ABSTRACT
With hindsight it seems easy to identify the causes and events that contributed to the 1956 war. Viewed from the broad sweep of history the war was a contest between declining European colonial powers allied with an insecure Israel and an increasingly strident Arab nationalism espoused by Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser. Moving toward specifics, there was Cairo’s growing assertiveness on the regional stage, its procurement of East Bloc weapons and Nasser’s shift toward non-alignment. For its part, Israel was uneasy about Egyptian military capabilities; it believed it had only a narrow window of opportunity to preempt and arrest Egypt’s rise to military parity with or even superiority over Israel. France resented Egyptian covert action in North Africa and its leadership increasingly sensed that Egypt alone was responsible for the Algerian revolt. Finally, the United Kingdom regarded Nasser as a threat to its historic interests in the Middle East including the Suez Canal, the Iraqi and Jordanian monarchies, Aden, colonies in East Africa and protectorates in the Persian Gulf. The war demonstrated that military victories do not necessarily translate to political success. Although the Israeli army captured the Sinai Peninsula and French and British forces had secured the northern entrance to the Suez Canal, US and Soviet diplomatic intervention forced the allies to relinquish their gains. Because he had survived to witness the retreat of his enemies from Egyptian soil, Nasser’s star was to rise even higher in the Arab firmament. The 1956 Suez war crisis also marked a watershed in the Egyptian intelligence community. While the war found Egypt’s intelligence analysis deficient in divining the intentions of its enemies, its counterintelligence enjoyed some success and covert action served as a method of Egyptian retaliation.
