On this date in 1990, Iranian-born British journalist Farzad Bazoft was hanged at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison as an Israeli spy.
The 31-year-old Observer freelancer was in Iraq to cover post-war reconstruction when he caught wind of an explosion at a military factory and set off to investigate.
This sniffing about Iraq’s weapons programs was not the sort of journalism Iraqi dictator (and future fellow gallows-bird) Saddam Hussein had in mind when his government invited Bazoft.
Bazoft was nabbed (along with the British nurse who had accompanied him, Daphne Parish) with photographs and soil samples from the sensitive compound.
Held incommunicado for six weeks, Bazoft was trundled onto state TV on November 1, 1989 to confess to spying for Israel (video of that confession is available from this BBC story).
Bazoft’s companion, Daphne Parish, was released after a few months in prison. She wrote this out-of-print book about her experiences. (Review)
He was convicted of espionage in a one-day, in camera trial on March 10 and hanged five days later.
Many years and wars later, Bazoft’s Iraqi interrogator would tell Bazoft’s former Observer colleagues that the man “was obviously innocent,” but that his fate had been decided at the highest levels.*
A few months after Bazoft’s hanging, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and thereby transmogrified from a source of moderation in the region into the new Hitler, Bazoft’s execution naturally went onto the bill of attainder against Baghdad.
Like other Iraqi human rights abuses that became much bigger news only after Saddam became an official enemy, however, Bazoft’s fate exercised some of his defenders more in retrospect than it did in the moment.
Indeed, some British MPs openly endorsed the execution and some Fleet Street contrarians bucked the worldwide humanitarian appeal by publishing embarrassing information about Bazoft (he’d been to jail in Britain) leaked by British intelligence.
(Margaret Thatcher made the seemly applications for clemency, and the incident certainly strained the countries’ relationship. But the Tory government would later be embarrassed by revelations that, before and even after Bazoft’s hanging, it was pushing for closer trade relations and helping British firms skirt the law to ship Baghdad the weapons it would use against British troops in the coming Gulf War.)
* Bazoft is still honored by his former employer and his former colleagues, as well he might be. But the Observer’s claim that it “proved” Bazoft’s innocence has to be taken with a grain of salt: apart from the de rigueur smoke-and-mirrors, plausible-deniability skein of the espionage game, the interrogator’s exculpatory statement was made by an obviously self-interested party to representatives of a power then occupying Iraq.
On this date in 1865, Confederate John Yates Beall was hanged at Governors Island, New York, as a spy and saboteur.
This Virginian was knocked out of regular service through injuries early in the Civil War, but proceeded to a privateering career harassing Union shipping.
The pinpricks inflicted by Beall’s couple of ships was hardly calamitous for the North, but what he lacked in resources he made up in persistence.
Captured and exchanged midway through the war, he returned to his swashbuckling ways. But sneaking into New York from Canada in a bid to free rebel prisoners, Beall was caught again trying to derail trains — and secretly condemned by a military tribunal.
When the news of his impending execution got out, six Senators and 85 other members of Congress* appealed for leniency.
“For days before the execution,” it was said, “the President closed the doors of the executive palace against all suppliants, male or female, and his ears against all appeals, whether with the tongue of men or angels in behalf of the unfortunate prisoner. From the first Mr. Lincoln had responded to all applications for his interposition — ‘Gen. Dix may dispose of the case as he pleases — I will not interfere.’ Gen. Dix on his part replied, ‘All now rests with the President — as far as my action rests there is not a gleam of hope.’ Thus they stood as the pillars of the gallows, on which Beall’s fate was suspended and between them he died.” (Source)
Here’s the capture-trial-and-execution portions of a homemade documentary on Beall (also check the preceding parts 1, 2, and 3)
On or about this date in 1945, three women who had been caught behind German lines working for the British Special Operations Executive were shot at Ravensbruck.
Left to right: Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe, Violette Szabo.
Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe, and Violette Szabo were all fluent young Francophones who volunteered their services for Britain’s dangerous spying-and-sabotage operations in support of the French Resistance.
Bloch and Rolfe were wireless operators; Szabo, the most famous of the three, got her hands dirtier with explosives and sabotage.
One evening towards 1900 hours they were called out [of the punishment block] and taken to the courtyard by the crematorium. Camp Commandant Suhren [German Wikipedia link] made these arrangements. He read out the order for their shooting in the presence of the chief camp doctor, Dr. Trommer, SS Sergeant Zappe, SS Lance Corporal Schult, SS Corporal Schenk, and the dentist Dr. Hellinger
…
All three were very brave, and I was deeply moved. Suhren was also impressed by the bearing of these women. He was annoyed that the Gestapo did not themselves carry out these shootings.
Extensive and illustrated biographies on all three, as well as other SOE agents, can be found at 64 Baker Street: Bloch; Rolfe; Szabo.
Violette Szabo in particular was much written-of after the war (long out of print, the classic Carve Her Name With Pride was recently republished), and was posthumously awarded a variety of decorations by both England and France.
Szabo has what looks to be a charming museum in Herefordshire (phone ahead to Miss Rigby before visiting!); for a younger generation, she’s the inspiration behind “Violette Summers”, the protagonist of the video game Velvet Assassin.
On this date in 1940, Isaak Babel, “the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry,” was shot in Moscow.
The Odessa-born 45-year-old had managed the difficult trick of maintaining a high-profile writing career in the 1930s Soviet Union without abandoning his artistic integrity. (This meant he published a lot less in that decade, which fact was held against him in his trial: “deliberate sabotage and a refusal to write.”)
Babel remains beloved today for that very reason; his Odessa Tales collection of short stories about Jewish gangsters still charms Russians and foreigners alike.
But Gorky died in 1936, and without that elder statesman’s protection, Babel’s insufficiently lockstep scribbling laid him increasingly liable to public denunciation for, e.g., “aestheticism.”
And as sickle follows hammer, miscalibrated revolutionary ardor in Stalin’s Russia led in 1939 to that dread knock on the door, that stay in Lubyanka Prison, that inevitable “confession” of Trotskyism, and that bullet to the head after a perfunctory trial.
Babel’s work is recent enough that it’s mostly not freely available in English. A couple in English and several in Russian are linked here; literary criticisms with plentiful excerpts of Babel’s work are available here, here, and here, among many other places.
Babel was officially rehabilitated during the Khrushchev era.
On this date last year, in the midst of Israel’s bloody incursion, Gaza’s Hamas government executed Palestinian journalist and human rights activist Haidar Ghanem as an Israeli spy.
Ghanem was the best-publicized of a number of Israeli collaborators to suffer that fate during the one-sided, three-week war.
“He was taken to an abandoned building in southern Gaza and shot to death,” a Palestinian source said. “Others were executed the same way.”
The Rafah resident had actually been a minor cause celebreback in 2002, when the Palestinian Authority condemned him to death for pinpointing Fatah activists for assassination by Israeli security, for which assignment he was supposedly recruited in the 1990’s while working as a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. International pressure got him released.
The Jerusalem Post reported that Ghanem confessed (as he had in the 2002 case) to the charges.
On this date in 1942, eleven members of a Berlin-based anti-Nazi resistance circle were executed at Plotzensee Prison — five by hanging, six by guillotine.
These members of the group organized around leftist Luftwaffe communications officer Harro Schulze-Boysen and intellectual Arvid Harnack were one of three Soviet intelligence nodes all of whom were confusingly designated Die Rote Kapelle.
That designation, assigned by Nazi intelligence rather than the networks themselves, has basically stuck and colored their postwar reputation with the anti-Communist politics of the Cold War.
Red affiliations that blackened Die Rote Kapelle’s memory west of the Berlin wall were more readily embraced by the Warsaw Pact. This East German stamp also honors John Sieg, a member of the circle who committed suicide upon his arrest.
And not only in retrospect: according to Gerald Reitlinger, the capture of known lefties misbehaving became the occasion of a McCarthyesque freakout full of internal political score-settling among the Nazis.
The affair of Burgess and Maclean will give some idea what capital can be made when someone with a leftish record enters and betrays a position of trust. The emotions roused are out of all proportion to the things that have been betrayed. [German military intelligence chief Wilhelm] Canaris declared that the conspiracy had cost the lives of 200,000 German soldiers.
While the cells in France/Belgium and Switzerland also covered by the “Red Orchestra” designation look like straight NKVD espionage operations, the Berliners were apparently more of a loose network of civilian dissidents who got pulled into (amateurish) spying as a part of their variety of quixotic protests from the very citadel of the Third Reich. When not nicking sensitive documents from Schulze-Boysen’s day job and haplessly attempting to ship them to the Russians, they made futile White Rose-like gestures of conscience, like anti-Nazi placarding under the cover of darkness, and more calculated stuff, like collecting war crimes evidence in the hopes of indicting their perpetrators after the war.
Well, what is one supposed to do as an anti-Nazi in Berlin in 1941?
And what if one is in a position to answer that question with, “provide effectual aid to the enormous army poised to destroy Hitler”?
Nelson’s book is new, but her argument is not unique.
Other books also titled Red Orchestra (Perrault, Tarrant | review of both) more strongly emphasize the commie-taskmaster dimension in what by any standard is thrilling real-life fare.
The German Resistance Memorial Center has salutes to the Red Orchestra’s members, networks and activities.
On this date in 1942, British merchant sailor Duncan Scott-Ford was hanged at London’s Wandsworth Prison for giving German agents sensitive information about ship movements.
This, of course, was just the sort of thing everyone was trying to discourage.
… and a version to keep young soldiers on the pull Mata Hari-conscious:
For a case that so handily underscored the posters, the Scott-Ford affair made great copy … but not until a day after the hanging itself. Having kept everything secret, the papers were finally allowed on Nov. 4 to announce
that a British subject was executed for treachery at Wandsworth Prison yesterday morning.
…
Scott-Ford was paid 1,800 escudos by the enemy. This sum, which in English currency is equivalent only to about £18, was all that Scott-Ford in fact received from the enemy, though promises were held out to him which lured him deeper and deeper into the blackmailing clutches of the enemy. Thus when Scott-Ford returned on his second visit to Lisbon with the information which he had collected the Germans, instead of honouring their promises, threatened that they would expose him to the British authorities unless he continued to perform further services, to collect more valuable information and to undergo greater risks in their interest.
Some of the information which Scott-Ford gave to the enemy related to his own ship, and thus imperilled the lives of his own shipmates.
…
The moral to be drawn from this case is that British and allied seamen when visiting neutral ports should be constantly on their guard against strangers who may frequently approach them for apparently innocent purposes. Such strangers are apt to be enemy agents … (London Times, Nov. 4, 1942)
At 11 p.m. this date in 1946, White general turned Japanese collaborator Grigory Semenov (or Semyonov) was hanged for a generation’s worth of anti-Soviet depredations in the Far East.
The tsarist officer Semenov joined the Russian Civil War as a notoriously vicious White commander with the grandiosely retro title of Ataman of the Baikal Cossacks.
According to G. Patrick March, Semenov’s “penchant for killing, torturing, and looting” extended to executing a captured socialist by tossing the man into his locomotive’s fuel chamber.
Although also a rival in the suicidally fractious White political jostle, Semenov was the designated successor of Aleksandr Kolchak when the latter was shot in 1920, but by that time there wasn’t much left to succeed.
Knocking around the interwar era in gloryless exile, Semenov was an easy recruit for the Japanese war machine, which was in the market by the late 1930’s for locals with command experience and a grudge against Moscow and put him on retainer in Manchuria. Like the Soviet-Japanese front in general after Khalkin Gol, nothing much came of that enterprise; the Ataman’s last great hurrah was but a footnote for Japan, and his death would be a footnote in the annals of postwar victors’ justice.
Having picked a loser two wars in a row, Semenov was captured during the short-lived Soviet invasion of Manchuria at the tail end of the war and packed off for the inevitable. Five co-defendants, including Semenov’s son Mikhail, suffered death as well — although they were simply shot, while Semenov was ignominiously hanged. (According to White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian, the hanging was either botched or engineered to be an ugly strangulation job.)
Sometimes it’s better to let your curiosity rest for a little while, especially when a violent despot takes charge of the region you want to do geological studies on. That was the takeaway lesson for Adolf Schlagintweit (English Wikipedia page | German) when Wali Khan discharged the German explorer’s head in 1857 in the Kashgar region of present-day China.
Schlagintweit and his brothers, Hermann and Robert, were in pursuit of knowledge, following up Hermann and Adolf’s drab and long-titled work Untersuchungen über die physikalische Geographie der Alpen, in ihren Beziehungen zu den phänomenon der Gletscher, zur Geologie, Meteorologie, und Pflanzengeographie (Studies of the Physical Geography of the Alps, in Relation to the Phenomena of Glaciers, Weather, and Phytogeography) and equally odorless (but far more accessibly titled) successor Neue Untersuchungen über die physikalische Geographie und Geologie der Alpen (New Studies of the Physical Geography and Geology of the Alps), authored by all three.
The Schlagintweits were successfully largely because of their ability to draw: their writing left much to be desired, and their scientific skills were frequently a target of ridicule after the voyage that saw the end of Adolf.
The East India Company funded that venture, which was intended to take magnetic field measurements, beginning in 1854. The trek was spurred on by the then-85-year-old Alexander von Humboldt, who had extensively traversed Latin America and attempted the first scientific description of its geology and wildlife; von Humboldt, a noted scientist throughout Europe, convinced the East India Company to pony up large amounts of money for what he expected to be a significant geological study, one that he long sought but could not undertake himself. This relationship is explored in-depth by Gabriel Finkelstein in his well-written History of Science article “‘Conquerors of the Künlün? The Schlagintweit Mission to High Asia, 1854–57″.
The brothers made their way to central India and from there journeyed north into the Himalayas. They did not travel together, but separated and re-united occasionally to go over samples, pictures, and notes.
After their last meeting in the fall of 1856, Adolf’s itinerary brought him through the mountains of Tibet and into present-day China, near the borders with Kyrgystan and Pakistan. It was in this Kashgar region that the geologist found himself embroiled in what would be the last in a series of revolts by the East Turkestan Khojas, a group claiming nobility in Eastern Kazakhstan from the time of Genghis Khan.*
Adolf’s end is largely shrouded in mystery, but some contemporaneous accounts given to the British government provide a minimal sketch. Schlagintweit’s ostensible goal was to reach the city of Kashgar; despite much of his party deserting, and in spite of a warning from fleeing refugees that the notably cruel Wali Khan had initiated a rebellion, Schlagintweit pressed on.
He was met at the city’s border and brought before the Khan, who, having little use for European interlopers wandering his territory, accused the scientist of being a spy and had Adolf summarily beheaded.
Adolf’s notebook was later purchased by a passing Persian from the tobacco shop, where its pages were being used to wrap tobacco leaves. The purchaser tracked down a skull he believed to be Schlagintweit’s and brought the chartaceous and skeletal evidence to India.
The book published from the travels of the Schlagintweits is available here. It has been widely panned as dull.
* Four years after Wali Khan was deposed once again by the Chinese, Uighurs successfully battled for the region’s brief independence. Tensions in the region, needless to say, have not settled.
As night fell this evening in Moscow, 13 prominent Soviet Jews were shot in Lubyanka Prison on trumped-up charges of treason and espionage.
“The Night of the Murdered Poets”, as it’s come to be remembered, wasn’t so much about the poetry; “only” five of the victims fit that description.
But as Joshua Rubenstein put it, “only the martyred Yiddish writers are mentioned at August 12 commemorations; the other defendants who lost their lives, as well as the sole survivor Lina Shtern, are rarely if ever remembered, perhaps because their careers as loyal Soviet citizens do not fit comfortably into an easy category for Westerners to honor … Stalin repaid their loyalty by destroying them.”
Falling victim to Stalin was such a particularly tragic fate because they were, in the main, good Communists:* good enough to have been part of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a World War II organ dedicated to rallying support for the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.
Such national particularism — any port in a storm! — was all well and good when Moscow had the Wehrmacht at its gates and a short supply of friends, but it increasingly ran dangerously afoul Soviet officialdom as the 1940’s progressed. It was a bastion of sectarian identity rather than socialist universalism; its celebration of the Jewish soldier and of Jewish wartime travails cut against the narrative of Soviet sacrifice and heroism; its overseas links to the United States (where it toured in wartime) and the new state of Israel made it suspect, or at least vulnerable.
Thin excuse for mass execution, to be sure, but in a structure of generalized antisemitism run by a trigger-happy dictator …
In 1948-49, fifteen JAC members were arrested. One would die in prison; the aforementioned Lina Stern, a scientist, would receive a term of exile and return to Moscow when this purge’s victims were rehabilitated after Stalin’s death.
The thirteen others were tortured and condemned by a rigged (but secret, since many of the accused wouldn’t cop to public self-denunciations) trial
Years before his arrest, Markish would write words to make a eulogy for many a disillusioned Soviet citizen … and literally so in his case, since the verse was cited at his trial as evidence of his “pessimism”:
Now, when my vision turns in on itself,
My shocked eyes open, all their members see
My heart has fallen like a mirror on
A stone and shatters, ringing, into splinters.
…
Piece by piece I’ll try to gather them
To make them whole with stabbed and bleeding fingers.
And yet, however skillfully they’re glued,
My crippled, broken image will be seen.
The 31-year-old Observer freelancer was in Iraq to cover post-war reconstruction when he caught wind of an explosion at a military factory and set off to investigate.
The Odessa-born 45-year-old had managed the difficult trick of maintaining a high-profile writing career in the 1930s Soviet Union without abandoning his artistic integrity. (This meant he published a lot less in that decade, which fact was held against him in his trial: “deliberate sabotage and a refusal to write.”)
The tsarist officer 
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