EPILOGUE

“THE CURSE OF THE PHARAOHS”

Dwight D. Eisenhower was reelected president of the United States by a landslide. He carried forty-one states with 457 electoral college votes, while his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, carried seven with 73 votes. Eisenhower won 57.4 percent of the popular vote, an increase of 2.5 percent on his majority in 1952.

On the morning of November 7, twenty-two thousand Anglo-French troops in Egypt were in command of Port Said. They had advanced south down the Suez Canal to El Cap. That day, members of the Baghdad Pact—Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan—met and passed a resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of British and French troops. The pact had been an attempt to reassert British influence in the Muslim world. Even the nations acquiescent in that now turned on Britain. Britain’s other important regional ally, Jordan, severed its bond by renouncing the Anglo-Jordanian defense treaty a few weeks later.

“You have cut off the British lion’s tail and we have drawn his teeth!” Nikita Khrushchev exclaimed to the Egyptian ambassador, Mohamed el-Kouni. “Now he can neither roar or bite!” According to Mohamed Heikal, the Soviets promised Nasser that all the arms and armaments he had lost during the war would be replaced: “the aeroplanes free of charge and the rest at half their cost price.”¹

Immediately after the crisis, Allen Dulles worried that “the precipitous military action by Britain, France and Israel have [sic] provided the Soviet Union with new opportunities which it has begun to exploit.”² But the warmth between the Soviets and the Egyptians did not last. Nasser arrested some Egyptian Communists soon after the Suez War and attempted to mend his relations with the United States. The Soviets tried a soft-power approach by organizing a film festival in Cairo, but annoyed the Egyptians by sending what Heikal called “a supply of films which were nothing but blatant communist propaganda.” The Egyptians canceled several screenings, and the event ended in acrimony.³ Fears about the Soviets attacking British and French troops still in the Canal Zone continued through November but came to nothing—though the British drew up a third Musketeer plan, code-named Musketeer Renewed, in case of emergency.⁴

In the inner circles of the British government, the mood was morose. “Anthony very depressed,” wrote Lady Eden in her diary. “It looks as if the Dulles regime is going to continue.”⁵ Eden telephoned Eisenhower and invited himself and Mollet to Washington, hoping to patch up the special relationship—at least for the sake of public appearances. In a boisterous mood after his election victory, Eisenhower casually agreed that Eden could visit. The White House chief of staff, Sherman Adams, who was with the president when he received the call, thought that the president “was too anxious to restore the traditional friendship between the Americans and the British to let pride or the nursing of hurt feelings keep him from eagerly accepting Eden’s offer to get together again.”⁶

According to Chester Cooper, though, “neither Eden nor Eisenhower had reckoned with the mood in Foggy Bottom. In the view of Acting Secretary Hoover and other officials, a visit by the prime minister and the premier to Washington before Britain and France had complied with the United Nations’ resolution was bound to be regarded by the Third World as American connivance with the ex-imperial powers; any credit the United States had accumulated in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia during the previous ten days would be dissipated.”⁷ Hoover telephoned Foster Dulles in his bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Dulles telephoned Eisenhower and insisted that he disinvite Eden and Mollet until Britain and France had withdrawn fully from Egypt.

Eisenhower did so. Afterward, he went to the hospital to talk to Dulles in person. Dulles’s aide William Macomber remembered the secretary of state propped up with pillows in his big, high bed; Eisenhower sitting in a little chair beside: “Mr. Dulles kind of peered over the bed and sort of down at him a little bit, and the President was sitting there looking up at Mr. Dulles.”

“Foster, I understand why you thought it was a bad idea and why it should have been called off, and as you know we called it off. I quite agree. But I want to explain to you what I had in my mind when I did it,” Eisenhower said. Dulles listened as the president spoke.

“I’ll always remember Mr. Dulles looking down at him,” said Macomber. “All he said was, ‘Well, Mr. President, I think it was right that we called it off.’ And the President, after having asked, ‘You understand why I did it?’—I think he expected: ‘I see.’”

Macomber was shocked. “I told Mr. Dulles later I thought it was kind of mean, on the morning that he’d been elected President of the United States, to be so stern,” he said. “But the President just let it drop and went on to other things. But it was an interesting episode in their relationship.”⁸

Israel emerged from the crisis with a sense of victory. “The Sinai campaign was the greatest and most glorious in the annals of our people,” claimed Ben-Gurion on November 7. It had, he said, restored “King Solomon’s patrimony from the island of Yotvat (Tiran) in the south to the foothills of Lebanon in the north.” He announced that Sharm el-Sheikh was now an Israeli town named Mifratz Shlomo, and hinted that Israel planned to keep Sinai, too: “Our army did not infringe on Egyptian territory. . . . Our operations were restricted to the Sinai Peninsula alone.”⁹

Eisenhower sent a message to Ben-Gurion telling him that if he kept Sinai, he would “bring about the condemnation of Israel as a violator of the principles as well as the directives of the United Nations.”¹⁰ Herbert Hoover informed the Israeli embassy that all aid from the United States would be terminated. Sanctions might be taken up against Israel at the United Nations, and it could even be booted out of that organization. According to the journalist Robert Henriques, Hoover’s personal message to Ben-Gurion was particularly abrupt: “If you do not withdraw your troops from Sinai, you personally will be responsible for the outbreak of the Third World War.”¹¹

Ben-Gurion tried to arrange a private meeting with Eisenhower to discuss it, but the president refused to meet him until the Israelis had relinquished Egyptian territory. And so, on November 8, Ben-Gurion wrote to Eisenhower: “We have never planned to annex the Sinai Desert . . . [We will] willingly withdraw our forces.”¹²

Though the principle of withdrawal had been accepted, Israeli troops stayed in Sinai and the Gaza Strip; their complete withdrawal would be announced by Dag Hammarskjöld on March 8, 1957. During the intervening four months, they mapped and photographed every part of the Sinai and hid caches of food and water in anticipation of future wars. “When we were finally forced to leave, I took it very hard,” Ariel Sharon remembered. “Most of all I could not understand why we withdrew from Gaza and from the settlement Ben-Gurion had established there. The relentless terror from the strip was one of the main problems we had tried to solve with this war. Our overriding goal had been to find a way of forcing Egypt to accept responsibility [for fedayeen activity] and put an end to it. And now the Egyptians would be coming back. It was as if we had not solved anything at all.”¹³

Though there was already much animus toward Israel across the Arab world, the Suez crisis made it worse. “The readiness with which Israel collaborated in this shameful grand conspiracy bore out the Arabs’ fears that Israel was a spear-head and instrument of colonialism in the Middle East,” wrote the Sudanese foreign minister Muhammad Ahmed Mahgoub. “Israel had, therefore, more than ever before become a serious and immediate threat to the security and well-being of the fifty million Arabs in the Middle East.”¹⁴ After Suez, Nasser’s public speeches became more militantly anti-Israel and stressed a more urgent desire for the liberation of Palestine.¹⁵ Owing to the deal it sealed with France at Sèvres for a nuclear reactor at Dimona, Israel would ultimately become a nuclear power as a result of the Suez crisis. While this may have made some Israelis feel safer, it would fuel ambitions toward nuclear arms in the hostile surrounding states. The specter of nuclear escalation in the Middle East would rise to haunt the region in the twenty-first century.

Operation Musketeer failed. Many claimed this was because it went too slowly. “Had it been possible to compress the operation into two or three days,” the then permanent secretary at the British Ministry of Defence, Richard Powell, said later, “the world would have been faced with a fait accompli and could have settled down to accept it.”¹⁶ Speaking in 1966, American admiral Arleigh Burke thought that Dulles might have supported the British if they had pulled the operation off more rapidly. “There’s certainly no doubt that he was solidified in his position because of the failure of the British to really pick the rose,” he said. “They fumbled it, and they made a mess of their operation.”¹⁷ White House staff secretary Andrew Goodpaster agreed: “Whatever their purpose was, they chose the world’s worst method of carrying it out and as the days went on and we read all about this parachute attack that was going to occur and it didn’t occur and it didn’t occur, and the pressure was building up, really any chance of it being carried through was lost in the way that this was done.”¹⁸

Musketeer was hamstrung by political considerations from the beginning. It was hastily and carelessly repackaged to fit the fake peacekeeping scenario dreamed up at Sèvres, and was repeatedly reimprovised as it went on to fit rapidly changing political objectives. Even if it had been put into action as originally conceived, though, it would have been impossible to compress the operation into two or three days. As the chief of the Imperial General Staff had repeatedly advised, the nearest usable harbor was Malta, 1,100 miles from Port Said. This crossing would take warships six to seven days at full tilt. The psychological warfare component in Phase 2 was intended to turn the majority of the Egyptian people and army against Nasser. Even with Musketeer spread over a couple of weeks, this phase was too brief to have any chance of success, and over two to three days it could barely have been started. Logistically, as the joint chiefs of staff had been pointing out since the summer, the fight from the canal to Cairo was not likely to be as quick and easy as Eden hoped and might take weeks. Operation Musketeer was not fit for purpose, and no amount of wishful thinking from politicians would change this. “It was not a well done military operation at all,” remarked Eisenhower. “It looked clumsy. I don’t know what happened.”¹⁹

In London, Eden’s government attempted to argue that the intervention was positive, for it had stiffened the resolve of the United Nations to deal with the issue of the Suez Canal. This convinced few: it was, as the Labour MP Denis Healey described it, “like Al Capone taking credit for improving the efficiency of the Chicago police.”²⁰ There was a vote of confidence in Eden in the House of Commons on November 8. The Conservative MP Nigel Nicolson went to see the chief whip, Edward Heath, beforehand. “I said that I would support the government only if he could assure me that we were not attempting to topple Nasser by a subterfuge,” remembered Nicolson. “He held my gaze steadily, and said nothing. I thanked him for his honesty, and left.”

The Conservatives still had a majority, so Eden survived the vote—though Nicolson and six other Tory MPs abstained. Even so, “Nothing I have done in my life affords me greater pleasure in recollection than the moment at 10pm on November 8, 1956,” wrote Nicolson forty years later, “when I sat in the library of the House of Commons, deaf to the appeal of the division bells.”²¹ Nicolson was deemed a “traitor” by the extreme right-wing League of Empire Loyalists. His constituency party held a ballot of confidence in him. He narrowly lost and was obliged to resign his seat at the next election.

In the House of Commons, the loyal Conservative MP Peter Thorneycroft argued that Soviet plans had included “the take-over of the Middle East, using Nasser as her instrument.” British troops, he said, discovered on the ground that Egypt “had been armed to the teeth by Russia,” though since Nasser had been public about his arms deals with Czechoslovakia for over a year, this was not a revelation. Moreover, after news broke of Nasser’s Czech arms deal in late 1955, Britain had ramped up its own sales of weapons to Egypt in an attempt to forestall further Soviet deals. In the first half of 1956, Britain sold four times as many arms and explosives to Egypt as it did to Israel, and fifty times as many aircraft and aircraft parts. (Over the previous five years, those ratios had been two and a half times and three times, respectively.) When British forces assessed the war matériel they had captured from Egypt, there were four times more British-made weapons than Soviet or Czech weapons.²² Thorneycroft omitted to mention this. “We intervened to stop the war, and we perhaps stopped it in the nick of time, before the Egyptian air force, organised by Russia, ran amok in the Middle East,” he claimed.²³

Operation Musketeer had damaged what credibility Britain had in the Middle East. “Popular sentiment against Nuri [es-Said, Britain’s ally] is rising in Iraq,” noted Allen Dulles, “and he may become ‘ill’ and retire, at least for the time being, leaving the country to more nationalistic elements. At present strong anti-British sentiment in Iraq has resulted in a desire to reconsider the Baghdad pact structure in order to exclude the British and obtain United States’ membership.”²⁴

General Burns, the Canadian chief of the United Nations Expeditionary Force, arrived in Cairo on November 8. Nasser suspected that this force would be a proxy to enforce the same “international” control of the canal that the British and French had wanted. He refused to accept troops from nations he saw as British stooges—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Pakistan. Lester Pearson was exasperated: Canada had, after all, brokered the deal, and had gone against its ally Britain to do so. He himself was under attack from conservative politicians and press in Canada and Britain for supposedly taking Nasser’s side. Dag Hammarskjöld persuaded Nasser to accept a compromise. Though there would be no Canadian infantry soldiers, Canadian administrative and logistical staff could be attached. The force itself was made up of troops from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, India, Indonesia, Colombia, Brazil, and Yugoslavia, under Burns’s command. Their first job was clearing the canal of the ships Nasser had used to block it. With his consent, they began on November 14.

One of the problems for the United Nations Expeditionary Force was that its members had no uniform apart from those of their own countries—yet they had to be distinguishable from the fighting men of Britain, France, Israel, or Egypt. Somebody at the United Nations came up with the idea that they should wear berets in the organization’s distinctive blue. There was no time to have them made, so the Expeditionary Force borrowed thousands of American plastic helmet liners, which were spray-painted blue.²⁵ The blue berets or blue helmets of the United Nations would become an international symbol of peacekeeping for the rest of the century and beyond.

The “special relationship” between Britain and the United States took a hit from the Suez crisis. For the Americans the problem was deceit, according to their ambassador in Paris, Douglas Dillon. “This led to further disenchantment with the British, and particularly with Eden personally.” By contrast, the relationship between the United States and France did not suffer too seriously, though there was bad feeling. “The Americans were hoping, in North Africa, to substitute their presence for ours,” wrote Christian Pineau twenty years later, rather overestimating their ambition. “They reckoned the same in Vietnam and we know what disasters and what horrors they accomplished.”²⁶

“The French felt that they were being a little bad, I think,” Dillon said. “There was a little guilty conscience. But once they decided to do it, they were really going to do it and see it through . . . the French were more frank all through it. I think that was the reason. The British consistently misled us, misinformed us and the French did not.”²⁷

Eden and his supporters felt the Americans had been disloyal. In the absence of full disclosure about the Suez plot, many British politicians and soldiers, as well as ordinary citizens, blamed the United States for thwarting what they believed to be a nobly intentioned, if incompetent, peacekeeping operation. Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s private secretary, admitted that he did not realize the British government “could be politically so inept, militarily so dilatory and indecisive and nationally so disunited, even gutless,” but added that even so he could not believe “that the Americans would turn on us with such joyful malevolence.”²⁸ The joyful malevolence was blamed on Foster Dulles by the British press—“but their bitter comments did not bother Dulles,” wrote the American diplomat Robert Murphy. “In fact, he seemed to enjoy their attitude. If they wanted to assign to him, rather than to Eisenhower, the dominant role in our Suez policy, that did not displease Dulles.”²⁹

Speaking a few years later, Eisenhower expressed his frustration that some Britons felt betrayed by the Americans. “And you know, strangely enough, later when things didn’t go the way they thought they should in Britain, some of their press began to charge us with pulling the rug from under them and letting the British down,” he said. “Nothing could have been further from the truth. We’d told them from the very beginning that would be our attitude. . . . I just couldn’t think of anything worse than to have Britain and the United States completely on the outs on anything. This was a place where we differed possibly because of differences of background and all the rest of it, and I don’t mean to say that I think we were perfect in our solutions. But we thought we were following principle and that’s a pretty good place to stay.”³⁰

Eisenhower’s anger with Eden grew over the final months of 1956. Winthrop Aldrich, the American ambassador to London, was surprised by Eisenhower’s vitriol. “The President just went off the deep end. He wouldn’t have anything further to do with Eden at all. He wouldn’t even communicate with him.”³¹ Aldrich claimed that for the rest of Eden’s prime ministership he was obliged to conduct all important Anglo-American business with Rab Butler, Lord Salisbury, and Harold Macmillan, with whom the president was still on speaking terms.

By November 9, Britain was plummeting headfirst into an economic crisis. The United States refused to support the pound with credits and would not let the International Monetary Fund (IMF) do so, either.³² Saudi Arabia embargoed oil exports to Britain and France that day; Lebanon embargoed tankers that were loading oil for Britain and France.³³ The British government introduced its national reduction of 10 percent in oil consumption. Motorists were asked to abandon their cars. By the end of November, Britain’s total gold and dollar reserves stood at $1,965 million—less than the $2,000 million that the Bank of England and the British Treasury considered was a minimum to keep the sterling area afloat. To make matters worse, from that sum the Treasury still owed $175.5 million to service its loans from the United States, another $5 million to the United States for a Marshall aid loan, $70 million to the European Payments Union and $7.5 million to Canada for its wartime loans, which altogether would debit another $258 million.³⁴ “And the interesting thing about the whole affair, which is often forgotten in Britain, is that the only successful use of sanctions in history was the Americans over Suez,” remarked the Labour MP Denis Healey.³⁵

CIA agent Miles Copeland had little sympathy for the British. “They blamed their losses on American pressures, arguing that had they been allowed to follow through to final success the outcome would have been favourable,” he wrote. “But, here again, all the intelligence we had indicated the opposite.” By 1956 the British intelligence services had neglected Egypt for several years, staffing their operation with low-caliber people and preferring to rely on self-serving fantasy rather than uncomfortable fact. The CIA had worked closely with Nasser and understood more clearly what was going on.

The British government had done every one of the worst possible things it could do with regard to its reputation in the Arab world. It had colluded with Israel; it had invaded a sovereign state on spurious grounds; it had prioritized oil and trade over honor and justice; it had raised the specter of imperialism, which it had been trying for years to bury; and, perhaps worst of all, the military operation it had done all these things to facilitate had failed. There was no point blaming the Americans for any of this. “Maybe we had there a ‘historical folly,’ as Barbara Tuchman was later to describe acts of leaders based on preconceived fixed notions while ignoring all contrary signs,” Miles Copeland wrote. “But I thought then, as I think now, that the British thrive on folly, so they’ll always soldier through somehow.”³⁶

In November, Selwyn Lloyd went to Washington. From his bed in Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the secretary of state asked the British foreign secretary, “Selwyn, why did you stop? Why didn’t you go through with it and get Nasser down?”

“Well, Foster, if you had so much as winked at us we might have gone on,” Lloyd replied.

Dulles, according to Lloyd’s recollection, “replied that he could not have done that.”

Lloyd was astonished by Dulles’s line. “If ever there was an occasion when one could have been knocked down by the proverbial feather, this was it,” he wrote.³⁷

On November 20, the diplomat Douglas MacArthur II (nephew of the World War II general of the same name) had a meeting with Eisenhower at the White House. According to MacArthur, “the President brought up the question of the great undependability and unreliability of Nasser and the fact that it would be most desirable if he were eventually gotten rid of.”³⁸ The expression of this sentiment at this point would have exasperated the British. Chester Cooper agreed that the administration in Washington “deplored” Nasser. “In the back of their minds (and perhaps locked in the vault of the National Security Council) may have been some more graceful and gradual approach toward Nasser’s disposal or subvention,” he wrote. “Eden and Mollet chose a blunter instrument, direct military attack. Eisenhower and Dulles refused to condone, let alone participate in, the carnal act. Instead, they chose a posture of high virtue and then paraded their chastity before the world. But this did not mean that the Administration was . . . above enjoying the rewards of sin, if they just happened to fall its way.”³⁹

Yet Allen Dulles, among many others, appeared to doubt the potential for getting Nasser down. “Politically, there is no organized opposition to Nasr,” he told a congressional meeting at the White House on November 9. “As yet no one aspires to take his place.”⁴⁰ The CIA agents in Egypt still tended to back Nasser. If there was a lesson for the United States government to take from Suez regarding its own practice, it was that the CIA in Washington often made substantial misjudgments, which it could have avoided had it paid closer attention to the reports provided by its own field agents.

Even Eden himself ultimately accepted that it would not have helped to see Musketeer through. In his memoirs, he wrote, “In the months after these events I repeatedly read and heard the comment, especially from the United States, even from those in high authority: ‘If only you had gone on.’” But the United States government, he now realized, would never have changed its attitude—though he attributed this to the enmity he believed the Americans had against the British. “The United States Government had engaged their authority in the lead against us and would not have been appeased had Anglo-French forces occupied more of the canal or even the whole of it. In all probability they would only have been more indignant.”⁴¹

Eisenhower proposed building up another leader of the Arabs to challenge Nasser—but not the British loyalist Nuri es-Said. According to MacArthur, “The President said he thought the person to build up was King Saud, who was a great spiritual leader and keeper of the holy places, etc.”⁴² After Suez, Eisenhower overcame his instinctive distaste for Middle Eastern monarchies to strengthen American ties with countries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, which he hoped would contain Nasser’s Egypt.⁴³

In December, the British Labour MP Richard Crossman visited Israel and admitted to David Ben-Gurion that Britain “was now totally dependent on the will of the U.S.” Ben-Gurion warned that this was dangerous. “It is imperative to establish a United States of Europe,” said the Israeli prime minister, using Winston Churchill’s phrase. “The existence of two free forces in the world, independent of each other but friendly and allied, will ensure world peace.”⁴⁴ Yet over the following decades Britain would prove resistant to uniting Europe or taking a strong leadership role within it, allowing the United States greater and greater global sway.

Though they continued to be allies and would cooperate again within a year, the bad blood between Britain and the United States did not entirely ebb.⁴⁵ A decade later, Chester Cooper was on the White House staff. Lyndon Johnson, then president, wanted the British to join his war in Vietnam against Ho Chi Minh, “whom he regarded, just as Eden had once regarded Nasser, as the devil incarnate.” Cooper was asked to persuade the British to back the Americans up. He approached his contacts in Whitehall, and suggested that at the very least the British might send medical teams. “The answer from Downing Street was ‘Sorry. The Prime Minister would have great difficulty in the Commons. Most Members of Parliament think Washington is morally in the wrong. And many remember the American reaction to Suez.’”⁴⁶ At last, then, Suez may have done Britain an unexpected favor, by keeping it out of one of the twentieth century’s messiest wars.

János Kádár returned to Budapest in a convoy of Soviet tanks and armored vehicles on November 7 to take up his position as leader of Hungary. When they reached parliament, he went inside and found his wife, Mária.

“You should have left this shit to Rákosi’s lot,” she said. “It shouldn’t be you doing this.”

Kádár’s colleagues were shocked by his transformation. He had acquired more in Moscow than just a natty suit: his whole personality seemed to have changed from that of an amiable relative liberal to an imperious ruler.⁴⁷ Around November 10 or 11, the last of the armed rebels in Hungary were defeated by Soviet troops. Several thousand of the fifteen thousand or so Hungarians who had taken up arms were killed; more than half of the dead were under the age of twenty-five. The new regime issued an order to round up anyone connected to the revolution. More than a hundred thousand were arrested; thirty-five thousand faced trial; twenty-six thousand were jailed. It is thought that around six hundred were executed.⁴⁸ Nineteen-year-old rebel Csaba Varró was among those marked for death, though his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He remembered that the prisoners—many of whom, like him, were still in their teens—communicated by tapping in Morse code on the pipes of the heating system. His cell was next to the door through which people were dragged to the gallows. “The most harrowing scene was when they cried out: ‘Please, don’t avenge our deaths!’” he remembered. “Even those who were really innocent and still had to die, often cried out, ‘Don’t avenge our deaths!’”⁴⁹ It was a remarkable plea to cease all further bloodshed.

In Moscow, the mood was upbeat. Some students and staff at Moscow State University tried to spoil it by holding rallies denouncing the Soviet intervention in Hungary and shouting anti-Soviet slogans. KGB forces were dispatched to arrest them. A thorough purge of higher education was carried out to avert any further trouble.⁵⁰

“The whole thing had been crushed in a single day,” was how Veljko Mićunović characterized Khrushchev’s view of Operation Whirlwind. “There had been practically no resistance. Kádár was a very good Communist and he would now extend and strengthen the government.”⁵¹ The Soviets left checkpoints to the west and south of Hungary unguarded for some weeks, perhaps hoping the rebel element would leave; two hundred thousand people made it to Austria or Yugoslavia before the borders were sealed again.

Despite his bullishness to Mićunović, Khrushchev had been badly shaken by the rebellion. At a New Year’s party a few weeks later, he declared that he and his comrades were all Stalinists: a reversal of the Secret Speech. He made more statements in favor of Stalinism during the weeks after that. He felt he had tried to change too fast and lost control. In hindsight, 1956–57 would mark the high point of cooperation between China and the Soviet Union. The upsets in Poland and Hungary confirmed Mao Tse-tung’s view that Khrushchev was not mature or sophisticated enough to lead the Soviet Union. Mao began to make speeches implying that Khrushchev and his like were weak-spined and incapable of analysis: they were not good Marxist-Leninists, and “lack revolutionary morality.”⁵² Though the two men would theoretically continue to cooperate until 1960, fissures in the Moscow-Peking relationship were visible.

Khrushchev’s remarks to the presidium on October 31 had linked Suez and Hungary. That day, he had thought Egypt was in danger of falling to imperialists. He could not allow a similar victory for Western interests—as he saw them—on his own periphery. Britain and France’s action in Suez was a factor in Khrushchev moving his policy in Hungary away from tolerance and toward violence, both because he had to look tough and because he could. As a CIA report judged afterward, “the military conflict in the Middle East offered them [the Soviets] both the desired diversion of world politics and international public attention and an opportunity for new political interventions.”⁵³

Yet if Suez condemned Hungary, Hungary may have spared the world a greater conflict. The fact that the Soviet leaders’ attention was taken up by Hungary for the crucial days of the crisis meant they had little time to consider the requests of Shukri al-Kuwatly and others to send troops to Egypt.⁵⁴ If the Soviets had intervened militarily in Egypt against Britain, France, and Israel at an early stage, the potential for the Suez crisis to explode into World War III might all too easily have been realized. As it was, Khrushchev could not give Suez his full attention until troops had been dispatched to Hungary on November 4. Bulganin’s inflammatory letters were sent overnight on November 5–6. By November 6, Britain was facing a major economic crisis, violent protests in the streets, and international sanctions. Though Khrushchev believed his rocket threat was decisive, and it probably did have a psychological effect in London and Paris, Eisenhower had already taken the steps that would force Britain and France into retreat.

Had the Suez invasion not interrupted the Hungarian rebellion, paralyzing NATO and the United Nations, the Hungarian rebels might have received outside help. The rebels themselves hoped and pleaded for it; they had advocates in the American legation in Budapest and in Washington. Eisenhower was determined to avoid a direct confrontation with the Soviets. It is unlikely he would have sent American armed forces unilaterally. Yet something could have been done through international organizations, especially if nonaligned nations like India could have been brought on board. In the event, nothing was done. The message to other “captive peoples” was clear: if you rebel, the United States will not help you, and the Soviets will crush you with overwhelming force. There was discontent in other satellite states at the time. If things had gone better in Hungary, more rebellions might have been inspired. The whole history of Europe and the Cold War might have developed differently.

On November 21, it was announced that Anthony Eden was leaving London for three weeks on the orders of his doctor. Rab Butler would fill in for him temporarily. Two days later, Eden and his wife departed for Jamaica and Goldeneye, the beachside villa owned by James Bond creator Ian Fleming. This was a public relations disaster. The austerity-bound British public generally felt that a serving prime minister ought not reward himself for orchestrating the biggest foreign policy disaster of the postwar era with an extended holiday in the Caribbean. “Torquay and a sun-ray lamp would have been more peaceful and patriotic,” admitted Fleming’s wife, Ann.⁵⁵ Lady Eden attempted to defend the choice: “A spell in Berkshire or somewhere would not have been any good, as Anthony would simply have gone on working.” He did anyway, issuing dozens of cables from Goldeneye about the United Nations force, the clearance of the Suez Canal, and the machinations of politics in London.⁵⁶

“Jamaica is a beautiful island, but sinister,” wrote Lady Eden. “There were strange tom-toms beating in the night—but when I asked Violet, the cook, what was going on she said, ‘Sal-va-tion Army.’ I was not wholly convinced.”⁵⁷ Though every James Bond novel had been written at Goldeneye, none of 007’s cool rubbed off on the prime minister. Fleming was not impressed with his guest, writing to a neighbor about Britain’s performance in the Suez crisis: “In the whole of modern history I can’t think of a comparable shambles created by any single country.”⁵⁸

Eden returned to London on December 14, still valiantly arguing that he had meant all along for the United Nations to come in to stop a Soviet advance. Few believed him, not least since Guy Mollet had already blurted out the truth. On December 9, the French prime minister told a press conference that there had been collusion with Israel and that Britain and France had hidden it from the United States because they knew Eisenhower would try to stop it.

On December 20, Denis Healey asked Eden in the House of Commons whether Britain had had any foreknowledge of the Israeli attack. “There were no plans got together [with Israel] to attack Egypt,” he replied. Commenting in 1994, Healey remembered: “He told a straight lie.”⁵⁹ Cabinet members continued to insist that there had been no conspiracy. “The wild accusations of collusion between the British, French, and Israeli Governments which were hurled by the Labour Party had absolutely no foundation in fact,” lied Lord Kilmuir in his 1964 memoirs.⁶⁰ That afternoon, Eden told the cabinet secretary Sir Norman Brook to destroy all records of Britain’s collusion with Israel. Brook apparently did so the same day.⁶¹ The attempt to cleanse the historical record did not work: far too many people knew the truth. As with most cases of the destruction of documents, all it did was make the perpetrators look even more guilty.

Guy Mollet continued as prime minister of France without any sense of shame. “I have only one regret: not to have been able to go all the way—but this was not determined by France,” he said. “As far as I am concerned, I accept the entire responsibility of the Suez Operation, and I am convinced that I did my international duty.”⁶² Christian Pineau was frank about the Protocol of Sèvres negotiations and the extent of collusion in a 1965 interview with the John Foster Dulles Oral History Project at Princeton, then expanded this into a full account in his 1976 book on the subject of the Suez War.⁶³ In the longer term, though, Suez fueled discontent with the government inside the French army—discontent that eventually led to a greater crisis over Algeria in 1958 and the collapse of the French Fourth Republic.⁶⁴

On December 22, British and French forces finally withdrew from the Suez Canal Zone, taking with them all their furniture, rugs, and chandeliers. The French also took a clock given to Ferdinand de Lesseps by the Empress Eugénie. The British took a marble bust of Napoleon.⁶⁵ The final few British and French troops embarked at Port Said the day before Christmas Eve alongside the colossal bronze statue of de Lesseps.

With the invading troops leaving Egyptian territory, cheering throngs hoisted Nasser’s picture aloft. The next day, a large crowd assembled along the quayside in Port Said. A ring of explosives was set around de Lesseps’s statue. With tremendous force, the memorial to the Frenchman who had started it all was blown up, its torso toppling forth into the water through a great cloud of smoke and dust. All that remained of de Lesseps were his boots and the stone pedestal. As a fitting memorial to the whole affair, that was allowed to remain: a pair of boots on a pedestal, to match the similar pair of boots on a pedestal that had been a Stalin statue before the rebellion in Budapest. Unfortunately, only one of these imperial influences had been permanently vanquished.

The winner of the Suez War was Gamal Abdel Nasser. His army had lost every battle. As it turned out, that did not matter. Britain and France had to back down—as did Israel, eventually. Nasser secured the Suez Canal for Egypt. “The prestige of Colonel Nasser in the Arab countries has never been greater,” declared a headline in Le Monde on November 8.⁶⁶ It was not just the Arab countries. Throughout the nonaligned and Communist world, Nasser was acclaimed as the Third World hero who had defeated two great Western empires.

“In the end, the Suez affair became a personal business, a duel between two men,” wrote Mohamed Heikal. “It was a situation that could only end in total victory for one and total defeat for the other. Nasser won and he never felt one speck of pity for Eden.” When he saw Eden fall from power and lose his health, Nasser remarked, “It was the Curse of the Pharaohs.”⁶⁷

Dwight D. Eisenhower emerged from the Suez and Hungarian crises with his international and domestic reputation enhanced. He had publicly taken a stand in favor of what was right, though that meant opposing two major NATO allies, Britain and France, as well as the United States’ best friend and protégé in the Middle East, Israel. He was able to do this without causing permanent damage to NATO. He refused to be intimidated just before his own election by the threat of losing the Jewish vote if he took a stand against Israel, or of losing the conservative vote by siding with left-wing elements internationally. With the Hungary drama playing out alongside Suez, he drew a moral distinction between American and Soviet behavior—even if he did not intervene. Though the United States found itself on the same side as the Soviet Union over Suez, he avoided consorting with the Soviets to any extent that might have damaged his government’s aims or endorsed their government’s excesses. He had proven his credentials as a peacemaker on the world stage—not for the first time, but against the greatest odds, living up to his own declaration that the only way to win World War III was to prevent it. He also won his second presidential election. Eight years later, an American journalist asked Nasser what had saved him at Suez: was it the Soviets, the opposition in Britain, the United Nations, India, the Arabs? Nasser replied with one word: “Eisenhower.”⁶⁸

“I find it difficult to believe, but I have been told by sources in whom I have confidence that, at the UN, delegates from Third World countries were actually smiling at our delegates as they passed them in the halls,” wrote CIA agent Miles Copeland. “But it didn’t last, because . . . [of] something called the ‘Eisenhower Doctrine.’”⁶⁹

The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 would commit American troops to defend any Middle Eastern government “endangered by armed aggression from any nation controlled by international Communism.” CIA agent Wilbur Eveland, listening to the draft speech, despaired: “Thinking perhaps of his boyhood in the Midwest, Eisenhower liked the term Mideast, and I sighed as it popped up all over the speech.” More serious, though, was the worry he shared with the other CIA men who had known and supported Nasser all along: that the suits in Washington failed to understand Arab concerns, framing them all as being about “the danger that stems from international communism.”

“Who, I wondered, had reached this determination of what the Arabs considered a danger?” Eveland wrote. “Israel’s army had just invaded Egypt and still occupied all of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. And, had it not been for Russia’s threat to intervene on behalf of the Egyptians, the British, French, and Israeli forces might now be sitting in Cairo, celebrating Nasser’s ignominious fall from power.”⁷⁰ According to Miles Copeland, “The Eisenhower Doctrine infuriated those Arab states which our political action campaigns were trying to bring into line, and only stimulated the prevailing inclinations to venality among our political mercenaries.”⁷¹

As far as many Arabs were concerned, this was all part of the Americans’ long-term plan to replace Britain and France as the biggest foreign player on the oil-rich sands of Middle East. “We thanked them,” remembered Nasser’s ally Amin Howeidy, later minister of defense and chief of general intelligence. “But everybody thought the Americans wanted to kill us by seizing our throats.”⁷² This may have been vividly expressed but was not far off the mark. “We must fill the vacuum of power which the British filled for a century” in the Middle East, Dulles said, “not merely the ability to act in an emergency but day in day out presence there.”⁷³ The Eisenhower Doctrine declared that the United States would now assert its primacy as an international player in the Middle East. Britain’s sterling crisis showed how weak its grip on that region really was, and how easily it could be lost if the oil dried up. The Suez crisis did not itself trigger political changes such as Britain’s decolonization of Africa and Asia, but it exposed the existing trend of British decline and American ascendancy—and once that trend was exposed, it was unstoppable.⁷⁴

“The genius of you Americans,” Nasser told Copeland, “is that you never make clearcut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves that make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something we are missing.” He added that the Eisenhower Doctrine was “one of the shrewdest mistakes ever made by a Great Power diplomat.” Copeland added that he realized later in life that “many of our ‘stupid moves,’ if that is what they were, were made for very good reasons and not by stupid people.”⁷⁵

The scheming of Britain, France, and the United States over oil, politics, and power helped create and fuel the problems of the Middle East for decades afterward. Nations and peoples were used as assets or weapons. The enemies of enemies were falsely considered to be friends. Lines were drawn in the sand, blown away, drawn again. All of this was done with precious little foresight about where it might lead.

There were plenty of well-informed, reasonable, and not at all stupid people within the British, French, and American administrative and intelligence systems that made these decisions. Many of them did warn their governments of the likely consequences of giving succor to extreme religious organizations, dividing territories, building up tyrants, and creating wars. Their advice was too often discarded. Men like Eden and Mollet—and frequently men like Foster and Allen Dulles—had their eyes on greater prizes and did not always want to hear the arguments against seizing them. But, for a signal moment in October and November 1956, the president of the United States of America did exactly the right thing for the right reasons. Britain and France’s invasion was wrong. Even aside from its threat to Egypt’s sovereignty and to the balance of power in the Middle East, and even aside from the catastrophic effect it had on their own foreign policy objectives, it seriously undermined the United Nations. It could have damaged it fatally, had it not been for the efforts of Lester Pearson. Many feared at the time that it might even trigger World War III—especially once the Soviets were involved. Eisenhower did not flinch. He just made it stop.

Eisenhower’s refusal to let Britain and France win at Suez shifted the balance of power globally. Britain did not have to go along with everything the Americans wanted, as it would demonstrate during the Vietnam War—but if it tried to act outside the Commonwealth against the interests of the United States, Washington could and might slap it down. The whole world saw that some former colonial subjects could overtake their former colonial masters. During the Second World War, when the term superpower was coined to describe states that could exert extraordinary power on a global scale, there were considered to be three of them: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire. Now there were two.