PROLOGUE

“I WANT HIM MURDERED”

March 1956 // Savoy Hotel // London, United Kingdom

It had been a busy Monday for Anthony Nutting. As part of his ministerial duties at the British Foreign Office, he had completed a plan for a United Nations police force takeover of British military positions on Israel’s border. At the same time, Britain would increase military and ecaonomic aid to its Arab allies.

As the spring day shaded into evening, Nutting left his Whitehall office for the more sumptuous surroundings of the Savoy Hotel on the north bank of the Thames. He was to dine with a visiting American member of the United Nations disarmament commission.

Halfway through dinner, they were interrupted. Nutting was told there was an urgent telephone call for him on the hotel switchboard. He excused himself. Out of earshot, he took the call.

“It’s me,” said the agitated voice at the other end. “What’s all this poppycock you’ve sent me? I don’t agree with a single word of it.”

Caught flat-footed, Nutting explained that the plan he had submitted earlier that day was designed to rationalize Britain’s position in the Middle East. The aim was to reduce the influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt and the most irritating of all the thorns in the British side.

“But what’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or ‘neutralising’ him, as you call it?” shouted the voice. “I want him murdered, can’t you understand?”¹

The threat shocked Nutting, but he kept his cool. Nasser could not be removed, he said, unless a preferable alternative were ready to replace him. Otherwise, Egypt might descend into anarchy.

“But I don’t want an alternative. And I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt,” snarled the voice, which belonged to the prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. There was a click on the line, then silence. Sir Anthony Eden had hung up.²

July 26, 1956 // Alexandria, Egypt

The thermometer hit 110˚ Fahrenheit as Gamal Abdel Nasser stepped up to speak in Alexandria’s Mansheya Square. He was thirty-eight years old, broad-shouldered, confident, and ambitious. Since the beginning of the decade, he had been a rising star in Egypt’s military. He had won important admirers—most notably inside the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s operation in Egypt. Nasser made it clear he was open to American overtures—potentially to the cost of Britain’s longs-tanding influence in Egypt: “America can win our friendship by acting in accordance with the principles of the American liberation revolution,” he said.³

Nasser had already overthrown a king and a president. He had been behind the dethroning of King Farouk in 1952. He had ousted Farouk’s successor, President Mohamed Neguib, in 1954. This was not a man who would quail at taking on an empire, or even two.

In another age, Nasser could have been the sort of Arab leader favored by the West. He was pro-American, anti-Communist, and secular, yet blessed with almost unlimited credibility throughout the Middle East. He was, according to one CIA agent, “a magnificent-looking man,” witty and personable, with an excellent command of English.⁴ He was fiercely opposed to Israel, but so were all Arab leaders; the CIA believed he had more potential for making peace than most of them. Though Egypt and Israel had engaged in an arms race against each other, he had consistently tried to avoid open war. With American encouragement, he had even allowed secret channels for communication to open between Cairo and Tel Aviv. He could be ruthless with his own people, but much of his ruthlessness was directed toward fighting the Muslim Brotherhood—whose leading ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, would go on to become the intellectual father of al-Qaeda. Less than two years earlier, Nasser had been speaking on the same spot in Mansheya Square when a Muslim Brother had slipped through the crowd and, from a distance of just twenty-five feet, fired eight shots at him. All eight had missed. Nasser had enhanced his public image by appearing unruffled.

The estimated quarter of a million people filling the elegant park of Mansheya Square on July 26, 1956, were crammed in under the palm trees between neoclassical facades leading down to the Mediterranean Sea. Nasser’s speech was broadcast over his Voice of the Arabs radio station to listeners throughout the Arab world and was simultaneously translated into English and French for those farther afield. For half an hour, he described imperialist crimes committed over the centuries by Britain and France, and—in a comic, knockabout style that the crowd enjoyed—his own recent negotiations with Eugene Black, the president of the World Bank. “Mr. Black suddenly reminded me of Ferdinand de Lesseps,” he said.⁵ He seemed to get stuck on this theme, and conspicuously mentioned the name several more times. “De Lesseps,” he kept repeating. “De Lesseps.”

The name was familiar to his audience, even if they were not sure why he kept saying it. Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps had been a nineteenth-century French aristocrat from a diplomatic family. He had befriended Mohamed Said, the fourth son of the pasha of Egypt, when both men were youths. Said ran to fat; his strict father, Mohamed Ali Pasha, put him on a regime of diet and exercise. The miserable Said appealed to de Lesseps, who passed him secret bowls of macaroni.

That was fateful pasta. As an adult, de Lesseps developed one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the age: the Suez Canal. From ancient times, the rulers of East and West had dreamed of cutting a canal through the Sinai Peninsula. The slender neck of land just over a hundred miles wide, separating Africa from the Middle East, blocked a direct sea route from Europe to Asia. Ships were obliged to spend weeks circumnavigating the African continent. De Lesseps realized his dream with land and loans granted by his grateful childhood friend, Mohamed Said Pasha, who was by then ruler of Egypt and could be as fat as he liked.

The opening of the canal on November 17, 1869, was one of the grandest parties in history. The harbors of Alexandria and Port Said were clogged with royal yachts. Empress Eugénie of France cut a striking figure on the hot sands of Ismailia, riding a camel sidesaddle with her frothy underskirts billowing in the breeze. Accompanying her were the emperor of Austria-Hungary and princes of Prussia, Russia, and Holland. Thousands of Europe’s and the Orient’s most celebrated personalities dined in the desert under silken tents. The evening was, according to one French journalist, “like something out of the Arabian nights.”

Like many good parties, Egypt’s opening of the Suez Canal was followed by a long and unpleasant hangover. The canal transformed Egypt into a conduit for world trade. Egypt’s rulers had believed this would make their nation rich. Instead, it made them vulnerable. The canal was coveted by the British, then approaching the height of their power. Britain’s bloated eastern empire helped it account for more than half of Suez Canal traffic before 1914.⁶ Britain and France were far stronger than Egypt—and Egypt had something they each wanted to control.

Egypt was a province of the Ottoman Empire until 1867, when the sultan bestowed a degree of independence upon it and raised the status of Egyptian monarchs from pasha to khedive. The first official khedive of Egypt was Mohamed Said Pasha’s nephew, Ismail Pasha. Ismail Pasha mired himself in a lengthy, expensive war with Ethiopia. During his first twelve years on the throne, his country’s debts increased from £3 million (by share of GDP, about £3.5 billion today) to £100 million (£117 billion).

Britain’s prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had his eye on the khedive’s 44 percent share in the Suez Canal Company, the private company that had exclusive license to operate the canal until the distant future date of 1968. In 1875, the khedive put his shares up for sale. The British Parliament was not in session at the moment they went on the market, so Disraeli could not put the deal through the legislature. Instead, he borrowed £4 million (£4.75 billion) personally from the banker Lord Rothschild on Britain’s behalf to buy the khedive out.

The physical structure of the canal was owned by Egypt. Britain’s new 44 percent share in the operating company—not the canal itself, though it was often assumed they were the same thing—was afterward said to be the best investment the British government ever made. Yet it was not secure enough. Overreacting to rumors of Egyptian unrest, British forces invaded Alexandria and Port Said in 1882.

De Lesseps, a patriot who had done his best to keep Britain out of the canal project all along, was hysterical with rage. “The English shall never enter the Canal, never,” he telegraphed to Ahmad Arabi, the Egyptian minister of war. “Make no attempt to intercept my Canal. I am there.”⁷ There or not, he could do nothing to stop them. Nor could the Egyptians. The British took Cairo, and installed a “representative” with the powers of a viceroy. Though it was not technically colonized, Egypt’s sovereignty was abrogated. In Constantinople, the great European powers—along with Russia and with Egypt’s imperial master, the Ottoman Empire—agreed to internationalize the canal. Egypt’s opinion was not sought.

“We do not want Egypt,” the British prime minister Lord Palmerston had once said, “any more than a rational man with an estate in the north of England and a residence in the south would wish to possess the inns on the north road. All he could want would be that the inns should be well-kept, always accessible, and furnishing him, when he came, with mutton-chops and post-horses.”⁸ From 1882, Britain operated what became known as the “veiled protectorate.” The khedive’s family remained on the Egyptian throne, but with a British agent and British advisers pulling the levers behind the scenes—furnishing British visitors with all the mutton-chops and post-horses they required. The protectorate became official only in 1914, when the Ottoman Empire, still theoretically the sovereign power above Egypt’s khedive, supported Germany against Britain in World War I. After the protectorate’s unveiling, the British tendency to treat the canal as their own property became increasingly difficult for Egyptians to ignore.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a literary, cultural, and ultimately political movement in the Middle East which became known as al-Nahda (the Awakening). This Arab renaissance developed senses of identity and purpose. It was both religious and secular, unifying and regionally diverse, bringing in ideas from the West as well as the East. From it were born ideas of pan-Islamism and the more secular pan-Arabism. The independence movements of many parts of the Arab world against the Ottoman Empire and European imperialism had their roots in al-Nahda.

The Arab renaissance coincided with the industrialized world’s shift from coal to oil as its main energy source and with the discovery of vast reserves of oil in the lands around the Persian Gulf. The oil industry originated in the United States in 1865, when a twenty-six-year-old businessman named John D. Rockefeller won an auction for a Pennsylvania company that would become Standard Oil. Within fifteen years, he was the richest man in the United States.⁹ Britain was then heavily dependent on a domestic coal industry to fuel energy-guzzling resources like the railways and the Royal Navy. Even so, a British oil company, Shell, was founded at the end of the nineteenth century. It later merged with another European company, Royal Dutch. To the fury of imperial Russia, Britain secured exclusive oil concessions in Persia from the shah. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company went public in 1909.

Black blood flowed in ever greater quantities through the veins of the Middle East to sustain the industrializing economies and militaries of Europe. While World War I was horrific for millions of ordinary people, to the oil industry it presented an unmatched opportunity for profit. The years from 1914 to 1918 saw a decisive shift away from the horse to horsepower. The land and air vehicles of war—trucks, motorcars, motorcycles, airplanes, and, from the Battle of the Somme onward, tanks—multiplied exponentially, demanding ever more oil. Moreover, the British Royal Navy was finally persuaded to switch from coal to oil. At the end of 1917, the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau wrote to the American president Woodrow Wilson that gasoline was “as vital as blood in the coming battles,” and warned that an acute shortage of oil might “compel us to a peace unfavourable to the Allies.”¹⁰ In 1918, a senior admiral advised the British prime minister David Lloyd George that the British must “obtain the undisputed control of the greatest amount of Petroleum that we can” if Britannia meant to continue ruling the waves.¹¹

With the Ottoman Empire collapsing, the British and French moved in. Lloyd George coveted the oilfields of Mosul in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), and would soon decide that he also wanted Palmyra, which was on a potential oil pipeline route from Mosul to the Mediterranean. He also toyed with giving Palestine and Syria to the Americans to keep the French out, and later for the same reason became interested in independent Arab rule for Syria.

Days before the war ended, Britain pressed France into releasing a joint declaration dedicating themselves to establishing freedom and democracy in a Middle East liberated from Ottoman rule. They also pledged to support the setting-up of independent governments and free enterprise. Yet the negotiations around the Versailles treaty saw Britain and France fight bitterly over who got what. The League of Nations awarded France a mandate over Syria and Lebanon, and Britain a mandate over the new nation of Iraq as well as Palestine. Britain chose a king for Iraq in Emir Faisal, son of the grand sharif of Mecca. Faisal had been a leader of the Arab revolt and close colleague of T. E. Lawrence before becoming king of Syria in 1920. The French had swiftly ousted him. He went into exile in Britain, where—thanks in part to Lawrence’s lobbying—it was decided he might do as king of Iraq instead. He was installed on his new throne in Baghdad in 1921.

After the war, the rise of the car and other gasoline-fueled vehicles ensured that the world’s thirst for oil kept growing. Egypt did not have Iraq’s oil, but it did have a supply route from the Gulf to Europe: the Suez Canal. In line with Lord Palmerston’s pronouncement about mutton-chops and post-horses, Britain still did not want to colonize Egypt fully. Following a rebellion in 1919, its appetite for taking responsibility for the day-to-day running of the country decreased yet further. In 1922, the government in London granted Egypt theoretical independence—while reserving direct control over communications, defense, the protection of foreign interests and minorities, and the administration of the Sudan. A nationalist party, the Wafd (meaning Delegation), was allowed to form.

With many nationalist leaders in exile, the sultan, Fuad, declared himself king of Egypt and the Sudan. Fuad had wide-ranging political powers: he could dismiss his ministers, dissolve parliament or even suspend the constitution as he wished. Britain sometimes acted with him; sometimes with parliament against him. He was succeeded by his son, King Farouk, in 1936. That same year, the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden helped negotiate a new Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, telling the House of Commons when he was recommending it, “Because of the Suez Canal the integrity of Egypt is a vital interest of the British Empire as well as of Egypt herself.”¹² British troop numbers in the Canal Zone were to be reduced to ten thousand plus support; Britain would train and supply Egypt’s army. If Egypt were threatened by war, the British military would be entitled to return. This allowed Egypt to look more independent, while allowing Britain to focus its resources on the part of Egypt it really cared about.

The treaty was supposed to last for twenty years, to be renegotiated or reaffirmed in 1956. Eden openly assumed it would last in perpetuity.¹³ In recognition of his role in negotiations, his face appeared on an Egyptian postage stamp.¹⁴

Anthony Eden was a product of the landed gentry, Eton, Oxford, and World War I. After his war service on the western front, he had married and produced two sons. He became a member of Parliament in 1923, went to the Foreign Office in 1931, and became foreign secretary four years later. He fell out with Neville Chamberlain and resigned in 1938. There were political considerations behind this resignation—yet the chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon, thought Eden was “both physically and mentally ill.” Eden denied this on the record, but privately confided to fellow MP Malcolm MacDonald that he was indeed “physically unwell and mentally exhausted.”¹⁵ He took the noncabinet post of secretary of state for dominion affairs in 1939—and, after Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940, returned to his former position as foreign secretary. Initially his relationship with Churchill was strong, though the demanding and increasingly erratic prime minister gradually wore him down. He developed a duodenal ulcer within two years of returning to the foreign office.

The Second World War again magnified Egypt’s strategic importance, and Britain’s promised troop reductions and withdrawals from non-canal areas did not come to pass. In 1941, Churchill declared that the “loss of Egypt and the Middle East would be a disaster of the first magnitude to Great Britain, second only to successful invasion [of Britain] and final conquest.”¹⁶ When Nazi troops under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel moved on Alexandria, some Egyptians—including a young Gamal Abdel Nasser and his associate Anwar Sadat—came to believe Rommel might do more for their liberation than the British ever had. Yet Allied troops defeated Rommel’s forces decisively at El Alamein in 1942, driving the Nazi threat away from the Suez Canal.

Britain’s postwar Labour government wanted to remove troops from Egypt entirely. The prime minister, Clement Attlee, proposed in 1946 to abandon the Suez base. Churchill, then leader of the opposition, exploded at this idea, calling it a “scuttle”—which was what he usually said about any retreat from empire, however measured.¹⁷ By 1948, the British had finally fulfilled their promise to restrict their troops to the Canal Zone, though progress on full withdrawal was stymied by complicated negotiations and mistrust on both sides.

In 1951, Churchill was returned to power as prime minister and Eden became foreign secretary yet again. He had suffered personal tragedy at the end of the war: his elder son was killed in Burma, and his marriage disintegrated. Churchill had implied that he would let him take over as party leader—yet in the event decided to stay in control.¹⁸

By now, Eden was a senior figure on the international stage. Yet he was still not well, suffering attacks of appendicitis and jaundice as well as alarming physical collapses. A colleague remembered him fainting twice—literally pitching forward and landing flat on the grass—while attempting to make a speech at a United Nations rally at Warwick Castle in 1950.¹⁹ His flashes of temper and fragile nerves led some to wonder about his genetic inheritance. His baronet father had been such an extreme eccentric—complete with episodes of “uncontrolled rages,” falling to the floor, biting carpets, and hurling flowerpots through plate-glass windows—that even the Wodehousian society of early twentieth-century upper-class England had noticed something was up.²⁰

At the same time as the Conservative Party returned to power in Britain, Egypt’s discontent with its British semi-overlords found expression. The Wafd government abrogated the 1936 treaty and a separate Anglo-Egyptian Condominium on the Sudan, signaling that Egypt no longer considered Britain’s presence in the Canal Zone or the Sudan to be legitimate. Britain hit back by pouring eighty thousand troops into the Canal Zone—eight times more than it was permitted under the 1936 treaty—and setting up a cordon around it.

Faced with what they saw as an occupation, nationalist Egyptians and the Muslim Brotherhood attacked British nationals and property. A general strike was organized against British companies. Ninety percent of Egyptian workers employed by them went on strike, with the Wafd offering them jobs in the civil service instead.²¹

By the beginning of 1952, thirty-three British servicemen and around one hundred Egyptians had been killed. Churchill wanted to mount an aggressive response. A full British battalion with six tanks and armored cars attacked an Egyptian police station at Ismailia, inside the Canal Zone, on January 25, 1952. There was a six-hour battle. Somewhere between fifty and seventy Egyptians were killed, about another seventy wounded. The following day, there was a rising in Cairo against European interests, known as Black Saturday. British properties in Cairo—and several other properties that seemed foreign enough to be suspect—were set on fire by mobs, including the famous Shepheard’s Hotel, Thomas Cook, BOAC, Barclay’s Bank, the Turf Club, the British Council, the French chamber of commerce, the consulates of Sweden and Lebanon, and dozens of cinemas, bars, and restaurants.

Even the most ardent British imperialists were now losing faith in King Farouk’s ability to keep order. Those Conservative MPs making up the “Suez Group” in Parliament—a group that considered the canal integral to the future of British world power—tended to share Churchill’s instinct to impose Britain’s will by force rather than rely on Farouk as a client-king. Yet one problem for such imperial enthusiasts in the early 1950s was that Britain no longer had the funds to run a full empire, as the Treasury sharply reminded Churchill’s government in 1952. The Second World War had left British finances in a disastrous state. Encouraged by the “special relationship” Churchill had described between Britain and the United States, the likes of Anthony Eden now believed it might be possible to reassert British control with American muscle. “Our aim,” Eden wrote, “should be to persuade the United States to assume the real burdens in such organisations while retaining for ourselves as much political control—and hence prestige and world influence—as we can.”²²

The United States had not up to this point shown much interest in Egypt. Under President Harry S. Truman, American involvement in the Middle East was limited mostly to private oil assets in Saudi Arabia and its attachment to Israel. Beyond that, the United States had been content to let Britain hold sway. The Soviet Union had not seen much opportunity in the region either. According to Nikita Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, King Farouk appealed to Stalin to send arms for Egypt to force Britain out. Stalin refused. “Stalin said in my presence that the Near East was part of Britain’s sphere of influence and that therefore we couldn’t go sticking our nose into Egypt’s affairs,” Khrushchev remembered. “Not that Stalin wouldn’t have liked to move into the Near East—he would have liked to very much—but he realistically recognized that the balance of power wasn’t in our favour and that Britain wouldn’t have stood for our interference.”²³

This was all about to change. In March 1952, the CIA operative Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt was in Cairo. The American Department of State was at the time wrongly predicting that there would be a popular revolution in Egypt; the CIA was correctly predicting a military coup linked to the mysterious Association of Free Officers, an organization of around eighty soldiers. The Free Officers adhered to no particular ideology, though they had contacts with most groups in Egypt, from the Wafd to the Muslim Brotherhood to the Communists.

One of those Free Officers the CIA thought might be influential was a young colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Roosevelt had a series of secret meetings with Nasser and established that he was acceptable to American interests: motivated by frustration at the lack of effective government, the privileges of the upper classes, the supine state of the army, and the continuing presence of the British. He was open to communication with the United States and did not seem excessively hostile toward Israel. “Nasser explicitly admitted to Roosevelt that he and his officers had been ‘humiliated’ by the Israelis,” remembered Roosevelt’s fellow CIA officer Miles Copeland, “but he insisted that their resentments were ‘against our own superior officers, other Arabs, the British and the Israelis—in that order.’”²⁴ Roosevelt reported to his superiors in Washington that a coup was going to happen whether they liked it or not; the men involved seemed reasonable; and the United States could not really help except by letting them get on with it.

On the night of July 23, 1952, it came to pass. The ringleaders of the Free Officers formed a fourteen-member Revolutionary Command Council. The Ras el-Tin palace in Alexandria was surrounded. King Farouk sent desperate messages to the American ambassador and to the British commander in the Canal Zone, asking them to rescue him. Neither the United States nor Britain had any intention of doing so. The Free Officer Ali Maher turned up at the palace with an abdication document.

“Is not mine the supreme will?” Farouk pleaded.

“The will of the people is supreme, Your Majesty,” said Maher.²⁵

Farouk signed. He had one afternoon to pack, meaning he had to leave with a mere couple of hundred trunks of his belongings. Among the things he left behind, according to the American diplomat Chester Cooper, was “the world’s largest royal collection of dirty pictures.”

“In ten years,” Farouk said as he stood on the deck of his yacht, sailing into exile, “there will be five kings left: Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades, and England . . .”²⁶

The new regime was headed by Mohamed Neguib, a prominent general, with Nasser and other more junior officers keeping a low profile. The Muslim Brotherhood was constrained. Though the new government itself promoted left-wing policies—redistributive land reform, social justice, and anti-imperialism—it also clamped down on the Communists. “Once Nasser confided to me that the Communists were his greatest opponents because they appealed to the masses in the same manner, and advocated the same cause, as he did,” recalled the Sudanese politician Muhammad Ahmed Mahgoub.²⁷

Any potential Nasser had for Communism was not obvious to the Soviets, though. “We were inclined to think that Nasser’s coup was just another one of those military take-overs which we had become so accustomed to in South America,” said Nikita Khrushchev. “We didn’t expect much new to come of it.” To Moscow, Neguib’s supposedly revolutionary government appeared bourgeois, its leaders attached to privilege and property. The Soviets were disappointed that no serious efforts were made by the new rulers to restrain banks or capitalists. Stalin had long doubted the potential for the Third World to be converted to the Soviet cause. He had disbanded the Comintern, the organization set up by Lenin to promote Communism internationally, in 1943. Since the end of World War II, the Soviet Union’s efforts had been focused on creating and consolidating allies in Eastern Europe. The fate of one of these Eastern Bloc nations, Hungary, was to intertwine—coincidentally, but momentously—with that of Egypt during the Suez Crisis.

The Soviets felt Nasser lacked the requisite Marxist-Leninist theoretical background. According to Khrushchev, “He talked about Socialism in such a way as to make us uncertain whether he really understood what he was saying.”²⁸ Conversely, the Americans in Cairo were impressed. “During the period when he was consolidating his position his attitude toward his American friends was, ‘If you don’t like the way I’m doing it, show me a better way. At least I’ll listen,’” wrote Copeland. “We never tested his sincerity because at no point along the line could we think of a better way.”²⁹

In London, Winston Churchill was still inclined to take a hard line on Egypt. Anthony Eden advocated complete military withdrawal. For personal reasons, it was an impolitic time for the prime minister and foreign secretary to disagree. Shortly after the coup in Egypt, Eden married his second wife: Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, twenty-three years his junior and the niece of his boss. Any coziness between the two men implied by this marriage was undercut by what one of Eden’s biographers called “an element of sadism” in Churchill’s behavior toward the neurotic Eden. Churchill’s joint principal private secretary, Sir John Colville, described it as “cold hatred.”³⁰ The prime minister seemed to take pleasure in needling Eden and playing him off against other colleagues. Messages from Churchill frequently provoked panic: “My nerves are already at breaking point,” Eden told his civil servants. So often did Eden end telephone calls to Churchill’s office with the words “And tell Winston that I’m at the end of my tether!” that his private secretaries developed an abbreviation: “The Foreign Secretary’s at the E. of his T. again.”³¹ When the American secretary of state Dean Acheson met the two of them, Churchill commented approvingly on his strong, healthy looks and bearing. “Dean looks like you are supposed to do,” he scolded the ailing Eden.³²

The tension between Churchill and Eden peaked over Egypt. On January 30, 1953, Eden’s private secretary Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh wrote in his diary: “Jock [Colville] tells me that the PM is very bellicose against A.E. [and says] ‘If he resigns I will accept it and take the Foreign Office myself.’”³³

Crucially, at this point, Eden enlisted the help of the new American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had developed a firm friendship with Churchill. Brought up in an ordinary Midwestern family without high-society connections, Eisenhower had joined the top ranks of the army relatively late in his career. Following a stint with the irascible General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines in 1935, he gained a reputation for being able to work with the most difficult of men. This skill served him well with Churchill.³⁴ Eisenhower had been posted to London in 1942 and was made supreme Allied commander in Europe the following year.

British politicians were sometimes wary of anti-imperialist feeling on the part of Americans, suspecting them of being motivated less by a moral desire to free the oppressed and more by a strategic interest in eroding British influence. Yet Churchill, whose mother was American and whose admiration for military men was profound, had genuine respect for Eisenhower. “I admired and liked him,” Eisenhower wrote of Churchill just after the war. “He knew this perfectly well and never hesitated to use that knowledge in his effort to swing me to his own line of thought in any argument. Yet in spite of his strength of purpose, in those instances where we found our convictions in direct opposition, he never once lost his friendly attitude toward me when I persisted in my own course, nor did he fail to respect with meticulous care the position I occupied as the senior American officer and, later, the Allied commander in Europe.”³⁵ If there is a note of strain in this generous passage—the hint that Churchill may have used Eisenhower’s goodwill to manipulate him, the pulling of rank—that may be because the two men often fought, sometimes violently. Even so, their affection for each other endured.

Together, Eden and Eisenhower eased Churchill into a more moderate position on Egypt. The foreign secretary managed to persuade his prime minister that British power might even be strengthened by moving troops to other British bases in the Middle East, including Jordan and Cyprus. Meanwhile, Eden’s health took another knock. In April 1953, he was diagnosed with gallstones. Two unsuccessful operations made things worse. He flew to the United States to have a third and was out of politics for six months, recuperating. Two months later, Churchill suffered a serious stroke—yet still refused to relinquish power.

Eisenhower’s government began to seek more overt links with Egypt in 1953, offering to sell arms to Neguib’s government. Though Eden had hoped the United States might get involved in the Middle East, he was horrified at the prospect of this deal. He sought a guarantee from the American ambassador in London that no weapons would be supplied while relations between Britain and Egypt were still shaky, for American weapons might be used to kill British troops. He received assurances from the ambassador, but remained frustrated that the Americans would not do more to persuade their new friends in Cairo to negotiate with Britain.³⁶

“American policy in general seemed to be conditioned by a belief that Egypt was still the victim of British ‘colonialism’, and as such deserving of American sympathy,” Eden noted in his memoirs. This view, along with an American fear of unpopularity and lust for influence, he thought, “resulted in the Americans, at least locally, withholding the wholehearted support which their partner in N.A.T.O. had the right to expect.”³⁷ Eden had believed it might be possible for British brains to run the world with American muscle. He had not expected the Americans to develop ideas of their own.

Between February and April 1954, there was a power struggle in Cairo. Neguib was removed from the presidency and prime ministership, and Nasser became prime minister; then Neguib was restored and Nasser dropped down to the level of deputy prime minister; King Saud arrived from Saudi Arabia to mediate. It was confusing, but the direction of events was plain to see. “President Naguib was being edged out as coolly as if he had been a Paramount executive in the whirling 1920s,” remarked the Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille, who was in Egypt at the time preparing to film his biblical epic The Ten Commandments.

DeMille had hoped to meet Neguib but was instead directed to meet Nasser, whom he found to be sincere, impressively masculine, and “by no means unfriendly to America.” Nasser endeared himself to DeMille with his love of Hollywood movies: “The young Gamal Abdel Nasser’s fellow-officers had nicknamed him ‘Henry Wilcoxon’!” wrote the director.³⁸ In his youth, Nasser bore a striking resemblance to the brooding Wilcoxon, one of DeMille’s leading men—especially in his 1934 role as Marcus Antonius, lover of the Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra.³⁹

On April 17, 1954, Neguib resigned for good and Nasser became prime minister again. He would ultimately become president, too, confirmed in that position by election on June 23, 1956. One of Nasser’s first priorities as leader of Egypt was to conclude negotiations with Britain for the complete departure of British troops from the Canal Zone. He had been involved in these negotiations since May 1953. The final agreement was signed by Nasser and the British Foreign Office minister Anthony Nutting on October 19, 1954. Under its terms, all British troops would be evacuated from the Canal Zone by June 18, 1956, and their bases handed over to the Egyptian army. British interests in the Canal Zone would thereafter be maintained by civilian contractors only. The agreement was set to last for seven years from the date of signing. During that time, if there was an attack by an “outside Power” on Turkey or any member of the Arab Collective Security Pact (Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or Yemen), Britain had the right to reenter the Suez base with its military and operate from there.⁴⁰

As the existing quasi-colonial presence in Egypt, the British knew they were not liked but were nonetheless sensitive to any confirmation of that fact. Judiciously, Nasser had tempered his statements on the British presence around the canal by emphasizing his admiration and even affection for Britons. “I am not against the British people, but I am opposed to the British forces’ occupation of the Canal Zone,” he told the Daily Mirror in 1953. “If this question were settled, a great friendship would exist between us.”⁴¹ After the 1954 agreement, Nasser was positive—genuinely positive, according to those who knew him well—about the prospect of moving smoothly into a new phase of Anglo-Egyptian friendship.⁴²

This conciliatory tone seemed to chime with Anthony Eden’s attitude. Eden meant to make British foreign policy more affordable in the Middle East. By removing tens of thousands of men from active duty, the Suez Base Agreement certainly did that. He wanted to reaffirm British influence, hoping it would now appear to be based on cooperation rather than colonialism. Yet Britain remained the largest single shareholder in the Suez Canal Company. Control over the running of the canal appeared essential to many Britons if their nation were to move on from the old imperial model to a new, prosperous future within the Commonwealth. By 1956, the canal was carrying 115 million tons of shipping a year and making clear profits of £11 million—of which Britain’s share was £4.5 million. The British Treasury estimated the value of its assets in the Canal Zone to be £500 million.⁴³ But the Canal’s real and growing importance concerned oil. For Britain in particular, the shortcut to the Persian Gulf was essential: the Gulf was where British oil companies operated, and therefore was where the oil priced in sterling came from. Oil from the Americas was priced in dollars, making it much less convenient or affordable for the British to buy.⁴⁴

The Suez Canal meant power: oil power and global power. And global power was being rebalanced. Across a world map that had once been tinged in every corner with British imperial pink, different colors had begun to return.

Much effort had been put into presenting the end of the British Empire as a positive development. The style was set by Lord Mountbatten in India, with a focus on friendship and equality between Britain and its former colonial possessions—even if this was quickly overwhelmed by horrific violence. The partition of India was a disaster in human terms, and in most other terms—but Mountbatten’s great achievement, from a public relations point of view, was reconciling a positive imperial narrative with the lowering of a flag. As historian David Cannadine observed, this “sought to present the end of the British Empire as the whole point of the British Empire.”⁴⁵ The story was carefully constructed to imply that Britain’s motives had always been benign.

“The United Kingdom has, for a century or more and in an increasing degree, applied herself to the trustee conception of her responsibilities towards colonial territories,” Eden wrote in 1959. “As a result, we have for years past fostered and admired the growth of countries which were once colonies and have since become part of the Commonwealth. Great nations like Canada and Australia, countries growing apace like New Zealand and the Union of South Africa, are the earliest examples. More have followed.”⁴⁶ All four of the examples he gave were “white dominions”: countries where people of European heritage had assumed control at the expense of the indigenous population. By the 1950s, even the staunchest of British imperialists accepted the granting of self-determination to other white people.

Following the independence of India and Pakistan, it became feasible inside the British establishment to consider people who were not white potentially responsible. Recently, a form of this rosy-tinted paternalism had been extended to Africa. “The end of 134 years of foreign rule in the Sudan could not have been more civilised,” wrote Mohamed Ahmed Mahgoub, who was foreign minister of Sudan during the Suez Crisis and later its prime minister. “The British handed over the Khartoum barracks to the Sudanese at a cocktail party.” Sudan achieved full independence on January 1, 1956, being, Mahgoub claimed, the first nation in Africa proper to exit imperial rule in what he called an “orderly” fashion.⁴⁷ Yet while the South Asian ex-colonies of Burma, Ceylon, India, and Pakistan had been offered Commonwealth membership, Sudan—like its regional neighbors Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, and British Palestine—was not. Though Britain had managed the fiscal, foreign, and military affairs of these Middle Eastern and North African territories, they had operated as mandates or protectorates rather than colonies. Now they were held at a distance.⁴⁸

Not everyone in Britain was sold on a comforting view of the end of empire. For many—especially, but not exclusively, on the political right—Britain appeared to be losing its divinely and racially ordained place at the top of the world. This induced a kind of desperation, growing ever more urgent and angry, to cling to the rotting reins of Britannia’s imperial chariot. It was impossible for some Britons to imagine a world that they did not control and did not want to control. If they could no longer dominate their colonies openly, they must at least try to foster a secret British Empire club: not the Kumbaya-ing Boy Scout jamboree of the Commonwealth, but a powerful hidden empire of money and control.⁴⁹ For oil was the future, they knew, everyone knew: and the canal was the lifeline to what was by imperial right Britain’s oil, inconveniently situated 3,500 miles off the white cliffs of Dover in the Persian Gulf.

Access to oil had already sparked conflicts. In 1951, the Iranian government had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British foreign secretary Herbert Morrison had warned that as a result “Egypt might be emboldened . . . to bring the Suez Canal under Egyptian control.”⁵⁰ Iran’s prime minister, Mohamed Mossadegh, was ousted in 1953 by a CIA-orchestrated coup, ordered by the British secret intelligence service, MI6. The Suez Canal was an even bigger deal than Anglo-Iranian Oil. Two thirds of Europe’s oil was transported through it, a situation Eden characterized as giving Nasser a “thumb on our windpipe.”⁵¹ Half of all the oil imported by Western Europe was consumed by Britain.

Otto von Bismarck, the great nineteenth-century chancellor of Germany, once described the Suez Canal as the “spinal cord” of the British Empire, “which connects the backbone with the brain.”⁵² To neo-imperialist Britons, it also came to look like the route to the future. For Egyptians, though, the canal remained a sore: the justification of outside control of their government, the excuse for foreign presences in their country, and the source of riches to which they were not entitled.

April 1955–March 1956 // London

In April 1955, Winston Churchill finally stepped down, allowing Anthony Eden to take over the British prime ministership. Eden had by then served as foreign secretary or shadow foreign secretary for twenty years, on and off, and was widely considered to have been a success. Yet his premiership started poorly. Trade figures declined. The balance of payments became unbalanced. Fears grew about speculative runs against the pound. The chancellor, Rab Butler, adopted a program of austerity and rises in indirect taxation. “By the end of August [1955] our gold and dollar reserves were falling by over $100 million a month,” Eden wrote in his memoirs.⁵³ The story of the Cambridge Spies broke and reflected poorly on the Foreign Office. Though the key period of the spies’ operation had been while Eden was in opposition, his association with the Foreign Office was so strong and the criticisms of its culture were so broad that inevitably he was tarnished. Hugh Gaitskell was elected as Labour leader. He was sharp, clever, and ten years younger than Eden. Conservative support slumped.

The press bubbled with criticism of Eden’s supposedly skittish and incoherent leadership—notably in a series of stinging articles written by Winston Churchill’s son and Eden’s own wife’s cousin, Randolph Churchill. The phrase “control freak” would not come into use for another decade, but it would have characterized Eden’s habits—which included telephoning ministers in the middle of the night to ask if they had done a certain task or read a particular newspaper article. Members of Eden’s own party described him as “highly strung” and suffering “a lack of confidence.” One claimed that “no one in public life lived more on his nerves than he did.”⁵⁴

On March 1, 1956, Eden received a piece of news that seems to have triggered a decisive abandonment of rational thought. It was about John Bagot Glubb, a British soldier who had for thirty years commanded the Arab Legion, the British-fostered army of Jordan. It was generally assumed in London that Glubb Pasha, as he was known, was adored by the Arabs, a successor to Lawrence of Arabia. This was not true. As a man known to serve two masters, Britain and Jordan, he was in a sticky position. He was widely rumored to be a British agent, and was blamed—unfairly, perhaps, but forcefully—for giving land away to Israel during its first war in 1948.

That day, Eden’s foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd was in Cairo dining with Gamal Abdel Nasser. During the dinner, the British ambassador to Egypt, Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, received a telegram informing him that King Hussein of Jordan had sacked Glubb Pasha and ordered him to leave the country immediately. He did not tell Lloyd—but he did notice that Nasser also received a note during the party, which he assumed contained the same information. On their way back to the British embassy, Trevelyan told Lloyd what had happened. “He was greatly upset,” Trevelyan remembered. “He was convinced that Nasser had known of General Glubb’s dismissal and half convinced that Nasser had planned it to coincide with his visit.”⁵⁵

One of Eden’s pet projects was the Baghdad Pact, a Middle Eastern defensive alliance in British interests. He had hoped Glubb would persuade King Hussein to join, and now he thought Nasser must have schemed to oust the British commander so Jordan would not join the pact. At this point, Anthony Nutting said, “the Prime Minister of Great Britain declared a personal war on the man whom he held responsible for Glubb’s dismissal—Gamal Abdel Nasser, President and Prime Minister of Egypt.”⁵⁶

Though the move to oust Glubb undoubtedly suited Nasser, cooler heads pointed out that King Hussein had made the choice himself. Jordan had been riven by riots since the end of 1955, which Glubb and the Arab Legion had failed to control. Anti-British feeling was an element in these riots. Glubb’s constant advice to Hussein could have been interpreted as interference.⁵⁷ “I often had to stop the King doing silly things,” Glubb later said, “like promoting people who I knew were dishonest or incompetent.”⁵⁸ It is easy to see how the fifty-eight-year-old British commander might have seemed patronizing to the twenty-year-old king.

In his memoirs, Eden put a different spin on their personal relationship: “I thought at the time, and I am convinced now, that part of the King’s sentiment towards Glubb was based on jealousy of a younger man for an older one long established in a position of authority in the country.”⁵⁹ Bearing in mind that Glubb was unpopular in Jordan at the time and that Hussein was in a position of considerable authority by virtue of being a king, this seems unlikely.

Nasser denied that he had anything to do with Glubb’s sacking. This was a little disingenuous—he had sent his most important colonels to persuade Hussein to do just that⁶⁰—but he did not know it was going to happen at that precise point. “I thought that this was a move by the British Government,” he later said. “And to my understanding this was a very good move and a very progressive move, because Glubb was aggravating the hatred of the Arabs in Jordan against Britain.”

The next morning, Lloyd met Nasser briefly on the way to the airfield. Nasser congratulated him on getting rid of Glubb. “He thought that I was joking, about him,” remembered Nasser. “The reaction of Mr Selwyn Lloyd was nervous, and I was surprised about his nervousness. Then he left without telling me anything.”⁶¹

Lloyd went on to Bahrain, where he was greeted by anti-British rioters throwing mud and stones. Both Lloyd and Eden chose to believe that Nasser had organized this too. In fact, the rioters had just emerged from a soccer match and may have been acting spontaneously. Nasser assured the British ambassador that he had no organization in Bahrain.⁶² Nevertheless, this was the point at which Eden telephoned Nutting at the Savoy to tell him he wanted Nasser murdered.

The Tory MP Nigel Nicolson remembered Eden addressing a meeting of Conservative backbenchers at the time. “He looked tired and worried,” Nicolson remembered. “He painted a haunting picture of what would happen if our oil supplies were cut off. We were obliged to suffer constant humiliations, sucking up to Egypt’s President Nasser, all for the sake of ‘oil, oil, oil’, and he spat the words out like cherry stones.”⁶³

Somehow, Eden seemed to have made the Egyptian leader a scapegoat for all his problems: the sinking empire, the sluggish economy, the collapse of his reputation within his party, and his dwindling popularity in the country at large. Lord Home, who was Commonwealth secretary in 1956, remembered that Eden saw Nasser as a man “who cheated in public affairs. That was really what it was. It was a blatant cheat, it was, and he was a nasty bombastic fellow.”⁶⁴ Nasser can hardly have imagined that a man he had met once (at a dinner in February 1955) would have developed such a vendetta against him. Yet on Eden’s side, at least, this conflict would be intensely personal.⁶⁵

July 19, 1956 // Washington DC

Out of context, the decision taken by John Foster Dulles, American secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, on July 19, 1956, sounded humdrum. It involved the financing of foreign exchange costs for a development project to build a new dam on the Nile at Aswan.

Nasser considered the Aswan Dam essential to the modernization and industrialization of Egypt. It was ambitious: the Americans estimated that it would take twelve to sixteen years to build and would cost $1.3 billion.⁶⁶ It would allow Egypt to control its annual flooding, increase its agricultural land by an estimated 30 percent, store water for planned irrigation projects, and generate hydroelectricity.

Neither the Americans nor the British much liked the dam project as Nasser planned it. The Americans thought it too expensive, while the British preferred other schemes. But then, in the autumn of 1955, Nasser made an arms deal with Czechoslovakia—part of the Soviet bloc. Foster Dulles declared angrily that Egypt was, with this deal, “jeopardizing its ability to remain a fully independent member of the free world,”⁶⁷ but he opposed any drastic response. If the United States did anything overt, he feared, “the entire Arab world might be aligned against us, which would make it more susceptible to Communist penetration.”⁶⁸

It had been British policy to exclude Russia from the Mediterranean since the Crimean War, and this policy had not softened now that the Suez Canal existed and the Russians had become Soviets. “On no account must we let the Russians into the Nile Valley,” Anthony Eden told one of his ministers.⁶⁹ When the Soviets hinted they might pay for Nasser’s dam as well as sell him arms, the Americans, the British, and the World Bank offered to stump up foreign exchange costs for the project to keep them out. The initial grant included $56 million from the United States, £14 million from Britain, and $200 million from the bank.⁷⁰

According to American diplomat Chester Cooper, Dulles had another motive: he hoped to use the dam as a bargaining chip in a plan to end the seven-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict. He was trying to push the reluctant nations of Israel and Egypt together to settle political and territorial questions, yet neither the Israelis nor Nasser wanted to talk about such sensitive issues alongside an industrial development project. “So much for the secretary [of state]’s attempt to tie aid for the dam to an Arab-Israeli treaty,” wrote Cooper. “And so much for whatever dreams he may have had of winning a Nobel Peace Prize.”⁷¹

During the first half of 1956, Britain and the United States turned against the dam. Nasser’s resistance to British influence in the Middle East was making relations with London difficult, while his recognition of Communist China in May upset Washington. “For the secretary, recognition of China had come to assume almost religious significance,” wrote Cooper; “it was just short of devil worship.”⁷² The Soviets floated the possibility that they would loan Nasser the full $1.3 billion cost of the dam at 2 percent interest over sixty years. Though Dulles thought the Soviet offer was probably a bluff, Nasser did not immediately reject it. By July it looked increasingly as if the United States would back out of the deal.

Foster Dulles was due to see the Egyptian ambassador, Ahmed Hussein, on the afternoon of July 19. At 3:20 p.m., forty minutes before Hussein was due to arrive, he telephoned his brother Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA. Foster told Allen that he was canceling the offer to finance the dam.

The secretary of state was under domestic pressure to make this decision, for Congress was demanding deep cuts to the foreign-aid budget. The trenchant attitude of some American politicians was summed up in a line from Otto Passman, the conservative Democratic congressman from Louisiana: “I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. My only pleasure in life is kicking the shit out of the foreign aid program of the United States of America.”⁷³ There was fierce opposition to aiding Egypt from pro-Israel and anti-Communist lobbies. The Senate Appropriations Committee had unanimously passed a resolution declaring that none of the 1957 funds could be used for the Aswan Dam. As Foster told Allen Dulles in that telephone call, “Congress will chop it [the funding] off tomorrow and the Sec. [Foster Dulles] would rather do it himself.”

Foster Dulles suggested to his brother that the Soviets stepping in might even help the American cause within the nations of the Soviet bloc: “If they [the Soviets] do make this offer [to Egypt] we can make a lot of use of it in propaganda within the satellite bloc. You don’t get bread because you are being squeezed to build a dam.” Foster told Allen that he had informed the British ambassador of his decision that morning. He had the impression that the British agreed with the policy of withdrawing support: “They would have liked more time but in view of Congressional situation, they understand.” Though the withdrawal of finance from the dam project was “hazardous,” the brothers agreed, the minutes stated that Allen Dulles “is inclined to think it wise in the long run.”⁷⁴ It was Foster Dulles’s decision: Eisenhower was at this moment incapacitated following an emergency operation for ileitis. According to the president’s son John, this was “the only instance in which Dulles made a policy move without consulting Dad first.”⁷⁵

At four p.m., Ahmed Hussein turned up for his meeting. “Don’t please say you are going to withdraw the offer, because”—Hussein patted his pocket—“we have the Russian offer to finance the dam right here.”⁷⁶

“Well then, as you already have the money, you have no need of our support,” Dulles snapped back. “The offer is withdrawn.”

Hussein asked him to confirm that the decision was final. “I am speaking for the President,” Dulles said, “and I am sure that I am also expressing the feelings of Congress and the country.”⁷⁷

As Hussein left the meeting, a State Department official remarked, “He looks as if he’s had a kick in the pants.”⁷⁸

“Did you make a decision to cancel the offer of aid on the Aswan Dam in order to force a showdown with the Soviet Union in the Middle East?” a journalist asked Dulles some months later.

Dulles replied ambiguously: “I think that question could be answered in the negative.”⁷⁹

At 5:10 p.m., right after the meeting with Hussein, Senator William F. Knowland telephoned Dulles. Dulles told him what he had done. “The Secretary [Dulles] said it would be interesting to see what happens,” the minutes of the call recorded. “In all probability when Nasser goes to Moscow he will sign up some agreement with the Russians. The Sec. said that the Egyptians, he told the Amb., having just won their independence, ought to be pretty careful.”⁸⁰

That evening, on his way out of the office, Dulles stopped by the desk of his special assistant, William Macomber. Stopping for a social chat was not Dulles’s style—indeed, this was the only time he had ever done it. Macomber leaped awkwardly to his feet.

“Sit down, Bill,” said the secretary of state. “Well, this has been quite a day.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Macomber.

“Well,” said Dulles, “I certainly hope we did the right thing.”

“I hope so,” said Macomber.

“Yes, I certainly hope we did the right thing,” Dulles said again. He turned and left.⁸¹

Though the timing of Dulles’s decision may have been ordained by his domestic political situation, it was a shock to his colleagues and allies. “The secretary of state has gone mad!” exclaimed Miles Copeland, one of the key CIA agents dealing with Egypt. He predicted Nasser would react violently.⁸² In London, Anthony Eden’s press secretary raced upstairs in Downing Street to give the prime minister the news in his bedroom. “Oh good, oh good for Foster. I didn’t really think he had it in him,” said Eden. There was a pause, and he added, “I wish he hadn’t done it quite so abruptly.”⁸³

Dulles issued a carefully worded press release affirming friendly intentions toward the people of Egypt. It was not worded carefully enough. “We in the CIA had nothing to do with that statement,” wrote Copeland, “and when Allen Dulles asked Kim Roosevelt later what he thought of it Kim was almost as enraged as Nasser.”⁸⁴ Allen Dulles asked how they thought Nasser would react. Copeland and Roosevelt’s immediate boss, Frank Wisner, suggested that Nasser might nationalize the Suez Canal Company. “Kim and I both kicked him under the table,” remembered Copeland. The prospect of nationalization seemed so unlikely that his fellow agents were trying to dissuade Wisner from making “a fool of himself” by mentioning it.⁸⁵

At that moment, Nasser was at the summer residence of the Yugoslav leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito on a picturesque island in the Brioni Archipelago in the Adriatic. Tito had invited him there for talks that would form the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement—a group of nations attempting to tread a neutral path between the capitalist and Communist extremes of the Cold War. It had been a convivial few days, with Tito serving wine from his own vineyard; nonalcoholic grape juice had been provided for Nasser.⁸⁶ Tito’s other guest was Nasser’s closest political ally outside the Arab world, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Nehru and Nasser sat in the front seats of a Viscount plane back to Cairo with Nehru’s quietly ambitious daughter Indira Gandhi and Nasser’s foreign minister Mahmoud Fawzi. The pilot and one of Nasser’s secretaries, who were listening to BBC radio news in the cockpit during the flight, sent messages back. Nasser told Nehru the news from Washington. “There is no end to their arrogance!” exclaimed Nehru. “These people are arrogant! Arrogant!” He turned to Nasser: “My dear friend, I know that you have much on your mind. But you will have to think about it carefully.”⁸⁷

The plane landed in Cairo in the small hours of July 20. Dulles’s statement had gone down as poorly as the CIA had feared. According to Nasser’s friend and confidant Mohamed Heikal, Nasser felt it went far beyond the mere cancellation of some development funding: “The studied offensiveness of the language made it clear that Dulles’ action was also a deliberate snub, a political challenge to Egypt’s dignity as well as to her aspirations.”⁸⁸ The next day, Eden, too, canceled his nation’s support for the Aswan Dam project.

Nasser’s anger was apparent at a reception he attended that day for foreign diplomats in Cairo. He had a good personal relationship with the American ambassador Henry Byroade, but now he took him aside. “You know, I’ve had a lot to do with the Russians, and I don’t like the Russians,” said Nasser. “I’ve had a lot to do with your people, and basically I like your people. This action of Mr. Dulles is an action against me by a great power, and no great power can take action against me without taking into account the necessary consequences of it.” He jabbed a finger against Byroade’s chest. “And the necessary consequences are that you fellows are out to kill me. And all I can do is protect myself. I tell you this. I am not going to be killed.”⁸⁹

Nasser and his aides spent that day working out a formal response. The strategy they came up with was designed to hit right at the most visible symbol of foreign influence in their nation. They would nationalize the Suez Canal Company. Later, the British ambassador Sir Humphrey Trevelyan suspected that Nehru—who had led his own nation to independence a decade earlier—had put Nasser up to this plan. The evidence from those close to Nehru suggests that Nasser’s action came as a complete surprise to him.⁹⁰

Nasser’s motivation was in part suspicion about the true purpose of Anglo-American policy. “It was the manner of the withdrawal which upset them [the Egyptians], since it appeared to conceal some other purpose directed at them,” Trevelyan remembered.⁹¹ Nasser later told Chester Cooper that the decision to nationalize was taken because he believed Britain and the United States were trying to use the dam funding issue to push him to make concessions to Israel—perhaps even to agree to an Arab-Israeli peace on unfavorable terms. This was not a suspicion without foundation, for it was exactly what Dulles had tried to do the previous year. “The purpose of his [Nasser’s] dramatic reaction had therefore been to show that Egypt was not going to be pushed around by the West,” Cooper wrote.⁹²

July 26, 1956 // Alexandria // London // Washington DC

Back in Mansheya Square on July 26, 1956, Nasser said “De Lesseps” a final time. Only one person knew what the signal meant: his trusted friend, Colonel Mahmoud Younis. When Nasser mentioned the name of the man who had designed the Canal, Younis mobilized his men. They stormed into the headquarters of the Suez Canal Company, guns drawn. In Alexandria, Nasser paused for a moment—then announced to his audience: “Today, in the name of the people, I am taking over the company. Tonight our Egyptian canal will be run by Egyptians. Egyptians!”⁹³

The crowd erupted with joy: embracing each other, shouting “Mabrouk!” (“Congratulations!”), letting off fireworks, and firing guns into the air. Revelers celebrated around a float depicting the Egyptian Sphinx devouring a British soldier, the Union flag sewn on his backside.⁹⁴

In 10 Downing Street, London, the news came through at around ten forty-five in the evening. Anthony Eden was hosting a dinner party. The guest of honor was the twenty-one-year-old King Feisal II of Iraq, along with his uncle Crown Prince Abdulillah and Nuri es-Said, Iraq’s prime minister. Iraq was a solid British ally: Nuri detested Nasser. The Iraqis were easy company for Eden, who had read Oriental languages at Oxford and had taken first class honors in Persian and Arabic.⁹⁵ Nuri had been a friend of his almost since that time. His Anglophilia earned him the scorn of some: Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, dismissed him as “a puppet of British imperialism and a faithful dog of the colonialists.”⁹⁶ Also present were Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the opposition; the French ambassador; and the American chargé d’affaires. Striking a classically imperial note, everyone was clad in full evening dress and decorations, with Eden and the Marquess of Salisbury in Order of the Garter sashes and knee-breeches.⁹⁷

Nasser’s nationalization of the Canal Company was not illegal, as Eden’s own advisers would point out. Eden argued that it was “an international asset,”⁹⁸ but it was a privately owned and run company. Other countries, including Britain, had nationalized those. Egypt offered financial compensation to the shareholders. Eden based his objection on two elderly treaties, the Constantinople Convention of 1888 and the Concession to the Canal Company of 1856. The former guaranteed “at all times and for all powers the free use of the Suez Maritime Canal,” yet Nasser was not planning to limit the operation or use of the canal—merely to change the ownership of its operating company. His government had prevented Israeli ships from using the canal since 1949. Eden tried to argue that Britain would be acting in defense of Israel’s rights, though the obvious question was why the British government was only now impassioned by the abrogation of those rights after an interlude of seven years. (In practice, between 1951 and 1954, Egypt had allowed canal passage to more than sixty ships carrying Israeli cargo, as long as they were not under the Israeli flag. Nasser relaxed the rules similarly during 1956.)⁹⁹ Anthony Nutting found this argument spurious in any case, remembering that only a couple of years before Eden had admitted that Egypt had a right under the Constantinople Convention to deny passage to the ships of a nation with which it was at war.¹⁰⁰ Yet to those in 10 Downing Street that night, Nasser’s nationalization appeared a hostile act. Eden titled the chapter dealing with it in his memoirs “Theft.”¹⁰¹

“Hit him hard,” Nuri advised Eden. “Hit him soon, and hit him by yourself.”¹⁰² According to Anthony Nutting, Nuri claimed specifically that he had warned Eden against any alliance with France or Israel against Nasser. The indignant response of the Iraqis to Nasser’s Suez decision cemented the hope in Eden’s mind that the British had solid support in the Arab world.¹⁰³ He was conscious, though, of the difficulty of moving immediately against Egypt. British troops were already engaged, fighting colonial rebels: EOKA in Cyprus, the Communist Malayan National Liberation Army in Malaya, and the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. A substantial part of the armed forces was assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), based in Germany, and could not be pulled out.¹⁰⁴ There was nonetheless a lust for war in London and Paris that night.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Britain and France’s most important ally felt differently. The European leaders had a tendency to underrate the president of the United States. “Despite his military prestige, Eisenhower is a weak man,” sneered Christian Pineau, the French minister for external affairs; “Dulles is his backbone.”¹⁰⁵ Eden and many in his cabinet—along with some American officials—also believed Eisenhower had little interest in foreign policy and left it to his secretary of state, the calculating Foster Dulles. In this presumption they were mistaken. Though Eisenhower took Dulles’s counsel on foreign affairs, he would drive Suez policy personally.

When the news of Nasser’s nationalization reached Washington, Dulles was away on a visit to Lima. Eisenhower met with the acting secretary, Herbert Hoover Jr., and with Allen Dulles. The notes of the meeting reveal Eisenhower’s response as measured and cautious, correctly predicting that “the British would want action in this matter” but reserving further judgment until more could be ascertained about Nasser’s legal position and whether any Americans would be caught up in it.¹⁰⁶ Within forty-eight hours, with Foster Dulles still absent, the opinions of Eisenhower and Hoover crystallized into strong opposition to any military action against Nasser. According to Hoover, Eisenhower agreed that he “must adopt a firm policy but at [the] same time not jeopardize our long-term position by precipitate action.”¹⁰⁷

“Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organisation will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples,” Winston Churchill had told an audience in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. “This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.”¹⁰⁸ The “special relationship” was easy to believe in when it was presided over by Eisenhower and Churchill, two old war heroes and friends. It had withstood American intervention in Korea, which Britain reluctantly but loyally joined. It had faltered slightly when Britain had refused to go into Indochina. Now, with a British government under Anthony Eden preparing for what looked like a colonialist initiative in the Middle East, that relationship would be tested to its limit.

The crisis that spiraled from Suez would drag in much of Europe, Asia, North America, and the Commonwealth as well as the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. Furthermore, the high point of the Suez crisis—from October 22 to November 6, 1956—would coincide precisely with the biggest rebellion yet against Soviet power, which took place in Hungary from October 23 to November 4. The fact that the Suez War and the Hungarian uprising happened simultaneously would ratchet up tension between the major Cold War players to its highest level since the end of World War II. With the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain all then holding nuclear weapons, this was a moment of unprecedented danger. It would test the limits and the mettle of the United Nations as never before.

Though many in Eden’s generation blamed him personally for Suez, later historians have instead set the British and French government’s actions in the context of the complicated, oil-fueled politics of the Middle Eastern region. This context is vital. Some of the triggers for action in the Canal Zone were related to oil or to the military and political demands of treaties. Moreover, the Hungarian rebellion and the Soviet response to it would affect the progress of events in Egypt; events in Egypt would likewise rebound on Hungary. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that everything that happened over the sixteen acute days of crisis in October and November 1956 had a sensible or rational basis. The crisis would be intensely emotional for the nations involved. For Hungary and Egypt, it would be about freedom. For Israel, it would be about survival. For France, it would be about saving territory it considered integral to the republic. For the Soviet Union, it would be about resistance to Western colonialism as well as reasserting and extending its own influence. For the United States, it would be about decency and the trustworthiness of its allies. And for Britain, as the then leader of the House of Commons Rab Butler admitted in his memoirs, it would be about the “illiberal resentment at the loss of Empire, the rise of coloured nationalism, the transfer of world leadership to the United States.”¹⁰⁹

For each of the state and individual actors in this drama, the 1956 crisis felt fundamental—even existential. This was the reason they were prepared to take it to the brink of what many at the time would call World War III.