Suez 1956, page 19
In the glare of these dangers only a complete abandonment of appeasement can save the situation . . .
In recent months the Government have been charged with failing to give leadership. They now have the chance, as they have the duty, to confound their critics and promote a rescue operation to save Britain from disaster in the Middle East.13
In his less than frank memoirs, Eden concedes that as a result of his Commons performance ‘my friends were embarrassed and my critics exultant’, before going on to claim that ‘as diplomacy, the speech served its purpose’.14 Few would have agreed with him. Whatever he was saying to Nutting and others in private of his determination to be tough, his stance in public was to adopt delaying tactics (‘I am not in a position to announce . . . definite lines of policy’) and to hope that Jordan would come to its senses, and, he might have added, help to save his premiership. The parliamentary correspondents were unanimously hostile. Unable to contend with the persistent barracking from the opposition, Eden had finally lost his temper, rounding on Alf Robens, the shadow foreign affairs spokesman, for daring to suggest that he might be unnerved by what was said in the press. To deny what was so patently true removed from Eden any remnants of sympathy that he might otherwise have garnered. ‘Deplorable’, ‘Inept’, ‘A Shambles’ – there was not a kind word to be said for the premier.
Reeling from this punishing experience, the prime minister again felt the need to substitute action for words. Nutting was the first to hear about it. On the Monday after the Glubb debate he had sent Eden a paper on Middle East policy, suggesting that it was about time the United Nations took over responsibility for keeping the peace between Israel and her Arab neighbours.
My second suggestion was that we should step up our aid, military and economic, to our friends in the Arab world. Bearing in mind how our refusal to deliver to Nasser the arms for which he asked had sent him shopping in the Soviet bloc, I felt that we should do all in our power to ensure that Iraq, Jordan and the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms were built up with British aid and British arms. Finally, realising that it would be useless to oppose head-on Eden’s declaration of war on Nasser, I tried to soften and divert him with suggestions for neutralising Nasser’s attacks on our interests. This could be done by, for instance, spelling out his proposals for concessions by Israel on frontiers, refugees and the Jordan waters problems, as well as by helping Israel’s Arab neighbours to secure their defences. For by such words and deed we would be demonstrating to the Arab world that we wished to see justice done for their cause.15
The response was quicker than Nutting had expected. That evening he was at a formal dinner at the Savoy when he was summoned to the telephone.
‘It’s me,’ said a voice which I recognised as the Prime Minister’s. If his esoteric self-introduction was meant to conceal his identity from the Savoy Hotel switchboard, our subsequent conversation could hardly have done more to defeat his purpose.
‘What’s all this poppycock you’ve sent me?’ he shouted. ‘I don’t agree with a single word of it.’
I replied that it was an attempt to look ahead and to rationalise our position in the Middle East, so as to avoid in the future the kind of blow to our prestige that we had just suffered over Glubb.
‘But what’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or “neutralising” him, as you call it? I want him destroyed, can’t you understand? I want him removed, and if you and the Foreign Office don’t agree, then you’d better come to the Cabinet and explain why.’
I tried to calm him by saying that, before deciding to destroy Nasser, it might be wise to look for some alternative who would not be still more hostile to us. At the moment there did not appear to be any alternative, hostile or friendly. And the only result of moving Nasser would be anarchy in Egypt.
‘But I don’t want an alternative,’ Eden shouted at me. ‘And I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt.’16
Nutting returned to his dinner guests feeling as if he were in a nightmare. ‘Only the nightmare was real.’
Nutting was ready to fight his corner. Lloyd gave in without a murmur. At cabinet on 21 March, he argued Eden’s policy as if it were his own. He was satisfied that Colonel Nasser was unwilling to work with the Western powers or to cooperate in the task of securing peace in the Middle East. It was evident that he was aiming at leadership of the Arab world; that, in order to secure it, he was willing to accept the help of the Russians; and that he was not prepared to work for a settlement of the Arab dispute with Israel. Despite the conversations in Cairo, there had been no slackening in the Egyptian propaganda against the British position in the Middle East. It was now clear, said Lloyd, ‘that we could not establish a basis for friendly relations with Egypt’. This being so, Britain should stop trying to conciliate Nasser, and rather seek increased support for the Baghdad Pact.
We should make a further effort to persuade the United States to join the Pact. We should seek to draw Iraq and Jordan more closely together. We should try to detach Saudi Arabia from Egypt, by making plain to King Saud the nature of Nasser’s ambitions. We should secure further support for Libya, in order to prevent the extension of Egyptian or Communist influence there. We should seek to establish in Syria a Government more friendly to the West. We should counter Egyptian subversion in the Sudan and in the Persian Gulf.
Lloyd also recommended direct action against Egypt, including the withholding of military supplies, the withdrawal of financial support for the Aswan Dam and the blocking of sterling balances. ‘In all this we should need the support of the United States Government. The first task would be to seek Anglo-American agreement on a general realignment of policy towards Egypt.’17
But Eden was thinking ahead to more drastic action. The Mussadiq regime in Iran had been overthrown by American and British intelligence services working more or less in unison. Could not the same be achieved in Cairo? It was a sign of the change in Eden that when covert operations in Iran had first been mooted he had reacted coolly. Now he was all for disposing of Nasser by whatever means.
At this point British intelligence entered the scene. It was not a good time for MI5 and MI6, the home and overseas branches of the intelligence service, reeling from the scandal of Burgess and Maclean, the two middle-ranking diplomats who had defected to the Soviet Union. There were worries at the highest level of other horror stories unfolding. These fears were realised in April 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin, the new faces of Soviet communism, made their appearance in Britain to see the wonders of capitalism at first hand.
It was an ill-fated visit with undiplomatic language leading to social gaffes on both sides. But it was the antics of the secret service which caused lasting embarrassment. It appeared that the Admiralty, presumably having nothing better to do, wanted to know more about the Ordzhonikidze, the Soviet VIP cruiser anchored in Portsmouth harbour. The specific request was for the dimensions of the propeller, knowledge that would assist the back-room boys in estimating the maximum speed of the ship and thus the setting for the homing device used on torpedoes. Matching the naivety of a naval command that imagined even a million-to-one chance of Britain ever again engaging in a conventional naval war with Russia, MI6 seemingly went out of its way to invest a simple task with maximum risk. The frogman chosen to inspect the Soviet vessel was heavy in nicotine, alcohol and years. But Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb was a jolly good chap and, said his superior, ‘he begged to be allowed to do the job for patriotic reasons’.18 So that was all right.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t. Crabb was spotted on his second dive and never returned. In a futile effort to muddy the tracks, a senior policeman dashed to the hotel where Crabb had checked in with Mr Smith, an agent whose name really was Smith, demanded to see the registration book and tore out four pages. By now, however, the Russians were spreading the word that their hosts had been up to no good. Khrushchev took particular delight in revealing that the Ordzhonikidze, far from being top of its naval class, was an out-of-date vessel used solely for ceremonial purposes. Soon after the Russian leaders returned home, the ship was sold to Indonesia.
When eventually the cacophony of excuses and recriminations died down sufficiently for Eden to learn the truth, he was understandably furious that his bid for world statesmanship – talking to the Soviets on equal terms – had ended in farce. Heads rolled, most of them at a junior level, though the chief of the secret service was sacked. His successor was Dick White, formerly head of MI5, an efficient if not a greatly imaginative administrator.
As was soon to become evident, the British intelligence network in Egypt was an amateurish set-up caught in the headlight beam of communist plotting, most of it entirely illusory. The chief source for this misinformation, codenamed Lucky Break, was said to have a direct line to Nasser and his trusted associates. The identity of Lucky Break is still unknown, but there was surely a link across to the deputy chief of Egyptian Air Force Intelligence, Squadron Leader Khalil, who was claimed by MI6 to be one of their own. Fed a sufficiency of secrets to satisfy his masters while clearing him of suspicion, Khalil was later exposed as a double agent. The revelation was buried in the Suez debacle.19
Even when the communist scare stories were known to be based on flimsy evidence, they were pushed hard in Washington in the hope of gaining CIA support for a covert operation against Nasser, similar to that which had led to the overthrow of Mussadiq in Iran. Foster Dulles was sufficiently interested to approve an operation codenamed Omega, designed to frighten Nasser into working with the West rather than with the Soviet Union. But as with so much else in the Atlantic alliance, opinions on what needed to be done were sharply divided between Washington and London. The Americans favoured economic pressure while setting the diplomats to work on isolating Nasser from the rest of the Arab world. Britain, or, rather, Eden, wanted Nasser out of the way, permanently. Somewhere along the line there was talk of an assassination plot. ‘Spycatcher’ Peter Wright was brought in to advise on how best to inject nerve gas into the ventilation system of Nasser’s office. ‘I pointed out that this would require large quantities of the gas and would result in massive loss of life among Nasser’s staff.’ Wright concluded, ‘It was the usual MI6 operation – hopelessly unrealistic.’20
Historians have tended to dismiss Wright as ‘notoriously unreliable’, though it is hard to understand why he should be any less reliable than Dick White, who, post-Suez, had every reason to distance the secret service from dodgy practices.
There is evidence of other ‘quick tricks’ of varying degrees of lunacy put up by Kirkpatrick. Two of them crossed the desk of Denis Wright. ‘One was some idea of poisoning the Nile. He just mentioned this casually, but didn’t go into details. I regarded it as ridiculous. And the other one was to sabotage a shipment of radio valves to Egypt. I’ve forgotten the details of it, but he did ask me about this, and I must have written a minute saying this wasn’t practical.’21 Equally fantastical was a French plot to send in a commando team to blow up the headquarters of the Revolutionary Command Council.22
Nasser himself certainly believed that the British and French secret services were out to get him. From KGB files we learn of a request to Moscow for help in updating Nasser’s personal security.
Two senior officers of the KGB Ninth (Protective Security) Directorate flew to Cairo . . . Subsequent investigation quickly revealed that Nasser’s only security consisted of a group of bodyguards. There was no alarm system in any of the buildings where he lived and worked. His cook bought bread at a bakery opposite the presidential residence, and meat and vegetables at the nearest market. Having rectified these security failings, the KGB advisers were then asked to provide protection against radiation and poison gas. The best method, they explained, was to keep a caged bird on all premises used by Nasser. If any of the birds died, the building concerned should be evacuated. Egyptian intelligence asked in vain for higher-tech systems of detection which the KGB was reluctant to provide.23
The CIA stayed clear of the James Bond antics of British intelligence, though it was agreed to mount jointly an Iraqi-led coup against the pro-Nasser regime in Syria, a plan that was overtaken and smothered by the Suez crisis. There was cooperation too in seeking out alternatives to Nasser who could be enlisted to form a government once the dictator had been overthrown. It was an unofficial task taken up enthusiastically by Julian Amery, who claimed to have been acting with Eden’s approval. His candidates for office were ‘generally liberal and pro-western in the sense of being anti-Soviet and anti-socialist . . . a lot of them were ex-ministers’.24 But in the absence of names, they remain shadows. Who they were and how strong their commitment was is impossible to say.
If American involvement in plots to oust Nasser fell short of Eden’s dearest wishes, he could at least take comfort in knowing that the Egyptian leader was no longer held in regard either by the CIA or by the White House. The Soviet arms deal had started Dulles on the downward slope of disillusionment. His descent accelerated sharply in mid-May when he heard that Egypt was about to recognise communist China. That Nasser should take this initiative – a calculated offence against all that Dulles held most sacred – at a critical moment in negotiations for financing the Aswan Dam, suggests a dangerous overconfidence. His excuse was a rumoured East-West embargo on sales of military hardware to the Middle East, which, if implemented, would stop the delivery of arms from Russia. In this event, China might take over as the weapon provider. But Nasser must have realised that the chances for the adoption of the embargo were remote. A likelier explanation for his provocative diplomacy was the simple wish to parade on the world stage as the head of a neutral country with an independent foreign policy. He was not beholden to the USA, the USSR or, least of all, to the UK.
As for the Aswan Dam, Nasser had only to read the newspapers to know that the prospects for an agreement were less than rosy. In Washington, where the make-or-break decisions were made, Republican economy watchers, who had been elected on promises to reverse the ‘reckless spending’ of their Democratic predecessors, were liable to react unfavourably to any high-cost aid programme that extended far into the future. As a senior staff member of the National Security Council, Chester L. Cooper was among those who learned ‘a surefire way to project the image of a sound fellow while killing an idea I was reluctant to criticize on its merits. When the discussion, pro and con, had all but run its course, I would simply ask, “How much will it cost?” When a number – any number – was mentioned, I needed only to raise my ample eyebrows, suck in my breath, and then utter a barely audible, “Wow!” 25
Pressure was put on Eugene Black of the World Bank to tie the Egyptians into a straitjacket deal. Tight limits on the country’s borrowing capacity outside the Aswan loan were demanded, along with undertakings not to siphon off Aswan money to spend on undeserving causes such as building up the military. Furthermore, the bank demanded the right to advise on Egyptian economic policy and to delay or stop funding if conditions were not met.
Eden was happy for the Americans to take the lead on negotiations with the Egyptians, though there were increasing worries that Britain, with its less than impressive infrastructure, could ill afford to support macro-projects overseas, let alone for a country that was less than friendly. While the Board of Trade worked on a less expensive blueprint, Kirkpatrick declared unequivocally against the dam.
If the Russians build the Dam they will increase their influence in Egypt and will appear to be benefactors. But if, as I suspect, Nasser is already sold to the Russians this advantage will be purely marginal. On the other hand if we finance the Dam we not only incur expenditure which we cannot afford, but we have to suffer the serious disability of seeming to do more for our enemies than we are prepared to do for our friends.26
The friends were Britain’s Baghdad Pact partners – Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and Iraq, all of whom were eager for Western aid. Eden and Lloyd, the latter still smarting from his treatment in Egypt, were onside with Kirkpatrick and disposed to reject the message from Trevelyan in Cairo that Nasser ‘still believes his interests to be with the West’27 and that nothing would contribute more to a stable Middle East than a prosperous Egypt. Eden described Trevelyan as ‘very gullible’. He might have said the same of Eugene Black. The head of the World Bank remained convinced that mutually acceptable terms could be hammered out.
But Nasser was losing patience. The Aswan Dam was to be his monument to greatness, but if getting it built required him, as he saw it, to hand over control of Egyptian finances to Anglo-American watchdogs, then the dam would have to wait. Black temporised, promising that rights of inspection would be exercised with restraint and with a proper regard for Egyptian sensitivities. But he was no match for the powerful voices in Congress objecting to the cosy relations developing between Egypt and Russia and to a trebling of the Egyptian defence budget. This was before the cotton producers’ lobby weighed in demanding to know why it was that the Eisenhower administration was so intent on destroying its market by subsidising foreign competition. The objection was of dubious validity since it would be twenty years before the economic plan based on Aswan would bear fruit. The effect, however, was to add to a growing chorus of complaint against Dulles and, by association, Eisenhower. And all in an election year. Foster Dulles was never one to throw away votes.
By the end of June, Nasser had given up on Western promises, confiding to Ahmed Hussein, his ambassador in Washington, that if money was not forthcoming he would in retaliation nationalise the Suez Canal Company, 28 the first suggestion that he was prepared to risk confrontation with America, Britain and France to achieve his ends. He was, however, willing for Hussein to have one last try at securing a deal. In fact, Nasser was well aware that his ambassador was on a hopeless mission. It was common knowledge that Dulles was faced with the real prospect of the Foreign Aid Bill being amended by the House of Representatives to exclude aid to Egypt. Since there was no way that the dam funding could be approved, Nasser was risk free in telling Hussein that he could accept all conditions including – a late entry – a readiness to come to terms with Israel.29 It was Nasser’s way of ensuring that after the inevitable brush-off he would be left on the moral high ground.
