The World

Yet he failed to keep the Communist world together. Mao was both horrified by and contemptuous of the cloddish Khrushchev, regarding himself as the paramount Marxist leader. His performance in Korea had demonstrated that China needed nuclear protection; now his shelling of Taiwanese territory provoked a nuclear threat from Eisenhower. ‘In today’s world, if we don’t want to be bullied,’ said Mao in January 1955, ‘we have to have this thing.’ In 1957, Khrushchev started to hand over nuclear technology to Mao, a process that led to the explosion of the Chinese Bomb. ‘If the worst came to the worst [nuclear war], and half of mankind died,’ Mao told the Russians in Moscow, ‘the other half would remain, imperialism razed, and the world would become socialist.’ Khrushchev was aghast. ‘I couldn’t tell if he was joking.’ He was not.

Mao was ungrateful. When Khrushchev requested listening posts on the Chinese coast, Mao reacted so menacingly that the Russian flew to Beijing. In a series of screaming rows, Mao humiliated and mocked him. ‘You’ve talked a long time,’ said Mao, ‘but you still haven’t got to the point,’ then forced him to come swimming where the floundering Russian struggled like a drowning pig to keep up with the Chinese shark. ‘I’m a miner, he’s a prize-winning swimmer,’ said Khrushchev. Mao, noticed his doctor Li Zhisui, ‘was deliberately playing the emperor, treating Khrushchev like a barbarian come to pay tribute.’

Khrushchev realized that Mao was like Stalin: ‘They were the same.’ Human life meant nothing. Challenged from within, Mao now launched a terror that took China out of the world game for a decade. Back in Moscow, the arrogant Khrushchev was scarcely chastened by this setback in Beijing. He backed the production of missiles to catch up with America – using the technology to launch space exploration, in October 1957, sending a satellite, Sputnik, then Laika the dog, the first mammal to orbit the earth (though she was probably already dead), and four years later the Vostok 3KA

, in which a cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, orbited and returned. Eisenhower, in response, established NASA to catch up. Khrushchev decided the way to defeat the west was a monumental bluff that would take the world to the edge of cataclysm.

Suez destroyed Eden, but it empowered Nasser. In July 1958, the Egyptian leader’s reach was demonstrated when the Iraq mob played football with the head of the young king Faisal of Iraq …

DISEMBOWELLED IN BAGHDAD: EL RAIS

AND THE LAST KING OF IRAQ

Nasser – wildly popular as El Rais, the Boss – threatened western allies, the Saudis of Arabia and the Hashemites of Jordan and Iraq. In Arabia, the founding king, Abdulaziz, died in 1953, choosing as heir, out of his forty-five sons, Saud, unwise and extravagant, who was soon embroiled in a costly war in Yemen against Egyptian troops. Saud and Nasser planned each other’s assassinations. In the Saud family, the brothers removed Saud and put the steely Faisal in control.

The Hashemites were more vulnerable. On 1 February 1958, Nasser and the Syrian president agreed to fuse their states into a single United Arab Republic with Nasser as panjandrum. The Hashemites panicked and planned a united kingdom of Jordan and Iraq, but this British-backed Arab Union was unpopular, especially in Baghdad. Its king Faisal II, a genial twenty-three-year-old, happiest playing cricket at Harrow, was dominated by the Anglophile strongman Nuri al-Said, who had fought with Lawrence of Arabia and been premier fourteen times. The Arab Union accelerated the plot of Iraq’s Free Officers, encouraged and inspired by Nasser.

On 14 July 1958, the night before King Faisal’s wedding, officers led by Abd al-Karim Qasim stormed the Rihab Palace. Faisal surrendered but was forced with his aunt, uncle and mother to stand in the courtyard, where they were machine-gunned down. ‘All I did was remember Palestine,’ said one of the assassins, ‘and the trigger on the machine gun just set itself off.’ The bodies were dragged down al-Rashid Street, stripped, mutilated, beheaded, stomped on, dismembered, gutted and dangled from balconies before being burned.

As the mob stormed his mansion, Premier Nuri escaped in women’s clothes, but his male shoes were spotted and he was shot and buried, only to be exhumed by the mob, emasculated, hanged and driven over repeatedly by buses. Nasser was delighted. The west was shocked, sending troops into Lebanon, while Khrushchev warned against any interference. In neighbouring Jordan, Hussein, now the last Hashemite monarch and surrounded by Nasserist officers, submitted himself to Nasser as Iraq was enveloped in a spiral of extremism. Qasim and his successors struggled to control a Baath (Resurrection) Party, founded in Syria by a Christian, which preached a violent mix of socialism, nationalism and anti-imperialism.