Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  The Soviet foreign service had its own pecking order, which resembled that of the US. The top assignments were Germany, nuclear disarmament, the US and Europe. The lowliest were the ‘provincials’ who dealt with Africa and Asia, a destiny consisting of ‘unpleasant climates, low salaries, and lack of consumer goods’ and few opportunities for promotion.8 All employees were subject to constant Communist Party scrutiny of their behaviour, from boozing and philandering to smuggling foreign goods. The KGB vetted those seeking an overseas posting, an opportunity open only to the really reliable, who would come back. Pay was poor. Those serving at the UN – and many did because of the opportunities for espionage in the US – were paid in dollars by the Secretariat, from which all but the official’s lower salary in roubles was deducted by a penny-pinching Moscow. Half of Soviet UN staff were KGB or GRU agents, identifiable by their better suits and shoes.

  The Soviet Union was going out into the wider world, initially concentrating on newly independent India, Indonesia and Egypt. In 1953 Moscow signed a trade deal with Cairo, providing kerosene in return for Egyptian cotton.9 But this was a question not just of improving trade, but of finding a forum where the Soviets could compete with the Americans without triggering a nuclear war. That was why they became so active in the Third World, where the US’s colonialist allies were facing ever more active national liberation movements.10

  The reverberations from Khrushchev’s speech were greatly magnified when Israeli intelligence provided Allen Dulles with a copy of the text and the CIA made sure it became widely disseminated within the Soviet bloc. After workers had rioted in Poznan in June 1956, the Polish Party resolved to recall Władysław Gomułka, who had been purged and jailed in 1948 for ‘Titoist deviationism’ after opposing the collectivization of agriculture. When they also sought to depose Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, the Russified Pole whom Stalin had made Poland’s defence minister, Khrushchev flew to Warsaw with a high-powered delegation including twelve bemedalled generals. The two sides met at Warsaw airport, where Russian fists were waved under Polish noses while Red Army armoured units were motoring towards the frontier. The tanks were halted, and then set in motion again before being halted for a final time.11 They did so because Gomułka pulled off the remarkable feat of persuading the sceptical Russians that his proposed reforms would not undermine either Communism or the unity of the Communist bloc, and that he had no intention of making his country vulnerable to West German ‘Fascist revanchists’.

  In Hungary the challenge to Soviet power was much more overt. From 1953 to 1955 the Marxist intellectual Imre Nagy had promoted a ‘New Course’, declaring that Marxism must evolve or fail. Under Soviet pressure he was deprived of his Party functions and then sacked as chairman of the Council of Ministers on 18 April 1955. Gomułka’s success in Poland led Hungarians to hope that they could bring Nagy back, but pro-Nagy demonstrators tore down a giant statue of Stalin, planting Hungarian flags in the empty boots on the plinth. The CIA, with only one officer in Budapest, was taken totally unawares by these developments, but its Radio Free Europe broadcast arguably irresponsible encouraging noises that may have led Hungarian patriots to overplay their hand.12

  Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov, who arrived in Budapest to monitor developments in conjunction with the Soviet Ambassador Yuri Andropov, initially consented to the appointment of Nagy as prime minister and János Kádár as first secretary of the Communist Party. This occurred even as Soviet tanks and troops entered Budapest to restore order and were met with fierce resistance from mainly young Hungarians, who erected barricades and attacked the tanks with petrol bombs. Hundreds of Hungarian patriots and Soviet soldiers died, and members of the hated secret police (AVH) were hunted down and lynched until Khrushchev ordered the troops to pull out of Budapest and the Presidium issued a declaration including an apology for ‘egregious mistakes and violations of the principle of equality in relations with socialist countries’.

  Nagy was no Gomułka. With an intellectual’s inability to see the wood for the trees, he asked Mikoyan and Suslov to reinforce the Soviet troops but also mooted the idea of Hungary becoming a constitutionally neutral state, like Austria.13 With tragic timing he announced his intention to take Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact on the same day (1 November) that the Presidium published the declaration that might have laid the basis for a phased decompression, not only for Hungary but for all the Soviet satellites. The role of China remains unclear – Mao had advised moderation in Poland, but at first urged strong repression in Hungary. Then he changed his mind, perhaps influenced by the Presidium’s call for greater mutual respect among fraternal socialist nations. Either way, it is noticeable that, whereas once the Soviets had been the ultimate arbiter of Communist orthodoxy, the arrival of several Marxist-Leninist states raised the possibility that they would have minds of their own, shaped by their distinctive national experiences and the personalities of their leaders. This was despite the obvious commonalities in how these states were ruled, with a single party, secret police and concentration-camp apparatus that made a nonsense of the rule of law. Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Broz Tito was the first to stray from the true path in the late 1940s, not just because he failed to mention Stalin’s name in his speeches, but because his machinations in the wider Balkan neighbourhood queered Stalin’s larger geostrategic concerns with the US and its allies. While Yugoslav estrangement was manageable, this would not be true when China broke ranks too.

  The respect Mao had felt for Stalin did not transfer to his Soviet successors, and was further diminished by Khrushchev’s denunciations of ‘the Master’. There were non-ideological tensions also arising from an adverse balance of trade and the Soviet refusal to share nuclear weapons with China. Adding insult to injury, Khrushchev’s decision to create a fleet of nuclear ballistic missile submarines would require Chinese co-operation if they were to operate at will in the Pacific since the Soviet port of Vladivostok iced up in winter and could easily be blockaded.14 Khrushchev rather too easily assumed that Mao would grant him the use of Chinese ports, and permit the Soviets to base on Chinese territory a coastal radio system to communicate with the submarines. Mao saw this as an affront to Chinese sovereignty and resented being treated as a backward, ‘inferior . . . dumb, careless’ nation by his Soviet patrons.15 It was not yet a Sino–Soviet split, but the mood of the relationship portended that way.

  In Europe, unrest in Romania and among students at Moscow State University led Khrushchev to act as the Soviet military was urging him to do. In an operation aptly codenamed Whirlwind the Red Army rolled back into Budapest and crushed the Hungarian Revolution, killing 20,000 people at a loss to themselves of 1,500 troops. A further 20,000 Hungarians were arrested and imprisoned (Nagy was secretly tried and hanged) and 200,000 Hungarians went into exile, an exodus of talent from which the free world benefited enormously. The diplomatic fall-out after Hungary reverted to being a grim Stalinist state was diluted by the simultaneous attack on Egypt by the British, French and Israelis, who Khrushchev believed were acting with US approval. Despite the Soviet Union’s vast investment in espionage, he could not have been more badly informed.

  Munich on the Nile?

  Before the Suez Crisis in 1956 the British were confident that they were still one of the great powers in the world. Afterwards the more realistic of them grasped that this was no longer so. At the eye of the ensuing storm was Anthony Eden, whose mental and physical ruination symbolized the burdens that Britain could no longer bear. The crisis involved oil, complex legal issues about ownership, and the wider strategic architecture of the Middle East.

  The Suez Canal was operated by an Anglo–French company whose commercial concession would expire in 1968. Around 122 million tons of cargo passed along the Canal each year, 40 per cent of it oil, which included two-thirds of Western Europe’s oil supplies; in contrast, only 5 per cent of US oil imports went through Suez. In the early 1950s the Egyptian government received just $3 millio
n of the company’s annual profits of $100 million, a source of burning resentment to the Egyptian ruling elite.16

  Britain controlled an area the size of Wales on either side of the Canal, in which it stationed 80,000 troops, a legacy of its armed intervention against the Egyptian military uprising of Ahmad Urabi in the 1880s.17 Potentially, this force could be used to determine who ruled in Cairo, though by the early 1950s it was just another brick in the global containment of the Soviets. The 1936 treaty governing this last arrangement was renegotiated in 1953–4, with the British agreeing in October 1954 to withdraw their troops within twenty months. By that time it had been decided by defence experts that the Soviets could be contained elsewhere. So when the British and their allies returned in force by air and sea in November 1956, they did so for no strategically valid reason.18

  The ejection of the British from the Canal Zone became an obsession for Egyptian nationalists, particularly among army officers who saw themselves as Urabi’s twentieth-century heirs. From late 1951 there were fitful attacks on British forces, and there was organized unrest among the 60,000-strong Egyptian workforce. What would be the last Wafdist government turned a blind eye to these disturbances, which often involved armed auxiliaries attached to the police.19 A more robust British response became inevitable when the Conservatives were returned to power in October 1951. The party harboured a vociferous Suez Group with whose strident views Churchill was in sympathy even though their leader, Captain Charles Waterhouse, had been a diehard appeaser in the 1930s. At this stage, Foreign Secretary Eden was not of their persuasion. Late one well-watered December night, Churchill rose from his chair to advance with mock menace on Eden: ‘Tell them [the Egyptians] that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should never have emerged.’20

  Yet Churchill’s views varied, depending on whether he was thinking atavistically or strategically. In the first case, he passionately believed that ‘scuttling’ from Egypt and Sudan would be followed by the sudden collapse of colonies in Africa, the British version of the domino theory. But when he thought strategically, as in remarks to three American journalists in January 1952, the Canal was not so vital: ‘Now that we no longer hold India, the Canal means very little to us. Australia? We could go round the Cape. We are holding the Canal not for ourselves but for civilisation. I feel inclined to threaten the Americans that we will leave the Canal if they don’t come in.’21

  In January 1952 British troops with tanks stormed the police post at Ismailia, killing forty-six of the occupants and wounding a further seventy-two. The post had been harbouring nationalist fighters who took pot shots at the British. In response policemen, students and the Cairo mob turned on the symbols of British power and Egyptian collaboration. Shepheard’s Hotel and the Turf Club witnessed scenes of wild violence, while the offices of such firms as BOAC, Barclay’s Bank and travel agent Thomas Cook were ransacked. Muslim Brotherhood supporters destroyed the city’s ten largest cinemas, for there were multiple agendas at play, including those of the tiny Egyptian Communist Party. A total of twenty people were killed, including eleven British subjects, one of whom was hacked to death after he broke his back leaping from a burning building. As the British Ambassador pondered whether to summon British troops from the Zone to restore order in Cairo, neither King Faruq nor the army leadership made any effort to bring ‘Black Saturday’ to a halt. Churchill railed against ‘degraded savages’, but in Washington Acheson sneered at Britain’s ‘splutter of musketry’ at Ismailia.22

  Faruq’s parliamentary monarchy limped on, until the King attempted to purge the self-styled Free Officers who had defeated his placemen in the executive committee of the Army Officers Club in Heliopolis. This seemingly obscure social issue was really about control of the armed forces and it triggered a coup long in the making. Colonel Gamal Nasser played a key part, motoring from base to base in his little black Austin to secure each individual unit’s support. He was also in regular contact with the CIA’s political action officers Kermit Roosevelt and Miles Copeland, who had fastened on him after failing to find a Muslim Billy Graham among Cairo’s mystic Sufi whirling dervishes to replace a king they privately referred to as ‘FF’ or ‘Fat Fucker’. The officers overthrew FF and installed the fifty-four-year-old General Mohammed Naguib in his stead, the front man of this bloodless revolution. Faruq was exiled to a life of limitless debauchery and international celebrity, finally choking to death in a Rome restaurant.23

  Churchill acknowledged the justice in the stated aim of the revolution, which was to close the yawning chasm between the Egyptian elite and a peasant population that struggled to survive on $50 a year, with an average life expectancy of thirty-six. He welcomed the advent of ‘Neg-wib’, scribbling on a memo ‘Down with the Pashas and Up the Fellaheen!’ In fact, real power lay with a thirteen-strong junta that met in Faruq’s boat house at night, which was dominated by Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Nasser. Nasser received CIA political coaching from learning to smile more frequently to designing a more effective security, immigration and customs service. The CIA discovered that in Egypt it was sometimes more ‘socially efficient’ to redirect 500 employees to copying the Koran than to make them redundant, thereby alienating their numerous dependants and kinfolk. Copeland had soup and sandwiches two or three times a week with Nasser, either in the Interior Ministry or at the Revolutionary Command Council HQ in Zamalek.24

  In August 1952 the new regime suppressed a textile-factory strike by executing the leaders. In January 1953 they banned all political parties except their own Liberation Rally mass movement. A year later they proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood on the grounds that it was a political party in disguise. The relationship between Naguib and Nasser was fraught, with Nasser playing Lenin to this ‘Kerensky in a fez’ until he forced his rival into retirement in late March 1954. Since Naguib was an ethnic Sudanese, Nasser became the first native Egyptian to rule Egypt since the time of the ancient pharaohs.25 In October a member of the Muslim Brotherhood tried to assassinate him as he addressed a huge crowd in Alexandria. Eight shots miraculously missed their target. Nasser put Brotherhood leaders on trial and executed them, going on to eliminate sharia courts too. The CIA brought in a New York policeman to improve his security, and even concocted anti-American propaganda for him, to boost his image of incorruptible independence.26

  As we have seen, the British had agreed to withdraw their forces from the Canal Zone, accomplishing this by June 1956. A committed devotee of international institutions since the 1920s, Eden forswore ‘the methods of the last century’ and knew that a compromise was necessary with Egyptian nationalism.27 Churchill’s views oscillated between resistance and compromise, often depending on whether he viewed the Egyptians through the prism of the past, the dimension he increasingly lived in. During the negotiations he dilated on appeasement, saying that ‘he never knew before that Munich was situated on the Nile’.28 Yet reality also impressed itself on him. Britain could not afford the luxury of maintaining 80,000 troops at Suez at an annual cost of £56 million. Respected military advisers advised him that such concentrated bases were a compact target for atomic bombs, and that the garrisons should be dispersed to Cyprus, Gaza, Jordan, Kenya and Libya.

  Churchill hoped the Americans would help him square the circle. Presuming on his wartime relationship with Eisenhower, he tried to inveigle the US into stationing a few troops on the Canal as part of a regional defence organization, to permit continued Egyptian subordination under a new guise. His letters to Eisenhower, Dulles and Under Secretary Bedell ‘Beetle’ Smith conjured up a host of useful demons: the Cairo mob, the ‘dictator’ Naguib, the interloping Russian ‘bear’, the strain of anti-Americanism in the British Labour Party, German Nazis in Egyptian employ (unknown to him, mainly there courtesy of the CIA) and even ‘50,000 British graves’ in the western desert. This emotive and incoherent guff made little impact on Ike, for like
Dulles he was determined not to find himself on the losing side of the argument between ‘old’ imperialism and ‘new’ post-colonial nationalism, least of all in a region whose oil was vital and where America’s only firm friend was Saudi Arabia. The Americans also simply did not understand the importance of the Canal to the British government and to French shareholders, for whom it was like a family heirloom.29 The Americans wanted as many Arab states as possible gathered in a regional alliance to repulse the Soviets, not a scrappy colonial conflict which would divide those states from the West, not least because of the wild card of Israel, which feared such an Arab alliance being armed by the US.30

  In the event, with Eden ill and Churchill felled by a stroke, the negotiations were concluded by Lord ‘Bobbety’ Salisbury, who took over the Foreign Office between late July and early October 1954. He was the author of the phrase ‘too clever by half’ to describe the many people who were not as stupid as he, but he had some help from the CIA station in Cairo, which helped to distinguish between what was posturing and what substance in the Egyptian negotiating stance. The final terms agreed that British forces were to evacuate the Suez bases, although 4,000 technicians would keep the bases in readiness should the troops have to return to defend Egypt and other states of the region from Soviet attack. The new treaty was to run for seven years, until 1961.

  The Suez Crisis is a notorious instance of misfires from bad historical analogies. Fresh from the horror of a world war most believed could have been prevented by confronting Hitler when he bluffed his way into the Rhineland in 1936, men with little or no knowledge of modern Egyptian history accommodated every assertive move by Nasser to a misleading Hitlerian template. This was a bipartisan affair since the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell was as keen on comparisons between Nasser and Hitler as any Tory.31 Nasser’s writings outlining his vision of Egypt’s role in the world were read by the light of Mein Kampf, yet in reality his view that Egypt was simultaneously a Middle Eastern, African and Muslim power was entirely comparable to the belief widespread among the British that their islands’ destiny was linked to the Commonwealth, Europe and the US.32 One who knew him well was the British Ambassador to Cairo, Humphrey Trevelyan, who memorably described him as a charming man of modest tastes, who never lost his temper or raised his voice, but who was also an inveterate conspirator whose suspicions of others were not dependent on the existence of plots.33