Blood-soaked struggle for
THE NATIONAL Archives released 64 MI5 files from the immediate postwar period last week. The activities of Nazi intelligence agents, Soviet spies, right-wing extremists and Stalinist fellow travellers are all described in fascinating detail — two files refer to the unsuccessful attempt by Lehi (the Stern Gang) to blow up the Colonial Office on April 15, 1947.
On June 2, 1947, a 30-year-old man and his younger female companion were arrested at the French border en route to Antwerp. MI5 was informed that the woman possessed “a double-bottomed suitcase containing explosive powder, 14 pencil-shaped batteries, 7 detonators and a small watch containing a time bomb fuse”.
Moreover, the two bore a resemblance to the couple seen earlier at the Colonial Office. A fingerprint comparison confirmed them to be Gilbert Elisabeth Lazarus and Jacob Eliav — members of a Lehi team which resolved to carry the struggle of militant Zionists in Palestine into the heart of Whitehall. Lazarus, known also as Betty Knout, was sentenced to a year in prison while Eliav received eight months.
Jacob Eliav, alias Ya’akov “Yashka” Levstein, was known to the British as Lehi’s bomb maker — a man with a history of violence who was responsible for the deaths of many British personnel in Palestine during the previous decade.
He had escaped from a British military prison in December 1943 and made his way to Paris to head Lehi operations in Europe. It was the discovery of a bomb-making factory in a Paris apartment in May 1947 that made Levstein’s own arrest inevitable.
Ever since the bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946, MI5 expected a wave of attacks in Britain. Sir Percy Sillitoe, the head of MI5, had handed a report entitled “Threatened Jewish Activity in the UK, Palestine and Elsewhere” to Prime Minister Clement Attlee and suggested Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, was a prime target for assassination. The members of Lehi were described as “desperate men and women who count their own lives cheap”.
MI5 also relied upon the Jewish Agency and British Zionist organisations to pass on any information about Lehi activities — many British Jews did not want violence to spill over from Jerusalem. MI5 applied for Home Office warrants to intercept correspondence and to tap telephones of “all the important Zionist organisations in Britain”.
Brought to Palestine as a child from Russia, Ya’akov Levstein had studied chemistry at the Hebrew University in the 1930s. In early 1939 he attended a training camp in the Tatra mountains near Slovakia for Irgun Zvai Leumi members, organised by the Polish military.
This had been initiated by Avraham Stern, the husband of his cousin and a leader of the Irgun. All this was unknown to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the hallowed leader of the Zionist Right, who placed his hopes in diplomacy and British fair play and whom Stern had compared to Hitler’s predecessor, Hindenberg — yesterday’s man.
Levstein and Stern were admirers of Boris Savinkov, the Russian social revolutionary who specialised in assassinations and acts of terror. On August 26, 1939, Inspector Ralph Cairns, head of the Jewish department of British intelligence in Palestine, and his friend, Ronald Barker, head of the Arab department, took their habitual Saturday afternoon stroll in Rehavia. They were blown to pieces by Levstein’s 15kg mine, placed hidden in the pathway — the Irgun accused Cairns of torturing prisoners.
Jews who worked for the British authorities — especially the intelligence services — were often targeted. So was T I Wilkin, a fluent Hebrew speaker and another head of the Jewish department of British intelligence.
Levstein was arrested with Stern a few days after the killing of Cairns and Barker. They were interned in Sarafand camp where Levstein helped Stern, an accomplished poet and classics scholar, to write poetry.
Yet these were difficult times for the Irgun. Jabotinsky had immediately declared his support for the Allies’ war effort in 1939 and many members of the
Lehi was made up of ‘desperate men and women’