So I went to Regent's Park Hotel, where there was a very nice woman who wrote letters for commercial travellers, helped people answer advertisements and so on. I asked if she could do something nicely typed for me, and she did. And a week later I get a letter from the BBC asking if I'd come to a test in French. A few out of a hundred people were chosen for a second interview in Italian, and after the Italian test I get a wonderful letter saying, "You're hereby offered employment for either three months, or the duration of a national emergency — whichever is the shorter." Because they were of course thinking it was going to be another Munich. 

So I was asked to go to a secret place — Broadcasting House — and was then evacuated to Evesham, where I spent the first two and a half years as a monitor. But I soon created a job for myself there: I found that there was a discrepancy between the German style of BBC broadcasting to the Germans, and the new German-speak (or the Nazi speak). We had too many émigrés who were still speaking Weimar German. So I made this point and produced a daily paper called Germany Day by Day (Deutschland Spiegel), and I quoted all kinds of things for counter-propaganda. 

And then they gave me the job, with 20 people on my staff, of organising three daily papers, in German, French and Italian, three daily selections of propaganda. I came to the notice of Richard Crossman, the head of counter-propaganda, and he gave me an assignment to be the liaison between his people and the propaganda people of the BBC.  

My job introduced me to all kinds of people, including Harold Nicolson, who was a governor of the BBC. And I then got the job, for the last three years of the war, as diplomatic correspondent for Europe. I had to go and see the various Allied governments and get stories out of Occupied Europe, and discuss important issues like post-war aims, frontiers and so on. Therefore I became friendly with Beneš, and had access to de Gaulle (although I mustn't exaggerate, because I saw him about four times during the war).

Part of my remit was to deal with the freedom movements not yet governing — the Free Germans, the Free Austrians, the Free Italians — and I did three or four programmes a day. Included in this was the Zionist Organisation. 

Now having been a Zionist boy at home for three or four years, belonging to its student corps, I was invited to meet Chaim Weizmann, and he took a shine to me. And then in 1945 he was ousted from the leadership of the Zionist Organisation and replaced by David Ben-Gurion, who was an activist and anti-British. 

Weizmann was living at the Dorchester and he befriended me. When Israel was born I was already in publishing, having first started with Contact magazine, and then with Nicolson's firm, and Weizmann invited me to Israel for a fortnight as a guest. While I was there, people came up to me, particularly the Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, and said, "Look, the old man likes you. Ben-Gurion and he don't get on. We need some sort of liaison person as his chef de cabinet but from outside, because we don't want any inside people being involved."  

And what's more, they said, "We know you don't speak any Hebrew, we know you're very young, but you must be primus inter pares" — in other words, being the chef de cabinet of the head of state means that you need to rank at least as an equal, if not a senior, to the head of the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and so on.