THE MIDDLE EAST: Between Thunder & Sun

Gamal Abdel Nasser dined quietly at Aleppo's guesthouse, then announced with studied casualness that he was going out for a tour of Syria's largest city (pop. nearly 500,000). He climbed into a black sedan driven by Lieut. Colonel Abdel Hamid Serraj, the man he has picked for his proconsul in Syria-now known as the United Arab Republic's "Northern Region." Serraj drove him to the airport, where Nasser's private airplane waited.' Under cover of darkness and secrecy, the plane headed southwest past Israel's intervening airspace, and arrived safely back in Cairo.

Despite the somewhat...

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