ON MARCH 6, 1956, THE EVE OF EDEN’S DISASTROUS PERFORMANCE IN the House of Commons, President Eisenhower’s Middle East envoy, Robert Anderson, wired home from Cairo with some bad news. A day earlier, after a meeting with Nasser, the Egyptian prime minister had kept Kim Roosevelt behind. “What was Mr. Anderson talking about?” he asked the CIA officer, having been unable to understand Anderson’s Texan drawl.
“I think he believes that you’ve agreed to meet with Ben-Gurion to resolve all your differences,” Roosevelt explained.
“I could never do that. I’d be assassinated,” said Nasser. “Go stop him. Don’t let him send that cable!” he urged. In a further meeting with Anderson that day, he had set out his position more clearly. His fear of being murdered meant that not only would he not meet with Ben-Gurion, he also would not say that he supported a peace deal with Israel himself.1
That mattered because the Americans had assumed that Nasser would. Their ongoing effort to build up his prestige, in the face of mounting British opposition, was based on the belief that the Arab world would not accept a peace deal with Israel unless the offer came from Nasser personally. On March 6, it became clear that either there had been a misunderstanding or, as Anderson believed, the Egyptian prime minister had finally decided to admit that he had no intention of doing what the Americans wanted because he feared a backlash in the Arab world if he did. “I doubt the fruitfulness of any additional conversations,” the American concluded.2
Eisenhower agreed that the Alpha peace plan was dead. “We have reached the point,” he wrote two days later, “where it looks as if Egypt, under Nasser, is going to make no move whatsoever to meet the Israelites in an effort to settle outstanding differences.” Dulles, who was in Karachi with Lloyd at a conference at the time, set out the implication. “Unless Nasser did something soon, we would have to ‘ditch’ him,” Britain’s foreign secretary reported his American counterpart as saying.3
This telegram was of crucial importance because Eden read “ditch” to mean that the administration was contemplating the overthrow of Nasser, which was what he wanted himself. In it, therefore, lay the origin of the Suez crisis.
THE PRIME MINISTER and an inner circle of officials had been considering a coup since receiving intelligence late the previous year that Nasser had also promised to collectivize the Egyptian economy in exchange for the Soviet weaponry he received. Their discussions acquired new impetus in March after the British ambassador in Cairo reported further secret intelligence that Nasser was planning to go to war with Israel, probably once the last British troops had left the Suez base in June. That was an alarming possibility because Britain, together with the United States and France, was committed by the 1950 Tripartite Declaration to guaranteeing the de facto borders between Israel and her neighbors established by the armistice in 1949. If Egypt invaded, Britain would be obliged to defend Israel against her erstwhile Arab allies. Having to take sides with Israel was a prospect that Eden himself described as “appalling” because it would destroy Britain’s remaining alliances in the Arab world—a calculation that was remarkable given what would happen later in the year.4
Since Lloyd was making his way home from Karachi, it was his junior minister, Anthony Nutting, who drafted the memorandum setting out a plan to isolate Nasser internationally and to undermine him at home. To isolate the Egyptian leader, Nutting proposed additional support for Britain’s Baghdad Pact allies, drawing the Hashemite monarchies of Iraq and Jordan closer together, seeking “a rearrangement of affairs” in Syria, and detaching Saudi Arabia from Egypt. To make life difficult for Nasser at home, the British would encourage the Sudanese to make trouble over the Nile waters, renege on their offer of finance toward the costs of the construction of the Aswan Dam, and encourage his opponents to oust him.
When Eden read Nutting’s effort, he was unimpressed. Tracking the author down to the Savoy, he rang up the hotel and summoned his minister to the phone. “It’s me,” he said, after Nutting had picked up the receiver. “What’s all this poppycock you’ve sent me? I don’t agree with a single word of it.” When Nutting said that he had followed his brief, Eden was not satisfied. “But what’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or ‘neutralising’ him, as you call it? I want him murdered, can’t you understand?”5
On March 21, Lloyd, now back from Karachi, told the cabinet that a new policy toward Nasser was needed. In Cairo, he explained, he had offered the Egyptian leader a deal: if Egypt dialed down its anti-British propaganda, Britain would not push for the enlargement of the Baghdad Pact. Since then, he continued, a further onslaught by Voice of the Arabs against Britain’s position in her south Arabian colony at Aden and the Trucial States showed that Nasser had rejected his overture. “We must therefore go for him, recognising that he will be a formidable opponent,” the foreign secretary argued, before running through the elements of Nutting’s plan, which included “seeking an alternative regime.” Everyone round the table must have known what this entailed, for after Eden had cagily admitted that the options had been discussed by a “smaller group,” another minister, Lord Salisbury, said that he supported the new policy: “Write him off—and see him off,” he declared, adding that it was “a pity we didn’t decide earlier to take this line.”6
MEANWHILE IN WASHINGTON, Dulles was simultaneously drafting his own plan, which—now that the Alpha initiative was dead—he labeled Omega. Much of it mirrored British thinking, but in one fundamental respect it was completely different. Contrary to what Eden assumed, by “ditching” Nasser, Dulles did not mean his overthrow. Rather, what he had in mind was the transfer of American support to the leader of another Arab state if Nasser’s conduct did not quickly improve. Nasser would be left to kick his heels.
That idea appears to have been Eisenhower’s. Impressed by Anderson’s account of how Nasser intended to lead the Arab world by championing opposition to Israel, and then by more intelligence from Eden, which alleged that the Egyptian prime minister was planning to oust the Hashemite, Libyan, and eventually Saudi monarchies, the president suggested to the State Department that “we begin to build up some other individual” to disrupt Nasser’s plans. “My own choice of rival,” Ike said, “is King Saud.”7
This was becoming something of a theme. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt before him, Ike hoped that the Saudi king might become the “spiritual leader” of the Arab world, a man who might one day achieve peace with Israel and thereby resolve America’s great Middle Eastern problem—that her two best allies in the region hated each other. The problem was that this vision put the United States on a collision course with their British counterparts, a fact that became apparent when two of their spies arrived in London for talks with MI6.
James Eichelberger and Bill Eveland each had significant Middle Eastern experience. Eichelberger had served in Cairo as the CIA’s first head of station after the Free Officers’ coup. His first encounter with Eveland came when Eveland, then working for the Operations Control Board, which managed covert operations for the National Security Council, arrived in Cairo late in 1954 on the ill-fated mission to establish what the new regime wanted by way of arms. In contrast to most of his peers who came from the East Coast, Eveland came from the mining town of Spokane in Washington state, and he was acutely conscious of, and determined to conceal, his humble origins. As he stepped off the plane in Cairo wearing a three-piece suit and homburg hat, Eichelberger had gawped. “Jeezus,” he whistled, “he’s in fancy dress.”8
Eveland may have attracted ridicule from his colleagues, but as a fluent Arabic speaker, he was better qualified than they were. When, a year later, Syrian politics was once again in turmoil, he was the man whom Kim Roosevelt sent to Syria to bolster the CIA officers who were trying to stop the country’s disconcerting drift into the arms of the Russians. Since regime change in Syria was common to both Nutting’s and Dulles’s plans, Eveland was the obvious man to join Eichelberger on the mission to London.
The two men came at the invitation of Selwyn Lloyd, who had admitted at the cabinet meeting on March 21 that the British government could not oust Nasser alone and would need Foster Dulles’s and Ike’s support to do so. Believing that, just as with Mosaddeq four years earlier, the way to go about this was to convince Allen Dulles first, the foreign secretary now sought to inveigle the Americans again by suggesting that the CIA and MI6 might come up with a joint appreciation of the available intelligence.
On March 31, Eveland and Eichelberger arrived at MI6’s damp-stained Westminster headquarters to meet George Young, MI6’s director of Middle East operations. “A big man, tough-looking,” in Eveland’s recollection, the red-haired Scot was one of the “robber barons” who ran the secret service. Recruited into MI6 after the war, he had made his name as a buccaneering head of station in Vienna before witnessing the Black Saturday riots in Cairo in January 1952. “When the British Council premises go up in flames the odour of roasting pansy is incense in the nostrils of Allah,” he commented laconically later. There was, he claimed, “no gladder sound to the Arab ear than the crunch of glass.”9
Young set out his service’s view of the situation. Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt all threatened Britain’s survival, but since Nasser could not be tackled immediately, the priority was Syria. As the overthrow of President Quwatly and his government would undoubtedly trigger a hostile Saudi reaction because Quwatly was a client of Riyadh, lasting change in Syria required the overthrow of King Saud. Finally, the British would deal with Nasser, who Young claimed was now inextricably entangled with the Russians.
Eveland and Eichelberger did not know what to make of Young’s presentation. Back at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair (for Eveland spared no expense when the American taxpayer was footing the bill), they agreed that what they had just heard was “sheer lunacy,” designed, they suspected, to provoke them into giving away details of how they were planning to oust the government of Syria.10
“The professional skill of espionage is the exploitation of human weakness,” Young once said. If so, Eveland was a rather better spy than he. Noticing that the British spy’s vulnerability was his desire to prove others wrong, the American now claimed that his own recent experience in Syria meant that he knew the score better than Young did.11
Unable to resist his instinct to correct Eveland, Young divulged the British plan. Incidents on the Turkish border, Iraqi incitement of the Syrian desert tribes, and subversive activities by the Lebanon-based Syrian People’s Party, he explained, would create chaos inside Syria, giving the Iraqis an excuse to intervene. The following day, Eveland extracted the final vital detail from Young by commenting on how much his scheme seemed to depend on the Iraqis. The idea, he continued, that they might be able to overthrow Nasser as well was wishful thinking.
Again unable to resist the bait, Young shook his head and told Eveland that he had forgotten about the “snipcocks”—his disparaging term for the Israelis—who were going to launch special operations against Egyptian military targets and attack Gaza and other areas along the border. That evening, with Young looking menacingly over their shoulders, Eveland and Eichelberger sent an urgent telegram to Washington to warn Allen Dulles that “our plans for an area peace settlement were now in real trouble.”12
Dulles had been due to travel to London with Kim Roosevelt for further discussions. Aware that if he did so he might seem to be endorsing the British strategy, he cancelled his trip, claiming a bad attack of gout. Roosevelt went to London on his own. To mollify the British, he accepted the need for a change of government in Syria, but he rejected their plans to remove King Saud and Nasser. Unlike in Tehran in 1953, he rather caustically observed, there was no other man to whom the Egyptians would gravitate. Lloyd got the message that the CIA was “obviously more dubious than the British… that the operation could be carried out.” His attempt to convince the Americans to back the British plan had failed.13
NOT CONVINCED THAT Roosevelt’s performance would stop MI6 from carrying on single-handedly, Eichelberger and Eveland took matters into their own hands. Eichelberger sent a message to Nasser in Cairo, warning him that the British were “determined to ‘do a Mossadeq’” on him. Eveland, in the meantime, returned to Beirut. On May 3, over drinks in the bar of the Hotel St. Georges with a New York Times correspondent, he learned of an article in that day’s Daily Telegraph, reporting that the Syrians had concluded a large arms deal with the Czechs some six weeks earlier. Recalling his CIA colleagues’ view that the Telegraph’s reporter was probably a deep cover agent for MI6, Eveland suspected that the article was a deliberate plant, designed to pave the way for imminent military action in the country, a possibility he felt his bosses in Washington were not treating seriously enough.14
Eveland knew Dulles read the New York Times every morning as he was driven into work; its Beirut correspondent was therefore well worth cultivating. He had also just returned from a trip through Syria, and he was able to tell the journalist categorically that he had seen no evidence at all of the two hundred tanks and armoured cars the British newspaper said the Syrians had just purchased. “Syrian Deal Doubted,” the next day’s New York Times reported.
Concerned that Britain’s plans were “not… wholly realistic or likely to achieve the desired results,” Dulles recalled Eveland to Washington in late May. There the spy voiced his concern that the British might be “stampeding us into an ill-conceived operation that Syria’s conservatives couldn’t sustain.” Dulles ordered his officials to tell Britain and Iraq that the United States opposed any covert action in Syria, while Eveland returned to Syria to assess how best to carry out a coup.15
Eveland’s job boiled down to choosing which of two potential candidates the United States could back: Syria’s former dictator Adib Shishakli or the former foreign minister Michael Ilyan. On his way back from his reconnaissance of northern Syria, the American intelligence officer had spotted Shishakli, who was supposed to be living in exile in Spain, in a town in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. A hard-drinking opportunist who had bounced between various foreign cities since his expulsion from Syria in 1954, Shishakli was now working for the Iraqis and the Syrian Popular Party, which favored a union between Syria and Iraq. That made Eveland wonder, rightly, whether the British might be involved with him as well. Ilyan was also a good friend of the Iraqi regent, Abdul Ilah, but Eveland saw him regularly enough to feel he was the safer bet. The former foreign minister, a Christian from Aleppo, was predicting that the current government would not last long; he expected its successor to be dominated by the right and to include two men that he would nominate. Eveland, reassured, told Washington that it was best to wait.
As Ilyan predicted, the government collapsed, but the right-wingers were not able to form a government on their own. Syria’s leftward journey continued when a new coalition government then awarded two key ministries—foreign affairs and economics—to the national-socialist Baath Party, which, having been forced underground during the Shishakli years, was now increasingly popular. When the two Baathist ministers called for union with Egypt and invited the Soviet foreign minister to visit, the Americans were forced to revisit the idea of a coup. Kim Roosevelt and his cousin Archie Roosevelt who also worked for the CIA, both hurried out to Damascus to meet Ilyan and see what help he needed. Eveland remembered Ilyan’s delight when he heard the Roosevelts were coming. “He’d always admired FDR, he said, and to meet his sons would be an occasion of great historical moment.” Deciding that the truth would be a disappointment, “I let this comment pass,” Eveland recalled.16
Kim and Archie Roosevelt arrived in Beirut on July 1 and drove over the mountains to Damascus, a journey they had first made when Kim was pretending to be a journalist in 1947 and that Kim had then repeated in a car loaded with banknotes, on his way to Tehran in 1953. First, they met the army chief of staff, and supposedly the real power in Syrian politics, but found him disappointing. The meeting with Ilyan went much better. Asked what he needed to stop the communists taking over the country, Ilyan said that he needed the support of a few senior military officers, the Damascus and Aleppo radio stations, and enough money to buy the newspapers that were currently in Egyptian or Saudi pay. Eveland recalled that what the Roosevelts wanted to know most of all was whether this could be accomplished with American support alone. “Without question,” Ilyan responded. But when a few days later the chief of staff was suddenly dismissed, Ilyan suspected that he had been discovered and fled Damascus for the relative safety of Beirut.17
The broader purpose of the Roosevelts’ Middle Eastern mission was to start the process of isolating Nasser. From Damascus, the two cousins went on to Amman where, on July 16, they met King Hussein of Jordan. A month earlier the king had driven his silver gull-wing Mercedes to Beirut to take part in a car race in the mountains. At a time when there were rumors that the Egyptians and the Saudis were plotting to depose him, he had used the opportunity to meet Eveland and ask for weapons. The Roosevelts now came to see the king, going a step further by finalizing a monthly payment of about $15,000, which the CIA head of station would leave behind in a white envelope without comment, when he met the king at the end of each month. Unusually, the Roosevelts’ arrival in Amman was reported in the New York Times. Whether or not this was deliberate, it must have sent the clearest message to London that the United States was now supporting Hussein. That support denied Britain another excuse to take unilateral action in Syria.18
“OUR EFFORTS SHOULD be directed toward separating the Saudi Arabians from the Egyptians and… in making the former see that their best interests lie with us, not with the Egyptians and the Russians,” Eisenhower had written that March. Courting no further publicity, the Roosevelts flew from Amman to meet King Saud in Riyadh and carry out this stage of Ike’s plan.19
A taller, fleshier version of his father, Saud otherwise bore little resemblance to Ibn Saud. Cursed with poor eyesight, he hid his pale watery eyes behind dark glasses, a habit that contributed to what one British politician called an “effete and generally rather sloblike appearance,” which his lifestyle reinforced. “A notorious consumer of Cointreau,” he had dismissed his father’s wise advice to live simply and traditionally like his people and built himself a concrete and steel palace that owed more to Las Vegas than to Mecca. A “garishly-lit funfair” in the words of one British visitor, it was decorated with hundreds of multicolored neon lights. Its centerpiece was a grand reception room, which could accommodate two hundred people sitting on gilt chairs and was illuminated by four large light fixtures made of green and golden glass and styled as palm trees. “They are hideous,” the same man remarked, “but for some strange reason do not seem out of place.” It was in this kitsch setting, midway through July 1956, that the Roosevelts met Saud to warn him that the Egyptians were in league with his half-brother Faisal.20
The Roosevelts’ job was made easier by the fact that it had become impossible for Saud, however poor his sight, to ignore what was going on. In May 1955, his supporters had broken up a conspiracy to overthrow him, plotted by officers who were mostly Egyptian trained. Despite this, following a deal brokered by Faisal, the Egyptians had sent military advisers to train the Saudi army later in the year. The American ambassador felt sure that the Egyptian aim was “to Egyptianise the army under the guise of the Egypto-Saudi Pact and, having got the Army completely under their thumb, to throw Saud out whenever they want to.”21
The effects of growing Egyptian influence in Saudi Arabia were all too clear. When Nasser visited Jeddah earlier that year, he had been greeted by the locals with shouts of “Nasser, you saviour of Islam” and “There is no God but Allah and Nasser is beloved by God.” This enthusiasm unsettled Saud, who feared that he had “become a follower of Nasser, as far as Arab politics were concerned, when he was once a leader.” And then in June, during a visit to Aramco’s headquarters at Dhahran, the king was confronted by a demonstration by Saudi workers, who the CIA believed were being encouraged by Egyptian propaganda. Affronted, Saud decreed days later that anyone inciting or organizing strikes at the company would face two years in prison.22
Whatever the Roosevelts did say to him, it worked. Saud resisted Nasser’s pressure to recognize communist China, as Egypt had already done that May. Within weeks, he would expel the Egyptian military mission from his country. And he stopped trying to undermine the Hashemite monarchies of Iraq and Jordan soon afterward, having realized that such activity was counterproductive. “If one [king] goes, the second will go, and after him how long will I last?” he asked rhetorically in 1957.23
BY THE TIME that the Roosevelts returned to Washington, the final element of the plan to isolate Nasser was about to fall into place. From the outset Dulles and Lloyd had regretted the offer they had made the previous Christmas to help finance the construction of a new Aswan dam. Not only was it domestically unpopular but it had also led the Egyptians to ask Moscow for most of the rest of the money, making it highly likely that the Russians would be awarded the contract to construct the dam—the very outcome the Anglo-American offer had been supposed to forestall in the first place. And yet, despite this, the British, in particular, were reluctant to withdraw the offer, fearing that to do so might court reprisals.24
By mid-July, it was clear that the matter was about to come to a head, whether the British liked it or not. On July 16, came the unwelcome news from the United States that, in four days’ time, the Senate Appropriations Committee intended to pass an amendment to the following year’s Foreign Aid bill that would effectively give it the ability to veto the American part of the Aswan loan. On the seventeenth, the Republican leader in the Senate went to see Dulles, warning him that he would “proceed at his peril” if the administration pressed ahead with the offer. Dulles, who had no desire to cede control of foreign policy to the Senate, ad-libbed: “We have just about made up our minds to tell the Egyptians we will not do it.”25
Dulles saw another advantage in suddenly dropping the loan: to do so would checkmate the Russians. Either they would have to follow suit, undoing their efforts to build their influence in Egypt, or they would have to pick up the entire tab, a move the United States could then exploit with propaganda in the Eastern Bloc. Over the telephone, Dulles tried out the line he was thinking of on his younger brother: “you don’t get bread because you are being squeezed to build a dam.” On the morning of the nineteenth, having put this argument to Eisenhower and gained the president’s approval, he summoned the British ambassador to tell him the decision. When the ambassador, seemingly failing to appreciate that he had been informed of a fait accompli, replied that his government “would prefer to play it very much longer and not give a definite refusal,” Dulles replied that he would have liked to as well, but “Congressional circumstances” prevented it. Just after four o’clock that afternoon, the secretary of state called in the Egyptian ambassador to tell him the bad news. “I wish he hadn’t done it quite so abruptly,” Eden reputedly remarked when he heard what had happened.26
The Egyptian diplomat “had handled himself surprisingly well,” Dulles told his brother afterwards. So, too, did Nasser. In Cairo on July 21, the day after the British government followed suit and said that it would not help fund the project, the Sunday Times’s correspondent rang up the Egyptian prime minister to find out whether a rumor that he was very upset was true. It was “terrible news,” the reporter suggested.27
“Not terrible,” replied Nasser, who said he had foreseen it and chuckled as he spoke. “Things are never as bad as they seem.” He gave away no hint of what he would do next.