Page 182 - ISRAEL'S CRADLE

At the end of the press conference, Dr. Eytan was involved in an unusual media matter. He asked Richard Williams, a reporter for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), to remain behind for a few minutes, and told him:
As far as I know, your news item on the explosion will be broadcast at the one o'clock newscast. I have a request. My mother, who is an elderly woman, lives in London and she listens to every newscast of yours. When she hears that a disaster occurred in the National Institutions Building in Jerusalem, she will be terrified. She knows I work in this place. Can you ask your people in London to call the telephone number I will give you now, and tell her that nothing happened to me?
The reporter looked at Dr. Eytan and the bandage on his head, and apparently wanted to tell his interlocutor that the information he wishes to convey to his mother is not entirely accurate. Dr. Eytan calmed him down and told him it was merely a superficial scratch. And indeed, several minutes before the broadcast in London, Mrs. Ettinghausen received a telephone call from the BBC, with her son's regards from Jerusalem and that nothing bad happened to him in the explosion...
The "Haganah" commander in the Jerusalem region, David Shaltiel, established an inquiry committee in order to investigate the circumstances that led to the disaster. This committee debriefed all who were involved and reached the conclusion that several Shai members, who were in contact with the American Consulate driver, failed in their handling of the situation. In particular, a finger was pointed at the cab driver Polyakov, who set up a meeting with Anton Daud in the courtyard of the National Institutions and not at their usual meeting place. Itzhak Levy notes in his book "Nine Measures" that "Without a doubt, the Shai's failure was enormous, as it was responsible for discovering enemy plots of this type. To the extent that I investigated this issue," noted Levy, who was then the Commander of Shai in Jerusalem, "I realized it was a miserable chain of circumstances."
Within a few days, voices of self-criticism started to be heard: Where did we go wrong? What must we do so that such instances do not recur? One of the writers on this issue was Shalom Schwartz, a well-known journalist in Jerusalem of that time. In the "Al HaPerek" Column in the weekly newspaper of the World Zionist Organization "the World", Schwartz wrote a profound list titled "On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have set watchmen...". The ellipsis at the end of the title speaks volumes. Schwartz opened his list as follows:
The conversation of the day, in Jerusalem and throughout the entire Land of Israel: the disaster-failure in the courtyard of the National Institutions, and it should be that all will discuss the bloody event of last Thursday – for several reasons. First, this is already the third attack upon us [the previous ones: the "Palestine Post" Newspaper building and the explosion in Ben Yehuda Street], of a different type, and almost in a single area. Second, this time it was not merely an assassination of an institution or just another Jewish
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