Since last November, this blog has produced a groundbreaking series of articles exposing for the first time that the Cambridge spy ring – the best known espionage story in history – was (as described by the KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn who first exposed it) in some vital aspects essentially Jewish.
This was so, despite none of the so-called ‘ring’ of five Cambridge spies being Jews themselves. In an online world that is today split between cranks spreading badly researched articles about vaguely defined and often illusory Jewish conspiracies, and propagandists who portray Jews as the victims of mass murder and deny the reality of genuine Jewish conspiracies, this blog aspires to be a rare voice of sanity and historical truth. For that very reason I am systematically blocked and banned by social media giants, who deliberately design their algorithms to elevate instead the most ignorant and blinkered versions of the ‘far right’.
So far I have explained why John Cairncross (the least known of the five, and one of two in that ring who had Jewish wives) would rightly have been assessed by his KGB masters as being closely linked to Jewish anti-fascists and Jewish arms dealers – aspects that MI5 only started to understand in the 1970s when it was too late to act.
I have also explained why Kim Philby (the best known of the five, and the other to have had, like Cairncross, a Jewish first wife) was in his early years as close to Zionist spies as he was to their Soviet counterparts, due to the extraordinary involvement of his father St John Philby with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, and a series of Zionist schemes to bribe Ibn Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia.
More than the rest of the five, Philby has been acknowledged even by mainstream historians to have been influenced by Jews during his first steps into the espionage world (though unlike two other members of the ring, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, he wasn’t especially close to the prominent and highly controversial Jew, Victor Rothschild, who has been discussed frequently in an espionage context and will be re-examined later in this series, in the light of newly available documents).
Those acknowledged facts about Philby’s earliest Jewish links can be summarised briefly:
- He married a communist Jewess, Litzi Friedmann, and though their marriage was short-lived he seems to have had suspicious espionage-related dealings with Litzi while he was working as a Times journalist in Spain during the Civil War, and into the early years of his British intelligence work in the Second World War.
- His initial recruitment to Soviet intelligence came via one of Litzi’s friends and fellow Viennese Jewesses, the photographer Edith Tudor Hart.
- After an initial introduction from Tudor Hart, his first Soviet controller was another Viennese Jew, the Czech-born Arnold Deutsch.
- In the autumn of 1934, Philby set up a news agency with yet another Viennese Jew and Soviet agent, Peter Smolka (alias Peter Smollett), who became a wartime propagandist for the British Ministry of Information, having also worked as a journalist for the Daily Express and The Times.
Today I extend the analysis of Philby and look at his strange and still unexplained connection to one of Chaim Weizmann’s leading young Zionist spies, before, during, and after the Second World War.
That spy was Teddy Kollek, who became best known as the long-serving Mayor of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993, but who had a previous life as a leading figure in the espionage world. As I will demonstrate, Kollek repeatedly disguised and distorted one aspect of his connection to Kim Philby. Generations of historians have continued to spread the disinformation that Kollek employed to obscure the truth.
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On 24th February 1934 – in a Vienna scarred by brutal street fighting between communist gangs and a reactionary Catholic conservative dictatorship – the 22-year-old Cambridge graduate Kim Philby married a 24-year-old Jewish divorcée, Litzi Friedmann. The bride was a well-known figure in the Austrian capital’s militant communist scene, and as was usual in those days she obtained a British passport almost instantly after marrying an Englishman. The groom had graduated from Cambridge the previous summer, then spent several months working with semi-underground communists in Vienna during the autumn-winter of 1933-34.
This Philby-Friedmann marriage was quite well known in the small Viennese world of left-wingers and Jews at the time, but was suppressed just a few years later when Philby started his rapid ascent within the British intelligence service MI6. Many of his MI6 colleagues (and friends in the sister service MI5) were astounded when they heard that their apparently conservative fellow officer Kim Philby had once been married to a notorious communist Jewess.
Yet one of the leading Zionist spies of the era was well aware of these facts – because he had been a guest at that wedding back in 1934.
Teddy Kollek was at that time the 22-year-old leader of Vienna’s Zionist youth movement. He was born into a Zionist family in 1911, in what was then the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was named Theodor after the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who had died seven years previously. He moved with his family to Vienna in 1918, aged seven, and remained there until emigrating to Palestine in 1935.
Ordinarily, you would expect those investigating the Cambridge spy ring to have been suspicious and to start digging further into Philby-Kollek connections. Yet, as with the Weizmann connection to St John Philby, the Zionist lie machine long ago cast a pall of fog over the entire story, after Kollek generated an inconsistent and deceitful version of events that is still repeated by historians to this day.
That deceit involves one of the most mysterious characters in the entire Philby story – CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton. It was Angleton who was the main sponsor and supporter of KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn – the very man who first alleged an essentially Jewish background to what we now know as the Cambridge spy ring.
Very cunningly, Kollek sought to cover these traces by claiming that he had himself been the first man to alert Angleton to Philby’s communist past. So before examining just who Teddy Kollek really was, and why his story is so central to the tangled web of Jewish involvement with mid-20th century espionage wars, we need to look in detail at this supposed ‘warning’, and unravel troubling inconsistencies in the tale. It’s only through the closest possible examination of the evidence that we can begin to discern what Kollek and his Zionist associates were really up to.
The basic story (which wasn’t told until 1987-88) is that Teddy Kollek had been visiting Angleton at the CIA’s then Washington headquarters on some unclear date during the early Cold War: and as we shall see, it’s vitally important to understand precisely when this is supposed to have occurred. During this visit (he later claimed) he happened to see Kim Philby in the CIA corridor, and recognised him as the young communist at whose wedding he had been a guest fifteen or so years previously in Vienna. (If literally true, this could only have occurred at some point between October 1949 when Philby arrived in Washington as MI6 representative, and June 1951 when he left for the last time.)
Supposedly Kollek asked his CIA friend Angleton what Philby was doing there, and was ‘shocked’ to be told that Philby was a senior British intelligence officer liaising with the CIA. Kollek supposedly said words to the effect: “Look, the man was once a Communist. If you didn’t know that, you should look into it.”
All this allegedly happened before Philby’s friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Moscow in May 1951, triggering Philby’s recall from Washington and his dismissal from MI6. After years of suspicion and denials, it wasn’t until January 1963 that Philby’s guilt was confirmed.
So on one level, Kollek was yet another Jewish hero in the story – the man who raised the alarm but whose warnings weren’t heeded.
But is Kollek’s story true: and if it isn’t true, what was he hiding by coming out with this tale?
Though it’s been told many times since, we can trace the first reported mention of this story to November 1987, six months after James Jesus Angleton’s death, when two Israeli memorials were dedicated to his memory. A grove of trees was planted by former and current heads of the intelligence service Mossad and the security service Shin Bet, on a hillside at Mevaseret Zion, ten miles west of Jerusalem. Later that day Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek and Israeli Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin presided over the dedication of a “memorial corner” near Jerusalem’s old city walls with an inscription in English: “In memory of a dear friend, James (Jim) Angleton.”
Three Mossad chiefs who had known Angleton were present: Meir Amit (1963-68), Zvi Zamir (1968-74), and Yitzhak Hofi (1974-82). But it was Kollek – whose intelligence career long predated theirs – who gave journalists a story that has been repeated and amended several times since.
According to Washington Post journalist Christopher Dickey (who was present) Kollek had “reminisced” about having “first met” Angleton in 1950 at CIA headquarters, and having bumped into Philby that same day – leading him to warn Angleton about his English colleague’s communist past.
Israeli journalists Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman repeat the same story in their bestselling history of the Israeli intelligence services: they are slightly more specific, dating this supposed Washington meeting as September 1950. However, since Raviv and Melman in the same book give completely the wrong date for Philby’s eventual escape to Moscow, this doesn’t inspire confidence in their accuracy.
Speaking to the Jerusalem Post in 1988, Kollek dated the crucial Washington meeting as “the late 1940s”. This utterly implausible version of the tale is also given in various earlier hints and incomplete accounts that predate its first complete presentation by Kollek in 1987. From close examination of these secondary sources, I’m now certain that Angleton himself and others in the CIA as well as MI6 attempted to sow doubts in Russian minds about Philby, even in the late 1970s. This is part of the reason why the Jewish nature of the Cambridge spy ring was covered up. Especially after Israel had fully changed sides and (by the early 1960s) was overtly ‘pro-Western’, it suited the CIA and MI6 to play on what they thought might be residual Soviet suspicion of Moscow’s pioneering Jewish spy networks.
An early example is a book published in 1977 – The Armies of Ignorance – by retired US Naval Intelligence officer William Corson, which was one of many such books to plant disinformation about the circumstances that led to Donald Maclean being exposed in 1950-51 as a Soviet agent. Corson hinted that this exposure had come from Israeli cooperation with the CIA – which is utterly untrue, since as we now know it was painstaking analysis of certain decrypted Soviet communications, codenamed VENONA, that incriminated Maclean. Corson’s book added in a series of sly asides that “the subsequent manipulation, which included providing them with intelligence disinformation to mislead the Soviets, makes the overall operation a classic case.”
He also turns the story into propaganda for the US-Israeli intelligence relationship, suggesting that Truman’s pro-Zionist policy had facilitated this connection, “without which the United States would have been deprived of intelligence assets it would have been unable to acquire on its own at any price.” Kollek isn’t mentioned by name at all in this 1977 Corson book.
Bizarrely (but if he was essentially acting as a disinformation agent for the CIA, perhaps understandably!) the same author William Corson gives a radically different account more than a decade later, by which time Angleton was conveniently dead. In Widows, a book co-authored with sensation-seeking journalists Susan and Joseph Trento – Corson peddles a theory devised by Clare Petty, a leading figure in the anti-Angleton faction of the CIA.
In this version – first published in 1989 – Philby had supposedly introduced Angleton to Kollek at some point during the later stages of the Second World War, and the three then met up regularly during the 1949-51 period: “Philby, Angleton, and Kollek socialised until the late hours on several occasions.” This would make a nonsense of the entire Kollek story, but it’s just another fable.
Untroubled by inconsistency, Joseph Trento performed another somersault for a later book – The Secret History of the CIA – in which he briefly repeats what was by then a standard tale that in 1950 Kollek had spotted Philby in the CIA corridor and had then warned Angleton: “Philby moved in Communist intellectual circles, and people I knew to be committed Communists were among his closest associates.”
A different spin on Corson’s earlier version was given in 1979 in one of the most famous books in the history of the Cambridge spy ring saga – Andrew Boyle’s The Climate of Treason. This was the book that triggered belated exposure of Anthony Blunt in 1979. While correctly pointing to Blunt (disguised for legal reasons in the book’s first edition under the codename ‘Maurice’ but instantly identifiable by any reasonably well-informed reader at the time), Boyle for some reason wrongly identified the nuclear scientist Wilfrid Mann (again disguised by Boyle, this time using Mann’s middle name ‘Basil’ as alias) as the ‘fifth man’.
Moreover, Boyle suggested that ‘Basil’ had been uncovered thanks to an Israeli intelligence operative, whom he doesn’t name but who is very obviously meant to be Kollek. The suggestion being that Mossad had discovered Mann’s treachery and passed his name to Angleton. Boyle further claims that Angleton kept this information to himself and turned Mann into a double agent, playing him back against the Russians with false intelligence “for at least a couple of years” and informing neither his CIA chief Allen Dulles nor the British.
Yet we now know that whether or not Mann was ever a Soviet agent, he certainly wasn’t the ‘fifth man’ in the ring identified by Golitsyn – that was definitely John Cairncross – and there’s no evidence at all that Kollek was linked to Mann. It seems that Boyle fell for a misinterpretation of gossip in old spy circles in the 1970s, and though he was correct about Blunt, he was wrong to imply a Mann-Kollek connection.
Quoting both Corson and Boyle in a 1983 article for Harper’s magazine, the Yale-educated Jewish journalist Ron Rosenbaum also refers to interviews he conducted with Angleton (after the latter’s dismissal from the CIA) and with several other informed sources and authors. Rosenbaum’s sources very likely included Kermit Roosevelt, the OSS/CIA officer and Middle East specialist who told a version of the same story in 1982 to Burton Hersh, yet another Jewish-American journalist who has written extensively on intelligence matters. Hersh (who was in many cases the first author permitted to interview certain OSS veterans and even some of their British counterparts) adds that Angleton later insisted to him and others that “he had played disinformation back to Moscow through Philby.” Hersh doesn’t give a specific date or other detail about this Kollek-Philby-Angleton story, other than vaguely stating that Angleton “had been tipped off by Teddy Kollek years before [i.e. before Burgess and Maclean’s disappearance in May 1951 and long before CIA officer Bill Harvey’s report a few weeks later denouncing Philby] as to Philby’s final loyalties”.)
Oddly, there’s no implication in Rosenbaum’s 1983 article for Harper’s that he had spoken to Kollek, and that’s very likely because, with Angleton still being alive, Kollek didn’t yet want to go on the record and risk being contradicted. However, Rosenbaum does specifically state that Kollek was a witness at the Philby-Friedmann wedding in Vienna in 1934, and that it was this personal knowledge of Philby’s communist connections that led him to tip off Angleton.
According to Rosenbaum, when he interviewed Angleton by telephone and directly asked him whether the Israelis had tipped him off about Philby, Angleton replied obliquely: “My Israeli friends have always been among the most loyal I’ve had. Perhaps the only ones to remain loyal.” When, later in their conversation, Rosenbaum returned to the question and pressed Angleton as to whether he had received a tip-off about Philby, Angleton again said he was “unable to comment”, adding: “What you have to understand about these matters is that the past telescopes into the present.”
One unusual aspect of this 1983 Rosenbaum version is that he suggests Kollek’s tip-off came as early as 1949 when Philby first took up a post in Washington. If so, that would raise very serious questions as to why Angleton had allowed matters to run on for at least another two years: and it would provide powerful ammunition for those arguing that perhaps Angleton was, during most of Philby’s time in Washington, providing him with false information, knowing it would be fed to the KGB. Hence, it’s possible that the entire Rosenbaum article is another example of Western intelligence still trying to plant false doubts in Soviet minds. This version of the story naturally also paints Kollek in the best possible light as having done his loyal best to help the Western cause!
Without explaining his change of mind, when writing for the online magazine Slate in 2013, Rosenbaum redated the fateful Kollek-Philby encounter as autumn 1950. The very controversial author and former British intelligence officer Morris Riley, in his book on Philby published in 1990, implies that he had interviewed or corresponded with Kollek and suggests that the Washington encounter was in September 1949, which for reasons I explain below can’t possibly be true.
The lies that I’m now uncovering about the Philby-Kollek relationship were promoted at different times and for different reasons by both Angleton himself and the Zionists. Despite having known for years (via Golitsyn) about the intense Jewish involvement in the whole Cambridge spy ring, Angleton found it convenient to avoid public comment on this and to be ostentatiously pro-Zionist himself, at least in public, hoping thus to encourage Soviet doubts about some of their own earlier espionage coups that had been accomplished during years of close communist-Zionist cooperation. After Angleton’s death, Kollek and the Zionists had their own different reasons for putting a new spin on the disinformation, this time to obscure the truth about various aspects of 1930s and 1940s history.
Another strange (possibly naive) misinterpretation in a footnote to Rosenbaum’s 1983 article involves T.E. Lawrence and St John Philby. Rosenbaum mentions a letter dated 1932, written by Lawrence, that appeared in the private catalogue of a dealer in rare books and autographs. In this letter, Lawrence referred to St John Philby with these words: “rather a ‘red’; but decent – very.”
This surely doesn’t refer to any serious suspicion of St John Philby being a Soviet agent, but rather to his maverick anti-imperialist attitudes, which were at times outspoken even for someone associated with the Labour Party and Fabians (as St John Philby publicly was by the time Lawrence was writing).
At some point Kollek gave an interview to the veteran New York Times correspondent Peter Grose for his biography of CIA chief Allen Dulles, and this time he dated the meeting as 1951. This detail is important because in Grose’s version of the story, Kollek specifies that he saw Philby outside Dulles’s office – and Dulles wasn’t appointed as CIA Deputy Director for Plans until 4th January 1951.
The Jewish novelist and former Newsweek correspondent Robert Littell includes a supposedly non-fictional postscript to his novel Young Kim, in which he records an interview with the 89-year-old but still competent Kollek in 2000: in this version the date is 1952 – which quite obviously can’t be true because Philby was recalled from Washington in June 1951 and never returned.
The most bizarre and utterly propagandist version of the story is given by the Jewish-American publisher Marty Peretz in his 2023 memoir The Controversialist. Here Peretz recounts a conversation over lunch with Angleton, supposedly soon after Peretz bought The New Republic in 1974. If so, this would have been right at the end of Angleton’s career, shortly before his dismissal by CIA chief William Colby. Peretz claims that Teddy Kollek had provided the introduction, and that he and Angleton had lunch at the Army and Navy Club in Washington, during which Angleton warned him that a journalist on the New Republic staff, Tad Szulc, was “a Soviet spy”.
Peretz claims that he said he couldn’t fire Szulc merely on Angleton’s word, without evidence, but agreed to keep an eye on what he submitted to the magazine. Peretz then asked Angleton why he was prepared to trust him, given his radical past, and Angleton supposedly replied: “Because you’re a Zionist.” In Peretz’s account, Angleton had an exceptionally dark view of communist infiltration of America, “but he saw Israel as a mirror of America: a democratic beacon pressed by Communists and authoritarians, a false step or two away from a fall. He was a bit paranoid, I suppose. But was he wrong?”
Linked to this anecdote, Peretz gives a distorted version of the Kollek-Philby-Angleton encounter. At one point, it’s implied to have been during Kollek’s Zionist arms-dealing role in the US before and shortly after Israel was created. This of course can’t be true, because Philby wasn’t given his Washington job until after that time! A second and inconsistent version in the same book, but again a change to the usual story, is that the encounter supposedly took place at the British Embassy in Washington in 1948 or 1949, when Kollek “ran into his old American friend” Angleton (whom he’d known, according to Peretz, during the war) and just at that moment also spotted Philby.
Kollek supposedly said “quietly” to Angleton: “There is a Communist agent. We fought, Zionists versus Communists, on the streets of Vienna. Don’t tell me he isn’t.” This really is remarkable chutzpah from Peretz, assuming it’s not merely evidence of mental decline, given that Peretz was 84 by the time this memoir was published.
These many different versions of the same tale suggest very low standards by journalists and contemporary historians, who don’t all have Peretz’s excuse of being both a fanatical Zionist and very elderly.
For example, we now know very precisely from recently published MI5 and MI6 sources that Philby would not have been in Washington (or anywhere in the US) in September 1949. He was head of the MI6 station in Istanbul from 2nd March 1947 to 4th September 1949; and was then based in London at MI6 headquarters from 4th September to 8th October 1949 preparing for his new Washington posting, which he didn’t take up until 8th October.
Meanwhile Kollek had left the US under a cloud of FBI suspicion in either January or May 1949, and it seems unlikely that he returned until late 1950 at the earliest.
So, was Kollek deliberately embellishing or even inventing the story?
The most intriguing version of the whole tale – based on the earliest and presumably most reliable evidence – comes from Phillip Knightley, the veteran Sunday Times journalist who was one of the legendary ‘Insight’ team at that newspaper who first broke the Philby saga to an astonished British public with sensational articles in 1967. Knightley went on to produce two books on Philby and interviewed him in Moscow. I had the chance to discuss the case over dinner with Knightley twice during the 2010s, not long before he died.
According to Knightley, Kollek had first given a version of this story as early as 1979 (arguably even earlier) in an interview with Philip Jacobson, a well-connected Anglo-Jewish journalist. Kollek told Jacobson that having seen Philby in a CIA corridor he had “later” mentioned to Angleton that to his certain knowledge, Philby had once been a communist. However, when speaking to his fellow Jew Jacobson, Kollek said he couldn’t remember whether this conversation was in 1951 or 1952.
As Knightley points out, if it was 1951 then it’s odd that (as we know for certain) Angleton went on the record as late as 18th June 1951 defending Philby, in an internal memo to the CIA’s then chief, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith.
For several reasons it seems more likely that Kollek passed on this warning to Angleton after the Burgess-Maclean defection of May 1951, and after Philby had already started to come under suspicion. In other words Kollek wasn’t giving an early warning, he was making sure that he put himself (and Israel) in the clear by throwing further mud at Philby as quickly as possible, before investigators caught up with the fact that he had been at Philby’s wedding to a notorious communist!
One reason why the later date seems more likely is that it wasn’t until May-June 1951 that the CIA reached its first formal intelligence-sharing agreement with Israel, negotiated by Kollek’s senior colleague at Mossad, Reuven Shiloah (previously Reuven Zaslani), having first been promoted during a visit to Washington by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in May 1951.
If it was shortly after this time that Kollek passed on the warning, then it makes sense. With typical cynicism, he waited until Angleton was dead before telling an embellished version of the story, and implying that Angleton and his CIA colleagues had in some sense been negligent in failing to act on the helpful advice of their Israeli friends!
Even more important than this cynical distortion is a more fundamental fact. Is it even credible that Kollek had remained in ignorance of Kim Philby’s career in British intelligence until as late as c.1950?
MI6 files are closed to the public, but when we look at extensive evidence from other secret files (notably MI5, Foreign Office, and Cabinet Office documents released in recent years to the UK National Archives) we can observe a considerable overlap between the espionage careers of Kim Philby and Teddy Kollek during the seventeen years between Kollek being a guest at Philby’s wedding in Vienna in 1934, and Philby being sacked from MI6 in 1951.
These years involve wartime Istanbul, postwar London, and the final years of the British Mandate in Palestine. In all three locations, Kollek was not merely a senior Zionist intelligence officer, but one with specific responsibility for liaising with the British, who never knew quite how far to trust him. Kollek and Philby were each men of considerable importance in their respective intelligence agencies, and were well informed about each other’s services. Yet there is no evidence until many years later that they ever mentioned having known each other – a suspicious fact in itself.
Kollek moved to what was then the British-controlled mandate of Palestine in 1935 and by the start of the Second World War he was already an important Zionist intelligence operative. He was especially useful because he didn’t look Jewish – so much so that his fellow Jews nicknamed him “The Goy”.
Meanwhile, after being evacuated from France in June 1940 where he had been a Times war correspondent, Philby was quickly recruited into what was then called Section D of MI6, which became the new Special Operations Executive during autumn 1940. He remained with SOE until September 1941.
Though this part of Philby’s career is especially shrouded in secrecy due to the paucity and confusion of documentary records, it’s interesting that Section D / SOE was the very section of British intelligence that had closest links to Zionist agents, for reasons that I’ll discuss on another occasion. There’s no special reason why Philby should have dealt directly with Kollek in this 1940-41 period, because Philby was mainly working on the propaganda-related side of training SOE agents, but even at this stage it wouldn’t have been surprising for Kollek to have learned that his old Vienna acquaintance Philby was now with British intelligence. All the more so given that he is sure to have heard about his mentor Chaim Weizmann’s discussions with Kim’s father, St John Philby, about the possibility of Zionists bribing the increasingly powerful Arab leader Ibn Saud.
For three years, starting in autumn 1941, Philby ran the Iberian section of the MI6 counter-espionage Section V, responsible for Spain, Portugal, Spanish Morocco, and the Atlantic islands. This meant he was closely involved with monitoring networks of dissident Germans – often within the Third Reich’s notoriously unreliable military intelligence service, the Abwehr – who made contact with their British counterparts in Madrid and Lisbon.
Throughout these years, Kollek was operating in a quite different theatre of the war – Istanbul and the Balkans – but similarly working with Abwehr dissidents in operations that sometimes overlapped with Philby’s Iberian work. It’s not certain that he would have come across Philby in these years, but it seems highly likely.
It’s after the autumn of 1944 that we can be sure Philby would have been at the very least informed about Kollek’s Zionist intelligence role, and likewise very likely that Kollek would have learned about Philby. In October 1944 the 32-year-old Philby became head of Section IX, with responsibility for tracking and combating Soviet espionage – a double irony, since Philby was himself a Soviet agent, and at this point the Soviet Union was still (in theory at least) Britain’s wartime ally.
Then in December 1945 – as it became clear that the wartime alliance was over and that a Cold War (and perhaps even a Third World War) with the Soviet bloc was inevitable – Philby took charge of the entire counter-espionage section of MI6, at first still named Section V but soon renamed R.5. At that point it was quite inevitable that Philby would have been informed about Kollek, and that someone at Kollek’s level in the Zionist intelligence apparatus – personally close to future Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and personally responsible for liaison with British intelligence in the increasingly delicate Palestine situation – would have known about Philby.
All the more so when in March 1947 Philby was given his first overseas MI6 posting as head of station in Istanbul, the very city where Kollek had spent much of the war, retaining many connections. Philby remained in Istanbul until September 1949, when he returned to London for a month before taking up his most famous (and final) MI6 post in Washington. It’s simply incredible that someone at Kollek’s level in what became Mossad didn’t know about Philby being a senior MI6 officer until happening to bump into him in a CIA corridor at some point in 1949-51. And if we assume that Kollek was lying about his previous knowledge of Philby, then it becomes imperative to ask why he was lying – not merely dissembling on some one-off occasion, but creating a vast carapace of deception that lasted until his death.
When we look at Kollek’s own espionage career, we can deduce some of the reasons why he might have lied to a succession of Western journalists and authors about this connection, and why this is also key to the mystery of the Angleton-Philby relationship.
According to Prof. Christopher Andrew (doyen of British intelligence historians and author of the official history of MI5) Teddy Kollek became deputy head of the Jewish Agency’s intelligence service in 1942. An MI5 document summarising his career notes that from 1942-44 [other sources say 1943-44] he was based in Istanbul both liaising with British and American wartime intelligence services in this capital of neutral Turkey, and “organising a Jewish underground escape organisation in Europe”.
There’s a danger here for modern readers in viewing this through the prism of what we now call the ‘Holocaust’. Contemporaneous records don’t concentrate (or in almost all cases even mention) the idea that Kollek’s main role was rescuing Jews from the ‘gas chambers’. Jews in Istanbul and the Balkans were throughout the war involved rather in cross-border wheeling and dealing of various kinds, often exploiting their contacts and experience as smugglers and financiers.
Especially during the later stages of the Second World War, several British intelligence organisations – increasingly also the American OSS, predecessor of the CIA – were trying to build contacts among the Axis powers, often using Jews to achieve this.
The networks that operated between Budapest and Istanbul during 1943-44 were an important example of such manoeuvres. Again we tend to think of cross-border operations primarily in terms of ‘escaping’ – whether Jews ‘escaping the Holocaust’ or escaped Allied prisoners-of-war. However, the reality (especially by 1943) is that cross-border covert travelling more often meant going in the opposite direction, i.e. inserting agents behind German lines. This included Jewish agents, especially after an agreement signed in January 1943 by the British intelligence officer Tony Simonds and Kollek’s Jewish Agency colleague Zeev Shind.
Building on the work of Shind and an even more important Jewish Agency intelligence officer Eliyahu Epstein, Kollek arrived in Istanbul in the spring of 1943 (perhaps having made a few earlier trips) and remained for a year. His main British contacts there were Philby’s MI6 colleagues Harold Gibson and Arthur Whittall, and the Naval Intelligence representative Vladimir Wolfson (a Russian Jewish convert who had become ‘more English than the English’ since his days at Cambridge in the 1920s).
Soon after his arrival Kollek joined other important Istanbul-based Zionists at a secret meeting with a newly arrived courier sent from Budapest by the Hungarian Zionist Samuel Springmann. This courier was a 38-year-old Jewish smuggler who used many names, but is most often known as Bandi Grosz – a man whose criminal career had by this point in the war come to include corrupt dealings with both Hungarian and German military intelligence (i.e. the Abwehr).
Grosz (a Jewish convert to Catholicism) went on to work for Kollek smuggling gold and cash into Hungary and Germany which was then used to pay bribes, facilitating the escape of Jews and others into Turkey and other neutral countries, but also liaising between Allied intelligence and Hungarian officials who were toying with the idea of changing sides and betraying their Axis comrades.
Kollek made one of the most important (and as it turned out disastrous) moves in this shadow war, when he introduced the chief OSS officer in Istanbul, Archibald Coleman, to the Jewish-Hungarian smuggler Grosz. This story has been debated by Israeli historians – who are allowed to discuss such topics without being accused of ‘anti-semitism’. But what hardly anyone has mentioned is something highly relevant to the Kollek-Philby connection. Among Grosz’s closest contacts was another shady Jewish operative, Richard Kauder (alias Klatt).
Klatt had for several years been running what was supposed to be a high-level Abwehr intelligence network. From a base in Bulgaria he claimed to have contacts with anti-communist White Russian informants behind Soviet lines, and was trusted by very senior figures in German intelligence, though rightly distrusted by Adolf Hitler, to such an extent that the Abwehr had to disguise from the Führer the fact that they were still employing this highly dubious Jewish agent. It turned out that Klatt and his fellow Jews were running a Soviet-controlled deception – one of the most successful such deceptions of the entire war.
The Klatt affair fascinated MI6 analysts during the mid-1940s, and was closely studied by the section of MI6 headed by Kim Philby. It’s therefore extraordinary that no-one until now seems to have looked into the fact that Klatt was also close to the Istanbul-Budapest courier line run in 1943-44 by Teddy Kollek. On every one of Bandi Grosz’s missions for Kollek and his fellow Zionists during 1943-44, he also stopped en route to consult Klatt and to be given extra missions to run ‘on the side’ for Klatt. Like Kollek’s operations, these often involved black market deals exchanging local currencies for gold and other commodities. According to several interrogation reports in British files, it was via Klatt’s corrupt contacts that Grosz avoided being searched by security guards at Svilengrad, on the Bulgarian-Turkish border, during his several journeys to and fro on Kollek’s behalf.
In May 1944 Grosz was sent on a final journey to Istanbul with a fellow Hungarian Jew, Joel Brand, on a mission devised by Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer who headed a section dealing with Jews and Zionism. In the postwar years, Eichmann became synonymous with the ‘Holocaust’, especially after Mossad kidnapped him in Argentina in 1960 and took him to Israel. The ensuing show trial made worldwide headlines, leading to Eichmann’s execution in 1962.
This later focus on the ‘Holocaust’ means that the Brand-Grosz mission on Eichmann’s behalf in 1944 is now seen in a distorted perspective, weaponised both by orthodox ‘Holocaust’ historians and by anti-Zionists. It’s generally described as a proposed release of Hungarian Jewish prisoners in exchange for 10,000 trucks and other commodities to be sent to Germany on the understanding that they would be used only on the Eastern Front, not against the Western Allies.
The strong possibility remains that this (as well as other approaches in Switzerland again involving Jews, which I discussed earlier this year in my conference presentation) was part of successive peace feelers from Himmler (with or without Hitler’s knowledge) to make a broader deal with the Western Allies and allow Germany to continue fighting the Russians.
In their assessment of the Grosz-Brand mission in May 1944, MI6 and MI5 noted intelligence showing that Grosz boasted to Samuel Springmann (the leading Zionist official in Hungary) that “he had obtained good political contacts in Istanbul through Kollek”, and that these contacts “would help to put him in the good graces of the Allies after the war.”
Kollek seems to have been the first Zionist recruited to work with OSS as part of the so-called “Dogwood” network run by Archibald Coleman, a close personal friend of the OSS chief William Donovan. The central agent in this network was a Czech Jew called Alfred Schwarz, who earlier in the war had worked for both British and exiled Czech intelligence services. From late 1943 the Dogwood network started to collapse, because another Czech Jew who worked with Schwarz had become a double agent working for the SS intelligence wing, the SD.
During the spring of 1944, Kollek’s main Hungarian Jewish contact, the smuggler Grosz, also (perhaps) became a double agent, in his case for the self-seeking and politically ambiguous Hungarian military rather than directly for the Germans. By this time Kollek had passed Grosz over to be run in Istanbul by his fellow Zionist intelligence officer Ehud Avriel. After being used as an OSS courier to Budapest liaising with senior Hungarian politicians who were eager to break their alliance with the Axis and go over to the Allied side, Grosz allegedly tipped off a pro-German Hungarian spymaster that these politicians were about to change sides. Some historians suggest that his information helped persuade the Germans to pre-empt such a betrayal and occupy Hungary (in alliance with more reliable Hungarians) on 19th March 1944.
Part of the reason why the OSS network fell apart during the winter of 1943-44 is that Coleman – previously a man of high ability – had become seriously ill and unable to exercise mature judgment and control. Yet it also seems clear that the Zionist intelligence service (with Kollek as its main representative) used Istanbul as the crucible of a strategic shift from trying to win over the British to collaborating with the American allies instead.
Until around this point, Jewish influence in the USA hadn’t contributed much in practical Zionist terms on the ground in the Middle East, because compared to the British (and even the French) empires, Americans didn’t count for much in that region. But Kollek and his Zionist bosses knew this was starting to change (partly for the oil-related reasons explored in my earlier article about Chaim Weizmann, Ibn Saud, and St John Philby).
Therefore in the summer of 1943 – on instructions from the Zionist leadership which was starting to pass from the traditionally ‘pro-British’ Weizmann to the unambiguously anti-British David Ben-Gurion, who was to become Kollek’s main political ally and mentor – Kollek began to build a close intelligence partnership with the OSS, separate from his agency’s existing liaison with SOE and MI6.
That’s part of the background to the strange events of spring 1944. Soon after the Germans (apparently assisted by tip-offs originating in Zionist circles) had imposed direct occupation in Hungary, the SS sent Kollek’s Hungarian contacts Bandi Grosz and Joel Brand on their much-discussed but still not fully understood mission. One of several possibilities is that MI6 were happy for the Istanbul-Budapest network to be ‘blown’ to the Germans, because the German takeover of Hungary in March 1944 was in strategic terms an advantage to the Allies rather than a setback. Throughout this period, the Western Allies were trying to fool Germany into believing that their invasion of the European mainland would come via Greece and the Balkans, rather than on the Normandy beaches. Every German unit that was sent to Hungary (or elsewhere in the Balkans) was potentially a force diverted from Normandy.
As for the Brand-Grosz mission, it’s evident that both organised Jewry and the Soviet Union had an interest in sabotaging any possibility of Heinrich Himmler and his trusted aides brokering a separate peace with the Western Allies. Grosz had (it seems) been given such a mission by the senior SD officer Gerhard Clages (who died in October 1944 so was unavailable for postwar interrogation).
For Himmler (according to Clages) the proposal carried by Joel Brand to exchange Jewish prisoners for a combination of trucks, scarce commodities, and cash, was little more than a cover. The main purpose of that mission, and the main reason for offering to release Jewish prisoners, had little to do with money or other material gain, but was rather to instigate “a propaganda campaign in the British and American presses, praising the altered policy of the Germans towards the Jews in Europe.”
Naturally, such a campaign would have made no sense if (as we are now told by ‘Holocaust’ historians) the offer was to spare Jews from some ongoing campaign of mass extermination in gas chambers. Had such mass slaughter ever existed, it’s inconceivable that Himmler would have thought he could win over the West – via Jews of all people! – to the idea of a separate peace. But if the idea was to spare Jewish prisoners from the chaos that would ensue if/when Axis territory was overrun by Stalin’s Red Army barbarians, then the scheme begins to make sense. If Germany faced defeat, then quite obviously Jewish prisoners – especially if held in camps towards the East – would face starvation and possible death: not because Germans were putting them in gas chambers, but because Germans could no longer give them food and medical treatment, and might even abandon the camps entirely.
Even if we forget about anything ‘Holocaust’-related, the Himmler peace proposals were quite obviously something that might well have been sabotaged both by Philby and Kollek, who were each in a position to know about them. For one thing, the moment such ideas were leaked to Moscow, it was inevitable that London and Washington would disavow them. So far as this article is concerned, the important aspect is that this web of intrigue during the war was an additional reason why Teddy Kollek later had to disguise the true story of his longstanding connection to Kim Philby, and why a lie became embedded in all mainstream accounts of Philby’s career.
Despite the failure of the Brand-Grosz mission, Kollek continued to promote such characters to his increasingly high-level contacts in OSS. Most blatantly on 31st October 1944 he wrote to Stephen Penrose, head of OSS Middle East Division based in Cairo, providing a list of Zionist representatives in Hungary and Slovakia who had official German contacts that OSS might find useful for intelligence purposes. The first two names on Kollek’s list were Rudolf Kasztner (whose later notoriety as a Zionist intermediary with the SS led to his being assassinated in Israel in 1957) and Hansi Brand, wife of Joel Brand.
(This contact with Stephen Penrose is interesting because despite this wartime liaison with Kollek, Penrose was to become the most outspoken pro-Palestinian voice within the US foreign policy establishment. Having risen close to the top of the wartime OSS, Penrose became an early recruit to the senior echelon of the CIA but soon quit because he felt that too many people with a military rather than an intelligence background were being put in charge. Penrose rightly believed that the CIA needed more people like him with a high-level academic background, rather than ex-soldiers. Right from the earliest days of the Cold War, it tended to be the military and ex-military who were most easily bamboozled by Israel.)
In the autumn of 1944 Kollek took over in Palestine as the main liaison between Jewish Agency intelligence (Shai, created in 1940 and eventually the basis of Israel’s military intelligence and Mossad) and the security authorities in the British mandate. An umbrella organisation known as SIME meant that MI5 and MI6 officers operated together, so Kollek worked with Philby’s MI6 colleagues Douglas Roberts and Maurice Oldfield as well as with MI5.
Within weeks of Kollek taking on this role, Anglo-Zionist relations were thrown into crisis by the murder of Lord Moyne in Cairo on 6th November 1944 by Jewish terrorists from the Stern Gang. MI5’s senior expert on Zionism, Alec Kellar, was sent out from London to tour the Middle East and report on the state of Jewish subversive movements. He pointed out that there seemed to be a division of opinion within the Jewish Agency leadership as to whether it would be justified “to inform against members of their own race”, but the matter was settled largely by the influence of Chaim Weizmann during a visit to Palestine early in 1945. Weizmann had (Kellar wrote) warned his colleagues on the Agency’s Executive that “if terrorism continues, the Zionist cause stands in grave danger of losing not only much of the moral support it enjoys outside Palestine but, more important above all, the political and very practical sympathy of Mr Churchill.”
(Though he was generally very sympathetic to the Zionist cause, Churchill had been especially appalled by Moyne’s murder not only because it was an inherently anti-British act but because Moyne, despite their differing views on Zionism, was a friend and long-term personal ally of Churchill’s. In early 1945 there would have been no reason for Zionists to realise that Churchill would soon cease to be Prime Minister.)
The consequent cooperation between the Jewish Agency – via their chief liaison officer Teddy Kollek – and the Mandate authorities (including SIME) was however, Kellar noted, “conditional and limited. It will continue as long as the Agency believe that we will ultimately lay down a policy for Palestine which will meet their demands; it is circumscribed in that the Agency is in general only passing lists of names to the Police for the latter to make arrests.”
It was even possible (as the Palestine Police had admitted to Kellar) that in some of these cases the Agency was “paying off old scores” and advancing their factional interests by implicating people who weren’t necessarily guilty of terrorist crimes at all. Most importantly, Kellar pointed out, the Agency was making sure it remained in control of the situation by limiting its intelligence cooperation to passing on lists of names. They were certainly not going to cooperate more fully in giving the British insights into the broader picture that British intelligence could then use to build up their own operations independently of the Agency. In fact the Agency’s cooperation was primarily designed to make the British dependent on them.
Kellar concluded: “This extra-constitutional action which the Agency is now allowed to take in Palestine has in fact given it something of the status of an imperium in imperio. It kidnaps or openly arrests terrorists with its own personnel, usually seconded for the work from the ranks of the Agency’s paramilitary and entirely illegal Hagana organisation. These suspects are interrogated in Jewish Settlement hideouts by methods which were openly admitted to me by Edward [sic] Kollek, one of the Agency’s principal security officers, as being on occasion ‘unorthodox’ but fruitful of result.”
Several entries in MI5 files make clear that throughout 1945 and into early 1946, Kollek was the key liaison in passing intelligence to the British, partly based on the kidnapping and torture of fellow Jews by his Hagana colleagues, as well as the judicious leaking of intelligence that favoured the Agency’s factional line.
An especially intense series of meetings took place in August and September 1945 between Kollek and the head of MI5 operations in Palestine, Maj. John Prendergast. It seemed (in Alec Kellar’s view) that Kollek and the Jewish Agency were trying to make MI5 so dependent on them for information that they could “blackmail’ the British authorities into releasing Hagana terrorists, in exchange for the names of Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists!
It was after further meetings with Kollek in October 1945 that Prendergast expressed concern to his MI6 opposite number Douglas Roberts that Kollek’s tone in these meetings was intended to demonstrate Jewish power and the futility of British efforts to combat the Zionists – in effect an implied threat that Britain would face serious problems if the government pursued an anti-Zionist policy. Following these MI5-MI6 discussions, a personal file on Kollek was opened by MI5 in October 1945, into which various earlier traces were extracted. The publication of an edited version of this file at the UK National Archives after Kollek’s death caused a sensation in the Israeli press.
The timing here is again crucial, because thanks to their own spy networks (about which I’ll explain more on another occasion) Kollek and his fellow Zionists knew in advance by early autumn 1945 that the newly elected Labour government was about to adopt an anti-Zionist policy. In fact, at exactly the same time that Kollek was trying to get MI5 to trust him as an informant against Irgun and the Stern Gang, we now know that his mentor David Ben-Gurion was creating a ‘Jewish Resistance Movement’ involving alliances with those same terrorist organisations Irgun and Stern. All the while pretending during liaison meetings with the British that it was trying to break up these groups and was prepared to inform on them!
Kollek, for example, during late 1945 and early 1946 pushed the line to his British contacts that the Hagana would use armed force only in support of illegal immigration, not in broader campaigns of sabotage and challenges to British authority in the Mandate – whereas in fact Hagana was continuing to carry out attacks such as the ones on Coast Guard installations and an RAF radar station in January 1946.
In February 1946 Kollek handed over his liaison role to his ally Ze’ev Sherf and prepared for a new mission in London, building up Zionist intelligence and propaganda in an effort to change the Labour government’s anti-Zionist policy. MI5 documents suggest that as with his earlier work in Palestine, this was double-edged. On the one hand he was to work openly with wartime friends and allies, whether in British intelligence circles or in the Labour movement and left-wing/liberal journalism in London; on the other hand he clearly had a more covert role building up clandestine and possibly subversive contacts.
Kollek arrived at Dover on 25th June 1946 and was allowed to land on a conditional visa valid for a two month stay, later extended. Coincidentally, the British security authorities in Palestine launched ‘Operation Agatha’ on 29th June against the Jewish Agency as well as other Zionist offices, determined to crush the Hagana’s paramilitary operations and uproot their intelligence networks across Palestine. It was partly in response to that operation, and in a desperate plan to destroy intelligence before it could be properly assessed, that the Jewish Agency and Irgun cooperated to bomb the British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22nd July 1946.
During the ensuing months of tension, Kollek occasionally travelled between London and Paris to meet with the Agency’s exiled chiefs Ben Gurion and Zaslani, who had established their base in Paris while things were too hot for them back in Palestine. (It’s important to remember that the British authorities were not only intercepting Kollek’s letters but also – at least until some point in mid-1946 and perhaps even later – breaking Jewish codes; though of course when Kollek travelled in person and met his Zionist colleagues, MI5 wouldn’t necessarily be able to find out what was said or handed over.)
After one of those Paris meetings, for example, Kollek wrote on 15th August 1946 that the central question before them now was:
“Has the British Government definitely come to an agreement with the Arab states to liquidate political Zionism? If they have, and there are many indications for this, then it will be very difficult to increase the strength of the Yishuv [i.e. the Jewish community in Palestine] by reorganising the party and to do all the other necessary things while waiting for a better political constellation. Probably in a few days’ time we shall know more certainly where we stand.”
Kollek warned of a pessimistic scenario “that a definite agreement exists between HMG [Attlee’s Labour Government] and the Arabs, or at least on the fact that there is some justification for dreading this contingency”, and he was concerned that he had not yet seen “any signs of practical suggestions being worked out, as to how to act in such an emergency.”
A week later in a letter dated 22nd August 1946, Kollek was more specific about the “practical” ideas he had in mind:
“I do accept violence as an argument in politics, but specific threats of violence not carried out defeat their purpose. The Resistance Movement has, I think, failed in its policy by what has or has not happened in Haifa when the first immigrants were sent to Cyprus [i.e. when the British authorities sent back boatloads of illegal Jewish immigrants and interned them in Cyprus]. If on this day people would have gone with their bare hands against British soldiers, and a great number would have been killed, maybe this would have made an impression and even stopped the transfer. However, that refers only to that special day and that special hour, and it has passed.”
The lesson Kollek drew from this was that the Jewish Agency should now refrain from making public threats, as this would lead to them being tarred with the same brush as Irgun and the Stern Gang:
“Maybe it would be better if we would refrain from any resolutions in connection with terrorist acts, at present these are regarded only as hypocritical.”
Kollek went on to criticise the existing Jewish Agency representatives in London, notably an old ally of Weizmann’s, Berl Locker, and suggested that this old guard should be replaced by more dynamic propaganda and intelligence agents such as himself and Reuven Zaslani, who had wartime experience of dealing at a high level with certain British contacts. (The internal Zionist conflict was partly generational: Zaslani at this time was 36 and Kollek 35; Berl Locker was 59 and his mentor Chaim Weizmann a rapidly ageing 71; Ben-Gurion was 59 but in far better health than Weizmann, so in practical terms the age gap between them was very considerable and telling.)
On 9th September 1946, for example, MI5 intercepted and translated a telephone conversation between Kollek in London and Ze’ev Sherf in Jerusalem in which two of the Zionist intelligence service’s “friends” on the British side were identified as Viscount Stansgate (at that point Secretary of State for Air in the Labour government, but for today’s readers best known as Tony Benn’s father), and Sir Ronald Campbell (the veteran diplomat who had been British Ambassador to Portugal, 1940-45).
It was against this background that the most controversial episode in Kollek’s association with British intelligence began. This was misunderstood when certain British documents were first declassified, and it was wrongly believed that Kollek had been a British agent codenamed ‘Scorpion’: in fact that codename applied to a British officer selected to liaise with Kollek, in what all concerned recognised was a very delicate operation.
When we also realise the longstanding Kollek-Philby connection, an extra layer of deception is added to an already complex tale. At a time when MI5 and MI6 were discussing how to handle Kollek, they had in their own midst a senior officer – Kim Philby, by this time head of the MI6 counter-espionage department R.5 – who had been an associate of Kollek’s in Vienna a dozen years earlier, and who was Moscow’s key agent inside British intelligence. When Philby left that R.5 post, he moved to Istanbul to become head of the MI6 station in the very city where Kollek had conducted high-level and mysterious Jewish espionage missions with the British – and to add yet another extraordinary aspect, Philby’s successor at R.5 was Douglas Roberts, one of the most senior of Kollek’s old associates in the MI6 Middle East section.
In fact MI5 knew that on arriving in London in 1946, Kollek had tried to contact Roberts as well as the former Naval Intelligence representative from his Istanbul days, Vladimir Wolfson.
MI5 decided that they should establish some permanent contact with Kollek, without allowing him to build the sort of semi-official links with either MI5 or MI6 that might allow him to use the British rather than the British using him. There was some debate as to whether an arm’s length cut-out should be used – a businessman or journalist who had links to MI5/MI6 but wasn’t a full-time officer – or whether they would have to grasp the nettle and use someone whom Kollek would know perfectly well was officially employed.
One suggestion was to use the top secret agent codenamed ‘U.35’: Klop Ustinov (father of the actor Peter Ustinov), who was himself of part-Jewish, part-Russian ancestry but who had handled highly secret negotiations with anti-Hitler German plotters in 1944, as well as other very sensitive matters.
In the end they chose Anthony Simkins, an Oxford history graduate who was just beginning what was to prove a long and distinguished career in MI5, ending in six years as Deputy Director-General, 1965-71. It was Simkins, not Kollek, who was codenamed ‘Scorpion’. The reasons for him being chosen as liaison with Kollek are redacted from most files, but I have been able to piece together what occurred.
Before joining MI5, Simkins had been a young officer in the Rifle Brigade, and was captured by the Italians at Derna in the Libyan desert in 1941. During his consequent two years in an Italian POW camp he became friendly with a fellow prisoner, a Jew named Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, who had similarly been captured while serving with fellow Jews in a British Army unit in Greece.
By 1946 Ben-Aharon was an important Zionist activist of interest to MI5 because although strongly associated with the left-wing of the Zionist movement he was considered not to be a communist. Therefore, when they realised Ben-Aharon would be visiting London, MI5 prepared Simkins to make contact with his old friend. When the parallel Kollek case came up, they decided that Simkins would also be the right man to be put in touch with Kollek, and that in his conversations with Ben-Aharon he should subtly engineer such a meeting.
Senior MI5 officers warned Simkins “rather strongly of the possible pitfalls which might occur in his relationship with such a man as [Kollek]” who, they explained, was known to be a Jewish Agency intelligence officer. For such a young and inexperienced MI5 officer (Simkins was 34 but had been in MI5 for only one year) this was a tricky assignment.
During October and early November 1946 the sensitivity of the situation was emphasised when MI5 monitored a series of potentially suspicious contacts between Kollek and former/present British officials including Dudley Danby, a homosexual who had been private secretary to the late Colonial Secretary Lord Lloyd and who is now known to have been an important informant for the Zionists within the British establishment. Other highly significant individuals contacting Kollek in London during these weeks included the left-wing journalist Jon Kimche whose contacts at the top of the Labour Party were vitally important for Zionist intelligence, and the businesswoman Flora Solomon, a close friend of both Chaim Weizmann and Kim Philby. Mrs Solomon’s very significant role in the Philby saga will be explored in a later article at this blog.
On 22nd November 1946 Special Branch officers at Northolt Airport observed a possibly suspicious contact between Kollek and the businessman Sigmund Gestetner (whose involvement with Chaim Weizmann’s most secret operations was discussed in my previous article and who was also closely linked to Philby’s friend Flora Solomon). This meeting appeared even more suspicious when just before Christmas 1946 MI5 monitored a phone call in which Gestetner told Kollek about a mysterious parcel and certain papers that he wanted to “get rid of” and which Kollek arranged to pick up.
Over several weeks Simkins carefully cultivated Ben-Aharon (and vice versa). Both the British and Zionist sides were feeling their way towards a channel of communication so that an all-out war between the British Empire and the Jews could be avoided. Simkins met Kollek for the first time on 30th January 1947. Reporting to senior MI5 officer James Robertson after this meeting, Simkins explained that Kollek had been anxious to portray the Zionists as keen to cooperate with Britain, and had insisted that only a tiny minority within the Jewish Agency leadership was in any way pro-Soviet.
Simkins wrote that Kollek had frankly explained how “he had been doing intelligence work from about 1941 to the end of the war and had had contacts with our intelligence in the Middle East. He had come here hoping that these contacts would enable him to get the ear of the people who really counted in determining what our strategic interests in the Middle East required. Unfortunately such contacts as he had were on too low a level: majors, even colonels, might accept the views he put forward, but they were not the people who would influence policy. He understood that there was a good deal of sympathy in the Cabinet for Jewish claims, but the sympathies of individual ministers – Shinwell [Emanuel Shinwell, Minister of Fuel & Power, who was the only Jew in Attlee’s cabinet] and Dalton [Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exchequer, one of the ‘Big Five’ in the Labour Party, and ministerial head of the Special Operations Executive during Churchill’s wartime coalition] were mentioned – even a numerical majority, would not prevail against Bevin, the authoritative Foreign Office and military appreciation.
“Bevin [Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary and by far the most important figure in the government alongside Prime Minister Attlee] was a tough and skilful negotiator. In his (Kollek’s) opinion, we could at the moment give the Jews substantially what they were asking and get away with the Arab League whose leaders had no wish to see Russia taking a hand in the Middle East. Terrorism could be dealt with easily if only a settlement could be reached with the Agency – in 1944 he had himself helped the Palestine authorities to deal with the terrorists, and this problem could be practically liquidated again inside two months with Jewish cooperation.”
This was a very high level and potentially incendiary discussion for a junior MI5 officer to be conducting. By early 1947 MI5 had decided that the British end of this liaison with the Zionists should be a military intelligence officer with a background in Palestine work, rather than someone inside MI5, because they still feared that if someone as crafty as Kollek started working regularly with an MI5 man, it would be the Zionist spy who ended up pulling the strings of his nominal MI5 handler. As Robertson put it, the record clearly showed that Kollek’s earlier motives in cooperation with MI6, MI5 and SOE had been “to obtain as much information as he can about our own intelligence activities, while giving away as little as possible himself.”
The chosen officer would need to be worldly and at ease in social situations (such as expensive restaurants): MI5 selected Martin Charteris, the Eton and Sandhurst educated brother of the Earl of Wemyss. One reason for the extreme sensitivity of the Kollek case today is that in 1950 Charteris went from military intelligence to serve as Private Secretary to the future Queen Elizabeth II, remaining a key figure at her court until his retirement in November 1977 when he took on another role at the summit of British establishment life as Provost of Eton. (Some readers might be familiar with Charteris as a character in the Netflix series, The Crown.)
Charteris was later therefore closely involved with the case of another of the Cambridge spy ring, Sir Anthony Blunt, who had moved from MI5 in 1945 to become a part-time courtier, remaining ‘Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures’ until 1973, long after his exposure as a Soviet agent. (Blunt will be discussed in a later episode in this series of articles on the Cambridge spies.)
There was no doubt about Charteris’s patriotism or ability, then or since, though in discussing whether he would be suitable as MI5’s contact with Kollek, Robertson did warn that Charteris was “perhaps a little too friendly with the Jews and particularly with Weizmann, with whom he is well acquainted.”
On 10th February 1947 the files show that Charteris accepted MI5’s suggestion that (even though he was himself with military intelligence, not a member of their service) he should act as MI5’s cutout with Kollek. In the meantime Kollek’s old MI6 contacts Douglas Roberts and Maurice Oldfield met him during their visit to London.
During February-March 1947 Charteris reported to MI5 on meetings with Kollek and his Zionist colleague Abba Eban (a former SOE officer who later became a prominent Israeli diplomat and eventually Foreign Minister). There are several jokes in his reports about how Charteris was entertained by these Jews at luxurious London restaurants such as Prunier’s. This was at a time when even fairly affluent Britons were struggling under the privations of postwar rationing, but such problems seem not to have restrained the likes of Kollek and Eban.
Even after Kollek abandoned his intelligence/propaganda mission in London and returned to Palestine in March 1947, later being sent on a secret and illegal arms-purchasing mission in New York that began in October 1947, Charteris continued to be employed by MI5 liaising with other Zionist agents such as Eban. The ‘Scorpion’ file was closed in September 1947 and (partly because of his later royal connections) further information about this side of Charteris’s work is sparse.
What we do know is that during 1948-49 Kollek had some trouble with the US authorities. MI6 reported that in late 1948 Kollek illegally purchased and exported radar equipment from the US that was successfully exported to Israel via Mexico. However (also presumably in 1948) the US authorities intervened to block the export of fifty tanks that Kollek had bought. Kollek therefore had to sell these to China, but as of summer 1949 the Chinese still owed the Israelis about $800,000 for these tanks (about $11 million in 2026 values).
The same MI6 report noted that Kollek left the US “as a result of having come to the notice of the FBI”, and returned to Israel, presumably in early 1949. Another MI6 report identified Kollek as having controlled “a Jewish espionage network in USA” before returning to Palestine via Geneva in early January 1949. After visiting London again during negotiations for the Anglo-Israeli Financial Agreement of May 1949, Kollek was in Washington as an official (and this time legal!) Israeli intelligence representative during 1950-51, before taking a new job on Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s staff in 1952.
All this was going on at a time when Kim Philby was advancing further in the MI6 hierarchy, first as head of its counter-espionage section targeting the Soviet Union during 1944-47, then as head of the MI6 station in Istanbul, 1947-49; and finally as MI6 representative in Washington, 1949-51.
The exceptionally sensitive period from summer 1946 to spring 1947 when MI5 was running its ‘Scorpion’ operation in London to make tentative and eventually closer contacts with Kollek, coincided precisely with Philby’s time as MI6 counter-espionage chief. Given that they delved into even tangential connections between British officers and the Zionists when trying to select a liaison with Kollek, it’s extraordinary that MI5 seemingly knew nothing of the fact that Kollek had been a guest at Philby’s wedding some 12-13 years previously and had been well-acquainted with Philby’s Viennese first wife and her communist friends.
We can be certain that the Kollek-Philby connection was one aspect of what the KGB meant when they highlighted the Jewish aspect of the Cambridge spy ring as being of fundamental importance – a fact that was stressed so heavily that when Anatoliy Golitsyn heard about this ring while making his way up the KGB ranks, it was one of the few key facts that he remembered.
We can be equally certain that somewhere still hidden in MI5 and MI6 files are further investigations into Kollek and the extensive overlap between Zionist and Soviet espionage. In the next episode of the Philby story I shall turn to another of his mysterious and important Jewish connections, after a brief diversion to discuss intriguing aspects of his years in Istanbul.
