ABSTRACT
In early 1953 the idea of setting up a MEDO still remained the joint AngloAmerican objective in the Middle East. However, the State Department and the Foreign Office had different approaches to the issue. At the end of December 1952 Henry Byroade, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs, was sent to London to try to work out Anglo-American differences over the Suez negotiations. Byroade’s meetings with Foreign Office officials highlighted the basic differences between the American and British approaches. From 31 December 1952 to 7 January 1953 seven meetings were held between the American and the British delegations and the participants kept minutes of the meetings, calling them an ‘agreed record’, which was later called ‘United Kingdom Memorandum on Defence Negotiations with Egypt’. According to the ‘agreed record’ of the US-UK talks on Egypt, the British position was broken down into three cases, called A, B and C. Case A called for the Canal Zone to be handed over to Egypt and the base area placed under Egyptian control. ‘The depots and installations would act as a working maintenance base for a proportion of the Middle East Land Forces in peace. The Army would retain not more than 5,000 personnel to run these installations and the RAF not more than 2,000 for the same purposes.’ The implication was that ‘the allies would be assured of having a working maintenance base in peace to which they could return and operate immediately in war’.1
