0300 Washington DC // 0800 Rabat; London // 0900 Paris // 1000 Cairo
Wearing neat blue lounge suits, five Algerian rebels gathered at the airfield in Rabat, Morocco, to await the arrival of the sultan. Their leader was Ahmed Ben Bella: a farmer’s son, a former football star, and a war hero. He had won the Croix de Guerre for his bravery during the German bombing of Marseilles and later the Médaille Militaire, the highest honor in the Free French forces. A grateful General Charles de Gaulle had presented him with his medal.
VE Day, May 8, 1945, was a turning point. A victory parade in the northeastern Algerian town of Sétif turned into a protest against French rule. There were rapes, mutilations, and murderous attacks on Europeans, leaving over 100 dead and a similar number injured. It was five days before the authorities could restore order. When they did, it was with unprecedented brutality. Muslim villages were bombed from the air and sea by French forces; 5,000 peasants from the Sétif region were forced to grovel on their knees in front of a French flag and plead for forgiveness.1 Summary executions were carried out by the military, and many Algerians were lynched by European vigilantes. An official French report suggested that 1,020 Algerian Muslims were killed. Far greater figures were quoted throughout the Arab world, up to 45,000.
Many politicians in Paris, much of the population in France, and much of the European population living in Algeria (known as pieds-noirs, literally “black feet”), argued that Algeria was an integral part of France: an equal, not a colony. Much of the political elite in Algeria—some Muslims as well as Europeans—believed strongly that Algerian nationhood was an artificial construct. Before French unification, they argued, the territory had been culturally, linguistically, and politically disparate. Their pride expressed itself not in advocating for independence but in achieving their full potential as free citizens of democratic France. Yet many indigenous Algerians outside the political elite did not feel free or equal, observing the generally greater wealth of Europeans, the disproportionate political representation of Europeans, and the fact that European farmers had settled in the most cultivatable parts of the land. Increasing numbers began to consider themselves under French occupation.
Ben Bella left the French army and joined the Algerian political opposition. The French tried to have him assassinated, so he went into hiding. He was found and imprisoned in 1950 but escaped two years later in a plot that seemed to have fallen out of a cartoon. A loaf of bread was delivered to him in prison with a metal file hidden inside. He used it to saw through the bars on his window, then fled to Cairo and to Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Nasser welcomed Ben Bella and other members of the nascent Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) to Egypt. In 1954, the FLN began an armed uprising against French colonialism in Algeria. Ben Bella remained in exile, coordinating international relations from Egypt and Tunisia and attempting to involve the United Nations on the FLN’s side.2
In February 1956, Guy Mollet—the new socialist prime minister of France, who had been in office for only a week—visited Algeria. He was ambushed by a mob who pelted him with rotten fruit and vegetables. This incident was described by the French and Algerian press as la journée des tomates, the Day of the Tomatoes. In the aftermath of the tomatoes, Mollet assumed a firm position. Describing the rebels as “a handful of maniacs and criminals who take their orders from outside Algeria,” he stated, “The Government will fight, France will fight to remain in Algeria, and she will remain there. There is no future for Algeria without France.”3
Mollet and his government had no doubt who they thought was giving the rebels orders from outside Algeria. An internal French government report on June 13, 1956—six weeks before the nationalization of the Suez Canal—accused Nasser of “a resumption of Egyptian interferences in the affairs of North Africa; outrageous propaganda on ‘Voice of the Arabs’; training commandos under the aegis of Egyptian officers . . . according hospitality to Algerian rebel military staff.”4
Anthony Eden was not the only man in Europe who had decided Nasser was his personal nemesis. According to C. Douglas Dillon, the American ambassador to Paris, Mollet “had almost a fixation about President Nasser.” The French prime minister believed that Nasser “was going to control oil and, therefore, control the world. . . . He was violently concerned about this.”5
Senior figures in the French government were open about their discomfort with Arab and African self-rule. “According to the most reliable intelligence sources we have only a few weeks in which to save North Africa,” Christian Pineau told Foster Dulles on August 1. “Of course, the loss of North Africa would then be followed by that of Black Africa, and the entire territory would rapidly escape European control and influence.”6 The director-general of the French Defense Ministry told the prime minister of Israel, “Black children in Equatorial Africa already bear flags with Nasser’s picture.”7 Canal nationalization affected the situation between France and the Algerian rebels, according to a CIA report: “Suez has hardened attitudes on both sides and dispelled the more favorable atmosphere for negotiations that had been developing.”8
The Algerian rebels had been staying in Morocco as guests of the sultan. The sultan, along with the Tunisian prime minister, Habib Bourguiba, was encouraging them to continue peace talks with the French. These had been going on in secret for a year. Mollet’s government had been pursuing a tough policy of “pacification”—heavy policing—alongside limited social and economic reforms. It was unpopular with the French public, for the cost of keeping the Algerian population subdued was steep. By the autumn of 1956, a blunt CIA memorandum determined that French policy in Algeria “had failed.”9 The talks with the FLN appeared to represent a different approach. The French government promised Ben Bella and his delegation safe conduct by air to meet Bourguiba in Tunis.
As they waited, word came from the palace that owing to a lack of space the Algerians could not share the sultan’s plane and would have to fly in a separate Air Atlas DC-3. “I was very upset by this news,” said Ben Bella afterward. But there was no time to reschedule. As the DC-3 took off from the airfield, Ben Bella carefully stashed his revolver in his seat pocket.
The plane’s route had been planned to avoid flying directly over French-controlled Algerian territory. It made a scheduled stop in Palma de Mallorca in the Mediterranean. Soon after it took off again, Ben Bella began to fear that they were flying too far south. He asked the stewardess what was going on.
“Maybe we’re taking a more direct route,” she replied.
Ben Bella started with alarm. “What do you mean, more direct?” he said. “We’re still not flying over Algerian territory, are we?”
“No, no,” she said hastily.
The plane entered Algerian airspace. As soon as it did, French fighter jets scrambled to meet it. They were not there as an escort. Instead, they forced the plane down.
Ben Bella went for his revolver. “Leave your weapon where it is,” said one of his comrades. “You’re not going to give them this wonderful pretext . . .”
The plane touched down in Algiers. “Then the interior lights went out and we could see armoured cars with spotlights and truckloads of gendarmes with submachine guns following us as we taxied to a halt,” wrote Thomas F. Brady of the New York Times, who was traveling with the rebels.
“All right,” said Ben Bella, as a gendarme with a tommy gun burst into the cabin. “We will come out.” Ben Bella and his companions were taken off the plane, arrested, and handcuffed. “This is how you can trust the French!” Ben Bella exclaimed.10
Two journalists, Brady and a colleague from France-Observateur, were also arrested and questioned—though Brady would soon be released.11 They were packed in a secure van with policemen and escorted away by motorcycles and tanks.12
News of this kidnapping began to spread throughout the Arab world that day, provoking outrage and an immediate demonstration in Tunis against the French. Habib Bourguiba “said that the arrest of the Algerian leaders risked hurling all North Africa into a trial of strength with France,” noted the Times of London.13
On an airfield outside Paris that same damp and misty morning, almost no one’s attention was on another plane: a French DC-4. The scene, Christian Pineau later wrote, “was worthy of a James Bond sequence.”14 The plane touched down on the wet asphalt, and a huddle of men disembarked. Among them was a distinctive figure, his cloud of white hair squashed under a broad-brimmed hat. One of the airfield workers did notice: he thought the figure looked like David Ben-Gurion, prime minister of Israel, and dashed off to tell a journalist friend. The journalist replied that he must have been mistaken. Such a visit was wholly implausible.15
Their cover unblown, Ben-Gurion and his Israeli delegation—Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan (wearing large glasses instead of his trademark eyepatch), and Lieutenant Colonel Nehemia Argov—got into unmarked black cars and drove to Sèvres. Under Ben-Gurion’s arm was a copy of the History of the Wars of Justinian by the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius. It was a hint as to why he was there. The history mentions an island at the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba, where the tip of what is now Saudi Arabia stretches toward the Sinai peninsula. This island was, according to Procopius, the site of an ancient Jewish community.
Ben-Gurion settled pragmatically on the island of Tiran as the site of the ancient community. His reasons were not entirely drawn from Procopius. Tiran was a strategic point on the sea approach to Eilat, Israel’s only southern seaport, linking it to the Red Sea and opening up potentially valuable trade routes to the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and beyond. The importance of the Straits of Tiran and the port of Eilat would become plain in 1957, when the Israelis would broker a secret deal with the National Iranian Oil Company to build an oil pipeline known as the Trans-Israel Pipeline, or Tipline, from Eilat to Ashkelon. This could bring Iranian oil through Israel to the Mediterranean and thus to the European market without using the Suez Canal, avoiding potentially hostile Arab territory. It had the potential to make Israel’s security vital to European interests.16 The possibility of this pipeline was discussed by the Israeli ambassador with British politicians as early as July 1956.17 Egypt, which controlled the Straits, had closed them to Israeli shipping in October 1955.18 Since then, Ben-Gurion had been putting together a plan to take Tiran by force.19
At Sèvres, a summit convened in a private villa belonging to a friend of the French minister of defense, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury. Representing France were Bourgès-Maunoury; Christian Pineau, the minister of foreign affairs; General Maurice Challe; and other senior French military officers. A British representative was to arrive later. The objective was to plan a secret war.
This was a huge moment for Israel: a possible alliance, even in secret, with two major world powers. The Israel of 1956 was a very different state than it is today: physically smaller and militarily far weaker. For its Jewish inhabitants, the Nazi Holocaust was a sharply recent trauma.
The history of Israel and its future hinged at this point on the political maneuverings of David Ben-Gurion. He had been born David Grin (sometimes spelled Grün) in Poland in 1886, at a time when antisemitism was on the rise throughout Europe. He was nine years old at the beginning of 1896, when the Hungarian Jewish writer Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State—suggesting that Jews leave Europe and set up their own country, perhaps in Palestine or Argentina (Uganda later came up as an alternative, but was quickly dropped). “The real, the only, Zionism is a colonization of Palestine,” David wrote to his father; “everything else is just eyewash, blah and a waste of time.”20 Some Zionists did not see the colonization of Palestine as essential to the project of creating a Jewish state. Some Jews continued to reject Zionism altogether, as they had for many years before Herzl revived the idea. As for Palestine itself, it had a population of around half a million people at the time, the great majority of whom were Arabs and Muslims. There was a small minority of Christians and an even smaller minority of Jews, though this soon began to grow as a result of Zionist immigration.
At twenty, David left Poland on a fake passport and made his way to Odessa. From there he took a Russian cargo ship to Jaffa, arriving on September 9, 1906. Palestine was then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Life was hard for the European Zionists who turned up. Few could cope with the climate, the unsanitary conditions, the hard labor, or the cool welcome they received from indigenous Palestinian Jews. David became a jobbing farmhand and contracted malaria. In 1912, he went to study law at Istanbul University. Around this time, he chose a Hebrew name: David Ben-Gurion. He returned to Jerusalem but, when World War I broke out, the Ottoman Empire decided that foreign national Jews in Palestine might constitute a fifth column. He and many others were expelled.
Ben-Gurion went to New York City. His prospects and those of Israel changed dramatically in November 1917, when the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland (the son of the Lord Rothschild who had lent Benjamin Disraeli the money to buy a stake in the Suez Canal Company). The full Balfour declaration read:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
The British government had no authority over the land or people of Palestine at this point. Its conversion to Zionism was opportunistic. The prime minister, David Lloyd George, “does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future,” remarked his predecessor as prime minister, H. H. Asquith, “but thinks it would be an outrage to let the Christian Holy Places—Bethlehem, Mount of Olives, Jerusalem &c—pass into the possession of ‘Agnostic Atheistic France!’”21
Official British Zionism was a response to the top-secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. When the British diplomatic adviser Mark Sykes and the French diplomat François Georges-Picot planned to carve up the Middle East between areas of British and French control, they could not agree who should get Palestine. Eventually, both reluctantly accepted that if the Ottomans were pushed out in the course of World War I, it would be placed under international control.
Without Palestine, though, Sykes felt there would be a hole in British defenses. Herbert Samuel, the British home secretary (who was both Jewish and a Zionist), argued that a Jewish colony east of Suez would be loyal to Britain—plugging that hole. He also argued that the small Jewish population in the United States—then around two million—might prove powerful advocates for British interests if Britain were seen to favor a Jewish state.
When the United States entered the war in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson specifically warned against further imperialism by any European powers. Six months later, British troops under General Edmund Allenby were on the verge of conquering Palestine. This put the British government in a quandary. The terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement meant Britain would have to hand Palestine over to international control—which it did not want to do. If the British took it for themselves, though, the Americans would see that as imperialism. The cabinet therefore chose this precise moment to declare in favor of Zionism. If Palestine were ostensibly ruled by Jews, they might be able to persuade the Americans it was not a colony.
Allenby launched the third British attack on Gaza in Palestine on October 31, 1917. By the morning of November 2, he was heading for victory. Balfour wrote his declaration that same day. It was published in the Times of London on November 7, just as Allenby’s troops marched into Gaza and found that the Ottomans had fled.22
The British cabinet had embraced Zionism because it presented an opportunity to stitch up the French and shut up the Americans. The fallout from this decision was disastrous. Britain had vital Arab allies. It would come to depend on the oil they supplied more and more as the century wore on. The diplomat Evelyn Shuckburgh thought, from the moment Balfour made his declaration, it was inevitable that British power would decline. “Palestine was the burial ground of our hopes for maintaining the British position in the Middle East,” he wrote some years later.23 For Zionists, though, it was a signal moment: a leap in the international legitimacy of Jewish claims for statehood. In the wake of the declaration, Ben-Gurion signed up for the Jewish Legion of the British army, which fought to liberate Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. By the time he got there, that liberation had already happened.
From 1920, Palestine was administered by the British, legitimized by a mandate from the League of Nations after 1922. The mandate was intended to be a temporary arrangement. During the 1920s and 1930s, enthusiasm for the Zionist cause began to falter within the British government, as the difficulty of balancing its Arab and Jewish interests became apparent. Jews in Palestine realized they were going to have to fight their own battles. The Haganah, a paramilitary organization, was set up to defend Jewish communities against Arabs. In 1931, a Haganah splinter group, the Irgun, formed to move from defense to attack. During that decade, Ben-Gurion vied with Ze’ev Jabotinsky for leadership of the Zionist movement and won.
In 1939, a White Paper from the British government backed off the idea of creating a Jewish state in Palestine or partitioning the territory between Arabs and Jews. With oil now indispensable to the British economy and armed forces, and the threat of another war looming, any sentimental attachment to the Balfour Declaration vanished. The prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, explained to his cabinet the “immense importance” of its alliances in the Muslim world. “If we must offend one side,” he said, “let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.”24 The White Paper placed strict limits on the immigration of Jews into Palestine at the point when they were facing a meticulously planned genocide at the hands of the Nazis in Europe. It also placed limits on Jewish acquisitions of land from Arabs. It proposed a jointly ruled successor state to be governed by Arabs and Jews in proportion to their populations. Zionist Jews generally saw the White Paper as an abject betrayal. An armed terrorist insurrection began against the British.
The full horror of the Holocaust began to be uncovered in the last stage of World War II. When the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) arrived in the Middle East in 1947, it was clear from the testimony of the Zionist leaders that the appalling revelations had made their demands urgent. “Not a few thousands, not tens of thousands, but millions, six millions were put to death. Can anybody realise what that means?” Ben-Gurion asked in his statement to the Special Committee. “Can anybody realise—a million Jewish babies burned in gas-chambers? A third of our people, almost as many as the whole population of Sweden, murdered?”25 UNSCOP recommended partition. The United Nations drew up a map dividing the territory into three tracts of Arab state and three tracts of Jewish state, intersecting at crossing points, with Jerusalem preserved separately under a Special International Regime. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution in favor of partition of the territory. A Jewish state was given international legitimacy by this United Nations resolution, as was an independent state for Palestinian Arabs.26
At one minute past midnight on May 14, 1948, the British Mandate ended. The following day, the brand-new state of Israel was invaded by expeditionary forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Lebanon joined later. Saudi Arabia and Yemen both sent troops. The fighting continued for almost ten months. At the end, Israel retained all the territory it had been allocated under the United Nations partition plan, and took more than half of what was to have been the Palestinian Arab state. Jordan occupied the West Bank; Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. These two tiny and compromised parcels of land were all that remained of any kind of Palestinian territory.
For the Palestinian people, this was the climax of al-Nakba, the Catastrophe. Seven hundred thousand people were displaced, many crammed into refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza. Devastated, occupied, overcrowded with traumatized people, and divided physically from each other by hostile Israeli territory, the West Bank and Gaza had little prospect of forming a coherent or stable state.
Israel may have won its first war, but the fighting left many Jewish Israelis—and Ben-Gurion particularly—feeling that their struggle for survival was far from over. “We have beaten the Arabs, but are they likely to forget it?” asked Ben-Gurion. “Are they going to take that insult? They must certainly have some self-esteem. We shall try to bring peace, but two are needed to make peace. Let’s be frank—it wasn’t because we were able to perform miracles that we won, but because Arab armies are rotten. What will happen to us if an Arab Mustapha Kemal [Atatürk] makes an appearance one of these days?”27
The years 1950–55 saw militarization in the supposedly demilitarized zones along the borders with Syria and Egypt, and infiltration raids into Israel by small bands of fighters and civilians. But these skirmishes did not appear to be building toward full-scale war. In Egypt, according to one of Nasser’s senior associates, there was no plan to attack Israel: “We did not even mention Israel,” he remembered. “We didn’t even realise that we didn’t mention it. . . . It wasn’t even in our agenda. . . . We did not ever think to attack Israel because we know that if we attack Israel we are attacking the whole world.”28 Indeed, so peaceable were the early 1950s that the Israeli chief of the general staff disbanded the Israeli Defense Force (IDF)’s Southern Command on its borderlands with Egypt.29
But an Arab Mustapha Kemal Atatürk did emerge: a charismatic visionary from a middle-class family with a strong military background, who had an ambition to create a modern, industrialized, secular state.30 That man was Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Uri Avnery was perhaps Israel’s most prominent critical journalist, editor of the magazine HaOlem HaZeh (This World). His family immigrated from Nazi Germany in 1933, when he was ten years old. He joined the Irgun when he was fifteen; he fought as a commando in the 1948 war. He became interested in ideas of Semitic unity: a joint initiative between Jews and Arabs to resist colonialism in the Middle East. In the 1950s he became a strong voice for peace with the Arabs—and an outspoken critic of Ben-Gurion.
“Ben-Gurion could not stand Abdel Nasser from the beginning,” Avnery said. “When Abdel Nasser came to power, Ben-Gurion developed a complex. He was by then an old man.” Ben-Gurion was sixty-seven when Nasser became prime minister in 1954. “And there was for the first time a young Arab leader, progressive, tall, good-looking—everything Ben-Gurion was not! He was not a good speaker, he was short, he was old—he was afraid. Abdel Nasser was inspiring a new generation of Arabs. . . . This was one of the real hidden motives of the [Suez] war—there was a new style of pan-Arab nationalism and Ben-Gurion wanted to destroy it.” Avnery compared the Egyptian leader not to Atatürk, but to a historical figure perhaps even more powerful: “Nasser looked like a new Saladin.”31
Since the end of 1955, Israeli intelligence services and the IDF had been predicting that Egypt might attack Israel. Moshe Dayan, a charismatic ladies’ man who had worn a black eyepatch since World War II, was chief of the general staff. He noted in February 1956 that nine of Egypt’s sixteen brigades were in Sinai, compared to just one a few months before. Dayan encouraged Ben-Gurion to consider a preemptive war against Egypt, with the aim of seizing the Gaza Strip and the Straits of Tiran. The more moderate foreign secretary Moshe Sharett wrote in his diary, “The press is covered with screaming headlines about Egyptian troop concentrations ‘on the border.’ . . . The impression left is that we are actually on the brink of war, but the sceptical reader can understand that we have artificially exaggerated [this impression in order to] buttress our demand for arms.”32 But Dayan’s enthusiasm for such a war was genuine, and he had Ben-Gurion’s attention. Mindful of the potential reaction of the international community, the prime minister had so far held back. Yet in October 1956 everything changed, for the Israelis found themselves at a negotiating table with Britain and France.
The plan discussed at the secret Sèvres meeting was so foolhardy that many in the British and French establishments would subsequently find it impossible to believe. Israel would invade Egypt. Britain and France would publicly condemn this action—though covertly they would support it. The two imperial nations would intervene under the guise of peacekeepers, interposing themselves between the Israeli and Egyptian forces for the “protection” of the canal. The canal would be given over to “international” control, and Israel would be confirmed in much of its territorial gain. Following a psychological warfare campaign, Nasser would be removed and Egypt handed over to a more obedient viceroy. The identity of the viceroy was undetermined, but the British had drawn up a list of candidates—including the former president Mohamed Neguib, former foreign minister Muhammad Salah al-Din, former prime minister and Axis sympathizer Ali Maher, and former interior minister Ahmed Mortada al-Maraghi. “Everything our colleagues in SIS [MI6] and the Foreign Office said to us showed that they had no information that made any sense at all on which Egyptian officers or civilians might constitute a new government if Nasser were to be eliminated,” remembered CIA agent Miles Copeland. “And they didn’t seem to care. They thought they should get rid of Nasser, hang the practical consequences, just to show the world that an upstart like him couldn’t get away with so ostentatiously twisting the lion’s tail.”33
“The British were still under the illusion that, even after the withdrawal from Egypt, they could organise the Arab world in their interests against Egyptian opposition,” wrote the British ambassador in Cairo, Humphrey Trevelyan, who repeatedly warned his own government against interfering in Egypt’s internal affairs. “Our actions were designed for a situation which no longer existed.”34
1500 London // 1600 Paris
Monday, October 22, 1956, was a day of bad news in London. Results from a general election in Jordan indicated that candidates who opposed the defense treaty Jordan maintained with Britain had done well. Many new representatives favored closer links with Gamal Abdel Nasser. “The trend against the West was clearest on the west bank of the Jordan River, in territory formerly part of Palestine,” reported the New York Times. “All three candidates elected from Jerusalem are considered strongly anti-Western.” One of them “generally is called a Communist.”35
Anthony Nutting requested a meeting with his superior, the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd. He was told Lloyd had a bad cold. He offered to telephone instead. Lloyd’s office replied that he was not taking calls, either.
Nutting thought this extremely strange.36 But then Lloyd was a strange foreign secretary. He was not a dynamic man; neither his intelligence nor his imagination was rated highly by colleagues. He had risen through the ranks politically by being unthreatening, diligent, loyal, and ready to take on tasks no one else wanted.
In 1951, when the Conservative Party returned to government, Lloyd had been summoned to Winston Churchill’s country house at Chartwell. He had assumed he might be made attorney general or solicitor general owing to his background as a lawyer. Instead, Churchill asked him to join the Foreign Office. “I was flabbergasted,” Lloyd admitted in his memoirs. “I wondered whether it was a case of mistaken identity.”
“But, Sir, I think there must be some mistake,” he said. “I do not speak any foreign language. Except in war, I have never visited any foreign country. I do not like foreigners.” (This, he added hastily in his book, was “a view which I very soon changed.”) “I have never spoken in a Foreign Affairs debate in the House. I have never listened to one.”
“Young man,” said Churchill (Lloyd was forty-seven at the time), “these all seem to me to be positive advantages.”37
With the ailing Churchill as prime minister and the ailing Eden as foreign secretary, both frequently absent from their desks, Lloyd was exposed to more than his expected share of responsibility. He was promoted to minister of defense in April 1955, when Eden became prime minister, and foreign secretary that December. He had by then visited some foreign countries and met some foreigners. He even liked a few of them, such as United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. He had dutifully plodded his way through any number of briefings and meetings. But he still could not be said to have a natural feel for his subject. He was easily influenced by the opinions of others, principally Eden’s. He referred almost every decision he was required to make back to the prime minister. “It becomes daily more apparent that we have no Secretary of State,” his officials were heard to remark.38
At the moment Nutting asked for him, Selwyn Lloyd was not in bed with a cold. He was in an RAF plane landing near Paris. In Lloyd’s official Foreign Office diary, everything on October 22 was crossed out. His assistant private secretary, Donald Logan, wrote on the page, “A day marked, among other things, by a nearly fatal car accident—for which my driving was not responsible!”39 This was a private code. There had been no nearly fatal car accident, just a near miss on the drive from the airfield to Sèvres. Logan later admitted that he wrote the cryptic clue to remind himself “of our clandestine visit to Sèvres. I had no idea that this scrap of paper would get into the public archives. I ought not to have been so flippant.”40
At Sèvres, the first session began at four p.m. with just the French and the Israelis. Ben-Gurion was on strong form, even though he was coming down with influenza. Israel, he said, faced a sea blockade to the south and terrorism from the Arab states, especially Egypt. He feared the Soviets were pouring armaments into Egypt. This was why his country wanted an offensive, which he described as: “More than a raid, less than a war.” France agreed to Ben-Gurion’s request for French air squadrons and warships to protect Israeli towns.
Then Selwyn Lloyd arrived. “His face gave the impression of something stinking hanging permanently below his nose,” wrote Ben-Gurion’s military assistant Mordechai Bar-On.41 Ben-Gurion felt Lloyd talked down to him; Lloyd found Ben-Gurion arrogant. “He did his best to put the British case, but I agree with the Israeli accounts of the conversations that his heart wasn’t in it,” remembered Donald Logan.42 “Moshe Dayan, with his black eye patch, gave the impression of a Caribbean pirate trying to board a vessel of Her Britannic Majesty,” noted Christian Pineau.43 It was perhaps not an auspicious image.
Though Eden was keen to work with the Israelis, Lloyd was not so sure. “Selwyn Lloyd was a modest man and was not very confident in his own judgement, I think,” said a Foreign Office civil servant. “Eden, of course, had a great reputation as an expert in foreign policy and I think Selwyn felt that he ought not to challenge Eden’s judgement.”44 There was a sticking point. Ben-Gurion wanted a simultaneous attack by Israel on Sinai, and by France and Britain on the canal. Eden wanted the British and French to attack two days after Israel, so that it looked as though the European powers had a pretext for intervention. But Ben-Gurion feared that plan would give the Egyptians two days in which to retaliate with their new Soviet arms, perhaps bombing Israeli cities.
In Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower was nearing the climax of his campaign for a second term as president. While Eisenhower shared the instinctive anticolonial sentiment of many of his countrymen, he had noted in his diary just before his inauguration as president in 1953 his concern that “immediate independence would result in suffering for people and even anarchy” if it were rolled out carelessly throughout the Third World. He understood that nationalism, anti-imperialism, and opposition to racial inequality ran high in colonized nations, and he was sympathetic. His fear was about how these sentiments might find expression if First World powers failed to listen: “Moscow leads many misguided people to believe that they can count on communist help to achieve and sustain nationalistic ambitions.” To avoid losing Third World countries to the Soviet bloc, Eisenhower believed the old imperial powers must distance themselves from colonialist ways: “Western powers must not appear before the world as a combination of forces to compel adherence to the status quo.”45
Despite his military background, and to a considerable extent because of it, Eisenhower based his reelection appeal on his ability to make peace—most recently demonstrated by bringing the Korean War to a close. His slogan was “Peace, Prosperity, and Progress.” He told the nation: “The only way to end World War III is to prevent it.” His television advertisements showed the same young men who had struggled and fought on Heartbreak Ridge in Korea now enjoying the relatively controlled violence of an American football game. Eisenhower’s mother had been a strong pacifist on religious grounds. Having experienced so much war as a soldier and commander, her son’s feelings against taking the United States into another armed conflict were just as passionately held. “The sum of our international effort should be this,” he told the nation in his State of the Union address in January 1956: “the waging of peace, with as much resourcefulness, with as great a sense of dedication and urgency, as we have ever mustered in defense of our country in time of war. In this effort, our weapon is not force. Our weapons are the principles and ideas embodied in our historic traditions, applied with the same vigor that in the past made America a living promise of freedom for all mankind.”46
Americans were due to go to the polls to give their verdict on this message in just two weeks. Never did Eisenhower imagine that his British and French allies were capable of launching a bellicose folly such as the Suez plot at this acutely sensitive moment. He was not expecting to have his credentials as a peacemaker tested before the votes were cast.
1200 Washington DC // 1700 London // 1800 Paris // 1900 Cairo
The American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was imposing, vain, clever, cool, and sometimes awkward of manner. Winston Churchill called him “Dull-duller-Dulles.”47 An American diplomat once described him with a phrase worthy of Raymond Chandler: “Foster looks as succulent as a hunk of Vermont marble.”48 He liked pragmatism and efficiency, defined on his own terms. “Handsome as a young man, Mr. Dulles in later years assumed the characteristics of a stern church elder,” his New York Times obituary would one day read.49 His father had been a stern church elder: a Presbyterian pastor who had instilled in his eldest son a powerful sense of right and wrong. His maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, and uncle, Robert Lansing, had both served as secretaries of state. His younger brother, Allen Welsh Dulles—a warmer personality, though ultimately an even more guarded man—was director of the CIA.
“Seven years younger than Foster, Allen Welch [sic] Dulles had little in common with him except the constant affliction of gout,” wrote Allen’s colleague, CIA agent Wilbur Eveland. “Fond of drink, rich food, and pretty women, Allen Dulles had in fact been the first to court Foster’s faithful wife, Janet, but had rejected her as dowdy and unexciting.”50
Foster Dulles’s sense of right and wrong expressed itself most clearly in the struggle he perceived between America—freedom-loving, enterprising, God-fearing land of opportunity—and Communism, which he saw as antithetical to all those things. Senator Joseph McCarthy had lent his name to McCarthyism, the crusade against Communism in the domestic arena. Dulles advocated a similarly febrile anti-Communism in the international sphere. “I think that Mr. Dulles had a certain strong religious streak in him which he brought to bear on the Communist problem,” said Charles Bohlen, the American ambassador to Moscow, “and he seemed to feel that it was black and white.”51
The Dulles brothers did have a couple of things in common aside from their gout. Both believed that the United States had to root out Communism wherever it sprouted. Both believed in taking an active yet highly secretive role in this struggle. When Foster became secretary of state and Allen director of the CIA, there had been fears inside the Washington establishment—expressed, among others, by the heads of armed services intelligence and by the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover—that the CIA’s mission would creep from passive intelligence gathering to off-the-books political action.52
It did. In 1953, Allen Dulles’s CIA engineered a change of government in Iran, ousting the democratically elected president and replacing him with a pro-Western absolute monarch. In 1954, it overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala and replaced it with a right-wing military dictatorship. These escapades were regarded within the CIA as successes.53 For Foster Dulles even more than for his brother, the world lined up into “with us” or “against us.” Those who refused to line up—notably the Non-Aligned Movement, which included Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt—could be tolerated and worked with but remained politically suspect. “He felt that neutrality was immoral,” remarked Charles Bohlen, “and . . . there became a slight public difference with the President over that.”54 Foster also felt strongly against alternative power blocs, such as the old European empires. The Europhile Allen was more forgiving of them.
Foster Dulles faced the complicating factor that his principal allies in the struggle against Communism were Britain and France—old European empires. Britain and France were the United States’ partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which had been carefully curated by the United States since 1949. The western European leaders, Dulles had told Eisenhower at the White House early in his administration, were “shattered ‘old people’” who “want to spend their remaining days in peace and repose.” They acted too casually, he thought, as if the “Soviets, like Ghenghes Khan, will get on their little Tartar ponies and ride back whence they came.”55
Both Britain and France reassured the United States regularly that they were on its side in the Cold War against Communism. Yet in the Arab world—which to Dulles’s mind was one of the most vulnerable fronts in that war—they seemed to be making strange decisions, and they did not seem to be telling him the whole truth.
When Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal Company in July, the immediate reaction of the British and French prime ministers, Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet, had been to call for an invasion of Egypt. Eden assumed the Eisenhower administration would back him: ideally by sending troops, or at least by supporting Britain’s case. He had no evidence for this assumption. On the afternoon of July 30, just after the nationalization, the British ambassador Sir Roger Makins met Foster Dulles in Washington. Dulles was adamant that the United States government would have no sympathy for the use of force against Egypt. “While he agreed that our attitude should be a firm one,” wrote Makins, “his view was that so long as there was no interference with the navigation of the canal, and no threats to foreign nationals in Egypt, there was no basis for military action.” Dulles explicitly ruled out any possibility of American intervention.56
In Paris, though, according to the British ambassador, “the mood was one of extreme urgency, since it was thought that the effect of Nasser’s action in Algeria would be so serious if counter-measures were not taken immediately that the whole position there might well collapse. The French were ready to go all the way with us. They would be prepared to put French forces under British command if this were necessary.” The French were considering a land and air response, as well as naval operations, and even declared themselves ready to take troops from Algeria to use against Egypt.57
The following morning, July 31, Eisenhower heard that the British and French had decided to go in. He wrote a strong letter to Eden expressing his horror at the prospect “of your decision to employ force without delay or attempting any intermediate and less drastic steps.” The letter left no room for doubt: “I have given you my own personal conviction, as well as that of my associates, as to the unwisdom even of contemplating the use of military force at this moment.” He asked Eden to rethink his position and sent Dulles to London to put pressure on in person.58 Yet Eden did not want to hear what Eisenhower was saying. His analysis of this letter, made some years later in his own memoir, was: “The President did not rule out the use of force.”59
The French minister for external affairs, Christian Pineau, also went to London to meet Lloyd at the House of Commons. He argued that they should “not allow themselves to be held up by United States waverings and reluctance.” Extraordinarily, he also suggested that a widening of the issue into a global conflict might be a good thing: “In a way the U.S.S.R. might be a sort of guarantee of safety. If they came in the Americans could not stand aside.” Lloyd recommended leaving the Soviet Union and the United States “on the side-lines,” adding an observation that “The Americans often followed where others took action.”60
When Dulles arrived in London, he found the British bristling for war. This was precisely the impression they had planned to give. “I think he [Dulles] was quite alarmed; for he had hoped to find me less extreme, I think,” wrote Harold Macmillan in his diary. “We must keep the Americans really frightened. . . . Then they will help us to get what we want, without the necessity for force. But we must have a) international control of the Canal b) humiliation and collapse of Nasser.”61 This attitude could hardly have been calculated to annoy the Americans more. “Eden’s arguments that Nasser had ‘grasped at the throat’ of the imperial lifeline, and that it was ‘a matter of life and death’ for the British Empire, explained so patronizingly to Americans as though we were a lot of backward children, cut no ice with us at all,” wrote CIA agent Miles Copeland. “Rightly or wrongly, we just didn’t take them seriously.”62
Neither the British nor the French government liked Americans to express contrary opinions, but in Eden’s case it was personal. Eden and Dulles had taken a dislike to each other when they first met in 1942. During the negotiations for the Japanese peace treaty of 1951, Eden felt Dulles behaved duplicitously. Dulles thought Eden went too soft on Communism; Eden thought Dulles was a manipulative hard-liner and anti-British. When Eisenhower became president, Eden had specifically asked him not to make Dulles his secretary of state on the grounds that he could not work with him.63 Eisenhower had gone ahead anyway.
Then, in 1954, Eden and Dulles had been thrown together again at the Geneva Conference, attempting to end the war in Korea. According to Chester Cooper, “it was at Geneva that Dulles’s disdain for Eden blossomed into loathing.” Evelyn Shuckburgh, a Foreign Office civil servant, agreed: “There is no doubt that Dulles and A.E. have got thoroughly on each other’s nerves, and are both behaving rather like prima donnas,” he wrote in his diary. “Dulles is said to be irritated by the ‘imprecision’ of A.E.’s mind.” Cooper added that Dulles was backed up by many in the State Department: “Under Secretary Herbert Hoover, Jr., could not abide the prime minister, and another senior official had said of Eden that he ‘had never met a dumber man.’”64
This situation did not improve while Dulles was in London trying to talk Eden out of military action against Nasser. The American diplomat Robert Murphy, who was present, remembered that “there was an obvious lack of rapport between the two of them [Eden and Dulles], which didn’t help matters at all.”65
In London, Dulles did a considerable disservice to his own nation’s position, which would haunt the rest of the crisis. At a meeting with the British and French foreign secretaries on August 1, he appeared to speak in favor of “international” control of the canal and seemed not to have closed his mind to a military option. “A way had to be found to make Nasser disgorge what he was attempting to swallow,” he told them, and noted, “It should be possible to create a world opinion so adverse to Nasser that he would be isolated. Then if a military operation had to be undertaken it would be more apt to succeed and have less grave repercussions than if it had been undertaken precipitately.”66
These words seemed to contradict Eisenhower’s stated opposition to the use of force. “I should say that Mr. Dulles was a lawyer—this is very important to remember—and that everything was a brief to him,” explained Charles Bohlen. “And he could be pleading a brief before one audience and forgetting the effect on the other.”67 Dulles often talked to allies as he had to clients: framing things in their own terms to make them feel he was on their side. His mind was flexible and unemotional; he did not realize the extent to which Eden and Mollet were dead set on one course and were profoundly emotional. The British and French premiers listened to him—and heard what they wanted to hear. “The judgment carried by Mr Dulles on Colonel Nasser’s decision and on Colonel Nasser himself is very severe,” noted a French diplomat.68 “These were forthright words,” wrote Eden. “They rang in my ears for months.”69 Following the meeting with Dulles, Eden formed the impression that it did not matter what Eisenhower said on the record: the United States was on his side and would support whatever he did.
Dulles persuaded Britain and France to agree to a conference of international powers, to be held in London from August 16 to 23. They consented—paying lip service to Dulles’s argument that every diplomatic method had to be exhausted before force was used, while at the same time believing incontrovertibly that force would have to be used. They continued to plan a joint invasion of Egypt.70
Nasser was invited to the London conference but was unsure whether to accept. On his own initiative, Eisenhower at this point considered an extraordinary intervention. He floated the idea that he could go to Rome before the conference and meet Nasser there. Then the two of them would travel to London together. He hoped that he could work in tandem with Jawaharlal Nehru. For Nasser, appearing flanked by two of the world’s great statesmen would allow him to attend the conference with his head held high. As leaders of postimperial nations themselves, Eisenhower and Nehru were in potentially ideal positions to mediate between the old guard of Europe and the nations emerging from colonial domination.
This was a thrilling and bold idea, reflecting Eisenhower’s instinctive sympathy with the postcolonial predicament. In a meeting with both Dulles brothers, the joint chiefs of staff, and others on July 31, Eisenhower had strongly disagreed with the suggestion that the United States should support Britain if it tried to oust Nasser, arguing, “Nasser embodies the emotional demands of the people of the area for independence and for ‘slapping the white Man down.’”71 He seemed to understand this demand much more clearly than his colleagues and did not appear threatened by it, as some of them were. He also knew full well that appearing with Nasser would induce apoplexy among his fellow white men in London and Paris. Yet he was prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with two of the world’s most influential Asian and African men to achieve peace.
It might have been a signal moment in world history. But Foster Dulles talked Eisenhower out of it on August 8, telling him that Nehru would probably not go to the conference. Instead, India would be represented by his favored emissary, Krishna Menon. Menon was a clever man: founding editor of Pelican Books and a Labour Party councilor in London before Indian independence. He was rabidly disliked by almost every diplomat with whom he ever negotiated. One British diplomat described him as Nehru’s evil genius; Eden called him the Hornet.72 Eisenhower balked at the prospect of dealing with Menon. Dulles flattered the president that he “had greater prestige throughout the world than any single man had ever had before,” not even pausing to exclude Jesus of Nazareth, before adding the kicker: “I recalled how [Woodrow] Wilson had dissipated his prestige at the [1919] Paris Peace Conference.”73 It was settled. Eisenhower would not go. Dulles would, and he would most certainly not be standing shoulder to shoulder with Nasser and Nehru.
At nearly the same moment this was happening, on the other side of the Atlantic, Eden made a public broadcast in which he called Nasser a “megalomaniacal dictator.” “The pattern is familiar to many of us, my friends,” he said. “We all know this is how fascist governments behave and we all remember, only too well, what the cost is in giving in to fascism.”74 Eden had been foreign secretary in 1936, when Nazi Germany remilitarized the Rhineland. He had participated in the British government’s decision not to challenge Hitler’s action at the time. Afterward, he deeply regretted his stand. This experience fueled his enthusiasm for an early strike against Nasser.
In 1951, the political philosopher Leo Strauss coined the term reductio ad Hitlerum to describe the often misleading comparison of an opponent’s views or behavior to those of Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party. The reductio ad Hitlerum, applied to Nasser, became a trope of British and French political language in the summer of 1956. Eden wrote to Nehru that Nasser’s actions in nationalizing the canal were “dictator methods reminiscent of Hitler and Mussolini,” but toned it down for Eisenhower, to whom he wrote, “I have never thought of Nasser as Hitler, he has no warlike people behind him. But the parallel with Mussolini is close.”75 In his memoirs, he would compare Nasser to Hitler, Mussolini, and Goebbels.76 Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary that Nasser spoke like “an Asiatic Mussolini.”77 Guy Mollet told the American ambassador to Paris that “Nasser’s deal with the Soviets for arms is the parallel to the Hitler Stalin pact of 1939,” and claimed that his book The Philosophy of the Revolution was “a perfect parallel” to Mein Kampf.78 Christian Pineau and Selwyn Lloyd repeatedly told American diplomats that Nasser was a new Hitler: Pineau arguing that the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company was a direct parallel to the remilitarization of the Rhineland, Lloyd insisting to Foster Dulles that “Nasser was a paranoiac and had the same type of mind as Hitler.”79
The problem with all this was that Nasser was not like Hitler. So irritated were the Americans by having this theme constantly blasted at them that the Bureau of Intelligence and Research draw up a three-page memorandum, systematically debunking it: “In manner, Hitler was noted for ranting and raging at visitors. Nasser tends to a relaxed and rational attitude. . . . Nazism was the extreme of reactionary totalitarianism in Germany. Nasser stands far from the conspicuous right-wing Moslem Brotherhood which indeed shows strong fascist elements. . . . Persecution of indigenous minorities, notably antisemitism, was the essence of Nazism. Nasser has not molested native Jews, despite the tension over Israel, and has even made addresses in synagogues, as well as in Coptic churches. . . . The master-race was proclaimed by Hitler as a justification for expansion. Nasser has produced no such concept.”80 And so it went on: there was no basis for any reasonable comparison in appearance, in personal life or habits, in the two men’s self-appraisal, in philosophy, in their attitudes to allies or opponents, in their styles of leadership, in their political organizations, nor in their actions.
Eden’s former chancellor of the exchequer, Rab Butler, was listening despairingly to the prime minister’s broadcast on August 8 at his home in Stanstead. “Nasser was not in politics for the good of our health, but he was no Hitler, no incarnation of evil, no megalomaniac who had to be toppled before free men could rest easy in their beds,” he wrote in his memoirs.81 Eden’s insult, he said, “virtually made it impossible for Nasser to attend” the London conference.
Accordingly, Nasser canceled his plans to come to London, sending an associate instead—not to attend formally on behalf of Egypt but to receive briefings from the Indian and Soviet delegations and report back to Cairo.82 Following a week of negotiations, the conference agreed by a majority of eighteen out of twenty-two nations to set up an international association to run the canal, made up of interested countries, including Egypt.
Sir Robert Menzies, the prime minister of Australia, was sent to announce this decision to Nasser in Cairo. Nasser was not inclined to accept the pronouncements of the conference in any eventuality, for Menzies had not been sent to negotiate on any substantial points; accepting outside proposals in their entirety would mean, the British ambassador to Egypt admitted, “destroying his position in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world.”83 Menzies managed to appear insensitive to the Egyptians, conveying the impression that the entire rest of the world thought they were incompetent to run the canal and that Nasser himself was untrustworthy. Personally, Menzies considered Nasser “in some ways a likeable fellow” but “rather gauche. . . . I would say that he was a man of considerable but immature intelligence.”84
The same day, Eisenhower answered a question at a press conference about Suez by saying that the United States was “determined to exhaust every possible, every feasible method of peaceful settlement.” He implied that peaceful negotiations might continue if Nasser rejected the Menzies mission—removing the threat of military action. “How could the West deal with a man like Nasser,” Menzies fumed, “if they throw their trump cards into the wastepaper basket?”85 The mission loitered in Cairo until September 9 and achieved nothing.
Part of Eden’s motivation at this point—and of his chancellor, Harold Macmillan’s—was to save the pound. Eden’s government had presided over a weakening economy. International confidence in sterling had fallen low by the middle of 1956. In 1955, the currency had effectively returned to convertibility—making it easy for investors to dump. British wages had been creeping up, which worried the markets. The nationalization of the Canal Company might, some feared, be the penultimate straw on the camel’s back. Were Britain unable to trade freely, especially in oil, it might take only one more event to collapse sterling altogether. The sort of event they had in mind seemed all too feasible, if Nasser continued in power: for instance, he might unite the oil-producing states against Britain.
So serious was the pressure on sterling that Macmillan and officials at the Treasury and the Bank of England were concerned that the currency might have to be devalued again. The pound had already been devalued by 30 percent in September 1949, from $4.03 to $2.80. A second devaluation only seven years later might, it was feared, terminate the use of sterling as a reserve currency. The plight of sterling—and the possible mortal threat the currency faced from Nasser—was repeatedly used by Eden and Macmillan to justify their preference for military action.86 “If Middle Eastern oil is denied to us for a year or two, our gold reserves will disappear,” explained a Foreign Office civil servant just after the Menzies mission failed; “if our gold reserves disappear, the sterling area disintegrates.”87 Eden and Macmillan did not seem to anticipate that an attack on Nasser might itself unite the oil-producing states against Britain, thus bringing their worst fears to life, for they did not seem to imagine that a plan to topple him might fail.
“We are wasting our time talking to the Americans,” Christian Pineau told the British ambassador. “Our two countries should now go firmly ahead on our chosen path.”88 Foster Dulles realized that the British and French would take the failure of Menzies’s mission as an opportunity to gear up for battle. He had to find another monkey wrench to throw into their works, and the one he came up with was an internationally governed Cooperative Association of Suez Canal Users (CASU). The Dutch foreign minister pointed out that this recalled the phrase in casu belli, “the cause of war,” referring to an act intended to provoke war. His suggestion for an alternative acronym, CASCU, was rejected by the Portuguese, in whose language that sounded like “something which is really not mentioned”—a vulgar term for testicles—and by Pineau, who heard it with a French ear as casse-cul, or “assbreaker.” Selwyn Lloyd suggested ASCU, but the Portuguese pointed out that this still sounded rude in Portuguese and in Spanish as well. All of the potential implications of these names were far too apt. The version finally settled upon was the Suez Canal Users’ Association, or SCUA.89
Neither Britain nor France cared for SCUA. Pineau thought it was a ruse to delay military action until after the American election. Eden complained again to Eisenhower, explicitly now comparing Nasser to Hitler.90 Eisenhower and Dulles stood firm and again refused to see the parallel. Eventually Mollet and Eden agreed, despite Pineau’s and Lloyd’s reservations, to give SCUA a whirl. Though they did not believe it would resolve anything, they were keen to keep the Americans on their side. “The more we can persuade them of our determination to risk everything in order to beat Nasser, the more help we shall get from them,” wrote Harold Macmillan in his diary. “We shall be ruined either way; but we shall be more inevitably and finally ruined if we are humiliated. . . .”91 To the CIA agents who knew Egypt, SCUA “seemed to be the nuttiest idea of all,” remembered Miles Copeland: “A series of dignitaries were to fly to Cairo to explain to Nasser how his nationalization of the Canal was unacceptable to the rest of the world and how, now that he’d had his fun, he should turn the whole thing over to adults who knew how to manage such things.”92
On September 11, Eisenhower was again asked at a press conference whether he might back Britain and France if they used force in Egypt. “I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘backing them,’” he replied. “As you know this country will not go to war ever while I am occupying my present post, unless the Congress is called into session and Congress declares such a war.” Another journalist pressed him further. “I think this,” Eisenhower said. “We established the UN to abolish aggression and I am not going to be a party to aggression if it is humanly possible.”93
Eden declared himself shocked by what he considered to be a change in Eisenhower’s opinion in early September. “Hitherto he and his officials had always given us to understand that the United States would not take exception to the use of force, if all peaceful means of settlement had been exhausted,” he wrote.94 There are sheaves of documents in the British and American archives that prove Eisenhower’s position against force had been solid from the beginning. It seems almost impossible to credit how powerfully the British were able to deceive themselves about the potential for American support—but it was because they chose to listen to Dulles rather than Eisenhower. The British ambassador to Washington, Sir Roger Makins, later said that there was a feeling that Anglo-American friendship had been unbreakable since the Second World War and that, when it came to a crunch, Eisenhower would go along with whatever Dulles said, “and of course that was a fundamental misunderstanding because Eisenhower was a very much stronger and more dominant President than people have given him credit for. He was the man who ran American foreign policy, not Dulles.”95
The American ambassador to Paris, C. Douglas Dillon, said the British had “read into what he [Dulles] had said . . . the sense that all right, let’s make a real attempt here, and if Nasser won’t behave, then, if you want to go clobber him, you’re free.” When Dulles kept trying to solve the problem with new diplomatic ideas, “they felt sort of double-crossed by Mr. Dulles.”96
Eden went to the House of Commons the next day and announced SCUA, adding that the British government reserved its right, if Egypt failed to comply with this plan, to “take such further steps as seem to be required.” He was booed and jeered by members of Parliament crying out “You are talking about war” and “Nonsense!”97 The Egyptians responded that, as far as they were concerned, the imposition of a Users’ Association would be an attack on their sovereignty. Nasser was thoroughly confused as to the messages coming from Washington. “I don’t know what America’s stand is,” he said. “The American President speaks of peace. The American Secretary of State makes proposals which mean war.”98 Yet he made sure that the Americans knew that he was prepared to negotiate. So conciliatory was he that Dulles had to warn Eden to tone the aggression down: “Egypt is striking a note of sweet reasonableness,” he pointed out.99
Most non-Egyptian pilots who had worked for the private Suez Canal Company, piloting ships through the canal, left by September 15. The newly nationalized operation replaced them with Egyptians and a handful of foreigners, including Russians and Yugoslavs. The British had arranged to back fifty ships up at both ends of the canal, deliberately causing chaos for the new pilots. This would, they hoped, demonstrate that Egypt was incompetent to run the canal and create a justification for intervention. In the event, the new pilots managed the excessive traffic without any problem. A jubilant Nasser bestowed the Order of Merit on each of them.100 “This argument [about Egyptian incompetence] just faded away,” remembered Eisenhower, “because the British faces were really quite red about the proof of the Egyptians’ skill.”101
From September 19 to 21, another London conference attempted to formalize SCUA. Dulles’s emphasis on cooperation with the Egyptian government impressed several of the non-Western countries involved. By the same token, though, Britain and France lost what little enthusiasm they had had for the plan. Selwyn Lloyd waited until Dulles was on a flight back to Washington, then undercut all his efforts by referring the question of the Egyptian government’s behavior to the United Nations Security Council.
At the United Nations, Britain and France were pressed into talks with the Egyptians by Dulles and the secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld. There was another upset at the beginning of the process when Dulles gave a press conference on SCUA. “There is talk about teeth being pulled out of the plan,” he said, “but I know of no teeth: there were no teeth in it, so far as I am aware.” This repeated disavowal of force, plus a couple of quite gentle references to “the problem of so-called colonialism” in Egypt, set Eden off again. “It was I who ended the ‘so-called colonialism’ in Egypt,” he told a journalist, exaggerating his role considerably. “And look what Britain has done all over the world in giving the colonies independence.” He went on: “We have leaned over backwards to go along with him. And now look. How on earth can you work with people like that? It leaves us in a quite impossible situation. We can’t go on like this.”102
In fact, Egypt showed itself ready to compromise at the United Nations. Talks began on October 9. Selwyn Lloyd laid down his Six Principles on October 13:
1. There should be free and open transit through the canal without discrimination, overt or covert.
2. The sovereignty of Egypt should be respected.
3. The operation of the canal should be insulated from the politics of any country.
4. The manner of fixing tolls and charges should be decided by agreement between Egypt and the users.
5. A fair proportion of the dues should be allotted to development.
6. In case of dispute, unresolved disagreements between the Suez Canal Company and the Egyptian government should be settled by arbitration.
Nasser’s foreign minister, Mahmoud Fawzi, agreed to all of these, and was prepared to discuss the possibility of having the canal run jointly by a committee of Egypt and its users—which was, in effect, SCUA.
“I felt that there was now little chance that force would be used against Egypt,” remembered the British ambassador to Egypt, Humphrey Trevelyan. “Nasser was giving no provocation and there was a clear division of opinion on the use of force in Britain.”103 The United Nations Security Council unanimously accepted Lloyd’s Six Principles on the same day he proposed them.104
Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed his nation on television, telling Americans, “It looks like here is a very great crisis that is behind us.”105 The Suez Canal dispute could have been neatly resolved through diplomacy on October 13, 1956, saving everyone a lot of trouble.
It was not, and one reason it was not was that significant actors in the conspiring governments of Britain, France, and Israel did not want it to be. Back in March, months before the nationalization of the Canal Company, Eden had spoken privately of his wish to have Nasser murdered. The French government had decided at around the same time that Nasser was responsible for the trouble they were having in Algeria. As far as these two powers were concerned, nationalization was no more than a hook to hang their case on. Resolving that did not resolve their problem. They wanted Nasser gone. Both nations began to behave as obstructively as possible at the United Nations, insisting on more and more impossible concessions from Egypt. As they hoped, this stalled talks.
1644 Washington DC // 2144 London // 2244 Paris // 2344 Cairo
Even though Dulles had no idea that British, French, and Israeli representatives were meeting secretly at Sèvres that day, he knew the French wanted a war with Egypt. He did not expect them to move immediately, though. At 4:44 p.m., he took a telephone call from Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the American ambassador to the United Nations, in New York. According to the minutes, Dulles told Lodge that he had “quite a bit of info from the Fre. [that] they are willing to stall until after [the American presidential] elections and then are not disposed to delay the use of force.” He was unhappy about Britain and France slowing things down in the United Nations. The minutes concluded firmly: “The Sec[.] feels this delay is very bad.”106
“I have the impression from your cables . . . that [the] French government feels that our opposition to the use of force in connection with Suez results from an election situation and that we might not be as strongly opposed after election,” he wrote in a top-secret telegraph to the American embassy in Paris that day. “I can assure you the views of the President and myself on this point are basic and fundamental and I do not see any likelihood of their being changed after election.”107 In fact, according to David Ben-Gurion’s diary, Christian Pineau’s whole strategy had been to go ahead with an attack on Egypt before the presidential election. “What position will the U.S. take? Pineau’s opinion is that they will be angry, but if the operation takes place before November 6, no actions will follow,” he wrote on October 18. “What about Russia? Pineau thinks they will not intervene.”108
It was nearly midnight in Paris by the time Selwyn Lloyd left the villa at Sèvres, heading back to London. But the talks he had had with Ben-Gurion and Pineau had not gone well, and the mood among those he left behind was low. Pineau attempted to cheer the Israelis up by promising that he would fly to London himself the next day, to convince Anthony Eden to join the plan. Nobody trusted Lloyd to achieve this on his own.
“We’ll see what will happen tomorrow,” wrote Ben-Gurion. “I fear that Pineau’s trip will be in vain.”109 In London, though, Sir Anthony Eden was keenly awaiting his chance to go to war against his nemesis: Gamal Abdel Nasser.