20

The Suez Miscalculation

SUNDAY THE FOURTEENTH OF OCTOBER 1956 WAS “A GLORIOUS autumn day, radiant with sunshine and crisp as a biscuit,” the Foreign Office minister Anthony Nutting later remembered. He had come to the prime minister’s country residence, Chequers, in the countryside northwest of London to bring Eden Selwyn Lloyd’s overnight report from the United Nations. The news was mixed. Although the Security Council had unanimously approved the first part of a two-part Anglo-French resolution concerning the future operation of the canal, the Russians had then spiked SCUA by vetoing the second part, which would have given the users’ association the right to collect the fees owed by its members and forced the Egyptians to cooperate with it. The question now was what to do next.¹

Nutting was not the only visitor to call on Eden that day. Albert Gazier, caretaker at the Quai d’Orsay while the French foreign minister Christian Pineau was in New York, and Maurice Challe of the French general staff had also come to Chequers. Itching to attack Nasser, the French were increasingly disgruntled by Eden’s insistence that, for the sake of his own party’s unity, they must exhaust all the diplomatic options first. Now they reckoned that they had come up with a way to force the British to take action—a method that relied on Britain’s knowledge of France’s conspiratorial relationship with Israel, which dated back to the time, a decade earlier, when the French had supplied arms and money to the Irgun and the Stern Gang in order to speed up the end of Britain’s mandate in Palestine.²

Gazier opened the conversation by saying that they had come to pass on Israeli concerns about the tensions on the frontier with Jordan, which he rightly guessed Eden would share. Since Glubb’s exit, the Jordanian army’s new chief of staff, Ali Abu Nuwar, had allowed the Egyptians to use his country as a base for fedayeen attacks. The killing of seven Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem in September had triggered an escalating tit for tat that led Hussein to request military assistance from the Iraqis, and then also from the British after a massive Israeli attack on October 10 left over a hundred people dead. When Eden readily agreed to intercede with the Iraqis to try to stop them deploying troops to Jordan, giving grounds for the Israelis to aggravate the situation further, the Frenchman abruptly changed the subject. What if Israel attacked Egypt? he asked.

Britain was obliged under the Tripartite Agreement to defend the current borders, said Eden, automatically—an answer that left Gazier incredulous. Surely Eden would not step in to protect Nasser, he retorted. Eden admitted that was unlikely and then turned to Nutting. “Didn’t your agreement say something about our not being obliged to send troops if Egypt was attacked by Israel?” he asked, since it was Nutting who had signed the 1954 evacuation agreement with Nasser. Nutting said it did but added that the deal did not override the commitment Britain had made in the Tripartite Declaration. Eden looked momentarily dismayed before Gazier offered an extraordinary piece of information: Nasser had recently said that the Tripartite Declaration did not apply to Egypt. “So that lets us off the hook,” exclaimed Eden. “We have no obligation, it seems, to stop the Israelis attacking the Egyptians.”³

The French were not simply planning to stand back. Gazier asked Eden’s private secretary to stop taking notes and turned to Challe, who outlined the plan that they were thinking of. They would encourage the Israelis to attack Egypt, at which point Britain and France would order both sides to draw back from the canal and would send in troops “to separate the combatants” and take charge of the waterway. Eden said he would think about it and would give the French a reply by Tuesday. The two Frenchmen were amazed that he had not had the same idea already.⁴

IN FACT, THE BRITISH had earlier considered using the Israelis to deal with the Egyptians: after dinner at the British embassy in Paris at the end of 1951, a well-watered Churchill had raised the possibility of getting Israel to do Britain’s dirty work in Egypt. But until now the British had discounted the idea, and such a move went against Eden’s instincts. When Macmillan again made the case for allying with Israel to remove Nasser in August 1956, on the grounds that the Israelis would seek to profit from the situation whatever Britain did, Eden refused to circulate his paper, and the Foreign Office warned against such a scheme. Since the Egyptians were sure to portray Anglo-French action as “an imperialist plot hatched with Israel,” it argued, the government should do everything it could “to keep Israel right out of the dispute.” On each occasion the chief counterargument had been the damage that such an alliance would do to Britain’s allies in the Arab world, especially Nuri Said in Iraq. But Nuri himself, during his July visit to London, suggested encouraging the Israelis to attack Egypt, and between then and the beginning of October, British reservations melted away.⁵

During that time, the stakes had grown so dramatically that a plan like Maurice Challe’s no longer seemed unthinkable. Three months’ diplomatic effort had just failed, and yet the Americans were as opposed to military action as ever. British efforts to prod Nasser to do something that would give grounds for war had come to naught. And the latest intelligence suggested that the Egyptian leader was trying to overthrow the kings of Libya and Iraq—two countries where Britain had military bases—and was stockpiling Soviet weaponry in Syria.

Most alarmingly, Jordan now appeared to be on the brink. Elections would take place there in a week’s time. To Eden it seemed inevitable that the nationalists would triumph and the country would become an Egyptian satellite. Certainly, Nasser had played his hand there brilliantly so far. By provoking incidents along the Israeli frontier, he had pitted his greatest enemy and his main Arab rival against each other, as well as distracting the British, who, by virtue of the Anglo-Jordanian treaty, faced having to come to the aid of a country they could no longer really count on as an ally.

After being told by his chiefs of staff that they could fight Nasser or the Israelis but not both simultaneously, Eden toyed with denouncing the Jordanian treaty unilaterally but realized that to do so would be a gift to Egyptian propagandists looking to undermine confidence in Britain. Redirecting Israel at Nasser, on the other hand, as the French envisaged, would spring him from the trap: once Israel was fighting Egypt, the danger that Britain would have to fight a war in Jordan disappeared, and Eden could focus all his energies on eliminating Nasser.⁶

Finally, the French plan elegantly resolved the problem that Eden had been grappling with for months—the question of how the United States would react to British military action—by bypassing it altogether. If the Israelis, rather than the British, attacked Nasser in the final moments of the American presidential election campaign, would Eisenhower dare object, given the power of the Jewish lobby, which Dulles so frequently mentioned? Macmillan, who had just visited Washington, thought not. While he was there, Dulles had recalled a favor he had done the British before their own election a year earlier and asked if they “could not do something in return and hold things off until after November 6th?”⁷

“I know Ike,” pronounced Macmillan after his return to London. “Ike will lie doggo.”⁸

THE FRENCH PLAN offered a pretext for intervention in a manner that the Americans would have difficulty opposing. Out of a mixture of desperation and opportunism, Eden seized it with both hands. Having bidden farewell to the French, he telephoned Lloyd in New York and told him to come home immediately.

Flying overnight, Lloyd arrived back on the morning of October 16 to find Eden, Nutting, and several others midway through a discussion of the French proposal. Lloyd did not like it, but then, as one official put it, he was “very coy about agreeing to anything.”⁹ Over lunch Eden battered him into submission. That afternoon the two men flew to Paris where they met Pineau and the French prime minister Guy Mollet. If Israel attacked Egypt, would the British intervene? asked Mollet. Eden said they would.

Back in London, Lloyd and Eden briefed the cabinet on October 18. After they had explained how they hoped to resuscitate talks with the Egyptians, Lloyd turned to the unstable situation in Jordan. The latest news was that the Jordanians, under Egyptian pressure, had now withdrawn their invitation to the Iraqis to send troops. Eden set out the dilemma. Faced with the possibility that “Jordan may go over to Egypt this weekend,” they could either do nothing, or they could advise Iraq to send in troops regardless, even though that created the grave risk of an Israeli attack. “This is the main reason why we went to Paris,” Eden claimed. “We tried to secure in Paris that if Israel moves, she will not move against Jordan but against Egypt.” If Israel did so, he continued, “We have made it plain to Israel through the French that… we should not feel obligated to Egypt.”¹⁰

As expected, the nationalists won the Jordanian elections on October 21. The following day, Lloyd returned to Paris for further discussions with the French and the Israelis without Eden, who now wanted to keep his hands clean. Lloyd, having told his colleagues in the Foreign Office that he was off sick with a cold, reached a villa in the well-to-do suburb of Sèvres at four o’clock that afternoon. There he found Pineau, as well as the hawkish Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion and General Moshe Dayan, who had lost an eye fighting with the British against the French in 1941. They had the look of people who had already been talking for some time.

LLOYD HAD NEVER expected to be foreign secretary. “I think there must be some mistake,” he reputedly told Churchill when the great man first made him a minister at the Foreign Office in 1951. “I do not speak any foreign language. Except in war, I have never visited any foreign country. I do not like foreigners,” he continued.

“Young man,” Churchill had said, “these all seem to me to be positive advantages.”¹¹

The Sèvres meeting did not go well. Ben-Gurion thought Lloyd was aloof; Lloyd thought Ben-Gurion was arrogant. They quickly disagreed. Ben-Gurion wanted all three nations to attack simultaneously, while Lloyd, to keep up the charade that Britain and France were only breaking up the fight, insisted that the two European powers should only come in two days later, by which time Ben-Gurion feared that Tel Aviv would have been reduced to rubble. Since only the RAF had the heavy bombers to put Egypt’s runways out of action, but early use of these would admit collusion, the meeting ended in deadlock.

Lloyd returned to London that night, telling Nutting when he arrived in the Foreign Office the next morning that it did not look like the French plan would come off. As Eden obliquely reported to the cabinet the same morning, it “now seems that Israel won’t attack.” He raised the possibility that the French might “act alone—or even with Israel” and ask for access to British bases on Cyprus.¹²

Eden and Lloyd underestimated the ingenuity of the French. At the same time as they were discussing the matter in London, in Sèvres Pineau offered to base French fighters in Israel to guard the Israeli coast. Ben-Gurion, thus reassured, agreed to launch an attack on a scale that would give London and Paris grounds to intervene thirty-six hours later. Pineau flew to London that evening. After dinner with Lloyd and talks with Eden, the British agreed to send an envoy back to Sèvres to have another go.

That job fell to the Joint Intelligence Committee chairman Patrick Dean, who was brought into the conspiracy by Eden very early the next morning and instructed to go to Sèvres. There he was to tell the others that the British would only participate if the Israelis invaded Egypt and there was a threat to the canal. By the time that Dean arrived at the villa, Pineau had got back from London to report that Eden had been much warmer than Lloyd and that the prime minister was signed up to the outline plan. Ben-Gurion had also been squared by the French prime minister’s offer of air defense. Still deeply suspicious of the British, he suggested—before Dean arrived—that Pineau’s plan be typed up so that representatives of all three nations could sign it.

When, on his arrival, Dean was confronted with the Sèvres Protocol, which had been cooked up by French and Israeli officials working in the villa’s kitchen, he felt he had no choice but to sign. After he arrived back in London that night and told Eden what he had done, the prime minister was horrified and sent him back to Paris the next day to try to retrieve the French and Israeli copies. It proved a fruitless errand. After being locked in a room at the Quai d’Orsay for several hours, he left empty-handed.

On October 25, while Dean was trying to recover the errant copies of the Protocol in Paris, Eden briefed the cabinet. “Bright-eyed and full of life,” according to one man in the room, he explained that it “now appeared” that the Israelis were getting ready to attack Egypt. He then asked his colleagues to consider whether Anglo-French intervention would be necessary if war broke out in the area. Given that the French were strongly in favor of intervention and might take action alone or “in conjunction with Israel” if Britain did not intervene, he said that his own preference would be for Britain and France to issue an ultimatum to both sides calling on each to withdraw ten miles from the canal. “Israel might well comply with such a demand,” he suggested. “If Egypt also complied, Colonel Nasser’s prestige would be fatally undermined. If she failed to comply, there would be ample justification for Anglo-French military action against Egypt in order to safeguard the Canal.”¹³

“We must face the risk that we should be accused of collusion with Israel,” Eden said. “But this charge was liable to be brought against us in any event.”

“Doubts were expressed,” the minutes of that meeting state, though they do not say by whom. The doubters were concerned about the offense to the Americans that British action would cause, that the ten-mile demand implicitly favored the Israelis, that Britain would be breaking the Tripartite Declaration, and that Anglo-French police action lacked a United Nations mandate. Despite this, the cabinet still approved the plan.¹⁴

At about this time, unnamed British officials sidled up to Ali Maher, the former Egyptian prime minister, who was then in Beirut. Would he be prepared to form a government, they asked, if Nasser’s suddenly collapsed? Yes, he would, he said.¹⁵

STRAIGHT AFTER THE Jordanian elections, King Hussein had said that he was determined to fight Israel, and on October 24 came the news that Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had agreed to a military alliance with their forces under Egyptian command. By October 26, Dulles knew that the Israelis were mobilizing, though to what end was far from clear. Since the British embassy had gone oddly quiet, he passed the news on to Winthrop Aldrich, the ambassador in London, asking his envoy if he could find any evidence to support his suspicion that the French, and possibly the British, were complicit in whatever the Israelis were up to.

Aldrich told Dulles he was seeing Lloyd for dinner on the evening of the twenty-eighth and would be able to probe for information then. In the meantime, the CIA’s Watch Committee concluded that the scale of Israeli preparations and Britain’s known commitment to defend Jordan meant that the most likely target of an Israeli attack, which it expected “in the very near future,” was in fact Egypt. Later the same day, it issued a further report that noted that eighteen French air transport aircraft had just arrived on Cyprus, meaning that the British and French together could now lift as many as three thousand men.¹⁶

Facing Aldrich’s questions over dinner, Lloyd took refuge in semantics. He, too, was concerned about the Israeli mobilization, he said, and although British reports also indicated that the Israelis were moving troops south rather than east, he was “inclined to believe” that Jordan was the real target, which of course justified Britain’s own dispatch of ships from Malta the previous morning. He was “unwilling to believe” that the Israelis would attack Egypt and said that his conversations with the French gave him “no reason to believe” that the French were encouraging the Israelis to do so. Unwisely, Aldrich believed him.¹⁷

The following lunchtime, the American ambassador reported to Washington that, although Lloyd had told him “he would like to see something happen to Nasser, his concern over the consequences of Israeli initiative carried sufficient conviction for me to conclude that any UK complicity in such a move is unlikely. Similarly, I thought his doubts that French would find it in their interests to stimulate Israeli ventures at this time are genuine.” Two hours after Aldrich sent this message, Israeli paratroopers dropped near the Mitla Pass, forty-five miles east of the town of Suez, at the southern entrance to the canal. The war had begun.¹⁸

UNLIKE ALDRICH, DULLES saw through Lloyd’s evasive comments. Soon after the Israeli parachute drop had taken place but before news of the invasion had reached the outside world, he sent another cable, this time to his ambassador in Paris. The previous evening he had finally managed to talk to the top French and British diplomats in Washington. “Their ignorance” of the movement of French warships to the eastern Mediterranean, he told Eisenhower over the phone, was “almost a sign of guilty conscience.”¹⁹

“I just cannot believe Britain would be dragged into this,” Eisenhower responded, when Dulles gave him the numbers proving the Anglo-French buildup on Cyprus.²⁰

By the time the Israelis invaded, Dulles had decided that the British were going to be involved, however. “Bits of evidence are accumulating,” he told the U.S. ambassador to Paris, that the French, perhaps with British knowledge, were working closely with the Israelis to provoke a war with Egypt in which France and Britain would then intervene.²¹

Dulles went on to warn his man in Paris of what would happen next, in much clearer terms than he had ever used when talking to the British. “As you know, it is profound conviction of President and myself that if French and British allow themselves to be drawn into a general Arab war they will have started something they cannot finish,” which would result in growing anti-Western sentiment from which the Russians would then profit and weaken the economies of both countries and the remainder of Western Europe. Given that they had started the war, it was “unlikely” that the United States would come to their aid. Interestingly, Dulles appreciated that the United States’ two supposed allies might be banking on the calculation that “Jewish influence here is such as to assure US sympathy with such operations as are outlined.” If so, he finished, that was “a miscalculation.”

THE NEXT MORNING in London, the government’s Joint Intelligence Committee informed the chiefs of staff that the United States would take “a strictly neutral attitude towards the Operations.” But by ten o’clock it was already clear that its assessment could not be more wrong. When Eden’s cabinet met that morning, Lloyd reported that he had already been told by the American ambassador that the United States government would shortly be asking the Security Council to consider a resolution condemning Israel as an aggressor. Lloyd said that he had argued that such a move would be open to criticism, given that Israel was acting in self-defense, but Aldrich was unsurprisingly unmoved. When later that day he learned that Eden and Mollet had issued their ultimatum calling on both sides to pull back ten miles from the canal, he told the Foreign Office that there would be “hell to pay.”²²

If the publicly available evidence, the intelligence, and instinct had left Dulles fairly certain that the British and the French were colluding with the Israelis, the implicit bias of the Anglo-French ultimatum removed any residual doubt. Since Eden and Mollet issued it at a moment when the center of the battle was still about a hundred miles farther to the east, they were effectively sanctioning an Israeli advance ninety miles farther into Egypt.

When Shuckburgh, who had left the Foreign Office several months earlier due to stress, heard the demand reported on the radio he was “staggered.” Knowing that, at a stroke, it would destroy Britain’s credibility in the Arab world, the very asset Eden had so long striven to maintain, he concluded, “We think A.E. has gone off his head.” That was a judgment shared elsewhere. “Nasser found the whole situation made no sense at all,” recalled one of his advisers. “It was in fact, quite mad.”²³

Eisenhower now wrote to Eden a schoolmasterly letter showing no hint of warmth. “I should like to ask your help in clearing up my understanding as to exactly what is happening between us and our European allies—especially between us, the French and yourselves,” it began, ominously. The Americans, the president continued, knew that the French had provided far more equipment than they had let on, and that communication traffic between Paris and Tel Aviv then leapt, suggesting that France and Israel were working together. Eisenhower stated that when the Americans had approached the British ambassador to the UN, Pierson Dixon, the previous evening, “we were astonished to find that he was completely unsympathetic, stating frankly that his government would not agree to any action whatsoever to be taken against Israel.” Dixon had argued that the Tripartite Declaration, which committed Britain to defend the current borders, was completely outdated. Whether or not that was the case, Ike suggested, when such an agreement was renounced by one of its signatories, it was “only fair that the other signatories should be notified.”²⁴

Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s fury at the Anglo-French ultimatum drove them to force the issue in the Security Council. But their draft resolution, which called for a cease-fire and the Israelis’ withdrawal and urged all members to avoid the threat or use of force, was vetoed by France and Britain. The Yugoslav member of the Security Council pushed for a new resolution calling an emergency session of the General Assembly. This option had been established to anticipate exactly the blockage that had just occurred in the Security Council. Although Britain and France could vote against it, they could not veto this resolution. That meant that their conduct would now be subject to the scrutiny of the General Assembly in two days’ time.

“BRITAIN AT WAR,” declared the Daily Mail on November 1, the day on which the General Assembly would meet. Overnight, and again that morning, British bombers attacked nine Egyptian airfields, though they aborted a raid on their main target, the West Cairo airbase, after discovering that it lay near the route that American citizens were using to escape toward Alexandria. When, however, Eden refused to say whether the country was at war in the House of Commons that morning, the violence of the reaction from the Labour benches was such that the Speaker had to suspend the sitting for half an hour to allow tempers to cool down.

The time difference meant that Egypt’s ambassador to the United Nations was able to quote from Gaitskell’s response to Eden in his own speech that evening in the General Assembly debate in New York. After Dixon had attempted to defend the British government’s position, Dulles spoke. The resolution that he went on to propose called for an immediate cease-fire, a halt to the movement of military forces and arms into the area, and the withdrawal of all forces behind the 1949 armistice lines. It was carried by sixty-four votes to five. Only Australia and New Zealand voted with Britain, France, and Israel. Six other countries abstained. One of them was Canada, whose prime minister, Lester Pearson, had been his country’s representative on the UN’s Special Committee on Palestine in 1947. He suggested creating and sending in an emergency UN force to keep the peace.

News of the late-night vote in New York reached London by dawn on November 2. In the House of Commons Gaitskell asked Eden if he would abide by the General Assembly’s resolution. Eden played for time by saying that he wanted to read it first and would answer the next day.

By now the Egyptians were retreating and the Israelis were close to the canal. British bombers had knocked out Cairo radio, enabling “Voice of Britain” to squat on its frequency and bombard the Egyptians with bloodcurdling propaganda. In two cabinet meetings that afternoon, Eden, in whose view the military situation was “very satisfactory,” argued that the British and French governments should use the speed of the Israeli advance to justify, as soon as possible, a landing of troops, who would then hand over to the United Nations force. To shouts of “murderer” from the Labour benches, this was the policy he announced to the House of Commons the next day.²⁵

Eden’s insistence on quick action required the use of paratroops because the main Anglo-French invasion force was still en route by sea. This, however, created a quandary. The situation that Eden was now trying to exploit had only come about because the Egyptians had withdrawn to the canal to avoid being trapped on its east bank by the Israeli advance. This meant that in the Port Said area—the very spot where the paras would be landing—there were large numbers of Egyptian troops who, aerial reconnaissance showed, were ready for a fight. The British could drop in parachutists rapidly, knowing that this lightly armed force would meet fierce opposition, or they could bomb the Egyptians’ new positions to make a landing easier, a move that would take time and make a mockery of Eden’s claim on television that evening that “all my life I’ve been a man of peace.” Nevertheless, the defense minister, Antony Head, headed out to the British headquarters on Cyprus to see what could be done.²⁶

Burning oil tanks at Port Said, November 5, 1956.

Head returned to London on November 4 with news that gave the cabinet grounds to hope that British troops might land unopposed. The Egyptians seemed to be withdrawing from Port Said, he reported; he felt that the “world will accept a fait accompli, if neatly done.” In back-channel messages to London, the CIA was implying the same thing.

With an antiwar protest going on in the streets outside, that evening the cabinet considered the options: to drop the paras straightaway, wait twenty-four hours to try to get UN endorsement for the operation, or to abandon it altogether. The minutes show that opinion was divided. Eden favored action. Lloyd feared that the UN would impose oil sanctions if they went ahead. Salisbury, once hawkish, now thought that there was no chance that Egypt and Israel would accept their peacekeeping role and that therefore their job was done. News that the Israeli government had not, in fact, accepted the terms of the cease-fire helped simplify the decision. In the end, Eden went round the table and found there was a majority for immediate action: the parachute drop would go ahead. Lord Home seems to have summed up the mood around the cabinet table. “[We] can get away with this, if it can be done without heavy casualties.”²⁷

Six hundred and sixty-eight British paras went in just after seven in the morning, local time. One man was killed in the drop, another was wounded, and twelve more were wounded in the fight to secure the airfield where they landed. From there, they faced a five kilometer advance to reach Port Said. Although by now the main, seaborne force was lying offshore, the Egyptians’ resistance had been stiff enough to deter any last-minute change to the plan. The main landings would take place the following dawn. Meanwhile, elite French troops had landed south of Port Said. Their task was to take the bridges on the causeway linking the port to the mainland, isolating the town. It was they who succeeded in forcing the Egyptian commander into asking for a cease-fire by cutting the freshwater supply into the port.

The news of this development reached London during another parliamentary debate on the situation. Lloyd, at the dispatch box, had been parrying a series of awkward questions about British propaganda, which had been threatening to bomb villages in the delta if there was resistance. Eden stood up to intervene, reporting that he had just received a top-priority Flash message from the front. “Governor and Military Commander, Port Said now discussing surrender terms with Brigadier Butler. Cease-fire ordered,” he read, triggering roars of approval from the government benches. On his return to Downing Street, the prime minister summoned his chiefs of staff and hugged the air marshal. “Oh my dear Chiefs, how grateful I am to you! You have been magnificent! It’s all worked out perfectly.” But the sense of triumph was to be brief.²⁸

Earlier that day, knowing that the parachute drop had gone ahead, Eden had written to Eisenhower justifying his actions and detailing what he still planned to do. It was an odd letter—at once confident, self-righteous, confessional, and complacent, which invited the president, if not to “approve… at least understand the terrible decisions we have had to make.”²⁹

“I know that Foster thought we could have played this longer,” Eden conceded. “But I am convinced that, if we had allowed things to drift, everything would have gone from bad to worse. Nasser would have become a kind of Moslem Mussolini and our friends in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Iran would gradually have been brought down. His efforts would have spread westwards, and Libya and North Africa would have been brought under his control.” Although Eden stated his willingness to hand over to an international force as soon as he could, the implication of “would have” was obvious. He was determined to remove Nasser first.

Eisenhower’s initial reaction to the letter was sanguine. Not only was Eden facing almost unanimous condemnation from the United Nations, but the Syrians had sabotaged the IPC pipeline and Nasser had blocked the Suez Canal. It would only be a matter of time before the prime minister had to cave in when, because of his own actions, he was faced with the very oil shortage he had once feared that Nasser would engineer. But after the president had drafted a surprisingly warm response urging Eden to do no more than carry out the landings and looking forward to renewed cooperation once the current crisis had passed, a message arrived from the Soviet premier Nikolai Bulganin in Moscow. Seeking to shift attention from his own country’s simultaneous and bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising, he suggested that the two nuclear-armed superpowers should take action to restore peace in the Middle East. Soon afterward came news that the Port Said cease-fire had broken down.

Eisenhower instantly rejected Bulganin’s letter for what it was—a diversionary tactic that was also designed to drive a wedge between the United States and her estranged European allies. But the Russian had also written to Eden, making a none-too-subtle hint that Britain might face a Soviet ballistic missile attack, and Ike worried that, after Budapest, the Soviets were “scared and furious, and there is nothing more dangerous than a dictatorship in this state of mind.” Fearing that the Russians might use the ongoing fighting at Port Said as a pretext to intervene, he decided not to send his letter to Eden.³⁰

Bulganin’s letter reached London at about two in the morning of November 6, and at eight-thirty Eden rang up Pierson Dixon, the British ambassador to the UN. Dixon told him he had just been in an emergency session called by the Russians. He thought that Russia’s aim was to “get themselves into a position where they could say that they had tried the UN and having failed, now had their hands free for some independent action.” That must have sounded rather familiar to Eden. Although he did not think the Russians would attack Britain, he feared that the message might be “cover for a military move”—most easily into Syria, in the worst case against the British force in Egypt.³¹

Far more significant, Dixon went on to warn that the Americans were drafting their own resolution calling for economic sanctions on Britain and France. From there the end came quickly. A few days earlier Lloyd had suggested that one way to counter oil sanctions, were they imposed, would be “to occupy Kuwait and Qatar”—the two oil producers that were not members of the UN—but this madcap scheme was not followed up. In the cabinet on the morning of November 6, Macmillan, who seemed to have turned overnight from tawny hawk to snowwhite dove, ran through the financial position, which was deteriorating fast as currency traders sold off their sterling holdings. For reasons that are still mysterious, he exaggerated the loss by a factor of three, claiming that £100 million had drained from the country’s reserves in the first week of November, when in fact the real number was nearer £30 million. But his colleagues were not to know that and accepted his bleak message that, if the reserves continued to run down at that rate, the coffers would be empty soon after Christmas. The country’s finances were not robust enough to withstand international isolation: as Macmillan later ruefully admitted, the Suez crisis had not changed Britain’s parlous economic situation, but it had revealed it. That evening, Eden announced that Britain had ordered her forces to cease fire at midnight. Defense minister Antony Head was among those disappointed. It was “like going through all the preliminaries,” the former brigadier said, “without having an orgasm!”³²

IKE WON THE November 6 election. When, days later, he received a message from Macmillan asking for “a fig leaf to cover our nakedness,” he could afford to be magnanimous. Ike had known Macmillan since their days together in North Africa in the war and rang up his ambassador. “Could you get them informally and say of course we are interested and sympathetic and, as soon as things happen that we anticipate, we can furnish ‘a lot of fig leaves’?” Once Eden had left on an extended holiday, and Lloyd told the House of Commons on December 3 that British troops would be withdrawn “without delay,” that help was rapidly forthcoming. Britain was now allowed to draw on the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. government waived the interest repayments it was entitled to on Britain’s 1946 loan. American oil arrived to make up for the shortfall caused by the sabotage of the IPC’s pipeline in Syria and the blockage of the Suez Canal.³³

Macmillan, who would succeed Eden as prime minister, blamed everything on his predecessor, despite having driven him to disaster. He told Dulles that “he, personally, was very unhappy with the way in which this matter was handled and the timing, but that Eden had taken this entirely to himself and he… had had no real choice except to back Eden.” He was more honest to his colleagues in the cabinet. “I advocated firm, but quick, action against Egypt,” he said, as he argued that they had no choice but to accept the unpalatable demands that Ike was making of them. “We have failed in that. What else can we do now?”³⁴