Conclusion

Summary

Many Egyptians never forgave the British for the ignominious treatment which we had meted out to them. Apart from occupying vast areas of Egypt with British bases, where Egyptian law was ignored, at the other end of scale there were the signs in public parks which read, ‘Dogs, nursemaids and Egyptians not permitted on these lawns.’ I was never surprised at the way Egyptians lionized Colonel Nasser and the way he freed the country from foreign domination.

Walter Coleshill, 2012

The diplomatic and intelligence documents over these two decades reveal vivid imagery of two very different Egyptian leaders who both exploited, indeed mastered, the art of political surprise. Comparing Egypt's presidents several decades on, the notorious Arabist Sir James Craig reflected that Nasser

was a fine man and if he had been more patient and if British ministers had understood that Arab nationalism was a completely natural thing, they might have worked together. But no, successive British governments held onto the view that Nasser was anti-British and pro- Communist. They patronised him and he didn't like that.

Sadat, he suggested,

was of much smaller stature than Nasser … a much lesser man, less intelligent, vainer. Most of my Arabist contemporaries … agreed with me on that, but ministers thought that Sadat offered a chance to bring peace to the Arab-Israel dispute. How wrong they were.

As the previous chapter demonstrates, the diplomatic and intelligence community proved significantly more sceptical.

Indeed, it is true to say that over the two decades following Nasser's dramatic nationalisation of the Suez Canal, intelligence analysis performed better than scholars have conventionally thought. In fact, at times it is striking how far-sighted contemporary analysis proved to be with the benefit of retrospect. Moreover, bringing the ‘missing dimension’ of intelligence to the forefront of international history, it becomes apparent that historians of intelligence and diplomacy can do more with these analyses than merely identify which predictions emerged as either right or wrong, although this is of course an interesting undertaking in itself. A deeper examination reveals how ‘official wisdom’ on both sides of the Atlantic thought about critical events in the region and the role of ‘cultural Otherness’ in their assessments.