The Smuggling Trials

The men Part I and Part II followed through warehouses, cockpits, and the Žatec night finally sat down in the one setting this book has not yet entered: a federal courtroom, under their own names, answering their own indictments. On April 7, 1949, a grand jury in Los Angeles returned charges against nine defendants and one corporation, accusing them of conspiring to ship airplanes and other war material to Israel in violation of the Neutrality Act and the export-control laws. The nine were Adolph W. Schwimmer, Ray Selk, William Sosnow, J. Leonard, Sam R. Leases, Herman N. Greenspun, Abraham J. Levin, Leon Gardner, and Elynor Rudnick, the sole woman among them; the corporation was Service Airways, Inc., of New York, the paper airline whose fleet had crossed an ocean in Part I. Bail was set at $10,000 for eight of the defendants and $1,000 for Rudnick. In New York, the attorney Bartley Crum, formerly of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, announced he was defending some of the accused and read a statement into the record that would recur, in substance, at every proceeding this chapter covers: “We are confident that no conspiracy or violation existed and that when all the facts are made known the accused will be acquitted. These defendants must be judged in the light of the situation confronting the Jews of Palestine and Europe at the time the alleged acts were committed.” The defense the network had practiced for two years, that necessity excused the law, was about to be argued out loud, in public, before a jury.

Notice what the indictment itself conceded before a single witness was sworn. Four of the nine defendants were charged specifically with defrauding the War Assets Administration by stripping a surplus C-46 transport in order to ship its parts abroad, a count that reached back to the government’s own liquidation apparatus described in Chapter One: the Haganah’s buyers had not merely evaded the December 1947 arms suspension, they had cannibalized equipment the government itself had sold them at scrap prices and then re-exported the pieces under false description. The prosecutors were not inventing a crime. The paper trail the network’s own accountants had kept, meticulous by necessity, supplied the government’s case against them. An underground that operated by disguising its shipments as agricultural machinery and textile goods had left behind exactly the records a competent U.S. Attorney needed to prove it had done so.

A month later the theater changed. On May 14 and 15, 1949, three of the nine surrendered to Los Angeles authorities: Schwimmer, of Bridgeport, Connecticut; Gardner, of Los Angeles; and Sosnow, of Brooklyn. JTA’s dispatch called them “American Jewish youths” freshly returned “from the battlefields of Israel,” and the phrase was not decoration. Ten Jewish organizations, from the American Jewish Congress to the Zionist Organization of America, issued a joint statement on the trio’s behalf, arguing that the men stood accused of aiding the victims of aggression and that most of those named in the indictment were veterans of the war just concluded. Consider what that show of institutional support actually was. The Sonneborn Institute of Chapter One had insisted on invisibility as its first condition; four years later, the movement’s establishment stood up in public, under its own letterhead, to vouch for men under federal indictment for smuggling arms. The network that began by hiding from its own sympathizers had matured into a cause its sympathizers were willing to defend by name. That reversal is itself a verdict on how far public opinion had traveled between 1945 and 1949, and it traveled without the law changing by a comma.

The case reached judgment on February 22, 1950. Three persons and the corporation were convicted of smuggling planes and equipment to Israel between 1947 and 1948, and the court fined each $10,000: Adolph Schwimmer of New York, Leon Gardner of North Hollywood, Ray Selk of Los Angeles, and Service Airways, Inc. No prison term touched any of the four. Schwimmer later told JTA that the Jewish Agency for Israel paid the fine and the court costs, which means the state’s penalty for arming a foreign underground was absorbed, dollar for dollar, by the underground’s own government. Of the original nine, the record printed here shows three convicted, and three surrendering to face trial; what became of the remaining defendants, Leonard, Leases, and Levin, along with Rudnick, is not resolved in the sources this book has verified, and the honest entry is silence rather than invention. The audit that matters is the one the court actually rendered: a $10,000 fine, paid by a foreign government, for a conspiracy that had moved thirty aircraft across two oceans. Measured against the object smuggled, the sentence was a customs duty, not a punishment.

Sit with the prosecutors for a moment, because their position deserves more than the caricature of reluctant enforcers going through motions. The Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s office had a genuine case: an armed conspiracy, run for profit and conviction both, that had violated a standing federal statute across state lines and two oceans, with witnesses, manifests, and defendants who did not deny the underlying facts. Whatever the office believed privately about the merits of the Middle East embargo, its obligation was to enforce the statute Congress had left on the books, and it did. The government’s dilemma was not whether to prosecute; the paper trail left it no real choice. The dilemma was what to ask a jury to do with men whose cause had, by 1950, become a fixture of front-page sympathy, defended in open court by ten national Jewish organizations and, by extension, by the same American public whose newsreels had carried the war reporting. A prosecutor reads a jury before he reads a statute. These prosecutors surely could.

The defense counsel Bartley Crum was not a random choice, and his presence in the case belongs in the ledger too. He had sat as one of the American members of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine in 1946, an official body appointed by two governments to study the question these defendants would later be prosecuted for answering with cargo planes, and he had emerged from that committee an advocate for the position the smugglers acted on before Washington had agreed to it. A former government investigator turned defense attorney for the men who had done, extralegally, what his own committee had recommended diplomatically: that inversion belongs beside the Justice Department analyst of Chapter One who spent a career cross-indexing the same movement he could never quite decide whether to prosecute. Crum’s statement to the press before the case was even called argued not that his clients were innocent of the acts alleged, but that the acts should be judged by the emergency that produced them. It is worth noting how much of official Washington, in its unofficial corners, appears to have agreed with him.

Herman Greenspun’s name sat on the same April 1949 indictment as Schwimmer’s, but his war had run on a separate track from the start, and the government eventually prosecuted him on it separately. Where Schwimmer had assembled an air fleet, Greenspun, a decorated ordnance officer under Patton in the European campaign, spent 1947 and 1948 running guns by sea. He inspected a naval surplus yard in Hawaii and found aircraft parts and machine guns adaptable to the Haganah’s needs; recent scholarship on the network’s Latin American routes places him at the center of a second operation, the diversion of roughly a thousand rifle-caliber machine guns aboard a sixty-foot schooner named the Idalia, loaded at Los Angeles harbor for a run to Mexico. The voyage supplies this book’s starkest image of improvisation under pressure. Warned that the FBI was closing on the dock, Greenspun ordered the Idalia to sea over the objection of its owner, a charter captain named Leland Lewis, and when Lewis balked at losing his boat, Greenspun leveled a loaded pistol at him and ordered him to cooperate; the schooner cleared the three-mile limit and ran roughly eighteen hundred miles down the Mexican coast to Acapulco under pursuit by both friendly and unfriendly aircraft. Lewis’s eventual lawsuit over the seizure of his vessel survives in the California appellate reports, an unlovely but solid confirmation, from a source with no stake in Greenspun’s legend, that a boat really was commandeered for this purpose.

From Acapulco the cargo traveled inland by a route that reads like a caper and happened anyway. Posing, by one veteran’s account, as an agent of Chiang Kai-shek, Greenspun toured Mexican military storehouses buying rifles, artillery pieces, anti-tank guns, and ammunition, some of it reportedly dating to the Pancho Villa era, and loaded two freight trains bound for the Gulf port of Tampico. There the arms went into the holds of an aging Panamanian-flagged freighter, the Pinzon, camouflaged under tons of sugar; once at sea the ship was repainted and renamed the Kefalos, and after a month’s blacked-out passage evading British patrols, she dropped anchor in Tel Aviv harbor on September 8, 1948. United Nations inspectors came aboard, certified the sugar cargo, and watched it unloaded by day, while the real freight moved off the ship by night. By a veteran’s account preserved in the World Machal archive, guns from the Kefalos reached the front in time for the opening of the army’s Negev offensive that October, the same campaign this book has already followed through Paul Shulman’s flotilla off Gaza. A Nevada gun-runner and an Annapolis-trained naval officer, working continents apart and never coordinating, fed the identical battle from opposite ends of the supply chain. That convergence is not a coincidence this book can prove; it is a coincidence the record happens to preserve, and it says something true about how narrow the whole American pipeline had become by the war’s last autumn. Mexico’s part in it, the storehouses opened, the trains guarded by its own soldiers, the presidential yacht that met the Idalia at Acapulco, belongs to the wider pattern of quiet official accommodation this book has traced in its account of that country’s clandestine role in 1948, where sympathetic officials looked past their own laws for reasons the documentary record only partially explains.