8

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1956

“SANDSTORMS IN THE DESERT”

2200 (Oct. 28) Washington DC // 0500 Tel Aviv

Before dawn, a car with diplomatic plates drew up outside the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv. It contained the counselor from the American embassy, who explained to the sentries that his visit could not wait. He delivered Eisenhower’s letter to David Ben-Gurion. Eisenhower had written that he had asked other Middle Eastern states to back off any aggression, and would discuss the situation with Britain and France, the other two parties in the Tripartite Declaration. “I feel compelled to emphasize the dangers inherent in the present situation and to urge your Government to do nothing which would endanger the peace.”¹

Eisenhower did not specify which country he expected to be Israel’s target in the letter, but the Israelis knew the Americans still expected it to be Jordan. According to his biographer Michael Bar-Zohar, the Israeli leader noted that “there was something sad in seeing the head of a great Power with a completely erroneous idea of the situation, believing quite candidly that the seat of the fire was to the east of Israel and thinking of appealing to the very countries which, at that moment, were in collusion with Israel. The smoke-screen drawn over the operation had obviously been most effective.”² It was. The Israelis even set up a fake fedayeen attack in the Negev desert and released news of it.³

“We all believed that we were going to attack Jordan, because the last attacks were against Jordan,” remembered Uri Avnery, editor of the Israeli magazine HaOlem HaZeh at the time. “Our magazine came out on Tuesday and it took about twenty-four hours to print. We had prepared a cover of the forthcoming attack on Jordan. I had to rush to the printing press that day to change it at the last minute. It was a very well-organized distraction. We really believed it.”⁴ If even critical journalists like Avnery, who devoted himself to interrogating the Israeli government and armed forces, were convinced by the feint, it is not surprising that the president of the United States was drawn in.

In his diary, Moshe Dayan regretted the “not at all agreeable” situation of having to deceive the United States, but complained that Washington “has no specific solutions to the problems which face us so acutely.” He was annoyed that Eisenhower encouraged “a peaceful and moderate approach,” asking, “What content of reality is there to such well-worn phrases, and what is their practical impact on the terror attacks of the fedayun, or the blockade of Israeli shipping in Suez and the Gulf of Akaba, or the Egypt-Syria-Jordan military pact?”⁵ Dayan felt, as did Ben-Gurion, that Israel again had no alternative.

0500 London // 0600 Budapest // 0700 Jerusalem // 0900 Moscow

At dawn, Soviet troops began to roll out of Budapest, leaving behind thousands of buildings ruined by tank and artillery fire. They were moving out of the city. People gathered in the streets to sweep away the shards of broken glass and cart off the blocks of fallen masonry.⁶ The Hungarian government was determined to be gracious about the withdrawal. Radio broadcasts and newspaper articles exhorted people to behave civilly to the Soviets. For the most part, they did, except for a few incidents in which some Red Army soldiers who had run out of food indulged in some looting.⁷

Imre Nagy moved his office from Communist Party headquarters in Academy Street to the parliament building. It was not a break with Communism, which he still espoused, but it was a sign of independence from the old party ways. In parliament, he met a group of young rebels to discuss a possible cease-fire. He asked them to lay down their arms. They were unsure whether to do so without their demands being met.

“Boys,” he said to them, “do you think that I’m not as good a Hungarian as you are?”⁸

The rebels were struck by this. They offered Nagy their support and agreed that they would give up their weapons once the Soviets had withdrawn. In practice, though, this agreement soon fell apart. The rebels still mistrusted the government, and instead demanded that they be incorporated by the Hungarian state into its army, police, and security forces.

For the first time in six days, Nagy had a chance to return to his home. The Western press was ecstatic. “The Hungarian people are winning,” declared an editorial in the London Times that day. “They have broken the gates of their prison. They have seen the Government bow before their demands.” The editors sounded a note of caution as well: “Certainly all eyes will have to be intent against trickery in the days ahead. But at the moment it seems that the people, rising against tyranny in the face of every odd, armed with little but their despair and courage and unity, have wrought a change that will transform far more than Hungary.”⁹

This withdrawal was not what it seemed. The Soviets were consolidating their forces along a crescent line ninety miles east of Budapest and moving heavy armored units along the border between Hungary and the Soviet Union. This was a hedging of bets rather than a definite threat; Khrushchev was at this point unsure how to proceed. But Moscow had not given up.

0900 London // 1000 Paris; Algiers // 1100 Cairo // 1300 Moscow

In Paris, Ben Bella and his four fellow Algerian rebel leaders were charged by a military tribunal with attempted demoralization of the army and the nation. The penalty could be death. “The only fact alleged against them at present is the distribution of pamphlets in the Paris region,” reported the London Times.¹⁰ At the same time as it used the stick against the Algerian rebels, the French government proffered a carrot. Guy Mollet promised Algerians equal citizenship in the French Republic, free elections, and increased investment.

At noon in Cairo, an Egyptian diplomat who served as press attaché at the embassy in Paris was shown into Gamal Abdel Nasser’s office. He had been sent by Tharwat Okasha—the Egyptian military attaché in Paris, who had been a Free Officer alongside Nasser. Okasha had an important message for Nasser, which he had learned from a mysterious but clearly well-connected French friend. Okasha and his friend had bonded over two things: a love of classical music, especially the works of Gustav Mahler and Richard Wagner, and a shared interest in communicating details of French plans for Algeria back to Cairo.

Two days before, Okasha’s French friend had told him everything that had been decided in the secret Anglo-Franco-Israeli meetings at Sèvres. Okasha repeated all the details carefully to the press attaché, and sent him to Cairo.

This meeting was recorded only by a secondhand source—Amin Howeidy, later Egyptian minister of defense and chief of general intelligence. Howeidy claimed to have heard it from the press attaché. According to him, Nasser was standing in the office with one foot on a chair. The attaché told the full story of the Protocol of Sèvres.

“This is very strange,” said Nasser, and asked the man to tell it again. He did. Nasser listened.

“Look here, my son,” the president said. “Israel, France can do it, but the British cannot at all co-operate with the Israelis. They have dignity, and they will hesitate 100 times to co-operate with the Israelis.”¹¹

Whether or not the precise details of this story are true, Nasser had received several warnings of the forthcoming attack. The Egyptian military attaché in Istanbul had correctly predicted on October 6 that Egypt would face an attack by Israel, followed by an ultimatum from Britain and France, followed by a joint attack by all three nations. This was particularly impressive and must have been guesswork, for he made the prediction eight days before the crucial meeting at Chequers in which the French informed Anthony Eden of the potential for such a plan. A few other hints had floated by. One report from Paris was written off as deliberate misinformation, and one man who turned up at the Egyptian embassy in Paris offering details of the Sèvres meeting was turned away as a crank.¹² Nasser’s dismissal of Okasha’s story, if accurately reported, is not surprising: these rumors were not well sourced and looked like blips amid a tide of information from much more reliable sources indicating an Israeli attack on Jordan. Nasser sent the press attaché away and felt relaxed enough to attend a party that afternoon for his son Abdel Hamid’s fifth birthday.

0700 Washington DC // 1200 London // 1400 Jerusalem; Cairo

At lunchtime, Israeli forces moved from the Beersheba area in the Negev desert toward the border with Egypt. Separate brigades fanned out into the Sinai, toward Gaza in the north, toward Kuseima in the center, and toward Kuntilla in the south. Four Israeli piston-engined fighter planes flew low over the Sinai, descending to just twelve feet to cut the wires between telegraph poles with dangling hooks and their wings and propellers. At two p.m., packed into requisitioned civilian buses, the Southern Infantry Brigade, heading for Kuseima, reached the point where the western Negev desert became Egyptian territory.

Much of the Israeli Negev is rocky ridges, with a few streams that appear in the cooler months and create gullies where desert plants and scrub can survive. It is not easy terrain, and in 1956 there was little infrastructure, but it was passable. Toward Egypt, the desert changes texture. When the Southern Infantry Brigade vehicles reached Sabha an hour later, they foundered in soft sand. The brigade continued on foot. Most of its soldiers were mobilized civilians, unlikely to be at peak military fitness, and their average age was over thirty. Trudging through deep, heavy sand under the beating sun would have exhausted fitter men. They had eleven hours of this to endure before they would reach Kuseima.¹³

At two p.m. Cairo time, reports came in to the Egyptian army that Israeli troops had been spotted in Sinai. Nasser had just watched his son blow out the candles on his birthday cake. He received word and excused himself, telling his wife only that he had been called into a meeting.¹⁴

Anthony Eden’s press secretary, William Clark, returned from a fortnight’s vacation. When he arrived at 10 Downing Street, he was told to stay in his end of the building and not to go near the prime minister’s private office. He went for lunch alone. When he was coming back through the garden gate, he saw military men milling about, waiting to go into the cabinet room. He was particularly surprised to see General Keightley, commander in chief of the Middle East Land Forces, who he had not even realized was in Britain.

Lord Mountbatten, the services’ most incorrigible gossip, sidled up to Clark. “Well, I don’t envy your job in the next few days,” he said; “this will be the hardest war to justify ever.”¹⁵

The Israeli border police guarding the central region near the Jordanian border had been told to take all measures necessary to keep order that evening. The local colonel, Issachar Shadmi, decided that this meant setting a curfew for Palestinian Arab villages, from five p.m. to six a.m. The news of the curfew was broadcast over the radio the same day it went into force. The border police unit commanders in the region were informed of the order by their commanding officer, Major Shmuel Malinki. Malinki implied that, in the event of anyone breaking the curfew, the police could shoot to kill.

Several platoons were charged with informing villagers in person. At the village of Kfar Kassem (or Kafr Qasim), close to the border with the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, a platoon arrived to announce the news—but too late in the day. They were told that many of the village’s agricultural workers were already out at work, mostly picking olives.

After five p.m., the villagers returned as expected: a mixed crowd of men and women, boys and girls, riding on bicycles, wagons, and trucks. Even though he knew these civilians would not have heard about the curfew through no fault of their own, the unit commander Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan determined that they were in violation of it and therefore should be shot. Out of all the unit commanders given this order, Dahan was the only one to enforce it.¹⁶

As each small group of villagers arrived, the border police opened fire. Forty-three civilians were killed and thirteen injured. The dead were mostly children aged between eight and seventeen: twenty-three of them, plus fourteen men and six women. It was said that one nine-year-old girl was shot twenty-eight times. Another little girl watched as her eleven-year-old cousin was shot. He was dragged indoors and died in his grandfather’s arms, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his chest. Laborers were ordered off their trucks in small groups, lined up, and executed. There were clashes between Arabs and border police that evening in which six more Arabs were killed.

The order to kill had not come from the top. It was traced back conclusively only as far as Major Malinki. When Ben-Gurion heard about the massacre, he was furious, telling his cabinet that the officers who had shot civilians should be hanged in Kfar Kassem’s town square.¹⁷ Yet the Israeli government covered the incident up with a press blackout lasting two months.

Despite the blackout, news of the deaths did spread. Israel’s most famous poet of the time, Nathan Alterman, wanted to travel to Kfar Kassem and offer his condolences to the villagers. Though he was a close friend of Ben-Gurion’s, the prime minister refused to let him go on the grounds that such a visit might publicize the incident.¹⁸

In 1958, eleven members of the border police stood trial in an Israeli military court, which judged the killings “blatantly illegal.” Of the eleven defendants, eight were sentenced to between seven and seventeen years in prison, including Malinki and Dahan. The trial set a precedent in the Israeli Supreme Court that a soldier could be held responsible for obeying an illegal order. It was an explicit rejection of the “Nuremberg defense,” so called following the trials of former Nazis—many of whom argued that they were only obeying orders.

The eight guilty men were all freed within three and a half years. Both Malinki and Dahan were pardoned and returned to official security work. Shimon Peres formally expressed regret for the Kfar Kassem massacre in 2007, when he was president of Israel. His successor, Reuven Rivlin, spoke at a memorial for the slain civilians in 2014. “A terrible crime was committed here,” Rivlin said. “Illegal orders topped by a black flag were given here. We must look directly at what happened.”¹⁹

In October 1956, though, the world knew nothing of these murders. The bodies of the Suez War’s first forty-nine victims went unseen and unmourned, except by their own community.

1100 Washington DC // 1600 London // 1800 Cairo; Tel Aviv

Sixteen Israeli DC-3s, among them containing 395 paratroopers, flew over the Negev. Trudging through the desert below were the four Israeli forces, including Ariel Sharon’s 202 Brigade heading for Kuntilla. They had thirteen French AMX light tanks. “Many of the trucks and half-tracks were also newly provided by the French,” wrote Sharon. “We had pressed them into use despite the fact that they had arrived without any tools. There was no way to even change a tyre.”²⁰ Almost sixty vehicles and most of the tanks had broken down in the sand by that evening. “With no road, there were places where the brigade’s tractors had to tow every single truck and half-track,” remembered Sharon.²¹

Above both Sharon’s men and the DC-3s were high-altitude British reconnaissance planes ordered to survey the situation by Anthony Eden. Back in London, Eden was frantically telephoning the chief of the air staff every fifteen minutes to check whether Israel’s paratroopers had landed so that he could begin his war.²²

In Cairo, Mohammed Heikal arrived at the Mena House Hotel, near the pyramids, at six p.m. He was to dine with the new Greek ambassador. The hotel staff told Heikal he had an important call. He went to the telephone. It was Gamal Abdel Nasser.

“Something very strange is happening,” Nasser said. “The Israelis are in Sinai and they seem to be fighting the sands, because they are occupying one empty position after another. We have been monitoring closely what’s going on, and it looks to us as if all they want to do is start up sandstorms in the desert. We can’t make out what’s happening. I suggest you come over.”²³

The 395 Israeli paratroopers were dropped at Mitla Pass, thirty miles east of Suez.

At nightfall, the Israelis in the desert were resupplied by French planes, dropping everything from jeeps and guns to jerry cans of water and gasoline to cigarettes. These were brought from the British base on Cyprus, though the British affected ignorance of the flights.

Neither the CIA nor the British and French had a clear idea of how much resistance Israel might meet in Egypt, nor the extent to which its forces might now be armed with Soviet weaponry. “During the past year—right up to the outbreak of hostilities—the USSR poured planes, tanks, guns and a host of other equipment into Egypt, to a value of about a quarter of a billion dollars,” Allen Dulles told a bipartisan White House meeting a few days later. “The first Soviet submarine for Egypt was en route from Poland when Israel launched its attack in Sinai.”²⁴ Allen Dulles had picked up inside information about the Suez plot in France; it is possible that he may have picked up talk about submarine deliveries there, too. A French diplomatic document from October 15 alleged that gunboats and submarines were being sent from the Soviet Union to Egypt. The vessels in question were old German stock that the Red Army had seized from Koenigsberg, Danzig, and Elbing after World War II. Their crews were said to be made up of Soviet sailors from East Germany and Central Asia. The report also suggested that seven former Nazi submarine officers in Egypt had returned to West Germany in disgust, refusing to serve in Nasser’s navy because they believed he was cooperating with the Soviets.²⁵ It was hard to know who in this situation was considered the greater villain.

1128 Washington DC // 1628 London // 1828 Cairo

Foster Dulles telephoned Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, at 11:28 a.m. Adams brought up remarks by the Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, the previous summer, accusing the Eisenhower administration of being unprepared for anti-Soviet rebellions in the Soviet satellite states. These remarks had annoyed Dulles intensely at the time and annoyed him again now.²⁶ “The Sec. said he has been forecasting it for a year and a half,” the minutes of the telephone call recorded. “Now they say we did not know about it.”

Furthermore, said Dulles, “The situation in the ME [Middle East] is awful,” adding that “there is a lot of evidence accumulating which indicates that the French with the British in [the] back of them are pushing into it.”²⁷

Dulles received a cable from C. Douglas Dillon, the American ambassador to France, stating firmly that “we are certain [the] French are not being frank with us and suspect they may be encouraging Israelis to take at least preparatory and possibly offensive military action.” He suggested Dulles send a message to Pineau, strongly condemning any possibility of such military action and stating that the United States would not back French involvement. He suggested that the NATO council should discuss this matter immediately.²⁸

It was too late. The Israelis were already a long way down the warpath. Mohammed Heikal arrived at his president’s office in Cairo. The Egyptian commander in chief, Abdel Hakim Amer—one of Nasser’s closest friends since his youth—was also there, albeit somewhat shaken. He had just arrived back from his trip to cement the Egypt-Syria-Jordan alliance. He had been due to fly back from Damascus the previous evening, but had delayed his return. This turned out to be fortunate. An Israeli jet shot down the Ilyushin transport plane that he would have been on as it flew over the Mediterranean. The Israelis had tried to assassinate him. Everyone on board had been killed: sixteen Egyptian officers and journalists, plus two crew members.²⁹

Heikal found both Nasser and Amer “in a state of bewilderment.” They knew Israeli paratroopers had landed at the Mitla Pass, but there seemed to be no air attack. It seemed extraordinary that Israel would send troops a hundred miles into Egypt without air cover. The Egyptians wondered whether the invasion of Sinai might be a feint, and the real target might be either Jordan or the Gaza Strip. Still, Nasser did not believe that Britain and France could be behind the attack. At that moment, as far as the Egyptians were concerned, they were near a deal to end the Suez Crisis at the United Nations. Heikal remembered the Egyptian command even wondering if “a frustrated Israel was trying to settle its own private scores with Egypt in a hurry,” before the Suez question could be resolved amicably.³⁰

1200 Washington DC // 1700 London // 1800 Budapest // 1900 Jerusalem; Cairo

Eisenhower was in Florida on the campaign trail. In his absence, Dulles sent a top-secret cable to the American embassies in London and Paris: “Bits of evidence are accumulating which indicate that [the] French Government, perhaps with British knowledge, is concerting closely with Israelis to provoke action which would lead to Israeli war against Egypt with probably participation by French and British.” He listed the facts as known: “conclusive but highly secret evidence” that the French had supplied the Israelis with more Mystère planes than they were permitted under the Tripartite Agreement, the Franco-British air buildup on Cyprus and naval units in the eastern Mediterranean, and the blackout of information from the French and British to Americans. “There are other items of information which cannot be reported here but which substantially round out the picture,” he added.

There were two possibilities, he believed, and they might both happen at once. One would be “an alleged ‘retaliatory’ military movement [i.e., reprisal] by Israel which would quickly take over Jordan west of the river”—the West Bank. Egypt would undoubtedly come to Jordan’s assistance, and that would provide a pretext for Britain and France to launch an attack on Egypt to avert war in the wider Middle East. The other possibility would be that Israel might attempt to sail a ship through the Suez Canal. It would be stopped by the Egyptian authorities—and that would create another excuse for Britain and France to attack Egypt under the terms of the 1888 Treaty and the Six Principles that Selwyn Lloyd had put forth at the United Nations.

Though he was wrong about both of these approaches, Dulles was right that a war was about to be started on a flimsy excuse. “As you know, it is [the] profound conviction of President and myself that if French and British allow themselves to be drawn into a general Arab war they will have started something they cannot finish and end result may very well be an intensive anti-Western sentiment throughout Middle East and Africa and intimacy with Soviet Union which will impair for [a] long time indispensable relations of Europe with Middle East and Africa,” he wrote. “Furthermore, the process will greatly weaken economies of France, Britain and Western Europe, [and] under circumstances it is highly unlikely US will come to aid of Britain and France as in case of first and second World Wars where they were clearly victim of armed aggression.”

He added, “We have no doubt that it may be calculated that Jewish influence here is such at [sic—as] to assure US sympathy with such operations as are outlined. However, if this is calculated we think it is a miscalculation.”

The telegram was intended as background information so that the ambassadors could report back to Washington for immediate authorization if they could think of “any steps which might still avert what we believe to be [a] very dangerous course of action.” It did acknowledge that it might be too late: “It is only [a] matter of hours rather than days before situation may become irrevocable.”³¹

Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were unusual in the twentieth century: an American president and secretary of state who were able and willing to say no to Israel. There were rumors at the time, which have been revived since, that Dulles’s views on the matter may have stemmed from a particular dislike of Israel. It has even been suggested that he was an antisemite.

Dulles had admired German society from a young age. He had been a legal adviser to a member of the American delegation at the Versailles conference when he was thirty years old, negotiating the peace after World War I. Like his fellow American delegates, he argued strongly that Germans should not be subjected to a level of punitive reparations that would create permanent resentment or damage their nation’s recovery. He came away from the conference convinced that Britain and France had demeaned themselves by punishing Germany so harshly. He began to believe that, for new, improved global powers—like the United States—to rise, the corrupt old empires must get out of the way.³²

During the 1930s, Dulles’s enthusiasm for Germany did not dissipate quite so swiftly as would have been politic. He was close friends with Hjalmar Schacht, the Weimar president of the Reichsbank, who became a strong supporter of the Nazi Party and was made Hitler’s minister of economics in 1934. Together, Foster Dulles and Schacht worked to bring American finance to the Nazi state, rescuing Germany from economic disaster and helping build Adolf Hitler up into a strong leader. (Schacht fell from favor and was frozen out of Hitler’s inner circle in 1937. He was tried at Nuremberg for his work in planning the war, but was acquitted.)

Sullivan and Cromwell, the New York law firm in which both Foster and Allen Dulles were partners before their political and intelligence careers took off, worked for a number of German firms in the 1930s whose operations at that time would later associate them with the German war effort and the Holocaust. These included arms manufacturer Krupp AG and chemicals company IG Farben. Many American firms worked for controversial German companies, and such links are easy enough to find—but the personal involvement of Foster Dulles and his sustained enthusiasm for the Nazi rebuilding of the German economy is noteworthy. During the 1930s, he wrote articles characterizing Britain and France as “static” societies—which had grown to their limit and were now merely defending their privileges—in contrast to the “dynamic” societies of Germany, Italy, and Japan, which he predicted would shape the future. Though he did not approve when these nations resorted to violence, he judged such violence unsurprising.³³

The struggle within the Dulles family over Foster’s involvement with Nazi Germany was shot through with tragedy. Foster and Allen’s sister, Eleanor, had fallen in love with David Blondheim, a divorced professor of medieval Jewish philology at Johns Hopkins University. Blondheim was from an Orthodox Jewish background, and the romance horrified both his family and the Presbyterian Dulleses. The couple waited to marry until after Foster, Allen, and Eleanor’s father’s death in 1931. David and Eleanor Blondheim grew increasingly alarmed at events in Germany; Blondheim became deeply depressed. When Eleanor found out she was pregnant in 1934, Blondheim was overwhelmed by guilt that he had abandoned his Jewish roots and would be starting a “mixed” family. On March 19, 1934, he poisoned himself with gas in the kitchen of their Baltimore apartment. Foster persuaded his widowed sister to drop her Jewish surname. The child, when he was born, was named David Dulles.

In 1935, Allen Dulles visited Berlin and formed what he described as a “sinister impression” of the way things were going. He decided Sullivan and Cromwell should close their office in Nazi Germany on political grounds.³⁴ Eleanor, too, visited Nazi Germany, and was appalled by what she saw. Foster resisted pressure from both his siblings, telling Eleanor she was “working herself up” over nothing. The Dulles brothers put it to a vote at the New York office of Sullivan and Cromwell in the summer of 1935, Foster passionately defending the firm’s connection to Nazi Germany and Allen arguing that it must be severed. Allen won the vote unanimously. Reportedly, Foster was so disappointed by this decision that he burst into tears. He cheered himself up by continuing to visit Nazi Germany, making trips there with his wife, Janet, in 1936, 1937, and 1939. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he defended Germany’s actions and argued publicly and frequently against the United States joining the war on the Allied side.³⁵

“Until after the United States entered World War II, Foster Dulles maintained his antipathy toward Britain and France and his pro-German sentiment,” wrote CIA agent Wilbur Eveland. “When the Second World War ended, Dulles advocated strengthening Germany as the best means for the West to contain the Soviet Union.” West Germany paid reparations to Israel from 1952, in recognition of the cost of resettling five hundred thousand Holocaust survivors and some compensation for looted property. Accepting this deal was controversial within Israel, where some felt it represented blood money; others felt it was practical and necessary. Eveland stated, “Reparations of any type were anathema to Dulles,” and said that Israel’s claim “received a cool audience from him.”³⁶

In 1949, Dulles ran for a New York Senate seat against Herbert Lehman. Lehman was Jewish, and there were suggestions at the time that Dulles’s campaign was antisemitic. His past links with Nazi Germany were brought up. Some years later, Abba Eban, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations at the time of the Suez Crisis and later deputy prime minister of Israel, was asked if he thought Dulles was antisemitic. “I think that Dulles, like many Americans, distinguished in his mind between two concepts, between the State of Israel and between [sic] American Jews,” said Eban; “with the American Jew there is a question of internal politics, and to an extent he entered into American politics. I presume there was a mutual action-reaction, and his attitude to them was governed by theirs to him, theirs to him by what they thought was his attitude to them. But having known him for a long time, I would repudiate an [sic] concept of anti-Semitism. On the contrary, I think he had a very large historic vision about the role of the Jewish people in history, and especially in religious history.”³⁷

Evelyn Shuckburgh, who was given to making disparaging comments about Jewish people himself in his memoir, was present at an unusually cordial meeting between Dulles and Eden in Paris in 1954. The Arab-Israeli conflict was supposed to be discussed. “Dulles, however, gave us an enlightening account of the power and influence of the Jews in America,” Shuckburgh wrote in his diary. “Subscriptions to Israel, alone of all non-local charities, are (quite illegally) exempt from tax. But he said we have just about twelve months to do something in, before another election looms up and makes all action impossible. A.E. for his part admitted the influence of the Jewish lobby in the House of Commons.”³⁸

Some suggested that Dulles’s views were balanced, but that he could react badly to pressure—and pressure often came from the Israeli side. A few years after Suez, the American ambassador to Egypt and State Department official Raymond Hare was asked where he thought Dulles was on the spectrum of opinion regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Mr. Dulles was right bang in the middle,” said Hare. “But he was consciously in the middle. And anybody who tried to push him around either way—he resented it—because he sensed the significance of this thing and the importance of approaching it with complete even-handedness. And this was very conscious on his part. It wasn’t just something that came that way.”³⁹ This may have been a fair assessment, but Dulles’s past affairs indicate that he had little natural sympathy for Jews or for the Jewish state. It does not appear he had much natural sympathy for Arabs either, aside from his strategic regard for Saudi Arabia.

By contrast, Eisenhower’s relations with Jewish communities were positive. He saw Nazi concentration camps soon after their liberation and was sickened by the horror that had been wrought. He requested that congressmen and journalists visit to document them. His careful and considerate policy toward Jewish displaced persons in Europe after World War II—formed in conjunction with a specially appointed Jewish adviser—had earned him the approval of American rabbis, though his directives were subverted in practice by the far less compassionate General George Patton.⁴⁰ “Unfortunately for Israel, the Americans had for the first and last time a president who was not afraid of the American Jews,” explains Uri Avnery. “He was so popular he could win elections without the American Jews.”⁴¹ In fact, Eisenhower was not sure of that, but he was not put off his stride. The United States was going to do what was right—whether it won him the election or lost it.

1500 Washington DC // 2000 London // 2100 Paris // 2200 Jerusalem; Cairo

Dulles’s attempts to warn Israel off came to nothing. At around three p.m. in Washington, the White House press office ticker clicked out the news that Israeli troops had moved across the Egyptian border. Eisenhower was in the air at the time, just taking off from Jacksonville, Florida. On the way back to Washington, the plane made a scheduled stop in Richmond, Virginia, for Eisenhower to deliver an election speech on the danger to world peace.

“That danger is in various places, none more critical at this moment than at the ancient crossroads of the world, the MidEast, where old civilizations meet and ancient animosities flash anew,” he said. “Fears and hatreds deeply divide nations, with all of whom American would be, hopes to be, and seeks to be, a friend.”

Mindful of what he had heard on the flight, he continued. “The news in this area is not good. But I do say this: In this specific case, as in all our efforts through the world for a just and lasting peace, here is my solemn pledge to you: by dedication and patience we will continue, as long as I remain your President, to work for this simple—this single—this exclusive goal.”⁴²

At the same time in London that evening, there was a reception for the prime minister of Norway. William Clark saw the first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Hailsham, and dug for information about what was going on. “I know much less than you suppose,” Hailsham replied, “and what I do know makes me profoundly unhappy.”⁴³

While minds in London, Paris, and Washington turned to the Middle East, the security of Budapest remained precarious. That evening, the American legation telegrammed Dulles to say that the nationalist rebels had risen spontaneously and were poorly led. “Leadership is weak, isolated, and represents different programs and degrees of willingness to compromise.” It was not clear who among them should be negotiating with the Soviets or the Nagy government. This, the legation worried, could lead to “real danger” that the Soviets and the government “may finally decide that only solution is absolute suppression and real iron fist policy.” The Soviets were “perfectly capable” of that, according to its assessment, and the only way to avoid it was for Western powers to give high-level political support and military material support.⁴⁴ If there had been even a small chance of that before the weekend, there was much less now. Israeli troops were already in Egypt and the United States’ NATO partners were only thirty-six hours behind them.

At midnight Cairo time, General Abdel Hakim Amer sent out the first orders to Jordan and Syria through their new unified command. They were to mobilize for Operation Beisan, a plan to drive forces across the narrow midpoint of Israel from the West Bank to Nathanya, snapping the country in half and surrounding Jerusalem. King Hussein was thrilled to receive these orders: he wanted to invade Israel immediately. The Jordanian chief of staff, Ali Abu Nuwar, advised the king to wait until Syrian reinforcements arrived in a couple of days. The Jordanian army was not up to taking on the IDF on its own, and Abu Nuwar knew it. Hussein was persuaded to keep his powder dry. Yet the troops were mobilized. Already the Suez War was threatening to drag in more of the Arab nations.⁴⁵

1900 (Oct. 29) Washington DC // 0200 (Oct. 30) Cairo

At around seven p.m., Eisenhower’s car arrived back at the White House. He went directly to his residence, where both Dulles brothers were waiting to meet him, along with Herbert Hoover Jr., Andrew Goodpaster, Charles Wilson (the secretary of defense), Arthur Radford (chairman of the joint chiefs of staff), and others. Dulles mentioned that there had been a substantial increase in communications traffic between Paris and Israel the day before.

Admiral Radford said that he thought Israel simply wanted the Sinai Peninsula. Dulles said it went further than that. “The Canal is likely to be disrupted, and pipe lines are likely to be broken. In those circumstances British and French intervention must be foreseen. They appear to be ready for it, and may in fact have concerted their action with the Israelis.”

Radford mentioned rumors that the British, French, and Israelis “have made a deal with Iraq to carve up Jordan.” So effective had been the Jordan distraction that it was still possible to feel that that territory must be part of the operation.

Dulles continued, with reference to Egypt: “The French and British may think that—whatever we may think of what they have done—we have to go along with them.”

Wilson agreed. “The Israelis must be figuring on French and British support, thinking that we are stymied at this pre-election period, and the USSR also because of difficulties in Eastern Europe.”

The president was in no mood to be stymied. According to Goodpaster’s minutes, he declared that “in this matter, he does not care in the slightest whether he is re-elected or not. He feels we must make good on our word [to defend Egypt]. He added that he did not really think the American people would throw him out in the midst of a situation like this, but if they did, so be it.”

Dulles added that “one adverse result of this action may be a wave of anti-Semitism through the country,” and there was a murmur of agreement.⁴⁶

“All right, Foster,” the president said to his secretary of state, “you tell ’em [the Israelis] that, goddamn it, we’re going to apply sanctions, we’re going to the United Nations, we’re going to do everything that there is so we can stop this thing.”⁴⁷ There is also a hint in the memoir of Jacques Baeyens, a diplomatic counsel to the French military, that the Americans warned the French and British off at this stage, too. “On 29 October, an official from the American embassy in Paris—perhaps he belonged to the CIA—let Colonel Saint-Hillier know that the allies would have less than twenty-four hours before an intervention by the White House,” he wrote. “This information was also taken to General Ely who did not believe it: he was convinced that the United States would leave the issue alone on the eve of presidential elections planned for 6 November.”⁴⁸

Eisenhower and Dulles talked for two hours before producing a statement for the press. It did indeed talk tough—to the point of hinting at intervention. “At the meeting the President recalled that the United States, under this and prior Administrations, had pledged itself to assist the victim of any aggression in the Middle East. We shall honor our pledge.”⁴⁹

“A nice moralistic stand,” commented Emmet Hughes, Eisenhower’s speechwriter, in his diary for that day. “But what does it mean? And how does one back it up? Literally read, it would seem to admit of two choices. One: We shall ‘assist’ Egypt against Israel and against Britain and France if they move in. Really? Or two: We ‘pledge’ flowers for the funeral of Nasser.”⁵⁰ Yet Eisenhower was committed to his moral stand.

Both Eisenhower and Dulles wanted to go straight to the United Nations. In a meeting at eight fifteen p.m., “the President said we plan to get there first thing in the morning—when the doors open—before the USSR gets there.”⁵¹ Eisenhower cared little for appeasement of his allies and believed they must abide by their word. Much of his appeal to American voters was based on the fact that he was not a professional politician. He had never even voted before the 1948 election, in which the Democrat Harry S. Truman had offered to retreat to the vice presidency if Eisenhower would lead the Democratic ticket. When he did finally stand as a Republican in 1952, he made his case on being a straight talker and cleanup man: pledging to end the war in Korea and to fight Communism and corruption. His personal popularity remained high in 1956 because he was seen as having delivered on these promises. And it flourished because—even with all the speechwriters and policy advisers and political grooming Washington could heap upon him—he still came across as an honest soldier from a farm in the Midwest who seemed like the kind of guy an ordinary voter might have a beer with.

Eisenhower’s reaction to events in the Middle East was characteristically straightforward. Israel had broken the rules and Egypt was the victim. He was, therefore, going to defend Egypt. His first instincts were to apply sanctions to Israel and go to the United Nations. He stopped short of talking about force—but did not rule it out.

That night, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Maria Callas was singing the famously difficult title role in Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma. Sitting in their respective boxes, dressed up in white tie and tails, were Sir Pierson Dixon, the British ambassador to the United Nations, and Henry Cabot Lodge, his American equivalent. During the performance, as Callas sang out Norma’s anguish at being betrayed by her lover, the two passed notes from box to box. Lodge told Foster Dulles afterward that the normally amiable Dixon “was ugly and not smiling” and “it was as though a mask had fallen off.” Lodge mentioned to Dixon that Britain, France, and the United States must come to Egypt’s aid against Israel. Dixon’s response, as Lodge described it to Dulles the following morning, was “Don’t be silly and moralistic. We have got to be practical.” Dixon dismissed the draft American resolution proposed for the United Nations, saying he “simply could not understand what the United States was thinking of.”⁵²

As the men passed their notes at the opera, the exhausted soldiers of the Israeli Southern Infantry Brigade arrived at Kuseima close to three hours behind schedule. Over several hours of fighting that night, they would take the two hills they needed. The Israeli conquest of the Sinai was advancing. The die was cast.