EIGHT WEEKS AFTER THE AMERICANS ADMITTED TO THEMSELVES that they had failed in Syria, an offer of help arrived from an unexpected quarter. On December 11, 1957, the American ambassador to Cairo reported that an Egyptian journalist had told him that Nasser was convinced by information, given him by the U.S., that the new Syrian chief of staff, Afif al Bizri, was indeed a communist and felt that “something must be done about it.” Nasser, the ambassador continued, “asks of us only that we keep [our] hands off Syria for a maximum period of three months and particularly that we do nothing which could have unintentional effect of making heroes out of Bizri, Baqdash and Khalid al Azm.”1
The journalist was a known confidant of Nasser, and since what he said tallied with American reports from Damascus that the Egyptians were supporting the Baath against the communists, the American ambassador decided that the overture was probably genuine and gave it a guarded welcome. “It is possible,” he reported to Washington, “that Egypt, though largely responsible for present chaos in Syria, may now be prepared exert serious effort to pull situation out of fire.” Dulles responded the following day to say that he would welcome any action designed to impede communist penetration in Syria. Since all American efforts to intervene decisively in the country’s politics had failed, there was, as Nasser had probably calculated, nothing else that he could say.
Exactly what Nasser was planning became clear the following month when, on January 12, 1958, a delegation of fourteen Syrian military officers, led by Bizri himself, came to see him in Cairo. Fed up with the swirling chaos enveloping their country, they begged him for a political union between Egypt and Syria on whatever terms he wanted; the rumor was that they had said that they would seek an alliance with Russia if he could not agree.2
According to the CIA, Nasser said afterward that he had been surprised by Bizri’s proposal, but this is difficult to believe. All eyes had been on Syria for months, and Nasser’s own ambassador to Damascus had long encouraged Baathist calls for a union with Egypt, a campaign that had grown louder as the Baathists’ fears of both Russian and American interference in their country grew. What is sure is that Nasser set the Syrian delegation two conditions: that Syria would be ruled from Cairo and her parliament and political parties dissolved, and that the army would now come under Egyptian command and play no further role in national politics. By January 20, he and Bizri had reached an agreement; the Syrian general, on his return to Damascus, summed up the choice for the remaining doubters in the government. “There are two roads open to you,” he told them. “One leads to Mezze [the political prison outside Damascus]; the other to Cairo.” Bizri himself took what turned out to be a dead end. Within eight weeks, he had been sacked by Nasser.3
On February 1, the United Arab Republic came into being. The Syrian pound slumped as investors shifted their money into other currencies, and land and share prices also fell. At the celebration in Cairo, Syria’s president Shukri Quwatly struck a cautious note. “You have acquired a nation of politicians,” he is supposed to have told Nasser, “fifty per cent believe themselves to be national leaders, twenty-five per cent to be prophets, and at least ten per cent to be gods.”4
Photographs taken that day suggest that Nasser was far more enthusiastic than Quwatly about the birth of the new union, which marked the zenith of his power. Elsewhere, the birth of the United Arab Republic (UAR) also caused mixed emotions. Although there was general jubilation in the Arab street, where people hoped it was a harbinger of long-dreamt-of Arab unity, the news caused consternation in the chanceries and palaces of the rulers of Syria’s immediate neighbors, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, as they digested the implications of having Nasser as a next-door neighbor. The Lebanese foreign minister feared that Nasser’s supporters in his own country would now mount a bid to join the Arab Union, King Hussein of Jordan realized the appeal that it would have on his country’s large Palestinian population, and Iraq’s crown prince Abdul Ilah wondered what Nasser might do now that he controlled the Iraq Petroleum Company’s pipeline. The tumultuous events of 1958 would show that all three men were right to be extremely worried.
AT KING HUSSEIN’S invitation, on February 11, King Feisal of Iraq and his advisers arrived in Amman by plane for talks. Born six months apart, the two kings got on very well with one another, but their families, as the British ambassador to Amman put it diplomatically, “were on less good terms.” In fact, they had fallen out spectacularly the previous year, and the root cause of the ill feeling was money. As the British ambassador observed, while Feisal’s suits were made for him on Savile Row, Hussein made do with a tailor on the Salt Road in Amman. The Jordanians disliked their “rich but stingy cousins.”5
It was Iraqi money that King Hussein so desperately needed. The Egyptians and the Syrians had, to no one’s great surprise, never honored the £7-million-a-year promise they had made in the previous year’s Arab Solidarity Pact, and then in January King Saud told Hussein that he could no longer afford to keep up his payments of £5 million, either. Facing the simultaneous challenge of the UAR and a £12-million-pound-sized hole in his finances, Hussein now suggested a federation with a rotating monarchy to his richer cousin. When Feisal refused to consider this, Hussein offered to stand down in Feisal’s favor. Having reached a deal by which each man would remain king of his own country, three days later the two kings announced the creation of the Arab Union, which would have Feisal as its king. “Any union is better than none,” admitted Jordan’s ambassador to Baghdad. But on the West Bank, Hussein’s Palestinian subjects disagreed. According to a State Department report, most of them were “Convinced They Are In The Wrong Union.”6
King Saud had received an invitation to join the Hashemites’ Arab Union, which he declined. Although, like the Iraqis, he worried that Nasser might be able to turn his pipeline on and off, he thought that he had come up with a better idea. By mid-February he was indiscreetly telling all and sundry to “expect wonderful news from Syria shortly.” On March 3, one of his officials more specifically told the American ambassador to Riyadh that “a successful military revolution” was about to take place in Damascus.7
The Americans, having been burnt by the Syrians themselves the previous year, urged caution, which Saud ignored. On March 5, Nasser, on his first visit to Damascus, announced that Sarraj, Syria’s intelligence chief, had recently been approached by an envoy from Saud, who had paid him nearly £2 million to launch a countercoup against the union with Egypt and promised him £2 million more if he assassinated Nasser during his Syrian visit as well. At a press conference soon afterward, Sarraj distributed copies of the three cheques he had been given, which had been drawn on the Arab National Bank in Riyadh. Pictures of the cheques were reproduced in the Egyptian press the following day. According to Kim Philby, who visited Riyadh soon afterward, the bank’s manager admitted that the money had been deposited by one of Saud’s officials. It looked like the Saudis had fallen for a sting.8
In Washington, the CIA director Allen Dulles despaired. “We had tried to warn Saud, vainly, that he was falling into a trap.” The plot was a significant setback for Washington since it damned the Americans by association and led Saud’s pro-Egyptian half-brother Faisal to seize most of the king’s remaining powers and embark on a course of studious neutrality. By 1959 it was reported that Saud did “little more than distributing charity, signing death warrants, State papers, etc.”9
IF SAUD WAS the first casualty of the United Arab Republic, the Americans and the British feared that the Lebanese president Camille Chamoun might be the next. In office since 1952, Chamoun had taken an openly pro-American stance that, while welcome in Washington, had made him lots of enemies at home where it went against the commitment to nonalignment, which had underpinned the country’s politics since independence in 1943. Now nearing the end of his six-year term of office and buoyed by the way in which a tidal wave of CIA money had helped him win the previous year’s parliamentary election, he wanted to stand for the presidency again—an ambition that was not as simple as it sounded to achieve.
As it stood, the Lebanese constitution barred the president from two consecutive terms of office: Chamoun would first need to seek parliament’s approval to amend its text before the legislature broke up in May if he was to put himself forward that summer. In theory, given he enjoyed a substantial parliamentary majority, that should have been easy. But, in the eight months since the parliamentary elections, anti-Western feeling had grown. By March 1958, Chamoun was unpopular and vulnerable. Moreover, the fact that the constitution was now seen by many Muslim Lebanese as flawed (because it institutionalised Christian dominance in a country where the majority of the population was now Muslim) made tinkering with it in such a transparently self-serving fashion, while failing to address its deeper failings, potentially incendiary. Chamoun’s outraged opponents said that he was risking a civil war.
The U.S. government realized that Chamoun had become a liability and wanted him to retire. On March 5, the American ambassador met the president to discuss who might succeed him. Chamoun “went through [the] process of elimination, ticking off one by one potential candidates” before reaching the conclusion that the “only politician who could lead [the] country and evaluate its present foreign policies was himself,” the ambassador reported back to Washington. The following month, Chamoun changed his mind and started to think that the army chief of staff, Fuad Chehab, might be acceptable. By May he was back to thinking that only he would do.10
Before Chamoun could announce that he was standing, however, the country erupted in a civil war. Following the murder of a Christian, pro-Nasser journalist on May 8, Chamoun’s opponents—who included leading Sunnis, the Druze warlord Kamal Jumblatt, and Christian leaders—called for the president’s resignation and a general strike. In Tripoli, during three days of violent clashes, protestors also set fire to the United States Information Service Library. On the twelfth the violence spread to Beirut itself, and the next day Jumblatt attacked the presidential palace southeast of the capital, although Chamoun was not there at the time. After Fuad Chehab refused to take action against the rebels, fearing that his army would split if he did, Chamoun warned both the American and British governments that he might have to ask for military help.
Chamoun’s warning left the Americans, in particular, with a dilemma. As Dulles put it, to send in troops risked creating “a wave of anti-Western feeling in the Arab world,” which might lead to the removal of the remaining pro-Western governments, the sabotage of the pipelines running through Syria, and so another major oil crisis for the West. To do nothing, however, would show that the United States was not willing to stand by her allies, a failure Moscow would certainly exploit.11
In London, Macmillan and his colleagues considered the situation the same day. After Lloyd warned that “unless we arrest this drift, Lebanon will be absorbed into the United Arab Republic,” the cabinet agreed that it would join with the United States to tell Chamoun that, if he asked for help, then he would get it. Chronicling the cabinet meeting in his diary that night, Macmillan feared that, after Lebanon, Iraq “will be next to go.” That comment seemed eerily prescient when, exactly eight weeks later, the Hashemites and their hangers-on were bloodily overthrown.12
IRAQ’S INEQUALITY HAD long worried the British, who encouraged the king and his advisers to spread their oil wealth more widely. And so in 1950, Nuri al Said had set up an Iraq Development Board. Anticipating its effects, four years later the country’s interior minister predicted to a visitor that “in five or six years the face of the country will have been changed and there will be no more talk of Communism. Come back and see us again and you will see.” But Nuri’s fondness for grands projets over less obtrusive schemes encouraged the board to squander its funds on vanity projects, when repairing existing infrastructure would have been more cost effective and housing was a far more urgent priority.
Nuri’s grip over the board and its failure to make an impact were symptoms of a much deeper malaise. By December 1956, an MI6 officer, Michael Ionides, reported hearing “bitter complaints from the younger men, up to 30 or 40, that Nuri has never brought the next generation along, has kept everything to himself, never built up the structure of Government and Parliament, never even tried to make elections work as other emergent countries have done.” There was, they grumbled, “no outlet for discussion,” “no means for the younger people to take part.” When the MI6 agent John Slade-Baker visited the following year, he heard exactly the same story from an Iraqi contact who said that discontent had now spread into the army. Intellectuals, meanwhile, were calling for al islah al jathri—reform from the root. “It is not a question of pruning the twigs and cutting out a certain amount of dead wood,” this man explained, when Slade-Baker queried what exactly that phrase meant, “the tree must be destroyed to the very roots.”13
In early 1957, just before Nuri became prime minister again, for the eighth, and as it turned out, final time, Sam Falle—who had helped organize the overthrow of Mosaddeq in Iran—was posted to Iraq. Nuri was now just shy of seventy, and the British government was uncomfortably aware that there was no one to step into his shoes once he was gone. Before setting out for Baghdad, Falle remembered being asked a question by his boss in London: “What we want to know, Sam, is ‘After Nuri, what?’”14
Having traveled the length of the country soon after his arrival, Falle could report that the signs were not reassuring. Some Baghdad contacts he inherited from his predecessor told him, over dinner, that their country’s independence was a sham because successive governments simply took orders from the British. “Their criticism of the Iraqi regime, particularly the Crown Prince and Nuri as Said, was blistering,” he recalled. Their strength of feeling was all the more astonishing given that it was the first time they had met him, and Nuri was not even in government at the time. The situation outside Baghdad was every bit as bad but in a different way. Downstream at Kut, Falle discovered peasants working in feudal conditions and “hardly able to scrape a living.” On his return to the embassy, he summarized the main problems facing the country as “predatory landlords and inefficient farming.”15
From Cairo, Voice of the Arabs fanned smoldering resentment. By the time that Nuri became prime minister, on March 3, 1958, there was mounting disquiet about the country’s situation. “The ruling classes here are getting more and more worried at the gap between the Government and the people and at the extent to which Nasser has captured their imagination,” said Ionides three days later.16
The British ambassador Michael Wright was not oblivious to what was going on but discounted it. He lived a cloistered existence in a residence hidden behind high walls, and after nearly four years in the post, he relied too heavily on Nuri for information. When Nuri reassured him that his security forces had already uncovered four plots that year and that the army was loyal to the monarchy, Wright was inclined to believe him: after all, Nuri was the consummate survivor and people had been predicting the collapse of the Iraqi state for years and it had never happened. And so when Falle raised his fear that a revolution seemed likely, Wright took little notice. He told the new boy not to attach too much significance to the views of a “discontented middle class.” He also warned him not to mix with the opposition in case it prejudiced his own relationship with Nuri. “The Embassy feel that so long as Nuri is back in the chair all is going well and that nothing more is required,” claimed one of Nuri’s rivals. Relying on his ambassador’s judgment, in London, Selwyn Lloyd said that the Iraqi government was going through “a serious crise de nerfs” but nothing that “dollops of short-term aid” could not resolve. But this time, Wright turned out to be wrong.17
In fact, it was probably too late for money, in whatever quantity, to save the situation. In response to repeated provocation by Nuri, who traveled to London in June and called, in an interview, for Anglo-American help to bring down the Syrian government, Nasser was doing his utmost to destroy the Hashemites’ Arab Union. In Jordan a young officer cadet, Ahmad Yusif al-Hiyari, was arrested on suspicion of plotting to kill Hussein and his uncle. Under interrogation, he revealed that the UAR was planning to stage simultaneous coups in Jordan and Iraq in mid-July.
The Americans meanwhile were also uncovering evidence that a conspiracy was afoot. In May the FBI sent the CIA the tape of a telephone conversation between the Jordanian and Egyptian military attachés in Washington, which suggested that the Jordanian was the leader of a plot against King Hussein. When, at the end of June, the CIA intercepted a radio message from Syria to the Jordanian conspirators telling them to launch the coup, it tipped off the king, who ordered the arrest of some forty Jordanian army officers.
Realizing the potential significance of al-Hiyari’s confession, Hussein called his cousin Feisal in Baghdad and asked him to send a trusted envoy to Amman so that he could brief him on the threat. On July 10, the commander in chief of the Iraqi army General Arif came to see him. When Hussein warned him about what he knew, Arif was dismissive. “Your Majesty,” he responded, “I appreciate all your trouble, but I assure you the Iraqi Army is built on tradition.… It has not had the problems—nor the changes—your army has had, sir, in the past few years. I feel that it is rather we who should be concerned about Jordan, Your Majesty. This coup applies to your country, and it is you we are worried about. I beseech you to take care.”18
It was, ironically, Hussein who then ensured his cousin’s fate. Worried when the arrested plotters refused to talk, he asked Feisal to send troops to Jordan to strengthen his own army in the event that Syria invaded. In response, Nuri al Said decided to task one of his favorite soldiers, Abdel Karim Qasim, with taking an Iraqi brigade to Mafraq near the Syrian frontier.
As Qasim’s force was based at Baqubah, east of Baghdad, it would have to pass through the capital on its way to Mafraq. Despite General Arif’s claims that the army was loyal, it was revealing that its standing orders mandated that troops passing through the capital did not carry live ammunition with them. On this occasion, however, that directive was ignored. After Qasim’s force had crossed the Tigris during the night of July 13–14, it dispersed in order to take over the radio station, the railway, and major government buildings and to assault the royal palace. When Feisal and Abdul Ilah emerged from the building to try to reach an agreement with their attackers, they were both shot dead. The rebels then stormed the palace, killing the remainder of the royal family. Abdal Ilah’s decapitated body was tied by its feet to a car and dragged through the streets. A day later, Nuri, who escaped his own home disguised as a woman, was found and murdered.
As the imagined power behind the throne, the British were also targeted. Driving to the embassy on the morning of the coup, Falle found himself surrounded by a baying mob, which started hammering on the roof of his car. “This did not look good,” he said, but his luck held when an Iraqi corporal in a jeep appeared, dispersed the crowd, and told him to go home immediately. One of Falle’s colleagues was also stopped and asked his nationality. “Scottish,” he responded. “Lucky for you,” came the reply. “We are killing all the English today!” The embassy was attacked, and the comptroller, a distinguished-looking former army officer whom the rioters had probably mistaken for Wright, was murdered. The closeness of this shave was lost on Wright’s Marie-Antoinetteish wife. “Oh, I still love my Iraqis,” she was quoted saying afterward.19
THE NEWS—AND, WORSE, the photographs—from Baghdad caused palpitations in Beirut and Amman. After Chamoun had made a formal request to the United States for help, Macmillan convened his cabinet early in the evening to discuss what they might do. Although he clearly felt Chamoun’s appeal presented a golden “opportunity to check Nasser and clean up the situation in the Middle East generally,” his colleagues were more cautious. Although none of them were willing to do nothing since that would only reinforce the impression that Britain was irrelevant, they feared that an American landing in Lebanon would make it more likely they would have to intervene in Jordan and subsequently have to pick up the pieces when American interest proved short-lived. To use Macmillan’s words, he did not “want to be left sitting in this tuppenny ha’penny place.”20
To try to force the United States to recognize that intervening in Lebanon carried regional consequences, Macmillan sent a telegram to Eisenhower asking him what forces he would be willing to commit to a British operation to support Hussein. But when the two men spoke over the telephone later that evening, Eisenhower dodged that issue because he and his advisers rightly wondered whether Macmillan’s real motive was to use Jordan as a base from which to launch a counterrevolution in Iraq.
Instead, Macmillan learned from the president that American forces would shortly be landing in Lebanon alone. “You are doing a Suez on me,” the prime minister responded, at which Eisenhower just laughed. The clear American determination to take unilateral and unassisted action was, as Rab Butler remarked when the cabinet reconvened afterward, “Quite a blow to our prestige.”21
The Americans landed at Beirut the following day. “We were just in time to watch as amphibious tanks eerily surfaced through the waves and stood on the shore rotating their gun turrets,” recalled a British journalist, who had seen the U.S. Sixth Fleet materialize on the horizon and had run down to the beach to watch. “They were followed by fearsome-looking marines… who leapt into the surf from landing craft. They were loaded with machine-guns, mortars and flame-throwers, and muttered ‘excuse me Ma’am’ as they advanced past sunbathers in bikinis, while Lebanese beach boys tried to sell them Cokes and ice creams.”22
When the same day Hussein asked Macmillan for help, should it “prove necessary to preserve the integrity and independence of Jordan,” the British realized that they were now on the hook, just as they feared they would be. A further plea from the king reached Macmillan in Parliament the following evening, just after he had wound up a debate on the events of the previous two days. Once again, he convened the cabinet, this time in his office in Parliament behind the Speaker’s chair. In a meeting that lasted deep into the night, Macmillan set out the military risks entailed in sending a lightly armed force of paratroops who might face serious Jordanian opposition and whose resupply would depend on Israeli agreement. “Determined not to repeat Anthony’s mistake,” he then asked each of his colleagues for his view. Shortly before three o’clock on the morning of July 17, the cabinet decided to send in the paras in a show of support for King Hussein. Two battalions of the Parachute Regiment, with light artillery and six fighter jets, left Cyprus for Amman soon afterward. Hussein was given “intelligence” of a plot timed to take place later that morning to give the British grounds for intervention.23
As Macmillan recounted, the operation nearly resulted in a “terrible disaster” that would have caused the fall of the government. Although the Foreign Office had assured him that the Israelis would not prevent the British airborne force from crossing their airspace, when the RAF then tried to do so early on July 17, the Israelis ordered them to land. The leading aircraft, carrying the paras, decided to ignore the command and safely reached the Jordanian frontier, but its escort turned back to avoid the risk of being shot down. To the horror of the British commanders on Cyprus, Macmillan ordered the operation to stop, while they waited for a response from the Israelis.
In the meantime, Macmillan stewed. “What was I to say in the House? I must announce the facts at least at 3.30. But what were the facts? No one seemed to know,” he wrote afterward, recalling how he had spent the morning trying to hide his “sickening anxiety.” It was only that afternoon, while he was briefing Gaitskell on the reasons for the overnight intervention, that an aide put a most welcome piece of paper in his hand. “The Israeli Govt has agreed,” was all it said.24
Despite this positive reply, Israel’s stance toward overflights was to change repeatedly in the next few days. Inside the country, her coalition government was split on whether it was better to help King Hussein survive or to connive with Jordan’s other neighbors in the breakup of the barely feasible state. As this tug-of-war continued, the government gave and withdrew permission for overflights several times. The uncertainty only increased Macmillan’s determination to withdraw the British force as fast as possible, especially after he was obliged, against his better judgment, to commit more troops in August to secure the paratroopers an alternative line of communication, between Amman and the port of Aqaba, Jordan’s only outlet to the sea.
Although the Americans helped break the impasse with Tel Aviv by operating the air bridge themselves, their continued refusal to send troops to join the British contingent in Amman reinforced Macmillan’s desire for a swift exit. So too did the election of Lebanon’s army chief of staff Fuad Chehab as Chamoun’s successor as president on July 31. With every sign that the Americans had stabilized the situation in Lebanon, on August 12, Macmillan told his colleagues that his hope was to hand over to the United Nations. A United Nations General Assembly resolution, which called on all Arabs states to respect one another’s territorial integrity and was sponsored by the Arab League, passed unanimously on August 21. It provided the necessary cover that would give the British grounds to leave.
Before Macmillan was willing to beat the retreat, there was one thing left to do. King Hussein had been counting on Iraq to fill the gap in his finances. The murder of his cousins and their advisers not only left him grieving but confronted with yet another financial crisis as well. Until the matter of Jordan’s future funding was resolved, Macmillan knew that the kingdom would not be stable. By the end of August, however, the matter had been fixed. The United States agreed to give Jordan $50 million to tide the kingdom over until the following April, enabling Hussein to recruit two extra Bedu brigades that would decisively tip the balance in the army in his favor.
MACMILLAN HAD EMERGED unscathed from a crisis that, as he was all too aware, could easily have destroyed his reputation. For the British, 1958 marked the end of an era. The collapse of the Hashemite regime in Iraq, so long forecast and yet so long delayed, removed the last strong British ally in the northern Middle East and dealt a severe blow to British influence in that part of the region. There was, moreover, nothing that the British could do about it. Britain had lost Palestine, then Egypt, and now Jordan and Iraq. From now on, her primary interests lay to the south, along the shores of the Arabian Peninsula. The British were back where they had started.