For the next three days Khrushchev preoccupied himself with the details of the Soviet-led counterrevolution in Hungary and acted as if he had written off the huge Soviet investment in the Middle East. He flew to the Polish-Soviet border to brief Gomulka, then went to Bucharest to meet with the Romanians and the Czechs and to Sofia for discussions with the Bulgarians. Finally, on November 3, the eve of the Soviet assault on Budapest, he visited with Tito in Yugoslavia. The Presidium met in his absence, but there was no discussion of anything but Hungary. The Kremlin was absorbed with planning the post-Nagy regime. János Kádár, a member of Nagy’s government, was secretly in Moscow and would proclaim a new government on the heels of the Soviet advance. In this second Soviet assault on Budapest, which started on November 4, there were twenty-thousand Hungarian casualties, including Imre Nagy, who fled to the Yugoslav Embassy but was later turned over to the Soviets.45
MOSCOW LEFT the Egyptians to fend for themselves until after the assault had begun on Budapest. On November 4 the Kremlin issued its first official protest of the Anglo-French military intervention, a toothless call for a cease-fire. Four days into the Western attack, Nasser’s military situation was grim. The superiority of Western pilots and equipment had decimated the Egyptian Air Force. The Soviet military estimated that the Egyptians had lost twenty-nine of their forty-eight IL-28 light jet bombers and seventy-six of their eighty-six Soviet-made MiG-15B fighters. Western air attacks on the Egyptian Army were equally successful. On November 2 alone, European planes had destroyed fifty Egyptian tanks and were now systematically destroying Egyptian weaponry. What couldn’t be destroyed from the air the Israelis were capturing or destroying on the ground. The Soviets had reports that the Israelis had captured the matériel from two whole artillery battalions in the Sinai after Nasser had abandoned the entire eastern bank of the Suez Canal.46
On the morning of November 5, when Khrushchev received reports that eleven hundred British and French paratroopers were landing in Egypt, he did not sink into a deeper depression over the future of his Egyptian ally. Instead he reacted to this development as if it were a personal challenge and once more demonstrated a capacity for dramatic, unpredictable behavior. It is not known for sure why a week into the Mideast war Khrushchev finally chose to act decisively on behalf of his Egyptian ally. A possible explanation is that he had always wanted to do something but that so long as the Hungarian matter was unresolved, he refused to assume the risks inherent in acting in the Middle East. By November 5, however, the crackdown was in full swing in Budapest and Hungarian resistance was quickly collapsing. This freed him to contemplate strong action somewhere else.
Whatever the immediate cause, the result would be a grandiose act of desperation. With the situation dire for Nasser and a Soviet conventional counterattack in the Middle East unacceptable to Moscow, it seemed to Khrushchev that he had to find a way to scare France and Britain into a cease-fire. As he had in the discussion of Poland on October 21, he dominated his Kremlin equals in explaining how this might work. He wanted the Soviet Union to rally the world behind a concerted effort to save Nasser. “We should go to the General Assembly or the Security Council,” Khrushchev stated. “We should present an ultimatum and blame the aggressors.”47
For the first time since the London Conference, Middle East policy was now the main focus of the Kremlin. Moscow shrugged off its earlier passive acceptance of Egyptian despair, and there was a new energy behind Khrushchev’s words. He had decided not to give up. But what could the Soviet Union do? It was later said that during Syrian President Quwatly’s visit on October 30, Marshal Zhukov had brought out a map to prove to the Syrian leader that there was no way the Soviet Union could defend Egypt. That scene may have been apocryphal, but on November 5 Khrushchev understood there was little in the way of military support that the Kremlin could give. “We would prefer cooperation,” he said to his colleagues, “but if not we can send the fleet.” As he well knew, the Soviet fleet could not hold its own in a struggle with France or Great Britain. He had been the one who advocated spending less money on a surface fleet so as to be able to invest in future submarines.
A bluff was the only real alternative if Khrushchev wanted to compel the Europeans to accept an immediate cease-fire. From Western newspaper reports, Khrushchev was aware that the West was watching very closely the development of a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile, the R5-m. Once deployed in the European part of the USSR, these missiles could theoretically strike targets in London and Paris. As in the case of the Soviet long-range bomber fleet, Western estimates far exceeded Soviet capabilities. Soviet trials of the R-5m, their first missile to carry a nuclear warhead, had begun as early as January 1955. Although the CIA began reporting in 1956 that the Soviets had this missile, called the SS-3 by NATO, the final stages of development and deployment of this missile would not take place until much later.48 There were no R-5ms on combat duty in November 1956.49
Without any real military options, Khrushchev believed he had no choice but to exploit Western fears of Soviet nuclear capabilities. Nuclear bluff was risky, but Khrushchev was now determined to rescue Nasser. He suggested that the Kremlin send threatening messages to the French, the British, and the Israelis. At the same time, he wanted to explore the possibility of working with the United States to achieve a cease-fire. Washington was saying publicly that it opposed what its allies were doing in the Middle East. Extending the offer of an unprecedented joint Soviet-American intervention for peace would test U.S. intentions. If this offer were rejected, at least Khrushchev would have smoked out Eisenhower’s real sympathies and gained a propaganda victory.
The Kremlin unanimously approved the strategy. Telegrams would be sent to the United States and to French and British leaders, as well as to India’s Nehru to build support in the third world, and an explanatory communication to Nasser. Although Khrushchev dictated the tone and even some of the phrases, all the messages were prepared to go out under the signature of the Soviet president, Nikolai Bulganin.50
At fifteen minutes before 10:00 P.M., Moscow time, on November 5, Moscow radio broadcast Bulganin’s message to Prime Minister Eden: “In what position would Britain have found herself had it been attacked by more powerful states possessing all types of modern weapons of destruction?” Bulganin added, “We are full of determination to crush the aggressor and reestablish peace in the East by using force.”
In Washington, where it was the early afternoon, Eisenhower expressed concern when he heard about Moscow’s threats to the Europeans. Observing that Khrushchev and his Kremlin colleagues “were scared and furious,” the president explained, “there is nothing more dangerous than a dictatorship in this state of mind.”51 He did not take seriously Khrushchev’s proposal that the superpowers should work together to stabilize the situation in Egypt. His principal concern remained that Moscow should not gain additional influence in the Middle East. The messages from Moscow only caused Eisenhower to redouble his efforts to compel the British and French to accept a cease-fire agreement lest the Soviets be given a pretext for further action.
The French government took the Soviet threat seriously. U.S. Ambassador C. Douglas Dillon was called in to see French Prime Minister Mollet and Foreign Minister Pineau. French and British paratroopers had easily captured the town of Port Said at the northern end of the canal, and Egyptian military resistance was melting away, yet the French government seemed to understand that time was running out on the Suez operation. Paris had every reason to believe that Bulganin’s message would mandate some form of response from Washington, and there was every possibility that the United States would want the French and the British out of Egypt. To forestall a hasty American demand, Mollet and Pineau told Dillon that they were ready to accept a cease-fire, perhaps as early as the next day, but under certain conditions. They asked that the UN Security Council resolution be sponsored by the United States, not by the Soviet Union. France also wanted the right to occupy the canal until “it is functioning no
rmally” and was considering calling for “free elections” in Egypt to ensure that the final settlement of the Suez problem would be negotiated with someone other than Nasser. The French were clearly not yet ready to abandon their objectives. They hoped the United States would help them achieve what they could not by force of arms.52
Anthony Eden also sensed that the operation was doomed. Although we cannot be certain, it appears that Moscow’s threatening message was not Britain’s greatest concern on the morning of November 6. The issue of the moment was the possibility of a financial crisis triggered by events in the Middle East. This had come about because of a central flaw in the British operation, the amount of time required to capture the canal and, it was hoped, to cause Nasser’s removal. It had been eight days since Israel launched its attack, six days since the start of the air campaign, and two days since British and French paratroopers had landed near Port Said. Over this period foreign currency traders had become concerned about Britain’s future oil supply and began dumping their holdings in British sterling. Just two days earlier Nasserist forces in Syria had sabotaged a key oil pipeline that ran through that country, and the Egyptians had begun to sink ships in the Suez Canal, the other main oil route to Britain.
Having assumed that the Americans would reluctantly support any military action against Egypt, the British had never considered how they would manage the economic consequences of the operation. International sales were now placing immense downward pressure on the value of the pound sterling. As part of the international financial system established in the aftermath of World War II, national currencies were pegged to a fixed value by international agreement, and when changes occurred in the demand for its money, a country was obliged to respond by buying or selling either bonds denominated in its own currency or gold reserves. The British were hard pressed to cope with the steep decline of the pound that followed the invasion, but they were confident that the U.S. Treasury would step in to help them defend the pound by buying it up in currency markets. But Eisenhower had already decided to let British currency sink. Every day that the military operation continued, the British were hemorrhaging gold and dollars, hard currency they desperately needed to purchase oil from Venezuela and the other non–Middle Eastern oil producers. By the morning of November 6, it was becoming clear to the chancellor of the exchequer, Britain’s finance minister, Harold Macmillan, that without U.S. assistance, the British government could not afford the war. Since that support was not forthcoming, Macmillan concluded that Britain had to end its little Egyptian war.53
Macmillan had been a strong hawk. He had also allowed himself to become entangled in the web of misconceptions that guided Eden’s policy toward Suez. He too had believed that when push came to shove, the United States would back its allies. During the Second World War he had been Eisenhower’s political chief in liberated Algiers. Just a month before hostilities broke out in Egypt, Macmillan had stopped in Washington to take the temperature of his old wartime comrade on a British assault against Egypt. He left assuming he had Eisenhower’s understanding, if not blessing for military action. He was mistaken.
Eden knew the writing was on the wall when Macmillan turned against the action. Calling a cabinet meeting in the morning to decide what to do next about the Suez action, the prime minister curiously relegated to the back burner the problem of how to respond to the Soviets. A veteran Foreign Office diplomat, Patrick Reilly, who was being trained for a future posting as British ambassador in Moscow, was assigned the job of writing the response to Bulganin.54 Besides having at his disposal a fine set of ideas that the current British ambassador, William Hayter, had cabled that morning, Reilly had no other guidance. It seemed that replying to Moscow was an afterthought in a busy day.
British intelligence was not taking the Kremlin’s nuclear threat nonchalantly. Chester Cooper, the CIA station chief in London, recalls a tense meeting of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee to which he was invited on November 6. The gathered British intelligence chiefs had only one significant question for the American: “Do the Soviets have missiles that could reach London?” When Cooper reported that the Soviets did not, everyone in the room visibly relaxed.55
The British cabinet decided that morning to seek a cease-fire in Egypt despite not having achieved its objective. With the decision made, Eden had the Foreign Office summon Reilly to complete the draft response to the Russians. London wanted Moscow to know that it no longer had any reason to be alarmed. The Suez operation was about to end. Reilly was told to bring the draft to 10 Downing Street after lunch.
Reilly, who had been personal assistant to the chief of British intelligence in World War II, had witnessed some dramatic discussions in his career. But on November 6, 1956, he found a listless prime minister and a distracted foreign minister. Eden took the draft and played with it for a while. Scoring a sentence here and a word there, he was like the child pushing an unwanted vegetable from one side of his plate to another. Reilly’s immediate boss, Selwyn Lloyd, was even less interested in what Britain ought to tell the Soviets. Reilly later described the foreign secretary as obsessively nattering about how he had to speak to the Venezuelan ambassador that afternoon—about oil, no doubt. Reilly was surprised that he was asked to wait in the room, while Eden placed a call to Guy Mollet. With the support of the cabinet behind him, Eden was asking the French to accept a cease-fire that day.
In Paris the American Douglas Dillon was in Mollet’s office suggesting that the French leader call Eden when the call came through. Mollet’s subsequent conversation with Eden ended French resistance to an unconditional cease-fire.56
For the British and the French, November 6 brought a tremendous anticlimax to the events since Israel launched its attack. The only sound was that of the air being let out of British and French imperial pretensions in the Middle East and the simultaneous inflation of Soviet self-confidence. Delighted by the turnaround and unaware of the backstage role that Washington had played in pressing Eden to stop the war, the Soviets indulged themselves in believing that it was fear of their power, especially their nuclear weapons, that had been central to the demise of the Anglo-French military operation.
For Khrushchev, the Anglo-French collapse and the eventual withdrawal of their forces and those of Israel from Egypt was a satisfying personal victory. It was nearly miraculous that Egypt had been spared. Only a week earlier Khrushchev faced the prospect of losing his key ally in the developing world as the price for restoring order in his Eastern European empire. But events had ultimately moved in Khrushchev’s favor. Besides vindicating the risky policy that Khrushchev had been advocating in the Middle East since 1955, Nasser’s survival demonstrated the utility of the nuclear bluff for the weaker superpower in international politics. Now it seemed to Khrushchev that he had found in the nuclear bluff an effective way to weaken Soviet adversaries on the cheap. Ironically the problem of Egyptian defense, a challenge that since July 1956 had produced ample evidence of the limits of Soviet power, served to give Khrushchev an inflated sense of what he could do abroad.
CHAPTER 6
“KHRUSHCHEY’S COMET”
In late 1956 the CIA assembled some spy photographs on a large briefing board to give President Eisenhower an overhead view of the Suez Canal. Gamal Abdel Nasser had sunk large ships to close the Suez Canal in retaliation for the Anglo-French attack, and now that the war was over Eisenhower had asked to see the damage sustained by the canal.1
Eisenhower, who kept a neat desk, did not want the board on his desk or even on an easel beside it. Instead the president asked the startled CIA analyst who had brought the photographs to place them on the floor of the Oval Office. Eisenhower then knelt and on his hands and knees began examining the images. What he saw stirred the famous Eisenhower temper. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” he muttered as he paused to look at each of the wrecked ships. More than fifty of them were clogging what he knew to be the most important commercial seaway in the world. The president was convinced that Nasse
r would never have closed the Suez Canal were it not for Anglo-French invasion. For one thing, Cairo badly needed the revenue from the tolls. Indeed, the Egyptians were already working very hard, and very efficiently, to clean up this mess. Despite their efforts, the canal remained closed until April 1957.2
The blocked Suez Canal symbolized for Eisenhower the self-inflicted wound that the West had suffered in the Middle East in 1956. Even though the United States had played a decisive role in ending the Suez crisis and as a result had earned the gratitude of many developing nations, Eisenhower was convinced that Khrushchev had emerged the bigger winner. By openly trying to overthrow Nasser, the French and the British had a lost a lot of their remaining influence in the Arab world, creating a power vacuum that the Kremlin was well positioned to fill.
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