by the service’s expert on counter-sabotage, Lord Rothschild, and its in-house scientist, Professor H.V.A. Briscoe of Imperial College London. Although SHAEF was sceptical about some of the supposed sabotage plots, the conclusion of one of its reports in March 1945, entitled ‘German terrorist methods’, was that Allied personnel should be forbidden from eating any German foods or smoking German cigarettes, ‘under pain of severe penalties’.7
However, contrary to all of the warnings and intelligence assessments made in London and Washington, the Nazi threat – and that of imperial Japan – disintegrated far more quickly than predicted. As it turned out, neither Nazi Germany nor the Japanese secret police (the Kempeitai) organised any effective stay-behind networks after the Allied victory. British intelligence nevertheless devoted significant resources to hunting down and capturing Nazi war criminals on the run. The Oxford historian and wartime SIS officer Hugh Trevor-Roper was sent by SIS to Berlin to make a detailed report on the final days of Hitler and the attempted escapes of Nazi leaders. His report eventually became a best-selling book, The Last Days of Hitler. One of the leading figures in the ‘Final Solution’, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, for example, was captured in Austria disguised as a huntsman and was then secretly transported to Britain. Though it has not been acknowledged in historical accounts to date, Kaltenbrunner’s interrogation by MI5 at Camp 020 played a significant role in his successful prosecution and execution at Nuremberg. Likewise, the notorious leader of the SS and architect of Nazi mass murder in Europe, Heinrich Himmler, was captured by the Allies as he attempted to flee across the German border in disguise. However, Himmler committed suicide in British detention, by biting into a cyanide pellet hidden in one of his teeth, before he could be brought to trial.8
The political situation in post-war Britain did not create an easy atmosphere for its secret services. The new Labour government of Clement Attlee, elected in July 1945, made an election promise to keep them on a tight leash. The Labour Party had experienced difficult relations with Britain’s intelligence services ever since the scandalous ‘Zinoviev affair’ in 1924, which had led to the downfall of Britain’s first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. The affair involved a letter supposedly sent by one of the Soviet leaders, Grigory Zinoviev, to the British Communist Party, in which Moscow apparently implored communist fellow travellers to spread revolution to Britain and its colonies. MacDonald’s government suspected that the letter was a forgery, concocted by conservative elements in British intelligence, but the Conservative Party pounced on the scandal, and implicated the Labour Party in the affair. It is now known that the letter was indeed a fake, but it was not devised by MI5 or any other part of British intelligence: it was forged by anti-Bolshevik White Russians, probably in one of the Baltic countries.9
Meanwhile, Churchill’s parting shot before he left office as Prime Minister in 1945 was to warn that a ‘socialist’ government in Britain would inevitably establish a ‘Gestapo’ and a ‘police state’. To nip Churchill’s prediction in the bud, when MI5’s wartime Director-General Sir David Petrie retired in 1946, Attlee attempted to keep MI5 under his control as much as possible, choosing a former policeman, Sir Percy Sillitoe, as Petrie’s successor. Many within MI5, probably with good reason, regarded Attlee’s choice of an outsider as a vote of no confidence. The fact was that MI5 emerged from the war judged not for its triumphs, like the Double Cross System, which remained secret, but instead on claustrophobic wartime security measures, including the temporary curtailment of civil liberties and, perhaps most notoriously, mass internment in Britain.10
For Britain’s intelligence services, as for many other departments in Whitehall, the transition from war to peace witnessed a rapid wind-down. Just as after the First World War, in the years after 1945, in ‘Austerity Britain’, funding of the nation’s intelligence services was slashed, their emergency wartime powers removed, and their staff numbers drastically reduced. Many of the brilliant amateur outsiders who had joined the ranks of the intelligence services during the war returned to their pre-war professions. MI5’s staff numbers were reduced from 350 officers at its height in 1943, to just a hundred in 1946. Its administrative records reveal that it was forced to start buying cheaper ink and paper, and its officers were instructed to type reports on both sides of paper to save money. Combined with all this, MI5 also soon became demoralised. The officer who had been responsible for skilfully running its double agents section during the war, Tar Robertson, was so disheartened with the service after the war that in 1947 he took early retirement and went off to become a sheep farmer in Gloucestershire, hardly ever speaking publicly of his secret wartime exploits. There were some serious discussions within Whitehall, as there had been after the First World War, about shutting MI5 down altogether. Unfortunately for MI5, in the post-war years it faced the worst possible combination of circumstances: reduced resources, but increased responsibilities. After the war Britain had more territories under its control than at any point in its history, and because MI5 was responsible for security intelligence in all British territories, it acquired unprecedented overseas obligations.11
A D-DAY FOR TERRORISM
If the British intelligence community faced an uneasy situation in the post-war period, with reduced funding, greater responsibilities, awkward relations with the Labour government and scanty intelligence on their new Soviet enemy, MI5 was confronted with an even more urgent threat. Recently declassified intelligence records reveal that at the end of the war the main priority for MI5 was the threat of terrorism emanating from the Middle East, specifically from the two main Jewish (or Zionist) terrorist groups operating in the Mandate of Palestine, which had been placed under British control in 1921. They were called the Irgun Zevai Leumi (‘National Military Organisation’, or the Irgun for short) and the Lehi (an acronym in Hebrew for ‘Freedom Fighters of Israel’), which the British also termed the ‘Stern Gang’, after its founding leader, Avraham Stern. The Irgun and the Stern Gang believed that British policies in Palestine in the post-war years, blocking the creation of an independent Jewish state, legitimised the use of violence against British targets.
As the Second World War came to a close, MI5 received a stream of intelligence reports warning that the Irgun and the Stern Gang were not just planning violence in the Mandate of Palestine, but were also plotting to launch attacks inside Britain. In April 1945 an urgent cable from SIME warned that Victory in Europe (VE-Day) would be a D-Day for Jewish terrorists in the Middle East. Then, in the spring and summer of 1946, coinciding with a sharp escalation of anti-British violence in Palestine, MI5 received apparently reliable reports from SIME that the Irgun and the Stern Gang were planning to send five terrorist ‘cells’ to London, ‘to work on IRA lines’. To use their own words, the terrorists intended to ‘beat the dog in his own kennel’. The SIME reports were derived from the interrogation of captured Irgun and Stern Gang fighters, from local police agents in Palestine, and from liaisons with official Zionist political groups like the Jewish Agency. They stated that among the targets for assassination were Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who was regarded as the main obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East, and the Prime Minister himself. Before his retirement as MI5’s Director-General, Sir David Petrie warned that the spike of violence against the British in Palestine, and the planned extension of Irgun and Stern Gang operations to Britain, meant that the ‘red light is definitely showing’. MI5’s new Director-General, Sir Percy Sillitoe, was so alarmed that in August 1946 he personally briefed the Prime Minister on the situation, warning him that an assassination campaign in Britain had to be considered a real possibility, and that his own name was known to be on a Stern Gang hit-list.12
The Irgun and the Stern Gang’s wartime track record ensured that MI5 took these warnings seriously. In November 1944 the Stern Gang assassinated the British Minister for the Middle East, Lord Moyne, while he was returning to his rented villa after a luncheon engagement in Cairo. Moyne, an heir to the Guinness dynasty, was a wealthy and well-connected figure, and his assassination prompted a furious reaction from Churchill. The wartime leader had been a long-time supporter of the Zionist cause, having known the Zionist political leader Chaim Weizmann (who later became the first President of Israel) since the early 1900s, when he was an MP and Weizmann a lecturer at Manchester University, but despite his private outrage with the Stern Gang ‘gangsters’, he urged moderation. However, Moyne’s murder was