But at the back of the group was one who stared at me constantly until it became quite uncomfortable. Finally, as drinks were being replenished, I felt a tug at my sleeve and it was the staring one.
“I must have a word with you,” he said. Close up, I realized he was not hostile but pleading.
“Not here,” he said, and drew me away to the far corner of the bar.
“I have to speak to you. I have waited twenty years. I have a confession to make.”
Normally when a journalist hears that someone wants to make a confession, his heart sinks. It is usually about some shoplifting years ago or a failure to report a spaceship landing in the garden last night. One looks around for an escape route. In this case, there was none.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because you are British,” he said, “and you are a Gentile.”
I could not see the connection, but I nodded anyway. I would just have to listen to what he had to say. He took a deep breath.
“I was in the Irgun back then. I drove the truck into the King David Hotel.”
There was silence between us. The murmur around the bar was a distant backdrop. He was still staring at me, small, wiry, intense, with black, unblinking eyes. Still pleading. I did not know what to say.
“That’s it?”
“No, not all. I want you to believe me. I walked out of the basement and went to a café, a French one, right opposite. I used the public phone. I rang the King David exchange and asked to be put through to military HQ. I spoke to a junior officer. I told him there was a bomb.”
“And?”
“He did not believe me. He said it was impossible. Then he put the phone down. Twenty minutes later, it went off. But I tried. Please believe me, I really tried.”
Whether there would have been time to evacuate that enormous hotel in twenty minutes was a very moot point.
“All right,” I said. “I believe you.”
“Thank you.”
“One question from me,” I said. “Why do you not tell them over there?” I nodded toward the warriors around the bar.
“They would kill me,” he said. He might have been right, too.
I left Israel the next day. Back to London, to Ashford, to see my folks. Then back to the rain forests. Back to the killing fields of Africa.
OF MICE AND MOLES
Most of the British media have an ongoing problem with the various organs of the British intelligence community, typified by a seeming inability to work out which is which.
Basically there are three main organs. The least mentioned is, ironically, the biggest. This is GCHQ, or Government Communications Headquarters, situated in a vast doughnut-shaped complex outside the country town of Cheltenham. Its task is mainly SIGINT, or signals intelligence.
Basically,
it listens. It intercepts and eavesdrops on Britain’s enemies and opponents, and sometimes even her friends, on a worldwide basis. In a quixotic throwback to the days of empire, it has outstations in various parts of the world, something even the American National Security Agency, immensely bigger and more generously funded, finds very useful. As a result, there is a constant sharing and interflow of “product” between the two.
It is this unceasing information swap, the invisible but crucial collaboration between the two countries’ information gathering and security agencies, that constitutes the much-mocked “special relationship” and that includes a mutual trust and fellowship between the Special Forces as well. It has nothing whatever to do with notional, and often passing, friendships between politicians.
Alongside GCHQ is the Security Service, or MI5. Long ago, its mailing address was PO Box 500, London, so it is sometimes mockingly referred to as Box 500. Its task is in-country security against foreign espionage, foreign and domestic terrorism, and homegrown treachery. It maintains just a few postings overseas to liaise with other, friendly security agencies.
The one regarded as the more glamorous agency is the Secret Intelligence Service, usually referred to by a title it renounced years ago: MI6. There is often confusion between the Secret Service and the Security Service, let alone the swapping of their numbers and thus their functions. But everyone remotely concerned is universally described by those on the outside with another misnomer, that of “spy.”
The true spy is almost certainly a foreigner employed deep inside the clandestine fabric of his own country who is prepared to abstract his country’s covert information and hand it over to his real employers. The go-between is called an “asset,” and the full-time employee who runs him is his “handler.”
There is the relatively new nomenclature of “spook,” but I never, ever heard the word spy used within that world. Only the papers and TV ever use it, usually wrongly.