Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

to block the entry of Jewish refugees into Palestine. The new US President, Harry Truman, repeatedly demanded that the British government should allow 100,000 Jewish refugees immediate entry into Palestine, even though his demand was not supported by the US State Department, which advised that Jewish immigration to Palestine should be controlled. Despite the pressure on it, the British government refused to increase substantially the Jewish immigration quota. With their hopes of securing greater Jewish immigration now sunk, all of the Zionist militias in Palestine – the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang – came together in late 1945 to fight the British in what was termed the Hebrew or United Resistance Movement.

      At this stage the British were faced with what appeared to be a hopelessly irreconcilable situation. By the end of the war, some British officials were already pessimistically forecasting that Britain would be unable to square the circle in the Palestine triangle between themselves, Jews and Arabs. In 1945 the Special Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Douglas Harris, said that Britain was doing little more than ploughing sand. Not long after, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, complained to Attlee that it was impossible to build a firm base on a wasps’ nest.²³

      Before 1948 several leading politicians of the future state of Israel were involved in fighting the British. Menachem Begin, one of the great pillars of Israeli politics, was denounced by the British as a terrorist, as was another future Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, and at least one future Israeli Supreme Court Judge (Meir Shamgar) as well as a future Minister of Justice (Shamuel Tamir). Avraham Stern himself was subsequently commemorated on an Israeli postage stamp, and today the Israeli town of Stern is home to a number of the country’s leading political and intellectual elites. All of this leads one to ask whether it is legitimate to call these fighters ‘terrorists’. After the state of Israel was established in May 1948, the overwhelming majority of those who had fought the British refused to admit that they were ever ‘terrorists’, instead labelling themselves ‘freedom fighters’. However, the fact of the matter is that, at the time, Stern Gang operatives openly admitted to using ‘terrorist’ tactics. The Stern Gang is thought to have been one of the last groups in the world to call itself a ‘terrorist’ organisation. Some of its members apparently used the term ‘terrorism’ as a badge of honour, romanticising the role of violence. Deceitful mythologies still insist that the Irgun and the Stern Gang acted as ‘soldiers’ and were ‘freedom fighters of the highest moral standards’. As recently as July 2006 a group of right-wing Israelis, including Benjamin Netanyahu, attended a commemoration organised by the ‘Menachem Begin Heritage Centre’ for the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel, which they insisted on labelling an act of ‘freedom fighting’. A plaque commemorating the attack attracted an official response from the British ambassador in Tel Aviv, who urged that it was offensive to celebrate an act of terrorism. In reality, the Irgun and the Stern Gang targeted and killed innocent civilians. The victims of over half of the forty-two assassinations carried out by the Stern Gang and the Irgun were Jewish, supposedly acting as ‘collaborators’ with the British.

      The extent to which the Irgun and the Stern Gang lacked legitimacy was seen in the fact that, after the state of Israel was created in May 1948, the new Israeli government was itself forced to deal with their threat. When David Ben-Gurion became Israel’s first Prime Minister, the firm stance he had always taken against the Stern Gang and the Irgun led to some dramatic confrontations. In June 1948 he ordered Jewish troops to fire on a boat moored off the coast of Tel Aviv, the Altalena, named after Vladimir Jabotinsky’s old nom de plume, which was bringing Jewish sympathisers and arms to the Irgun. At this point the fragile young Israeli state came closer to civil war than it would in its entire history. The episode has echoes closer to our own time. In 1995 Israel’s Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by an ultra-Zionist Jewish extremist in a ‘revenge attack’ for proposed Israeli withdrawals from the Gaza Strip and for the fact that Rabin had been one of the troops responsible for shelling the Altalena in 1948.²⁴

      MI5 AND COUNTER-TERRORISM

      In the post-war years MI5 did not have a specific department dedicated to counter-terrorism, but dealt with it under the rubric of ‘counter-subversion’, the concern of F-Division. The F-Division officers most concerned with Zionist activities were Alex Kellar and his assistant James Robertson. Kellar was a flamboyant Scot who held law degrees from Edinburgh and Columbia Universities, and was probably the inspiration for the ‘man in cream cuffs’ depicted by John le Carré in his first novel Call for the Dead (1961), played in the 1966 film (retitled The Deadly Affair) by Max Adrian wearing a dragon-patterned silk dressing gown with a purple handkerchief and a rose in his buttonhole. During the war Kellar had served as head of SIME, travelling frequently between London and the various stations MI5 maintained in the Middle East. Later, while stationed in the Far East, Kellar would memorably put in expense requests to MI5 HQ for tropical kit, including ‘two Palm Beach and one Saigon linen suitings, white shirts, drill, sharkskin dinner jackets’. Kellar’s homosexuality was widely known within MI5, a remarkable fact given that at the time homosexual practices were still illegal in Britain, and as such were regarded within Whitehall vetting circles as a potential source for blackmail. Vetters also apparently overlooked the homosexuality of the Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt. Despite his sometimes unserious appearance – he had a penchant for wearing purple socks – in the course of his thirty-five-year career in MI5 Kellar served in the front line during the last days of the British empire and the Cold War, acting as a roaming troubleshooter in successive Emergencies that broke out in Britain’s holdings across the globe.²⁵