On February 18, 1948, representatives of a Swiss company met secretly with Egyptian and Jordanian envoys in the office of Hector McNeill, the British minister of state for foreign affairs, to finalize the details of a $140 million arms deal. Considering the price of arms at the time, this was a major deal which, had it gone through, would have completely changed the military balance between the Arab states and the yet-to-be-established State of Israel. It was presented as a contract between the Swiss company Friedli and Kauffmann (Oerlikon) and the government of Ethiopia, but the true destinations of the arms were Egypt, Jordan and other Arab states.
'French friends.' David Ben-Gurion with Charles de Gaulle in Paris, 1960.
Photo: Jerusalem Post archives
The British Foreign Office, which mediated the deal, maintained the utmost secrecy, as its involvement contravened the UN resolution on partition and flouted the appeal by the UN Security Council for an embargo on arms sales to either Arabs or Jews. The United States, which was one of the first to comply with the UN embargo, would have undoubtedly reacted strongly if it had learned of Britain's double game.
Information on the "Swiss-Ethiopian" arms sale reached French Intelligence via the Jewish Agency. French agents subsequently followed the Swiss company's representatives on their travels between Geneva, London and Cairo and eavesdropped on their telephone conversations. The deal fell through, however, after the Swiss government learned the true destination of the arms and the Ethiopian government refused to comply so as not to re-export the arms to a third country. (On February 2, shots were fired at the Ethiopian consul general's car in Jerusalem.)
Documents on the deal, as well as on the shadow war that was going on at the time between the Hagana's secret service together with the French on the one hand, and the British on the other, were revealed during research conducted recently in archives in France. One major finding was that the French Intelligence had planted an agent in the Syrian Foreign Ministry who, from 1944 to 1949, provided it with copies of hundreds of original documents on Syria's foreign relations.
The French received copies of top-secret correspondence between the Syrian president, Shukri al-Quwatly, and the British, as well as Arab leaders, including King Farouk of Egypt, King Ibn-Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah of Jordan and the Iraqi regent, Abd al-Ilah. They also received copies of telegrams from the Syrian embassies in London, Washington, Moscow, Paris and Arab capitals to the Foreign Ministry in Damascus.
From the documents of the secret British-Syrian correspondence, it can be concluded that Charles de Gaulle's accusations that Britain had deliberately engineered the crisis in Syria in the summer of 1945 to oust France from its mandate states of Syria and Lebanon was indeed justified. On May 29, with his capital under fire from the French forces, Quwatly had no choice but to sign a secret agreement with the British government according it a privileged military and economic status in Syria. Only then did the British army take action against the French.
French Intelligence also placed a mole in the British Legation in Beirut, which had become a center for British political and intelligence activities in the Middle East after World War II. The agent passed on copies of top-secret documents on British intelligence operations in the region, including names of agents, copies of receipts for bribery payments to Arab leaders and secret agreements by various Arab politicians to undertake to collaborate with the British.
For example, Mohsen al-Barazi, the Syrian president's private secretary, was a British agent who later became foreign minister and prime minister. He was handled by Walter Stirling, who operated in Damascus from 1946-1949 under the guise of a journalist for The Times of London. In November 1949 Stirling was shot by an unknown assailant in Damascus and severely wounded. Another informer was Ibn Saud's private doctor, who was handled by William Smart, a diplomat in the British Embassy in Cairo. The information received gave the French ample opportunity to blackmail Arab politicians and force them to collaborate with them.
The British Legation in Beirut was also the target of a joint operation by the Hagana (The Jewish Agency Defense Force) and French Intelligence. On December 15, 1947, about 20 Hagana fighters seized a British truck north of Acre carrying half a ton of documents from the British Legation in Beirut's archives and 12 sacks of diplomatic mail en route to Haifa Port and from there to England. The documents were returned to the British only after being thoroughly examined by the Hagana and a French intelligence officer who was dispatched to Tel Aviv.
SYRIAN AND British documents in the French archives provide a rare glimpse of the modus operandi of the British diplomats and intelligence officers in the Middle East, which is seldom seen in the British archives. After the war, British intelligence formed a chain of agents and informers around each of the Arab kings or presidents, including their trusted allies, the Hashemite sovereigns in Iraq and Jordan. For instance, copies of private letters from Jordanian Crown Prince Talal to his father King Abdullah, and from the latter to his nephew, the Iraqi regent Abd al-Ilah, reached the British Legation in Beirut, and subsequently French Intelligence.
The British exerted considerable influence behind the scenes in Arab politics after securing the secret collaboration of prominent Arab nationalist leaders such as Quwatly, his prime minister Jamil Mardam, the Lebanese prime minister Riyad al-Sulh, as well as Abd al-Rahman Azzam, the secretary-general of the Arab League. The British often acted indirectly in the highly-divided Arab world, particularly in the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine in 1947-1948, using their allies to conceal their involvement. For example, in July 1947, following a British request, Quwatly wrote to King Farouk of Egypt warning him not to collaborate with France as it was supporting the Zionists.
