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

by Burleigh, Michael

  Different visions of how the strategic architecture of the Middle East should be organized contributed to the general air of tension. Nasser’s desire to lead the Arab world – evidenced day and night by Radio Cairo broadcasts – received a major setback with the signing in February 1955 of the Baghdad Pact, linking Britain to Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan. Only Iraq was an Arab power, one moreover with the most pro-British rulers: Harrow-educated King Faisal and his Prime Minister Nuri as-Said. It seemed as if Britain was cunningly shifting power in the Middle East northwards – to the Northern Tier in fact – and away from a country which saw itself as being the most important in the Afro-Arab world, with a civilization older than that of the Greeks and Romans. Nasser used every means, fair and foul, to ensure that other Arab countries, and especially Jordan and Syria, did not follow the treacherous Iraqis into this alliance.

  It was against this background that Eden, who was touring the Middle East and Asia in his final month as foreign secretary, met Nasser in the British Embassy in Cairo. Eden was dressed to kill; Nasser wore a military tunic. As they were being photographed, Nasser awkwardly clutched Eden’s hand. Having read oriental languages at Oxford, Eden spoke to Nasser in Arabic, inquiring whether this was the first time he had been in the embassy. It was, Nasser replied, his first chance to see where Egypt was governed from. ‘Not governed, advised perhaps,’ replied the silky Foreign Secretary. Over dinner, when Eden tried to explain the benefits of his new northern alliance, Nasser shrewdly replied that it was a flimsy construction involving unpopular rulers, no substitute for defence deeply anchored in the national sentiment of a country’s people. Nasser came away from the meeting with the feeling that Eden was behaving ‘like a prince among beggars’.34

  Although Nasser was careful not to get drawn into a hot war with his Israeli neighbours, the opposite consideration was uppermost for such Cairo-based Palestinian exiles as the student activist Yasser Arafat, an engineering student busily converting himself into Mr Palestine.35 In response to Palestinian raids, launched mainly from Jordan but also from Egyptian-occupied Gaza, the Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion and his Chief of Staff, Moshe Dayan, unleashed the bull-like young airborne commander, Ariel ‘Arik’ Sharon, against both Jordan and Gaza. With his characteristic finesse Sharon botched an attack on Egyptian headquarters in Gaza, killing thirty-six Egyptians at a loss of nine of his own men. Nasser was incensed, but Egypt only had six functioning aircraft and enough artillery shells for a one-hour bombardment. Instead, the Egyptian army combed Gaza’s jails for recruits to Palestinian fedayeen groups to wage a limited-liability proxy war against Israel.

  Nasser hoped to buy weapons from the US, and in principle agreed a deal involving $20 million of arms and a further $40 million in economic aid. But Washington stalled, belatedly realizing that the weapons would be used against the Israelis, or even the British. Nasser made no bones about it in talks with John Foster Dulles in early 1953, when Britain and the US were still trying to interest him in an anti-Soviet Middle East Defence Pact: ‘How can I go to my people and tell them I am disregarding a killer with a pistol sixty miles from me at the Suez Canal to worry about somebody who is holding a knife a thousand miles away?’36

  Although Nasser hated the Egyptian Communist Party and its analogue in the Sudan, which was lobbying for independence, when the deal with the US did not prosper he turned to the Soviets, who saw a chance to neutralize the Baghdad Pact at a stroke and gave Nasser a deal based on barter and a cheap loan. The arms were to come through Prague, the back channel they had used to sell arms to the Israelis. This was astute, and gave Kermit Roosevelt and Miles Copeland just enough wriggle room when they flew to Cairo in September 1955 to minimize the fall-out from the Egyptian–Soviet deal. They persuaded Nasser to emphasize that the arms deal was with ‘the Czechs’, from whom the Israelis had themselves purchased arms, and also drafted a speech including the words ‘reduce the tensions between the Arabs and Israel’, although they could not get him to speak the word ‘peace’. Nasser and the CIA men watched with amusement as the lights came on in the British embassy and Sir Humphrey Trevelyan’s car drove across a Nile bridge for a meeting with Nasser, who told him the lies the CIA men had recommended. They joked about how Sir Humphrey would have reacted had they popped out from behind the arras to inquire, ‘Excuse me, Gamal, but we’re out of soda. Where do you keep the soda?’37

  The US might be able to live with an Egypt armed by the Soviets, but the arrival of medium-range Ilyushin bombers in Cairo created an existential threat to Israel, which began to shop around to upgrade its own military capability. The Americans did not want to get into an arms race by proxy, and the only regional war the British thought they might get involved in was in defence of Jordan against Israeli retaliation for the guerrilla raids launched from Jordanian territory. The French stepped into the breach, cheerfully selling the Israelis Mirage jets and their new AMX-13 light tank. In a parallel development the two countries developed the ‘Super Sherman’, with a French gun turret married to the better-armoured hull of the old American M4 Sherman, the standard tank of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in the 1950s. The Israelis began planning ambitious strikes against Gaza and south through Sinai to Sharm al-Sheikh, where the Egyptians could throttle access through the Red Sea to the developing Israeli port of Eilat.38

  Once the Soviet arms deal was in place, London urged Washington to trump the Soviet gambit by offering, with Britain as a junior partner, to arrange the vast loans needed to finance the High Aswan Dam, a project dear to the hearts of Egypt’s military rulers. The dam would indeed generate hydroelectricity while irrigating around three million more acres of the Nile Valley; but the longer-term environmental impact of interrupting the annual flooding of the Nile has included the death of once-abundant fisheries off the delta and disastrous soil salination. An outline deal emerged in which the initial funding would come from the US aid budget – which required the approval of Congress – to be followed by the main funding from the World Bank. Established at Bretton Woods in 1944, after the Marshall Plan had focused attention on Europe, this specialized in loans to the developing world. Neither side was happy with the arrangement, Nasser because of the historical echoes of foreigners gaining a degree of control over the Egyptian economy, while in the US Southern Congressmen were hostile to it because it would help out a rival cotton-growing nation, as were Cold War hardliners because Nasser had recognized the People’s Republic of China.

  Despite the CIA’s best efforts, Dulles was never enthusiastic about Nasser or the Aswan project, and even imagined an alternative scenario in which it might cripple the Soviets in perpetuity should they be rash enough to get involved. How would they explain giving over $1 billion to Egypt when people in the satellite countries were cold and hungry? In July 1956 he withdrew the offer of loans and the World Bank pulled out of the scheme. Since Nasser had no desire to become dependent on the Soviets, the only alternative appeared to be to nationalize the Suez Canal and use its revenues to service the required loans. That possibility had certainly been at the back of Anthony Eden’s mind when he lobbied for Washington to fund Aswan, but even so Nasser’s quick reaction to the collapse of the US deal came as a surprise.

  On 26 July 1956, addressing 250,000 people in Alexandria and a wider radio audience throughout the Arab world, Nasser used a confidential mode and colloquial Arabic to rehearse the sins of the British since the time of Cromer’s semi-viceregal regime in the 1870s, conflating them with the recent actions of the US and the World Bank. ‘I started to look at Mr [Eugene] Black [President of the World Bank], who was sitting on a chair,’ he said, ‘and I saw him in my imagination as Ferdinand de Lesseps [constructor of the Suez Canal].’ In the rest of his rambling speech, Nasser contrived to mention de Lesseps fourteen times, for the name was a codeword for the seizure of the Canal. The news reached London while Eden was hosting the Iraqi King and his Prime Minister, Nuri es-Said. The latter’s advice to Eden was ‘
Hit Nasser, hit him now, and hit him hard.’ Descending the stairs of 10 Downing Street, Nuri glanced at a portrait of Benjamin Disraeli. ‘That’s the old Jew who got you into all this trouble,’ he remarked, with reference to Disraeli’s 1875 purchase of a controlling interest in the Canal.39

  Eden’s view of Nasser went from patronizing to pathological after he had convinced himself that Nasser was behind the March 1956 Jordanian sacking of Lieutenant-General Sir John Glubb (a.k.a. Glubb Pasha), who had trained and led Jordan’s Arab Legion since 1939. In fact Glubb was well past his sell-by date and had long ago gone native, and Nasser had nothing to do with it. But the Egyptian leader gave that impression to the Foreign Office Minister Selwyn Lloyd, who was dining with him the night of Glubb’s dismissal. Lloyd was infuriated by Nasser’s smirk and by an evening of being treated much as Eden had treated Nasser during their meeting a year earlier. Eden’s mind was clouded by the morphine and benzedrine he took to cope with chronic ill health and weariness and he told a junior Foreign Office official, on an open phone line, ‘I want him [Nasser] murdered.’ SIS turned to the CIA for advice and Dulles instructed his brother Allen to seem to play along, while in Cairo Copeland casually discussed it with the would-be victim:

  Copeland: How about poison? . . . Suppose I just wait until you turn your head and slip a pill into your coffee?

  Nasser: Well, there’s Hassan standing right there. If I didn’t see you Hassan would.

  Copeland: But maybe we could bribe a servant to poison the coffee before bringing it in?

  Nasser: Your New York policeman seems to have thought of that. The coffee would only kill the taster. And when the taster fell over dead, wouldn’t that alert us to your plot?40

  Eden’s belligerent response to Nasser’s actions reflected a deeper anxiety about loss of face and the country’s international standing, as well as guilt about 1930s appeasement. Eden drew a totally false analogy between Nasser’s coup de main and Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, although Nasser was perfectly entitled to nationalize the Canal with due compensation, and the Egyptian takeover was not in breach of the Constantinople Convention governing the free use of the waterway. In addition the supposedly indispensable expertise of the Canal Company’s foreign employees was revealed to be bogus when Egyptian pilots handled a record number of 254 vessels in one week without incident, and insurance premiums for passage of the Canal did not rise.

  In a pattern grimly familiar from the resort to pseudo-legalism by more recent British governments, Lord Chancellor Kilmuir, the senior lawyer in the Eden administration, endorsed its aggressive policy with learned paragraphs, declaring Egypt to be in breach of international law in the teeth of contrary advice from the Attorney-General Reginald Manningham-Buller. Foreign Office lawyers also demurred, but they could be safely ignored, as they were programmed to find legal justification for an institutional predisposition to submissiveness.41 The result was a disjunction between the Foreign Office’s meek attempts to resolve the issue through diplomacy and the very real threat of force. It is instructive to compare the British government’s futile attempts to gain international approval and the elusive moral high ground with the forthright belligerence of the French, where both left and right were one big Suez Group, further infuriated by Egypt’s role in arming rebels in Algeria.42

  On 27 July 1956, the British cabinet invited the Chiefs of Staff to prepare war plans, while a crisis group was formed known as the Egypt Committee. This grouping deserves the epithet ‘war cabinet’ only if one believes that the British were hell bent on war from the start. It was much more anaemic than such a name suggests, and besides, with a combined membership of over fifty, it was too unwieldy for an effective conspiracy. The caution of Britain’s service chiefs obliged Eden to explore diplomatic ways of discrediting Nasser to trigger his downfall. There was also the problem of gaining US support and ‘moral cover’, both of which the French regarded with disdain.

  On 2 September 1956, Eisenhower wrote to Eden explaining: ‘I must tell you frankly that American opinion flatly rejects the thought of using force, particularly when it does not seem that every possible peaceful means of protecting our vital interests has been exhausted without result.’ The smooth operation of the Canal was one thing, Nasser’s pan-Arab pretensions another. US policy was to avoid war by spinning out technical negotiations about the nationalization of the Canal. Based on their comprehensive bugging of the US embassy in Moscow, the Soviets were able to assure Nasser that the US would not take a confrontational stance over Suez.43

  Dulles was sufficiently concerned by the bellicose tone of British ministers, notably that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan, to fly to London. A lawyer of considerable standing himself, he brushed aside Lord Kilmuir’s disingenuous arguments to concentrate on the likely reverberations of armed Anglo–French intervention across the Arab world. Thanks to the likes of Copeland and Roosevelt, who reported to his brother Allen, Dulles knew that there was no plausible successor to Nasser, whose popularity increased with every tweak of the Lion’s tail. He won Eden’s support for a conference of all the major maritime users of the Canal, which would enable it to be passed from the Suez Canal Company to international control, with an equitable proportion of the revenues paid to Egypt. It appears Eden wrongly concluded that Dulles had consented to use of force as a last resort, whereas Dulles merely regarded it as an ulterior threat within the framework of tough negotiations. With a presidential election due in November, there was no way he was going to countenance old-school gunboat diplomacy. Dulles may have said Nasser should ‘disgorge’ his spoils, but he also stressed that Britain ‘should make a genuine and sincere effort to settle the problem and avoid the use of force’.44

  Even as the first of two conferences convened in London from 16 to 23 August, military planning for Operation Musketeer continued. There was, unsurprisingly, disagreement between the French and British staff officers over the extent and focus of the operation. Meanwhile the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies went to Cairo on behalf of the London conference to find out whether Nasser would consent to the establishment of an international users’ association. Nasser’s reaction to the ‘Australian mule’ was unequivocally negative. With the ‘last resort’ looking more likely, the Anglo–French military planners revised Musketeer to a limited attack on Port Said. The aim was to concentrate the issue on the Canal, hoping it would deflate Nasser’s image as the champion of Arab nationalism without being seen to be seeking his overthrow. It was an idiotic premise, made worse by the French insistence that weather considerations made it necessary to mount the operation in October.

  Dulles tried again with a second London conference in September, called the Suez Canal Users’ Association, although Eden was already resigned to referring the issue to the United Nations Security Council. He had put himself in the worst of all positions. If he went for a negotiated settlement, his own fire-eating backbenchers would brand him an appeaser; if he used force against Nasser, the less belligerent Tory ministers and backbenchers would resign, and combine with Labour to defeat him. Meanwhile, on 20 September, Macmillan went to the US on a ten-day trip. His sole concern should have been to ensure that the US would not crack the financial whip, but instead he made the rounds of wartime colleagues in positions of power and gave Eden the entirely false impression that Eisenhower would tacitly back an Anglo–French operation against Egypt.

  This was extremely dishonest. It flew in the face of repeated warnings, including a press conference on 2 October, when Dulles publicly distanced the US from anything reeking of colonialism, an antipathy which Roger Makins, the British Ambassador to Washington, reported rose to the surface within him like lava in a volcano. While perhaps we can acquit Macmillan of consciously pushing Eden into a hopeless situation in order to replace him as prime minister, we know enough about subconscious motivation to cast a very cold eye on his visit to Washington and the advice he gave the m
an he hoped to replace if it all went wrong.45

  In truth Eden needed replacing. He was seriously ill, with recurrent bouts of fever which pushed his temperature to 106, and his attempts to keep the US abreast of every twisting development meant that he was on the telephone throughout the night rather than sleeping. When hope loomed on the horizon, in the form of a Six-Point Agreement devised by foreign ministers Selwyn Lloyd and Mahmoud Fawzi at the UN, Eisenhower, perhaps inadvertently, wrecked it in a speech that made it clear he did not support Britain’s tough negotiating stance, while also refusing to oblige Eden with a public statement about sharing nuclear-missile technology. Any such statement at this stage was certain to be interpreted by Arab minds as indicating that the US did indeed support the British in their confrontation with Nasser.

  The Lloyd–Fawzi formula was doomed to fail anyway, since the French opposed it and Eden could not stomach most of the Canal’s revenues going to Egypt, thereby rewarding Nasser’s aggression. With the French government colluding with the ‘Anglo-Gaullist’ Suez Group of Tories, who blamed him for frittering the Canal Zone away in 1954, Eden opted for a path which would end his career ignominiously and permanently alter Britain’s standing in the world. For at the root of the crisis was a weak man compelled to act strong by those who had not fully grasped that Britain’s post-war position was fundamentally altered. What had been obvious to outside observers now pricked the bubble of delusion of men who still thought they ruled the world.46