Ike's Gamble by Michael Doran

Author:Michael Doran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

The Qibya Vise

Around the time that Nasser announced the Soviet-Egyptian arms deal, the Israelis were gaining a clear picture of the new Egyptian terror network with its various nodes in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and, of course, Jordan. On October 3, 1955, Colonel Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel’s chief of military intelligence, explained at a press conference that Egyptian intelligence had taken over a Syrian-sponsored group of terrorists stationed in Irbid, Jordan. It had also established an entirely new hub in the Hebron hills, also then in Jordan, under the direct control of the chief Egyptian diplomatic representative in Amman.11

Neither the British nor the Jordanians doubted Harkabi’s claims. Everyone understood clearly that Nasser was launching a clandestine border war—everyone, that is, except for the Americans. “We have recently sent to Washington a report by the Jordan Military Attaché in Cairo of the Egyptian organization of terrorist gangs,” a British Foreign Office official informed his colleagues in September. “This is to convince the State Department that such activities are going on, which they did not believe.”12

The lead skeptic in the State Department was Henry Byroade. In November, he met with Nasser to convey the concern of Dulles over mounting reports that Egypt was sponsoring terrorism against Israel. Nasser denied the charges. He explained that the Fedayeen attacks were “spontaneous,” implying that the Palestinians were acting on their own. He went on to say, however, that the Egyptian military did possess “an organization for such operations and he supposed knowledge of this might be being used as evidence of Egypt’s complicity in present operations.”13

As Byroade should have known, this admission was damning. The Fedayeen campaign was covert only insofar as Nasser downplayed its existence to Western officials. In Jordan it was an open secret. As Glubb reported to London, Voice of the Arabs was publicly taking credit for the attacks.14 Indeed, Glubb, who was fluent in Arabic and had spent his entire adult life working on the ground in the Middle East, understood the Egyptian game perfectly. Nasser’s goal, he explained, was to play the role of the “heroic leader [of the] whole Arab world,” precisely in order to embarrass the Jordanian government by making it look “timid and treacherous” before its own public.15

The Soviet arms deal, Glubb stressed, had made Nasser extraordinarily popular on the streets of Jordan, where people now believed that the “Jews . . . will very soon be destroyed.” Nasser’s portrait, distributed freely by the Egyptian embassy, was ubiquitous, hanging in shops and public places and putting the government on the defensive. Although local authorities monitored Egyptian agents, they refrained from rounding them up for fear of a backlash in the form of “street riots whipped up by Egypt.”16

Nasser had already won the moral high ground. He had Glubb right where he wanted him: squeezed between the Egyptian-Palestinian terror network and the Israeli military—in the Qibya vise.

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