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By Root 2732 0

at Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro survived. SIS had even less involvement with Africa, where in the late 1940s, apart from the British Dominion of South Africa, there were only two independent countries, Liberia and Ethiopia. Security in the British territories was the responsibility of MI5 and, apart from a small station in Addis Ababa, which was geared more to the Middle East than to Africa, it was reckoned that any intelligence concerning the colonies of other European countries could be acquired in the appropriate European capitals. Across the Middle East, beyond sizeable stations in Istanbul, Cairo and Jerusalem, SIS was pretty thinly spread, and tackling Communism in Iraq and Iran largely depended on liaison services. Palestine, which for SIS constituted a major commitment, was highly unusual in the postwar world in that Communism was hardly an issue. Here ‘end of empire’, the quest of Jewish people for a secure ‘national home’ and the terrible legacy of the Holocaust combined to fuel a troubling, combustible and violent situation for which in the end neither Britain nor its security and intelligence agencies, including SIS, could do much to help.

Palestine

Although SIS had an important station in Jerusalem, the gathering of intelligence about Palestine (which counted as part of the British empire) was shared with the Criminal Investigation Department of the Palestine Police, Military Intelligence and MI5. SIS, indeed, had no direct role in the sharp and violent campaign waged between British forces and Jewish insurgents from 1946 until the unilateral British withdrawal in May 1948, and which included (among others) the assassination in September 1946 of a former SIS officer, Desmond Doran, who had transferred to Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) in October 1942. In December 1946 Broadway estimated that SIS’s sources were rather better on the Arab than the Jewish side, and that Jerusalem was the only political intelligence station in the Middle East ‘to have penetrated effectively the Communist organisations of its own area’.

The threat posed by militant Zionist groups, such as the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang, threatening enough in Palestine (where, for example, in July 1946 the Stern Gang blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with the loss of ninety-one lives), extended to Continental Europe and the United Kingdom itself. In 1946-7 Irgun units launched sabotage operations against British military installations in Germany, planted a substantial bomb (which did not explode) at the Colonial Office in London, threatened to assassinate Bevin and Attlee, sent letter-bombs to Cabinet ministers and blew up the British embassy in Rome (where the SIS office was badly damaged). SIS helped track Zionist units, and reported (wrongly) to MI5 that the Irgun leader Menachem Begin had altered his appearance by plastic surgery.1 Of particular concern was the question of Jewish illegal immigration to Palestine, which had troubled the British administration since the 1930s. The quotas which the British had established in order to prevent the Jewish population in the country from growing uncontrollably (which would inevitably exacerbate communal tensions) proved increasingly difficult to enforce. This was especially so in the context of the Holocaust when the legalities of the situation seemed both cruel and pettifogging in the face of the evidently desperate desire to reach Palestine of people who had survived savage persecution and the death camps. On the other hand, British responsibilities to the non-Jewish population of Palestine, the government’s hope that some sort of communal balance might be maintained, and the need to maintain good relations with the leaders of oil-rich Arab states led the British authorities to maintain strict limits on the numbers of Jews who were permitted to settle in the territory.2

But how could this be enforced? Towards the end of 1946 the government sought advice from SIS and a paper was prepared containing ‘proposals for action to deter ships’ masters and crews