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would be accepted, the primary consideration was to be that no proof could ever be established between positive action against this traffic and H.M.G.’. Knowledge of the operation within SIS was very carefully monitored (indoctrinated personnel were described as ‘Embarrassed’), and a special communications network, ‘Ocean’, was set up dedicated exclusively to Embarrass traffic. Outside the Service a few individuals in MI5 and the Foreign Office (including Orme Sargent) had outline knowledge of the scheme, although in May 1947, after consulting the Foreign Office, Menzies instructed his representatives in Athens, Cairo and Rome to ‘approach their heads of Mission personally and tell them the story’. With a budget of £30,000 (£875,000 in current terms), although in the end only £13,000 was actually spent, the operation had three aspects: direct action against potential refugee ships; a propaganda campaign; and a deception scheme to disrupt immigration from Black Sea ports inaccessible for direct action.

A team of former SOE personnel was deployed in France and another in Italy, though actual attacks were mounted only in Italy. British limpet bombs and timers were supplied. Since huge numbers of such weapons ‘had been supplied to resistance movements in Europe during the war and had not been accounted for’, this was not thought to constitute any security risk. But very careful thought was given to the agents’ cover. In the first place the British individuals involved needed a good reason for their presence abroad, and this included business, visiting friends, holidaymaking generally and taking a Mediterranean yachting trip. If things went wrong and these stories were broken, ‘they were under no circumstances to admit their connection with H.M.G.’. Instead, they were to claim that they had been recruited ‘by an anti-Communist organisation formed by a group of International Industrialists, mainly in the oil and aircraft industries’, said to be directed from New York, which aimed to stop illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine on the grounds ‘that the Russians were infiltrating Communist Jews into Palestine through the Jewish Escape Groups, thus endangering the various interests of the Group in the Middle East’. To do this the international organisation had recruited agents ‘of the ex-Commando type’, who were trained in ‘an old manor house’ near Oxford in England. Agents were warned that this cover ‘was their final line of defence and, even in the event of a prison sentence, no help could be expected from H.M.G.’.

During the summer of 1947 and early the following year attacks were made on five ships in Italian ports. A priority for the sabotage team was to ensure that any target ship was unloaded and that there were no personnel on board. One ship was reported as ‘a total loss’ and two others were damaged. Limpet mines planted on the other two were apparently both discovered. In one case a mine was knocked off, later recovered by divers and ‘its English origin established’, but the local harbour master thought this was ‘not surprising as the Arabs would of course be using British stores’.

As part of the propaganda side of the operation, and in order to divert suspicion from the British, a notional organisation called the Defenders of Arab Palestine claimed responsibility for work against Jewish immigration into Palestine. Letters prepared in Broadway on ‘typewriters of appropriate nationality’ and posted in Paris were sent to the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary (among other prominent personalities) and major newspapers, implicating Soviet Russia in the immigration. It was, claimed the letters, ‘Russia’s intention to force the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish state which looks to them rather than the West for inspiration and support . . . Faced with the alternatives of a war between Arab and Jew in Palestine or the seizure of that country by the Jews’, the Defenders declared that they would ‘carry the fight into those lands where these troubles have their roots’. There was no intention to harm ‘innocent