A Daring Young Woman Spymaster

Sarah Aaronsohn’s daring, brief life elicited respect from both adversaries and friends. Her Turkish foes called her the equal of a hundred men; the British, whom she aided, assessed that she had saved the lives of thirty thousand people. She died at age 27 in 1917, having run a Jewish spy network in Ottoman-ruled Palestine (a district of Syria) that provided British intelligence with copious details on Turkish forces during World War I. The network’s single most valuable contribution was to inform the British about Turkish and German airpower, enabling British forces to conquer the country she hoped would become a Jewish homeland.

Gregory J. Wallance has written a beautiful, hard-to-put-down book about Sarah and the Nili spy ring that she led. Though Nili was founded by her siblings and their friends, Sarah came to be the embodiment of it. Born in Palestine to Romanian Jews who believed in the Zionist dream, Sarah came from a highly educated family that had succeeded despite the travails of Ottoman misrule. Her brother Aaron was a world-famous agricultural scientist, and family members frequently roamed to Europe and even America. After marrying a Bulgarian Jew and living in Constantinople, she witnessed parts of the Armenian genocide of 1915 as she returned home via Anatolia and Syria. Her horror at that experience was exacerbated by the sense that the Jews of Palestine, and perhaps of the entire Ottoman Empire, might be next.

Steeled with determination, she threw herself into her siblings’ nascent intelligence efforts upon her return. Scientific research, including how to counter a plague of locusts, served as a useful cover for their work. Even as some of Palestine’s Jews thought that they should support the Ottoman Empire (David Ben Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister, tried to form a Jewish Ottoman military unit), the Nili spies intently sought to aid British and Australian forces in Egypt. Liaising with the British turned out to be more difficult than expected: Nili agents’ attempts to pass through the Sinai tended to result in them getting killed or captured by the Turks or local Bedouin tribes. Even when contact with British forces was established via Aaron’s convoluted sojourn across Europe, and despite Aaron’s fame, he struggled to earn their trust.

However, the two sides eventually set up a semi-regular exchange of information, personnel, and supplies. On moonless nights when the weather was favorable, small boats or swimmers would shuttle between a British ship and the Aaronsohn’s beachside agricultural research station, from which the Nili spies operated. Aaron coordinated this from Cairo, where Sarah and other Nili operatives also went. She might have stayed, as Aaron and others insisted, but she demanded to be taken back to Palestine to take up the fight. Her network of spies gathered copious intelligence regarding military hardware, troop movements, and even the health condition of the troops (with the assistance of a Jewish doctor).

Despite Nili’s success, dissension within the Jewish community—a mainstay since the days of Joseph and Moses—occurred on multiple levels. Aside from the minority who thought that they should fight for the Ottomans, most of Palestine’s Jews just wanted to keep their heads down until the war was over. Stern warnings from communal leaders to stop the spying were not heeded by Sarah and other Nili agents. At the same time, Aaron and the London-based Zionist leaders (including Chaim Weizmann, later Israel’s first president) had long-distance arguments over what seemed to be personal differences.

The network was unraveled by the capture of a Nili agent in the Sinai, who had been searching for his cousin Avshalom, who had disappeared along the same route. It had been a closely kept secret by Sarah and her siblings that Avshalom, who was also married to Sarah’s sister Rivka, was known to be dead. In addition to getting information from the captured agent, the Turks may also have discovered carrier pigeons carrying small capsules with encoded messages, alerting them to the spy network in their midst. Seizing Sarah and other Nili agents, they tortured them relentlessly, but Sarah refused to tell them anything. After four days, they permitted her to go to her own home under guard to get clothing before they shipped her to Nazareth and then Damascus. In the bathroom, she shot herself in the mouth with a pistol that had been in a concealed compartment, though it took her four days to die. Sarah and some of her agents died just weeks before British forces freed her country from four centuries of the Ottoman yoke, a liberation that they had done so much to enable.

This excellent book is full of human, moving stories of Sarah, her siblings, their friends, and other agents. Their disagreements and faults are presented without shame, alongside the magnitude of their achievements. It closes with a discussion of the Nili spies’ legacy, alongside the touching discovery of Avshalom’s desert grave fifty years later.

Sarah, like Joan of Arc, died young for the cause of liberating her country against the odds. This compelling book tells her story in a way that reminds us of the heroism of past ages.

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Our Reviewer: Dr. Scott Savitz is a defense researcher in the Washington, DC area. He earned his doctorate and a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a bachelor’s degree from Yale University. A senior engineer at the RAND Corporation. He has led research on such diverse subjects as employment of unmanned maritime vehicles, the impact of non-lethal weapons, addressing threats from naval mines, testing of autonomous systems, gaps in Arctic military capabilities, how to make airbases less vulnerable, and many other topics. He is the author of The Fall of the Republic, a fictionalized account of the Catiline Conspiracy in ancient Rome. His previous reviews include Machiavelli's Legacy: The Prince After Five Hundred Years, The Machiavellian Enterprise: A Commentary on The Prince, Machiavelli's Three Romes, Great Power Clashes along the Maritime Silk Road, The Crisis of Catiline, War Underground: A History of Military Mining in Siege Warfare, Strategy and Grand Strategy, The Quotable Machiavelli, Greenland at War, Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography, and Machiavelli on War.

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