America's Great Game (38 page)

“We in the CIA kept telling our State Department colleagues that Nasser was going to make this move, simply because as game players we had to admit that it was precisely the move any one of us would have made had we been in his place,” Miles wrote later. With the foreign service insisting that the Egyptian was bluffing, the CIA Arabists made a last effort to salvage the situation themselves. Kim and go-betweens such as Ike’s pastor, Edward Elson, met with Ambassador Hussein in New York; in Cairo, Miles tried to reassure his liaison, “Angrylion” Tuhami, about American intentions (and, if Miles’s later testimony is to be believed, smuggled a lion cub into Egypt as a gift for him). In the summer, it briefly seemed as if a US-Egyptian deal was back on the table—Free Officer ‘Ali Sabri even handed Byroade an arms “shopping list”—but it soon became obvious that Nasser was going through the motions. Byroade, seeing the American position in Cairo collapsing before his
eyes, frantically lobbied Foster Dulles. The moralistic secretary of state, who in July attended an unprecedentedly amicable East-West summit in Switzerland, simply refused to believe talk of a secret Soviet arms deal, explaining (in the somewhat contemptuous recollection of Kim Roosevelt) that such a move would contravene “the spirit of Geneva.” When on September 21, 1955, Byroade confirmed that the Egyptian government had just agreed to take delivery of a consignment of Russian arms, including fighter planes, tanks, and submarines, Dulles was dumbfounded. The communists had leaped over the protective barrier of the Northern Tier right into the heart of the Arab world. Suddenly, ALPHA’s prospects seemed the least of the secretary’s concerns.
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Dulles’s next move was decided in conversation with his undersecretary of state, Herbert Hoover Jr., the son of the former US president and a forbidding, rather irritable man. “H[oover] thinks we should make one further, final try,” read a secretary’s notes. “Apparently there are misunderstandings and difficulties with respect to our man who is there”—Hoover was referring to Ambassador Byroade—“and H. would not feel satisfied we had done everything in our power unless Kim could go himself and talk with [Nasser].” Such a mission carried with it considerable risks: although Kim “could move without its being picked up,” Hoover reckoned, there might well be “an explosion on the part of our man there”—in other words, a confrontation between the CIA officer and the ambassador. However, if Byroade was recalled to Washington, this would be widely interpreted as a sign that the State Department had lost confidence in him. “We have to weigh what [Kim] can do as against discrediting . . . our own ambassador,” reflected Dulles. In the end, the decision was taken to “leave him there and shoot this boy out,” as Hoover put it—to take the risk of sending Roosevelt without recalling Byroade. Kim was called back from a family vacation in Nantucket and instructed by Dulles to “Go and tell your friend [Nasser] this would be a foolish thing to do.” Kim later claimed that both he and Allen Dulles thought the mission futile—the latter reportedly told his brother, “if he goes, he goes for you, not for me”—but there is no contemporary evidence of such a disagreement.
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Accompanied by his sidekick Miles Copeland, Kim Roosevelt arrived in Cairo on Friday, September 23, 1955. It was Miles’s first time back in Egypt since July, when his sabbatical with Booz, Allen & Hamilton had ended and he had returned to Washington to work in CIA
headquarters. The two men were collected from the airport and whisked straight to the Revolutionary Command Council headquarters and the Egyptian prime minister’s second-story private quarters. “Nasser was in a teasing, ‘I told you so’ mood,” Miles wrote later, “very cheerful and all set to enjoy hearing the famous Roosevelt persuasion grapple with his own unanswerable arguments.” The precise content and sequence of the discussions that followed are not completely clear: accounts by Nasser’s journalist friend Muhammad Haikal differ from American sources in claiming that Roosevelt did try to dissuade Nasser from dealing with the Soviets and that the Egyptian leader rebuffed the CIA man. That said, official US records back up Miles Copeland’s claim that Kim, having accepted the deal as a fait accompli, then made a clever play to soften its impact (and give a boost to ALPHA) by suggesting to Nasser that he announce that the arms were intended purely for defensive purposes and that, with its borders secure, Egypt would be in a better position to reach a peace settlement with Israel. According to a cable sent from the Cairo US embassy on Monday, September 26, probably by Kim and Miles, Nasser “drew [the] line at making [an] outright conciliatory gesture . . . but agreed to go along with [the] suggestion to issue [a] public statement . . . stating [his] desire [to] discuss directly with Secretary Dulles concrete steps to reduce Arab-Israeli tensions.” Although the Egyptian prime minister wanted it to be understood that he was “not a stooge,” he was “willing [to] follow our advice to [the] extent such advice made sense to him.”
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This agreement came in the course of a three-and-a-half-hour meeting in Nasser’s RCC apartment that seemed to augur a dramatic recovery of the American position in Cairo—“a bold new era of friendship and economic development,” as Miles put it. The high point of the evening came when, just after the prime minister had produced the bottle of Scotch he kept for Western visitors, the telephone rang. The British ambassador, Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, had gotten wind of the arms deal and was requesting an urgent meeting with Nasser. While the Egyptian and his American companions watched from a window as Trevelyan’s Bentley pulled out of the British embassy compound and made the short journey across the Nile to RCC headquarters, they discussed what Nasser should tell him. Kim suggested that he stress the literal truth that the arms were being shipped not from the Soviet Union but from Czechoslovakia, the same nation that had in the past supplied Israel.
(Whether this means that Kim invented the concept of the “Czech arms deal,” as was later claimed, is doubtful: the ruse had already been suggested to Nasser by the Soviet ambassador to Egypt.) The prime minister, his mind possibly going back to the moment in 1942 when Trevelyan’s predecessor, Sir Miles Lampson, had deliberately humiliated King Farouk in his palace, descended to receive the ambassador. Kim and Miles, meanwhile, stayed in his private quarters, nursing the whiskey. The meeting was brief, Trevelyan issuing a warning from Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan that the deal could “not be allowed to go on,” and Nasser stating simply that there was now no going back on it—few echoes here of Lampson and Farouk. After Trevelyan had left disconsolately, Miles’s old associate Zakaria Mohieddin and Chief of Staff ‘Abdel Hakim ‘Amer arrived to take Nasser and the CIA men off to a dinner hosted by Kim’s friend Ambassador Hussein, who was in Cairo on leave. The atmosphere by now was positively lighthearted, with the Egyptians imagining the expression on Trevelyan’s face had the Americans come downstairs to ask Nasser for some soda to mix with their drinks. What better way to bond than over the mocking of a British ambassador, and a knight of the realm to boot?
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But then the mood of the evening changed dramatically. Waiting at the dinner party were three other Americans—CIA station chief James Eichelberger, the businessman and special presidential representative Eric A. Johnston, and Hank Byroade. The US ambassador was in a bad way. From the moment he had arrived in Cairo, his mission had been undermined by misunderstandings with Nasser, lack of support from Washington, and suspicions about the activities of the CIA. Rumors had also begun to circulate about his personal life, that he was hitting the bottle and “skirt-chasing.” Earlier that day, Byroade had learned that a member of his embassy staff, the labor attaché, had been subjected to a brutal beating by a mob in Ismailia, probably because he was suspected of spying. Now, having had no intimation that Kim Roosevelt was even in Egypt, the ambassador was treated to the sight of the senior CIA officer walking into the room arm in arm with the prime minister, laughing at some private joke. Miles Copeland and Muhammad Haikal both described what happened next. After silently brooding over his whiskey, Byroade snapped. Interrupting a rambling anecdote by Johnston, he “launched into a tirade against the ‘Egyptian police state’” that ended with the words, “I thought we were in a civilized country.”
Nasser stubbed out his cigarette, turned to his fellow Egyptians with the words “Let’s go,” and stalked out.
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It was a calamitous performance by Byroade, and he regretted it instantly, the next morning enlisting both Miles Copeland and Haikal in an effort to appease Nasser. Meanwhile, Kim, assisted by Johnston, was reporting the whole incident to Washington, suggesting that perhaps the ambassador “needed a rest.” As Miles explained to Eichelberger, Byroade’s rant threatened to undo Kim’s good work of turning the arms deal to American advantage by linking it with the cause of Arab-Israeli peace. When Byroade learned that Kim and Johnston were using his embassy’s facilities to cable the State Department urging his recall, he was incandescent, yelling down the phone at Kim: “If you don’t bring that goddamn cable here I’m coming over with my Marine guard.” Egyptians with some inkling of these events were greatly amused. “Intrigue and rivalries among the Americans in Cairo had . . . reached an almost Byzantine pitch,” recalled Haikal.
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The plot was about to grow even more convoluted. Dwight Eisenhower had suffered a heart attack on September 24, leaving the Dulles brothers in complete charge of US foreign policy while he recovered. In New York City two days later for the opening of the UN General Assembly, the secretary of state met with his UK counterpart, Foreign Secretary Macmillan, who was furious about the nerve of the upstart Nasser. “Dulles and H[arold] M[acmillan] got more and more worked up against the prospects of a Soviet arms deal with Egypt as they warmed to the subject,” recorded London’s point man on ALPHA, Evelyn Shuckburgh. “We could make life impossible for Nasser and ultimately bring about his fall by various pressures,” ruminated Macmillan, the first recorded time the British had aired such a possibility before an American. With his brother Allen and trusted Middle Eastern lieutenant Kim Roosevelt still behind the Egyptian leader—“Our conviction . . . is that Nas[se]r remains our best, if not our only, hope here,” declared the CIA cable from Cairo of September 26—Foster was not ready yet to entertain such talk seriously. He was, however, persuaded of the need for some sort of reprimand, especially after the public announcement of the arms deal came on September 27 sans the passage about peace with the Israelis, confirming the failure of the Roosevelt/Copeland mission and generating a wave of nationalist excitement around the Arab world. George Allen, Byroade’s successor as assistant secretary for Near East
affairs, was delegated with the task of writing a stern message to Nasser. But now the secretary of state faced another problem: how to deliver the note given that his ambassador in Egypt was, according to Roosevelt and Johnston, persona non grata with the Egyptian leader? The solution was decided in conversation with Herbert Hoover: Dulles would send George Allen to Cairo so that he could hand over the message personally. The assistant secretary was duly placed on board a Pentagon transport plane and arrived in Egypt the morning of Friday, September 30.
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Now the American handling of the Soviet-Egyptian arms deal descended into farce. The Associated Press had reported that a high-ranking US official was on his way to deliver an ultimatum to Nasser. Enraged at the prospect of being treated like some colonial satrap, the Egyptian premier told Kim that, if the story proved true, “he would ring the bell on his desk and have the Chief Chamberlain of the Presidency show the American out.” After explaining to Washington that it was “most important not to put [Nasser] on the public spot,” Kim scrambled to warn Allen himself not to tangle with the Egyptian leader. As the State Department official was preparing to exit his plane, Henry Byroade rushed through the crowd of waiting reporters and bounded up the aircraft steps. “If you say anything about an ultimatum,” he warned Allen, “your ass is out of here right now.” Then, while the two Americans were getting ready to descend together, up came an Egyptian messenger (Hassan Tuhami, according to Miles Copeland) with a note stating, “Advise extreme caution in whatever y[ou] say. Kim.” By now, Allen had presumably gotten the message.
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After running the gauntlet of crowds of reporters and protestors chanting anti-American slogans, Allen arrived at the American embassy, where in a hastily convened meeting he discussed his next step with Kim, Miles, Johnston, and Byroade. Assuming he got to see Nasser—by no means a certainty, as the Egyptian leader was currently refusing him an appointment—what was he to do with Dulles’s letter, which, if Nasser saw it, might very well cause him to break off diplomatic relations with the United States? Perhaps he could simply rip it up, suggested Johnston. No, said Allen, he had his orders. Eventually, after a discussion Miles Copeland recalled as “one confused rumble,” it was decided that, rather than handing it over, Allen would read the message aloud to Nasser, possibly mumbling during the most objectionable passages. Kim, by now thoroughly disgusted with the whole affair, left to play tennis.
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Nasser relented the next day and agreed to see both Allen and Byroade, the latter for the first time since the fateful dinner party (Kim later claimed credit for engineering the meeting). The prime minister smiled his forgiveness at the ambassador, Allen recited the message, concealing the fact that it was a personal letter from Dulles, and Nasser used the opportunity to recount the unhappy history of Egypt’s efforts to obtain American arms, concluding “that, in all frankness, he had the conviction that U.S. Government was trying to keep Egypt weak, and that this resulted from Jewish influence in U.S.” Overall, the meeting was surprisingly friendly—Allen’s report to Washington was noticeably sympathetic to the Egyptian leader, suggesting that yet another American visitor had fallen under his spell—and the special emissary left Cairo a few days later having at least averted a complete breakdown in US-Egyptian relations. Still, from the US point of view, there was very little else to show for “Allen’s lost weekend,” as Miles Copeland took to calling it.
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