15

The Gift of a Gun

IN THE SPRING OF 1953, FOSTER DULLES BECAME THE FIRST U.S. secretary of state to visit the Middle East—a move that signaled a new era of more active American involvement in the region. On May 11, he arrived in Cairo and met the man the CIA had helped to power the previous year, Egypt’s prime minister Mohammed Neguib.

Talks between the Egyptian and British governments over the Suez base had started late the previous month, and Dulles was under the impression that they were on the verge of delivering an agreement that would fix dates for the withdrawal of British forces and, further in the future, for the handover of the base to Egypt. The secretary—who, as ever, had the fight against Communism foremost in his mind—was keen to start discussing the regional defensive pact, which would give the British government the political cover that it needed before it announced that it was abandoning its biggest foreign base. The Middle East Defense Organization he envisaged, in which the United States and Britain would play major roles, would organize the states of the region to confront the Soviet threat. But Neguib had bad news.

Not only had the talks with the British broken down, the prime minister explained, but the Egyptian people, who had been let down by the British on so many previous occasions, would never accept a defense organization of the type that Dulles sought because it would involve the British. “Free us from the British occupation first,” Neguib told the secretary of state, “and then we can negotiate in good faith.” The prime minister, as Dulles knew, was “merely a front,” but a day later the man who really ran the country, Gamal Abdel Nasser, made exactly the same point. The pact that Dulles advocated was seen by the Egyptian people as “a perpetuation of occupation,” Nasser explained quietly. “British influence must entirely disappear.”¹

Two days eye-to-eye with the leaders of the new regime in Cairo brought home to Dulles the ferocity of their hatred of the British and made him appreciate—in a way that no telegram from the embassy had previously done—how close the situation was to boiling point. The fedayeen’s attacks on the British base had already resumed following the collapse of the talks, the British were hinting that they might have to reoccupy Cairo and Alexandria, the Egyptians were moving troops to oppose any British attempt to do so, and Neguib had warned him that further Black Saturday–type outrages could not be ruled out. It seemed entirely possible that a new Middle Eastern war might suddenly break out.

Before Dulles flew on to his next meeting with Ibn Saud at Dhahran, he telegraphed his impressions home to Washington. “Observers here are convinced, and I share their view, that the possibility of open hostilities in the near future is real” because the Egyptians “would rather go down as martyrs than concede” to the British in the talks. “It is almost impossible to overemphasize the intensity of this feeling,” he reported. “It may be pathological but it is a fact.” Under these circumstances, Dulles accepted that his Middle East Defense Organization did “not have a chance.”²

By the time Dulles arrived back in Washington at the end of the month, he had an alternative in mind. Although the Egyptians were too preoccupied by the British to be useful in the fight against communism, the leaders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan, whom he met later in his tour, had an awareness of the Soviet threat that reassured him. On his return home, in an attempt to calm the situation in Egypt, Dulles said publicly that the Middle East Defense Organization was “a future rather than an immediate possibility.” He told the National Security Council that a different and less formal approach, involving the “Northern Tier” of states, which were all “feeling the hot breath of the Soviet Union on their necks,” was more likely to succeed. Iran’s role in this chain of defense helps explain why he was so keen to see Mosaddeq removed.³

Dulles’s abandonment of the Middle East Defense Organization did not, however, mean that the secretary of state had washed his hands of the long-running Anglo-Egyptian dispute over the Suez base. Although Suez would not serve as the nucleus for the new Northern Tier arrangement, Dulles believed that he could not afford to leave the problem unresolved. As it had become a cause célèbre across the Arab world, he felt certain that, if it were allowed to fester, the Soviet Union was certain to exploit it. Until recently, United States policy had been to leave the defense of the Middle East to Britain. But the secretary had found “an intense distrust and dislike for the British” on his trip, and convinced that the British troops still based in the area had become “more a factor of instability… than stability,” he now believed the time had come for the United States to take charge of the situation and to ease the British out.⁴

IN BRITISH EYES, Dulles’s visit to Egypt had been defined by an extraordinary gaffe. Although the secretary of state knew that the regime was directing the attacks by the fedayeen, at the beginning of his May 11 meeting with Neguib, he had presented the Egyptian prime minister with a pistol as a gift from Ike. The moment, which the Americans sheepishly said was “intended to be in private,” was captured by a photographer, and the image of Neguib holding the weapon was reproduced around the world. Afterward, Churchill—in charge of the Foreign Office during Eden’s convalescence—hauled in the American ambassador. It was “slightly irritating,” he told him, “that Dulles in his globe-trotting progress should be taking pains at every point to sympathise with those who were trying to kick out or do down the British.”⁵

Dulles ignored Churchill’s complaint. With Ike’s approval, the secretary of state drafted a new proposal for his ambassador in Cairo to give to Neguib so that Neguib could send it back to Washington, aware that it would elicit a favorable response. On July 15, 1953, Eisenhower replied, offering economic aid and help to strengthen the country’s armed forces if Egypt could reach a deal with Britain over the base. In hinting at what would follow if the Egyptians played ball, the president’s gift of the pistol to Neguib was quite deliberate.⁶

The prospect of new weaponry was a significant incentive, given Neguib’s complaint that the Egyptian army was “fit only for funeral celebrations,” but Nasser, who had just formally become deputy prime minister, was by now keen to achieve a breakthrough to divert attention from his troubles elsewhere. The Revolutionary Command Council, which he and his colleagues had established in the wake of the previous year’s coup, had proved an ineffective talking shop, which had failed to make headway on any of the domestic reforms that they had promised. The Free Officers were uncomfortably aware that the most important of these, land reform, was not feasible because there were simply too many Egyptians to divide the large estates between.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian economy continued to stagnate, and falling cotton prices were contributing to an angry public mood, which the Muslim Brotherhood was successfully exploiting. As Nasser’s colleague Anwar Sadat explained, the regime sanctioned the fedayeen’s attacks on the canal base because “if our people do not fight you, they will fight us, and we prefer that they should fight you.” Worried that the situation was getting out of hand, Nasser made himself deputy prime minister and minister of the interior in June. A deal that would speed Britain’s peaceful departure from Suez, and thus deny the Brotherhood its central grievance, held great appeal.⁷

When the British and the Egyptians restarted discussions late in August, they had three questions to answer. The most important concerned the circumstances in which Britain and her allies might reoccupy the base and the duration of the deal. Yet it was not over these two but the third question that their discussion then quickly foundered: whether the British technicians maintaining the base before its handover would wear uniforms. The British believed wrongly that the Egyptians had already conceded that they could; Nasser was adamant that they had not. When the British refused to budge, in late September, Nasser “lost his temper and stalked out.”⁸

Trivial though it seemed to be, the uniforms question encapsulated the greater but vaporous issues of national pride and sovereignty that lay at the heart of the dispute. Uniforms, as the politicians on both sides instantly appreciated, were the emblem that the man in the street would grasp and care about. While there were uniformed British servicemen on the base, Nasser could not claim to have ended the British occupation, but equally Churchill could deny allegations that he had sold out, by arguing that nothing much had changed. There was also, in the British prime minister’s mind, a more important point. Lacking any faith that the Egyptians would respect the terms of the deal once it was done, he had always been adamant that the wearing of uniforms by British personnel on the base represented a vital safeguard: any attempt by the Egyptians to molest them could be interpreted as an act of war.

Having previously been assured by the British in Cairo that the question of uniforms “need not become a major issue,” the Americans were not impressed when it caused the collapse of the talks. In their ambassador to Cairo’s eyes, the focus on a “question of haberdashery”—rather than the far more important strategic issue of the future availability of the base—proved his own view that “the British had bungled these negotiations from the start.” Once Eden had returned to the Foreign Office after six months’ absence, in October, Dulles confronted him about the situation and later warned his counterpart that he would soon have to give Nasser the military aid the president had promised him that summer. Since Dulles’s implication was that the British would soon be facing fedayeen armed with U.S. weaponry, the British leaked this threat to the New York Times, on the basis that it would alarm Jewish readers of the paper.⁹

Despite Dulles’s unsubtle approach, Eden, who thought Churchill’s insistence on the subject was ridiculous, agreed with his American counterpart that the British should withdraw from the base as quickly as they could. But when Churchill asked him “What security have we got that the Egyptians, now breaking your treaty of 1936, will keep any agreement that you will make with them?” he had no answer. Desperate to take Churchill’s job, but realizing that the prime minister’s tough line was supported by many in the parliamentary party, Eden hardened his own views over the winter of 1953–1954. This was the period when the influence of the Suez Group—the forty or so Tory MPs who vehemently opposed Britain’s withdrawal from the canal base—was at its height. A fight between the ailing prime minister and his skittish foreign secretary to hold the party’s steering wheel ensured that government policy on Egypt veered between pragmatism and inflexibility throughout this time.¹⁰

IT WAS THE CIA officer Kim Roosevelt who, fresh from his triumph in Tehran, managed to break the deadlock in Cairo in January 1954. Convinced that Nasser was “the one man I have met who has impressed me with the feeling that he possesses the capabilities to lead the Near East—not only Egypt but through Egypt her Arab friends and neighbors—out of the barren wilderness,” the CIA officer had muscled in on the relationship with the Egyptian leader soon after Dulles’s visit the previous May. On January 24, Roosevelt arrived in Cairo; Nasser made a significant concession the following day, by indicating that he would allow the British to reoccupy the Suez base in the event that Turkey, a NATO member, was attacked. Six weeks later, and having ousted Neguib as prime minister, Nasser made a further overture to the British via Roosevelt to say that he was eager to reach a quick agreement if the British made a concession over the vexing question of uniforms.

The conspirators. From left to right, Abdel Hakim Amer, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mohammed Neguib, and Salah Salem.

Seizing the opportunity, Eden argued that the base should be turned over to civilian contractors and that the government should instead focus on trying to extend the lifespan of the deal. Grudgingly, Churchill went along with this idea. Dulles recalled that, when he mentioned it approvingly, the prime minister had “merely grimaced to show his distaste for the proposal.” But Eden now had the support of the chairman of the Conservatives’ foreign affairs committee. A bluff Tory squire who was respected across the party, Charles Mott-Radclyffe visited the base that spring and reported that, in the absence of a friendly local population, it was a “useless white elephant.” The eighty thousand troops who lived on it were guarding neither the base nor the canal; they were “merely guarding each other.” Meanwhile, the United States’ detonation of a hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in March gave Churchill the fig leaf he needed because it supplied a compelling military argument for not concentrating a large number of troops in one place. On June 22, the prime minister finally conceded that “our position in Egypt is not militarily advantageous.” It was only now that he gave up trying to sabotage a deal.¹¹

Until that point Dulles had conspicuously refused to offer what Eden wanted: a joint approach that would make it clear to Nasser that there was a united Anglo-American front. “The whole point is to be ‘ganging up’—and to be seen to be ‘ganging up’,” said Eden, which was precisely why Dulles was averse to the idea. It would be the happiest day in his life, the secretary of state told the president, “when we don’t have to modify our policies to keep up a façade of unity.” The secretary of state kept up the pressure on his British counterpart by negotiating military aid deals with Iraq, that April, and Pakistan the following month, as if to remind Eden that he would not let the lack of progress in Egypt impede him from establishing direct alliances with countries that Britain regarded as her allies in the region.¹²

Dulles did, however, need British support for a similar defensive alliance in Southeastern Asia. In exchange for this, at an Anglo-American summit in Washington at the end of June 1954, he made it clear to Churchill and Eden that he would use the economic aid that Eisenhower had promised Neguib the previous year to ensure the Egyptians kept their side of the deal, once it was done. On their return to London, Eden said that the Americans had been “unusually helpful.” But Ike was unable to resist a dig at Churchill in a letter to the prime minister three weeks later. “Colonialism is on the way out as a relationship among peoples,” he wrote. “The sole question is one of time and method.”¹³

The Washington summit nevertheless cleared the way for a rapid deal with Nasser. After Churchill had convinced the parliamentary party by telling it that he now accepted the need for a deal, at the end of July, Antony Head, the secretary of state for war, and Eden’s adviser Evelyn Shuckburgh flew to Cairo. At a dinner in the shadow of the pyramids on July 26, the two men put a proposal to Nasser and his colleagues. The British would withdraw their forces within twenty months, and civilian contractors would maintain the base for seven years, during which time the British could return in the event of an attack on Egypt, Turkey, or any country belonging to the Arab League’s security pact—a provision that the H-bomb made pointless but which was politically necessary to salvage British pride. After half an hour’s discussion, the Egyptians agreed. On August 6, Nasser expressed his hope to Eden that the agreement would “really inaugurate a new and happier chapter in the relations between our two countries.” It was to be brief.¹⁴

EISENHOWER’S GIFT OF the pistol to Neguib and his subsequent promise that the United States would strengthen Egypt’s army had opened the way for a deal, but trouble followed when it soon became clear that the presidential pledge was undeliverable. United States law, specifically the Mutual Security Act, required the Egyptians to enter a security pact with the U.S. and to accept the presence of American military advisers in order to receive military aid. But these were conditions that Nasser, having only just got rid of the British, could not possibly accept.

Even before the Anglo-Egyptian agreement was signed that October, setting a departure date for British forces on June 20, 1956, Egypt’s foreign minister warned the American ambassador that the Revolutionary Command Council no longer wanted U.S. arms. The ambassador tried to see the positive side, arguing that the Egyptian decision relieved Washington of an awkward commitment because military aid to Egypt—at a time when the country was still officially at war with Israel—would undoubtedly encounter fierce opposition from a coalition of isolationists and pro-Israelis in Congress, but it was undoubtedly a setback.

It had been clear from the outset that the Egyptians wanted new weaponry, and the CIA were desperate to avoid accusations of bad faith. Since Eisenhower had also promised economic aid, Kim Roosevelt came up with a plan to hide $5 million for weapons purchases within a larger grant of $40 million for infrastructure investment. He also proposed that Miles Copeland—the man who had lured the Syrians into a gunfight and who was now the agency’s direct liaison with the Egyptian leader—should hand Nasser a further $3 million in cash to buy new uniforms and transport. An American delegation, which went to Cairo in November to deliver the good news to Nasser and his sidekick, the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian army, Abdel Hakim Amer, received a rather chilly reception, however. Amer’s wishlist, which included bombers, tanks, and artillery, showed that he had wild expectations the Americans were never going to satisfy, while Nasser, according to Copeland, explained “for the thousandth time” that he could not accept any aid that appeared to come from Washington, D.C. He was also very worried that, were anyone to find out about the suitcases of money that Copeland had given him, he would be accused of being in the Americans’ pay. He eventually blew the money on the construction of a monument on an island on the Nile. If we believe Copeland, it was soon christened “Roosevelt’s erection.”¹⁵

Unable to supply Nasser with arms, the CIA instead supported the establishment of a powerful new radio station, Voice of the Arabs, which enabled Nasser to broadcast propaganda across the Middle East, interspersed with popular music from singers like Umm Kalthoum. “How can you listen to ‘The Voice of the Arabs’ when you see what they say is not true?” a puzzled British journalist asked a Palestinian. “Because what they broadcast is what we like to hear,” came the reply. In time, the folly of the CIA’s move became clear. “We shall continue to preach hate,” Sadat said later, when he was challenged about the nature of the station’s broadcasts. “What of?” he was asked. “The West,” he said. “We shall continue until you reform your policies and give the Arabs what they want.”¹⁶

As 1954 came to an end, Foster Dulles had managed, through brokering the Anglo-Egyptian agreement, to remove one source of tension that the Soviets might exploit. But by making the promise of weaponry with conditions that Nasser could not accept, he had managed to introduce another. Egypt wanted modern weaponry, and Dulles knew that, if the United States did not supply it, there was now a danger that the Russians would. To add to the secretary of state’s problems, Eden now tried to regain the initiative in the Middle East.