Suez 1956, page 44
Falling back on his diplomatic charm, Eden rounded off a telephone conversation with the second time elected American president – Eisenhower had won 457 electoral votes against seventy-four for his Democratic challenger – with a suggestion that he and Mollet take an early opportunity to visit Washington. Buoyed up by his victory and by the news that hostilities had ended in Egypt, Eisenhower was friendly and welcoming. ‘Sure, come on over,’ he told Eden.19
The presidential advisers were less enthusiastic. Hoover was in the Oval Office while Eisenhower was taking the London call. Care must be taken, he said, not to give the impression that the USA was teaming up with Britain and France. The risk was of a turn-about by the Arabs that would put them in opposition to Hammarskjöld’s efforts to set up a peacekeeping force. Consulted by telephone, Dulles backed his deputy. Eisenhower took the point. By telephone and cable, he made his excuses to Eden. While agreeing that ‘we should meet at an early date’, he went on to say:
Now that the election is over, I find it most necessary to consult urgently the leaders of both Houses of the Congress. As you can understand, it will take some days to accomplish this. Furthermore, after a thorough study of all the factors and after talking to various branches of the government here, I feel that while such a meeting should take place quickly, we must be sure that its purpose and aims are not misunderstood in other countries. This would be the case if the UN Resolution had not yet been carried out.20
There was broad agreement in the Eisenhower administration that nothing much could be achieved in the Middle East until France and Britain were out of Egypt and Israeli forces were back behind the armistice lines. Handshakes with Eden and Mollet in front of the press cameras were not on the agenda while interpretation of the UN ceasefire resolution was open to debate. It was easy enough for the USA to put pressure on Britain to accede to UN demands. The ceasefire having heralded Britain’s economic vulnerability, a word here and there from treasury secretary George Humphrey that economic help for Britain was strictly conditional was enough to cause jitters in the financial markets and despair in Downing Street.
But it is hard to understand why blame should then have been put on the USA for following what any objective observer would have seen as a strictly logical policy. Having called a ceasefire there was no earthly justification for Anglo-French forces remaining in Egypt for more time than it took for the UN to arrive. That Eden wanted it otherwise was purely a way of justifying the chapter of disasters that had preceded the ceasefire, thus keeping himself and his government in power.
It was some time before Eisenhower caught on to Eden’s duplicity. Listening to Hoover expound on the logistics of UN involvement in the Canal Zone, the president interrupted to muse on the rigidity of Anglo-French thinking.
In his conversation on the telephone with Anthony Eden, the British Prime Minister had expressed extreme reluctance to agree to the proposal that this police force would have no British or French troops as a component. When the President asked Sir Anthony how he proposed to exclude Soviet troops from the UN forces if he insisted on British and French components in the UN police force, Sir Anthony had indicated that this problem had not occurred to him, and that he would have to give it some thought. The President said he was absolutely astounded.21
As well he might have been, since he could still not bring himself to believe that Eden would say or do anything just to save face. All along, Eisenhower tried to put the best interpretation on Anglo-French machinations.
Mounting evidence of a stitch-up between Israel, France and Britain to bring about Nasser’s downfall could not be ignored. Time magazine had near enough the full story within a week of the invasion. In the same issue in which Time reported on the battle of Port Said, it also disclosed how premeditation went back at least two months. It was all there – the secret meetings at Chequers and in Paris, the build-up of forces in Cyprus and the pre-knowledge of when and where the Israelis would attack. If the White House needed confirmation, it was provided in full measure on 16 November when Pineau opened up in conversation with Alan Dulles.
After luncheon M. Pineau turned to me and said he wanted now to tell me in strict confidence what really had happened. On October 14 he had arrived back in Paris from New York after the UN meeting on the Suez Canal; on October 15, he was approached in Paris by Israeli representatives. They told him that Israel had definite proof that Egypt was preparing to move against them and that they could not wait much longer. They were therefore determined to attack Egypt; that they would do it alone if necessary but do it they would. On October 16, Eden had come over from London and the plan had been worked out among the three of them and that was that. He, in effect, apologized for not having kept us informed but said that under the circumstances it seemed to serve no useful purpose to do so. I remarked that he probably also was aware of the fact that if we had been advised we would have opposed the plan.22
Rumours were all over the British press that at least three ministers – Eden, Lloyd and Head – were aware of Israeli intentions and that France had played an active part in the Sinai campaign.
But Eisenhower stuck to a line favourable to the British, that they ‘had not been in on the Israeli–French planning until the very last stages when they had no choice but to come into the operation’. His reasoning was based on a flattering but woefully inaccurate assessment of British military capability.
One of the arguments the President cited to support this view was the long delay that took place between the time the British declared their intent to go into Egypt and the time they actually went in. He said that the British were meticulous military planners and he was sure that if they had been in on the scheme from the beginning that they would have seen to it that they were in a position to move into Egypt in a matter of hours after they declared their intention to do so.23
As the French might have said, if only.
There seemed to be no bounds to the efforts of British ministers to ingratiate themselves with Washington. ‘Never has an ambassador occupied a more important position than you do at the present moment,’ Butler told Aldrich, who was solemnly designated as ‘the only man who is in a position to explain to your government the various attitudes of the members of our government’. The typically Butleresque hint that some ministers might be more reliable than others passed unnoticed. Macmillan was more direct, confiding in Aldrich that he very much regretted giving up the job of foreign secretary because Lloyd was ‘too young and inexperienced for a position of such great responsibility under the present difficult circumstances’. Macmillan was eager to leave for Washington immediately, but was urged by Aldrich to wait until Eden’s visit had been confirmed.24
As for Eden, he was back on the Red scare as the justification for the Suez war. ‘The bear is moving not only in the Middle East but in Eastern Europe and we must coordinate our plans,’ he opined, adding that ‘it was most urgent for him to have talks with the President soon.’25
But it was Salisbury who carried scare tactics to the point of lunacy, claiming, on what evidence no one knows, that
additional information was accumulating regarding definite character and scope of conspiracy between Nasser and Russians to take over entire Middle East and its oil as soon as Nasser had established himself as head Arab world. Salisbury felt that fact Nasser had blocked Canal was highly significant. This act he said had not been necessary and was not in interest of Egypt but could only be explained as part of a plot to assist Russia by making it more difficult for Europe to defend itself or protect its interests in Middle East.26
That Nasser might have blocked the canal as part of his defence against an Anglo-French invasion appears not to have occurred to Salisbury, who, in Tory circles, was said to be expert in foreign affairs.27 Equally extravagant claims were coming from Paris, where the stress was on justifying cooperation with Israel. For Mollet, if the Israelis had not taken the initiative, ‘a joint Egyptian-Syrian-Jordanian attack on Israel, directed by Soviet officers and technicians, would have taken place at the latest during December or January’.28 Again, in the absence of sources for this improbable intelligence, credit must go to the creative interpretation of the few facts that were available.
On 11 November Selwyn Lloyd was packed off to New York to see what he could do to save Britain’s reputation at the UN. He was naively optimistic.
‘Arrived safely after quite a good flight,’ he wrote to Eden once in New York. ‘I gather the situation is thawing between the US and ourselves and I shall continue to try to drive into their heads that the Anglo-French forces in Port Said are the only effective bargaining counter for either the United Nations or the Americans with the Egyptians and the Russians.’29
He was soon to be disillusioned. With an argument so patently feeble, how could it have been otherwise? The depth of his misunderstanding of the American position hit its nadir with a visit to Foster Dulles at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. The conversation opened with the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question from Dulles. ‘Selwyn, when you started, why didn’t you go through with it?’ It was a perfectly reasonable enquiry. Dulles was generously crediting the Eden government with having calculated the economic risks of the operation and of realising, after countless warnings, that no support could be expected from Washington. Once the decision was taken to go ahead, it was surely absurd to cancel the expedition after barely a day of land fighting just because of an attack of economic jitters.
Dulles was not alone in finding this hard to understand. Anthony Head, who, as defence minister, was nominally in charge of the expedition, compared it to a romantic let-down – ‘like going through all the preliminaries without having an orgasm’.30 Dulles would not have expressed himself so earthily but his sentiments were the same. He would also have sympathised with a senior British officer who confided in a television reporter, ‘What I always say is, if you’re going to be a shit, be a fucking shit.’31
If it had been put this bluntly, Lloyd might just have got the message. But Dulles was disinclined to elaborate, and in the true spirit of the tragically misguided Lloyd concluded that the question showed that Dulles ‘had already realised what a mess he and the President between them had made of the situation’.32
Lloyd was in the States for just over a fortnight. In that time, aided by Harold Caccia, the newly installed British ambassador who shared the Foreign Secretary’s mindset, Lloyd blustered his way from one inanity to another, starting with the claim that the Suez war stopped a greater evil. Apparently, in paving the way for an international peacekeeping force to hold the line between Arabs and Jews, British and French forces had pre-empted a full-scale Arab-Israeli war. Fifty years on, the parallel with Iraq, starting a war for one reason only to end up justifying it for a totally different reason, hardly needs emphasising. On this weakest of arguments Lloyd then went on to claim that an Egypt–Israel war would have happened anyway within five to six months, that a UN force could not possibly operate effectively without British and French help, and that it was the responsibility of the USA to force concessions from Egypt as a condition of an Anglo-French withdrawal.
‘He is in a dangerous frame of mind and could set off a war,’ declared Henry Cabot Lodge, the US representative at the UN. He added of Lloyd, ‘his attitude struck me as reckless and full of contradictions. It has made me more pessimistic about the British than anything that has happened in my service here’.33
While Lloyd defended the indefensible in New York, his colleagues in London were busy looking to their own future. It was clear that Eden was heading for a collapse. He looked awful, his powers of concentration were fast failing and his general weariness made him a poor prospect for influencing Eisenhower if and when he ever got the chance of going to Washington. On 18 November, Macmillan spent an hour with Aldrich, promoting himself as ‘Eden’s deputy’, ready to take up the challenge of a top-level tripartite conference. He detailed what he saw as the ‘terrible dilemma’ for the British government, which had to be resolved. This was either:
. . . withdrawing from Egypt, having accomplished nothing but to have brought about the entry into Egypt of a completely inadequate token force of troops representing the UN, whose only function is to police the border between Israel and Egypt, without having secured the free operation of the Canal or even being in a position to clear it, or (b) renewing hostilities in Egypt and taking over the entire Canal in order to remove the obstructions which have been placed there by Nasser and to insure its free operation and to avoid the complete economic collapse of Europe within the next few months. The danger of course in the minds of the British Cabinet of adopting the first alternative is that loss of prestige and humiliation would be so great that the govt must fall, while the second alternative would obviously involve the risk of bringing in the Russians and resulting in a third world war.34
But, of course, if the US government would guarantee the management of the canal by an international agency, on the lines of the recommendation of the first London Conference on Suez, then he, Macmillan, was sure that he could persuade the cabinet to agree to a withdrawal of British forces and also ‘bring pressure on the French to withdraw their forces from Egypt at once’.
Aldrich was smart enough to pick up on the hints that Eden was on his way out. It thus came as no surprise to him when, the following day, it was announced that the prime minister was cancelling all his engagements. Officially, Butler was to take charge, but Macmillan told Aldrich that the government would be run by a triumvirate of Butler, Macmillan and Salisbury. Eden would go on vacation ‘first for one week and then for another and this will lead to his retirement’. The assumption by the ambassador was that Butler would eventually become prime minister, but he noted again Macmillan’s eagerness to be designated as deputy prime minister in Eden’s absence with authority to talk directly to Eisenhower.
There was not much public sympathy for Eden. It might have been otherwise had he made a wiser choice of retreat from the strains of office. His departure for Jamaica, where he and his wife, Clarissa, had use of Ian Fleming’s holiday home at Goldeneye, was seen as a master stroke of insensitivity. The island, observed John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, ‘is much patronised by tax evaders and affluent idlers’; he added, ‘with petrol and oil rationed again in England, the retreat of the Prime Minister to a parasites’ paradise seemed to rank prominently in the annals of ministerial follies’.35
Colville was premature in his mention of petrol rationing. This did not come into force until 17 December. But meanwhile there was much else to remind the public what they were sacrificing to defend Britain’s world role, starting with a tax hike on oil that rolled through to price increases for travel, heating and a whole range of energy-related goods. To cap it all, the country was hit by some of the coldest weather on record; hardly the government’s fault, but nevertheless serving to intensify the feel-bad factor. The Daily Mirror had fun at Eden’s expense by offering a three-week holiday for two in Jamaica for anyone who could solve the Suez crisis.
While Jamaica prepared for its distinguished guests with a calypso band rehearsing ‘Jamaica the Garden of Eden welcomes Britain’s Sir Anthony Eden’, his foreign secretary was playing out his time in Washington and New York knowing that there was no earthly chance of persuading Eisenhower to offer even token support for the Anglo-French presence in Egypt. In his speech to the UN General Assembly on 23 November, he offered what amounted to an unconditional withdrawal of British forces as soon as the UN peacekeeping force was ready to take over. Four days later he was back in London, where he offered to resign.
At last! In his memoirs Lloyd made it sound like an act of noble self-sacrifice as he stood forth as the voluntary scapegoat for all that had gone wrong. It is impossible to imagine his true feelings. Noble self-sacrifice was not in his nature, but as a shrewd operator he may well have calculated that staying on, and without Eden to protect him, would have invited dismissal from whoever took over in Downing Street. Better to go before he was pushed. But Lloyd’s timing was wrong. The cabinet was delighted to have a scapegoat, but not one who was about to leave the government just at the moment when it was under maximum fire. He was persuaded to stay on.
The deal on Anglo-French withdrawal from Egypt was finally settled on 3 December when Caccia told Robert Murphy at the state department that while Britain felt it was impossible to set a definite date, ‘the plain facts of the case . . . are that we have decided to go without delay and we intend to go without delay’. When Dulles heard this he telephoned Eisenhower, who was in Augusta, Georgia, and together they agreed that Britain ‘had gone adequately to meet the requirements’.36
While Humphrey along with Hoover had been seen as motivated entirely by anti-British sentiment, the tune in London changed when, as Humphrey had promised, a firm commitment to get out of Egypt triggered an IMF loan of $562 million with stand-by credit of $739 million. Moreover, Britain was granted a US credit line of $500 million with the right to defer interest and principal payments a total of seven times.37
The ‘almost insoluble problem of Israel’, as Dulles dubbed it, had still to be settled. Eisenhower was not in thrall to the Jewish vote but he was certainly not about to sacrifice Israel for the sake of Arab goodwill. Knowing this, Ben-Gurion was inclined to be bullish. On 14 January, the UN was told that Israel would not withdraw its troops from Gaza or from Sharm el-Sheikh on the Gulf of Aqaba. Washington reacted angrily and with more strength than Ben-Gurion had expected. Dollar aid was cut back and a guarantee of unrestricted oil supplies was withheld. As Dulles observed, the US possessed the sticks and the carrots.38
