The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  In practice, this meant forcing Britain and France into a corner. Although a plan was drawn up in Washington to ship oil from the US to western Europe, it was intentionally not put into practice in order to bring matters in Egypt to a conclusion. With confidence in the British economy collapsing and sterling’s value plummeting, London was forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund for financial assistance. In barely four decades, Britain had gone from world mastery to holding out its cap and begging for help. It was bad enough, then, that the appeal to the IMF was flatly turned down; it was positively humiliating that the troops that had been sent to Egypt to fight for one of western Europe’s most precious jewels were now withdrawn without having accomplished their mission. Their recall home, in the glare of the world’s media, was a telling sign of how the world had changed: India had been abandoned; the oilfields of Iran had been prised from Britain’s grasp; now so too had the Suez canal. The resignation of the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, at the start of 1957 simply served as another paragraph in the final chapter of the death of an empire.22

  The US, on the other hand, was acutely aware of its newfound responsibilities as a superpower when it came to the countries lying across the spine of Asia. It had to tread a careful line – as the fall-out after Suez demonstrated clearly. British prestige and influence had slumped spectacularly, raising the prospect that the southern flank acting as a bulwark to the Soviet Union might ‘completely collapse through Communist penetration and success in the Middle East’, as President Eisenhower put it at the end of 1956.23

  Moreover, the fiasco over the aborted military action had served to rouse anti-western sentiments across the Middle East as a whole, with nationalist demagogues taking heart from Nasser’s success in holding his nerve and overcoming European military pressure. As the Egyptian leader’s status rose exponentially across the region, ideas of Arab nationalism began to emerge, and with it, a growing sense that the unification of all Arabs into a single entity would create a single voice that would balance that of the west on the one hand and that of the Soviet bloc on the other.

  Astute observers had predicted just such an eventuality even before Nasser’s masterclass in political brinkmanship. The US ambassador to Teheran, Loy Henderson, who understood the region better than any other American, had concluded that nationalist voices would become increasingly vocal and powerful. ‘It seems almost inevitable’, he wrote in 1953, ‘that at some time in the future . . . the Middle Eastern countries . . . will come together and decide upon unified policies.’24 Nasser was the figurehead that this movement had been waiting for.

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  This prompted a significant change in posture from the US, articulated in what became known as the Eisenhower doctrine. Keenly aware that the Soviet Union was looking opportunistically at the Middle East, the President told Congress that it was essential that ‘the existing vacuum’ in the Middle East should ‘be filled by the United States before it is filled by Russia’. This was not just important for US interests, he went on; it was vital ‘to the peace of the world’.25 Congress was therefore asked to approve an ambitious budget to fund economic and military aid across the region, as well as for the authority to defend any country threatened by armed aggression. While one key purpose was to pre-empt the Soviet Union, it was also intended as an alternative to Nasser’s vision – one that was attractive to countries which could see the benefits of receiving substantial disbursements of money from Washington.26

  This attempt to reposition did not convince everyone. The Israelis were unimpressed by American attempts to improve relations with the Arabs and had little truck with assurances that they too would feel the benefits of the raised profile and role played by the US.27 These misgivings were understandable given the anger swirling around Israel, especially in Saudi Arabia and Iraq in the wake of the botched intervention in Suez. It did not help, of course, that Israeli troops had taken part alongside British and French soldiers; but what was more important was that the country was fast becoming a totemic symbol of outside interference by the west in the affairs of the region – and as a prime beneficiary of it. As a result, increasingly aggressive noises were being made about US support for Israel being incompatible with assistance for Arabs.

  Israel was now a focal point for Arab nationalists to rally around. Just as the Crusaders had found in the Holy Land hundreds of years earlier, the mere existence of a state supposedly made up of outsiders was a cause for disparate Arab interests to be set to one side. As the Crusaders had found too, Israelis assumed the ambiguous and unenviable role of a target that united many enemies into one.

  Anti-Israeli rhetoric featured strongly as politicians in Syria threw their lot in with Nasser and the vision he was articulating for a united Arab world. At the start of 1958, a formal merger with Egypt created a new state, the United Arab Republic, a prelude to future consolidation. Washington watched anxiously as the situation unfurled. Ambassador Henderson had warned that the emergence of a single voice might bring difficulties – ‘disastrous effects’, as he called them. The US wrestled with the implications and the State Department buzzed with debate, much of it highly pessimistic. A paper produced by the Bureau of Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs observed anxiously that Nasser’s radical nationalism threatened to engulf the region, noting that American ‘assets’ across the Middle East had been reduced or neutralised as a result of the Egyptian leader’s success with Suez and his step forward with Syria.28 Nasser’s progress would inevitably pave the way for Communism, concluded John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State and elder brother of Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. It was time to take decisive action and put up ‘sandbags around positions we must protect’.29

  The mood worsened when what looked unmistakably like the start of a chain reaction swept eastwards across Asia. First to go was Iraq. The unification of Egypt and Syria prompted much discussion among the well-educated elite in Baghdad, for whom the attractions of pan-Arabism seemed increasingly tempting as a third way between the attentions of Washington and Moscow. But things turned poisonous in the capital in the summer of 1958, sparked by a dangerous rise in pro-Nasser sympathies and rising anti-western sentiments laced with aggressive rhetoric about Israel. On 14 July, a group of high-ranking Iraqi army officers led by Abdul Karim Qasim – a man nicknamed ‘the snake charmer’ by contemporaries who attended a military course with him in Britain two decades earlier – staged a coup.30

  Marching on the palace at breakfast time, the plotters rounded up leading members of the royal family, including King Faisal II, in the palace courtyard and executed them. The body of Crown Prince Abd al-Ilha, a thoughtful and rather serious man, was dragged ‘into the street like . . . a dog’, torn apart and then burnt by an angry mob. The next day, the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Said, a veteran politician who had witnessed the transformation of the Middle East at first hand, was tracked down as he tried to flee, dressed as a woman, and shot dead. His body was mutilated and gleefully paraded through Baghdad.31

  These events seemed to herald a near-certain expansion of the Soviet Union’s interests. Iran, the Russian supremo Nikita Khrushchev told President John F. Kennedy at a summit in 1961, would soon drop like a rotten fruit into Soviet hands – a prospect that seemed likely given that even the head of the Iranian secret police was known to be plotting against the Shah. After Moscow’s State Security Committee (better known as the KGB) had failed with one assassination attempt, attention was turned to preparing landing sites and munitions dumps across Iran – presumably in anticipation of the decision to escalate efforts to foment a popular uprising and bring down the monarchy.32

  Things looked little better in Iraq, where a senior US policymaker wrote that the country ‘almost surely will drift into what amounts to a Communist takeover’.33 One result of this was western realignment with Nasser, who began to be viewed as the ‘lesser of two evils’. The US was at pains to build bridges with the mercurial Egyptian leader, who himself recognised that
Arab nationalism could be compromised by what he reportedly referred to as the growing ‘Communist penetration of the Middle East’.34 Common cause between Washington and Cairo was underscored by the decision of the new leadership in Iraq to plot a course of its own and steer away from pan-Arabism and from Nasser; this simply raised concerns still further about the spectre of the Soviet Union.35

  Plans for dealing with Baghdad were drawn up, with a committee appointed in the US to look at ‘overt or covert means’ of avoiding ‘a Communist takeover in Iraq’. Limitations in the source material make it difficult to know how much involvement, if any, the CIA had in an attempted coup to remove Qasim, the nationalist Prime Minister who had deposed the Iraqi monarchy, that was staged towards the end of 1959. One of those involved, who grazed his shin during the confusion, later used his participation to near-mythical effect to show his resolve and personal bravery. His name was Saddam Hussein.36

  Whether the plotters enjoyed US support on this occasion is not certain, although records show that the American intelligence community was aware of the failed putsch before it took place.37 The fact that elaborate plans were developed to remove key figures from positions of authority – such as an unnamed Iraqi colonel who was to be sent a monogrammed handkerchief contaminated with an incapacitating agent – also shows that active steps were being taken to try to ensure that Baghdad did not slip into Moscow’s orbit.38 It was perhaps no coincidence that when Qasim was finally deposed in 1963, his overthrow came as no surprise to American observers who later stated that this had been ‘forecast in exact detail by CIA agents’.39

  This deep engagement with the situation in Iraq was primarily driven by the desire to keep the Soviet Union out of the countries to its south. Building connections across the belt that spanned the Silk Roads was partly a matter of political prestige, where the US could not afford to be seen to be losing out to a rival that offered a sharply contrasting vision for the world. But there were other reasons for the intensity of this sustained interest.

  In 1955, Moscow decided to locate a major testing site for long-range missiles at Tyuratam, in what is now Kazakhstan, after concluding that the steppes provided a perfect environment in which to establish a chain of guidance antennae that would allow launches to be monitored without obstruction during flight, while also being sufficiently isolated as to pose no threat to existing urban centres. The resulting centre, later named the Baikonur Kosmodrome, became the primary location for the development and testing of ballistic missiles.40 Even before the centre was established, the Soviets had launched the R5, which had a range of over 600 miles and was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. In 1957, its successor – the R7, better known by its NATO codename SS6 ‘Sapwood’ – came into production with a range of 5,000 miles, dramatically raising the threat posed by the Soviet Union to the west.41

  The launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, the following year, along with the introduction of a fleet of Tupolev Tu-95 ‘Bear’ and Myasishchev 3M ‘Bison’ long-range strategic bombers, focused the minds of American military planners further still: it was vital that the US should be able to monitor missile tests, keeping an eye open for developments in ballistic capabilities as well as possible hostile launches.42 The Cold War often prompts thought of the Berlin Wall and eastern Europe as the principal arena for confrontation between the superpowers. But it was the swathe of territory within the Soviet Union’s underbelly where the real game of Cold War chess was played out.

  The strategic value to the US of the countries along the USSR’s southern flank had long been recognised. Now they became vitally important. Airbases, listening stations and communication networks in Pakistan became a crucial part of US defence strategy. By the time the Soviet missile capability reached the intercontinental stage, Peshawar Air Station in the north of the country was providing vital intelligence-gathering services. It served as a departure point for U-2 spy-plane operations that undertook reconnaissance missions over Baikonur as well as over other major military installations, including the plutonium-processing plant at Chelyabinsk. It was from Peshawar that Gary Powers took off on the ill-fated mission that saw him shot down in Soviet airspace near Sverdlovsk in 1960 in one of the most gripping incidents of the Cold War.43

  There was no small irony then that American political and military objectives, which were central to the defence of the free world and the democratic way of life, led to very different results. The US position in this part of the world was built on a series of strongmen, with undemocratic instincts and unsavoury methods of staying in power. In the case of Pakistan, the US were happy to deal with General Ayub Khan after he had led a coup in 1958 which he cannily billed as a ‘revolution away from Communism’ in an effort to gain American support. He was able to impose martial law without incurring the opprobrium of his western backers, justifying his actions as being ‘harsh only to those who have been destroying Pakistan’s moral fiber’.44 Lip-service was paid to the restoration of a ‘workable constitutional government’, though few had any illusions that military dictatorship was likely to be long-lasting – especially after Ayub stated that it would be ‘some decades’ before educational standards had been raised sufficiently to trust the population to vote for their leaders.45 The US was more than happy to provide weapons in large quantities to this dubious ally: Sidewinder missiles, jet fighters and B-57 tactical bombers were just some of the hardware sold with the approval of President Eisenhower.46

  This had the effect of further building up the status and power of the armed forces in Pakistan, where upwards of 65 per cent of the national budget was spent on the military. It seemed the necessary price to pay to keep friends in power in this part of the world. Laying the basis for social reform was risky and time-consuming compared to the immediate gains to be made from relying on strongmen and the elites that surrounded them. But the result was the stifling of democracy and the laying down of deep-rooted problems that would fester over time.

  The leadership of Afghanistan was courted equally assiduously, with the Prime Minister, Daoud Khan, for example, invited for a two-week visit to the United States at the end of the 1950s. The desire to make an impression was such that when he landed he was greeted on the tarmac by both Vice-President Nixon and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles before being cordially received by President Eisenhower, who was at pains to warn the Afghan Premier of the threat Communism posed to the Muslim countries of Asia. The US had already begun a series of ambitious development projects in Afghanistan, such as a major irrigation scheme in the Helmand valley and a bold effort to improve the education system. It now gave further commitments in order to counter-balance substantial Soviet investments, loans and infrastructure projects that were already in operation.47

  The problem, of course, was that it did not take long for leaders in the countries concerned to realise that they could play the two superpowers off against each other – and extract increasingly large benefits from both as a result. Indeed, when President Eisenhower visited Kabul in person at the end of the 1950s, he was asked point-blank to match the aid that was being given to his country by Moscow.48 Refusal had consequences, but so did acquiescence.

  American planners became highly agitated meanwhile about what was seen as a distinct wobble in Iran at the end of the 1950s, when Shah Reza Pahlavi demonstrated a willingness to improve relations with Moscow following a damaging campaign of radio propaganda funded by the Soviet Union, which relentlessly played on the image of the Iranian ruler as a puppet of the west and urged the workers to rise up and overthrow his despotic regime.49 It was enough to make the Shah consider abandoning what he called Iran’s ‘totally antagonistic’ relations with the USSR, and open up more conciliatory channels of communication and co-operation.50

  This set off alarm bells in Washington, where strategists took an uncompromising view of Iran’s pivotal importance on the Soviet Union’s southern flank. By the start of the 1960s, as one report put it, the country’s ‘strategic loca
tion between the USSR and the Persian Gulf and its great oil reserves make it critically important to the United States that Iran’s friendship, independence and territorial integrity be maintained’.51 Considerable energy and resources went into supporting Iran’s economy and its military and to reinforcing the Shah’s control over the country.

  It was considered so important to keep the Shah happy that a blind eye was turned to intolerance, and to large-scale corruption and the inevitable economic stagnation this helped to cause. Nothing was said and done about persecution of religious minorities, such as the Baha’i, who were singled out for brutal treatment in the 1950s.52 There was precious little to show, meanwhile, for the steep increase in Iran’s oil revenues, which had multiplied more than seven-fold between 1954 and 1960. The Shah’s relatives and the group informally referred to in Iran as ‘the 1,000 families’ established an iron grip on imports, making fortunes for themselves as they did so. Soft loans given by Washington simply served to line the pockets of the few at the expense of the poor, who found it difficult to keep up with the soaring cost of living – especially following a bad harvest in 1959–60.53

  It did not help that some US projects that were designed to stimulate the agrarian economy were spectacular failures. Attempts to replace traditional seeds with modern hybrids were a disaster, with the new strains proving unsuitable for the terrain and lacking resistance to disease and insect devastation. A scheme designed to help both Iranian and American poultry farmers by introducing US chicks to Iran had calamitous results too, with the unavailability of suitable feed and the lack of vaccination having consequences that were all too predictable. The embarrassing failure to understand how the water table in Iran worked led to wells that drained underground reservoirs and destroyed the viability of many farms across the country.54