ABSTRACT
The 1957 American-Syrian crisis officially began on August 12, when the Syrian government announced it had uncovered an American plot to overthrow the regime. Among the Syrians Stone had recruited were several officers who either worked for Sarraj or upon hearing about the details of the plot decided to divulge its contents to Syrian intelligence. The fact that the Syrian government's initial reaction to the disclosure of the American plot was relatively mild indicated that it was not anxious to confront the United States for fear of providing it with a pretext to intervene in Syria. Although Syrian trade by 1958 was still largely with the West, the Eisenhower administration had seen a forty-fold increase of communist bloc purchases of Syrian goods between 1954-1958, capped-off by the August 6, 1957, Soviet-Syrian economic agreement. John Foster Dulles gave a press conference in which he considerably downplayed the danger of the Syrian situation, in stark contrast to the administration's earlier statements.
