Good Friends in Low Places? The British Secret Intelligence Service and the Jewish Agency 1939–45

Abstract

This article explores intelligence collaboration between British Intelligence and the Jewish Agency during the Second World War. Most accounts of this period highlight the functional nature of this collaboration, accounts that inevitably have come to be viewed through the prism of the Holocaust, and with it the prevailing sense that Britain offered ‘too little too late to help’ in using its clandestine assets to help rescue the remnants of European Jewry. By focusing however on collaboration primarily between the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Jewish Agency, this article argues that intelligence liaison and collaboration at an operational level was closer and less conditioned by adherence to stated British government policy than hitherto suggested