb to the flat of one of his confederates, Eliahu Levy, then went to see a film at the Mograbi cinema. As he told Tom Wilkin, he got home just after midnight and was ‘about to retire when I heard the bell ring twice. I opened the door and I saw six or seven men.’7 He tried to slam the door shut but was overpowered, dragged outside, blindfolded and handcuffed, bundled into a car and driven off. After a while the car stopped on some rough ground and Nikolaievski’s mystery captors started to question him.
‘They asked me where the landmine was which was in my house the previous day. I told them that I didn’t know what they wanted from me.’ His memory clearly needed jogging. Now they ‘handcuffed me behind the back, placed a rope through the handcuffs and hoisted me in the air so that my feet were off the ground. They again demanded that I should tell them where the landmine was. As I was in great pain I told them to let me down and I would tell them everything.’
Nikolaievski gave them half the story, admitting his part in the bomb-making but giving phony names for his confederates. He was set free but the following night he received another visit from the same men. The torture was repeated and this time he gave up the name of Eliahu Levy. They returned for a third time in the early hours of the morning and, after handcuffing and driving him around for half an hour, cut him loose for the police to find.
Who were Nikolaievski’s night callers? According to Shand they were members of the Haganah. The wave of arrests that followed suggests the CID were being given valuable help from very well-informed Jewish sources. By 12 May, nine men and a woman had been arrested. They included Shimon Lokshin, who had planted the bomb intended for Morton, and Nehemia Torenberg, who had passed on to Stern the Irgun’s offer of salvation. Some had given themselves up, including Yitzhak Tselnik, the man closest to Yair in his last days and his effective deputy. A few other significant figures were still at large, however, notably Yehoshua Cohen, who it was thought had triggered the bomb aimed at Morton.
Most of those in detention kept their mouths shut but some spoke quite freely. One, Yitzhak Reznitsky, who had been part of the plot to kill Morton, gave an interesting account of the dynamic that had driven the group’s survivors to attack the British establishment head on. Alan Saunders’ report on the round-up operations says that Reznitsky told his interrogators that the killing of Schiff and his colleagues at Yael Street ‘produced a state of turmoil within the Stern Group. Members were shocked and displeased by the action and the movement was in danger of liquidation.’ However, the police actions that followed brought them back into line. ‘The severe methods employed by the police … including the shooting of Zak, Amper, Sevorai [sic], Levshtein [sic] and Stern himself … convinced the members of the Group of Government’s intention to crush their organisation at any cost, and it was decided to fight back.’8
Saunders judged that the Jerusalem bombs and the attempted killing of Morton were ‘intended to advertise this fact and … to indicate the Group’s determination to eradicate its particular enemies in the CID’. Stern’s death certainly sparked a thirst for revenge among the boldest of his followers. ‘Heavy darkness descended on their hearts and minds,’ wrote Yaacov Banai, an early chronicler of the group. ‘Hatred was aflame in their hearts and the need for vengeance burned.’9 Ezra Sharoni was sitting with Nehemia Torenberg in a café in King George V Street, Tel Aviv, when they heard the news. They struggled ‘to avoid crying’, he remembered, years later. ‘We sat in shock and shortly afterwards parted, determined to prepare a plan of attack.’10
According to Nathan Yellin-Mor, who would be one of the triumvirate who revived the group’s fortunes, hatred was focused on one man in particular. ‘The first goal for a revenge attack was perfectly clear – Geoffrey Morton, the murderer of Yair.’11 The problem was how to get at him as ‘he took strict precautionary measures … there was no chance of harming him in a direct attack’. He confirmed that a first attempt to plant a mine in the wall of an orange grove had been foiled when the device was discovered.
The vendetta against Morton was personal. By killing Stern he had put not only himself but those around him in mortal danger. Having scoped out his route to work, the would-be assassins knew very well that Alice was always at his side. The Jerusalem bomb had been more in the nature of business. After the initial discovery, more mines were discovered in the area around Saunders’ house. The planned operation, it turned out, had not been aimed specifically at him: the police chief’s house happened to be on the way to the Mount Zion cemetery, where McConnell would have been buried had the car bomb hit its intended target. The mines, wrote Yellin-Mor, ‘were intended for the heads of government and senior ranks of the police and C.I.D.’ who would have come to McConnell’s funeral. Thus, a child’s discovery averted a spectacular outrage that might have wiped out a sizeable number of the British elite in Palestine, from Sir Harold MacMichael downwards. By going after Morton and the Mandate’s top brass, the plotters believed they would have at least the tacit approval of the Yishuv. ‘In the minds of those seeking vengeance,’ wrote Yellin-Mor, ‘the Struma disaster had created the right climate of opinion among the public.’ It was a judgement that was shared at least in part by those responsible for Palestine’s security.
As it was, these operations used up the last reserves of strength of an exhausted and enfeebled organization. Almost all the key figures and most of the veterans were now locked up − 150 of them by the police count. For those who remained on the outside, further attacks on the British were too hazardous. The main aim now was to free their comrades, detained in Mazra’a and the other main compound holding emergency regulations prisoners at Latroun, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. For the time being, escape plans would absorb most of their time and resources.
Geoffrey Morton had been gratified by the avalanche of letters and telegrams he received from Palestine’s notables, Jewish and Arab, congratulating him on his lucky escape. One, from a fellow officer, Assistant Superintendent Henry Bennett Shaw, who would go on to become third in command of the PPF, mentions some act of kindness Morton had shown him. It gives an idea of his standing with his peers, not merely as a policeman but as a human being. ‘My Dear Geoff,’ he wrote. ‘First of all I should like to congratulate you on your recent miraculous escape but also to thank you for your very nice and sincere letter as real friends are few and far between, but believe me old boy, it is at times like these that one appreciates them to the full. I do hope that for our sake and your dear wife that they shift you from Jaffa soon …’12 Other correspondence came from people he had never met. One letter arrived from someone he knew only too well – Max Seligman, counsel to some of Palestine’s leading Jewish desperados and a formidable courtroom foe. ‘My sincere congratulations on your happy escape,’ he wrote. ‘Although this sort of thing may mean business for me professionally, you know that I deplore and abhor it.’ He went on to pay Morton a considerable compliment. ‘There is no need to tell you that with all our clashings, I do really appreciate your attitude and courtesy in regard to the various matters in regard to which I have had to approach you, and I am glad of your escape and hope that you will be spared to win the laurels which you deserve.’13 This was all very gratifying and carried the ring of sincerity. But the tone was that of a respectful and even affectionate adversary. No one assumed that the battle between the Stern group and the British powers was over, least of all Morton’s chief, Alan Saunders.
Saunders was worried that two major regional dramas, coming within a few weeks of each other, had had a toxic effect on mainstream Jewish public opinion. He quoted the opinion of a ‘leading member of the Revisionist Party’ who ‘stated recently that whereas the original Group enjoyed little, if any, public support, the circumstances of the shooting of Stern, coupled with the feeling aroused by the “Struma” tragedy had caused some people to wonder if Stern’s “idealism” was not, after all, worthy of serious thought’. He concluded that ‘mere arrests and administrative detention is not likely to deter the fanatics from the present Stern group’ and that ‘further acts of terrorism are to be expected’.14
It was clear by now that MacMichael’s solution of deporting the problem en masse to some remote corner of the empire was not going to work. London was sympathetic. The problem was that there were simply not enough ships to spare, even if some colonial governor could be persuaded to take in a boatload of hardened and violent hotheads. ‘Much as I should like to help the High Commissioner it seems the practical difficulties are too great at the moment,’ sighed Sir Cosmo Parkinson, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office. He did not rule out the measure for ever for ‘the situation might so develop that we should have to move these ruffians, whatever the inconveniences involved’.15
So what was to be done? MacMichael’s room for manoeuvre was circumscribed by the fact that the Struma affair had grabbed the attention of public figures in London who were now keen to know more about what was happening in Palestine. They were led by the tireless Josiah Wedgwood, whose support in 1939 for armed insurrection against colonialist oppression had so gratified the Irgun. Wedgwood had reacted to the news of the shooting in Mizrachi Bet Street by dropping a note to Viscount Cranborne – ‘Bobbety’ to his intimates – who had taken over from Moyne as Colonial Secretary at the end of February. ‘Dear Bobbety,’ he wrote. ‘Who on earth (and off it) is Stern and what have your Palestinian rulers done now?’16 Now a peer, he tabled a question in the House of Lords on 2 June publicly asking Cranborne ‘when and under what circumstances a Palestinian Jew named Stern was killed while attempting to escape?’ The minister replied by listing the group’s crimes and repeating the formula that Stern and ‘two other terrorists’ had been killed ‘while attempting to escape’.
Faced with scrutiny from London, the perceived change of mood among the Yishuv and the realization that Stern’s followers were not going to be defeated by force alone, MacMichael and the security apparatus of Palestine settled for a policy of appeasement.
The shift in approach was never openly acknowledged but it was apparent in many ways great and small, and Geoffrey Morton was alert to, and resentful of, all of them. He noticed a telling change in terminology in official correspondence. In the months leading up to the death of Stern his organization had been routinely referred to as the ‘Stern Gang’. Within a few weeks of the event this contemptuous phrase had disappeared and it became again, as it had been before, the more respectable-sounding ‘Stern Group’.
Ten days before the attempt on his life, Morton had been angered by a memorandum he received from Superintendent Laurence Harrington, addressed to the officers in charge of the five divisions in the Lydda area under his command. It passed on an instruction from Jerusalem that henceforth ‘in all cases where it is intended to prosecute Jews who may be found contravening the Firearms Ordinance, the approval of the Inspector General [Alan Saunders] in writing must be obtained before referring the case to the Military Court under the Emergency Regulations’. Morton would later describe this as ‘the most disgraceful official document it was ever my misfortune to receive’.17 He pointed out that ‘at that time illegal possession of firearms could be punishable on conviction with the death penalty and during previous years many Arabs had been so charged, had been convicted and duly executed’.
The new instruction meant that there would be one rule for Arabs and another for Jews: ‘Whereas Arabs could continue to be prosecuted at the discretion of local police without reference to anybody’, Jews could not be charged ‘without first submitting the case through the Assistant Inspector General CID in Jerusalem for onward transmission to the Inspector General himself, who had no doubt been instructed to refer such cases to the High Commissioner’.
Morton was convinced that the edict originated in London. Whatever its origin, however, it was clear that the Mandate powers were now anxious to avoid anything that might inflame Jewish public opinion. On 6 March, Yehoshua Becker and Nissim Reuven, perpetrators of the wages snatch in Tel Aviv in January in which two Jewish passers-by had been shot dead, were convicted and sentenced at the Court of Criminal Assize in Jerusalem. Becker was condemned to death. Reuven got fourteen years’ imprisonment. Three weeks later the convictions were upheld and the sentences confirmed in the Court of Criminal Appeal. Morton and his colleagues ‘felt certain that Becker would pay the full penalty of the law for a clear case of murder, as many Arabs had done in the preceding years’.18 The Jews Morton spoke to, though, were ‘completely confident that he would not be executed’. Morton was sufficiently alarmed to raise the subject with Jerusalem, only to be told he was ‘talking nonsense’. The matter preyed on his mind. Writing an intelligence summary for his superiors he took the opportunity to point out that if Becker were reprieved, ‘any gangster cornered in possession of a firearm would have every incentive to try to shoot his way out’.19 This intervention made him ‘thoroughly unpopular’ in high places. In any case, ‘it made no difference – in due course Becker was reprieved without any official explanation as to why this was done, and those terrorists who were not already in the bag took on a new lease of life’.
Such appeasing gestures from the authorities themselves were unlikely to have much effect. What was needed was a démarche that might result in a cessation of hostilities, such as the one that had been worked out between the security services and the Irgun. Stern, after all, was dead. Perhaps after a decent interval, his followers’ fury might start to abate to the point where an accommodation was possible. In May, MacMichael was informed that an offer to mediate between the Sternists and the authorities had been received from an unlikely quarter. Josiah Wedgwood informed ‘Bobbety’ Cranborne that he had been approached by Eri Jabotinsky, son of the late Ze’ev, with a proposal that he travel to Palestine to try to talk sense into the large number of Sternists behind the wire. Jabotinsky had come to know Stern well when they had both done time in Mazra’a.
Since his release he had been living in New York where he watched events in Palestine with dismay. Stern, he wrote to Wedgwood, had been a ‘personal friend’. He stressed the purity of his motives and defended him from the charge of collusion with the enemy. As Jabotinsky saw it, ‘Stern was slain in battle with the Police at Tel Aviv and thus became a hero and martyr for large sections of Jewish youth, even for those who in former times had been violently opposed to him’. He went on: ‘The slaying of Stern is a personal affront to many hundreds or even thousands of Jews, and I am convinced that the actions of the Palestine Administration can only result in the fanning of a vendetta which may last for years and spread far outside the limits of Palestine.’ Jabotinsky was offering to ‘fly to Palestine in order to try and use my influence to negotiate [a] truce’, and sought only ‘airplane priority’ and a guarantee that he wouldn’t be arrested.
The overture was rejected by Cranborne. There ‘could be no question of a truce with people who adopt such methods’.20 Yet within a few weeks of Jabotinsky being told to mind his own business, two senior policemen set off on a mission that looked remarkably like an attempt to organize some sort of ceasefire. On the morning of 15 June Giles Bey arrived at Mazra’a camp accompanied by another officer called Ballantine. There, about a hundred Stern group members had been assembled in a hut to listen to a proposal being put forward by the visitors. It was delivered by Ballantine, a shadowy figure whose precise identity is unclear: there is no mention of him in the Palestine Police Force records, though he may have been a senior figure in the Nigerian colonial police on a temporary secondment.21
Ballantine left an account in a document marked ‘secret’ which described how he ‘informed the persons present that I was new to this country and believed in making personal contacts with as many sections of the community as possible with the idea of (1) getting acquainted and (2) conveying to them the objects and purpose of a police force’. The gist of his message was that the Palestine Police had a job to do and were determined to do it, with the use of force if necessary. He flattered his audience by saying that he ‘did not doubt members of the Group would be prepared to sacrifice their lives’ to achieve their aims but the same applied to the police. This resulted in an inevitable ‘exchange of lives’ which was ‘very foolish, childish and unnecessary’. He suggested that ‘any lawful objects the group might have in mind would be at least equally worth pursuing by lawful and manly methods’.22 The inference seemed to be that if they renounced violence they would be released.
Ballantine believed his address had gone down well. He was told by representatives from the audience that they wanted ten minutes to discuss the overture. Some then met him in the camp office and asked whether he would agree to allow an envoy safe passage to report his words to other members of the group. Ballantine replied that he didn’t have the authority to grant the request and that he or Giles would pass it up the line.
Among those listening was Yitzhak Shamir. He later claimed that he had proposed that six Stern group members should be brought from detention in Acre to meet the Mazra’a detainees. This was done and they sat down to ‘thrash out the pros and cons of the British proposal’.23 Shamir’s view was that ‘we must do nothing, give nothing, exchange nothing – unless the British were prepared now, to pledge the post war creation of a Jewish state’. Instead they produced a set of counter-proposals, including the demand that the British hand over immigration control to the Jews, that were designed to be unacceptable. ‘[Ballantine’s] spokesmen thanked us coldly and broke off further negotiations.’ The encounter had taught them something that cheered them greatly: ‘The Mandatory Government, at last, was becoming worried about’ the Stern group.
This was a fair assessment. Ballantine’s olive branch was indeed an indication of Britain’s deepening concern about its situation in the Middle East. In the high summer of 1942, alarm was mounting among Palestine’s rulers who were now extremely anxious to win whatever support and cooperation they could from their charges. On 26 May, after a lull of several months, Rommel’s advance across the Western Desert resumed. A few weeks later the Germans were in Tobruk and on 23 June they crossed the Egyptian border, stopping, a week later, at El Alamein. In the Caucasus in late July, Hitler launched Operation Edelweiss. The objective was to seize the oilfields of the region, but beyond them a bigger prize beckoned. Success could force Turkey into the war on Germany’s side, creating a vast new menace to Britain’s Middle Eastern possessions.
In Palestine, the British rulers and the Yishuv establishment needed each other as never before. Jewish paramilitary organizations now represented a significant military resource, and none more so than the Haganah. The Mandate’s security staffs spent much time calculating their strengths. In early July an intelligence report assessed the Haganah as being capable of mustering 41,600 men and women, excluding their members in the British Army and police. An earlier report had calculated that just over 24,407 rifles, handguns and machine guns were in Jewish hands. Thus, despite their numbers, the Haganah were still badly under-equipped. The need for the Jews to be able to defend themselves could not be more acute. They faced a war of extermination on two fronts – from the Arabs, who might choose to exploit Britain’s difficulties to rise up against them, and from the Germans should they break the British in Egypt. It was inevitable that they should seek to acquire weapons by whatever means available, including stealing them from the army.
The authorities’ attitude towards illegal arms had havered with the prevailing political situation, and the mailed fist alternated with the blind eye. In August 1942, the British knew that if the worst came to the worst, Jewish support would be most welcome and assumed that it would be forthcoming. This, surely, was a time for official myopia.
Geoffrey Morton’s nature had always rebelled against the notion of selective justice. He was an intelligent man who recognized the complexities of the Palestinian situation. For him, though, the law was far more than a mere set of rules, to be bent or ignored as circumstances directed. It was the essence of everything he believed in, the bedrock of the society he risked his life to defend. His opposition to those who sought to undermine it – Arab or Jew, left or right – was unequivocal. By seeking to arm themselves the Jews were not only breaking the law, they were harming the British war effort. He freely admitted that he ‘enjoyed pitting my wits against these illegal organisations, which, for their own selfish ends, were prepared to go to any lengths to undermine the war potential of the Allies at a most critical stage in the fighting’.24
Early in August, Morton received a tip-off which held the prospect of just the sort of police work he relished. The Special Investigation Branch of the RAF told him that a locally recruited Jew, Leading Aircraftman Zaks, had approached an RAF driver at a local ammunition dump with a proposal. He was offering big money for any rifles, machine guns and aerial bombs he could lay his hands on. Up to a thousand pounds was available for the right stuff. Leading Aircraftman Watts reported the approach straightaway. Morton and his men now set about organizing a sting operation.
On 11 August, Watts told Zaks that he was detailed to drive a truck-load of ammunition from a dump near Ramleh to an RAF landing field near Gaza the following day. He was prepared to let him have ten boxes from his load in return for payment. Zaks was delighted and disappeared to Tel Aviv to ‘make the necessary arrangements’.25
The following morning Watts set off in his lorry with fifty cases of ammunition on board. A short way down the road he saw a parked ‘touring car’ and opposite a man, who signalled him to stop. He then jumped in and they drove on, followed by the car. A few minutes later he was ordered to stop, just short of a track on the right that led to a kibbutz called Givat Brenner, a stronghold of the Haganah. The ‘touring car’ checked the road ahead. Several men from the kibbutz, who appeared at the junction, carried out a foot patrol at the same time. ‘Both the occupants of the touring car and the scouts paid particular attention to an Arab taxi which had stopped a few yards from the Givat Brenner junction,’ wrote Morton in his report. ‘But after a thorough inspection of its occupants, which consisted of two veiled Moslem women, accompanied by baskets, suitcases and other paraphernalia, an Arab driver and fellah consuming bread and olives, they were apparently satisfied that there were no police in the vicinity.’ They waved the lorry through some big iron gates into an orange grove alongside the track which belonged to the kibbutz.
The operation was watched closely by the two ‘Moslem women’ in the taxi. Sweating under their heavily embroidered dresses and veils were two of Morton’s men, Sergeants Kenneth Hutchens and Ken ‘Busty’ Woodward. The driver drove slowly away. Down the road Morton, Tom Wilkin and several more officers were waiting. They drove back to the turning, meeting Watts and his lorry on the way. When the party arrived at the orange grove the gates were chained and padlocked. Woodward and Hutchens cut through the wire fence and raced through the trees in time to catch two men trying to hide the boxes in previously dug holes. Seven men were arrested and the car, which belonged to the kibbutz, impounded.
All but one of the prisoners were Givat Brenner residents. The other lived at a kibbutz nearby. When Morton sent a few policemen to search the kibbutz they were refused entry. An angry crowd gathered, a shot was fired, then the search party retreated, one of them nursing a badly bitten hand. A stronger force returned later and completed the task.
Before Morton could organize a search of the Givat Brenner prisoners’ homes, however, he received ‘urgent instructions from Jerusalem’ to desist. This was despite the fact that one of those held was found in possession of notes listing a cache of 119 rifles along with a mass of other military equipment. Morton was not one to let the matter pass. ‘In view of the notes found … it is probable that the results of these searches would have been helpful in the investigation of the case,’ he recorded plaintively in his official report.
It had been a classic Morton operation involving cunning, slick planning and psychological manipulation. The use of policemen in drag provided a touch of humour guaranteed to raise a laugh in messes the length and breadth of Palestine for years to come. The Givat Brenner caper, though, was to be Morton’s last hurrah. The prisoners were sent for trial and most were convicted, and Zaks court-martialled and put away. All of were members of the Haganah.
Alan Saunders had appeared to appreciate Morton’s ruse. ‘Your arrangements for the trap into which the accused fell were based on the best detective novel background,’ he enthused.26 Yet within a few days of this success, Morton received a very different missive from Saunders. ‘The blow fell,’ he wrote. He was ‘informed that it had been decided that I had been working too hard and that for the sake of my health my wife and I were to be sent home on leave by air immediately.’27 Morton was sickened by the news. ‘The war was at its height; we had our backs to the wall in the Western Desert … things had never looked blacker and we were to pack up and go home to England for an indefinite period with no indication as to what my future was to be.’ He ‘argued to the point of insubordination’. His resistance produced a meagre result. ‘The only concession I could obtain was that I would certainly be allowed to return to Palestine when I had had a good rest.’
Why had Saunders decided he could do without the services of one of his most effective officers at a time when Palestine was in such danger? There is nothing in the files that provides an answer. The strong suspicion must be that, with the Givat Brenner raid, Morton had overstepped the mark. Throughout his career he had bridled at the notion that political expediency should be allowed to restrain the pursuit of the guilty. He recognized the trait in himself and made no apology for it. ‘As a policeman I doubtless took an oversimplified view of matters,’ he wrote fifteen years after these events. ‘To me a thing (in theory anyway) was either right or wrong, legal or illegal; if it was illegal, my job was to do all in my power to bring to justice the person responsible for it: it was equally my job to see that a man would be able to do without hindrance that which he was legally entitled to do.’28
This attitude had been more than apparent in a furious protest he directed to his bosses shortly before the Givat Brenner episode. A memo had crossed his desk revealing a plan by Saunders to release five low-level Stern group detainees. According to the Inspector General, they were now ‘definitely hostile to the group’s policy and have made known their change of front to their fellow internees’. He judged that their release ‘would react considerably on the die-hards of the group without public security suffering in any way’. Morton and other senior officers had been asked if they had any arguments against the proposal. ‘The most reasonable argument I can offer is the number of dead policemen for which these gangsters have been responsible,’ fumed Morton in his reply. ‘I would point out that it was exactly this policy applied to Messrs Stern, Levstein and Co which secured their release from internment following the double assassination of Inspectors Barker and Cairns in Jerusalem and which proved to be the death warrant of Messrs Schiff, Turton, Goldman, Soffiof …’ The ‘blow’ to the organization Saunders envisaged would ‘prove to be a boomerang’, he predicted.29 He had already heard that Eliyahu Moldovan, whose arrest had resulted in the assassination of Soffiof, was also due for release. The news led him to send an anguished letter to his immediate boss, Superintendent Harrington. Despite his proven toughness and considerable pride, Morton did not hide his fears for his personal safety. ‘As you know full well it is war to the end between the Stern gang and the Police in general, not to mention me in particular, and I am most apprehensive of retaliatory action which may be taken if Moldovan and other members of the gang are released,’ he wrote.30
At a time when the British were anxious to keep Palestine’s Jews on side, Morton was becoming a problem. The Givat Brenner sting – which seems not to have been referred up the chain of command for approval – was unlikely to improve relations between the authorities and the Haganah, who might be needed at any moment to shore up Palestine’s defences. Morton’s part in the raid on 30 Dizengoff Street and his shooting of Avraham Stern meant he was already a controversial figure in the eyes of the Yishuv. Judged from the viewpoint of political expediency, the perspective that Morton so despised, he was becoming more trouble than he was worth. It was time for him to go.
In early October the Mortons received two days’ notice that there were seats on an aeroplane to take them out. They had just enough time to pile all their furniture and effects into a spare room in a police station before they departed. Morton’s men at Lydda CID, Briton, Jew and Arab, gave them ‘a most wonderful send-off – a farewell party which will always stand out for us as one of the greatest things in our not uneventful lives’.31 Alice wrote in her diary that they left from Lydda at lunchtime on 16 September ‘with about 30 police as escorts’.32 Catling and John Scott came down from Jerusalem to wave them off, with Giles Bey, who was on their flight.
When they arrived in Cairo that afternoon the city seemed very relaxed and Alice noted there was ‘hardly any effort to black out’. The Mortons put up at the Carlton, ate ice creams at Groppis and lunched at the Gezira Sporting Club with Mr and Mrs Giles. During a visit to the zoo they heard ‘loud bursts of gunfire which made all the animals roar and scream’. It was a harbinger of things to come. Five weeks later the second Battle of El Alamein began. With victory, British fortunes in the war altered for the better. In Palestine, though, things would soon be changing for the worse.