John Foster Dulles and the Suez Crisis of 1956: a fifty year perspective.

• Author: Matthews, John P.C.

As the United States continues to struggle with what has become its first "tar baby" of the twenty-first century, the Middle East, it may be instructive to look back at a crisis that took place there precisely fifty years ago: the Suez crisis of 1956, and to measure our progress, or lack of it, in dealing with the area today. Though today's crisis is quite different, there are some striking similarities in both our attitude and approach to the inhabitants of this area then and now.

More than any other man alive at that time our Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, had helped to bring on both the Hungarian and Suez crises of that year. He helped to foment the former by loudly proclaiming his policy of "liberation" for the countries of Eastern Europe and "rollback of the Iron Curtain." He helped to precipitate the latter by his sudden reneging on the American pledge to provide funds, along with Britain and the World Bank, to build Nasser's Aswan Dam. Dulles felt little responsibility for the first crisis. The crisis over the Suez Canal, however, he felt was far more important and dangerous to world peace and thus he devoted most of his time and energy toward solving it. Britain and France were much more heavily involved then than they are today. In examining the origins and development of that crisis, however, this article concentrates on the U. S. role, which boils down largely to that of John Foster Dulles.

From the beginning of the Eisenhower administration in early 1953, Dulles had sought to restore a greater measure of evenhandedness in American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, which he felt Truman had tilted too much toward Israel. Dulles, a devout Christian, harbored a secret desire to be the man who brought peace to the Holy Land. Like most Americans, he was not about to accept the fact that the conflict was too deep for evenhanded compromise.

Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser had come to power not long after the abdication of the British puppet ruler, King Farouk, in 1952. Britain had concluded an agreement with the newly independent Egypt on July 24, 1954, that allowed for the gradual withdrawal of British troops from its base at Suez, ending in the summer of 1956, by which time the last vestige of colonialism would be dismantled.

Both the Baghdad Pact, which Nasser feared and detested, and an unexpected Israeli raid made the Colonel feel particularly vulnerable. Egypt needed more arms to protect itself. Reluctant to turn to his previous overlords, he called in U. S. Ambassador Henry Byroade on March 10 and presented him with a list of arms he felt he required and hoped to buy from the U. S. When Eisenhower saw the list he called it "peanuts." But no prompt action was taken. There was Zionist opposition in the U. S. Congress, as well as reluctance to displease the British. And there was also Dulles' well-known prejudice against rewarding neutralists. In Dulles' lexicon "neutralism" was not a viable political status; he regarded it as a morally untenable position. There was something suspect, unstable, dishonest, and even sinful about neutrality. The request was treated routinely and put into the bureaucratic maw. (1-)

Nevertheless, in early May, Ambassador Byroade was able to tell Nasser that his request had been approved, though due to Dulles' dim view of the Egyptian economy, it was to be "cash on the barrel" payment and not barter goods. Dulles had guessed correctly, for Nasser replied that the price of $27 million would put too great a stress on Egypt's foreign exchange reserves. With some reluctance Nasser now turned to the Soviets on May 18th.

The Soviets soon assured Nasser that they would be willing to sell him arms on a barter basis, and Nasser, in turn, went to Ambassador Byroade on June 9th and told him that he had "tentative agreements" with the Soviets, but that he would much prefer to buy his arms from the United States. (2-) As proof of this he submitted a much pared-down list amounting to less that ten million dollars worth of armaments for which he would pay cash. On June 19, Nasser again told Byroade that he was still hoping to buy arms from the United States and had postponed his military mission to Moscow in hopes of being able to do so. He preferred not to have to go through with investigating the Soviet offer. (3-) Dulles felt Nasser was just trying to blackmail Washington into better terms; he knew enough, he thought, about the state of the Soviet economy to realize that the Soviet offer was just so much hot air. Even when U. S. intelligence came up with specifics of the Soviet offer, which ranged from ninety to 200 million dollars worth of arms, Dulles refused to believe the evidence.

Meanwhile, Israeli attacks and Egyptian counter-attacks grew more frequent and bloody over the summer, bringing more and more Soviet "salesmen' to Egypt. On August 26, Dulles gave a major speech offering to overcome what he saw as the three main obstacles to peace:

1. The tragic plight of 900,000 Arab refugees,

2. The "pall of fear" of Israeli expansion and eventual Arab retaliation, and

3. The lack of fixed, permanent boundaries.

This last was anathema to Ben-Gurion and he promptly rejected any thought of territorial compromise. The Arabs greeted Dulles' offer with silence. (4-)

Nasser had a dream: to build a high dam south of Aswan on the Nile, which, it was hoped, would end forever Egypt's grinding poverty. It was a mammoth project and the keystone of his popularity. By the energy generated by that dam and the irrigation that it would make possible, Egypt, he said, would be reborn and recapture the greatness of its ancient past. But it would take time and a lot of money, which the nation lacked. As the then chancellor of the British Exchequer, Harold MacMillan, later wrote in his memoirs: "Eden and I agreed with Dulles to help Egypt in the ambitious scheme." (5-) This involved not just money from Britain and America, but loans from the World Bank, as well as surveys, which the Bank had begin in 1954.

Now in early September 1955, West German, British, and French companies formed and announced a consortium to bid for the construction contract of the High Dam. (6-)

In the United States it took his brother, Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA, to convince Foster Dulles that the Soviets were entirely serious about selling arms to Egypt. The Department of State, much to its dismay, now discovered that Nasser's request of June 30th had never even been acknowledged. "Oh well," said Dulles, "it doesn't really matter since his offer was surely a bluff--the Soviets just don't have that kind of surplus to sell or give away." (7-)

Nevertheless, Kermit Roosevelt, a high-ranking CIA official who knew and was liked by Nasser, was dispatched to try to persuade Nasser not to go through with the Soviet deal. He was too late.

On the 27th of September 1955, the announcement was made in Cairo. The size and terms of the deal were breathtaking: 200 MiG-15 fighter planes, fifty Ilyshin bombers, sixty half tracks equipped with 122 mm cannons, 275 T-34 tanks. Not until the following January did Israeli intelligence discover that the actual numbers were far larger. (8-)

Dulles, through his contemptuous attitude toward the upstart "neutral" Nasser, and his conviction that the Soviet economy could not possibly produce what Nasser needed, had, as Townsend Hoopes was later to write, "brought the Soviet Union into the Middle East--a move that destroyed, at one stroke, the main objective of Dulles' Middle East policy and the principal reason he had labored to establish the 'northern tier' barrier. The penetration, moreover, was clothed in irony, for it had been achieved not through dramatic aggression or subversion, but on the invitation of a local government and through a conventional instrumentality (a military assistance program) with respect to which the West had assumed it enjoyed a monopoly position." (9-)

Russia's penetration into the Middle East led the French to increase immediately their arms shipments to Israel, where the warlike faction, previously forced out, was thus able to recapture the premiership from Moshe Sharett in November. Thereupon Ben-Gurion began his plans for invading the Sinai and seizing the strongpoint at the Strait of Tiran so that Israeli shipping need not go through the Suez Canal.

--Three days before Nasser's announcement of the deal, President Eisenhower had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. With American foreign policy on hold for the next two months it was actually the Russians who first made a formal offer to build Nasser's dam. Nasser politely turned the offer aside, saying he was already dealing with the World Bank and a western consortium, so could not consider it. Indeed, Nasser had realized, when he began his plans for the Aswan High Dam, that his entire economy would be tied up for years with whoever provided the money. He much preferred the World Bank and a variety of western sources to putting his economy at the mercy of Soviet Russia. The Egyptian ambassador in Washington, Ahmed Hussein, as pro-American as any foreigner could be, called on Dulles on October 17 to assure him that Egypt much preferred U. S. aid in building the dam to Russia's, despite the latter's easier terms. Three days later the Department of State let it be known that the U. S. was ready to help with the high dam. (10-)

The Western offer was announced in Washington on December 16, 1955. The United States was to contribute $56 million and the British $14 million for a total of $70 for the first stage. The World Bank's share was to be a loan of $200 million, but this was predicated on the Anglo-American grant being raised to match it in later stages. The total western grants thus came to $400 million, against which the Egyptians themselves would be paying more than double this amount. There were certain conditions, both from the World Bank and from the two allies, attached to these...