The Counterpuncher

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The man the London conference was all about stayed home in Cairo last week, getting in provisions for a long fight. Gamal Abdel Nasser affected to be confident, but he could not bring off an appearance of indifference. TIME Correspondent John Mecklin, in a private interview, found him tense and unusually subdued, in his bare little office in the building beside the Nile that ex-King Farouk built as his yacht house. Dictator Nasser seemed more concerned about the threat of economic sanctions than of armed invasion. His right knee jiggled constantly as he talked.

The London conference? "I don't know what to expect. We had a reply today from Monsieur Pineau in his speech. He said he would agree to our ownership of the canal if we would agree to internationalize it." Nasser leaned back laughing, and lit up an L & M cigarette.

"Really," he said, "there's a lot of confusion about this. We are ready to discuss freedom of navigation -but the canal is part of our land."

What would he like the U.S. to do now? "Be fair, just fair. The Russians are fair, you are not. In your proposals of yesterday you are supporting collective colonialism, while the Russians in their proposals today are supporting our sovereignty and dignity."

Is a neutral policy still possible for Egypt? "What's a neutral policy? Neutrality is a term to use only in war. We adopt an independent policy, a policy of active coexistence. One-third of our trade is with the Western bloc, one-third with the Eastern bloc, and one-third with the rest of the world. If our trade had all been with the West, we would be in a very critical position today. Thank God we had this policy." He lit another cigarette, fingered his Dunhill lighter nervously.

What if Egypt should be attacked? "We would fight."

What if the West should apply economic sanctions? "We would try by all our means to escape. You know we are a patient country. What would the effect be upon world conscience? This would be an action against the sovereignty and independence of all countries. The West would lose ground all over the world."

Would Egypt try to increase its trade with Russia? "Of course, we would use any means when it's a choice of starving or cooperating with anyone. In this connection we are preparing to receive a Chinese delegation at the end of this month. They are ready to supply anything we can't get from the outside." Arms? "We have enough arms. We think about food if there are going to be sanctions."

"Somewhere in Jordan." The dictator's remarks were made with an assurance that his demeanor did not fully match. This was a heady game he was playing: one man against 22 of the world's most powerful nations -though he counted on having some on his side to begin with, and others if he played his cards right.

With skill, Dictator Nasser last week sought to display a double image: an Egypt under calm discipline, an Arab world up in arms. The Arab League's political committee, ever ready to accent the negative, met in Cairo and strongly endorsed Nasser's seizure of the Suez. On the day the London conference began, all Egypt stopped work for 24 hours, and stopped talking for five minutes, in protest. About the only operation in the country unaffected by the strike was the daily passage of ships through the canal, which the government's control agency ordered to continue as usual. In Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, Western-owned pipelines stopped pumping oil for most of a day. In Libya, police used tear gas to break up a pro-Egyptian demonstration. Nasser's propaganda news agency proclaimed the organization at a secret session "somewhere in Jordan," of an Arab underground stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. "Particular stress was laid on the importance of destroying oilfields and pipelines and paralyzing work of all imperialist companies sucking the blood of Arab peoples." That was the clenched fist of the man with the cigarette in his other hand.

Gamal Abdel Nasser is a tall (6 ft.), hefty Egyptian of 38 who just four years ago was an unknown infantry officer in a beaten and discredited army. Not very long ago, Western leaders (and even Israel's) saluted him as a genuine, responsible leader at last in the Middle East, a young man whose forceful vision might yet bring tranquillity where there was chaos. Today, having seized control of the world's most important waterway, he is defiantly whipping up Arab hatred to drive the Western powers from the Middle East. Said one Western expert: "We thought we were dealing with a kitten. In fact it was a leopard."

There are other names for him too. London's Tory Daily Mail calls him "Hitler on the Nile." The Peking press coos: "Egyptian brother." France's Premier Guy Mollet has called him "a megalomaniac" dictator. "This is how Fascist governments behave," warns Sir Anthony Eden. The Cairo press calls him "savior of the people," the Israelis say "highway robber," "treacherous wolf." Nehru's private verdict: "Too young and inexperienced." To France's Foreign Minister Christian Pineau, Nasser is "a congenital liar."

"One-Card Game." Nasser's own view of himself is as a man of destiny, fitted to play a role in the Arab world "wandering aimlessly in search of a hero" (see box). "We are in a position to ruin the West if we set to work and stop talking," he has said.

Nasser has always admitted that his movement was essentially negative, "a revolution without a plan." He has costumed himself in the verbiage of Western liberalism, but in fact his regime has been politically retrogressive. Only last June, 5,000,000 Egyptians certified his dictatorship by casting a 99.9% majority in "free" elections. Years ago he wrote a friend: "I really believe that imperialism is playing a one-card game in order to threaten only. If ever it knew that there were Egyptians ready to shed their blood and to meet force by force, it would have given way like a harlot." Nasser is a counterpuncher who has won a number of prelims by meeting blow with counterblow. All things considered, he has come far; the question is, how much farther can he go?

Double Revolution. Nasser's own life sharply defines the Middle East's double revolution, in which men torn between new Western ideas and old Oriental traditions seek to shake off Europe's political dominance, but. with the techniques learned from Europe, also to break free from their country's stagnant past. It is a combination most often found these days in soldiers of humble origins, European-trained, and hotly nationalistic.

Nasser was born in a farm village some 200 miles up the Nile from Cairo. Like most Egyptians, he was of mixed Egyptian and Arab stock. "We were all one family there," he has said. "The landlords treated the people as slaves." His father was an assistant postmaster. Sent to school in Cairo, young Nasser learned the classic Middle East three Rs: reading, 'riting and rioting. Shouting "O Almighty, disaster take the British!", he fought nationalist street battles, won admittance to the military academy. Of these struggles he has bitterly said: "You come back from your studies feeling a new world is in front of you to a home where there is no food to eat."

In the army he learned to hate the corpulent corruption of King Farouk and his senior officers. Wounded in the Palestine fighting, outraged at the army's wretched performance and sleazy equipment, Nasser went back to Cairo to conspire his way to power. Of the Free Officers' movement he says simply: "I am the original." On the night of July 22, 1952, the plotters struck. Victorious, Nasser ruled through General Mohammed Naguib for two years, then through a junta of which he was the Premier.

When he first came to power, Nasser's knowledge of how to run a country was close to zero, and he said so. In 1953, when he was negotiating with the British for the evacuation of their Suez base, he suddenly broke off the talks one day, explaining to the astounded British that they were making things too complicated for him. "The British are too clever," he told a friend. "I think I'll take some time out." The talks were resumed some weeks later. Today Nasser still plays the role of youthful amateur, frank and quickwitted in private conversation, making his sharper points with a disarming, schoolboyish grin. It is one of his most winning techniques. But in fact, Gamal Abdel Nasser has acquired a new opinion of himself.

"I'm Too Suspicious." This may have been as inevitable as his success. From the day of the revolution, he set out to be boss, and chafed at the delays in getting decisions inside the old Free Officers' junta. Of the 14 members of Nasser's first junta, four in top jobs survived when Nasser finally dissolved it and became constitutional President this summer. A friend once asked the strongman why he was so reluctant to delegate authority. "Show me ten men I can trust," he replied, "and I will delegate authority." Recently a visiting diplomat, who had been doing a lot of business with him, remarked: "Sometimes I think I hardly know you, despite all our talks." Nasser's answer was candid: "Nobody does. I'm too suspicious."

Closest to Nasser is the man to whom he first confided his conspiratorial ambitions in 1942: Army Chief Abdel Hakim Amer, 36. He still plays chess with Nasser ("A fox," says Amer), and is in on all the big moves. Ali Sabri, 36, whom Nasser sent to London to keep watch on the Suez conference, is his political fixer, and probably sees him most frequently. Sabri is also Nasser's most frequent tennis opponent (Sabri usually wins -;Nasser has gained weight of late). These and other close advisers are smart, dedicated -and obedient.

"I Run Everything." His trip last spring to the Bandung conference, where Nehru and Chou En-lai made much of him, helped convince Nasser that he had become a world figure. His pressagents, exuberantly whooping up the cult of the Cairo hero, seem to have influenced him at least as much as their readers. Two years of almost unbridled authority have also left their mark. "I know everything that goes on in this country," he told a U.S. newsman recently. "I run everything myself."

To make good on that boast, he works a ferocious schedule, often staying up till 4 a.m. dictating letters and memos on every subject of government. He is a tireless reader of the newspapers, and cons the entire Arab world press daily, down to the last movie review. It is one of the world's" misfortunes that, never having lived in a free country, Nasser does not grasp how Western policy is made, and tends to read all sorts of secret motivations and nonexistent attitudes of governments into the comments of the foreign press. He has become excessively sensitive to personal criticism, and maintains a tight censorship over his own press.

Nasser, says one caustic Englishman, "displays that unmistakable mark of the second-rate, the belief that human affairs can be reduced to simple, single causes." In a safe in his office he keeps a neat file of all his main problems, with the essentials of each summarized as briefly as his staff can get them down. When the dictator has to face a problem, he writes down the considerations in three columns on a piece of paper. In one column he sets down what he wants to do, in the next the obstacles, in the third his possible courses of action. "He doesn't always recognize all the obstacles," one of his friends concedes.

Pact Trouble. The U.S. and Nasser got off to a fine start when John Foster Dulles visited Cairo in 1953 and listened to Egypt's dynamic young leader argue earnestly that the country's troubles lay, not in Palestine, but at home -where a misgoverned and exploited population, grown from 10 million to 22 1/2 million in 50 years, needed land, three square meals, and some intimation of human dignity. With every intention of basing its Middle East policy on a revitalized Egypt, the U.S. poured $25.9 million in economic aid into Nasser's development program, helped him get the British out of their Canal Zone base, and sent Ambassador Henry Byroade, a West Pointer who could work closely and frankly with a fellow army man. "Egypt stands today in every respect with the West," smiled Nasser.

But Nasser declined to sign a military aid agreement with the U.S. "Too much like 'colonization,' " he said. He did not like the anti-Communist Baghdad Pact, either. But it was Israel's 1955 Gaza Strip raid, in which 38 of his soldiers were killed, that Nasser called "the turning point." "Until that moment," said Nasser later, "I felt the possibility of real peace was near." He counterpunched. He had to have more arms, he said.

While the U.S. hesitated, anxious not to start an arms race in the Middle East, the Russians saw the chance they had been looking for. The Nasser who found Chou En-lai's coexistence charter at Bandung "quite convincing" sounded to Communists like their kind of neutralist -a soldier, a conspirator with a smoldering sense of anticolonial vengeance. By offering arms to Nasser, the Communists could strike hard at the Baghdad Pact. They could also win a foothold at last in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Double Play. Their deal gave Nasser a reported 200 MIG fighters, 50 jet bombers, 200 tanks, two destroyers, six submarines. Nonetheless, Washington at first took Nasser's word that it was just a commercial transaction with the Czechs, based on considerations of self-defense and the need for bartering away surplus cotton. Turning the other cheek, the U.S. practically embargoed arms shipments to Israel, and even volunteered to help build a $1.3 billion dam at Aswan, offering Nasser a $56 million grant for a starter. The World Bank pledged an additional $200 million loan.

But that tireless student of the Levantine press already knew that his Soviet arms deal had set the whole Arab world afire. He had played the West against the East, and come out on top; he had received arms from the East, and stood to get a dam from the West. He began to throw his weight around. When the British tried to line up Jordan with the Baghdad Pact, he counterpunched. Radio Cairo's propaganda, joined by Saudi gold and Communist intrigue, helped blow Glubb Pasha out of Jordan. Nasser's broadcasts spread hatred for the U.S. among the 900,000 Palestinian refugees. In French North Africa, Nasser's radio preached enmity to the French. Despite Nasser's "soldier's word" to the contrary, the French say that in Algeria they have captured 50 graduates of Egyptian non-com schools, and believe there are 500 more Egyptian-trained guerrillas fighting there.

The British and French were the first to become disenchanted with Nasser. But slowly the U.S. learned, too. Nasser had made, not one deal for $60 million in Czech arms, but four -for a total of some $240 million; he had pledged such sums that it seemed doubtful that Egypt would have any money left to pay its part of the Aswan Dam costs. He boldly tried to blackmail the U.S. with a Russian offer to build the dam -an offer that proved to be nonexistent. In a fit of pique at the U.S., he recognized Communist China, breaking his word to Byroade that he would let him know first. He freely admitted recently to having lied about the "Czech" arms deal: it had been with Russia all the time.

India's Nehru is convinced that the U.S. withdrawal of its offer to build Nasser's high dam is not what set him off recently, but "the way it was done." Whatever set him off, Nasser in a blind rage counterpunched. Screaming: "Americans, may you choke to death on your fury!", he ordered his police to seize the Suez Canal Company. "The annual income of the company is $100 million!" he shouted. "Why not take it ourselves? We shall build the high dam as we desire. The company will be nationalized. And it will be run by Egyptians! Egyptians! Egyptians!"

Universal Ditch. Once again, the man who tried to figure out everything on paper had not paid due heed to the obstacles in his second column. Says a friend: "He didn't understand that the British mean what they say when they call the canal the lifeline of empire. He thought this would be like the Czech arms deal, a stir for a couple of weeks and then forgotten."

The crisis also brought fresh proof that in the coiled-spring character of Nasser there is a cool, calculating brain, as well as an emotional impulsiveness. The expropriation of the Universal Suez Canal Company, though executed as an act of hurried vengeance, had been thoroughly prepared for 2 1/2 years. Nasser's case was technically strong, since the company is Egyptian and owes its existence to Egyptian law. Yet the notion that the international waterway belongs to Egypt and can be run to Egypt's will is insupportable under the original compact and inadmissible in practice. The great Frenchman, De Lesseps, who conceived and built the canal, was a private citizen with a belief in "universalism" (the 19th century equivalent of One World), who called his company "universal" in the hope that it "will weld, the whole universe into one great unit, politically, industrially, religiously."

Today the Suez Canal is more a world seaway than ever. Last year 14,666 ships passed through, half of them tankers. Nearly half of all Western Europe's oil imports pass through the canal. Almost all of the 525 French, British, Greek, Dutch, Scandinavian, Yugoslav and other non-Egyptian employees have pledged to quit working for their new Egyptian bosses whenever their old bosses tell them to. "These foreign workers include all the key men, the technicians and engineers," said a canal expert. "Without them the Egyptians couldn't run the canal for more than a week." Last week the Egyptians admitted that the number of convoys making the 103-mile, slow journey through the canal each day had been cut from two each way to one each way, because many of the 200 pilots "have not returned from their vacations."

Sweet Independence. Nasser and his canal bosses have the advantage of possession. As Nasser predicted, the British and French threats to retake Suez by force faded quickly. The earnest reformer who used to say: "How easy it is to appeal to the emotions of the people -and how difficult to appeal to their minds!" now went around tearfully calling on boys to form home-guard units, and confiding to his handlers: "Never before have I tasted the sweetness of independence like this." The night the Big Three call for the London conference arrived in Cairo, Nasser and his advisers debated for several hours what to do about it. All agreed immediately that Egypt could not go, and that the invitation should be rejected, immediately. When the conversation broke up at 2 a.m., the word was passed to the controlled press.

After he got to bed, however, Nasser could not sleep. He got up and resumed studying the teletyped Big Three communique. In the morning the Egyptian press bannered the word that Egypt would say no that very day, but Nasser announced to his staff that he had decided to postpone a decision. He made his decision only after a week. The delay gave Nasser time to recruit some allies.

Choosing His Words. By the time he finally spoke, he had sought the Russian ambassador's advice six times. His press conference was a slickly staged affair held in the Egyptian Chamber of Deputies, unused since the 1952 revolution. The key phrase of his statement, rejecting the invitation as an act of "collective colonialism," was his own idea. "Perhaps the Americans will understand better if I say it this way," he said. "They don't like words like collective."

After last week's press conference, Nasser talked long with India's Krishna Menon. Then he left by car to join his family at a riverside government rest house just north of Cairo. There he spent the day with his wife Tahia, their three sons and two daughters. The main event: an afternoon showing of six Tom and Jerry cartoons, with the President himself running the projector.

Whenever Nasser finds time to join his family these days, he takes the youngsters swimming at an Alexandria beach called Borg el Arab (top temperature in Cairo last week: 108DEG). He also finds an outlet for his pent-up tensions by lining up empty Coca-Cola bottles in the sand and shooting them up with his service revolver. Though President of his country, and wandering hero to the Arab world, Nasser has lost none of his old field soldier's disdain for luxury. This summer, while an extra room is being added to his family's five-room bungalow, he works and sleeps in one room at his old revolutionary headquarters on Cairo's Gezira Island.

What Says the Sphinx? One hot night last week the dictator turned his back on his telephones and Teletype messages to ride out from Cairo to the Pyramids. There, where Napoleon cheered his troops into action with the words: "Forty centuries look down upon you!", Gamal Abdel Nasser walked alone in the moonlight. By week's end he had still not acted. The counterpuncher was still waiting. He had never been in so tight a spot. His consolation was that others were in a spot too, and might find it to their own interests to propose a compromise in a way that he might accept -as a gesture volunteered rather than extorted from him.

But even if such an accommodation should be reached between Nasser and the West, giving this proud man what looks to the Arab world like a victory (since he would still own the canal), he had already lost something precious and irreplaceable. No longer were the British and French insisting that he be brought to heel publicly : they would settle for the fact rather than the admission. But whether Nasser knows it or not, he has. by his duplicity and by his tearing of the fabric of international agreements, forfeited the indispensable good will of the West that alone could help build a strong, new Egypt.

He may seem to be "getting away with it" for the moment, for if he proves amenable, the Western nations are ready to let him off for now: they have no wish to make a martyr of him. Or he may, desperate and defiant, go further to make himself dependent on the Communists -who, by reason of his policies, are now for the first time a force in the Middle East. The West is anxious to save him from that too.

But when Britain and France apply to a head of state such words as liar and fascist, it means that they have made a fundamental decision about him. They may find it impossible or impolitic to push him out. But they will not lift a finger to help Nasser if he totters; they will not mourn him if he falls.

This is the tragedy of a man who in many respects has given Egypt the most effective, certainly the most honest government in years; a man sincere in devotion to the improvement of his impoverished land and desperate people. He had, and has, immense capabilities, however much they have been flawed by the workings of his ambition. The tragedy is that he does not see that it is not Arab strength which the West has reason to fear, so much as Arab weakness.

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