In July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) nationalized the Suez Canal Company, surprising the world. The government of France, in whose capital of Paris the company was headquartered, and the British government, the company’s plurality shareholder, sought to reverse nationalization in court, but failed—even though they clad their case in the language not of imperial self-interest but, rather, of international public interest. The time in which such language was somewhat acceptable, even at home, was passing, and the Suez Crisis played a big part in this final act.

At the same time, the two governments early on after the canal nationalization decided to remove Nasser by force, for re-compensation was not their central concern. France believed Nasser was enabling the FLN, which in 1954 had started Algeria’s War for Independence, and Britain wanted some say in the canal, which had for decades been its worldwide empire’s “swing-door,” as a member of parliament, Anthony Eden (1897-1977), called it in 1929. In August 1956 France began discussing a joint operation with Israel, which wanted Nasser gone, too, and the Red Sea opened for Israel-bound ships. In early October the two were joined by Britain. On the 29th, Israel invaded the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. On the 30th, France and Britain gave Israel and Egypt a 12-hour ultimatum to cease hostilities, or they would intervene—and Anglo-French forces bombed Egyptian forces from the 31st and on November 5-6 occupied the canal’s northern tip. Although a power play, “Operation Musketeer,” like the court case, could not be an open imperial move anymore, then, and did not present itself to the world as such. No matter: especially in colonies and postcolonial countries, people were outraged.

More problematically for France and Britain, Washington was incredulous. This Middle Eastern affair triggered the worst crisis of the 1950s between America’s rising international empire and Europe’s descending empires, and indeed clarified and accelerated that descent. President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) fumed that Prime Ministers Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet (1905-1977) had disregarded his administration’s opposition to military action. Worse, they had deceived him about their intentions. And worst, their attack on Egypt undermined the supreme US tenet: Soviet containment. The Americans were by association tainted by their NATO allies’ imperialist move while the Soviets looked good—on November 5 they offered Egypt troops and threatened to nuke London, Paris, and Tel Aviv—and that although they had just repressed an uprising in Hungary.

On the very day of the ultimatum, October 30, Eisenhower washed his hands of that move on live US television, and the US mission at the UN organized a cease-fire resolution vote in the Security Council. France and Britain vetoed it. Although sharing its European allies’ emotions about Nasser, the US administration withheld critical oil and monetary supplies from them to bring them to heel and withdraw from Egypt—after which, it promised, they would be warmly welcomed back. It ceased most bilateral communications and froze almost all everyday social interactions with its two allies, even cancelling a scheduled visit by Eden. And it badgered its allies at the UN, supporting an Afro-Asian resolution that on November 24 called Israel, Britain, and France to withdraw forthwith. On December 3, the British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd took the floor in the House of Commons.

Eighty-seven years after the Suez Canal’s completion in 1869 and less than two months after the last British troops had left it in June 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) on July 26, 1956, nationalized the Suez Canal Company.

Nasser announced the step in the text printed here: a speech that would become a classic in the annals of twentieth-century decolonization worldwide. The English translation used here is included in a documentary publication printed in 1956 by the US State Department in Washington, DC, titled The Suez Canal Problem; it is an excerpt of the whole speech.

Nasser pronounced the speech in the Egyptian Mediterranean city of Alexandria in front of a crowd of tens of thousands, during which he also uttered the code word signaling his security forces to occupy the company’s assets and offices in Egypt. Nasser’s step took the world by surprise. The French government, the Suez Canal Company’s Paris headquarters and its many French shareholders, and the British government that was the company’s largest shareholder and that on July 23, following Washington’s lead, had retracted a 1955 offer to back a World Bank loan to Egypt: all they were outraged. (France and Britain would fail to reverse nationalization in court; the outcome, in Britain, of the ensuing Franco-British-Israeli attack is the focus of another document dated 1956 in this collection). Diametrically opposed was the dominant reaction among Egyptians, other Arabs, and people in newly independent and still colonialized countries. They were ecstatic. The reason was not so much that Nasser nationalized the canal in order to find a new way to finance a dam at Aswan, on the Nile, although that project was a linchpin of Egypt’s modernization, a history analyzed in Guy Laron’s Origins of the Suez Crisis (2013). The reason was more existential. Nasser’s act turned himself, Egypt, and by proxy the entire non-white world from a passive object of history into an active subject. “Die of your fury,” Nasser told the Americans, and by extension Europe’s descending imperial powers. And by calling the shots—“Today, citizens, the Suez Canal Company has been nationalized. This order has been published in the Official Journal. It has become a matter of fact”—he symbolically subjugated Britain and France, humiliating those once so powerful empires as only a non-white ex-colonial subject could. Even a cut as historic as India’s independence, in 1947, had not hurt Britain this much. Technically speaking Britain had co-initiated that final act of the British Raj, and it was a loss of a limb, however crucial. Nasser, by contrast, had stabbed the empire in its very heart—a story classically narrated in Keith Kyle’s Suez (1991).

In 1901, Iran granted an oil concession to a foreigner: William Know D’Arcy (1949-1917), a British national who before had worked in mining in British imperial Australia and New Zealand. The 60-year concession gave the Iranian government, then led by the Qajar dynasty (1794-1925), 16-percent of annual profits. In 1908, D’Arcy’s engineers found oil in the southwestern province of Khuzistan, bordering Ottoman Iraq. The same year, D’Arcy’s company became the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC; from 1935 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company [AIOC]; from 1954 British Petroleum [BP]), which by 1913 began to commercially exploit Iranian oil. In 1914, the British government bought 51-percent of APOC’s shares and hence effectively its control, which mattered particularly to the Navy, the world’s largest, that was shifting from coal to oil combustion. In 1933, the 1901 concession was moderately revised. Iran now received 20-percent of annual profits, and APOC made other minor concessions, agreed on in a meeting between Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878-1944, r. 1925-1941) and APOC Chairman John Cadman (1877-1941).

Iranian AIOC laborers’ and the Iranian public’s complaints about the status quo grew audible after the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran opened up the political sphere in 1941. Later that decade, nationalist parliamentarians, including Muhammad Musaddiq (1882-1967), began to demand a new agreement along the lines of the 50-50 profit-sharing deal that Venezuela’s 1943 Hydrocarbons Law had successfully imposed on foreign oil companies. AIOC refused. Its 1949 counter-offer was accepted by Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919-1980, r. 1941-1979) but rejected by parliament, not the least because in 1950 also Saudi Arabia got a 50-50 profit-sharing deal with ARAMCO. In April 1951, parliament elected Musaddiq Prime Minister.

Having for a long time criticized AIOC’s role—and by extension Britain’s influence—in Iran, Musaddiq demanded AIOC respect sovereign control. When it refused, he cancelled its concession and nationalized its assets in Iran. The following two years were fateful. They ended with a CIA-led coup d’Etat that in 1953 ousted Musaddiq, turned Iran into a US client, and allowed the US government to bring (initially not quite willing) US oil companies into Iran, sidelining BP, and to create a consortium in 1954 that paid Iran 50-percent of its profit. Moreover, Iran’s oil nationalization drama was an international affair. Anticolonial masses treated Musaddiq as a hero also outside Iran, as Lior Sternfeld shows in “Iran Days in Egypt: Mosaddeq’s Visit to Cairo in 1951” (2015). And Christopher Dietrich’s Oil Revolution (2017) demonstrates that among anticolonial elites in many non-Western countries and at international organizations like the United Nations (UN), Iran’s case sharpened conversations about and demands for economic decolonization, i.e. for politically independent countries’ right to also exercise sovereign rights over their resources. (Publics were involved in these debates, too.)

In New York, Iran’s UN delegate Djalal Abdoh (1909-1996) was a leading voice in this regard, together with colleagues especially from Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. Moreover, Musaddiq himself addressed international organizations on economic decolonization. In June 1952, he was at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, The Netherlands, which would accept Iran’s claim that AIOC’s nationalization was a domestic Iranian rather than an international legal matter. And on October 15, 1951, he addressed the UN Security Council’s 560th meeting in New York, speaking in French; as he was frail, after a while Allahyar Saleh, Iran’s ambassador to the United States, took over.

In this excerpt, Mao speaks with a delegation from the British Labour Party and argues that Britain changed its attitude toward China after World War II because of the United States. He emphasizes that China and Britain can not only coexist in peace, but can cooperate and trade with each other.

Mao Zedong and Kissinger's meeting was aimed at establishing political relations between China and the United States. They discussed the following issues: U.S.-Chinese cooperation, the differences in ideology, Western German policy towards the Soviet Union, the amount of American overseas troops, the Vietnam War, trade barriers between two nations, Chinese-Japanese relations, and the historical issues between Germany and Britain during WWII.

John D. Cockcroft, head of the British Atomic Energy Research Establishment, writes to Homi J. Bhabha, Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, informing him that the British will not be assisting India with its beryllium experiements since India has already made agreements with the French Atomic Energy project.

Materials provided by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin to CWIHP, following the publication of the Working Paper No. 40, "The KGB in Afghanistan." As with all Mitrokhin’s notes, his compilation on Soviet “active measures” in South and Southwest Asia is based on other smuggled-out notes and was prepared especially for CWIHP. Please read the Notes on Sources for information on the nature and limitations of these documents.

The Soviet leadership discusses the state of Soviet foreign policy after the Hungarian crisis and Khrushchev’s visit to the US. Molotov criticizes Khrushchev for recklessness in foreign policy direction. Soviet inroads in the Middle East and the Third World are analyzed. The effects of the crises in Eastern Europe are placed in the context of the struggle against US imperialism.

Outlines the KGB’s response to the USSR’s signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975. The accords obligated signatories to respect their citizens’ human rights. This gave Soviet dissidents and westerners leverage in demanding that the USSR end persecution on the basis of religious or political beliefs.

Some of the KGB’s active measures included the establishment of a charitable fund dedicated to helping victims of imperialism and capitalism, and the fabrication of a letter from a Ukrainian group to FRG President Walter Scheel describing human rights violations in West Germany. The document also mentions that the Soviet Ministry of Defense obtained an outline of the various European powers’ positions on human rights issues as presented at the March 1977 meeting of the European Economic Community in London from the Italian Foreign Ministry.

The KGB also initiated Operation “Raskol” [“Schism”], which ran between 1977 and 1980. This operation included active measures to discredit Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov, Yelena Bonner, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, measures designed to drive a wedge between the US and its democratic allies, and measures intended to convince the US government that continued support for the dissident movement did nothing to harm the position of the USSR.

Soviet Ambassador to the US, Nikolai Novikov, describes the advent of a more assertive US foreign policy. Novikov cautions the Soviet leadership that the Truman administration is bent on imposing US political, military and economic domination around the world. This telegram has, since its discovery in the Russian archives, been labelled the Soviet equivalent of US Ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan's "Long telegram."