Gvozdev had a message to deliver to Holeman. “War is close,” he said. The Kremlin knew that the international press would soon pick up evidence of the military “exercises” in the Caucasus and Bulgaria. But the Soviet leadership wanted to send a clear message directly to the White House. “Any United States or British move toward Iraq will mean war,” Holeman noted in listening to Gvozdev. Moscow did not want Eisenhower to think that this was an idle threat. Gvozdev had been instructed to tell the Americans that the Soviet Army could react as quickly as could the U.S. Army. Gvozdev also raised the possibility of Russian “volunteers” being airlifted into the Middle East. If that weren’t enough to deter Washington, he observed that any superpower clash over Iraq would not be contained within the Middle East. “If [there is] war,” Gvozdev warned, “[then] Russians will ignore European bases and attack the United States directly.”40
The Soviets lacked any trusted unofficial link to Eisenhower or Foster Dulles. Perhaps that was why they chose to send the message through the vice president. Nixon was well known to Khrushchev. “He occupied a special position among American political leaders,” the Soviet leader later recalled. “We considered him a man of reactionary views, a man hostile to the Soviet Union. In a word, he was a McCarthyite.”41 The Soviets could not have chosen a better channel to the vice president than Holeman. Nixon considered few journalists his friends. Holeman of the New York Daily News was an exception.42
Having first been used by the Russians in early 1958 to tell the White House of Khrushchev’s interest in a summit, Holeman clearly loved the intrigue that ensued. Whenever he had some news from a Russian contact, he left a tongue-in-check message for Nixon’s longtime secretary, Rose Mary Woods: “This is Frank Holeman, Boy Spy.” That July morning, however, Holeman didn’t joke around about Gvozdev’s latest message. Since Nixon was out of the office, Holeman conveyed to one of the vice president’s aides the gist of Gvozdev’s statements. He stressed that he was sure this came from the Soviet leadership.
When Nixon returned after lunch, he instructed that copies of Holeman’s message be sent to both the Dulles brothers and J. Edgar Hoover. The private warning through the Soviet intelligence officer reinforced the more public warnings reaching Washington that same day. From Moscow came the official Soviet press agency (TASS) announcement that Soviet land and air forces, approximately twenty-four divisions, would begin maneuvers in the Transcaucasian and Turkestan military districts, on the borders of Turkey and Iran. A few hours later Belgrade added to the tension by reporting on its government radio station that Bulgarian land, sea, and air forces would start maneuvers the next day, with Soviet Marshal N. S. Skripko of the Soviet Air Force in command.43
AS WASHINGTON absorbed the Soviet leadership’s initial efforts to stabilize the situation in the Middle East, Khrushchev was attempting to manage another dimension of the crisis. Nasser, who arrived in Moscow on July 17, wanted Khrushchev’s word that the Kremlin would stand by Egypt’s new ally.
The two leaders ultimately spent eight hours together, with Khrushchev doing what he could to reassure Nasser that Moscow’s wait and see attitude toward the situation in Iraq was evidence of steel nerves, not neglect. “The people with weak nerves,” an aide to Nasser heard Khrushchev say, “will go to the wall.”44 At the same time he wanted Nasser to understand that resolve was not the same thing as recklessness. “We are now involved in a game that is being played at a very high speed, and in which everyone has to act quickly, without being able to judge what the other players are going to do.”45 Moscow would recognize the Iraqi regime and then rely on bluff, as it had in protecting Syria in 1957. Nasser, however, wanted more of a commitment than this.
After word of Nasser’s dash to Moscow had leaked out, Western diplomats heard rumors, probably spread by Egyptian sources, that Nasser had made the trip to prevent Khrushchev from overreacting.46 The Soviet leader, said these sources, was so incensed at the U.S. intervention in Lebanon that he was considering a threat to deploy Soviet volunteers in Iraq, as he had threatened to do in Egypt during the Suez crisis. In reality, these roles were reversed. It was Khrushchev more than Nasser who had reason to be concerned about an overreaction by his ally. Even before the Iraqi Revolution, Nasser had come to the Soviet leadership with an extravagant shopping list for Soviet weaponry. In May 1958 he had asked for Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles and medium bombers, a request that Khrushchev was quick to deny.47 Amid this new crisis, Nasser asked again for Soviet missiles. “Your country is too small for such military systems,” Khrushchev replied. He was astonished that his Egyptian ally would present such a provocative request when Moscow’s expressed goal was to prevent Western military intervention in the region. “If the need arises for these weapons to be used,” Khrushchev told Nasser, “then it would be better to launch them from our territory. [And] you can be assured that if aggressors start a war against your country, then we will help you by means of these rockets from our territory.”48 Khrushchev was not much more forthcoming when Nasser also asked for Soviet military assistance to the new Iraqi regime, whose army he described as ill equipped.49 He told Nasser that Moscow would consider giving the Iraqis some low-tech weapons, something that Egypt had already pledged to do, but that was all the military assistance he would promise to Baghdad for the time being.
Khrushchev stressed that Qasim, who was an unknown quantity to him, should not inadvertently provide the West with a pretext for an attack. He advised Nasser to preach caution to the Iraqi. It was the Soviet view that Qasim needed to announce that he would maintain all of Iraq’s treaty commitments. For the time being at least, Baghdad should stay in the Baghdad Pact and not threaten the oil wells.
Moscow recognized the Iraqi revolutionary government the next day, and the same day Khrushchev received a telegram from Qasim indicating that Iraq wished to restore diplomatic relations, which had been cut by the previous regime.50 Qasim also issued a public promise to protect Iraq’s oil wells and ensure the flow of oil exports. It appeared that Nasser had been in touch with Qasim to coach him on how to reassure Khrushchev and bring the Soviets to his side.
IN WASHINGTON the successive warnings from Moscow did not have the hoped-for deterrent effect. Soviet actions merely confirmed for the hawks in the administration that the Kremlin was limited in terms of what military assistance it could provide to its Middle Eastern ally in response to the movement of U.S. troops into the region. Dulles told congressional leaders on July 18 that Soviet military intervention in the Middle East was unlikely.51 Dulles thought a “dramatic gesture” by the Soviets, perhaps a large arms shipment to Cairo, but nothing directly threatening to U.S. troops in Lebanon, was a possibility.
Washington did not stop planning for a possible military move against Iraq. On July 15, the same day as the landing in Lebanon, Eisenhower had ordered the embarkation of elements of the First Marine Division, stationed in the United States, for deployment in the eastern Mediterranean or the Persian Gulf.52 The next day he approved an additional recommendation from the Joint Chiefs for the movement of a marine battalion from Okinawa in the Pacific to the Persian Gulf.53 He did not change these orders after Moscow’s public warning on July 16 and the private warning through the Soviet agent Gvozdev the following day.
The Kremlin’s public statements also had no appreciable effect on British plans. Following a formal request from King Hussein on July 16, London decided to deploy twenty-two hundred paratroopers and a guards brigade to protect the Jordanian regime.54 In meetings with Secretary of State Dulles and President Eisenhower the next day, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd again requested U.S. military assistance so that these could be joint operations in Jordan.55 In the meantime, as insurance against trouble in Kuwait, the British government ordered reinforcements moved from Aden on the Arabian coast to the Persian Gulf.56
In spite of these war preparations, Anglo-American views on the utility of military power in Iraq were very much in flux, but the cause was less what
the Russians were saying than word of new developments in Iraq. Qasim was effectively rooting out his enemies and establishing firm control in the country. By July 16 London and Washington had learned the sad fate of Nuri al-Said, the key to most official hopes for a counterrevolution. Dressed in woman’s clothing, he had been captured and then executed. As early as July 17 the British foreign secretary was cautioning Foster Dulles that “if the new Government of Iraq obtain[ed] effective control of the country it would be out of the question to consider re-conquering the country from the military standpoint.”57 In the judgment of both governments there was no real resistance movement around which to organize a military intervention.
For Washington and London there then came a startling shift in Iraqi statements. On the day of the revolution Qasim’s group had vowed to leave the Baghdad Pact. Now there was talk coming out of Baghdad that it might stay in. On July 15 Qasim met with both the U.S. and British ambassadors. He told the U.S. ambassador, “[W]e Iraqis wish for good relations with the United States.”58 Similarly, he promised Sir Harold Caccia, Viscount Hood, Her Majesty’s representative, that “not even friendship with any Arab country shall interfere with [Anglo-Iraqi relations],” adding that there would be “no steps to damage British trade.”59 Even more comforting was the public announcement of July 18, the day after Khrushchev and Nasser had their summit in Moscow, that the new regime was committing itself to a stable oil supply. “In view of the importance of oil to the world economy,” Qasim announced, “the Government of the Iraqi Republic wishes to declare its anxiety to see the continuation of the production and flow of oil to the markets where it is sold, because of its importance to national wealth and the national and international economic and industrial interests.”60 To counteract Western fears of sabotage, he added that his government had taken “all necessary steps” to protect oil wells, pumping stations, and other oil-related facilities in Iraq.
The vow that Iraq would protect the oil wells reassured the British that if hopes of overthrowing Qasim proved futile, then it might be possible to do business with this regime after all. Macmillan’s fears had been fueled by suspicions of a link between Qasim and Nasser. But in light of the somewhat moderate things being said by the regime, the British began to reassess the nature of this revolution and its leader. Having dubbed him the “Iraqi Cassius,” the diplomats in Baghdad were now describing Qasim to the Foreign Office as a “highly trained staff officer, extremely popular, [who] regularly kept Ramadan but without distinctly fanatical leanings.”61 Reacting to this new information, Macmillan cabled Foreign Secretary Lloyd, who was still in Washington conferring with the Americans, that there was “quite a chance…from the character of the men and some of their first statements that they may turn out to be more Iraqi nationalist than Nasserite.”62
Washington was less impressed with Baghdad’s apparent change of heart and continued to consider military options.63 What finally ended American talk of an invasion was word on July 18 that the UAR had signed a mutual defense agreement with Iraq, rounding out Qasim’s rapid consolidation of his authority and ensuring that any U.S. incursion into Iraq would spark a much larger conflict.64 That very night Foster Dulles told the French ambassador that now “it was not possible to alter the status quo in Iraq by military means.”65 He made the same point to the British.66 This shift in policy occurred in spite of the fact that in recent days the prospects of a successful invasion seemed to have become even brighter. On their own initiative, Jordan and Turkey had jointly offered to commit forces to invading Iraq.67 But with the Qasim regime firmly in control of Iraq, the Eisenhower administration stopped exploring the invasion option. It would not be right, the president explained, for the United States “to get into the position of supporting Kings against their own people.”68
IRONICALLY, AS LONDON and Washington were decisively moving away from the idea of a military overthrow of the Qasim regime, Nikita Khrushchev became convinced that a Western attack on Baghdad was imminent. Late on July 18 or early on July 19, Moscow time, Khrushchev probably received something—a piece of intelligence, a flash of insight, or maybe just TASS or foreign press reports—that significantly raised his anxiety level about the possibility of an attack by Western forces or their allies on Iraq. It is not wholly out of the question that Soviet military intelligence had detected the movement of the U.S. Marine unit coming from Okinawa or of the British force from Aden to the Persian Gulf, though the source seems more likely to have been a leak about the intentions of Iraq’s neighbors. Just before midnight on July 16, the Turks passed official word to the Americans that fearing Soviet intervention in Iraq, Jordan, or Syria, the governments of Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey were requesting U.S. preemptive action.69 A day later, the same day Nasser visited Khrushchev, the Turkish and Jordanian governments notified both the British and the Americans that they were prepared to invade Iraq with Western backing. The Turks also told the French, whose foreign ministry was infiltrated by Soviet intelligence.70 London and Washington jointly turned down the offers from Amman and Ankara once they abandoned their own hopes for an immediate counterrevolution.71 But Moscow at that point would not have known of this Western caution.
The evidence from Lebanon and Jordan also indicated to Khrushchev a hardening of the Western position in the region. The U.S. contingent in Lebanon had risen to eight thousand with two additional battalions disembarked late on July 15 and July 16. The British had slightly more than three thousand in Jordan. There was also something in the news that Khrushchev later admitted to having bothered him in this critical period. On July 17 the Soviet military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda carried a comment from the commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, Vice Admiral Charles Brown, that the United States was “ready to land forces immediately at practically any point in the Mediterranean.”72 American bravado always annoyed Khrushchev, and this statement came at a particularly bad time for him. “If he were a citizen of the Soviet Union,” he declaimed, “he would be tried or…put into a mad house.”73
In light of these developments, Khrushchev convened an unusual Saturday meeting of the Presidium on July 19 to discuss what to do next. Sensing that the meeting would be a turning point in the Soviet handling of the crisis, he invited a stenographer into the proceedings. Ordinarily the chief of the Central Committee’s General Department, Vladimir Malin, took notes pertaining to decisions, occasionally preserving the substantive discussion, but this time the meeting also produced a transcript that could be rapidly turned into speeches, letters, and action memorandums. Khrushchev believed that time was of the essence. Soviet warnings up to this point had not worked, and who knew when the Americans, the British, or their allies would strike?74
Khrushchev’s mood was explosive. Dictating the guts of an angry letter to President Eisenhower, he intentionally used the most hurtful analogy available to get the former Allied commander’s attention. “Mr. President,” he dictated, “you started the aggression. Now you wish to conduct an aggression, as you claim, of a local character. But Hitler, when he attacked Poland, also considered that he was starting just a local conflict. He thought that they would finish off Poland and then, one by one, they would finish off France and afterward the Soviet Union. This is how he acted, but this led to a world war and catastrophe for Germany.” Khrushchev stressed that as veterans of World War II he and Eisenhower did not have the right to forget the lessons of that conflict.75
Despite his anger, the Soviet leader was not prepared to threaten nuclear war over Iraq. Instead he proposed that Moscow send a direct appeal immediately to Macmillan, the new French president, Charles de Gaulle, who had returned to power in June 1958 after a twelve-year absence, and India’s Nehru as well as to Eisenhower to participate in a Middle East summit with him under the auspices of the UN Security Council.
He also hoped to enlist world public opinion. The Soviet leader was reasonably confident that Dwight Eisenhower personally did not want world war but was not entirely sure that the old military hero could
control the hawks like Dulles and Nixon around him. Khrushchev advocated a major propaganda campaign by international labor unions to hamper any Western attempts to use force against Iraq.
Khrushchev wanted to end the letter to Western workers with the customary Marxist flourish, “Workers of the world, unite.” But his ideology chief, Suslov, who was showing a little sensitivity to what did and did not sell in Great Britain and the United States, gently suggested that the line might not be helpful. Other Presidium members endorsed expanding the target audience beyond the international proletariat to include writers, students, and women. So too did the Kremlin’s veteran troubleshooter in foreign affairs, Anastas Mikoyan, who mentioned that anything that smacked of Communist ideology in the appeal would be twisted by American leaders to make standing up for nonintervention an impossible political position. The line was purged, and letters for progressive constituencies in addition to international labor were prepared.
There were additional recommendations for softening the rhetoric in the letter to Eisenhower. Khrushchev dismissed outright the suggestion of a sentence reminding the leaders and the world that the USSR had no designs on the wealth of the Middle East. “The entire world knows that we have no material interests [in the Middle East],” he snarled. There would be nothing apologetic in the letter. “It must be written from a position of strength…. It is necessary to say here that we make this appeal because we cannot be indifferent,” he said, “but we don’t want to resolve this question by means of war.” Another suggestion, which came from Mikoyan, Khrushchev did take. “For the sake of compromise,” said Khrushchev, “I don’t insist on [the reference to Hitler].”
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