Dulles asks Egypt to spare the Lavon affair prisoners (27 January 1955)

This is the only direct act of the United States government in the Lavon affair that the published diplomatic record shows, and it is a short one. At 9:06 p.m. on 27 January 1955 the State Department told its embassy in Cairo to deliver, urgently and personally, a confidential message from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to Egypt's foreign minister, Mahmoud Fawzi¹.

Background

The prisoners in question were members of a network of young Egyptian Jews that Israeli military intelligence had activated in the summer of 1954. In July they set incendiary devices in Alexandria and Cairo, including in the US Information Agency libraries, intending the attacks to be blamed on Egyptian groups and to persuade Britain to keep its troops at Suez. The cell was caught that month. A military court in Cairo tried the accused from 11 December 1954; at the end of January 1955 it sentenced Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar to death, acquitted two defendants and gave the rest prison terms⁴. The full story is told on our page on the Lavon affair.

What the telegram says

Telegram 1196 answers a Cairo telegram of the same day that FRUS does not print. The message it carries is two paragraphs long. The first says that the President and the Secretary had been working on ways to reduce tension in the Middle East, believed some progress had been made, and feared that carrying out the executions "just now" could damage that work. Dulles therefore asked Fawzi to convey "informally" his hope that Egypt might commute "the sentences of the two condemned"¹.

The second paragraph is careful to the point of apology. The request, it says, does not question the court's procedure or verdict and is not an intervention in Egypt's internal affairs; it is meant only to recall "an international aspect" of the case¹. Nowhere does the telegram mention Israel, the bombings, or the American libraries that were among the targets. The prisoners are not named.

The source note shows how it was handled: confidential, "Niact" (night action, to be acted on at once), limited distribution; drafted by John D. Jernegan, cleared by Robert Murphy and Herbert Hoover Jr., and signed for Dulles by Jernegan¹.

What happened next

The FRUS editors summarize the sequel in two footnotes. On 28 January the embassy reported that G. Lewis Jones had delivered the message; Fawzi said he would put it "personally, informally, and urgently" before the head of state and the government but did not want "to arouse any unwarranted hopes." On 31 January the embassy reported that the executions had taken place that morning¹.

In Israel the affair's political fallout began at once. Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon resigned in February, and David Ben-Gurion returned to the government in his place⁴. On 4 March the US embassy in Tel Aviv, reporting on the cabinet change, judged that the large Israeli raid on Gaza of 28 February had been a cabinet decision taken with Ben-Gurion's influence behind it².

Reading it

The telegram is useful for what it leaves out. Washington's own libraries had been firebombed, yet the appeal is framed purely as a matter of regional diplomacy, in language designed to let Cairo refuse without embarrassment. It was printed in 1989 in the Foreign Relations volume on the Arab-Israeli dispute in 1955; there is no published facsimile^1,3.