The Lavon Affair / Operation Susannah

On July 14, 1954, bombs went off in the United States Information Agency libraries in Cairo and Alexandria. These were American government facilities, and the plan was that Egypt would be blamed for them: the Muslim Brotherhood, or the communists, or some unspecified local nationalists. The bombs had been placed by a cell recruited and run by Israeli military intelligence.

For fifty-one years Israel said it had nothing to do with any of it. In 2005 the President of Israel handed the surviving operatives certificates of appreciation.

The problem it was meant to solve

In 1952 Nasser’s officers overthrew the British-aligned government in Cairo and began moving toward nationalizing the Suez Canal. Washington, meanwhile, had grown more sympathetic to Egyptian nationalism than London was, and was encouraging Britain to pull its troops out of the canal zone.

Israel read a British withdrawal as dangerous, on the theory that it would leave Nasser unconstrained. It tried to change American and British minds through diplomacy and got nowhere.

So the objective became to change their minds by other means. If Egypt looked chaotic and hostile to Western interests, Britain might keep its soldiers in place. The way to make Egypt look that way was to arrange attacks on Western targets in Egypt and let the Egyptians be blamed.

Operation Susannah

Israeli Military Intelligence activated Unit 131, a cell of recruited Egyptian Jews, in the summer of 1954. The targets were civilian: cinemas, post offices, libraries, American educational centers. The devices were timed to go off hours after closing, which is why the operation killed no one.

The first bombs were placed on July 2 in post offices. The USIA libraries followed on July 14.

It collapsed almost immediately. A device in an operative’s pocket ignited early outside a cinema in Alexandria. He was arrested, and the Egyptian security services pulled the rest of the network apart within days.

The cost fell entirely on the people Israel had recruited. Two captured cell members killed themselves. Two more, Dr. Moshe Marzouk of Cairo and Shmuel Azar of Alexandria, were tried, convicted, and executed in January 1955. Others drew sentences running up to life. Israel could not negotiate for them without conceding that the operation had been authorized by the state, so they stayed in Egyptian prisons for years.

The question Israel never answered

What consumed Israeli politics afterward was not the bombing of American libraries. It was who had given the order.

Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon said he had not. Colonel Binyamin Gibli, the chief of military intelligence, said he had verbal authorization from Lavon. The inquiries that followed produced contradictory findings, accusations of forged meeting minutes, and allegations of perjury. Lavon resigned in 1955. The affair carries his name anyway, despite the chain of command never being established.

The historian Tom Segev’s summary is the one usually quoted: “the Lavon Affair remained shrouded in mystery, a riddle that no one wanted to solve.”

The ceremony

In March 2005, President Moshe Katsav presented each surviving operative with a certificate of appreciation for their service to the state.

That ceremony is what lifts this case out of the category of allegation. Israel is not accused of having run Operation Susannah by its critics; it has honored the men who carried it out, publicly, at the level of head of state. The denial lasted fifty-one years and then ended, not with an admission but with a decoration.

No apology was offered to the United States or to Egypt.

What Washington said

Nothing.

There is no formal American statement about any of it. Not when the operation was exposed in 1954, and not in 2005 when Israel honored the men who had bombed United States government libraries and tried to pin it on Egyptians. An allied intelligence service attacked American facilities in order to manipulate American foreign policy, and the United States has never, on the record, had a position on it.

Why it matters

The operational logic is the part worth holding onto. This was not an attack on the United States as an enemy. It was an attempt to move American and British policy by manufacturing evidence that a third country was dangerous, using American casualties as the medium if it came to that. The bombs were set for empty buildings, but the method does not depend on that choice.

It is a documented precedent, acknowledged by the government that ordered it, for using fabricated attacks on Western targets as an instrument of persuasion against Israel’s own allies. And it is an early entry in a pattern the rest of this archive traces: the operation was exposed, the responsibility was eventually admitted in the most public way available, and the country whose libraries were bombed never said a word.

Sources

• Israeli Ministry of Defense Archives, Operation Susannah exhibition — archives.mod.gov.il
• Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion’s Spy: The Story of the Political Scandal That Shaped Modern Israel (Columbia University Press, 1996)
• Time, “Israel: The Lavon Affair,” February 1961 — contemporaneous reporting on the political fallout
• James M. Lutz and Brenda J. Lutz, Global Terrorism (Routledge, 2004), p. 46
• Associated Press reporting on the March 2005 ceremony awarding certificates to the surviving operatives
• Jewish Virtual Library, “The Lavon Affair”