0800 Paris // 0900 Jerusalem; Cairo; Amman; Damascus
From Amman, it was officially announced that Jordan would join the Egyptian-Syrian military command, placing its Arab Legion forces under Gamal Abdel Nasser as commander in chief. Nasser had been trying to secure this alliance since the Baghdad Pact was signed in February 1955. It came together at this moment because, like the United States, he believed Israel was gearing up to attack Jordan.
Secretly, the Jordanian general Ali Abu Nuwar told the Egyptian general Abdel Hakim Amer that, based on the Israelis’ positions, he thought they might be aiming at Egypt. Amer doubted this.1 Publicly, Abu Nuwar confirmed reports that Egypt and Saudi Arabia had offered to replace about $30 million a year in financial aid to Jordan if Jordan dropped its defense treaty with Britain.2 In reality, though, neither Britain nor Jordan wanted to let the treaty drop. The Jordanians reassured the British ambassador that they intended to continue their friendship with Britain alongside their friendship with Egypt. The British were keen to prop Jordan up, for fear that if the monarchy there fell, Iraq might be next.3
For those who knew about the conspiracy between Britain, France, and Israel, the new Arab alliance appeared potentially useful. The military consolidation of these Arab states under Egyptian direction would give the British and French evidence to back up their claim that Nasser’s influence was growing and threatening regional peace.4 The alliance would also give the Israelis a pretext to justify their mobilization.
Though the new agreement with Jordan was an achievement for politicians in Cairo, the predominant mood there remained tense. The Egyptian government knew that momentum was being lost in the discussions about the Suez Canal at the United Nations. Despite Egypt making every possible concession, Britain’s commitment to negotiations seemed weaker and less sincere. There was concern that London might be trying something else, the American ambassador in Cairo reported, perhaps related to the tension between Israel and Jordan or the unreliable alliance between Jordan and Iraq. These, it seemed to him, might be “an alternative to the Suez Canal dispute which the British may no longer consider an effective means of ‘getting Nasser.’”5
At the United Nations, the Israeli ambassador Abba Eban—who did not know what had been agreed at Sèvres—spoke at length on the tension between his nation and Jordan. Eban declared that the government of Israel had no belligerent intentions toward its Arab neighbors: “It will start no war. It will initiate no violence.” All of the violence so far, he argued, was in response to acts by Jordan. “Not once have the Israel forces taken up arms except in reaction to prior Jordanian aggression, and, even then, only after patiently suffering death and destruction for months on end without any response.” While pledging not to start a war, though, he made it clear that Israel would defend itself: “If we are not attacked we shall not strike; if we are attacked we fully reserve the inherent right of self-defense.”6
In Israel, Ben-Gurion returned to his home. After the stresses and strains of the previous few days, he took to bed with a high temperature and fever. But he made sure to give his favored young commander Ariel Sharon his orders in person. “I could almost feel the wings of history brushing the air,” remembered Sharon.7 Moshe Dayan went to the army headquarters to retune the plan for the invasion of Sinai along the lines decided at Sèvres. The IDF began to mobilize.
1000 London // 1100 Paris; Budapest
The British chief whip, Edward Heath, arrived at the cabinet room shortly before the meeting was due to start. Anthony Eden was already there. He was standing by his chair, “bright-eyed and full of life.”
“We’ve got an agreement!” the prime minister said. “Israel has agreed to invade Egypt. We shall then send in our own forces, backed up by the French, to separate the contestants and regain the Canal.”
Eden admitted that the Americans would not be informed about this plan. “He concluded, somewhat unnervingly, that ‘this is the highest form of statesmanship,’” Heath remembered. According to his own recollection, he tried to change Eden’s mind. The prime minister “simply reiterated that he could not let Nasser get away with it.”8
The cabinet meeting went ahead at ten a.m. Eden told his colleagues that the Israelis were massing their forces to attack Egypt: “They evidently felt that the ambitions of Colonel Nasser’s Government threatened their continued existence as an independent State and that they could not afford to wait for others to curb his expansionist policies.” If Israel did invade Egypt, an Anglo-French force could issue an ultimatum and require both parties to withdraw ten miles from the Canal. If Egypt failed to comply, he noted, “there would be ample justification for Anglo-French military action against Egypt in order to safeguard the Canal.” He also admitted, “We must face the risk that we should be accused of collusion with Israel.” He brushed this off on the not especially convincing grounds that Israel might have become involved anyway, had Britain and France gone ahead with an attack on Egypt earlier that summer.
Four objections were immediately raised by members of the cabinet. First, intervention might offend the United States and damage the special relationship. Second, if both sides were asked to withdraw ten miles from the canal, that meant the Egyptians would have to withdraw farther into their own territory while the Israelis would still be on Egyptian soil, far in advance of their own border. Third, Britain and France might be accused of breaking the Tripartite Declaration. Fourth, it might undermine the United Nations.
Each of these four points would prove significant, yet all four were overridden at the meeting. One of the conclusive arguments in favor of action with the French was simply that it had already been planned. “A crisis in the Middle East could not now long be delayed,” said the minutes. “If . . . force might ultimately have to be used, would it not be used more effectively and with more limited damage if we acted promptly now when an Anglo-French operation was already mounted?” The cabinet agreed to Eden’s war.9
Afterward, Selwyn Lloyd returned to the Foreign Office. His face, Anthony Nutting remembered, showed strain.
“When is it to happen?” Nutting asked.
“October 29: next Monday,” Lloyd replied. “And now, I must call a meeting to draft the ultimatum which we shall be sending out. You are welcome to stay and help us if you’d like to.” The British government would afterward maintain that the ultimatum Lloyd was already drafting had been issued in response to Israel’s “surprise” action four days later.
“You seem to have forgotten our talk of last week,” Nutting replied. “Or perhaps you did not take me seriously. But I meant what I said. I cannot stay in the Government if this sordid conspiracy is carried out. You can draft your own ultimatum without me.”
Lloyd told him he had discussed Nutting’s threat to resign with Eden. “He’s very put out, of course,” he said, “but he doesn’t want to lose you, and if you feel you cannot stay at the Foreign Office, he’d be very willing to give you some other department.”
Nutting refused the offer. He agreed to continue coming into the Foreign Office for the meantime to avoid embarrassing or exposing the government.
Later, at the Commons, he met an old friend, Walter Monckton. “He made no bones about his view that Eden was a very sick man,” Nutting remembered. “He had always been excitable and temperamental, but in the last few months he had seemed to be on the verge of a breakdown.”
Looking for an explanation for Britain’s behavior during the crisis, many at the time seized on the idea that Eden’s ill health had affected his judgment. When official documents were released, though, it became clear that members of the cabinet, as well as others in political and military circles, had known of the Suez plot—and some, such as Harold Macmillan, had been far more bullish about it than they had wanted to admit later. Whatever Eden’s mental difficulties were at this point, they cannot explain other men’s enthusiasm for the plan.
Yet the question of Eden’s health cannot be written out of the story entirely, for so many of his friends and critics at the time insisted it was a factor. At the very least, it does provide one possible explanation for why a man who had been a stalwart public supporter of the League of Nations and the United Nations from the beginning, who was considered a master of diplomacy, who had a long history of sympathy for Arab causes and of moderate and respectful behavior toward Egypt in particular, might over the course of a few months in 1956 pursue a course of action that seemed designed to undermine all his life’s work. “Who can wonder that in the present crisis he was so edgy and indecisive?” wrote the military historian Correlli Barnett. “His were the dithers of a bishop nerving himself to enter a brothel.”10
Eden had been acting irrationally toward Nasser and Egypt since Jordan’s dismissal of Glubb Pasha in March. His level of tension alarmed colleagues then; his grip on his physical and mental health appeared to be loosening. He gave a weak performance in the House of Commons in early March discussing the Baghdad Pact and Egyptian policy. “Eventually Eden sat down and everybody was saying after it that he really could not last much longer,” the leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, recorded in his diary. “He looked thin and tired and ill and one could not help feeling really rather sorry for him.”11 In late March, Foster Dulles had a meeting with Eisenhower, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent of Canada, and Lester Pearson, the Canadian secretary of state for external affairs. “I said I had felt some concern because of the rather jittery attitude evidenced by the British,” Dulles wrote in his memorandum on the meeting. “Mr. Pearson said that he was very much concerned and particularly worried about Sir Anthony Eden. He said he had great admiration for Eden. On the other hand, he felt that he was not reacting very well to the strains and pressures of the present situation. He referred to the fact that his father had been quite eccentric.”12
“Eden seemed to alternate between phases of sublime confidence and dreadful misdoubt [sic] during the months of crisis and trauma,” wrote Chester Cooper of the American embassy in London. “He was acutely sensitive to everything that was happening, but seemed sometimes unaware of and sometimes excessively obsessed by the dire consequences that dogged his every move. Eden appeared to be functioning on a level 10 percent removed from reality. It was a critical 10 percent and virtually guaranteed that his Suez policy, flawed as it was, would turn into a grave national and personal tragedy.”13
Just three weeks earlier, with the British case for war foundering, the Americans refusing to support him, and criticism piling up on all sides, it had all become too much. On Friday October 5, Eden had been visiting his wife, Clarissa, who was in University College Hospital for a dental examination, when he had suffered a sudden collapse and needed to be admitted himself. “I suddenly felt chilled to the bone,” he remembered. “In a few minutes a severe ague fell upon me and I was put to bed, somewhat ignominiously, in a neighbouring room. I did not know much more after that for a while, but I was told later that my temperature had risen to 106˚.”14 Though he stayed in the hospital only from Friday to Monday, his health took a serious knock. He was thereafter, according to one biographer, “in constant need of drugs.”15 One of his closest aides later claimed that he used amphetamines as well as heavy painkillers, while a senior Whitehall official confirmed that he was “practically living on Benzedrine.”16
Harold Macmillan destroyed his diaries from the high period of the Suez crisis, but wrote afterward that “Eden was a very sick man” by the time of his resignation.17 Eden’s doctor told Rab Butler that “Anthony could not live on stimulants any more.”18 Eden himself denied all of this in his memoirs. “My critics wrote that I was calm under the strain,” he claimed. “I felt at ease; there was a reason for this. From the first I was convinced that the course on which we had decided was the only acceptable one in a grim choice of difficulties. I did not expect it to be popular, but my colleagues and I had been grappling with the deteriorating situation for months and we were confident in our cause. That makes for calm.”19
Eden’s 1959 memoirs are an extraordinary read, often betraying a disconnection from the truth so profound as to indicate that he must have been engaged in a deliberate project of denial, whether conscious or unconscious. He refused to admit any collusion with Israel; he insisted his own motives stemmed purely from concern for international trade, for Arab-Israeli peace, and to prevent Nasser from becoming Hitler. He blamed the United States for everything that had gone wrong for him at Suez. He repeated throughout that public opinion in Britain was with him, at one point pathetically quoting in his own defense a fan letter written to his wife by a London transport worker: “If a bus driver agrees—he must be right—I personally thank God we’ve got one man who’s not afraid to do the right thing.”20 His colleagues attempted to dissuade him from publishing. “I think it will damage his own reputation so much,” wrote Selwyn Lloyd, who read a draft of the manuscript. “Many of the things said in it seem rather petty and to indicate personal malice and resentment of criticism. . . . I feel that to publish the book in anything like its present form is a mistake from his personal point of view.”21 Rather than providing a counterargument to the suggestion that Eden’s mental health may have been on the rocks during the Suez Crisis, Eden’s memoirs paint a picture of a man who was still, three years later, unwilling or unable to engage with reality.
After Nutting had seen Monckton, he considered dragging the Suez affair into the light himself: “I was seized with a sudden wild desire to make straight for the American Embassy and there to tell the Ambassador everything I knew in the hope that this would bring Eisenhower to weigh in and prevent us and the French from going ahead.” The Americans, he knew, already suspected collusion between France and Israel. It would take only a few words to whisk the veil off the whole operation. That might, he knew, save his country’s reputation. (Monckton, as the American archives show, had already hinted to the Americans the previous evening that there would be a war. It is not clear whether Nutting knew this.)
Nutting could not do it. To blow the whistle might save his country, but it would betray his government. “Yet, looking back on that fateful October afternoon, I wish in more ways than one that I had yielded to my first impulse. No one can tell how we should have then ended up; but that we should have lost less than we did in reputation and influence cannot be denied.”22
Meanwhile, Patrick Dean and Donald Logan arrived back at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, to ask Christian Pineau to destroy the remaining two copies of the Protocol of Sèvres. Pineau was unimpressed with the request and pointed out that the Israelis had already taken theirs back to Tel Aviv. He said he would make inquiries, and he had Dean and Logan shown into a grand reception room.
Dean and Logan waited for some time, but Pineau did not return. At lunchtime, they decided to venture out—to find they had been locked in. Aware that they were there on a secret mission, they did not dare shout for help or hammer on the door in case somebody unauthorized came to rescue them.23 So they sat in the room and waited.
1200 Paris; Budapest
While Dean and Logan were twiddling their thumbs, shocking things were happening in Budapest. Overnight, Soviet forces had occupied much of the city. The loyal Radio Kossuth had been announcing since dawn that “Soviet troops liquidated the counter-revolutionary putsch attempt on the night of October 24.”24 The rebels had not been liquidated, for incidents of fighting broke out intermittently across the city in many places throughout the morning. The Soviets on the ground—Anastas Mikoyan, Mikhail Suslov, and the head of the KGB, Ivan Serov—were in the Communist Party headquarters on Academy Street that morning and could hear the gunfire. They lashed out at Ernő Gerő.
“You stampeded us into an ill-advised commitment of Soviet troops through an exaggerated and distorted picture of the situation,” Mikoyan told Gerő.25 Suslov ordered him to resign. János Kádár—a loyal Communist, but not one tainted by too close an association with the old Stalinists like Rákosi and Gerő—was brought in to replace him.
Gerő’s fall was not made public immediately. At the same time as he was being given the sack, a crowd of unarmed demonstrators marched through the city, demanding his resignation. Among them were some Russian speakers, who addressed the Soviet troops: “Russian friends. Do not shoot! They have tricked you. You are not fighting against counter-revolutionaries. We Hungarians want an independent, democratic Hungary. You are not shooting at fascists but at workers, peasants and university students.”26 The police chief in Budapest, Sándor Kopácsi, saw Soviet troops get out of their tanks and talk to these Hungarians—even embrace them.27
The protesters, estimated at between three thousand and twenty thousand in number, assembled in Kossuth Square, opposite a line of Soviet tanks guarding parliament. It seemed to some observers that Soviet vehicles and troops deliberately “shepherded” various protesters from around the city into Kossuth Square. The crowd that gathered was, by all reports, peaceful.
Eyewitness reports of what happened next are confused and contradictory. Some reported the Soviet tanks fired straight into the crowd, and others reported that AVH snipers began shooting first from the windows of the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Defense, as well as from the rooftops. It has been suggested that some Hungarian border guard units also fired on their compatriots. There were reports of counterfire, including some Soviet forces attempting to defend the crowd. The firing went on for about fifteen minutes. Then, as the survivors were trying to flee or to help the injured, they were shot at again, for another fifteen minutes.
“Am typing on floor,” began an unsigned teletype message to Washington DC from the American legation, just a couple of streets away from Kossuth Square. “A big battle has just took [sic] place in front of Legation seems to have gone towards Parliament seems all Americans still OK and safe. Street fighting again flaring up with tanks fighting it out at present.” The writer reported heavy firing and the presence of large numbers of Soviet tanks and troops. The officers of the legation, he wrote, were “all in TELEX room huddling on floor to avoid gunfire.”28
The variance in estimates of the number killed in Kossuth Square and its surroundings on what would become known to Hungarians as Bloody Thursday are considerable. The subsequent Soviet-authorized government investigation suggested a mere 22, and even that was not admitted publicly: for thirty years after Bloody Thursday, no atrocity was officially acknowledged. Some eyewitnesses put the total casualties lying in the square in the hundreds, which was probably accurate, and the total dead, including those who later died of their injuries, at 1,000, which is probably far too high. The journalist John MacCormac, reporting from Budapest for the New York Times, saw a dozen bodies in Kossuth Square and estimated total casualties at 170.29 The British embassy observed that twelve trucks were brought in to take the bodies away, but it would have been difficult for its witnesses to establish how many of these bodies were dead and how many were merely injured.30 Recent archival research by the Hungarian Institute for the History of the 1956 Revolution has suggested 60 to 80 were killed and around 100 to 150 wounded.31 As for who ordered the massacre, it has been suggested by former Soviet security officers that the man responsible was the head of the KGB himself, Ivan Serov.32
The Soviets could suppress official mention of the Bloody Thursday massacre, but they could not stop news spreading among the people. As it did, more and more Hungarians decided to fight. An estimated two thousand people besieged the American legation, appealing for intervention. A similar crowd gathered outside the British embassy.33 Imre Nagy spoke on the radio, emphasizing his commitment to reform and a more broadly based government—and pledging that he would “initiate negotiations” with the Soviets, “including the question of withdrawal of Soviet military forces.”34 This did not wholly convince the people of Budapest. Another three divisions of the Red Army—twenty thousand men—arrived in the Hungarian capital from Romania and the Soviet Union that afternoon.
At four p.m. Paris time, half an hour after Nagy’s broadcast, Christian Pineau finally returned to liberate Patrick Dean and Donald Logan from the reception room at the Quai d’Orsay. Both the French and Israeli governments, he informed them, declined to destroy their copies of the Protocol of Sèvres. Dean and Logan’s hours of waiting had been in vain. They returned to Eden with the news that two copies of a document proving Britain’s guilt still existed somewhere in the world.35
1500 Washington DC // 2000 London // 2100 Paris
That evening, Guy Mollet’s government called and won a vote of confidence in the French parliament prompted by events in Algeria and Suez. His administration had faced two resignations over the kidnapping of the FLN rebels: those of the undersecretary of state for Moroccan and Tunisian affairs and of the ambassador to Tunisia. Mollet took an assertive line on the arrest of the rebels. He recognized, he said, that there would be serious repercussions in countries like Tunisia and Morocco, but this was not France’s fault.
The town of Meknes in Morocco was still in a dire state. Two French policemen and five European civilians were killed, taking violent deaths of Europeans there in the previous forty-eight hours to a total of forty-one. A crowd of Europeans demonstrated outside the French police headquarters, demanding weapons. The Moroccan government refused to send its troops to protect French lives. In Tunisia, there were clashes between Tunisian troops and a French military convoy trying to cross the border from Algeria. Habib Bourguiba, the prime minister, was defiant in his address to parliament, saying: “We prefer death to degradation, and battle to servitude.” The impassioned parliamentarians rose to sing the Tunisian national anthem.36
The Egyptian minister of state, Anwar Sadat, wrote, “France, a rotten, decrepit state, has become a third-class country which wants to make a show of force at the expense of the Arabs.” He added a comment that would only confirm French suspicions that Nasser was involved in Algeria, arguing that the rebellion there “is closely linked with the struggle about the Suez Canal and that in the Jordan-Israel border region.”37 Meanwhile, the Moroccan government recalled its ambassador to France and turned to the United States, with the usual implication that its next option would be to go to the Soviet Union. An “authoritative Moroccan” was quoted by the New York Times saying, “The United States can save North Africa for the West if she helps us now. France is pushing us towards the East.”38
At the same time Mollet was defending himself in Paris, Anthony Eden was hosting a dinner party in London for the American general Alfred Gruenther, NATO’s supreme Allied commander in Europe. Among the guests was the first sea lord, Lord Mountbatten, who harangued Eden about the planned war. “He started on the doorstep,” remembered Clarissa Eden, “and Edwina [Lady Mountbatten] interrupted him and said, ‘You are being very foolish, Dickie,’ although she presumably agrees with him.” Mountbatten wrote a few days later to Eden of their conversation: “You told Edwina and me that you realised how much I hated making the preparations which had been ordered.” A stalwart defender of her husband, Lady Eden thought she knew the reason for Mountbatten’s objection to the planned operation: “The Chiefs of Staff are very reluctant to have the Israelis as allies.”39
Conversation beyond the doorstep must have been more discreet, for there were Americans present. The American ambassador, Winthrop Aldrich, was among the guests and had a chance to talk both to Eden and Lloyd. “Eden was in mellow, relaxed mood in contrast [with] recent occasions on which I have seen him,” Aldrich cabled to Foster Dulles in Washington. “He expressed [the] view that Israel-Jordan situation and Egyptian involvement therein is of more fundamental importance even than Suez problem. On latter, Lloyd said there have been relatively few new developments.” Lloyd was frustrated at what he perceived as the Americans’ lack of support: he felt “that this course is driving him into closer alliance with France and away to some extent from us, which he deplores. Among other things, he believes the French are politically inept and may be counted on to make major political blunders, such as the arrest of the five Algerian leaders.”40
All these tidbits of information that Eden and Lloyd were feeding to the American ambassador were designed to throw Dulles off the scent, distracting him from Suez with the new situation between Israel and Jordan and falsely claiming that the British were reluctant to get into any action with the French.
In Washington, though, attention was focused on Hungary. The minutes of a meeting of the Special Committee on Soviet and Related Problems at the State Department that day note: “We’re considering UN action”—first through the Security Council, then possibly the Human Rights Committee or the General Assembly.41 Just after five p.m., Foster Dulles telephoned Eisenhower (who was in New York) to discuss whether to circulate a letter in the United Nations Supreme Court about Hungary. Circulating a letter was a procedural move to raise the issue without putting it on the agenda or inscribing a resolution: a low-profile way to make a fuss. Allen Dulles also raised this possibility in a conversation with his brother and suggested it might be worth trying to team up with India’s Jawaharlal Nehru. Though he knew Nehru was committed to remaining nonaligned, he suggested that “if he [Nehru] gets consulted and feels he is in things, he would operate differently.”
The president and secretary of state were of different minds as to how to operate in the United Nations. Eisenhower wanted to “act in deliberate fashion,” and bring in other NATO countries. Dulles thought the other NATO countries “will be reluctant to come along with us—as they will interpret it as being an election move” by Eisenhower with less than two weeks to go until the presidential election. Dulles was also concerned about the United States alone condemning Soviet repression in Hungary at the United Nations, because “it might look as though we were in the back of it.”
The thought that it might then look as if the Americans had provoked the Hungarian rebellion did worry Eisenhower. “The worst thing, said the Pres., would be to be thought of as guilty of spurious interest.”42 An essential truth about Eisenhower and Dulles’s policy on the Soviet Union is revealed in these minutes. Though they talked tough for American voters, both men tacitly accepted a state of coexistence with the Soviets. Eisenhower was consistently more concerned than Dulles about human rights violations and the cost of violent conflict, but he was also mindful of the global picture.
That night, Eisenhower spoke at an election rally in New York. “Twenty thousand roaring partisans inside Madison Square Garden and 10,000 relatively quiet ones who stayed outside, unable to get in, far surpassed the crowd attracted two nights earlier in the same arena by Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic Presidential nominee,” noted the New York Times. The fire department had to order the doors closed. Eisenhower’s speech called for a strong military—but a policy of peace. Owing to the tight schedules of radio and television broadcasts and the fact that he was interrupted forty-eight times by cheering, Eisenhower had to dump large chunks of his speech as he spoke. One of the lines he dropped had said that it was the purpose of the United States “to strengthen the love of liberty everywhere—and to do all within our peaceful power to help its champions.” Some journalists, who had received copies of the speech beforehand, noticed this omission and queried whether the line had been removed because the word peaceful appeared to rule out American military intervention in Hungary. Eisenhower’s press officer said the president stood by the pre-prepared draft of his speech.43
In reality, Eisenhower was not considering intervention, for the reasons he had discussed with Dulles. If something could be done through the United Nations—with the involvement of allies such as Britain and France, and better still the support of nonaligned nations like India—joint action might be a possibility. But the United States would not go it alone. What the Soviets were doing in Hungary was bad. The fallout from a Soviet-American war could be much worse.