Last week a long-lost film was at last broadcast by the BBC, half a century after it was made. The footage has added to longstanding questions about the role of IRA commander Martin McGuinness, fuelling speculation that this terrorist godfather was an important agent (or at least ally) of British intelligence. Many of his former comrades now believe that McGuinness was part of a long-term plan to surrender Ulster to a version of Sinn Fein / IRA that had been made palatable to the authorities in London and Washington.
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But for historical revisionists and European patriots, the most interesting aspect of last week’s revelations involved the director of this long lost film, The Secret Army. This was Zvi Aldouby, an Israeli intelligence officer who organised the attempted kidnap of Léon Degrelle in 1961. [Note that the names of some of the Israelis in this article are spelled several different ways by different sources, for example Zvi Aldouby is often written Zwy Aldouby.]
Today I reveal the one participant in this Mossad conspiracy who is still alive – an American Jewess and feminist activist who is a personal friend of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As a 22-year-old, Carol Klein worked closely with Zvi Aldouby in the conspiracy to kidnap Degrelle. She then helped disguise Mossad’s involvement by promoting an agreed cover story. In later years under her married name Carol Mack, she became a well-known playwright and activist, working with international networks of liberal feminists. Curiously, like Aldouby, she developed a particular connection with the Irish political scene.
But first, some readers might be asking – who was Léon Degrelle, and what was this mysterious kidnap plot in 1961.
Léon Degrelle died thirty years ago, on 31st March 1994, aged 87. He had lived in exile in Spain since his daring flight across Europe in May 1945.
In pre-war Belgium, Degrelle was a campaigning journalist, famous for his exposés of political corruption. He founded the nationalist Rexist Party in 1935, and in 1941 set up the Walloon Legion to fight against Soviet communism alongside the German Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS.
Degrelle himself commanded Walloon forces in front line combat, and won several medals for his gallantry – eventually gaining the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, one of the highest awards ever given to a non-German. His Legion became the SS Division Wallonien, and by the end of the war Degrelle held the rank of SS-Oberführer.
During the night of 7th-8th May 1945, Degrelle and a small group of comrades flew from Oslo to Spain. They had barely enough fuel to reach Spain’s northern coast, where they crash-landed on La Concha beach, San Sebastián, just a few miles from the border with France.
Jews and ‘anti-fascists’ were angered by their failure to force the Spanish Government to surrender Degrelle for a show trial. They became even more incensed when rather than retreating into obscurity, Degrelle continued to be an outspoken national socialist and supporter of worldwide political networks defending Adolf Hitler’s political legacy.
In 1961 Zionist agents decided it was time to act against Degrelle. At first they planned to take him to Israel, but the plan was later amended. Instead they would torture and interrogate him on a yacht off the Spanish coast, then they would take him to Belgium, where the postwar government had already sentenced him to death. The true story of this conspiracy has been deliberately obscured for more than sixty years, but this week’s BBC broadcast exposed part of the truth, and this article will reveal further details.
“Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan,” is a proverb often attributed to President Kennedy. In fact it was first stated by Mussolini’s foreign minister and son-in-law Count Ciano. Regardless of its origins, the proverb is certainly applicable to Israel’s intelligence service Mossad and its ‘nazi-hunting’ operations.
When a Mossad team kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in May 1960, Israel was happy to take the credit. Eichmann’s show trial in Jerusalem was (in true Stalinist fashion) celebrated as ‘evidence’ of the ‘Holocaust’, which in the early 1960s was just beginning to be transformed from a disputed and marginal aspect of Second World War history into what it has become in the 2020s – an unchallengeable holy writ.
But when – almost exactly a year after the Eichmann kidnapping – a similar operation was attempted against Léon Degrelle, the ignominious failure of this conspiracy meant it had to be dismissed as the work of ‘amateurs’, entirely disowned by Israel.
The conspiracy’s ringleader, journalist Zvi Aldouby, received most opprobrium. Within days of his arrest and the collapse of his plan to kidnap Degrelle, Aldouby was condemned by fellow Jews, including some who had worked with him in the plot. Recent authors such as Guy Walters have believed and repeated Israeli disinformation, but closer examination of the facts suggests that this was an exercise in the traditional intelligence game of “plausible deniability”.
The man later known as Zvi or Zwy Aldouby was born Herbert Dubinsky in 1931. Having immigrated to Palestine with his family, the teenage Dubinsky was a volunteer with the Haganah, the paramilitary wing of the Jewish Agency fighting against the British Mandate. After the State of Israel was declared in 1948, he joined the Haganah’s elite spearhead – Palmach – terrorising Palestinian civilians and fighting against Arab armies.
Having worked in a field intelligence and reconnaissance role for Palmach, Dubinsky joined the Shin Bet security and intelligence service in 1949, transferring to the Israeli Foreign Office in 1951, and it was at this point he was advised to change his name from Dubinsky to Aldouby. (This could be understood as either a Hebrew or an Arab name, and was therefore suitable for a covert operative.)
From 1952 to 1957 the young Aldouby worked as a journalist for the Haboker newspaper (associated with the conservative opposition party in Israel) and for the official Army journal Bamahaneh. After moving to New York in 1957 he continued working as Bamahaneh‘s US correspondent, travelling around the US and visiting Army bases.
Later this allowed him to insist that he had ceased to have any official Israeli role as early as 1952, but certain aspects of his work imply that he continued to perform a propaganda and intelligence function.
During 1957-60 Aldouby studied journalism at Columbia University, from which he was supposedly expelled for a “poor academic record” in the spring of 1960. Coincidentally or not, this was at precisely the same time as the Eichmann kidnapping. Aldouby quickly combined with fellow-Israeli Ephraim Katz to produce articles about the Eichmann case for the American magazine Look and the German magazine Stern.
Look magazine’s founder and editor Mike Cowles had a longstanding relationship with the CIA. Aldouby and Katz were put in touch with Quentin Reynolds, an American journalist with long experience of propaganda work. Their articles about Eichmann were expanded into a book – Minister of Death, co-authored by Reynolds.
After the collapse of the Degrelle kidnapping plot, Aldouby was quickly painted as a mere opportunist who had jumped on the Eichmann bandwagon to make money. Yet the choice of Quentin Reynolds as his co-author is strong evidence that Aldouby was actually a trusted Israeli propaganda and intelligence asset from the start.
Quentin Reynolds had a significant role for many years as a leading propagandist for Jewish and ‘anti-nazi’ causes. As I explained a few weeks ago, Reynolds collaborated with the Jewish congressman and Soviet agent Sam Dickstein in one of the earliest propagandist promotions of what later became known as the ‘Holocaust’. In May 1939, soon after the British White Paper on Palestine (which shifted London’s policy away from Zionism), Reynolds gave evidence (as a supposed expert on Germany) to a congressional committee chaired by Dickstein, who asked Reynolds: “Do you contemplate that there will be another pogrom?”
Reynolds replied: “I not only contemplate it, but I am confident the complete pogrom is not very far away.”
Dickstein asked again: “In other words, there will be a new slaughter?”
Reynolds replied: “Yes, there is no doubt about that.”
Dickstein interjected: “Annihilation!”
Reynolds replied: “Yes, a complete pogrom.”
This testimony qualifies as one of the first examples of Holocaustian propaganda, in which Jews and their allies advanced from complaining about persecution to speaking about “Annihilation”, so as to enhance their demands for a Jewish state, contrary to the direction of British policy.
Eighteen months later Zionist lobbyists were (temporarily) on the British side, aiming to boost Churchill’s government in its efforts to combat American isolationism and ease the path for Roosevelt’s ambition to bring the USA into war against Germany.
Quentin Reynolds again had a central role, as narrator of a famous propaganda film about the Luftwaffe’s bombing of the British capital – London Can Take It. This was produced by the films division of the British Ministry of Information, where the most important official working with Reynolds was Sidney Bernstein, employed as an official British propagandist despite MI5’s suspicion of his communist affiliation. Bernstein became a lifelong friend of Reynolds, who arranged a personal showing of London Can Take It at the White House for President Roosevelt.
In April 1942 Reynolds was guest speaker at the 25th anniversary dinner of the American Jewish Congress, held at the Hotel Astor, New York. His fellow speakers included Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig, who is now known to have been sent to the USA on a propaganda mission secretly funded by the ‘dirty tricks’ wing of the British war effort, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), later working for its propaganda offshoot PWE.
By the end of the war, international Zionism had become Britain’s enemy, and Quentin Reynolds followed suit. In 1946 he narrated a propaganda film for the Jewish terrorist gang Irgun – Last Night We Attacked. This was widely shown across the USA and included an explicit appeal for funds to support the Irgun terrorist campaign against Britain.
MI5 learned that the Irgun’s political front – the American League for a Free Palestine – planned to purchase three ships to transport illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine. One of these ships was to be named the Quentin Reynolds in honour of their American propaganda agent.
In 1953 Reynolds was embarrassed when he wrote a book about the supposed exploits of an undercover SOE agent, George Dupre. It turned out that Dupre’s heroic tales were a hoax.
Yet despite this setback, Reynolds was a big name in American journalism. The book he co-wrote with Aldouby and Katz was heavily promoted, and the simple fact of Reynolds’ involvement disposes of the idea that Aldouby was merely a small-time hustler.
It’s also highly significant that as part of his work on the Eichmann story, Aldouby obtained partial transcripts of interviews between Eichmann and Willem Sassen. These interviews (and other highly dubious ‘confessions’ by Eichmann) are a complicated subject requiring analysis in a later article. But for the purpose of today’s article, the important thing is that Aldouby himself was one of the first people to obtain the Sassen transcripts, which sixty years later have been deployed as ‘evidence’ for the official ‘Holocaust’ narrative.
Following his work on the Eichmann story, Aldouby travelled to Israel and Europe carrying out further research and planning the Degrelle operation. This time his right-hand man was an older Israeli also resident in New York, Yigal Mossinson. Like Aldouby, Mossinson was a veteran of the Palmach. He had for a time been interned by the British mandate authorities for Zionist terrorist activities. During the 1950s he was sent by Mossad to operate under journalistic cover in New York.
On 27th May 1961, Aldouby and Mossinson sailed across the Atlantic to Le Havre.
They spent several weeks in Paris meeting with fellow conspirators, mostly Jews and Spanish leftwing exiles. Then Mossinson travelled ahead to make preparations for a yacht that would smuggle the kidnapped Degrelle out of Spain.
Aldouby and a young Parisian Jew, Jacques Feinsohn, drove through France and crossed the Pyrenees. But instead of being able to proceed with their plot, they were arrested soon after entering Spain on 3rd July 1961. Officers of the Guardia Civil took them into custody, after discovering weapons and incriminating documents in their car.
What had gone wrong for the supposedly ultra-efficient Mossad?
As early as 14th April, seven weeks before the arrests, the CIA’s Madrid station received information from one of their contacts inside the Spanish intelligence service. At about the same time (as explained in the book Degrelle in Exile by Spanish historian José Luis Jerez Riesco, now available in English translation, which I shall review in the July 2024 edition of Heritage and Destiny), Spain’s Director General of Security, Carlos Arias Navarro, warned Degrelle that Jews were planning to kidnap him.
It’s clear that the CIA’s information came from Arias’s office, and amounted to the same story. While they didn’t yet know the names of those involved or the specifics of what was planned, the report read as follows:
“The Jews have been planning the kidnap of Leon Degrelle. They plan to abduct him in the same manner by which Eichmann was abducted in Buenos Aires and with the intention of making him appear in the trial of Eichmann in Tel Aviv. It appears they are trying to abduct ex-Nazi chiefs in a spectacular manner for political and vindictive purposes.
“The plotters of the kidnapping of Degrelle belong to the Israeli Secret Service and have been personally in contact, or at least have had contact, with a group of Jews in Hamburg who influence the German magazine Stern; and according to what is said, they plan to abduct Degrelle with a plane, exactly like they did with Eichmann. In the Eichmann operation they counted on Soviet collaboration; Russian agents were the ones who identified and discovered the true identity of Eichmann.”
This is itself a highly significant comment that we should pause and consider. By 1960, in theory, international Zionism and Soviet Communism were at loggerheads. Yet this CIA report states that Mossad’s kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann was carried out with “Soviet collaboration”. In other words, just like the ‘evidence’ of homicidal ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz which came from a Soviet commission, the most famous postwar capture and trial of a ‘war criminal’ involved the KGB.
“It is also said that the Jewish agents are trying to locate and detain other Nazi leaders like Bormann in order to abduct them. It is advisable that Degrelle be watched and guarded, above all during the period of the Eichmann trial.
“The Israeli operation consists in carrying out sensational abductions, like that of Eichmann, in order to fulfil their vengeance, to get the most out of propaganda, and to complicate by any way possible the international relations and the internal politics of certain countries.”
The report went on to speculate that the kidnap plot might be linked to the mysterious activities of the head of the Belgian security service, Paul Woot de Trixhe, whose son Jacques had recently been working for the electronics company Philco on contracts at a US military base close to Degrelle’s home near Constantina, about 70 km from Seville.
Other reports now available in the CIA’s archives have been censored to blank out Woot de Trixhe’s name, but close examination of these files suggests that by mid-June, almost three weeks before Aldouby and Feinsohn were apprehended, the CIA had obtained further reports from Hubert Halin, a Jewish veteran of the wartime Resistance who was close to the Belgian intelligence services. (For some reason the CIA archives still attempt to disguise Halin’s identity and his awareness of the kidnap plot, though he died in 1974.)
By this point of course, the CIA knew that the Spanish were aware (in general terms) of the kidnap plans. They advised Halin that neither he nor his close associate Roger Katz, who was part of Aldouby’s kidnap gang, should enter Spain themselves, but that he should ensure that Aldouby and his fellow kidnappers should take a doctor with them, so as “to ensure that the ‘interrogation’ of Degrelle in the South of France …does not lead to unintentional manslaughter.”
On balance, at this stage the CIA thought the kidnap plot should go ahead – but they wanted the best of both worlds. Ideally their asset Halin should reap the propaganda advantages of being connected with a successful show trial of Degrelle in Belgium, but avoid the embarrassment of being connected with the plot if it went wrong.
Note again the acknowledgment that (as with Eichmann and most other ‘confessions’ relating to the ‘Holocaust’) the interrogation of Degrelle was to involve torture and other inducements, perhaps including drugs.
It’s possible to infer from the CIA files that one reason for the Degrelle kidnap plot failing is that 1961 was the height of the Cold War. Intelligence agencies even within the Western side were sometimes at odds with each other. In particular, the West German intelligence service BND was run by Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the Third Reich’s military intelligence on the Eastern Front.
In Degrelle in Exile, José Luis Jerez Riesco explains that in addition to his information from Spanish security chief Arias, Degrelle was tipped off by two sources who had close links to Gehlen’s BND: the Count of Mayalde, former Spanish Ambassador to Berlin and by this time Mayor of Madrid, who had been in charge of Franco’s security service just after the Civil War; and Horia Sima, exiled commander of the Romanian Iron Guard.
For almost three months during April, May and June 1961, Léon Degrelle took the advice of his friends in the Spanish security services (and other friends with connections to national socialists still serving in West German intelligence) and stayed away from his home, remaining under close guard in a small apartment in Madrid.
But in the absence of definite information, he decided to return to his estate at La Carlina, near Constantina. And shortly before his return, Degrelle started to get clearer information from his national socialist comrade François Genoud.
Two years ago in my essay on the controversial Hitler-Bormann Testament, I wrote about Genoud – a Swiss banker (of half-French, half-British descent) and a lifelong national socialist with extensive contacts in the Arab world and among Third Reich veterans. To read that essay, click here.
In his letter, Genoud warned Degrelle that he had by chance discovered details of a kidnap plot against him similar to the Eichmann conspiracy. There are slightly different versions as to how Genoud became aware of the plot, but one possibility is that Mossad had set out to create an elaborate ‘false flag’.
During the first months of 1961, Aldouby travelled in Israel and Europe building his network and compiling information. In Switzerland he presented himself as an Arab-American and used a non-Jewish variant of his name – Herbert Aldouby. Together with a young Moroccan Jewess and fellow Mossad officer, Barbara Aigon, he introduced himself to anti-colonial activists who (then as now) included both left-liberals and anti-Zionists with a national socialist background such as Genoud.
Aldouby and Aigon’s cover story was that they needed to free a Moroccan activist from Spain, and they asked Genoud for help in obtaining a yacht. Their real objective, of course, was to use this yacht to abduct Degrelle. The fact that it had been obtained via anti-colonialist, anti-Zionist and national socialist networks would conveniently have obscured Mossad’s involvement.
Genoud consulted his Moroccan socialist friend Mehdi Ben Barka, who warned him that this smelled like a possible Mossad trick similar to the Eichmann operation. (Ironically Ben Barka himself was kidnapped and presumably murdered in 1965. His corpse was never found.)
Soon after Ben Barka’s warning, Genoud had a stroke of luck that confirmed the real nature of the plot. As explained in my earlier essay, at exactly this time Genoud had been working with the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper on an English edition of the Hitler-Bormann Testament. Examining this hardback book published by Cassell, Genoud happened to see on the fly-leaf an advertisement for the book on the Eichmann case by Reynolds, Katz and Aldouby.
Though this referred to a “Zwy Aldouby” not a “Herbert Aldouby”, it seemed to be more than a coincidence. So Genoud checked with the head concierge at Aldouby’s hotel in Lausanne, who happened to be a national socialist comrade.
Sure enough, the hotel registration was in the name “Zwy Aldouby”. It was easy for Genoud to work out that an Eichmann-style plan to kidnap Degrelle was under way.
Genoud therefore wrote again to Degrelle on 2nd July, informing him of these new developments. It seems likely that it was via Genoud as well as the BND that Spanish security authorities knew enough to be waiting for Aldouby and Feinsohn when they crossed the border.
As soon as the two kidnappers were arrested, Mossad’s cover story came into operation. Mossinson was arrested separately, but there was no clear evidence linking him to the conspiracy, and by one account Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben Gurion intervened with Franco. Mossinson was never brought to trial. He was simply taken to the French border and deported.
On arrival in Paris, Mossinson showed the US Embassy’s legal attaché an Israeli police ID card signed by Israel’s Minister of Police, Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, stating that the Minister knew Mossinson personally. He flew back to New York, and went on to write many more plays and novels, returning to Israel in 1965, where he died aged 76 in 1994. Mossinson was honoured on an Israeli postage stamp in 2004.
Another member of the team had avoided Spanish security’s surveillance. Carol Klein, a 22-year-old New York Jewess, travelled across the Atlantic from New York to Le Havre with Aldouby and Mossinson on the SS Liberté. She then stayed with them for a while in a Paris hotel while preparations for the kidnap were worked out, before flying to London, while other conspirators headed to Spain.
On 4th July Klein flew to Madrid and checked into the Palace Hotel, expecting to meet Aldouby on his arrival in the capital, and unaware of the fact that he had been arrested at the border the previous day and was now in a Spanish jail. She later presented an elaborate cover story to account for her actions.
According to Klein’s subsequent tale, she was a young innocent who had been seduced by Aldouby during the trans-Atlantic voyage. Having rapidly fallen in love with this alleged stranger, she spent time with him and his friends in Paris, knowing little of their conversations because she knew little or no French or Hebrew.
By Klein’s account, the unscrupulous Aldouby had pretended to be a widower and asked her to marry him. But by a remarkable coincidence, just after her arrival in Madrid on 4th July – and supposedly knowing nothing of Aldouby’s arrest – Klein’s parents had contacted her and summoned her back to New York, having supposedly discovered just at that instant, from the Israeli consulate, that Aldouby was in fact married to someone else!
Klein claimed to have flown back to her parents, received the bad news, and then returned to Madrid on 14th July – again supposedly as a naive young woman planning to confront Aldouby about his lies, and still supposedly unaware of his arrest.
It was only after tracking down the Madrid hotel which Aldouby had pre-booked that Klein (by her account) caught up with fellow conspirator Barbara Aigon and learned of the arrests. Afraid that she might be implicated, Klein (accompanied by Aigon) went to the US Embassy, where diplomats arranged a flight to London. She also asked Embassy staff to take care of a package of documents and correspondence that she had collected from American Express on Aldouby’s behalf.
Obviously, Mossad could not risk Klein or Aigon being found by Spanish police with these documents, so the Embassy agreed to forward them to London by diplomatic bag. On her arrival in London, Klein again sought US Embassy assistance and was escorted onto a flight to New York.
At this point Carol Klein disappears from history.
But in researching this article I discovered that she was not the ignorant, innocent young girl she claimed to be. Carol Klein was and is a highly educated and committed left-wing, feminist activist. Under her married name Carol Mack she has written several plays, as well as teaching fiction writing as an adjunct professor at New York University. Carol Mack is best known for devising the “collaborative documentary theatre piece” Seven, in association with a feminist NGO, the Vital Voices Global Partnership.
Mack’s contribution portrayed the Irish political activist Inez McCormack, who became a great heroine for former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a friend of Mack’s and prominent sponsor of Vital Voices. (McCormack was portrayed in Seven by Meryl Streep.)
Mossad kidnapper Carol Mack’s son Joshua Mack is now Vice-President of New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, described as ‘A Living Memorial to the Holocaust’. Perhaps one day he will encourage the Museum (and his mother) to tell the truth about the conspiracy to kidnap Léon Degrelle.
In the short term, however, Carol Klein followed the Mossad script to portray her friend Aldouby as a rogue. Speaking to the FBI in New York on 27th July she described him as “a psychopathic liar because he told her so many lies for no good reason other than to impress her.” This reinforced her “firm opinion that Aldouby and Mossinson were freelance writers not connected in any way with any government or group.”
The impression was also encouraged by a carefully prepared bank account in Aldouby’s name that he had opened with $2,300 cash but which later had very little deposited, and where he had often bounced cheques.
(below) Her son Joshua Mack, Vice-President of New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage
A parade of other “witnesses” lined up to give the FBI and CIA the same impression. Aldouby’s personal reputation could now be trashed – he was in prison awaiting trial, and knew he could expect little help in the short term once the mission had failed. All that mattered was to distance Mossad from the plot.
The FBI tracked down several American Jews who had connections to Aldouby, including the prominent literary figures and socialites Harvey Breit and his wife Patricia Rinehart, who admitted giving Aldouby $3,000, but all of them insisted that he had merely been a journalist looking to make a name for himself.
The same line about Aldouby was repeated by Thomas Guinzberg, president of the publishers Viking Press; by Cecilia Razovsky Davidson, a veteran official of Jewish refugee charities; and by Aldouby’s former co-authors Quentin Reynolds and Ephraim Katz.
The cover story was (for their own reasons) assisted by Spanish prosecutors who, on instructions from the Franco government, avoided all mention of the kidnap plot and prosecuted Aldouby and Feinsohn solely for their illegal importation of arms. Aldouby received a nine-year sentence, and Feinsohn six years.
However, two influential figures who (in a fashion that is familiar to readers in 2024) were well known in ‘far right’ circles but also very pro-Zionist, intervened to have the sentences reduced.
These intermediaries were Franco’s brother Nicolás, who had business contacts with leading French Jews because of his role as General Manager of Renault’s operations in Spain; and Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, the lawyer and politician who during the 1960s was seen as leader of the French ‘far right’.
Tixier-Vignancour was an early associate of Jean-Marie Le Pen, and though they later fell out with each other, he shared the Le Pen dynasty’s curious relationship with Israel and its intelligence service. In October 1961 Tixier-Vignancour visited Madrid and intervened with leading politicians, arranging a reduction in the sentences.
Feinsohn was freed and returned to France in December 1963 after two and a half years in Spanish detention. Two months later Aldouby was allowed out of prison and spent a few months under house arrest before also being allowed to return to France.
Aldouby and Feinsohn co-operated with the Israeli journalist Michael Bar-Zohar (a frequent writer on Mossad history) for his 1969 book The Avengers where the former’s name is confusingly spelled Zvi Aldubi. Unsurprisingly, Bar-Zohar repeated Mossad’s cover story – Aldouby was “a clever, resourceful journalist”, but one who “pursued the sensational, with little regard for scruples.” Bar-Zohar insisted that “the Israeli secret services had no hand at all in Operation Degrelle, but to suggest that they were behind it inspired the trust of men Aldouby recruited.”
Bar-Zohar avoided all mention of Carol Klein (by this time Carol Mack), no doubt to her relief as well as Mossad’s.
Meanwhile Aldouby teamed up with another Jewish-American journalist Jerrold Ballinger for a book published in 1971 about the Mossad agent Eli Cohen (whose story eventually became more famous as the basis for a Netflix miniseries, The Spy, starring Sacha Baron Cohen.
And now we know that very soon after that book, Aldouby was hired to direct a documentary film about the IRA – The Secret Army, a film which has all the hallmarks of being influenced on several levels by the intelligence services.
This project was devised by an American academic, J. Bowyer Bell, and based on his book of the same name. Bell’s early academic work for his doctorate (awarded by North Carolina’s prestigious Duke University in 1958) was on the Spanish Civil War, and involved interviews with Republican exiles scattered around Europe.
This led to contacts with Jewish communists and other militant ‘anti-fascists’, and during research for his first book in the mid-1960s Bell interviewed veterans of the Irgun, the militant Zionist terrorist group responsible for atrocities such as the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946.
It was via the Irgun that Bell first became interested in Irish republican terrorism. One must understand that in the mid-1960s the IRA was an obscure subject – Northern Ireland had not then become synonymous with terrorist outrages.
But Bell took an interest far earlier than most journalists and academics, simply because he had learned that the Irgun and the IRA had regarded each other as role models. This will surprise many readers in 2024, because IRA and Sinn Fein sympathisers now prefer to pose as friends of the Palestinians. But during the late 1930s and 1940s the IRA and Irgun made common cause against the British. One leading Irish Jew – future Mayor of Dublin Robert Briscoe – was an important fundraiser and arms dealer for both the IRA and Irgun. Future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (then leading another bloodthirsty Zionist group, the Stern Gang) took the alias ‘Michael Collins’ in tribute to an IRA leader of an earlier generation.
Eventually Bell was to write more about the IRA than about any other subject, but it’s obvious that his contact with Aldouby must have come via his early work on Irgun, which led to Bell’s book Terror out of Zion. He was a ‘respectable’ if maverick academic, but Bell’s books indicate sympathy both with the Irgun and the IRA. This sympathy might have genuine, but would not exclude the kind of relationship between Bell and the CIA that is suggested in last week’s BBC investigation.
Whatever his initial intentions, Bell’s close relationship with Irish republicans – he had first visited Belfast in 1967 where he met leading activists in the then-proscribed ‘Republican Clubs’ as well as the IRA – meant he had a head start over most other writers when the Provisional IRA was formed in 1969. The PIRA rapidly expanded a ruthless campaign of terrorist bombings and shootings.
Early in 1972 Bell began filming at various secret locations around Northern Ireland. Somehow he had been given permission by the IRA Army Council not only to interview leading terrorists, but to film them in the act of planting bombs which later exploded.
Among those taking part in the film were Des Long, a co-founder of the Provisional IRA who organised training in the use of guns and explosives; Paddy Ryan, one of the seven commanders on the IRA Army Council; and most remarkably the young Martin McGuinness, an IRA gunman and bomber in Londonderry who was to become the most influential and controversial figure in IRA history.
As the new BBC programme explains, Bowyer Bell and his team made all kinds of promises to the IRA, but later handed over all of their film footage to British intelligence. Given Aldouby’s involvement it’s fair to assume that Mossad enjoyed even greater access to everything that was recorded.
During the past week, since the sensational rediscovery of the Secret Army footage and broadcast of interviews with surviving participants, well-informed journalists and participants on various sides of Northern Ireland’s paramilitary struggles have begun to be even more sceptical about the role of Martin McGuinness.
Sam McBride in the Belfast Telegraph said that the footage “raises fresh questions about why Martin McGuinness evaded a long jail term”, since his participation in bombings and his role as a leading terrorist are blatantly captured on film.
British and American intelligence agencies had a clear interest in obtaining detailed inside information about the IRA, but quite obviously they chose not to use the intelligence they had about McGuinness. Or at any rate, they didn’t use it to prosecute him.
Perhaps instead they used their knowledge to develop a long-term cooperative relationship with McGuinness and his close ally Gerry Adams – to turn the IRA and Sinn Fein into the type of organisation with which the government in London (under pressure from Washington) could safely cooperate on an agenda of surrendering Ulster to a “United Ireland”?
Within a few months of the Secret Army footage being sent to MI6 in London, the MI6 officer Michael Oatley was sent to Ulster, where he developed a “back channel” relationship with the IRA. This “back channel” operated sporadically even during the worst years of IRA terrorism. Rather than crushing the terrorists, Michael Oatley and his MI6 colleagues always believed that there should be some form of negotiated settlement with them. Given the IRA’s implacable agenda, such a settlement has to mean compromising Northern Ireland’s constitutional position within the United Kingdom.
What was Mossad’s interest in all this?
The new BBC film speculates that they (and the Americans) were concerned about the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, who by 1972 was just beginning his years of involvement in arming the IRA, and also had an on-off relationship with Palestinian guerrilla movements.
Strangely, however, we also know that at exactly the same time as Bell and Aldouby’s activities in Ulster, a British intelligence operation to overthrow Gaddafi – coincidentally also involving a film company used as a front – was called off because of American pressure.
Whereas British intelligence had built links with anti-Gaddafi rebels willing to overthrow his regime, the CIA preferred to keep Gaddafi in place, suspecting that any successor might be worse, and that whatever his eccentricities, Gaddafi could be relied on to be anti-communist.
Perhaps Mossad agreed: in which case any Libyan link to Mossad’s interest in the IRA would have been broader and more indirect. Remember that they arranged links to Moroccan and Congolese anti-colonial movements as part of their anti-Degrelle plot – partly so as to generate plausible ‘false flags’.
It’s a remarkable coincidence that Aldouby’s partner in the 1961 Degrelle kidnap plot, Carol Klein Mack, also developed a close interest in Irish and Northern Irish politics, which she was able to promote at the highest level in Washington. Are we to believe that she had ceased any connection with Mossad? Perhaps, as apparently the last survivor of the conspiracy against Léon Degrelle, it’s time for Mrs Mack to end her six decades of silence?
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This article is dedicated to my Spanish comrade Isabel Peralta, European correspondent of Heritage and Destiny, who represents the true European values that Zvi Aldouby, his Mossad kidnap gang, and his terrorist friends sought to destroy. Die Wahrheit – Die Wahrheit: wär es auch Verbrechen.
For further details about Léon Degrelle, read the July 2024 edition of Heritage and Destiny, where I shall review the recent English translation of Degrelle in Exile, by the Spanish historian José Luis Jerez Riesco.
