286. Suez Crisis: Hungary Revolts & Britain Bombs Egypt (Part 3)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William de Rimpel. And again, we are delighted to be joined by Alex von Tunselman, author of Blood and Sand. It is a marvellous book. And we left you on quite the cliffhanger. I mean, I think it's one of the best cliffhangers we've ever done. World War III is about to erupt. I mean, it's a biggie. I mean, it is a biggie. And I think people these days do not realise. They talk about, you know, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or they talk about the times we're living in today. But this was properly on the brink. And just remind us why. were you looking at two different arenas of action, which both seem to be going to hell in a handcart simultaneously.

1:12That's absolutely right. So what you had is Britain and France colluding with Israel to start a war in the Middle East, specifically for Israel to stage an invasion of Egypt that would allow Britain and France to intervene, ostensibly to protect the Suez Canal, but actually really to take over and topple Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of Egypt. Simultaneously and unrelated, and yet in the minds of many very powerful people, surely it had to be related, there was the first major uprising in the Soviet satellite states against Soviet control. And that happened in Hungary. And it was a popular uprising centered around Budapest, but actually sort of nationwide, completely spontaneous.

1:55and yet happening so much in the same days that you had Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, and indeed over in the US, many people in Washington thinking, surely there must be some sort of plan going on here on the other side and these things must be linked. So what was extraordinary from that episode, and I think it bears repeating before we sort of dive into the nitty gritty of all of this, is two things are apparent. Number one, these are almost the death throes of a colonial mindset in Europe, because that is what France and Britain are working on. Some would say that the colonial mindset has not entirely disappeared from Europe even today.

2:34But yes, we'll let that pass. On this issue of the canal itself, how could it possibly be run and how can we possibly do business with an Egyptian looking after a canal in Egypt? And you've got this sort of secretive conversation going on between these two old colonial powers. But on the other hand, the thing that I found most eye-watering of all is that you've got the brink of World War III going on and no direct line of communication between the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and America. No way that they can pick up the phone and back-channel each other going, are you really doing this? No, we're not.

3:08Okay, stand down. There is just no, there's over communication, secret communication on one side and zero communication on the other side. That's right. There's no direct phone line actually between the White House and the Kremlin until after the Cuban Missile Crisis several years later. Astonishing. There's also just the astonishing cynicism of this whole invasion. The fact that it's sort of so completely naked and the fact that there's no even remote pretense at any virtuous motive for this. This goes right back to sort of 18th century clive in India, sort of weighing one power against another and just the completely open cynicism of the British.

3:46The sense that they can do this just because they want to do it and don't even have to dress it up. It's an astonishingly sort of backward glance from the Seven Year War or something. I mean, unfortunately, as you say, the mindset of them probably also hadn't changed really that much by the 1950s. And I think it's very striking from both Britain and France. And in a sense, the difference, I'm sure we'll come back to this because it comes up again and again between Britain and France, is that France is completely shameless about this, whereas actually in Britain, Eden does feel the need to at least try and keep this secret.

4:20In fact, he gets quite obsessed with the idea of keeping collusion secret. He wanted all copies of the secret agreement with Israel, the Protocol of Sèvres, found and burned. Both the Israelis and the French completely refused to do that, so it didn't happen. And he kept lying about this for the rest of his life. In his memoirs, he wrote there was no collusion, even though by then everybody knew that there had been. he tried to insist on it for the rest of his life. So he obviously did feel some sort of shame about it. Not enough not to do it, but enough to feel sort of guilty and try and cover it up.

4:52I mean, you've mentioned Eden. So let's do a quick recap. If people haven't listened by the Empire Club, and by the way, this is a very good reason to join the Empire Club because you don't have to wait in between episodes. You can just binge the whole lot. EmpirePodUK.com is where you can join up and then you can get these things in one great hot flood. But if people are listening and there's been a period of time. So Anthony Eden, you've mentioned, sort of debonair, man who's been in government for a very long time. He was there during Yalta. He was critical of Churchill. He's handsome. He is older with a much younger wife.

5:24You have Nasser, who we've kind of established as a bit matinee idol kind of hot, much younger and very much more interesting, perhaps, to Eden's wife than Eden at this point in time. And Guy Mollet, and I just remind us about Guy Mollet because we sort of talked about him very likely, but we need to sort of paint a picture. Yes. I mean, he's a really interesting character. So he quite recently came in as the leader of France just in 1956, and he was a socialist. But the thing that you have to sort of adjust your mind to from a modern perspective is that that did not mean that in any way he was going to try to give independence to France's kind of colonial possessions, partly because they weren't really seen as colonial possessions by the French.

6:07So Algeria, which was having this uprising against French control, was seen by the French and by indeed some Algerians as part inherently of France. And therefore, an overseas department with equal rights, and therefore they're saying, well, it's not a colony, so this uprising is effectively illegitimate. And he very much took that view, that this was some troublemakers being annoying in a place that was inherently part of France. And the third part of this triangle is David Ben-Gurion in Israel, who is this sort of Einstein lookalike with kind of mad grey hair, very capable, extremely ruthless.

6:49He'd been the one who, in a sense, had overseen the Palestinian Nakba only eight years before, and from the Arab point of view, were responsible for 750 ,000 Palestinians ending up outside Palestine, many of them sitting now on the Egyptian border in Gaza, where of course they remain. And these three pulled together, as you described beautifully last time, Alex, into this unholy triangle, working together to re-establish colonial power, effectively, on the Suez Zone, reacting to Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal by using this as an opportunity to reassert control. And I would just emphasize that it was sort of reacting to the nationalization of the Suez Canal, but that was really a hook.

7:35All of these countries already had their reasons, and these leaders specifically already had reasons they hated Nasser, which long predated the nationalization. So really when that happened, it was a catalyst, but it wasn't that Nasser could have avoided this by just not doing that. But in some version of the stories, NASA is aware that it's going to provoke a massive response from Britain and France. It's not that he's surprised that they reacted the way they did. Absolutely. I mean, he knows that this is a bit of a trigger. But at the same time, you know, it was this was already courses of action that were well underway.

8:09I mean, you know, even if you go back to March 1956, long before the canals nationalized, you have, you know, things like George Young and British Secret Intelligence Services planning, actually a triple coup simultaneously in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt to try and re-establish Britain's interests in the Middle East. You have all sorts of kind of extraordinary preparations going on for regime change in that region and for promoting, well, the British want to promote Iraqi interests, the Americans, Saudi. But basically, the CIA was very pro-Nassar and saw him as a very useful figure in the Middle East.

8:46They thought he was someone they could work with. a stabilising nationalist, but not pro-Soviet, not Marxist. Not pro-Soviet, independent, going down that non-aligned route. You know, I mean, not their dream of a leader, but much more practical and very powerful. They thought he was a man they could do business with. He was younger, he spoke the language, and they felt that he could be, if not tamed, but at least spoken to. Now, let's go forward to this very important date, October 30, 1956. So after all these secret meetings have taken place, The cigarette packet plan is being enacted. An ultimatum is issued directly to the ambassador of Egypt.

9:23What exactly are they saying to him? So, yes, Britain and France issue a 12-hour ultimatum, which is an incredibly short period of time, by the way, for a military ultimatum. And they issue it technically simultaneously to the ambassador at the Egyptian embassy and to the chargé d 'affaires at the Israeli embassy in London. although, of course, the Israelis know this is coming because they are in on this plan. So that is really for show. Both nations were ordered to stop fighting and withdraw 10 miles from the Suez Canal. Egypt was also told to accept temporary occupation, temporary, of key points on the canal by Anglo-French forces operating as a police action.

10:07and if they didn't, these countries accept this ultimatum within 12 hours, Britain and France would intervene militarily. But what is extraordinary about this is that actually the mileage between these two forces on the ground does not make sense when you apply it to the ultimatum. And I think you mentioned this last time, but it's worth doing the distances again, Alex. I know you mentioned them last time, but just tell us exactly why this sounds so stupid after 12 hours. You know, everyone can see this as stupid because the ultimatum had been planned on the basis that the British and French thought the Israelis would probably get all the way to the Suez Canal by this point.

10:43Well, they hadn't. They were still bogged down in the Sinai, and that's actually quite a long way east of the Suez Canal. So in fact, the front where the Egyptians and Israelis were fighting each other was then between about 75 and 125 miles east of the canal. So effectively, this statement that they must both withdraw 10 miles from the canal, was actually asking the Egyptians to withdraw another 135 miles within their own territory, while Israel was actually being asked to advance between 65 and 115 miles into Egyptian territory. So this just didn't work. How did that happen? Just that they delivered it at the wrong time, that they hadn't got the intelligence of where the armies were?

11:27It's the Israelis being bogged down. They just didn't get as far as they thought they would get. I mean, they just counted on the Israelis moving a lot faster. Huge cock-up. Huge cock-up. I mean, and you could tell it had been pre-planned because of this, because it wasn't responding to events. It brought no resemblance of what was going on the ground. Now, how did civil servants, because civil servants will have been watching this. I mean, if a secret plan and Eden was as paranoid as he was, for some of them, they will have woken up, read the newspapers or heard it on the wireless, that, hang on, we've issued an ultimatum.

11:58And hang on, I know a little bit about the region. Hang on a minute. I've got many hang ons here. I mean, what kind of response was going on around the British Parliament and the civil service? I mean, people were completely horrified by this and sort of didn't know what to make of it. So, I mean, you know, you have things like Evelyn Schockberg, who was a civil servant listening to the radio, and he wrote in his diary at that point, you know, staggered by this. It seems to have every fault. It is clearly not genuinely impartial since the Israelis are nowhere near the canal. It puts us on the side of the Israelis.

12:27The Americans were not consulted. The UN is flouted. We're about to be at war without the nation or parliament having been given a hint of it. We think A.E., Anthony Eden, has gone off his head. Brilliant. That was pretty representative, actually, of what people were saying. Because people aren't completely stupid. They could see that this was nonsense. Yeah, but then he stands up. It's 15 minutes after the announcement of this ultimatum. Eden finally takes this to Parliament because he's been doing this without any kind of democratic mandate whatsoever. It's an important foreign policy decision, but he has not passed it by anybody else.

13:04Do you know from Hansard or from the time, you know, what was the reaction when Eden got to his feet and finally told Parliament the thing that he had been planning with the French for a long time and they just still don't know that he'd secretly been planning with the French? Well, you know, there's a little bit of the Conservatives backing him, Although you have to remember, a lot of them probably also didn't know about this conspiracy and this secret plan and thought he was being genuine. That's a very important part of the story. And many people remember this as a great moment of division between left and right.

13:34For example, my parents-in-law, who were engaged at this time, very nearly broke off their marriage because my slightly right-wing father-in-law was very much behind Suez, giving Johnny Arab what he deserved. while my mother-in-law thought this was an appalling act of antediluvian colonialism. And I think that was reflected across the country. This is a major dividing line with many people had very different ideas. Yeah, and I mean, you certainly see Labour figures immediately challenging this in Parliament. Dennis Healy asking, you know, have the Americans been consulted? Have you asked them what they think of this ultimatum?

14:11And Eden just comes out with this very bland response about, we've been in close communication with them, which is not true, actually. You know, they haven't. They've been concealing it. They do get challenged immediately. And as you say, you initially what you see in the first year, it evolves very fast, this situation. What you see initially is a sort of partisan left-right split. But actually, as it becomes more and more clear what is going on, you actually see quite a lot of people on the right also deeply horrified by what is happening. I mean, because this doesn't make sense. And you've got to also remember, apart from it just not making sense, there's nothing a Tory grandee hates more, let me tell you, even to this day, than being kept in the dark.

14:50They feel insulted, they feel slighted, they feel disrespected. So you've got all of this sort of momentum building up, even sort of bubbling up within the party. So party loyalties aside, Eden is not universally liked by his Tory current. Very far from it. At all. Quite unpopular at this point. Already before all this. Yeah. Yeah, he was very high-handed with colleagues. He talked down to everybody. He thought he was better than everybody. He was also remarkably bitchy about his colleagues as well. So, you know, he was an unpopular man in the party. And so when he stands up in all of his pomposity and says before Parliament, what we hoped for, what we asked for, what we prayed for, is that both parties to whom these appeals have been made, Israel and Egypt, he meant, will accept them.

15:34Because if they do accept them, then we will truly believe that a new era can open in the Middle East. And you can just imagine, although Hansard, I often think this is a failure of Hansard, does not record the and the eye rolling alone would have been really voluble on those benches. And you've got the Labour MP, you mentioned Dennis Healy. By the way, quick aside about Dennis Healy, what's the phrase that you most associate with Dennis Healy? Silly Billy, right? That's what he's meant to have said. You silly Billy. Didn't say it. It was Mike Yarwood who did impersonations of him who first brought in Silly Billy because he was actually very, very funny in his insults.

16:13And it was only after Mike Yarwood did it that the substantially eyebrowed Dennis Healy took it on and made it his own and then became famous to Silly Billy. Wasn't his phrase. Anyway, ats and aside, but Tony Benn, another Labour MP, wrote in his diary on this day. It is impossible to see how this can end without far graver disasters. And what is what is going on in America? Are they also thinking of far graver disasters, Alex? They are absolutely furious. Eisenhower is livid about this. I mean, there are stories about, you know, they're sort of wonderfully discreet, I think, in a way that actually some of the British diaries aren't.

16:53But they sort of said, you know, the White House rang with barracks from language not heard since the era of General Grant. I mean, so you can only imagine the effing and blinding that was going on about Britain at this point. Shouts of perfidious Albion, this sort of thing. You know, there was a deep sense of betrayal. What was Eisenhower's attitude about the British in general? I mean, was he during the Second World War? Was he pro-British and this was a break from his usual? Or was he always pretty cynical about British motives? No, Eisenhower was pretty pro-British. He liked Churchill, yeah.

17:26Yeah, he liked Churchill. he kind of, well, mostly, I mean, he was quite irritated by Churchill at points, but everybody was quite irritated by Churchill at points. I mean, this is sort of quite normal. Even his wife and children, yes, indeed. Especially his wife and children. You know, but I mean, definitely, I think Eisenhower always saw the British and he kind of said, you know, look, the British are always by my right hand, you know, they're a really important ally, but this was just way too far. And it was a huge betrayal of that kind of what was previously considered the special relationship, this idea, which, you know, between kind of Eisenhower and Churchill and so on, it seemed quite convincing.

18:02This sort of genuine friendship, you know, suddenly looked like complete nonsense. Also a break with this new spirit of the age. The United Nations had just been formed. We had our special episode with Thant about the early days of the United Nations. And this is meant to be a new era. And there's been so much rhetoric on all sides saying that, you know, the age of imperialism is over, the British have left India. And here we are with the British sort of doing Clive in India stuff all over again in 1956. Exactly. And I mean, and also just not telling the Americans and, you know, becoming quite clear quite quickly that in fact, they've been lying to the Americans for months.

18:38You can sort of see Eden sort of in his superiority thinking, oh, we'll sort out the Americans later. But he does have to come face to face with Her Majesty the Queen. Now, this has been portrayed a couple of times in film and television adaptation. And I am absolutely dying to know how accurate those are because certainly in those televisual portrayals, homage is not amused at all. A chilly reception. So just tell me what happens. Oh, glacial, one might say. So just tell us the truth behind what happened as far as we know, Alex. How did that go, that meeting with the Queen that happens? By the way, if you don't know, in Britain, there is a weekly sit down between the Prime Minister and the monarch where the Prime Minister, and it lasts about 15 minutes, two chairs opposite each other where the prime minister of the day will inform their majesties, whoever they might be at the time, what is going on, what her majesty or his majesty's government is doing and what they're thinking.

19:34And that conversation where she had no idea would have been hashtag orcs, I'm thinking. Go on, Alex, what was it? Well, I mean, the thing is, like, For the reasons you said, we actually don't know because there is a tradition of complete confidentiality between monarch and prime minister. There are records of those meetings which are not subject to the Official Secrets Act, are never declassified, are not publicly available. Really? They're specifically excluded? All royal papers are, yes. So they're all kept within the royal archive and you can only access them if they let you, which is very much on their gift.

20:13Doesn't matter whether they date back to Elizabeth I, that's still the case. So we don't know particularly. What we do know is the gossip from the Queen's private secretary who wrote about it. Martin Charters wrote about it quite a bit, who was her private secretary at the time. As depicted in the crown, brilliantly. Absolutely. Depicted in the crown, depicted elsewhere. So we know some from him. We know some from Lord Mountbatten, who was the Queen's cousin and was also a very senior British military leader at this point. And basically, he was always kind of talking to the Queen. They had a very close relationship.

20:47And Mountbatten was never shy to let royal gossip slip from his lips. Very gossipy. I mean, what Charter said is that Mountbatten was talking to her. He said he was typically devious, is what Charter says, that he was saying things like, I think they're being absolutely lunatic. He didn't mean her to sort of then immediately go and repeat that to Eden. He's just kind of trying to put these thoughts in her head, basically. We don't know whether she did directly. What we do know, what Charter said, at least, if we believe him, is I think the Queen believed Eden was mad. When he came for his weekly meetings with the Queen, he ranged up and down and wouldn't sit still.

21:27He was edgy, jumpy. And what we do know, a small piece of information we do have, because this was very unusual, is that she requested on that first day, 30th of October, when this kicks off, she requested top secret daily reports on the progress of military operations and intelligence to be delivered to her from the next day. And those would continue to be delivered daily till the 22nd of November. You can read those briefings in the British National Archives. So that's very unusual that she would have done that. We should say at this point that Eden is about twice the Queen's age. She's just about 30 and he's coming on for 60 at this point.

22:05Yes. And I mean, I think, you know, it's worth bearing that in mind that like whatever passed there, you know, she's really still a very young woman and very much kind of at the beginning of her reign. Uncle Dickie probably leaning on her off camera a bit and saying these people are all nuts and her trying to conduct herself. I mean, I think, you know, the thing we do know about her personality is she was deeply concerned with duty and with kind of conducting things in a very correct way, trying to hold it together while Eden's being basically pretty loopy in front of her and jumping up and down like a maniac and kind of saying these things.

22:35that she knows aren't true. I mean, lying to her. Yeah, she believes in order and she believes in, you know, sort of not the, we don't have a written constitution, but the unwritten constitution, which is if you're going to do something this big, you tell parliament, you ask parliament, you get parliament behind you. This is not a monarchy or a dictatorship. And certainly the monarch is not about to be replaced by Anthony Eden, who suddenly on a whim decides to do something this big. So one can imagine that all that we know of Queen Elizabeth, The second is that she would have been pretty pissed off because all of this flies in the face of everything that she knows is duty to the country.

23:14How does Nasser react to this at the same time? Is he immediately on to what's going on? Does he correctly deduce this to be a ruse? Well, it starts to become apparent very quickly. And actually, NASA doesn't really believe this can be happening. He's so - It's so probable. Completely shocked, yes, by this happening, that he sort of doesn't really believe it. And I mean, you know, they can see that there are British planes flying over, they can see what's happening. And they quickly realise, I mean, the first problem here is very, very quickly. So, I mean, after the ultimatum, for instance, the Egyptian ship Ibrahim El-Oal, which in fact used to be HMS Cottesmore, but Britain sold it to Egypt, so was an ex-British ship, was shelling Haifa in Israel.

23:58And what happened straight away, and this is still within the 12-hour ultimatum, about 3 a.m., is that Israel fought back, but so did a French ship, intervened on the part of Israel, captured this Egyptian ship, sailed it into Israel. So the French had already broken the ultimatum, even though it was only 12 hours. And the pretense of neutrality. Yeah, neutrality was gone. They were already intervening very clearly on the side of Israel. So Nasser could see this happening and he's going, what the hell is going on? What is happening here? This is just absolutely baffling. I mean, I know what it looks like, but surely not, right?

24:32Surely not. They wouldn't do it. They wouldn't do it. They sure they couldn't do it. Not in this day and age, not after the Second World War, he may be thinking. However, if you needed a little more convincing, a snowstorm will be thicket because both the British and French embassies in Cairo start destroying all their documents. I mean, just indiscriminately, the equivalent of Tesco receipts, parking tickets and communiques all go into a furnace. And it's described, I mean, you do it beautifully, that, you know, this sort of light flutter of ash that lands outside. Now, if you've got sort of neutral countries who are supposedly policing a volatile situation they probably wouldn't be burning documents in this way.