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the British government ‘was the greatest danger and the association of an Englishman with the event afterwards [an irrelevant factor in wartime] would have been disastrous’. In September 1947 SIS claimed that the deterrent effect of the ship attacks had caused a complete cessation of sailings from Italy. The following spring they noted that a number of potential emigrant vessels had left Italian waters and that the Jewish organisers of the illegal immigration had lost confidence in the chief provider of ships ‘as they consider him to be too compromised to be of any further use’. In terms of the actual special operations, the final Embarrass report concluded that ‘careful planning and attention to detail’ had enabled the smuggling of large sums of money as well as explosives across frontiers and proved that the Service could carry out sabotage while maintaining ‘complete cover’ for the agents concerned, thus ‘enabling them to have freedom from suspicion for future action in the countries concerned’. Above all, the operation had been ‘carried out in peace in the interests of H.M.G. without any suspicion of H.M.G. being aroused’. As for the propaganda side, and reflecting on the relative press coverage of different episodes, SIS wryly concluded that a lesson from the operation was that ‘from a purely publicity aspect, a failure involving the discovery of the limpet was of greater success than an actual sinking’.

On 8 May 1948, six days before the proclamation of the new independent state of Israel, Nigel Clive, who had been head of the Athens station, took over in Jerusalem. A month later he reported his initial impressions of Palestine. ‘I think we are wrong’, he wrote, ‘if we persist in thinking of it as a country and wronger [sic] still if we think of Jerusalem as a capital - even a future capital.’ The situation in the region, he thought, was ‘roughly’ back to what had obtained just after the First World War ‘when there was a major dispute over the ownership of this area and where there is now again likely to be some land-grabbing’. There were, too, opportunities for SIS. The early days of the Israeli state, he argued, ‘are those in which they are likely to be most vulnerable. The longer we leave them to settle down the less chance there will be of our finding chinks in their iron curtain.’ Thus he hoped that the situation could be exploited to SIS’s advantage. But the violence and chaos of the First Arab-Israeli War which accompanied the birth of the new state put the lives of British personnel in Jerusalem at risk and in July obliged SIS temporarily to relocate the station to Amman, when Clive was replaced as head of station.

But Broadway remained keen to keep some representation in ‘the Jewish areas of Palestine’. Since it was ‘considered impossible under present circumstances for a male officer to work there effectively’ (but why is not clear), in August the Service (with Foreign Office approval) proposed to attach ‘a woman intelligence officer’ to the British consulate in Haifa, ostensibly as one of the consul-general’s secretaries. But the consul concerned, Cyril Marriott, would have none of it. Already worried by the unsettled situation and the arrest on espionage charges of five British employees of the Jerusalem Electric Corporation (one of whom was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, but released in November after his conviction was quashed),6 Marriott said that the arrival of ‘an English woman’ would undermine his current advice that the country was unsafe ‘for wives and children’. If she did come, however, she should ‘realise that she would be the only English woman here and therefore conspicuous and that she would be under constant watch by Jewish intelligence’. Moreover, if Marriott had to provide accommodation for her, a ‘bathroom and lavatory’ would have to be installed in his office premises ‘where existing arrangements in living quarters are for men only’. Appointing women to work in the region proved a continuing problem with the Foreign Office. In the spring of 1949 Broadway proposed posting a