A DRAMATIC EVENT in the summer of 1954, thousands of miles from Egypt, very nearly brought the Kremlin’s hopes for a close relationship with Nasser to an abrupt end. The June 1954 overthrow of another young progressive colonel in Central America reinforced Nasser’s reluctance to get too close to the Soviet Union.6 Although it predated Khrushchev’s emergence as a major player in shaping Soviet foreign policy, the case of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala would remain an enduring object lesson in what could go wrong for Moscow whenever it tried to help a third world regime. This sad tale not only complicated Nasser’s relations with the Kremlin before the breakthrough of 1955 but would affect Khrushchev’s future relationships with third world leaders, especially in areas where the U.S. was the predominant power.
When Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala in late 1950, Moscow did not consider him a Communist, though the Foreign Ministry knew that some of his advisers were leading members of the Guatemalan Communist Party.7 The Kremlin had watched with approval as the Guatemalan parliament passed, in 1952, an extensive land reform decree which in the following year permitted Arbenz to nationalize the vast tracts of unused real estate belonging to the two largest firms in Guatemala, the United Fruit Company and the American Railway Company.
Not surprisingly Washington viewed these events differently. Arbenz’s land reform stirred concerns in the United States that he might be a Communist. The Truman administration launched the first covert action designed to overthrow Arbenz, but the job was finished by Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles when they came into office in 1953. Eisenhower shared Dulles’s alarm about the susceptibility of the third world to Communist infiltration. Speaking for the new administration, Dulles explained the nature of this threat to Western security:
On the free world front the colonial and dependent areas are the fields of most drastic contest. Here the policies of the West and those of Soviet imperialism come into headlong collision…. The Soviet leaders, in mapping their strategy for world conquest, hit on nationalism as a device for absorbing the colonial peoples…. In the first phase the Communist agitators are to whip up the nationalist aspirations of the people, so that they will rebel violently against the existing order. Then, before newly won independence can become consolidated and vigorous in its own right, Communists will take over the new government and use the power to “amalgamate” the people into the Soviet orbit.8
The new administration quickly deemed Guatemala a major battleground in this new war. The covert action authorized by President Eisenhower was designed to undermine Arbenz’s support within the Guatemalan Army. Like all armies in the developing world, it was poorly equipped, and its leaders, though some had served with Arbenz for some time, judged his commitment to the army as an institution in modern Guatemala in terms of how well he could equip it. Washington imposed as tight an arms embargo as possible on the country. Timed to coincide with an extensive propaganda campaign that played on military fears of Communist influence, the operation was intended to culminate in a series of small military skirmishes led by counterrevolutionaries that would spark a sympathetic military coup.9
Faced with this embargo and aware of the propaganda campaign, Arbenz sought weapons from the Soviet bloc. In the spring of 1954 the Kremlin arranged for Czech weapons to be carried on a Swedish ship, the Alfhelm. Although measures were taken to hide the ship’s destination from even the captain until he had reached the Caribbean, there was not much that was covert about the Soviet operation. The Guatemalans had to pay for the weapons themselves and the $4.9 million transaction was carried by commercial wire through the Union Bank of Switzerland and Stabank, Prague to the Czech company Investa.10
As the Kremlin watched, this arms deal set in motion a series of events that were tragic for Arbenz and Guatemala. The CIA easily picked up news of the commercial transaction and, after mistakenly following a West German freighter, determined the arms were on the Alfhelm.11 At a press conference on May 25, 1954, Foster Dulles denounced the shipment as dramatic evidence of the international Communist conspiracy. The Alfhelm quickly became a powerful symbol that created enormous support in Washington to do something about Soviet machinations in the third world. “[T]his cargo of arms is like an atomic bomb planted in the rear of our backyard,” said the Speaker of the House of Representatives, John McCormack. “The threat of Communist imperialism,” said the Washington Post, “is no longer academic, it has arrived.”12
What was a black eye for the Kremlin turned out to be a terminal condition for the Arbenz regime. The docking of the Alfhelm accelerated CIA planning for an attack. On June 18, 1954, a small rebel force invaded a few miles into the country. This force was not designed to overthrow Arbenz—the CIA case officer for the operation called it “extremely small and ill-trained”—and it didn’t.13 What it was supposed to do was to magnify the anxiety fostered by the arrival of the Alfhelm and create a sense of increasing disorder that would push the Guatemalan Army to get rid of Arbenz. This it did. Fence-sitters in the Guatemalan Army, few of whom had not been told of the secret purchase from the East, had already started viewing Arbenz as Moscow’s puppet. The discovery of the Alfhelm helped the United States rally support for a strong response from members of the Organization of American States (OAS), which in 1950 had gone on record opposing the spread of communism or Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere.14
Having provided their enemies with so much fodder, the Soviets found they could do nothing else for their friends. No Soviet service, including the KGB, had a direct line to Guatemala City.15 The Soviet Navy was incapable of projecting force into the Caribbean, and the Soviet Union lacked any nearby military bases that could sponsor a show of force of any kind.
On June 23, 1954, the Guatemalans requested assistance from the Soviet Union. At the very least they wanted Soviet diplomats to use the UN Security Council to stop the fighting. The next day Molotov instructed the Soviet delegation at the United Nations to express Moscow’s “deepest sympathies” for the Guatemalan people and to push for Security Council action.16 Meanwhile the situation went from bad to worse in the country. On June 25 the Guatemalan foreign minister cabled the Kremlin that jets piloted by rebels had begun bombing Guatemalan cities from bases in Honduras.17 This disturbing message was distributed to Khrushchev and the other members of the Presidium, who decided to publish the sad correspondence with Arbenz’s foreign minister for want of anything better to do for the dying regime.
As the Presidium was deciding it could do little to help the Guatemalan government, Arbenz was telling his cabinet and the leaders of his movement that the army was in revolt. Two days later Arbenz was overthrown by a military that both feared Moscow’s presumed influence and wished to avoid Washington’s expected retribution.
FOR SIX MONTHS after the fall of Arbenz, Nasser avoided the subject of Soviet military assistance. As if the events in Guatemala had not been enough of a reason for caution, the conclusion of the long-awaited military agreement with the British that same summer underscored the folly of risking Western displeasure, at least in the short term. The British agreed to relinquish their military base in the town of Suez at the southern end of the Suez Canal by mid-1956. Nasser did not want to give the British any reason in the next two years to break that agreement and keep their soldiers in Egyptian territory.
Nasser’s abstinence did not last long. Two events in February 1955 so shook his confidence about Egypt’s destiny in the region that he decided that he could not wait until 1956 to create a modern Egyptian military. That month the British government played midwife to a defense arrangement signed between Iraq and Turkey. Egypt interpreted the pact as both a British effort to retain influence in the region after the Suez base agreement and as an Iraqi bid for dominance. In the modern era Egypt and Iraq had continued the centuries-long rivalry between the civilizations along the Nile and the Euphrates, often by playing one foreign empire off another in an attempt at regional dominance. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said lacked Nasser’s
charisma but not his regional ambitions. A close ally of Great Britain’s and friendly toward the United States, Nuri saw the agreement with Turkey as the basis of a wider alliance that would link all pro-Western Arab regimes under Iraqi leadership in the Middle East, precisely what the Kremlin feared.
The British had tried to involve the Egyptians. Before the Turks and Iraq had signed their agreement, British Prime Minister Eden visited Nasser in Cairo in February 1955 in an effort to convince the Egyptian leader to join an anti-Soviet military pact. Nasser, who was too skeptical of British aims to join, told him that if the Soviet Union attacked Egypt, he would request Western assistance, and if the West attacked Egypt, he would turn east for help.
The second event involved Israel. On February 28, 1955, four days after the Turks and the Iraqis signed their agreement in Baghdad, paratroops under the command of a young officer named Ariel Sharon infiltrated Egyptian military positions in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli mission was to damage the bases from which Palestinian commandoes, the so-called fedayeen, were believed to be operating into Israel.18 The successful attack on Egyptian territory not only humiliated Nasser but played upon his deep suspicion that Israel was an agent of British imperialism. Despite the history of the Jewish struggle with the British authorities in Palestine, Nasser stubbornly believed in the existence of ongoing secret coordination between the British and Israeli governments and he convinced himself that London had ordered the Israelis to attack Gaza. “The western powers are continually using Israel to organize all kinds of provocations against us,” Nasser later confided to Nikita Khrushchev. In his eyes, the Gaza attack was payback for his refusal to join the Turkish-Iraqi alliance, the so-called Baghdad Pact.19
In Moscow only one event was required in February 1955 to rekindle interest in closer relations with Egypt. The creation of the Baghdad Pact symbolized a tightening of the vise established by the West and its allies all along the periphery of the Soviet Union. Fearing that Turkey and Iraq would soon be joined in the alliance by Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, and Libya, thus transforming it into a region-wide anti-Soviet bloc, Moscow saw a new mutuality of interests with Arab nationalists, especially Nasser. His dreams of Arab unity were incompatible with the formation of a regional bloc centered on Turkey and Iraq.
To signal their willingness to establish closer relations, the Soviets made a sudden 180-degree change in their policy toward Egypt’s neighbor the Sudan. In 1954 Soviet propaganda and the Sudanese Communists had argued against the union of Sudan and Egypt, which Moscow knew was one of Nasser’s goals. In February 1955, Moscow began publicly supporting the unity of the Nile Valley.20
KHRUSHCHEV’S PERSONAL ROLE in this shift in policy toward the Sudan is unknown. In February he was very busy with the formal removal of Georgi Malenkov as Soviet premier. But there is evidence that he soon took a special interest in Nasser. Khrushchev was encouraged when, as hoped, Nasser responded to the policy change by initiating discussions about buying Soviet weapons. But when the Kremlin answered that it could start serious negotiations immediately, Nasser again became elusive. And by May 1955 the news from Cairo was discouraging for Khrushchev. In conversations at the Soviet Embassy, Nasser was alluding to the “risks” involved in acquiring Soviet weapons, a subtle reference to the calamity in Guatemala. Moreover, having just returned from the inaugural conference of the nonaligned movement in Bandung, Indonesia, Nasser was not at all subtle in assuring the Kremlin that he had no intention of joining the Soviet bloc. He told Soviet Ambassador Daniel Solod that he was beginning to fear that strengthening economic and cultural ties between Egypt and the Soviet Union would lead to an increase in the activity of the Egyptian Communist Party, something he considered against the interests of his Revolution. In light of the Communists’ anti-Nasser propaganda, which he assumed was directed from Moscow, the Egyptian leader explained to Solod that he had real doubts that the Kremlin truly supported his regime.21
Somewhat exasperated, Khrushchev asked Tito during his trip to Yugoslavia in June for his opinion of the Egyptian. Tito advised him to be patient. “Nasser is well disposed toward the USSR,” the Yugoslav replied.22
Khrushchev understood that Moscow’s appeal to Nasser, if successful, would have to be based on the two leaders’ shared interest in reducing Western imperial power in the Middle East. Streams of information from the Soviet Embassy in Cairo and via Moscow’s official TASS news agency and the KGB detailed Nasser’s staunch anticommunism and his preference for U.S. military assistance.23 Khrushchev was nevertheless optimistic that the two countries and even the two leaders could develop a tight bond. Nasser, however, was stalling because he did not share Khrushchev’s belief that close relations between Cairo and Moscow were inevitable. The events in Baghdad and the Gaza Strip served as warnings that Egypt needed to be stronger; but they were not arguments necessarily in favor of looking East for help. Nasser still preferred U.S. military assistance, if he could find away to convince the Americans to circumvent the Tripartite Declaration. The Americans had already been generous with Egypt. In November 1954, Washington had provided Cairo with forty million dollars in economic aid.24
In June 1955 the Egyptian leader decided that while keeping the Soviets at bay, he should start playing upon U.S. fears of Soviet influence in the Middle East to force the Eisenhower administration to reconsider its policy on military assistance.
“The Russians have offered me all that we need in arms,” Nasser told U.S. Ambassador Henry Byroade on June 9. To add an edge to his little deception—for Moscow had not gotten down to any details with Nasser about a military package—Nasser advised the U.S. ambassador that he had a military mission that was poised to go to Moscow in a week.25 When he still didn’t get a quick answer from the Americans, Nasser chose a dramatic gesture to get President Eisenhower’s attention. On June 16 he arrested the leaders of the Egyptian Communist Party and then went back to the U.S. ambassador.26
Byroade pushed Washington to give Nasser a reason to believe the United States would sell him weapons. The challenge for Washington was to establish a balance between this policy of cultivating Nasser and the need not to alienate the Israelis and the British. Domestic politics, even more imperatively than Israel’s evidently pro-Western orientation, argued for not ignoring Israel. Egypt was an equally sensitive point with the British, who had effectively exercised a veto on U.S. aid to Nasser during the negotiations of the June 1954 Suez base agreement.27 The product of this dilemma was the Anglo-American Alpha program, an initiative designed to seek a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict through mutual border concessions, massive regional development projects, and economic assistance to both sides.28 Although Washington and London had been talking about the Alpha program since January 1955, it had yet to be launched.29
The day after Nasser jailed the Egyptian Communist leaders, Washington informed Egypt that it was welcome to purchase arms and that its requests would be judged within the framework of the principles of the Tripartite Declaration. If Egyptian requests were “reasonable,” Nasser could expect a positive response from Washington.30
Nasser submitted a wish list to the Americans on June 30. In all he wanted twenty-seven million dollars’ worth of equipment. At the heart of the request were 120 M4 medium tanks, 15 M24 flamethrower tanks, and 26 B-26 jet aircraft. The list was delivered by Nasser’s chief of staff, Ali Sabri.31 Nasser had yet to send a similar list to the Soviets.
The United States responded rapidly to this request. Nasser had firm allies within the administration, including the president. When Eisenhower saw the list of what Egypt wanted, he thought it reasonable. Dulles did not oppose the sale. In fact these events compelled him to work on a general statement of U.S. policy in the region. The administration had promised this statement in 1953 but had decided to wait out the midterm congressional elections in 1954 before approaching such a sensitive political matter.
The problem that the drafters of this general statement faced was that Egypt’s long-range
goals in the Middle East were incompatible with the realities of the Middle East or U.S. policy there. First, Nasser wanted material compensation for the Palestinian refugees. He did not insist that these refugees had the right to return to pre-1948 Palestine, but he believed they deserved a better life in whatever Arab country in which they had resettled. Nasser’s other goal, however, would never be acceptable. As the Egyptian foreign minister explained to John Foster Dulles, “If I wish to go by car from Egypt to Damascus, I would have to have to obtain the permission of Mr. Sharett [the Israeli prime minister].” Egypt wanted the Negev desert to be ceded by Israel to Jordan, “including Beersheba,” a town that had been included in the original British plan for state of Israel.32 No Israeli or American Jew would permit that to happen peacefully.
A still greater problem was that Egypt couldn’t really afford to pay for these weapons. At the very least Nasser would need them to be given at a discount. The Egyptian government was hemorrhaging foreign reserves, at the rate of about two million dollars per month. Cairo had only about twenty-four million dollars in hard currency left. In early August, a month after his representative sent the wish list, Nasser himself appeared at the U.S. Embassy to ask for American financial assistance in buying the weapons.
Byroade didn’t quite understand the significance of this conversation. In contrast with Washington’s reaction to Nasser’s June wish list, the administration was slow to respond to his new request. The delay would have severe consequences.
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