The Defence of the Realm (66 page)

The Security Service had no specialist counter-terrorist department. B3a in the Intelligence Division
³
at Leconfield House was mainly responsible for dealing with Zionist terrorism and other Middle Eastern matters. In the Middle East the responsibility fell to the interdepartmental SIME (Security Intelligence Middle East) in Cairo, which controlled a network of defence security officers (DSOs), later renamed security liaison officers (SLOs), and liaised with B3a. Though SIME had been primarily a military organization during the war, in December 1946 it was transferred to the control of the Security Service with the flamboyant Alex Kellar as its head.
⁴
Kellar is thought to have been the inspiration for the ‘man in cream cuffs' in John le Carré's
Call for the Dead
, played in the film by Max Adrian wearing a dragon-patterned silk dressing gown with a purple handkerchief and a rose in his buttonhole.
⁵
In the summer of 1947 he suffered a breakdown
after being diagnosed with suspected amoebic dysentery and returned to London. Kellar's far more robust successor, Bill Magan, who had begun his career in an Indian cavalry regiment, was admiringly described to his wife Maxine before their wedding in New Delhi in 1940 as ‘a Cavalry officer who actually reads a book'. Though suffering on the day of the wedding from a relapse of malaria with a temperature of 103°, Magan characteristically declined to postpone the ceremony.
⁶
He was well aware that his views did not commend themselves to the Jewish Agency, which was preparing for the foundation of the State of Israel: ‘I said, “You may pack a couple of million Jews into your little Jewish state, but you will be for ever more surrounded by two hundred million Muslims who will never leave you alone.” ' Magan also knew that he was high on the Zionist terrorist target list.
⁷

In March 1946, B3a received information from a ‘reliable' source in Palestine, in ‘direct contact' with the Stern Gang, that ‘terrorists are now training their members for the purpose of proceeding to England to assassinate members of His Majesty's Government'.
⁸
The wartime track record of Zionist terrorists ensured that such reports were taken seriously. In November 1944 the Stern Gang had assassinated the British Minister of State in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, and Zionist extremists had made several attempts to murder the British high commissioner for Palestine, Sir Ronald MacMichael. Shortly before Sir David Petrie was succeeded as DG by Sillitoe, he concluded in a minute on the Zionist threat that ‘the red light is definitely showing.'
⁹
In July 1946 Irgun, headed by the future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, blew up the British Palestine HQ in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with 500 pounds of explosives packed into milk-churns.
¹⁰
Ninety-one lives were lost,
¹¹
five of them staff engaged locally by the Security Service. All staff from Head Office survived. One eyewitness later recalled three of the ‘London ladies' staggering from the ruins of the hotel with ceiling plaster in their hair and ‘looking like the wrath of God'. They showed ‘no hysteria – they were marvellous'.
¹²

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 from 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