Whatever the Haganah’s motives, it is equally clear that the Irgun had reasons of its own for undertaking the attack. Begin makes no secret of his conviction that such an operation was needed to restore the Yishuv’s pride and, in Agatha’s dispiriting aftermath, reignite its fighting spirit. “Defeatism raised its deathly head,” he wrote, and the Irgun was “therefore greatly relieved by the request of the Haganah, and plunged with enthusiasm into a re-examination of every detail of the operation.”8
Begin assigned Amichai Paglin, the group’s operations chief and, at twenty-three, the youngest member of its high command, to oversee preparations for the attack. Paglin was perfectly suited to the task. Within months of graduating from high school in 1942, he and two friends had formed their own terrorist cell with the intention of assassinating the high commissioner, MacMichael. One Sunday night shortly afterward, they lay in wait outside Government House intending to climb into MacMichael’s second-floor bedroom and slit his throat before it dawned on them that they lacked the courage required to murder someone in cold blood. Three years later, however, one of these same boys—Eliahu Bet-Zuri—would be hanged for assassinating Lord Moyne. Meanwhile, undeterred by this collective loss of nerve, Paglin next concocted a plan to kill MacMichael with a mine as the high commissioner traveled in his official car along the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road. But after weeks of waiting, when the opportunity finally presented itself, the mine malfunctioned. Paglin then came up with an idea to dynamite Government House. To accomplish this, he needed hundreds of pounds of TNT, and this drew him to the Irgun. He met with Meridor in 1943 but was unimpressed with the Irgun leader and consequently abandoned the plot. When the Irgun resumed its revolt under Begin’s command the following year, however, Paglin joined the organization and thereafter rose rapidly through its ranks.9
Paglin, who would later serve as Prime Minister Begin’s adviser on combating Arab terrorism, decided that the King David operation would be carried out by the group’s Jerusalem branch. He impressed upon its commander, Yitzhak Yagnes, the urgency that the Haganah high command attached to striking quickly. Yagnes, who went by the underground nom de guerre Avinoam and at age twenty-five was already a nine-year veteran of the Irgun, in turn selected twenty-year-old Yisrael Levi, whose code name was Gideon, to lead the attack. Levi, who had joined the Irgun at age fifteen and was considered among the bravest and most experienced of the organization’s fighters, wasted no time. On the morning of July 2, surveillance teams began reconnoitering the hotel. And by midnight the following day, a plan had taken shape. The previous February, Gideon and another male Irgun operative had gone on a double date with two women to La Regence to undertake a very general, preliminary reconnaissance. As they danced and drank champagne, Gideon took note of the four massive columns at the center of the room, which he deduced supported the hotel’s entire southern wing—and the four floors of government and military offices above it. Recalling that epiphany five months later, he dispatched another Irgun team to the nightclub to map the hotel’s basement—and especially its entrances and exits. Hence, on the evening of July 3, two couples went to La Regence, ostensibly for a night out. Three were members of the Irgun; the fourth was a well-known Jerusalem prostitute who, though not aware of the revelers’ intelligence-gathering mission, provided additional cover. While pretending to look for the men’s lavatory, one of the operatives walked into the kitchen. There, at the end of the room, a set of swinging doors had been propped open. Beyond it, he could see the green walls of the basement corridor, and with that crucial observation the plan fell into place.10
A few days later Paglin briefed Sneh and the Haganah’s operations officer, Yitzhak Sadeh. Without going into detail, he explained how the Irgun planned to bring down the hotel’s southern wing. Approximately eight hundred pounds of explosives would be placed in the basement and set to detonate forty-five minutes after a warning to evacuate the hotel was given. According to both David Niv, the Irgun’s historian, and Begin himself, Sadeh interjected that this duration was too long as the British might still be able to remove the documents before the explosion. He suggested no more than a fifteen-minute delay. In the end, they compromised on a half hour. But just as all the preparations were in the process of being finalized, a new problem arose: Weizmann’s demand that the Haganah cease attacks on Britain and abandon all cooperation with the Irgun and Lehi. The X Committee’s vote to accede to the Zionist leader’s ultimatum—despite Sneh’s strenuous objection—resulted in the immediate cancellation of the coordinated operations Sneh had assigned to each resistance movement partner. The Haganah commander resigned in protest and prepared to leave for Paris to confer with Ben-Gurion. But rather than call off the Irgun and Lehi attacks, he allegedly decided not to inform them of the X Committee’s decision and instead on July 17 simply communicated a request to Begin and the Lehi high command that they postpone their respective operations for the time being. Sneh supposedly hoped to string both leaders along until he could meet with Ben-Gurion and persuade him to override the X Committee’s decision.11
The smaller, more logistically challenged Lehi was already having difficulties synchronizing its attack on the Palestine Information Office with the Irgun’s on the hotel and readily acceded to Sneh’s request. Begin, however, did so reluctantly and rescheduled the operation for the week of July 19. Every delay, he believed, incurred the risk of someone’s being captured or leaking information. The nineteenth arrived, and so did another request from Sneh. Begin again agreed to postpone the attack, as did Lehi. It was now decided that the joint operation would take place without fail at eleven on the morning of Monday, July 22. The Irgun had intentionally selected that time of day in order to maximize the likelihood that La Regence nightclub would be deserted and few hotel staff would be present in the basement. At the last moment, however, Lehi dropped out. Undaunted, the Irgun resolved to act alone. A final adjustment, though, was made to the attack plan: it would commence around noon instead of eleven because that was the time of the hotel’s regularly scheduled milk delivery.12
At approximately 11:45 a.m. on July 22, a stolen delivery truck pulled up to the basement service entrance at the front of the King David Hotel. An Irgun operative disguised as an Arab laborer alighted and approached the clerk sitting at the door, who asked to see his delivery order. The Arab instead produced a pistol and ordered the clerk into a nearby office where he and his fellow employees were held at gunpoint. Meanwhile, a second laborer strode from the truck into the basement and began gathering up whatever other hotel staff he could find, who were then herded into the kitchen and similarly kept under guard. The remaining four Irgun fighters now began to unload seven large milk churns that they carried into La Regence. Each contained over one hundred pounds of high explosive. Gideon supervised their placement alongside the columns supporting the six floors above. When he was satisfied that they were properly positioned, he wrapped detonating cord around the churns, set the timing devices, and activated the booby-trap mechanisms that the Irgun had designed to prevent the bombs from being tampered with. Signs printed in English, Arabic, and Hebrew warning MINES—DO NOT TOUCH were then attached to each milk churn. It was just a few minutes before noon, and everything was going exactly according to plan.13
The Irgun team left La Regence and was proceeding back down the corridor toward the basement exit when they were confronted by a British army Royal Signals Corps captain. What the group’s February and July reconnaissance visits to the nightclub had failed to discern was the existence of a basement room located between the service entrance and La Regence that housed the hotel’s telephone exchange. Because of this oversight, Gideon and his men could not have known that it was the switchboard for the military headquarters offices upstairs and was therefore staffed not by civilian operators but by six women serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. It was their commanding officer who, curious about the unusual noise and commotion he heard outside the room, had stumbled upon the assault unit.
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A fierce struggle ensued as two of the intruders grappled with the Signals Corps captain, who was dragged flailing and kicking toward the kitchen. Alerted by sounds of the scuffle, one of the ATS operators went to investigate and saw a pair of pistol-wielding Arabs pummeling her boss. She immediately rang the military police post in the hotel’s annex to report the incident. At that same moment, the bloodied officer broke free from his assailants and tried to escape up the service staircase to the hotel lobby. One of the Irgun men raised his revolver and fired at point-blank range: the young captain staggered up a few more steps and then collapsed, mortally wounded. And with that, the Irgun’s plan unraveled.14
A hotel porter coming down the stairs from the lobby saw everything and raced back upstairs to another military police post on the hotel’s third floor, where he breathlessly recounted what had happened. Meanwhile, the Irgun fighter guarding the hotel staff in the kitchen, distracted by the sounds of the hallway scuffle and gunfire, failed to notice that one of the clerks had inched his way over to an alarm button set in the wall, which he was frantically pressing. The distress signal was received at 12:15 p.m. in the Jerusalem district police’s wireless transmission room, on the Mamillah Road, about a quarter of a mile down the street from the King David, and a police radio van was duly dispatched to the hotel. By this time, the duty officer from the third-floor military police post, accompanied by a soldier, had come to the fallen officer’s aid. They were followed by a sergeant who raced past them into the basement, where he encountered the retreating Irgunists. More shots rang out as the sergeant and one of the Irgun fighters exchanged fire.
Military police were now rushing out of the hotel’s main entrance toward the sunken driveway leading to the service entrance. They arrived just as Gideon and his men emerged from the basement. A gun battle erupted in which one of the assault team was fatally wounded. Forced to abandon the truck as bullets rained down upon them, the men fled on foot through the hotel’s garden in the direction of the Old City. Running down King David Road, just north of the hotel, they were joined by a second Irgun team that had been positioned outside the hotel as a blocking force in the event that any of the ubiquitous police radio vans were summoned. Everyone piled into a waiting taxi parked in front of the French consulate as a backup escape vehicle, and it headed toward the Old City.
Just about the same time that the taxi with the assault team was speeding away from the French consulate at 12:20, the small bomb left by another Irgun unit exploded outside an Arab-owned souvenir shop located next to the YMCA, directly across Julian’s Way from the King David’s southern wing. Its purpose, Begin later explained, was to “make a big noise and disperse the people. We achieved this goal, to disperse the passers-by without anyone being hurt.” The device, however, was considerably more powerful than the Irgun commander recalled and perhaps had even been intended. It not only damaged the shop but also shattered the windows of a passing No. 4 bus, injuring several of its Arab passengers, who were taken into the secretariat to be treated for their wounds. The explosion also automatically triggered the police municipal alarm system operated by the Jerusalem district police’s control room. Accordingly, sirens now blared the warning that a terrorist attack had occurred. All vehicular traffic in the city immediately came to a stop, and all government and military facilities went into lockdown mode.15
The CID’s report of its investigation into the bombing clearly depicts the confusion that reigned. The police unit that had originally been summoned by the alarm call from the King David’s kitchen instead now rushed to investigate the presumed bombing of George Salameh’s popular store. Only two days before, the CID’s chief, Giles, had informed Salameh of a threat from Arab terrorists that if Salameh did not observe the commercial boycott declared the previous month of Jewish businesses and, moreover, if he continued to allow Jews to patronize his shop, he would be punished. Having satisfied themselves that this was the cause of the bomb blast, the police reported this information back to Jerusalem headquarters, and at 12:31 the municipal sirens sounded the all clear—the signal that the terrorist threat had passed and normal activity could resume. What the police had failed to realize was that the events unfolding around them were not individual, isolated occurrences but all part of a coordinated terrorist operation that had been compromised by the alarm issued from the hotel’s basement sixteen minutes before.16
Meanwhile, a young woman had been waiting patiently by a public telephone in an Armenian-owned pharmacy just down the road. Upon hearing the sound of the explosion outside Salameh’s shop, she immediately dialed the King David’s number. Obeying the instructions given to her, Adina Hay-Nissan, a member of the Irgun’s Jerusalem branch, spoke quickly in English, telling the switchboard operator who answered her call, “This is the Jewish Resistance Movement, we have planted bombs in the hotel. Please vacate it immediately. You have been warned.” She repeated the message in Hebrew and hung up. Hay-Nissan then ran through the side streets linking Julian’s Way to King George V Avenue, where she entered a telephone booth and rang the French consulate. Speaking only in English this time, Hay-Nissan told the person on the other end of the line to open all the windows in the building so that they would not be shattered by an explosion. Finally, she ran to a telephone booth across the street from the central bus station on Jaffa Road and called The Palestine Post’s office. Speaking in Hebrew, she repeated her warning about an impending explosion at the King David and told the operator to inform the hotel that it should be evacuated immediately. Hay-Nissan believes that she placed the last call no more than ten minutes after the diversionary bomb had exploded.17
At 12:37 the bombs concealed inside the seven milk churns detonated—ripping the stone façade from the building and slicing through the six floors of government and military offices that then collapsed in a massive heap of shattered glass, broken masonry, and crushed, lifeless bodies. It was as if a thousand-pound aerial bomb had been dropped on the King David. “The chandelier fell down on my desk and the room filled with dust and smoke,” Shaw recalled of the explosion’s force. “I went out into the corridor and it was black as soot. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I walked long [sic] the corridor, with one hand to guide me, when suddenly I saw a yawning chasm under my feet, almost the whole depth of the building, from the fourth floor to the ground.”18
The carnage was appalling. Ninety-one persons had been killed—forty-one Arabs, twenty-eight Britons, and seventeen Jews, as well as two Armenians, a Russian, an Egyptian, and a Greek national—and nearly seventy others injured. The overwhelming majority of the dead were civilians: low-level clerks and typists, junior government officials and hotel employees, canteen workers, and five members of the public who happened to be in the hotel or on the street outside at the time of the explosion. More than two-thirds of the secretariat’s staff was either killed or wounded. Among the dead were some of its most senior officers: nine assistant secretaries, two undersecretaries, one principal assistant secretary, an economic adviser, and the postmaster general. The departments of finance, economics, and personnel had suffered especially grievously. Only a quarter of their employees had escaped death or injury, and the files and records maintained by each were completely destroyed. Almost as many women (twelve) as military personnel had perished (thirteen). Three police officers were also among the dead. The physical damage caused to the hotel was substantial. The compensation that would eventually be paid by the government and the army to the King David’s owners amounted to over triple the initial estimate—a sum of £350,000.19
“Even the centuries-old turbulent annals of the Holy Land record few crimes worse than the outrage perpetrated by the Irgun Zvai Leumi on the 22nd of July,” Cunningham told Hall. Indeed, for decades to come, the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel would hold the infamous distinction as the most lethal terrorist attack in history, surpassed only in 1983 with the suicide bomb attack on the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, by a fanatical
Shia terrorist organization. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the bombing of the King David Hotel has always been shrouded in controversy. Blame for the horrific loss of life and catastrophic injuries has been variously laid on the Irgun, the Haganah, the Palestine government, and indeed Shaw himself. It has been voiced by Briton, Jew, and Arab alike as well as by those intent on proving that Jewish terrorism has historically been no less sanguinary or abominable than its modern-day Islamic counterpart.20
Begin, however, always denied that the Irgun’s intention in attacking the King David was to harm anyone. This was why, he maintains, the Irgun had affixed timers to the bombs so that the hotel could be evacuated and had also set off a small, diversionary explosion across the street to clear the area before telephoning three separate warnings to the hotel, the French consulate next door, and The Palestine Post. Yet, despite all these precautions, tragedy ensued. A careful reconstruction of the chain of events that transpired from the time that the Irgun assault team shot their way out of the King David to the moment that the bombs exploded reveals why.21
In his tiny, ramshackle house on Yeoshua Bin-Nun Street, a nondescript, run-down Tel Aviv neighborhood, Begin awaited word of the attack. Together with Chaim Landau, the Irgun’s chief of staff who would later co-found with Begin the Herut Party and himself be elected to the Knesset and go on to serve as a cabinet minister in successive Israeli governments, and Yitzhak Yagnes, a.k.a. Avinoam, Hay-Nissan’s commander, they sat listening to the hourly news bulletins. Each successive one painted an increasingly grim picture of the slaughter that had occurred at the King David. According to Landau, the color drained from the Irgun leader’s face as the death toll mounted. “Begin was shocked,” his chief of staff recalled. “It could be seen that the broadcasts produced shame in him. He continuously muttered as if to himself: ‘What happened there?’ ” When Paglin arrived later, the Irgun leader did not blame or chastise him. Instead, he simply remarked, “I don’t know what mishap occurred there, but know you are not personally responsible; we are all equally responsible.” Paglin took this to mean that Begin “believed that the warning was not given for some reason.”22
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