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Old September 14th, 2011 #7
Mike Parker
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Join Date: Jul 2007
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A Date with Bevin

Audio: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/...t_20060724.ram

Monday 24 July 2006

Mike Thomson investiagtes Jewish insurgency in Palestine after WWll and a plot to assasinate Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Earnest Bevin. Follow this link to view a gallery of images taken by Document during the making of this programme.



In 1946, not long after the Second World War was won, Britain was again under threat. Jewish insurgents, who had long been fighting a bloody insurgency campaign against British troops in Palestine, were about to take their war to London. Previously top secret documents reveal that assassination squads were being sent to the capital armed with a hit list. On it were the names of several top government figures. These included Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Earnest Bevin.

Extremist groups like The Stern Gang (or Lehi) and Irgun, were determined to end the British mandate in Palestine and replace it with a Jewish homeland. Hundreds of their fighters, along with many British soldiers, were killed or injured in a struggle that escalated after the end of the war. Desperate to achieve a breakthrough after the arrest or deaths of many of their members, the two groups set up underground cells in Britain. It wasn’t long before British security services got wind of what was happening and in early 1946 they issued this top secret internal warning:

“Members of the Stern group are now being organised and are under training. It is expected that they will be sent to the United Kingdom to assassinate important members of his majesty’s government, particularly, Mr Bevin.”

In the months that followed a number of bombs exploded in London and an attempt was made to drop on a bomb on the House of Commons from a hired plane. This last effort was only stopped after French Police discovered Stern Gang members preparing to cross the channel in a plane containing a large bomb.

Mike Thomson and the Document team track down the assassin sent to kill Earnest Bevin and the man who gave him the explosives to do it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/...20060724.shtml

Telegram warned of plot to kill Attlee's ministers

Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian, Monday 6 March 2006

MI5 was warned that Jewish terrorists planned to assassinate members of Clement Attlee's postwar Labour government and feared that Menachem Begin, then leader of the extremist Irgun resistance group and a future prime minister of Israel, had tried to trick it by having cosmetic surgery to disguise his identity, files released yesterday disclose.

The files include a telegram dated February 12 1946 from Palestine saying that a reliable source claimed the Stern gang were "training members to go to England to assassinate members of His Majesty's Government, especially Mr Bevin [British foreign minister Ernest Bevin]". The Stern gang, in common with Irgun, were fighting against the British mandate of Palestine and murdered Britain's Minister Resident in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in Cairo in 1944. A memo from the Officer Administering the Government of Palestine to the Secretary of State for the Colonies the following day warned: "The Stern Group have decided to assassinate both the High Commissioner and the General Officer Commanding. In addition, a number of CID officers are to be assassinated as well as police officers and any high government officials who are thought to be anti-semitic."

In 1946 Irgun blew up the King David hotel in Jerusalem, and attacked the British embassy in Rome. A year later MI5 received a report about a rumour that Begin had "undergone a plastic facial operation and that his appearance is totally different from that displayed on police photographs". In 1948 Begin founded the Herut party, which later became Likud, and he was appointed prime minister in 1977. He was awarded the Nobel peace prize with Egypt's President Sadat after agreeing to withdraw Israeli forces from the Sinai peninsula and return it to Egypt.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...06/israel.past