Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil
1942, and finally by defeat in the 1948 Palestine war. It was thus only natural that procuring advanced weapons was at the top of Nasser’s agenda. Capitalizing on his CIA links, he first turned to the United States. In October 1954, a meeting was held at the security operative Hassan al-Tuhami’s apartment between Nasser and Amer, on the Egyptian side, with the CIA’s Miles Copeland, and the generals Albert Gerhardt and Wilbur Eveland, representing the Americans. According to Copeland, an agreement was reached to sell Egypt $20 million worth of weapons on easy credit terms. But the following month, Washington announced only an economic aid package of $40 million; Nasser also received $3 million under the table from the U.S. president’s executive budget, which was normally earmarked for CIA operations. Copeland returned to Washington in July 1955 to consult with George Allen, assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, regarding the delayed arms deal. A desperate Nasser followed this with a warning message to Kermit Roosevelt, director of the CIA’s Middle East operations, in mid-September that if the deal did not go through, he might consider requesting military aid from the Eastern Bloc, but the latter did not take him seriously.4
Clearly, America’s intention was to coax Egypt into joining the Western-oriented regional defense alliance known as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), or simply, the Baghdad Pact. The pact allowed U.S. and British forces to use the territories and facilities of member countries (Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan) to block Communist incursions into the region. When Egypt refused to join, the Americans, according to the future foreign minister Ismail Fahmy, encouraged Israeli raids against the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip between February and September 1955 under the pretext of checking the activities of Palestinian guerrillas. The raids exposed Egypt’s military vulnerability even further, forcing Nasser to conclude the famous “Czech arms deal” with the Soviet Union in September 1955—a substantial deal that included 200 fighter jets and bombers, 230 tanks, 500 artillery pieces, 530 armored vehicles, 200 troop carriers, and a naval force of 3 submarines and a handful of destroyers and minesweepers.5 Nasser made it clear that the West had only itself to blame. In a speech delivered on September 27, 1955, at a military fair, he said: “When we carried out the revolution we turned to every country … to arm our forces, we turned to England, we turned to France, we turned to America … [but] we only heard demands [that undermine] Egypt’s dignity.”6 American strategists were stunned. They had placed too much store in Khrushchev’s public pledge to the Central Committee of the Communist Party to adhere to Joseph Stalin’s policy of never staking Soviet credibility on non-Communist developing countries, especially ones that were too far away and too unstable. Stalin, as is well known, was an advocate of “socialism in one country” (meaning the USSR), and intervened outside Russian borders only when success was guaranteed at the hands of a Communist party loyal to Moscow. Washington believed the Soviets eyed Third World nationalists with suspicion, if not disdain, and would never ally with them. Obviously, however, the success of the U.S. Containment Doctrine, which prevented the spread of communism outside the USSR and Eastern Europe, forced Moscow to treat postcolonial nationalists as “good enough Communists” in order to break its isolation. And before the Americans knew what hit them, Nasser strained the situation even further by recognizing Red China in May 1956. Enraged, the United States not only canceled military aid talks, but also withdrew its offer to help build the High Dam, a massive hydroelectric project that was supposed to double Egypt’s industrial capacity. By doing so, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles played unwittingly into Nasser’s hand. For months the president had been looking for a pretext to reclaim Egypt’s rights over the Suez Canal. Now, citing the need to channel the canal’s revenue toward financing the dam, a defiant Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in front of an ecstatic crowd on July 26, 1956.
Instead of just aggravating the United States, Nasser’s decision convinced three odd partners to carry out a joint military strike against Egypt, what became known as the Tripartite Aggression. Britain, France, and Israel came to this decision through very different routes, though it was the conjunction of their interests to depose Egypt’s new regime that made their cooperation possible. For Britain, as Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd later revealed, Nasser’s obvious ambition to project power in the eastern flank of the Arab world (Jordan, Iraq, Aden, and the sheikhdoms of the Gulf) undermined its strategic allies and threatened its control of the region’s oilfields. Egypt’s control of the Suez Canal itself represented another problem: not only did a quarter of all British imports come through the canal, but also three-quarters of its oil needs. Of the 14,666 ships that passed through the canal in 1955, for instance, 4,358 were British. If Nasser blocked the canal, Britain might suffer “the worst industrial crisis in her history.”7
France’s grievances had to do with Nasser’s actions in the North African side of the Arab world, particularly in Algeria. The French military establishment blamed Nasser for the Algerian Revolt. Hard-pressed to justify their failure to end the insurgency, French generals needed an excuse, and the most sensible one was Nasser. In the French army’s propaganda, Egypt’s role in Algeria was the same as the Chinese role in Vietnam, the difference being that Egypt, unlike China, could be defeated. So if France had been humbled by China in Southeast Asia, there was no need for it to suffer the same fate in the Middle East at the hands of a lesser power. If only Nasser were deposed, Algeria’s Front de Liberation National (FLN) would lose its capacity to evict the French by force. As with Britain, the Suez Canal also had an influence over France’s decision: “In the Gallic imagination the canal was not just a masterpiece of engineering but a tribute to the Napoleonic mission … On a less elevated level, the Canal Company was the ‘last great international stronghold of French capital.’ Its board was controlled by French directors, it was staffed largely by French technicians, and it provided a modest income to tens of thousands of French shareholders.”8
Soon after resolving to launch war against Nasser, France approached Israel. Egypt’s new neighbor was alarmed by the Czech arms deal, and believed it had only a narrow window of opportunity to cripple Cairo’s drive for military parity. Israel and France developed intimate military links in the 1950s as French armaments and aviation industries sought clients with long shopping lists and generous funds to help them achieve economies of scale. Transactions increased in value from a few Mirages and Mystères to a deal to help Israel establish its first atomic reactor, in Dimona. Moreover, the Mossad shared intelligence with the Service de Documentation et Centre de Espionnage (SCCE) regarding FLN activities. Now France offered Israel a full military partnership in a joint assault against a common enemy, an offer it could hardly refuse. On September 21, Shimon Peres, the man responsible for French-Israeli military cooperation, was invited to France to plan the operation.9
The aim of the tripartite plot, as set in the Sèvres Protocol on October 24, 1956, was simple: toppling Nasser and establishing control over the Suez Canal. However, the military plan and the logistics required to pull it off were anything but simple. Israel was assigned a diversionary role. Its forces would roll into Sinai to draw in Egypt’s army. The two Western powers would then demand an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of each force to equal distances from the Suez Canal. Egypt would certainly refuse because such a withdrawal would mean surrendering Sinai to the Israelis. Citing the need to safeguard the international waterway, Britain and France would occupy the Suez Canal Zone. First, Egyptian airfields would be bombed to neutralize the air force and unnerve the population; then a naval barrage would smother canal defenses to allow paratroopers to be parachuted in; and finally, a full-fledged airborne and seaborne invasion would wrest the canal cities away from Egypt and advance to Cairo to install a friendly government.
As agreed, Israel’s elite strike force, the 7th Armored Brigade, stormed into Egyptian territories on October 29, 1956. Nasser issued his orders for the six battalions stationed there to block the Israeli advance until the 4th Armored Division could cross the canal to join the battle. The next day, Egypt received warnings through its ambassadors to London and Paris to withdraw ten miles from the canal within twelve hours to avert international intervention. Nasser’s suspicions that a plot had been hatched were soon confirmed when Britain and France raided Egyptian airports, ravaging the country’s air force. By the end of October, Egypt was confronting a force four times as big as its own, with 1,000 jets, 700 tanks, and two naval fleets with 130 warships. This was “the largest amphibious fighting force since the end of the Second World War.”10