417. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson1
SUBJECT
- Our Latest Brush with Nasser
Nasser’s Foreign Minister promises that our two AID men in Yemen will be out of jail by 15 May.2 We’ve evacuated all but a skeleton [Page 820] crew there. If we get these two out safely, our main loss will be some CIA material the Egyptians filched from one of the safes left behind when our people were dragged off.
We don’t think Nasser staged the incident in Yemen to get us out. However, once Egyptian mishandling on the scene created an opening, Cairo gave vent to its emotions and played it out for its full propaganda and intelligence advantage. Their readiness to see us humiliated and their duplicity illustrate the bitterness they feel toward us, while their willingness to set limits against harm to our people suggests they want to stop short of an open break.
Nasser summed up the reason for this bitterness in his 2 May speech: “… you do not consider us your friends.” To him, our cutting back food aid is the final evidence that we are working against him and want to see him crushed under his economic burdens. But above all, he sees CIA’s hand behind everything that goes wrong for him. In his final talk with Luke Battle, he admitted he is a “suspicious man,” but he also claims he has evidence that CIA is working to topple him. It was natural for him to see a sinister hand behind AID’s roadbuilding work in southern Yemen where Egyptians are training the “liberation army” for South Arabia.
We’ve held our tempers so far, but getting our men out of jail may take the lid off strong pent-up desire to wash our hands of Nasser. The Egyptians have maddeningly violated every code of diplomatic practice—despite Secretary Rusk’s strong statement on the “rights of legation”—and they’ve used more poison gas in Yemen. Yet on the constructive side, they have reached agreement with the IMF, entertained American businessmen, are negotiating with another American oil company and are trying to avoid defaulting on debt repayments to us. While the temptation to break will be greater than ever, cooler heads will probably prevail. With the South Arabian problem reaching center stage, we’ll badly need someone on the scene in Cairo.
- Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, United Arab Republic, Vol. V. Secret. A handwritten notation on the memorandum states that it was received at 5:20 p.m., and a handwritten “L” indicates that it was seen by President.↩
- An April 27 note from Rostow to the President states that two Americans at the AID mission in Yemen had been charged with attempting to destroy the city of Taiz. It comments that in both Cairo and Yemen, some groups wanted to get rid of connections with the United States, and that those groups appeared to have won. It states, “We shall be announcing tomorrow that the charges are without foundation—which they are.” (Ibid., Memos to the President, Walt Rostow, Vol. 26) The two men were released on May 17. For further information concerning this episode, see the Yemen compilation in Foreign Relations, 1964–1968, volume XXI.↩