News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) A new book details how former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kolek worked for the British intelligence agency MI5 and helped them capture underground Jewish fighters during the British occupation of the Land of Israel.

Quotes from the book:

“Among those who provided names was Teddy Kollek, later famous as a long-serving mayor of Jerusalem, who in 1942 had become the Jewish Agency`s deputy head of intelligence. From January 1945 to May 1946 Kollek was the Agency’s chief external liaison officer in Jerusalem, in regular touch with both the main MI5 representative, DSO Palestine, and SIME, to whom he gave intelligence on `intended terrorist activities`"

"In fact the intelligence supplied by the Jewish Agency had sometimes been more specific than [DDG, Guy] Liddell suggested. On 10 August 1945 , for example, Kollek revealed the location of a secret Irgun training camp near Binyamina and told an MI5 officer it would be `a great idea to raid the place`. The raid led to the arrest of twenty-seven Irgun members.”

(Christoper Andrew, The Defense of the Realm - The Authorized History of MI5, 2009, Pages 355-356)