For a time last week, responsible statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic feared that war was in the making. Messages of alarm shot between Washington, London, Paris and Tel Aviv. U.S. armed forces were alerted—not because attack was believed imminent, but in case it was. Out of their mutual concern, the Western alliance, rent by the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, was put back together again. The price: an incomplete victory in Egypt.
The chief fear was not the war of "rocket weapons" and other "modern and terrible means" that Russian Premier Nikolai Bulganin threatened against Great Britain and France (TIME, Nov. 12). This was taken to be crude and nasty propaganda. The fear was of a limited war in the Middle East, of the kind Soviet Russia likes: perhaps without any Russian soldiers, but instigated and supplied by the Russians.
Bell Rings. The alarm bell did not ring until after Britain and France had already agreed to a cease-fire in Egypt, in the face of the expressed disapproval of other principal allies around the world and a 64-10-5 vote against them in U.N. Israel too had agreed to a ceasefire, but was waiting to exact a victor's satisfaction from Nasser.
Then came reports of Soviet MIGs landing in Syria. The alarm faded in a few hours when intelligence officers concluded that Nasser had simply flown his Russian planes to Damascus to save them from destruction by the British and French invaders.
But at midweek Israeli intelligence (usually quite good) reported that 24 Russian-manned MIG-17s, accompanied by Soviet transports bringing technicians, radar and ground equipment, had landed in Syria. This report fitted in with the recent visit to Russia of Syrian President Shukri el Kuwatly, whose government and army are more thickly infested with Communists than any other Arab state. His was no casual visit. His wife, his daughter, his Foreign Minister and staff. Minister of Defense. Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Propaganda and the manager of the Central Bank of Syria had flown to the Crimea with an escort of Soviet fighter planes. They returned last week with smiles of satisfaction.
Quiet Toughness. Late Wednesday David Ben-Gurion got a personal message from President Eisenhower. Its gist, as relayed by Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban, was that the U.S. had reached a stern decision: unless Ben-Gurion backed down and agreed to retreat from the Sinai peninsula as the United Nations asked, he could not expect any U.S. aid in the event of a Soviet attack. The White House had already made clear to Paris and London that the U.S. did not conceive its NATO commitment to include the Middle East or Cyprus if the Anglo-French persisted in their use of force. In short, so long as Britain, France and Israel had not purged themselves of their aggressions, they were on their own. But Eisenhower had also served notice on the Kremlin in a White House statement: the U.S. would not allow any "new force" to intervene in the Middle East situation except under the mandate of the U.N. This was a characteristically quiet way of asserting a tough stand: the U.S. would not let the Russians intervene.