Khrushchev's Cold War

by Aleksandr Fursenko

KHRUSHCHEV WAS MEANWHILE getting impatient with Nasser. Unaware of the details of Nasser’s visits to the U.S. Embassy but no doubt suspicious, Khrushchev decided to send Dmitri T. Shepilov to Egypt to edge Nasser closer to forming a military alliance against the Baghdad Pact. It had been three months since Moscow had made its offer to provide weapons to Egypt, yet not only had the Egyptians not accepted the offer, but Nasser seemed to be intentionally delaying taking the next step. Shepilov, a trusted associate who understood how Khrushchev thought on foreign affairs, would make a perfect representative and observer.

  “Dmitri the Progressive,” as Shepilov was known by the Moscow elite, was a Khrushchev lucky charm. Having ascended to the editorship of Pravda in 1952 at the age of forty-seven, he had been Khrushchev’s most important ally in shaping the Soviet press to reflect Khrushchev’s rise in stature. It was Shepilov who had written Malenkov’s political obituary in January 1955, with a perfectly timed article critiquing Malenkov’s approach to economics. Although economics was Shepilov’s chosen specialty, Khrushchev decided to groom him for a responsibility in foreign affairs. In 1954 Shepilov was given the chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Council of Nationalities, one of many standing committees on the government side of the massive Soviet bureaucracy. There Shepilov had campaigned against Molotov’s worldview, advocating the Khrushchev line of peaceful coexistence and the senselessness of continuing the rift with Tito.

  Shepilov’s rise accelerated with Malenkov’s dismissal. Khrushchev brought Shepilov into the planning of the trip to Belgrade, where he played a role in writing the diplomatic communiqué that the Soviets offered the Yugoslav Communist Party as a possible joint statement of fraternity and solidarity. The Yugoslavs had opposed the joint statement, but this failure had no negative consequences for Shepilov. In early July 1955 Khrushchev rewarded Shepilov for his loyalty by making him one of three new secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, effectively the new Khrushchev team.33

  “WE HAD DOUBTS until you visited,” Nasser’s defense minister, Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, later told Shepilov.34 The Shepilov visit, which lasted from July 21 to 29, helped clear the air in Cairo about Soviet intentions. For all his doubts about the Soviets, Nasser was willing to give them a chance to prove themselves. He therefore arranged a very personal visit for Shepilov. The Soviet representative was invited to dinner at the home of Abdel Nasser Hussein, Nasser’s father, in Alexandria.

  Rumors swirled in Moscow that the younger Nasser had once been a devotee of Adolf Hitler, that there was a portrait of Hitler on Nasser’s desk. Shepilov did not find a fascist. What he thought he found was a man with somewhat confused political views. “There was such a soup [of ideas] in his brain, especially at the time of our first meeting,” he later recalled.35

  When Shepilov asked him what his goals were, Nasser introduced a new concept to the editor of Pravda: “We would like to build moderate socialism.”

  “What exactly is that?” Shepilov asked.

  “It is socialism without capitalists, without imperialists, and without Communists” was the response.

  Shepilov was dismissive. “That kind of socialism doesn’t exist.”

  But Nasser wanted to understand Moscow. He was not about to give up on Khrushchev’s envoy. So the men talked for days. “You wrote a book, didn’t you?” Nasser asked at one point. Shepilov had written a text on political economy. “Well, is it available in English?” It was, and the Egyptian, who could read English well, wanted a copy to learn even more about Shepilov’s thinking.

  The Shepilov visit calmed Nasser’s concerns about Moscow enough for him to move to the next step in purchasing Soviet weapons. Still having heard nothing concrete from the Americans, Nasser authorized the dispatch of a military purchasing mission behind the iron curtain. These first negotiations were for the supply of Soviet planes. The Egyptians requested jet fighters, the MiG-15s and Nasser asked that these discussions be held in secret.36

  The Soviets suggested Prague as the location for these meetings. Ironically the Soviets were reviving a Czech back channel that had initially been established to permit secret deliveries of weapons to the Jews in Palestine in 1947 and 1948 before the proclamation of the state of Israel. Now with the shift in the geopolitical needs of the Soviet Union, this system would serve the Arabs. To help shield the group, Cairo also decided not to inform its embassy in Prague of the existence of this delegation. Few Czechs were told of the negotiations either. The Soviets took responsibility for the protection of the Egyptian teams, and Cairo asked Moscow to provide the communications link between Nasser and his representatives in Prague.

  NASSER WAS STILL very uncomfortable with this decision. Communists were his enemies in Egypt and his rivals for authority in the rest of the Arab world. Nasser might well have waited longer to give the United States another chance to help him had it not been for an event in the Sudan in August 1955 that touched on Nasser’s deepest insecurities.

  Sudan loomed large in the consciousness of Nasser and his fellow revolutionaries. Since the nineteenth century, the British and the Egyptians had contested control over the land that contained the headwaters of the Nile. In 1899 Britain had arranged an Anglo-Egyptian condominium in the region, effectively sharing control with the authority in Cairo. A motherland issue for the Free Officers led by Nasser was the revocation of that condominium to permit the unification of Sudan and Egypt. This goal was related to the regime’s extensive plans for the development of the Nile. But it was also linked to the traditional Egyptian claim on the ancient kingdom of Nubia, so redolent of ancient Egyptian power. Personal history also played a role for the young revolutionaries. Two of Nasser’s closest allies, the Salem brothers, had grown up in Port Sudan, and since 1954 Salach Salem had been Nasser’s deputy for Sudanese affairs. Nasser had had his own Sudanese days. He and his military chief of staff, Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, had spent the opening years of World War II stationed in the Sudan as lieutenants in the Egyptian Army.37 It may therefore seem less surprising to reveal that events in the Sudan provided the final nudge to send Nasser into a Soviet arms deal.

  Although the new line taken by the Kremlin on this issue after February 1955 should have pleased Nasser, it was contradicted by the propaganda of the Sudanese Communist Party, which continued to attack the Sudanese government for “selling out the Sudan to Gamal Abdel Nasser.”38 Like many world leaders, Nasser couldn’t believe that Communists anywhere could act independent of the Soviet party. As recently as June Salach Salem had been instructed to ask Soviet Ambassador Daniel Solod what Moscow thought it was doing in allowing Sudanese Communists to attack the regime in Cairo.39 Despite the assurances coming directly from Moscow, Nasser had a hard time shaking the view that statements by the Sudanese Communist Party were a better barometer of the Kremlin’s real intentions in the region. Then two coinciding events convinced him that his greater enemies lay elsewhere.

  On August 19, when armed riots broke out in three southern Sudanese provinces, the government in Khartoum blamed Nasser. It asserted that the organizer of the riots was a longtime advocate of Sudanese-Egyptian union, who had only recently been in Cairo for the celebration of the third anniversary of the overthrow of King Farouk. Nasser had had nothing to do with these riots. Moreover, whatever Nasser initially thought of the events in the Sudan, his assessment was immediately affected by an occurrence hundreds of miles away in the Gaza Strip. Early on the morning of August 22 the Israelis killed an Egyptian officer and at least two enlisted men near Kilometer 95 in the Gaza Strip.

  As Nasser had done in February, he linked Israel’s latest Gaza raid to a large geopolitical conspiracy. Nasser convinced himself that Great Britain had stage-managed the Israeli attack to distract Egypt from southern Sudan. Because Nasser thought the black residents of southern Sudan incapable of political self-organization, he immediately assumed that the riots that started on August 19 had to have been orchestrated by outsiders. Nasser assumed t
he Sudanese government would request British intervention to quell the riots, which would allow a de facto division between a pro-Egyptian northern and a pro-British southern Sudan.

  A few hours after the Israeli attack in Gaza, Nasser’s most trusted adviser, Ali Sabri, met with the Soviet ambassador.40 Cairo now wanted to speed up the negotiations in Prague. At Nasser’s request, Sabri laid out Cairo’s conspiracy theory to the Soviets. Nasser expected a British military intervention in the southern Sudan. There were no roads connecting Egypt and the Sudan, and in any case, the northern Sudan was separated from the southern provinces by a marsh. The only way the Egyptian Army could reach the rioters was by air. So desperate were the Egyptians for assistance in the Sudan that Sabri explained Cairo would permit Soviet pilots to fly the MiG-15s and Soviet military cargo planes directly to Almaza Airport in Cairo.

  WHILE THE PACE of events accelerated in the Middle East, Secretary of State Foster Dulles took his time answering Nasser’s request for financial assistance for the proposed U.S. arms deal. Dulles disliked fence-sitters in the Cold War. “He thought it was sinful,” recalled Eisenhower’s national security adviser, General Andrew Goodpaster. “It was immoral of many of the nations to try to take a neutral stand when truth and right were in jeopardy, so to speak.”41 He was not about to let Nasser dictate how and when the U.S. secretary of state would make his much-anticipated statement on Middle Eastern policy.

  Unaware of the dramatic shift in Nasser’s assessments of Egypt’s immediate interests, the State Department continued working on Dulles’s statement. Not only did Washington miss entirely the deep effect that the riots in the Sudan were having on the Egyptian leader, but the secretary of state was convinced that Nasser could be satisfied with less than a concrete offer of an affordable arms deal. On August 23 Byroade was instructed to meet Nasser to tell him the statement was coming.42 Byroade went the next day and found Nasser surprisingly passive. A few days later, when he presented an advance copy of Dulles’s speech to Nasser, once again the usual Nasser fire was absent. “Had [the] feeling he [was] somewhat confused by general nature of the approach and really did not understand significance of some passages,” Byroade cabled. Nasser was not so much confused as distracted and disappointed. He had wanted a response to his request for U.S. economic assistance to pay for the twenty-seven million dollars’ worth of weapons. Instead Dulles was sharing a vaguely worded commitment to a general peace agreement in the Middle East.43

  As Dulles put the finishing touches on his address, Nasser asked for even more from the Soviets. Now convinced that the United States would not subsidize his purchase of M4 tanks, Nasser asked the Soviets for tanks. He also requested a financial aid package to buy all the weapons, the planes, and these newly requested tanks. Despite what he later said publicly, Nasser could not afford to buy any modern weaponry at commercial prices.

  In the end, the Soviets got their deal by trying harder to appease Nasser than did the Americans. In early September the Presidium decided to agree in principle to sell Egypt tanks, though the quantity and model remained to be determined. More important, given Nasser’s immediate concerns, the Soviets allowed him to buy the artillery pieces and the MiG-15 fighters now and told him that they would accept barter as payment for most of it. After paying for a fifth of the total in Egyptian pounds, Cairo could defray the remaining bill gradually by means of sending rice, cotton, leather, and even silk clasps to the USSR. This remainder was effectively a loan that would increase by 2 percent a year.44 These were even better terms than Cairo had requested from Washington. On September 12 Soviet and Egyptian negotiators signed the agreement in Prague.

  A WEEK LATER U.S. intelligence agents in Cairo picked up pieces of the story from their sources. Sunday evening, September 19, the embassy in Cairo cabled Washington: “[Egyptian] acceptance Soviet arms offer likely…Soviet offer said to be embarrassing in size.”45 One person who was not surprised was U.S. Ambassador Byroade. When the State Department responded by asking him to warn Nasser that any Egyptian arms deal with the Soviets “would create most serious public reaction in the US and greatly complicate our ability [to] cooperate with them,” Byroade said that this threat lacked the power that it once had.46 He had said this so many times to Nasser, while promising that an alliance with the United States would be helpful to Cairo, that he was beginning to sound like a broken record. It was time for positive action. Why hadn’t Washington responded favorably to Nasser’s request in late August for financial assistance so he could buy U.S. weapons? “It is crystal clear that by our unwillingness [to] manipulate a few million dollars we are permitting situation [to] deteriorate to point where chain reaction of nature that will constitute a major defeat for US policy in [the] Middle East…is highly probable.”

  The Soviets partially confirmed the arms agreement with Cairo. Molotov happened to be in New York in the third week of September for the opening of the UN General Assembly. Dulles took the opportunity to sound him out on these reports of Soviets arms sales to Egypt. Although not mentioning Egypt by name, Molotov confirmed that arms negotiations might be going on with Arab countries but that “these conversations should not cause misunderstanding.” The matter is being approached “on commercial grounds.”47 With Soviet confirmation—even if tepid—Dulles informed President Eisenhower and conferred with his brother, Allen, about whether to take a positive step to prevent Nasser from going through with it.48 The secretary of state was very worried. He thought the Israelis might launch a preemptive strike before the Soviet weapons arrived. Also always lurking in his mind was the possibility that once armed with Soviet weapons, the Egyptians might hit at Israel. Dulles approached the British and the French at the UN privately to send a message to their capitals to prepare for the new reality of Soviet involvement in the Middle East.

  Dulles conferred with Eisenhower and suggested that this could be stopped only in Moscow. He thought that Nasser had no choice but to take the weapons. His army would overthrow him if he didn’t. But perhaps the Soviets could be scared into leaving the Middle East alone. Dulles told the president he would draft something for his consideration.

  Allen Dulles thought that his brother was focusing on the wrong people. He doubted Moscow would respond to a protest from the president. The secretary of state and his brother disagreed on the handling of Nasser. Foster said the United States had offered arms to Nasser. Allen wondered if enough had been done. In any case, Foster believed that Nasser could not be turned around on this. Foster did not know what to do, then suggested they wait. Allen agreed briefly, accepting that a few days wouldn’t matter. Then he changed his mind and sent a CIA officer to Cairo to speak directly to Nasser.

  Although there was no doubt that Nasser’s acceptance of MiGs from Moscow was a major turning point, he almost single-handedly built up this event into a revolutionary moment by exaggerating the size of the arms deal. Egyptian sources are very weak on Nasser’s thinking at this stage in the relationship with Moscow.49 On the basis of Soviet information, it appears likely that Nasser was not convinced in September 1955 that the opening to Moscow was anything but a one-shot event. He still wished to establish a close economic and political relationship with Washington. He said as much to Allen Dulles’s personal representative in Cairo, Kermit Roosevelt, on September 25. Over the course of this long meeting—three and one-half hours—Nasser played the supplicant, asserting time and again that he thought he might be making a mistake by turning east for his supplies. Even though he had an agreement with Moscow for the delivery of eighty MiG-15s, he wasn’t about to end his game of playing the superpowers off each other. Nasser told Roosevelt that the Soviets had already sold him medium bombers, PT boats, and tanks, as well as the fighters and artillery pieces. Nasser claimed that the first shipment was expected in early October.50

  Like Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt believed that despite the arms deal, Nasser remained “our best hope.” In that spirit, he recommended that Nasser make a public statement disavowing any ag
gressive intent. The CIA officer had not cleared this suggestion before the meeting with the State Department. Indeed, Allen Dulles also knew nothing about it and was later skeptical when Roosevelt reported the conversation to him. Dulles thought it wiser for Nasser to keep the weapons deal secret “in the hope that practical operations under [the] agreement will be less spectacular and possibly disappointing to [him].51 Nasser liked the idea of a public statement regarding the Soviet deal and used Roosevelt to tell Washington that he wanted to meet with Foster Dulles soon to discuss the secretary of state’s peace proposals.

  Nasser let the Soviets know the next day that he would be making a speech to announce the Czech sale.52 Saying nothing, of course, of the fact that the idea had come from the CIA, Nasser had his closest aide, Ali Sabri, tell the Soviet ambassador that in the speech he would explain Cairo’s decision to seek weapons from the Soviet bloc as a reaction to the threat from Israel. In response, Ambassador Solod suggested that Nasser not raise Israel and instead focus on the perceived need to strengthen the Egyptian Army. Nasser said he agreed. But he also admitted that he had something else in mind. He would announce his readiness to begin negotiations on reducing Arab-Israeli tension. Direct negotiations with Israel were out of the question, but he hoped for negotiations through Secretary Dulles.

  Nasser’s comments reminded the Soviets of the work they still had to do with him. He remained very tempted by the American option. Solod discouraged him from working with either Dulles brother. He reminded the Egyptian leadership of how poor the secretary of state’s plan was for Egypt. “If you feel it necessary to have an intermediary,” Solod suggested to Ali Sabri, “it would be better to turn to the United Nations or to some kind of neutral government.”53

  That night at an arms fair in Cairo, amid a three-hour address, Nasser announced that his regime would buy weapons from the socialist world. Khrushchev’s new policy of flexibility in the developing world had just scored its greatest victory.