"We Never Believed"

From the moment Israeli columns plunged into Sinai, what little the outside world learned of the manner in which Gamal Abdel Nasser and his soldiers faced up to the task of defending their country came from the other side. Cairo itself was under heavy censorship. Last week, in the first interview since the Israeli attack, President Nasser gave TIME Correspondent John Mecklin the Egyptian version of what happened during the ten-day war.

In the ground-floor office of his unpretentious, concrete house on the outskirts of Cairo, Nasser, in grey slacks and open-necked white shirt, unfolded his story with calm confidence, and with apologies for his hoarseness. ("The doctor told me to stop smoking and talking so much, and those are two things I just can't do.") Two days after the Israeli invasion began, said he, "I was sitting in this office talking to the Indonesian ambassador. Suddenly I heard enemy planes overhead. They were jets, but I realized immediately that they were not Israeli planes. I went to the roof to be sure. These were jet bombers, and the Israelis have no jet bombers. They had to be British."

"Clear Objective." By his own account, the Anglo-French attack caught Nasser flatfooted. "We had never believed any responsible British leader could do it," said he. "When their ultimatum came on October 30th, I had calculated there was no more than a 40% chance they would really take military action. Of course, we refused it--they wanted to occupy Egyptian territory--but we then raised our estimate only to 60% or 70% that they would act. I hadn't thought any man [i.e., Eden] could gamble like this with his vital interests, not only in Egypt but the whole area, a gamble that would affect everything--oil, commerce, pipelines, politics--to a degree that would never be easy to repair even if he achieved military victory."

This was a miscalculation that might easily have proved fatal. "We were caught in a very serious situation," said Nasser. "The bulk of our army was in the middle of the [Sinai] desert facing the Israelis . . . Even in Cairo we had kept only one battalion for the city's defense. Our enemies' clear objective was to draw our troops into Sinai, then occupy the canal, isolate them and cut them to pieces, dealing later with the rest of Egypt at will. Between 8 o'clock and 10 o'clock on the night of October 31st at General Headquarters we made a quick new appreciation of the situation. We decided to withdraw completely from Sinai and concentrate all our activities in the Canal Zone and the Nile Delta."

"Without Success." Until then, Nasser says, operations were not going badly in Sinai: "All our operations had been defensive. For us, war had not begun." His main forces, not yet engaged, planned to mount a counterattack on the seventh or eighth day. The decision to withdraw from Sinai was easier made than carried out. With Egypt's airfields under Anglo-French attack, Nasser could not give his retreating forces air cover. By the time it got back across the Suez Canal, he admitted, the main body of his armored forces had lost 30 out of about 200 Russian T-34s and 50 out of 300 armored cars. At Abu Aweigila, site of the heaviest fighting in Sinai, the Egyptians, according to Nasser, lost another 24 artillery pieces, 24 self-propelled guns and 21 Sherman tanks. Nonetheless, he insisted, the Israelis (who claim to have captured more than 100 tanks and nearly 200 artillery pieces) had won no real victory in Sinai. Said he: "Despite great superiority--three brigades against two battalions--the Israelis attacked Abu Aweigila for three days without success, and finally took it only when our troops had withdrawn."

"No Losses." When it came to explaining his failure to rush reinforcements in to counter the Anglo-French landing at Port Said, Nasser was considerably less explicit. "We may not yet be finished with the British and French," said he, "and I don't want to talk about strategy." By implication, however, he seemed to concede that the Egyptian army, after its frantic rush back from Sinai, simply wasn't able to mount a major effort at Port Said. "We were so deceived about British intentions," said he, "that one of the first things we did after the Israeli attack was to remove the brigade stationed at Port Said and send it to Sinai."

On the critical question of what happened to Egypt's air force, Nasser insisted that, except for one Ilyushin that cracked up on a takeoff, all of Egypt's bombers had escaped to other Arab lands. In addition, said he, some of his MIG fighters had taken refuge in Syria. Among the fighters that he had packed off to Syria, Nasser revealed, were some of the new twinjet, supersonic MIG 17s. "Nobody knew we had any 17s," he boasted, "until one day early in the fighting, when three of them were surprised near an airfield in the Canal Zone. The MIGs turned, shot down three [French] Mysteres and drove off the others with no losses."

Where else besides Syria had his planes taken refuge, Nasser was asked. "After enemy forces withdraw from our territory." grinned the Egyptian strongman, "we shall have many stories to tell."

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