17

Overreach

BY THE BEGINNING OF OCTOBER 1955, THE DISPUTE OVER THE ownership of Buraimi, the oasis that lay on the edge of the Empty Quarter of southern Arabia, was about to rumble into its seventh year, having recently looked set to be decided in the Saudis’ favor. Following the explorer Wilfred Thesiger’s repeated intrusions into territory Ibn Saud regarded as his, in mid-October 1949 the ageing king had laid claim to the area southwest of Buraimi. Although the British had rejected that claim in their role as protectors of the rulers of Qatar and Abu Dhabi, in August 1952 the Saudi king dispatched an official named Turki bin Ataishan to occupy Buraimi itself. The strategic position of the oasis meant that this move put the entirety of southeastern Arabia in play.

The British, who were at that moment reeling from their relegation following the Free Officers’ coup in Egypt, had handled bin Ataishan’s arrival in Buraimi clumsily. Their decision to send jets to buzz the oasis and to encourage the Sultan of Oman to send a force to eject the Saudi party led Ibn Saud to threaten to refer the dispute to the UN’s Security Council. Uncertain whether they would be able to count on American support if the king did make such a move, the British acquiesced to a standstill agreement that left the Sultan of Oman in the lurch. As Churchill put it somewhat apologetically, in a conversation with the sheikh of Bahrain the following year, “We try never to desert our friends—unless we have to.”¹

On Ibn Saud’s death in November 1953, the king’s son, Saud, succeeded to the throne, providing the opportunity that British diplomats had long argued their government should wait for. After much haggling, in July 1954 they agreed with the Saudis to put the Buraimi dispute to international arbitration. The two sides would put their respective cases to a five-man tribunal, comprising British and Saudi nominees and three others from neutral countries. In the meantime, detachments of British and Saudi forces were supposedly to keep the peace at the oasis.

Meanwhile, the stakes had grown considerably, following the discovery of oil in the vicinity of Abu Dhabi, and as a consequence, both sides ignored the standstill agreement. The British encouraged the Sultan of Oman to spend money shoring up the support of key tribes in the area, and in late 1954, the Saudis made an unsuccessful effort to overthrow Sheikh Shakhbut of Abu Dhabi by paying his cousins to oust him. The detachment they sent to Buraimi included an intelligence officer, Abdullah Quraishi, who was in direct contact with King Saud’s foreign policy adviser, Yusuf Yassin, and bought off the most influential sheikhs in the oasis. In August 1955, Quraishi approached Shakhbut’s brother Zayid, who lived on the oasis, and offered him the stupendous sum of four hundred million rupees—or £30 million—to switch sides.

The arbitration was scheduled to take place in Geneva in September, and while the Saudis nominated Yassin to sit on the tribunal, the British rather naïvely proposed an utterly decent, recently retired diplomat, Sir Reader Bullard. These two men were joined on the panel by Charles de Visscher, a former judge of the International Court, who would serve as its chairman; a former foreign minister of Cuba; and a Pakistani educationalist, Mahmud Hassan, who delayed the start of the proceedings by stopping to undertake the pilgrimage in Mecca.

Aware that the Saudis had tried to bribe Zayid and suspecting, correctly, that they had successfully suborned Mahmud Hassan during his stop in Mecca, the British hoped to win the arbitration by exposing Saudi malfeasance. Accordingly, they briefed the former Nuremberg prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross to represent the sheikh of Abu Dhabi and the Sultan of Oman. While waiting for Hassan to arrive, Shawcross told the remaining four members of the tribunal that he would be making serious allegations against the Saudis when Hassan turned up. When the proceedings finally got going on September 11, the British senior barrister accused Saudi Arabia of trying to buy the loyalty of the sheikhs on the oasis through large-scale bribery. But his arguments, the testimony of his witnesses, who included Sheikh Zayid, and the implausibility of Quraishi’s account all failed to sway Visscher and the other neutral members of the panel. On September 15, after the tribunal had adjourned for its deliberations, Bullard warned the British that, behind closed doors, Yassin and Hassan were dominating their colleagues by insisting they had a far greater understanding of Islamic law and Arab culture. What the British labeled bribery was, they said, simply Arab generosity. As matters stood, the veteran diplomat warned that the arbitration was on the verge of delivering a finding that, a British official later wrote, “would have been disastrous for us.”²

Just in time, British intelligence made a breakthrough the following day, establishing—probably by intercepting and decrypting Pakistani diplomatic telegrams—that the tribunal’s Pakistani member, Hassan, had twice taken money from the Saudis, which he had not declared. The British delegation in Geneva put the evidence to Bullard, who immediately told Visscher he was stepping down. Unable to refer to his real reason because of the risk of compromising its source, Bullard could only blame Yassin’s behavior and, more vaguely, “other distasteful matters” that had come to his notice. Visscher suspended the arbitration on the sixteenth.

Deciding that they needed to give Visscher the full story but unwilling to give away how they had found it out, the British sent an MI6 officer, posing as an oil company executive, to meet Hassan. Visscher resigned when, shortly afterward, he was presented with the transcript of the ensuing conversation, which the spy had taped, during which Hassan admitted he had taken a £600 “loan” from the Saudis. On October 4—the same day that Eden demanded a rethink of Middle Eastern policy in the cabinet—the government announced that it supported Bullard’s decision to resign from the tribunal after “confirmation was secured of Her Majesty’s Government’s suspicion that attempts had been made by the Saudis to tamper with the impartiality of the Tribunal behind the President’s back”—wording designed to send the clearest signal to Riyadh and Hassan.³

CLANDESTINE BRITISH ACTION had derailed the arbitration but not killed it off altogether because the agreement that had established it provided for the replacement of any members who resigned. The Foreign Office summarized the options for Macmillan. The British government could either continue with the process once the tribunal was reconstituted or renege on the arbitration agreement by abandoning the tribunal. While continuing might avoid or postpone an international row, the new panel would be just as susceptible to Saudi pressure as its predecessor, British participation would look like acquiescence to bribery, and when, almost inevitably, the arbitration went against the British, the local loss of faith in the value of British protection would be profound. Macmillan’s officials recommended confronting the problem head-on. The government, they argued, “must… announce that the Agreement has been terminated by Saudi action, re-occupy the area and be prepared to defend it diplomatically and militarily.”⁴

The British knew that the Saudis had only managed to occupy Buraimi in 1952 thanks to Aramco’s support. They had agreed to a standstill because they were not confident that they would enjoy American support were Ibn Saud to carry out his threat to refer the matter to the Security Council. Their willingness now to confront the United States’ main ally in the region was an extraordinary sign of how far their thinking had moved on.

The collapse of the arbitration coincided with the discovery of the Soviet arms sale to Nasser, and it was not until October 20 that the cabinet formally discussed its options, after considering a Foreign Office report on Middle East Oil that warned that the region was slipping out of Britain’s grasp “because of the indigenous forces of nationalism, and because our enemies are making a greater effort than we.” Against this alarming backdrop, Macmillan favored informing the Americans that they were going to break off the arbitration, and then overpowering the Saudi police contingent without warning, to reduce the likelihood of casualties. But Eden clearly did not trust Washington not to tip off the Saudis. He preferred that “the disputed area should be reoccupied first, and an explanation given afterwards.” The cabinet agreed with him and, once the chiefs of staff had come up with a plan, approved Operation Bonaparte two days later. “Let’s hope it comes off,” the foreign secretary wrote in his diary.⁵

Before dawn on October 26, two parties of the Trucial Oman Levies—a British-led Arab force—drove from the camp into the neutral zone, surprising the Saudi police as they were washing before their dawn prayers. Following a fierce gun battle with tribesmen loyal to the sheikhs bought by the Saudis and a tug-of-war between the leader of the Saudi detachment and a British officer over a dispatch box, the British took control of the oasis. The box turned out to contain rupees amounting to a quarter of a million pounds and a mass of incriminating paperwork that showed that Quraishi had been lying under oath in Geneva and that Yassin knew what he was doing. The British felt it vindicated their decision to abandon the tribunal.

The Saudis again threatened to go to the Security Council but never did. Better still, so far as the British were concerned, was the muted American response to what became known as the Buraimi incident. When Macmillan broke the news to Dulles in person later the same day, on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in Paris, he claimed that he had not provided any advance warning so that his counterpart could deny any complicity. Dulles does not appear to have taken issue with this unconvincing explanation. The secretary of state “did not like the news,” recorded Macmillan’s adviser, Shuckburgh, “But he was not unpleasant about it.”⁶

WITH THE REVELATION that the Saudis had offered Zayid £30 million and the discovery that they had nearly swung the arbitration by giving Mahmud Hassan a tiny fraction of that sum, the Buraimi arbitration brought into sharp relief an issue that the British increasingly regarded as the root cause of their difficulties in the Middle East—the scale of Saudi bribery.

Though the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Said was exaggerating when he claimed that the Saudis spent £100 million a year on bribery and subversion, the number was certainly large. Although the Saudi kingdom’s finances were opaque, its oil revenues had rocketed since the fifty-fifty negotiations of 1950, reaching a figure of about £100 million in 1955. By borrowing aggressively, the Saudis could spend even more. Where the money went was far from clear. The expenditures set out in a rare budget, published in August 1955, only accounted for half the country’s income, and of this it allocated sums under vague headings like “tribal subsidies” and “charitable grants,” which could be going anywhere. All that could be said for certain was that, at a time when Britain’s Middle East budget amounted to a puny £15 million (or $42 million), the Saudis—to quote the CIA—had “almost limitless funds to spend.”⁷

The problem dominated the first meeting of the council of the Baghdad Pact, which took place in the Iraqi capital in November 1955. On his arrival, Macmillan was immediately buttonholed by Nuri who was alarmed by the situation developing in Syria. Earlier that year, the Egyptians and the Saudis had helped their long-standing client Shukri Quwatly win the Syrian presidential election. Quwatly now seemed to be repaying his sponsors by threatening to cut off the oil pipeline from Iraq if the Iraq Petroleum Company did not pay Syria a higher transit fee. Nuri told Macmillan he was convinced that Syria was “almost wholly” in the Saudis’ pay.⁸

The other country that the delegates agreed the Saudis were energetically targeting was Jordan. Following the assassination of King Abdullah in Jerusalem in 1951, Abdullah’s son Talal had succeeded to the throne, but Talal suffered from some sort of mental illness and abdicated within two years in favor of his seventeen-year-old son, Hussein. While Talal spent the rest of his life in a sanatorium, his glamorous wife, Queen Zein, remained a force to be reckoned with in Jordan’s politics. The Saudis, having established that she was, like them, extremely hostile to the ambitions of the Iraqi branch of the family, were now subsidizing her extravagant lifestyle. The Iraqis felt that “far too much… royal money was being spent on shopping.”⁹

Macmillan returned to London via Beirut, where he heard a similar story from the Lebanese president, who complained that his prime minister had just taken £10,000 from the Saudis and begged the British foreign secretary not to push the question of Baghdad Pact membership too hard. Back in London, he briefed the cabinet and wrote up his impressions for Eden, warning him that “if we do not get Jordan into the Baghdad Pact now, she will drift out of our control” because the country, like her neighbors, was being “rapidly undermined and corrupted by Saudi money.” He was confident that Hussein would accept the invitation if were it accompanied by a threat that, if he didn’t, Britain would stop paying the £12 million a year subsidy that financed his Arab Legion, leaving his country defenseless against an Israeli invasion. More fundamentally, Macmillan continued, action was needed to prevent the Saudis’ oil royalties undermining the Arab states and opening the way for communism. If Eisenhower was unwilling or unable to take action to stop American money being spent on subversion, Britain should tackle the oil companies directly. “Alternatively, it may be a question of Anglo/US action to upset King Saud and remove this canker.”¹⁰

Eden had previously feared that bringing Jordan into the pact increased the risk that Britain could be dragged into a war with Israel. Swayed by Macmillan’s argument that the threat to Jordan now outweighed that danger, he changed his mind. On November 30, Macmillan approved Shuckburgh’s idea that the new chief of the imperial general staff, Sir Gerald Templer, go to Amman to convince King Hussein to sign up to the pact by offering a sweetener of £25,000 a year if necessary to do so. Templer set out for Jordan six days later, shortly before a message arrived from Dulles asking London to “wait a little” before trying to secure Jordanian membership of the pact. “It is a great gamble,” Shuckburgh admitted, “for the Egyptians are as thick as flies in Amman, trying to stop the King from joining the pact, and we have got to overcome them now or never.”¹¹

Having once told Lord Mountbatten, “Dickie, you’re so crooked that if you swallowed a nail you’d shit a corkscrew,” Templer was certainly a bold choice of envoy. Described as “a man who lives on his nerves and ‘gets there’ by quickness of thought, intelligence and sheer guts,” Britain’s top general was an Irishman who had made his name waging a successful counterinsurgency against the communists in Malaya. His rasping voice, tendency to peer over the top of his spectacles, and use of his swagger stick “like a matador’s sword” disconcerted his subordinates. “He looked a dangerous sort of general,” recalled one of them, remembering how “his interrogation of me started with a jab in the navel from the cane, a move I found unendearing.”¹²

Templer’s mission failed miserably. Although King Hussein was keen to accede to the pact, the British general wanted to be sure that the king had the backing of his government, and this was not forthcoming. Jordan, once dominated by three tribes, had been transformed by King Abdullah’s annexation of the West Bank and the influx of refugees during the 1948 war. Palestinians, who blamed the British for their plight, now made up a majority of the population, a fact the Egyptians exploited. “We can do what we like in Jordan because of our stand against Israel,” Nasser boasted.¹³

By the time of Templer’s visit, Hussein had been forced to appoint a government that reflected the divide in Jordanian society. Following a well-timed visit by Nasser’s sidekick Abdel Hakim Amer, the four Palestinian members of the cabinet insisted on referring the matter to Cairo before making a decision. On December 11, Macmillan summarized the telegrams he was receiving from Templer. “He is striving hard to get Jordan into the Baghdad Pact, but it’s touch and go. The ministers are mostly timid or bribed by the Saudis. The Prime Minister he describes as jelly.” When all four Palestinian ministers suddenly resigned, the prime minister had no choice but to tender his resignation. Templer left empty-handed a day later.¹⁴

Templer was in Amman for barely a week, but the shockwaves resulting from his visit reverberated for another month. King Hussein appointed a man from the most southerly of the three tribes, Hazza al-Majali, as his next prime minister. Majali’s job was to try to bring Jordan into the pact. By then, however, Nasser’s CIA-supplied radio station, Voice of the Arabs, was in full cry. Its ceaseless attacks on the Baghdad Pact cut through, and on December 17, riots broke out across the West Bank, as well as in Amman and two other towns on the east side of the Jordan. Lacking adequate police, Majali sent in the Arab Legion to quell the protests. At least fifteen people died; the Saudis, seeking to aggravate the situation, claimed the figure was much higher. Whatever the death toll, the use of British-led forces to restore order played straight into the hands of Egyptian propagandists. After just five days in office, Majali, too, was forced to resign.

Hussein appointed a successor and dissolved parliament, hoping to turn a general election into a referendum on Baghdad Pact membership. Under the circumstances, this was an enormous gamble, and a high court judgment that the king’s dissolution decree was illegal gave him the opportunity to backpedal. But the news that he had cancelled the elections triggered further rioting, and when a mob broke into one ministry, the government again called on the Arab Legion, which this time used teargas, rather than live rounds, to break up the crowd. Only the appointment of yet another prime minister, who declared that he would not pursue membership of the pact, bought an uneasy calm, but Jordanian politics had changed forever. “Your Majesty,” a Palestinian delegation from the West Bank town of Nablus told Hussein, “among the Arabs there is a saying that the people follow the religion of the king. Today things have changed. Now we say that the King must follow the religion of the people.”¹⁵

The British suspicion that the Saudis had orchestrated the riots was given further weight days later when intelligence reached London that a three-thousand-strong Saudi force was moving toward the Jordanian border. By now, Eden’s once-huge popularity had evaporated. Criticized on all sides for lacking leadership, the prime minister reshuffled his government, shifting Macmillan to the Treasury and replacing him with the junior Foreign Office minister Selwyn Lloyd. At the same time, he decided to send two Parachute Regiment battalions to Cyprus and deploy Royal Air Force (RAF) units based at Habbaniyah in Iraq to Amman. Lloyd warned the Saudis that British troops would be sent in to support Jordan if they attacked. “We have lost the first round,” Macmillan admitted the next day. “However the game is not over yet; and we have got to win.” The stakes, he said, were very high—“no less than the economic survival of Britain. For if we lose out in the Middle East, we lose the oil. If we lose the oil, we cannot live.”¹⁶

The fact that the Saudis were ferried to the Jordanian border in trucks provided by Aramco added piquancy to Anglo-American talks on the Middle East at the end of January 1956. Requested by Eden after the Tories’ house journal, the Spectator, had reported “a terrifying lack of authority at the top,” they took place amid growing tensions between the two allies over Middle Eastern policy. An openly pro-Arab Mansion House speech by Eden the previous November had riled the Israelis and vexed Dulles, who must have regarded the consequences of Britain’s failure to heed his advice not to push the Jordanians on the Baghdad Pact as entirely predictable. On the other hand, Dulles’s manifest reluctance to put pressure on Aramco infuriated the British. Believing that the Americans could try harder, in January the government briefed the press that when Eden arrived in Washington he would be raising the Saudis’ subversive activities, which depended on “money derived from the American oil company, Aramco.” A further article in the Sunday Times the following week directly accused the Saudis of using Aramco royalties to foment anti-British riots in Amman.¹⁷

Preliminary talks between the two sides’ officials had revealed a gulf between them over what to do about Saudi Arabia. The British, aware that there was interest inside the CIA for the dismemberment of Saudi Arabia, hinted at regime change, while the Americans wanted their ally to go back to arbitration, not least because they feared an argument might derail the smooth extension of the Dhahran base agreement, which expired later that year. But by the time that Eden arrived in Washington on January 30, 1956, he found that the atmosphere had markedly improved. Eisenhower had sent an old friend, Robert Anderson, to the Middle East to speak to the Egyptians and the Israelis about peace, but Anderson had made little headway. Dulles was absorbing the fact that Nasser’s latest suggestion—that he would be willing to discuss peace with the Israelis in six months’ time—would push any talks into the presidential election campaign. The secretary of state was now clearly considering the option of moving against Nasser and dealing with the Syrians at the same time as well. And when Eisenhower, who was recovering from a stroke, joined Eden and Dulles to discuss Buraimi, he was far more sympathetic toward the British view of the Saudis than either Dulles or his State Department advisers had ever been. “Some way must be found of breaking the deadlock and getting past the evil counsellors who surrounded the King,” Ike mused, appreciating that the British would not return to arbitration under the same conditions. Eden could live with the American desire for direct talks with the Saudis. He left the U.S. capital on February 3 elated: “this is the best meeting in Washington we have ever had.”¹⁸

The talks brought out a useful piece information that suggested a way forward to the British. It concerned the exact way that the Saudis were raising their money. Contrary to British impressions that the king was leaning on Aramco to advance him ever greater sums against future royalties, the Americans explained that the Saudis were in fact borrowing from American banks on the security of “tax anticipation warrants” that authorized the banks to collect directly from Aramco money that the company owed to the Saudis in tax. This ingenious method spared the bankers from having to deal with the Saudis, but it relied on their ongoing faith in the survival of the Saudi monarchy and state, which the British now decided to try to undermine.¹⁹

Four days after Eden told the cabinet, on his arrival back in London, that he had agreed with Eisenhower that they should try to divert Saudi spending into “roads, hospitals, etc,” a well-known British journalist wrote on exactly this theme. The Daily Express’s chief foreign reporter, Sefton Delmer, had worked for Special Operations Executive during the war, running a sophisticated propaganda operation designed to undermine German morale. Writing from Beirut following a visit to Saudi Arabia, Delmer reported anger at the failure of the king to build the roads, schools, and hospitals he had promised and mounting criticism of Saud’s Syrian and Palestinian advisers, who were lining their own pockets with money given them to fund subversion in Jordan and Iraq. Leading the critics was the king’s own brother Faisal, who Delmer claimed had recently been urged, during a visit to Cairo, to oust his sibling. Firm action by Saud, he ended, “would avert the danger of two lots of rebellion: that which the Saudis with their money, are trying to spread in Jordan and Iraq; and that other revolt which they are going to cause at home in Saudi Arabia by not using their money properly.”²⁰

THE BRITISH COUNTEROFFENSIVE came too late to save their key official in the region, the commander of the Arab Legion, Glubb Pasha. A veteran of the First World War, Sir John Glubb enjoyed hero-like status in Britain, but he had never hit it off with King Hussein. Taking it upon himself to act as a khaki-clad godfather to the king, four years earlier he had taken the then sixteen-year-old for a day out in Battersea Park, where he was then amazed to discover that the teenage prince “did not want to go on the merry-go-rounds or the scenic railway.” Their relationship had been tense since.²¹

Glubb Pasha. Glubb’s dismissal was a major blow for British prestige in the Middle East and convinced Anthony Eden that it was time to try to oust Nasser.

The real problem, so far as Hussein was concerned, was not that Glubb was a patronizing old fart, it was that he was too powerful: not without reason was the Pasha known as the “uncrowned king of Jordan.” Glubb’s power came from controlling the money: he received the £12 million subsidy that the British paid to maintain the Arab Legion, and he spent it how he wanted. In old Transjordan, his recruitment of jobless youths from Bedu families had made him very popular; west of the Jordan, however, the picture was very different. His scrupulously defensive posture in the face of Israeli border raids was controversial, and the opposition argued that, until he was thrown out, the country was not truly free. Hussein was alive to these concerns and asked Glubb to Arabize the legion completely, and when Glubb prevaricated, he grew increasingly annoyed.²²

Glubb’s position was therefore vulnerable even before Templer’s visit, but the Arab Legion’s involvement in suppressing the riots that had followed it rendered it unsustainable. The Pasha was, quite simply, too big a target for Voice of the Arabs, which spread the untrue but all too plausible rumor that he was about to launch a coup. On March 1, a day after he had submitted Hussein a list of Arab officers he suspected of nationalist sympathies and wanted sacked, the king fired him instead. “Were things slack today at the office?” his wife enquired, when he then arrived home early from work. “My dear,” said Glubb, “the king has dismissed me. We leave Jordan at 7 o’clock tomorrow morning—and we shall never come back.”²³

Although Glubb was sanguine, putting his removal down to a “young King wanting to run his own show,” Selwyn Lloyd, who was in Cairo at the time on a tour of the region, and Eden both leapt to the conclusion that it was Nasser who had masterminded the coup, timing it to cause maximum humiliation, when in fact the Egyptian leader was as surprised as they were. By March 3, the day that the papers reported the news, Eden had become “violently anti-Nasser,” comparing him with Mussolini, his adviser Shuckburgh recorded.²⁴

When Lloyd went on to Bahrain and he and the political resident were yelled at by an angry mob, the opposition Labour Party scented blood and called for a debate on the government’s Middle East policy. To allay King Hussein’s anxieties, Eden had been trying, behind the scenes, to arrange for Iraqis to replace the British officers seconded to the Arab Legion. But when the debate took place on March 7, it was too early to say whether this decidedly optimistic plan would work. When the prime minister wound up the debate for the government, he was forced to admit that he was not in a position to say what the government’s policy on Jordan was, almost a week after Glubb had been fired. With nothing of substance to offer, he resorted to personal abuse instead, accusing the leader of the opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, of serving as a mouthpiece for Moscow.

Shuckburgh had a grandstand view of the proceedings from the officials’ box beside the Speaker’s chair. Eden seemed to have “completely disintegrated,” he wrote immediately afterward, describing his old boss as appearing “petulant, irrelevant, provocative, at the same time as being weak.” Even Eden’s loyal wife, Clarissa, described her husband’s performance as “a shambles.” What really wounded the prime minister, however, was the universal drubbing he received in the press the following day.²⁵

The debate showed that, barely eleven months into his premiership, Eden was utterly beleaguered, and for the prime minister, it was a turning point. Whereas the reality was that the threat of Saudi bribery had driven Macmillan to push for the enlargement of the Baghdad Pact, creating pressures in Jordan that had forced the king to sack Glubb, Eden was convinced that Nasser had masterminded the Pasha’s removal. He now feared that the Egyptian leader would be his nemesis as well. “It is him or us, don’t forget that,” he told Shuckburgh a few days later.²⁶

Yet Eden had every reason to feel confident that it was a vendetta he would win. For, from the other side of the Atlantic, came the signs of a dramatic shift in American thinking as well. “Today,” Shuckburgh recorded in his diary on the day after the debate, “both we and the Americans really gave up hope of Nasser and began to look around for means of destroying him.”²⁷