Anonymous Soldiers by Bruce Hoffman

Author:Bruce Hoffman [Hoffman, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-101-87466-0
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2015-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

“If it is accepted that the problem of defeating the enemy consists very largely of finding him,” General Sir Frank Kitson, arguably Britain’s preeminent expert on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, has written, “it is easy to recognize the paramount importance of good information.” Such intelligence, as the above vignette illustrates, was in woefully short supply in Palestine. For example, although as recently as May the CID had warned of an Irgun plot to blow up the secretariat, the vagueness of the information, coupled with the fact that since December 1945 several other such threats had failed to materialize, led to the threats’ repeated dismissal not only by Shaw, as Rymer-Jones repeatedly complained, but also by Cunningham and Barker. Accordingly, the lack of more specific intelligence, the repeated false alarms about impending attacks, and the widespread belief that the Irgun would never undertake an operation that risked harming Jews all led to tragedy.60

Moreover, in the days preceding the bombing, British intelligence might have been the victim of a colossally successful Irgun deception operation. On July 9, H. A. R. “Kim” Philby, a senior officer in the Secret Intelligence Service who would later be unmasked as a Soviet spy, had written to the Foreign Office with information about an Irgun plot to attack British diplomatic personnel and facilities in Beirut. British intelligence was already aware of the existence of Irgun operatives in that city. Accordingly, the threat was judged sufficiently serious to warrant sending both Isham, the DSO, and Giles, the head of the CID, to Lebanon. The threatened attacks never materialized, and nothing more was ever heard of the alleged plot. Isham was convinced that it was a deliberate Irgun ploy to ensure that the country’s two most senior intelligence officers would not be present in Palestine when the attack on the King David occurred.61

In the bombing’s aftermath it was bad intelligence again—that the attackers had come from Tel Aviv—which accounted for the decision to undertake the massive cordon-and-search operation, code-named Shark, in that city rather than in Jerusalem, where the assault unit in fact was based. Military intelligence had identified Tel Aviv as the attack’s origin based on the fact that one of the vehicles used in the bombing had been stolen in Tel Aviv, hence the conclusion that the “inhabitants of Tel Aviv were involved.”62

Operation Shark began shortly before dawn on July 30. It involved four infantry and parachute brigades, three independent battalions, and three cavalry regiments drawn from the Sixth Airborne and the First Infantry Division—amounting to fifteen thousand troops. Together with additional uniformed police and CID personnel, these units cordoned off and searched the entirety of Tel Aviv. “At last the Lion was roused,” Dare Wilson approvingly wrote in his official history of the Sixth Airborne’s time in Palestine.63

The city’s 170,000 inhabitants were placed under curfew and allowed to leave their homes for only two hours each day to obtain food and medicine. According to the official history prepared by army headquarters in Jerusalem, “Every house, attic and

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