Suez 1956, page 20
And that is how it went. Dulles kept his options open until the last moment, hoping that the Egyptian president (the title had been bestowed on Nasser on 23 June after an election in which he was the only candidate) would take precipitate action, making the closing of the Aswan cheque book a fait accompli. Nasser failed to oblige. A meeting between Dulles and Ambassador Hussein was fixed for 19 July.
Two days earlier Selwyn Lloyd had warned his cabinet colleagues of an impending adverse decision on Aswan. He made no comment on the likely consequences. The only link over to the Suez Canal was made by Maurice Couve de Murville, French ambassador in Washington, who had also served in Cairo. He predicted that if Nasser were rebuffed he might well retaliate by seizing the canal. His words were ignored.30
There are contrasting accounts of the meeting between Foster Dulles and Ahmed Hussein. Was Dulles curt and ill tempered or correct and polite? The first version has Hussein touching a raw nerve with Dulles by claiming that in the absence of American support the Russians would step in. Dulles is said to have retorted, ‘Well, as you have the money already, you don’t need any from us. My offer is withdrawn.’31 Hussein’s own account is more in line with conventional diplomatic exchanges and accords with the secretary of state’s claim that he was in no way abrupt. Admittedly, Dulles came straight to the point. ‘Mr Ambassador, we are going to issue a statement. I am sorry, we are not going to help you with the Aswan Dam.’32 Dulles then gave his reasons, mentioning in passing that he did not think the Russians had sufficient resources for the project but if they did undertake it, they would have trouble with their satellite countries. He was right in that, at least. The meeting was conducted, however, the deed was done.
Later, when the Suez crisis had run its course, a stock response in British political circles was to put all the blame on Dulles for the way things turned out. Was it not Dulles who had started it all by his summary rejection of the Aswan Dam project? In one interview Lloyd even had the gall to criticise Dulles for handling the Egypt ambassador ‘a little harshly’, adding smugly, ‘but there it was’.33
As we now know, Lloyd and Eden were given plenty of notice of what Dulles had in mind.34 Sir Harold Beeley, who was an under-secretary at the foreign office at the time of Suez, recalls ‘a long departmental meeting in London, on whether or not we should go ahead with the Aswan Dam, before Dulles withdrew, and I was the only dissident at that meeting. I don’t think I had more than one supporter. I said that it would be a mistake to withdraw our funds, and I recommended that to Kirkpatrick after the meeting. The weight of opinion on the British side was in favour of withdrawing before Dulles actually told the Egyptians that he was’.35 In the event, a curt announcement from the Foreign Office concluded ‘that in present circumstances it would not be feasible to participate in the project’. The satisfaction at having quashed Nasser was palpable. What could he do but accept defeat? The answer came a week later.
12
The fourth anniversary of the overthrow of King Farouk was the perfect occasion for President Nasser to confound his enemies and startle the world. Alexandria, a nationalist stronghold, was the ideal setting. So it was that on 26 July 1956 the rostrum, the microphones, the loudspeakers and the searchlights – for Nasser was not due to address the faithful until dusk – were set up in Liberation Square. From the early hours the crowd gathered until it was 100,000 strong. When at last Nasser appeared, strategically placed cheerleaders led a frenzied welcome that echoed across the city. Then he spoke.
Though not a natural demagogue (his early speeches lacked passion), Nasser had quickly learned the art of holding and manipulating an audience. It was all there – the defiant gestures, the dramatic pauses, the gut-rending appeal to the deepest emotions rising to a shrill call to action that could so easily tip over into mob violence. His theme was the evils of imperialism.
Imperialism attempted to shake our nationalism, weaken our Arabism, and separate us by every means. Thus it created Israel, the stooge of imperialism. The battle in which we are now involved is a battle against imperialism and the methods and tactics of imperialism, and a battle against Israel, the vanguard of imperialism. Now Arab nationalism marches forward, knowing its road and its strength, knowing who are its enemies and who are its friends.
He recalled the days when Egyptians and their Arab brothers were denied dignity and freedom. But those days were over.
Arab nationalism has been set on fire from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf. It believes in its right to life. Here are the battles which we are entering. We cannot say that the battle of Algeria is not our battle. Nor can we say that Jordan’s battle is not our battle . . . Our fates are linked. My fate in Egypt is linked with that of my brother in Jordan, in the Lebanon, Syria and in the Sudan.
On he spoke into the hot night, lashing the American and British governments along with the World Bank, linking the building of the Aswan High Dam with the building of the Suez Canal.
The Suez Canal was dug by the efforts of the sons of Egypt – 120,000 Egyptians died in the process. The Suez Canal Company, sitting in Paris, is a usurping company. It usurped our concessions. When he came here de Lesseps acted in the same manner as do certain people who come to hold talks with me. Does history repeat itself? On the contrary! We shall build the High Dam and we shall gain our usurped rights. We are determined. The Canal company annually takes thirty-five million pounds. Why shouldn’t we take it ourselves? The company said they collected a hundred million dollars every year for the benefit of Egypt. We desire to make this statement come true, and to collect this hundred million dollars for the benefit of Egypt.
He had been speaking for well over two hours. Now, at the repetition of the codeword ‘Lesseps’, Egyptian troops who had been following his words on radio moved in on the Canal Company’s offices in Port Said, Ismailia, Suez and Cairo. With perfect timing, Nasser reached his peroration. ‘Today, O citizens, the Suez Canal has been nationalized . . . Today, O citizens, we declare that our property has been returned to us. We are realizing our glory and our grandeur.’ A new Suez Canal Company would be formed. ‘And it will be run by Egyptians! Egyptians! Egyptians!’
The crowd went mad with cheering. As reports of Nasser’s speech spread across Egypt, the people came out on the streets to shout their support. Stopping along the route from Alexandria to Cairo to receive the congratulations of his adoring public, Nasser took thirty-six hours to return to the capital.
As Eden’s recent run of bad luck would have it, when the news came through of the sting in Nasser’s Alexandria speech, the prime minister was giving a dinner in honour of Britain’s closest friends in the Middle East – the young King Faisal of Iraq and his mentor, the sixty-seven-year-old Nuri el-Said, who had been prime minister on and off for thirty years. The embarrassment of a monumental put-down in front of those he most wanted to impress fuelled Eden’s determination to be seen to act decisively. Hugh Gaitskell, who was at the dinner, gave his support. ‘I said that I thought he ought to act quickly . . . and that as far as Great Britain was concerned, public opinion would almost certainly be behind him.’1 Nuri chimed in, urging Eden to ‘hit Nasser hard and hit him now’.
Eden needed no encouragement. Cutting the evening short, he set the tone for a national emergency by immediately summoning a meeting of senior ministers and the chiefs of staff. Also invited were Andrew Foster from the US embassy (ambassador Winthrop Aldrich was on vacation) and Jean Chauvel, the French ambassador, who brought with him Jacques Georges-Picot, director general of the Suez Canal Company, who happened to be in London. There was a touch of irony in the fact that the only person with first-hand knowledge of the operation of the canal was not asked for his views. Instead, Georges-Picot was ushered into a waiting room where he could recover from the shock of realising that just six weeks after signing a new agreement with the Egyptian government, he no longer had a company to run.
It was a good hour later that Jean Chauvel reappeared to tell me the conference was over. Then came the prime minister, who was kind enough to stop and thank me for my trouble and tell me that since the talk dealt only with the political situation, he had not needed my services . . . As I left, I learned from our ambassador that the British government had a vigorous reaction in mind.2
Georges-Picot was not alone in his surprise at the turn of events. But that he and the political establishment in Britain and France had failed to anticipate Nasser’s bold move says much of the inability of the political old guard to understand the world in which they were operating. It was the insolence of the upstart which generated anger. How dare he? If Nasser was allowed to get away with it, how many other third-rate countries would begin to get above themselves? Later, when a more rational justification was needed for action against Egypt, economic and legal arguments were brought into play. But in the early critical days after the takeover, emotion ruled.
Eden’s fury was plain to see. He had been made to look a fool by Nasser, who was always one step ahead in a diplomatic game for which the rules were still being written. If there had ever been any doubt in his mind that Nasser was his enemy, his latest act of defiance was too close to European events of the 1930s for Eden to ignore the parallels. As he saw it, Nasser may not have been as dangerous as Hitler or even Mussolini, but he was of the same aggressive mindset, taking what he could not get by peaceful negotiation.
It fell to Kirkpatrick to remind Eden that the very day of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal was the twentieth anniversary of Germany’s unprovoked and, as it turned out, unopposed reoccupation of the demilitarised Rhineland. A few lonely voices pointed out that the relevance of the Rhineland episode was more tenuous than the government chose to suggest. No Egyptian troops had crossed any frontier, no foreign or disputed territory had been seized and on the canal no British ship had been denied passage or detained. But Eden was not listening. As recalled by Sir Guy Millard, who was one of Eden’s private secretaries at the time of Suez, the military option was consistently high on the agenda. ‘It was decided that, in default of other solutions, eventually there would have to be a military solution to reverse what had happened. Other solutions would be explored first, but from day one they were committed to a military solution, if all else failed.’3
The Suez crisis brought about a dramatic, if temporary, change in Eden’s fortunes. On the very day that Nasser went for broke, Harold Nicolson, whose son, Nigel Nicolson, was to wreck his parliamentary career over Suez, was at a party with a mixed bunch of political friends.
Nye Bevan was there, and talked to me about the ‘decay’ of the present government. He attributes it entirely to Eden, who, he says, is much disliked, weak and vacillating, and in fact, hopeless. He was not talking as an Opposition leader, but as a student of politics. He said that in his experience the character of a government was determined by the character of the Prime Minister. To choose Eden had been a mistake, since he was not a strong man. He interfered with his colleagues and did not control them, and gave the impression to the House that he did not know his own mind. Now when I hear a man abused like that, I immediately wish to take his side. But I fear that it is all too true.4
Less than twenty-four hours later Bevan, the torch-bearer of the far left in the Labour Party, was giving full backing to Eden’s resolve to slap down Nasser. As Richard Crossman, another left-winger, put it, ‘Nasser really did grab it [the canal] in an intolerable way and, if he got away with that grab, might well launch a war against Israel.’5
Cross-party support for the government remained solid throughout the Commons debate on 27 July. Hugh Gaitskell deplored ‘this high-handed and totally unjustifiable step by the Egyptian Government’ and urged the blocking of Egyptian sterling balances in retaliation. In the parliamentary lobbies members of the Suez Group, formerly reviled for their blimpish mentality, were praised for having foreseen the consequences of the British evacuation of the Canal Zone. They, in turn, resisted the urge to put the knife into the politician who had submitted to the sell-out. The new Eden, action man, deserved unreserved support. From the back benches there were respectful murmurs of approval when the prime minister, speaking of the need for ‘firmness and care’, told the Commons how the government had thought it necessary ‘to take certain precautionary measures of a military nature’ .
In a surfeit of patriotic fervour, the press weighed in on the side of the government. It was no surprise that The Times, then still the voice of the establishment, was strong on action against ‘a clear affront and threat to Western interests’. But the liberal News Chronicle also urged ‘retaliatory action’, while the Herald, the mouthpiece of the Labour Party, wanted ‘no more Hitlers’. Writing in The Spectator, Charles Curran congratulated Eden on regaining ‘every yard of the ground he has lost inside the Tory Party during the past year. He has established a hold on Tory loyalties firmer and warmer than he has ever had before. So far he has acted about Suez in complete conformity with one of the basic tenets of Toryism and by doing so he has secured the support of the great majority of British citizens. For the party this result is seen as a vindication as well as an achievement’.6
At the heart of the rhetoric was the dreadful fear that Nasser could now hold Britain to ransom. In Eden’s lurid imagery, ‘The Egyptian has his thumb on our windpipe.’ A quarter of all British imports came via Suez. That made the canal significant but hardly dominant in the British economy. But it was the oil which really mattered. Of this precious liquid, three-quarters of British needs were satisfied by Middle East providers using the canal. The accepted, though exaggerated, consequences of an interruption of canal traffic were of petrol rationing within a week and of a run-down of manufacturing industry within a fortnight. But, in 1956, oil accounted for only 13 per cent of Britain’s total energy needs. Coal was far more important. On the other hand, the long-term prospects appeared to be more daunting. In his brief occupancy of the Foreign Office, Macmillan had presented a cabinet paper forecasting a trebling of oil imports over twenty years.
Although some of the extra oil required will come from the Caribbean area, the greater part must come from the Middle East, where the major proved reserves of the world are situated and where our companies have their greatest interests. There is no alternative source, as the only other large producing area, the United States and Canada, has become a net importer. Therefore supplies of Middle East oil are essential to the economy of this country. If they were cut off or seriously interrupted irrevocable harm would be done to our economic position, and a British investment now valued at some £600 millions would be lost. Western Europe as a whole is similarly dependent on the Middle East for its oil supplies, 75 per cent of which came from that area last year.7
The paper made no dramatic recommendations. It simply urged that a working party be set up to consider action the oil companies should take.
These civil service ruminations on Britain’s dependency on oil are an early indication of the political myopia that characterised the entire Suez episode. If the authors of the cabinet paper had dug a little deeper, they might have discovered that the oil companies were already well ahead with building giant tankers that were better suited to the Cape route than to the canal. More pipelines were planned with capacity for stockpiling oil to raise Britain’s reserves above the currently estimated and totally inadequate six weeks. And this was before the promise of discovering new oilfields was brought into the account. In any case, the ownership of the canal did not make a scrap of practical difference to European communications with the oil-rich states. The difference, if there ever was one, had been made with the withdrawal of British troops from the Canal Zone in 1954. If Eden had been paying closer attention to Foreign Office and defence thinking he would have heard wise counsel offering an alternative to confrontation with Nasser. The way forward, it was argued, was to reduce military expenditure in the Middle East (running at around £57 million a year) in favour of economic and technical assistance.
Certain steps are already being taken, but it is essential that we should intensify our efforts in all possible ways. In particular, we consider that there is an immediate need to expand and improve local police forces and intelligence, thereby reducing the need for military intervention. Furthermore we see great advantages in offering training facilities in this country to the military and police forces of the appropriate Middle East States. We also consider that everything possible should be done to prevent further Middle East States from turning to the Communist bloc for military equipment and techniques. Measures should also cover the diplomatic, economic and cultural fields; and we should seek to make effective use of psychological and clandestine operations. In addition, in colonial territories and protectorates, we must improve and control educational facilities.8
And this was from the recently bullish chiefs of staff. Perhaps the Suez Canal was not the vital artery that Eden and his supporters assumed.
Immediately after the Commons debate on 27 July, there was a cabinet meeting. Butler was the only absentee. After hearing that £2 million held in the Canal Company’s bank in Cairo had been confiscated, a Suez Committee, otherwise known as the Egypt Committee and by jokers as the Pretext Committee, 9 was set up, chaired by Eden; the other members included Macmillan, Salisbury and Lloyd, though significantly Macmillan’s diary reference relegated Lloyd to the ‘other ministers turning up as required’.10 Later in the week the twin aims of the committee were specified. These were to place the canal under international control and to ‘bring about the downfall of the present Egyptian government’. No room for misunderstanding there.
