The resulting scandal cost Webb his job. He was swiftly relieved of command on grounds of publicly expressing “unauthorized and unofficial” opinions and given twenty-four hours to pack his kit and leave Palestine. Furthermore, Webb’s comment acknowledging, indeed condoning, looting by his soldiers also proved singularly unhelpful, vitiating the repeated claims made by Cassels and other commanders that such accusations were baseless products of Zionist “propaganda.”32
The international attention given to Webb’s remarks accorded perfectly with Begin’s strategy of transforming Palestine into a “glass house,” where any misstep by the British would be broadcast to the world. “We knew that Eretz Israel, in consequence of the revolt, resembled a glass house,” the Irgun commander explains in The Revolt. “The world was looking into it with ever-increasing interest and could see most of what was happening inside. That is very largely why we were able to pursue our struggle until we brought it to its successful climax in 1946–47. Arms were our weapons of attack; the transparency of the ‘glass’ was our shield of defence. Served by these two instruments we continued to deliver our blows at the structure of the Mandatory’s prestige.” At this strategy’s foundation was Begin’s conviction that the British, unlike the Nazis, were incapable of visiting barbaric reprisals on a civilian populace—an observation reflected in Kenneally’s reminiscence that “the British soldier is not of the stuff the SS troops were made from.”33
Accordingly, the Irgun commander correctly assessed that the British army would respond to terrorist provocation with a predictably self-limiting repertoire of set-piece countermeasures—including curfews, roadblocks, snap checks, and massive cordon-and- search operations—that were conceived to inconvenience and harass rather than slaughter and destroy. Begin further banked on the fact that the disruption to daily life and commerce that these activities caused would inevitably create new frictions between the populace and the government, thus further alienating the Yishuv and thwarting British attempts to obtain its cooperation. In other words, the Irgun was intentionally provoking precisely the strategy that Webb admitted the army was pursuing. Moreover, by forcing the army and the police to impose this unrelenting security regimen on the Yishuv, Begin hoped that blame would be focused on the highly visible, almost omnipresent government forces rather than on his unseen and elusive fighters. In this respect, the Irgun commander sought to exploit the elevated security presence to portray the British as the Jewish community’s oppressors and the Irgun as its true defenders. Finally, Begin deliberately fostered and exploited the fundamental paradox inherent in counterterrorist operations: the more pervasive and extensive the deployment of government security forces, the more powerful and threatening the numerically inferior terrorist organization appears. In the case of Palestine, the army’s increasingly dominant role in internal security because of the manifestly understrength police inadvertently created an image of terrorist strength and ubiquity divorced from reality.
A key element in Begin’s strategy was to take the struggle against British rule beyond Palestine—to “beat the dog in his own kennel,” as the aforementioned MI5 informant had reported following the King David Hotel bombing. To do so, however, the Irgun first had to establish the conspiratorial infrastructure necessary to support such overseas operations. As we have seen, repeated alerts of possible terrorist attacks in the U.K. had already led to the tightening of border controls and closer monitoring of the movements of Jews attempting to enter the country from the Middle East and Europe. Intensified scrutiny had also been applied to domestic right-wing Zionist organizations, such as Betar’s British affiliate, which the authorities feared would be used to provide logistical support to Irgun operatives dispatched from Palestine to Britain or whose members themselves might feel emboldened to carry out attacks on the Irgun’s behalf. The threat to the U.K. was judged serious enough and the countermeasures proposed to thwart it so extensive as to warrant the recently appointed director general of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, to personally brief Attlee.34
Sensing that the environment in the U.K. was for the moment less propitious to infiltration and operational planning and execution, the Irgun changed gears and focused its propaganda and recruitment efforts outside Britain, concentrating on the vast pool of young Holocaust survivors and displaced persons arrayed across eastern, central, and southern Europe. Irgun emissaries were thus actively engaged in such activities in countries as varied as Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Germany, and Cyprus. Italy in particular, the British historian David Cesarani explains, “was a perfect base for Irgun activity. The country was awash with survivors of the ghettos and the concentration camps. Many were young and had been radicalised by their experiences. More than a few had acquired military training in the Jewish underground or various national resistance movements during the war. They were conveniently gathered together in Jewish Displaced Persons camps run by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) or were clustered in ports waiting to board ships intending to run the British blockade of Palestine.”35
The priority that the Irgun attached to Italy is demonstrated by Begin’s selection of one of his top lieutenants, Eliahu Tavin, to take command of the group’s operations there. Tavin had been a high-priority target for the Haganah when the counterterrorist Saison campaign commenced in November 1944. He was walking along a Tel Aviv street three months later when a car carrying Saison agents pulled up beside him. The Irgun intelligence chief was bundled into the backseat and taken to a makeshift jail at a kibbutz near Ein Harod. Tavin was chained to a bed and roughly interrogated. Despite the increasing severity of his treatment and harsh conditions of his imprisonment, Tavin refused to divulge the names of the Irgun’s sources within the Haganah. At one point, he was ceremoniously taken to an isolated orange grove, told that he had been sentenced to death, placed in front of a mock firing squad, and given a final chance to talk and escape execution. Tavin still refused to speak. His treatment again worsened. He was threatened with hanging and had his teeth forcibly extracted with pliers. In August 1945, Tavin was living in his own excrement, confined to a cave at the Mishmar Ha-Emek settlement, when word came that he was to be freed under the terms of a truce concluded between the Haganah and the Irgun. Begin had made Tavin’s release an ineluctable condition of the agreement.36
Tavin was spirited out of the country on Begin’s orders to Italy. The Irgun commander tasked him with building an infrastructure that would both support illegal immigration activities and facilitate terrorist attacks. Tavin trawled the UNRRA camps for recruits, seeking former Revisionist Party members, battle-hardened partisans, and radicalized young refugees eager to fight for a Jewish state. He set up training camps and also oversaw the group’s increasingly active information operations—all the while awaiting word from Begin for the attacks to begin. It finally came early that fall—concealed in the heel of a shoe belonging to Samuel Katz, a longtime Jabotinsky acolyte who had immigrated to Palestine from South Africa in 1936 and was now in charge of Irgun external relations.37
Tavin selected the British embassy in Rome as the Italian cell’s target. Two thousand years earlier the Roman Empire had conquered the Kingdom of Israel. The rich symbolism of executing the Irgun’s inaugural overseas attack in that empire’s former capital figured prominently in his thinking. And the embassy—later described by the Irgun’s newspaper as “a centre of anti-Jewish intrigue,” responsible for coordinating regional efforts to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants from southern Europe and the Balkans to Palestine—loomed equally large as the embodiment of the modern-day foreign occupation and repression of Eretz Israel.38
The plan that Tavin devised entailed the placement of two suitcase bombs at the embassy’s main entrance under cover of darkness that would be timed to explode sometime in the early hours of the morning. Accordingly, on October 31, an Irgun team deposited the devices on the embassy’s front steps. A notice was attached to the suitcases that read, in a combi
nation of Italian and Polish, “Attenzione—Miny” (Attention—Mines). Identical signs, complete with red flags—the universal symbol for explosives—were placed at either end of the street where the embassy was located. The ambassador’s Italian chauffeur, however, happened upon the mysterious suitcases when he returned to the embassy at 2:30 a.m. He alerted a guard who in turn was able to rouse the embassy staff asleep inside and evacuate the building. Fifteen minutes later the bombs exploded. The damage was extensive: the building’s ornate entrance and grand staircase were completely destroyed, its elegant façade reduced to a pile of rubble, and a large part of its roof blown away. The only person injured was an Italian man who happened to be bicycling past just as the blasts occurred. Police specialists sent from Palestine to assist in the investigation assessed the force of each explosion as approximating that of a thousand-pound bomb.39
The Irgun’s temerity, coupled with the threat of further attacks in both Europe and Britain—made explicit in the Irgun claim of responsibility for the attack—prompted the Palestine government to dispatch two of its most senior and experienced intelligence officers to Rome. Richard Catling, the head of the CID’s Jewish Affairs section, arrived on November 3. He was accompanied by John J. O’Sullivan. Although officially gazetted as an assistant superintendent of police, O’Sullivan was Isham’s replacement as MI5 station chief in Palestine. The morning after they arrived, letters posted by the Irgun claiming responsibility for the attack were delivered to American journalists stationed in Rome. The attack, they warned in stilted English, “marked opening of Jewish military front in the Diaspora. Armed might of eternal people will reply with war everywhere until our fatherland is freed and people redeemed.” Catling and O’Sullivan quickly confirmed the letters’ authenticity.40
The first big break in the case followed soon after. Not far from the scene of the explosions, Italian police had detained a suspicious-looking man. Upon further investigation, they concluded that he was responsible for a third suitcase found abandoned nearby that contained explosives and detonators wired to an electric fuse. The arrest subsequently led Italian authorities to a Jewish-owned boardinghouse frequented by Polish Jews. There, they found a discarded warning sign identical to those left at the embassy. Further inquiries led to a Jewish displaced-persons camp outside the city, where police learned six Jews had arrived on October 25, only to vanish without explanation on November 1.41
Catling had to leave for a previously scheduled high-level meeting in London. O’Sullivan, accordingly, continued the investigation on his own, combing through immigration records at the camps for suspicious recent arrivals and departures. In this manner, he identified a known Irgun operative named Moshe Krivoshein, who had fled Rome on November 13 and was believed to be hiding in Athens. When O’Sullivan went to search Krivoshein’s hotel room, he was surprised to find someone else staying there—another Jew named Israel Epstein. Although Epstein had no role in the embassy bombing, he was an old and trusted friend of Begin’s from their days in the Polish Betar. The Irgun leader had sent Epstein to Italy to strengthen the group’s operational capacity. He had now been inadvertently swept into the bombing investigation’s widening dragnet. For the moment, O’Sullivan remained unaware of just how important a catch he had. Nonetheless, his hunch that Epstein was somehow involved in the embassy bombing was sufficient to ensure that the Italian police detained him. Demands for Epstein’s release sent by the American League for a Free Palestine to the Colonial Office, to the British ambassador in Rome, and to the commander of British military forces in Italy served only to confirm O’Sullivan’s suspicions.42
Two other breaks came over the succeeding weeks when both Krivoshein and Tavin were apprehended. The British now presented the Italian authorities with extradition requests to return all three men to Palestine for trial. Epstein panicked and, having made contact with members of the Irgun still at large, persuaded them to help him escape. The plan, however, went disastrously wrong. While attempting to scale the prison’s walls, Epstein was shot dead by guards. Krivoshein and Tavin, however, kept quiet and were eventually released for lack of evidence.43
The investigation, in any event, had started to unravel once O’Sullivan returned to Palestine on November 14. “The Italians are not a persistent race and soon get bored with difficult subjects, particularly anything to do with the Jews, about whom their policy is to forget as far as possible,” an after-action report prepared by the Rome embassy in October 1947 complained. No one in fact was ever charged with the bombing, much less brought to trial and convicted. And, except for a series of Irgun pamphlet bombs that exploded harmlessly in eight Italian cities in January 1947, as well as a series of hoax telephone calls warning of attacks on a Rome hotel used by RAF personnel and their families and on a building where both American and British intelligence agencies had offices, no further Irgun attacks ever occurred in that country.44
Nonetheless, the bombing instantly reignited British fears that the long-anticipated international Jewish terrorism campaign had begun. The Foreign Office urgently instructed legations across Europe and the Middle East to tighten security. Attlee himself wrote to Bevin to express his concern for the foreign secretary’s safety during his upcoming visit to New York. The prime minister assured him that the State Department had been asked to ensure that “extra precautions for yourself and staff” would be taken “in view of [the] Rome outrage.” The British consul general in New York was also directed to bring the matter of the foreign secretary’s security to the attention of both the local FBI field office and the New York Police Department. Although demonstrators pelted Bevin with eggs, his visit to New York otherwise passed without incident.45
London meanwhile braced for an anticipated terrorist onslaught. An anonymous call placed to the War Office on November 6 only heightened the anxiety already gripping both Whitehall and its intelligence and security services. “Listen carefully my friend. If another drop of blood is shed in Palestine, retribution will follow to the War Office and to military officers. This will begin tomorrow. Tell Field Marshal Montgomery. You have been warned,” the caller instructed the CIGS’s military assistant in a voice described as that of a “typical screen villain.” Although the caller did not identify himself or the organization behind the threat, the call had indeed been made at the Irgun’s behest.46
The London press soon got hold of the story. On November 11, headline stories warning of impending Jewish terrorist attacks appeared both in sensation-prone tabloids like the Daily Mail and The Evening News and even in more sober broadsheets like The Daily Telegraph. “Stern Gang Here,” screamed the Daily Mail. The Evening News breathlessly recounted how “emissaries of Jewish terrorist organisations have arrived in Britain from France in spite of the measures taken to prevent them. Terrorist chiefs have drawn up a ‘death list’ and ‘operational instructions,’ ” it reported, “have been issued by the secret combined general staff of the two terrorist organizations to the terrorist agents now being infiltrated into Britain.” Adding to the frenzy was the new session of Parliament scheduled to begin the following day, which was thought to be an especially inviting terrorist target as it would be formally opened by the king and attended by the queen and various other dignitaries. The army was called out and every police officer in London mobilized for duty. In addition to the strong uniformed-police presence along the route that the king and queen traveled from Buckingham Palace to the Houses of Parliament, armed plainclothes detectives circulated throughout the crowds lining the Mall and in front of Parliament. The usually straitlaced Times was also carried away by the prospect of terrorist attack. It reported that “two-way radio telephone patrol cars ready to receive instructions from and supply information to the operations room at Scotland Yard” were prowling the city on heightened alert. The number of guards at government buildings was also doubled, and they were instructed to carefully scrutinize the identity documents of all visitors.47
Both John Rymer-Jones, now back with th
e Metropolitan Police, and the director of military intelligence, Major General Sir Gerald Templer, were inclined to regard the threats as inflated and the precautions as excessive. Nonetheless, they also readily conceded that the possibility of a terrorist attack could be neither confidently nor completely dismissed. The arrest in Glasgow only a few weeks earlier of a suspected Lehi operative, posing as a Polish soldier attached to General Anders’s army, had lent greater credibility to fears of impending terrorist attack, as did the appearance of an important Irgun defector, who claimed to have knowledge of definite plans by the group to “carry out acts of sabotage” in Britain. Brought to London for further questioning by Special Branch officers at Scotland Yard, the man professed to be unaware of any decision to attack specific targets but insisted “that if they attempt anything they will try to sabotage buildings.”48
The acute anxiety that reports from a variety of shadowy informants claiming access to the masterminds behind these plots generated within the British intelligence and security establishment is perhaps best illustrated by the seriousness with which a contemporaneous account of the Irgun’s alleged interest in “atomic fission” was taken. According to the MI5 Haifa office, information had been received from a trustworthy source that the terrorist organization was running a “Canadian spy-ring” that, in tandem with American and Canadian sympathizers and “Jewish scientists and others connected with research work on atomic energy and atomic bomb production,” was providing the Irgun with a steady stream of documents pertaining to atomic weapon research and development. The group reportedly hoped to barter its access to such information with the Soviet Union in exchange for its assistance in transporting illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine. Although nothing more apparently was heard of any Irgun efforts along these lines, the sense of genuine alarm pervading both the intelligence community and its political masters had given rise to a remarkable situation where, on the eve of the cold war and just six months since Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the prospect of Jewish terrorist attacks in the U.K. was regarded as a more serious threat than that of Soviet spying and subversion. “For the only time before the closing years of the Cold War,” the renowned historian Christopher Andrew has observed, “counter-terrorism thus became a higher Secret Service priority than counter-espionage.”49
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