Eric Ambler: The Levanter

What happened in Israel was this:

On June 28 a bus from Haifa bound for Tel Aviv stopped at Nazareth to pick up passengers. These included a party of eight American tourists. Some rearrangement of the contents of the baggage compartment at the back of the bus was necessary in order to make room for the tourists’ bags and cases. In the course of this rearrangement a small but heavy carton which had been put aboard the bus in Haifa, together with other packages for delivery in Tel Aviv, fell to the ground.

A series of explosions followed. They were not big explosions, but there were a lot of them, and then the carton caught fire.

Nobody was injured, and the bus was eventually allowed to proceed. No publicity was given to the incident. The police were naturally interested in finding out who in Haifa had sent the carton and who in Tel Aviv was to have been the recipient. Publicity would have warned both parties. As the carton had been quite badly burned the task of deciphering the writing on the charred labels was taken over by a police laboratory. The results, if any, of the investigation have not so far been announced.

All that is known publicly is what Mr. Robert S. Rankin, of Malibu, California, heard and saw.

He was on a tour of the Holy Land with Mrs. Rankin and they were among the passengers on the bus who joined it at Nazareth. Mr. Rankin is a motion picture executive, and when he and his wife arrived in Rome a few days later they were invited to a dinner party. One of their fellow guests was a roving American gossip columnist. During the evening Mr. Rankin told her about the exploding carton. The columnist, who was short of copy that week, used the story.

Here is Mr. Rankin’s own account of the incident:

“It was the damnedest thing. The guy with the baggage dropped this carton on the ground. Not carelessly, you understand. If it had been a case of Scotch nothing would have been broken. He just gave it a hard jolt. Well, the next moment it was like the Fourth of July. Suddenly, a lot of bangs — pah — pah — pah! I thought it was a machine gun at first and yelled to Mrs. Rankin to get down. But no — pah — pah — pah! And there were these bits flying all over the place. Bits! What do you think they were? Flashlight batteries, that’s what! Ordinary flashlight batteries going off like Chinese firecrackers. I picked one of the cases up and kept it. One of those that had gone off, I mean. An army man took the rest away. I kept it as a souvenir and because I thought nobody would believe me otherwise. I mean, flashlight batteries! Of course they weren’t real batteries. Our guide said they had this sort of trouble once in a while. At the airport a month or so back he said they found explosive detonators in some woman’s shoes, hidden in the heels. It’s the Palestinians.”

In Paris two days later, Mr. Rankin was asked by a reporter from a French news magazine if he could see the battery case. The magazine published a photograph of it. The label had been singed, but the Green Circle trademark and the words “Made in Syria” were clearly visible.

The government of Israel tends to assign the responsibility for hostile acts committed by foreign based groups of Palestine guerrillas to each group’s host country, and to determine its reprisal policies accordingly. Smuggling in detonators disguised as flashlight batteries was clearly a hostile act, no matter which guerrilla group was involved.

In Damascus, Dr. Hawa hastened to dissociate his ministry from the Green Circle trademark. In his statement he pointed out, quite truthfully, that the Green Circle dry-battery factory was a private enterprise of the Agence Howell, that no government money was involved in its financing, and that Michael Howell, a foreign entrepreneur resident in Syria, had no official standing whatsoever.

On the heels of Dr. Hawa’s statement came the publication of Mr. Howell’s and Miss Malandra’s confessions by Colonel Shikla’s department.

In Damascus they meant to defend themselves by discrediting Michael Howell, and they succeeded. The Arab press, hysterical as ever, tore into him with everything they had.

And they had plenty. Here was this Howell, a rich businessman whose family company had battened for years on poor Arab countries, revealed as an Israeli provocateur and spy. Having joined or having pretended to join the Palestinian liberation cause he had then proceeded to betray it in the vilest way. Worse, he had organized treacherous murder plots against Arabs who refused to be blackmailed by his agents. Nor was blackmail his only source of profit. In his factories he had made illegal arms and sold them to the very fedayeen whom he later betrayed. Among his known victims was the Palestinian patriot Salah Ghaled, lured aboard a Howell ship and murdered for Howell’s Zionist masters; though perhaps Ghaled’s fate was merciful when one thought of other Howell victims delivered bound to the Israeli usurper and condemned to rot in the Zionist concentration camps.

To this sort of insensate attack there can be no real defence. The victim can only wait for it to exhaust itself. Mr. Howell’s initial response had been a blank and steadfast denial of all the charges. However, when the European press took up the story, he changed his tactics and began to explain. He would have done better, perhaps, to have stayed with the denials. They at least had been unequivocal. Of the explanations that could not be said.

In August I had occasion to go again to Beirut, where I talked to Frank Edwards about Mr. Howell. He had recently been in Israel and had discussed the case with contacts there. For reasons which seemed to me very sound, the government of Israel had refused to comment publicly on either the “Green Circle Incident” or the Arab charges against Mr. Howell. Frank Edwards’ contacts, however, had been more forthcoming, and he had picked up some intriguing scraps of information. The idea of someone doing a full-length feature on the subject was mooted. Frank Edwards knew Mr. Howell slightly and could set up an interview with him. As I had been the one to interview Ghaled it seemed logical that I should now interview the man who had been accused of murdering him, and write the feature.

The Villa Howell near Famagusta does not look very big from the outside, but when you get inside you know that you are in a wealthy house. It has that “old-money” look: everything is very good, nothing is very new-except, possibly, the swimming pool — and it is all slightly, pleasantly, untidy. I had been told that Mr. Howell’s mother and his wife and children were all in Cannes for the summer, so I was not surprised to find Miss Malandra there with the master of the house.

They were in beach clothes by the swimming pool, where, Judging from the files scattered about them, they had been working. I was invited to take off my jacket and tie, offered swimming trunks if I would feel more comfortable, and a champagne cocktail. I refused the swimming trunks but accepted the cocktail.

Miss Malandra served it. Lunch would be at one thirty, she said. There would be ample time for a second drink. Then we got down to brass tacks.

Or, rather, Michael Howell got down to brass tacks, with a denunciation that lasted for twenty minutes of the iniquities of the press. Frank Edwards had warned me to expect this, so at first I let it flow; but when he began to quote from an article written by Melanie Hammad for a Cairo paper and read long extracts from it, I had to interrupt.

“Mr. Howell, I’m afraid I don’t understand Arabic.”

“Ah, sorry. Well, I can tell you what she says about me in English. Hashemite lackey, running dog, murderous viper, jackal, hyena, defiler of youth. Those are some of the nicer things she has to say.”