The Kidnaped Lieutenant

"I wish something exciting would happen," Lieut. Anthony Moorhouse, 20, wrote his family from Suez. Life after the cease-fire was getting monotonous for a young officer doing his national service with the British forces in Egypt. His father, a prosperous jam and preserves manufacturer from Leeds, read the letter in a taxi en route to a business engagement in London and smiled at his eldest son's restiveness. For the moment the headlines on the news vendor's sign just across the street seemed remote and unimportant. BRITISH OFFICER KIDNAPED IN PORT SAID, they read. It wasn't until after he reached his hotel and got an emergency call from Leeds that Francis Moorhouse learned that his son had found the moment of excitement he sought.

Tea & Sympathy. The anguished father went to call on the M.P. for Leeds, who happens to be Opposition Leader Hugh Gaitskell. Gaitskell poured him tea and got busy at the War Office. Lieut. Moorhouse, Gaitskell learned, had led his platoon through the back streets of Port Said on a night raid in which nine Egyptian terrorists were rounded up. He had gone back alone to the scene of the arrest next morning in an open Land Rover. The car had been found deserted on a side street. Lieut. Moorhouse was not seen again. That night Commanding General Sir Hugh Stockwell sent out search parties to comb every house in the district, but they found no sign of the young lieutenant. Francis Moorhouse's first instinct was to seize a telephone and put in a direct call to Egypt's Strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser. It failed to get through.

But there were other ways of reaching the Egyptian dictator. Cyril Banks, a Tory M.P. who had quit his party in protest over the Suez occupation, was a close friend of the Moorhouse family and also knew Nasser from his days as a Middle East hand. "What would you really like me to do?" he asked Moorhouse. "Get over to Cairo," was the answer. "I believe that you could bring my son back if he is still alive." Banks promised to do what he could. By now the War Office, the Foreign Office, U.N. headquarters and 10 Downing Street were all at work.

Preparing for the Worst. Bit by bit the story of the kidnaping was fleshed out. An Arab boy admitted having seen a crowd of Egyptians surround the British officer when he left his car. One of them had seized his pistol from its holster and held it to his ribs. Others had hustled him into a big car. The car was found later, abandoned, with a length of rope, a gag, a cloth bag and some bloodstains on the back seat. Some days later a U.N. intelligence officer had gone to the Arab section in an attempt to negotiate Moorhouse's release and had seen a man in British uniform. The U.N. officer reported that Anthony Moorhouse was "alive and well." General Stockwell confidently ordered a destroyer to stand by at the Port Said quayside to pick him up. As the last British troops evacuated Port Said, the young lieutenant failed to materialize. But that night, Francis Moorhouse got a telegram from the War Office telling him definitely that his son was "safe and well," along with a personal note from Sir Anthony Eden. "This," said the lieutenant's mother, "is the most marvelous Christmas present." Then a cable arrived from the old family friend, Cyril Banks, who was in Beirut. "RETURNING HOME," it said, "PREPARE FOR THE WORST." On Christmas Eve, Cyril Banks had at last got to see Colonel Nasser for three hours. Nasser told him that young Moorhouse was dead.

According to Nasser, during General Stockwell's house-to-house search of Port Said, Egyptian guerrillas had hidden Moorhouse in a steel clothes locker with a gag in his mouth, and when they returned he was already dead of suffocation. "Thus," said Cairo's government newspaper, Al Gumhuria, "did General Stockwell, with his foolishness and recklessness, cause Moorhouse's death." All of Britain's pent-up frustration over its troubles in Egypt focused last week on the story of Lieut. Moorhouse. Papers that had supported the invasion of Egypt and those that had condemned it, alike joined in angry outcry. Nasser's explanation that he had no responsibility, said the Manchester Guardian, "opens up equally grim prospects for the future, when, as Colonel Nasser hopes, these marauders can once again operate from the Sinai and the Gaza Strip--and when their actions can subsequently be disowned."

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