Her Majesty’s Government have been informed of the course of the conversations held at Sèvres . . . and confirm that in the situation there envisaged they will take the action described.
SIR ANTHONY EDEN to GUY MOLLET, 25 October 1956
On the morning of Monday 22 October 1956 Selwyn Lloyd, the British foreign secretary, cancelled his public engagements, citing a heavy cold. Having donned a battered raincoat to conceal his identity, he was then bundled into a waiting car and driven to RAF Hendon by his private secretary, Donald Logan. There, the two men boarded an aircraft and flew to the Villacoublay military airfield, eight miles south-west of Paris. On landing, they were met by a French officer who drove them to a modest villa, partially concealed by trees, on rue Emanuel Girot in the Parisian suburb of Sèvres. Lloyd arrived at about four o’clock in the afternoon. Waiting at the house, which had served as a Resistance headquarters during the war, were Guy Mollet, Christian Pineau and Maurice Bourgès-Manoury, the French defence minister, together with the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, and Shimon Peres, director of the ministry of defence.1
The plenary discussions, which began at 7 p.m., were tense and the personal chemistry poor. The Israelis were, Lloyd noted, ‘utterly exhausted’ – they had endured a gruelling seventeen-hour flight the day before – and Ben-Gurion was ‘in a rather aggressive mood . . . implying that the Israelis had no reason to believe in anything that a British minister might say’.2 They also took an instant dislike to Lloyd, whom they viewed as patronising and aloof.3 Mordechai Bar-On, Dayan’s twenty-seven-year-old personal assistant, noted in his diary that Lloyd was ‘a typical English diplomat’ with a ‘shrill voice’ and a face that ‘looked as if something stinking hangs permanently under his nose’.4 Nevertheless, as the talks progressed (there was a brief adjournment while the guests consumed an ‘enormous fish’), the outlines of a plot were sketched out.5 Ben-Gurion explained that Israel was prepared to launch a ‘reprisal raid on Egypt on D-Day in the morning, reaching the canal by that evening. That night, Britain and France can meet and issue a demand to Egypt to clear all its forces from the canal zone and send a simultaneous demand to Israel to refrain from approaching the canal.’ Because Israel had no interest in capturing the canal this ultimatum would ‘have no real meaning to us’. However, if the Egyptians refused to comply, Britain and France would ‘start to bomb Egyptian air-bases the next morning’. A non-committal Lloyd departed after midnight, with a promise to consult his colleagues back in London.6 Just two days later, the British, French and Israeli governments signed a top-secret agreement to launch a war to overthrow Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Throughout August and September the United Kingdom and France had engaged in what one historian has described as a ‘dance of diplomacy’.7 London, in fact, hosted two international conferences. In mid-August, twenty-two maritime powers – including Australia, the USA, the USSR, the Netherlands and India – gathered to discuss Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal. Of those invited, only the governments of Egypt and Greece declined (Greek public opinion was broadly sympathetic to Nasser and, given the increasingly bitter dispute over Cyprus, Athens judged it prudent not to attend).8 After several days of talks, eighteen nations endorsed a resolution that called for a ‘definite system destined to guarantee at all times, and for all Powers, the free use of the Canal’, to be established with ‘due regard to the sovereign rights of Egypt’. At the start of September the Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, flew to Cairo to present the London proposals. On the first day of talks, he took the Egyptian leader to one side to warn that if a deal was not reached, an Anglo-French military strike was still very much alive. (Nasser promptly complained to the Americans about the ‘Australian mule’ who had been sent ‘to threaten me’.) The mission came to nought. In private, Menzies blamed President Eisenhower for undermining the talks; during a press conference on 5 September, Eisenhower had emphasised that the US was committed to a peaceful resolution of the crisis.9 As he prepared to leave Cairo, the Australian premier informed Eden that Egypt had ‘all the markings of a Police state’ and Nasser, though ‘in some ways a likeable fellow’, was ‘rather gauche, with some irritating mannerisms, such as rolling his eyes up to the ceiling when he is talking to you and producing a quick, quite evanescent grin when he can think of nothing else to do’. The Egyptians, meanwhile, were not exactly enamoured with Menzies. Egypt’s foreign minister – who described the Australian as having ‘gruff eyebrows, glaring eyes and a sharp voice’ – believed that he was totally insensitive to the Afro-Asian sensibility, and appeared to see nothing wrong in asking Nasser to accept that his fellow Egyptians were incapable of operating the waterway successfully without outside help.10
A subsequent effort, spearheaded by John Foster Dulles, to set up a Suez Canal Users’ Association also ran into the sand when Nasser made it clear that Egypt would ‘stand firm in safeguarding its sovereignty’. Finally, towards the end of September, the British and French governments referred the Suez dispute to the United Nations Security Council.11
It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that a good deal of this diplomatic activity was simply for show. Christian Pineau was dismissive about the UN, telling the British ambassador in Paris that the referral to the Security Council was ‘largely immaterial, except for window dressing purposes’.12 Throughout the summer and on into the autumn, as conferences were convened, communiqués issued and diplomatic notes exchanged, London and Paris were busy refining their war plans, moving ships, aircraft and other military assets into position, and waiting for a casus belli that would enable them to strike. In an insightful editorial published at the start of September the Manchester Guardian noted that, while all of the diplomatic hustle and bustle ‘point to a settlement by conciliation’, the continued government talk about the ‘possible use of force’, together with a heavy (and heavily censored) military build-up in the Mediterranean, ‘seem to cover a less happy state of affairs’. This, the paper noted, enabled the government ‘to be, if it pleases, hypocritical, two-faced: it can look wholly peace-loving while actually it prepares for an attack. We may trust that this is not so . . . but . . . it is an explosive possibility to be kept in mind.’13
On the evening of 8 August, Sir Anthony Eden had addressed the British people about the Suez crisis for the first time. Speaking from a hot and cramped BBC studio, he declared that Nasser’s ‘act of plunder’ could not be allowed to stand. ‘Our quarrel’, he explained, ‘is not with Egypt, and still less with the Arab world; it is with Colonel Nasser’ – a man who could not ‘be trusted to keep an agreement’. Eden then invoked the lessons of the 1930s: ‘The pattern is familiar to many of us, my friends. We all know this is how fascist governments behave and we all remember, only too well, what the cost can be in giving in to fascism.’ ‘With dictators’, he explained, ‘you always have to pay a higher price later on, for the appetite grows with feeding.’14 Coming from Eden, who had made his name as an opponent of appeasement, these words were hugely powerful. Although keen to stress that he did not ‘seek a solution by force’, Eden justified the recent military movements ‘by land, sea, and air’ as a sensible precaution. Behind the scenes, though, the prime minister was working hard to foster public support for military action. His administration waged an extraordinarily intensive propaganda campaign, exploiting relationships with newspaper proprietors and editors, making liberal use of anonymous briefings to lobby journalists and deploying its powers of censorship. The purpose was to deflect attention away from any meaningful discussion of the legality of Egypt’s decision to nationalise the canal, stoke hostility towards Nasser through a relentless campaign of vilification and ‘whip up public opinion’. These efforts were highly effective.15 In its ‘A Hinge of History’ editorial of 1 August, for instance, The Times warned that if Nasser was allowed to ‘get away with this coup all the British and other western interests in the Middle East will crumble’. Nasser’s ‘seizure’ of the canal was a turning point – a ‘hinge of history’, akin to ‘Hitler’s march into the Rhineland’. ‘Quibbling’ over the legal technicalities of Nasser’s move was beside the point. Not only did Nasser’s actions threaten the economic security of the West, but they set a dangerous precedent: there would be ‘no stability and confidence in the world so long as [international] agreements can be scrapped with impunity’. It was, then, vital that Britain took the lead in confronting Nasser, even if that meant resorting to force. After all, if a nation did not ‘stand up’ for its rights, it would be destined to forfeit them.16 Sir Anthony could hardly have put the case better himself.17
Behind closed doors – at meetings of the cabinet and the Egypt Committee (the de facto War Cabinet) – Eden and his senior ministers were explicit about their desire not simply to secure international oversight over the canal but to ‘bring about the downfall of the present Egyptian government’.18 They were equally clear that this intention should remain hidden. As Selwyn Lloyd noted, it was ‘important, from the point of view of public opinion, especially in the United States and in Asia, that the purpose of our action should appear to be confined to establishing the security of the international waterway’. Were any official document to leak that appeared to ‘define our objective in wider terms’ then the consequences, he warned, might very well be ‘disastrous’.19
By the end of July the service chiefs had the outlines of a workable plan, Operation Musketeer, which envisaged an attack on Port Said involving an amphibious landing by Royal Marines and an airborne assault by the Parachute Brigade Group. Soon, though, both military and civilian leaders were expressing doubts. Port Said was far from ideal terrain, with only very limited space in which troops could be deployed, and there was a real risk that the Canal itself would be damaged, or blockaded, during the fighting. Perhaps most significant, though, was the realisation that such a localised strike was unlikely to topple Nasser’s government.20 As Harold Macmillan pointed out, if Britain satisfied itself with merely reoccupying the Canal Zone, it would be in the same highly unsatisfactory position as in 1954, though this time with far fewer forces at its disposal to deal with hostile locals and a likely campaign of sabotage and guerrilla warfare. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was one of the government’s most vociferous hawks, argued that the military objectives should be expanded to include the destruction of Nasser’s armies, the overthrow of his government and its replacement with an administration that ‘will work satisfactorily with ourselves and other powers’.21
During the second week of August the cabinet approved a new plan. After a bombing campaign of two or three days to wipe out the Egyptian air force, troops would be landed at Alexandria and a force of eighty thousand would march to the Suez Canal, via Cairo. But in early September the plan was changed yet again – this time because of concerns about the devastating effects that a naval bombardment of Alexandria would have on the city’s civilian population and on international opinion. The landings would take place at Port Said after all, though they would be preceded by a major air offensive designed to neutralise Egypt’s air force, cripple its economy and shatter both military and civilian morale – thereby, it was hoped, destroying Nasser’s hold on power.22
On the evening of 10 August the Egypt Committee had concluded that ‘any military operation against Egypt should be launched in retaliation against some aggressive or provocative act by the Egyptians’, and that the government ‘might be compelled to take advantage of any provocative act by Egypt, even though it came at a time when the preparations for military operations were less well advanced than might have been desired’.23 The difficulty for the British, though, was that no such provocation was forthcoming. Much to the frustration (and surprise) of Downing Street, the Egyptians seemed to be doing rather a good job of running the canal. Back on 1 August, the British Embassy had reported, ‘All quiet and canal functioning normally.’ By and large, that was how things remained. The Egyptian government repeatedly made clear its determination to ‘honour’ all of its ‘international obligations’ with respect to the Canal, and to ensure freedom of navigation.24 Even when more than two hundred foreign employees of the Suez Canal Company, including ninety pilots, quit their posts in mid-September, the waterway continued to operate smoothly – despite a concerted British effort to pile up maritime traffic in the hopes of causing chaos.25
On 16 October the minister of defence, Sir Walter Monckton, noted that ‘It now seems probable that military operations against Egypt will not be required in the immediate future, but that there will be further negotiations which may well be protracted.’26 As one of the few cabinet members who had consistently opposed the military option (the use of force, he believed, threatened to ‘precipitate disorder throughout the Middle East and to alienate a substantial body of public opinion in this country and elsewhere throughout the world’), Monckton must have been a very relieved man.27 For all the talk of war, a negotiated settlement now seemed at hand.
Selwyn Lloyd had departed for New York on the evening of 1 October for high-level talks at the United Nations, brokered by Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. By the morning of 12 October, it appeared that a decisive breakthrough had been made when Mahmoud Fawzi, Egypt’s foreign minister, accepted the ‘six principles’ that the British had been pushing – including a commitment to ‘free and open transit through the Canal without discrimination’ and an acknowledgement ‘that the operation of the Canal should be insulated from the politics of any country’.28 Although major issues remained unresolved, not least how these principles might actually be enforced, and despite persistent doubts about Nasser’s personal commitment to an agreement, there were grounds for optimism. Lloyd certainly felt that a deal could be done which, as he told his cabinet colleagues, would ‘give us the substance of our demands for effective international supervision of the Canal’. Eden, too, seemed keen. At 1.30 p.m. on Sunday 14 October, the prime minister sent a telegram to Lloyd, urging that further, substantive negotiations be undertaken to hammer out the details and suggesting Geneva as a suitable location for such a summit. Diplomacy, it seemed, would be given every chance to succeed. Within hours, everything had changed.29
Chequers Court, a grand sixteenth-century house in the foothills of the Chilterns, has served as the official country retreat for British prime ministers since 1921.30 On the afternoon of 14 October Albert Gazier, France’s minister for social affairs, and Major-General Maurice Challe, deputy to the chief of the French General Staff, arrived there in conditions of the utmost secrecy. The two men had come with a plan that would resolve the Suez Crisis once and for all: an Israeli strike against Egypt would be used as a justification for France and Britain to occupy the Suez Canal, under the pretext of safeguarding free maritime passage.31
Both Tel Aviv and Paris had reason to want Nasser gone. Egypt, along with several other Arab states, had launched a war against Israel in May 1948 in an effort to destroy the new Jewish state. Despite the 1949 armistice agreement, relations between the two countries were poor. Cairo denied Israeli ships and shipping the right to use the Suez Canal, tightened the blockade of the Straits of Tiran (cutting off Eilat, the port city on Israel’s southernmost tip, from the Gulf of Aqaba and preventing access to East Africa and the Far East) and encouraged attacks by Palestinian fedayeen from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza strip, as well as from Lebanon and Jordan. This was all justified by a series of increasingly vitriolic attacks on the ‘Zionist enemy’.32 On 31 August 1955, for example, Nasser had declared that Egypt would ‘despatch her heroes’ to ‘cleanse the land of Palestine . . . There will be no peace on Israel’s border because we demand vengeance, and vengeance is Israel’s death.’33 All this, together with the massive build-up of modern military hardware that followed the controversial arms deal with Czechoslovakia, caused considerable alarm in Tel Aviv.34 According to Moshe Dayan, there ‘was no doubt in our minds that Egypt’s purpose was to wipe us out, or at least win a decisive military victory which would leave us in helpless subjugation’. In fact, in the same speech in which he had announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Nasser had declared that ‘the gangs which were converted into a State in 1948 are now being converted back into gangs and it is a good omen that they should go back to what they were in 1948 . . . Victory Day is coming near.’ He had also pledged to support fedayeen attacks until the ‘Arab motherland extend[s] from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf’.35
Meanwhile, French convictions that Nasser posed an existential threat to their position in North Africa were strengthened after the Athos – a four-hundred-tonne former Canadian minesweeper flying under the Sudanese flag – was intercepted by the French navy. French submarines and aircraft had been tracking the ship for several days as she zigzagged her way across the Mediterranean. Then, on 16 October, as she headed for the Algerian coast, the Athos was approached by a destroyer escort and boarded. It turned out that the rusting vessel was a ‘floating arsenal’ with some seventy tonnes of military equipment in the hold, including seventy-two mortars, forty machine guns, seventy-four automatic rifles, 240 sub-machine guns, 2,300 rifles, two thousand mortar shells and six hundred thousand cartridges – enough, declared the French, to arm three thousand FLN fighters (and at a time when the Algerian rebels could boast fewer than twenty mortars and ten machine guns between them). Moreover, Nasser’s fingerprints were all over the contraband: the ship had set sail from Alexandria, the weapons had been purchased with Egyptian money, and, after interrogating the captain and the crew, the French authorities announced that the arms had been loaded onto the Athos by uniformed Egyptian soldiers.36
The possibility of Franco-Israeli military action against Egypt, first mooted during the summer, was pursued more seriously at the end of September, when senior military and civilian officials from both countries held top-secret talks in Paris. The Israelis – afraid that their major cities would be devastated by Egyptian air raids, and reluctant to appear before the world as the sole aggressor – insisted that the two nations (or all three if Britain agreed to take part) would have to attack simultaneously. The French continued to push for an initial military strike by Israel that could be used to justify French (or Franco-British) involvement.37 Nevertheless, the talks were encouraging, and the mood was further improved by France’s willingness to provide Israel with a major shipment of arms, including one hundred Super-Sherman tanks and two hundred armoured personnel carriers. Soon the Israelis were drawing up contingency plans for a major military offensive in the Sinai Peninsula.38
The French, who were reluctant to proceed without British support, now sought to sell the plan to London.39 The wider diplomatic context in which they did so was complicated. In the Tripartite Declaration of 1950, Britain, France and the United States had jointly stated their ‘unalterable opposition to the use of force or the threat of force’ between Israel and her Arab neighbours and had pledged to intervene to prevent any violation of national frontiers or armistice lines.40 Britain relied heavily on strategic partnerships with Jordan and Iraq – implacable opponents of Israel – to promote her interests in the region, and had treaty obligations to assist Jordan in the event of an attack by Israel. Given escalating tensions along the Israel–Jordan border (fuelled by fedayeen attacks on Israel) and ominous talk from Tel Aviv about seizing parts of the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, Whitehall viewed a war against Israel as a very real possibility.41
Concerns that Britain might become embroiled in an Arab–Israeli war were, in fact, uppermost in Eden’s mind when he entertained Gazier and Challe at Chequers on 14 October. Just a few days before, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had launched a major reprisal raid on Qalqilya in the West Bank, killing seventy Jordanians.42 According to Anthony Nutting, the foreign office minister, who was present during the discussions, the prime minister could ‘scarcely contain his glee’ when the French reminded him that Nasser had recently repudiated the protections offered by the Tripartite Declaration: ‘“So that lets us off the hook,” Eden said excitedly. “We have no obligation, it seems, to stop the Israelis attacking the Egyptians.”’43 The French now sought to capitalise on British fears that Israel might launch a full-scale attack on Jordan.44 As the historian Scott Lucas has explained, they effectively ‘blackmailed’ the British by warning that if she declined to support the Franco-Israeli plan, the Israelis would attack Jordan instead of Egypt. This would leave London with an impossible choice: abandon their obligations to Amman, and so undermine their entire position in the Middle East, or come to Jordan’s aid in a war against Israel, which, given her close military and economic ties with France, would pit the British against their French allies.45 Eden, who remained eager to strike against Nasser, was in. Lloyd was summoned back from New York and on 16 October, during a private lunch in Downing Street, won round. Lloyd initially wanted nothing to do with the French plan, but gradually allowed himself to be persuaded that the proposed UN deal would not hold and that, with the window for military action narrowing as winter approached, it was time to act. From now on, Lloyd put all private doubts to one side, and offered full support to his prime minister.46
The complex and highly secret negotiations between Britain, France and Israel were finally concluded on Sunday 24 October. It was, noted Mordechai Bar-On, ‘one of those wonderful days which Paris gracefully bestows upon its inhabitants and visitors. The sky was clear, but the streets and trees were still wet from the autumn shower which had briefly washed them in the morning. Red leaves were dancing in the chilly breeze. Everything was glittering and full of colour.’ As the young Israeli officer approached the Sèvres villa for what would be the final time, he could ‘smell the roasted chestnuts someone was selling on the corner’.47 During several hours of discussions – first with the French and then, later that afternoon, with the British (this time Patrick Dean, deputy under-secretary at the Foreign Office, accompanied Logan) – France agreed to station a squadron of Mystères IV A jets and a squadron of fighter bombers, carrying Israeli air force markings, in Israel, to strengthen the country’s air defences; Israel agreed not to attack Jordan; and Britain confirmed that in the event of Jordan attacking Israel, the mutual defence pact between London and Amman would not be activated.48 At Ben-Gurion’s suggestion, a formal protocol was drawn up. Drafted in the villa’s kitchen and typed up on a portable typewriter, it summarised the undertakings that had been given by the three governments. Israel agreed that on the evening of 29 October it would launch a ‘large scale attack on the Egyptian forces with the aim of reaching the Canal Zone the following day’. In response, the British and French would issue their ultimatum – requesting a ceasefire, insisting on a withdrawal of all Israeli and Egyptian troops from the Canal Zone, and demanding that Cairo accept a temporary Anglo-French occupation to safeguard the waterway. If these terms were rejected, Britain and France would commence military action against Egypt on the morning of 31 October. At 7 p.m., Ben-Gurion, Pineau and Dean signed the agreement. The Israeli prime minister, struggling to conceal his excitement, picked up his copy and ‘as if holding a fragile treasure, folded it, and stuck it in his waistcoat pocket’. A bottle of champagne was produced and the operation’s success was toasted – although the atmosphere was one of quiet satisfaction, rather than jubilation. Moshe Dayan, who had already sent the order to mobilise the Israeli forces, recalled that the British were ‘the first to leave, mumbling as they went words of politeness tinged with humour and not quite comprehensible’. D-Day was less than a hundred hours away.49
The Polish leader Władysław Gomułka addresses a vast crowd of supporters in the centre of Warsaw, 24 October 1956.
© Bettmann/CORBIS