The drip feed of information on the attempted assassination of President Nasser continues. In a recent episode of the Channel 4 TV series ‘The End of Empire’, Sir Anthony Nutting, former Minister of State at the Foreign Office, who later resigned over Suez, recalled that he had been “horrified” to receive a telephone call from Prime Minister Eden over an open line in which Eden shouted: “What is all this poppy-cock you have sent me about isolation and quarantining Nasser. Can’t you understand…that I want Nasser murdered!” This occurred some six months before the invasion. (Daily Telegraph 24 May 1985) Sir Ivonne Kirkpatrick, the senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, was also told by Eden that he wanted Nasser murdered. (Daily Telegraph 25 May 1985)
What happened next is not at all clear. Who, for instance, within the government and the Foreign Office gave the go ahead? It seems that Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary, expressly opposed such action.
According to Chapman Pincher (Their Trade is Treachery p 206), in collaboration with leaders of the SAS, a plan to kill Nasser, his bodyguards, and anyone else who got in the way, was put together. They were going to use cannisters of poison gas . Eden vetoed this, supposedly because he didn’t like the idea of gas. Pincher also says that he didn’t support the assassination of heads of state. This is hard to square with what Eden had said earlier, but during WW2 he had been against what he called the ‘war crimes business’ (Times 16 March 1985) – in this case referring to the assassination of Hitler and Heydrich.
Perhaps MI6 were on their own with this one. The SAS plan seems never to have got off the ground, even though they had claimed that any evidence of their involvement would be removed so smartly as to be deniable. Pincher’s source may have been Maurice Oldfield, former head of MI6, who told friends of the gas plot four years before he died. (Daily Telegraph 29 May 1985)
MI6 had other plots up their sleeve. A second plan was to be controlled by an officer under the name ‘Colonel Yarrow’, in which the killing was to be accomplished by Egyptian officers using a cache of weapons hidden in the sand. The key man in Cairo was Mahmoud Khalil, the head of Egyptian Air Force Intelligence who was called to a meeting in Rome with his MI6 contact in February 1957. Between then and the following November Khalil was given a total of £162,500 to finance a coup and restore the monarchy. This was terminated on “23 rd December when Nasser announced the existence of the ‘restoration plot’ – as it became known – at a rally celebrating the first anniversary of the Anglo-French withdrawal from Suez. Khalil, it turned out, was never really working with the British and followed the orders of his superiors throughout.” (British Intelligence and Covert Action, Bloch/Fitzgerald, Brandon Books, 1982 p126.)
A third plot is suggested by a passage in Ropes of Sand by Wilbur Eveland (Norton, 1980). He reveals that an envoy from George Young, then Deputy Director of MI6, appeared, somewhat the worse for drink, at a meeting in Beirut.
“Apologising neither for his lateness nor his condition he took over the meeting. Teams had been fielded to assassinate Nasser, he informed us, and then rambled on about bloody Egyptians who had planned to turn the Middle East over to the ‘commies’. His voice trailing off, he finally sank in his chair and passed out.” (emphasis added).
Perhaps these ‘teams’ were part of the complicated plot which Anthony Verrier talks of in his Through the Looking Glass (London 1983). According to Verrier, before leaving for Jamaica to stay at Ian Fleming’s house to recover from his fevers, Eden ordered Nasser’s assassination.
“The SIS station officer in Beirut packed up immediately and left for London. Thuggery was on the agenda. But the Prime Ministerial order was disobeyed. SIS was not living in a James Bond world.. an elaborate assassination plan was made carefully arranged to fail. Nasser never did get the razor designed to explode when used.”
Verrier is very much an apologist for MI6 so we can’t be sure that the order was disobeyed. The existence of other plots over a lengthy period suggests that the order was taken seriously. Perhaps, like the Foreign Office over Suez, the ‘firm’ was split.
David Leigh in his High Times (reviewed in this issue), describes what seems to be an imaginary conversation between an MI6 officer, Hamilton McMillan and his superior officer. During the talk McMillan’s superior says MI6 was cleaned up by Prime Minister Harold McMillan because “half of them were trying to assassinate Nasser.”
SD