0500 Brioni
Talks between Khrushchev and Tito ended abruptly before dawn. “For some moments there was a general silence,” Veljko Mićunović remembered. “It was a rather awkward pause, with no one inclined to attract the attention of others for further conversation, since there was nothing more to be said on the political questions.” He added (usefully for posterity, for it was a break with usual Soviet convention): “Practically no alcohol had been drunk at dinner and none was served during the talks.”
Khrushchev and Malenkov returned via their boat and plane to Moscow. “Flying conditions were exceptionally bad,” wrote Mićunović.1 The storm that had been raging the day before had abated neither metaphorically nor literally.
0600 London // 0700 Budapest // 0800 Khan Yunis
Chester Cooper was summoned to his embassy before the sun was up in London for a call on the secure telephone line. The voice on the other end was that of Robert Amory, deputy director of the CIA. “He shouted so loudly that I could have heard him across the Atlantic without a telephone,” Cooper remembered.
“Tell your [British] friends,” Amory yelled, “to comply with the goddamn ceasefire or go ahead with the goddamn invasion. Either way, we’ll back ’em up if they do it fast. What we can’t stand is their goddamn hesitation waltz while Hungary is burning!”
Cooper was shocked at this new offer to “back up” a British invasion, and felt he should discuss it further with his fellow diplomats. He went home after the call, returning to the embassy at nine a.m. By then, news of Foster Dulles’s sudden illness had reached London. “And so, at the most critical moment of crisis in both Hungary and the Middle East, John Foster Dulles was taken out of action,” Cooper wrote. “Responsibility now rested with a well-meaning, but basically uninterested President and with an unimaginative, relatively inexperienced, reportedly anti-British acting secretary, Herbert Hoover, Jr.”2
Cooper was wrong in saying that Eisenhower was uninterested. If anything, he was too interested, according to the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, who had worked well with Dulles. “The next thing was that he [Dulles] was in hospital,” Eban remembered, “and we had to deal with Eisenhower in his full righteous fury, and an extremely unprepossessing gentleman called Herbert Hoover, and [Henry Cabot] Lodge who was more concerned with the twelve Arabs than with the solitary Israeli in the United Nations.”3
Amory’s instruction to the British to go ahead was based on Allen Dulles’s assessment of the situation—that Nasser might be on the verge of falling. A letter was drafted for Eisenhower to send to Eden, suggesting that Britain could cooperate with the cease-fire after achieving its objectives. It was not sent.4 There were two problems with this policy initiative, which came from the headquarters of the CIA in Washington, not from the better-informed CIA agents on the ground in the Middle East. First, Nasser was not on the verge of falling. Second, Britain was not able to achieve its objectives with any speed.
According to Cooper’s recollection, he met with the Joint Intelligence Committee that morning and passed on to his British contacts the advice that they should either cease firing or invade—adding that he was “not speaking without instructions.”5 But if this was a sign of a possible change in direction from Washington, it arrived at a moment when the campaign directed from London was in chaos: the French were still pressing for landings to be sped up and the British were still dithering. After the meeting, Cooper spoke to a British acquaintance—a liaison officer working between intelligence and military staff.
“What’s going on? Cooper asked. “Is there going to be a landing or not?”
The officer took him upstairs to a temporary operations center. A harried-looking colonel sat behind a desk heaped with papers.
“Cooper wants to know where the hell our troops are,” the officer said to the colonel.
“Our troops?” replied the colonel. He pulled back a curtain covering a map of the Mediterranean and pointed to a flotilla of colored pins in the blue between Malta and Egypt. “There they are. In the middle of the bleeding Med!”6
According to CIA agent Wilbur Eveland, “It seemed obvious that Britain and France were either so ill prepared or so inept that they’d never reach their presumed objective, Cairo.”7 The slow progress of the British and French was deeply irritating to the Israelis. The Israeli ambassador in London saw Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick of the Foreign Office and told him it was “absolutely essential” that the British and French troops should now arrive without delay. “He had seen no very recent reports, but according to reports three days old, there was considerable dissension amongst the Rulers of Egypt,” Kirkpatrick wrote in a minute to the Africa Department. “The Israel Government would not be much surprised if the Egyptian Rulers did not begin murdering each other fairly soon. I got the impression that he was telling me this in order to reinforce his argument that it would be a fatal error to relax the pressure.”8
The French were amenable to speeding the operation up. Eden discussed the French and Israeli call for a swifter landing of troops with his cabinet and military advisers that morning, but seemed unable to come to a decision. Antony Head, minister of defense, was put on a plane to Cyprus to meet with the commanders there to assess if this would be feasible.9 There was another consideration, too: the need to make the whole operation look like a peacekeeping intervention rather than a straightforward invasion. To this end, the British also considered the possibility of slowing the operation down—and ditching the element of surprise. The commanders in London sent a message to General Keightley in the Mediterranean: “For very strong political reasons we may wish to make an announcement that the landing will be at Port Said in order to save the lives of civilians, thus sacrificing tactical surprise.” They added: “We assume you still have flexibility to postpone landing for up to 48 hours as before?”10
“Since we were launched on this operation the whole emphasis has been on speed,” Keightley replied in an exasperated tone. He was not sure whether a postponement would be possible. “Incidentally it will cause a complete break with the French on [sic—to] whom we have given a solemn undertaking we will not postpone except for bad weather,” he added. “What is behind this suggestion?”11 The suggestion, came the reply, was that this might allow for an extended period of aerial and psychological warfare to make the landing in Port Said easier—“though it is realised that this is a slender hope.”12
A few days before, when he had first begun to feel the pressure, Eden had requested a message of support from Winston Churchill. Churchill was still recovering from his minor stroke and was too tired to write one, but authorized his private secretary Anthony Montague Browne to draft it for him. “World peace, the Middle East and our national interest will surely benefit in the long run from the Government’s resolute action,” it concluded. “They deserve our support.” It was published on November 3, to Eden’s delight. “My dear Winston, I cannot thank you enough for your wonderful message,” he wrote, expressing his hope that it would influence American opinion. “These are tough days—but the alternative was a slow bleeding to death.”
“Thereafter everything came to pieces,” remembered Montague Browne. “I find it painful to recall the details of our decline. . . . WSC [Churchill] sank into a mood of deep melancholy.”13
In Budapest, Imre Nagy made the rebel colonel Pál Maléter his minister of defense in response to public demand. At ten a.m., he recommenced what he hoped were good-faith negotiations with the Soviets about their military presence in Hungary. His hope was misplaced. The Soviets were already acting: closing Hungary’s border with Austria to the west and occupying railway stations, highways, and border stations in the east.14 The CIA learned that “at least 600 Soviet tanks” had now entered Hungary from the Soviet Union and Romania.15 Owing to the press and radio blackout, the people of Budapest did not have this information.
The last Egyptian and Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip were still holding out against the IDF in Khan Yunis, a former caravanserai and British fortress town in the south of the strip. But their comrades in Egypt had withdrawn from the Sinai, and they were cut off from any relief or resupply. It was only a matter of time before the IDF would take Khan Yunis, and it did so that morning.
Early in the afternoon, the governor of the Gaza Strip formally surrendered to the IDF’s Southern Command. “The surrender act was written by a young Israel army officer on a sheet of paper torn out of a copy book and placed on a map folder,” reported the Jerusalem Post. It was written in Hebrew and Arabic. After he had signed it, the governor was taken prisoner. Other military defenders were taken prisoner, too, and marched away in columns. “There is something theatrical in all this but the square is littered with empty cartridges,” wrote the Post correspondent. “From near and far come the intermittent stutter of a machine-gun or boom of a mine exploding. No[t] all the soldiers received the surrender order, or perhaps they do not feel like abiding by it.”16
Or perhaps those shots were something else. There were conflicting stories about what triggered the events in Khan Yunis that day. According to the Israeli authorities, they met with resistance to their occupation, and the resisters included some Palestinian refugees. According to the Palestinian refugees, Israeli troops went through the town and the refugee camp, rounding up any men in possession of arms and allegedly some without.
What happened after that, though, was independently documented. A large number of civilian men and boys, aged approximately between fifteen and fifty-five, were escorted roughly into open squares and lined up against walls, including those of the Ottoman caravanserai. They were shot and killed where they stood by IDF troops. The director of UNRWA reported some weeks later that he had compiled a list “from sources he considers trustworthy” of 275 people who had been summarily executed. This included 140 refugees and 135 local residents of Khan Yunis. There was another such spate of executions a few days later at Rafah, in which a further 111 people were estimated to have been killed. The United Nations report also mentioned “the many serious surgical cases caused by the fighting and the subsequent incidents at Khan Yunis and Rafah, where a number of refugees were severely wounded.” How many were wounded is not known.17
“I still remember the wailing and tears of my father over his brother,” said the Palestinian refugee Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, who was nine years old in 1956 when he watched the IDF kill his uncle in Khan Yunis. “It left a wound in my heart that can never heal. I’m telling you a story, and I am almost crying. . . . They planted hatred in our hearts.”18 When Rantissi grew up, he became one of the founders of Hamas, the militant Palestinian Islamic organization that grew out of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas refused to renounce violence against Israel; Rantissi was one of the strongest voices against compromise. He served as leader of Hamas briefly in 2004 until he was assassinated by the Israeli air force, which blew up his car with a missile launched from a helicopter.
Eisenhower and Dulles had worked for years to bring the two sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict together. Eden claimed by his Suez action to be separating combatants and ensuring peace. Yet the violence that was done in the Suez War had the opposite effect. Members of Eden’s administration did not know of these murders. But they could have foreseen that stoking the Arab-Israeli conflict would produce uncontrollable violence, and in fact they had: this was one reason so many British advisers, civilian and military, warned Eden off involving Israel in any attack on Egypt. Rantissi’s case illustrates how the Suez War scattered dragon’s teeth on all-too-fertile soil. Across the whole of the Middle East, not just in Israel and Palestine, these would for decades bear gruesome fruit.
1200 London
In the House of Commons—convened unusually on a Saturday—the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell pointed out that the rapid advances made by Israel across the Sinai meant that the fighting was all but over. Consequently, there were now no grounds for an Anglo-French intervention.
Eden insisted that the British and French must be allowed to finish their “police action” to protect the canal and “to pave the way for a definite settlement of the Arab-Israeli war.” He said the British and French would “most willingly” stop if three conditions were met. First, the Egyptians and Israelis must accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Second, the United Nations must put that force in and maintain it until an Arab-Israeli peace settlement was reached. Third, until a United Nations force could be put in, Egypt and Israel must both agree to accept “limited detachments of Anglo-French troops to be stationed between combatants.”19 It was not a climbdown—but Eden had, for the first time, publicly hinted that he might be amenable to a United Nations force taking over his “peacekeeping” mission. From the back benches, a voice called out, “Burglars.”
“We are not burglars,” Eden replied testily. “The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition has himself told us that we brought some fighting prematurely to an end.”
“The Prime Minister is perfectly right,” Gaitskell said. “What we did was to go in and help the burglar and shoot the householder.”20
0925 Washington DC // 1425 London // 1625 Cairo // 1725 Moscow
“At this moment thousands of young English men are sitting on landing craft moving from one destination in the Mediterranean towards the shores of Egypt,” Labour MP Denis Healey told the House of Commons. “I spent some time in the last war in exactly that situation.” Healey claimed he had known what he was fighting for, and had been confident that the cause was just. “I know that there are many hon. and right hon. Members opposite who sincerely believe that our cause is just,” he said. “I respect their convictions, but they must know also that there are many men in those landing craft who do not believe that our cause is just.”21
The Egyptians claimed to have shot down fourteen British, French, and Israeli planes, including nine over Cairo. “At least one was seen falling near the centre of the city, and two explosions were heard,” reported the London Times. “Excitement followed, and crowds were seen running in streets, pursued by police.”22 Twisted wreckage was displayed in Tahrir Square. A British frigate in the Gulf of Suez was attacked by four aircraft and shot one down. The downed plane had been thought to be an Egyptian MiG, but the crew on the frigate thought it might have been an Israeli Mystère or Sabre. This caused excitement in the Admiralty and Foreign Office. Shooting down an Israeli plane made the British attack look even-handed; they did not have to tell anyone it had been an accident. The Foreign Office ordered the Allied Forces Headquarters to put out a statement, reading: “British frigate operating in Gulf of Suez has shot down an Israeli aircraft which interfered with her patrol.”
“You will realize value of such a release, if facts can be confirmed,” read the secret instructions from the Foreign Office. “Meanwhile can you arrange non-attributable publicity for this report.”23 The story duly appeared in the London Times the following Monday, repeating verbatim the government statement.24 The British government did not intentionally comply with the request of some of its allies in Iraq reported by the British ambassador in Baghdad that day: “Our friends are saying that even a single bomb on an Israel air field or a single action to stop Israel detachments advancing would restore their confidence in us.”25
Nasser was cheered by crowds as he drove through Cairo, but the mood in Egypt was one of “incredulous sorrow,” according to the London Times. There had been a notable shift in the tone of Arab press coverage over the previous week. On October 28, the day of the Arab general strike against the kidnapping of the Algerian rebels, France was the greatest villain in the Arab world. After Israel’s invasion of Egypt on October 29, Israel took over that role. By November 3, though, much of the Arab press blamed Britain, with Iraq’s al-Hurria newspaper joining many deploring “the traditional enmity of Britain” toward Egypt. The Times correspondent in Cairo reported that “one is constantly approached by Egyptians, as bewildered as they are angry, for an interpretation of British motives and an assessment of Sir Anthony Eden’s personal character, almost as if they were hoping that they could be persuaded by some explanation other than the familiar one of ‘imperialist conspiracy’ which nothing will now eradicate.”26 Yet while the anger against Britain and France was real, Egypt was offering an olive branch as well as resistance. In the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld announced that Egypt had said it would cease fire if Israel also stopped fighting and the British and French called their war fleet off.27
Nasser was becoming desperate and depressed. According to Abdel Latif al-Baghdadi, who spent time with him that day, “He did not know a thing of what the Army was doing” and felt cut out of events by the military commanders. So worked up did he get over this that “he almost lost his self-control.” He was thrilled, though, when Baghdadi told him that he had seen an enemy plane shot down near the Misr al-Jadida air base. “When Gamal heard these words he took my face between his two hands and kissed me,” remembered Baghdadi. “In truth, I lied to him for what had fallen by this air-base were none other than the reserve fuel tanks of one of the planes.”28
Anthony Nutting called together three ministerial colleagues—his co-minister of state, Lord Reading, and the joint parliamentary undersecretaries of state, Douglas Dodds-Parker and John Hope—in Reading’s room at the Foreign Office. He told them his resignation was going to take effect that night, and he told them why. They were, Nutting remembered, “deeply shocked and angry at having been kept in the dark about actions and decisions which, as Ministers, they could be called upon to defend in Parliament. For a moment, they seemed to be on the point of walking out with me.” They discussed it and decided they must not: if all four went at once, the consequences for the Conservative government could be fatal. Reluctantly, they stayed.
Nutting returned to his own office to find the atmosphere among senior civil servants even more mutinous. They had worked out what was really going on, he wrote, and “felt deeply in their hearts that they could no longer serve a Government which had so debased our name and fame in the eyes of the world. In all my five years as a Foreign Office Minister I had never seen such a demonstration of real indignation from officials normally the epitome of unruffled calm.” They were not, he reminded them, responsible for political policy: civil servants were there to advise and facilitate. Eventually, he persuaded them, too, not to resign.29
At 11:10 a.m. that morning, Eisenhower met Herbert Hoover Jr., the acting secretary of state, and legal adviser Herman Phleger to discuss the Hungarian question at the United Nations Security Council. According to the minutes of the meeting, Hoover noted that “Secretary Dulles did not want to join the British and the French, and the President said that such a thought was almost absurd.”30
In Moscow, American ambassador Charles Bohlen was at a reception for the Syrian president Shukri al-Kuwatly in the Kremlin. Khrushchev appeared with Malenkov, back from their secret trip to Yugoslavia, and was immediately surrounded by other members of the presidium. Later, though, he came up to Bohlen. The Soviet leader opened the conversation by saying he assumed NATO was pleased at the possibility of what he called “dislocation” in the Warsaw Pact. Bohlen asked him about Soviet intentions in Hungary. Khrushchev said negotiations were going on between the Soviet and Hungarian governments and matters “would be straightened out.”
Bohlen protested that the Soviets were still putting more troops into Hungary. Khrushchev replied that they had enough troops there already, but said, “We will add more and more if necessary.” He added that this was “not a joke.”
Khrushchev then raised the subject of Egypt and accused the United States of failing to prevent the Suez invasion. The Americans could, he thought, have stopped it if they had wished. Bohlen replied that the “president and US government had done everything they could to restrain Israel” and that the United States had raised the matter in the United Nations. Khrushchev repeated that the “voice” of the United States would have been strong enough to stop the war, implying that he still believed the United States had been privy to Britain and France’s plot. If this was his drift, Bohlen did not catch it—and the conversation was interrupted by the departure of Kuwatly. “The only discernible virtue in Khrushchev that I can see is his brutal frankness,” Bohlen wrote. “He is first Soviet official who has admitted Soviets intend [to] send amount of troops necessary [to] achieve their projectives [sic] in Hungary.”31
That evening, at nine p.m. Moscow time, many in the presidium supported the hard-line Ferenc Münnich for leader of Hungary. Khrushchev, perhaps influenced by Tito, disagreed. He preferred the slightly softer János Kádár, and sold him to his comrades as the candidate it would be easier to control.32 In Hungary itself, the Soviets were negotiating with Nagy’s government—but in Moscow they had already chosen his successor.
1400 Ottawa; New York; Washington DC // 1900 London
Eden made a formal broadcast to the nation on television that evening. “If you see a fire the first question is not how it started, but how to put it out,” he said, claiming that the British and French intervention had been a spontaneous response to Israel’s action. “What we did do was to take police action at once. . . . Our friends inside the Commonwealth and outside could not, in the very nature of things, be consulted in time. You just cannot have immediate action and extensive consultation as well. But our friends are coming, as Australia and New Zealand have already done—and I believe that Canada and the United States will soon come—to see that we acted with courage and speed to deal with a situation which would just not wait.”
In fact, Canada and the United States were coming closer to seeing that Britain had planned the whole thing. As the Canadian prime minister said after Eden’s speech, the Suez crisis had “strained both the western alliance and the bonds of the Commonwealth more than any event since the second world war.”
“All my life I’ve been a man of peace, working for peace, striving for peace, and negotiating for peace,” Eden went on. “I’ve been a League of Nations man and a United Nations man. And I am still the same man, with the same convictions, and the same devotion to peace. I could not be other, even if I wished, but I am utterly convinced that the action we have taken is right.”
The prime minister spoke clearly, without stuttering, reading from a script with a clipped, rhythmic tone like a vicar delivering an overrehearsed sermon. The political historian Peter Hennessy remarked that every time he rewatched the footage of Eden’s broadcast, he was “struck by the sincerity of Eden’s exhausted self-belief.”33 Eden had convinced himself that his actions were in pursuit of righteousness, even if the actions themselves were not righteous. It was this belief that he was clinging to that day. He would be unable to pry himself away from it for the rest of his life.
1745 Washington DC // 2245 London // 2345 Budapest // 0245 (Nov. 4) Moscow
At Tököl, on Csepel Island just outside Budapest, a delegation of senior Hungarians had gone to meet their adversaries at Soviet military command. They were hoping to negotiate the Red Army’s withdrawal. The Hungarians were led by Colonel Pál Maléter, now minister of defense. Maléter was accompanied by a minister of state, the chief of staff, and another colonel.
The Soviets played nice. They had invited the Hungarians to a lavish banquet with three Red Army generals. As the time neared midnight, toasts were being drunk. Suddenly, armed Soviet security police burst into the dining hall. They were led by Ivan Serov, head of the KGB, his Mauser pistol drawn.34
General Mikhail Malinin, the most senior of the Red Army generals present, appeared genuinely shocked by Serov’s interruption and protested vociferously. Serov strode over and whispered something to him, which nobody else could hear. Malinin took it in, shrugged, and told his fellow Soviets to leave the room. They stood and walked out.
Serov took the Hungarians prisoner. He had already ensured that Budapest was surrounded by Soviet forces. Now he had efficiently beheaded the Hungarian military command. Imre Nagy, with increasing concern, repeatedly tried to telephone Maléter for updates. There was no reply.
1900 New York // 0000 London // 0100 (Nov. 4) Budapest
In New York, the United Nations Security Council met to discuss the Soviet troops advancing on Budapest. The Soviets, as usual, vetoed a resolution. In the General Assembly, Lester Pearson pushed through a resolution formally requesting that Dag Hammarskjöld submit a plan for a United Nations Expeditionary Force for Egypt.35
At around midnight, Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador, pulled a completely unexpected move. “Israel agrees to an immediate cease-fire,” he said, “provided a similar answer is forthcoming from Egypt.”
Israel had, by this point, achieved all its objectives aside from the capture of Sharm el-Sheikh. There seems no evidence that it was prepared to give up on capturing Sharm: the calculation made was, perhaps, that in the twenty-four hours or so after the announcement of a cease-fire, it could still do so.36 Egypt had already accepted the General Assembly’s call for a cease-fire, so Israel’s formal condition had already been fulfilled. Only two nations were now holding out against peace. The whole world’s thoughts were expressed by the ambassador from Ceylon, who asked, “What further reason is there for the UK and France to intervene?”37
Pierson Dixon, the British representative, sent an urgent message back to London. In just a few hours, the General Assembly would reopen. If Britain continued with its assault on Egypt, it could face international sanctions. “It is hard to be sure whether Soviet action in Hungary will deflect the impact of further military operations in Egypt,” he wrote. “I fear that it will contribute to a mounting indignation against the use of force by large Powers, which will make our own actions seem all the more heinous.” Even if Britain could take the most scrupulous care to avoid civilian casualties in Egypt and contrast this with the behavior of the Soviets in Hungary, he did not think the United Nations would be convinced. There was only one option: “If we could swiftly announce that we were now in a position to suspend military action and were awaiting the arrival of an international force the position would of course change at once.”38
The official justification for Anglo-French intervention had evaporated. The combatants had agreed to stop fighting. Yet the supposed peacekeepers’ joint assault force was still sailing steadily across the Mediterranean—into a profoundly uncertain engagement.