0700 London // 0800 Algiers
American diplomat Chester Cooper woke to a cold, dank October morning that augured poorly for that afternoon’s outing to the picturesque South Downs. The Coopers were supposed to be picnicking with their close friends, Patrick Dean and his family. In the event, neither the Coopers nor the Deans were obliged to endure the English weather. That morning, Dean placed what Cooper called a “disturbing” telephone call to explain that he had been summoned to an urgent meeting with Selwyn Lloyd.
Cooper went into the American embassy, where he learned that Israeli troops had been mobilized and that his president believed their target to be Jordan. After lunch, Dean telephoned again. His meeting had finished. The families drove together to Greenwich for tea instead. “It turned out to be a glum, silent afternoon,” Cooper remembered. “I had never seen my friend so morose, so preoccupied.” He asked why Dean was so tense. Was it Hungary, or the Middle East?
“You and I are in for much trouble,” Dean replied, “and it won’t be because of Hungary.”
“He volunteered nothing further,” Cooper recorded in a cable to Washington that evening. “Will check this worrisome matter again in morning.”1
Anthony Nutting also spoke of his “feelings of impending doom” in the hours counting down to the attack, and of the enormous challenge not to reveal too much to the well-meaning family and friends who constantly engaged him in conversation about Suez. “‘Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you try that?’ friends would say,” he remembered. “And all the time I longed to scream at them to shut up because we had decided what to do, and it was lunacy.”2
Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the Algerian rebels, was still languishing in his cell in Algiers. A French colonel strode in.
“He told me they were going to settle Nasser’s account,” Ben Bella remembered. “They had already settled ours. Consequently, in Egypt and in Algeria, no more revolution, all would return to order. I looked at him, stupefied. Military men are sometimes so simplistic.”
Ben Bella tried to explain that the revolution in Algeria had passed the stage where it depended on four or five men. It was not finished, he said. It was only just beginning. “But he shook his head; he kept returning to the same point. No more Nasser, no more Ben Bella, the problem was solved.”3 Remarkably, the entire French state appeared to have convinced itself of this line of thinking. “We must finish with Nasser,” Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, the minister of defense, often repeated to Christian Pineau and Guy Mollet. “Then we will have finished with the [Algerian] rebellion.”4
Aside from the mobilization continuing in Israel, there was a great silence throughout North Africa and the Middle East that day. Arabs everywhere had gone on strike for twenty-four hours to protest the kidnapping of Ben Bella and other Algerian leaders. In Egypt, the streets of Cairo were deserted. Almost all of its three million people stayed home. Incidents of violence broke the quiet. Around a thousand protesters burned down the French consulate in Jerusalem. An estimated twenty-four thousand people demonstrated in Amman, Jordan, chanting anti-French slogans and attempting to torch the French consulate there, too. In Aleppo, Syria, a state of emergency was declared after mobs set fire to French buildings.5
An internal report at the CIA indicated that the rulers of Tunisia and Morocco were trying to restrain people from violence, with limited success. In Algeria and in Cairo, the CIA had detected that new command arrangements were already being made for Ben Bella’s organization, the FLN. There was “no indication of any abatement of guerrilla activity.” Furthermore, “the capture of the five leaders not only provided the Algerian nationalist movement with a set of martyrs, but promises to result in increased diplomatic and material assistance [to the Algerian rebels] from Morocco and Tunisia, where the moderate leaders probably will be forced to make substantial concessions to rising popular sentiment in favor of independence for Algeria.”6 The French remained unrepentant. After his conversation with the French colonel, Ben Bella and his compatriots were loaded onto a plane and flown to Paris. The streets of the French capital were closed, with police vans stationed along their route; the government was determined to avoid any risk of the city’s sizable Algerian population attempting to liberate its prisoners as they were driven to the high-security La Santé Prison in Montparnasse. There they were to await trial.
1100 Budapest // 1400 Moscow
That morning, the Soviet and Hungarian militaries attacked the rebel strongholds in Corvin Alley and Széna Square. Hungarian Ministry of Defense loyalists and the Soviet authorities ordered this attack without Imre Nagy’s agreement.
The rebels in Széna Square were temporarily driven out. The Corvin rebels, working loosely with the group commanded by Colonel Pál Maléter stationed at the nearby Kilián Barracks, managed to hold back Hungarian forces and the tanks of the Red Army.7 Several tanks were destroyed. Nagy found out about this assault and called it off, but the rebels had already defeated it.
Belatedly, Nagy seemed to have found his guts. For the first time he took a strong stance in the Hungarian Politburo, calling for change. Anastas Mikoyan, attending as a “guest,” was not convinced. “We respect Comrade Nagy, we consider him a sincere man, but at times he very easily gets under the influence of others,” he said. “To be firm, one must take a decisive position.”
Nagy was not intimidated. “Comrade Mikoyan turned to me and said that one must remain firm,” he remarked to those assembled. “At the point where the interest of the party requires further movement, then I will not remain firm but go ahead.” He continued, even more daringly in the light of the attack on the Corvin rebels that morning: “If we assess the broadly based movement as counter-revolution, as we did at first, then we have no choice but to suppress it with tanks and artillery. That would be a tragedy. We now see that this is not our way.”8
The rebellion in Hungary was not helped by the only tool of American power that was in use: Radio Free Europe. The American-run station broadcast constant, violent criticism of Imre Nagy, advising ordinary citizens to join the fight for a complete revolution against his government as well as against the Soviets. “The programs did not advise prudence,” wrote the Hungarian journalist and historian Charles Gati. “The programs did not quote Western press reports explaining Nagy’s predicament. The programs did not speak of a possible Titoist scenario, or of the Soviet Army’s might and determination, or of the dilemmas of choice in the West.”9 Though it is not true, as it has sometimes been claimed, that Radio Free Europe repeatedly broadcast empty promises of American military intervention at this point—it would do that only on November 4—it did not tell its many Hungarian listeners that Eisenhower and Dulles were publicly ruling out such an intervention. It is unclear whether or not overeager agents within the CIA were responsible for Radio Free Europe’s stance or whether it came from managers or broadcasters at the station itself. Whatever the truth, the broadcasts made it harder for Imre Nagy to calm and unite the rebels, made it easier for the Soviets to divide them, and encouraged thousands of ordinary people to put themselves in danger.
In Moscow, hard-liners in the presidium criticized Suslov and Mikoyan’s mission in Budapest. Molotov sneered that they were providing “calm reassurances” while Soviet policy “is gradually moving toward capitulation.” This was, in effect, an attack on Khrushchev for failing to act more decisively. “The American secret services are more active in Hungary than C[omra]des Suslov and Mikoyan are,” added Voroshilov.10 But Khrushchev held firm, conscious of the potential for disaster in Hungary if the Soviet Union were to impose its will by force. “The English and French are in a real mess in Egypt,” Khrushchev told the presidium. “We should not get caught in the same company.”11
1500 Jerusalem
David Ben-Gurion, still on his sickbed in Jerusalem, summoned the leaders of all parliamentary groups (except the Communists) to his bedside. There, he told them of his plan to attack Egypt by invading the Sinai. He received unanimous support.12 A messenger was sent to Washington to deliver a top-secret document in a sealed envelope to Abba Eban, the ambassador to the United Nations. This document contained all the details of Israel’s invasion plan, code-named Operation Kadesh.
Ben-Gurion made his own objectives clear. His interests were in the Eilat coastal strip and the Straits of Tiran, the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba. He intended to reopen the straits, judging the permanent acquisition of this territory essential to the free movement of Israeli shipping. Israel would, during its campaign, attempt to conquer Sinai too—but he did not believe he would be able to hold it permanently in the face of the opposition he expected from the international community. Still, he hoped Operation Kadesh would damage Nasser politically and might even bring about his downfall. Finally, he told the assembled parliamentarians, “The Gaza strip is a hindrance; we’ve got to take it, but it’s a burden to us. If I did believe in miracles I would like it to sink beneath the sea. . . .”13
1500 Washington DC // 2100 Budapest // 2200 Tel Aviv // 0000 Moscow
In Budapest that evening, Imre Nagy ordered several Stalinist former leaders—including Ernő Gerő—to leave for exile in Moscow. They boarded planes with their families and went. At the same time, from his bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, President Eisenhower sent off an appeal to Israel to stop mobilizing its troops. He returned to the White House in the afternoon and spoke to his speechwriter, Emmet Hughes, about the suggestion that he cancel a campaign trip to the Southern states. He dismissed the idea, fearing it would be misunderstood. “There’d be political yapping all around that the doctors yesterday really found I was terribly sick and ready to keel over dead.” In fact, he felt fine, though the day in the hospital composing a letter to David Ben-Gurion in between medical examinations had not been cheerful. “Israel and barium make quite a combination,” he remarked.
Hughes summed up the president’s state of mind: “The whole Middle Eastern scene obviously leaves him dismayed, baffled, and fearful of great stupidity about to assert itself.” This could probably be said of almost any world leader at any point in modern times, but it is less common for so many great stupidities to have been preparing to assert themselves all at once. “Maybe they’re thinking they just can’t survive without more land,” Eisenhower mused of the Israelis. “But I don’t see how they can survive without coming to some honorable and peaceful terms with the whole Arab world that surrounds them.” France’s action made him angry. “Damn it, the French, they’re just egging the Israeli[s] on—hoping somehow to get out of their own North African troubles. Damn it, they sat right there in those chairs three years ago, and we tried to tell them that they would repeat Indochina all over again in North Africa. And they said, ‘Oh no! That’s part of metropolitan France!’—and all that damn nonsense.”
The possible involvement of the British in this conspiracy still seemed inexplicable. “I just can’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t believe they would be so stupid as to invite on themselves all the Arab hostility to Israel.” He wondered if the British were daring him to defend the Tripartite Declaration of 1950: after all, the United States could be asked to step in on the side of Egypt.
He signaled the end of the meeting with a heavy sigh. “Well, I better get out of here,” he said to Hughes, “or—despite all those doctors—these things will have my blood pressure up to 490.”14
At the State Department, Foster Dulles was questioning the Israeli ambassador, Abba Eban. Eban, who had not yet received the sealed envelope from Israel and did not know of the real invasion plan, said that his nation feared that the new joint command formed by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria was planning “the massive use of fedayeen activity,” and aggression against Israel. This, he said, was the reason some reserve units had been called up.
Dulles interrupted to ask whether the statement “some reserve units had been called up” really covered what was happening. “The Secretary said that according to his information Israel was being totally mobilized.” Though Dulles knew Ben-Gurion had been concerned about the possibility of Iraqi troops moving into Jordan under the British plan, this had not happened—and there was therefore no obvious provocation.
Eban replied that Iraqi troops still might threaten Israel. The mobilization, he insisted, was defensive.
Dulles retorted that “at no previous time had Israel been as safe as it was today.” Jordan’s government was weak and Egypt was distracted by the ongoing dispute with Britain and France over the Suez Canal. “For these reasons it was hard to see how Israel was endangered to such an extent as to require total mobilization. The Secretary thought, on the other hand, that Israelis might calculate that this was the best moment in which Israel could move.”15
Eban repeated that Israel was acting defensively and its fears were well founded, but this only irritated Dulles. Afterward, the secretary of state checked Israeli government balances in New York banks, and was relieved to see that there had not been any unusually large withdrawals recently. If the Israelis had started pulling money out, it would have been a sign that they were up to something. They knew that the American government would freeze their balances in the event of aggression.
Eisenhower and Dulles had several frank and revealing telephone calls that evening. The most frank and revealing of them was placed by the secretary of state shortly after five thirty. They discussed evacuating American civilians and nonessential military personnel from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. Eisenhower wondered if this made things worse. Dulles did not think so, though “it may lead to anti-American demonstrations and if the British strike it will lead to the inference we knew about it.” Eisenhower reassured him that deniability was in place: “The Pres. said our statement today would almost certainly take care of that one—we don’t know about the Br[itish].”
They went on to discuss the British and French military buildup on Cyprus—though Eisenhower still suspected there was some other plan brewing. “The Pres. said he can’t believe the Br. would let themselves be dragged into it on this basis.”
Eisenhower said he would wait out the night and see what the morning brought before warning Britain and France off aggression in the Middle East. Dulles argued that it would be too late then, if the invasion had already begun. The president was persuaded, and told him to go ahead. “The Pres. said it will be a world-shocking thing tomorrow.”16 On that point he was certainly right.