The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [408]
Contrasting with this attempt to implicate Russia in the movement of Jews, the deception scheme aimed to suggest that the British were using the traffic to get agents out of Eastern Europe. Thus it was hoped that the Soviet authorities would act to impede it. A faked British government document was prepared suggesting that not only was the ‘British Secret Service’ exploiting Jewish emigration channels in Bulgaria and Romania to exfiltrate agents to the Middle East, but that ‘Jewish migrants from behind the “iron curtain” were a valuable source of information on Russian activities in that area’. In February 1948 the document was planted by an officer from Broadway in the Casanova night club in Vienna, which was ‘known to be frequented by the MGB [Soviet intelligence service] and believed to be under Russian control’. In the hope that the local postal censors would report it to the Soviet authorities, various letters were also posted in Bucharest hinting at this British scheme, but by the time Embarrass was stood down at the beginning of April 1948 (anticipating Britain’s weary withdrawal from Palestine on 14 May) there was no indication that the deception scheme had had any effect whatever.
Reflecting on the matter afterwards, one SIS officer reckoned that perhaps the biggest missed opportunity had been a planned operation to disable the President Warfield in the small French Mediterranean port of Sète during the early summer of 1947. The ship had been shadowed by an SIS-controlled yacht carrying sabotage-trained agents, who planned to disable the ship by placing a limpet mine ‘on the hull with a three or four day time delay’. While this was to enable ‘the yacht to be in Italian waters before the explosion occurred’, it also inevitably meant that the agents could hardly guarantee that there would be no casualties. In any case, after the French government assured the British in May 1947 that they would themselves take steps to stop the immigrant traffic, the Foreign Office placed a strict embargo on Embarrass operations in France and the yacht was instructed to ‘proceed to other targets in Italy’. The President Warfield, however, sailed from France in July with a cargo of 4,500 refugees and became internationally famous as Exodus 1947. On its arrival off Palestine the ship was seized by British security forces (during which operation three people were killed) and the immigrants forcibly returned to Europe, in the full glare of extremely critical press publicity, especially in France and the USA. ‘The cost’, mused one of the SIS officers involved, ‘both direct and indirect to H.M.G. must have been enormous.’ The affair presented Zionists with ‘a first rate propaganda weapon and even among our friends sympathy was shown towards the illegal immigrants’. All of this, the officer argued, ‘could have been spared if the F.O. had permitted the S.S. [SIS] to take the appropriate action against the President Warfield when they suggested doing so’. Hazarding that the actual cost would have been an improbable £100, and that any British involvement would have been ‘impossible to trace’, he suggested that it would ‘be difficult to find a more glaring example’ of the value of special operations in peacetime or of the inability of the Foreign Office ‘to appreciate the use to which they can put the operational weapon which they have at their disposal in the S.S.’.5
Despite the case of the President Warfield, and uncertainty over the deception side, Operation Embarrass was judged on the whole to have been a success, especially in demonstrating the capabilities of special operations in peacetime, which presented different, and in some ways greater, challenges than in wartime when, for example, ‘the greatest risk occurred during the operation itself and, once the operator was clear of the area, the operation could be considered a success’. But in peace the risk of compromising