with incidents against the British and Irgun and Stern Gang fighters being followed by bloody reprisals. In mid-June 1946, after the Irgun launched a wave of attacks, bombing five trains and ten of the eleven bridges connecting Palestine to neighbouring states, London’s restraint finally broke. British forces conducted mass arrests across Palestine (codenamed Operation Agatha), culminating on 29 June – a day known as ‘Black Sabbath’ because it was a Saturday – with the detention of over 2,700 Zionist leaders and minor officials, as well as officers of the official Jewish defence force (Haganah) and its crack commandos (Palmach). None of the important Irgun or Stern Gang leaders was caught in the dragnet, and its result was merely to goad them into even more violent counter-actions. On 22 July the Irgun dealt a devastating blow, codenamed Operation Chick, to the heart of British rule in Palestine, bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the offices of British officialdom in the Mandate, as well as serving as the headquarters of the British Army in Palestine and all the British intelligence services operating there.13
The bombing was planned by the leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, later to be the sixth Prime Minister of Israel and the joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. On the morning of 22 July, six young Irgun members entered the hotel disguised as Arabs, carrying milk churns packed with five hundred pounds of explosives. At 12.37 p.m. the bombs exploded, ripping the façade from the south-west corner of the building, which caused the collapse of several floors in the hotel, resulting in the death of ninety-one people, including British civilians, Arabs and Jews, some of whom were maimed beyond recognition, and causing a further forty-five casualties. Begin later claimed that he had given adequate warnings about the bomb, which were ignored by the British authorities: a young Irgun courier, Adina Hay-Nissan, had made three telephone calls to the hotel’s switchboard, as well as to the French consulate and the Palestine Post before the explosion. However, the reality was that, as her terrorist bosses knew well, the Irgun issued so many warnings that the British police had become blasé, and the bomb went off just fifteen minutes after the warnings, leaving little time for evacuation.14
The Chief Secretary of the Palestine Mandate, Sir John Shaw, who narrowly escaped being killed in the explosion, and who went on to work for MI5, was adamant that he never received a warning about the bomb – he privately recorded in MI5 files that he was contemplating suing Begin for libel following Begin’s assertion in his book The Revolt (1951) that Shaw had ignored the warning. Shaw graphically described to Labour MP Richard Crossman how he lost nearly a hundred of his ‘best officers and old friends’ in the bombing, and in its aftermath helped to dig lacerated bodies from the rubble, attending thirteen funerals in just three days. The explosion was so powerful that the body of the Postmaster General was hurled across the street from the hotel into the YMCA, where his remains had to be literally scraped off a wall. One clerk in the hotel had his face cut almost entirely in half by shards of flying glass. A photograph from the scene shows a typewriter sitting on top of a pile of rubble, with dismembered fingers still attached to its keys. The post-war diaries of Guy Liddell reveal that in the aftermath of the bombing, Shaw made an urgent trip to London, where he briefed the JIC:
He [Shaw] was obviously considerably moved by his recent experience. The principal point of his statement [to the JIC] was his conviction that Palestinian Arabs would prove entirely intransigent. He thought that we were lucky to have got over the funerals of the Arab victims in the King David Hotel without any serious incident. He thought that it was quite on the cards that, although the Arabs knew that in a street fight with the Jews they could not hope to win, they might at any moment commit some outrage which would cause things to flare up. It might even lead to a Holy War.
In terms of fatalities, the King David Hotel bombing was one of the worst terrorist atrocities inflicted on the British in the twentieth century. It was also a direct attack on British intelligence and counter-terrorist efforts in Palestine: both MI5 and SIS had stations in the hotel.15
In the wake of the bombing, the Irgun and the Stern Gang launched a series of operations outside Palestine, just as the reports coming into MI5 had warned. At the end of October 1946 an Irgun cell operating in Italy bombed the British embassy in Rome, and followed this in late 1946 and early 1947 with a series of sabotage attacks on British military transportation routes in occupied Germany. In March 1947 an Irgun operative left a bomb at the Colonial Club, near St Martin’s Lane in the heart of London, which blew out the club’s windows and doors, injuring several servicemen. The following month a female Irgun agent left an enormous bomb, consisting of twenty-four sticks of explosives, at the Colonial Office in London. The bomb failed to detonate because its timer broke. The head of Special Branch, Leonard Burt, estimated that if it had gone off it would have caused fatalities on a comparable scale to the King David Hotel bombing – but this time at the heart of Whitehall. At about the same time, several prominent British politicians and public figures connected with Palestine received death threats from the Stern Gang at their homes and offices. Finally, in June 1947 the Stern Gang launched a letter-bomb campaign in Britain, consisting of twenty-one bombs in total, which targeted every prominent member of the cabinet. The two waves of bombs were posted from an underground cell in Italy. Some of those in the first wave reached their targets, but they did not result in any casualties. Sir Stafford Cripps was only saved by the quick thinking of his secretary, who became suspicious of a package whose contents seemed to fizz, and placed it in a bucket of water. The Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Anthony Eden, carried a letter bomb around with him for a whole day in his briefcase, thinking it was a Whitehall circular that could wait till the evening to be read, and only realised what it was when he was warned by the police of the planned attack, on information provided by MI5. General Evelyn Barker, the former head of British land forces in Palestine, was saved when his wife smelt something strange – gunpowder – as she was opening the morning post, and called the police. None of the other letter bombs in the second wave got through to their targets, but ballistics experts at the Home Office found that all the bombs were potentially lethal.16
MI5’s involvement in dealing with Zionist terrorism offers a striking new interpretation of the history of the early Cold War. For the entire duration of the Cold War, the overwhelming priority for the intelligence services of Britain and other Western powers would lie with counter-espionage, but as we can now see, in the crucial transition period from World War to Cold War, MI5 was instead primarily concerned with counter-terrorism. This sensitive chapter in the history of the Cold War and Britain’s end of empire was not publicly revealed until the recent declassification of MI5 records. It also provides a remarkable new chapter in the history of modern international (trans-national) terrorism. Most studies on the subject suggest that this began in earnest in July 1968, with the hijacking of an Israeli El Al flight by Palestinian terrorists. In fact, as we can now see from MI5 records, it began over twenty years earlier. In the years after 1945, Jewish-led terrorist groups in Palestine deliberately sought to internationalise their conflict with the British. The infiltration and radicalisation of a terrorist minority from the Middle East – so prevalent among terrorist groups today – was experienced in Britain half a century ago.17
THE BRITISH MANDATE OF PALESTINE
Britain became the uneasy patron of Zionism when it was granted Mandatory Power over Palestine by the League of Nations in 1921. The doctrine of Zionism, the political movement seeking to establish a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, was largely derived from the writings of Theodor Herzl, in particular his book Der Judenstaat (1896). However, it was the famous (and fateful) Declaration framed by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in November 1917 that set the agenda for British policies in Palestine for the next twenty years. The Balfour Declaration provided Zionist groups with a moral, and they argued also a legal, right for Jews to settle in Palestine. Made public on the same day as the Bolshevik coup in St Petersburg, the Declaration was designed to be a rallying point for the Allies, a kind of Christmas present for beleaguered troops and governments which was also intended to whip up further support for Britain in Russia and the United States. The Declaration stated that Britain aimed to establish a ‘National Home for the Jewish People’ in Palestine, but went on to state, ‘it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights existing of non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. Balfour