The Defence of the Realm (67 page)

‘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:

We are at present investigating what appears to be an attempt to set up an international service designed to collect funds and intelligence on behalf of the Irgun Zvai Leumi. The [telephone] check on Landman, who appears to be taking the lead in organising the projected service, keeps us informed of his numerous contacts, of the nature of the business he is discussing with them, and, at the moment, of what appears to be a leakage at Cabinet level.

Although Landman figures as the chief conspirator in this scheme, Bella remains the chief suspect by reason of his past association with the terrorist organisation in Paris and the liaison which he is believed to maintain with the Irgun Zvai Leumi, through the medium of his brother in Paris.
⁶²

That the Security Service was right to take the continued threat of extremist Zionist terrorism seriously was shown by the assassination in Palestine in the summer of 1948 of the president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Bernadotte, for allegedly siding with the British in his recommendations to the UN for the future partition of the country.
⁶³
The failure of Irgun and the Stern Gang to achieve their ambition of killing Bevin or another senior figure in London reflected both the lack of serious support for terrorism among British Zionists and the stronger protective security in Britain compared with Palestine.

The intelligence obtained from an HOW on Samuel Landman initially suggested that one of his contacts was passing him information from a Jewish member of the Attlee government, Emmanuel ‘Manny' Shinwell, in 1947 successively Minister of Fuel and Power and Secretary of State for War. B3a reported in November 1947:

There have been various indications that Landman has contacts with, and is getting information from, official Government circles, through a friend of his named ‘Stanley' . . . not definitely identified . . . The first mention of these contacts is on 31st October, when Landman mentions that ‘he' (probably Stanley) is going to the House of Commons to see Shinwell and has also had a telephone conversation with Bevin's secretary.

On the next day Stanley gives Landman an account of his meeting with ‘Mannie' (probably Emmanuel Shinwell) who has promised to do everything in his power during the moving [of a parliamentary Bill] for which he will have entire responsibility.
⁶⁴

. . . Stanley says he has an appointment to see the Prime Minister on Tuesday afternoon (4th November) if the latter is back from Holland. If he is not back by then Stanley will see ‘Ernie' [Bevin] instead. Landman will give Stanley all the necessary material for presentation to the Prime Minister or to Stanley's friend (presumably Shinwell) who, according to Stanley, has been given full power by Attlee (?) to deal with the whole problem.
⁶⁵

Further investigation revealed that Landman's claims of influence via Stanley on Shinwell and the Attlee government were based on a mixture of invention and exaggeration. The Service regarded Landman as deeply untrustworthy. As a solicitor in 1938 he had been suspended for three years by the Disciplinary Committee of the Law Society for misappropriation of clients' funds.
⁶⁶
During the Second World War Landman was regarded by both the Service and Scotland Yard as ‘a rogue who has been preying upon ignorant clients and upon anyone else who offers a chance of making easy money'.
⁶⁷

Landman's friend ‘Stanley' was discovered to be the confidence trickster and undischarged bankrupt Sidney Stanley, a Polish Jew who was probably the most flamboyant fraudster to prey on post-war British public life. His claims of influence with the Attlee government were characteristically overblown. He had indeed made the acquaintance of Manny Shinwell, then Secretary of State for War, who had sought his services as a fixer to find his son Ernie a job.
⁶⁸
Stanley acquired confidential information on the disbandment of the Transjordan Frontier Force,
⁶⁹
for which the War Office may (or may not) have been the source.
⁷⁰
Stanley also met Ernie Bevin at a dinner party which he had organized and paid for, while arranging for the invitations to go out in the name of a prominent Labour Party member.
⁷¹
On the strength of their conversation, he later tried unsuccessfully to arrange a private meeting with Bevin through his private secretary.
⁷²
Stanley's claim to Landman that he had an appointment with Attlee and would see Bevin instead if the Prime Minister failed to return in time from abroad was pure invention – as was Stanley's alleged ability to sway votes ‘in an area where the Government need support'.
⁷³