He gave me the address of a luxurious mansion above Beirut. There I found Israeli troops in the grounds, but was shown into a book-lined library where an Israeli lieutenant colonel sat behind an oak-panelled desk. And beside him lay two large, blue-covered files on the disappearance of Major Palmer. The colonel introduced himself as Shlomo Ben Elkanah. Only years later would I discover that he was something of an expert in finding corpses. After the 1967 Six-Day War, he had questioned Bedouin Arabs in newly captured Rafah in the Gaza Strip in an attempt to find the body of Avshalom Feinberg, a member of a pro-British Jewish underground organisation in 1917 who died in a battle with Arabs while trying to contact General Allenby's British forces. In 1967, the Bedouin pointed to a palm tree and Elkanah dug it up. There were the bones of Feinberg, the tree embracing his skeleton because it had sprouted from the dates which the dead man had in his pocket.
Now Elkanah was trying to find the graves of Palmer and the 23 dead Jews who were also aboard the Sea Lion. He wanted to bring the remains of the Haganah men – one of whom had been Elkanah's friend – back to Israel, which regarded Operation Boatswain in 1941 as the first military action of the Israeli army. The operation had been arranged between a Palestinian Jew called David Cohen and de Gaulle's Free French forces in London.
And to my amazement Elkanah showed me his files. These papers suggested that the Sea Lion reached the coast of Tripoli but was intercepted by "the French and Italian (sic) coastguard". One of his reports said four of the Jewish commandos were killed and their bodies washed ashore, but when Palmer turned back south he was stopped by an Italian submarine. A British intelligence officer called Perkins, according to this document, then told a Jewish Agency official, Reuven Zaslani, that Palmer and his surviving 19 men had been taken prisoner. The paper said that Palmer then escaped his French guards, was recaptured on the island of Arwad off the Syrian coast, was returned to Lebanon and executed without trial at Jounieh, just north of Beirut. At the time, a German radio broadcast referred to the capture of "a British agent and 20 Jews" by Italians.
Elkanah showed me another paper. This recorded that Moshe Sharett – later Israel's foreign minister – handed a report to Perkins that a "Jewish messenger" called Joseph Fines saw the clothes taken from the bodies of the four dead Jewish sailors and believed the rest of the crew, including Palmer, were taken away to an unknown destination. Then the British authorities declined to allow Perkins to continue his investigation. Because, perhaps, the few Vichy French soldiers in Lebanon who transferred their allegiance to de Gaulle had been involved in the killing of Palmer?
In 1982, the Israeli army captured Beirut but stopped short of Tripoli. Could I, Elkanah wanted to know, drive up to Tripoli – still under Syrian and Palestinian guerrilla control – and take a look around the city's cemeteries? Could I find a mass grave, perhaps? Journalist I may be. Agent I am not. I waited till long after the Israelis had left. Then I began to prowl the graveyards of Tripoli, sniff for the municipality archives, talk to middle-aged men who supported Vichy and who remembered 1941. They knew nothing. Or they said they knew nothing. Two of the Jews were said to have been buried in sand dunes, a third in a "cemetery for foreigners".
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