America's Great Game (37 page)

But perhaps most worrisome of all for ALPHA’s planners were unmistakable signs that Nasser himself, the Arab hero on whom their hopes for peace were pinned, was not acting according to his script. The Gaza raid and the Baghdad Pact were both blatant provocations, and it was understandable that the Egyptian should have been in a prickly mood in early 1955. Yet something else about his demeanor that spring was even more disquieting: a new determination to forge an independent course of his own.

FOURTEEN

Crypto-Diplomacy

“HE IS VERY GOOD AT chess,”
‘Abdel Hakim ‘Amer, Nasser’s friend and army chief of staff, told a
Time
reporter in 1955. “If he tries to win, he does. He is a fox. It’s never easy to know his intentions.” As Nasser consolidated his hold on power, the imagery of courtship and marriage that had previously characterized US-Egyptian relations, and in particular the relationship between the Free Officers and the CIA Arabists, was being replaced by gaming metaphors. This was perhaps not surprising, given the extent to which the British imperial narrative of the Great Game spilled over into the American encounter with the Middle East during the first years of the Cold War. However, the rules of the game were changing. Whereas previously British and Russian spies had, at least according to the logic of the Great Game, faced each other across a central Asian game board of passive chess pieces, now the game was growing more complicated and difficult, with local players starting to make moves of their own. Of course, the colonized peoples of Asia had long nursed nationalist aspirations, and these had eventually proved far more dangerous to the British Empire than Russian imperialism, in either its czarist or its Bolshevik incarnations, ever did. But this was not the lesson taught by Kipling: in
Kim
, the conspiracy threatening the Raj
comes from without; of Indian resistance to British rule, there is no hint whatsoever.
¹

The issue that eventually ended the honeymoon period in the CIA Arabists’ relationship with the Free Officers was a surprising one, considering how important military assistance would later become as an adhesive in US-Egyptian relations. Despite repeated attempts, Washington and Cairo proved unable to agree on the terms of a deal that would provide Nasser with arms to protect Egypt’s new government from possible threats, both internal and external, thereby leaving the door open to deals with other powers. As before, during the Anglo-Egyptian dispute over the Suez base, Kim Roosevelt and his assistant Miles Copeland were called in to solve the problem by using their CIA back channels to broker an agreement in secret. In this instance, however, CIA “crypto-diplomacy,” as Miles called it, did not work. Indeed, if anything, it aggravated the situation, mixing up the messages that Washington was sending Cairo through regular diplomatic channels. Ironically, the ultimate effect was to strengthen Nasser’s position—but not in a way intended by the Arabists.
²

THE INITIAL PROSPECTS FOR A
US-Egyptian arms deal had seemed favorable enough. Nasser badly needed equipment for his armed forces, not just to defend Egypt against its external enemies but, no less importantly, to boost officer morale so as to proof himself against further military coups. On the American side, John Foster Dulles had already hinted at the possibility of military assistance by presenting General Naguib with a brace of pistols when he visited Cairo in May 1953, and other US officials had bandied around various dollar sums. The trouble was that any major appropriations for arms for Egypt were bound to run into resistance in Congress from American supporters of Israel and economic isolationists, while also likely arousing British fears of US-supplied weapons being turned against the Suez canal base before its final evacuation in 1956 (Winston Churchill was reportedly furious about Foster Dulles’s gift to Naguib). For his part, Nasser strongly objected to requirements in the US legislation governing foreign military aid, the Mutual Assistance Program, that he sign a security pact with the United States and admit American military advisors to Egypt. After their experience with the British, Egyptians did not want uniformed Western officers on their soil again.

After a series of meetings in Cairo and Washington in late 1954, Kim Roosevelt came up with a plan. As a reward for signing off on the Suez treaty, the Egyptian government was to receive $40 million of economic aid for infrastructure improvements, a fraction of what had originally been implied, but with the tacit promise of more to come in the future. Of that sum, $5 million would be secret Defense Department money earmarked for the purchase of military equipment, thus circumventing the requirement for advisors. In addition to the public gift of $40 million, a further, nonattributed payment of $3 million would be made from the president’s executive budget directly to Nasser himself so that he could buy such morale-building items as new army uniforms, again without the need for any overt US involvement. Nonetheless, two Pentagon negotiators in civilian clothing would be dispatched to Cairo to agree on how the disguised $5 million of military aid was to be spent.

The Pentagon mission duly arrived in Cairo in November 1954 and met with leaders of the Revolutionary Command Council in the guesthouse occupied by Hassan Tuhami next to the Copeland villa in Maadi. Although the mood of these meetings was friendly, even convivial in a gruff, soldierly way, it soon became clear that Kim’s plan had failed to resolve the underlying problems in US-Egyptian relations. “Colonel Abd-el-Nasr [
sic
] explained, for the thousandth time, . . . why he could not accept military aid unless we could conceal the fact that it was grant aid,” Miles reported to Kim. “The Pentagon officials, in their turn, explained why we could not give aid unless Egypt would agree to certain minimum terms and that, moreover, we would find it extremely difficult to keep this fact secret.” The gap between the two sides grew even wider when, in a turn reminiscent of the May 1953 meeting between Foster Dulles and Nasser, the conversation focused on regional defense issues, with the Pentagon representatives insisting on the need for collective security pacts to ward off Soviet adventurism and the Egyptians, rather bemusedly, pointing out that the more likely source of attack on their country came from across its border with Israel.
³

Nor were these the only sources of US-Egyptian misunderstanding. Kim regarded the $3 million direct grant to Nasser as a very generous gesture. As he explained to Miles, “we have no funds for ‘foreign aid’ in the first place, and in the second place our budget is figured on an extremely tight basis.” Moreover, simply getting the money to the Egyptian leader proved a challenge. Issued by the CIA’s regional finance office in Beirut, the cash was then smuggled in the diplomatic pouch to
Cairo. There it was transferred to two suitcases by Miles, transported along the bumpy road to Maadi jostling against some groceries of Lorraine’s, counted in the presence of Hassan Tuhami ($10 was missing), and eventually driven in Tuhami’s Mercedes to Nasser’s home on the other side of the Nile.
⁴

Far from being gratified by all this trouble, however, Nasser was offended by the gift, interpreting it as a crude Western attempt to bribe a supposedly venal Oriental. When word of this response reached Kim back in Washington, it was his turn to react angrily. “We have made every effort to understand the Egyptian position but we are doubting that they are making any effort whatsoever to understand ours,” he wrote Miles. “They have gotten some things from us, but we have gotten
nothing
from them.” Nasser, meanwhile, had decided what to do with the perceived bribe. Instead of military hardware, he ordered the money to be spent on a public monument of considerable ostentation and questionable taste: a great concrete tower on Gezira Island in the center of Cairo, rising up in vertical, silent reproach to his would-be American corrupters. The Cairo Tower, which still looms above the city’s skyline today, was referred to within Nasser’s circle as
el wa‘ef rusfel
or “Roosevelt’s foundation.” Wags at the CIA, however, chose to translate the Arabic as “Roosevelt’s erection” and began calling it instead “Nasser’s prick.”
⁵

The language indicated a clash of masculine wills developing between Kim and his putative Egyptian protégé. Nonetheless, the CIA Arabist continued to back Nasser in Washington, and the prospects for an arms deal appeared to brighten briefly as 1954 turned into 1955. Miles carried on his meetings with “Angrylion” (his code name for Tuhami)—“‘We must never give up hope,’ Angrylion always says,” Miles told Kim—and took advantage of a trip home to present the Free Officers’ perspective on the issue to a joint State-CIA meeting in John Foster Dulles’s office. The launch of ALPHA and accompanying arrival in Cairo of US ambassador and Arab sympathizer Henry Byroade seemed to promise a new phase of US-Egyptian cooperation. Most important, the pressure on Nasser to acquire arms increased suddenly in February 1955 with the twin shocks of the Baghdad Pact and the Gaza raid. Now military assistance was desirable not just for psychological reasons: the Egyptian government had to have the means to defend its citizens against further attacks from Israel and to keep up with its Arab rivals. As if to reinforce the Egyptian feeling of defenselessness, Israeli warplanes were appearing
regularly in the skies over Cairo. Sitting outside with Miles during one of the noisy overflights, Nasser complained, “I have to sit here and take this—and your government won’t give me arms.”
⁶

Unfortunately for the CIA Arabists, an even more important effect of the Gaza raid and Baghdad Pact was to foster a growing sense of disillusionment with America in Nasser’s circle. Not only did the Free Officers suspect the Americans of conniving in the British effort to build up the Northern Tier, they also began to doubt the sincerity of the Eisenhower administration’s policy of friendly impartiality, even speculating about a possible US hand in the border incidents that continued to trouble Egyptian-Israeli relations. Far from allaying such concerns, the CIA’s extensive penetration of the Egyptian government now served only to strengthen them. Was Kim Roosevelt plotting to install a new, more biddable pasha in Cairo, just as he had in Iran in 1953? Despite his soon establishing warm personal relations with Nasser, the new ambassador, Henry Byroade, was badly hampered by these suspicions, having to spend much of his time with the Egyptian leader reassuring him that US embassy officials were not spreading rumors against him. With the Cairo air thick with conspiracy theory, Byroade got short shrift when, as instructed by Foster Dulles, he attempted to link the promise of American military assistance with progress in Arab-Israeli peace talks. If anything, this crude bargaining ploy only served to turn the Egyptians against ALPHA.
⁷

Nasser had sought US support as he strove to rid his country of the British imperialists for a number of reasons, among them America’s anticolonial origins and nonimperial history in the Middle East; the unstuffy friendliness of its representatives in Cairo, young men like William Lakeland and Miles Copeland; even the seductive appeal of its popular culture. This did not mean, however, that he was prepared to go along with measures that he perceived as likely to turn Egypt into a US satellite. “Nuri Pasha may be willing to make his decisions on a basis of whether or not they fit your world strategy,” Nasser once explained to Miles, referring to Iraq’s pro-Western prime minister. “I intend to . . . make my decisions only on a basis of what’s good for Egypt.” The same applied to the regional role Nasser was expected to play now that he had consolidated his domestic base. “A strong and independent Egypt could take the lead . . . towards Arab unity,” he went on to tell Miles, but only if that unity was “meaningful,” not the kind “which the British and
Secretary Dulles [speak] of in connection with military alliances, and with an outdated, Lawrence of Arabia . . . understanding of the Arab mentality.”
⁸

Nasser’s growing sense of his own importance as a national and regional figure was strengthened by his attendance at the conference of nonaligned nations that took place in April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, where he was acclaimed as a great future leader of the postcolonial world. If the CIA Arabists were unnerved by these developments, John Foster Dulles was appalled: in his view, anything other than whole-hearted support for the United States in its crusade against communist atheism was an offense against God. But Bandung was significant for another reason: it was the first occasion on which the CIA picked up signals that Nasser was talking with communists (in this particular instance, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai) about a possible arms deal. In fact, Free Officers such as Hassan Tuhami had already been meeting with Soviet officials, in both Cairo and Moscow, for several years, as first Naguib and then Nasser explored alternatives to Western military assistance. By the time of Bandung, with the American avenue apparently closing down and the recent provocations of Gaza and Baghdad, the Egyptians had begun to negotiate in earnest. They found the Soviets in an accommodating mood. Stalin had died in 1953, and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was much more interested than Stalin had been in building the Soviet position in the Third World generally, and the Middle East in particular.
⁹