AS DULLES SLOTTED IN THE PIECES OF HIS NORTHERN TIER PLAN, THE British looked on with mounting alarm. Following the signature of the Turco-Pakistani Agreement on April 2, 1954, and the U.S. government’s announcements that it would supply military aid to Iraq and Pakistan weeks later, they realized that they had no time to lose if they were to maintain any semblance of influence in the region. Otherwise, as one Foreign Office minister admitted, “the Iraqis and others may get the idea that we are leaving it to the Americans to make the running in that part of the world.”1
Following the withdrawal from Palestine in 1948, and with the departure of British forces from Suez now scheduled for June 1956, Jordan and Iraq were the two remaining countries where the British retained a presence in the northern Middle East. When Eden reviewed the implications of Dulles’s Northern Tier strategy, he argued that Britain should build up her position in each country to resist American encroachment.
The problem was that in both countries, the British military presence was unpopular and hung on the elites’ support. A 1930 treaty sanctioned Britain’s base rights at Shaiba and Habbaniyah in Iraq. But it was due to expire soon after the British quit the Suez base, and an attempt to renew it just before the British left Palestine had ended with rioting in Baghdad that left bodies floating in the Tigris. The British had had more luck in Jordan. But the Anglo-Jordanian Treaty of 1948 committed them to come to Jordan’s aid in the event that she was attacked. As tensions mounted along the country’s disputed frontier with Israel on the West Bank, the Jordanians had asked for help. Although this had enabled the British to deploy more troops to Jordan surreptitiously, it threatened to drag them into a war that they did not want to fight. If Iraq and Jordan were going to fulfill the roles that Eden envisaged, then Britain needed a new basis for her position in Iraq and an Arab-Israeli peace agreement that reduced the danger that she might end up fighting the Israelis on the Jordanians’ behalf.
By August 1954, MI6 knew that Nasser was also interested in a peace deal, and that December Eden and Dulles agreed to try to pursue a peace initiative between Egypt and Israel, which they code-named Alpha. While Eden’s motive for doing so was to remove a threat to his new strategy in the region, Dulles’s interest was both anti-Soviet and domestic. He wanted to resolve an issue that the Russians would try to exploit and that gave the pro-Israeli lobby unwonted leverage in U.S. politics, largely to the benefit of his Democratic Party opponents. Simultaneously, the recent return of the great survivor in Iraqi politics, Nuri al-Said, to power in Baghdad offered the British an opportunity to reinforce their own position in Iraq.2
Nuri saw adhesion to Dulles’s Northern Tier as a way to regain ground against Nasser who, since his agreement with the British over the Suez base, was well on his way to acquiring hero status in the Arab world. After the signature of the Turco-Pakistani Agreement in April 1954, Nuri confided to the British government his own hope of concluding a treaty with the Pakistanis into which he would then draw Syria and Lebanon and so “leave the Egyptians out in the cold.” His return to the premiership that summer put him in a position to pursue that goal.3
For Nuri, the beauty of joining the Northern Tier in order to advance his old pan-Arab ambitions was that it would be difficult for Nasser to block him without risking his own relationship with the United States. When he met Nasser in September 1954, the Egyptian leader told him that he would not oppose Iraq’s accession to the Turco-Pakistani Agreement but would not join in because of the likely opposition of the Muslim Brotherhood. So in November Nuri went to Istanbul to see if he could do a deal with Turkey’s leader Adnan Menderes, who felt exposed by Britain’s decision to abandon the Suez base. Although the two men agreed to nothing on that occasion, in January 1955 Menderes paid a return visit to Baghdad. While he was there, Menderes persuaded Nuri to sign off a communiqué in which both men declared their willingness to sign a bilateral defense deal that would be open to other states to join as well.
Eden now saw an opportunity. Having long opposed the Northern Tier, which he felt was “ostentatiously provocative” toward the Soviets, he now realized that if Britain associated herself with the Turco-Iraqi move, he might steal a march on Dulles, who could not do the same without annoying the Israelis. Two days after the pact was initialled, he sent a message to Nuri welcoming his move and hinting that Britain would like to join in. Like Nuri, Eden believed that Nasser would not oppose this move. In mid-December, the Foreign Office had received a report from Cairo detailing off-the-record comments made by the Egyptian leader during an interview with the Arab News Agency, a Cairo-based newswire that appears to have been a front for MI6. In it Nasser said that while he was not enthusiastic about Nuri’s plans, “if Iraq insisted on going ahead, Egypt would raise no objection.” Although she would not support Iraq’s move in the Arab League, the Egyptian press would not attack Iraq. And so Eden welcomed the news from Baghdad.4
Nasser, on the other hand, reacted furiously, despite everything he had previously said. In an attempt to stop the agreement being signed, the government-controlled Egyptian press mounted an immediate and violent attack on Nuri. Seizing on the fact that he had allied himself with Turkey, a country that had normal relations with Tel Aviv, Voice of the Arabs declared him “the ally of the ally of Israel” in broadcasts beamed across the Middle East. Nasser called an urgent meeting of the Arab League in Cairo. Nuri, however, claimed illness and refused to attend. In his absence, the summit descended into farce when the representatives of several other states all said that they were not willing to begin discussions, and Nasser was then forced to shelve a resolution committing the league’s membership not to join the pact when Syria and Lebanon refused to support it. Although the Egyptians were subsequently able to prevent the Syrians following in Nuri’s footsteps by leaking a secret recording of the Syrian foreign minister at the conference, which led to the collapse of Syria’s government, in the meantime Nasser made the impulsive, unwise step of threatening to withdraw Egypt from the Arab League’s security pact if Iraq went ahead and signed the treaty.
Offered the chance to leave Nasser looking isolated if he carried out his threat, or thoroughly stupid if he did not, Nuri did not hesitate. When he persisted with his agreement, Nasser had to eat his words. Thereafter, the Egyptian prime minister would blame his self-inflicted humiliation on Nuri. A British spy, who got to know Nasser quite well, described his hatred of Iraq as “almost pathological”; in a conversation a year later, he noted moments when Nasser “could hardly bring himself to pronounce” Nuri’s name.5
The first estimates of Nasser had described a man whose wide-swinging handshake conveyed confidence and energy and whose quiet, frank, and often humorous conversation suggested a shrewdness that intrigued Western diplomats. The events of early 1955 revealed another, previously unseen side to the Egyptian prime minister—a man who was acutely status conscious and easily offended. In the interval between the announcement and the signature of the Turco-Iraqi deal, Nasser admitted that his country had an “inferiority complex,” but he might as well have been describing himself. A village postman’s son, he never forgot how the wealthy local landowners had talked down to his father. A Saudi prince believed that this boyhood experience was key to understanding the Egyptian leader. It was, he said, “at least partially responsible for his behaviour and aggressiveness in seeking Egyptian hegemony over a wide area.”6
IT WAS IN these unpromising circumstances that Eden met Nasser for dinner at the British embassy in Cairo on February 20, 1955. The British foreign secretary had agreed with Dulles that he would stop in Egypt on his way to a summit in Bangkok in order to broach the subject of the Alpha peace plan. But the encounter got off to a poor start when Eden, in his dinner jacket, asked Nasser, in his army uniform, if it was the first time he had ever entered the building. Nasser admitted that it was. It was interesting, the Egyptian prime minister continued, to see the place from where his country had once been governed. “Not governed, perhaps,” Eden ventured, “advised, rather.”7
Although the two men do seem to have discussed the peace initiative briefly, the deal that Nuri had just struck with Turkey’s Menderes dominated their conversation. Nasser said that he agreed with the strategic idea behind the pact, but he did not like it because it smacked of “foreign domination.” At the recent Arab League meeting, he continued, the Iraqi foreign minister had told him that he personally opposed the deal but that his government had been forced to proceed with it following British pressure. Eden, who was in an ebullient mood, having just heard that he would soon be prime minister as Churchill was on the point of resignation, did nothing to dispel the impression that his diplomats had been heavily involved in the negotiation of the Turco-Iraqi Pact. He invited Nasser to suspend judgment on the deal until he knew its terms: “it might then not turn out to be so objectionable as they now imagined.” The Egyptians, he suggested, “should not treat this pact as a crime.”
“No,” replied Nasser, laughing. “But it is one.”8
It was, in all, an uncharacteristically high-handed and ham-fisted performance by Eden, an unflattering preview of what was to come once he had crossed the threshold into Number 10. Although he reported breezily to London that the meeting had gone well, he managed only to needle the Egyptian prime minister’s insecurity. “What elegance!” Nasser reportedly exclaimed afterward of his British hosts’ attire compared to his own. “It was made to look as if we were beggars and they were princes!”9
Worse was to come for Nasser. Four days after the signature of the Turco-Iraqi Pact on February 28, Israeli forces attacked Gaza, killing thirty-eight. The attack was a premeditated reprisal for Egypt’s execution of several Israeli agents provocateurs earlier in the month, but it had the effect of exposing Egypt’s military weakness just as Nasser was reeling from the setback in Baghdad.
Although Eden guessed that Nasser’s objection to the Turco-Iraqi Pact was down to “jealousy… and a frustrated desire to lead the Arab world,” he was in no mood to give Nasser any quarter. On his way back to London from the Bangkok summit, he stopped off in Baghdad where Nuri now showed him a draft Anglo-Iraqi agreement, which terminated the 1930 treaty and replaced it with a framework for full military cooperation. On March 15, this proposal was discussed in the cabinet. “This is the moment to go forward,” declared Eden, describing the new arrangement as securing “solid advantages for us, though dressed up for Iraqi consumption.”10
Dulles had discussed these matters with Eden on the margins of the Bangkok summit. It appears he only belatedly realized what his British counterpart was trying to achieve. On his return to Washington, he told his advisers of his worry that Eden’s determination to help Nuri draw Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon into his pact would not only “further isolate and embitter Nasser” but also damage American relations with the Israelis, who would fear that they were being encircled. Fearing that “the UK had grabbed the ball on the northern-tier policy and was running away with it in a direction which would have… unfortunate consequences,” he asked British diplomats to communicate his alarm to Eden in London.11
The foreign secretary, however, was unwilling to back down. It would be “most unwise to try to help Nasser at the cost of weakening our support for the Turco-Iraqi Pact,” he replied to Washington. “Our declared object is to make the Pact the foundation for an effective defence system for the Middle East. If this is to be achieved, Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian accession will eventually be necessary.” Eleven days later, on April 4, 1955, Britain joined what had become known as the Baghdad Pact. Having waited for what seemed like an eternity, Eden became prime minister the day after.12
AMERICAN ASSERTIVENESS HAD led Britain to join the Baghdad Pact, and the threat that this posed to Nasser reminded the Egyptian prime minister of his lack of modern weaponry. The talks with the United States government about military aid had foundered over the accompanying conditions, and the British were reluctant to release arms Egypt had already purchased because they did not want to tip the military balance with Israel. Meanwhile, the Israelis had taken delivery of new tanks, artillery, radar, and jet fighters from the French. The growing disparity infuriated Nasser. One day in Cairo, while he was talking to Miles Copeland of the CIA, the city was buzzed by Israeli jets. “I have to sit here and take this,” he cursed, “and your government won’t give me arms.” When Copeland told him that the State Department was stopping the Pentagon from supplying him with weapons, Nasser decided that it might help break the deadlock in Washington if he conducted a semipublic courtship with Moscow.13
Nasser had been trying for two years to draw the Russians into this game without success because the Russians had guessed what he was up to. But then in May 1955, a month after the signature of the Baghdad Pact, the Soviet ambassador obliged, offering him Russian weapons in exchange for Egyptian cotton and rice. Having pocketed this offer, the Egyptian leader went to see the new U.S. ambassador, Hank Byroade. “This is the last time I shall ask for arms from the US,” he told him theatrically. “If I do not get them from you I know where I can and will ask the Soviets for them.”14
Nasser’s aide Hassan Tuhami set out the strategy: the aim was to preserve Egyptian freedom by encouraging the great powers to fight over her. But in fact the idea that Nasser could choose between America and Russia was an illusion. For one thing, he could not now easily accept American arms without damaging his anti-imperialist credentials; for another, the Americans were starting to show signs of impatience because of his unwillingness to start talking about peace. At a June 9 meeting, Byroade accused him of “spreading disruption throughout the Middle East.” Nasser had tried to answer Nuri’s diplomatic coup by cobbling together an alliance with the Syrians and the Saudis, but the ambassador now told him in no uncertain terms that if he believed this arrangement put him in a stronger bargaining position, he was “basically wrong.”15
As a consequence, when the Soviet ambassador suggested to Nasser that Dmitri Shepilov, the editor of Pravda, might visit Cairo for discussions about arms, Nasser agreed. Shepilov met the Egyptian leader on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Free Officers’ coup and offered him two hundred tanks, and one hundred fighter aircraft and jet bombers, which Egypt could repay in cotton over thirty years. With this offer in the bag, Nasser now played hard to get with the Americans. Byroade had left open the possibility that Egypt could still buy American-made weaponry. In mid-August, Nasser told him that the Egyptians could only do so if they were allowed to pay in their own currency. He knew this would be unacceptable and was aiming to put the Americans in the position of having to reject his offer. Earlier the same day, Byroade had learned the details of Shepilov’s offer.
Like the Soviets, Foster Dulles suspected he was being played, and he initially told his younger brother that he did not know “how seriously we should take the Russian proposals about Egypt.” But, whether they were serious or not, if the news that they had been made to Nasser got out, it was likely that Israeli’s recently reelected prime minister David Ben-Gurion would take unilateral action, given that he was a well-known believer in the use of force. Dulles would then face irresistible pressure from the Israeli lobby in Washington to support Tel Aviv, which would destroy his ability to pose as an honest broker in any peace talks. And so he brought forward his speech announcing the details of the peace plan by a fortnight, to August 26.16
The speech came too late. On August 22, four days before Dulles spoke, Israeli troops invaded the Gaza Strip. Three days later, and despite Byroade’s last-ditch efforts, the Egyptians retaliated with a series of fedayeen raids that reached the suburbs of Tel Aviv and killed eleven Israelis. Israel responded with an offensive in Gaza, killing thirty-six Egyptians. Dulles’s Alpha peace initiative was dead before it got started.
ISRAEL’S INVASION OF the Gaza strip put Nasser under further pressure, but it also enabled him to justify the arms deal with the Russians. On September 19, the CIA reported that the Egyptians looked “likely” to accept the Russian offer, which was “said to be almost embarrassing in size.” Two days later Byroade confirmed that there had been a deal. The Russians were supplying “Stalin” tanks. “We shall have to change their name,” Nasser admitted a little while later.17
The news reached the United States as the world’s foreign ministers were congregating in New York for the opening of the UN General Assembly, and so Dulles was able to confront the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, directly. When Molotov tried to pass it off as a commercial sale without political implications, Dulles was unconvinced. In London, Harold Macmillan, whom Eden had made foreign secretary, agreed. “This is a most alarming and perilous success for the Russians,” he wrote in his diary, “and we must stop it somehow.”18
Dulles did not think Macmillan’s hope was realistic. For starters, the Russian offer, in the words of one of the joint chiefs of staff, came “very cheap.” Believing that Nasser would be ousted by the army if he went back on the deal and aware that Byroade had had an argument with the Egyptian leader the previous week, he decided to send Kim Roosevelt—long Nasser’s main advocate in Washington—to Cairo to try to limit the damage.19
Roosevelt and Copeland met Nasser for three and a half hours at his home on September 26, during which time Nasser agreed to issue a statement that his intentions were peaceful and that he was willing to discuss with Dulles ways to calm Arab-Israeli tensions. The subsequent drafting session was disrupted by news that the new British ambassador was coming to see the Egyptian leader. Since Dulles had not told Macmillan that Roosevelt was visiting, the two Americans decided they should go and hide upstairs. Before they did so, they advised Nasser to tell his British visitor that the weapons came from Czechoslovakia rather than directly from the Soviet Union to make the deal sound marginally less incendiary. Copeland joked that it would have been entertaining to have seen the British ambassador’s reaction had they gone downstairs to interrupt: “Excuse me, Gamal, but we’re out of soda.”20
After the meeting the spies reported their conversation to Washington. In a defensive telegram, they asked Dulles to confirm that he agreed that a statement, along the lines that they had suggested to Nasser, would “at least do some good.” Although they went on to admit that they were “still somewhat uneasy” that Nasser was merely taking their word for the trouble that his decision would cause in the United States rather than acting from a change of heart, they were adamant that Nasser remained “our best, if not our only, hope here.”21
DULLES WAS NOT so sure. A day earlier he had had the first of a series of extremely significant conversations with the British foreign secretary, Harold Macmillan, who had come to New York for the UN’s general assembly. It was the first time that the two men had met, and they seem instantly to have hit it off, slipping into an easy conspiracy, which was sealed a few weeks later when Dulles excitedly told Macmillan that together they must start a “counter-reformation” in which they would “disprove slanders against the old western civilisations, shew that ‘colonialism’ was a false charge; prove the immense benefit that the British Empire had been and was; and lead the young nations to our side.”22
In New York, a sense of outrage united the two men. While Macmillan was furious that Soviet technicians would be working from airfields built by the British, it was Nasser’s ingratitude that rankled Dulles. They “got more and more worked up,” according to Macmillan’s adviser, Shuckburgh, who was also present.23
Thinking aloud, Macmillan wondered whether “we could make life impossible for Nasser and ultimately bring about his fall by various pressures.” Dulles was thinking along similar lines. A few days later he would ask Macmillan, “if we had enough troops to re-occupy Egypt.”24
“Not in Suez,” Macmillan admitted. “But it could be done from Cyprus, no doubt.” The lesson he drew from the conversation was that Dulles was not averse to the idea of military action, which he wrongly assumed could be swiftly taken by the British force on Cyprus—a misunderstanding that shaped the following year’s crisis.
Both men appreciated the stakes. Dulles’s own reputation was on the line, for he had unwisely lauded Nasser as a Middle Eastern George Washington during his visit to Cairo two years earlier. “In the United States we will not be able to put a good face on the matter,” he declared. “It will be regarded as a major defeat.” Accordingly, he told Roosevelt in Cairo that he did not think the proposed statement would help at all and that Nasser “should not be encouraged to believe it would.” For his part, Macmillan knew that, when the news of Nasser’s purchase became public, the Suez Group would crow that they had been right all along.25
When Macmillan suggested abandoning the Suez base agreement and the troop withdrawal, Dulles was clearly interested. But the U.S. secretary of state did not want to take “any threatening or drastic step” while they waited to see what Nasser actually bought. It was “not a very attractive policy,” he admitted, saying that he only offered it “for lack of a better alternative.” It was also very difficult to criticize Nasser when the West had also welcomed Khrushchev and the possibility of détente.26
Returning overnight by air to London, Macmillan briefed his colleagues on the crisis in the cabinet meeting on October 4. The arms the Russians were offering were obsolescent, he explained, but the decision to offer them indicated that Moscow had now decided “to fish actively in Middle Eastern waters” and had probably made an offer to the Saudis as well.27
Ignoring the role that his pursuit of an alliance with Nuri had played in the affair, Eden blamed the Americans for the debacle. “Mr Dulles started all this, and if he has got himself into trouble, it is not for us to help him out,” he told his colleagues. After Macmillan had summarized the situation at the October 4 cabinet meeting, Eden called for a drastic review of Middle Eastern policy, and then launched into an unprecedented attack on the Americans, describing them as having “almost always been wrong on the Middle East,” ignorant, and erratic. The minutes of the meeting set out the logical but ominous conclusion he drew from this: “We should not therefore, allow ourselves to be restricted overmuch by reluctance to act without full American concurrence and support.”28
The following year would see him practice what he preached, starting, days later, in the southeast Arabian backwater of Buraimi.