Influence of the Permanent Under-Secretary's Department (PUSD) on the Decision-Making in British Foreign Policy during the Suez Crisis

There are lots of studies on the Suez Crisis, which show us why the British government carried out such an infamous military intervention in Egypt in 1956. Various reasons of the intervention have been discussed since 1960s; some explain British intentions of regaining control over the Suez Canal, dealing a heavy blow to Nasser's regime and holding the British Empire in the Middle East, while others refer to political inside stories of Anthony Eden's administration, especially impact of hawks in the Tory, “Suez group” and Eden's health conditions.<br>These interpretations can be persuasive for understanding the crisis, but we should also view the problem from a different perspective: that is, why could Eden carry out his plan despite the fact that some of his ministers and the Foreign Office opposed to Eden's belligerent attitude. One of the keys to reconsider the crisis is to examine senior government bureaucrat in the Whitehall who personally supported Eden's foreign and military policy, but it has been difficult to follow these senior staffs' influence on the crisis. When Anthony Nutting, ex-Minister of State for Foreign Affairs published his book, No End of a Lesson in 1967 (which is still one of the basic works for Suez watchers), the British Government censored the book and eliminated most secret matters, including names of senior bureaucrat alleged to have an involvement with the crisis decision-making. However the British National Archives opened record of the censor and we come to know their roles, especially Ivone Kirkpatrick, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and Patrick Dean, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Kirkpatrick's subordinate at the Foreign Office.<br>Recent studies such as Whitehall and the Suez Crisis (2000) and Reassessing Suez 1956 (2008) reveal the role of the senior officials during the crisis. This essay also focuses on the influence of the Permanent Under-Secretary's Department (PUSD) on the crisis decision making, which Kirkpatrick and Dean were involved in. Documents released at the National Archives, Kew, oral history records of the Liddell Hart Center for Military Archives, King's College London and private papers of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford would give us a chance to reconsider the crisis.