The Spy Who Wasn’t
The improbable story of a British-born working-class gentile, Israeli covert operative, and ‘Hero of Israel’, who was NOT a British spy.
In 1948 agents of the Haganah, the Jewish fighting force in Palestine, met improbable agent Gordon Levett, an orphan in his twenties working at a Jewish owned diaper factory in London. They were seeking to recruit him for a secret mission to undermine the United Nations (‘UN’) arms embargo of Israel and help transport fighter planes the nascent Israeli state had covertly purchased from Communist Czechoslovakia.
Gordon Levett in Israeli Airforce uniform in 1948. [credit]
Gordon Levett was not only not Jewish, but he was also British, making him a figure to be viewed with the utmost suspicion by the Haganah. The UN had given the British Government the Mandate for Palestine, and many supporters of an independent Israel viewed the British as, at a minimum pro-Arab, if not outright anti-Jewish. The Israelis, albeit desperate for pilots, thought that Levett was a British secret agent, sent by MI5 to infiltrate their ranks and report back to Westminster, the seat of government perceived as actively hostile. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The reality was that while not ever being a spy for the British, Gordon Levett did participate in some hair-raising covert action on behalf of the newly emerging Jewish state, action for which he would be officially recognised some fifty years later.
Levett had joined the RAF in 1939, before the war got going, aged just 17, perhaps as much to escape the extreme poverty of his childhood. At one point his mother had no choice but to abandon him to an orphanage just so he could eat.
In the Royal Air Force, he would find his feet and go on to achieve his dream to fly, rising to Squadron Leader in the process. But in those days the RAF remained riddled with class bias and largely kept the likes of Levett and other working-class servicemen and women to non-combat flying. He served out the war flying transport planes and training other pilots. The end of his RAF career was ignominious, with Levett drummed out of service without references for an unauthorised period of leave when stationed in far-flung Burma. Without RAF recommendations he could not find work as a pilot and on his return to England he ended up working in a Jewish owned laundry. Here he must have heard tales of Israel’s struggles for independence against overwhelming odds and he made the contacts that would decide his destiny.
In London, under the discreet observation of British Special Branch, Levett held two meetings with Haganah agents, at one of which he was given a train ticket to Paris, from where he made his way to the newly established Czechoslovakian republic. So far from being the British spy the Israeli agents suspected, the British had him under observation for his contacts with suspected spies from Israel.
On arrival in Czechoslovakia he found the authorities there had allowed Zatec, a decrepit former-Luftwaffe fighter base inside the country, some twenty miles from the East-German border, to be used by agents of Israel to assemble planes and crews and fly them to their new homeland, undermining the UN arms embargo. It was a small group that would become a core component of the yet to be operational Israeli Air Force (IAF).
The Czechoslovakians also allowed Israeli agents to buy twenty-five of the notoriously bad Avia S-199 fighter planes they produced. The S-199 was a product of circumstance, with an abandoned Nazi factory making Messerschmitt Bf-109 airframes, which were then fitted with left-over engines and propellers from German bomber planes. The result was an under powered, badly balanced, near death-trap of an aircraft. But the desperate agents seeking to assemble some form of air defence for Israel against the established air forces of Egypt and her allies would take whatever they could get.
Israeli Avia S-199, with its massive paddle-bladed Heinkel He 111 bomber propeller, in 1948. [credit]
Levett would help transport Avia S-199’s, a plane he would achieve his dream to fly combat missions in, from Czechoslovakia to Israel. It was a risky business, which largely involved flying at night to avoid unwanted scrutiny, covering long distances over the sea, with little chance of rescue if the second-hand and dubiously assembled planes encountered any mechanical problems. In this covert operation Levett and his fellow pilots had no paperwork, no licenses, no advanced weather-reports to speak of and no parachutes. There was also an equal chance of detention; the pilots that were forced to land in Greece or Italy because of mechanical or navigational problems were immediately arrested.
Levett originally joined the newly formed Israeli Air Transport Command (ATC) and under that wing he ferried the Avia S-199s from Zatec to Israel. But in November 1948 he joined a combat unit, 101 Squadron of the brand-new Israeli Air Force. He did not tell his new employers that he had never flown in combat, and they wrongly assumed with his wartime RAF pedigree that he must have done. He made a less than stellar first impression on his fellow fighter-pilots, trying to adjust from flying air transport planes that weighed from 25 to 40 tons to a roughly four-ton fighter plane. Levett later claimed that in a few flights he managed to handle the smaller planes less “ham-fistedly.”
His wait for combat flying would be short. On December 28, 1948, Levett and 101 Squadron commander Syd Cohen took off in two Spitfires, each armed with two 250-pound bombs, to bomb a suspected enemy troop-carrying train heading from Rafah. The bombing raid was unsuccessful, but they did manage to strafe the railway engine and damage it.
Later the same day Levett went up again, this time in the dreaded Avia S-199, alongside fellow 101 Squadron pilot Jack Doyle in a Spitfire. The mission was to escort IAF 35-Squadron Harvard bombers on a raid to Faluja. Before they returned the two fighter pilots, the sun behind them, spotted eight Egyptian fighters about 4,000 feet below. With these crucial advantages Levett and Doyle managed to attack and shoot down two enemy fighter planes. They were officially credited with one Egyptian Macchi MC.205 fighter each, as well as another two enemy planes damaged.
In all Levett flew some twenty combat missions for 101 Squadron before taking command of a transport squadron and training new IAF crews, rising to the equivalent rank of Lieutenant Colonel before retiring from duty. After a return to England, and still without RAF references, his Israeli Air Force experience and senior officer status finally earned him a job as a civilian pilot, ferrying planes around for various aircraft companies.
In 1998, Gordon Levett, now seventy-seven years old, was among a few hundred volunteers invited by Israel to officially celebrate the 50th anniversary of its declaration of independence. The event earned him a write-up in the New York Times in which he shared his views of the country and the contribution he made in his covert mission to bring fighter aircraft to Israel and help establish an air force to defend the Jewish homeland:
“I had fought a moral war and was associated with a great cause. I still feel more at home here walking down Ben-Gurion Street than I do in England walking down Piccadilly. I know why: In a tiny way, I helped build this country.”