0600 Malta // 0700 Cairo
At dawn, British and French aircraft carriers left Malta, sailing eastward on “training exercises.” More French ships, renamed and repainted to look anonymous, ferried two hundred heavy trucks to northern Israeli ports. Two squadrons of French warplanes landed in Israel. Operation Musketeer Revise was under way—cobbled hastily into a new shape so it might in a few days look like a response to Israeli aggression.
The Anglo-Israeli link in the three-way alliance remained shaky. “Although Ben-Gurion had concluded an agreement with the British, he did not trust them,” remembered Ariel Sharon. “Nor did the rest of us. We remembered the treatment of the Jews during World War Two too well, as we did their 1948 evacuation of Palestine when they turned over the most strategic positions under their control to the Arabs.” Moshe Dayan visited Sharon at his headquarters and told him he was concerned that the British would at the last minute refuse to put their part of the plan into action. “If that happens,” Dayan told Sharon, “it will be a very complicated situation. . . . You’ll have to bring back your forces. I’m confident you’ll be able to find a solution to that, but you might be the only ones in Sinai.”1
Mordechai Bar-On, who was Ben-Gurion’s military assistant at the time, thought Ben-Gurion still placed the British on a pedestal—in their capacity as villains as well as heroes. “He too was a prisoner of his past,” Bar-On wrote of his boss. “His greatest glory, as the man who in 1948 successfully resisted the invasion of five Arab armies, pushed him to consider Arab enmity as irreconcilable. His memories of the German Blitz over London exaggerated his fears of Egyptian air raids on Tel Aviv. But the most important distorted image was his perception of the British. He certainly overrated their enmity to Israel, he over-suspected their deviousness, overestimated their capabilities as a military power, and over-appreciated their wisdom.”2
Evidently, there were those in the British government and armed forces who were also beginning to doubt their prime minister’s wisdom. Some saw Nasser as a minor problem or no problem at all; some saw him as a problem, but one that could be dealt with without going to war. For those who thought he was a big problem and Britain should get rid of him, an obvious suggestion short of war was to have him “removed.” Back in March, Eden himself had dispensed with euphemism and told Anthony Nutting that he wanted Nasser murdered. Douglas Dodds-Parker, a Conservative MP and junior minister at the Foreign Office, asked the permanent undersecretary of state, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, why they could not “aim at Nassir alone? I understood that this was possible, using methods that had proved successful in the past—most recently the removal of Dr. Mossadeq in Iran.” Kirkpatrick replied vaguely that some politicians were opposed to capital punishment and might not like that sort of thing.
“Yet they are prepared to risk an assault which could injure, even kill, women and children, not to mention our own troops?” Dodds-Parker asked. Kirkpatrick, as far as he remembered, did not reply.3
It is unlikely that MI6 would have been able to carry any covert assassination plan out. In the secret struggle for influence in the Middle East—the maneuverings of the CIA and MI6, in competition with each other as well as with the French—British intelligence was in short supply. By 1956, the Americans were overwhelmingly in the lead.
Until the 1950s, Britain had maintained good intelligence sources in Egypt, especially in the royal household and the Wafd party. In 1952, though, the monarchy fell and the Wafd was dissolved. There were no moles in the new government or military to replace the ousted sources. It did not help that the MI6 office in Egypt was staffed with bumptious imperialists of questionable competence. In 1953, they scotched the idea that the army would stage a coup against King Farouk, just before it did exactly that.4 Once the Free Officers took power, MI6 began to consider ways to bring Neguib and Nasser down, possibly replacing them with the least unappealing member of the former royal family, Prince Abdul Monheim, or with an Islamic theologian.
A shady relationship sprang up between British agents and the far-right-wing Egyptian Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. It was a curious alliance, for the Brotherhood had originally been set up to oppose the British presence in Egypt—but like the French and the Israelis, the two groups were brought together by their hatred of Nasser. Islamic fundamentalists were not then seen as a threat to Western interests and were considered a potential bulwark against Communism.
The Muslim Brotherhood had been founded in March 1928 by Hasan al-Banna. The first six members were all laborers from the British military camp at Ismailia. Banna and his followers were enraged by the foreign domination of the Suez Canal Zone. Europeans seemed to enjoy every kind of privilege, from better housing and utilities to street signs in their own languages. “We are weary of this life of humiliation and restriction,” the six told Banna. “Lo, we see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and no dignity. They are not more than mere hirelings belonging to the foreigners.”5
Though the Muslim Brotherhood was dedicated to religious discipline, it was also strongly anti-imperialist. It rejected the ideologies of the non-Islamic world, whether nationalist, socialist, or capitalist, though it appreciated the advances of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union in the fields of science and governance. It envisaged a society defined by the implementation of Sharia. The Brotherhood’s interpretation of Sharia was not without room for maneuver: it claimed that unpopular aspects of the law, such as the cutting off of a hand for theft, had been “misunderstood.” According to Brotherhood scholars, society had a duty to provide food, clothing, and shelter for everyone; if people were provided for, then no theft would occur and consequently no hands would need cutting off. The Brotherhood condemned Saudi Arabia’s willingness to chop hands off its thieves “while the rulers swim in the gold stolen from the state treasury and the wealth of the people.”6 Banna also started an auxiliary Muslim Sisterhood, though the organization largely failed to capture the imaginations of the educated women he hoped would run it.
In October 1941, there was contact between the British embassy and the Muslim Brotherhood, though witnesses told different stories about who took the initiative. A British agent afterward claimed Banna had asked him for “forty thousand dollars and a car” to support the British cause;7 Muslim Brothers claimed that it was the other way around, that the British had tried to buy them off. Members of the competing political group Young Egypt were convinced that the Brotherhood had taken the money, for it refused to join anti-British demonstrations in favor of the German general Erwin Rommel, which they organized in the summer of 1942. The Brotherhood kept trying to expand, and in 1944 one of its recruiters met with various discontented army officers. Among them was Gamal Abdel Nasser, who met the Brotherhood officer on the Tea Island at Cairo Zoo—more often a retreat for illicit lovers. At that early stage, Nasser had some sympathy for the Brotherhood and joined its secret military wing.8 This sympathy would not last.
After the war, the Muslim Brotherhood became notable for its tough anti-Communist stance and links to conservative parties. It accused the Wafd of having “communist affiliations.”9 Banna ordered the Brotherhood to prepare for jihad in October 1947, when it began to look likely that a Jewish state would soon be created in Palestine. Some Brothers went on to fight in the 1948 war against Israel, as Nasser did. In 1948–49, the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior presented a case for the dissolution of the Muslim Brotherhood on grounds of multiple acts of terrorism. Banna attempted to negotiate his way out of the charges. He published a pamphlet arguing that the Brothers had suffered “persecution,” claiming that the government of Egypt was under pressure from abroad and intended to negotiate with the British and the Jews. He identified in all this the designs of “international Zionism, communism, and the partisans of atheism and depravity.” Soon after the pamphlet was written, on February 12, 1949, Banna was shot as he was getting into a taxi in Cairo. He lived only long enough to get to a nearby hospital.
The Brotherhood survived. By the end of 1951, it had been legally reconstituted. At the same moment, the Wafd prime minister abrogated the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936. The Brotherhood supported this, and declared jihad against the British in Ismailia.10 It supported the revolution that threw out King Farouk and installed Mohamed Neguib as president. The Revolutionary Command Council, perhaps under Nasser’s direction, invited members of the Brotherhood to join Neguib’s cabinet—but the relationship soon soured.
While the Muslim Brotherhood continued to proclaim its anti-imperialist principles, its new leader, Hasan al-Hudaybi, attracted some positive attention from those imperialists themselves. A long report from the British ambassador in Cairo asserted, “It is generally believed that he is a man of different type from the fanatical Hassan al Banna” and claimed that he was received by King Farouk, that he was a stalwart anti-Communist, and that his speeches had been “studiously moderate.”11 The British embassy even considered that Hudaybi might be suitable for office. “We might be on more solid ground with a Moslem Brotherhood Government: if they could retain power long enough, and if I am right in thinking that they could produce a fairly efficient and clean administration.”12 Yet an internal CIA briefing described the Muslim Brotherhood as “a fanatical, nationalistic, terrorist organization which has caused trouble in Egypt and Syria.” The CIA blamed the Brotherhood for the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister in 1951 and warned that it was the only terrorist organization in the region that could attract “a sizeable following.” Its activities, the CIA warned, created “a formidable deterrent to those Arab leaders who wish to reach a settlement with Israel or to cooperate with the West.”13
This did not deter the British. Hudaybi met the oriental counselor of the British embassy to discuss the upcoming evacuation of British troops from Egypt, Canal Zone incidents, an Anglo-Libyan treaty, and other matters. The French ambassador reported sniffily to Paris that Hudaybi “wants power,” and had therefore “declared himself ready to accept, in the name of the Brotherhood, the terms of an agreement with Britain much more disadvantageous than those obtained by the military directorate.” These terms included, apparently, giving Britain permission to reoccupy its Egyptian bases in the event of a Soviet attack on Egypt.14
Hudaybi went to the American embassy, too, and the officer there formed the impression that he was “an extremist and a born opportunist.” The British felt, “An opportunist he no doubt is, but . . . he strikes us as more of a moderate.”15 “Although El Hodeibi [Hudaybi], the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood, had been anxious for friendly relations with us,” recalled Anthony Eden, “the majority of his followers were set against any settlement acceptable to us until after evacuation was complete.”16 On January 12, 1954, Muslim Brothers and university students clashed with a group of secondary school students and organizers from the government-approved Liberation Rally and Youth Formations. Dozens were injured; a government jeep was burned. The next day, the Egyptian cabinet again outlawed the Brotherhood.
Just a few weeks later, the government of Egypt was consumed by the drama of Neguib’s fall and Nasser’s rise. King Saud intervened with Nasser on behalf of the Brotherhood—which, though it had started out critical of state brutality in Saudi Arabia, increasingly found itself drawn to Saud’s golden embrace.17 Its members were released and permitted to reconstitute. It seems Nasser’s strategy all along was to court the Brotherhood, hoping he could win its support rather than fighting it. But Hudaybi again made a nuisance of himself after Nasser finally took power, demanding a greater voice in government. Nasser’s administration turned against him, accusing him of being in league with all the greatest villains in Egyptian demonology: imperialists, Zionists, Communists, and the British.
By October, some Brothers were plotting their revenge. They came up with a plan for a suicide bomber to approach Nasser wearing a dynamite belt and blow himself up. It was scuppered by a complete lack of volunteers. Instead, a Brother was sent to shoot Nasser on the evening of October 26, 1954, while he gave a speech in Mansheya Square celebrating the agreement he had made with Anthony Nutting to set a timetable for the British to leave Egypt. As he was talking, eight shots rang out. When they finished, he spoke up again, unharmed and undaunted.
“I, Gamal Abdel Nasser, am of your blood and my blood is for you,” he said. “I will live for your sake and I will die serving you. . . . Even if they kill me, I have placed in you self-respect. Let them kill me now, for I have planted in this nation freedom, self-respect, and dignity. For the sake of Egypt and for the sake of Egypt’s freedom, I will live and in the service of Egypt I will die.”18
Conspiracy theories flourished. Some thought Nasser staged the event himself to justify cracking down on the Brotherhood. Others suggested that the CIA had done it and had issued Nasser a bulletproof vest beforehand.19 There was no evidence for these theories, though that did not diminish their popularity. The Muslim Brotherhood leaders did have a meeting at which they discussed their plan to kill Nasser, which Hudaybi apparently attended.20 It is true, though, that Nasser’s crackdown was swift and thorough. Within weeks, six Brothers had been hanged and thousands imprisoned. The Brotherhood continued unofficially, with the imprisoned Sayyid Qutb as its chief spokesman. Qutb, a teacher and civil servant who had spent some time living in the United States and had not liked it at all, was a prominent conservative Islamic thinker. Though he remained in prison for the next decade, he spent that time writing and developing a powerful ideology. He believed the world suffered under jahiliyya (ignorance). The term had originally been used to describe the “unenlightened” state that existed before the prophet Mohammed’s revelations. Qutb applied it to parts of the Muslim world in his own time, which he thought had been corrupted by foreign and un-Islamic ideas and had lost sight of their true path.
Qutb would be tried and executed in 1966 by the Egyptian state for plotting its overthrow. His ideas would live long after his death, filtering out to influence fundamentalist Islamic movements across the world. Though Qutb himself disapproved of violence against innocents, not all of his followers heeded that aspect of his philosophy.
Among those strongly influenced by Qutb’s ideas was Egyptian student Ayman al-Zawahiri, who became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood when he was a teenager. Zawahiri went on to become Osama bin Laden’s personal physician. According to him, bin Laden was a member of the Saudi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.21 Zawahiri founded the organization Islamic Jihad, which merged with al-Qaeda. After bin Laden’s assassination in 2011, Zawahiri became the leader of al-Qaeda. Little did the British agents who hoped the Muslim Brotherhood might help them overthrow Nasser in the 1950s realize what the men they were dealing with would do in the future. Though the details of that future may not have been foreseeable, the direction of travel was—which is why the CIA disdained the Muslim Brotherhood and would not work with it.
In 1954, CIA agent Wilbur Eveland wrote, “The CIA had launched an enormous operation in Egypt, perhaps the largest of its kind since the inception of the agency.” He also noted, “What disturbed me most was the youth and apparent immaturity of the people [in the CIA operation], who seemed to have been given a free hand.”22 The inexperience of the Americans was outpaced, though, by the ineptitude of the British. MI6 barely noticed their new American neighbors and omitted to report the existence of this significant CIA endeavor to London. Eveland’s fellow agent Miles Copeland described MI6 as “grossly uninformed.”23
In the spring and summer of 1955, MI6 had failed to pick up on another crucial development: the prospect of Nasser making an arms deal with the Soviets. Consequently, Britain refused an Egyptian request for more arms in June 1955, and this refusal pushed Nasser “straight into the arms of Moscow,” as one British field marshal put it.24 After Nasser’s deal with Czechoslovakia, MI6 reported that he was falling to the Communists. Though this message was eagerly received by Eden and by right-wing Conservatives in Britain, it was not true. Many at the Foreign Office doubted it, even those who disliked Nasser. “It begins to look as if Nasser is even more unreliable than he seemed, and may even be consciously handing his country to Communism,” wrote Evelyn Shuckburgh in his diary. “But I do not quite believe that. I think he thinks himself supremely clever, and is playing East off against West to the last moment.”25 This was a more accurate assessment than MI6 had provided, even though Shuckburgh was in Whitehall rather than Cairo.
MI6’s sources in Egypt had begun to send mysterious reports to London from an agent they called “Lucky Break.” They claimed Lucky Break was close to Nasser and was working to bring him down. Lucky Break said that Nasser and most of the Revolutionary Council were in thrall to Moscow and were planning a war with Israel to begin in June 1956. This information was uncorroborated by any other evidence. The Foreign Office soon decided it was junk. Lucky Break may have been a crank, or his testimony may have been talked up—perhaps even invented—by MI6 agents or stringers to cover up their failure to secure real information. Yet Harold Macmillan, then foreign secretary, was alarmed, writing to the British ambassador in Cairo on November 26, 1955, that the Egyptians could soon be “well in the clutches of the Communists.”26
“I think that you will agree with me that we are faced by the most serious and urgent threat to the whole Western position in Africa,” he wrote in an emergency secret telegram to Foster Dulles the same day, “and that we must do all we can without delay to prevent Russia gaining control of Egypt.”27
Instead of accepting and rectifying its inability to influence Nasser, MI6 decided the fault must be his. If they could not predict the Egyptian leader’s actions, they supposed his actions must be impossible to predict. If his actions were impossible to predict, they supposed he must be volatile and dangerous, and from that it followed that he had to be removed. Allegedly, British agents were conspiring to stage riots by militant Islamic groups in Egypt’s main cities to create a pretext for intervention.28 An MI6 agent showed the CIA’s Miles Copeland a highly secret document which he claimed was a chart of the organization of the Mukhabarat, the Egyptian secret service. “I thought he was pulling my leg!” Copeland remembered. It was a chart Copeland himself had drawn up in 1953 when working for the consultancy Booz-Allen and Hamilton (and, covertly, the CIA), helping to reorganize the Egyptian interior ministry. “The interesting part was the list of the section heads, all friends of mine, some of them misspelled, some without first names, and some entirely wrong due to faulty interpretation of footnotes.”29
The French secret service had apparently already made and botched an attempt to kill Nasser in 1954. Both the French and the Israelis would consider further plans to have him killed in 1956.30 Former British intelligence officers have denied that MI6 could or would have carried out a hit on Nasser.31 Yet declassified documents prove that removing the Egyptian leader from office was discussed at the highest levels. On receiving Macmillan’s fervent secret telegram about a Communist Nasser posing a threat to the whole of Africa in November 1955, Herbert Hoover asked the British ambassador in Washington if the British had “thought of finding an alternative to Nasser somewhere?” The ambassador asked him who he had in mind. Hoover replied vaguely that he would need to consult his colleagues, but mentioned that there were some officers in the Egyptian forces who “were strongly attracted to [a] Western connexion and who might form the nucleus of another regime.”32 This received an immediate and enthusiastic response from London. “We are afraid that Nasser, whether innocently or deliberately, is dangerously committed to the Communists,” Macmillan wrote back the next day. “Consequently, we believe that it would be advantageous to overthrow him if possible. We suggest that this problem should be subjected to joint Anglo-American examination as soon as possible.”33
The mood became darker yet after Glubb Pasha was ousted in Jordan. “Today both we and the Americans really gave up hope of Nasser and began to look around for means of destroying him,” wrote Evelyn Shuckburgh in his diary on March 8, 1956.34 “It is either him or us, don’t forget that,” Eden told Shuckburgh four days later.35
The deputy director of MI6, George Young, confirmed to BBC documentary makers in 1985 that plans to overthrow Nasser were considered. Had they gone ahead, he admitted, “It was easy to see that Nasser might have been killed.”36 Those who talked about ousting Nasser may not always have explicitly mentioned murder, but equally they did not seem to be making plans for him to enjoy a comfortable retirement. The accounts of CIA agents indicate Young himself went further. At the end of March 1956, Wilbur Eveland had been in London with his colleague James Eichelberger to discuss Middle East affairs. “Young said that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria threatened Britain’s survival,” Eveland wrote. “Their governments would have to be subverted or overthrown.” At the same time, the friendlier regional powers of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran would be strengthened.
Young proposed that Syria, which he suggested was about to become a Soviet satellite, should be dealt with first, then—because the Saudis would react badly to a coup in Syria—the kingdom of Saudi Arabia would have to be brought down. Finally, before Nasser could use his new Soviet arms to bomb Israel, he would have to go too. Young imagined all these coups could be carried out in conjunction with the Iraqis and said they must start within a month. Eveland remembered thinking “that I’d entered a madhouse.” When Young asked him for his impressions of the triple coup plot, Eveland had to bite his lip “to avoid saying that I thought total insanity had set in.” Instead he warned that too much of the British plan depended on the Iraqis’ ability to overthrow both Syria and Saudi Arabia consecutively, and that the Iraqis certainly did not have the capability to knock Egypt over as well. Young, whose politics were explicitly racist, countered that the CIA were forgetting “the snipcocks,” a disparaging epithet for the Israelis.37
Back in Washington, Foster Dulles took some of the British ideas seriously—not on Saudi Arabia, but he was worried about Egypt’s and Syria’s links to the Soviet Union. On March 28, 1956, he drew up a special secret policy code-named Omega. The previous plan, Alpha—aiming at achieving peace in the Middle East through Nasser—was supplanted. The new plan aimed to curb Nasser’s ambitions and curtail his power. The point, Dulles wrote, was “to let Colonel Nasser realize that he cannot cooperate as he is doing with the Soviet Union and at the same time enjoy most-favored-nation treatment from the United States.” The plan aimed to delay aid to Egypt, including delaying a decision on the funding for the Aswan High Dam. It attempted to strengthen pro-Western feeling in all Arab states, especially Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Dulles recommended that the Americans give “increased support to the Baghdad Pact without actually adhering to the Pact or announcing our intention of doing so.” He added, “It is extremely important that the American position in Saudi Arabia be strengthened.”38
The preferred State Department candidate for leadership of the Muslim world was King Saud, though the CIA disagreed. Its own internal report suggested that the Muslim nation most able to lead and simultaneously to serve American interests would be Pakistan.39 The State Department’s enthusiasm for Saud was largely based on his generous entertaining of American oil interests, for the man himself could not really be said to have represented a model leader in Foster Dulles’s terms or anyone else’s. Saud and Nasser regularly found themselves on the same side—and that side was often opposed to American policy, notably regarding Israel and the Soviet Union. At the same time as Dulles was drawing up the Omega plan, CIA briefings to the National Security Council in Washington complained of the Arab response to Israeli recruitment of soldiers in Europe and Latin America: “Saud and Nasr gave veiled threats of doing some recruiting of their own ‘outside Arab world’—i.e., in USSR.”40
Dulles noted that Omega “would in the main be coordinated with the United Kingdom.” The CIA and MI6 would jointly be charged with weakening Nasser’s regime and isolating Egypt from other Arab nations. The released part of the document ends with the ominous words: “In addition to the foregoing course of action, planning should be undertaken at once with a view to possibly more drastic action in the event that the above courses of action do not have the desired effect.”41
As part of the “more drastic” course of action, Operation Straggle, a plot to undermine and ultimately replace Shukri al-Kuwatly as president of Syria, was drawn up with input from British, American, and Iraqi agencies. Kuwatly had tried to buy American arms but had been turned down. His rejection by the United States dismayed CIA agents in Syria, who predicted that he would be forced to turn to the Soviet Union. They were right: Kuwatly soon began to consider Soviet offers, just as Nasser had.42
The CIA’s Wilbur Eveland, who knew Syria well, was mystified as to why the State Department would go along with British plans for a coup there. He speculated that the Dulles brothers may have been bluffing: trying to make the British think that the Americans were on board. He did not think the Dulles brothers could possibly want to go all the way with the British and overthrow Nasser. “There was, at least, too much CIA prestige invested in Nasser,” Eveland wrote. “To forestall the SIS [MI6] plan to eliminate the Egyptian president, the CIA had, apparently, compromised with an offer to consider joining in a Syrian coup.”43
After George Young had told Eichelberger and Eveland MI6’s plans for Nasser, the CIA men took the information straight back to Nasser himself.44 Nasser took note, but delayed action until the summer. Egypt’s secret service raided the offices of MI6’s front operation, the Arab News Agency, in August 1956, arresting some British agents on suspicion of espionage. Extensive documents were recovered from the home of James Swinburn, the head of the network, detailing Egyptian military maneuvers and contacts between Nasser’s administration and the Soviets.45 Swinburn and others were tried and imprisoned. Two officers at the British embassy linked to the MI6 network were expelled. Harold Macmillan described Nasser’s behavior over the British prisoners as “getting more and more truculent,” as though a president who had just discovered the spies of a hostile foreign state intent on killing him should have meekly accepted them.46
Sir Dick White—who was then “C,” the chief of MI6—later implied to historian Peter Hennessy and biographer Tom Bower that Eden had attempted to order the assassination of Nasser, but that he, White, refused to carry the order out.47 Other accounts suggest that some madcap plots may nearly have been put into action after Nasser smashed MI6’s network. These accounts are from less impeccable sources than Dick White, though sources from the murky world of intelligence are routinely less than impeccable. The former MI5 counterintelligence agent Peter Wright alleged in his sometimes questionable memoir Spycatcher that MI6 had developed a plan to assassinate Nasser with nerve gas: “Eden initially gave his approval to the operation, but later rescinded it when he got agreement from the French and Israelis to engage in joint military action.”
Wright claimed he had been consulted about the plan by MI6’s technical services. “They told me that the London Station had an agent in Egypt with limited access to one of Nasser’s headquarters,” he wrote. “Their plan was to place canisters of nerve gas inside the ventilation system, but I pointed out that this would require large quantities of the gas, and would result in massive loss of life among Nasser’s staff. It was the usual MI6 operation—hopelessly unrealistic—and it did not remotely surprise me when [MI6 technical services officer John] Henry told me later that Eden had backed away from the operation.”48 In 1975, former CIA officer Miles Copeland told the Times of London that “Anthony Eden wanted me to shoot Nasser.” He said he had frequently “but not seriously” discussed the idea of having Nasser murdered with Eden and top British intelligence officials. Eden told the paper Copeland’s claim was “a load of rubbish.” Copeland retracted his allegation publicly at the time, but confirmed it again to the historian Scott Lucas in 1989.49
Further stories abounded. One claimed that a three-man assassination squad had been sent from London to Egypt, but the men apparently thought better of it once they arrived. It has been suggested that one British plot involved sending the SAS, and one French plot involved sending frogmen.50 Another rumor held that a BBC journalist was ordered to drop off a package from his Morris Minor at the twelve-mile post outside Cairo. It contained £20,000 sterling, apparently to pay Nasser’s doctor off to kill him; the journalist accidentally gave it to the wrong man. MI6’s “Q” operations department was said to have considered assembling an electric razor filled with explosives, or injecting several boxes of Egyptian Kropje chocolates with poison—though the head of the department was concerned that they might be eaten by someone else. No nerve gas canisters, murder squads, frogmen, malign doctors, exploding razors, or poisoned chocolates seem ever to have reached Nasser.51
There was a fire beneath all the smoke. Two MI6 officers and a British MP—Julian Amery, who was Harold Macmillan’s son-in-law and had been a spy in Egypt during World War II—met Egyptian military contacts in France on August 27, 1956. They discussed the planning of a coup to assassinate Nasser and his ministers and install a new government headed by former president Mohamed Neguib.52 The prospect of ousting Nasser was discussed by the British and the U.S. State Department throughout the summer and autumn of 1956. The British were keener on overthrowing him violently than their American counterparts. On September 22, a British diplomat told Foster Dulles that Eden had “suggested that a secret working party be established to consider how Nasser might be unseated. The Foreign Office was anxious to get under way this planning operation, as it was hoped that its objectives might be accomplished within six months.” Dulles replied that “we could do more in the economic, political and propaganda fields to further deterioration” in Nasser’s standing, which he believed was already occurring. “If we had a group to focus on the matter, there might be a fair chance to create a situation in which Nasser’s position would be undermined.” Yet he emphasized, “The use of military force was not right,” and added, “He had told Mr. Eden he did not want to get into CIA type work and Eden agreed.”53 Internally, the State Department worried that there were “informal indications that the British may be thinking more in terms of a CIA type operation than the Secretary intends.”54
The subject was brought up again in secret American talks with the British Joint Intelligence Committee chairman, Patrick Dean, at the beginning of October 1956. Eisenhower intervened. As he told Foster Dulles, “We should have nothing to do with any project for a covert operation against Nasser personally.”55 Suggestions were made to him for how the CIA could do such a thing, but according to the minutes of an Oval Office meeting on October 6, “The President said that an action of this kind could not be taken when there is as much active hostility as at present. For a thing like this to be done without inflaming the Arab world, a time free from heated stress holding the world’s attention as at present would have to be chosen.”56 According to a KGB agent in Cairo at the time, the Soviets dispatched two KGB protection agents to Egypt to defend Nasser against a targeted assassination.57
Still, one of George Young’s three coup plots was about to go into action in October 1956. The CIA and MI6 had worked up Operation Straggle (alternatively known as Wakeful). Syria’s president was to be overthrown and replaced by a wealthy Christian landowner, Michail Bey Ilyan, leader of the conservative Populist Party. Ilyan had already been paid 500,000 Syrian pounds—around $167,000—and the coup was originally planned for the end of August, though it had to be repeatedly delayed.58 By mid-October, the Syrians were still not ready. The date of the coup had then been delayed until October 29.59
By October 27, Operation Straggle/Wakeful was still planned to go ahead in less than forty-eight hours. The CIA was therefore preparing to help topple the government of Syria on October 29, which they did not realize was exactly the same day Israel was planning to invade Egypt. If their partners in MI6 were aware of the timing clash, they do not seem to have mentioned it.
Owing to the French kidnapping of the Algerian rebels, there was unrest in Syria—which could either help or hinder Anglo-American plans for a coup. That day, October 27, anti-French and pro-Algerian demonstrators threw bombs at the French embassy and at the Jeanne d’Arc French girls’ school in Damascus, Syria, and more bombs at the French consulate in Aleppo. Windows were blown out of these buildings, but no casualties were reported.60 Throughout North Africa, anti-French protests continued. In Tunisia, roadblocks were set up by civilians (aided, apparently, by the army) to constrain French troop movement. Tunisian reports claimed that French forces trying to pass these roadblocks fired on civilians. Fourteen people were said to have been killed, including six Frenchmen. The French army admitted only to twenty-four of its soldiers being injured and seven missing. In Morocco, a European family of five were murdered on their farm. It was one of two hundred farms estimated to have been destroyed or damaged by rioters. “The events of the weekend,” opined the London Times, “lent grim support to the arguments of those who think the arrest last week of the five Algerian rebel leaders is likely to imperil France’s relations with the two ex-protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco.”61 More than that, it was imperiling France’s position in the entire Arab world. Britain had regretted letting France have Syria under the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement and had attempted to snatch some or all of it out of French influence at the Versailles Conference after World War I. Now, Britain was finally in a position to get a leader friendly to itself and the Americans into power in Damascus—at the precise moment when it was also conspiring with France to invade Egypt.
In Paris that same day, Christian Pineau gave a strong speech at a lunch for foreign press. Not only was he unrepentant about the disorder France’s kidnapping of the Algerians had caused, but he was angry that his nation was being accused of colonialism. “The present Government has the majority of the country and parliament behind it and it is determined to restore France’s rightful place in the world,” he said. “We shall fight for this whatever may be the decision of any international organisation.”62 With the French minister for external affairs now openly bragging that he was not going to be held back by the United Nations in the pursuit of French interests, Britain’s hope that the invasion of Egypt could be made to look like a selfless peacekeeping mission seemed less likely than ever to be fulfilled.
0900 Washington DC // 1500 Budapest
A Russian voice crackled over a weak short-wave radio signal from an unofficial station in Budapest: “Their fight is our fight.” The speaker claimed to be a Soviet colonel who had defected to the Hungarian rebels and implored his fellow Soviet soldiers to join him.63 In the streets, skirmishes continued.
Inside the Hungarian administration, Imre Nagy had been trying to position himself as a moderate between the angry rebels and the vengeful Stalinists. On October 27, his minister of defense (a staunch Communist) ordered Hungarian troops to “annihilate the rebel groups.” Nagy pointed to an amnesty on rebels who laid down their weapons, which he had declared days before, and vetoed the order. He also received a delegation of rebels in parliament that day to discuss a possible cease-fire. Under cover of that group, a few Hungarian opposition members—friends of Nagy’s—managed to sneak into the building. They told him that the rebels thought he was responsible both for the Soviet intervention and for the imposition of martial law, and begged him to go into the streets himself to understand the mood of the population. Nagy seemed shocked; one of the opposition members present reported that he wept throughout their discussion.64
“Although he [Nagy] was always twenty-four hours late in reacting to public demands, he was nevertheless twenty-four hours ahead of the Party leaders,” wrote the Hungarian historian Miklós Molnár.65 In line with his long-held opinions on the need for gradual, gentle change, Nagy had been trying to manage a transition to something more like consensual government without getting countless more people killed on either side. This strategy had not been convincingly communicated to the population. After the meeting with opposition members, Nagy realized that he must toughen up. He went with János Kádár to meet Mikoyan and Suslov at the Soviet embassy, and over the course of several hours managed to convince them that any military attack by the Hungarian army or police or by Soviet troops would guarantee that the government would lose the support of the whole country. Though no minutes survive from this conversation, it was referred to afterward by its participants as a “turning point.”66
At nine o’clock that morning, both Allen and Foster Dulles attended a meeting in Washington to discuss a speech the latter would make later in Dallas in support of Eisenhower’s election campaign. It was largely about Hungary—but the Middle East had to be mentioned. As part of his comment on that region, Foster proposed to say: “We cannot guarantee a peaceful outcome. . . .”
Robert Amory, who had warned Allen Dulles about the possibility of the Israelis invading Egypt at the CIA Watch Committee meeting the day before, interrupted: “Mr. Secretary, if you say that and war breaks out twenty-four hours later, you will appear to all the world as partie prise [literally “captive party,” or unwilling partner] to the Israeli aggression—and I’m positive the Israelis will attack the Sinai shortly after midnight tomorrow.”
Allen Dulles appeared shocked. “That’s much stronger than the Watch Committee’s conclusion yesterday,” he said.
“Okay,” said Amory. “I’m sticking my neck out. I’m only a $16,000 a year CIA official, but I’m prepared to lay my job on the line that there’s a war coming tomorrow or the day after.”
Foster Dulles duly removed the line from his speech.67
The joint chiefs of staff discussed a possible Anglo-French invasion, and their memoranda were circulated to the White House as well as the State Department. By the end of October 27, both Eisenhower and Foster Dulles had documents on their desks that raised the possibility of Anglo-French collusion in an Israeli invasion of Egypt.68
Eisenhower, though, was not at his desk. He had been admitted to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for a checkup. His health was an issue in the election campaign: he had suffered a serious heart attack a year before and undergone an operation for ileitis in June. The checkup had been scheduled so that he could be publicly pronounced fit in time for the vote. He would remain in the hospital that night and into the next day.69
1400 Washington DC // 1900 London // 2100 Tel Aviv
That evening, the United Nations hosted a cocktail party for the diplomatic corps in Israel. The talk was all of the coming military action. It was widely expected that Israeli troops would enter Jordan in the next few hours. “An ambassador, leaving the cocktail party in evening dress on his way to an official dinner, was driving his own car,” noted journalist Robert Henriques. “His chauffeur had been mobilised that morning. Another diplomat complained of a sore finger. He had spent the whole day typing a letter, since his secretary had been called up.”70
Later, at the Dallas Council of World Affairs in Texas, Foster Dulles delivered his speech about Poland and Hungary. “The weakness of Soviet imperialism is being made manifest,” he said.
Our Nation has from its beginning stimulated political independence and human liberty throughout the world. Lincoln said of our Declaration of Independence that it gave “liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time.”. . .
Today our Nation continues its historic role. The captive peoples should never have reason to doubt that they have in us a sincere and dedicated friend who share[s] their aspirations. They must know that they can draw upon our abundance to tide themselves over the period of economic adjustment which is inevitable as they rededicate their productive efforts to the service of their own people, rather than of exploiting masters.
Yet, as Eisenhower had requested, Dulles also signaled to the Soviets that the United States would not interfere in Hungary. “The United States has no ulterior purpose in desiring the independence of the satellite countries,” he said. “We do not look upon these nations as potential military allies.”71
On the CIA’s advice, nothing was said that could potentially suggest that Dulles knew about a coming Israeli invasion of Egypt, potentially in cahoots with the French or even with the French and the British. By the end of October 27, the three supposed NATO allies—Britain, France, and the United States—were playing a poker game. Everybody was bluffing about their intentions, and nobody was ready to show his hand.