13 Jews were killed, including the head of the Agency, Leib Jaffe, 71, who had attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1898.
A Christian Arab employee of the US Consulate took the car, with the US flag, into the compound and the Jewish Agency guards trusted him.
Arab snipers shot at rescue workers from across an Arab cemetery nearby.
A couple of days later, the Arab Higher Committee published a "Black Paper" listing the imagined crimes of the Jewish Agency and named major Zionist leaders as targets, comparing them to the Nazis.