Knout-Lazarus left for London in mid-April and checked into a nondescript hotel near Paddington Station. An initial reconnaissance of Whitehall drew her attention to Dover House, a Colonial Office annex situated at one end of Horse Guards Parade. On the morning of the sixteenth, Knout-Lazarus assembled the time bomb in her hotel room according to Eliav’s instructions. It consisted of a pocket watch attached to twenty-four sticks of dynamite wrapped in copies of the Evening Standard and The Daily Telegraph disguised to appear as an ordinary parcel. She checked out of the hotel, deposited her luggage in a locker at Victoria Station, and made her way to Whitehall. Immaculately attired in a smart suit with a blue leather handbag and carrying an expensive coat on her arm beneath which was the small parcel, she failed to arouse the suspicions of the guard at Dover House’s front door when she innocently inquired if she might use the ladies’ room to adjust one of her stockings. The unwitting guard asked a cleaning lady to escort Knout-Lazarus downstairs; she deposited the parcel in a toilet stall and departed, thanking the guard before stopping to collect her luggage at Victoria Station and boarding a train for the south coast and thereafter a ferry for Belgium. The bomb was discovered—unexploded—later that day. The hands of the pocket watch’s timing mechanism had jammed, thus preventing the completion of the electrical circuit that would have detonated the explosives. According to Commander Leonard Burt, the head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, had the device exploded, “it would have blown the sort of hole in the Colonial Office that was blown in the King David Hotel”—inflicting a similar number of casualties.65
Eliav’s communiqué taking responsibility for the incident tried to put the best face on another botched operation. “The bomb laid by our fighters in the Colonial Office,” his message stated, “was accidentally discovered before it exploded.” Nonetheless, this was indeed “the second time within a month that the hand of the fighting Underground ha[d] reached the heart of the British Empire.”66
The Dynamite Man understandably decided to change tactics for his next round of attacks, posting twenty-three letter bombs from Italy to Attlee, Bevin, Churchill, Stanley, Cunningham, Shaw, Sir Harold MacMichael, Sir Stafford Cripps, and Anthony Eden, among others. Several in fact reached their intended recipients but also failed to explode. The post office was alerted to the plot, and all the remaining explosive missives were intercepted and safely defused. Both Eliav and Knout-Lazarus were arrested that June at the Belgian border trying to return to France. Customs officials discovered a cache of additional letter bombs addressed to more British officials in the false bottom of Knout-Lazarus’s suitcase. She was reported to be dressed in the same expensive suit and carrying the same distinctive blue leather handbag that she had at Dover House two months earlier. A thumbprint lifted by police from the pocket watch affixed to the Colonial Office device clearly matched Eliav’s. Because no extradition treaty then existed between Britain and Belgium, Eliav and Knout-Lazarus were tried in Mons and sentenced respectively to just eight months and a year in prison. At a party in Tel Aviv celebrating Knout-Lazarus’s release fourteen months later, she was totally unrepentant. “I’m sorry none of them was delivered,” Knout-Lazarus told reporters, before announcing that her “terrorist days are over and done with now.”67
That the terrorists’ intelligence was generally superior to that of the security forces was again demonstrated on April 30 when a routine police sweep of the route along which MacMillan would shortly travel uncovered a land mine that the Irgun had buried. Thereafter, however, an ominous quiet descended on Palestine. Despite Begin’s threat to hang four British officers for every Jew executed, the sustained onslaught of terrorist attacks that had followed Feinstein’s and Barazani’s deaths suddenly ceased—as did any further abduction attempts. British military intelligence nonetheless remained concerned that the Irgun was planning something spectacular. The fact that the United Nations was then meeting in a special session, called at Britain’s request, to appoint a committee to study the Palestine question in advance of the General Assembly’s consideration of the matter in September was cited by Sixth Airborne intelligence as providing a likely rationale for some new, dramatic act of terrorist violence. Indeed, Begin himself later admitted that the Irgun for this very reason “wanted to show to the whole world that the British could not control and rule this country.” And it did so in suitably spectacular fashion on May 4.68
Of Palestine’s two central prisons, the fortress at Acre functioned as the mandate’s maximum security facility. It stood on the foundations of the bastion that the Knights of the Hospital of St. John, the Hospitallers, had erected in 1104. It was captured in 1187 by Saladin, the famed first sultan of Egypt and Syria and founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, only to be brutally retaken six years later by Richard the Lionheart. Acre returned to Muslim rule a century later, and this proved critical in withstanding Napoleon’s months-long siege of Acre in 1799.69
When Allenby’s forces captured the city in September 1918, Palestine’s new British rulers were quick to grasp the fortress’s potential as a high-security prison. With three-foot-thick, seventy-foot-high walls and a succession of internal iron gates and portcullises through which entry was gained only after crossing a forty-foot-deep and fifteen-foot-wide moat, the Acre fortress appeared to be impregnable. By 1947, it held a total of 671 male prisoners, including 163 Jews (including 60 Irgun and 22 Lehi fighters), 58 mentally deranged common criminals, and 450 Arab convicts.70
Begin and the Irgun’s high command were neither impressed nor daunted by Acre’s formidable defenses and impenetrable image. Virtually from the moment that Gruner and the three other death row Irgunists had been transferred there, the group’s efforts to devise a means to free them were unceasing. Begin assigned Amichai Paglin, the Irgun’s operations chief and architect of the King David Hotel bombing, to this high-priority mission. The direct line of communication that the Irgun had already established with its fighters imprisoned in Acre enabled Paglin to maintain regular contact with his predecessor as Irgun operations officer, Eitan Livni. The father of the future Israeli political leader and foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, the elder Livni was the Irgun’s prison commander. Using coded scraps of paper concealed in bars of soap, cake, fruit, and clothing or information passed orally through the Jewish doctors, lawyers, and clergymen permitted access to the prisoners, he explained to Paglin that Lehi prisoners had been digging an escape tunnel that was nearing completion. But the chance discovery of a room within the fortress that abutted the Arab souk (market) outside changed everything. After careful reconnaissance undertaken by Paglin himself of the warren of alleyways bisecting the market and leading to the external walls of the prison fortress, he came up with a daring plan that would entail a simultaneous break-in and breakout.71
Sunday was the start of the workweek in mandate Palestine, and that morning a work crew arrived to cut back tree branches overhanging the power lines around the Acre fortress. Having subsequently learned from the Palestine Electric Corporation that it had no record of any maintenance being done in the prison’s vicinity, British army intelligence concluded that the maintenance team was in fact an Irgun unit performing last-minute surveillance. The workers deliberately left behind two of the tall ladders that they had used to access the overhanging branches.
Around 4:15 p.m., a British military truck pulled up alongside the old Turkish baths, adjacent to the prison. An army telephone repair crew, attired in full battle kit—including webbing, anklets, belts, and pouches—and bearing the shoulder flashes of the Royal Engineers, alighted and, placing the work crew’s ladders against the prison’s exterior wall, began to hoist two heavy cases of telephone equipment that together contained the equivalent of 250 pounds of high explosive. A jeep soon arrived carrying more troops and a captain, who took charge of the detail. His name was Dov Cohen, a.k.a. Shimshon (Samson), and he was in fact the commander of the thirty-four-man Irgun assault team that Paglin had assembled for the operation. Cohen, aged thirty-one,
was a decorated combat veteran of a British army commando unit during World War II who had fought with distinction in the Abyssinian, North African, and Italian campaigns, rising to the rank of staff sergeant. Short but powerfully built, with blond hair and piercing blue eyes, the former Hebrew University philosophy student made a perfect British army officer, complete with the appropriate English accent despite his Polish origins.72
Ascending to one of the barred prison windows high above the baths, the bogus telephone repairman positioned the two explosive charges just inside the wall and quickly scrambled down the ladder. A few minutes later a deafening blast filled the souk with smoke, rubble, and shattered chunks of masonry. This was the signal for the Irgun prisoners inside to implement the previously agreed-upon diversions that would facilitate their escape. The explosion had been deliberately timed to coincide with the moment when all the cells—including those of the condemned—were open and all prisoners, Arab and Jew alike, were exercising in the prison yard. Just as the mostly Arab guards were recovering from the shock of the blasts, three Irgun prisoners tossed hand grenades into the lunatic section of the prison to further sow confusion and disorder. Other Irgun detainees wielding sticks with rags soaked in paraffin immediately set fires in hopes of scattering the Arab prisoners and forcing them away from the south side of the fortress, where the blast had occurred. Meanwhile, the forty-one Irgun and Lehi prisoners preselected to take part in the escape quickly changed into the civilian clothes that had previously been brought into the facility and made their way toward the breach in the outer wall. Their path through two iron gates was cleared by inmates using smuggled explosives that had been hidden inside tins of a Glasgow-manufactured jam. Upon emerging from the huge, gaping hole in the fortress, some of the prisoners were handed spare weapons by the Irgun attack force. They piled into the waiting military vehicles that began to snake their way out of the market.73
In order to impede any pursuit, additional Irgun teams had mined all the roads north and south of Acre, especially at potential bottlenecks such as bridges. Only the eastern road out of the city had been kept clear as an escape route. Meanwhile, a third Irgun unit was positioned elsewhere outside the city, waiting in the vicinity of an encampment of the Second Parachute Battalion. Just as the explosions breached the wall at the prison, it fired six mortar rounds into the camp to prevent the nearest available military from pursuing the Irgun force.
Paglin’s plan, however, went disastrously awry when a bathing party of Sixth Airborne troops, alerted by the explosions and gunfire, hastily organized an impromptu roadblock about a half mile outside the city. A fierce firefight ensued as two of the fleeing vehicles careened to a halt. One of the soldiers was seriously wounded, and half a dozen others sustained minor injuries. The Irgun’s losses, however, were substantial. Three members of the assault team, including Cohen, were killed, and five others had been captured. Six of the freed prisoners had also perished in the gun battle, and two others had been recaptured. Moreover, only twenty-three of the forty-one detainees selected for the escape had survived. In the confusion, more than two hundred Arab prisoners had inadvertently been freed as well, including nine persons serving long sentences for terrorist offenses committed during the 1936–39 Arab Rebellion.74
Hailed by Begin as “amongst the most daring attacks of the Hebrew underground and possibly of any underground,” the raid—like the King David Hotel bombing ten months before—was incontestably audacious in planning but seriously flawed in execution. The high Irgun casualty toll, including the death of the operation’s commander along with several of the freed prisoners, in addition to the fact that far fewer of the handpicked escapees actually got away while far more of their Arab counterparts did, deprived the group of the unalloyed military triumph that the Irgun leader clearly desired. But although its results were decidedly mixed militarily, they were unequivocally triumphant in both psychological and propagandistic terms.75
The raid was featured in all the major American and British newspapers and, according to The Palestine Post, “temporarily overshadowed” the discussions on Palestine taking place at the United Nations. Much to Britain’s consternation, it also provided a huge boost to the Irgun’s image in the United States. Seeking to capitalize on the spectacular prison assault, a delegation from the American League for a Free Palestine was waiting at Ben Hecht’s bedside when he awoke from surgery in a New York City hospital. “We need more money,” one of them told him. “Millions.” And they had someone willing to pay for full-page newspaper advertisements to solicit contributions. “I emerged from my [oxygen] tent,” Hecht reminisced, “and called for stationery.” The ad that he penned appeared under the memorable title “Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine.” It boasted, the former advertising copywriter turned award-winning screenwriter and playwright recalled, a “full and honest report of our Committee’s fiduciary and spiritual accomplishment.” The best-known excerpt controversially read, “Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky-high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.” The ad went on to credit the Irgun with compelling the British to submit the Palestine issue to the United Nations “because they were frightened of you. They were afraid your gallant fight for your homeland would gather to you the sympathy of the world,” before promising, “Hang on, brave friends, our money is on its way.”76
Hecht claimed that hundreds of newspapers in the United States, Mexico, South America, and France ran the advertisement gratis with only a dozen or so American papers charging their usual rates. The timing could not have been worse for Britain. For months the Foreign Office had lodged successive complaints with the State Department about the regularity with which tendentious advertisements extolling terrorism appeared in U.S. newspapers. British officials had taken particular umbrage at the blatant raising of funds with which to purchase weapons for use against America’s closest ally. They had also repeatedly complained about the legal tax-exempt status enjoyed by registered charities, such as the American League for a Free Palestine, behind these allegedly philanthropic activities.77
This advertisement in particular had an especially chilling effect on Anglo-American relations. Sir Orme Sargent, the permanent undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, scolded Lewis Douglas, the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., for giving the New York press free rein to incite violence and bloodshed in Palestine. He pointedly asked, “What would be the feeling of the United States Government if, for instance, British Communists were to publish in the British press an advertisement to the effect that ‘every time you blow up an American arsenal or wreck an American gaol or send an American railroad train sky high … British Communists make a little holiday in their hearts’[?] Mr. Douglas said that the indignation of his Government would know no bounds and they would not be slow to show it.”78
The official U.S. government response was unhelpful. State Department lawyers had determined that nothing could legally be done to prevent the advertisements and fund-raising nor deprive these organizations of their tax-exempt status. It was therefore of little consolation to the British when the new U.S. secretary of state, George C. Marshall, voiced his opinion that such donations were clearly not charitable.79
Begin’s assessment of the Acre raid as a milestone in the Irgun’s struggle and a major propaganda victory is thus not without merit. The assault did indeed dramatically underscore the decline of the Palestine administration’s capacity to maintain order by depicting its inability to secure even the country’s maximum security prison. Indeed, so far as Cunningham was concerned, it was evidence that relations with the Yishuv had become completely irreparable. “The first and most important element in the situation,” he dejectedly told Creech Jones,
is that, because of political differences with the mandatory administration on account of the inability of His Majesty’s
Government to accede to Jewish demands, the Jewish community, whose dissident members are responsible for these outrages, have declined and still decline to give any assistance to the police and military forces in the maintenance of law and order … It is a situation in which a policeman is shot and lies wounded in the street beside a bus queue, no member of which will lift a hand to help him.80
CHAPTER 18
Buried Quietly in the Night
While the Irgun licked its wounds and quietly exulted in the attention and publicity reaped by the Acre raid, the authorities in Palestine pondered their next move. It was a depressing exercise. As the renowned historian of the British Empire William (Wm.) Roger Louis notes, “One-tenth of the armed forces of the entire British Empire now occupied a territory the size of Wales. There was one soldier for every eighteen inhabitants in the country, or, as one observer calculated, one for every city block.” Indeed, the security forces enjoyed a twenty-to-one numerical superiority over the approximately five thousand terrorists that British military intelligence believed to make up the combined ranks of the Irgun and Lehi. Yet, despite this overwhelming numerical advantage, it remained an environment where “Jewish terrorism thrived as never before,” according to the OSS’s former chief Middle East analyst.1
The situation was regarded as so dire that a week after the prison attack William Nicol Gray ordered six of the CID’s top intelligence officers to relocate immediately to the heavily defended PPF headquarters complex in the Russian Compound. The inspector general apologized for the inconvenience and overcrowding, implying that they might wish to emulate the example of two of their colleagues who had already made arrangements to sleep in their offices. As the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, Robert Macatee, observed in a report to Washington on May 22, “One cannot escape the conclusion that the Government of Palestine is a hunted organization with little hope of ever being able to cope with conditions in this country as they exist today.”2
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