Last week the Real History blog revealed that the grandfather of Tom Tugendhat – a candidate for leadership of the Conservative Party and now seen as a potential Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary in the next government – was investigated for decades by MI5 due to his links to international criminals, arms dealers, and leading Zionists including the father of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme.
Today we examine documents showing that one of the most prominent British politicians of the 20th century was also targeted by MI5 – the UK’s Security Service which counters subversion, espionage and terrorism.
This investigation of Sir Keith Joseph – who was to serve in Conservative cabinets during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s and was considered the closest political ally of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – caused panic among MI5 officers in the summer of 1948, though at the time Sir Keith was a little-known financier, recently returned from war service.
So obscure was the future minister – eight years before being elected to Parliament – that MI5 staff resorted to looking him up in Who’s Who!
His name had come to their attention during MI5’s interception of correspondence between the Jewish Agency offices in London and the newly created state of Israel’s representative at the United Nations, Abba Eban.
Like Joseph, Eban was a young Jew who served in the British Army during the Second World War – in Eban’s case as a secret liaison with Zionist agents working in cooperation with Britain’s Special Operations Executive – the ‘dirty tricks’ department of the British war effort.
Before his appointment to the UN, Eban was regarded by MI5 as one of the most important operatives of an increasingly aggressive Zionist secret service engaged in propaganda, intelligence gathering, arms smuggling and even terrorism. He was posted to London in October 1946 alongside Teddy Kollek (future Mayor of Jerusalem) to create a new and more active Zionist intelligence operation, officially working for the Jewish Agency.
British security and intelligence officers knew that for several years supposed ‘moderates’ at the Agency, especially Eban’s ultimate boss David Ben Gurion, had coordinated terrorist and other subversive acts with rival Zionist groups including Menachem Begin’s Irgun and Yitzhak Shamir’s Stern Gang. At other times however the likes of Ben Gurion and Eban had been bitter enemies of Begin and Shamir (each of whom later became Israeli prime ministers in their turn, while Eban served as deputy prime minister from 1963 to 1966 and foreign minister from 1966 to 1974).
Hence Abba Eban and his Jewish Agency offices in London were an important surveillance target for MI5.
In June 1946 the Agency’s offices in Palestine (then ruled as a British mandate) were raided as part of Operation Agatha, a counter-terrorist operation by the British Army involving 2,700 arrests, including senior Agency personnel. British codebreakers had been reading the Jewish Agency’s secret communications, so MI5 and its sister service MI6 knew that Ben Gurion’s disavowal of involvement in terrorism was bogus.
By 1948 their concern had shifted to Zionist money-laundering and arms dealing for the new Israeli state: Abba Eban and Teddy Kollek were leading figures in these secret deals.
It was against this background that MI5 officers opened a letter from the Jewish Agency to Eban, posted on 4th June 1948. Formerly top secret records now available at the UK National Archives show that one paragraph in the letter was heavily underlined by the MI5 department specialising in Zionist terrorism, espionage and subversion. It read:
“Sir Keith Joseph has asked me to convey his kindest regards to you. He wanted to see you in connection with one or two matters which had come to the notice of his circle, and he thought they might be able to help us. I put him in touch with Mr Locker. I cannot give details here since he asked that they should not be disclosed in writing.”
Berl Locker was the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s board of directors, and a long time ally of Chaim Weizmann, newly installed as the first President of Israel.
An MI5 officer passed an urgent request to the service’s registry, which in those mostly pre-computer days kept a massive card index of spies, saboteurs, terrorists, and just about anybody regarded as dangerous to the security of the state: “Please look up Sir Keith Joseph everywhere you can think of – including Who’s Who!”
MI5’s Pamela Stiebel sent a memo to her colleague David Scherr, another young MI5 high-flyer who had run cross-border operations from Gibraltar against the German secret service. Postwar Scherr and Stiebel had become specialists on the new threat to Britain from Zionist intelligence and terrorist organisations:
“David – What, if anything, can we do about the para side-lined re Sir Keith Joseph?”
Scherr replied that no action should yet be taken against Joseph, except to enter his name in MI5’s card index of Zionist suspects, and to copy the intercepted letter into the MI5 files on Abba Eban and Berl Locker.
An entry for Sir Keith was drawn from Who’s Who and added to the file, noting that he was a 30-year-old baronet who had inherited the title from his father, Bovis construction tycoon Sir Samuel Joseph, in 1944 while serving in the Middle East as a captain in the Royal Artillery. He had since become a barrister and Lloyds underwriter, and had begun to cement a position in the British establishment as a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and an Alderman of the City of London.
MI5 have not yet published any later records that they kept on Sir Keith, though it is certain they took an interest when a man who had featured in their counter-espionage files became Conservative MP for Leeds North East in 1956 and went on to serve as a minister in successive Conservative cabinets.
In 1974 after the Tory election defeat, Sir Keith even became Shadow Home Secretary, in line to take responsibility for MI5 itself had the party returned to government! Would this have been the first time that MI5 acquired a political boss who had once himself been a target of their investigations?
Perhaps fortunately, Sir Keith’s party was not to return to office for another five years, and he never got to run the Home Office. After briefly considering a campaign for the Conservative leadership, he stood aside to support the successful candidature of Margaret Thatcher and became her closest ideological ally in government, serving as Secretary of State for Industry from 1979 to 1981, then as Education Secretary from 1981 until his retirement in 1986.
Sir Keith Joseph stepped down as an MP in 1987 and was raised to the upper house as Lord Joseph of Portsoken (taking the title from his old ward on the City of London Council where he had started his postwar career). In their book and PBS series on the transformation of the world economy, Commanding Heights, economists Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw wrote:
“Arguably, Keith Joseph did as much as any other single person around the world to reshape the debate about government and marketplace, to take a variety of ideas and bind them together into a powerful critique of the mixed economy and, in the course of things, help shape them into a political program.”
In 2014 his name was dragged into a scandal over alleged paedophile abuse that obsessed the British press for several years. However, many of the allegations made during this affair have since been discredited. Having examined the witness statements and other documents considered by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, I don’t see any serious evidence against Joseph. (Readers are invited to look at these documents themselves, by searching the IICSA website.)
Unlike the paedophile saga, the links between Sir Keith Joseph and the Zionist spy network in 1940s London are part of real, documented secret history – not crank conspiracy theory.
While the investigation of Georg Tugendhat continued for decades and became a multi-volume personal file, MI5’s investigation of Sir Keith Joseph is at present only visible in a few pages of a single file.
As readers of this blog and a forthcoming book will discover, related evidence shows the extraordinary scope of the Zionist intelligence effort in 1940s Britain – a time when organised Zionism was both ally and enemy of the British Empire.
We still live in the shadow of those years, so it is imperative that we uncover a truthful history of the period. Keep reading the Real History blog for further revelations.
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