Suez 1956, page 12
Still in Alexandria, Farouk held on to a fading hope that America or Britain would come to his aid. But his appeals went unanswered. Having no faith in the ability of Farouk to hold together a pro-Western or even a benevolently neutral administration, American diplomacy had long since homed in on the Free Officers as the best hope for productive partnership. Likewise, Britain was not so enamoured with royalty as to believe that Farouk, once he was seen to be on the losing side, was worth a fight.
Early on the morning of 26 July, tanks surrounded the Ras al-Tin Palace. After the royal guards had put up a token resistance, access was gained to Farouk, who was presented with an act of abdication in favour of his infant son, Ahmen Fuad. As he pondered the document, memories must have stirred of an encounter, ten years earlier, when a British ambassador had forced him to surrender his prerogative. Then he had lost a prime minister; now it was his throne that he was signing away.
That same evening, Farouk with his young queen, Narriman, sailed for Naples. That he escaped a trial for his life was largely thanks to Nasser, now interior minister, who argued that a court hearing would be costly and time consuming, diverting attention from more pressing matters. ‘Let us spare Farouk and send him into exile. History will sentence him to death.’
The pretence of an Egyptian monarchy was kept up for less than a year. In that time, the military junta strengthened its political base by breaking up and redistributing the landed estates so that no holding was more than 200 acres. The measure was less radical than it first appeared. The wealthy landowners were brought to heel but few of the fellahin benefited. Moreover, a small step towards equality did not imply support for democracy. Along with the clear-out of Farouk’s entourage, political parties were abolished and their funds confiscated. Power was concentrated on a revolutionary command council of twelve young officers led by Neguib as president and prime minister. The more perceptive observers spotted Nasser as the rising star; he soon consolidated his position by becoming deputy prime minister as well as minister of the interior. In mid-June 1953, Ahmed Fuad II was formally deposed. Farouk and Narriman remained in the public eye with the publication of their much-embroidered memoirs, culminating in Narriman’s announcement that Farouk, the ex-monarch, was about to become an ex-husband. She demanded alimony of £5,000 a month.
Farouk’s possessions were put up for sale by the army, which staged a news conference to announce what one newspaper described as ‘the world’s biggest and most expensive accumulation of junk’.
The reporters toured through the palace and stared at the hoard. In a gaming room a cabinet was full of roulette wheels, dice, and packs of cards with Esquire-type girls on the back. On the keyboard hung keys to apartments in Cairo, each clearly labelled with the girl’s name. In the vaults six safes contained medals, coins and stamps. On his study desk, beside the nude statuettes, lay boxes of tricks, including pocket radiation counters inscribed ‘Measure Nuclear Energy Yourself’ and a penknife bristling with all manner of blades. In his bedroom were glamour girl photographs, Kodachrome nudes with pocket viewers, pictures of Narriman and a pile ofUS comics. There were six telephones and two radios beside the bed. In the dressing-room were one hundred suits, fifty walking sticks, seventy-five pairs of binoculars, a thousand ties, some with the initial F five inches high. Between the first and second floors there was a windowless room, a sort of treasury with boxes of rubies, diamonds, emerald, and platinum brooches.25
So ended the dynasty of Muhammad Ali and the world’s oldest kingdom.
8
There was a new man in the White House. Lately wartime supreme commander of allied forces in Europe and subsequently head of NATO, Dwight Eisenhower had a chest full of ribbons to show that he could hold his nerve in a crisis. But though an army man through and through, he was not one to reach for his gun in international disputes, at least not until all else had been tried. Having been persuaded by first-hand experience of the ‘cruelty, wastefulness and stupidity of war’,1 he started with the assumption that any problem could be solved by rational discussion. Even the confrontation with Soviet or Chinese expansionism ‘was a problem to be managed, not an all-consuming crusade against the forces of evil’.2
It was this conviction which inspired his vote-winning pledge to fly to Korea to ‘bring to an early and honourable end’ a war in which 34,000 Americans had died holding the line against communism. It was largely Eisenhower’s initiative which brought about a ceasefire in July 1953. But Korea was just one small segment of the cold war. Keen as Americans were to put world affairs aside to concentrate on enjoying a standard of living that Europeans could barely imagine, there was an underlying anxiety that all would be lost if the Soviet Union and China ever suspected that America was weakening in its resolve. Eisenhower knew that the anxiety was excessive, that sabre-rattling by the Marxist powers was more a demonstration of their own insecurity and a defiance of their internal problems than a real threat to the West. But he also acknowledged that keeping up the pressure was the best insurance against the temptation of potential enemies to take dangerous risks.
To settle fears and satisfy aspirations, a twin policy evolved. The first part, a threat of massive retaliation if the Soviets or Chinese mounted a pre-emptive strike, was the brainchild of Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. A complex and controversial figure in American politics, Dulles was less of a warmonger than his enemies – and allies – made him out to be. His policy of threatened retaliation was based on the not unreasonable assumption that a deterrent – as from March 1954, it was an H-bomb 750 times more powerful than the A-bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima – was only effective in so far as everyone could be made to believe that in certain circumstances America would use it. To achieve this Dulles expressed himself bluntly, almost brutally. There can be no doubt that he set nerves jangling in the Kremlin. The trouble was, he also put the fear of God into his friends, as in January 1956, when he was quoted by Life magazine as saying that the ‘art of diplomacy is to bring nations to the brink of war’. A further observation that this had happened three times during his tenure as Secretary of State prompted the quip ‘three brinks and he’s brunk’.
Though from a political family (his uncle had been secretary of state) and a long-standing Republican spokesman for foreign affairs (Eisenhower said of his colleague that he had been in training for his job all his life), Dulles was not a natural communicator. Given to ‘moralistic flourishes more appropriate to church councils than to international conferences,’3 his solemn monotone wearied and irritated his listeners. Another popular wisecrack attached to his name said it all: ‘Dull, Duller, Dulles’.
Eisenhower, who was easily bored, acknowledged the drawback to regular meetings with Dulles but had his own way of coping. ‘. . . the restless rhythm of the pencil tapping his knee . . . the slow glaze across the blue eyes, signalling the end of all mental contact . . . finally, the patient fixing of the eyes on the most distant corner of the ceiling, there to rest till the end of the Dulles dissertation’.4
Churchill and Eden were less indulgent. Both underestimated Eisenhower, who, despite his laid-back image, was a man ‘of keen political intelligence and penetration, particularly when it came to foreign affairs’,5 and neither of them could stand Dulles. His pomposities were characterised by the prime minister as a compulsion to ‘make a speech every day, hold a press conference every other day and preach on Sunday’, while Eden described his counterpart as ‘the woolliest type of pontificating American’.6 The criticism must be offset by the tendency of the British leaders, given half a chance, to dominate a conversation. Their dislike of Dulles was as much as anything an aversion to being upstaged by New World politicians, still seen in Europe as apprentices in the art of diplomacy.
For his part, Dulles had an innate distrust of British foreign policy, which he saw as motivated almost entirely by a hopeless and dangerous desire to interfere in matters that were beyond the country’s capacity to control. Many American opinion leaders agreed with him. The consensus on both sides of the Atlantic, however, held that Dulles could be difficult and there was surprise that the cautious, pragmatic Eisenhower was able to rub along with a secretary of state who had a talent for making enemies and in his incautious moments seemed to be relishing the onset of a Third World War.
In fact, they made a good team. While superficially there was a contradiction between Eisenhower’s pursuit of peace and the hawk-like sentiments emerging from the Pentagon, the two policies worked well in tandem. It was only by deploying atomic weaponry to strongest effect, reasoned the president, that he had any chance of reducing the dependence on conventional forces and thus of cutting a defence budget that had ballooned from $13.1 billion in 1950 to $50.4 billion by 1953.
Parallel thoughts were beginning to take hold in the British defence establishment. Shortly before the upheaval in Egypt that brought the Free Officers to power, the chiefs of staff (COS) accepted, if reluctantly, a measure of economic common sense. Responding to ever more pressing demands from the Treasury to behave less as if the entire earning power of the country was owed to the armed services, a strategy was advanced for shifting the emphasis from a build-up of conventional forces to relying more on American atomic power to check the ‘implacable and unlimited aims of Soviet Russia’.
The major cuts were reserved for NATO, with the other European powers accepting, albeit reluctantly, an increased share of defence costs. As for the Middle East, ‘we have concluded that, given a settlement in Egypt, it should be possible to reduce the United Kingdom peace-time garrison to about one division and approximately 160 aircraft’.7 In other words, a 50 per cent cut. The reduced garrison would be spread across Cyprus, Malta and Libya, with air bases in Iraq and Jordan.
In the autumn of 1952, the British joint forces headquarters was moved from Suez to Cyprus. But Egypt was said to remain critical as part of a Middle East Defence Organisation, even if the base there was under Egyptian command. ‘The establishment of new treaty relations with Egypt on a basis which will fulfil these requirements should remain a major objective of British policy.’8 Though clearly reluctant to backtrack on earlier declarations that any reduction in the British presence in the Middle East would be fatal, the COS took comfort in the recent entry of Turkey into NATO and the expectation that the USA could be persuaded to participate in a Middle East Defence Organisation.
It was a vain hope. A fundamental misunderstanding of American policy in the Middle East led Britain to great expectations and even greater disappointments. That America was increasingly active in the region was plain for all to see – starting and, some might say, ending with oil. Aramco was the dominant economic force in Saudi Arabia (where the USA maintained an air base at Dhahran), while Mobil and Exxon were increasingly active in Iraq, and Gulf concentrated on raising production in Kuwait. Washington’s preferential treatment for the oil companies guaranteed protection for the higher-cost wells in the States at the same time as huge profits were made from the cheap crude of the Middle East, most of which was refined and sold in western Europe via the Suez Canal. In this way the economic and military needs of the European allies were satisfied with no great inconvenience to the USA. It was a small but significant sign of the times that the Suez Canal Company now had an American director on its board.
The fifty-fifty split on oil revenues agreed by Aramco in Saudi Arabia seemed to be a fair deal – it was certainly fairer than anything on offer from the British oil companies – but there was more to it than a simple commercial arrangement. The four companies that owned Aramco went along with the spirit of generosity only as long as the dues paid to the Saudi Arabian royals were deductible against business taxes in the States. Thus, while King Ibn Saud received some $500 million a year, the American treasury lost the same amount.9 The point of the exercise was to subsidise the Saudi Arabian regime – and to keep the oil flowing – without giving undue offence to the supporters of Israel.
From Britain’s viewpoint, the Saudi deal had the unfortunate effect of encouraging its own client Arab states to demand better terms. But a more serious point at issue was the Saudi tendency to devote a large part of its economic windfall to supporting nationalist movements working against British interests. With the military coup in Egypt, the Free Officers became the latest recipients of Saudi patronage. Frustratingly for Britain, this seemed not to trouble Washington as long as its culpability was kept under the radar of publicity.
Another British grievance was the failure of America to side with Britain on a long-standing border dispute with Saudi Arabia. This centred on Buraimi, a tiny oasis which Britain argued came within the jurisdiction of Abu Dhabi, a sheikhdom under British protection. The value of a dot in the desert was, of course, the prospect of it yielding large quantities of oil. Saudi interest was taken for granted, but what was galling for Britain was the haste with which Aramco caught on to the chance of added profit and, even worse, the enthusiasm of the CIA, with Kim Roosevelt in the lead, to facilitate what looked very much like a joint Saudi–American bid to gain sovereignty over Buraimi, to the extent of sending in troops transported in Aramco trucks. As Evelyn Shuckburgh, in charge of Middle Eastern affairs at the FO, noted petulantly, ‘The fact is that the American oil men have gone into Saudi Arabia with this vast enterprise which utterly submerged the old economy of the country, without assuming any responsibility for the political effects.’10 The dispute rolled on until 1955 with an attempt at arbitration breaking down amid accusations of Saudi bribery that amounted to buying off everybody who lived within striking distance of the disputed village while handing out new rifles to those who promised to use them against the British.11 A more fruitful Anglo-American relationship was born of the crisis in Iran, where a populist leader, Dr Mohammed Mussadiq and his nationalist party, had gained power on an anti-British ticket, pledging to take control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). Though at the time Mussadiq was portrayed in the British press as an unprincipled buccaneer, the Iranians had cause for complaint. While it was true that in addition to paying a large labour force above-average wages the AIOC built schools and hospitals and was generally seen as a model employer, there was something odd in a division of oil revenues that gave Iran a mere £24 million in assured royalties, a figure that was just 1 million more than the British tax authorities skimmed off the company’s profits. Put another way, Anglo-Iranian had paid just £122 million in royalties on oil worth £1,200 million extracted since 1913.12
Mussadiq was a jumble of contradictions. As one who liked to bill himself as a man of the people, he was in fact a wealthy landowner. A democrat who successfully opposed the absolute rule of the Shah, he was not above fixing elections when it looked as if the result would go against him. Western-educated and surrounded by those of like background, he could work himself into a frenzy in his condemnation of foreign intervention. Intelligent and well possessed of political skills, he was also the buffoon of popular Western imagery, who was liable to collapse in tears, overwhelmed by the power of his own oratory. Seventy-one when he became prime minister in 1951, he played the role of the fragile invalid, yet he lived to be eighty-seven.
With such a complex and apparently vulnerable character it is easy to see how his opponents underrated him. Easy too to understand how it came as a shock to the British government when, in short measure, he succeeded in reducing the Shah to little more than a figurehead. But the heaviest blow to British prestige came in May 1951 when Mussadiq carried out his threat to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, reducing at a stroke the British share of Middle East oil production from 53 to 24 per cent13 and depriving his old enemy of the refinery at Abadan, an offshore island at the head of the Persian Gulf. The largest installation of its kind, it had cost £100 million to build and was Britain’s single biggest overseas asset.
At America’s urging, the Attlee government rejected armed intervention in favour of a boycott, supported by the American oil companies, which shut off Iranian oil from the world market. The 4,500 British technicians who ran the oilfields and the Abadan refinery left the country in October 1951. Thereafter, the task of making trouble for Mussadiq and, pious hope, of restoring British power was handed over to British intelligence. The chief MI6 operative in Tehran was Christopher Woodhouse, who quickly recognised that nothing much could be done without the help of the Americans and that they were likely to get involved only if they saw the problem as one of containing communism rather than of re-establishing the British oil monopoly.14
With Eisenhower’s entry into the White House, the anti-communist argument was strengthened by Dulles’s conviction – Eden called it an obsession – that Russia was about to cross the border into Iran, involving ‘the loss of Middle East oil supplies or the threat of another world war’. What made the Soviet incursion all the more likely, reasoned Dulles, was the welcome sign put up by the powerful TUDEH, or People’s Party, which was communist in all but name.
A fervent anti-communist who could overcome his distaste for European colonialism when American interests were at stake, Dulles was helped towards a decision to topple Mussadiq by his brother Allen Dulles, who had moved up from deputy to head of the CIA. He, in turn, was pressed towards intervention by Kim Roosevelt, now head of CIA operations in the Middle East. While Roosevelt had no time for the British in Egypt he was convinced that in Iran the Soviet threat was real and that, if nothing was done, the oil might be made to flow in the wrong direction.
As one who relished covert operations, Churchill was eager to work off his frustration over Egypt by gaining the upper hand in Iran. Eden was more circumspect, and might indeed have called a halt to the plot to overthrow the Mussadiq regime had he not been rushed into hospital for a gall bladder operation. He was home in the last week of July, but soon after was convalescing in the Mediterranean, leaving his ultra-conservative deputy, Lord Salisbury, to defer all too readily to Churchill’s commanding presence. Enjoying a resurgence of wartime adrenalin, Churchill was quick to give the go-ahead for what he dubbed, ungraciously, Operation Boot but was known in the USA as Operation Ajax.
