by David Martin
That the American press should vigorously suppress this news should hardly surprise us. As we see throughout the book, they were a very active party in selling the story that the far-sighted statesman, Forrestal, the man who saw better than anyone where America’s Middle East policy was leading it, ended his own life. The last thing such a press would want would be for the public to learn of the existence of powerful evidence that undermines the suicide thesis, and worse, points the finger of blame at Zionist terrorists.
The complete suppression of the news of Irgun’s assassination attempt on Foreign Minister Bevin for all these many years is almost as important as the attempt, itself. Imagine how much stronger that 1948 New York Times warning letter by Albert Einstein and a number of other prominent American Jews about the murderous proclivities of Menachem Begin and company could have been had they known about Begin’s previous attempt on the life of Bevin. In all likelihood, no such warning letter would have even been needed. If Begin had been known to have attempted to kill Britain's most powerful opponent when Britain was the power over Palestine, he and his organization would certainly have been regarded as a similar threat to Forrestal when the United States had become the main controller of Palestine's destiny.
Actually, three years prior to the shocking story in the Times, Peter Day had co-authored a piece in London’s Telegraph with essentially the same revelations, and a bit more, that got even less attention than the Times article did. Probably by coincidence, it came out 54 years to the day after James Forrestal’s death, May 22, 2003. The article is about an ambitious bombing campaign involving both Irgun and the Stern Gang that MI5 got wind of. Bevin was to be a primary target:
Security Service files also contain details of an outlandish plan by the followers of an American Zionist rabbi to bomb London from the air. Details of that plot have been heavily censored.
The warnings came in 1946 from James Robertson, head of the Security Service's Middle East Section.
He wrote:” The Stern group has been steadily recruiting in recent months and may now number 600 followers, most of whom are desperate men and women who count their own lives cheap.
"In recent months it has been reported that they have been training selected members for the purpose of assassinating a prominent British personality. Special reference has been several times made to Mr Bevin."
The plot to bomb the capital from the air was said to be the product of followers of one Rabbi Korff...
Robertson identified Menachem Begin, the future Israeli prime minister, as leader of the 5,000-strong Irgun.
Bevin was a hated figure among all the Jewish groups trying to establish a homeland, arguing that Jews needed to be reassimilated into the nations of Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust. He accused the United States of encouraging illegal migration to Palestine in contravention of British quotas.147
But what’s this about a Jewish terrorist plot to bomb London from the air? Could this have been real? Yes, it was. “Plot to bomb London was thwarted by heroic pilot,” reads the headline in an article in the July 13, 2014, edition of Britain’s Birmingham Post, another newspaper story that seems not to have gotten around at all. It was of interest to the people of Birmingham, because the man whom Rabbi Korff enlisted for the bombing job—who also promptly turned him in—was a native of that city. His family had emigrated to the United States and he had become a decorated pilot in World War II in the U.S. Army Air Force:
A new book has revealed the astonishing story of how an ex-Spitfire pilot from Birmingham foiled an international plot to firebomb London.
The year was 1947 – and in war-weary Britain the rubble from years of Nazi air raids and rocket attacks was still being cleared away.
But across the English Channel a group of fanatical terrorists were planning a new aerial blitz on the capital.
Members of the radical Zionist terror group the Stern Gang had decided to drop improvised bombs on the Foreign Office in Whitehall as part of their fight for a homeland.
The full details of the extraordinary plot and the heroic Spitfire pilot from Birmingham who helped foil it have now been revealed by American Middle East expert Alison Weir in her new book about the tangled history of US-Israeli political relations, Against Our Better Judgment.
"When Britain failed to accede to Zionist demands, an American rabbi named Baruch Korff fomented a plan to drop incendiary bombs on London," she revealed.
In the summer of 1947 Ukrainian-born Korff, a passionate supporter of the creation of a Jewish State, travelled from his home in Boston and made contact with members of the Stern Gang in Paris.
The Jewish militant group was at the time waging a brutal terrorist campaign against British forces which were in control in Palestine, in an attempt to force the Government to pull out of the territory.
Korff proposed hiring a civil aircraft in France and using it to scatter propaganda leaflets over London, following this up by dropping six homemade bombs on the city.
MI5 documents released in 2003 confirmed there was "A project for an air raid on London, in the course of which leaflets were to be dropped in the name of the Stern Gang, together with high-explosive bombs".
But the full details of the planned aerial attack have only now emerged in Weir's book.
In late August 1947, Korff approached Reginald Gilbert, a decorated 25-year-old World War II veteran, who flew Spitfires in the US Army Air Force (USAAF) during the war. At the time was studying at the University of Paris, and offered him a large cash sum to fly the plane on its bombing mission over London...
Gilbert pretended to accept Korff's offer but immediately after their meeting went to the French police, who warned the British Embassy of the Stern Gang‘s plot. MI5 then became involved, persuading Gilbert to play along with their plan.
On the evening of September 6, as Gilbert, Korff and a female Stern Gang member, Hungarian Judith Rosenberger, climbed aboard the air-craft at Toussus-le-Noble airfield near Versailles – which, ironically, had been used by the Luftwaffe to bomb England during the Blitz – French police officers disguised as ground crew drew their pistols and arrested Korff and Rosenberger.
In two suitcases carried by Korff were found thousands of propaganda leaflets demanding that the British Government withdraw its forces from Palestine.
Gilbert was secretly flown to an RAF base in England and placed in protective custody by Special Branch.
Days later, he gave an interview to a US newspaper in which he shed more light on the Stern Gang plot, revealing that Korff had changed the target from the House of Commons to the Foreign Office building "because Korff held a grudge against that Office for refusing him a visa to Palestine".
The young pilot also disclosed that, when he pointed out to Korff fog could prevent him finding the target, the rabbi told him to drop the bombs anywhere over London, brushing aside Gilbert's concerns that innocent civilians would be killed.
"They are British," Gilbert recalled Korff telling him, "so they are our enemy."
In the days following Korff's arrest 10 other members of the gang were rounded up by the French police and the explosive devices to be used in the raid – contained in six fire extinguishers – were discovered in a Parisian apartment...148
Notice that the writer of the Birmingham Post article, which carries no byline, seemed to be unaware that at least the bare essentials of the story had been reported by the Telegraph eleven years before, another indicator that the Telegraph story had no legs.149
Who Knew?
Although it is apparent that those signers of the warning letter to The New York Times had no knowledge of the previous attempt on the life of Ernest Bevin or the London air raid attempt, one must wonder who, out-side the ranks of British intelligence, did know about it. In particular, we have to wonder if one so connected to the higher reaches of power in the world as Bernard Baruch, when he warned his friend Forrestal in February of 1949 that he had already become too identified with opposition to Israel f
or his own good, knew more than he was telling about the danger that Forrestal faced. And when Forrestal complained about being followed and bugged, did he know that the Irgun crowd had come pretty close to snuffing out the life of his British counterpart? Could such knowledge have been behind his resistance to commitment to Bethesda Naval Hospital and his reported claim that he would never leave the hospital alive when he attempted to get out of the car taking him there? Might that have been the revelation from Secretary of the Air Force Symington on the day of Forrestal’s departure from office that drove him into his sudden funk?
And after Forrestal’s death, could there have been any doubt in the minds of those aware of the attempt on Bevin who had ultimately been behind the later crime? Might these have included those powerful friends such as Ferdinand Eberstadt and Robert Lovett, who had failed to visit him in the hospital and then, when the results of the investigation of his death were never made public, failed to register any public complaint? At the very least, those in the know included the contemporary and future leaders of Great Britain, and the knowledge that the leaders of the United States government had conspired with Zionist thugs in the assassination of the one courageous voice of reason in their midst would very likely have animated their own future Middle East policy.
One must also wonder if Forrestal and other key people in the Truman government knew about the still little-known fact that the Jewish Stern Gang actually made an assassination attempt on President Truman in 1947. They did it by sending a letter bomb to the White House, but the mail room was on alert because they knew of the previous attempt against the British officials, and they intercepted it. It seems not to have been reported by any news media at the time and biographers of Truman and other historians have kept the matter a secret even though it was reported in a book by the former head of the White House mail room in 1949 and again by Margaret Truman in her book about her father in 1972.150
Zionists and Communists
The Times article on the Bevin assassination attempt has one particularly intriguing passage, which might fill in some more pieces of the puzzle. That is that Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, believed that Menachem Begin was backed in his terrorist activities by the Soviet Union. One might wonder whether their belief was founded on solid evidence and, if so, how far this backing went. Did they just generally encourage him in his murderous endeavors, or were they actually calling the shots? If MI6 was right, then those like author Cornell Simpson who argue that the Communists killed Forrestal and those who suggest that the Zionists did it are probably both right.
The Soviets, as Simpson explains quite well, certainly had ample reasons to want to be rid of Forrestal. Not only was he the leading anti-Zionist in the Truman administration, but he was also the leading anti-Communist. Interestingly enough, the same can probably be said for Ernest Bevin in Britain’s Clement Atlee administration. Bevin’s anti-Communism carried a particular potency because he came from a British labor movement that was heavily influenced and infiltrated by the Communists.
In many instances in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s pro-Communism and pro-Zionism could be found in the same individuals, who were also almost invariably Jewish. As we noted in the Chapter One, that appears to have been the case for the very powerful and secretive adviser to both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, David Niles.
The following passage from Alfred Lilienthal’s 1953 classic What Price Israel? is very revealing of the person described by Alfred Steinberg in the December 24, 1949, Saturday Evening Post as “Truman’s Mystery Man”:
There were many ways in which Niles served the State of Israel after partition, too. Early in 1950, when the United States first awoke to the Soviet danger in the Middle East, our Government requested the various Arab countries for information regarding troops, equipment, and other confidential military data. These statistics were necessary in order to plan possible assistance under the Mutual Security Act. The Arab nations were naturally assured that the figures, supplied for the Chief of Staff, would be kept secret.
Late that year, military representatives of the Middle East countries and of Israel were meeting with General [W.E.] Riley, who headed the United Nations Truce Organization. Trouble had broken out over the Huleh Marshes, and charges and counter charges of military aggression were exchanged between Israel and the Arab countries. The Israeli military representative claimed that the Syrian troops were employed in a certain manner, and General Riley remarked: “That’s not possible. The Syrians have no such number of troops.” Whereupon the Israeli representative said, “You are wrong. Here are the actual figures of Syrian military strength and the description of troops.” And he produced the confidential figures, top-secret Pentagon information. General Riley himself had not been shown the new figures given by the Syrian War Ministry to his superiors.
When the question of Egyptian military strength was raised, a similar security leak appeared. It was obvious that top-secret figures had been passed on to the Israeli Government. Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Army G-2 investigated the security breach but discovered only that these figures had been made available to the White House. How and through whom they leaked out of the White House remained forever obscure. However, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Omar Bradley, reportedly went to the President and told the Chief Executive that he would have to choose between him (Bradley) and Niles. Not too long after this reported intervention, David Niles resigned from his post as Executive Assistant to the President and went on a visit to Israel.151
And David was not alone in the Niles family when it came to serving the interests of Israel over those of the United States. An investigation in 1948 determined that his brother, Lieutenant Colonel Elliot Niles, a former high official of B’Nai B’rith, while working in the Pentagon, had turned over to the Zionist Army, Haganah, Adjutant General’s Office records of the names of former officers in the U.S. Army that met Haganah’s recruitment needs.152
With these new revelations, David Niles is due even greater scrutiny than before as the most likely coordinator of the Forrestal assassination. Some measure of Niles’s power can be gained from the following passage in the oral history interview of Truman aide, Stephen J. Spingarn:
David Niles worked with nobody. He was suigeneris. David Niles was the oldest senior staff man in point of service. He came over from the Roosevelt administration. His titular jurisdiction was minorities. But, actually, his main job, I suppose you could say, was Jewish problems on the one hand, and the intricate politics of New York City, those two things; maintaining liaison with Dave Dubinsky and Alex Rose and the Liberal Party there, you know, and keeping the White House abreast of that. But David Niles seemed to me to pay very little attention to Negro and other minority matters, so it seemed to me. Philleo Nash was his assistant and Philleo paid a lot of attention, but it didn't seem to me that Dave paid much. And there was another interesting thing, Dave Niles did not attend the President's morning staff conferences—ever.
[JERRY] HESS: Can you tell me about those morning staff conferences?
SPINGARN: Yes. The President held a morning staff conference every morning at 9:30 -- I think it was 9:30. It was indispensable to a staff man -- a senior staff man -- to attend that thing, but it was a very delicate matter as to who attended.153
Elsewhere Spingarn makes it clear that Niles was very much a part of Truman’s inner circle, so it would have been natural for him to attend these daily meetings. The impression one gets is that he was so powerful, and confident of his power, that the staff meetings were actually beneath him. He didn’t have to go in order to stay on top of the issues that really mattered, and to continue to have the ear of the putative boss, President Truman. Or perhaps he realized that it wasn’t all that important to have influence with Truman, when he had influence with the people who really mattered.
At this point, the observations of the son-in-law of President Franklin Roosevelt, Colonel Curtis Dall, as relayed by
Henry Makow, are apropos:
Dall maintained a family loyalty but could not avoid several disheartening conclusions in his book [FDR: My Exploited Father-in-Law, 1970]. He portrays the legendary president not as a leader but as a “quarterback” with little actual power. The “coaching staff” consisted of a coterie of handlers (“advisers” like Louis Howe, Bernard Baruch and Harry Hopkins) who represented the international banking cartel. For Dall, FDR ultimately was a traitor manipulated by “World Money” and motivated by conceit and personal ambition.154
If such a commanding politician as Franklin Roosevelt, a man widely believed to be the most powerful president the United States has ever had, was really little more than a quarterback executing plays called in by the coaching staff, what would that have made the former haberdasher and protégé of the Kansas City machine of boss Tom Pendergast? Certainly, it was not Truman’s idea to have James Forrestal assassinated and very little was required of him for the assassination to be carried out and covered up. In matters such as this, the President would not have been calling the shots.
Consider, finally, this entry on the “Talk” page on Wikipedia on the September 17, 1948, assassination in the new state of Israel of United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, by the Stern Gang (Lehi), an entry that seems no longer to be there:
Contrary to what you say, Lehi being a terror organization is very much disputed. Most (or at least many) Israelis (myself included) do not consider Lehi to be a terrorist organization. Lehi never targeted innocent civillians [sic] in attempt to terrorize them. All of Lehi's attacks were against military or government targets (including high-ranked officials such as Bernadotte). This is very different than what "proper" terrorist organizations do - attacking random civilian targets such as busses or airplanes.