285. Suez Crisis: The Secret Meeting Between Israel, Britain & France (Part 2)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnhem. And me, William Lurie. And once again, we are joined by the fabulous Alex Fontenzelman. Alex, absolute superstar, author of Blood and Sand, Sewers, Hungary and the Crisis that Shook the World. And you left us on just the most delicious cliffhanger. It was a psychodrama of Shakespearean proportions between, in the red corner, Anthony Eden, Fading Hottie and Prime Minister. Greying moustache. Prime Minister of Great Britain with a much younger wife, Clarissa. And in the blue corner, you've got Nasser of Egypt, who is the young hottie who is much closer in age to Clarissa.

1:17And the whole kind of sort of clash of these two men, one of whom insists at this dinner, this horrible dinner of talking down to Nasser and explaining to him what it is to be Arab. You can just imagine a sort of butt clenching moment that would have been. And the two of them have precisely zero chemistry, unless the chemistry is explosive. So from that point, I think what we should do is look ahead to July the 26th, 1956, which is not long after this dinner, is it, Alex? It's a year and a bit. The dinner was February 1955. So it's taken a while for Eden's loathing of Nasser to reach a sort of full pitch, about a year.

1:57To ripen. Yeah, I mean, it's about a year between the disastrous student party and then Eden telling his ministers that he wants Nassau killed. Literally. I mean, you know, he says, I want him murdered. This isn't a sort of vague illusion. Just to put that in context, Alex, is that unique? I mean, were there many British assassinations at this point of national news? No, no, not many. No. I mean, and there are sort of some hints that possibly good old James Bond in SIS had a bit of a go at various things like this. But I mean, it wasn't really done. It wasn't what they did. No, you didn't go for prime minister.

2:31No, I mean, when Eden said this to his minister, Antony Nutting, Nutting was really shocked. I mean, this was a sort of completely horrendous thing to say that was not normal at all, which is why Nutting wrote it all down in his diary and why we know about it is because it was such an unusual thing for this to happen. He thought at that point that Eden was losing his mind. I mean, that was the sort of level of this. Evidence is stacking up against Eden and the state of his mind. But then if anything is going to push him over the edge, it is what NASA does in July 1956. Because as you've pointed out, there was a distinction between who owns the canal itself, which was always the Egyptians, and who owns the operating company that operates the Suez Canal, which was this conglomerate of investors, predominantly French.

3:16And so at this point in 56, NASA says, you know what, nationalizing it, had enough of this, had enough of the colonial interference in my country, the whole thing is going to be ours. How does he make the announcement, first of all? Well, it was a very dramatic scene, which of course we love on Empire. So he wasn't telling anyone he was going to do this, although it had been suspected that that was a possibility that would happen. And what had just happened is that the Americans in the World Bank had just pulled funding from his big development project, which was the Aswan Dam project. Just to explain what that is, this is this crucial moment when NASA is going to build the first of the big dam.

3:56This is happening all through the post-colonial world. Nehru is building dams in India and calling them the new temples. and NASA's one involves moving some of the biggest ancient Egyptian monuments, including Abu Simnel. And this is a huge moment. National Geographic are covering this moment when these great statues are moved around. This will allow NASA to control the Nile and the annual Nile floods, which have been such a feature of Egyptian life since antiquity, are no longer going to be random. They're going to be controlled. And this is the background to what happens next. Yeah, it's a huge project.

4:32And the Americans didn't particularly like it, but they kind of helped fund it. And they'd allowed the World Bank to go along with that too and all of this, largely because of sort of maintaining a good relationship. John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, did not like NASA, but the CIA really did. They thought he was a very useful man to them in the Middle East, someone they could do business with. What did they like about him? Because it's not an automatic match, you'd have thought, the CIA and NASA, this leading post-colonial figure. I know. You wouldn't have thought so. So, well, the reason is basically they just thought he was quite sensible.

5:03They thought, you know, he wasn't a communist, not in league with the communists. At this point, there are communist rebels all over Yemen and so on. And Nasser is not that. Absolutely. And, you know, Syria and everywhere else. And he is not a commie. In fact, he's persecuting the commies. Not in with the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, he's persecuting them and they tried to kill him. And the founder of the Muslim Brothers has just been shot, Hassel Abandon. Right. I mean, you know, so all of this is a real mess. But, you know, he's not an extremist. He's actually someone they see as quite a sort of sensible centrist as Middle Eastern leaders go.

5:35They also thought, I mean, all Arab leaders were obviously implacably opposed to Israel, but they thought that with Nasser, they at least had the possibility of conversation. That's right. And in fact, Nasser had been stopping the first Palestinian Fedayeen raids, which were taking place in Gaza, and he was arresting them. Yeah. So again, the CIA thought, well, look, this is someone we can work with. They could not understand why the British were being so nutty about him, really. because they feel like this is really useful, but we have this guy who, you know, speaks English, is very aware. And yes, fine, he wants to be non-aligned and he wants all of this, but actually we can kind of work with that.

6:10It's fine. So basically the scene happens in Alexandria in Manchea Square, which is this really beautiful square in the middle of Alexandria, very neoclassical palm trees sweeping down to the Mediterranean Sea. And it is also very resonant because Nasser had been given their speech exactly the same spot in Manchea Square less than two years before when he was attacked by an assassin from the Muslim Brotherhood who fired, just from 25 feet away, fired eight shots at him, all eight missed. And Nasser appeared completely unruffled. And that really sort of cemented him as, you know, this sort of great leader.

6:42Well, much more dangerous than Trump. I mean, eight shots from 25 feet is much, much more dangerous than what was fired at Trump. But he wasn't hurt and he did survive. And so this spot's very resonant, very important. And he went to give this speech there and huge crowd, about a quarter of a million people packed in to the square at that time. But also this was broadcast on Voice of the Arabs. This is going out to the whole Arab world. And it was translated as well. And he gave this sort of speech and he talked about imperialism, about Britain and France, about this control. And he was being quite funny about it.

7:14It's very comical speech. And he was talking about, you know, the Aswan Dam and his recent negotiations with the president of the World Bank, who is a man called Eugene Black. And then he said, Mr. Black suddenly reminded me of Ferdinand de Lesseps. Now, this name, you will recall, is your mate, Ferdi, the guy who built the Suez Canal or oversaw the building of the Suez Canal. Obviously, it was Egyptian workers who built it. But he seemed to get stuck on this name, Nasser, and he kept repeating it. He kept saying de Lesseps, de Lesseps, de Lesseps. Yes, people were kind of like, what is happening?

7:48What's going on? Now, what was happening is that the name de Lesseps was actually a signal. And it was a signal to his very trusted friend, Colonel Manboud Younis. When that name was mentioned, Younis mobilized his men. They stormed into the headquarters of the Suez Canal Company with their guns drawn. NASA paused for a moment and then said, today, in the name of the people, I'm taking over the company. Tonight, our Egyptian canal will be run by Egyptians. Egyptians. and the crowd erupted. They're shouting Mabruk, which is congratulations, letting off fireworks. There's a huge float. I think you will particularly love the float that paraded past.

8:27It was a float of the Egyptian sphinx devouring a British soldier who had a Union flag sewn onto his backside. Oh, my word. So Tipu's salt up. I know. Tipu's tiger living again and growling again. So this rather wonderful scene. Now, when this happened, Anthony Eden was in 10 Downing Street hosting a dinner party. This news came through in the evening, about 10.45pm. And his guest of honour was King Faisal II of Iraq, a 21-year-old king, and his uncle, Grand Prince Abdullah, and Nouria Saeed, who was the Iraqi prime minister, who was Eden's closest friend in the Arab world. So they heard that this had happened.

9:04And I mean, can you imagine a sort of more incendiary moment for this to turn up when he's around these people? and the French ambassador was there, the American Charger de Ferdinand. It's a big sort of fancy evening, everyone wearing their tin pot medals and all of this stuff. NASA nationalizing the Suez Canal Company was not illegal. Eden was trying to say, oh, it's an international asset. He mustn't do that. But it wasn't. It was a private company with various international investors. Britain had nationalized those, of course, under Atlee. That had already happened. There was nothing illegal about this.

9:35But Eden sort of was immediately furious. And this looked like kind of what he'd been waiting for, which was an excuse to go to war and to topple Nasser. That's what he was really wanting. And Nouri really encouraged him at that meeting. Nouri said to him, this is according to Nouri's own recollection, he said, hit him hard, hit him soon, and hit him by yourself. And again, to give context here, the reason that Hashemites don't like Nasser is that he, again, is the wrong sort of Arab. The Hashemites were the Sharifs of Mecca. They are one of these old established Arab families. They are royalty now.

10:10And Nasser's from none of that. Nasser is, in their view, from the streets of Alexandria. And he represents a completely different movement that threatens all these Middle Eastern monarchies. He's nationalist. He's a meritocrat. He's risen up the army. And he's as much of a threat to the Hashemites as he is to Eden. Absolutely. I mean, they can't stand him because he's much more popular than them. I mean, you know, and he's there sort of genuinely uniting a lot of the people in the Arab world, a lot of younger ones. They can see their powers ebbing. They look, you know, old, tired, stooges, basically.

10:44Creaky and colonial. They look creaky and colonial and the world is not like that. Exactly those things. And Nassau looks cool. They've still got Brits running their own. Yeah. And I mean, you know, this is sort of horrifying for all of them. So absolutely, that's sort of what happened that night. And I mean, Eden straight away wanted to go to war. and the Americans warned him off straight away, actually. The Americans took a really strong line from the absolute beginning of like, no, you are not going to invade Egypt. You are not going to do this. So they warn him off, but presumably at that point, they're not saying you're not going to do this, because at this point, the Americans are not saying that to the Brits, are they?

11:20No, they are saying precisely that. They are saying exactly that in those words. It's actually an incredibly strong position that Eisenhower takes from the absolute beginning. What does Eidenhauer think of Eden? He has his doubts, but at this point is kind of, you know, is sort of thinking, well, this must be a reasonable man because he's got such a good reputation and, you know, he's done all these things in the past. But he begins to have his doubts about him. He begins to think, you know, Eden's going a bit rogue here, really. So actually, you know, Eden and Guy Mollet wanted immediately to invade Egypt and seize the canal.

11:58Well, okay, you've mentioned a name. We haven't talked about so much. And also we're acting as if, you know, this is a British asset that's been seized. Yes, sure. But de Lesseps, de Lesseps is the French name that's being mentioned. And what do the French make of all of this? Guy Mollet, Prime Minister of France, is actually a socialist because, you know, France's politics is a bit different. And it's sort of important to say here because I think, you know, when we're coming at this from a modern perspective, we don't always appreciate these different dynamics that were operating at the time.

12:26Even though Guy Mollet, left-wing Labour leader, all of this kind of stuff, he was extremely pro-France keeping control of places like Algeria. In French politics, that didn't go with a kind of anti-imperialist movement in a way that it did in Britain and elsewhere. So he was actually extremely concerned with keeping Algeria. And one of his first acts when he became prime minister was to go to Algeria. And he was pelted with rotten fruit by Algerians. This made him extremely angry. It was known as la journée des tomates, the day of the tomatoes, for the fact that he was pelleted with it. And this humiliated him.

13:03It made him furious. And he decided, much as Eden had kind of formed this fixation that Nasser was somehow behind all of his ills, Mollet, not quite to the same extent, but sort of similarly decided that, you know, Algeria would be absolutely fine. Nobody would be making any kind of fuss if it wasn't for Nasser. I mean, look, OK, so you've got the French, understandably, up in arms, Eden frothing. But you said the Americans warned against it. But I want to know how strongly worded that warning is, because there are warnings and there are warnings in diplomacy. So what does Eisenhower say? This is really strong.

13:36OK, so Britain and France said basically, OK, we're going to invade Egypt. That's what's going to happen. Eisenhower heard that. So if you remember, Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal Company on the 26th of July, the 31st of July. So just days later, Eisenhower heard this had happened and he wrote this letter to Eden. An incredibly strong letter. expressing his horror at the prospect of, and it's quote, your decision to employ force without delay or attempting any intermediate and less drastic steps. I have given you my own personal conviction, as well as that of my associates, as to the unwisdom even of contemplating the use of military force at this moment.

14:13And I think you can see the level of Eden's delusion that when he wrote his memoirs, many years later, which are, I'm afraid, totes de Lulu and really bear very little relation to reality, Eden said the president didn't rule out the use of military force. And actually, he really does. I mean, it's about as clear as these sort of letters get. So from the beginning, the Americans didn't want that. They spent the whole of this summer of 1956 with John Foster Dulles trying to organize various conferences to resolve this issue. But in fact, what happened is that Britain and France decided they were going to plan a war anyway.

14:48It's going to be called Operation Musketeer, and they were going to set up a plan to invade Egypt. So, Alex, you have very beautifully painted the picture in England with Eden. You told us of Guy Mollet and his new socialist government, who are perhaps counterintuitively determined to cling on to Algeria and are also ready for a punch up with Nasser. Tell us about the third corner of the triangle, which is Israel, and tell us all about the situation there. Because Ben-Gurion is in charge. This is only, what, eight years after the foundation of the country. Ben-Gurion had always been more anti-British than the generation before him.

15:35Chaim Weitzman was the guy who was very Anglophile, who had charmed Balfour. And Ben-Gurion, born in Poland, a Labour leader who rises by the power of the Hestradut Labour Union in pre-state Israel, always wants to take a stronger line with the Brits than Weizmann does. And in the process of the end of the Second World War and the British pull out from Mandate Palestine, the pre-state Israeli forces and the British often come to blows. And actually, there are moments in Jaffa during the withdrawal when they're shooting at each other. And there, of course, beyond Ben-Gurion, there is the Stern gang blowing up the King David Hotel, hanging the British sergeant.

16:14So it's not necessarily the case that Ben-Gurion and Eden are going to be mates. I'm very far from mates. And at this stage, again, we have to kind of put ourselves in 1956, where the political kind of allegiances and things are completely different from today. Israel at that time, David Ben-Gurion's a socialist. Israel's politics were seen as much more left wing at that time. And of course, this is long before 1967, or yes, it's after the Nakba, but this is a very different point in Israel's history. And actually, the allegiances were much stronger at that stage between the Labour Party and the left and Israel.

16:49Eden was an Arabist and saw himself much more in league with those kind of more conservative strains in the Arab world, didn't trust Israel at all. So not natural friends. And, you know, I think now we sort of tend to see that obviously support for Israel is on the right of politics in the West, usually. and tends to be very criticised on the left. But those positions are completely different in 1956, totally the other way around. So this was a surprise that Eden would reach out to Ben-Gurion, a man who he may well have clashed with. No natural sympathy. No, a huge surprise. And it didn't happen for a very long time.

17:24So all of that summer, Britain and France were planning an open invasion of Egypt, Operation Musketeer, that they were just going to go in together and seize the canal. That's what they were going to do. But meanwhile, as I say, everyone was trying to have negotiations, operations and actually those worked pretty well. You had at the UN late in the day actually Egypt pretty much giving in to most of the demands to you know have sort of international control of the Suez Canal Company and all of this being really quite accommodating and it's pretty much resolved. When you say international control I'm sorry I just want to understand what that means so NASA says okay we'll have a body looking after your interests even though we will take all the profits I mean what is the what is the give that he gives?

18:03Really they're completely accommodating I mean, there's a complex list of demands you can look up if you want. But, you know, basically, it's pretty much resolved, actually. And Britain and France are then very upset that they're not going to be able to have their war. And it's really the French that come up with this wizard wheeze of why don't we talk secretly to Israel. It hasn't been planned like that. This war has been planned as an open invasion. But the French come up with this idea and invite them. There's this extraordinary meeting at Seve-Royce. And they decide to have a meeting there, a completely secret meeting between Britain, France and Israel.

18:34where they will plan a conspiracy. And there's this wonderful moment, isn't there, when Ben-Gurion arrives at the airport and he's spotted by a worker because Ben-Gurion is a very distinctive looking character. It looks like Einstein. He's got hair all over the place and he's not someone that you'd mistake when you saw him in the street. The guy at the airport calls his friend, who's a journalist, and says, Ben-Gurion's just landed in Paris, furtively. And the journalist said, oh, rubbish. Couldn't be possible. Don't be so stupid. What would Ben-Gurion be doing in Paris? What are you crazy? Exactly.

19:04So he just missed the biggest story of his lifetime, basically, because it was Ben Gurion. Let's take a break here and we'll come back with the biggest story of that stupid journalist lifetime that he missed, but we're not going to.

19:22So welcome back. So we left you just before the break with David Ben Gurion arriving at an airport. Not even that much incognito, but nobody seems to notice except one airport worker who tells a journalist who misses the story of his life. But Ben-Gurion is on his way to this secret meeting. And Alex, I want to know who else is at this secret meeting. So this meeting, you have this Israeli delegation led by Ben-Gurion. But, you know, he's also got Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres with him. Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan are both there. They are both there. Both young men at this point. Very young men.

19:55And by the way, the French really didn't like Shimon Peres. they thought he was badly dressed and they called him the man in the blue suit the entire time. He was almost impeccably dressed at the end of his life. I know, they didn't like him anyway, didn't like his outfit. They thought it was too blue. Anyway, there we go. That was just the French opinion at the time. And then you had Christian Pinot, who's kind of the French equivalent foreign secretary. Eden wasn't there, but he had his British representatives were there, basically his private secretary, Donald Logan. And there was a British delegation.

20:21So there were delegations from Britain, France and Israel there. And at this point, we should say that the relationship is so sour between Eden and Nasser that he has taken to calling him the new Hitler. And so, you know, it's very much the sort of notion that he's having a sort of a second Yalta wind to him. This is how we defeat the new Hitler. The talks last for how long and what is it exactly that they want to come out of these talks? So it goes on for a couple of days. And effectively, the idea here, I mean, to put it in the simplest possible terms, is to plot a secret war. So as I say, Britain and France already had an invasion plan to invade Egypt, but now they weren't going to be able to do that openly because Egypt had kind of agreed to everything they said they needed.

21:05They still wanted to do it. So the idea that comes up, which is so mad that actually afterwards lots of people really didn't believe it could possibly have happened, although we know it definitely did because we now got the papers and so on, was that there would be a sort of fake beginning to this. So what was going to happen was called the Protocol of Sev, this is what was agreed, was that Israel would pretend that there had been attacks from Arab raiding groups. And on that basis, it would invade Sinai, attack Egypt, saying Egypt was sending these raiders. We should say that that is not an improbable thing at this point.

21:41No, no, it's happening all the time. To give the context here, you've got sitting in Gaza, for example, 200 ,000 Palestinian refugees, many of whom are from the immediate vicinity, looking onto their land that they can't visit. Exactly. So from the very beginning in 1948, you have these people trying to go across. Initially, you have people just going to go and harvest their crops. They are refugees in Gaza, but their fields are within sight over the new international border. And they go and try and harvest their crops and they're pushed out. Then you get the growth of what's called the Fidayin, who are these guys who in Gaza are usually Muslim brothers, who are doing potshots at the Israeli border guards.

22:20You have the new kibbutzes, which are being built on Palestinian villages, which had just been destroyed and emptied only eight years earlier. In Jordan, which at that point includes, of course, the West Bank, because the Arab Legion have held the West Bank at this point. You have other Palestinians trying to both infiltrate and get back to their lands and also do military raids across the border. So the whole idea of a Fedayeen raid, a mock one, is entirely plausible. A lot of this sort of stuff is going on and isn't in the news every week. That bit is plausible. The rest of what happens is not.

22:58That is the kind of setup that is actually vaguely feasible at the beginning. So the plan was that Israel would claim this had happened and it would then attack Egypt. It would cross the Sinai Peninsula with the goal of reaching the Suez Canal. Britain and France would then issue an ultimatum to both Egypt and Israel. They would act as peacekeepers or a sort of international police force saying, both of you must cease fire, withdraw your forces from the Suez Canal zone. And the idea would be that this was because they only care about protecting the canal in good international interests. That's what they're doing.