Ebbing Fears

Like so many functionaries sidling from a throne room, murmuring polite words of undying admiration and fealty, the Arab nations were backing away from their once-feared leader, Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In Lebanon, pro-Nasser candidates met a humiliating defeat at the hands of the pro-Western forces of President Camille Chamoun and his Prime Minister Sami Solh (see below). The day had passed when word from Cairo could bring mobs into the streets of Beirut and make governments quail. Instead. Lebanon felt confident enough to brusquely deport the bureau chief of Nasser's propaganda apparatus, Middle East News.

And in Iraq, Nasser's old enemy. Premier Nuri asSaid, was so scornful of Nasser's attacks that he had already announced plans to take a vacation as soon as he had formed his new government.

Electronic Conspiracy. Worst of all. his old ally. King Saud. whose money used to fuel Nasser's shrill pan-Arabism. spent all week conferring warmly with Jordan's young King Hussein in Amman. Only eight months ago, Hussein joined Syria and Saudi Arabia in putting their armies under the joint command of an Egyptian general. By last week the joint command had collapsed. Almost the first thing Saud asked on his arrival was what Hussein was doing about removing Egyptian-backed subversives. Hussein responded by demanding the recall of the Egyptian military attache in Amman, Lieut. Colonel Fuad Hillal, accusing him of plotting the assassination of members of the royal family.

The assassination "plot," as both sides told it, was an old-fashioned Levantine conspiracy complicated by 20th century gadgetry. According to the Jordan account, a Jordanian sergeant was approached by the Egyptian and offered money to do a killing. The soldier loyally disclosed the plot to the chief of staff of the Jordan army, who told him to pretend to go along with the attache, but to take a miniature recording machine with him. At the soldier's next meeting at the Egyptian embassy, the attache grabbed the sergeant, took the recorder and his service revolver from him. (This proved, said the Jordanians, that the Egyptians had spies in the office of the chief of staff himself.)

Within hours, recriminations were flying. Egypt demanded the immediate recall of Jordan's Ambassador Abdul Monem Rifai, brother of the Deputy Premier, and Radio Cairo began broadcasting the soldier's taped "confession" that his superiors had sent him equipped with recorder to implicate Colonel Hillal falsely. Jordan retorted that Egyptian military attaches had in recent months been expelled or formally denounced by Libya, Tunisia, the Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, "which was Egypt's best ally." Was it possible that all these Egyptian attaches were innocent?

At week's end Saud departed in his Convair in a flurry of gifts given and accepted, topped by Hussein's gift of a $350.000 twin-engined Vickers Varsity for Saud's personal use. Behind him Saud left a communique, clothed in the exquisite evasions of Arab courtesy, in which the two Kings declared their joint devotion to "military collaboration among the four Arab countries," their enmity for Israel, their "adoption of the positive neutrality policy and the rejection of all foreign pacts."

Nasser had only one moment of pleasure all week: France, the last holdout among the users of the Suez Canal, surrendered and agreed to pay its tolls to Nasser and was allowed to pay in sterling. But it was small comfort. His sole staunch ally, Syria's President Shukri el Kuwatly, spent the week in Egypt conferring worriedly between visits to the hospital for medical checkups. Syria's businessmen were complaining loudly that "politics"--by which they meant arms purchases and unprofitable deals with the Soviet bloc--were ruining the economy.

It is always dangerous in the Middle East to boast that things are going well. In fact, sometimes the best results come from saying nothing. Last week, though no government proclaimed the fact, the Atlit became the twelfth ship to reach the Israeli port of Elath since the blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba was broken. Nasser has made no fuss, though U.N. troops still hold the key position on his side of the strait.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.