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The secrets of the spies’ favourite hotel

American Colony Hotel is a luxury hotel located in a historic building in Jerusalem - Richard T. Nowitz
American Colony Hotel is a luxury hotel located in a historic building in Jerusalem - Richard T. Nowitz

In a scrap of land pockmarked by a century of near-constant conflict, home to three global faiths and claimed by two peoples, few can agree about anything. Yet the American Colony Hotel, located just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s old city, is by common consent a glorious haven from the Middle East’s most fractious disputes.

Perhaps that’s why it has long attracted those who shape such disputes: T.E. Lawrence and Gen Edmund Allenby from the days of the British Mandate for Palestine; an ever-growing diplomatic and aid agency corps after the birth of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent attempts to snuff out the nascent state.

It was at the Colony (room 16, legend has it) that the architects of the so-near-and-yet-so-far 1993 Oslo Accords met to get talks off the ground when it seemed Israelis and Palestinians could never shake hands on anything. And it was where Tony Blair, never lacking self-belief, spent his first months as a peace envoy, eyeing success where so many others had failed. After eight years in the job, he finally called it quits in 2015.

For more than a century, the American Colony Hotel has been home to diplomats, politicians, authors, romantics and spies. Around it buzzed a constantly revolving cast of the great and the good. Winston Churchill, Graham Greene, Sir John Gielgud, John Le Carré, Alec Guinness, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, as well as Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif – looking to pick up tips on the real Lawrence of Arabia from one ancient scion of the Colony’s founding family, who lived at the hotel and remembered correcting Lawrence’s Arabic grammar.

Today, however, members of that founding family have fallen out among themselves. Having survived Middle Eastern wars in 1917, 1948, 1967 and 1973 and two armed uprisings, the family behind the hotel has now ended up fighting a furious internecine battle in London’s courts.

Winston Churchill - Topical Press Agency/Getty Images
Winston Churchill - Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

While their forebears managed to maintain peace in a region with constant casus belli, contemporary combatants Judith Andersson and her sister-in-law Diane Ward – both part-owners of the Colony – have spent tens of thousands of pounds in a legal wrangle over a suitcase of family photographs that the court has been told have “no monetary value”.

Even the presiding judge, Nigel Gerald, has described the situation as “completely mad”.

Perhaps they should have taken a lesson from the Colony itself, a glorious honey-hued mansion built with high, vaulted ceilings in the Ottoman style by a man named Khaldi in the mid-1800s. Splitting its rooms between his four wives, he knew a thing or two about dividing up property of sentimental value.

Yet despite his serial weddings, he never had an heir, and so the building passed instead to more than 100 distant relatives, who rented it to the Spafford family, Americans who arrived in the late 19th century – a cross between pioneers and pilgrims. As Khaldi’s relatives died off, the Spaffords acquired ever more shares in the building. Eventually, in the 1890s, Anna Spafford, having lost her husband but acquired a kibbutz-like community of hangers-on, became sole owner.

The process took decades, but finally the American Colony was born. By the early 20th century it had become a hotel, formalising its reputation as a sanctuary from the dust, heat and fighting.

No longer. It is the children of Anna Spafford’s granddaughter, Frieda, who have gone to war today over the photographs, with Andersson claiming that Ward has failed to hand them over as agreed since her husband died.

The American Colony Hotel as it was in 1950 - Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The American Colony Hotel as it was in 1950 - Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Ward denies such an agreement existed between the siblings and claims she tried to settle the row by offering to provide copies or originals of items. Andersson’s lawyer insists that, far from being worthless, the photos are an “invaluable repository of her family history”, with “potential historic interest, given the family links to the British presence in Israel”.

It’s certainly true that the Colony has drifted repeatedly on to the stage of international affairs. When Allenby massed his men and artillery on the surrounding hills in December 1917, poised to capture Jerusalem, it was Anna Spafford who pressed a bedsheet into the arms of the Ottoman mayor to wave as a flag of surrender – an item now in the Imperial War Museum.

And during the Six-Day War in June 1967, the Spaffords recalled that there was “a Jordanian tank in our driveway and the Israelis threw a hand grenade into the bar because they claimed that there was a sniper hiding there.

“After the fighting stopped, we began looking over the damage and found an unexploded rocket and a dead Jordanian soldier in the driveway. The main building was very badly hit and we took five mortar rounds in the courtyard.”

For generations of foreign correspondents, though, the hotel was a place to retreat to after a day reporting on war, rather than a battlefield itself. Often pouring through the door into its garden, certain of finding a friendly face looking up from a bougainvillaea-shaded table.

 Tony Blair walks through the courtyard in the American Colony Hotel - Debbie Hill
Tony Blair walks through the courtyard in the American Colony Hotel - Debbie Hill

In the days when I lived in Jerusalem, the Colony was quite frankly intoxicating, and not purely because of the martinis mixed by Ibrahim, lord of the bar. The senses were fired by the scent of the blooms, the sound of the piano mixing periodically with the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer at the mosque next door, and the sight of old pals.

We weren’t just there for the booze. The Colony was perched on the fault line of Jerusalem’s Israeli west and Palestinian east, and as such was perfectly placed to cover a conflict defined by disputes over land. It became a place for secret hook-ups, for espionage, and a popular location for meeting Palestinian politicians. Its very address, Nablus Road, names the West Bank town where many a day’s reporting would be spent.

The fresh lemonade was served in glass made in Hebron, home to the tombs of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – bronze-age Biblical figures whose holy site fired very real present-day fighting.

There was always excited chatter around those garden tables, or around the little swimming pool, as we gathered self-importantly to put the world to rights. The more intense the fighting outside – notably during the very darkest days of the second intifada in the early days of this century, with its brutal Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli military assaults – the harder the partying inside. The frontline was minutes – and a world – away.

Naturally, there was plenty of bad behaviour. Rumours of affairs and betrayals – personal and professional – ricocheted endlessly around the Colony’s courtyard. How could it have been otherwise with an adrenalin- and vodka-fuelled coterie of expats?

Your humble correspondent made few excuses and often stayed on to enjoy the gossip late into the evening, guided by those two greats of the game: Patrick Bishop (formerly of this paper) and the wonderful and sadly missed Marie Colvin. Colvin continued to hold court even after a rocket-propelled grenade cost her the sight in one eye while she was covering another war, in Sri Lanka.

Thereafter, smiling and smoking and calling Ibrahim for another martini, she liked to sport a diamond-glinting eye patch, a reminder – like the Colony itself – of the glamour and the grisly cost of war.