Suez 1956, page 17
William Hayter, one of the most senior of British ambassadors, found it impossible to take Lloyd seriously.
It was clear that he’d been put into the Foreign Office as a kind of Minister of State. If I came on leave at that time, it was Eden who I used to go and see. I’d pay a formal call on Selwyn, but it was Eden I would talk to. It was clear that he had no personal initiative and was entirely under Eden’s thumb . . . [who] . . . had complete control, as far as I could see. He had almost forgotten that he wasn’t Foreign Secretary. On the whole, the Foreign Office is an obedient department. It does what the Foreign Secretary wants it to do, and it was clear at this time that the Foreign Secretary was the Prime Minister.12
Macmillan could barely disguise his disappointment at losing out to Lloyd. He felt at home in the foreign office, where he imagined himself making a real contribution to international accord. The consolation was the almost certain knowledge that he was now second in line to Eden, ready to take over should events create room at the top.
Eden’s reshuffle raises a tantalising hypothetical question. If Macmillan had remained as foreign secretary would there have been a Suez crisis? His biographer, Alistair Horne, thinks not, 13 on the assumption that Macmillan would have been more aware of the importance of winning over opinion in Washington. Even so, when it had come to a showdown between Saudi Arabia and Britain’s client Gulf sheikhdoms over the supposedly oil-rich Buraimi Oasis, he had sent in troops from Abu Dhabi and Muscat commanded by British officers, having ‘thought it wiser not to consult the United States or even the old Commonwealth territories about our decision’.14 The irritation in Washington was ignored by Macmillan. Then again, Macmillan’s voice was one of the loudest, if not the loudest, in urging Eden to be tough with Nasser on the assumption that the Americans would eventually join in. What might have made the difference was Macmillan’s powerful instinct for survival. Also, he was less in awe of the Churchillian legend.
With his lapdog at the foreign office, Eden felt free to indulge his passion for trying to solve worldwide problems without having to worry too much about ministerial sensitivities or boring details. One of his first moves was to send Robin Turton, one of Lloyd’s parliamentary under-secretaries, on a tour of the Middle East. ‘This is a great opportunity [for you] to find some solution to our many problems.’15 In the event Turton came back not so much with answers but with an added load of problems that Eden had not even begun to consider. In Israel he picked up on rumours that Egypt was about to take delivery of large quantities of Soviet arms. Another Arab-Israeli war seemed to be imminent. Moving on to Cairo, Turton was given the charm treatment, with Nasser assuring him that he had no desire for war with Israel, that he was in secret negotiations to avoid such a calamity. A rumoured arms deal with Russia was sidestepped with an appeal to Britain to help push ahead Nasser’s ambition to revolutionise Egypt’s economy and to release the country from its poverty trap. The means for achieving this was to trap the flood waters of the Nile behind the Aswan High Dam.
Not since the days of the pharaohs had the Egyptians undertaken an engineering enterprise as ambitious as the Aswan Dam. More impressive than the Pyramids and much more useful, the new structure would be 250 feet high at the centre and 3 miles wide. The lake formed by the dam would be 300 miles long. Its purpose was to reclaim 1,300,000 acres of desert and to raise the agricultural potential of another 700,000 acres, as well as provide hydroelectric power for new industries.
The idea had been around for some time. A smaller dam had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, and in Farouk’s time plans for a High Dam had been drawn up. As with so many other grand schemes that attracted the monarch’s interest, the will to act was weaker than good intentions. Until, that is, Nasser came along. Via his CIA friends, he lobbied successfully for the money to pay for a new survey. When this showed positive results the serious business of raising the necessary $1.3 billion investment got under way. A mix of grants and loans from the USA, Britain and the World Bank was agreed in principle and a consortium of British, German and French engineering firms was commissioned to carry out the work.
But while courting Western finance for the Aswan Dam, Nasser was equally impatient for means to equip his armed forces with modern weapons. Promises had been made by the USA and Britain. Egypt’s requests would be taken seriously – in time. Meanwhile, Nasser was fobbed off with occasional deliveries of near-obsolete armoury while stores at the canal base, which were otherwise serving no useful purpose but were due for renewal, were denied to the Egyptians and instead shipped back to Britain. In Washington it was amazing to those who were not used to diplomatic delaying tactics to find how many declarations of approval from congressional and other committees had to be secured before arms deliveries could begin.
In June 1955, responding to rumours that Russia might act as an alternative supplier of weapons, Eisenhower finally gave the go-ahead for an arms order worth $27 million, but with financial conditions attached. The Egyptian government offered to pay in cotton, its only substantial revenue earner. Unfortunately, cotton, especially high-grade Egyptian cotton, was the last thing wanted in the USA where its own cotton producers were suffering hard times. The counter-offer of extended credit was dependent on financial restraints that, for the ever sensitive Nasser, were reminiscent of the economic control once imposed by the British occupiers. With negotiations going nowhere Nasser delivered an ultimatum. If he could not buy arms from the West, he told American ambassador Henry Byroade, then a deal with the Russians, who were prepared to accept cotton in part payment, would go ahead.
It was a double shock for Byroade. Taking his cue from his CIA colleagues led by Kermit Roosevelt and Miles Copeland, the ambassador had tried hard, not without success, to persuade Foster Dulles that Nasser was the best hope for Egypt and America’s best hope for peace in the Middle East. Now, it seemed, Nasser was about to prove himself deficient on both counts. Angry and confused, Byroade acted uncharacteristically by consulting his British opposite number, Sir Ralph Stevenson. A busy humming of the diplomatic wires brought an uncompromising reaction from London. If Nasser signed up with the Russians he could expect no further aid from those who sought to be his closest allies. The Egyptian leader was furious. It was bad enough that Byroade had, in Nasser’s view, broken a confidence. But that the British should then come on with threats laced with false protestations of friendship was too much. The Russian offer would be accepted and there would be no further talks with the British about arms. Washington remained silent, probably hoping for more encouraging news from Roosevelt and Copeland, both of whom remained convinced that Nasser was clever enough, given CIA counsel, to duck out of the communist embrace.
Confidence in London that Nasser would heed its warnings had evaporated by the last week in September. On the 27th, the newly installed British ambassador, Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, called on Nasser at the office of the revolutionary council to demand a formal explanation. From his window, Nasser watched the approach of the ambassadorial Rolls. With him were the terrible twins of the CIA, who had spent the past three hours persuading Nasser that it would soften the blow to associate his arms contract with Czechoslovakia, where the weapons factories were situated, rather than with Russia and the Kremlin, the font of all Western terrors. If that was mere window dressing so also was the optimistic reference in Nasser’s forthcoming speech to an Egyptian-Israeli détente.16
With Trevelyan waiting in an outer room, Roosevelt and Copeland went upstairs, where they shared a laugh at Trevelyan’s expense. It was not the friendliest of meetings, but at this and in subsequent conversations with Trevelyan, Nasser made his position clear.
He said that he had been increasingly nervous of Israeli intentions. The Israelis were far better armed than the Egyptians and were in the process of gaining a decisive superiority. He quoted a French pamphlet which he insisted was derived from official sources, which gave a list of arms supplied to the Israelis by the British. He printed an extract from a British military intelligence review which his agents had stolen from a British Unit in the Canal Zone, in order to support his claim that the Israelis had arms superiority even over the Arabs as a whole. He enlarged on the pressure continually coming from his younger officers, who had been urging him for months to accept the Soviet offer and thus redress the balance. He put the blame on us and the Americans for our failure to give him enough arms and for our political conditions. He spoke of his sleepless nights and increasing tension. He had no alternative . . . He knew the dangers well and would guard against them. He did not intend to get rid of the British only to bring in the Russians.17
Trevelyan was equally frank in his response.
I replied that he under-rated the danger of an arms race and of Communist infiltration, that his information about our arms supplies to Israel was not true – the French pamphlet, for instance, was not official and was nonsense – and that even if he were not breaking any agreement, he was certainly not acting in the spirit of the preamble of the Base Agreement, which contemplated the development of friendly relations between us after the end of the occupation.18
When news of the latest twist in Egyptian affairs reached Washington, there was no need to spell out the implications for Dulles. In little more than a year – the time it was reckoned that Egyptian forces needed to learn how to press all the right buttons – Israel would be vulnerable. Before then, possibly within weeks, Israel would be tempted to strike first. This might bring in the Soviets on the side of the Arabs. World war loomed.
In the absence of the president, who had suffered a heart attack and was confined to hospital, Dulles jerked into action. Doubtless telling himself that whenever the initiative was left to the Brits something was bound to go wrong, he dispatched his Near Eastern affairs specialist, George V. Allen, to pull Nasser back onside. It was a hopeless assignment. Nasser was in no position to backtrack on his arms deal, even if the prospect had appealed to him, which it didn’t. Anti-American feeling was strong within the revolutionary council, where some of Nasser’s more demonstrative colleagues were convinced that the USA was no longer playing an even hand between Egypt and Israel. There were strong indications of substantial deliveries of French arms to Israel, which the USA had done nothing to discourage. At the other end of the scale of grievances – but in Egypt it was often the minor slight which gave greatest offence – it did not pass notice that uniquely for charities operating outside the USA, contributions to Israel were exempt from tax. Clearly the Zionist lobby was gaining strength.
If Nasser had shown any inclination to submit to US demands, his political career would almost certainly have come to an untimely end. There was only one good reason why he should even have considered a retraction. He was still dependent on the USA for the financial guarantees that would enable him to build the Aswan High Dam. It was a chance he had to take.
When Allen, with the much-discomfited Byroade in attendance, arrived for the meeting with Nasser they were kept waiting for an hour or more, ‘to cool off ’, as one of Nasser’s secretaries put it.19 The preliminary humiliation over, they were subjected to an impassioned monologue from Nasser on the double dealing of American diplomacy. After hearing the bad news, Dulles concluded that his special envoy and the ambassador would be better occupied on other duties, well away from the Middle East. Byroade was subsequently appointed US ambassador to South Africa, while Allen became ambassador to Greece.
In London, the advice from Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick at the foreign office was to play the anti-Russian card for all it was worth.
The Russians have deliberately elected to open a new old War front in the Middle East . . . Egypt is the largest of the Arab states and no Western policy in the Middle East which is actively opposed by Egypt will be entirely satisfactory. An effort should be made to prevent Egypt falling completely under Russian domination. If this fails we must try ruthlessly to isolate Egypt. In the meantime we must try to prevent the uncommitted Arab States joining the Egypt-Syria-Saudi combination. Finally we must recognise that it is the Israel-Arab conflict which has weakened Western influence in the Middle East and opened the door to Russia. If we wish to maintain a position of influence with the Arabs we must bring the conflict to an end as soon as possible. This means strong pressure on Israel and also on those Arab states in which we still have influence.20
The details of how this was to be achieved were left unstated.
Nasser awaited the delivery of an arsenal valued at around £150 million. By mid-1956, it amounted to some fifty llyushin jet bombers, 100 MiG fighters, 300 medium and heavy tanks, more than one hundred self-propelled guns, 200 armoured personnel carriers, two destroyers, four minesweepers, twenty motor torpedo boats, 500 pieces of artillery, rocket launchers, bazookas and radio and radar equipment.21 It took a little time for the western allies to respond. The temptation to put an immediate stop to the Aswan Dam project was resisted. Dulles feared that a slap-down for Nasser would give the Soviet foreign minister, the convivial Dimitri Shepilov, another excuse for showing how friendly he could be. In fact, while making sympathetic noises, Russia was reluctant to act as an alternative banker for the dam, having too many infrastructure priorities of its own to worry about, but Dulles was not to know that. Dulles also reasoned that if Aswan went ahead, it would at least keep Nasser occupied for the foreseeable future, tying him to a high-prestige enterprise that he was not likely to sacrifice for a military adventure.
The cost of building the dam was huge, starting with $70 million in grants, three-quarters from the USA and a quarter from Britain. The follow-up was a loan of $200 million from the World Bank, plus a loan of $130 million from the USA and $80 million from Britain. But spread over fifteen years, the burden on foreign aid was manageable. The counter-claim held that the Egyptian economy was too fragile to support such a vast scheme. With a trebling of the Egyptian defence budget to a quarter of the country’s total revenue, there was a risk that part of the Anglo-American money advanced for the dam might be siphoned off to pay for Soviet weaponry. Dulles also faced opposition in Congress. Handing out fat cheques to foreign clients to increase cotton production, undercutting American producers, did not go down well with representatives from the southern states. There was also resentment that the dam was to be built by a European consortium. The treasury secretary, George Humphrey, saw the whole scheme as a British plot.
With the two sides of the argument in balance, Dulles opted for delaying tactics. When British and American leaders met in Washington at the end of January 1956, Aswan barely rated a mention. In his own account of the Suez crisis, Selwyn Lloyd claims ingenuously that ‘we learned, I think for the first time, of doubts about the Aswan Dam project’, 22 adding that Eugene Black, head of the World Bank, was having problems in introducing Nasser to economic realities. In fact there were several warning signals of trouble that Eden and Lloyd chose to ignore. On such a sensitive issue they were happy to let Dulles take the decisions. Instead they focused on trying to establish common ground on promoting the Tripartite Agreement to contain the arms race in the Middle East and to prevent violations of the Arab-Israeli frontiers.
But Dulles had no wish to be tied to policies dreamed up in London, the heart of old-style colonialism, especially in a presidential election year. He was cool on imposing restraints on Israel or, indeed, on America’s client oil state of Saudi Arabia, which then, as now, was permitted to get away with financing subversion and terrorism throughout the region. Nor was Dulles prepared to add muscle to the Baghdad Pact, still the great hope for Eden of a defence structure that would protect Western interests in the Middle East.
Eden and Lloyd returned home from their prestige trip with little except a vague promise from Washington to support the British nuclear deterrent. Eden put a gloss on his report to the cabinet, excusing Dulles from holding back on the Tripartite Declaration on the grounds, easily shown to be specious, that while the president might ‘move’ forces, he might not ‘engage’ them without congressional assent. The all but outright rejection of the Baghdad Pact was softened to US ‘support, moral and material short of membership’.23
Subsequently, Eden conceded that he had ‘probably overvalued the political results, as one is apt to do at a time of contact with close allies’.24 Press comment at the time was less charitable. Leading the pack was Randolph Churchill.
The Washington conference has failed to produce any result which could not have been procured through normal diplomatic channels. This was made abundantly plain by a pompous declaration and uninformative communiqué. When the statesmen and politicians can’t think of anything else to say they always drag in God. Last night’s declaration did it twice over, both in preamble and in peroration.
It was obvious from the start of the conference . . . that as no planning had been done by either side, no joint plan could be produced. The declaration and the communiqué were full of pious platitudes and impeccable opinions.25
This was just the latest of a succession of press attacks on Eden which had started in January when the usually loyal Daily Telegraph accused him of failing to live up to his election promise of strong leadership. ‘There is a favourite gesture of the Prime Minister’s . . . To emphasize a point he will clench one fist to smack the open palm of the other hand – but the smack is seldom heard. Most Conservatives, and almost certainly some of the wiser trade union leaders, are waiting to feel the smack of firm government . . .’26 To which the Mail added, ‘The many events are wrapped up in uncertainty and indecisiveness . . . There are few hard-and-fast decisions. The Government’s trouble seems to be not paralysis so much as lack of will.’
