After Saadeh was executed and its high-ranking leaders were arrested, the party remained underground until 1958 when it sided with the pro-Western president Camille Chamoun against the Arab nationalist rebels. This occurred right after the Party was accused of having plotted the assassination of Adnan al-Malki, a left-leaning Baath Party army officer in Syria, and after Party members had fled to Beirut. The Party at that time still viewed the Soviet Union with contempt, and opposed the Arab Nationalist current of Nasser, while retaining its commitment to Syrian Nationalism. Indeed, the idea of having Greater Syria subsumed under the creed of Arab Nationalism founded on the Arabic language, Arab and Islamic culture was abhorred by the SSNP, which retained its profound belief in Syrian social and anthropological historicism, namely the process of national and social association that characterizes the Fertile Crescent and that differentiates it from the Arabian Peninsula or North Africa.