WHEN DEAN ACHESON MET THE NEW BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY, Anthony Eden, for the first time, on the margins of a meeting in Paris in November 1951, he hoped to make a breakthrough on the long-running Anglo-Iranian dispute. Having attributed the Labour government’s inflexibility to electoral pressures, tiredness, and infighting, he anticipated that the new Conservative government would be strong enough to be more generous to Tehran. He was to be disappointed.
In reality, the new British government was in no stronger a position than its limping predecessor had been. Campaigning on a manifesto that promised a “Britain Strong and Free,” Winston Churchill had won the previous month’s election but far less decisively than he would have liked. Labour had in fact polled more votes: it was only a collapse in the Liberals’ vote and the vagaries of the UK’s electoral system that had given him a narrow majority of seventeen.
A month short of his seventy-seventh birthday, Churchill was well aware that many people—foremost among them his impatient understudy Eden—thought that he was too old for the job. On the stump he had tried hard to counter the perception, on one occasion tucking in to an enormous fry-up followed by a large whisky and soda and a huge cigar—all at half past seven in the morning. That feat impressed Harold Macmillan, the up-and-coming Tory politician who was with him on that occasion. But Macmillan would, however, later skewer his boss as “admired, but on the whole disliked.”1
By the time that Churchill reentered 10 Downing Street, he faced a further Middle Eastern crisis. Days after Mosaddeq decreed that the British staff in Abadan must leave within a week, the Egyptian government had presented its parliament with a bill abrogating the 1936 treaty with Britain—the agreement that gave Britain the right to station troops along the Suez Canal. The day after the abrogation bill passed into law, the Egyptian government publicly rejected an Anglo-American proposal for a Middle East Command, which would have internationalized the Suez base and provided the basis for an ongoing British presence. That same day Egyptians rioted in Ismailia, the city where the British military headquarters was situated. “This is the example we must follow in our struggle with the British,” an Egyptian newspaper declared as the British were forced out of Abadan. “It is only the weak whom they oppress. Their prestige in the Middle East is finished.”2
Churchill had no doubt whatsoever that Britain’s unceremonious expulsion from Abadan had emboldened the Egyptians to take action, since he described the developing Suez crisis as the “bastard child of the Iranian situation.” Well aware that he owed his narrow victory in part to his repeated accusations that Labour had failed to defend the empire, he was in no mood to make concessions to Egypt or Iran.3
Nor, at that point, was Eden. When the foreign secretary met Acheson in Paris that November, he had just come off the telephone from the prime minister. With Churchill’s warning “not to yield an inch” ringing in his ears, he told the secretary of state that his proposal—which accepted nationalization as a fait accompli—was “totally unacceptable.” Mosaddeq, still then waiting in New York, should be made to go home empty-handed, he continued, since if the grandstanding Iranian prime minister fell as a result, “there was a real possibility that a more amenable Government might follow.” Acheson disagreed, feeling that his counterpart had failed to appreciate that it was impossible to turn back the clock. “You must learn to live in the world as it is,” he told Eden’s adviser Evelyn Shuckburgh, tartly, afterward.4
Eden showed no sign of wanting to take Acheson’s advice. To his next encounter with Acheson three days later, he brought two senior officials, from the Treasury and the Ministry of Fuel and Power. After the oil expert had dismantled the American proposal, showing rightly why it was commercially unviable, the Treasury mandarin observed that there would be “catastrophic” consequences if it became more widely known that the British were even considering negotiating on the basis suggested by Acheson. The secretary of state’s face betrayed his feelings. “He seemed irritated by our experts,” a British diplomat recorded, “when they explained the damage that might be done to our interests all over the world if we gave the Persians a premium for having seized our installations.”5
Only after Acheson had spent six days in Paris did the penny finally drop. Neither Churchill nor Eden had any intention of accepting a settlement that suggested that Mosaddeq had profited by his actions while Britain was humiliated. Nor were they willing to lift the highly effective boycott of Iranian oil that was now bringing the country to its knees. The secretary of state’s argument that the blockade left the country on the brink of a collapse from which Moscow could only benefit did not register with Eden or his advisers. “If your appraisal of the Iranian situation is correct, then the choice before you is whether Iran goes Commie or Britain goes bankrupt,” a member of the British delegation had told him. “I hope you would agree that the former is the lesser evil.” Acheson’s disappointment was obvious. “The only thing which is added to the Labor party attitude is a certain truculent braggadocio. They have not been returned to office to complete the dissolution of the empire,” he concluded.6
That nod to Churchill’s defiant statement at the Mansion House in 1942 was apt, for the prime minister referred constantly to the war. The fact that there were “more than 50,000 British graves in Egypt” was as powerful an argument as any for an ongoing British presence there, in his view. His magic formula for dealing with the crisis facing Britain was unchanged from a decade earlier. “It is of utmost importance to get America in,” he wrote days after his return to power, on November 10—the exact same day that Acheson described him and his colleagues as “depressingly out of touch with the world of 1951.”7
While Churchill, oblivious to Acheson’s opinion of him, waited for the Truman administration to come round to his way of thinking, his strategy was simple. Do nothing “sharp or sudden,” he instructed Eden. There was “no need to hurry either in Egypt or Persia,” he reiterated in the cabinet a few days later, “Time is now on our side.” His hope was that a mounting sense of crisis in both Iran and Egypt would force the United States to back him, creating pressure on the rulers of both countries to appoint new governments that would deal with him. It was a strategy that was deeply flawed.8
BY THE END of 1951 the chances that the Iranians would accept any outcome that stopped short of nationalizing Anglo-Iranian were nil, as Acheson had already grasped, and in Egypt the list of politicians willing to risk their reputations by negotiating with the British was short. In the decade since the then British ambassador, the bullying Miles Lampson, had parked his tanks outside the Abdeen Palace, relations between the British and their unwilling Egyptian hosts had not improved. Egypt’s unstable situation had not helped. Following the war’s end, boom had given way to bust and mass unemployment, which a series of coalition governments all failed to solve. Egypt’s defeat by Israel in the 1948 war reinforced the sense of national crisis, while the ongoing presence of tens of thousands of British troops on the canal continually tweaked Egyptian insecurities. The major beneficiary of the mounting discontent at the country’s predicament was the Muslim Brotherhood, the half-million-strong Islamist and anti-imperialist movement born two decades earlier in Ismailia, the city where the divide between the Egyptians and the British was glaring.
Had the British left Egypt in 1949, as Ernest Bevin had originally intended, they would have avoided becoming such an easy scapegoat for the country’s woes. But as they had not, they became the targets of an insurgency organized by the Muslim Brotherhood that, by the end of 1951, had been going on for over eighteen months. Its foot soldiers were the fedayeen, commandos who would coat themselves in grease and then roll in sand for camouflage. Trained by former German army officers, they were joined by moonlighting Egyptian auxiliary policemen, who were sent to Ismailia to keep the peace after the October 16 riots. Benefiting from the auxiliaries’ inside knowledge, the fedayeen’s attacks increased in frequency and accuracy.
The nature of Britain’s Suez base, which was in fact a series of separate encampments covering an area of 750 square miles, left it and troops traveling between its different installations extremely vulnerable to fedayeen attacks. Barbed wire, arc lamps, dogs, and antipersonnel mines did not prevent several break-ins each week. Since the British controlled the oil refinery at Suez, the Labour government’s response to these attacks had been to cut off the supply of fuel oil periodically, on which Egyptian bakeries, sewage works, and light industry across the Nile delta depended. Churchill enthusiastically continued this policy, hoping it would bring matters to a head. “Touch ’em up on the black oil,” he urged on November 12. “Let the temperature rise.”9
And rise it did. Five days later two British army officers were murdered when they came under fire from a police station while out shopping with their families in Ismailia. The British government responded by evacuating military families from the city and, under pressure from the generals to take tougher action, imposing stiffer oil sanctions, which cut off the supply one day each week. Churchill’s justification for this policy was that the troops involved in checking vehicle traffic needed some respite, but Acheson correctly saw it as deliberately provocative. When he saw Eden on the margins of a foreign ministers’ conference the same day, he told the foreign secretary that the British approach would achieve nothing and that he was wholly wrong to endorse it.
Meanwhile, the attacks continued. There was nighttime sniping, cable cutting, and ambushes. British soldiers were sandbagged in the streets and murdered. Their mutilated bodies were usually found floating in the Sweet Water Canal, which linked the Nile to the Canal Zone. The British retaliated. In the six weeks following the October 16 riots, their soldiers killed 117 Egyptian civilians and wounded another 400. They caused outrage when on December 5 they made nearly 300 Egyptians homeless when they bulldozed their houses to widen a particularly ambush-prone road.
The British had given no warning of this operation to the Egyptian government, which now recalled its ambassador to London in protest. The American ambassador reported that Egyptian anger had reached “such white heat that a real explosion seems inevitable.” Ominously, he warned that “there are no longer elements of the press, officialdom or even the public to whom we can look for rationality on this question.”10
By the end of 1951, the situation in the Canal Zone bore striking similarities to Palestine five years earlier. More and more British troops were embroiled in an insurgency that was unwinnable now that they had lost the support of the majority of local people. The two British generals in Egypt asked London for powers enabling them to detain, try, and punish fedayeen they captured, but Eden quickly dismissed their request for what amounted to a local martial law. Setting aside the fact that executions would be as counterproductive as they had been in Palestine, the Egyptians were bound to retaliate by cutting off food and water supplies on which British forces in the Canal Zone depended. To work, the generals’ proposal required the government either to supply the Suez base itself or else to sanction the takeover of Egypt. Since neither option was remotely feasible, Eden instead suggested giving the commanders on the ground the power to detain suspects indefinitely instead. Although he admitted that this measure was of “dubious legality,” Churchill was unfussed. “Pig it,” the prime minister suggested, when the issue came before the cabinet. “Don’t be too scrupulous about the law.”11
A few days later, after dinner in the British ambassador’s residence in Paris, Eden raised the question of what to do about the Egyptians when the prime minister was present. The whisky had been flowing, and a witness recalled how Churchill rose from his chair and advanced toward Eden with clenched fists. “Tell them that if we have any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter, from which they should never have emerged,” he growled at the foreign secretary.12
The morning after, Eden asked his office to draft instructions for the British ambassador to Cairo, telling him to approach King Farouq and suggest he replace his government with one willing to negotiate with the British. Recalling how the Anglo-Egyptian relationship had worked in wartime, he also told his envoy to “lecture King in Miles Lampson way.” Whether or not Eden really wanted the ambassador to do this is moot. The fact that this message was shown to the U.S. ambassador before it was sent tends to suggest that the foreign secretary hoped to scare the Americans into doing his dirty work for him. Possibly after being tipped off by the Americans, Farouq did not throw out his government but instead appointed two well-known anglophiles to advise him. One of them was the ambassador his government had just pulled out of London. Heartened by this encouraging gesture, Eden argued that it was time to try to help the king.13
IN EARLY JANUARY, Churchill and Eden went to Washington in search of Truman’s and Acheson’s support to resolve their Middle Eastern woes. Before Truman met with Churchill, he read an acute and devastating assessment of the prime minister by his ambassador in London and knew what to expect. Churchill, said the ambassador, was “definitely aging and is no longer able to retain his full clarity and energy for extended periods. Also he is increasingly living in the past and talking in terms of conditions no longer existing. These developments in his personality mean that he is more difficult to deal with.”14
Churchill, Truman, Eden, and Acheson dined together on January 5, 1952. “Did you feel,” the prime minister asked Acheson afterward, “that around that table this evening was gathered the governments of the world—not to dominate it, mind you—but to save it?” How Acheson responded is not recorded. Eden and his advisers, on the other hand, were horrified by Truman’s treatment of their boss. When Churchill raised his hope that the Americans might commit troops to Suez and stand shoulder to shoulder against Mosaddeq, Truman delegated the matter to Acheson and Eden to discuss. The president “was quite abrupt… with poor old Winston,” one of the British team wrote afterward. “It was impossible not to be conscious that we are playing second fiddle.”15
The talks went nowhere. Churchill again appealed to the Americans to send troops to the Canal Zone to help, telling Congress it had become “an international rather than a national responsibility.” But Truman and Acheson were determined to keep their distance. “We would be like two people locked in loving embrace in a rowboat which was about to go over Niagara Falls,” the secretary of state said. He “thought we should break the embrace and take to the oars.”16
With that analogy, Acheson got a laugh out of Churchill but nothing more. He wanted the British to recognize Farouq as king of Sudan, believing that this would break the deadlock over the Middle East Command talks. But Eden refused. The foreign secretary had an unmatched command of the finer points of the 1936 treaty because he had originally negotiated it. Since the treaty had deliberately left the awkward question of Sudan’s future unresolved, he argued that to do as Acheson suggested would implicitly concede that Britain accepted Egypt’s abrogation of the agreement, a concession he did not want to make.
Eden arrived back in London ahead of Churchill and candidly briefed his colleagues. “He had been forcibly struck—indeed horrified—at the way we are treated by the Americans today,” Harold Macmillan wrote afterward. “They are polite, listen to what we have to say, but make their own decisions. Till we can recover our financial and economic independence, this is bound to continue.”17
WHILE THE BRITISH and American governments struggled to find common ground, the Egyptian crisis deepened. In Ismailia on January 19, 1952, a bomb hidden in a barrow of oranges exploded, killing two British soldiers and wounding six others. The murders sparked open celebration on the streets of the city, with fedayeen firing their weapons in the air. A battle for a bridge over the Sweet Water Canal ensued, during which an American nun in a nearby convent was killed.
The British military authorities knew that auxiliary policemen were moonlighting as fedayeen: the orange barrow bomb convinced them that the time had come to disarm them. Having got the go-ahead from London, on January 25 they launched Operation Eagle. After surrounding the Ismailia auxiliaries’ headquarters before dawn, the British force called on the policemen to surrender, using a loudspeaker.
The British had deliberately timed the attack for a Friday—the Muslim day of rest—and expected a walkover. But over the telephone from Cairo, the minister of the interior ordered the auxiliaries to resist. After the British sent their tank crashing through the main gate of the Egyptians’ compound, a fierce battle erupted. During nearly four hours’ fighting, fifty Egyptian policemen and ten British soldiers were killed. For Britain’s commander-in-chief in the Middle East, it was a sobering encounter. “Whereas we once thought that all Egyptians are cowards and would pack up when confronted by force,” he admitted, “that is certainly not the position today.”18
The Egyptians responded with a devastating day of arson the following day. After a rumor spread that the interior minister had made his no-surrender phone call while lying in his bathtub smoking a cigar, Cairo’s auxiliaries took to the streets. Around lunchtime, when their protest was winding down, news arrived that a series of fires had broken out in the European part of the city. When the auxiliaries arrived, they found organized gangs torching British and other foreign-owned properties and businesses and joined in. So too, later in the day, did members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Two totems of the British presence, Shepheard’s Hotel and the Turf Club, were gutted by fire; the mob beat several of the Turf’s escaping members to death, throwing their bodies back into the building to be consumed by the flames. Nor did the local branches of Barclays, WH Smith, Thomas Cook, BOAC, and the British Council escape the rioters’ attentions. On Black Saturday, as that day became known, nine Britons and twenty-six other Westerners were killed, and over seven hundred buildings were ruined.19
The British thought that Farouq had encouraged the riots, or at least made no effort to suppress them, never envisaging damage on the scale that then occurred. What was known for certain was that unfounded rumors that British army units were moving westward from the Canal toward Cairo had made the king take action. Fearing the reoccupation of his country by British troops, on the day after Black Saturday the king dismissed his government.20
The new prime minister, Ali Maher, was notoriously anti-British, but Eden nonetheless saw an opening, since a new government meant elections. Believing that Maher would want to go to the country able to show that there had been progress over the treaty, the foreign secretary argued that there was an opportunity to reach a quick settlement. When, however, he suggested in the cabinet that the British government should show that it was willing to withdraw its troops within a year, Churchill exploded. In opposition, the Tories had hammered the Labour government hard on exactly this issue, and what Eden was now proposing was “worse than Abadan,” he said. In the aftermath of the Black Saturday riots, he feared Eden’s offer could easily be interpreted as appeasement. For Churchill, like many Tories, Egypt had acquired a talismanic importance as the key setting for the lonely British stand against Hitler during the war, and while Eden was undoubtedly being realistic, the prime minister knew that most of his party remained behind him. A few weeks later, Harold Macmillan would privately compare the cabinet to “the directors of a rapidly deteriorating concern. They dare not tell the shareholders the facts, for fear of destroying the credit of the company so completely as to destroy all hopes of recovery.”21
LIKE EDEN, ACHESON was also searching for a breakthrough in Egypt. Whereas the British liked to portray themselves, to borrow Churchill’s old phrase, as a rock in an uncertain world, the secretary of state’s fear was that their continued presence in Egypt produced anger and instability. Soon after Black Saturday, he sent the CIA officer Kim Roosevelt back to Cairo to see if King Farouq could be persuaded to implement far-reaching reforms and establish a new government that could negotiate a speedy British departure.
At Acheson’s behest, Roosevelt had just spent several months chairing a committee tasked with defining a new American approach to the Middle East. “Our principle,” he and his colleagues had concluded, “should be to encourage the emergence of competent leaders, relatively well-disposed toward the West, through programs designed for this purpose, including, where possible, a conscious, though perhaps covert, effort to cultivate and aid such potential leaders, even when they are not in power.” This represented a sea change. Where once the Americans had invested all their hopes in democracy to transform the region, they would now actively hunt for competence. That shift heralded a more pragmatic American approach, which represented a challenge to King Farouq, who embodied neither value.22
Although the king willingly connived in the removal of the prime minister Ali Maher, the man the Americans had once thought “could probably be developed into a very useful, progressive and influential young monarch” no longer looked like the potential savior of the country. Having divorced his first wife after she had failed to bear him a male heir, a year earlier Farouq had married his second, Narriman. She came to their wedding in a gown embroidered with twenty thousand diamonds to become queen of a country whose inhabitants, at birth, could expect to live to the grand old age of thirty-six. The newlyweds did not endear themselves to ordinary Egyptian Muslims by going on their honeymoon during Ramadan, and when after a conspicuously short pregnancy, Narriman then gave birth to a son, it became obvious that the couple must have consummated their marriage some time before exchanging their vows. Other rumors swirled around the king: that, after a nightmare, he had shot all the lions in Cairo zoo, that he had once let some porters compete for a handful of gold coins he had dropped in a bucket of liquid that turned out to be sulphuric acid, that he had forced a female peasant on his estate to have sex with an ape. The list was long and lurid. Whether these stories were true was impossible to say. What mattered was that they spread because they seemed all-too plausible, and they reinforced the corrosive perception that the king was above the law.23
Other officers in the CIA’s Near East Division referred to Roosevelt’s mission as Operation Fat Fucker, and it is hard to imagine that there was much surprise when the king rejected Roosevelt’s advice. But the spy was no longer depending on Farouq and, in keeping with the new policy that he had helped devise, arrived in the Egyptian capital with some more competent leaders in mind. A few months earlier he had been put in touch with the Free Officers, a group of middle-ranking army officers who were disenchanted by their country’s downward spiral. Having met three representatives of the movement secretly on Cyprus, Roosevelt offered them his country’s backing and appears to have been instrumental in ensuring that six of them were among fifty Egyptian officers who were then invited to the United States for training. Egypt’s chief of air force intelligence, Ali Sabri, who was a sympathizer, spent six months on an intelligence course in Colorado.24
Early in 1952, the Free Officers decided to test the water by putting up a popular general for the presidency of the Officers’ Club, against Farouq’s own candidate, who was normally elected unopposed. Mohammed Neguib—affable, courteous, and not terribly bright—won.
While Eden later admitted that “the coup happened so quickly that no one was aware as late as the morning before,” the Americans were well aware of what was brewing. On July 13, by which time King Farouq was on his fourth prime minister that year, the assistant air attaché in the U.S. embassy in Cairo was told that the Free Officers were on the point of making a move against the government. A week later, after the king had tried and failed to sack Neguib, the U.S. ambassador said that his embassy would not “interfere in the domestic politics of another country”—a tacit declaration that the U.S. would not stop the rebels if they decided to act.25
The Free Officers did so in the early hours of July 23, 1952, when three hundred officers and three thousand of their men occupied army headquarters, the radio station, and a number of other key buildings in Cairo, including police stations and ministries. At breakfast time an army officer named Anwar Sadat came on the radio to tell the country that Neguib was now commander-in-chief and that the army was “now in the hands of men in whose ability, integrity and patriotism you can have complete confidence.”26
Later the same day, the Free Officers recalled the man the king had only just sacked to serve as prime minister once more. The choice of Ali Maher reflected their own political inexperience, but the effect of choosing such a well-known figure provided some reassurance to the country’s establishment and the king, who had unsuccessfully appealed to both the Americans and the British to reverse the coup. Although the British feared that the Free Officers were a front for some more extreme organization, on the day after the coup a senior British diplomat, John Hamilton, went to see Neguib to tell him that his government viewed the takeover as an internal matter and would only intervene if foreign lives were threatened. To Neguib, who had been born and brought up in British-run Khartoum, the experience was oddly familiar. “Y’know Hamilton,” he reminisced, as he copied out what the British diplomat was telling him, “this reminds me of taking dictation at Gordon College.”27
It appears that the Free Officers had not considered what to do about the king, who was in Alexandria. After reports reached them that he had asked the British to intervene, they briefly considered court-martialing and shooting him, before Ali Maher intervened. Maher went to the port city on the twenty-sixth to tell Farouq he had to abdicate. “Sir, it is too late to do anything else,” he said, when the king bridled at the prospect. “You have only two choices… Do you go by air or by sea?”28
“In a few years there will be only five Kings in the world,” Farouq had long predicted.29 “The King of England and the four Kings in a pack of cards.” Helped on his way by the CIA’s clandestine support of the Free Officers, he sailed for Italy and exile that evening.
THE BRITISH HAD long prided themselves as the kingmakers in Egypt, while the Americans were mere spectators. But the coup had swept away the king, and in the following weeks, the British were forced to acknowledge that they had effectively been usurped: an abrupt role reversal had taken place. A request from the Free Officers that Britain not interfere in the coup reached them via the U.S. embassy. A timely tip enabled an enterprising American diplomat, William Lakeland, to make friends with one of the Free Officers’ ringleaders, a reserved young army officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser, who turned out to like hotdogs and Esther Williams’s films. Meanwhile, a British spy complained that he had been kept waiting by the new Egyptian chief of intelligence because the American military and air attachés were already in seeing him.30
By the end of August 1952, British diplomats suspected that the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, was encouraging the junta to keep them at arm’s length. The British ambassador admitted that, because his “crystal” was “not in working order,” he had no idea what would happen next. The ambassador’s and his colleagues’ sense of being passengers only grew when, a week later and without warning them, Acheson issued a statement welcoming the “encouraging developments” in Egypt and wishing the new government “every success.” The new regime interpreted this as a green light to arrest sixty people, many of whom had been close to the British. Ali Maher resigned in protest at the interference the following day, and Neguib succeeded him as prime minister, supposedly at the American ambassador’s instigation. “Caffery could not be worse,” raged Eden, in London. “The British are showing a few signs of being a little unhappy that they have practically no relations with the Egyptian military and our relations are so cordial,” the American ambassador purred, a few days later.31
In London on September 27, Macmillan summed up the situation. “Perhaps the most noticeable, and painful difference between our position now and when we were last in office… is our relationship to the US. Then we were on an equal footing—a respected ally.… Now we are treated by the Americans with a mixture of patronising pity and contempt.”32