16

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1956

BACK DOWN

0200 London // 0300 Paris // 0400 Cairo

In the middle of the night, Nikolai Bulganin’s letters arrived in London and Paris. According to Peter Wright’s memoir Spycatcher—a book notoriously unreliable in places, but illuminating in others—MI5 had bugged the Egyptian embassy in London, and were intercepting messages between it and the Egyptian embassy in Moscow. Information from this source, Wright alleged, raised the eyebrows of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). One message from Moscow apparently recounted a conversation between the Soviet foreign minister and Egyptian ambassador in which the Soviets said they were preparing aircraft for a confrontation with Britain.

“The panic provoked by this cable, which was handed straight to the JIC, did as much as anything to prompt Eden into withdrawal,” Wright wrote. He admitted that the Soviets had swept the Egyptian embassy for bugs and found a Special Facilities washer he had fitted to a telephone in the code room while disguised as a Post Office engineer. He wondered whether the messages sent were therefore deliberate: “They did not want us to assume they were bluffing. The best way of ensuring we took their posture seriously would be if we obtained information from an unimpeachable source, for instance from a secret cable.”¹

As the arms race sped up over the course of the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev knew that the Soviets were behind the Americans. For several years, while Soviet nuclear scientists—including his own son, Sergei—toiled to catch up, he resorted to bluff. He bragged often about how many missiles the Soviets had and what an enormous range they could cover. It was mostly nonsense. On one occasion, he claimed the Soviets were popping out missiles like sausages from a machine.

“How can you say that, since we only have two or three?” asked Sergei in private.

“The important thing is to make the Americans believe that,” his father replied. “And that way we prevent an attack.”²

In November 1956, the Soviet arsenal consisted of two models. The T-1 (M101) was a single-stage, liquid-fueled tactical attack missile, which could carry an 800-pound nuclear warhead. Its maximum range was around 450 miles, which fell well short of London or Paris. The T-2 (M103) was a two-stage, liquid-fueled intermediate range ballistic missile, which could carry a 700-pound nuclear warhead and could possibly reach up to 1,100 miles, though it had not yet been range-tested that far. This gave it a chance of hitting something important and Western, but it had been produced on a small scale and was not yet deployed in significant numbers. Full production would begin in 1957. The Soviets made no obvious move to deploy any of their missiles to locations that might have allowed them to attack the Operation Musketeer launch bases in Cyprus, nor cities in Western Europe. The Red Army was still focused on Hungary.³

“Some accounts well after the event imply that officials in London discounted the Soviet threat,” wrote Chester Cooper. “But that is not the way I remember it at the time. . . . Some British intelligence officers, to be sure, were skeptical that Moscow could throw nuclear missiles from Soviet territory into Britain—but they were not certain. And they knew the consequences of their being wrong were grave indeed.”⁴

Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union wanted a war, nuclear or conventional. Both administrations believed it necessary to act as if they were prepared to launch nuclear weapons, as much or more for domestic political reasons as to hold each other at bay. The theory of mutual assured destruction would not be articulated publicly in American policy until the 1960s, but the principle that a nuclear state ought appear too dangerous to hit was understood by both Eisenhower and Khrushchev.

Among the many problems with mutual assured destruction was that it assumed everyone would act rationally. Both Eisenhower and William Hayter had indicated the previous evening that they did not feel the Soviets could be relied on to act rationally. With nuclear weapons in play, any fleeting moment of irrationality—or miscalculation, or misunderstanding—had the potential to trigger global disaster.

At three o’clock in the morning Paris time, Guy Mollet summoned Douglas Dillon, the American ambassador. Dillon dragged himself out of bed, dressed for the cold, and drove in the dark to the Hôtel Matignon.

Several French cabinet members were already assembled at Mollet’s official residence. Mollet handed him some yellow sheets, which had come off a news machine. They contained the statement from the Soviets as reported by the TASS news agency, threatening nuclear war. (The Soviets soon published an official government statement, which was more carefully phrased than the TASS statement. “But that Tass statement really did scare these people,” Dillon said.)

According to Dillon’s recollection, “Everybody was scared to death.” Mollet asked him how the American government would respond if the Soviets attacked France.

“Well, there’s no doubt that it would be a violation of the NATO Treaty,” Dillon said. “I’m sure we’d be at your side.”

“Well, you say that, but what about Washington?” Mollet asked. “They’ve been saying these terrible things about us. Would they do this?”

Dillon reassured him that Eisenhower would respond to a direct attack. Mollet asked him to contact Washington for confirmation, but Dillon pointed out that night had already fallen on the other side of the Atlantic: he would not be able to get a reply for hours. At that exact moment, a telephone call came through. It was Anthony Eden in London, telling Mollet he could at most keep the attack going only until the next morning, November 7.

“All right,” said Mollet.

“It’s clear that the French, that night, did not want to stop, and they would not have stopped if the British hadn’t stopped,” said Dillon.

Mollet pointed to a spot on a map of the Suez Canal, about two thirds of the way up, indicating where he believed French forces were currently fighting. “By ten o’clock tomorrow we might even have the whole thing,” he told Dillon mournfully.

Mollet was mistaken as to the French position, believing that his nation’s forces were already surrounding Ismailia and might therefore be only twelve hours away from taking the entire canal, down to the southern port of Suez itself. “Well, of course,” Dillon said, “it turned out the next day, when the smoke cleared, that they weren’t anywhere near the city they were supposed to have been in.”⁵

0400 London // 0500 Paris // 0600 Cairo

As Dillon later realized, British and French forces were at that point still at the northern end of the canal. Confusion about the operation continued. “We are completely in the dark about the situation in Egypt,” telegraphed Ralph Murray at the Allied Forces Headquarters to the Foreign Office in London. “I can not [sic] even see newspaper reports. The four papers which do arrive are three days old and I should have no time to scour them in any case.” He requested a daily telegram of collated information covering internal security, government measures, public feeling, the positions of foreign communities and religious minorities in Egypt, and the locations within Egypt of diplomatic personnel and base contractors.⁶

Commando units landed at Port Said, aiming to meet up with the paratroop forces dropped the previous day. French paratrooper Pierre Leulliette remembered clearing the canal area for the landings. He and his fellow soldiers came across a dozen or so fishermen, who put their hands up and shouted in Arabic—declaring, he thought, that they were not soldiers.

“No unnecessary prisoners! They’re a nuisance and a waste of food!” barked one French paratrooper.

“A voice in the hearts of some of my comrades was whispering ‘Kill! Kill!’” remembered Leulliette. “They had hardly slept and hadn’t had time to drink their coffee, so they were in a foul temper that morning.”

The French opened fire. One by one, the fishermen slumped and fell into the waters of the canal—except two, who dived in to hide among the boats. One soldier, whom Leulliette called “Première Classe L”—equivalent in rank to lance-corporal—stood on the boats and waited for the men to surface.

“Première Classe L. had obviously never had such fun,” Leulliette wrote. “After a few minutes, a face emerged. ‘Rat-a-tat-tat!’ went Première Classe L.’s automatic rifle. The head disappeared, riddled and shot to pieces at point-blank range. Three minutes went by and the head again appeared, streaming with blood and water, a horrible sight. Another burst. The water covered it for good. A large, pink bloodstain slowly spread on the surface and then dispersed.”⁷ The last fisherman met the same end.

In the wake of the commandos came a motor launch bearing the three splendidly uniformed task force commanders, General Stockwell, Admiral Durnford-Slater, and Air Marshal Barnett, along with the French General Beaufre. The launch proceeded toward the grand headquarters of the Suez Canal Company. Shots peppered out from Egyptian guerrillas stationed in the building. One bullet whizzed past Stockwell’s thigh. “I don’t think they are quite ready to receive us yet,” remarked Durnford-Slater.⁸

When they managed to land, the commanders found chaos. The Egyptian guerrilla resistance was scrappy but well armed and effective. They soon gave up trying to broker a cease-fire with anyone there. Musketeer headquarters in Cyprus telegraphed London with the news that the Egyptians had refused the surrender they thought they had secured the previous evening. “General Stockwell reports that it is abundantly clear that this was the result of intervention by Cairo,” the telegram noted, though it was not actually as clear as all that. “Operations were therefore resumed.”

Eden could see what he had left of the moral high ground crumbling away under his feet. “Prime Minister is concerned at the renewal of fighting with no certain explanation,” the Ministry of Defence telegraphed back.⁹ At the same time, emergency messages were being sent from Anglo-French headquarters to their task forces warning: “Russia may intervene in the Middle East with force. Action will be taken forthwith so that all airfields are at the maximum state of preparedness for an attack against them. In particular the greatest possible dispersion of aircraft will be achieved and maintained. Naval and army force will also take appropriate action to meet this threat.”¹⁰ British and French forces were now actively preparing for an attack on the Soviet Union or its bases.

0400 Washington DC // 0900 London // 1300 Moscow

In response to Bulganin’s letter, the CIA in Washington lifted the embargo it had put on sharing intelligence with the British authorities. Chester Cooper went into a meeting with the Joint Intelligence Committee in London, able to talk freely for the first time. “I had recently become used to seeing these men, my friends, gray with exhaustion,” he remembered. “Today they were ashen. They were worried. Really worried. For the past many hours they had been grappling with Moscow’s unexpected, hideous threat.” He told them the United States thought Bulganin’s letter was a bluff. As a result, “The room seemed brighter.”¹¹

The American diplomat Robert Murphy noted that not everyone in Washington was so sure. “We must stop this before we are all burned to a crisp!” he remembered one “high ranking official of the State Department” exclaiming.

“I am inclined to suspect that fear of the bomb motivated Sir Anthony Eden during this period more than he ever admitted,” Murphy wrote, “more perhaps than he himself realized.”¹²

Most of the Middle Eastern diplomats in Moscow did not believe the Soviets would bomb Britain or France. They did believe the Soviets might hit British and French ships in the Mediterranean, attack invasion forces in Port Said and Malta, or even create a diversionary incident somewhere else in the Middle East. “What was generally agreed was that if the Russians were bluffing and did nothing, their reputation in the Third World would be destroyed for at least ten years,” wrote Mohamed Heikal.

There is a hint from Egyptian sources that the Soviet Union may not have been bluffing entirely. The Egyptian ambassador in Moscow, Mohamed el-Kouni, was summoned to see Nikita Khrushchev.

“This will make them stop,” said Khrushchev, speaking of Bulganin’s letter.

“You know, Mr. Chairman,” said Kouni, “you nearly broke my heart when you spoke to me at the reception four days ago.” Khrushchev had told him the Soviets could not help.

“I meant to give you a misleading message,” Khrushchev replied, “because I knew you would report it back to Cairo in cipher. We think the Americans and British have broken your ciphers and we wanted them to think we were not going to intervene. So we had to use you as a tool in this deception. Please forgive me.”¹³

This story chimes with Peter Wright’s claim that the Soviets used lines of communication they knew would be intercepted to disinform Western powers. Of course, Khrushchev may merely have been flattering the Egyptians: the presidium had been far more occupied with Hungary than with Suez until November 4. Yet with the world as tense as it was at the beginning of November 1956 and British and French forces already preparing to hit Soviet targets, it need not have taken a nuclear bomb to escalate this situation. A conventional attack on the Anglo-French force in Egypt might have been enough.

London was facing up to the prospect of nuclear annihilation from the east and financial annihilation from the west. A run on the British pound was now in effect. The British chancellor, Harold Macmillan, had spent much of the night on the telephone to Washington, including a call to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. From his sickbed, Foster Dulles made the position of the United States stark. If Britain called a cease-fire, the United States would help rescue sterling. If Britain did not, it would not.

“It’s ruin either way but it’s better the quick way,” admitted Macmillan.¹⁴ Having been a great supporter of the Suez operation, he now committed fully and forcefully to stopping it. Previously, as the former Conservative politician Brendan Bracken put it, Macmillan’s “bellicosity was beyond description,” and he seemed to want “to tear Nasser’s scalp out with his own finger nails.” From this point on, though, “he might be described as the leader of the bolters.”¹⁵

Macmillan went to Lloyd to explain to him how grim the country’s financial position was. The immediate problem was oil. Britain was no longer able to buy oil from the Arab nations. Its alternative was to buy oil from the United States, but Eisenhower was now going to force it to spend dollars—which it could not afford. The only way to keep the lights on was to ask the Americans for credit, and the Americans would not give credit until the advance south of Port Said stopped.

0945 London // 1045 Paris

At nine forty-five a.m., the British cabinet met. “The Chancellor of the Exchequer had rightly been to see the Foreign Secretary about our financial position earlier that day and I knew that it was grim,” Eden remembered.¹⁶ Macmillan told the cabinet it was much grimmer than they thought. Britain’s gold reserves had lost $280 million in a week thanks to Operation Musketeer, he claimed. He was wrong about this: they had lost $50 million in the first two days of November, going up to $85 million by the end of the first week. The reason for his extraordinary overestimate is unknown. It has been suggested that he might have mistaken dollars for pounds: £100 million was then worth $280 million. The economic historian Diane Kunz argued that Macmillan cannot possibly have been so incompetent, and instead must have ramped up the figure intentionally to stop the war: he “used the most effective device at hand to convince any reluctant colleagues of the danger facing Britain.”¹⁷ Macmillan’s private diary of the crisis might have answered questions about his reasoning and motivation definitively, had he not destroyed it.

There was resistance to stopping the operation, for the objectives had not been achieved. Only Port Said was occupied, not Ismailia nor the port of Suez itself; the canal was not secured, and Anglo-French forces were not yet in position to unblock it. If the world had to wait for a United Nations force to be constituted and travel to Egypt, the canal might remain blocked for months.

Yet the arguments in favor of stopping immediately were now overwhelming. Israel and Egypt had stopped fighting, so the Anglo-French justification for war had evaporated. There was the Soviet threat; even if the rocket attacks were discounted, the cabinet considered the possibility of Soviet forces intervening in Egypt or Syria feasible. According to Anthony Nutting, it was the prospect of devaluing sterling again and perhaps losing its status as a reserve currency that prompted the cabinet to call a complete halt that day—though Eden (and several others) did so with much reluctance.¹⁸ Butler, Salisbury, and Macmillan were all now ready to accept Dag Hammarskjöld’s plan. Though Lloyd still supported Eden’s inclination to fight on, the prime minister could not carry the cabinet.

In 1987, Lord Home, who was Commonwealth secretary during the Suez crisis, was asked why Eden ignored several warnings from the Treasury dating back to August 1956 that, without American support, sterling would be put under intense strain.

“A warning is a different thing from it happening, isn’t it?” Home replied. “You often get warnings of this sort and then the results are different.” He conceded that the cabinet only really took the prospect of a sterling crisis seriously on November 6, when the Americans effectively issued their own ultimatum. “I think what really turned the scale and made the Chancellor of the Exchequer that day so terribly anxious was the American action in really putting the Sixth Fleet alongside us in the Mediterranean, for all the world to see, and therefore announcing in effect that America was totally against us. And the effect on sterling as a result of that was catastrophic. It was the actual effect on sterling rather than the warnings, I think. Perhaps we ought to have taken the warnings more seriously.”¹⁹

The cabinet voted to stop the war. Ministers had to take their decision as swiftly as possible before eleven a.m., for at that hour they all had to proceed to Westminster. Tuesday, November 6, was the official state opening of the British Parliament. The Queen, clad in white fur and long white gloves, proceeded from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in the Irish state coach, drawn by four white horses. Tradition commanded that she speak in the House of Lords. The political lines in her speech were written for her by her government, and so she too was now obliged to say things that were not true while bedecked in all the glorious regalia of British monarchy. “My Government have been gravely concerned at the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Egypt,” she said. “They resolved, in conjunction with the French Government, to make a quick and decisive intervention to protect the lives of our nationals and to safeguard the Suez Canal by separating the combatants and restoring peace. My Government have proposed that the United Nations should take over responsibility for policing the area, as a prelude to a satisfactory settlement in the Middle East.”²⁰

Immediately after the state opening, Eden rushed to a telephone and called Christian Pineau and Guy Mollet in Paris.

“I don’t think we can go on,” said Eden to Mollet, according to Pineau’s memory of the conversation. “The English can take a lot of things, but I do not think they would be willing to accept the failure of sterling which would have considerable consequences for the Commonwealth. And the pressure is getting worse from day to day.” He said the British cabinet had voted in favor of a cease-fire to take effect in a few hours.

“That’s very quick,” Mollet replied. “Could we not wait two or three days? In those two or three days we could gain some advantages. We could occupy more of the Canal which would put us in a better negotiating position when the final say of settlement comes.”

“No,” said Eden. “I cannot hold out any longer.”

“Try to,” Mollet pleaded.²¹

But Eden would not. He said he would soon be informing Eisenhower of his move.

Mollet was not the only one who thought a few more hours might have made a difference to the outcome of the Suez crisis. “After we prevailed upon the invaders to withdraw, senior people in the Foreign Office and the British Defence Ministry were insisting that if we had delayed our outcry for just twenty-four hours Nasser would have fallen,” wrote CIA agent Miles Copeland. “We were amazed at such nonsense, inasmuch as there was no intelligence whatever to support it. . . . Moreover, not one of our British friends could give us a rational estimate of what would have happened to our benefit if he had fallen.”²²

By coincidence, Mollet and Pineau were with the chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, when they spoke to Eden. The negotiations to form the European Economic Community were almost complete. “France and England will never be powers comparable with the United States and the Soviet Union,” Adenauer remarked to Mollet. “Nor will Germany. There remains to them only one way of playing a decisive role in the world, which is to unite to make Europe. England is not ripe for it but the Suez affair will help to prepare her spirits. As for us, we have no time to lose: Europe will be your revenge.”²³

In London, Eden’s press secretary, William Clark, was on his way to the prime minister’s private office at the House of Commons when he ran into Lord Mountbatten.

“You not resigned yet?” Mountbatten asked.

“Of course I have,” Clark replied, “and you?”

“I can’t think why they haven’t sacked me,” admitted Mountbatten. “I’ve said such outrageous things.”

The two of them continued to the Commons.²⁴

1300 Sharm el-Sheikh

A platform had been constructed from two command cars. Atop it stood Moshe Dayan and two other senior officers of the IDF. They faced an audience of hundreds of Israeli soldiers, watching with pride as the blue and white Israeli flag was hoisted on an Egyptian mast on the golden-sanded shores of the Red Sea. Sharm el-Sheikh had “one of the most spectacular views I have ever seen,” wrote Dayan. “Its waters are deep blue (Egyptian prisoners warned us against swimming there for they are teeming with sharks) and they are framed by hills of crimson rock.”²⁵

Dayan read out a letter from Ben-Gurion. A review of the troops was held, and that was it; the Sinai campaign was over. Israel held the territory. Before the campaign, Dayan asked Ben-Gurion if he thought they would keep it. “I hope so, but I’m not sure,” the old man had said. “We shan’t hang on to it with the same tenacity as we did over Jerusalem.” Yet now, in victory, he was thrilled with his spoils. “After all, Sinai never has been part of Egypt,” he claimed.²⁶

0837 Washington DC // 1337 London // 1437 Paris // 2237 Peking

Eisenhower met Allen Dulles, Herbert Hoover Jr., and others at 8:37 a.m. in Washington. “If the Soviets attack the French and British directly, we would be in war,” he told them, “and we would be justified in taking military action even if Congress were not in session.” He also added that if current American reconnaissance missions found any Soviet air force presence in Syrian bases, he thought “there would be reason for the British and French to destroy them.”²⁷ Eisenhower may have been furious still with Britain and France for their perfidy, but he would not tolerate an attack by the Soviet Union on NATO allies.

Somewhat late to the party, China announced that the Egyptian embassy in Peking had received two million telegrams of support from the Chinese people and that 250,000 Chinese had volunteered to travel to Egypt and take up arms against the imperialists.²⁸ While these numbers were doubtless impressionistic, they underlined again the potential for the Suez crisis to spiral into a far greater war. “In the rest of Africa and Asia, from Japan to Casablanca, the reaction to the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt has been one of virtually unanimous revulsion,” remarked Allen Dulles. “Earlier doubts as to Nasr’s ambitions, and outrage over the tragic events in Hungary, have been drowned out by a wave of revived age-old hatred of Western imperialism and colonialism.”²⁹

With the threat of nuclear war and global conflagration looming, Eisenhower maintained his cool. He went to Gettysburg to cast his vote in the American presidential election. Owing to the global crisis, he was forced to cancel his plan for an immediate postelection golfing holiday. According to his secretary, this was the real blow: “He’s as disappointed as a kid who had counted out all the days to Christmas.”³⁰

1230 Washington DC // 1730 London // 1830 Budapest

William Clark returned to Eden’s private office at the House of Commons at five thirty p.m., about thirty minutes before the cease-fire was due to be announced. The British ambassador to Paris was on the telephone, saying that Mollet was begging Eden to delay the announcement by another half an hour at least. “I don’t think the PM was even told,” remembered Clark.

Another telephone call came through at 5:55 p.m., this time from Eisenhower on the brand-new transatlantic connection. Eden took it. There is a transcript of the call in the American archives. Eden spoke with dignity but tightly; Eisenhower was more relaxed and conveyed an easy, almost unconscious sense of authority.

“We cease firing tonight at midnight provided we are not attacked,” said Eden.

“I see,” Eisenhower replied.

“What you may call the long cease-fire, the cessation of hostilities, that is more complicated,” Eden said.

Eisenhower understood that this was about the “technical troops”—the men who were supposed to secure and clear the canal. “The point I want you to have in your mind is that the cease-fire tonight has nothing to do with technical troops,” he said. “You cease anyway.”

“Unless attacked,” rejoined Eden. The prime minister then added that he had to go to Parliament. “Would you authorize me to say that you think this is helpful outside . . .”

The president interrupted. “You can say that I called to say how delighted I was you found it possible to cease fire tonight so that negotiations could start.”

He had to repeat this a couple of times so Eden could write it down. Eisenhower told him that he did not want any quibbles with the cease-fire: United Nations troops would arrive quickly so that Britain and France could withdraw quickly. Eden, who still hoped British and French troops would stay in Egypt, expressed his hope that American troops would join them: “Are we all going to go out?”

“I would like to see none of the great nations in it,” Eisenhower replied. “I am afraid the Red boy [the Soviet Union] is going to demand the lion’s share. I would rather make it no troops from the big five.”

Eden was clearly flustered by this refusal and asked for time to think it over. “If I survive here tonight,” he said, referring to what he was about to face in the House of Commons, “I will call you tomorrow.” He asked how Eisenhower was doing.

“We have given our whole thought to Hungary and the Middle East,” admitted the president. “I don’t give a damn how the election goes. I guess it will be all right.”³¹

“I gathered that Ike was very stern indeed,” wrote Clark, “insisted on the ceasefire (but agreed to congratulate Eden on it publicly) and insisted absolutely on Anglo-French withdrawal from Suez.” In his memoirs, Eden remembered Eisenhower’s tone differently. “He was vigorous and in good spirits,” Eden claimed. “He was delighted by our order to cease fire and commented that we had got what we had set out to do; the fighting was over and had not spread.” According to the minutes of the call, Eisenhower made no comment about the fighting not spreading. “There seemed no doubt at that moment that friendship between our two countries could be quickly reanimated,” Eden concluded.

Clark returned to Downing Street to write his formal resignation letter. Before he could finish, he was summoned back to the House of Commons to see Eden again. “All he wanted was that I should put out the message of congratulation from Ike and make it clear that it came after the announcement of the ceasefire ‘or it will look as if he was influencing me,’” Clark wrote. “I gladly told this last lie for the PM.”³²

Eden entered the House of Commons to a “profound silence,” reported the Times. But the silence “was shattered with a great cheer at the announcement of the British cease-fire [pending] at midnight.” Most of the cheering came from the Labour benches, but some on the Conservative side too waved their order papers.

Eden summoned all the dignity he could to make a case for his own victory. Though this case was based in significant portions on untruths and obfuscations, he expressed himself eloquently and attempted to turn the debate back to the subject of peace in the Middle East and beyond. If the British and French invasion had encouraged the United Nations to intervene, he told the house, “the better it will be for the peace and future of the world.” Though this appeared to be a claim that he had promoted peace by starting a war, it was the cue for government supporters—excepting a few dissenters—to cheer again. Eden phrased the defeat to allow his fellow Conservatives to feel it as a victory. Even the convalescing Sir Winston Churchill was seen to rise to his feet to join the applause.

Eden went on to defend his campaign from Bulganin’s accusation about “barbarous bombing,” claiming that the British had gone to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties in Egypt. “They will in any event be in no way comparable with the casualties that have been and are still being inflicted by the Soviet forces in Hungary,” he said. “The world knows that in the past three days Soviet forces in Hungary have been ruthlessly crushing the heroic resistance of a truly national movement for independence.”³³

“The adrenalin that accompanies high drama is dangerous when the drama ends, as this one had, so suddenly and so harshly,” wrote Robert Rhodes James, later Eden’s biographer, who was watching from the gallery. “Suddenly, he looked aged and ill, defeated and broken.”³⁴

Eden made it through his parliamentary performance, but his health failed soon afterward. “I will never forget the last act of the Grecian tragedy,” wrote Gerald Templer, the chief of the Imperial General Staff. “The Prime Minister in his bed at 10 Downing Street, his wife sitting on the bed and holding his hand. Who else was there? The four Chiefs of Staff. Not a Minister. A broken man.”³⁵

At the United Nations in New York, Dag Hammarskjöld announced that Britain and France had agreed to the cease-fire. “There were emotional scenes as delegates, who had feared the worst after yesterday’s menacing move by Moscow, realized that the threat of another world war had been lifted, and hastened to congratulate the Secretary-General and one another,” reported the London Times correspondent in New York.³⁶

“It was the BBC news bulletin, it might have been six or it might have been seven p.m., I can’t remember when it was exactly,” said General Sir Kenneth Darling, chief of staff to the army task force commander, General Stockwell, “when suddenly we heard on the tannoy [loudspeaker] echoing round the ship the news that there would be a ceasefire at midnight GMT, which was 0200 hours on the 7th, local time. We were just astounded. It came straight out of the clear blue sky. The whole thing was brought to a halt and it had hardly started.”³⁷

The French paratrooper Pierre Leulliette was about a mile outside El Kantara by his recollection when the order—“so incredible that we thought at first that it was some huge joke”—came to halt. “We even withdrew a bit in astonishment,” he remembered. “We dug fresh holes in the sand for the night. But we no longer knew which way to face. Even in Indo-China, said the veterans, where you were betrayed daily by everyone, they wouldn’t have dared do anything like that.”³⁸

The cease-fire order was delivered to General Keightley, the operation’s commander. His reply did not sound happy. “Egyptian armed children from 12 years upwards are being nuisances,” Keightley complained, and warned that the main problem would be “irregulars[,] civilians and children continuing to fire on our men and probable accusations of our having broken the cease fire.”³⁹ There was disquiet among the fighting men, too. Douglas Clark, in Suez, felt that the United Nations had it all wrong. When the Soviets retook Hungary, he thought, “the United Nations did not even consider sending an international force to stop the retaliatory slaughter; but in Port Said, where we were merely recovering our own property, U.N.O. immediately decided to send a force to stop a war which had already come to an end.” Historians might quibble with several assertions in that sentence, but Clark insisted in his memoirs: “Everybody in the bridgehead had the feeling of being let down.” The Soviet bomb threat, he said, was “empty”—and the real man to blame was “the President of the United States, who at the moment of our landing was seeking re-election on a ‘peace ticket,’ [and] had taken up an uncompromisingly hostile attitude towards us by denying us the oil he could so easily have supplied.”⁴⁰

On a bright and clear autumn day for most of the United States, American voters headed for the polls. “No other American election can, like this one, have been overtaken in the home stretch by the onrush of world events, the anguishing omens of the future, which have virtually swept it from the headlines,” wrote the Times correspondent in Washington; “and the irony is that for purposes of the Republican campaign the world had been depicted as such a comfortable and safe place to live in.” The central issue of the election, wrote the American journalist James Reston, had become “how America is to be governed for four long years in a world of crumbling empires, suspicious alliances, rising nationalism, and social, political, economic, and military revolution.”⁴¹

In some northern industrial states, as well as California and Texas, pollsters commented on an increased turnout, above 1952’s figures—“in response, it seemed, to the gravity of the hour and the President’s exhortation last night that citizens should use their ‘priceless privilege’ for which people in Hungary were dying.”⁴²

In Budapest, the fighting continued. “Heaviest continuous shelling yet,” reported the American legation. “One defender [of the] Kilian barracks reported [it was] bombed first time early Monday morning. Said defenders 700–800 strong when fighting restarted but men no problem because ‘when one [is] killed there [is] always someone, maybe a woman, to pick up his rifle.’”⁴³ The Soviets had now cut all escape routes out of the country, and the resurgent AVH was mounting what a Reuters report called “a wild fury of revenge.” Soviet troops were said to be hanging rebels and displaying their bodies on bridges over the Danube River. Those rebels who surrendered were given a concession: they would be shot instead of hanged.⁴⁴

Béla Lucza was twenty years old and fought with the rebels at Corvin Alley. He was one of the last holding out—but now found himself surrounded by a ring of Soviet soldiers. One of them punched him. Another kicked him and raised his gun. Lucza put his hands in the air. “What the hell do you want here?” he shouted. “I am a Hungarian, this is my home and this is no Suez for you.” The Soviet officer shot him twice: one bullet hit him in the head and the other glanced off the side of his mouth. Lucza fell to the floor and pretended to be dead. The officer shot a third time at his heart. The shot missed, but ripped a bone out of his shoulder. Though he was blinded, Lucza survived by playing dead. “I knew they thought I was a capitalist and all,” he remembered. “I wanted to face him, to give him a piece of my mind when the blast came.”⁴⁵

The British journalist Peter Fryer was a Communist himself and believed that what he saw in Hungary was a travesty of every principle of that philosophy. He accused the Communist government under Rákosi and Gerő of “the most abominable methods, including censorship, thought control, imprisonment, torture and murder.”⁴⁶ His dispatches attesting to the reality of the revolution and of Soviet persecution horrified the loyal Stalinist staff of the Daily Worker, who refused to publish some of them. He resigned and was expelled from the Communist Party.

The Yugoslavs were disgusted by Soviet behavior. “They are already describing them [the Hungarian rebels] officially as a counterrevolution,” Veljko Mićunović wrote angrily in his diary. “So to ‘defend the revolution’ in Hungary they have sent Soviet troops against Budapest in revolt and are seeking the causes of the revolt from here all the way to America: In their view everyone else is to blame, they alone are in the right!” To Mićunović, it seemed any prospect of liberalization within the Soviet bloc was slipping away. “It is now simply impossible to talk about the policy of the Twentieth Congress and de-Stalinization when the Soviet Union is restoring order in Hungary by means of armed force and is threatening to do the same for other countries of Eastern Europe,” he wrote.⁴⁷

Mićunović saw Khrushchev that evening. It was Soviet National Day, the anniversary of the October Revolution, and Khrushchev was wearing a dark suit with two gold stars—decorations reserved for special occasions. He met Mićunović near St. George’s Hall in the Kremlin, where that night’s grand reception was being set up.

Though Khrushchev was cross with the Yugoslavs for giving Imre Nagy asylum in their embassy in Budapest, he was triumphant about Suez. He believed that the United States’ refusal to join a Soviet-American force had struck a propaganda blow against it: “The United States was exposed as an accomplice in the Western plan to attack Egypt.”

His conclusion made a certain stark sense from a Soviet internationalist point of view. “The defeat of the West was complete,” Mićunović wrote, characterizing what Khrushchev had said. “Nasser remained, and the Arabs would be even stronger after this idiotic war-making by the French and British.”⁴⁸

“Father was extraordinarily proud of his victory,” said Khrushchev’s son Sergei.

“I’ve been told that when Guy Mollet received our note, he ran to the telephone in his pyjamas and called Eden,” Khrushchev remembered later. “I don’t know if this story is true, but whether or not he had his trousers on doesn’t change the fact that twenty-four hours after the delivery of our note the aggression was halted.” Khrushchev’s biographer William Taubman added: “The lesson he learned and applied in later crises was both that nuclear weapons were all-powerful and that he didn’t need many of them.”⁴⁹

Nasser’s closest chroniclers, his wife Tahia and his friends Mohamed Heikal and Abdel Latif al-Baghdadi, do not record his reaction to the cease-fire. There was little immediate cause for celebration. The armed forces of three foreign powers were still in Egyptian territory; the Egyptian armed forces had so far failed to evict them; and there was no guarantee that the untried United Nations Expeditionary Force would retrieve Egypt’s sovereignty or dignity from this situation. Over the following couple of days, the few testimonies that exist seem to hint that Nasser still felt out of sorts. Baghdadi recorded his continuing gripes with colleagues, especially Abdel Hakim Amer, and his complaints about the army’s “spirit of surrender” and “paralysis” following the British and French attack.⁵⁰ When the Canadian General Burns met him on November 9, he was wearing “an ancient grey cardigan and looked rather tired, but still vigorous and confident.”⁵¹ According to press reports, the reaction in Cairo was subdued. News from the Canal Zone was confusing. Some Egyptians had rejoiced at the prospect of Soviet intervention, while others had feared it. Few now welcomed Ben-Gurion’s announcement that Israel had won.⁵² While Israel had won a military victory over Egypt, though, Nasser had won a diplomatic victory against Britain and France. British and French forces had not taken and could not take the whole canal. They were nowhere near toppling his government.

At 9:21 p.m. London time, Eden cabled Mollet. “The President of the United States telephoned me on his own account. There is no doubt at all that the friendship between us all is restored and even strengthened,” he asserted. “I feel that as a result of all our efforts we have laid bare the reality of Soviet plans in the Middle East and are physically holding a position which can be decisive for the future.” He offered his thanks to Mollet for his loyalty and understanding: “I am sure history will justify us.”⁵³

1900 Washington DC // 0000 London // 0100 (Nov. 7) Paris // 0200 Cairo; Tel Aviv // 0400 Moscow

At midnight, Britain’s imperial adventure in Suez ended. Ten years after the event, the British historian Hugh Thomas wrote that “the spectacle of over one hundred thousand men setting off for a war which lasted barely a day and then returning has few parallels in the long gallery of military imbecility. The ‘grand old Duke of York’ at least got to the top of the hill.”⁵⁴ (In an old English nursery rhyme, the duke pointlessly marches ten thousand men up to the top of a hill and then down again.)

In Washington, Eisenhower’s campaign team had holed up in the presidential suite at the Sheraton Park Hotel to watch the election results come in. “The air is stale with smoke from hundreds of cigarettes nervously puffed and snuffed out,” wrote Emmet Hughes, the president’s speechwriter, “with scores of whisky glasses half-gulped and left to stand and turn to water, with simple sweat from all the brows and bodies waiting, waiting, waiting . . .”

Eisenhower was in an ebullient mood, perking up still more as the news came in that he was leading strongly in some Southern states. “Louisiana? That’s as probable as leading in Ethiopia!” he exclaimed. But he stopped around midnight and sat down, telling Hughes he needed to rest. “Emotions are the things you got to watch out for. So all the doctors say. The worst is anger. . . . And after anger, any great emotional strain or worry is bad. . . . But these are the things that do affect the heart. . . . Haven’t had a twinge since the first one [heart attack], but . . . just got to be careful, I guess. . . .”

Then came the news that they had won Alabama—the first time since 1876 that that state had voted for a Republican. There was joy, and then impatience as Eisenhower waited for Adlai Stevenson to concede. “What in the name of God is the monkey waiting for?” he growled. “Polishing his prose?” Then, as Stevenson appeared on the television screens, he stalked quickly out of the room, saying, “I’m just looking for a drink.”

A few minutes later he reappeared, having changed into a blue suit and regained his presidential composure. He gathered up his family and went downstairs to appear before the cameras. His speech, according to Hughes, was unrehearsed.

“With whatever talents the good God has given me,” Eisenhower said, “with whatever strength there is within me, I will continue . . . to do just one thing: to work for 168 million Americans here at home—and for peace in the world.”⁵⁵

Though it had been brief, the Suez War had been messy. Its cost could not merely be estimated in the thousands of lives lost, the soldiers and civilians injured, the infrastructure, homes, and property destroyed, or the expense of mounting the failed operations. The cost also included the follow-on effects of the stoppage of oil through the pipelines and international trade traffic through the Suez Canal, the sterling crisis, and the economic damage to all the countries involved.

There were even greater costs, which could not be calculated in figures: the cost to British prestige, the cost to Britain’s, France’s, and the West’s relations with the Arab world in the short and long term, the cost to the already distant prospect of Arab-Israeli peace, the cost to trust within NATO, the cost to the reputation of the United Nations, the cost to the liberty of Hungary.

For all that expenditure of money, power, prestige, and lives, Britain and France had failed to meet their objectives. The Suez Canal was closed and still held under Egyptian national control; the Algerian rebellion would not quiet down but would grow; and Gamal Abdel Nasser was still president of Egypt.