0000 New York // 0500 London // 0700 Port Said
Midnight New York time was the deadline Dag Hammarskjöld had set for Britain, France, Israel, and Egypt to cease all hostilities if they were to comply with the General Assembly’s resolutions. Precisely fifteen minutes after that deadline, British and French warplanes zoomed low over the twin towns of Port Said and Port Fuad. Incendiary bombs scattered explosions throughout the towns, setting factories, shops, schools, and houses aflame. The bombardment of Port Said was followed by 668 white, black, green, and khaki parachutes floating down to land, each bearing a British soldier; and 500 parachutes bearing the men of the French 2 Régiment Parachutistes Coloniaux. “And then the Egyptian anti-aircraft guns, machine-guns, tanks and rifles opened up,” wrote the Daily Mirror correspondent, who parachuted with the British forces. “As I dropped towards an airfield runway strewn with barrels to keep us from landing, I saw Egyptian troops in slit trenches point their rifles towards me and start shooting. Everywhere they were waiting for us.”1
The French paratrooper Pierre Leulliette, a veteran of the conflict in Algeria, jumped just after a fellow paratrooper he referred to only as “Sergent B.” Leulliette remembered bullets whistling past him as he landed on the sludgy sand. He scrambled out of the way of field-gun fire. “Yet, in a flash, I took in an image which I shall never forget: hanging from the top of a palm tree by the straps of his parachute, Sergent B.’s body was slowly dripping blood into the sand. He had, apparently, been . . . shot in full flight. His large body was swaying in the palm fronds, sharp as spears.”2
The paratroopers arrived on a flaming plain strewn with rubble that had, till half an hour before, been neat, terra-cotta-brick residential streets. Part of Port Said was destroyed. In other areas, houses and offices still stood. Troops searched what was left. Douglas Clark, a British artillery observer who had been called up from reserves to serve at Port Said, saw shots coming from one large house. The soldiers blew the door open with a bazooka.
Inside, the assistant adjutant found a piano on a dais. He called Clark over. The piano bore an inscription saying that it had belonged to the long-departed King Farouk, and had been bought by the owner at a sale of his property. “My companion opened the lid, and standing there, fully caparisoned for war, he played and sang the song which, set to the tune of the Egyptian National Anthem, is known to every soldier who has ever served in Egypt,” Clark remembered. “Farouk was asked to perform an extremely painful gymnastic feat, and [Queen] Farida was told that about which, if it was true, she herself must have been increasingly aware.” This elliptical description hardly does justice to the doggerel lyrics, of which there were several versions. A sample verse went:
“Oh we’re all black bastards,
And we all love our king,
Stanna shwya, kwise kateer,
Mungariya, bardin.”
These approximately transliterated Arabic words were phrases known to British troops: “wait a moment, very good, something to eat, later.” In some versions, Farouk’s sympathies for the Nazis were detailed; others focused on the queen’s charms (“Queen Farida, Queen Farida, all the boys want to ride her”) and requested that she “shufti kush” (“show cunt”).3
Civilians who survived the bombing fled along the docks clutching their screaming children. Hundreds leaped into dhows and feluccas, overloading and in some cases sinking the tiny boats. Many fell into the water as they struggled to escape. The Reuters correspondent saw “three plumes of smoke rising 1,500 feet into a sunny sky, a grim corona of fire twinkling at their heart”—the Shell Oil refinery, hit by British bombs and spewing out dense black clouds that billowed back across the desert. Paratroopers grappled hand to hand with lightly armed Egyptian defenders, moving from the ruins of one house to the wreckage of another as they swept through the remains of the town. “The smell of blood and smoke pervaded everything,” added the Reuters correspondent, “a sinister undertone to the waft of salt from the near-by sea.”
In Gaza, an Israeli loudspeaker truck drove through the mud-walled alleys. “Now is your last chance to surrender,” it broadcast, addressing the fedayeen. The IDF claimed that three hundred fedayeen had already given themselves up and said it was “screening” the rest of the men in Gaza. “Hundreds of white-and-black robed Arabs squat in courtyards facing the wall, prior to screening, or are being marched away to prison,” reported the Jerusalem Post. “The same goes on in El Arish and Khan Yunis.”4 Unsurprisingly, the newspaper did not mention that dozens or perhaps a few hundred of these men were shot without trial. The Israelis stated that two months’ worth of supplies had been looted from UNRWA stores by desperate Gaza residents. A military government was installed and set about rebuilding the infrastructure to link the Gaza Strip to Israel.
0230 New York // 0730 London // 0930 Cairo; Sharm el-Sheikh
It was two thirty a.m. in New York. Dag Hammarskjöld was angry with the Israelis. Under private pressure from France, they had now added conditions to Abba Eban’s offer of a cease-fire. These were effectively impossible to fulfill. Israel now required that Egypt declare it was no longer in a state of war with Israel, that Egypt attend peace negotiations, that all blockades and boycotts of Israel must end, and that all fedayeen in countries neighboring Israel be recalled.5 Hammarskjöld thought these conditions represented “an open insult to the United Nations and it was impossible to do diplomatic business with such people.”6
At that unsociable hour, Hammarskjöld was meeting the British and French representatives at the United Nations, Pierson Dixon and Louis de Guiringaud. In contrast to his fury at the Israelis, he was relatively open to the British and French replies supporting the principle of an international force, though he was suspicious about Eden’s insistence that the Anglo-French invasion force could transition into United Nations peacekeepers. This was a moment of opportunity: Hammarskjöld seemed inclined to assume Britain was acting in good faith. Dixon felt there was some chance Britain and France might retrieve their dignity and even some form of victory from Operation Musketeer.
Shortly after Dixon left, Hammarskjöld received news that British planes were again bombing Cairo. These bombs were aimed at military targets—a railway line, a military airfield, and a barracks—but the targets were situated in or near populated areas, and it was likely civilians would be killed. As far as Hammarskjöld was concerned, these bombings destroyed any good faith he may have had in Britain’s motives. Now, he believed, it would be impossible for a United Nations force to go in until “those who had disturbed the Peace and refused the United Nations demand for cessation of hostilities should have first been declared morally in the wrong.”
He telephoned Dixon. Dixon reported to London that Britain would be in a difficult position when the United Nations reconvened later that day: “They [Britain’s critics] will be in a very ugly mood and out for our blood. . . . Between them they might well cook up an appeal by the Arabs to the Soviet Union to come in and help them.” By continuing to attack, he wrote, Britain was at risk of “alienating the whole world.” He added: “I do not see how we can carry much conviction in our protests against the Russian bombing of Budapest if we are ourselves bombing Cairo.”7
At the same moment, the Israelis were taking their final target, Sharm el-Sheikh. The Nine Brigade of the IDF had already made two attacks on the town, one the previous evening and another overnight. Egyptian forces resisted, and the Israelis were twice beaten back. Early in the morning of November 5, Nine Brigade had begun an all-out assault in concert with Ariel Sharon’s troops, who made a fast advance from the other side, building on two days of exhaustive bombardment with artillery and napalm. They took Sharm at nine thirty that morning. Nasser’s forces retreated to the west bank of the Nile. Two hundred Israeli troops had been killed and eight hundred wounded, but they had achieved their objectives.8 Britain and France were still a long way short of theirs.
1000 London // 1100 Paris // 1200 Cairo; Port Said
Douglas Clark was smoking a cigarette on the wharf at Port Said, watching British troops herd Egyptians onto the beach. Those in military uniform were prisoners. Others were in civilian clothes.
“Are you taking the civilians to the beach for safety?” Clark asked a soldier.
“Not bloody likely, sir,” he replied. “They’re no more civilians than I am. Every one of them had a rifle. Caught us out proper, they did. We started to treat ’em like civilians until they began to whip weapons from under their galabiyas. D’you know, sir, even the kids have got rifles; and they’re firing ’em, too. And you can’t fire back at ’em, not at kids, can you, sir? But the Troop Commander had the answer. He whipped their rifles away and then booted their arses to help ’em on their way to the beach. You should have heard some of ’em yelp!”
Egyptian civilians would afterward claim mistreatment by British forces at Port Said. In his memoirs, Clark denied this, arguing, “It was only to be expected that the Egyptians should make such allegations.” He claimed that the Egyptians “swarmed” the beach demanding British food handouts and medical care, an assertion that does not quite sit with his previous implication that soldiers had to shepherd people onto the beach. British soldiers had helped old ladies and babies to safety, he wrote, and even tended to enemies who “had been yelling and firing [at them] with all the abandon of drunks at a shooting gallery.” He complained that “the Egyptians knew no code of war. It was immaterial to them whether a Commando was helping one of their own people or not. Just as long as he wore a green beret, he was fair game.” According to the code of war, specifically the Geneva Convention of 1949, uniformed members of an armed force who had not laid down their arms or been placed hors de combat by injury were still considered legal combatants.9
Back in London, the junior Foreign Office minister Douglas Dodds-Parker was walking through Speaker’s Court to the Commons when he was waylaid by Harold Macmillan “in an anything but unflappable state.”
“We must stop, we must stop,” Macmillan told him, “or we will have no dollars left by the end of the week.”
“I restrained myself from saying that surely in the circumstances as Chancellor he should have arranged to have sufficient dollars, or do without them, before he agreed to the launching of the operation,” wrote Dodds-Parker in his memoir.10
Macmillan was facing what he believed to be a catastrophic situation: Britain’s dollar reserves were running out. Those reserves might be vital for the functioning of the nation if Britain’s oil link to the Middle East could not swiftly be restored. The Treasury now calculated that replacement oil would have to be bought from the Americas at a cost of $800 million a year—an impossible sum.11
Several drains on Britain’s dollar reserves had come at once. India chose to pull its deposits in Britain out at this precise point, ostensibly to fund a new five-year plan; China withdrew its deposits in Britain to give to Egypt; speculators from several Middle Eastern oil-producing nations transferred their funds from British to Swiss banks. (British banks were then paying around 7 percent interest and Swiss banks only around 2 percent; many Swiss bankers simply redeposited the money in London, but the transfer of funds from sterling to Swiss francs nonetheless had an impact.) The speculators of Wall Street and the United States Federal Reserve began to dispose of their sterling. “Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, with Eisenhower’s encouragement, was applying the bluntest weapon in America’s nonmilitary arsenal,” wrote Chester Cooper, “a financial squeeze.”12
The Treasury had debated in October whether to borrow from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to shore up Britain’s reserves. The governor of the Bank of England and many Treasury officials argued that it should not. The governor warned Macmillan that going to the IMF at that point might be “regarded on a second view as a sign of weakness,” and the officials agreed: they believed there was more danger to sterling from a further loss of confidence, especially in European markets, than from a potential clash with Egypt. This turned out to be bad advice. France did borrow from the IMF in mid-October, and therefore was better prepared for a run on the franc than Britain was for a run on the pound.13
Macmillan’s advisers might have offered different advice if they had been aware of the plan for the Suez operation. It seems likely that they would have felt very differently had they foreseen the possibility of Britain’s oil supply being cut off. The cabinet might well have viewed military action less enthusiastically if it had been informed of how dire the risks to Britain’s financial stability were.
Macmillan was the only person who knew both sides of this story—who heard all the fiscal advice and who knew what Eden had planned. It appears he did not work out how they would collide with each other. Historians and politicians afterward accused him of incompetence. It is hard to vindicate him. It has even been hinted that he may have caused the sterling crisis deliberately to push Eden out of the prime minister’s office, so that he could step in himself.14 Though it is true that the two men disliked each other, this seems like a conspiracy theory too far: Macmillan’s behavior during the crisis speaks of panic, not design.15 He was out of his depth; Britain was out of its depth, too. The only hope now was to appeal to the mercy of Washington. “Without credits from the United States, we should therefore be unable to buy the oil we needed; and the Americans were violently opposed to us,” wrote Anthony Nutting.16
Yet Eden wrote again to Eisenhower that day justifying his continuation of the war. He had to invade, he insisted, or else “Nasser would have become a kind of Moslem Mussolini” and would soon have brought down the governments of Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, and the whole of North Africa—a rather more lavish assessment of the Egyptian president’s powers than even Nasser’s supporters might have made. He pleaded that Britain had undertaken its “police action” only as a last resort on the basis of “a genuine sense of responsibility . . . to all the world.” He assured the president that the British would be delighted to hand over to a United Nations force: “As you can imagine, no one feels more strongly about this than Harold[,] who has to provide the money. We do not want occupation of Egypt, we could not afford it, and that is one of many other reasons why we got out of Suez two years ago.” And he was petulant about the difference between Suez and Hungary: “It is indeed ironical that at this very moment, when we are being pilloried as aggressors, Russia is brutally re-occupying Hungary and threatening the whole of Eastern Europe, and no voice is raised in the United Nations in favour of intervention there.”17
0830 New York // 1330 London // 1430 Budapest // 1530 Cairo // 1730 Moscow
“Dark reaction prevails in Hungary,” announced the commander of the Soviet troops in that unhappy country on its national radio. “Counter-revolutionary gangs are looting and murdering. The Government of Imre Nagy has collapsed. Hungary addressed herself to the Soviet troops to re-establish order in the country. . . . We address ourselves to the soldiers and officers of the Hungarian army to fight for sacred victory.” The Red Army soldiers, he declared, were merely Hungary’s “selfless friends.”18
Those in Budapest reported tanks crunching through the streets and soldiers shooting civilians indiscriminately. “Bread queues were fired on by Soviet tanks,” wrote Peter Fryer of London’s Daily Worker. “I myself saw a man of about seventy lying dead outside a bread shop, the loaf he had just bought still in his hand.”19 The Soviets had reportedly overrun the Egyptian embassy (an intriguing choice under the circumstances) and the Astoria Hotel. They had taken everything, even the clothes from the porters’ restroom. Many of these troops were not Russian; it is unclear how much they knew about who or why they were fighting. The story was repeatedly told in Hungary and in the Soviet Union that Soviet troops from far-flung regions—generally Tartars or Mongols—had not been informed by their commanders that they were in Budapest to quell a Hungarian rebellion. Instead, they had been told that they were in Egypt fighting “Anglo-French imperialists.” The story inevitably added that these troops “mistook the Danube for the Suez Canal.” Though this tale made it into the United Nations report on the rebellion, it has the ring of an urban myth.20 Conversely, it was true that some Hungarian rebels were frustrated to find they were not fighting Russians at all. “I found myself shooting at bewildered Ukrainian peasant boys who had as much reason to hate what we fought as we had,” remembered one young rebel. “It was an embittering shock to find that one can’t confront the real enemy even in a revolution.”21
American observers in Budapest reported “steady fighting sporadic all over city . . . artillery, tank and mortar fire predominate[;] systematic searching of buildings in city, probably for insurgent[s]. Resistance continuing.”22 But that resistance had no help from outside and was being crushed. From Bonn, an American diplomat observed, “There is widespread belief that UK and French aggression in Egypt made it easier for Soviets to launch attack in Hungary and concomitantly made it doubly difficult for West to condemn Russian action. Best typifying this reaction is lead editorial in ‘Die Welt’ stating both sides have equally ‘dirty hands.’”23 From Budapest, and from Cardinal József Mindszenty, now settled in the American embassy, came an alarming report considered “reliable” by the American legation that the Soviets were going to attempt to retake the Kilián Barracks by advancing through the Second University Clinic of Children. “If this step taken which seems most probably [sic] 200 to 300 additional children will be slaughtered.” Mindszenty conveyed his “earnest request for [American] intervention [with] Moscow.”24
“I am one of the millions who watching the martyrdom of Hungary and listening yesterday to the transmission of her agonized appeals for help (immediately followed by the describing of our ‘successful bombing’ of Egyptian ‘targets’) have felt a humiliation, shame, and anger which are beyond expression,” wrote Lady Violet Bonham Carter, the former president of the British Liberal Party, close friend of Winston Churchill, and daughter of former prime minister H. H. Asquith, in a letter to the Times. “We cannot order Soviet Russia to obey the edict of the United Nations which we ourselves have defied, nor to withdraw her tanks and guns from Hungary while we are bombing and invading Egypt. To-day we are standing in the dock with Russia. Like us she claims to be conducting a ‘police action.’” With dismay, she concluded: “We have coined a phrase which has already become part of the currency of aggression.”25
1000 Washington DC // 1500 London // 1600 Paris
In Washington, the president and his advisers were discussing the unforeseen consequences of the Anglo-French invasion. Staff secretary Andrew Goodpaster worried that “the French might be trying to widen and worsen the conflict for their own ends, which may . . . begin to depart from those of the British.” Everyone was worried that a landing in Alexandria, if it was attempted, would result in a long war. Herbert Hoover Jr. was worried about Syria, believing the Soviet Union might consider sending forces there. Eisenhower assured him that Syrian airfields were in a poor state of repair, though he did ask Allen Dulles to keep a watch on them just in case. Richard Nixon worried that the United States was on the same side as the British socialists, saying that it was “too bad that [Aneurin] Bevan is allowed to make political capital out of supporting the same position that we hold, since any swing to that school of thought would be tragic for us.”
Nixon also worried that in the United Nations, India was abstaining from condemning the Soviet Union over its action in Hungary. Eisenhower replied, “Nehru thinks of only one thing, which is colonialism, by which he means the white over colored people.” The president suggested that he could write to Nehru, “bringing out that we are witnessing colonialism by the bayonet in Hungary.”
But the biggest thing worrying all of them was oil. Owing to the Syrian sabotage operations over the weekend, supplies from the Middle East to Europe were now dwindling. Only one pipeline remained functional: the Tapline, the American-maintained pipe running from the Saudi oilfields to pop out on the Mediterranean coast at Sidon in Lebanon. The Saudis vehemently opposed the British and French action. As Hoover pointed out, “The oil supply of NATO military forces in Western Europe may soon be endangered.” With the world on the brink of war, this was no time to risk that.
Eisenhower suggested that any American heavy tankers and all fleet oilers currently assigned to nonmilitary purposes should be put to immediate use. While mobilizing American oil ships, though, he moved away from the idea he had mooted on October 31 of letting the British pay for their oil in sterling. As the minutes of the meeting (written by Goodpaster) recorded: “With regard to the oil problem faced by the French and the British, the President felt that the purposes of peace and stability would be served by not being too quick in attempting to render extraordinary assistance, and the Vice President reinforced this view.”26
Eden had complained that Nasser’s control of the Suez Canal was a “thumb on our windpipe” because the Egyptian leader could cut off Britain’s oil supply. Now that thumb belonged to the president of the United States.
1100 Washington DC // 1600 London // 1700 Paris
In Paris, Christian Pineau was distributing a new crop of imaginative tales. He told the British ambassador that Nasser would have resigned on Saturday but decided to stay in his post only after the American embassy in Cairo told him the United States government insisted he must stay in office. The British ambassador told the American ambassador in Paris, Douglas Dillon. “Pineau apparently is spreading this story in French government circles here,” Dillon telegraphed wearily back to Washington.27
When this claim was put by the State Department to the embassy in Cairo, ambassador Raymond Hare replied stoutly that he had last seen Nasser on Friday: “There was no discussion at that time, nor had there been previously, of any question of Nasser’s resignation. Only comment in Friday’s discussion which might be considered as having indirect bearing on subject reference[d] [in State Department’s] telegram was expression [of] Nasser’s intention not even [to] evacuate his family.” A line of the cable is still redacted in the State Department’s record, but it goes on to say that though there have been “varying degrees of despondency” following the destruction of the Egyptian air force, the people of Cairo were not giving up. “On contrary attitude has been ‘if they want us, let them come and get us.’”28
Anti-American feeling was widespread in Paris, where many felt that the United States’ focus on Suez was obscuring the plight of Hungary. The reaction of the French, Dillon reported, was “extremely violent.” One prominent journalist, a Hungarian-born French correspondent for Paris Match who had been one of the last people out of the country, had written provocative reports. “He [is] very emotional over slaughter and lays large share of blame on US because of Radio Free Europe broadcasts inciting population to revolt, followed by refusal of concrete help from US,” Dillon wrote. “This line can be very damaging to US therefore prompt action required to show our continued interest, our refusal to give up hope in face of Soviet atrocities and our solidarity with Western allies regarding future course of action.”29
The mood was different in London, where Eden’s government was now caught off balance. In the House of Commons, Selwyn Lloyd argued valiantly but unconvincingly that he could not “ensure that the Israelis withdraw from Egyptian territory until we are physically in the area to keep the peace.”30 Anthony Nutting was watching. “Amid a crescendo of angry protests from the Opposition, he was subjected to one of the toughest cross-examinations ever endured by a Minister of the Crown,” he remembered. “If our purpose was to keep the peace and police the area, then why, he was asked, were we dropping leaflets threatening to bomb Egyptian villages and telling the Egyptian populace that they had ‘committed a sin’ by placing their ‘confidence in Abdel Nasser and believing his lies’?”31 This particular leaflet was read out by the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, who added, “In my respectful submission we have here not a military action to separate Israeli and Egyptian troops; we have a declaration of war against the Egyptian Government, in the most brutal terms.” He asked Lloyd, “Will the Government stop lying to the House of Commons?”32
The Labour MP Victor Collins read out part of the text of another Anglo-French leaflet dropped over Egypt the previous day: “We have the might and we shall use it to the limit if you do not give in.” He asked Selwyn Lloyd, “Can the Foreign Secretary say whether, in principle, there is any difference between that and the Russian threat to the Hungarians, except that they gave four hours’ notice and we gave twelve hours’ notice? . . . Can he say whether the Egyptians were guilty of the same crime as the Hungarians—wanting to run their own country in their own way?” Lloyd said he would need to see a copy of the leaflet before he could answer.33
While Eden’s government was on the ropes in the House of Commons, though, the commanders of Musketeer had reason to believe their operation might be on the verge of salvation. At five p.m. Cairo time, the local Egyptian commander in Port Said met British and French officers. The Egyptians asked that the British and French reconnect the water supply to Port Said and stop “killing civilians.” The British commander on the ground asked for a surrender, which the Egyptians refused to provide on grounds that it would have to be approved in Cairo. A temporary cease-fire was agreed until nine thirty p.m. that night, then extended to ten thirty p.m.
As the message about this cease-fire was relayed from the ground commander to General Keightley in Cyprus and from Cyprus to London, it grew in the telling. In Cyprus, it was understood to mean the British and French would the next morning face no opposition to their landing. In London, it was taken to mean the surrender was already complete. Britain and France had won.
“Our most sincere congratulations to you all,” read London’s delighted response. The invaders were ordered to occupy Ismailia and Suez immediately “with minimum loss of life,” perhaps by arrangement with the local Egyptian governors. Further air bombings were canceled. The United Nations was informed right away.
The news was passed to Eden in the Commons. Thrilled, he leaped up and interrupted Lloyd to announce that General Keightley had ordered a cease-fire. There was happy uproar from the government benches and confusion among the opposition. Conservative members called for Gaitskell’s resignation.
Eden rushed back to Downing Street and summoned the chiefs of staff, embracing them joyously. “Oh my dear Chiefs, how grateful I am to you!” he exclaimed. “You have been magnificent! It’s all worked out perfectly!”34
1500 Washington DC // 2000 London // 2100 Paris // 2200 Port Said // 0000 Moscow
At midnight in Moscow, the Soviet foreign minister, Dmitri Shepilov, sent for the British ambassador, William Hayter. He gave him a message from Bulganin for Eden, and said similar messages were going to Mollet and Ben-Gurion.
Hayter read the text. “I said that a message of this kind called for no comment by me, especially in the present international situation,” he reported to London. “Shepilov replied that he did not expect comment; he only asked me to pass it on.”
Hayter returned to his embassy and began the time-consuming process of communicating the long, rambling note. Bulganin condemned the collusion between Britain, France, and Israel—not only as unjustified violence against Egypt and its people, but as a threat to world peace and freedom. “The Suez Canal question has been merely the pretext for Anglo-French aggression, which has other and more far-reaching aims,” he wrote. “It cannot be concealed that, in fact, there is now being launched an aggressive brigandly war against the Arab peoples with the object of liquidating the national independence of the Middle Eastern countries and the restoration of the régime of colonial slavery which the people had overthrown.”
The most controversial and, for the Western powers, most terrifying paragraph of Bulganin’s letter—which had actually been drafted by Khrushchev himself35—implied that the Soviets might be about to play their trump card.
“What would have been the position of Britain, if she had been attacked by stronger Powers, with all kinds of modern offensive weapons at their disposal?” the letter asked. “And remember that such countries at the present time need not even send their naval and air forces to British shores, but could use other means, such as rocket techniques. If rocket weapons were used against Britain and France, you would no doubt call this a barbarous act. But how is this different from the inhuman attack carried out by the armed forces of Britain and France on an almost unarmed Egypt?”36
This message would widely be read as a threat by the Soviet Union to launch a nuclear attack on London and Paris. Bulganin had made no clear demands or threats. He had not described the possible scale or target of such an attack, nor when it might be launched, nor the circumstances that would provoke it; nor had he actually said that nuclear, rather than conventional, weapons would be mounted on any rockets fired. But he had alluded to the Soviets’ medium-range arsenal and equated an act of war against a Third World power with an act of war against a First World power.
The British government had not completely failed to anticipate the possibility of a Soviet attack on its own territory. “If we should be destroyed by Russian bombs now, that would be better than to be reduced to impotence by the disintegration of our entire position abroad,” Harold Macmillan had said while grandstanding to Foster Dulles in London on August 1. The loss of Britain’s position in the Middle East would reduce Britain “to a status similar to that of Holland,” which was implicitly the worst thing the British chancellor could imagine and explicitly worse than a nuclear holocaust.37
On September 11, Bulganin had written to Eden noting British and French military concentrations in Cyprus, “in the neighborhood of the Suez Canal area.” Bulganin judged that this was designed to threaten action against Egypt, should Egypt refuse to place the canal under international administration. He warned Eden then: “Small wars can turn into big wars. . . . I must tell you, Mr. Prime Minister, that the Soviet Union, as a great power interested in the maintenance of peace, cannot hold aloof from this question.”38
Bulganin’s ominous tone of November 5 built on this earlier threat. “Though there is an element of bullying bluff in this intolerable message I am afraid there is no doubt that the Soviet Government are working themselves up into a very ugly mood,” Hayter wrote. He did not comment on the likelihood of an attack on Britain or France, but considered it possible the Soviets might “take independent violent action against our forces in the Middle East.” It was essential, he advised, that Britain must “get in step” with its American allies again without delay: “Only clear and early proof of this will stop these people from committing dangerous acts of folly.”39
Bulganin’s letter to Guy Mollet was phrased in similar terms. His letter to David Ben-Gurion included an extra sting. For the first time in the Soviet Union’s relationship with Israel, he cast doubt on its future existence—a point of extreme sensitivity for the Israeli government. “The whole of peace-loving humanity condemns with indignation the criminal action of the aggressors who have tried to undermine the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of the Egyptian state,” Bulganin wrote. “Entirely ignoring this fact, the Israeli government, acting as a tool of imperialist external forces, is continuing its crazed adventure, challenging all the people of the East who are fighting against colonialism and for their freedom and independence.” Israel’s behavior, Bulganin said, “is sowing among the peoples of the East a hatred for the State of Israel—a hatred which will inevitably impact on Israel’s future and will call into question Israel’s very existence as a state.”40
So shocked was Ben-Gurion at this that he confessed in his diary, “If his [Bulganin’s] name hadn’t been signed on it I could have thought that it had been written by Hitler.”41 Soviet arms, he believed, were then flowing into Syria. If they now came with Soviet soldiers attached, Israel could face a much greater threat—one that might drag the whole region into war.
1530 New York // 2030 London // 2230 Port Said
The Egyptian authorities in Port Said unloaded new Czech rifles and machine guns that had arrived a few hours before, put them on trucks, and gave them out to any civilians who would take them.42 That afternoon, they had been broadcasting around the town that World War III had begun. The Soviets, they said, had already bombed London and Paris and were on their way to help Egypt.
Though the timing of these broadcasts, beginning just a few hours before the official issuing of Bulganin’s threat, was remarkable, there is no evidence that the script in Port Said was dictated to the Egyptians by the Soviets, as the British and French would later claim, nor even that it was inspired by their move. Communications between Port Said and the outside world had been deliberately targeted by the Anglo-French assault. There was only one underwater cable remaining with a telephone line, which they had neglected to cut.
General Moguy, the Egyptian commander in Port Said, had used it to telephone Nasser earlier in the evening. Finally, he rejected the British and French conditions for cease-fire. He claimed he did so on his own authority. Other sources say Nasser ordered him to fight on.
At ten thirty p.m., gunfire rang out again in Port Said. Anthony Eden’s perfect victory was being shot to pieces.
1600 Washington DC // 2100 London // 2200 Paris // 0100 (Nov. 6) Moscow
Nikolai Bulganin continued to press the strong new Soviet line on Suez in a cable to Eisenhower, which arrived in Washington at four p.m. that afternoon. He proposed something extraordinary: a joint Soviet-American task force to liberate Egypt. “The United States have a strong fleet in the Mediterranean,” he told the president. “The Soviet Union also has a strong fleet and strong air units. The joint and immediate use of these means on the part of the United States and the Soviet Union, if the United Nations so decides, would be a competent guarantee of stopping aggression against the Egyptian people and against the Arab countries.” If Britain and France’s invasion were not stopped, he warned, “it could develop into a third world war.”43
The Soviet offer of a joint force had been Khrushchev’s idea. He telephoned Vyacheslav Molotov: “Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, I think that we should address ourselves to the President of the United States with a proposal to take joint action against the aggressors who have attacked Egypt.”
“Eisenhower will never agree to join forces with us against England, France, and Israel,” replied Molotov.
“Of course he won’t,” agreed Khrushchev, “but by putting him in the position of having to refuse, we’ll expose the hypocrisy of his public statement condemning the attack against Egypt.”44
Eisenhower declined the joint venture, stating publicly that it was “an obvious attempt to divert world attention from the Hungarian tragedy.” He could hardly do otherwise. Americans were due to cast their votes for or against his reelection the very next day: this was no time to sign up with the Soviets. When Khrushchev received his rejection, though, he was jubilant, believing that it revealed all the American claims of standing for fine principles of liberty and justice to be lies. “We had unmasked them!” he crowed.45
At five p.m., Eisenhower met his advisers. They all agreed that the Soviet suggestion of joint military action was “unthinkable.” Herbert Hoover, citing CIA information, opined that Nasser’s position was “wobbly.” He thought the British and French may now be in a position “from which they cannot pull back until Nasser is out.”
This was new, Eisenhower said. The British had been saying their aim was to “deflate” Nasser, not topple him.
Hoover suggested that Dag Hammarskjöld might have asked Nasser to resign, though it is not clear he had any evidence to back this up. It may have been speculation, or a result of listening to Christian Pineau’s far-fetched stories. He added, “The British may still have a coup in mind, as Nasser’s position deteriorates.”
Eisenhower responded dryly, “Tell Nasser we’ll be glad to put him on St. Helena and give him a million dollars.”
But the threat of Soviet intervention had them worried. “Those boys are both furious and scared,” said Eisenhower. “Just as with Hitler, that makes for the most dangerous possible state of mind. And we better be damn sure that every Intelligence point and every outpost of our Armed Forces is absolutely right on their toes.” According to Emmet Hughes, whose notes on the meeting are livelier than the official minutes but are corroborated by them, Eisenhower added darkly: “You know, we may be dealing here with the opening gambit of an ultimatum. We have to be positive and clear in our every word, every step. And if those fellows [the Soviets] start something, we may have to hit ’em—and, if necessary, with everything in the bucket.”
It was not only the Soviets, then, who were threatening to turn this conflict into a nuclear war.
Somebody (the official minutes do not say whom) suggested that Eisenhower could get in touch with India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The president leaped on this suggestion, saying he would “like to send a message to Nehru to bring Nehru’s weight to bear on the side of peace and a limitation of the hostilities.”
A messenger brought in an urgent telegram from Charles Bohlen, the ambassador in Moscow, advising that they should push for an immediate cease-fire in the Middle East to avoid Soviet military action. “There has to be some way out of this impasse,” Eisenhower said with a sigh.
The president’s aide, Herman Phleger, said that the standoff in the Middle East was now so tense, and the stakes so high, that the crisis had become a zero-sum game: “Either Nasser must fall—or Eden must fall.”
“All I can say is—it’s one hell of a way to conduct a world election,” said Eisenhower, and closed the meeting.46