0400 Washington DC // 0900 London // 1000 Paris; Budapest
During the Cold War, Europe was said to be divided by an Iron Curtain: the border between Western-aligned and Soviet-aligned nations. The Soviet Union had surrounded itself with Communist countries—Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania (plus until 1948 Yugoslavia). These were collectively known as the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet bloc, or the Soviet satellites—or as the “captive nations” by anti-Communists like John Foster Dulles. In 1955, when NATO admitted West Germany and allowed it to rearm itself, the Soviets reacted by formalizing the Soviet bloc with the Warsaw Pact, their own treaty of mutual defense and cooperation.
In the time of Stalin, Hungary had been controlled by Mátyás Rákosi. The Hungarian people were inclined to refer to him as Baldy or Asshead, though not within his earshot.1 Under Rákosi’s leadership, Hungary became a repressive Stalinist state, terrorized by the interrogation and torture experts of the State Security Authority (Államvédelmi Hatóság, AVH).2 Many were imprisoned arbitrarily. “Then aged 23, I was locked up in a camp near Budapest as an alleged Trotskyite, although I had not read a single volume of Trotsky’s works,” remembered the Hungarian journalist Paul Lendvai. His fellow prisoners included a farmer who had failed to supply enough grain to the authorities, a fascist count who had worked in military intelligence, a Jewish doctor accused of Zionism, and a chess grandmaster who had defected to the West then unwisely returned. The ideologist of the Nazi-style Arrow Cross party, which had ruled Hungary from 1944 to 1945, was in the camp alongside Lendvai; so was the judge who had sentenced the ideologist.3 Talk of the repression and dissatisfaction at all levels of Hungarian society found its way back to the Soviet Union.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviets summoned Rákosi to Moscow and told him to resign as prime minister, though he was permitted to stay on as leader of the Communist Party. If there was any impulse to liberalize in this decision, there was also pragmatism—and antisemitism. Rákosi had been born into a Jewish family. Like other Communists, he renounced his family’s religion. But the Soviets officially considered Jewishness a nationality as well as a religion—and that could not so easily be renounced. Believing that ex-Jews inevitably retained loyalties to Judaism, they considered them unreliable. Despite the killing of 565,000 Jews—around two thirds of Hungary’s entire Jewish population—during the Nazi occupation in World War II, Jewish people were still a substantial presence in the nation’s political life on all sides. Rákosi’s deputy, Ernő Gerő, and another of his powerful inner circle, Mihály Farkas, were of Jewish backgrounds and were hard-line Stalinists. At the same time, estimates suggest that most active anti-Stalinist intellectuals in Hungary were of Jewish heritage.4
The Soviets were not comfortable with any of this. “What we’re saying is that there must not be three Jews [Rákosi, Gerő, and Farkas] in the leadership,” the chairman of the Council of Ministers, Georgy Malenkov, told Rákosi. Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s former secret police chief, added a threat: “As an old Bolshevik, you, Rákosi, must know that we really know how to break someone’s back.”5
The Soviets replaced him with a non-Jewish figure, Imre Nagy. Nagy was a Communist, but a reformer rather than a Stalinist. He had stood out from the beginning of his political career, when in the 1920s he had been sent to prison for his Communist beliefs and had arrived there wearing a bowler hat. “A Communist with bowler hat!” exclaimed the Hungarian journalist Tibor Méray. “He must be a different kind of Communist.”6 Later, he got into trouble with his party for refusing to stand at attention when “The Internationale” was played. It had been suggested in the press and in American State Department documents that he could be a Hungarian version of Josip Broz Tito, the charismatic president of Yugoslavia: unique among Eastern Bloc leaders for publicly splitting from Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Nagy had a skeleton in his closet. In the 1930s, he had lived in Moscow and acted as an informant for two predecessor organizations of the KGB: the OGPU and the NKVD. This may have been a survival strategy. Like other Muscovite Hungarians he was subject to constant intimidation, including arrest and the threat of much worse. “These Muscovites lived in a curious mental state that combined permanent anxiety and boundless idealism,” wrote the Hungarian journalist and historian Charles Gati. “Their Communist faith blinded them to the realities they were experiencing, because they believed in the promise of a Communist paradise with all their heart.”7 Nagy’s dubious past was unknown to the public in the 1950s. Had it been, he might have been a lot less popular. By the time he got into power, there was no doubt he was sincerely a reformer. Yet his brushes with the dark side of the Soviet system may hint at why he was such a cautious one.
Nagy was chairman of the Council of Ministers—effectively, leader of Hungary—from July 1953. He began a “New Course” of limited but significant reforms, including rehabilitating some Hungarian politicians and thinkers who had been imprisoned. In 1955, Rákosi convinced the Soviets that Nagy was a right-leaning anti-Soviet, beloved of Western imperialists. The Soviet leaders summoned Nagy to Moscow to fire him. The American radio station Voice of America, Khrushchev told Nagy during that painful interview, was hoping he would “become a traitor . . . Churchill is rubbing his hands now.”8 Though he was removed from power, Nagy was allowed to live freely in Budapest. He continued to be regarded by many as a man of courage and commitment to liberalizing Hungary, though he remained personally reluctant to join, let alone lead, any revolution.9
In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and Stalinism in what became known as the Secret Speech. Though Khrushchev himself emphasized the need for secrecy during the speech, he meant its message to get out: he ordered edited copies to be distributed and read out to millions throughout the Soviet Union. “Now those who were arrested will return,” remarked the poet Anna Akhmatova, “and two Russias will look each other in the eye: the one that sent people to the camps and the one that was sent away.”10
The Secret Speech was thrilling but dangerous. It promised hope and some relief from the most repressive aspects of Stalinism. It also opened the door to a plurality of ideas, which could destabilize the whole Soviet revolution. In its wake, there were protests both for and against Stalinism. In some parts of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s statues were defaced, while in others—notably his native Georgia—there were enormous demonstrations against Khrushchev for insulting his legacy. The Soviet system struggled with the new concept of accommodating dissent. Its instincts were to shut it down—yet Khrushchev wanted political prisoners to be freed and limited forms of open debate to be permitted. The difficulty many Soviet officials had in reconciling these conflicting urges to repress and to conform goes some way toward explaining what a mess they were about to make of things in Eastern Europe.
Rákosi had finally been removed from the Hungarian party leadership in the summer of 1956 by his Moscow overlords and replaced by Ernő Gerő. This did not quell Hungarian dissent, for Gerő was Rákosi’s closest political ally. Large political meetings had taken place in mid-October. The American ambassador reported that there was a “stormy atmosphere” and students were chanting “Go home!” at Soviet troops. Demands were also made for the freer expression of religion in a nation where that had been repressed for a long time.11 The leader of the Catholic Church in Hungary, József Mindszenty, was imprisoned during World War II by the Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross regime and had been imprisoned again by the Communist government since 1948, becoming an international cause célèbre (though some Hungarian dissenters considered him a reactionary of limited intelligence).12
On October 21, 1956, Władysław Gomułka was elected first secretary by the Polish United Workers’ Party, making him leader of Poland. Gomułka was not a radical anti-Soviet, but he was a strong believer in Poland’s right to determine its own economic and political policy—and an opponent of Soviet military presence in Poland. In Washington, Foster Dulles declared that the world was “seeing the beginning” of Poland’s liberation.13 The Soviets had been accusing the Poles for at least six months of “wanting to go West.” It looked as though that could be about to happen.
“In Moscow the meeting of the Polish Central Committee and the election of Gomułka has produced something like a state of panic,” wrote Yugoslav ambassador Veljko Mićunović in his diary for that day. Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev, Anastas Mikoyan, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Lazar Kaganovich flew to Poland—uninvited—to bring the Poles back in line.14 Gomułka refused to be intimidated.
As the Soviets knew, rebellions spread. Hungarian students had been demonstrating since Gomułka’s election, and specifically cited his rebuff to the Soviet leaders as an inspiration for their big demonstration on October 23.15
On the morning of October 23, news spread throughout Budapest that those students (in collaboration with professors, writers, and even some party leaders) had drawn up a list of demands to present to the government. They had occupied the Red Spark printing plant and ran off leaflets, which were now being distributed throughout the city, calling among other things for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, free elections, free expression, the reconstitution of political parties, and a new caretaker government under Imre Nagy. Nagy was not leading the students, nor was he even aware of their demands; he was that morning on a train returning from a trip to the countryside. When student representatives went to his house to invite him to join them, he had not yet returned. His wife answered the door and appeared anxious at the prospect that her husband might be roped into an uprising.16
The Hungarian Ministry of the Interior attempted to ban demonstrations in Budapest that morning. An hour and a half later, it realized it could not stop them and issued permission. Citizens assembled that afternoon around a statue of national hero Jószef Bem, a Polish general who had joined Hungarian forces in 1848 to fight in a previous Hungarian revolution. The crowd swelled until it numbered in the thousands. Factory workers and some uniformed soldiers were seen alongside the students. The demonstration was, according to the American legation, “orderly but highly emotional.” An old Hungarian national flag, with the coat of arms of nineteenth-century hero and patriot Lajos Kossuth, was fixed to Bem’s sword buckle. Students carried the current flag—a red, white, and green tricolor with a Communist hammer, wheatsheaf, and red star crest in the center—with the Communist emblem torn out to leave a gaping hole. “We vow we shall no longer be slaves,” they chanted. Older Hungarians watched with tears streaming down their faces.17
Gerő telephoned Nikita Khrushchev to report all this.
“You must come to Moscow urgently for talks,” said the Soviet leader.
“The situation in Budapest is serious,” replied Gerő. “I would rather not go to Moscow at this time.”
Just a couple of minutes later, Khrushchev received almost simultaneous communications from Marshal Zhukov, his minister of defense, and from Yuri Andropov, his ambassador in Budapest, both advising that Soviet troops would be required in Hungary soon. In his replies to both men, Khrushchev indicated that he was inclined to send the Red Army.18
0900 London // 1000 Sèvres
After failing to see Selwyn Lloyd the day before, Anthony Nutting was shown into the foreign secretary’s room.
“How’s the cold?” he asked as he walked in.
Lloyd paused and then, looking (according to Nutting) “like a schoolboy caught in some mischief,” said, “Oh! the cold! Yes. Well, I never had one. I went to see Ben Gurion outside Paris.”
Nutting did not have time to reply before he continued. “And you, my dear Anthony, will no doubt be delighted to hear that it doesn’t now look as if the French plan will come off.”19
Lloyd told Nutting that the Israelis were sticking on the point that they needed early British and French airstrikes to eliminate the Egyptian air force so that Israeli cities would not be threatened. They were mistrustful of British commitment, believing the British to be too pro-Arab and in particular too bound up with Jordan and Iraq.
Nutting asked Lloyd what he would do.
“I really don’t know,” said Lloyd. “I am so confused and exhausted that I honestly have no advice to offer any more.”20 He added that he hoped someone else would make the decision. Nutting replied, with a sharpness he later regretted, that he had never in his life thought he would hear a British foreign secretary say something so weak.
In later weeks, months, and years, as the real story of Suez began to seep out and became increasingly embarrassing, some British ministers claimed that the full cabinet had never been made aware of what was going on with France and Israel. Yet on October 23, minutes of a meeting of the entire cabinet state that “from secret conversations which had been held in Paris with representatives of the Israeli government, it now appeared that the Israelis would not alone launch a full-scale attack against Egypt.”21 It seems the cabinet knew of the talks at Sèvres, even if it was not fully informed of what action might be taken.
At Sèvres, the conversations continued—more cordially in the absence of Lloyd. The French and the Israelis tried to work out how they could create a believable motive for Britain to step in. There was an awkward moment at lunchtime when General Challe, the French deputy chief of staff, suggested that Israel could stage a fake “Egyptian” bombing raid on the Israeli town of Beersheba—historically an Arab-majority city but one that since 1948 had seen huge growth in its Jewish population.
“As the General explained his idea, Ben-Gurion’s face visibly darkened,” remembered Shimon Peres. Ben-Gurion replied, “There are some things that I cannot do, and that I cannot advise my Government and my country to do. One of them is to lie to the world . . . to lie to the world in order to make things more convenient for England!”22
In the end, Moshe Dayan suggested the plan that was adopted as a front—which, as he put it, would allow Britain and France to “wash their hands in the waters of purity.”23 It would be claimed that the Israelis were undertaking an operation to eliminate fedayeen bases in the Sinai, creating the appearance of a reprisal raid. The fedayeen (literally meaning “those who sacrifice themselves”) were armed groups of Palestinians and/or other Arabs who attempted to carry out guerrilla attacks in Israel. They usually infiltrated from bases in the Gaza Strip (which was under Egyptian control), the West Bank (under Jordanian control), or the borderlands of Syria. They were considered terrorists by Israel and resistance fighters by much of the Arab world. Fedayeen raids were happening almost weekly in 1955–56.24 Under Ben-Gurion’s direction, Israel’s policy was to answer the fedayeen with reprisals: for each attack, the IDF would retaliate with great force. The theory was that this would have a deterrent effect.
Technically, staging a reprisal into the Sinai still involved lying to the world. As Ariel Sharon admitted, “in fact there were no terrorist bases in the Sinai.”25 Still, this plan was preferable, for it did not involve bombing an Israeli town. IDF paratroops would land at the strategically important Mitla Pass in the Sinai Peninsula, close to the canal, and from there work their way backward toward the Israeli frontier through the mythical fedayeen bases. As Shimon Peres put it, “We would start our war from the end.”26
Ben-Gurion let Dayan and Peres work out the details with Christian Pineau in private. Dayan drew up a list of Israel’s conditions for participation. These included its desire for “permanent annexation” of half of the Sinai Peninsula: the entire area east of a line drawn from El Arish to Abu Aweigila to Nekhel to Sharm el-Sheikh, to secure the Straits of Tiran and “free herself from the scourge of the infiltrators.” Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Ben-Gurion was aware that oil had recently been found in Sinai. “Britain and France are required to support or at least to commit themselves not to show opposition to these plans,” Dayan said. “This is what Israel demands as her share in the fruits of victory.”27
If Britain’s motivation in the Suez crisis was about controlling oil and trade, and France’s was about ending the troubles in Algeria, Israel’s motivation was intimately connected to the Arab-Israeli conflict. And the Arab-Israeli conflict was now connected to Britain, France, and the United States. In 1950, those three nations had issued the Tripartite Declaration. This was intended to freeze the conflict in the Middle East in the hope that, if the status quo could be allowed to settle in, peace might become a realistic long-term goal. Britain, France, and the United States agreed to maintain a balance in arms sales between the Arab states and Israel to avert an arms race. They agreed not to supply arms to any country in the region intending an act of aggression against another. They also agreed to “take action, both within and outside the United Nations,” if any state in the region violated frontiers or armistice lines.
Though the Arab-Israeli conflict did quiet down for the first few years of the 1950s, it was impossible to freeze for long—especially after a strong Arab leader arrived on the scene. Since Nasser had come to power, he had worked to create international connections: not only within the Middle East, but beyond that to the Non-Aligned Movement and the United States, and to some extent with the Soviet Union. He was also easing Britain out by the diplomatic means of negotiating full withdrawal from the Canal Zone. When he came to power, Nasser perhaps hinted subtly at his own hopes for future allegiances by changing the three packs of cigarettes he smoked every day from the British Craven A to the new American brand L&M.28 He maintained links with the United States overtly through its embassy and covertly through the CIA. The small CIA team in Egypt was run by James Eichelberger and more distantly overseen by Middle East specialists Kermit (“Kim”) Roosevelt and Miles Copeland. The CIA men liked Nasser personally and appreciated his potential as a strong leader—perhaps even strong enough to push through a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.29 CIA agent Wilbur Eveland arrived in Cairo just after Nasser had assumed the presidency and found his colleagues in a jubilant mood. “Copeland hinted that Roosevelt had ‘invented’ Egypt’s new president and conducted high U.S. policy discussions with him much as he did with the shah of Iran,” Eveland remembered. “Kim, he [Copeland] said, as I no doubt knew, had staged King Farouk’s ouster and had now moved up Nasser to run the country.” In conversation with Eveland some years later, Roosevelt was more modest about his role.30
Though he liked the CIA men, Nasser was initially wary of the potential for more substantial support from the United States. As he told the American ambassador, he believed it “always sides with Britain”31 and that it was attached to Israel to an extent that was dangerous for the Arabs.32
The Tripartite Declaration of 1950 was still in place, with the aim of balancing the Israelis’ and Arabs’ arms. In the past, Egypt had bought most of its arms from Britain, but Egypt’s relations with Britain had deteriorated in the early 1950s. The British had proven increasingly obstructive, supplying guns with no ammunition and holding up exports of obsolete aircraft on bureaucratic grounds.33 The Egyptians worried that Israel would soon outgun them. In 1954, Nasser turned to the United States for arms. He felt this would help him maintain Egypt’s balance against Israel, with the added benefit of cementing his nascent relationship with American agencies. When the terms of the deal were made clear, though, the Americans offered him only $20 million worth of weaponry, less than a fifth of what he had hoped for. Furthermore, American legislation meant he was required to welcome a military mission of American soldiers to supervise the arms. Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA tried to sweeten the pill by offering a suitcase containing $3 million in cash, euphemistically described as being for the purchase of “certain morale-building items of military equipment such as uniforms and staff transportation.” Deeply insulted by this bribe—for one thing, it was not very much—Nasser used the money to build the decorative but functionless Cairo Tower on Gezira Island. Locals in the know soon nicknamed it el wa’ef rusfel—Roosevelt’s Erection.34
Relations between Egypt and Israel worsened in the later half of 1954. Kermit Roosevelt tried to coax Nasser back into secret talks. “It appears to many of us in Washington you are in danger of walking into some well laid Israeli traps . . . which will handicap seriously the ability of your friends in the United States to counter Zionist pressures here,” he wrote to Nasser at the end of the year. “As you are aware, these pressures are steadily mounting.”35
At that time, Anthony Eden set in motion two policies for the Middle East intended to reaffirm British influence after the Canal Zone withdrawal. The first aimed toward a NATO-style defensive union of friendly Middle Eastern states oriented toward Western interests and designed to keep the Soviets out of the region. Its effective figurehead would be Eden’s friend and Nasser’s rival Nuri es-Said, prime minister of Iraq. This would become known as the Baghdad Pact and later as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). Britain persuaded only one Arab nation, Iraq, to join, building on an existing agreement Iraq had with Turkey. Iran and Pakistan were also roped in. Eden hoped the United States would come in, too, but Foster Dulles, despite having an enthusiasm his colleagues called “pactomania” for international treaty organizations, dragged his feet.36
French Ministry for External Affairs documents reveal that the French were discomfited by this organization “where they [the British] are the only representatives of a western power.”37 They also noted that the signing of the Pact had “the most unfortunate consequences,” namely, “Britain lost, in Egypt, the benefit of the sacrifices it made in evacuating the Suez Canal. It awoke the distrust and increased the concerns of Syria and Lebanon. It discouraged Israel. It seriously alienated Saudi Arabia. Finally it compromised its good relations with Jordan.”38 Many Arab nations saw the pact as a hostile move by Britain against their interests. It presented a direct challenge to Nasser’s unofficial leadership of the Arab world and his prestige in the Muslim world.
The second policy, a project devised by Eden and Foster Dulles in the utmost secrecy, was known as Alpha. It aimed to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict—and explicitly acknowledged that the only Arab leader powerful enough to achieve that was Nasser. Britain and the United States would have to influence him, and in order to do so, they would have to work with him.
These policies could not sit together. For Alpha to work, Nasser needed to be strengthened and had to trust Britain and the United States. Yet the Baghdad Pact was aimed at undermining him.39
On February 22, 1955, Eden and Nasser met for the first and only time, at the British embassy in Cairo. Eden brought his young wife, Clarissa. He seemed, Nasser thought, to be trying to impress her. He began by greeting Nasser in Arabic—which “astonished” the Egyptian president, according to his friend Mohamed Heikal—and then rolled out a lengthy monologue on the Quran, Arabic poetry, the nobility of the desert Bedouin, and so forth. Next, he attempted to move smoothly from romantic orientalism to the subject of Egypt’s defense.40 He told Nasser that he should not consider the Baghdad Pact a crime.
“No, but it is one,” replied Nasser with a laugh.41
Faced with resistance to his charms, Eden became testy. He asked why Nasser would not ally with people like Nuri es-Said and the Hashemite family.
Nasser tried to explain that the Baghdad Pact was dividing the Arab world while he strove instead for Arab unity. According to Mohamed Heikal, “Eden said that he knew enough about Arab unity, after all it was he who initiated the idea of the Arab League.”42 Nasser tried to explain that Eden had not in fact invented pan-Arabism himself with one speech in 1942. Yet Eden would not listen, said Heikal; he “was completely convinced of the correctness, the justice and the strength of his line of thought.”43
“Eden tried rather insensitively to lecture Nasser on what his defence arrangements should be,” said Ralph Murray, a member of the Foreign Office team who was there with him. “It produced rather a bad effect on Nasser, who didn’t like being lectured.” Nasser, for his part, felt Eden talked to him as if “he was talking to a junior official who could not be expected to understand international politics.”44
The week that followed Eden and Nasser’s meeting on February 22, 1955, dramatically changed the Egyptian leader’s outlook. Just two days later, the Baghdad Pact was officially signed. Just four days after that, Israel launched a massive raid on the Egyptian-held Gaza Strip. This raid—known as Operation Black Arrow or the Gaza raid—would be the most serious yet of Israel’s reprisals and the most substantial engagement between Egypt and Israel since the 1948 war. It was led by a twenty-seven-year-old officer, Ariel (“Arik”) Sharon. “Few, if any of his superior officers over the years had a good word to say for him as far as human relations and integrity were concerned,” remarked Chaim Herzog, who commanded the Jerusalem District during the Suez Crisis and would later become president of Israel, “although none would deny his innate ability as a field soldier.”45 Sharon had already gained considerable notoriety—and, in some important quarters, approval—for his efforts, notably the Qibya raid of 1953.
On October 12, 1953, a grenade was thrown into an Israeli house in Yehul. A woman and her two children were killed. Two nights later, Sharon’s forces crossed the border into the Jordanian-held West Bank and blew up forty-five buildings in the village of Qibya. Fifty-three people were killed. The wounded were abandoned to die, raising the number of dead to sixty-six. This was a far greater toll than the politicians who had ordered the reprisal had intended. Ben-Gurion claimed publicly that the reprisal was not an official Israeli action, but rather a spontaneous response to Arab harassment by Israeli citizens.46 The international community did not believe him. CIA agent Wilbur Eveland was sent to investigate on behalf of the American ambassador to the United Nations. Appraising the evidence, he wrote that it “left no doubt that Israeli troops had waged an unjustifiable attack on a defenseless village.”47
Sharon, writing many years later, admitted that it had been an official action but argued that it was intended to cause only military damage: “I was to inflict as many casualties as I could on the Arab home guard and on whatever Jordanian army reinforcements showed up. I was also to blow up every major building in the town. A political decision had been made at the highest level. The Jordanians were to understand that Jewish blood could no longer be shed with impunity. From this point on there would be a heavy price to pay.” Sharon maintained that his forces had rescued a little boy and girl they had found in the buildings and that the civilian deaths were accidental. “In those big stone houses where three generations of a family might live together, some could easily have hidden in the cellars and back rooms, keeping quiet when the paratroopers went in to check and yell out a warning,” he wrote. “The result was this tragedy that had happened.”48
Israel was strongly censured by the UN Security Council.49 Foster Dulles announced that the United States would withhold $60 million of economic aid from Ben-Gurion’s government.50 The campaigning Israeli journalist Uri Avnery published a piece criticizing Sharon’s actions in his magazine, HaOlem HaZeh. Soon afterward, he was attacked by unknown assailants who broke both his hands. “I asked Arik about Qibya once,” Avnery said. “There was a short while when we were friendly after he left Likud. He assured me that they did not know people were in the houses. This whole story”—he laughed dryly at the memory—“it was a lie from beginning to end.”51
Despite all of these reactions, Ben-Gurion appeared satisfied. A few days after Qibya, he invited Sharon to Jerusalem to meet him for the first time. “It doesn’t make any real difference about [sic] what will be said about Kibbiya around the world,” the prime minister said. “The important thing is how it will be looked at here in this region. This is going to give us the possibility of living here.”52 Even so, after Qibya, the IDF altered its policy to attack what it considered to be Arab military rather than civilian targets.
Fedayeen raids against Israel continued. Some Palestinian activists in the Gaza Strip, then administered by Egypt, believed their best tactic was to harass Israel in the hope of provoking an all-out attack by the IDF on Gaza. If that happened, they thought Nasser would be drawn into a war—which might improve their lot or at least wreak some kind of revenge. It was a desperate strategy and unlikely to work. Nasser attempted to restrain these activists, without much success.53 He visited Gaza in early 1955 and spoke of peace. Neither he nor the Israelis, he told his Palestinian audience, wanted the borderlands to become battlegrounds. It is true that the Egyptians did not: Nasser knew he could not win a war against Israel. Owing to the slowdown in arms sales in the early 1950s from Britain and the United States, the Egyptian armed forces were in a parlous state. It was estimated that the army had only enough tank ammunition to last for an hour of battle.
Ben-Gurion returned to the Israeli government as minister of defense on February 21, 1955, the day before Eden met Nasser and three days before the Baghdad Pact was signed. Israeli intelligence services assured him that the Egyptians were incapable of a large-scale military attack on Israel. They presumed this meant Israel could attack Gaza without fear of the consequences.54 On February 23, a group of fedayeen from Gaza traveled far into Israel, reaching the outskirts of Tel Aviv. There was some suggestion that they may have been sent by Egypt on an intelligence mission. That day, they murdered an Israeli civilian.55 Ben-Gurion made his decision. Sharon was unleashed again on February 28 to undertake Operation Black Arrow, a raid on Egypt’s military camp in Gaza. Thirty-six Egyptian and Palestinian soldiers were killed and twenty-nine wounded. Two Arab civilians were also killed. CIA agent Miles Copeland judged that the Gaza raid was “an atrocity by anyone’s definition.”56
Israeli intelligence had been right to predict that Egypt would not strike back. It could not and did not. Those Palestinians who had hoped Egypt could be drawn into a war on their behalf were disappointed. There were violent protests against Egypt in Gaza, especially by Communists and Islamic fundamentalists. Nasser was denounced; Egyptians were accused of being in thrall to “American agents.” Twenty-five-year-old Yasser Arafat led a demonstration at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo.57
Yet Israeli intelligence had been wrong to imagine that this raid would be without consequence. It was, as the historian Avi Shlaim said, “a turning point in the history of the Middle East.”58 The Gaza raid reignited the Arab-Israeli conflict with extraordinary force and made a future war between Egypt and Israel inevitable.59 The focus of Egypt’s military policy shifted from relations with its fellow Arab states to active conflict with Israel.60
After the raid, Nasser “spoke of his sleepless nights and increasing tension,” and described himself as being in “constant fear of an Israeli attack,” wrote Humphrey Trevelyan, the British ambassador to Egypt at the time.61 His fear was not unrealistic: Ben-Gurion proposed to the Israeli cabinet in April 1955 that they attack Gaza again, aiming to push all Egyptian forces out. Moshe Sharett warned against it on the grounds that such an action would violate the Tripartite Declaration, potentially obliging Britain, France, and the United States to join the fighting on the Egyptian side. It would give the United States cause to stop all economic aid to Israel. According to the American embassy in Tel Aviv, Sharett “gave the impression of a man under great emotional strain who had been subjected to strong pressures from his colleagues” after the meeting. He won the vote against Ben-Gurion: nine cabinet members to four.62 That time, Gaza was left alone.
Another result of the Gaza raid was that Nasser’s enthusiasm for entertaining American overtures cooled. Disappointed by the failure of his American arms deal, he wondered, according to aides, whether the United States was deliberately using Israel to pressure him into accommodating its own defense needs. He resented Foster Dulles’s continued attempts to persuade him to make peace with the Israelis.63 Now he felt he must look elsewhere to buy weaponry. The United States had been trying to convince him for some time that the greatest danger to Egypt was the Soviet Union, but there was no chance he would accept that now. He saw his greatest enemy as Israel and believed he must to buy more arms to protect Egypt against it. At the Bandung conference of non-aligned nations, he asked China’s Chou En-lai whether China could supply him. Chou told him China was itself dependent on the Soviets and pointed him in the direction of Moscow.64
On September 19, 1955, a panicked American cable from Cairo reported talk of a “Soviet arms offer [to Egypt] . . . said to be almost embarrassing in size.”65 On September 27, the news became public: Nasser had made an arms deal with the Soviet satellite state of Czechoslovakia. For Israel, this particular unintended consequence of the Gaza raid spelled potential disaster. Arab armies may have been “rotten,” as Ben-Gurion had said after the 1948 war, but Arab armies backed by unrestricted Soviet military supply might be a very different prospect.
Egypt’s deal was not without precedent. Israel had bought arms from Communist Czechoslovakia when its American arms supply was stopped in 1948.66 This, too, had caused consternation in London and Washington, though not on the scale of the British and American reactions to Nasser’s deal in 1955. A crucial difference was that this new deal undercut the Tripartite Declaration. If the Egyptians bought arms from the Soviets, the Western powers could not even know what they had, let alone regulate the situation. So serious was this that one senior British civil servant commented darkly, “We may have to get rid of Nasser, especially if he becomes committed to the [Soviet] contract.”67
The CIA men in Cairo still backed Nasser. Kermit Roosevelt and Miles Copeland had helped him draft his announcement of his arms deal; according to Copeland’s recollection, it was Roosevelt who advised him to say the arms had come from Czechoslovakia rather than ultimately from the Soviet Union itself.68 Now they tried to explain that by getting involved with Moscow he was endangering his position with the United States. According to Mohamed Heikal, Kermit Roosevelt told him, “[Foster] Dulles was behaving like an agitated ox and was determined that the deal had to be stopped.” The Egyptian ambassador to Washington, Ahmed Hussein, warned Nasser not to upset the Americans, nervously repeating, “Guatemala, Mr. President, Guatemala.” He was referring to the recent CIA overthrow of Jacopo Arbenz’s left-wing government on skimpy evidence that it was cooperating with the Soviets.
“To hell with Guatemala,” growled Nasser.69 He kept his Soviet deal. Kermit Roosevelt tried to convince Allen Dulles at the CIA back in Washington that they should not pull a Guatemala on Nasser: “Our conviction . . . is that Nasr remains our best, if not our only, hope here.”70
A few days after the Czech deal, Nasser met the American ambassador, Henry Byroade, who read him a stern letter from Foster Dulles.71 “I have been through a nightmare . . . which your Secretary of State may not be able to realize,” Nasser replied. He explained that he had tried to buy arms from France first, but they had not been delivered; he felt he had no choice. “In summary he said that in all frankness he had the conviction that [the] US Government was trying to keep Egypt weak and that this resulted from Jewish influence in the US,” Byroade reported to Washington.72
Nasser still tried to work with the Americans. In November 1955, he agreed again—in extreme secrecy—to pursue a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.73 The CIA operatives in Egypt were not optimistic. “Although we would work at trying to bring about peace between the Arabs and Israel, we did so largely for the benefit of our domestic audience,” wrote Miles Copeland, “while fully realizing that a continuing state of hostility was something we just had to live with.”74 Foster Dulles, though, may still have thought he had a shot at that Nobel Peace Prize that his colleagues believed he craved. It suited Nasser to be seen to play along with Western interests, and in any case he found some evidence for hope on November 9. Anthony Eden gave a speech at the Guildhall in the City of London that day on possible solutions to the Arab-Israeli dispute. The British prime minister called for Israel to make territorial concessions to the Arabs, notably in the Negev desert, to create a land link between Egypt and Jordan and to bring the map of the Middle East closer to the 1947 United Nations partition plan. Eden’s speech found a predictably poor reception in Israel. Golda Meir, then minister of labor, railed against the demand that Israel should “serve this peace to Nasser . . . on a platter of the Negev,” and stated that the Israelis would give up “not one grain of sand—not one.”75 Nasser saw Eden’s speech as a distinct improvement in Britain’s attitude.
Concerned that Nasser might outgun them with his new Soviet weapons, the Israelis asked the United States for a new arms deal which they hoped would rebalance their defenses against Cairo’s under the terms of the Tripartite Declaration. Moshe Sharett and the diplomat Abba Eban—both moderates within the Israeli administration, preferring political solutions to war—were attempting to negotiate this deal in December 1955. As they did so, Ben-Gurion again sent forth Sharon. This time, he went to Kinneret, where, in reprisal for the harassment of Israeli fisherman, he attacked Syrian emplacements around the Sea of Galilee.
“The next day there was an outbreak in Kinneret in which our forces killed 73 Arabs in retaliation for an Arab attack on our fishing vessels which had scraped the paint off the vessels and had not caused any casualties,” Eban recalled. “This was, of course, an appalling international situation, because the gulf between the effects of the retaliation and the thing which had brought it about was greater than any engagement that had happened before or since. It is no secret that Mr. Sharett finally protested Mr. Ben Gurion’s decision nor of [sic] the furls and flurries of letters that I exchanged with Mr. Ben Gurion then.”76 The Americans were furious. Dulles halted Israel’s arms deal. But if Israel could not get arms cleanly through the Tripartite Declaration, it, too, would have to try to work around it.
From an Egyptian point of view, it looked as though the Americans were trying to play both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They also seemed to be in cahoots with Britain, which was trying to divide and rule the Arab nations with the Baghdad Pact. “We think you have been conducting a comic opera in the Middle East,” Nasser told a CIA agent in a meeting in Cairo on February 22, 1956. British and American activities in support of the Baghdad Pact, he explained, were creating “internecine warfare” among the Arab states. He also felt the British were running a propaganda campaign against him. Nasser refused point-blank to meet with Israelis, though the agent hopefully reported to his superiors that “we may have as much as one out of five chances of changing his mind.”77 Though the situation between Israel and Egypt calmed down with a formal cease-fire from April 18, 1956, it would not stay quiet for long.
In 1954, the date for Britain to withdraw its troops from the Canal Zone had been set as June 18, 1956. As that date approached, there were rumblings in some quarters of the Conservative Party that this had been too hasty. Glubb Pasha was sacked in March, and Eden’s dislike for Nasser rocketed into an expressed wish to have him murdered. The Arabs and the Israelis were at each others’ throats, and the Tripartite Declaration was no longer preventing a Middle Eastern arms race. The security of the region was precarious. Yet the Suez Base Agreement stood. The last British soldiers left the Canal Zone as agreed. Nasser felt able to be magnanimous. “In regard to Britain, she has fulfilled her obligations under the Evacuation Agreement,” he said in a broadcast speech on June 19. “Britain had 80,000 troops in the Canal Zone. They have all left. In connection with Britain we have no aggressive aims against them at all.”78
Soon afterward, Egypt’s relations with Israel took another dive. On July 11, 1956, Israeli military intelligence delivered a bomb disguised as a book to Colonel Mustafa Hafez, the head of the Egyptian intelligence service and the man they held responsible for coordinating fedayeen attacks. Hafez was killed and was celebrated in Gaza as a martyr.79 Dulles’s withdrawal of the Aswan Dam funding just days later, followed by Nasser’s nationalization of the Canal Company, changed the international atmosphere. The CIA agents on the ground had been supporters of Nasser; Dulles was not. After the nationalization, he removed two key American diplomats who were sympathetic to Nasser—Ambassador Byroade and Assistant Secretary George Allen—from Egypt, replacing them with more pliant State Department officials. “Foster Dulles was now clearing the deck of any independent thinkers and would take complete personal charge of the Middle East,” wrote the CIA’s Wilbur Eveland, despairingly.80 Dulles, agreed Miles Copeland, was “making moves that gave Nasser little choice but to escalate the conflict.”81
Nasser’s response was to work on his own regional alliances throughout 1956, in an attempt to shore up his influence against Nuri es-Said and the Baghdad Pact and as a defensive move against Israel. By October 23, 1956, these alliances were bearing fruit. That very day, two Russian-made transport aircraft landed in Amman, Jordan. From them emerged Major General Abdul Hakim Amer, the Egyptian minister of war and chief of staff, and thirty Egyptian military men, including more than a dozen pilots. At almost exactly the same moment, the Syrian chief of staff, Major General Tewfik Nizameddin, arrived in Amman, having driven from Damascus. The Egyptians and Syrians were there to meet King Hussein and Jordanian military commanders to talk about greater cooperation. Saudi Arabia was also involved. Their schedule included a visit to the border with Israel. The Times of London fretted that this visit coincided with Egypt and Syria’s introduction of Soviet-made equipment in their frontline forces, meaning Egypt and Syria’s plan could well be to sell off their old Western-made arms to Jordan on the cheap. “Each item supplied in this way would in effect bear the message ‘Look what help we are giving! What have Iraq or your western friends provided?’” the correspondent wrote.82 Only a week before, an Iraqi military delegation had visited Jordan to encourage it to join the Baghdad Pact, without success. There seemed to be a serious danger of Britain losing its influence in Jordan altogether.
In the wake of France’s kidnapping of the Algerian rebels the day before, anti-Western feeling was running high throughout the Middle East on October 23, 1956. There was a general strike in Tunisia that day, and anti-French demonstrations and rioting throughout North Africa: French flags were torn down, cars were torched, and three Frenchmen were killed in a riot in Meknes, Morocco.83 Demonstrators in Casablanca shouted “Free Algeria!” and “Lacoste to the gallows!” (Robert Lacoste was the French minister residing in Casablanca.84) French prime minister Guy Mollet again accused Egypt of arming the Algerians, withdrew his ambassador from Cairo, and ordered the French fleet to patrol the whole North African coast in case Nasser attempted to ship more weapons to rebel forces. According to an internal CIA memorandum, “Morocco and Tunisia . . . tried without success to obtain US and British intervention.”85 Thanks to the French action, NATO countries looked at best unhelpful—at worst villainous—just as Nasser was putting the finishing touches to his Arab anticolonial alliance. The omens did not portend peace.
1200 Washington DC // 1700 London // 1800 Budapest
By six o’clock that evening in Budapest, the crowd of protesters had crossed the Danube and congregated with other citizens outside parliament on the Pest side of the city. A United Nations report later estimated their numbers at an extraordinary two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand. The crowd shouted for Imre Nagy, who had by now returned from his trip. A group of writers and intellectuals had spent much of the afternoon at his home trying to persuade him to speak to the people. Sticking to his belief that reform must be orderly, though, he refused—waiting for the Communist Party itself to summon him. Finally, a close friend of his pleaded that hundreds of thousands of people had been waiting for him for hours. He gave in and went to parliament.
Nagy encouraged the crowd to trust the party to reform itself. He said little and could not be heard well. He addressed them as “comrades,” which provoked a chorus of booing. After just a few sentences, he asked them to disperse peacefully and let change proceed at a natural pace, which was not what they had hoped to hear.86 “Crowd hardly listened and Nagy said ‘you called me here to give my opinion and I’m giving it,’” reported the American legation. The American officer was disappointed: “Legation sternly urges media refrain from taking any kind of stand on Imre Nagy for the time being.”87
“Only when I perceived the mood in the square did it become clear to me that what was called for was quite different from what I had prepared, for that would not satisfy the crowd,” Nagy admitted later.88 He cheered them somewhat at the end of his speech by singing the Hungarian national anthem.89
After Nagy had gone, a speech recorded earlier that day by Ernő Gerő, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, was broadcast. Gerő’s speech had been greatly anticipated by the protesters, for he had that day returned from a visit to Tito. It was hoped that some of the Yugoslav leader’s liberalism might have rubbed off. Yet Gerő’s speech made no move toward liberalizing anything. Instead, he enraged the crowd by insisting in heavily Soviet tones that they were “a mob attempting to make trouble,” reactionary and chauvinist riffraff.90 As Tito later put it, Gerő had “insulted almost an entire nation. . . . That in itself was enough to put a match to the fire.”91 Shouts of “Down with Gerő!” and even “Death to Gerő!” echoed throughout the city.
The terms in which Gerő dismissed the protesters—accusing them of being counterrevolutionaries—were significant. During the middle years of the twentieth century, a tendency developed in the United States to view any foreign movements opposed to American involvement in their countries through the polarizing lens of the Cold War. Communists were anti-American, and anti-American feeling was Communist. This conflation was disastrous and frequently counterproductive. In Cuba, for instance, the 1959 revolution began as a nationalist movement, and the first administration installed by Fidel Castro was right of center politically and economically. Only after his repeated attempts to cooperate with the United States were rebuffed did Castro and his revolution become socialist, then eventually Communist.92 In the Soviet Union, the understanding of dissent was no more sophisticated. Khrushchev, whose liberalizing instincts offered a ray of hope after the gruesome years of Stalinism, still tended to assume that dissatisfaction within the Soviet bloc was stirred up by fascist quislings or outside provocateurs. The rest of the Soviet leadership felt the same. When rebellion broke out in Hungary, Kliment Voroshilov, the chairman of the presidium (effectively, the Soviet cabinet), immediately claimed that “American secret services” were active in it.93
Since the CIA-orchestrated coup in Guatemala two years earlier, it was far from impossible to believe that the United States was behind movements to oust left-wing governments. But Hungary under Communism was a brutal and repressive society, nothing like, for example, the relatively moderate left-wing democracy presided over by Jacopo Arbenz in Guatemala. The CIA, which along with the State Department had consistently underestimated the potential for Hungarian rebellion, had no Hungarian speakers in its nearest operation, in Vienna, only one Hungarian-speaking agent in Budapest itself, and “seven or so” more in the country at large. It was as surprised as anyone by the uprising on October 23.94 It was certainly not responsible.
Nonetheless, a feeling that the Hungarian rebellion must be the result of outside interference was rife among the Soviets. At an emergency meeting in the Hungarian interior ministry, a new Soviet adviser was introduced. His name was not mentioned, but it was Ivan Serov, the head of the KGB. This would be the first time a KGB chief had taken charge personally of an operation outside the borders of the Soviet Union. Serov was furious about the demonstration: “The fascists and imperialists send their shock troops into the streets of Budapest and there are still comrades of your armed forces who hesitate to use arms.”
“Clearly, the comrade counsellor from Moscow hasn’t had time to inform himself of the situation in our country,” replied Sándor Kopácsi, Budapest’s chief of police. “He should know that it is not fascists and other imperialists who are planning the demonstration. These are university students, sons and daughters of peasants and workers, very carefully chosen, the pride of our intelligentsia who demand their rights and want to manifest their sympathy for the Poles.”95
Serov lost his temper, but Kopácsi was right. Few of these rebels were the “fascists” of Soviet nightmares; they were ordinary and diverse Hungarians, exhausted by years of hardship under a Stalinist regime. The leaders of rebel groups in the city included Gergely Pongrátz, a twenty-four-year-old agricultural engineer; János Szabó, a fifty-nine-year-old bus driver and former soldier of peasant origins; and László Nickelsburg, a thirty-two-year-old factory worker who was Jewish and a Communist, whose mother and three siblings had died in a Nazi concentration camp.96 The British journalist Peter Fryer, who was in Budapest for the Communist Daily Worker newspaper, described it as a spontaneous uprising: “A city in arms, a people in arms, who had stood up and snapped the chains of bondage with one giant effort.”97
The United States and the Soviet Union were two nations themselves formed by revolution, each of which revered its revolutionary forebears. Yet now that their founding revolutions had settled into power and were beginning to expand, neither seemed able to imagine that new revolutions might spring up against them. They believed they were different from the old European empires. They believed they were exceptional.
“On every appropriate occasion, the Secretary [Foster Dulles] would recount the fact that the United States was once a colony itself, and that it became a nation by freeing itself from colonial domination,” said Herman Phleger, a legal adviser to the Eisenhower administration. “He frequently, in speeches and otherwise, expressed the view that one of the missions of the United States in the world was to see that every people, all people, were free to choose their own method of government.”98 In a very frank speech that April, Foster Dulles had argued that the old empires were falling. “You take the British,” he said. “They feel that they are on the downgrade; they are just desperately grasping almost at straws to find something that will restore their prestige and influence in the world. And France is the same. Most of our Western Allies are in the same position. Their colonial areas are melting away, and with it [sic] many of their reserves in terms of raw materials, and so forth, and they feel in a quite desperate position.” By contrast, he claimed, “the United States is, I suppose, the only country in the world which has foreign policies which are not primarily designed for its own aggrandizement. Almost every other country in the world is thinking primarily on how it can develop itself, generally at the expense of somebody else.”99
The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev echoed Dulles’s sentiments—though he felt they applied to the Soviet Union. “It wasn’t that we wanted to replace England as an exploiter of Egypt and other Arab countries,” he remembered. “We weren’t motivated by self-centred, mercantile interests. Quite the contrary, we wanted only to help these peoples to cast off the yoke of their servile dependence on their colonialist masters. Ours has been a noble mission.”100 Sometimes the peoples “helped” either by the Soviets or the Americans found that their experience diverged significantly from the noble stated aims of those powers.
At nine p.m. in Moscow, the presidium met. “Hungary is coming apart,” said Vyacheslav Molotov. Lazar Kaganovich agreed. Georgy Zhukov advised sending troops, declaring martial law, and imposing a curfew.
“There’s no alternative but to send in soldiers without delay,” Khrushchev said.
Anastas Mikoyan was the only man present who disagreed. “We should get Imre Nagy into the Hungarian leadership and let him try to restore order,” he suggested. “It’s cheaper for us that way. What are we losing? If our troops go in, we will ruin things for ourselves. The Hungarians will restore order on their own. We should try political measures and only if they fail then send troops.”101
Khrushchev compromised somewhat. Mikoyan would be sent to Budapest, along with Mikhail Suslov. Nagy would be given a chance. But Soviet troops would be mobilized—just in case.
1500 Washington DC // 2000 London // 2100 Budapest
Christian Pineau arrived in London from Sèvres with the details of the plan Moshe Dayan had designed. He dined with Selwyn Lloyd, who (as he had indicated to Anthony Nutting earlier) did not think the plan would come off. Lloyd was now inclined to let the United Nations set up an Egyptian-operated canal-management authority under international control, along the lines Dulles had been suggesting.
Pineau sensed the opportunity slipping away—until Anthony Eden arrived after dinner. Eden was much more enthusiastic about Pineau’s plan than Lloyd, and the opportunity seemed to have returned. Eden decided to send another British representative to Sèvres the next morning.
While the British and French politicians were talking in London, the mood in the streets of Budapest was growing explosive. The protesters had decided to enforce one of their demands themselves and spent four hours attempting to topple the enormous statue of Stalin on Heroes Square. They attacked it with blowtorches and hauled it with winches attached to cars and trucks. When finally, at 9:37 p.m., it pitched over and lay in the street, protesters went at it with hacksaws, knives, and axes, and stood upon its colossal head.102 Only Stalin’s boots remained rooted to the plinth.
“It was such an eerie sound,” recalled one of the students there to see it fall, “several thousand people sighing with joy. I think we all had a sense of making history.”103 Red Stars were chiseled off buildings. Some students attempted to enter the Radio Building. They were teargassed, then shot at, by the AVH.104 Rumors on the streets suggested dozens had been killed. Two officers from the American legation saw the body of a young man in the street. He had been shot in the face.105 Troops of the Hungarian army were also sent in to subdue protesters. Faced with fighting their countrymen, many defected to the rebel side. The United Nations investigating committee afterward reported one striking story. At ten p.m., an army unit was stopped by protesters. An old worker climbed upon a truck and recited a famous poem: “Shoot not, my son, for I shall also be in the crowd.” At this the soldiers, with just a quick glance at their commanding officer, leaped from their vehicles and joined the rebels.106
Large numbers of workers were now driving into the center of town to join the uprising, supported by soldiers and police who joined them and distributed arms. Pitched battles raged at the Radio Building and at the offices of the Communist Party newspaper. In the offices of the Communist Party, Gerő and Nagy had a fight in front of their comrades.
“You instigated the riots,” shouted Gerő. “Now you can stew in your own juice.”
“I have instigated nothing and you know it,” Nagy shouted back. “Everything that is happening now could have been prevented if you had handled the situation better during the day.”107
In the middle of the night, the presidium’s instruction came through from Moscow: Nagy was prime minister again. On Khrushchev’s request, he was told to sign an appeal for Soviet troops to enter Budapest and restore order. Shortly afterward, such an appeal was made to the Soviet Union in the name of Imre Nagy.108 It is now clear that Nagy did not sign this appeal himself, though there was confusion about this at the time. He did, on the other hand, impose martial law and a curfew.109 Here was his chance: if he could pacify Hungary fast, he might be able to install a government the people could tolerate.
2000 Washington DC // 0100 London // 0200 Budapest
In Washington, Eisenhower had a long talk in the afternoon with Foster Dulles and Lewis L. Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. “One highlight of the discussion came with another display of Eisenhower’s pacifist fervor—and the World War II soldier’s view of nuclear war as ‘unthinkable,’” remembered the president’s aide and speechwriter, Emmet Hughes.
The reason for their discussion was that Nikolai Bulganin of the Soviet Union had on October 17 called for the United States to support an international ban on nuclear testing. The United States had increased its nuclear capacity under Eisenhower, but the president himself had a profound fear of the power of nuclear weapons. Nor was he confident in the policy of mutual assured destruction, which assumed that neither side would dare use nuclear weapons first in case the other side struck back.
“I do not fully share your conclusion that an end to nuclear war will come about because of realization on both sides that by using this weapon an unconscionable degree of death and destruction would result,” he wrote to Winston Churchill in April 1956. “I do think it might tend to reduce very materially the possibility of any war; but I think it would be unsafe to predict that, if the West and the East should ever become locked up in a life and death struggle, both sides would still have sense not to use this horrible instrument.”110
Eisenhower was wary of how such a ban could be enforced when the vastness of Soviet territory made it relatively easy for them to hide nuclear test sites. His advisers decided to issue a cautious statement along those lines. Yet the president himself was inclined to agree with Bulganin’s basic principle: that the weapons both the United States and the Soviet Union now possessed were so dangerous that they had to be controlled.
“My God, we have to simply figure a way out of this situation,” said Eisenhower. “There’s just no point in talking about ‘winning’ a nuclear war.” He waved an arm in the direction of the Atlantic. “You might just as well talk about going out and swimming that ocean.”111
Eisenhower could not have realized how close the danger was. The Soviets were poised to take action that could pit the nuclear-armed superpowers against each other. Though Bulganin may have been sincere about disarmament when he wrote his letter to Eisenhower on October 17, by October 23, Hungary was in rebellion. At two a.m. Budapest time, six thousand Soviet troops, with armored cars, tanks, and cannon—which had been waiting southeast and southwest of the city—rolled toward Budapest at top speed. They powered through the city in the middle of the night, spraying machine-gun bullets into apartment blocks and office buildings. Order would be reimposed. If Imre Nagy could not or would not do it himself, the mighty Red Army would do it for him.112