1000 London
In London that morning, Eden received a report from the chiefs of staff suggesting that the consequences of Britain and France invading Egypt would be terrible. The Egyptian economy, infrastructure, communication, and civil administration would be in disarray; public health would be threatened, and “an unpredictable proportion of the Egyptian people would be hostile.” It warned of guerrilla action and labor strikes. It pointed out that an uncooperative government might still be in power: “In this case it would first be necessary to overthrow such a government and create conditions favourable to the setting-up of one prepared to co-operate.” Occupying only the Canal Zone, it suggested, was not feasible: “We should be prepared to occupy Cairo and possibly Alexandria.” The commitment of British military power required by such an operation was so large—three or four divisions, naval and air force units, plus administrative and other support—that Britain would not be able to meet any other emergencies if they arose, except by pulling troops out of NATO. Furthermore, national service and reservist levels would have to be maintained. The Chiefs of Staff recommended that occupation of Egypt should be avoided altogether or restricted to a minimum. Beyond that, it was airily hoped that Britain would not have to cope with strife in the rest of the Arab world on the grounds that “the reaction of the oil-producing states to the Suez crisis [so far] suggests that their governments are well aware of the need in their own financial interest to maintain the flow of oil to Europe.” It did, however, acknowledge that these governments might struggle against internal dissent.
Eden was upset by this memorandum. Even though it was signed by Dickson, Mountbatten, Templer, and Boyle, on the front page a hand added in pencil, “Spoken to Gen. Stirling. This was written by the Staffs who were not in the picture.”1 The picture, presumably, would have included full details of the planned collusion with Israel. But all the Chiefs of Staff had put their names to it, indicating the concern among them about invading Egypt under any circumstances. The fact that the potentially enormous consequences of ousting Nasser were only just being considered in late October indicates how unrealistic some of the military planning that summer had been.
The British and French armed forces had been planning a joint military operation against Egypt since Nasser’s nationalization of the Canal Company in July, under the name Operation Musketeer. Eden and Mollet had wanted to invade immediately, but were told that neither of their nations’ militaries was in a position to launch anything other than an air attack on such short notice. “Unless we could fly all the forces needed, they [would have] had to swim” to Egypt, Eden wrote. “The nearest place from which to swim was Malta, a thousand miles away.”2 He was not serious about making them swim. The operation would require landing craft, which could be launched only from Malta’s harbor. The British base in Cyprus was much closer to Egypt—250 miles away—but had no suitable harbor.
In the first hours after Nasser’s nationalization, there was hope in London that the United States might join an invasion. Remembering this some years later, Eisenhower remarked: “And of course, the British themselves, only two years earlier, had refused to touch the Indochina affair, and so we thought now their excuse for trying to get us to participate in an attack on Nasser was just thin. It wouldn’t work.” Eisenhower made it clear from the beginning that he could not support an attack on Egypt: “We said, ‘We don’t believe there’s any legal or moral grounds that will stand up before world opinion or the World Court, for any interference with that thing by force.’”3 To the dismay of the French, the British could neither logistically nor, under pressure from the United States, politically invade in August.
Yet the British did want to go ahead. As Foster Dulles commenced his long summer of negotiations, Britain and France planned their joint operation in secret (or at least in semisecret: troop, equipment, and naval moves could not be hidden entirely). Working together was not easy: Britain and France had been rivals for centuries. While Agincourt, Yorktown, and Waterloo may have been distant memories, their fierce competition in the Middle East over oil and territory was a live issue.
Control of Operation Musketeer planning was centered in Britain. There was, from the beginning, friction among the chiefs of staff there. “They all argue with one another,” complained civil servant Evelyn Shuckburgh. He complained about the chairman of the chiefs of staff committee, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir William Dickson, in his diary, writing that he “has an ulcer and talks too much.” Dickson himself admitted that he had taken the job only because he thought it would be easy. “I was told that Defence would be a piece of cake, a rest cure.”4 According to Shuckburgh, Louis Mountbatten, Earl Mountbatten of Burma—first sea lord and chief of the naval staff, who was promoted to admiral of the fleet on October 22—“is full of undigested bright ideas and is really a simpleton though very nice.”5 Air Chief Marshal Dermot Boyle was less objectionable. The least ineffective of them was General Sir Gerald Templer, chief of the Imperial General Staff, but he had blighted his record in the Middle East the previous year with a catastrophic visit to Jordan. During an official meeting, he had lost his temper with King Hussein and his ministers, shouted at them, and ended up punching a table.6 For reasons not connected to the table but very much connected to Templer’s visit, anti-British riots broke out throughout Jordan. The prime minister of Jordan had to resign.7 “The British never had any sense in the Middle East,” mused Eisenhower on hearing of the disaster.8 Furthermore, Templer loathed Mountbatten, once saying to him across a dinner table, “Dickie, you’re so crooked that if you swallowed a nail you’d shit a corkscrew!”9
These fractious old men were supposed to coordinate a plan with General Charles Keightley, the appointed commander in chief of Operation Musketeer, and General Hugh Stockwell, the appointed land force commander. The outline plan for an operation would take weeks or months to set up. Forces had to be moved within striking distance of Egypt before an ultimatum would be issued. If Nasser did not accept the ultimatum, there would be a maritime blockade and air bombardment. If this did not break him, there would be an assault on the north end of the Suez Canal and on Alexandria. The Joint Intelligence Committee warned as early as August 3, 1956, that this needed to be a major operation: “Should Western military action be insufficient to ensure early and decisive victory, the international consequences both in the Arab States and elsewhere might give rise to extreme embarrassment and cannot be forecast.”10
The plan was hampered by a triple objective: to destroy the Egyptian army, to bring down Nasser, and to secure the canal under international control.11 If the assault began at Alexandria, it would threaten Nasser but not secure the canal. If it began at Port Said, it might secure the canal but not threaten Nasser. The British cabinet had trouble deciding which of these things it wanted more, and Eden reacted angrily when he was asked for clarification of the operation’s objectives by Mountbatten and Keightley, so they remained confused.12 In August, the decision was made that it would begin at Alexandria, and a psychological warfare component was added to debase Egyptian morale. D-Day was set for September 15.
Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, formerly the chief of the Imperial General Staff and one of the most distinguished commanders of World War II, was then in Paris. Eden asked him to return to Britain to discuss Musketeer.
“Will you tell me what is your object?” Montgomery asked. “What are you trying to do?”
“To knock Nasser off his perch,” replied Eden.
“I said that if I were his military adviser—and I made it very clear that I was not—that object would not do,” remembered Montgomery in 1962. “I should need to know what was the political object when Nasser had been knocked off his perch, had been ‘hit for six,’ because it was that which would determine how the operation was best carried out, what was the best position for our Forces, and so on. In my judgment, it was the uncertainty about the political object of our leaders which bedevilled the Suez operation from the beginning.”13
In the first flush of anger about Nasser’s nationalization of the Canal Company in July, there was considerable support from the British press and public, and from the Labour opposition, for military action against Nasser. As tempers cooled, this dissipated. The leader of the opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, warned Eden off attacking Egypt in August in a series of private letters and meetings, stating that the Labour Party would not support any use of force unless Nasser were first condemned by the United Nations.14 Gaitskell’s concerns about intervention in Egypt arose despite his long-standing support for Israel. At the time, Zionism was popular on the democratic left internationally; as a result of his sympathies for it, Gaitskell was not always well received in the Arab world. “I accuse the leader of the British Labour Party of being a puppet and hireling of world Zionism,” Anwar Sadat had said on Voice of the Arabs radio in April 1956, after Gaitskell had criticized Eden for allowing the sale of British tanks to the Egyptians. “It is well known to all of us that he is married to an ardent Zionist Jewess. . . .”15 Gaitskell’s wife, Dora, had been born in Latvia into a Jewish family.
Musketeer preparations continued despite the lack of political support. British reservists were called up, obliged to abandon their civilian lives to wait for a war to begin. “Most of the reservists bore up cheerfully and without complaint,” Eden claimed. “A few became restive.”16 Yet by August 10, opinion polls were showing only around one third of Britons interviewed favored military action even if diplomacy failed.17 Moderate Conservatives, such as Walter Monckton, expressed queasiness at the prospect of a war. So increasingly did Mountbatten, though he was advised by the political chiefs at the Admiralty that it would be unconstitutional to say this to Eden directly. He was obliged to restrict himself to expressing his opinions loudly and repeatedly in the joint chiefs of staff committee. There, he claimed that the Egyptian people were solidly behind Nasser, that there was no workable plan for a new government in the event of Nasser being overthrown, and that Operation Musketeer would create long-lasting disorder throughout the Middle East.18
Nonetheless, as the politicians and diplomats of twenty-two nations negotiated in London during the week of the first Canal Conference in August, Eden and Lloyd put pressure on Dulles to speed things up by telling him that British and French military action—suspended during the conference—“could not long be delayed.” Dulles replied that he “had encountered a general feeling that the British public would not support the use of force,” adding that the Soviet negotiator had noticed it too. According to Dulles’s assistant William Macomber, the secretary of state was frequently recognized when they drove through London: “Every time we stopped at a red light people would bang on the window. . . . They would say, ‘God bless you Mr. Dulles, keep us out of the war.’”19 Eden and Lloyd denied there was any such feeling among the public, Eden insisting that “when the chips were down, the Government would have the full backing of the public in any military operation.” The Labour Party, he claimed, would fall in line too. Dulles was not convinced.20
Even within the British government, the question was being raised as to whether public opinion really was on the side of the interventionists. Members of the cabinet began to consider more conspiratorial methods of justifying force to a skeptical public. Harold Macmillan suggested in his diary that they might need to arrange some sort of fake provocation and attribute it to Egypt. “Of course, if an ‘incident’ took place, that w[oul]d be the way out,” he wrote. “We must secure the defeat of Nasser, by one method or another. If not, we sh[oul]d rot away.”21
By September, though, conditions had changed. The operation was repeatedly delayed beyond its original D-Day: to September 19, then to September 25. The planners warned that it could not be mounted beyond the first week of October owing to the unreliability of the Mediterranean weather. With political negotiations still going on, an attack on Nasser personally was looking risky. General Keightley warned that it was vital that “our moral case [should be] unassailable” before Arab countries and the wider world, yet it was unlikely this case could be made convincingly in just a few weeks before military action began. He recommended delaying the operation to “a much later date.” Eden responded that the French would not accept delays.22
Major practical difficulties with Musketeer became apparent. Beginning the assault at Alexandria would likely cause a very high level of civilian casualties, which would do little to help Britain and France win the psychological war or international support. Lord Hailsham, the new first lord of the Admiralty, admitted, “There is one thing in this that I simply cannot stomach and that is the bombardment from the sea by the British fleet of the open city of Alexandria.”23 Mountbatten told Eden that it would take at least two, perhaps three months to fight from Alexandria to the Canal Zone, during which time Egypt would surely haul them up before the United Nations. Eden did not believe him, arguing that “the Egyptians were yellow and would crumble immediately,” and suggesting that it would take only five days to get from Alexandria to Cairo. For once, though, Templer, Mountbatten, and Keightley were in agreement.24 Musketeer would not work.
Musketeer was redrafted as Musketeer Revise. The new operation ditched the assault on Alexandria and focused on Port Said. The psychological warfare plan was intensified with the aim of debasing Nasser’s reputation with his own people. There were now three phases. First, the Egyptian air force would be destroyed by air strikes. Second, there would follow at least ten days of an air war campaign alongside psychological operations. Third, the landings would take place. By that point, it was hoped they would not face much resistance.
Musketeer Revise still failed to impress the commanders who were supposed to carry it out. General Stockwell later wrote that Phase Two “produced considerable apprehension in the minds of the Joint Task Commanders.” British intelligence sources in Egypt were woeful, he admitted: the military commanders would not know to what extent the psychological campaign had worked, so troops would have to land without a clear sense of the opposition they might face. Furthermore, he did not believe air strikes alone would destroy the Egyptian army, the national guard, and any armed civilian resistance.25 Air Marshal Sir Denis Barnett added that Musketeer Revise “was dictated to the Force Commanders as a result of political limitations and was never considered by them to be a sound military operation.” He concluded that the entire operation “was coloured and limited by political considerations from start to finish.”26 Air Chief Marshal Sir David Lee, secretary to the chiefs of staff committee, remembered extensive opposition to any military action at all: “Lord Mountbatten was the strongest opponent of the operation, but I think the other Chiefs of Staff, if not quite so vociferous about it, were very anxious that it was an operation which might lead us into very considerable difficulties, and, for example, get us bogged down again in Egypt, a country which we’d only left six months beforehand.”27
On the other side of the Atlantic, Eisenhower—himself a five-star general—considered any plan to occupy Egypt untenable. “I remember the President saying that, if you went in to topple Nasser, you would have to contemplate occupying Cairo,” remembered his adviser Herman Phleger, “and that occupying a city of a million or two million people, if they were putting up a fight, was an almost impossible task—because they fought from house to house and block to block—and that it would take many, many thousands of troops. Then the question of ever getting out was one that was appalling. They [sic] felt that if you got militarily involved in Egypt, you would have to occupy the country and you probably never could get out.”28
The CIA formally assessed the prospect of British and French military success if they invaded Egypt. It did not have access to their plans, but even so it predicted that in the event of invasion, the Egyptians would block and close the Suez Canal, other Arab nations would sabotage oil pipelines, and the invaders would face “widespread anti-Western rioting” and “substantial guerrilla activity.” The CIA believed this might be suppressed “within a few weeks,” but there would still be major problems: “sabotage and terrorism and manifest Egyptian restiveness under military occupation would continue. Nasser would probably set up a government-in-exile to direct this activity and furnish a basis for UN action.” It also believed that no new Egyptian government would survive long without the support of the British and French militaries: “As a result the occupation would have to be prolonged.”29 Some in the British armed forces recognized this, too. As the commander in chief of the Royal Air Force in the Middle East put it, “Even with a puppet regime in Egypt favourable to us I believe we shall have to face a basically hostile and uncooperative population.”30
Musketeer Revise had a Latin motto, Nec tenui ferar penna: “Nor shall I be borne on a fragile wing.” As it turned out, a fragile wing was built into the operation at the last minute: the element of collusion with Israel. When Britain agreed to the Protocol of Sèvres on October 24, there was no time to design a new operation. Musketeer Revise had been devised as an overt invasion of Egypt, not a peacekeeping mission. Now, with a matter of days to go before its launch, it had to be made to fit a different situation: to look like a spontaneous response to an Israeli attack with the aim of separating two warring nations. “The British generals’ ignorance of the secret alliance with Israel contributed to the problem [of bad military planning],” wrote the London-based American diplomat Chester Cooper. “Not until October 26, on the very eve of the Israeli invasion, did Eden tell his commanders what had been arranged.”31
The only person in the British military who seems to have been told the full extent of collusion with Israel was Lord Mountbatten. General Keightley alerted his troops to be on ten days’ notice for Musketeer Revise on October 24, fewer than ten days before the operation was to begin. He seems to have been told that Israel was likely to launch an attack and Britain would respond with Musketeer Revise, but it is not clear how much he was told about the Protocol of Sèvres, if anything.32 On October 26, he summoned the acting quartermaster general of the forces, and told him, “The PM has decided that the landing at Port Said must take place as soon as possible but has also said that no one is yet to know.” The armed forces were told that they were participating in an exercise rather than preparing for war. General Stockwell found out that Israel was preparing to launch an attack on Egypt in three days when he landed in Paris on his way to Malta on October 26—and he was told by his own deputy, the French general André Beaufre. “The English General Stockwell, commanding aviation [sic—land forces], seems devoid of any imagination; he is in any case very badly informed,” wrote Christian Pineau.33
Once he arrived in Malta, Stockwell told the four British admirals running the naval operation about the Israeli attack. Admiral Manley Power looked up from a chart of the Mediterranean. “My dear old boy,” he said, “we’ll have to start tomorrow.”
Power recalled a conversation afterward with his fellow admiral Guy Grantham. “The Government must have gone raving mad,” he said. “If we are in any way mixed up with Israeli action we shall upset the whole Muslim world and I think we shan’t have the rest of world opinion behind us either. It’s daft.”34
As Power had realized, the new fact of collusion with Israel meant endangering one of Britain’s most important priorities. Apart from the significant blip of the Balfour Declaration, British interests in the Middle East had rested on good relations with the Arabs. With the appetite for oil still growing, it seemed to many in the Foreign Office that these good relations would be even more essential to British interests in the future. On no account, then, must the invasion of Egypt seem like a broader anti-Arab move—and that meant it must not appear to aid Israel in any way.
“Anglo-French action in the Canal Zone will probably be misrepresented, to our damage in the Arab world, as part of an imperialist plot hatched with Israel,” predicted a paper composed by a British Foreign Office committee in the first stage of planning on August 3, long before any possibility of collusion was raised in London. “It is, therefore, important that we and the French (and the Americans) should agree to use our influence to keep Israel right out of the dispute.” The Foreign Office paper even considered adding a component to the operation that would go against Israel’s interests, suggesting that Britain could in the course of an invasion of Egypt push Israel back beyond its “existing boundaries.”35 The British cabinet was united over the summer on the point that Israel should be kept out of the operation—with the exception of the chancellor of the exchequer, Harold Macmillan, who had convinced himself that Israel could be a useful ally.36 In the political directive prepared by the cabinet office for General Keightley in September, there was another strong warning against cozying up to the Israelis: “It is possible that Israel may take advantage of the situation and attack Egypt. . . . It is politically most important that . . . there should be no association or appearance of association between your forces and Israeli forces.”37 The French cabinet was told by the British that Israel must neither be involved nor even informed of the plans. The French cabinet was not especially concerned with keeping such things secret. This directive was leaked swiftly to Shimon Peres in Tel Aviv.38
Given that Ben-Gurion and many others in Israel nurtured long-standing resentments toward Britain and knew that Britain saw them as toxic allies, it may seem curious that the two nations embraced collusion with each other that autumn. The emulsifier was France. The French had been planning to collude with Israel from the start. On July 27, the day after Nasser had nationalized the Canal Company, interior minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury had asked Shimon Peres to an urgent meeting.
“How long, he asked, would it take the IDF to fight its way across the Sinai and reach the canal?” remembered Peres. Peres stated in his 1995 memoirs that he had guessed about two weeks; in a 1990 article, he remembered saying about six or seven days.
Bourgès-Maunoury asked Peres straight out: “Would Israel be prepared to take part in a tripartite military operation, in which Israel’s specific role would be to cross the Sinai?”
To the astonishment of a more cautious colleague, Peres replied, “Under certain circumstances I assume that we would be so prepared.”39
The cordial relationship between France and Israel had begun in the early 1950s, thanks to France’s willingness to sell Israel arms and Israel’s willingness to assist France with its nuclear program. Israeli scientists developed procedures for uranium separation and heavy-water manufacture, which France bought in 1953. After Nasser came to power, the two nations found they had even more in common. The French government, increasingly convinced that Nasser was wholly responsible for unrest in Algeria, wanted Israel to act as a counterweight and a distraction to Egypt. Israel, frustrated by American and British condemnation of its reprisals policy and the consequent withholding of military and economic aid, sought a new powerful ally that would be less squeamish about its actions. Though Franco-Israeli relations were supposed to be clandestine, news soon filtered out and caused trouble. “We were collaborating with the French, it was said, in their war against the FLN in Algeria,” remembered Shimon Peres. “We had created ‘an unclean alliance with the forces of imperialism.’”40 The United States tacitly approved the French supply of arms to Israel: Washington hoped, a little naively, that this would satisfy Israel and put pressure on Egypt to seek Arab-Israeli peace.41
The pragmatic nature of the Franco-Israeli association was underpinned by genuine comradely feeling. Guy Mollet was close to Israel’s socialists, particularly members of Ben-Gurion’s Mapai. Many French politicians had witnessed firsthand the persecution of the Jews in World War II and were inclined to accept Israel’s own assessment of its defense requirements. Foremost among these was Christian Pineau himself, who as a French Resistance leader had been imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp from December 1943 until April 1945, where he was traumatized by seeing Jews brought in from Auschwitz as the Soviets advanced. They had been reduced to “half frozen skeletons . . . covered in pus, dust, excrement,” he wrote. All of them died in the week following their arrival at Buchenwald. The “nightmare vision,” he remembered, became “ingrained in me. . . . I remain convinced that the destruction of the State of Israel would condemn the Jews to a similar fate to the one they suffered in Auschwitz and other extermination camps.”42 Well before Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, mainstream opinion in the French government leaned toward Israel. The view is summed up by a letter sent by France’s ambassador in Tel Aviv to Pineau in June. Israel, he claimed, was “a young state, the only stable and peaceable element in a tormented region,” set against “an Arab bloc . . . increasingly turbulent, backward and bellicose.”43
If anyone had a chance of convincing the lifelong Arabist Anthony Eden that he needed to align himself with Israel, it was Guy Mollet. Though Eden was a conservative and Mollet a socialist, the two got on exceptionally well. “I have never enjoyed a more completely loyal understanding with any man,” Eden wrote of Mollet in his memoirs. “In the hours of strain there was never a harsh word, a reproach or a recrimination between us.”44 Mollet began to work on Eden.
Yet if in August 1956 it had seemed like a bad idea for Arab-allied Britain to be associated with Israel, the events of September and October made it much worse. On September 10, Jordanian national guards shot at an IDF unit near the border, killing six men and injuring three. An Israeli reprisal was carried out the next day, killing six Jordanian policemen and ten soldiers, as well as demolishing a police fort and a United Nations school. Another Israeli reprisal two days later killed eight Jordanians. On September 23, a Jordanian national guardsman—not acting on orders, according to his government—fired his machine gun at a group of archaeologists who were working on a site at the Israeli border, killing four and injuring sixteen. Two Israeli civilians were killed in separate incidents that day. Two days later, Israeli forces overseen by Moshe Dayan himself attacked an Arab Legion post at Husan, near Bethlehem. There was fierce fighting; the death toll included ten Israelis, thirty-seven Jordanian police and soldiers, and two civilians.45 “This is the first action involving deliberate Israel penetration of Arab territory to which the Israelis have openly admitted for several months,” reported a British diplomat in Tel Aviv.46
The Foreign Office was “somewhat disturbed” by these outbreaks of violence on both sides. “If the Israel Government as a whole now considers that fedayeen attacks from Jordan will increase and that the Jordanian Government will lose control of the situation, we can only suppose that this is the effect which they intended to bring about by their raids,” wrote the officer in London. “In other words their purpose is not to pacify the border but to create an excuse for invading Jordan.” He added that the Foreign Office hoped they were wrong about this.47
Britain had a mutual defense treaty with Jordan. If Jordan called in British troops, Britain would have to fight Israel. Britain did have a war plan ready for fighting Israel, under the code name Operation Cordage. This could not be carried out at the same time as Musketeer Revise, logically or even logistically, for it required the same troops and equipment. On September 27, Ben-Gurion and Dayan discussed the possibility that a full-scale war with Jordan would mean war with Britain—but another option was already on the table. On September 30 and October 1, a delegation led by Golda Meir held secret meetings in France to put together a plan for invading Sinai and taking the Suez Canal—attacking Egypt, not Jordan.
Then two Israeli workers were murdered in an orange grove at Even Yehuda, near the Jordan-controlled West Bank. In a reprisal on October 10, the IDF attacked Qalqilya, in the West Bank. This was on a different scale from previous reprisals. It began with an air attack and artillery bombardment, then turned into a pitched battle. Eighteen Israelis were killed; the Jordanian death toll was somewhere between sixty and a hundred. As the attack went on, King Hussein called for assistance from British Royal Air Force bases in Jordan, invoking the Anglo-Jordanian alliance. The British consul general in Jerusalem telephoned the Israeli governor there and told him that he had to call off the attack or Britain would have to declare war on Israel.48 According to Ariel Sharon, who was one of the commanders at Qalqilya, these political concerns won out: “General Headquarters was trying to limit the scope of the operation.”49 Sharon was furious about the restrictions on his action and fell out badly and publicly with Moshe Dayan. Such was the tension that the British air and naval forces earmarked for Musketeer Revise were put on alert to enact Operation Cordage instead. They were ready, if the situation required, to go to war with Israel.50 The British government tried to squirm out of sending its own troops to King Hussein. Eden asked Nuri es-Said to send Iraqi troops to Jordan in their place. But this ploy created a new problem of its own: the Israelis were horrified by the possibility of a large, well-equipped Arab army amassing just over their border.
Mollet realized at this point that he would have to let Eden in on his plan to collude with Israel. Throughout negotiations at the United Nations in the first weeks of October, Christian Pineau had been meeting secretly in his New York hotel every morning with Colonel Yehoshafat Harkabi, the Israeli chief of army intelligence, to discuss this new plan.51 The United Nations adopted Selwyn Lloyd’s Six Principles on October 13. The next day, General Maurice Challe, the French deputy chief of staff, and Albert Gazier, the French foreign minister, visited Eden at Chequers, the prime minister’s official country residence. Anthony Nutting remembered that it was “a glorious autumn day, radiant with sunshine and crisp as a biscuit.” The men talked for a while in front of a private secretary—until Gazier indicated to Eden that he should instruct the secretary to stop taking notes. Eden did so. Then Challe presented the possibility that Israel might agree to attack Egypt, so Britain and France could invade on the pretense of “separating the combatants” and “extinguishing a dangerous fire.”
“Doing his best to conceal his excitement, Eden replied noncommittally that he would give these suggestions very careful thought,” Nutting remembered, but he already knew that the prime minister was committed to the plan.52 Now, though, Eden had to deal with the problem that he had already asked the Iraqi army to go to Jordan. He begged Nuri to make two concessions: first, to send a token infantry regiment instead of full forces, and second, to keep them nowhere near the border with Israel. Nuri complied. The Israelis were not mollified. “Save for the Almighty,” Dayan wrote in his diary, “only the British are capable of complicating affairs to such a degree. At the very moment when they are preparing to topple Nasser . . . they insist on getting the Iraqi Army into Jordan, even if such action leads to war between Israel and Jordan in which they, the British, will take part against Israel.”53
Eden and Lloyd flew to Paris on October 16 to meet Mollet and Pineau. According to Eden, they discussed their disappointment with the United Nations and with Dulles’s SCUA, and their fears that Middle East peace was faltering owing to the “line-up between Jordan, Egypt and Syria . . . menacing [Israel] with destruction.”54 Eden did not mention in his memoir that they also discussed the details of a possible Israeli attack on Egypt and subsequent intervention.55 Meanwhile, in Israel, Shimon Peres had to exert all his diplomatic skills to soothe Ben-Gurion, who had thought the French plan was for Israel to mount a joint invasion of Egypt with France and Britain—not to stage a feint to allow Britain to keep its image clean. “He saw in this proposal the acme of British hypocrisy,” remembered Peres. “It reflected . . . the British desire to harm Israel more than their resolve to destroy the Egyptian dictatorship.”56
“The English plot, I imagine, is to get us involved with Nasser,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary, “and bring about the occupation of Jordan by Iraq.”57 Relations between Britain and Israel worsened when the British representative at the United Nations, Sir Pierson Dixon, criticized the Israelis for their reprisal at Qalqilya in front of the Security Council. Eden was exasperated, complaining that Dixon “aligns himself with the Russians.” Dixon did not know what was going on with the Israelis behind the scenes and could hardly be blamed for pursuing the British government’s usual line of condemning reprisal raids. Eden was now terrified of scaring Ben-Gurion off: “The French warned how suspicious of us the Israelis are.”58
“October 1956 was one of the craziest months in history,” remembered Shimon Peres. With outrage over Qalqilya and the threat of a British attack on Israel happening at the same time as Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were discussing a joint military command, “Israel found itself facing a terrible situation.”59 On these grounds, Peres and Mollet managed to convince Ben-Gurion that he should go to Paris for talks at Sèvres with the British. He agreed to do so but ruled out acting ahead of Britain or France; he felt that all three must invade simultaneously. Only at Sèvres had he been persuaded to change his mind. Israel’s agreement had dropped the final piece of the puzzle in place for Eden. And so, by October 26, when the commanders of Musketeer Revise made one last attempt to tell Eden that it would be a disaster, it was too late. The prime minister was determined to go ahead with his new plan.
0900 Washington DC // 1500 Budapest
In Budapest, Imre Nagy struggled to deal with the chaos following the previous day’s massacre. Ferenc Donáth, a liberal member of his administration, suggested that they must meet with the rebels. “The party dare not oppose the mass movement that seeks to build socialism by democratic means,” Donáth argued; “it must rather place itself at the head of that movement.” Even old Stalinists like Gerő agreed. Yet Nagy was curiously distracted during this meeting, wandering in and out of the room and letting others draw up a draft resolution. Afterward, he met a group of writers and students. By this point, Nagy “appeared completely helpless and we were extremely angered,” remembered university assistant István Pozsár, who was there. Nagy said vaguely that he would represent their position to the administration, then turned to leave.
“You should represent it in your role as Hungary’s prime minister!” yelled one student after him.60
Those close to Nagy tried to shake him into action. His wife told him plainly that his own supporters were baffled by his behavior, and his daughter reported that there was a real revolution in the streets. “I know it,” Nagy replied. According to a colleague, Nagy then “sank into himself, he was silent and tears ran from his eyes. . . . He gave the impression of a man who was serving his people, his country, and the cause of socialism, a man full of goodwill and good intentions, [but] a man in a very difficult situation facing events without knowing what to do.”61
Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov reluctantly agreed to give Nagy some real power as the leader of Hungary if he could stop the fighting. Though they considered him potentially bourgeois—calling him a kulak, after the supposedly profiteering class of farmers exterminated by Stalin—they knew Bloody Thursday had made the Soviet position difficult. Mikoyan still wanted to avoid a full invasion. As he wrote to Khrushchev that day, all-out action would be dangerous: “In that case they [the Hungarian government] will lose all contact with the peaceful population, there would be more deaths which will widen the chasm between the government and the population. If we follow that path, we will lose.”62
The rebels were building barricades and training new recruits. “The average age didn’t reach 18,” admitted rebel leader Gergely Pongrátz, who was himself only twenty-four at the time, “but we had over there 12–13–14-year-old kids. Many times I sent them home, and they didn’t wanted [sic] to leave.”63 Throughout Hungary, smaller towns set up their own ad hoc councils of workers. In Mosonmagyaróvár, a small town near the Austrian border, a crowd called for the removal of a colossal Red Star from the AVH headquarters on October 26. The local AVH commander was not inclined to comply and instead ordered his troops to attack the crowd with machine guns and grenades. An estimated fifty-two people were killed. Afterward, four of the AVH men who had carried out the massacre were beaten by citizens. Two survived, albeit with serious injuries; two were literally ripped to pieces.64
As the violence continued in Hungary, Allen Dulles returned to work in Washington following a trip to Europe. He went straight into a meeting of the National Security Council. The rebellion in Hungary, he told them, was a far bigger deal than that in Poland; it “constituted the most serious threat yet to be posed to continued Soviet control of the satellites.” Dulles saw two alternatives for how Moscow might respond to Hungarian dissent: either vicious repression or democratization and a loosening of control in the satellites, which might, of course, risk losing them entirely. There was excited discussion about the possibility of “Western orientation” replacing Soviet influence.
Eisenhower asked Allen Dulles what he knew about the reaction in Czechoslovakia. Dulles was not encouraging. He knew little: “In any event, practically all the potential Gomulkas in Czechoslovakia had been pretty well slaughtered.”
The president’s own concern, as he had discussed with Foster Dulles the previous evening, was about how the Soviets might react if they thought the United States was involved. “In view of the serious deterioration of their position in the satellites, might they not be tempted to resort to very extreme measures and even to precipitate global war?” Harold Stassen, Eisenhower’s disarmament adviser, suggested that he send a message to Marshal Zhukov assuring him that the United States had no intention of pursuing military action in Hungary. Initially, Eisenhower dismissed this. He did not believe that the Soviets feared an American invasion, but he was sure they feared American subversion. Instead, he asked for a security analysis and recommendations.65 But the idea played on his mind and on Stassen’s, for both of them continued to discuss the possibility with Foster Dulles that day. Eisenhower had a subtler message incorporated into a speech, applauding the possibility of the satellite states becoming neutral.66
The discomfort with Communism in the United States went back to the first “Red Scare,” just after World War I, in which it was feared that Communists would organize themselves and eventually topple the government as they had in Russia. Concerns that American Communists sought violent revolution grew again before and during World War II. Despite the specific protection afforded to free speech by the First Amendment to the Constitution, new laws placed severe criminal penalties on advocating such action.
Both Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt respected the Soviet contribution to the Allied war effort—a contribution on the Eastern Front that was decisive to victory in Europe—and both had some personal regard for Joseph Stalin. Yet the prospect of continued coexistence with a Communist superpower became increasingly troublesome for American politicians. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman declared the Truman Doctrine, stating that the United States would intervene with political, military, and economic assistance in any struggle by a democratic nation against an authoritarian threat, whether from outside or within. The policy was aimed at Soviet expansion. Generally the Truman Doctrine had been pursued passively, though in 1949 a secret joint American-British operation had parachuted trained Albanian exiles back into Albania to start a counterrevolution. This had failed, and nothing much had been tried since, aside from propaganda, notably the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe. American agents did not start the anti-Communist uprisings in East Germany or Czechoslovakia in 1953 or those in Poland or Hungary in 1956.67
The United States sometimes had trouble persuading its NATO allies to see the problem of communism in the black-and-white terms that Foster Dulles preferred. Dulles felt that Eden acted “like an impartial mediator” between the United States and the Soviets, rather than taking the American side.68 Christian Pineau (a socialist himself) complained later that Dulles never distinguished clearly between different types of left-wing politics, creating a gap between European and American opinion. “At the time, I could already feel the difference. But why? Because I had read Marx and Lenin. Because I knew communist doctrine from having studied it,” he wrote. “For me, these were quite current problems: my friends and I had published numerous articles on the opposition between democratic socialism and communism. For us these were familiar things: they weren’t for Mr Dulles.”69 The divisions were deep: when Khrushchev and Bulganin visited Britain in April 1956, Khrushchev found that he detested British democratic socialists, ending up in violent arguments with Labour Party luminaries Aneurin Bevan, Richard Crossman, and George Brown. By contrast, he rather liked Anthony Eden. “Bulganin can vote Labour if he likes,” Khrushchev told the British ambassador to Moscow after the trip, “but I’m going to vote Conservative.”70
Though there was no serious appetite inside the highest circles of the United States government for taking armed action in the Soviet bloc, there was a great deal of talk—in public and in official meetings—about whether the United States might “liberate” the “captive peoples” under Soviet domination. Much of this talk came from Foster Dulles himself, who had spoken during Eisenhower’s first presidential campaign of the need to move “from a purely defensive policy to a psychological offensive, a liberation policy, which will try to give hope and a resistance mood inside the Soviet Empire.”71 This was politically expedient at home. Since the Truman Doctrine, a second Red Scare had surged in the United States, pioneered by the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee and by the investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Though McCarthy himself fell from grace at the end of 1954, Communism remained a bogeyman in domestic politics.
In Eisenhower’s first term, some moves had been made toward the “liberation policy” Foster Dulles had championed—notably the coup in Guatemala. A rebellion against Soviet control in Eastern Europe was an even more thrilling prospect for some in the CIA, especially as they had not started this one themselves. But they faced strong opposition on any case for intervention from more or less the whole of Eisenhower’s administration.
The Middle East preoccupied Foster Dulles and Eisenhower that morning. Since Qalqilya, the Dulles brothers had been discussing the probability of Israel escalating its attacks on Jordan from reprisal raids to an invasion. Foster had told Allen that the Israelis “think Jordan is breaking up and it is a question of grabbing the pieces.” Allen had confirmed that it looked like that to him, too.72
On October 26, Foster Dulles learned that the IDF was mobilizing, and began to smell a rat. The American army attaché in Tel Aviv believed the mobilization was greater than anything he had seen since the 1948 war. He was hearing rumors that the French were involved and the target was the Straits of Tiran.73 Eisenhower summoned the British chargé d’affaires to ask him what was going on. The British chargé d’affaires insisted that nothing was. This was not surprising: Eden had deliberately not informed the British embassy in Washington of his plans.
Dulles cabled the American embassy in London to ask whether anyone there knew what was happening. “We do not know their [the Britons’] intentions with reference to resuming negotiations with Egyptians nor with reference to SCUA nor do we know what are [the] understandings apparently arrived at with French,” he wrote. “We have information of major Israeli preparations and suspect there may be French complicity with them and possibly UK complicity with various moves which they think it preferable to keep from us lest we indicate our disapproval.”
Frankly, he continued, under the protection of top-secret classification: “We are quite disturbed here over [the] fact there is apparently a deliberate British purpose of keeping us completely in the dark as to their intentions with reference to Middle East matters generally and Egypt in particular.”74 This was exactly right: even Dulles’s turn of phrase was being echoed across the Atlantic. “Nobody was kept more completely in the dark than the President of the United States,” remarked British foreign affairs minister Anthony Nutting.75
Yet there were people in Washington who could have shed light on what was happening. There is evidence from many sources that Allen Dulles had found out about Franco-British collusion with Israel on his European trip, and possibly that he had even tacitly allowed some American involvement. According to the well-informed Israeli historian (and later politician) Michael Bar-Zohar, who interviewed Ben-Gurion extensively in the 1960s, “The head of the CIA knew the truth of the matter; he even knew that the United States Army had obligingly organized an air-lift from Florida to France in order to supply the French ‘Sabres’ with extra fuel-tanks.”76
Allen Dulles called a meeting of his CIA deputies later that day. In the 1970s, journalist Leonard Mosley spoke to several people who were present, including Richard Bissell and Robert Amory. The deputies reported that the British and French had gone quiet, and that Israel’s top military man, Moshe Dayan, had gone missing. He was thought to be in France. At this point, according to Mosley’s reconstruction, Dulles revealed to the deputies that he had been told by a source in the French cabinet that the British, French, and Israelis were planning a joint invasion of Egypt. He added that he saw why the French would do such a thing, owing to their interests in Algeria—but he was surprised that the British would risk their alliances with Iraq, Jordan, and the Gulf states by joining up with the Israelis. Bissell then showed the meeting photographs taken by U-2 spy aircraft of French warships being loaded with supplies in the ports of Marseilles and Toulon, and British military preparations in Malta and Cyprus. According to Mosley, he “dryly remarked that they were hardly there for a regatta.”
Amory said that Eden would ally with anyone who would help him destroy Nasser. He added that “almost everyone on the British General Staff was dead against a military operation in Egypt,” not least because they lacked the naval resources. He had heard that Lord Mountbatten had fought with Eden about it.
Counterintelligence expert James Jesus Angleton spoke up. Angleton had intimate ties with the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency.
“Amory’s remark may sound alarming, but I think I can discount it,” Angleton said. “I’ve spent last evening and most of the early hours with my Israeli friends in Washington, and I can assure you that it’s all part of maneuvers and is certainly not meant for any serious attack. There is nothing in it. I do not believe there is going to be an attack by the Israelis.”77
It seems Allen Dulles did not pass the mixed messages he was getting about whether the Israelis were attacking Jordan or Egypt on to Eisenhower immediately. It is not clear if he even told his brother that day. When he was later challenged on possible intelligence failures leading up to the Suez War, Allen Dulles claimed that the CIA had warned the State Department the next morning, October 27, of a possible Israeli attack on Egypt. In the official United States collection of foreign-relations documents, his letter is annotated: “No record of this communication has been found in Department of State files.”78
General Charles Cabell, deputy director of the CIA, later claimed, “The fact of the matter is that the intelligence community did give advance warning of this [the British, French, and Israeli attack plan] to the Secretary of State—not long in advance, but advance in a matter of days. We had given tentative warnings about it considerably earlier than just days in advance.” Cabell suggested that if Foster Dulles had claimed otherwise, he may have done so because “he was feeling that it was the interests of the United States to give the impression that the policy makers did get caught completely unawares of this act.”79 Speaking in 1965, Christian Pineau agreed: “There is in any case one untrue thing that has been said, and I don’t mean to implicate [Foster] Dulles. It is that the Americans were not aware of our projects. This is not correct. They were not informed by diplomatic means, but I have good reason to know that they were by secret services.”80
Under the doctrine of “plausible deniability” favored by Allen Dulles, the president was sometimes not told things it might be inconvenient or embarrassing for him to know—assassination plots against foreign politicians, for instance. But in this case, plausible deniability for the president would not have been required, for the United States was not doing anything dubious. It looks instead as though crucial intelligence about the activities of key allies was withheld from the president during an international crisis.
Faced with the prospect of war just days before an election in which he was standing on the promise of peace, Eisenhower would surely have put pressure on Britain, France, and Israel to back down. If one or both of the Dulles brothers did not want to tell the president what was going on, it could have been because they did not want Britain, France, and Israel to back down. It is possible they wanted to see Nasser fall and thought Britain, France, and Israel might achieve that. It is possible that Foster Dulles wanted to see Britain and France—in his own phrase of two days earlier—“commit suicide” in the Middle East.
There are no clues in the archives, for Allen Dulles had many of his papers destroyed. He may have seen this as a way to keep secrets. Instead, it has encouraged conspiracy theorists to indulge in wide-ranging speculation about his role in controversial events—speculation that, owing to the absence of evidence, historians are restricted in their ability to investigate. No one can now know what was going through Allen Dulles’s mind on October 26 if he did intentionally withhold this crucial information from Eisenhower. There was a conspiracy in London, Paris, and Tel Aviv to topple Nasser without informing the president of the United States. It remains an intriguing but unproven possibility that there may have been one in Washington, too.
1430 Washington DC // 1930 London // 2030 Budapest
At Kensington Palace in West London that evening, the glamorous Duchess of Kent, formerly Princess Marina of Greece, gave a cocktail party. Among the guests was Jock Colville, who had been joint principal private secretary to Winston Churchill. During the party, he had “a long talk” with Eden. Eden had been impressed by the news coming from Hungary. “He was elated by the apparent split in the Communist empire.” Indeed, his mood was notably positive. “I found him cheerful and apparently exhilarated.”81
The meeting with Colville may have given Eden an extraordinary idea. Churchill’s new private secretary Anthony Montague Browne remembered that at some point in late October—he did not specify exactly which day—he was summoned to see Eden in the cabinet room. “Eden seemed a different man from my previous meetings, friendly, exhilarated, almost light-hearted,” he wrote.
“You are to promise not to tell anybody except Winston until this is all over,” Eden said. Montague Browne promised, and Eden revealed to him the plan for an Anglo-French assault on Suez. He sent Montague Browne to see Norman Brook, the cabinet secretary, to hear more about the military plan. Before he left, though, Eden stopped him.
“I want to ask you this,” said the prime minister. “If I offered Winston a seat in the cabinet without portfolio, would he accept?”
“I was astounded,” wrote Montague Browne. “I simply couldn’t imagine anything less likely.”82 Churchill turned down the opportunity to serve under Eden; he had had a mild stroke while in the south of France on October 20 and was in no position to take the post even had he wanted it. Montague Browne’s story hints at how concerned the prime minister was at this point to legitimize his Suez strategy. It had taken Eden years to persuade Churchill to retire and bequeath the Conservative Party to him. If Churchill returned to government now—even in a relatively junior role—he would inevitably overshadow the unpopular Eden and might threaten his leadership. It was a tremendous risk to take and indicates that Eden may have suspected that he would face opposition to his war at home.
1900 New York; Washington DC
Shortly after seven p.m., Foster Dulles telephoned Eisenhower to discuss the situation in Hungary. The minutes of the conversation reveal that both men were excited about the prospect for change. As Eisenhower saw it, “The whole European and world security would seem to be on the road to achievement.” As an incentive to the Soviets to let Hungary go, Dulles suggested they imply that in the event of Hungarian independence, they “might not need to build up NATO so much or something to that effect.”
Eisenhower agreed. “The Pres. said that if they could have some kind of [free] existence, choose their own government and what they want, then we are satisfied and this would really solve one of the greatest problems in the world that is standing in the way of world peace.”
For all their hopes, though, Eisenhower and Dulles were not blind to the fact that Hungary was still under threat. Dulles mentioned the need to get the question before the United Nations as soon as possible, “in order to focus attention on it so the Russians will not commit vast reprisals.” He was contacting Selwyn Lloyd, who he expected would support the American case at the Security Council. Eisenhower instructed him specifically “to say to Lloyd it is so terrible we would be remiss if we did not do something.”83
After he hung up, Dulles sent a telegram to the American embassy in London with instructions for staff there to tell Lloyd they wanted to inscribe an item at the Security Council: “The [Hungarian] revolt is assuming proportions which may in turn bring Red counter-action of major proportions. Emotional reaction to this would be very serious, certainly in this country.” He advised that the United Nations should be focused on Hungary and that the British and Americans should speak informally to the Soviet permanent representative there.84
All the worst allegations the United States government had made about the Soviet Union—its antidemocratic repression, its brutality, and its imperialism—were being demonstrated for the world to see. In Cold War terms, the iron was hot. It was the perfect time for the United States to prove its point, and to do so at the world forum of the United Nations with the backing of its strongest allies, Britain and France.
Except, of course, that Britain and France were preparing to launch something which might appear just as repressive, brutal, and imperialist as the Soviet repression of Hungary—and they were planning to mobilize for it the very next morning.