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The Hebrew newspaper “Haaretz” published a lengthy article by the Israeli researcher, Meir Zamir, revealing that the late Syrian prime minister during the French Mandate era, Jamil Mardam Bey, had “important and decisive” information that he relayed to the leader of the Zionist movement, then Ben-Gurion. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Although Jamil Mardam Bey is considered in Syrian collective memory as one of the heroes of Syrian independence and one of the “founding fathers” of the Syrian Republic, researcher Zamir confirmed that this veteran Damascene politician was a “double agent” who cooperated with the Jewish Agency during his work as Syrian ambassador and delegate in Cairo. In the Arab League in 1945.
The story begins
According to the documents Zamir spoke of in his article, the recruitment of Jamil Mardam Bey began in the summer of 1945, after French intelligence information revealed that the French-mandated prime minister of Syria had been recruited by the intelligence chief. British in the Middle East, Ilted Nicole. Clayton, and then Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Saeed.
According to the article, Mardam Bey dreamed of establishing a Greater Syria that included Syria, Iraq and Jordan under the rule of King Faisal Ibn Sharif Hussein, while he would be the Prime Minister.
However, the French decided to blackmail Mardam with you after they threatened to leak documents in their possession to his political opponents, prompting his resignation in August 1945, after consulting with Britain, which did not know he had become a double agent.
The “Haaretz” newspaper reported that Mardam Bey had provided the French with valuable information about the intentions of the British army and intelligence services in the Middle East.
When Mardam was appointed Syrian ambassador to Egypt and his representative at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo, the French had difficulty blackmailing and exploiting him without raising suspicions. For this reason, they resorted to hiring the head of the Arab division of the political department of the Jewish Agency, Eliyahu Sasson, to transmit the important information that the Syrian ambassador Paris had.
What helped facilitate Sasson’s mission was that he was of Syrian origin and had a good relationship with Mardam Bey since 1937, and Ben-Gurion appointed him to the Jewish Agency to coordinate cooperation with French intelligence.
An important source of information
The documents indicate that on November 12, 1945 Sasson met with Mardam in Cairo, before meeting again 6 days later, when Mardam visited Jerusalem at the head of the Arab League delegation to organize the Palestinian representation at the university.
After these meetings, Ben-Gurion met with Sasso, and in the November 22 diary), details related to the Jewish Agency official’s conversations with Mardam.
According to the documents, this is one of the few occasions when Mardam can be directly identified as an intelligence source for Ben Gurion, who later became the first prime minister of the State of Israel.
In the years that followed, both French intelligence and Sasson concealed by various means the fact that Mardam was the source of the information, so as not to be revealed.
However, the information that was first revealed in the diary of Maurice Fischer, an intelligence officer at the Free French Forces military headquarters in Beirut, who previously served in the Haganah militia before the establishment of the Hebrew state, and then he became Israel’s ambassador to France, it is further proof that Esa Mardam was an important source of information for Ben Gurion.
In his memoirs, Fischer explained that Mardam revealed a secret Anglo-Iraqi plan to establish the so-called Greater Syria for agents of the Zionist movement at a meeting in Cairo.
The Israeli investigator’s report indicated that Ben-Gurion had been preparing since July 1945 for the possibility of an attack by Arab armies in the event that Israel declared its independence. However, the information received by Mardam diverted attention in another direction, as Ben-Gurion learned that the direct threat to the establishment of Israel does not lie in a possible attack from neighboring Arab countries, but in British plans to thwart the establishment of the Arab state
This was evident through the declaration of the “Haganah” militia as a terrorist organization, and the effort to implement the “Greater Syria” plan, which would create a Jewish entity with limited powers and not an independent state.
Fears of a Soviet intervention
According to the information that Mardam Bey relayed to Ben-Gurion, the Arab leaders, who feared Soviet intervention, were determined to support the United Kingdom in the event of an all-out war between Britain and the Soviet Union in the lands of the Middle East.
In the end, according to the newspaper “Haaretz”, she was free to thwart the idea of ”Greater Syria” thanks to the efforts of the then Saudi monarch, King Abdulaziz bin Saud, who considered her a threat to his country, and managed to do so. after gaining the support of US President Harry Truman.
On July 14, 1946, London had no choice but to accept that it did not support the establishment of the Greater Syria project. However, British intelligence continued its efforts to establish Greater Syria as the government of the Hashemites (members of the Sharif Hussein bin Ali family), to be part of a regional alliance against any potential Soviet threat.
According to the Hebrew newspaper, the information that was transferred from Mardam Bey to David Ben-Gurwin was very important, indicating that the events of 1946 confirmed the veracity of this information about the intentions of Great Britain.
In May 1946, the British intelligence chief for the Middle East, Alted Clayton, had initiated cooperation with the secretary of the League of Arab States, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, after a meeting of Arab leaders at the Inshas Palace in Cairo, where conference decisions first confirmed that “Zionism represents a danger.” To all Arab countries. “
“Secret decisions”
In June, a second meeting of the Council of the League of Arab States was held in the Bludan compound, near the Syrian capital, Damascus, where “secret decisions” were issued stipulating the need for a military confrontation with the Zionist movement and supported the Palestinians with money, weapons and manpower.
Mordam Bey and Sassoon attended that meeting, who then returned to Jerusalem with information about the secret decisions.
Subsequent movements by the British Army and the secret services confirmed Mardam’s information. On June 29, 1946, in what is known as “Operation Agatha” – or “Black Saturday” in Hebrew – British Army units arrested the leaders of the Jewish Agency, in particular the foreign policy chief Moshe Sharett, and files were seized at the agency’s Jerusalem headquarters.
And he raided large numbers of kibbutzim for banned weapons. The real objective of the operation was to disarm the Haganah and replace the “extremist leaders”, first of all, Ben-Gurion, with more moderate figures.
The British operation largely failed, as its details were leaked to Haganah leaders two months ago, while Ben-Gurion escaped arrest as he was in Paris at the time.
The British also tried to find evidence of French support for the Zionist movement (Eliyahu Sassoon’s files were among the first they seized), but found nothing to suggest this.
‘Moderate Arab leader’
In December 1946, Clayton forced Syrian President al-Quwatli to remove Prime Minister Saadallah al-Jabri for his role in thwarting the Plan for Greater Syria, and replaced him with Jamil Mardam.
The aim of this step was to allow Mardam to secure a parliamentary majority for the plan, but Mardam began to distance himself from the British, despite the fact that British intelligence continued to regard him as a reliable agent.
Mardam’s return from Cairo allowed the French to administer it directly without Sassoon’s mediation. In the summer of 1946, France established diplomatic relations with Syria and established a consulate in Damascus where intelligence agents would operate under diplomatic cover. These actors were able to meet Mardam in his official capacity without arousing suspicion.
However, after the failure of British efforts to resolve the Jewish problem in Palestine by force, the task was imposed on the Arab armies. He described this phase, which began in August 1947 and culminated in the war of May 1948.
In the wake of the defeat of the Arab states in the 1948 war, winds of political, social, and economic turmoil swept through the former regimes in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq.
Jamil Mardam was one of the victims of the December riots following a serious political and economic crisis in Syria, where he was once again forced to resign from his post to spend the rest of his life in Cairo until the date of his death. in the world 1960.
In February 1947, Ben-Gurion met British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in London and praised Mardem as a moderate Arab leader.
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