Both Irgun and the Stern Gang were also believed to be plotting the assassination of the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who became a figure of hate for many Zionists during the first year of the Attlee government. On his arrival at the Foreign Office in July 1945, proud of his pre-war record as Britain’s most successful trade union negotiator, Bevin had rashly boasted that he would stake his ‘political future’ on securing a settlement between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. He also had a reputation as a committed supporter of the establishment of a Jewish state. Within days of becoming foreign secretary, however, he had changed his mind. ‘Clem,’ he told the Prime Minister, ‘about Palestine. According to my lads in the Office, we’ve got it wrong. We’ve got to think again.’ Though President Truman urged Attlee to admit 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine immediately, the Labour government imposed a limit of 1,500 immigrants a month (a limit Labour leaders had previously opposed). With remarkable insensitivity, Bevin joked to the Labour Party conference in June 1946, little more than a year after the liberation of the last Nazi concentration and death camps, that the United States supported mass Jewish immigration into Palestine ‘because they did not want too many of them in New York’.13
According to an intelligence report from Palestine on 23 August 1946, a month after the bombing of the King David Hotel: ‘. . . Irgun and Stern have decided to send 5 cells to London to operate in a manner similar to I.R.A. To use their own words “beat the dog in his own kennel”.’14 Sillitoe included this warning written in red ink as a stop-press addition to a note entitled ‘Threatened Jewish Activity in the United Kingdom, Palestine and Elsewhere’, which he handed to Attlee shortly afterwards. He added that Bevin was believed to have been marked out for assassination.15 The Security Service reported in September 1946 that most Stern Gang recruits were ‘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 proceeding overseas and assassinating a prominent British personality – special reference having been made several times to Mr Bevin in this connection.16
The apparent threat to Bevin was given added emphasis by reports in the autumn of 1946 that the leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, had disappeared from the Middle East; MI5 and SIS sources believed that he was in Paris and intending to travel secretly to Britain. (In reality Begin remained in Palestine until late in 1948.) An SIS source reported that Begin had undergone plastic surgery to alter his appearance – though, SIS noted, ‘We have no description of the new face.’17 Though Begin had not in fact undergone plastic surgery, there was considerable confusion about his appearance. Jerusalem CID had obtained two photographs of him. One, in Begin’s view, was a fairly good likeness; the other, which the CID believed to be Begin’s military identity card, ‘bore only a slight resemblance’ to him but had a somewhat villainous appearance. Largely for that reason, Begin believed, the CID relied on the latter photograph when hunting for him. Begin confused them further by growing a beard and drastically limiting the circle of those able to identify his bearded self. When he agreed to give a secret interview to the writer Arthur Koestler, his security guards insisted that they meet in a darkened room. Koestler chain-smoked throughout the interview, drawing heavily on his cigarettes in the vain hope of generating enough glow to enable him to catch a glimpse of Begin. According to Begin, the myth of his plastic surgery was confirmed in the minds of British intelligence when a leading Irgun activist, imprisoned in Cairo, was asked about the surgery during interrogation and replied in apparent alarm (but with the real intention of adding to British confusion): ‘How did you know that? No, no, it’s not true!’18
Irgun dramatically demonstrated its ability to carry out attacks in Europe in October 1946 by blowing up most of the British embassy in Rome – a clear indication, the Security Service believed, of what Irgun was planning in the UK. MI5 reasonably assumed that if Irgun and the Stern Gang set up terrorist cells in Britain, they would be assisted by British Zionist extremists.19 In addition to intelligence from SIME and agent reports in Britain, B3a depended on intercepted communications and ‘technical coverage’ of some British Zionists which led to the identification and surveillance of a number of individuals involved with Irgun and the Stern Gang. SIGINT had been a major part of British intelligence-gathering in the Middle East ever since the establishment of an intercept station at Sarafand in Palestine in 1923. Alastair Denniston, the interwar head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), the predecessor of GCHQ, paid tribute in 1944 to the ‘close liaison between GC&CS and Sarafand’ over the previous twenty years.20 MI5’s Middle Eastern section found the wartime SIGINT derived from intercepted Zionist communications of ‘considerable assistance’.21 It continued to do so after the war.
In Palestine, Begin wrote later, ‘There is no disputing that . . . the names of many hundreds of officers and men of the Irgun Zvai Leumi were given to the British police by official Jewish institutions and their liaison officers.’22 Among those who provided names was Teddy Kollek, later famous as a longserving mayor of Jerusalem, who in 1942 had become the Jewish Agency’s deputy head of intelligence. From January 1945 to May 1946 Kollek was the Agency’s chief external liaison officer in Jerusalem, in regular touch with both the main MI5 representative, DSO Palestine, and SIME, to whom he gave intelligence on ‘intended terrorist activities’.23 In November 1946 the DDG, Guy Liddell, briefed Attlee on the Service’s relations with Kollek and other Jewish Agency representatives in Palestine and Cairo:
I told him that the measure of this co-operation was limited; it had never led to the actual pin-pointing of terrorists – it had generally taken the form of notifying us that something was likely to happen somewhere within the next 24 or 48 hours, or that the terrorist was believed to be in Jerusalem. In fact, the Agency told the authorities just as much as they thought was good for them and had always endeavoured to keep the strings in their own hands and to imply that they were the people who were governing Palestine and not the British Government. The P.M. remarked that they were singularly tortuous people to deal with.24
In fact the intelligence supplied by the Jewish Agency had sometimes been more specific than Liddell suggested. On 10 August 1945, for example, Kollek revealed the location of a secret Irgun training camp near Binyamina and told an MI5 officer it would be ‘a great idea to raid the place’. The raid led to the arrest of twenty-seven Irgun members.25
The Security Service also had contacts in London with the Jewish Agency and official British Zionist organizations whose leaders were anxious that terrorism in Palestine should not spread to Britain and were willing to provide intelligence on Irgun and the Stern Gang.26 Service co-operation with mainstream British Zionism, however, was combined with close surveillance. MI5 successfully applied for Home Office Warrants (HOWs) to enable it to intercept the correspondence and tap the telephones of all the important Zionist organizations in Britain: both the mainstream Jewish Agency and Jewish Legion and the smaller, extremist United Zionist Revisionists (UZR) and United Zionist Youth Organization (better known by its Hebrew acronym, Betar).27 The Security Service became particularly concerned about Betar, of which Begin had been a teenage militant in interwar Poland, and which trained its post-war members to ‘go into Palestine in order to build, defend and fight for the Jewish state’. According to reports reaching MI5, the Betar organization in Palestine had close links to the Irgun. The Service feared that the British Betar would establish similar links.28 The HOW on its London HQ identified a number of visitors who had connections with the Stern Gang and Irgun, and were involved in the illegal purchase of arms.29 By September 1946 the Security Service was receiving detailed reports on support for terrorism by British Zionist extremists from two agents, one in the UZR and the other in Betar, both run by Captain F. C. Derbyshire.30 More reassuringly, Security Service investigations concluded that the Jewish Agency and other mainstream official bodies had distanced themselves f
rom the extremist UZR and Betar.31
In November 1946 an Irgun defector, who claimed to have been ‘shocked by the King David Hotel operation’, provided important intelligence on other planned attacks, as well as revealing the location of the Irgun’s Jerusalem headquarters (which contained only files when it was raided) and a large arms cache.32 The defector knew far less about planned attacks in Britain. After being brought to London for questioning by the Security Service and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB), he claimed that ‘Attempts to carry out acts of sabotage in U.K. will definitely be attempted.’ When asked for details by his interrogators, he replied, not very helpfully, ‘All I can say is that if they attempt anything they will try to sabotage buildings.’33 The warning, while vague, turned out to be well founded – though the main threat came from the Stern Gang rather than Irgun.34
On 15 April 1947 the Stern Gang almost succeeded in blowing up the Colonial Office in Whitehall. A bomb containing twenty-four sticks of explosive failed to detonate only because the timer failed. Commander Leonard Burt, head of the Special Branch, believed that if the bomb had gone off, the damage might have been as bad as that inflicted on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem nine months earlier.35 In June 1947, following earlier death threats, the Stern Gang posted twenty-one letter bombs from Italy to Bevin, Attlee, Churchill, Anthony Eden and other British notables.36 Several reached their destination but failed to explode; the GPO was then warned and the others were intercepted before they could be delivered.37 Explosives experts at the Home Office reported that all were potentially lethal.38 On 2 June, shortly before the letter bombs reached England, two Stern Gang terrorists, Betty Knouth (also known as Gilberte or Elizabeth Lazarus) and Jacob Elias, were arrested at the Belgian frontier as they were about to cross into France. Envelopes addressed to British officials, together with detonators, batteries and a time fuse, were discovered in the false bottom of Knouth’s suitcase.39 Knouth was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and Elias to eight months for carrying concealed explosives. At a Stern Gang press conference in Tel Aviv after her release, the twenty-twoyear-old Knouth said in reply to questions: ‘Did I post letter bombs? Unfortunately, the Belgian police got me before I could do so. They are a Stern Gang patent, you know . . . Belgian experts said they were deadly. I’m sorry none of them was delivered.’ Among the intended recipients of the letter bombs was the former Chief Secretary of the Palestine administration, Sir John Shaw, later head of the Security Service Overseas Division.40
‘Elias’ had a much longer track record as a terrorist than Knouth. When his fingerprints were sent to London, his real identity was discovered to be Yaacov Levstein,41 who had been a Stern Gang terrorist in Palestine throughout the war and was believed to be responsible for the deaths of a number of police officers as well as an attempt on the life of the high commissioner. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment (subsequently commuted to ten years) in 1942, but had escaped from jail after eight months.42 Levstein’s fingerprints were discovered on the timing device of the bomb which failed to explode at the Colonial Office on 15 April. The Security Service believed, however, that the bomb had been planted by Betty Knouth. She fitted the description of an attractive young woman who had been seen at the Colonial Office, carrying a distinctive blue-leather mitre-shaped handbag, which was still in her possession when she was arrested. Knouth admitted arriving in London on 11 April and leaving on the 15th.43 When asked at the Stern Gang press conference after her release from prison whether she ‘had anything to do with the bomb in the Colonial Office’, Knouth replied: ‘Scotland Yard could give you very precise details about that, but I don’t consider this the right time to talk about it. We are still at war with Britain. But my terrorist days are over and done with now.’44
Daily Express, 25 August 1948.
While investigations were continuing on the continent, the Security Service simultaneously discovered within Britain a group of Zionist ‘conspirators’ led by two north London Jews, Leo Bella and Harry Isaac Presman, whose aim, it reported, ‘was undoubtedly to organise acts of terrorism in this country’. Bella was a stateless company director of Russian origin; Presman was a British subject also of Russian origin, and the director of a firm of chemical manufacturers.45 ‘Bella and his associates’ were believed to be involved in the April 1947 letter-bomb campaign.46 Telephone tapping (telechecks) of Bella and Presman revealed that, though both usually spoke in guarded terms, they were obtaining explosives which, it was believed, were intended for terrorist attacks in Britain.47 The summary of a telecheck on 15 July records: ‘Pressman [sic] says that he has got that Barium nitrate potassium chloride. Bella asks if it is possible to get a pound or two. Presman thinks so – he will post them to Bella, unless somebody is going that way in which case he will send them by hand.’48
Covert surveillance of Presman’s attempts to stockpile weapons and explosives were interrupted by the unexpected discovery on 19 July by Presman’s chauffeur, Charles Whiting (who was unaware of his employer’s terrorist connections), of twenty-four hand grenades and twenty-four detonators in a lock-up garage recently vacated by Presman. What followed provides a striking and somewhat comic illustration of post-war London’s unpreparedness for terrorist attacks. Since this was an era when ‘bobbies on the beat’ were a much more visible part of life in the capital than they have since become, Whiting went out into the street to look for one and saw Pc 560N passing on horseback. After inspecting the grenades and detonators, Pc 560N told Whiting to take them to Stoke Newington police station in Presman’s Rover, which he duly did.49 When questioned by the police, however, Presman denied all knowledge of the weapons in the garage:
. . . Presman now declares that he is not responsible because he recently sub-let the garage No. 2 to an unknown man. He cannot now produce the man concerned and we cannot accept his story. He appears to have made some moves to support his alibi in the event of disclosure . . .50
Improbable though Presman’s explanation was, there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution – particularly after Whiting made a further statement on 22 July in support of his employer’s alibi. Presman, he declared, had ‘refreshed my memory [about] certain incidents and I feel sure this is the true story . . .’51 Probably as a result of the discovery of the weapons in the garage and questioning by the Special Branch on his ‘possession of extremist Jewish literature’,52 Presman seems to have decided to lie low. No further evidence came to light of his links to terrorist groups.53 Unlike Presman, Bella appears to have been unaware that he was under suspicion. The Security Service continued to regard him as ‘the chief organiser in the UK of a Revisionist movement reported to be in contact with the HQ of a terrorist organisation in Paris, consisting of members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi and Stern Gang’.54
By the beginning of 1947 Bevin’s rash initial optimism that he could engineer a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian problem had evaporated. ‘I am’, he confessed, ‘at the end of my tether.’55 In February, unable to devise a settlement acceptable to both Jews and Arabs, Britain handed over the Palestine problem to the United Nations, which voted nine months later for partition. British attempts to stop ‘illegal’ Jewish immigration which exceeded the 1,500 monthly quota, however, continued to exacerbate the mutual antagonism between Zionists and the British authorities. David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister, declared that Britain had ‘proclaimed war against Zionism’.56 The earlier flow of intelligence from the Jewish Agency in Palestine seems to have dried up. In June Guy Liddell inveighed in his diary against what he believed was the ‘duplicity’ of the Agency, which regarded as equally duplicitous British restrictions on Jewish immigration. The British administration in Palestine, Liddell believed, lacked the intelligence necessary to wage a successful counterterrorist campaign:
What was really lacking was positive information on what the Irgun were going to do next Friday. Only with information of this kind was it possible to suppress terrorism. It was difficult, or
almost impossible, to obtain owing to the hostile or terrorised attitude of the population. The Police clearly [had] been let down over a long period both in strength and efficiency, and it was difficult to build them up in the present circumstances.57
In July 1947, a month after Liddell’s diary entry, the Irgun captured two British sergeants from British military intelligence in Natanya and used them as hostages to try to secure the release of three of their members awaiting execution after being convicted of terrorist attacks.58 When the Irgun members were executed, the bodies of the two British sergeants were found hanging in an orange grove. Their corpses had been boobytrapped and a British officer was seriously injured when he attempted to cut them down.59
Intelligence had greater success in restricting what Britain declared was illegal Jewish immigration. The Security Service believed that, as a result of its penetration of the Jewish organizations in London and other intelligence sources, ‘only one out of some thirty ships carrying illegal immigrants reached their destination.’60 The most controversial case was that of the Exodus, intercepted off Palestine in July 1947 with 4,500 Jewish ‘illegal immigrants’ on board, whom Bevin ordered to be forcibly returned to refugee camps in Germany. As the captain of the Exodus later recalled, Zionist intelligence officers ‘gave us orders that this ship was to be used as a big demonstration with banners to show how poor and weak and helpless we were, and how cruel the British were’. Newspaper photographs around the world showed apparently brutish British soldiers manhandling defenceless Jews.61
Though attacks on British forces and officials in Palestine continued right up to the end of the mandate in 1948, both Irgun and the Stern Gang failed to mount a major attack within the United Kingdom. By the end of 1947, with the approach of Israeli independence and a looming Arab–Jewish conflict in Palestine, the Security Service believed that the threat of Zionist terrorist attacks in the UK had passed the acute phase. In order to ‘lighten the load’ on the transcribers, the labour-intensive telephone check on the UZR head office had been suspended, along with checks on three leading Revisionist militants. Of the four militants on whom telephone checks remained in place, only two, Samuel Landman and Leo Bella, still gave rise to serious concern – neither, however, in connection with an imminent terrorist threat to Britain:
The Defence of the Realm Page 48