It was Nasser’s working assumption that Fulbright’s main interest was in sufficiently pacifying the warring factions in Libya to facilitate the influx of US-based oil companies. On a previous visit he had acted virtually as the agent of American companies interested in clearing Suez Canal at Ismailia and developing the recently discovered oil fields in the Sinai. These previous meetings had left the President of Egypt undecided whether Fulbright was a statesman or simply the overseas representative of corporate America.
Nasser was none the wiser if Fulbright had the remotest understanding of anything in the Middle East, uncertain if Fulbright realised that members of Nasser’s High Command viewed the events taking place in Iraq and Iran as a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to ‘annexe’ the ‘failed Libyan state’ and bring it under ‘the protection’ of an Egyptian dominated ‘commonwealth’. Libya was falling apart, rapidly becoming a threat to itself, its neighbours and to the free movement of seaborne traffic along the North African coast. An Egyptian military intervention in Libya could be seen, if handled correctly, as a statesmanlike act of kindness rather than aggression throughout much of the Arab world.
Nasser prided himself on being a realist. He yearned for pan-Arabist unity but recognised that ‘unity’ could never be bought by war, especially not when the entire region was already like a powder keg ready to blow up. Everywhere was chaos, new threats encircled Egypt at the very time his regime had embarked on a program of massive social and economic reforms. Too many of his people still lived in poverty, worrying daily where their next meal was coming from. Egyptian industry, such as it was, was incapable of sustaining the country without external meddling. While he dreamed of a cultural revival to throw off the shackles of the colonial past, his people needed him to concentrate on projects like the High Aswan Dam, not foreign adventures. His people needed food, jobs, schools for their children and hospitals for all, not just the rich and the lucky. Moreover, while Nasser’s personal popularity with the masses remained his real powerbase, there were always plots and coups rumbling just beneath the surface. Problems never arrived singly; there were Red Army tanks in northern Iraq and Iran, on his western border lay a lawless Libya, the Suez Canal was blocked and therefore the income from it indefinitely suspended, his attempts to support republican rebels in North Yemen had alienated the pro-western elements of the Saudi Royal Family, and now the American Secretary of State had demanded an audience at forty-eight hours notice.
In this the twelfth year since the Free Officers had toppled the corrupt regime of King Farouk, Gamal Abdel Nasser was acutely aware that nothing was ever quite so straightforward as it seemed. Just when he had imagined the World was an impossibly complicated place in which few, if any of the really important things were resolvable in his or any other man’s lifetime, Fulbright’s visit threatened to throw another wild card into the great game.
Had the Americans got wind of the meeting he and Sadat had had with the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson and Field Marshall Hull, the Chief of the United Kingdom Defence Staff at Sharm el-Sheikh three days ago?
After that short, terse conference beneath a hurriedly erected tent on a desert air strip — one of those ultra-secretive meetings where all aides and flunkies were banished well out of the hearing of the participants — Nasser and Sadat had looked at each other in stunned silence, as if daring the other to confirm what they had just been discussing only minutes before. Both men understood that for all their bluster and obsession with protocol and ‘form’ that the British could — if push came to shove — be the most ruthlessly pragmatic people on earth. Even so, what their guests had broached in the cold of that Arabian night had rocked the two men to the very core of their beings.
Seven-and-a-half years ago a British Prime Minister had likened Nasser to Hitler and Mussolini, and plotted with the French and the Israelis to invade his country and to remove him from power. The resultant Suez Crisis had very nearly fractured the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’, fatally undermined what was left of the British Empire, driven Anthony Eden from office, and changed the political centre of gravity of the whole Middle East for a generation. And yet in that tent in the desert in the middle of the night in Sinai, a British Foreign Secretary and the most senior officer in the British Army had baldly invited the Egyptian Republic to reshape the map of the Middle East…
Gamal Abdel Nasser and Muhammad Anwar El Sadat strode confidently into the reception hall where J. William Fulbright and his overlarge coterie of suited and stern-faced staffers awaited their pleasure.
Three days ago both Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson and Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull, had made the effort to acquaint themselves with sufficient of Nasser’s mother tongue to greet him in his own language, and to contritely apologise for suggesting that the rest of their exchange be conducted in English.
But no American Secretary of State ever made that sort of concession to a mere Arab. So, at both Nasser’s and Sadat’s shoulder stood interpreters.
The American Ambassador, sixty-one year old John Stothoff Badeau, an Arabist who understood Egypt and the Middle East better than practically any other living American with whom Nasser enjoyed frank, friendly and mutually respectful personal relations, read the runes and did his best to hide his dismay. The Kennedy Administration had sent him to Cairo in 1961 to ‘mend fences’ but almost immediately cut the ground from beneath their ambassador’s feet by taking Israel’s side in the United Nations and by describing Nasser’s regime as ‘Castro-like’, and Nasser himself as a ‘socialist’, and a ‘Soviet stooge’.
It was Ambassador Badeau who stepped forward and introduced his chief to Nasser in Egyptian, signalling that he planned to be his Secretary of State’s translator.
Nasser looked J. William Fulbright in the eye.
The American met his stare, unblinking.
That was when Nasser knew that although Fulbright must have heard about the meeting with the British in the Sinai; he had not yet drawn any of the obvious conclusions. If he had he would have brought senior military officers with him rather than the pale-skinned, sweating State Department second-raters standing at his back.
For all that the US Sixth Fleet, with its big grey warships swinging around their anchors in the Grand Harbour at Malta like some occupying armada pretended that it had made the Mediterranean an American sea, it was only the British who actually had the will and the courage to fight.
Before J. William Fulbright had opened his mouth to speak Nasser, and at his side, Anwar Sadat, were already redrawing their thoughts about the proposition put to them at Sharm-el-Sheik.
If the United States really was disengaging from its former — mostly unspoken — commitments East of Suez then the rules of the game had just changed.
Suddenly, sitting on the fence awaiting developments was no longer an option.
Chapter 26
Major Generals Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov and Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik snapped to attention as Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian walked into what had been — up until seven days ago — the dining room of the residence of the Military Governor of Sulaymaniyah.