What happened
Between 2 and 14 July 1954 a small Israeli-run cell set off a series of firebombs in Egypt. The first was in the post office at Alexandria. The second wave, on 14 July, struck the United States Information Agency libraries in Alexandria and Cairo and a British-owned theatre. The devices were crude and deliberately so: bags of acid placed over nitroglycerine, slipped between the pages of books and left on library shelves just before closing. They did almost no damage and injured nobody.
That was close to the point. The attacks were not meant to destroy the buildings. They were meant to be attributed to someone else — to Egyptian nationalists, the Muslim Brotherhood, local communists, anyone whose involvement would suggest to London and Washington that Gamal Abdel Nasser could not hold the country together. Britain was then negotiating the withdrawal of its forces from the Suez Canal Zone. An Egypt that looked ungovernable was an Egypt the British might be persuaded to stay in. The stated aim was to generate public insecurity, and arrests and reprisals along with it, while keeping Israel's hand out of sight.
The cell was broken almost immediately, and in the least dignified way available. On 23 July an operative named Philip Natanson was arrested outside the Rio cinema in Alexandria after the device in his pocket caught fire. Eleven suspects were picked up.
Who was actually sent
The operatives were not Israelis flown in. They were Egyptian Jews, recruited inside Egypt by an Israeli intelligence officer named Avraham Dar, who had arrived in Cairo under cover as a British citizen from Gibraltar called John Darling. Several had come to his attention because they were already active in helping Jews leave for Israel.
This is the detail that changes the character of the thing. The people who planted the devices lived in the country they were planting them in, and they belonged to a community of roughly eighty thousand Egyptian Jews whose position was already precarious. An operation designed to be blamed on Egyptians, run by local Jews, carried an obvious risk to every Jew in Egypt if it were ever traced — and within three weeks it was.
They were run by Unit 131, a cell that had existed since 1948 and had passed to military intelligence in 1950. At the moment of the operation, control of Unit 131 was itself the subject of a bitter institutional fight between Aman and Mossad. A unit being pulled between two agencies is not a small background fact; it bears directly on the question of who could give it orders, which is the question the next seven years failed to answer.
The cost
What followed is the part the retellings tend to leave out, treating the affair as a political scandal in Tel Aviv rather than a criminal trial in Cairo.
Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar were sentenced to death on 27 January 1955 and executed. Yosef Carmon and Meir Max Bineth died in prison by their own hand. Two of the accused were acquitted and five imprisoned on sentences from seven years to life. Meir Meyuhas and Meir Za'afran came out in 1962; the rest were not released until February 1968, in an exchange that was not announced.
Maurice Orbach, a British MP, travelled to Cairo in 1954 to intercede for the condemned on behalf of Winston Churchill and the World Jewish Congress. He said afterwards that Nasser had agreed to spare them and then went back on it. That account rests on Orbach's own telling.
The question nobody could answer
In Israel the operation produced a political crisis that ran for seven years on a single question: who gave the order.
In January 1955 Prime Minister Moshe Sharett convened a committee of two — Supreme Court Justice Isaac Olshan and Yaakov Dori, the first chief of staff of the IDF. Their brief was narrow and they could not discharge it. The committee was unable to find conclusive evidence that Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon had authorised the operation, and equally unable to clear him. Either Lavon or Binyamin Gibli, the head of military intelligence, had given it, and the committee could not say which.
Lavon resigned on 17 February 1955, maintaining he had not known. David Ben-Gurion replaced him at the ministry. Sharett was gone by November, replaced by Ben-Gurion too.
The matter did not stay closed. In April 1960 a review turned up inconsistencies in Gibli's original testimony, and a document submitted to the committee that appeared to be fraudulent. A second inquiry under Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohn confirmed that perjury had been committed before the first one, and found that Lavon had not authorised the operation.
Avri Elad, who had run the cell on the ground, was the perjurer. He was also suspected of having betrayed his own operatives to Egyptian intelligence, which was never established, and was separately sentenced to ten years in 1956 for trying to sell Israeli documents to Egypt.
Ben-Gurion would not accept the second committee's finding or any compromise around it. The fight consumed his coalition: Lavon was expelled from the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion resigned as defence minister, and the country went to early elections. A forged document produced to an inquiry into a failed bombing campaign had, by a long route, unseated the man who founded the state.
Before Lavon's resignation gave the affair his name, it was referred to in Hebrew as HaEsek HaBish — the bad business, or the unfortunate affair. The euphemism outlasted the euphemism's purpose.
Why this one is not a theory
Most entries in this archive turn on whether an operation happened. This one does not. Israel denied involvement publicly until 2005 and then stopped: on 30 March that year President Moshe Katsav presented the surviving operatives with certificates of appreciation for their service to the state. In June 2016 the correspondence was unsealed after sixty-two years.
So the operation is a matter of record, acknowledged by the government that ran it and honoured by one of its presidents. What remains genuinely open is the chain of command — and it remains open not because of secrecy but because of contamination. The first inquiry was lied to, and a document put before it was apparently forged. Once that is true, the honest position is that the authorisation was never established rather than that it was established in anyone's favour. The second committee cleared Lavon. It did not produce the order, or the person who gave it.
Where it sits now
The affair is cited constantly, and usually as a general-purpose argument: proof that states stage attacks and blame others, and therefore evidence for whichever unproven operation is being argued for at the time. The inference does not carry. What Operation Susannah establishes is narrower and sturdier. It establishes that this state ran this operation on these dates, that the attacks were designed to be misattributed, that the cell was caught within three weeks, and that two of its members were hanged.
It also establishes something less convenient for the general argument. The operation failed immediately and comprehensively, and it failed because a device went off in a man's pocket. Then it took seven years, two judicial inquiries and a forged document to work out who had ordered it, and the answer is still that nobody knows.