Читать книгу Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen - Hazem Kandil - Страница 10

2

Two States Within a State: The Road to June 1967

Too much ink has been spilled on the intimate relationship between Nasser and Amer. Those closest to them spoke of them as “soul brothers” until the very last day of their struggle. In fact, their special bond has been the standard explanation for why Nasser hesitated to move decisively against Amer from 1956 to 1967, despite the latter’s apparent military ineptitude: he did not want to hurt his best friend’s feelings. While such an explanation is obviously unsatisfactory, it rules out the possibility that what sparked the decade-long struggle between the two was personal enmity. In reality, the struggle was fueled by those who stood at the true locus of power: that is, the security elite that stood united against Naguib’s faction, but was now divided into two competing camps: those who attached themselves to the political apparatus, namely, the Ministry of Interior with its General Investigations Directorate (GID), and the President’s Bureau of Information (PBI), and those who attached themselves to the military, that is, the Office of the Commander-in-Chief for Political Guidance (OCC), the Military Intelligence Department (MID), and the General Intelligence Service (GIS). It was a struggle for supremacy between two sets of security institutions, masked as a personal rivalry between the president and the field marshal, a struggle that unfolded rapidly, with dizzying shifts in cleavages and alliances, only to end with disaster on the morning of June 5, 1967.

It is little wonder why, in a speech delivered after his final showdown with Amer in 1967, Nasser regretted the way security officers had transformed Egypt into a “mukhabarat [intelligence] state,” and pledged to dismantle this state, which he partly blamed for the June defeat. The president’s description was quite accurate. Many observers agree: “By any historical yardstick, what existed in Egypt was something unique, a dictatorship without a dictator.”¹ That was because power was vested in the security complex, whether civilian or military, while the political apparatus had little influence. It was the security aristocracy that now ruled the country after the coup had beheaded the traditional nobility; this new aristocracy occupied the position of the old not just figuratively but in a very material sense: they inhabited royal households, married into noble families, joined exclusive social clubs, and so on. They differed from the old elite only in their draconian method of rule. The formidable security system now in place rounded up suspected dissidents on an unprecedented scale—prisons contained an average of 20,000 political detainees throughout the sixties. To live in Egypt during this period was to be constantly under the purview of a pervasive surveillance structure: phones, offices, and homes were bugged; mail was regularly checked; neighbors, colleagues, even siblings could not be trusted. Politically suspect individuals would typically be arrested at dawn, when they were too disoriented to resist, and with no one around to help. The unwelcome “dawn visitors” would then detain suspects for indefinite periods, torture them systematically, and force them to sign confessions that would land them hefty prison sentences.

How did things get so bad? After the mutinies of January and March 1954, Nasser’s suspicions of the military grew. He sidelined its influential leaders, including his RCC colleagues (safe for Amer), and entrusted officers-turned-security-officials with safeguarding the regime. Yet regime stability was still threatened by the fact that security agencies were divided along a two-tiered command structure: the presidency, with Nasser at its helm, and the military leadership under Amer. Nasser, of course, controlled Interior Ministry organs, which he himself had set up and entrusted his loyal lieutenant Zakaria Muhi al-Din to run. Driven, however, by his innately conspiratorial nature, Nasser developed a veritable intelligence unit within the presidency, which was devoted, according to its director, Samy Sharaf, to gathering information about the private lives of officers and state officials through a network of informants and an elaborate tapping system.² In truth, this unit thrived not only on Nasser’s “pathologically suspicious” character, but also on Sharaf’s skill in playing “Iago to the President’s paranoid Othello.”³ The PBI kept army officers and ministers under strict surveillance: recording their conversations, videotaping their private meetings, recruiting their underlings, and meticulously filing every trivial rumor regarding any of them. Through it Nasser also reached out to former officers and asked them to gather as much information as they could from colleagues still serving in the ranks. Amer, on the other hand, controlled military-based security organs (MID and military police) orchestrated by the OCC, first under Salah Nasr and Abbas Radwan, and then under the aggressive leadership of Shams Badran. Amer substantially increased his power when in 1957 his protégé Nasr took charge of the civilian GIS. More important, through dispersing benefits and promotions, Amer swayed dozens of officers to his side—only those strictly committed to professional military service resented his corruption of the corps. This alignment of forces set the stage for an epic battle for power between those competing organs, with the first round commencing in October 1956, during the Suez Crisis.

SUEZ 1956: MILITARY DEFEAT, POLITICAL TRIUMPH

The road toward the Suez War did not begin with the nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956, but almost two years earlier over a military-related dispute. Many officers supported the coup because of their resentment of the army’s inadequacy as a fighting force, as was first demonstrated by its failure to prevent British occupation in 1882, then its powerlessness as the country’s monarch was humiliated by Britain in February 1942, and finally by defeat in the 1948 Palestine war. It was thus only natural that procuring advanced weapons was at the top of Nasser’s agenda. Capitalizing on his CIA links, he first turned to the United States. In October 1954, a meeting was held at the security operative Hassan al-Tuhami’s apartment between Nasser and Amer, on the Egyptian side, with the CIA’s Miles Copeland, and the generals Albert Gerhardt and Wilbur Eveland, representing the Americans. According to Copeland, an agreement was reached to sell Egypt $20 million worth of weapons on easy credit terms. But the following month, Washington announced only an economic aid package of $40 million; Nasser also received $3 million under the table from the U.S. president’s executive budget, which was normally earmarked for CIA operations. Copeland returned to Washington in July 1955 to consult with George Allen, assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, regarding the delayed arms deal. A desperate Nasser followed this with a warning message to Kermit Roosevelt, director of the CIA’s Middle East operations, in mid-September that if the deal did not go through, he might consider requesting military aid from the Eastern Bloc, but the latter did not take him seriously.⁴

Clearly, America’s intention was to coax Egypt into joining the Western-oriented regional defense alliance known as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), or simply, the Baghdad Pact. The pact allowed U.S. and British forces to use the territories and facilities of member countries (Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan) to block Communist incursions into the region. When Egypt refused to join, the Americans, according to the future foreign minister Ismail Fahmy, encouraged Israeli raids against the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip between February and September 1955 under the pretext of checking the activities of Palestinian guerrillas. The raids exposed Egypt’s military vulnerability even further, forcing Nasser to conclude the famous “Czech arms deal” with the Soviet Union in September 1955—a substantial deal that included 200 fighter jets and bombers, 230 tanks, 500 artillery pieces, 530 armored vehicles, 200 troop carriers, and a naval force of 3 submarines and a handful of destroyers and minesweepers.⁵ Nasser made it clear that the West had only itself to blame. In a speech delivered on September 27, 1955, at a military fair, he said: “When we carried out the revolution we turned to every country … to arm our forces, we turned to England, we turned to France, we turned to America … [but] we only heard demands [that undermine] Egypt’s dignity.”⁶ American strategists were stunned. They had placed too much store in Khrushchev’s public pledge to the Central Committee of the Communist Party to adhere to Joseph Stalin’s policy of never staking Soviet credibility on non-Communist developing countries, especially ones that were too far away and too unstable. Stalin, as is well known, was an advocate of “socialism in one country” (meaning the USSR), and intervened outside Russian borders only when success was guaranteed at the hands of a Communist party loyal to Moscow. Washington believed the Soviets eyed Third World nationalists with suspicion, if not disdain, and would never ally with them. Obviously, however, the success of the U.S. Containment Doctrine, which prevented the spread of communism outside the USSR and Eastern Europe, forced Moscow to treat postcolonial nationalists as “good enough Communists” in order to break its isolation. And before the Americans knew what hit them, Nasser strained the situation even further by recognizing Red China in May 1956. Enraged, the United States not only canceled military aid talks, but also withdrew its offer to help build the High Dam, a massive hydroelectric project that was supposed to double Egypt’s industrial capacity. By doing so, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles played unwittingly into Nasser’s hand. For months the president had been looking for a pretext to reclaim Egypt’s rights over the Suez Canal. Now, citing the need to channel the canal’s revenue toward financing the dam, a defiant Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in front of an ecstatic crowd on July 26, 1956.

Instead of just aggravating the United States, Nasser’s decision convinced three odd partners to carry out a joint military strike against Egypt, what became known as the Tripartite Aggression. Britain, France, and Israel came to this decision through very different routes, though it was the conjunction of their interests to depose Egypt’s new regime that made their cooperation possible. For Britain, as Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd later revealed, Nasser’s obvious ambition to project power in the eastern flank of the Arab world (Jordan, Iraq, Aden, and the sheikhdoms of the Gulf) undermined its strategic allies and threatened its control of the region’s oilfields. Egypt’s control of the Suez Canal itself represented another problem: not only did a quarter of all British imports come through the canal, but also three-quarters of its oil needs. Of the 14,666 ships that passed through the canal in 1955, for instance, 4,358 were British. If Nasser blocked the canal, Britain might suffer “the worst industrial crisis in her history.”⁷

France’s grievances had to do with Nasser’s actions in the North African side of the Arab world, particularly in Algeria. The French military establishment blamed Nasser for the Algerian Revolt. Hard-pressed to justify their failure to end the insurgency, French generals needed an excuse, and the most sensible one was Nasser. In the French army’s propaganda, Egypt’s role in Algeria was the same as the Chinese role in Vietnam, the difference being that Egypt, unlike China, could be defeated. So if France had been humbled by China in Southeast Asia, there was no need for it to suffer the same fate in the Middle East at the hands of a lesser power. If only Nasser were deposed, Algeria’s Front de Liberation National (FLN) would lose its capacity to evict the French by force. As with Britain, the Suez Canal also had an influence over France’s decision: “In the Gallic imagination the canal was not just a masterpiece of engineering but a tribute to the Napoleonic mission … On a less elevated level, the Canal Company was the ‘last great international stronghold of French capital.’ Its board was controlled by French directors, it was staffed largely by French technicians, and it provided a modest income to tens of thousands of French shareholders.”⁸

Soon after resolving to launch war against Nasser, France approached Israel. Egypt’s new neighbor was alarmed by the Czech arms deal, and believed it had only a narrow window of opportunity to cripple Cairo’s drive for military parity. Israel and France developed intimate military links in the 1950s as French armaments and aviation industries sought clients with long shopping lists and generous funds to help them achieve economies of scale. Transactions increased in value from a few Mirages and Mystères to a deal to help Israel establish its first atomic reactor, in Dimona. Moreover, the Mossad shared intelligence with the Service de Documentation et Centre de Espionnage (SCCE) regarding FLN activities. Now France offered Israel a full military partnership in a joint assault against a common enemy, an offer it could hardly refuse. On September 21, Shimon Peres, the man responsible for French-Israeli military cooperation, was invited to France to plan the operation.⁹

The aim of the tripartite plot, as set in the Sèvres Protocol on October 24, 1956, was simple: toppling Nasser and establishing control over the Suez Canal. However, the military plan and the logistics required to pull it off were anything but simple. Israel was assigned a diversionary role. Its forces would roll into Sinai to draw in Egypt’s army. The two Western powers would then demand an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of each force to equal distances from the Suez Canal. Egypt would certainly refuse because such a withdrawal would mean surrendering Sinai to the Israelis. Citing the need to safeguard the international waterway, Britain and France would occupy the Suez Canal Zone. First, Egyptian airfields would be bombed to neutralize the air force and unnerve the population; then a naval barrage would smother canal defenses to allow paratroopers to be parachuted in; and finally, a full-fledged airborne and seaborne invasion would wrest the canal cities away from Egypt and advance to Cairo to install a friendly government.

As agreed, Israel’s elite strike force, the 7th Armored Brigade, stormed into Egyptian territories on October 29, 1956. Nasser issued his orders for the six battalions stationed there to block the Israeli advance until the 4th Armored Division could cross the canal to join the battle. The next day, Egypt received warnings through its ambassadors to London and Paris to withdraw ten miles from the canal within twelve hours to avert international intervention. Nasser’s suspicions that a plot had been hatched were soon confirmed when Britain and France raided Egyptian airports, ravaging the country’s air force. By the end of October, Egypt was confronting a force four times as big as its own, with 1,000 jets, 700 tanks, and two naval fleets with 130 warships. This was “the largest amphibious fighting force since the end of the Second World War.”¹⁰

Naturally, Egypt’s military command was startled. When Nasser got to GHQ on October 31, he was advised to surrender himself to the British to spare the country from total destruction. Amer, who was apparently suffering from a nervous breakdown, cried: “The air strikes will send the country back a thousand years. I cannot expose my countrymen to such a massacre.”¹¹ Ahmed Hamroush, who was present at the meeting, describes how Nasser harshly responded to Amer’s pleas for submission: “Nobody is going to surrender; everybody is going to fight … Your behavior is unmanly; the first shots have hardly been fired. Not only must I take direct command of the army, but I also don’t want you issuing any orders … If you can’t do better than mope like an old hag then you will be court-martialed.”¹² Unshaken by the defeatism of his chief military commander, Nasser offered to lead the battle personally, a suggestion to which Amer quickly conceded. The president gathered that if the army was dispatched to face the Israelis in Sinai it would be caught between a rock and a hard place as soon as the Franco-British forces landed in the Canal Zone, and the road to the capital would be virtually undefended. He thus ordered all forces to pull out of Sinai in forty-eight hours (by November 2) and dig in around the banks of the canal. Despite the pressure, Nasser planned the withdrawal meticulously; his successful delaying tactics saved two-thirds of the men and equipment. He also prevented the pilots from joining the battle because he felt they were not yet equipped to take on Western aces. After effectively benching Amer, the president authorized the sinking of fifty cement tanks at the canal’s northern entrance to block an invasion from the Mediterranean, even though he knew this would obstruct navigation in the entire canal. On November 2, Nasser gave a resounding speech at al-Azhar mosque, rallying Egyptians for an all-out popular resistance. He put Zakaria in charge of coordinating popular resistance throughout the country, and dispatched three former RCC colleagues to organize resistance in the canal cities, especially around Port Said, before visiting the battlefront himself days later.¹³

In a few days, the attack came to a halt. British and French troops evacuated on December 22 with no gains to speak of, followed by the Israelis in March 1957. Why did the tripartite campaign falter so soon? Nasser’s swift measures certainly had some effect. In addition, the British part of the military operation faced several logistical complications. British troops had evacuated the canal in June 1956 and were already too far away; the closest detachment was in Malta, six days’ sail from Egyptian shores. Assembling the troops once more proved to be one of the most “laborious, elaborate, and time-consuming” mobilization processes in military history.¹⁴ Part of the reason for that was that Britain, as Harold McMillan confessed in his memoirs, wanted to prepare for all eventualities. This is a better way of saying that his government “lacked the imagination and initiative to move on from the Second World War … launching a Normandy-style armada by the sure knowledge that in the time it took to cross the Mediterranean world opinion, already sympathetic to Egypt, would have moved much farther in that direction.”¹⁵ Ultimately, however, it was the actions of two countries that really mattered: the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States was not willing to accept a reverse to the retrenching of European imperialism after it had finally began to replace British and French hegemony in the Middle East, and the Soviet Union considered an assault on a country with which Moscow had just established military cooperation an unforgivable insult. It was their fierce rejection of the attack—one of the very few things they agreed on during the Cold War—that brought it to nothing.

Although the Egyptian military was officially defeated (it was forced to withdraw from Sinai, and could not prevent allied air attacks or occupation), the Suez War was hailed as a “political triumph.” Of course, Nasser’s calculations had turned out to be flawed: he ruled out an Israeli intervention; he thought Franco-British competition in the Middle East would preclude their cooperation; he believed France was totally consumed in Algeria and could not afford to open another front; and he estimated that the time and cost needed to assemble a substantial British force was too prohibitive.¹⁶ Still, the president displayed great political agility in mobilizing popular resistance and securing diplomatic support out of all proportion to his country’s strength. His arousing speeches and confident attitude inspired Egyptians to resist fiercely, and the stories of their heroic defiance are still part of the folklore of the citizens of the canal cities. Also, the way he presented Egypt’s case to world opinion, and his willingness to compensate Britain and France for their lost shares in the Suez Canal, turned the table on the aggressors. He also proved to be a successful tactician, delaying the aggressors’ success and managing to bring home two-thirds of the army intact.

But at the same time that Nasser’s political leadership was being celebrated in Egypt and throughout the developing world, Amer’s mediocre military abilities were exposed. Analyzing the military balance sheet, Egypt’s future war minister Abd al-Ghany al-Gamasy explains:

The political victory might have overshadowed our dismal military performance, but there was no escaping the fact that we failed to secure the country from the east or the north; that the belligerents only yielded to international pressure; and that Israel managed to secure at least one considerable gain in exchange for its withdrawal: an international peacekeeping force stationed in Sharm al-Sheikh to guarantee freedom of Israeli navigation through the Straits of Tiran into the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea. Amer was supposed to reshuffle the general staff and service heads, upgrade the air force and air defenses, and establish a strong presence in Sinai to deter future Israeli aggression; none of this was done.¹⁷

Keen on preserving the patronage network they had established, Amer’s security associates convinced him that the war was the president’s fault; after all, it was his reckless decision to nationalize the canal that brought it on. They also warned him that purging his loyal subordinates under pressure from Nasser would irrevocably tarnish his reputation. Personally, Amer became apprehensive of the military prowess his friend displayed during the war. His method to win back the respect of his men was to shower them with favors, to spoil them even further than he had already done. So while Nasser demanded far-reaching changes in military leadership and organization, an embittered Amer remained unyielding, refusing during a stormy meeting on November 15 to even transfer the scandalously incompetent air force commander, Major General Sedqi Mahmoud, because he was “his man.” Not only that, but Amer also lashed out at Nasser, accusing him of provoking an unnecessary war and then blaming the military for the result.¹⁸ Amer’s audacity shocked the president, who began to suspect that the military might be slipping out of his control, that his trusted lieutenant might have built his own power base in the corps. For the first time, a wedge was driven between the two longtime comrades. It could not have come at a worse time. Eisenhower expected a grateful Egypt to embrace his January 1957 offer of U.S. support for countries threatened by communism; instead, Nasser attacked the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine vehemently as an imperialist ruse that justified U.S. military intervention in the Middle East instead of arming newly independent states to defend their own borders. On March 22, 1957, the U.S. president met with the CIA chief, Allen Dulles, and the veteran Middle East operative Kermit Roosevelt to consider means of ousting Nasser¹⁹—plans that would finally take shape a decade later, shaking the Egyptian regime to the core.

THE DARK YEARS

The Suez War debacle and the confrontation that followed it made the president determined to remove his friend from military command. This was easier said than done. Building on his amicable and lavish personality, Amer’s security aides had placed him at the center of an elaborate patronage network within the officer corps. They talked him into promoting himself to the rank of field marshal in 1957 (a rank unknown in the Arabic lexicon), and helped him transform the army into a tribe, with him as tribal chief: allocating gifts and honors, granting personal favors, solving family disputes, inviting his men to all-night parties at his house, and making sure that the “field marshal’s men” remained untouchable. During his tenure, promotions accelerated to the point where one could become a brigadier general at the age of forty (compared with colonel in the early 1950s). All officers benefited from his doubling of salaries; his raising of the retirement age; his allocation of summerhouses, automobiles, travel grants, and interest-free loans; his order to have officers’ children accepted at universities regardless of their academic scores; and various other privileges.²⁰ For the army, the field marshal had become something of a Santa Claus. Colonel Muhammad Selim recounted one indicative incident: “A junior officer once walked up to Amer as he was about to leave GHQ and complained that he was forced to use public transportation to commute to work every day. Amer tore the top part of his cigarette packet and wrote on its back: ‘Dear Fiat manager, dispense a car immediately to the bearer of this message.’ The field marshal did not even ask for his name; the fact that he donned the uniform and came to him for help was enough.”²¹

Amer did not want to replace the president, but aspired to having equal power. So instead of enhancing the army’s fighting capacity, Amer devoted himself to transforming it into “a state within a state” through the help of his security aides. He treated the military as a personal fief, promoting officers based on their loyalty to him, rather than to Nasser or the state. To keep the president on his feet, Amer’s security men provided him with a regular stream of attempted plots they claim to have foiled (such as an alleged plot in April 1957 involving British operatives and eight army officers). The aim was to make Nasser too anxious to carry out a military shake-up against their will.²² So what had originally begun as an attempt to secure the revolution in 1954 had been gradually transformed into securing the dominance of the present military leadership. Nasser’s only hope now was to persuade Amer to leave the military on his own accord, an impossible task by any measure.

The president thus turned to the next best option: acting on the advice of the PBI director, Samy Sharaf, he tried to create his own secret network within the army. Quickly realizing that the officer corps was effectively sealed off by Amer’s security apparatus, Sharaf shifted his effort to the Military Academy, which was headed by a relative of his, the future war minister Muhammad Fawzy. By the end of 1956, Sharaf had recruited six cadets. Their mission was to lie low until they graduated, then actively build a network loyal to the president once they joined the service. After a few meetings, however, the field marshal’s security men picked them up, and after a fiery confrontation with Nasser, the organization was disbanded. Another PBI operative, Hassan al-Tuhami, decided to bug Amer’s phones on his own initiative. Again, Amer’s alert security apparatus found out, and Tuhami was not only dismissed, but also exiled to Vienna for an entire decade.²³

Exposed and increasingly on the defensive, Nasser now became entrapped in a cat-and-mouse game with his field marshal. To ease Amer’s suspicions, Nasser surrendered a bit of ground by appointing the OCC director, Salah Nasr—the field marshal’s right-hand security man—as head of the GIS in May 1957, and Nasr’s OCC deputy Abbas Radwan as interior minister in October 1958. But in order to protect himself, Nasser employed the former GIS director Aly Sabri at the PBI to capitalize on his contacts at the agency to neutralize Nasr. The president also anticipated Nasr’s official takeover in May by appointing two confidants (Amin Huwaidi and Sha’rawi Gomaa) to senior positions at the GIS in February. He then convinced Amer to appoint the second-tier Free Officer Colonel Shams Badran as the new OCC director, replacing Nasr. Badran had been acting as liaison between the presidency and the military, and Nasser hoped he would deliver the military back to him. In addition to all these tactical precautions, Nasser was ultimately reassured by the fact that Zakaria Muhi al-Din, the architect of the entire security apparatus, was unofficially supervising all civilian security agencies, regardless of who was in charge at GIS or the Interior Ministry. The president’s safeguards, however, soon came to nothing. Sabri clashed with Sharaf and had to be reallocated, and the shrewd Nasr not only refused to begin his tenure unless the GIS became independent of Zakaria’s hegemony, he also isolated Nasser’s men, Huwaidi and Gomaa, forcing them to move to the PBI in a few months, before proceeding to ally the GIS with the military-based security group.²⁴ Now all military and civilian security organs (except for the president’s own PBI) came under Amer’s control. Worse still, the field marshal won over Badran, Nasser’s supposed spy. Badran relished the fact that his new boss’s laissez-faire management style, which sharply contrasted with Nasser’s tight-leash supervision, would grant him virtual control of the entire military.

By 1958, Nasser’s position within the security community had considerably deteriorated. That same year, however, presented Nasser with a golden opportunity to sway Amer away from command. The centerpiece of Nasserist foreign policy was Arab nationalism, a policy aimed at uniting all Arab countries under one body (like his European neighbors to the north were striving to do themselves). The first step of this long-term plan was to merge Egypt and Syria, the closest two Arab countries (in institutions and temperament) into one state: the United Arab Republic. To kill two birds with one stone, Nasser decided to combine the expansion of Egyptian influence abroad with the consolidation of his power at home, and so he kicked his friend-turned-rival upstairs by appointing him governor of Syria, now renamed the Northern Sector. The field marshal agreed, believing he would now have his own country to run. But the union lasted for only three short years. This was a disaster for Amer on many levels: first, it was his trusted Syrian aide-de-camp (Abd al-Karim al-Nahlawy) who organized the anti-Egyptian coup that dissolved the union; second, Syria’s new leaders shipped Amer back to Cairo on September 28, 1961, in a humiliating fashion (rumor has it, in his undergarments); third, his military commanders again failed to fly troops to Syria fast enough to avert the coup; and finally, one of the factors that fueled the secession was that he allowed his men to run rampant all over the Syrian corps. Shaken by this spectacular blunder, Amer tendered his resignation, which Nasser accepted with great relief. Three days later, the president reappointed Zakaria as interior minister, demoting Radwan to minister without portfolio, and was preparing for a similar move against Nasr at the GIS. But in January 1962, before Nasser could catch his breath, Zakaria and Sharaf uncovered a military plot to reinstate Amer and dismiss the president if he attempted to resist.²⁵ It was clear that the field marshal’s men were not ready to surrender their boss. Amer’s ejection from the military had to wait.

This time Nasser had to improvise. In September 1962, he told Amer he intended to rule Egypt collectively through a twelve-member Presidential Council, which would include both of them, in addition to some old RCC colleagues and a few civilian ministers. To join the council, however, Amer had to resign and accept the appointment of Muhammad Fawzy, director of the Military Academy, as the new commander-in-chief. Nasser’s real intention, as he later confessed to Fawzy, was to isolate his unruly field marshal with a sleight of hand from the corps.²⁶ Amer reluctantly agreed, not knowing exactly what he was getting into. During the council’s first meeting, on September 18, Nasser announced the appointed of Aly Sabri (his close security associate) as prime minister, and reminded Amer to submit his resignation as agreed. Instead, Shams Badran, the OCC director, came to see Nasser the next day to inform him that after consulting with his men, the field marshal had decided to stay on. A furious Nasser insisted that Amer carry out his part of the deal, and all Badran managed to secure from him was an extension. After a couple of months, Badran turned up with a letter of resignation. As the president skimmed through the lines, he quickly realized it was a ploy—and a quite dangerous one. In the letter, which Badran claimed had “somehow leaked” to the officer corps and the press, Amer said he was stepping down because Nasser adamantly pursued the path of dictatorship: “What you should be working for now is democracy … I cannot imagine that after all this time, after eradicating feudalism and manipulative capitalism, after the masses have placed their trust in you unreservedly, you still fear democracy.” On that same day, before Nasser could recover from the shock, paratroopers demonstrated outside his house with their machine guns pointed toward the presidential residence. The PBI also informed him that Nasr at the GIS was plotting something big with the general staff. A few days later, Badran carried to the president a new message from the field marshal: Amer would not resign unless Nasser pledged in writing to establish democracy. The president had no choice but to negotiate with Amer. A meeting was set for December 11. The field marshal began by stressing that the political security of the armed forces depended on him personally, and that any attempt to remove him from office would lead to disaster. Amer followed his not-so-subtle threat with a list of demands that included promoting him from commander-in-chief to first vice president and deputy supreme commander of the armed forces (Nasser holding nominally the title of supreme commander), in addition to undivided control over the military’s financial and administrative affairs. Realizing at this point that challenging Amer would certainly provoke a coup, the president retreated.²⁷

So basically the Presidential Council gambit backfired. The field marshal not only emerged unscathed, but also his position improved considerably, in effect being promoted from the number two man to sharing the number one position. The confrontation confirmed Nasser’s worst fear; he complained to Zakaria, after what he considered Amer’s “silent coup,” that there were now two states in Egypt, an official one, which he presided over, and a shadowy one led by Amer.²⁸ In a less guarded moment, he bluntly confessed to Sadat that the country was currently “run by a gang … I am responsible as president, but it is Amer that rules.”²⁹ The type of regime emerging in Egypt in the 1960s was therefore one of dual power, an unstable and alarming situation.

The previously lurking power struggle now came into the open. Nasser’s goal was to infiltrate the military, while Amer’s goal was to extend his influence over the political sphere. The president pushed Amer in March 1964 to hire Muhammad Fawzy as chief of staff, after he had refused to surrender general command to him two years earlier. The field marshal acquiesced in order to appease Nasser, but then restricted Fawzy’s duties to trivial administrative tasks, and created a new position in the chain of command—the so-called Ground Forces Command (GFC)—to carry out the duties of the chief of staff.³⁰ Amer and his entourage, on the other hand, tightened their grip over the military and security, and began to extend their influence over civilian sectors as well, from overseeing land reform to supervising public sector companies and running sporting clubs. In truth, though, the real players in this struggle were neither Nasser nor Amer, but rather their security associates. For example, hiring Fawzy as chief of staff was proposed by his relative Samy Sharaf, the PBI director; at the same time, the OCC head, Shams Badran, had an infinitely stronger control over the military and military-based security organs than Amer himself.³¹

At this point, Nasser began to regret his disregard for political organization. If he had formed a strong ruling party, he would have kept the military in line via political commissars, as was the case in Russia and China. Instead, he resolved to control the military through secret cells loyal to his regime. Now that their loyalty had shifted to Amer, he had no way of purging them—he simply did not know who the members of these cells were.^* But perhaps it was not too late. If the military had become his rival’s power base, and if the security apparatuses he controlled (the PBI; the Interior Ministry’s investigative organ, the GID; and the police force) were no match for Amer’s ensemble (the OCC; the military and civilian intelligence agencies; and the military police), then maybe he could turn his attention to the political apparatus—maybe he could shore up his social support and transform the rudimentary organs that existed so far into an all-powerful ruling party. If he succeeded in expanding and organizing his social base, then maybe he could reduce the relative weight of the military in the ruling coalition. The idea of the Arab Socialist Union (ASU) was thus born—conceived from the beginning as a political counter to the military.

COUNTERWEIGHING THE MILITARY

Nasser deeply mistrusted political parties because they could be easily infiltrated and subverted. He preferred to mobilize support through direct appeal to the masses via speeches and state-controlled media. But by 1962, he realized how he had inadvertently cornered himself; because of his reluctance to build a powerful ruling party, the political arena became entirely dominated by the military and the security apparatus. Nasser was now determined to remedy this deficiency. He began to build on what he had. The chaotic array of political currents that constituted the Liberation Rally gave way by 1958 to a more pyramid-shaped, district-based structure called the National Union (NU). But despite its more solid structure, the NU was a nonideological control instrument open to all citizens and concerned mostly with providing crowds to welcome state dignitaries, shepherding them to root for the president during national celebrations and to vote for whatever the government ordained in referendums. Neither the Liberation Rally nor the NU had any capacity for popular mobilization. They were more like fluid social networks of all those who supported—or more accurately, sought to benefit from—the regime. They included students, workers, peasants, professionals, merchants, as well as rural notables and capitalists, coming together occasionally to express approval of whatever the regime did.

The passing of the socialist laws of 1961, which Nasser used to broaden his mass base and tighten his grip over the bureaucracy, provided the occasion to reorganize and empower the NU. Through the National Charter of 1962, Nasser announced the creation of the ASU, which was supposed to represent the will of what he called “the alliance of the people’s productive forces” in achieving freedom (from imperialism), socialism (which meant a state-planned economy), and (Arab) unity. It was methodically structured along two axes: one based on profession, with committees for workers, peasants, intellectuals, soldiers, and “patriotic” capitalists, as well as the Socialist Youth Organization for students; and another on residence, with district branches in the cities and basic units in the villages (7,500 chapters in all). In theory, the ASU was supposed to provide candidates for parliament and cabinet, as well as other leadership positions, such as mayors and university deans, and “inspire” legislation and policies on all state levels. In short, it was supposed to represent the seat of political power.

The GIS deputy director and leading ASU cadre Abd al-Fattah Abu al-Fadl published an exposition of the origins and goals of this new organization in the regime’s mouthpiece Al-Tali’ah (The Vanguard). Abu al-Fadl first explained that the ASU was a mass organization that brought together members of all social groups to allow them to resolve their conflicts and contradictions peacefully and to find common ground under the supervision of a political apparatus composed of “politically trained elements committed to the revolution’s principles.” Abu al-Fadl denied that the ASU was a ruling party, dismissing single-party rule as either fascist (representing the interests of the economically dominant class), or Communist (representing the dictatorship of the workers), and thus inherently prejudiced against other social groups. The ASU, in contrast, was an alliance of the people as a whole and allowed them all to express their interests and negotiate a means for coexistence. He then explained that the regime rejected political pluralism because in multiparty systems party struggles are proxies for class struggles, which the ASU aimed to eliminate; “in the absence of a basic contradiction between the interests of the people’s productive forces, there is no need for each of them to form an independent political organization.”³²

All this rhetoric notwithstanding, it was clear that Nasser aspired for a Leninist-styled organization modeled on Soviet and East European (especially Yugoslavian) experiences. In a meeting with the members of the ASU’s provincial executive offices, on January 12, 1966, he stressed the “vanguard” role of the party: “We cannot succeed unless we understand the masses. We must take their ideas and opinions, study them, organize them, give them back to them, and then point them in the right direction.” His language then turned militaristic: “you must engage with people, recruit them, invite them … to expand the ASU army.”³³ But regardless of what Nasser desired, the ASU was not equipped to perform this vanguard role. In his enthusiasm to replicate the superb organization of Communist parties, the president seemed to have overlooked one missing ingredient: communism. Nasser was not a Communist, and did not adhere consistently to any strict ideology. He was a pragmatic man, though imbued with lofty ideas about modernity and social justice. Needless to say, without ideology there can be no ideological indoctrination.

So all the ASU was capable of was to bond key social groups to the regime through material temptations rather than ideological commitment. This was good enough to achieve Nasser’s immediate goal: to revamp the political apparatus and place it on par with the military. Sharaf admitted that much: “We suffered an imbalance; the weight of the military was growing beyond control. Nasser created the ASU as a political counter to the army.”³⁴ And because Amer was aware of this, he fought the new organization fiercely. A good example is the Alexandria summer camp incident of 1964, when the organization’s youth branch (the Socialist Youth Organization) chose the following topic for its cadres to research during their stay: “How should ASU youth resist a possible coup?” When the MID reported the episode to Amer, he was naturally furious.³⁵

The absence of ideology and the hidden goal of neutralizing the army condemned the ASU from the beginning to the fate of a highly centralized totalitarian body that issued directives from the top downward to keep citizens in line with regime policies and curb any opposition, rather than a mass mobilizing organ. The future ASU secretary-general Abd al-Muhsin Abu al-Nur described how he presided over nine organs, one for indoctrination, another for propaganda, a third for monitoring religious affairs, and the rest for “managing” students, workers, and peasants, and none of them tried to go beyond exerting regime control over all aspects of life.³⁶ The organization regulated rather than inspired society. And it did so through presenting ASU membership as a sine qua non, the fastest road to upward social mobility and the safest way to alleviate suspicions of dissent. Instead of instilling belief in the virtue and justice of the regime in the hearts and minds of its six million members, it became a magnet for opportunists from all walks of life. Those who flocked to swell its ranks did so because they realized that one no longer had to be a military or security officer to “benefit” from the revolution; another, civilian route had just opened up, and all one needed to do to join was fill out an application.

That was not the biggest problem with the ASU. Because of the deeply embedded security character of the regime, the new organization was quickly drawn into the security orbit. To begin with, the Interior Ministry screened recruits, nominated candidates for senior posts, and kept the entire body under tight surveillance through informants and bugging devices. Next, intelligence officers, such as Abu al-Fadl, were planted at the ASU to closely monitor its members and overall performance.³⁷ In addition, the organization itself incorporated security functions in addition to its political control duties; its members were not only expected to preach obedience to the rulers, but also to submit secret reports of any dissident views, even if expressed in the form of jokes or asides. By 1966, its secret archives held more than 30,000 files on military officers alone.³⁸ Nasser himself encouraged this role. During the same January 1966 meeting, he openly invited ASU members to act as informers: “You must be courageous enough that when you notice the deviation of another member to bring it to the attention of the [provincial] office, and if it is not remedied, to contact the [ASU] Secretary-General.”³⁹ The organization became so proficient in collecting information that Salah Nasr at the GIS complained to Nasser that the ASU (aided by Sharaf’s PBI) was spying on his own intelligence operatives.⁴⁰

Obsession with security reached its zenith with the creation of the Vanguard Organization (al-Tanzim al-Tali’ie), a secret body within the ASU originally designed to help with indoctrination, but rapidly degenerating into a full-fledged intelligence organ. The idea behind the Vanguard Organization (VO), as Nasser explained during the founding meeting in June 1963, was to form secret ten-member cells of carefully selected ideological cadres to infiltrate public institutions and indoctrinate its members.⁴¹ To help get it off the ground, the president convinced the scores of Communists that were completing their prison terms in the mid-1960s to join the new movement. In 1965, the underground Communist parties dissolved themselves and joined the new organization. Their rationale was that working with the regime would help them proliferate their ideas and—more practically—keep them out of prison. Nasser shrewdly incorporated the talented intellectual cadres and discarded the rank and file, even imprisoned many of them, so that Communist leaders would not have their own mass base within the VO. For Nasser, the VO would serve as an ideological nucleus for the regime itself, a civilian equivalent of the Free Officers cabal that he created in the military two decades before. By 1967, its membership had swelled to more than 250,000. Of course, Amer’s diligent security apparatus could not have overlooked something that big. By October 1964, the field marshal had learned about the VO, and instructed Badran to keep it away from the army.

Despite its alleged indoctrinating mission, the security component of the VO was dominant from the beginning. First, its four founding members had little to do with ideology. It is true that one of the four was a socialist doctrinaire (Ahmed Fouad, who innocently thought he could influence the rest), but the other (Al-Ahram’s chief editor, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal) was no more than a Nasser confidant, and the last two (Samy Sharaf and Aly Sabri) were essentially security men. Second, there was the emphasis on secrecy (its existence came into the open only in August 1966) in this supposedly programmatic organization. Why would a president who openly advocated socialism need a secret body to spread his ideology? Even if Nasser wanted to model his new organization on underground Communist parties, these were underground before, not after their leaders came to power. Also, for ideological indoctrination the president had encouraged freelance socialist intellectuals, led by Lutfi al-Khuli, to issue a monthly magazine—Al-Tali’ah (The Vanguard)—in 1964, so again, why the need for secrecy?

This emphasis makes sense only when one considers the security role that the VO started playing, especially after 1965, when Interior Minister Sha’rawi Gomaa became its head. Instead of preaching socialism and winning new recruits, VO members were fully devoted to infiltrating social associations (universities, factories, trade unions, syndicates, the media, state bureaucracy, and the ASU itself, of which they were all members) to uncover and report on suspicious activities. As interviews with a sample of the VO’s members later revealed, they were told that their primary function was not to win people over to socialism, but rather to submit regular reports on subversive elements in their respective institutions. This was not a simple misunderstanding; the organization’s charter explicitly mentioned: “each member is obliged to present [security] reports … to his superiors,” which turned it, in the words of one member, Hesham al-Salamuni, into a political Gestapo.⁴² Worse still, instead of performing the role of ideological spearhead, the VO dragged its mother organization (the ASU) down the same road, converting it from a potentially mass-mobilizing party to a giant security edifice centered on surveillance and political control.

But was Nasser’s real aim to create a programmatic organization to infuse political consciousness in the masses? Several reasons suggest otherwise. To begin with, it seems that Nasser understood socialist doctrines as means of achieving managerial control of politics and economics, rather than revolutionary purposes. Reviewing the minutes of a secret meeting he held on March 7, 1966, at the VO’s Cairo branch provides a firsthand view of what the president aspired to. He began by proclaiming: “We can achieve a lot … not through punishment and the military police … We can change people through the [new] political organization,” but then he quickly added: “Sabri [his security aide, VO founder, and now acting prime minister] has a point, we need believers within the executive branches and administration … these can actively and effectively supervise employees … they can also recruit more members to help them in surveillance and oversight.”⁴³ With this stress on surveillance, it is hardly surprising that Nasser entrusted the VO not to leftist intellectuals but to intelligence officers, who by disposition and training prioritized security over ideology. It would have been very naïve of the president to believe that the VO could transform his security associates into ideological cadres, rather than the other way around. In the end, the gap between the intentions he professed and the actions he carried out could be explained only by the fact that Nasser’s real goal was to create a civilian network of vested interests to enhance his power vis-à-vis the military. This was natural considering not only his struggle with Amer, but also the fact that there had been eighteen attempted coups against Nasser so far. “There has been continuous intrigue over the last fourteen years and it is likely to continue,” he said at that same meeting in March. “But I believe that it would be impossible for the army to prepare for a coup [without political support].”⁴⁴ In the opinion of one VO veteran, Nasser’s motives were not to create a real popular (let alone socialist) organization, but rather to counter the power of the field marshal.⁴⁵ And the ASU, and its secret VO, did indeed become a power to be reckoned with. But rather than deriving their power from a broad mass base, they relied on an insular class of political opportunists, thriving on state patronage and closely supervised by an expanding security elite. Nasser’s failure at building a mass-mobilizing party was particularly significant to the military sociologist Eric Nordlinger, who concluded quite emphatically:

Egypt constitutes an especially telling example of the inability of praetorian rulers to build a mass party capable of monopolizing the population. For this particular failure occurred under exceptionally favorable conditions. The officers who took power in 1952 … have had ample time to create one … the government was headed by one of the few truly charismatic figures capable of eliciting emotion-charged support, loyalty, and energy at the mass level. Egyptian society is not divided along ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, or regional lines that would have made the building of a nationwide party a highly problematic undertaking. And the presence of a powerful and much hated neighboring state has given rise to a nationalist fervor that could readily be used to recruit and energize a mass party … The people needed only to be offered an organizational framework … [Yet the ruler still assumed] that what applies within the military sphere also applies within the political realm … [he] visualized Egypt in managerial terms, as an organization instead of a polity.⁴⁶

To the extent that the ASU and VO had a social power base at all, it was the aspiring rural middle class and its urban offshoot in the state bureaucracy. This distinctive social composition characterized Egypt’s ruling parties during the crucial decades of the 1960s and 1970s, and remained well in play until the final years of Mubarak’s rule; these middling landowners and their offspring in the bureaucracy wound up constituting the backbone of the ruling party.

Recall that one of the first things the new regime did in 1952 was initiate land reform. The coup took place in a semifeudal society where 2,500 large landowners (with 147 elite families) and 9,500 middling owners controlled a third of arable land and half of the parliament’s seats. There were also more than 2.5 million smallholders, and 11 million tenant farmers and landless peasants.^* Aside from the rich absentee landlords, all the rest coexisted in the countryside, running their affairs with the aid of traditional social mores and hierarchy. The land reforms placed progressively lower limits on land ownership: 200 feddans in 1952, reduced to 100 in 1962, and finally 50 in 1965 (though the ceiling for family ownership was always higher). This was more than enough to run profitable agricultural projects. On the other hand, land redistribution granted each poor peasant five feddans or less—barely enough land to subsist on. While economically the peasants could not achieve independence, they were politically grateful to the revolution for providing them with a plot of land they could call their own. Therefore peasants could have offered a solid base for popular mobilization, but the insecure Nasser chose to blunt the revolutionary potential of the peasants lest they get out of control. Instead, he kept them tied down through reproducing traditional authority structures. He achieved this by allowing a prosperous rural middle class to occupy the apex of the patronage networks that were already set in place by large landlords, and thus perform the same political control function of their predecessors. So instead of redistributing all the surplus land among the peasants, or providing them with loans to buy it from the government, large owners were allowed to sell whatever exceeded their ownership limit on the open market where only financially solvent peasants could afford to buy. The relatively cheap divested land allowed small owners (controlling between 10 and 50 feddans) to become middling landowners (possessing between 50 and 200 feddans), and middling owners to become even wealthier. So the agricultural reform laws enabled the rural middle class, which had expanded modestly in number from 22,000 after the first installment of the land reform law in 1952 to 29,000 in 1965, to increase its land ownership by 29 percent, its annual income by 24 percent, and its share of state loans and subsidies by 80 percent during the same period.⁴⁷ By enhancing the economic power of the middling landowners, land reform shifted the balance of political power from large landlords to these new kulaks, who now enjoyed undisputed hegemony in the countryside. Security and stability were thus prioritized over the potential for mobilization, a potential that might have served the regime today, but could have been used against it tomorrow. Conservative village notables were considered a safer bet.

The arbitrarily passed July 1961 Socialist Laws, which crowned Nasser’s drive to bring the economy under state control, further enhanced the position of the rural middle class by undermining the economic power of the wealthy urban stratum. Though one could scarcely argue that Nasser’s version of state socialism was detrimental to the interests of private enterprise, capitalists and former large landlords (with a lot of cash on their hands after forcibly selling their land) were reluctant to subject themselves to the whims of what they considered a totalitarian regime and so they held back on investment, preferring to make a profit in nonproductive fields, such as real estate speculation. Nasser tried his best to lure them back to productive investments through various tax exemptions, but this could not substitute for the lack of trust.^* Following the Suez Crisis, it was estimated that out of £E45 million redirected away from agriculture, only £E6 million was invested in industry, while the rest went to real estate. In 1956 alone, real estate investment constituted 75.8 percent of all private investments. Nasser first responded in January 1957 by nationalizing foreign companies and forming the Economic Agency and the High Committee for National Planning to manage economic development. He then brought Egypt’s largest banks under state control in February 1960, and formulated the first Five-Year Plan, for 1960–1965.⁴⁸

Although the upper bourgeoisie was forced to work for the state as executive managers after the nationalization laws, it remained obstinate. In 1961 Zakaria reported that a group of thirty high-ranking officers had been meeting regularly with Egyptian capitalists, and that together they were pushing Amer to help them end the dictatorship and restore private liberties. Zakaria’s report also highlighted that two-thirds of the economy was still in the hands of the private sector (that included 80 percent of commerce, and 70 percent of construction and industrial projects), and that half of Egypt’s workers were employed by private businesses. A swift move against capitalists was necessary. In October 1961, Zakaria detained 40 prominent investors, and in mid-November sequestrated the financial assets of another 767. The government then took over 80 banks and insurance companies, and 367 commercial companies.⁴⁹ The Socialist Laws of 1961 were a logical next step. They eliminated the private sector in banking, insurance, international trade, heavy industry, transportation, large hotels, and the media. Even in light and medium industries and commercial companies—the last domain of private enterprise—the public sector became a partner with no less than 50 percent control. By 1967, the Supreme Council for Public Organizations supervised 48 public organizations, which in turn ran 382 affiliated companies.⁵⁰

The bureaucracy and public sector were swelled further by state welfare laws passed during the same period. In 1962, Nasser’s cabinet decided to admit all secondary school graduates to university, and to secure a job for every college graduate. As a result, state employment in the civilian sectors alone jumped from 770,000 in 1962 to about 1.1 million by 1967. At the same time as state employment rates were as high as 70 percent between 1962 and 1969 (employing more than 60 percent of university graduates), state salaries increased by 102 percent.⁵¹ Needless to say, that expansion reflected neither population nor economic growth. It was part of Nasser’s attempt to expand and consolidate his civilian social base.

The expansion of the urban managerial class offered the middling landowners a golden opportunity to extend their influence to the city. They now pushed their offspring to find employment in the bureaucracy and public-sector companies. That is why the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, which doubled in size between 1962 and 1965, was overwhelmingly composed of the sons of rural notables. Soon these young bureaucrats transformed the public sector into a labyrinth of commercial and financial fiefdoms, which supplemented the agricultural fiefdoms their families had established in the countryside. Strategically placed in the city and the countryside, this new elite now represented the bulwark of the ruling party, the ASU. This leads us to conclude that the guiding rational for both the land reform and socialist laws was political, not economic.^* In effect, this alliance between a class of wealthy landowners and the state bourgeoisie that sprang out of it pushed the economy toward commercial and real estate investment rather than industry. Even agriculture suffered as middling landowners passed a considerable part of their returns to their urban offshoots to double it through short-term economic ventures instead of reinvesting it in the land. Land was treated as a source of prestige, not a productive asset.

But the regime had only itself to blame. The poverty of its economic policy really stemmed from the poverty of its politics. Rather than focusing on development, the regime was motivated by the need to curtail capitalist interests, on the one hand, and the need to “bribe” society to excuse its dictatorial methods, on the other. The costly commitments imposed on the bureaucracy and public sector included employment of all university graduates, the provision of cheap housing and free health care and education, and so on. In the sixties, for instance, public-sector companies were forced to increase wages by 40 percent to absorb the quadrupling of university students without a corresponding increase in productivity or profit. In the bureaucracy alone, Egypt had one million civil servants on the payroll by 1967.⁵² The price was administrative chaos and corruption, but now there were millions of white-collar employees ready to root for the ASU. Clearly, Nasser perceived state institutions more or less as political power structures, as incubators for a new class of citizens whose interests were tied to his ruling party.

To empower a stratum of conservative village notables and civil servants appeared much more expedient to Nasser’s security coterie than to mobilize urban activists or unruly peasants. Egypt’s long experience with elections (dating back to 1866) had laid down certain political practices in the countryside, such as having village notables register peasants to vote for their landlords or mobilize them to show support for a particular candidate. All Nasser’s faction needed to do was to utilize this preexisting setup for its own purposes; that is, all it had to do was to lock into existing authority structures instead of creating new ones. In that sense, the emasculation of the upper class in the village was symbolic; its political influence was simply passed on to those next in line.

With peasant support channeled by rural notables, and employees and workers’ support channeled by their supervisors in the bureaucracy and public-sector companies, the ASU had a considerable social base. These notables and managers, in turn, dominated the apparatuses of the ruling party and got themselves elected to the various representative bodies. That is not to say that this stratum constituted a new “ruling class,” because its role was rather one of sustaining those in power. Its influence was mostly local, and its aspirations were limited to increasing its wealth and status. In Gaetano Mosca’s terms, it represented the “second stratum of the ruling class,” one that mediates power between regime and society without actually holding the keys to political authority.⁵³ According to another political scientist, Timothy Mitchell, Nasser’s experiment provides a good case study of the complex set of relations that constitute the state: “These no longer appear primarily in the form of a central power intervening to initiate change, but as local practices of regulation, policing, and coercion that sustain a certain level of inequality … The center did not initiate change, but tried to channel local forces into activities that would extend … regime influence.”⁵⁴

The fingerprints of Nasser’s security elite appear all over this power-building process. The president himself aimed for a wider popular base. For example, in a speech delivered on October 16, 1961, he criticized the National Union for including fewer than 2,000 urban activists among its 29,520 committee members, with the rest representing the forces of reaction in the countryside, and pledged that the new ASU would come up with preventive measures against the infiltration of these elements, the most important of which was that its membership would include 50 percent workers and peasants. The presidential initiative was quickly frustrated when Sabri and the rest of the security crew agreed to include those who owned 50 feddans in the peasant category, and to consider those who sat on the boards of public-sector companies as workers.⁵⁵ Nasser then delegated to his security men the task of filtering out conservative elements during the transition from the NU to the ASU. The result was that only 1.5 percent of NU members who applied to join the ASU were disqualified, and a striking 78 percent of those in charge of NU village units, and 60 percent of those heading NU secretariat positions in the cities, continued to occupy the same posts under the new organization.⁵⁶ Not only that, but while village notables occupied 11.7 percent under the NU watch in the 1957 parliament, their share more than doubled (to 30 percent) in the ASU-supervised parliamentary elections in 1964.⁵⁷ It was the typical “the devil we know” mentality that governs security thinking that assured the continued predominance of the rural middle class and its urban offshoots. As the senior intelligence official Abd al-Fattah Abu al-Fadl concluded after his five-year tenure at the ASU, the new party was not only formed of the same social material as that of the old, but of the exact same people.⁵⁸

It is this group of middle-class opportunists that would run and benefit from the ruling party for the next five decades—although it would have to share the spoils with more affluent businessmen after the seventies. Instead of undermining the new class of security officers, the ASU provided this mostly urban class with a bridge to the countryside, thus tightening relations between security and politics more than ever. Eventually, this security-political alliance would succeed in marginalizing the military, but at the price of fortifying the dictatorship. An early demonstration of the fatal consequences of this emerging alliance was there for all to see in 1966 in a small village on the Nile Delta known as Kamshish.

THE KAMSHISH AFFAIR

The Kamshish Affair brought into sharp focus the alignment of forces in place during the final days leading up to the climactic 1967 war. This small village of perhaps 10,000 inhabitants and 2,120 feddans in al-Munufiya province on the Nile Delta in northern Egypt (the home province of Sadat and Mubarak) became an international cause célèbre in 1966, receiving extensive coverage from Egyptian and world media, and attracting visits from no less than Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone De Beauvoir, as well as honorable mention in one of Fidel Castro’s fiery speeches. It was celebrated as the only instance of peasant revolt in postcoup Egypt, though the reality was much more humble. Its true significance was that it accurately reflected the political configuration and power balances of the time. Lutfi al-Kholi, editor of the regime’s mouthpiece, Al-Tali’ah, thought it was “a political and economic thermometer” of the state of the country.⁵⁹ In fact, the GIS director, Salah Nasr, described it as the “apex of the power struggle” that consumed the country during the 1960s.⁶⁰

The whole affair began with peasant activists leading a campaign against the large landowning family of al-Feqi, which retained 650 feddans above the limit prescribed by the land-reform laws. Complaints against the formerly dominant landlords also incriminated ASU and security officials, who—together with village notables—facilitated the family’s fraudulent behavior. The campaign, which centered on petitions to the president and the ASU leadership in Cairo, was led by two Communists, Salah al-Din Hussein and his wife, Shahendah Maqlad. But Nasser’s security lieutenants kept a lid on it, making sure he never saw any of the letters addressed to him. But it all came into the open during the president’s tour of the countryside in March 1966, when he heard demonstrators chanting: “The Kamshish Revolution Salutes the Mother Revolution!” followed by Maqlad rushing toward his motorcade to hand him a memo detailing the whole story—how Kamshish peasants were among the first to back up the land-reform laws in 1952; how appalled they were when the “feudal” al-Feqis became the representatives of Nasser’s first popular organization (the Liberation Rally), and afterward made sure that NU and ASU dignitaries in the province were their junior allies; how al-Feqis regularly consorted with security officials to make sure peasant petitions were intercepted and their drafters detained; and finally, how this whole charade made it seem as if the revolution’s political organizations were “born dead.”⁶¹ Upon returning to Cairo, Nasser demanded a full investigation. Party and police officials claimed it was a minor affair stirred by Communist troublemakers, and decided to shelve the case. Weeks later, Hussein was shot dead by a police-hired peasant, sparking massive peasant riots that soon made local and international headlines. The press coverage highlighted how little the power structure had shifted in the countryside after a decade and a half of land reform.

In his dual capacity as intelligence operative and ASU functionary, Abu al-Fadl was asked to investigate the murder. A few weeks later, he reported that Hussein had in fact been submitting one complaint after another to ASU officials and the PBI concerning violations by al-Feqis. The complaints were ignored, and the Interior Ministry detained Hussein twice, once (between November 1954 and February 1956) for being a Communist, and the other (during the second week of September 1965) for being an Islamist.⁶² Hussein’s widow also provided investigators with a security memo written weeks before the murder (on March 3, 1966), accusing her husband of rabble-rousing and warning of his subversive activities, thus further implicating the security apparatus in his assassination.⁶³ The investigation also revealed that the Speaker of Parliament, Anwar al-Sadat, intervened in al-Feqis’ favor, and that even after the murder he tried to shore them up by claiming that his own investigations (carried out by Mahmoud Game’, a confidant who also happened to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood) confirmed their innocence of all charges—whether land-reform violations or incitement to murder. Sadat further claimed that Hussein and his wife were Soviet agents, who received regular visits and funding from the Russian embassy.⁶⁴ Sadat was not the only actor in this unfolding drama who would later assume a high public position (that of president), but others who were also involved in the cover-up would rise to power and fame—rather than suffer for their complacency. Prominent examples included, on the political side, Kamal al-Shazly, future minister of parliamentary affairs and deputy secretary-general of the ruling party, who was back then the ASU representative in Munufiya, and on the security side, the future interior minister Abd al-Halim Musa, and the future director of state security Hassan Tal’at.⁶⁵ And without getting too much ahead, it is worth mentioning that in September 1998 al-Feqi family and their hirelings spearheaded the repression of Kamshish peasants who resisted President Hosni Mubarak’s reversal of the state protection guaranteed to tenant farmers in the 1950s. Al-Feqis still owned land above the limit prescribed by law and were hungry for more, and Shahendah Maqlad, Hussein’s widow, was still there to lift the peasants’ spirits. Little had changed in three decades.^*

The complacency of political and security cadres alarmed Nasser, who pointed to the “tragedy of Kamshish” during his May Day speech of 1967, as an indicator that opportunists had hijacked the ASU, and that even after he sequestered the lands of large landlords, “they remained emperors just as they were before, even more so.”⁶⁶ A few days before, the daily Al-Akhbar came out with a dramatic headline that read: “Nasser Warns of Counter-Revolutionary Forces.”^† But it was Amer who was truly disturbed by the intimate relations that were forming behind his back between the president’s ASU and security men (at the PBI and the Interior Ministry) and the rural elite, and saw this as a potential threat to the political influence of the army. Determined to liquidate this last bastion of social reaction, Nasser and Amer, each for his own reasons, agreed to form the Committee for the Liquidation of Feudalism. Infighting over who should be included, however, produced a catchall twenty-two-member committee with all the usual suspects from both security factions: Sabri, Sharaf, Gomaa, and others associated with Nasser, alongside Amer, Badran, Nasr, and their allies.⁶⁷

In a matter of weeks, the committee received complaints from hundreds of villages against the still dominant power of large landowners. Investigations revealed that more than 45 percent of the peasants were still landless, that 95 percent of the landed peasants held less than 5 feddans, and that only 5 percent of landowners controlled 43 percent of all arable land. Petitions also highlighted how the rising agricultural bourgeoisie was gaining political control over the countryside. Soon the committee issued its final report: “After eight months of continued work … the Agricultural Reform [Agency] sequestered or placed under state guardianship about 200,000 feddans … banished 220 feudalists from the countryside … expelled hundreds of mayors, clerics, and officials who were dominated by feudalists, and dissolved dozens of ASU village committees … This was an ‘agricultural revolution.’ ”⁶⁸ It was excellent propaganda for Amer and his associates.

In reality, the results had been much more modest. Probably under pressure from ASU-connected security officials, the committee examined only 330 cases out of Egypt’s five thousand villages before hastily concluding that there were no systematic violations, only a handful of pockets of illegality. It did not matter that some of these “irregularities” were as blatant as the six families that each held between 1,275 and 4,500 feddans, although the law allowed for only 300 feddans per family.⁶⁹ Nor did it matter that, as the report confessed, there was as much as 200,000 feddans concealed from legal authorities. The problem was reduced to the survival of individual feudalists associated with the old regime, rather than an indicator of the emergence of a new landowning class nurtured by the new regime.⁷⁰ The civilian and military security elite had no need to investigate how this happened—they were the ones who allowed it. Committee members also had no real stake in changing the situation. Nasser’s faction (probably without his consent) was determined not to alter the power structure it had developed in the countryside, and Amer decided—after flirting a bit with the possibility of sabotaging this arrangement—that this was perhaps too distracting, that his efforts should be entirely focused on military rather than social affairs. And it was this latter decision that set the stage for the final and painfully spectacular showdown of 1967.

THE MILITARY NEEDS A WAR

For such a brief encounter, the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 remains one of history’s most consequential confrontations. In Egypt, the defeat was “so unexpected in its totality, stunning in its proportion, and soul-destroying in its impact that it will be remembered as the greatest defeat of the Arabs in the twentieth century.”⁷¹ How can we explain the astonishing sequence of events that led up to this defeat? How can we solve the central puzzle of the war, which is how a politically astute leader like Nasser held firm on the path of escalation against Israel, even though he knew how little he controlled his own military. The standard interpretation underlines the incompetence of Egypt’s political and military institutions at the time. Another common interpretation in Egypt points to a mischievous plot hatched between Washington and Tel Aviv to destroy Nasser’s regime. Israeli analysts and diplomats claim that Nasser thought be could actually defeat Israel, or at least snatch a substantial political concession from it through a grand military bluff. Western scholars highlight psychological pressures by other Arab states on Egypt to carry the banner of resistance against Israel and to protect neighboring Syria and Jordan, adding that it was Nasser’s virtuoso politics and impulsiveness that made him rush headlong onto the perilous path of war.^* Doubtlessly, there is a kernel of truth in all these claims. But if we move away from trying to explain what brought about the defeat, to considering the more perplexing question of why the military drove the country to the brink of war in June 1967, we can see that none of these interpretations hold. If regime institutions were so incompetent, and Amer knew it (as discussed below), then why rush to war? And if the United States and Israel were out to get Egypt, and both Nasser and Amer were quite aware of this (again as discussed below), then why fall into their trap? And if we blame the escalation on Nasser, then why was he desperately trying to defuse the situation until the last moment? Perhaps the “true” motivation behind this unwarranted escalation will remain forever hidden, but the logic of the intraregime power struggle provides an explanation that best incorporates the available historical evidence. This logic points in only one direction: that the effectiveness of Nasser’s counterbalancing strategy convinced Amer and his associates that if the military did not accomplish something spectacular soon, it would be gradually displaced from the center of power. In other words, the escalation was an attempt to salvage the image and influence of the military.

Let us first underscore how Amer knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that the army was not equipped for war, even as he pretended he was preparing for one. On December 16, 1966, the field marshal received a report by the military’s high command advising against any military confrontation with Israel in the foreseeable future. The report was based on the disastrous effects that the Yemen War had had on the armed forces. The Egyptian army had sent military instructors to support Yemeni left-leaning nationalists in 1962—an opportunity Amer had embraced to boost the military’s public image in what he believed would be a short and effortless campaign against pro-monarchy bandits. According to Chief of Staff Muhammad Fawzy, Amer’s strategy in Yemen was theatrical, a mere show of force. He encouraged firing excessively into Yemeni mountains for no other purpose than to demonstrate lethal strength back home; he gave out field promotions and military decorations to officers who barely saw combat; and his aides fabricated press releases about the army’s heroic exploits.⁷² Sadat, who was responsible for the political side of the war, also complained how Amer treated the war as “a new theater to strengthen his position and extend his influence.”⁷³ Amer’s plan almost worked, in light of the fact that the United States under John F. Kennedy had initially recognized the republicans in Yemen. Soon, however, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, which both supported the Yemeni monarchy, persuaded Lyndon B. Johnson to change sides. Saudis could not live with a Communist regime on their southern borders; the British could not stand losing the strategic port of Aden to Communists; and Johnson was much more hawkish than his predecessor in fighting communism.⁷⁴ Now the army was trapped in an unconventional war against Western-funded guerrillas and European mercenaries. What started out as a simple operation requiring no more than a few hundred officers turned into a quagmire that drew no fewer than 70,000 men by 1965.⁷⁵

The report submitted by the general command at the end of 1966 assessed the impact of this new reality. It emphasized how military discipline had suffered from the exigencies of guerrilla warfare and policing in Yemen; how soldiers had unlearned all the rules of modern warfare in this unconventional operation; how combat pilots had forgotten the basics of strategic bombing and dogfighting after five years of aimless strikes against a country that had neither an air force nor air defense capabilities; how self-esteem had deteriorated as the army felt outmaneuvered at every turn; and how equipment and ammunition were being thoughtlessly expended by the frustrated troops. Subsequent reports pointed to the fact that budget constraints imposed by the Yemen War forced the military to discharge thousands of reservists in March 1967 and issue a three-month freeze on conscription, and that as a result of these constraints, in May 1967 (the month Amer decided to escalate) the army had been suffering a shortage of 37 percent in manpower, 30 percent in small arms, 24 percent in artillery, 45 percent in tanks, and 70 percent in armored vehicles; trained pilots were fewer than the available aircraft (while the Israeli ratio was 3 pilots to every plane, in Egypt it was 0.8), and not a single fortified hangar had been built in the last five years. Another report on military training described 1966–1967 as the worst training year in the history of the Egyptian army: not a single brigade-level maneuver had been conducted, and only 5.2 percent of the training fuel was used. In terms of munitions, the infantry consumed only 26 percent of its allocated share for military exercises; the armory only 15 percent; and the artillery 18 percent. Still more startling figures revealed that on average each tank fired only 1 shot during that entire training period, each howitzer only 1.5 shots, and each bazooka only 15 shots. Finally, because security considerations advised against the hiring of educated soldiers, only 19 percent of the infantry, 18 percent of the marines, and 21 percent of the air force were literate, which reduced the overall quality of the fighting force. Added to the fact that the last major divisional exercise conducted by the army had been in 1954, the picture was unmistakably bleak.⁷⁶