Indeed, after the explosion, the boat was repaired (one of Friedman’s sources reports the damage was “minor” - somehow this detail gets left out of the book), but the boat was still junked, presumably since it wasn’t worth buying. Moreover, the Grille’s military equipment had been stripped by the British, and it was at this point a pleasure yacht. If the best Palestinian explosive expert was German-trained, well, the best American was in fact a Nazi, the notorious rocket-scientist Wehrner von Braun.
After all, in 1947, German military men and equipment were everywhere: that is what happens to defeated armies and munitions after a world war. But that interpretation has little to do with reality. It may be true that the Jews interpreted their Arab enemies as continuous and even allied with Nazis. Friedman merges his own perspective with his subjects, the spies and intelligence forces of the nascent Jewish state. Were they right? “Spies of No Country” does not answer that question clearly. “For many” Jews, Friedman explains, “the war wasn’t really over.” “Evidence of Nazi fingerprints on the Arab side,” Friedman writes, “always drew special attention from the Jewish intelligence services.” He goes on to provide his own list of such evidence: German advisers working with Arab troops, a Palestinian explosives expert responsible for truck bombs in 1948 who trained in German, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s support for Hitler during World War II. In the case of the Grille, the entire episode comes off as a weird attempt to tie Israel’s Arab enemies in 1948 to the Nazis.
The trouble with this story, as with the book generally, is that Friedman yokes research, suspenseful storytelling and austere but potent prose to historical narratives that are both simplistic and pernicious. The explosion left a hole “the size of a large dining room table,” and the ship was eventually sold for scrap, its toilet ending up “in an auto shop in Florence, New Jersey.” As I said, extremely entertaining.
During World War II, we learn, the Grille’s crew members wore white dress uniforms and “had to be at least six feet tall.” The Jewish saboteur, named Rika, carried, along with flippers and the mines, “a bottle of rum to warm him up when he came out of the water” and “‘energy pills,’ probably methamphetamines.” After diving under water to avoid the searchlights of a British warship, he struggled with a slippery, defective detonator. In his new history, “Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel,” Matti Friedman tells this story with great style. It is entertaining to learn that in Beirut in 1947, Jewish intelligence agents detonated a mine attached to the Aviso Grille, which was once Hitler’s personal yacht.
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