“Nasser’s Gamble tells the story of Egypt’s intervention in Yemen, a venture that was supposed to last weeks but which dragged on for more than five years before Egyptian troops were finally withdrawn. The point Ferris makes–and he does it exceptionally well–is that the Yemeni episode bears much of the responsibility for the decline of Egyptian power in the 1960s.”–Adeed Dawisha, author ofIraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation

“An engrossing and lively narrative. Ferris has taken advantage of the release of many important Soviet documents and has also made very extensive use of documents from U.S. and British archives, a host of memoirs and other sources in Arabic, and some exceedingly useful items in Hebrew. Nasser’s Gamble is a model of how a true international history should be written.”–Mark Kramer, Harvard University

Jesse Ferris is vice president for strategy at the Israel Democracy Institute and a historian of the modern Middle East.

Nasser’s Gamble

HOW INTERVENTION IN YEMEN CAUSED THE SIX-DAY WAR AND THE DECLINE OF EGYPTIAN POWERBy Jesse Ferris

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15514-2

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………..ixIntroduction……………………………………………………………………………………..1Chapter One The Road to War……………………………………………………………………….24Chapter Two The Soviet-Egyptian Intervention in Yemen………………………………………………..70Chapter Three Food for “Peace”: The Breakdown of US-Egyptian Relations, 1962–65……………………102Chapter Four Guns for Cotton: The Unraveling of Soviet-Egyptian Relations, 1964–66…………………142Chapter Five On the Battlefield in Yemen—and in Egypt…………………………………………..174Chapter Six The Fruitless Quest for Peace: Saudi-Egyptian Negotiations, 1964–66……………………215Chapter Seven The Six-Day War and the End of the Intervention in Yemen…………………………………262Afterword The Twilight of Egyptian Power……………………………………………………………295Bibliographical Note………………………………………………………………………………313Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..319Index……………………………………………………………………………………………335

Chapter One

The Road to War

I sent a company to Yemen and had to reinforce it with 70,000 soldiers. —Gamal Abdel Nasser, in conversation with the historian Ahmad Hamrush, 1967

Before dawn on September 28, 1961, units of the Syrian military seized control of Damascus and put an end to the grand experiment in pan-Arab unity launched with Egypt more than three years before. Egypt’s most famous journalist, Muhammad Haykal, called Syria’s unilateral secession from the United Arab Republic (UAR)—the infamous infisal—”the greatest blow to the Arab revolutionary movement” since 1952. In fact, the blow landed squarely in Egypt.

Nasser’s star had been on the ascendant ever since 1955. With the formation of the United Arab Republic in February 1958, his influence in the Arab world attained its climax. To the crown of anti-imperialism he had won at Suez, the Egyptian president, in Damascus, added the mantle of Arab unity. And he did it without shedding a drop of blood. In the wake of his great victory in Syria, Nasser’s inchoate call for unity seemed irresistible to many ordinary Arabs. Gripped by the quasimessianic fervor that engulfed Nasser everywhere he traveled in the Arab world, they seemed ready to follow “Gamal” wherever he might lead. Their leaders, however, had other ideas.

The union was an improbable one from the outset. Separated by sea and enemy territory, Egypt and Syria were widely disparate in terms of elite structure, ethnic makeup, economic foundations, and political culture. Egyptian policies compounded the structural weaknesses of the union. If the enormous disparities between the two states militated in favor of considerable autonomy, the Egyptians proved incapable of restraining the centralizing reflex of their regime. The appearance of a voluntary union between two equal entities masked a considerably less appealing reality. Cast as an act of involuntary surrender to the will of the Arab masses, the wildly popular unity agreement concealed Egypt’s stubborn insistence on preserving Cairo’s seniority in the new partnership from the very beginning. Over time, the illusion of an independent Syrian voice in the joint conduct of affairs gave way to the reality of Egyptian control—in political, economic, and military affairs. And along with Egyptian rule came the less pleasant trappings of the Nasserist system of governance: cronyism, strong-armed security tactics, and an incipient trend toward radical nationalization.

To the Syrians these deficiencies would only become apparent with time, producing alienation among the elite and eventually precipitating the military coup that ended the union. But the surrounding governments immediately appreciated the negative significance of the UAR. Notwithstanding the popularity of the union among ordinary Arabs everywhere, to Arab statesmen, the incorporation of Syria into Egypt represented a dangerous extension of Egyptian power into the Levant. The merger of these two ancient entities signaled Nasser’s apparent intention to follow in the footsteps of Saladin and Muhammad Ali. That geopolitical constants trumped ideological principle in this instance is demonstrated by Iraq’s consistent opposition to the union both before and after the revolution of July 1958. In fact, when revolutionaries toppled the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad in July, the new regime soon turned out to be just as hostile to Egypt as the old regime had ever been. Nevertheless, the momentum acquired by the nationalist juggernaut in Damascus posed a special threat to the Arab royal families. For the monarchs in Amman, Riyadh, and Baghdad in particular—already reeling from the shock waves of revolution emanating from Cairo for the better part of a decade—the UAR was a step too far.

Although King Sa’ud bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, ruler of the oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was less outspoken than his counterparts in Jordan and Iraq, he had no less profound misgivings about the expansion of Nasser’s power and was more in a position to orchestrate his demise. Whether or not the king had actually bankrolled an assassination attempt on Nasser in early 1958 or had merely funded attempts to subvert the union from its inception, it was the Saudis who emerged at the forefront of the conservative forces opposing Egypt’s aggrandizement. Following the exposure of these bungled conspiracies in 1958, it became increasingly difficult for the Saudi leadership to evade Nasser’s ire. Although a truce took root between Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia from 1959 to 1961, it was the tenuous product of fear and a common interest in opposing Iraqi expansionism. It did not survive the infisal.

Nasser apparently took the Syrian slap quite personally, and it was this blow to the president’s prestige—and by extension, to Egypt’s as a whole—that explains the bitterness of his reaction. Reversing the longstanding policy of solidarity with other Arab regimes summed up in the slogan “unity of rank” (wahdat al-saff), he announced a new slogan: “unity of purpose” (wahdat al-hadaf). The purpose Nasser had in mind was revolution, and it was one aimed directly at the so-called reactionaries in Amman, Riyadh, and San’a’ as much as at rival revolutionaries in Damascus and Baghdad. Revolution, in other words, was henceforth to be a precondition for unity—where “revolution” designated rule by military officers with a pro-Egyptian orientation, while “unity” meant not so much territorial union as political solidarity under Egyptian leadership. Nasser’s new posture posed a basic challenge to the very legitimacy of the postwar system of Arab states. “It was,” in the words of Avraham Sela, “tantamount to a declaration of indiscriminate war against his Arab rivals, ‘reactionaries’ and ‘revolutionaries’ alike.” The new policy “heralded the collapse of the Westphalian order struck by the foundation of the Arab League in 1945, whose most important principle was the commitment of its constituent members to respect each other’s sovereignty.” To the ruling elite in much of the Arab world, Nasser’s aggressive posture posed a challenge of near-Napoleonic proportions.

Nasser reacted to the dissolution of the UAR with resolve to export Egypt’s revolution to his Arab rivals and determination to deepen the revolution in Egypt itself. In the immediate aftermath of the infisal, the Egyptian leadership rededicated itself to shoring up the revolution at home. Further nationalizations, expropriations, and arrests of “reactionaries” followed within weeks. Within months the government dissolved the quasi-parliamentary National Union, soon to be replaced by the more regimented Arab Socialist Union (ASU). Then in May 1962 a new “national charter” (al-mithaq al-watani) was promulgated, which expounded the new socialist principles of Egypt’s domestic revolution. But all this was carried out to the drumbeat of a defiant pledge to continue shouldering Egypt’s revolutionary responsibilities abroad. Not unlike Stalin’s “socialism in one country,” Nasser’s turn to radical socialism underlined the dual status of Egypt under the Free Officers: a pragmatic nation-state on the one hand, it was an interventionist revolutionary vanguard on the other. And if the rhetoric was anything by which to judge, it was only a matter of time before Egypt’s domestic preoccupations came to an end.

For exactly one year, Nasser smoldered as his enemies rejoiced at Egypt’s misfortune. Of the major Arab states, only Algeria was on good terms with Egypt in the summer of 1962; Iraq, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, and Saudi Arabia were all arrayed against Nasser. For the self-proclaimed leader of the Arab world, the unprecedented regional isolation that followed the secession must have been intolerable. The humiliating peak of Egypt’s solitude came in August 1962, when the Egyptian delegation walked out of an Arab League summit in Lebanon, which had turned into a verbal lynching of the organization’s putative leader. The loss of control over the Arab League, Cairo’s principal instrument for the imposition of Egyptian-led solidarity, attested to the depth of Nasser’s predicament. One month later, on the eve of the anniversary of the infisal, events in Yemen provided a timely opportunity to strike back at Egypt’s rivals, capture the moral high ground, and regain the initiative in the Arab Cold War.

The Coup in Yemen

On September 19, 1962, Imam Ahmad bin Yahya, iron-handed ruler of Yemen since 1948, passed away. His son, thirty-six-year-old Muhammad al-Badr, succeeded him. One week later, on September 26, 1962, a group of Yemeni army officers assaulted the Royal Palace in San’a’ and at the conclusion of a night-long bombardment declared the establishment of a republic. The rebels believed they had killed the young Imam; in fact, he had managed to escape. As the revolutionaries struggled to consolidate their hold on power in the major towns in the center and south of the country, many of the Zaydi tribes of the rural north of Yemen, upon which the Imamate had based its power for centuries, rallied around the deposed Hamid al-Din royal family. Some of the republic’s opponents were attracted by the cause of restoration; others were repelled by the personages, ideology, and behavior of the Republican government. All were subsequently lumped together under the banner Royalists, a misleading if indispensable shorthand designation for the various tribal forces opposed to the republic and the Egyptian presence in Yemen at any given moment. The Royalists stood in contradistinction to the so-called Republicans—likewise a motley crew of army officers, merchants, southern Shafi’is, and disaffected Zaydis. Yemen’s difficult topography and deep social cleavages, along tribal, sectarian, and class lines, heightened the chances of indecision in the struggle for power, thereby raising the specter of civil war. The fact that this local contest took place in a regional context of great tension made armed conflict all the more likely.

Egyptian military aid followed so fast upon the coup that many foreign observers suspected, not unreasonably, that the “revolution” was an Egyptian concoction. Indeed, the incredible speed of the Egyptian response, the suspicious coincidence of the coup with the anniversary of the infisal, and the conscious emulation of Egypt by the self-styled Yemeni Free Officers all seemed to point in one direction: the revolution was a conspiracy hatched in Cairo. To what extent an Egyptian hand had guided the Yemeni revolutionaries is a question that may never be resolved. Oddly enough, both the Egyptian and Yemeni narratives of the revolution share an interest in portraying the coup d’état as a Yemeni affair—with the Egyptians emphasizing that they were merely responding to Yemeni pleas for protection from Saudi Arabia. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two extremes: the Egyptians had known about preparations for the coup and prepared to aid it in advance, but they did not take an active role in the coup itself. In any event, there was something more to the intervention than the seizure of an opportunity crafted by Yemeni agency.

The view of the intervention as Egypt’s response to the infisal, though it contains important elements of truth, fails to account for the considerable record of Egyptian subversion in Yemen well before the Syrian secession. According to an alternate interpretation, presented most compellingly by Sami Sharaf, Nasser’s private secretary at the time, the explanation for Egypt’s reaction to the events of September 1962 ought not to be sought in the tumultuous period that immediately preceded the revolution; rather, it is to be found in a decade of Egyptian support for national liberation movements in the Arab world in general and in Yemen in particular. Ever since the early 1950s, the Free Officers had volunteered their capital as a hub for the funding, training, and arming of myriad Arab and African revolutionaries. Against this background of energetic activism, Egyptian policy toward the revolutionary movement in Yemen stands out as especially proactive. Yemen lay at the heart of plans formulated in 1953 by Egyptian intelligence to spread revolution throughout the Arab world. Soon after seizing power in Egypt, Nasser was already convinced that the collapse of the Imamate would do much to further the cause of revolution throughout the Arab world, and he was therefore determined to promote those who were capable of opposing it. It is in this context that we should consider the extensive record of Egyptian intelligence contacts with opposition elements in Yemen and in Cairo throughout the 1950s, a bungled coup d’état in 1955, and the dispatch of Egyptian military and police training missions to Yemen in 1954 and 1957.

In other words, the overthrow of the Imamate, though primarily a Yemeni achievement, was also the culmination of nearly ten years of joint Egyptian-Yemeni efforts. The Egyptian government did not control the events of 1962. But its agents were in contact with all the main protagonists, most of whom had studied in Egyptian military institutions and operated under assurances of Egyptian support. Accordingly, when the Egyptian government received a call for help from a clique of Yemeni officers acting in evident emulation of Egyptian role models, there was no question of ignoring the appeal; the decision to support them had already been made. Egypt responded, in other words, not on impulse, but by reflex, conditioned by nearly a decade of consistent policy.

This unapologetic depiction of the campaign as the natural product of Egypt’s revolutionary foreign policy steers the debate about the origins of the intervention away from both the scholarly trope of post-infisal trauma on the one hand and the Egyptian apologia of unanticipated reaction to Saudi meddling on the other. Nevertheless, there is no escaping the fact that the Syrian secession marked a turning point in Egyptian-Yemeni relations and in Egyptian attitudes toward the use of force.

Up until 1961, Egypt concealed its revolutionary intentions toward the Imamate beneath a veneer of friendly relations. The Egyptian military and police missions went to Yemen ostensibly to train the Yemeni armed forces to fight the British, not their sovereign. Moreover, Nasser’s friendly relations with Ahmad’s chosen successor, Crown Prince Muhammad al-Badr, seemed to indicate that differences between the two states arose out of specific policies, not a fundamental contradiction between two systems of government. This conclusion seemed all the more justified when, in March 1958, the Imam elected to join the UAR as a junior partner in what became known as the United Arab States, or UAS, thereby associating his ancient kingdom with the grandest pan-Arab experiment of the century. But the chimera of two revolutionary republics joined to a deeply conservative kingdom had a complex psychological makeup. The Imam acceded to the UAR not out of a desire for self-immolation. Quite to the contrary, Ahmad’s primary goal was to move out of Cairo’s line of fire by tethering himself to Egypt’s revolutionary bandwagon. Nor did Nasser’s acceptance of the Imam reflect a genuine sprit of compromise. The need to generate momentum behind an expanding pan-Arab entity must have barely outweighed the embarrassment caused by introducing such a reactionary partner to the union.

Thus Yemen became one of Egypt’s most obvious targets for retribution in the aftermath of Syria’s secession—along with Syria itself. Relations between Egypt and Yemen came under strain even before the infisal on account of the Imam’s tacit support for Iraqi leader ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim’s annexationist ambitions in Kuwait in the summer of 1961. After Syria seceded from the union, Yemen remained formally federated with Egypt. Within several weeks, however, the Imam, seeing that the tide had shifted against Cairo, summoned the courage to join in the monarchs’ schadenfreude at Nasser’s predicament. Ahmad did so not by dissolving the union as Syria had done—secession would have posed too direct a challenge to his nemesis in Cairo—but rather, true to Arabian tradition, by expounding his position in verse.

In a sixty-four-line poem addressed “To the Arabs” in mid-December, the Imam attacked the noisy propaganda and socialist heresies of an unnamed regime, contrasting them sharply with the principles of Islam. Nasser responded immediately. In his Victory Day speech at Port Sa’id on December 23, the Egyptian president defended Egypt’s socialist turn as inherent in the Islamic conception of justice and ridiculed the perversion of social justice Imam Ahmad and King Sa’ud practiced. Three days later the Egyptian government announced its decision to terminate the association with the Imamate, politely citing the failure of the two governments to agree on social policy. The dismissal, however civil, could not disguise Nasser’s deep displeasure.

(Continues…)

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