The loss of Iraq was particularly troubling to the administration. Since 1954 Washington had been content to build on the anti-Soviet regional defensive organization established by the British in cooperation with Turkey and Iraq. The choice of Baghdad as the administrative home for this alliance signaled Western assumptions that Iraq was stable enough to serve as a pillar of resistance to Nasserism and communism in weak Arab states.13 Now with the apparent disappearance of this regional pillar, it seemed possible to Washington that Arab nationalists would be inspired to finish off the established regimes in Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, and possibly Saudi Arabia. The only credible counterforce appeared to be Western resolve to assist those established regimes to hold back the Nasserist tide.
Foster Dulles called President Eisenhower at 8:29 A.M., Washington time, on July 14 with the news that because of events in Baghdad, the government of Camille Chamoun in Lebanon was calling for U.S. military assistance. Lebanon had been the only other Arab country to have publicly embraced the Eisenhower Doctrine.14 Chamoun headed a weak pro-Western regime. Although grateful to the Central Intelligence Agency for engineering the overwhelming success of his parliamentary faction in the 1956 elections, he was not an easy client. In assuming the presidency in 1952, Chamoun, who led Lebanon’s slim Christian majority, had promised supporters and opponents alike that he would serve only one term. He had proved an unpopular leader, and as evidence mounted that he had no intention of leaving office when his term was up, the country slipped into civil war, with Chamoun’s most vocal opponents the country’s large Islamic population. For months Washington had been trying to convince him to step down for the good of the anti-Nasserist and anti-Communist cause in Lebanon.
Before the Iraqi Revolution, Chamoun’s intransigence had presented Washington with unpalatable alternatives. In a desperate bid to hold on to power, the Lebanese president had asked for U.S. military assistance in May. Although there was no great desire to protect Chamoun, the fear that Lebanon might fall to Nasserism or, worse, to communism was enough to prompt serious contingency planning for U.S. military intervention in Lebanon. As far back as the Turco-Syrian tension of October 1957, the chiefs of staff began drafting plans for a joint Anglo-American intervention to assist Lebanon and Jordan.15 Despite having ordered this contingency planning, President Eisenhower was not particularly happy that the United States had to look at military options to stabilize Lebanon. But he believed he had no choice. Intercepted communications between Syria and the leader of the main rebel group in Lebanon indicated that Nasser was deeply involved in arming and financing the opposition to Chamoun.16 As the crisis heated up in the spring, grumbling directed at the troublesome Lebanese could be heard in the Oval Office. “How can you save a country from its own leaders?” Eisenhower had exclaimed at one point in frustration.17
With the surprising turn of events in Iraq, however, Eisenhower no longer needed any convincing to initiate the first military intervention of his presidency. The Lebanese request provided an opportunity to demonstrate American commitment to the region, “to avoid the crumbling of our whole security structure.”18 The issue was no longer the right way to handle Chamoun; Eisenhower now feared that Iraq was the beginning of a wave of defections to the anti-American side. “Jordan can’t stick,” Eisenhower warned, sensing that if Lebanon went, then Israel’s eastern neighbor, the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, would be the next to fall under a Nasserist government.
At a hastily convened midmorning meeting of the National Security Council on July 14, Eisenhower’s preferences for direct U.S. action in Lebanon became policy. He told his advisers, “[W]e either act now or get out of the Middle East.”19 He was emotional about the challenge his government was facing, resorting to very powerful analogies to explain why there was no choice but to proceed with a show of force in Lebanon. He recalled the mistaken appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938. He also equated an unfavorable outcome in the Middle East with the greatest defeat yet suffered by America in the Cold War, Mao’s victory in China in 1949. “To lose this area by inaction,” he said, “would be far worse than the loss in China, because of the strategic position and resources of the Middle East.”20
His advisers did not need any persuading. Even before the president announced his determination to organize a show of force in Lebanon, Allen Dulles had painted an ominous picture of the situation in the region. Although the CIA had no firm evidence that Nasser had “spearheaded” the coup, there was no doubt that the new government was led by “pro-Nasser elements” in the Iraqi military. The prospects for any pro-Western resistance were dim. The Iraqi crown prince was confirmed dead, and King Feisal and Nuri al-Said had disappeared along with forty-eight Iraqi military officers, who had been “retired.” In Jordan, where the government had recently unraveled a Nasserist plot against him in the army, King Hussein had announced that with the disappearance of his cousin King Feisal of Iraq, he was assuming the leadership of the Arab Union, an Iraqi-Jordanian organization set up earlier in the year as a rival to Nasser’s Egyptian-Syrian union, the UAR. In the Gulf the coup had roiled the sheikhdoms. King Saud of Saudi Arabia was threatening to seek an accommodation with Nasser if the West did not intervene to overthrow the new regime in Iraq. Meanwhile there was evidence that Kuwait might also fall. The CIA director reported that the Kuwaiti leader was in Damascus, the Syrian capital, for talks with Nasser, perhaps as a first step to joining the UAR. While the U.S. national security team agreed that a U.S. military intervention would stir anti-Western feelings in the Middle East, there was a strong consensus that the costs of inaction were greater than enraging the Arab public.
What Eisenhower didn’t yet know was how far the United States would have to go to stabilize the situation. He had no immediate plans to do anything other than to order U.S. forces to deploy to Beirut.21 But as he admitted to his national security team in the morning and explained to the congressional leadership later in the day, he knew that there was probably more work to be done in the region. The possibility of the sabotage of oil wells by the new Iraqi regime and that day’s news about the teetering of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia raised the specter of losing NATO’s principal source of oil. Eisenhower thought it nearly inevitable that the new Iraqi regime would seek to ruin Western interests in the Persian Gulf once it had consolidated its position. If it looked as if this were about to happen, the United States might have no choice but to move beyond Lebanon.22
There was no real consensus among Eisenhower’s advisers on what to do after Lebanon. Khrushchev had been right to assume that Secretary of State Dulles would be especially alarmed at the turn of events. Together with Vice President Nixon, Foster Dulles hoped that the revolution might yet be overturned in Baghdad. Nixon leaned a little more toward a military solution than did Dulles, who wanted to see if there were any credible pro-Western Iraqi leaders left before giving up on a form of countercoup sponsored by U.S. intelligence. But both thought it inescapable that the United States would have to prepare for joint military operations with the British to occupy Kuwait and the oil fields of eastern Saudi Arabia in order to protect Western interests in Middle East.23 The president’s military advisers were initially more cautious. Having seen what had happened to the French and the British in the Suez crisis two years earlier, they did not want the United States to be embroiled in an unpopular neocolonial war in the Persian Gulf. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Nathan Twining advocated a combined military strategy that limited the United States to Lebanon, while other countries undertook their own military interventions. The British could go into Iraq and Kuwait, as these were their area of special interest. The Israelis would be encouraged to go into the West Bank, and the Turks into Syria. The U.S. military’s apparent reluctance to engage in small conventional conflicts annoyed the secretary of state. “All they think about is dropping nuclear bombs,” Dulles told Nixon, “and they don’t like it when we get off that.”24
One area where the secretary of state and the military agreed was over wha
t could be expected from the Soviets in this crisis. Neither the State Department nor the Pentagon was concerned that wider military intervention in the Middle East would provoke the start of World War III with the Soviet Union. There was a pervasive sense of confidence that the United States was ahead in the strategic arms race with Moscow. No one in Washington could explain why, but it seemed that Khrushchev had decided not to build huge squadrons of long-range bombers, and the Soviets were apparently encountering difficulties in translating their Sputnik success into a credible intercontinental ballistic missile force. As a result, it was assumed that Moscow would have no choice but to tolerate a show of U.S. power in the Middle East. “[O]ur military advisers,” Dulles explained to Congress, “believe we now hold a considerable superiority which the USSR would not want to challenge…. So, it is a probability that if we act decisively and promptly, they [the Soviets] may figure that Nasser has gone too fast. They may withdraw before their prestige is engaged and general war risked.”
Eisenhower shared his advisers’ confidence that the Soviets were very unlikely to use military force in the region.25 For Eisenhower, who was particularly sensitive to Nasser’s and Khrushchev’s success in appealing to the Arab world, the struggle for popular opinion in the region was a more significant reason to limit any U.S. military intervention. There had to be a clear, moral rationale for the use of U.S. power in the Middle East. Although he worried about Western access to Persian Gulf oil, he was reluctant to make that the basis for any enlargement of the intervention beyond sending troops to Beirut. Besides this important foreign consideration, he was conscious of a preeminent domestic factor that argued for a disciplined reaction to the evolving and still-confused situation in the Middle East.26 Eisenhower believed that existing agreements with Lebanon and the fact that Chamoun had requested this assistance provided all the authority he needed to send the U.S. Marines into Lebanon the next morning, but he did not have the necessary congressional approval for any major move beyond Beirut.
The British tested Eisenhower’s restrained approach to the evolving crisis. Throughout the day on July 14 the president received word that London wanted to take military action against the Qasim regime. The British were already thinking of sending forces to Jordan, both to strengthen the backbone of its Jordanian ally and as a first step to Baghdad. And they didn’t want to act alone.
Harold Macmillan, the former chancellor of the exchequer who had replaced the disgraced Anthony Eden as British prime minister after Suez, made the pitch for joint operations in a telephone call to President Eisenhower that evening. The events in Baghdad had been even more threatening to the British than to the Americans. In the words of the historian William Roger Louis, the revolution signaled “the virtual end of the British Empire in the Middle East.”27 It had been Eden who had orchestrated the Baghdad Pact in the first place, and although Macmillan had indeed been the beneficiary of Eden’s mistakes—notably the debacle in Suez—the new prime minister shared Eden’s intense dislike of Nasser. In 1956 Macmillan had argued vehemently that the British had no choice but to remove Nasser: “If not, we would rot away.”28 Two years later he shared Washington’s conviction that Nasser was the puppet master behind the Qasim regime. At stake for Britain was not just imperial prestige. Access to cheap oil was essential to the British economy, and the events in Iraq threatened their interests in the Persian Gulf. As the news from Baghdad reached him, Macmillan began to worry about Kuwait. “Kuwait with its massive oil production,” the prime minister wrote in his diary, “is the key to the economic life of Britain—and of Europe.”29 Kuwait provided one-half of all of Britain’s oil and one-third to one-half of the profits of British oil companies. Kuwaiti oil was priced in sterling, thus propping up the British currency and aiding British banks.30 The shock to the British financial system by the loss of these assets would be incalculable.
Despite these high political and economic stakes, one mistake Macmillan was determined not to make was to initiate any deep British military engagement in the region without an ironclad commitment that the United States would support him. “If we do this thing with the Lebanese,” Macmillan explained obliquely to Eisenhower (because he was on an unencrypted transatlantic telephone line), “it is only really part of a much larger operation, because we shall be driven to take this thing as a whole…. I’m all for that as long as we regard it as an operation that has got to be carried through.”
Eisenhower’s response disappointed the British leader. He refused to give Macmillan the guarantee of support the British leader needed to widen the war. “If we are now planning the initiation of a big operation that could run all the way through Syria and Iraq,” the president said, “we are far beyond anything I have [the] power to do constitutionally.”31 He also refused to hint that it was his expectation or even his hope that the United States would eventually participate in an attack on Syria or Iraq.
After he set down the receiver, the president turned to his secretary of state, who had witnessed Eisenhower’s half of the call in the Oval Office. The conversation had clearly bothered the president. At one point Macmillan had referred to the possibility that Nasserists would destroy the oil pipelines through Iraq and Kuwait, a nightmare scenario that had also worried Eisenhower all day. “Then we are really at war,” Eisenhower told Dulles as he recalled the conversation, adding plaintively, “[but] then what do we do?” Eisenhower knew he had left the British leader with the sense that the U.S. military would just stop in Lebanon, forcing the British to clean up the rest of the mess in the region. This image of the United States not pulling its weight frustrated the American leader, but Eisenhower thought he could not give the British the blank check they were looking for. He would have to see how events played out in the Middle East before seeking additional authority for more interventions.32
THE MORNING LANDING of a U.S. Marine battalion in and around Beirut was well publicized in the world press on July 15. Neither the press nor Soviet intelligence, however, could tell Khrushchev if the marines’ arrival in Lebanon foretold a broader attack. “We are playing chess in the dark,” Khrushchev admitted to Nasser two days later.33 As much as Khrushchev did not like the fact that U.S. troops were in Lebanon, as long as they did not go any farther, he believed that the landing itself did not represent a challenge to Soviet interests. His primary concern was the protection of revolutionary Iraq, which he now considered the front line of Soviet influence in the region. If he let Iraq go, what would happen to Egypt and Syria?
The problem was that Khrushchev did not have a viable military card to play if the West indeed attacked the Qasim regime. The Soviet military was in no better position in the summer of 1958 to defend a strategic ally in the Middle East than it had been during the Suez crisis of 1956 or the Turco-Syrian tensions less than a year earlier. Once again Khrushchev’s 1955 decision to limit expenditures on conventional forces, particularly surface ships, was pinching his options in far-flung military crises. The Soviet Navy lacked the aircraft carriers necessary to project power quickly into the region.
The immediate alternative was to resort to political theater yet again and threaten the Western powers with war if they used force against Iraq. But Khrushchev suspected that his Kremlin colleagues might not be prepared to extend a defensive umbrella over Baghdad. A modified version of his 1957 Syrian strategy, which balanced these foreign and domestic considerations, seemed more appealing pending future developments in the region. On July 16 Moscow declared that “the Soviet Union cannot remain indifferent to events creating a grave menace in an area adjacent to its frontiers, and reserves the right to take the necessary measures dictated by the interests of peace and security.”34 Meanwhile last-minute maneuvers by Soviet forces in the Caucasus and the Bulgarian Army were ordered to put some teeth into the public statement. Preparations were also made to announce recognition of the Iraqi regime by the entire Soviet bloc. Finally, the Kremlin decided to send President Eisenhower a special private message that intentionall
y expressed Soviet interest in Iraq.
Although Khrushchev had the protection of Nasser’s regime at the back of his mind, the Egyptian leader himself was not consulted in the first round of Soviet decision making in this crisis. Vacationing in Yugoslavia at the time of the coup, Nasser had scrambled to establish a line of communications to Khrushchev. As a first step, he had wanted Moscow to recognize the Qasim regime “as quickly as possible.”35 On July 15 Nasser’s deputy Marshal Amer had brought a message to the Soviet Embassy in Cairo. The Egyptian government believed that not only Soviet recognition but that of the entire Soviet bloc, “including the People’s Republic of China,” would be helpful to Qasim.36
When he heard nothing from Khrushchev, Nasser began to worry that Moscow might not do enough to protect Iraq. When he learned a day later of the U.S. decision to send marines into Lebanon, he thought he had to confer in person with Khrushchev. His immediate concern was how to get himself to Moscow to discuss the evolving situation in the Middle East.37
The Yugoslav ambassador in Moscow approached the Kremlin on the morning of July 16 to ask whether Nasser would be welcome if he made a quick trip to the Soviet Union. Khrushchev convened the Presidium to discuss the matter, and the leadership decided to dispatch a Soviet Tu-104 airplane that very night to Belgrade with instructions to pick up the Egyptian leader and his entourage for a secret early-morning flight to Moscow.38
LONGCHAMPS WAS A trendy lunch spot in Georgetown. On July 17, Yuri Gvozdev, the Soviet military intelligence (GRU) officer masquerading as a commercial attaché in the Soviet Embassy, had asked Frank Holeman, the chief of the New York Daily News’s Washington operations and the president of the National Press Club, to lunch there. Holeman and Gvozdev had been meeting off and on since 1955. Holeman liked to “swap lies” with Soviets in an effort to see what he could learn from them and had a reputation in the local GRU office of being unusually close to Vice President Richard Nixon. The Russians had spotted Holeman as an interesting point of contact in the early 1950s, when he had defended their right to be members of the press club. Gvozdev was Holeman’s second GRU contact. His first had been Georgi Bolshakov, who had gone back to Moscow in 1955 and later returned to play an extraordinary role as a back channel in the Kennedy years.39
Khrushchev's Cold War Page 22