EGYPT: We Never Believed

From the moment Israeli columns plunged into Sinai, what little the outside world learned of the manner in which Gamal Abdel Nasser and his soldiers faced up to the task of defending their country came from the other side. Cairo itself was under heavy censorship. Last week, in the first interview since the Israeli attack, President Nasser gave TIME Correspondent John Mecklin the Egyptian version of what happened during the ten-day war.

In the ground-floor office of his unpretentious, concrete house on the outskirts of Cairo, Nasser, in grey slacks and open-necked white shirt, unfolded his story with calm confidence, and with apologies for his hoarseness. ("The doctor told me to stop smoking and talking so much, and those are two things I just can't do.") Two days after the Israeli invasion began, said he, "I was sitting in this office talking to the Indonesian ambassador. Suddenly I heard enemy planes overhead. They were jets, but I realized immediately that they were not Israeli planes. I went to the roof to be sure. These were jet bombers, and the Israelis have no jet bombers. They had to be British."

"Clear Objective." By his own account, the Anglo-French attack caught Nasser flatfooted. "We had never believed any responsible British leader could do it," said he. "When their ultimatum came on October 30th, I had calculated there was no more than a 40% chance they would really take military action. Of course, we refused it—they wanted to occupy Egyptian territory—but we then raised our estimate only to 60% or 70% that they would act. I hadn't thought any man [i.e., Eden] could gamble like this with his vital interests, not only in Egypt but the whole area, a gamble that would affect everything—oil, commerce, pipelines, politics—to a degree that would never be easy to repair even if he achieved military victory."

This was a miscalculation that might easily have proved fatal. "We were caught in a very serious situation," said Nasser. "The bulk of our army was in the middle of the [Sinai] desert facing the Israelis . . . Even in Cairo we had kept only one battalion for the city's defense. Our enemies' clear objective was to draw our troops into Sinai, then occupy the canal, isolate them and cut them to pieces, dealing later with the rest of Egypt at will. Between 8 o'clock and 10 o'clock on the night of October 31st at General Headquarters we made a quick new appreciation of the situation. We decided to withdraw completely from Sinai and concentrate all our activities in the Canal Zone and the Nile Delta."