The British, French and Israelis shared the same enemy. An Israeli, Shimon Peres, protégé of Ben-Gurion, born Szymon Perski in Poland before arriving in Palestine in 1934, a master negotiator with a poetical streak, was already buying French weapons. ‘I was seduced by the French, nation of seduction,’ he told this author. ‘To me, a rough kibbutznik, Paris was the most beautiful city of dreams and literature.’ The US had refused to sell arms to Israel; France supplied them.
Now in Sèvres, Ben-Gurion, accompanied by his one-eyed chief of staff Moshe Dayan and Peres, secretly agreed with the French premier Guy Mollet and the British foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd to kill several birds with one stone: in an operation appropriately codenamed Musketeer, Israel would attack Egypt, whereupon France and Britain would intervene to impose peace. Within the secret Sèvres negotiations lurked a deeper secret. Peres explained that Israel was a tiny new state taking a risk: ‘We need a force of deterrence,’ he said. ‘France can give us this deterrent.’ France agreed. A country eight years old was getting the Bomb, developed at Dimona in the Negev. Peres never admitted that Israel had the Bomb. ‘War and peace are always a dance of the mysteries,’ he told this author, but it changed the balance of power in west Asia.
On 29 October, Ben-Gurion sent his army racing across Sinai; Anglo-French paratroopers seized the Canal; Nasser and his commander Abdel Hakim Amer bickered about the imminent downfall of Egypt. But the plan fell apart: Eden had not consulted Eisenhower, who, fearing that the Arabs would rally to the Soviets, demanded an Anglo-French withdrawal, sparking a run on the pound and the resignation of Eden. Ironically, Khrushchev also demanded their withdrawal, threatening nuclear war if they did not. Suez helped doom the Hungarians and save Khrushchev.
THE MINER AND THE SWIMMER: KHRUSHCHEV AND MAO
On 4 November, Khrushchev ordered Soviet forces to invade Hungary: they killed 10,000 rebels and restored Soviet rule before the capitalists could intervene. Yet his political bungling and drunken jabbering had alarmed his Stalinist comrades, who tried to overthrow him. Khrushchev was rescued by Marshal Zhukov, who flew in regional leaders to back him. But Zhukov was too popular, and Khrushchev soon denounced him for ‘Bonapartism’. Initially self-deprecating, Khrushchev, now both Party secretary and premier, changed into a swaggering autocrat who never stopped talking and believed himself expert on all matters, from literature to science. Now he was ready to break the impasse with the west. ‘Like it or not, history is on our side,’ he told ambassadors after the crushing of Budapest. ‘We will bury you!’ His nuclear threats during Suez had worked: ‘The winner has the strongest nerves.’
Yet he failed to keep the Communist world together. Mao was both horrified by and contemptuous of the cloddish Khrushchev, regarding himself as the paramount Marxist leader. His performance in Korea had demonstrated that China needed nuclear protection; now his shelling of Taiwanese territory provoked a nuclear threat from Eisenhower. ‘In today’s world, if we don’t want to be bullied,’ said Mao in January 1955, ‘we have to have this thing.’ In 1957, Khrushchev started to hand over nuclear technology to Mao, a process that led to the explosion of the Chinese Bomb. ‘If the worst came to the worst [nuclear war], and half of mankind died,’ Mao told the Russians in Moscow, ‘the other half would remain, imperialism razed, and the world would become socialist.’ Khrushchev was aghast. ‘I couldn’t tell if he was joking.’ He was not.
Mao was ungrateful. When Khrushchev requested listening posts on the Chinese coast, Mao reacted so menacingly that the Russian flew to Beijing. In a series of screaming rows, Mao humiliated and mocked him. ‘You’ve talked a long time,’ said Mao, ‘but you still haven’t got to the point,’ then forced him to come swimming where the floundering Russian struggled like a drowning pig to keep up with the Chinese shark. ‘I’m a miner, he’s a prize-winning swimmer,’ said Khrushchev. Mao, noticed his doctor Li Zhisui, ‘was deliberately playing the emperor, treating Khrushchev like a barbarian come to pay tribute.’
Khrushchev realized that Mao was like Stalin: ‘They were the same.’ Human life meant nothing. Challenged from within, Mao now launched a terror that took China out of the world game for a decade. Back in Moscow, the arrogant Khrushchev was scarcely chastened by this setback in Beijing. He backed the production of missiles to catch up with America – using the technology to launch space exploration, in October 1957, sending a satellite, Sputnik, then Laika the dog, the first mammal to orbit the earth (though she was probably already dead), and four years later the Vostok 3KA, in which a cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, orbited and returned. Eisenhower, in response, established NASA to catch up. Khrushchev decided the way to defeat the west was a monumental bluff that would take the world to the edge of cataclysm.
Suez destroyed Eden, but it empowered Nasser. In July 1958, the Egyptian leader’s reach was demonstrated when the Iraq mob played football with the head of the young king Faisal of Iraq …
DISEMBOWELLED IN BAGHDAD: EL RAIS AND THE LAST KING OF IRAQ
Nasser – wildly popular as El Rais, the Boss – threatened western allies, the Saudis of Arabia and the Hashemites of Jordan and Iraq. In Arabia, the founding king, Abdulaziz, died in 1953, choosing as heir, out of his forty-five sons, Saud, unwise and extravagant, who was soon embroiled in a costly war in Yemen against Egyptian troops. Saud and Nasser planned each other’s assassinations. In the Saud family, the brothers removed Saud and put the steely Faisal in control.
The Hashemites were more vulnerable. On 1 February 1958, Nasser and the Syrian president agreed to fuse their states into a single United Arab Republic with Nasser as panjandrum. The Hashemites panicked and planned a united kingdom of Jordan and Iraq, but this British-backed Arab Union was unpopular, especially in Baghdad. Its king Faisal II, a genial twenty-three-year-old, happiest playing cricket at Harrow, was dominated by the Anglophile strongman Nuri al-Said, who had fought with Lawrence of Arabia and been premier fourteen times. The Arab Union accelerated the plot of Iraq’s Free Officers, encouraged and inspired by Nasser.
On 14 July 1958, the night before King Faisal’s wedding, officers led by Abd al-Karim Qasim stormed the Rihab Palace. Faisal surrendered but was forced with his aunt, uncle and mother to stand in the courtyard, where they were machine-gunned down. ‘All I did was remember Palestine,’ said one of the assassins, ‘and the trigger on the machine gun just set itself off.’ The bodies were dragged down al-Rashid Street, stripped, mutilated, beheaded, stomped on, dismembered, gutted and dangled from balconies before being burned.
As the mob stormed his mansion, Premier Nuri escaped in women’s clothes, but his male shoes were spotted and he was shot and buried, only to be exhumed by the mob, emasculated, hanged and driven over repeatedly by buses. Nasser was delighted. The west was shocked, sending troops into Lebanon, while Khrushchev warned against any interference. In neighbouring Jordan, Hussein, now the last Hashemite monarch and surrounded by Nasserist officers, submitted himself to Nasser as Iraq was enveloped in a spiral of extremism. Qasim and his successors struggled to control a Baath (Resurrection) Party, founded in Syria by a Christian, which preached a violent mix of socialism, nationalism and anti-imperialism.
Within five years, in February 1963, the Baathists seized power in Syria and then in Iraq, where the bluff new premier, Colonel Ahmed al-Bakr, used his implacable cousin for special murderous tasks: the thirty-one-year-old Saddam Hussein.
Suez accelerated the African crisis that France and Britain handled very differently. Their vast African empires had existed for only around seventy years, but their power was haemorrhaging. Now France suffered an existential crisis that led to a military coup and the near destruction of democracy.