Suez Crisis 1956
Britain's Three Way Conspiracy With France And Israel
Anthony Eden Wanted President Nasser Murdered As MI6 Plotted Regime Change
In Egypt, Syria, And Saudi Arabia
Http://www.nlpwessex.org/docs/BBCSuez.htm
Multiple British Plots Reported By BBC
Fifty Years After The Event
From Anthony Eden 1956 To Anthony Blair 2003
British Invasions Of Egypt And Iraq
"Four books on Britain's invasion of Suez 50 years ago emphasise how little we have learned... Historical parallels are always dangerous, but as the anniversary books and TV documentaries remind us, the political commentators who kept muttering 'Suez' in 2003 had a point.... The fear that the communists would grab the black stuff was overridingly behind the decision to invade Egypt. The west got into a lather about the canal because of oil. Lateral thinkers were already suggesting that the answer might be to use less of it.... On its 50th anniversary, we are all still slipping about in the long shadow of Suez."
The long shadow
Guardian, 4 November 2006
'Old Colonialist'
Julian Amery
Anthony Eden wasn't the only Briton plotting against Egypt in 1956. Conservative MP
for Preston North, Julian Amery,
was a leading conspirator with MI6 to topple Egypt's popularPresident
Gamal Abdel Nasser. New details were disclosed in a BBC documentary broadcast for the 50th anniversary of the Suez crisis in 2006.
"I was horrified to get a telephone call over an open line.... in which Anthony Eden said, 'What's all this poppycock you've sent me about isolating and quarantining Nasser. Can't you understand and if you can't understand it will you come to the Cabinet and explain why - that I want Nasser', and he actually used the word 'murdered'."
Anthony Nutting, British Foreign Office Minister of State 1956 in an interview 30 years later
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
"At the official level Eden's immediate response was refined both by Whitehall planning, lead by the Foreign Office, and by discussions with the US government. By the end of March the Eden and Eisenhower administrations had agreed a plan, 'Operation Omega' - isolating Nasser through propaganda, economic sanctions, and support of countries such as Turkey and Iraq. ... Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6 wanted to go much, much, further. Under the American Freedom of Information Act I've obtained a CIA memorandum from April 1st 1956. Presented for the first time in a documentary, it records two days of meetings between MI6 Deputy Director, George Young, and his CIA counterparts. In this record, personally approved by Young, he instructs the Americans about Nasser's menace as a Soviet ally.... To deal with this imminent threat Young suggested regime change in not one, but three Arab countries, and for the first time he mentioned the possibility of working with a new Middle Eastern partner. Israel."
Professor Scott Lucas
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
"I was astonished when somebody showed me some document written by an acquaintance of mine in MI6. I wouldn't have recognised it at all as being anything like British policy, but it was set out as being so. These secret people, you see, they get so above themselves, if I might say so."
Evelyn Shuckburgh, Assistant Under Secretary of State for Middle East Affairs at the British Foreign Office in 1956
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
| On This Web Page |
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| The Suez Crisis - BBC Documentary Short Excerpts |
| The Suez Crisis - BBC Documentary Transcript Of Major Parts Of Broadcast |
| The Suez Crisis Other Press References |
| The Plot To Assassinate Nasser Other Media References |
| Other British Scheming Against Syria |
"Here is a tale from our recent history which might seem oddly familiar. Crazed by the obduracy shown by an autocratic Arab leader, a British prime minister abandons reason and plumps for an armed invasion to unseat his bugbear. He is one of the most popular prime ministers of recent times, a star turn much admired for his ability to get across his message and to glad-hand the public into agreeing with his policies. Only recently, he has fought and won a general election, increasing his party’s majority in the House of Commons and presenting to the country a picture of easy charm and unruffled competence. There are those who oppose the use of force against an Arab country which once had been a friendly power – demonstrations take place in Trafalgar Square and Glasgow – but Downing Street is convinced they are doing the right thing, that a wicked despot has to be unseated and Britain’s interests protected. As the prime minister reads the newspapers in the days before the attack, he does so with an easy conscience. For every leading article which advises caution there are red-topped exhortations for him to keep his nerve and bring the Arabs to heel. One reads simply: 'LET THE CRYBABIES HOWL! It’s GREAT Britain again.' The attack takes place and, although from a purely military point of view it is successful, the bombing of civilian targets outrages world opinion and sends British prestige plummeting throughout the Middle East. For anyone who opposed the regime-change operations in Iraq in 2003, that scenario is recognisable , but this particular piece of Western interference in the Middle East took place 50 years ago, on November 5 1956, when British and French airborne forces dropped out of the skies over Egypt to seize the Suez Canal."
Iraq: Blair’s Suez?
Sunday Herald, 29 October 2006
"John McGlashan, who has died aged 88, was a British MI6 officer linked to a plot to assassinate Egypt's President Nasser during the Suez crisis and subsequently accused of espionage – a capital crime. Exactly how he came to be seized in Cairo in August 1956 by agents of the Egyptian mukhabarat, or secret police, remains a mystery. But on February 8 the following year The Daily Telegraph reported President Nasser's demand for four other British 'plotters' to hang, under the headline 'Egypt Demands Death for 'Spies''. Equally mysterious was the manner in which McGlashan – or John Reidmack Glashem, as some papers mangled it – was smuggled out of Cairo to safety. In June 1957, in his absence, he was accused in a major show trial with James Zarb, a Maltese businessman, and James Swinburn, Cairo business manager of the British-operated Arab News Agency (ANA). Both Zarb and Swinburn were jailed (then rapidly released), but McGlashan was acquitted. Based at the British embassy in Baghdad, where he operated under diplomatic cover as third secretary, McGlashan was one of 20 people said to have belonged to a 'dangerous' Secret Intelligence Service spy ring, and to have monitored Egyptian naval movements in the run-up to the 1956 Suez invasion. The ANA was SIS's local commercial cover in Cairo and also served as a useful conduit for British propaganda; it sowed 'disinformation' about Nasser via news outlets throughout the Arab world. Its journalists, including the agency's head, Tom Little, a correspondent for The Times and The Economist, were British intelligence officers, a fact quickly grasped by the Egyptians, who raided its offices in August 1956 and closed it down. This immediately compromised SIS's ability to work in Egypt�including on the plan ordered by the prime minister, Anthony Eden, for British agents to assassinate the Egyptian leader and facilitate a coup d'tat, in response to 'the Muslim Mussolini's' declaration the month before that he intended to nationalise the Suez Canal. Along with McGlashan and the other British personnel, 11 Egyptians were also accused of espionage, including Swinburn's principal agent, who was later executed. With MI6 in Cairo effectively neutered, the plot to assassinate Nasser was turned over to outside agents, including the BBC Panorama reporter James Mossman, who was posted to Egypt as The Daily Telegraph's correspondent. Pressed to help, Mossman reluctantly agreed to drop off a package from the boot of his Morris Minor at a spot 12 miles from Cairo. It contained 20,000 in British banknotes, intended as a bribe to Nasser's doctor to poison the Egyptian president. Telephoning to confirm safe delivery, Mossman realised he had given the money to the wrong man."
John McGlashan
Daily Telegraph, 10 September 2010
The Suez Crisis - BBC Documentary
Short Excerpts
BBC Radio Documentary 1 - 'Suez: The Missing Dimension'
"At the official level Eden's immediate response was refined both by Whitehall planning, lead by the Foreign Office, and by discussions with the US government. By the end of March the Eden and Eisenhower administrations had agreed a plan, 'Operation Omega' - isolating Nasser through propaganda, economic sanctions, and support of countries such as Turkey and Iraq. ... Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6 wanted to go much, much, further. Under the American Freedom of Information Act I've obtained a CIA memorandum from April 1st 1956. Presented for the first time in a documentary, it records two days of meetings between MI6 Deputy Director, George Young, and his CIA counterparts. In this record, personally approved by Young, he instructs the Americans about Nasser's menace as a Soviet ally.... To deal with this imminent threat Young suggested regime change in not one, but three Arab countries, and for the first time he mentioned the possibility of working with a new Middle Eastern partner. Israel."
Professor Scott Lucas
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
| Three Arab States And Oil |
| "Following is outline of our impression of the British Government three phase plan. First phase - complete change in government of Syria. MI6 believes it can mount this operation alone, but if necessary will involve joint action with Iraq, Turkey, and possibly Israel. Phase two - Saudi Arabia. Believe MI6 prepared to undertake efforts to exploit splits in Royal Family and possibly hasten fall of King Saud. Phase three - to be undertaken in anticipation of violent Egyptian reaction to phases one and two. This ranges from sanctions, calculated to isolate Nasser, to use of force, both British and Israeli, to tumble Egyptian government.�Extreme possibilities would involve special operations by Israelis against Egyptian supply dumps and newly acquired aircraft and tanks, as well as outright Israeli attack on Gaza or other border areas." CIA Memorandum, 1 April 1956, obtained by Professor Scott Lucas under the Freedom of Information Act Suez - The Missing Dimension BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006 "Following emerged as MI6 position. Nasser's aims are the total destruction of Israel, Egyptian domination of all Arab governments, and elimination of all western positions in the Arab area. In order to realise his ambitions Nasser has accepted full scale collaboration with the Soviets. Nasser has now taken the initiative for the extension of Soviet influence in Syria, Libya, and French North Africa. Nasser must therefore be regarded as out-and-out Soviet instrument. MI6 asserted that it is now British government view that western interests in the Middle East,particularly oil, must be preserved from Egyptian-Soviet threat at all costs." CIA Memorandum, 1 April 1956, obtained by Professor Scott Lucas under the Freedom of Information Act Suez - The Missing Dimension BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006 |
"This is also the tale of how one man, Julian Amery, Conservative Member of Parliament, intelligence officer from World War II, and son-in-law of Harold Macmillan, fostered that intrigue - how his meetings with rebellious Tory back-benchers, shadowy Egyptian dissidents, and even King Zog of Albania, led to the disastrous plan that marked the downfall of the British Empire. ... At the beginning of 1956 he revived contacts with the Egyptian elite opposed to Nasser. These included members of the Egyptian royal family, deposed by the 1952 revolution, the Waft party - the ruling government of Egypt until 1952, and King Zog, the former ruler of Albania and a distant relative of the Egyptian monarchy .... by May 1956 Amery and his fellow Conservative MP Billy McLean had developed their plans. Working with a representative of former Egyptian Prime Minister Nahas Pasha, and with King Zog, they schemed for a shadow or restoration government to assume power after the British military had toppled Nasser.... Thus months before Nasser moved against the Suez Canal Company there were no less than three British schemes to undermine his power - the Anglo-American Operation Omega, the Amery plan for a new Egyptian government, and the radical MI6 blueprint for regime change throughout the Middle East. The attitude of the Secret Intelligence Service [MI6] was well known to Julian Amery, who wrote in his diary on 11 June about a meeting with MI6 Deputy Director George Young.. . By the end of June 1956, with the support of Lloyd, Amery and Billy McClean were meeting not only Dean, but also other interested parties [including a man called Farmer] .... My research reveals Farmer to be John Farmer, MI6's chief operative in Cairo. Through Amery and McLean he met Egyptian opposition figures. It only remained now for the touch paper for the coup to be lit.... On its own the Amery-MI6 scheme might have been an intriguing footnote to the Suez crisis. But by late August it had become enmeshed with official British military plans. Initially 'Operation Muskateer' was to land troops near Alexandria, who would then march on Cairo. At the start of September, however, this was replaced by 'Musketeer Revise', in which British and French bombing and propaganda would turn the population against Nasser. Regime change was now firmly linked to Amery's discussions with his shadow network."
Professor Scott Lucas
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
"... on the morning of 14 October two envoys from the French government arrived at Eden's country residence, Chequers, with a dramatic proposal.... There is no evidence that Amery knew of the French approach, but in effect his plan for a coup against Nasser was now being put into motion. This was complimented by the collusion with Israel that MI6 and Harold Macmillan had long been advocating. Three days of discussions in Sevres outside Paris, and in London, led to the agreement that after Israel attacked Egypt, Britain and France would then step in as 'peacekeepers' to occupy the Suez Canal Zone. The agreement was signed by Pat Dean and by Donald Logan, the private secretary to Selwyn Lloyd ..... When the plan began to emerge Amery was jubilant... On 29 October 1956 Israeli forces moved across the Egyptian border, advancing 40 miles into the Sinai peninsula. The next day Eden, addressing the House of Commons, issued an ultimatum to Israel and Egypt to move back from the Suez canal or face an Anglo-French intervention. He subsequently told the nation: 'All my life I have been a man of peace, working for peace, striving for peace, negotiating for peace. I've been a League of Nations man, and a United Nations man, and I'm still the same man with the same conviction, the same devotion to peace. I couldn't be other even if I wished. But I'm utterly convinced that the action we have taken is right.' Eden's ruse of disgusing British military operations as 'peace keeping' was somewhat transparent as it allowed the Israelis to march another fifty miles into Egypt while forcing Egyptian defenders to withdraw 10 miles west of the Suez Canal zone."
Professor Scott Lucas
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
"[MI6 ally, British MP Julian] Amery held a series of meetings in Switzerland and France with Egyptian royalist[s?], politicians and even the Muslim Brotherhood, who had once attacked British troops in the Suez Canal zone, but had subsequently tried to assassinate Nasser. In 1989 I asked Amery exactly whom he met."
Professor Scott Lucas
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
| "I was horrified to get a telephone call over an open line .... in which Anthony Eden said, 'What's all this poppycock you've sent me about isolating and quarantining Nasser. Can't you understand -� and if you can't understand it will you come to the Cabinet and explain why - that I want� Nasser', and he actually used the word 'murdered'." Anthony Nutting, British Foreign Office Minister of State 1956 in an interview 30 years later Suez - The Missing Dimension BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006 |
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
| No MI6 official was punished for the Suez failure, although quietly the service was reorganised to prevent any repetition of its Middle Eastern scheming. Julian Amery became Minister for Air in the Macmillan government, but his true role in the Suez crisis never emerged. Instead Anthony Eden was left alone to carry the responsibility for one of Britain's greatest foreign misadventures ever. Privately Amery still maintained that his plan was the right one - it was just the Prime Minister's execution that was at fault....." Suez - The Missing Dimension BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006 |
BBC Radio Documentary 2 - 'A Comfort to the Enemy'
"With hindsight it's clear that Eden was already committed to military action. Approaching the problem through the United Nations was unlikely to work, since in international law Nasser probably was within his rights to nationalise the Suez Canal Company. With the likelihood of armed conflict in mind, in fact� Eden would ultimately engage in an illegal secret pact with France and Israel to provide a pretext to start it....[In a broadcast by the BBC Eden] did his best to sound conciliatory: 'My friends we do not seek a solution by force, but by the broadest possible international agreement.'... but in private Eden was singing a very different song, one that he dare not share with the nation, the BBC or even most people in his very own Foreign Office. William Clarke, speaking here in 1979, was Eden's press secretary and privy to his private deliberations: 'The Prime Minister made it absolutely clear that military action would have to be taken. Nasser would have to go. That Britain could not abide Nasser controlling the Suez Canal, and he used then a phrase that he used later in public, that it put him in a position where his thumb was on our jugular vein - the Suez Canal with the oil flowing through it was our jugular vein.'.... no one outside of a very few close confidants knew of Eden's single minded commitment to a military solution, and still less about the very secret plan hatched with the French and Israelis to provide a pretext for that military action to start.... Government preparations for war went largely
unreported in detail having been the subject of two 'D' notices. That's the system by which press and broadcasters agree voluntarily to restrict reporting of matters relating to national security. Meanwhile unknown to any but his closest inner circle the plan for the Israelis to invade Egypt, thus allowing Britain and France to intervene on the pretext of keeping the waring sides apart, was ready to be put into action."
'A Comfort to the Enemy'
BBC Archive Hour, Saturday 4 November 2006 20:00-21:00 (Radio 4 FM)
________________________________________________________________
The Suez Crisis - BBC Documentary
Transcript Of Major Parts Of Broadcast
"I was astonished when somebody showed me some document written by an acquaintance of mine in MI6. I wouldn't have recognised it at all as being anything like British policy, but it was set out as being so. These secret people, you see, they get so above themselves, if I might say so."
Evelyn Shuckburgh, Assistant Under Secretary of State for Middle East Affairs at the Foreign Office in 1956
Suez - The Missing Dimension
Archive Hour Interview Broadcast, BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
|
Archive Hour –
Suez: The Missing Dimension Saturday 28 October 8.00-9.00pm BBC RADIO 4 http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/proginfo/radio/wk44/sat.shtml#sat_archivehour
|
"No MI6 official was punished for the Suez failure, although quietly the service was reorganised to prevent any repetition of its Middle Eastern scheming. Julian Amery became Minister for Air in the Macmillan government, but his true role in the Suez crisis never emerged. Instead Anthony Eden was left to carry responsibilty alone for one of Britain's greatest foreign misadventures ever..... There's one final twist to our tale, however. More than fifty years after Suez, Anthony Eden's call for action against evil dictators is echoed by his successors. Britain is once again involved with regime change in the Middle East, albeit one led by a different imperial power...."
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
|
"No MI6 official was punished for the Suez failure, although quietly the service was reorganised to prevent any repetition of its Middle Eastern scheming. Julian Amery became Minister for Air in the Macmillan government, but his true role in the Suez crisis never emerged. Instead Anthony Eden was left to carry responsibilty alone for one of Britain's greatest foreign misadventures ever..... There's one final twist to our tale, however. More than fifty years after Suez, Anthony Eden's call for action against evil dictators is echoed by his successors. Britain is once again involved with regime change in the Middle East, albeit one led by a different imperial power...." BBC Announcer:� The programme offers new evidence on the role played by British intelligence services in creating a war with Egypt. It features interviews with British politicians and officials aired now for the first time, and the archive of the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden....
Presenter :On 26 July 1956 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company, owned and operated by British and French companies for almost a century. For Britain's Prime Minister Anthony Eden, it was an action that couldn't be tolerated. Eden�: "We all know this is how fascist governments behave, and we all remember only too well what the cost can be in giving in to fascism. We cannot agree that an act of plunder, which threatens the livelihood of many nations should be allowed to succeed, and we must make sure that the life of the great trading nations of the world cannot in the future be strangled at any moment by some interruption to the free passage of the canal." Presenter�: Three months later after Israel forces invaded Egypt's Sinai peninsula Britain and France bombed Egyptian positions. The operation would end catastrophically for the Eden government. Under pressure from the United States and the United Nations it was forced to cease fire less than 48 hours after landing paratroops in the Suez canal zone. Nasser survived, but it was Eden who fell from power to be succeeded by Harold Macmillan in January 1957... More than thirty years later I interviewed many of the key British participants involved in the Suez crisis - men from the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, Members of Parliament. Those interviews have never been aired, and some have only recently been declassified. Because the tapes are not of broadcast quality actors have revoiced their words. This is the standard narrative of Suez: - an arena for the rise of Egyptian nationalism and the emergence of the modern Middle East; a drama featuring an unprecedented collusion between Britain, France, and Israel; and a tragedy in which America's Eisenhower administration would turn against its British ally. Yet fifty years later, there is an even more dramatic tale to be told - a tale of intrigue by Britain's intelligence services to bring about regime change in Egypt. This is what Evelyn Shuckburgh, assistant Under Secretary of State in 1956, confided to me more than thirty years later. Shuckburgh: "You find that people in MI6 were conducting quite separate policies from the Americans, the CIA, quite regardless of what the Foreign Office view was. But I didn't know that existed at the time. I was astonished when somebody showed me some document written by an acquaintance of mine in MI6. I wouldn't have recognised it at all as being anything like British policy, but it was set out as being so. These secret people, you see, they get so above themselves, if I might say so." Presenter�: This is also the tale of how one man, Julian Amery, Conservative Member of Parliament, intelligence officer from World War II, and son-in-law of Harold Macmillan, fostered that intrigue - how his meetings with rebellious Tory back-benchers, shadowy Egyptian dissidents, and even King Zog of Albania, led to the disastrous plan that marked the downfall of the British Empire. We begin at the start of 1956 when Amery was a member of the Suez Group, a collection of Conservative MPs who had vehemently opposed the withdrawal of British Troops from the Suez Canal base two years earlier. More than three decades later Amery spoke to me passionately about the group's aspirations... �Anthony Eden had been Foreign Secretary when the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1954 was signed. After a long wait he finally succeeded Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in April 1955. Less than a year into his premiership, however, he was in political trouble. The economy was sluggish, and abroad British forces faced an insurgency in Cyprus lead by Archbishop Makarios. Even more importantly, Egypt's president Nasser had refused to join Britain in a new alliance in the Middle East..... William Lakeland was political officer in the American Embassy in Cairo from 1952 until 1955. In a new interview for this documentary he offered his first hand knowledge of Nasser and his ambitions in Egypt. Lakeland: "The national revolution to us looked generally like a good thing. It seemed to be a way of breaking out of the old power-centred mode, and most of the ideas that Nasser expressed, at least to me or that I became aware of, sounded quite reasonable. Of course, the thing that really motivated him was what he felt was the need to break the old treaty obligations that he had, with the British particularly, of course, because he felt that was a form of infringement on Egyptian sovereignty and a lack of complete independence under that system."... Presenter: Nasser had refused to agree to the Baghdad pact, London's attempt to link Arab states with Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran, in a regional defence arrangement. And he had followed this by accepting arms supplies from the Soviet block .... Shuckbrow: "Eden was up against people who didn't see any need for us to give anything away, anywhere. People like Julian Amery. They were little Empire people. They even thought we should be extending the area of pink on the African map.".... Presenter: Soon after the fateful commons debate [on General Glubb, 7 March 1956] the Prime Minister removed Archbishop Makarios from Cyprus, but agitated, he was offering even more drastic remedies for his Egyptian problem. Anthony Nutting a young Foreign Office minister in 1956 offered an extraordinary revelation about Eden in an interview thirty years later. Anthony Nutting: "I was horrified to get a telephone call over an open line to [unclear - Savoy?] hotel in which Anthony Eden said, 'What's all this poppycock you've sent me about isolating and quarantining Nasser. Can't you understand - and if you can't understand it will you come to the Cabinet and explain why - that I want Nasser', and he actually used the word 'murdered'." Presenter: At the official level Eden's immediate response was refined both by Whitehall planning, lead by the Foreign Office, and by discussions with the US government. By the end of March the Eden and Eisenhower administrations had agreed a plan, 'Operation Omega' - isolating Nasser through propaganda, economic sanctions, and support of countries such as Turkey and Iraq. This is what President Eisenhower�"No MI6 official was punished for the Suez failure, although quietly the service was reorganised to prevent any repetition of its Middle Eastern scheming. Julian Amery became Minister for Air in the Macmillan government, but his true role in the Suez crisis never emerged. Instead Anthony Eden was left to carry responsibilty alone for one of Britain's greatest foreign misadventures ever..... There's one final twist to our tale, however. More than fifty years after Suez, Anthony Eden's call for action against evil dictators is echoed by his successors. Britain is once again involved with regime change in the Middle East, albeit one led by a different imperial power...." Suez - The Missing Dimension |
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/schedule/2006/11/03/day/
BBC Radio 4, Friday 3rd November 2006
21:02
Friday Play
'A Conspiracy at Sevres'
By Charles Wood
The play explores the illicit pact which ignited the Suez crisis. Prejudice, secrecy, plotting and misdirection lie at the heart of Britain's actions in the Middle East.
With Geoffrey Palmer, James Fleet, John Standing, Corin Redgrave.
________________________________________
"The underground bunkers beneath Whitehall had been busy since July, and the 'arthritic' British war machine was already creaking into action. A top-secret meeting at Suvres between the three allies (the Israelis turning up in hats and dark glasses) to plot the final moves was foolishly recorded on paper. Eden was thrown into a panic. The French and Israelis refused to destroy their copies, but the evidence was clear: a squirming Eden was up to no good."
The long shadow
Guardian, 4 November 2006
�
"Secret papers released today confirm that Sir Anthony Eden’s Tory Government invaded Egypt in 1956 without consulting its law officers and in the knowledge that its action was almost certainly a breach of international law. The ill- fated military intervention, which followed the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Colonel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, has clear parallels with Britain’s decision to join the invasion of Iraq 47 years later. Confidential Cabinet papers from the Suez era, released after 50 years, show that Sir Anthony and a small coterie of senior ministers consulted only Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, on the legality of their plans — much to the fury of, among others, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the Attorney-General and father of the present head of MI5.... One vital document is still missing: Britain’s copy of the Sevres Protocol, the report of a secret meeting at which Britain, France and Israel devised the pretext for the Suez operation — Israel would attack Egypt, and an Anglo-French 'police action' would follow. The British copy of the Protocol has never been found. Sir Anthony is assumed to have ordered its destruction but David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister, kept his copy and it now resides with the rest of his papers in an archive in Tel Aviv."
Dubious legality of Suez attack revealed
London Times, 1 December 2006
"In July 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had led the coup that overthrew King Farouk, became Egypt's president and nationalised the Suez Canal - the west's 'jugular' connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, which had been a contentious symbol of imperial power and control since its opening in 1869. Nasser had also made an arms deal with the Soviet Union. This, along with fears of his grandiose project of 'pan-Arab' unity, was the pretext for invasion.There followed ministerial lies to parliament and the UN; a prime minister undoing all his previous good work before a spineless cabinet; thousands of deaths (mainly Egyptian); huge anti-war demos in Trafalgar Square; and the shattering both of Britain's world prestige and the long-term reputation of a popular premier."
The long shadow
Guardian, 4 November 2006
"Four books on Britain's invasion of Suez 50 years ago emphasise how little we have learned... Historical parallels are always dangerous, but as the anniversary books and TV documentaries remind us, the political commentators who kept muttering 'Suez' in 2003 had a point.... The fear that the communists would grab the black stuff was overridingly behind the decision to invade Egypt.the west got into a lather about the canal because of oil. Lateral thinkers were already suggesting that the answer might be to use less of it.... Far from being an eccentric recluse, Britain might now be a model for the rest of the world in this era of global warming, a threat which makes so much flotsam of issues such as nationalism, superpower status or even what religion you are - a threat largely caused by our profligate use of oil. On its 50th anniversary, we are all still slipping about in the long shadow of Suez."
The long shadow
Guardian, 4 November 2006
"Here is a tale from our recent history which might seem oddly familiar. Crazed by the obduracy shown by an autocratic Arab leader, a British prime minister abandons reason and plumps for an armed invasion to unseat his bugbear. He is one of the most popular prime ministers of recent times, a star turn much admired for his ability to get across his message and to glad-hand the public into agreeing with his policies. Only recently, he has fought and won a general election, increasing his party’s majority in the House of Commons and presenting to the country a picture of easy charm and unruffled competence. There are those who oppose the use of force against an Arab country which once had been a friendly power – demonstrations take place in Trafalgar Square and Glasgow – but Downing Street is convinced they are doing the right thing, that a wicked despot has to be unseated and Britain’s interests protected. As the prime minister reads the newspapers in the days before the attack, he does so with an easy conscience. For every leading article which advises caution there are red-topped exhortations for him to keep his nerve and bring the Arabs to heel. One reads simply: 'LET THE CRYBABIES HOWL! It’s GREAT Britain again.' The attack takes place and, although from a purely military point of view it is successful, the bombing of civilian targets outrages world opinion and sends British prestige plummeting throughout the Middle East. For anyone who opposed the regime-change operations in Iraq in 2003, that scenario is recognisable , but this particular piece of Western interference in the Middle East took place 50 years ago, on November 5 1956, when British and French airborne forces dropped out of the skies over Egypt to seize the Suez Canal."
Iraq: Blair’s Suez?
Sunday Herald, 29 October 2006
"Another secret society with a number of former intelligence officers as members is Pinay Circle (earlier known as the Cercle Violet). It is believed to be a secret Right-wing transnational intelligence and direct action group used to fight communism. The Circle is said to be mainly in the business of regime change in the West to keep the US and Europe close to each other. The group continues to exist although communism is no longer the threat it was. Its members have included Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, (all three associated with the Bilderberg Group), George Soros, Paul Volcker, Turki Al-Faisal, former CIA chief William Colby, among other US, British and German intelligence officers. Nadhmi Auchi, a one-time Saddam Hussein confidante, was also a member of this secret group. British luminaries have included Lord Julian Amery [leading architect, along with MI6, of the 1956 Suez crisis] and James Goldsmith. The Circle is also linked to other influential groups like the Heritage Foundation and Opus Dei, often through its members."
The gaze is upon you
Hindustan Times, 25 October 2006
"Eden concocted a secret tripartite plot with France and Israel. France was hostile to Nasser because Egypt was helping the Algerian rebels, and attached to the canal for historical reasons. After all, a Frenchman built it. Israel was longing to have a go at Nasser anyway because of Palestinian fedayeen attacks and the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran. The ruse was that Israel would invade Egypt across the Sinai peninsula. Britain and France would then give an ultimatum to the parties to stop fighting or they would intervene to 'protect' the canal. And so it played out. The Israelis even had to moderate their attack in case they won before the 'intervention' forces could arrive. But the British and French went in to 'save' the canal. There was only one thing wrong. Eden had not told the Americans. And President Dwight Eisenhower, concerned about wider relations with the Arab world and horrified at such an adventure anyway, was not amused. 'Our closest ally pulled the plug,' says Corelli Barnett. 'We acted on the back of a struggling economy and there was a run on the pound. 'Macmillan, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the cabinet that the only way to save the situation was for an IMF loan backed by the United States. 'The Americans refused to back it. We were told by them to go no further and to evacuate promptly. So we did. It was a complete fiasco.' British and French troops left Egypt by December 1956. Eden left office early the next year. The fallout was huge. For a start, it got the Soviet Union off the hook, as it was brutally crushing the Hungarian uprising at the same time. But it also meant that no longer could Britain - or France - act alone on the world stage. They did however draw different conclusions. Harold Macmillan, who succeeded Eden, decided that in future Britain had to side with America. He made good friends with President John F Kennedy and even persuaded Kennedy to let Britain have the Polaris nuclear missile. Since then, Britain has been reluctant to oppose any US policy. Even during Vietnam, the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson forbade criticism of the US while shrewdly refusing Lyndon Johnson's request to send a token force."
Suez: End of empire
BBC Online, 24 July 2006
"The Suez Crisis, which occurred 50 years ago, was the full stop at the end of the British Empire. In 1945, at the close of the Second World War, Britain still governed the world’s largest Empire, with an independent Commonwealth of the Old Dominions. The Raj ruled India. Britain enjoyed a strong influence in the oil-rich Middle East and was still a genuine world power, behind the United States and the Soviet Union.... If one had to pick a day for the end of the British Empire, it might be July 26, 1956, the day that President Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal.... In 1956 I was writing leaders for The Financial Times. I had been commissioned to write a brief life of the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, a man whom I liked and admired. I had also become involved as an assistant speech writer to Eden, specialising in economic policy..... In July to November 1956 I was a convinced advocate of Eden’s Suez policy.....Middle Eastern oil was as essential, in 1956 as now, to the economy and security of the United States, Europe and world trade. So long as Britain had influence in the Middle East, Britain would remain a real world power. Yet Britain could not maintain that influence without American support. Nasser’s nationalisation of the canal was a direct challenge to the West. Eden believed that the challenge had to be met. Eisenhower and Dulles, his Secretary of State, were not prepared to meet it; at the Suez Canal Users Conference held in London it became apparent that American policy could not be trusted. Dulles promised action, which he failed to take. The shift of Western power in the Middle East should have been a relay race, in which Britain would transfer the baton to the United States. Eden was willing to transfer the baton in August 1956 but Eisenhower, with his re-election campaign much in mind, was not ready to take the transfer. Only in October did Eden adopt the joint Anglo-French-Israeli plan that was indeed a disaster. Eisenhower had made the mistake of leaving Eden with no better option. The world community had an essential interest in the free flow of oil through the canal. That could have been secured only by joint Anglo-American action. Eisenhower decided against such action; Dulles’s conduct convinced Eden that he personally was hostile and untrustworthy. The Suez Crisis was indeed the end of the Empire, but it was a blunder of American policy, for which the United States is still paying a very high price."
Lord William Rees-Mogg
Suez: why I blame it on Ike
London Times, 24 July 2006
"When in 1954 a new type of political leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, a strong Arab nationalist, emerged as leader of Egypt, Eden did not understand that the world had changed. Instead he looked and saw another dictator, another Mussolini. Eden could not accept that Egypt should run the Suez Canal, even though he had previously accepted that British troops should leave the Canal Zone. The canal had lost some of its strategic importance for Britain, but not all. And it had acquired a new importance, as a passageway for oil to get to Europe. �When, therefore, Nasser announced that he was nationalising the Suez Canal Company (partly, he said, to pay for the Aswan dam that the West refused to finance) in which Britain and France had controlling interests, Eden was alarmed. He told his government colleagues that he would not allow Nasser to 'have his thumb on our windpipe'.... The ruse was that Israel would invade Egypt across the Sinai peninsula. Britain and France would then give an ultimatum to the parties to stop fighting or they would intervene to 'protect' the canal."
Suez: End of empire
BBC Online, 24 July 2006
"24 October 1956: Protocol of Sevres signed in Paris in secret by Britain, France and Israel. Britain, France and Israel agree a plan, codenamed Operation Musketeer, to invade Egypt. Israel is to attack the Egyptian Army near the canal as a pretext for miliary intervention by Britain and France. Israel had been angered by cross-border raids from the Sinai peninsula and it also wanted to break the Arab blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba to win a secure outlet to Asia and Africa from its port at Eilat."
Timeline: The Suez Crisis
BBC Online, 19 July 2006
"The underground bunkers beneath Whitehall had been busy since July [1956], and the 'arthritic' British war machine was already creaking into action. A top-secret meeting at Sevres between the three allies (the Israelis turning up in hats and dark glasses) to plot the final moves was foolishly recorded on paper. Eden was thrown into a panic. The French and Israelis refused to destroy their copies, but the evidence was clear: a squirming Eden was up to no good."
The long shadow
Guardian, 4 November 2006
"It was a classic setting for international intrigue, a tile-roofed villa secluded among fog-swirled trees, ivy clinging to building wings clustered around a stunted steeple-like tower. The first group of conspirators landed at a French airfield outside Paris and reached the wall-enclosed villa in an unmarked car during the wee hours of October 22, 1956. Later that Monday morning, French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau visited his office in Paris, then was chauffeured home to switch to his personal car. He soon was at the villa shaking hands with Israel's 70-year-old Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, eye-patched Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan and Defense Ministry Director-General Shimon Peres. British Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd, a key member of the third group of plotters, called his office in London to say he was staying home with a cold. He left England shortly after, to arrive at the villa that afternoon. By the time the tense clandestine discussions--which also included French Premier Guy Mollet and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden--ended two days later in France and England, a secret accord had been reached. Champagne glasses were raised to celebrate a tripartite pledge to pursue what one chronicler called 'the shortest and possibly silliest war in history.' The target was Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt, which had become the symbol of Arab nationalism.... As the three conspiring nations formulated their plot at Sevres, they also set in motion military preparations. At first dubbed Hamilcar, the operation was soon renamed Musketeer, presumably in honor of Alexandre Dumas' three musketeers. Although the three-country scenario was essentially a French brainchild, Britain, as the major contributor to the invasion, assumed command of the Anglo-French portion of the military operation.... Israel went into action at between 2:15 and 2:35 p.m. on October 29, 1956. Two pairs of piston-engine North American F-51 Mustang fighters raced westward over the parched wasteland of the triangular Sinai Peninsula. Swooping to a dozen feet over the desert, the American-built planes used propellers and wingtips to sever overhead telephone lines linking the 30,000 men of the Egyptian 3rd Infantry and Palestinian 8th divisions and their subordinate units.....Israel had surprised Egypt and given its co-conspirators their 'justification' for intervention.... Egypt accepted the United Nations call for a cease-fire on November 2. Israel, assuming it could achieve its objectives before one went into effect, accepted the next day. But persuaded by his co-conspirators that this would nullify the Anglo-French intervention, Ben-Gurion withdrew Israel's acceptance by setting impossible conditions.... The Soviets had been apprised of the tripartite conspiracy by their agents in France, Egypt and Israel. Most important among those agents were army reserve Colonel Israel Beer, who became Ben-Gurion's personal secretary, and Ze'ev Goldstein, an Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs official and veteran of the Red Orchestra spy network of World War II fame. The Soviets also had an Egyptian spy, Sami Sharif, Nasser's future chief secretary. Yet, unlike Washington, Moscow did not try to head off the crisis. The Anglo-French intervention gave the Soviet Union a stronger Mideastern role as a friend of the Arabs and diverted world attention from its brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising."
Suez Crisis: Operation Musketeer
Military History Magazine, April 2001
"By March 1956, the United States began to view the direction of Egypt's policy as hindering its objectives, and attempted to defuse the nationalist challenge. The new policy, code-named Omega, was based on existing assumptions as Washington continued to seek to impose its aims on Cairo. While in the past few years that goal would have been sought through selective cooperation, now it would be accomplished by a program of gradual coercion.... The British leadership had come to see the Nasserist regime as threatening its long-term interests in the Middle East. However, the Anglo-American attempt to coordinate their policy would not be without tensions. The Americans viewed Omega as a gradual program that involved various escalating measures designed to reorient Egyptian policy. The British policy-makers were far more dubious of the possibility of Cairo's readjustment and increasingly perceived Omega's gradualism as not commensurate with the Egyptian threat.... In due course, London's patience with Omega evapo-rated altogether, moving to a more dramatic policy of dislodging the troublesome Colonel Nasser through collusion with France and Israel."
Operation Omega and the Policy of Antagonism
The Origins of the Eisenhower Doctrine: The US, Britain and Nasser's Egypt, 1953-57
Ray Takeyh; Macmillan, 2000
"In October 1956, a troubled IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan flew back to Tel Aviv from a secret meeting in Sevres, France. The one-eyed Israeli general had been helping cement a conspiracy among Britain, France, and Israel to try to remove Egyptian President Jamal Abd al-Nasser, the increasingly powerful Arab nationalist whom all three either loathed or feared."
America and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917–1960
Kennedy’s Inheritance, Chapter 1
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Other Media References
"When Britain lost control of Egypt in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden said he wanted the nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser 'destroyed . . . murdered . . . I don't give a damn if there's anarchy and chaos in Egypt.' Those insolent Arabs, Winston Churchill had urged in 1951, should be driven 'into the gutter from which they should never have emerged'."
Welcome to the violent world of Mr Hopey Changey
New Statesman, 26 May 2011
"The security service (MI5) operates alongside the secret intelligence service (MI6), and within Wright's memoirs was the revelation that MI6 had planned to assassinate Colonel Nasser at the time of the Suez crisis."
Geoffrey Alderman - Murky deeds, mealy mouths
Jewish Chronicle, 25 February 2010
"At the end of the second world war MI6 absorbed the remnants of the Special Operations Executive, the wartime organisation that, on Churchill’s orders to 'set Europe ablaze', had wreaked havoc behind enemy lines. Some of the darker elements of that organisation sought not just to gather intelligence on Britain’s enemies but also to undermine them and even to bring down their leaders. These dubious activities reached their height during the 1950s when George Kennedy Young, the most enthusiastic of these so-called 'robber barons', masterminded the coup that ousted Mohammed Mossadeq, the Iranian prime minister, and the plot to 'bump off' Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president. A number of plans were put together variously involving an exploding electric shaver, poisoned gas in the ventilation system or a straightforward hit squad."
Don’t worry, 007, you’re still licensed to kill
Sunday Times, 24 February 2008
"... the staff reports of the 9/11 Commission had noted that the purported mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, had been captured, and had boasted that he had been recruited to the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 16. .... author Robert Dreyfuss has provided a timely work that offers some relief to this major deficiency in our so-called Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) in particular, and American diplomacy and intelligence operations in general. Devil's Game provides a vivid picture of how the United States has spent the last century being dragged into a Middle East quagmire by a British imperial apparatus that has sponsored and manipulated Islamic fundamentalism, since the first hours of the era of petroleum politics at the end of the 19th Century. Dreyfuss's work combines a careful and thoroughly readable survey of the major academic literature on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and its various 20th-Century offshoots, with interviews with some of America's senior Middle East diplomats and intelligence officers. Dreyfuss carefully catalogues the twists and turns of American policymaking during the 1950s toward Iran and Egypt, two early test-cases for secular nationalism in Islamic countries. In both instances, the United States ultimately sided with Great Britain against the legitimate, popular secularist governments of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh. And in both instances, the Anglo-Americans played the Muslim Brotherhood as the battering ram to bring down the offending regimes.... Despite Washington's ambivalence about Nasser, Britain's Prime Minister Anthony Eden had no doubt that the Egyptian President was a menace and had to be eliminated. By 1954, George Young, a top MI6 officer posted in Cairo, was ordered by Eden to assassinate Nasser. Young, according to MI6 documents, turned to the Muslim Brotherhood's 'Secret Apparatus' to do the job. By the middle of the year, a full-scale war had erupted between the Brotherhood and Nasser. Thousands were killed, and eventually, the Brotherhood was forced to flee, taking refuge in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other Arab states in the British or Anglo-American camp. The U.S. adoption of the British 'Islamist' game was described by retired CIA officer Robert Baer, in his recent book Sleeping With the Devil: 'At the bottom of it all was this dirty little secret in Washington: The White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret weapon against (what else?) communism. The covert action started in the 1950s with the Dulles brothers—Allen at the CIA and John Foster at the State Department—when they approved Saudi Arabia's funding of Egypt's Brothers against Nasser. As far as Washington was concerned, Nasser was a communist.... The logic of the cold war led to a clear conclusion: If Allah agreed to fight on our side, fine. If Allah decided that political assassination was permissible, that was fine too, as long as no one talked about it in polite company.' Baer added: 'Like any other truly effective covert action, this one was strictly off the books. There was no CIA finding, no memorandum notification to Congress. Not a penny came out of the Treasury to fund it. In other words, no record. All the White House had to do was give a wink and a nod to countries harboring the Muslim Brothers, like Saudi Arabia and Jordan."
Book Review of Robert Dreyfuss' 'Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam'
Executive Intelligence Review, 17 February 2008
"In 1954, Nasser survived an assassination attempt which he blamed on the Brotherhood and he moved to quickly jail hundreds of its members."
Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood
Al Jazeera, 2 February 2008
| Who Are The Muslim Brotherhood? |
| "The American PBS network is going after the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood and its operations in America in a forthcoming expose, WND has learned.... FBI investigators tell WND that most of the major Muslim NGOs in America were founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement that gave rise to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are all members of the Muslim Brotherhood." PBS targets dangerous Muslim Brotherhood WorldNetDaily, 16 November 2006 |
"... the preparations for establishing an alternative government in Egypt—‘regime change’ in today's parlance—continued apace. Overseeing the process in London was Ralph Murray, who was on secondment from his position as minister (second-in-charge) at Britain's embassy in Cairo. The plan was to install a broad-based administration comprising many of the leading politicians whom Nasser had banned from public life, and sometimes imprisoned, in the period since the 1952 coup. Using contacts made during the Second World War, Julian Amery, the former Suez rebel (and Macmillan's son-in-law), was intimately involved with these activities. ... The precise nature of MI6's role in the efforts to remove Nasser remains veiled by official secrecy, but many books refer to plans to have him assassinated (so precluding the need for an invasion). The involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood, a politically orientated Islamic pressure group that Nasser had banned early in 1954, seems highly plausible in this respect. In addition a British spy ring was rounded up in Egypt in late August, allegedly for trying to encourage rioting in the main Nile delta cities—the excuse for military intervention in 1882. The Oxford DNB article on John Bruce Lockhart, an intelligence operative, touches upon MI6's activities in 1956; those on George Young, the officer in charge of Middle East operations (written by Lockhart), and Dick White, the head of the agency, remain silent."
The Road To Suez
Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography, 2004
"George Young in 1956, at the time the deputy chief of MI6, quite openly advocated the killing of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser..."
Assassination and the license to kill
Asia Times, 13 June 2003
"George Young, an avuncular Scot from Moffat with a love of classical music and alpine walking, more than proved during his long and secret life that he deserved his double-0 classification - the MI6 code for a licence to kill. In fact, Young was so at ease with his power and patriotism that the former deputy head of MI6 once ordered, between pink gins, the assassination of President Nasser, the Egyptian leader, during the Suez crisis.... If Young, then aged 45, had had his way, the crisis would have been solved with an assassin's bullet in Nasser's head - or rather, in the great tradition of espionage, an elaborate plan involving the lacing of Nasser's chocolates with botulism and a poisoned dart secreted in a cigarette. Young's murderous scheme is revealed in a powerful new book due to be published this month by the celebrated intelligence expert Stephen Dorril. His mammoth analysis of Britain's secret service, MI6: 50 Years of Special Operations, details the shadowy spying career of Young, who Dorril describes as 'the greatest of all intelligence agents'.... As early as February 1956, MI6 and its vice-chief, Young, were considering murdering Nasser. The plan that unfolded was straight out of the pages of Ian Fleming's James Bond. An attempt was first made to bribe Nasser's doctor to poison the troublesome Egyptian leader. Then, when that was abandoned, Young instructed Major Frank Quinn, MI6's chief technology and scientific officer - known as 'Q' both in the service and in the James Bond movies - to inject poison into some of Nasser's chocolates. It took six attempts to perfect the lethal confection, but then Q had an ethical dilemma. 'The recipient could hand one of these to innocents in his immediate vicinity,' he reported. He voiced his worries to his operational section head, but was told there would be 'no danger of this'. The sweets were handed over, but never reached Nasser. Another plan was drawn up by John Henry and Peter Dixon, MI6 technical service officers. They decided to order a double agent with access to Nasser to place canisters of nerve gas in the ventilation system of his headquarters. But the plan was abandoned due to the risk of huge numbers of innocent casualties. The ever-more bizarre assassination schemes continued, and the Ministry of Defence's Explosives Research and Development Establishment designed a modified cigarette packet which fired a poisoned dart. It was tested on a sheep, and MI6 reports say that, when the animal was hit: 'Its knees began to buckle it started rolling its eyes and frothing at the mouth. Slowly the animal sank to the ground, life draining away.' As well as MI6 fomenting a coup by dissident Egyptian army officers which would lead to the execution of Nasser, the SAS were also put on standby to carry out an assassination attempt. A three- man hit team was smuggled into Egypt to kill Nasser, but got cold feet and left before the murder bid. A German mercenary was hired for a 'wet job' - a shooting - but had to flee after the Egyptian secret service learned of his presence. According to the CIA's London officer, James Eichelberger, Young was excited and cold-bloodedly candid about his desire to do away with Nasser. 'He talked openly of assassinating Nasser, instead of using a polite euphemism like 'liquidating',' a horrified Eichelberger said in a telex back to his Washington chief. 'He said his people had been in contact with suitable elements in Egypt and in the rest of the Arab world, and with the French, who were thinking along the same lines.' Eichelberger was so alarmed that he leaked much of his knowledge to Nasser. Prime Minister Eden was by now calling for MI6 to rid him of the meddlesome Nasser. It is known that Eden was using some sort of prescription amphetamine to help him through the Suez crisis. Instead, the drugs took their toll on his reason and nerves and at one point he told his Foreign minister, Sir Anthony Nutting: 'I want him (Nasser) destroyed I want him murdered.' Young, who was intensely racist in MI6's great colonial tradition, often poured scorn on the unsupportive Americans for taking a soft line with Nasser and 'knocking down every proposal for bashing the Gyppos'. He even seems to have usurped his immediate superior, MI6 chief Dick White, who was against the assassination. White made clear his organisation 'was not a collection of hit men'. Young, ironically, said 'thuggery was not on the agenda', yet continued with his Machiavellian plots. By now MI6 was split over the assassination attempt, with the doves describing the hawks as 'lunatic and 'out of control'......The Nasser plot was never successful, and Young came to despise the USA for its failure to support Britain. 'When the moment came it was not prepared to lift a finger,' he later said. Suez sickened him of the service and he left in 1962, moving into a career in banking - a switch aided by his former incarnation as a director of MI6's industrial espionage section."
Revealed: the Scots spy who plotted to kill Nasser with poisoned
Sunday Herald, 19 March 2000
".... Peter Wright reveals that there was a plan to assassinate Nasser. If it is true that we had a secret service that was entitled, under its rules of operation, to prepare for the assassination of heads of foreign states, nothing could be more damning. If Nasser had been assassinated as a result of terrorist activities conducted by our Security Service, the consequences for our reputation throughout the middle east would be almost incalculable. Anybody who has been to Egypt knows the reputation that President Nasser had in that country, whether we liked it or not. If a British Government at that time were engaged in preparing for his assassination--an act of terrorism against a head of state--it was a monstrous affair. Despite all the obstacles put in the way by the Home Secretary and his colleagues, the Peter Wright case eventually got to the judges, most of whom agreed with me about the implications of a possible plot to assassinate Nasser. They said that it was absolutely horrific that such an act might have been carried out by our secret service. Some of the judges questioned what would have been worse--a scheme to assassinate Nasser succeeding, or failing--and said that, either way, it would be outrageous if such activities had been authorised. They could think of nothing worse than terrorist acts against heads of other states being authorised and conducted by our secret service. I had hoped that there would be an investigation into this matter. I wrote to the Prime Minister on a number of occasions and urged that, whatever happened at the end of the affair, she should instigate such an investigation. The Prime Minister has said that there has been an inquiry into all of Peter Wright's allegations, but when I asked whether it had incorporated an investigation into the supposed preparations for the assassination of foreign heads of state she could not give any answer and, so far as I know, there has never been any proper investigation into that allegation. It is monstrous that such an inquiry has never occurred. If such things did occur, it is monstrous that, even 30 years later, this country does not have sufficient determination to protect its good name. We want that kind of thing rooted out."
Michael Foot MP, House Of Commons
Hansard, 17 January 1989
"Between 1955 and 1976 Peter Wright was a senior officer in M.I.5, the department of British intelligence concerned with domestic security. For the past two years the British Government has been engaged in a determined legal struggle to prevent him from publishing his autobiography, both in Australia, where he now lives, and in Britain itself, where a series of injunctions have cut short attempts to publish extracts in the press. The American publication of these memoirs, under the title of 'Spycatcher,' represents their first appearance in book form.... he offers novel interpretations of a number of classic counterintelligence coups and scandals, and revelations ... [including] British plans toassassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser with nerve gas...."
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
New York Times, 21 July 1987
"Peter Wright, a disgruntled former deputy director of MI5, Britain's counterintelligence agency, has angered officials as high as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by planning to publish a book that alleges that MI5 [Note the existence of MI6 was not officially acknowledged until 1994] engaged in some less-than-savory operations.... He charges the service with bugging friendly French and West German embassies in London and breaking into Soviet consulates abroad. Wright also says MI5 was involved in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser during the 1956 Suez crisis."
A Not-So-Secret Service
TIME, 1 September 1986
"In 1954 Egyptian President Gamal Abddul Nasser’s nationalist policies in Egypt come to be viewed as completely unacceptable by Britain and the US. MI6 and the CIA jointly hatch plans for his assassination. According to Miles Copeland, a CIA operative based in Egypt, the opposition to Nasser is driven by the commercial community—the oil companies and the banks. At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood’s resentment of Nasser’s secular government also comes to a head. In one incident, Islamist militants attack pro-Nasser students at Cairo University. Following an attempt on his own life by the Brotherhood, Nasser responds immediately by outlawing the group, which he denounces as a tool of Britain. The following years see a long and complex struggle pitting Nasser against the Muslim Brotherhood, the US and Britain. The CIA funnels support to the group beccause of 'the Brotherhood’scommendable capability to overthrow Nasser.' [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 101-108; Baer, 2003, pp. 99] The Islamist regime in Saudi Arabia becomes an ally of the United States in the conflict with Nasser. They offer financial backing and sanctuary to Muslim Brotherhood militants during Nasser’s crackdown. [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 90-91, 126-131, 150] "
Profile: UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
Cooperative Research
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Other British Scheming
Against Syria
"It is not every day that historians come across the word 'eliminate' in papers they are working through. I was taken aback to read the word in the report and to see such candid references to the role of MI6 in a covert operation to remove the leaders of Syria approved by Harold Macmillan. The net gain for Macmillan in going along with the coup plot would be to restore some degree of harmony to Anglo-American relations after the body blow they received during the Suez crisis of 1956.... The plans involved provoking internal unrest in Syria, eliminating individuals, psychological pressures, provocation of border incidents, and the mounting of 'sabotage, national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities' in Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, which could be ascribed to Syria. They are all strongly reminiscent of the work favoured by the special political action section of the SIS [MI6], which had its heyday in the late 1940s and 1950s. When, in early 1956, the then prime minister, Anthony Eden, made clear that he wanted Nasser 'destroyed' - a former minister at the Foreign Office later claimed that Eden expressly called for the Egyptian leader's murder - he unleashed a frenzy of conspiratorial planning by SIS officers, led by the notorious deputy head of the service, George K Young, aimed at sparking a coup in Egypt."
Matthew Jones, reader in international history Royal Holloway, University of London
Scheming spies leave paper trail
Guardian, 27 September 2003
"Following is outline of our impression of the British Government three phase plan. First phase - complete change in government of Syria. MI6 believes it can mount this operation alone, but if necessary will involve joint action with Iraq, Turkey, and possibly Israel. Phase two - Saudi Arabia. Believe MI6 prepared to undertake efforts to exploit splits in Royal Family and possibly hasten fall of King Saud. Phase three - to be undertaken in anticipation of violent Egyptian reaction to phases one and two. This ranges from sanctions, calculated to isolate Nasser, to use of force, both British and Israeli, to tumble Egyptian government. Extreme possibilities would involve special operations by Israelis against Egyptian supply dumps and newly acquired aircraft and tanks, as well as outright Israeli attack on Gaza or other border areas."
CIA Memorandum, 1April 1956, obtained by Professor Scott Lucas under the Freedom of Information Act
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
"No MI6 official was punished for the Suez failure, although quietly the service was reorganised to prevent any repetition of its Middle Eastern scheming. Julian Amery became Minister for Air in the Macmillan government, but his true role in the Suez crisis never emerged. Instead Anthony Eden was left alone to carry the responsibility for one of Britain's greatest foreign misadventures ever. Privately Amery still maintained that his plan was the right one - it was just the Prime Minister's execution that was at fault....."
Suez - The Missing Dimension
BBC Radio 4, 28 October 2006
"Tlas describes many conspiracy theories, including the 1956 covert plan to overthrow Syria concocted by Iraqi Chief of Staff General Dagestani, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said, and members of the British intelligence. The plan called for sowing civil unrest within Syrian political factions, executing police actions to restore order, and instituting a government favorable to the Baghdad Pact. Tlas believed the plan was to secure Israel's northern border before Israel, France, and England attacked Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Tlas did not back his assertions with any documentation or scholarly research, however. He also includes a theory of U.S. CIA involvement with the IslamicBrotherhood in 1954 in an attempt to assassinate Nasser."
Syrian Defense Minister General Mustafa Tlas: Memoirs, Volume Two
Military Review, May-June, 2005 by Youssef H. Aboul-Enein