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The Dark Side of Militarism: The March 1954 Crisis

In a single stroke, on the night of July 23, 1952, eighty middle-ranking officers seized the leadership of the armed forces, arrested all generals (except for the two who endorsed the coup), and cashiered all brigadiers and lieutenant colonels that did not participate. The king facilitated their job in two ways: despite the fact that military discontent pointed toward an impending coup, he left the capital for the summer palace in Alexandria as usual; and once he received news about irregular army movements, he ordered an emergency meeting of the high command at the army headquarters in Cairo, making it easier for the Free Officers to capture the entire top brass and therefore paralyze the military hierarchy. Without his army, King Farouk was powerless. He pleaded for U.S. support, considering that his relations with the British had been strained after their 1942 showdown. But the Americans had decided it was high time for a modernizing coup in Egypt to put an end to political chaos and economic stagnation lest the country drift to communism (the same policy they adopted in Latin America). Besides, the Free Officers had shared their intentions with the U.S. embassy shortly before the coup and pledged to protect American interests. The United States in turn weighed in on the British not to intervene on behalf of a king they already disliked. The king was forced to abdicate and, on August 2, 1952, departed Egypt for the last time.

The ringleaders then organized themselves in a fourteen-member Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) to assume executive authority until a new government was elected. These were roughly the same members of the executive committee of the Free Officers Movement. Demand for secrecy had forced the movement to assume a cellular shape with no hierarchy, branches, or committees. A freshly recruited Free Officer (usually through Nasser’s recommendation, and always with his approval) would only know those in his own cell and a couple of names on the executive committee. Only Nasser had the full list of members. To ensure the military’s loyalty, both the executive committee and the RCC, which replaced it right after the coup, included all service branches: four from the infantry; three from the cavalry (armored corps); three from the air force; two representatives from the artillery; and one from the signal corps (military communications) and the border guards. In fact, real power lay with the infantry. On the council, the three men who would later control Egypt’s political, military, and security institutions belonged to this service. The future president Gamal Abd al-Nasser was the effective leader of the Free Officers; Abd al-Hakim Amer, soon-to-be general commander of the armed forces, had been Nasser’s kindhearted and overgenerous “soul mate” since the day he joined the army; and Zakaria Muhi al-Din, the architect of Egypt’s new security apparatus, was the cousin of Nasser’s intellectual companion Khaled Muhi al-Din (who represented the cavalry on the RCC), but was distinguished from both by his solid, practical, and cool-minded temperament, as well as by his piercing glance and long silences. It was the meticulous and security-oriented Zakaria (referred to usually by his first name to separate him from his cousin and because it rhymed with Beria, Stalin’s security henchman) who was in charge of planning the coup and leading the units that surrounded the king in Alexandria, and it was the second-tier Free Officer Captain Salah Nasr of the 13th Infantry Battalion (later to become Egypt’s intelligence czar) who played a key role in protecting the new regime during its first days in power. The infantryman Youssef Sediq, who did not belong to this troika, was pressured to resign and leave the country in March 1953. RCC members who did not have troops on the ground to fall back on, such as Anwar al-Sadat of the signal corps and the two air force representatives, gave carte blanche to Nasser, who had recruited them to the movement. In effect, therefore, Nasser always had the majority of the RCC vote in his pocket, and was challenged only by the figurehead he had handpicked, Major General Muhammad Naguib of the border guards, and the free-spirited and increasingly left-leaning Khaled.

Once the RCC was established, Nasser directed his infantry aide Salah Nasr to prepare two lists: a list of independent-thinking officers who might compromise the security of the emerging regime, and another of those who belonged to the Free Officers Movement and might therefore harbor political ambitions. According to Nasr’s memoirs, out of the 3,500 officers on the first list, 800 were asked to retire, 2,300 were reassigned to administrative duties within the army, and the rest were appointed to civilian positions. The 329 officers on the second list were placed under strict surveillance before almost all of them were let go in a couple of years. Curiously, another 71 officers were killed in “random accidents” between March and December 1953. In order to preserve their loyalty, the purged officers were told that their role as “leadership representatives” to civilian posts was necessary to revolutionize the bureaucracy.¹ These sugarcoated purges killed two birds with one stone: they destroyed the Free Officers power base in the army, while creating a loyal network of commissars within the state bureaucracy. The RCC then created the Republican Guard in June 1953, which in the words of its first chief, Abd al-Muhsen Abu al-Nur, was meant to defend the new regime against the rest of the military, and in October of the same year, the National Guard, to train citizens loyal to the revolution.² Finally, Law 505 of 1955 introduced mandatory conscription and expanded the promotion of NCOs to officers, since big armies are more difficult to enlist in a coup. The now secure military was used to neutralize political threats from monarchists and landlords, as well as intransigent workers and peasants. Firmly in control, the coup makers began to debate the future.

As in most cases, the success of the coup caused an immediate split within the ranks between those who wanted to return to barracks and resume their professional duty, and those who aspired to create a military regime to revolutionize society from above. The division ran from the RCC downward. Those in favor of withdrawing found support in Naguib, the council’s nominal leader, and Khaled Muhi al-Din, the most intellectually mature member of the group, in addition to the critical mass within the artillery and cavalry, the army’s democratic-leaning and professional-minded elite services. Advocates of revolution from above organized around Nasser, the RCC’s effective leader, and those second-tier Free Officers (lieutenants and captains who had no significant role before the coup) whose loyalty he shrewdly cultivated in his own service (the infantry) and in small branches, such as the air force, and the still minuscule military police and intelligence. The confrontation between the two camps thrust the country onto a turbulent path between 1952 and 1954, and its outcome shaped the new regime—an outcome determined largely by their very different strategies.

NASSER’S POWER BLOC

The position of officers adamant to stay in power was well articulated in a speech that Nasser delivered to weavers in the Shubra al-Khima factory, on December 20, 1953, in which he warned that the military “did not carry out this revolution to govern or lead … one of our first goals was to restore genuine representative life … but we were appalled by the bargains, demands, maneuvers, and deceit … we decided that this country should not be ruled by a class of political mercenaries.”³ Or as he later wrote in his Philosophy of the Revolution, that the Free Officers had considered themselves the vanguard of the nation, that they needed only to take the first step to encourage the masses to follow. Instead, those who flocked to benefit from the coup were none other than the petty stranglers of the old elite.⁴

It is true that it was Nasser who invited Naguib to join the coup at the last moment because he thought that a popular and highly decorated general would add credibility to a movement led by colonels and majors in their early thirties, and guarantee the support of many politically unaffiliated officers, but he kept a close eye on the old general from the beginning because he knew that figure­heads usually develop an appetite for command once they get a taste of it. That is why he surrounded Naguib with members of his own entourage. When Naguib became the first president of the new republic, Nasser acted as his chef de cabinet, and appointed his good friend Captain Abd al-Muhsen Abu al-Nur head of the Republican Guard, the elite unit charged with protecting the president. Nasser also held (informal) weekly meetings with RCC members to coordinate their stances before convening under Naguib, who chaired the council.⁵ These containment tactics, however, represented a modest part of Nasser’s overall plan to consolidate power. His grand strategy stood on three pillars: building an entrenched security force; replacing the existing power centers with a new political apparatus; and garnering geopolitical support.

(i) The Security Community

In most authoritarian regimes, the multiplication of offices is believed to provide an extra security measure. It keeps the central decision maker more informed than any single actor, and allows him to divide and conquer when necessary. Instinctively paranoid, Nasser adopted this doctrine faithfully. He assigned similar tasks to civilian and military security organs, and created within each sector several competing bodies. What emerged was a hydra-headed security community, which was quite successful in terms of domestic repression.

Nasser’s first official post after the coup was that of interior minister. There he found an adequate infrastructure to build on. For seven decades, the British had been improving on the secret police apparatus they found in Egypt in 1882. They created the Ministry of Interior in March 1895, followed by the Special Section in 1911 for domestic surveillance. They also sent officers for training in London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.⁶ Although the Free Officers promised to abolish the notorious secret police, it soon became clear that Nasser intended to expand the agency and bend it to his purposes.

Already in the 1940s, political detention had become a standard practice against dissidents, especially after political crimes were redefined in a 1937 stature to include any expression of contempt of government. The wide use of detention was not only a result of increased British intolerance in the years leading up to the Second World War, but also a product of the enhanced state capacity for coercion. Prisons, for example, were expanded in the late 1930s to include detention camps built either in the desert (such as Huckstepp, al-Tur, and al-Wahat), or on the outskirts of cities (such as Tura, Abu-Za’bal, and al-Qanater). During the war years, these camps held a total of 4,000 political detainees, and by the early 1950s, the number swelled to 25,000, and it is estimated that during Nasser’s tenure some 100,000 citizens passed through them.⁷ Another example of enhanced state capacity was surveillance. Nasser inherited the system the British called the City Eye—a modern version of the basaseen (onlookers) structure, which had existed in Egypt for centuries. This was basically an expansive network of informers, or more accurately, common folk reporting any suspicious activities in return for modest rewards; these included beggars, porters, vendors, cab­drivers, telephone operators, and scores of other people.

Increased detention and surveillance capabilities notwithstanding, the system was evidently inefficient—or else how did the Free Officers manage to circumvent it? Nasser’s initial concern therefore was how to close the gaps. After investigating the system for four months, Nasser passed his ministerial responsibilities in October 1953 to his security wizard, fellow RCC member Zakaria Muhi al-Din. The methodical Zakaria was a man of few words and remarkable deeds—the Egyptian journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal recounts being struck during his first meeting with Zakaria, in October 1951, by the fact that he was voluntarily submitting counter­intelligence reports to the political leadership, despite only being an infantry officer⁸—and now he was in charge of restructuring Egypt’s entire security apparatus. Unlike almost all other Free Officers, this vault of a man died in May 2012 at the age of ninety-four years without having made a single public revelation about his founding role in the regime.

Although police officers took no part in the coup, the Free Officers Movement had directed Zakaria beforehand to cultivate relations with the few who resented the regime. We do not have a list of his police contacts, but we know that relying on a handful of policemen, supplemented by several of his own military lieutenants, Zakaria refashioned the police corps, after purging 400 of its 3,000 officers.⁹ Next, the old Special Section, under the supervision of military intelligence officers, was transformed into a new intelligence organ with expanded capabilities and jurisdiction: the General Investigations Directorate (GID)—renamed in 1971 as the State Security Investigations Sector (SSIS). Combining his ministerial position with that of director of the Military Intelligence Department (MID), Zakaria reoriented this agency as well toward internal political security, i.e., monitoring Egyptian dissidents rather than spying on the armies of other countries, as it was supposed to.¹⁰ He then selected a handful of MID officers to help him create Egypt’s first civilian intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Service (GIS), in December 1953, which he headed for a couple of years. Zakaria was also asked to recruit a group of loyal military captains, train them as security agents, and assign them to Nasser’s home-run intelligence unit—soon to be known as the President’s Bureau of Information (PBI). So in a few short years, Zakaria had built a “veritable pyramid of intelligence and security services … [whose] labyrinthine complexity and venality” became the mainstay of Egypt’s new political order.^*11 And although he later assumed several nonsecurity posts (including the premiership and vice presidency), Zakaria maintained his hegemony over the country’s sprawling and intrusive security apparatus throughout—an apparatus directed solely to the protection of the regime.

But apart from the ingenious founder, foreign expertise was crucial to the construction of this security community—after all, it was foreign powers that had originally designed modern security systems within the colonies. The American embassy provided a million dollars’ worth of surveillance and antiriot equipment immediately following the coup. Americans also helped Zakaria reinforce the unobtrusive City Eye system through a whole range of electronic equipment and techniques for installing bugs and hidden cameras in hotel rooms, army mess halls, private residences, and automobiles.¹² Even in terms of how to prepare timely intelligence estimates, Egypt turned to an American: Charles Cremeans, future head of the CIA’s Office of National Intelligence Estimates. But Nasser expected more. In October 1952, he requested CIA assistance in overhauling the entire security system, and Kermit Roosevelt, director of CIA operations in the Middle East, was more than willing. A few months later, a troika of intelligence operatives set up camp in Cairo; James Eichelberger, Miles Copeland, and Frank Kearn had all served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, and later witnessed the transformation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) into the CIA. In other words, they combined civilian and military intelligence expertise. Their designated contact in Egypt was another Nasser loyalist, Captain Hassan al-Tuhami, who administered an intensive training program that involved inviting several CIA experts for short visits, as well as sending Egyptian operatives for instruction abroad.¹³ Captain Abd al-Fattah Abu al-Fadl, who was a vital part of that program, recalls how former German intelligence officers provided another important source of expertise; and it was the CIA that initiated this Nazi connection, putting Nasser in contact with prominent SS and Gestapo officers in hiding.* Later, in April 1958, Egypt signed a training and intelligence-sharing agreement with the KGB, which provided the latest surveillance technologies and interrogation techniques. A similar agreement was signed a decade later with Eastern German intelligence, the Stasi.¹⁴

If Zakaria did Nasser’s bidding in the domestic security sector, he expected the same of his delegate in the army: Abd al-Hakim Amer. When the republic was declared on June 18, 1953, Nasser insisted that Naguib’s first presidential decree would be to promote Amer from major to major general, and appoint him commander-in-chief of the armed forces. This meteoric rise in rank (perhaps the most meteoric in history) placed Amer officially on the top of the military chain of command. This is because Nasser did not believe in the Communist measure (adopted in Russia and China) of attaching political commissars to army units to report on officers; he preferred direct control from above. Amer was, of course, a perfect candidate. He was not only Nasser’s most intimate friend since college and his right-hand man in the Free Officers Movement, but he was also the only RCC member that Naguib trusted, since he had served as his chief of staff during the 1948 war in Palestine, and because his amiable, cheerful, and appeasing personality made him seem harmless. The president’s press secretary, Riyad Samy, says Naguib would not have surrendered control of the army to anyone else.¹⁵

Amer’s main task was to coup-proof the military. This he accomplished through an office that Nasser had created while serving as Naguib’s chef de cabinet, the conspicuously named Office of the Commander-in-Chief for Political Guidance (OCC), which was nominally responsible for issuing political directives to the corps, while in reality charged with monitoring suspicious activities. To staff the office, Amer turned to “Zakaria’s boys,” the second-tier Free Officers selected and trained by Zakaria to serve as the country’s new security stratum. Salah Nasr served as the first OCC head in June 1953, followed by Abbas Radwan in 1956, and Shams Badran from 1958 until the office was abolished in 1967. OCC functioned as a political watchdog, ferreting out troublemaking officers and ensuring the loyalty of the rest through dispensing patronage. It accomplished this through three main mechanisms: severing relations between RCC members (except for Nasser) and the rest of the military under the pretext of allowing Amer to perform his duties without outside interference; isolating the officer corps from all political and ideological forces; and, most important, creating a secret network of politically ambitious officers who did not participate in the coup itself but were eager to prove their worth by helping secure the revolution. Nasser, the first OCC chief, began to organize this cell-based network immediately after the coup. By 1967, its members exceeded 65,000 officers.¹⁶ It is through this embedded organization that the OCC monitored political views and activities within the army, administered political indoctrination, and decided on promotions and assignments. This new security community would come to play a significant role in Egypt’s political fortunes; its dramatis personae would tip the balance in Nasser’s favor in 1954; create the mukhabarat (intelligence) state of the 1960s; constitute the formidable “centers of power” between 1967 and 1971; and ultimately pave the ground for Egypt’s ostentatious police state by the end of 1970s.

(ii) The Political Apparatus

While Naguib rested confidently on his popularity on “the street,” Nasser was busy building concrete political organizations to mobilize popular support. This was certainly a more effective strategy. As an avid reader of Machiavelli, Nasser certainly knew that “People are by nature inconstant. It is easy to persuade them of something, but it is difficult to stop them from changing their minds. So you have to be prepared for the moment when they no longer believe. Then you have to force them to believe.”¹⁷ To start with, he created the new Ministry for National Guidance for censorship and propaganda in November 1952. The minister, RCC member Salah Salem, did his best to keep Naguib away from the limelight, and later to tarnish his reputation and boost Nasser’s image instead. Here, too, Nasser relied on foreign expertise, notably the OSS operative Paul Linebarger, America’s leading black propagandist; Leopold von Mildenstein, Joseph Goebbels’s Middle East information director; and the SS black propaganda expert Johannes von Leers.¹⁸

To further cultivate his popular base, Nasser dissolved all existing political parties (via Law 179 of 1953) and replaced them with the loosely organized, mass-based Liberation Rally in January 1953, which was basically a platform for arranging pro-regime rallies and public lectures. It had no clear hierarchy, and its work depended on 1,200 district offices open for all those willing to offer their support to the new regime. These were mostly corrupt officers and political opportunists eager to get on the bandwagon, as well as rural notables and capitalists, willing to send their peasants and workers to demonstrate under Nasser’s banner, to protect their financial interests in these uncertain times. Nasser appointed himself secretary-general of this new organization, though he delegated its everyday management to two junior associates, majors Ibrahim al-Tahawi and Ahmed Te’ima, whose job was primarily to monitor the public mood and political trends, and foil mobilization efforts by other political forces (particularly Islamists and Communists) through organizing counterrallies. In addition, as recounted by Suleiman Hafez, who served briefly as interior minister in 1953, the two majors submitted regular reports to the ministry against suspect activists.¹⁹

(iii) Geopolitical Support

The final component of Nasser’s strategy was to secure geopolitical support for his faction. At this point, the only candidate was the United States. America’s Middle East policy in the 1950s was to encourage national independence movements to curtail British and French hegemony, and then draw the newly independent nations to its orbit through strategic alliances and economic aid. After two world wars convinced the Americans to cast aside their isolationism and engage with the “old world” across the Atlantic, they figured that although they lacked the experience of Europeans in dealing with Africa and Asia, their comparative advantage lay in the fact that they had never acted as an imperialist power (outside Latin America and the Pacific). The key to promoting U.S. influence therefore was to lend a helping hand to those eager to liberate themselves from European imperialism, and to pose as a true partner in helping develop the postcolonial world. Toward the end of 1951, Secretary of State Dean Acheson formed a special committee on the Arab world under the chairmanship of Kermit Roosevelt, from the newly established CIA. The committee suggested the need for “an Arab leader who would have more power in his hands than any other Arab leader ever had before, ‘power to make an unpopular decision’ … one who deeply desires to have power, and who desires to have it primarily for the mere sake of power.”²⁰ This recommendation was made more explicit in a British Foreign Office minute on December 3, 1951, which described the joint American-British view as follows: “the only sort of Government with which we can hope to get an accommodation is a frankly authoritarian government … both ruthless and efficient … We need another Mustafa Kemal [the Turkish officer who led a modernizing coup in 1921, and assumed the title Atatürk, the father of the Turks], to secularize and Westernize his country … Even though Egyptians are not Turks, and men like Mustafa Kemal cannot be ordered à la carte!”²¹

In February 1952, Kermit Roosevelt traveled to Cairo to find an Egyptian Atatürk. He had been to Egypt twice before: first in 1944 to help establish the Cairo branch of the OSS (the CIA’s predecessor), and then in 1950 to instruct the Egyptian Interior Ministry on how to counter communism. During both visits, he developed a list of contacts in the military, and set up a CIA-run military training program for young Egyptian officers. Curiously, six among the fifty officers that received American intelligence and military training played a crucial role in the 1952 coup, and two actually became members of the RCC. The air force officer Aly Sabri, the first official liaison between the RCC and the United States, admitted—without much elaboration—that “the attendance of many Egyptian officers at US service schools during the past two years had a very definite influence on the coup d’état in Egypt.”²² Apparently, Roosevelt’s mission was to set the stage for a peaceful replacement of Egypt’s archaic and corrupt monarchy before the increasing radicalization of Egyptian workers and peasants drove the country into the arms of communism. Only the military, thought Roosevelt, could modernize the state along lines agreeable to the West without causing too much turmoil. Through Ambassador Jefferson Caffery’s good offices, the CIA representative held three meetings in March 1952 with members of the Free Officers, including Nasser.²³ According to one participant in those early meetings (Hussein Hammudah), discussions focused on how the Americans could convince their Anglo-Saxon partners not to resist the coup, to prevent a repeat of 1882, when the British aborted a similar move by the army, in return for guarantees from the Free Officers to implement the needed reforms to modernize the Egyptian economy and keep the Communists in check.²⁴ Three nights before the Free Officers seized power, on July 19, 1952, Nasser asked Sabri to inform the U.S. assistant military attaché (David Evans) that the coup was now impending, and to stress once more that it would not harm American interests. The United States carried out its part of the deal, refusing to extend support to a pleading king, and advising him instead to submit to the officers’ demands. President Franklin D. Roosevelt immediately welcomed the coup, warned the British not to intervene, and directed his ambassador in Cairo—who infamously referred to the Free Officers as “my boys”—to support the new rulers.²⁵

The day following the coup, Nasser relayed an even more important message to the Americans, this time asking for CIA help in reorganizing Egypt’s internal security apparatus. To add a sense of urgency to his demand, Nasser warned of Communist-led disturbances throughout the country. The message resonated with a hastily prepared report by the agency, “The Expected Consequences of a Reoccupation of Cairo and Alexandria by British Forces,” which concluded that violent confrontations would pave the road to a Communist takeover. This is why, according to the Cairo CIA station chief, Colonel William Lakeland, the agency responded favorably. Kermit Roosevelt met Nasser’s delegates shortly after the coup to draw the general guidelines for future cooperation. This was followed by a series of private meetings between CIA representatives James Eichelberger and Miles Copeland with Nasser and his associates at Lakeland’s apartment.²⁶

Parallel to this security track, other meetings were held between Nasser and the Americans to discuss political and socioeconomic reform. The RCC member Khaled Muhi al-Din, who attended a couple of those meetings at the house of Abd al-Moun’em Amin (another officer Nasser charged with contacting the United States), noted that the Americans adamantly requested the quick adoption of land reform.²⁷ At the beginning of 1952, a U.S. advisory committee, convinced that the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions relied mainly on deprived peasants, suggested that land redistribution was an indispensable buffer to communism. This was reinforced, in February 1952, by a State Department brochure entitled “Land Reform: A World Challenge,” calling for swift action in that direction to channel agrarian capital toward rapid industrialization. On August 20, 1952, Washington sent a telegram to its ambassador in Cairo stating, “The Government of the United States will give encouragement and assistance to land reform … to lessen the causes of agrarian unrest and political instability,” and then went on to detail what this law should include.²⁸ Barely three weeks later, on September 9, the RCC issued a hastily prepared agricultural reform law.

In return, Nasser sought the U.S. president’s support to convince the British to evacuate the country. Dwight Eisenhower first sent Steve Meade from the U.S. military to evaluate the power balance within the RCC. Meade reported back in May 1953 that Nasser held a tight grip over the council and that the new regime was fairly stable. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the first high-ranking official to visit the new republic, seconded the report the following month.²⁹ Afterward, the United States exerted so much pressure on the British to negotiate their way out of Egypt that Churchill protested in a lengthy letter to Eisenhower, on June 12, 1953, that America’s bias toward Nasser “in spite of the numerous far-reaching concessions which we made” was surprising and frustrating—concluding, dramatically, “we should not think we had been treated fairly by our great Ally.”³⁰

But while the United States understood from day one that Naguib was merely a front man and acted accordingly, there were other reasons why the CIA in particular was enthusiastic about supporting Nasser. True to its Cold War conviction that military strongmen are more reliable than erratic civilians, the agency was worried about Naguib’s promise to reinstate civilian democratic rule. As early as July 30, 1952, Dean Acheson had noted in a cable to the U.S. ambassador in Cairo that a return to democracy would have unexpected consequences, and that a small group of officers would be easier to handle than a multiparty system.³¹ The historian, and special assistant to President Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger explains the logic behind this doctrine, citing support for Nasser as one its prominent instances:

[Premature civilianization of coup-installed regimes] would only alienate those who held the real power—the military—and open the door to incompetent liberals who would bring about inflation, disinvestment, capital flight, and social indiscipline and would finally be shoved aside by the communists … the process of development was so inherently disruptive that the first requirement had to be the maintenance of order. The basic issue is not whether the government is dictatorial or is representative and constitutional. The issue is whether the government, whatever its character, can hold the society together … civilian government tended to be unstable and soft; military governments were comparably stable and could provide the security necessary for economic growth.³²

But what sealed the deal for the Americans was Nasser’s demonstration that Naguib was soft on communism. Nasser had brandished his anti-Communist credentials in clamping down on the Kafr al-Dawar strike. Kafr al-Dawar was a small textile industrial city on the outskirts of Alexandria. The labor activist Helmi Yassin, who helped organize the strike, explains that workers heard the revolutionary communiqués promising to restore the people’s rights, and so decided the time was perfect to press forward their right to control the organization of production instead of the antirevolutionary factory owners. None of them suspected that on the morning of August 13, 1952, Nasser would dispatch five hundred troops to shoot them, and execute two of the ringleaders after a summary trial five days later. For the workers, the military’s shocking behavior was totally unjustified, especially considering they were demonstrating in support of the revolution.³³ In his meetings with CIA officials, Nasser exposed how Naguib was reluctant to sign the execution orders of the agitators; that he openly criticized the land-reform law; and that he nominated a constitutional lawyer with leftist sympathies (Abd al-Razeq al-Sanhouri) to the premiership. Naguib tried to explain to the Americans that executing workers would fuel further radicalism; that progressive taxation on agricultural land was better for the economy than its random parceling; and that Sanhouri was not a Communist. But his justifications fell on deaf ears. The communication channels that Nasser established with the Americans before and after the coup secured their trust and gave him more access to Washington.³⁴ At the end, not only the United States, but the capitalist West in general, leaned toward the strong leader they all believed would be tough on communism: Nasser.

NAGUIB’S NOT-SO-POWERFUL BLOC

While Nasser set himself the task of creating a new order, Naguib continued to invest in the old; while the former was pushing forward, the latter insisted on swimming against the current. Naguib still believed in the binding power of the law, the legitimacy of the old political groups, the need for democracy, and the importance of popularity in general. Instead of the security coterie with which Nasser surrounded himself, Naguib attracted constitutional lawyers who carried great weight in the old regime, notably Abd al-Razeq al-Sanhouri, head of the State Council (Egypt’s highest administrative court), who was charged with issuing a new constitution following the coup, and Suleiman Hafez, another legal heavyweight, who had drafted the monarch’s abdication letter. But while Egypt’s first president busied himself with the process of drafting a new constitution, his rival promoted the view that revolutionary legitimacy trumps any constitution. Perhaps more important, Naguib’s fatal mistake of appointing the lawyer Suleiman Hafez as interior minister in September 1952, to signal his respect for the law, made it easy for Nasser to take over the ministry in June 1953 with the reasonable argument that the country needed a firmer grip than that of a constitutional lawyer at this critical juncture.

Naguib also tried to make himself popular with the old political elites, portraying himself in speeches and personal interviews as pro-democracy and free enterprise, and distancing himself from RCC decrees against political parties and large landowners.³⁵ The problem was, of course, that Egypt’s sociopolitical structure was designed to weaken the hand of those elites vis-à-vis the state. Muhammad Ali, the founder of the modern Egyptian state in the first half of the nineteenth century—following the example of Hohenzollern Prussia, tsarist Russia, and Japan’s soon-to-come Meiji Restoration—had dismantled the Mamluks’ military aristocracy, established in the thirteenth century, and tied the landed class to his expansive state. So instead of dividing sovereignty over the land among loyal warlords, each autonomously managing his own plot, governing the population that lived on it, collecting taxes, and raising militias in time of war, Muhammad Ali declared himself the sole proprietor of the land and treated Egyptian landlords as his subjects. He also established a central tax-collecting authority, a modern judicial system, and a standing army with a professional officer corps and nationally recruited conscripts. Egypt’s mostly absentee landlords had remained in this position ever since; they had no independent source of power to confront whoever controlled the state—as Nasser diligently strove to.

Another mistake: Naguib rested too confidently on the fact that he had become an immediate sensation following the coup, and tried to preserve his folk-hero image by spending most of the period between 1952 and 1954 traveling around the country in a train (Truman style), galvanizing the masses through inspirational speeches. In that, he was enormously successful: “People lost control when they saw him, applauding, chanting, and throwing themselves on his car.”³⁶ Considering popularity his main asset, the president wasted the efforts of his closest military associates on a trivial popularity-boosting campaign instead of planting them in the emerging security sector: Riyad Samy was hired as press secretary, and Muhammad Riyad was put in charge of protocol. He also flirted with the leaders of the Muslim Brothers, beginning from 1954, with the hope that garnering the support of the most popular force on the street would eventually help him send the officers back to the barracks and remain president under a liberal constitution.³⁷ What the president failed to understand, in contrast to his sober rival, was that popularity was a mercurial asset that could evaporate as easily as it could be gained.

One of Naguib’s worst flaws, however, related to how he went about securing foreign support. As opposed to Nasser’s direct and aggressive campaign to build a security alliance with the United States, Naguib—too worried about tarnishing his reputation—preferred a more roundabout approach. Instead of relying on loyal officers, he encouraged the Muslim Brotherhood to endorse him in their discussions with the British and the Americans. Between May 1953 and January 1954, the Muslim Brotherhood representatives Munir Delah and Saleh Abu-Raqiq conducted two rounds of talks with Mr. Evans and Mr. Creswell of the British embassy, in which they mentioned that Naguib would be a better guardian of democracy.³⁸ Those talks overlapped with another seven rounds with the Americans, between May and August 1953, in which the Brotherhood’s general guide, Hassan al-Hudaybi himself, participated. In one meeting, on June 4, the Brotherhood envoy Mahmoud Makhlouf tried to promote the president by claiming: “Naguib would be willing to sign a secret understanding with the US. The Moslem Brotherhood would support such a move. [But] Opposition might be encountered from Abdel Nasser.” On their July 17 meeting, the general guide relayed that he and Naguib supported the “withdrawal of the military from the government and their replacement by a coalition of ‘good men’ from the various political parties.”³⁹

There were several problems with this approach. For one thing, the Western powers, as we have seen, were not particularity enthusiastic about democracy. The fact that Naguib was negotiating through an Islamist movement was an additional turn-off. But the biggest problem was that the president was quite reserved with his own representatives. Naguib recounted several unsolved difficulties during his secret talks with the Muslim Brotherhood between December 1953 and March 1954 through his secretaries Samy and Riyad and the Brotherhood dignitaries Hassan Ashmawi and Munir Delah. While he wanted to reestablish democracy, they wanted a package deal in which Naguib would remain president, provided he appointed a pro-Brotherhood chief of staff, Major General Rashad Mehanna from the artillery. Naguib confessed to his press secretary Samy that he was noncommittal because he never imagined the Brotherhood would turn against him; he neglected the fact that a return to democracy would mostly benefit the liberal al-Wafd Party, not Islamists.⁴⁰

Naguib’s main shortcoming, though, was that he developed no organization within the army, let alone the new security regime being assembled under his nose. It is true that his pro-democratic stance had the support of the bulk of the officer corps, but he did not try to coordinate their actions, preferring to pass down orders through official channels rather than create a network of loyal officers. Even when artillery and cavalry officers begged him in August 1952 to do just that, he turned them down, fearing that fractures within the military would push the country to the brink of civil war. Naguib’s viewpoint, as he later confided to the head of the Republican Guard, Abd al-Muhsin Abu al-Nur, was that he had no need to weave conspiracies; he was the highest-ranking officer in the realm, let alone president of the republic and chair of the RCC; he thus expected officers to obey him unconditionally.⁴¹ Despite Samy’s repeated pleas that his boss build a political power base within the corps, a Naguib dazzled with the aura of authority insisted that it was beneath him as a major general to reach out to junior officers; he also held that it would serve him better to professionalize rather than further politicize the corps.⁴² He also underestimated his rival’s influence among officers, refusing to acknowledge that a colonel with an “undistinguished public presence”—as he referred to Nasser in his memoirs—could threaten him.⁴³ In his heart, Naguib counted on the support of the people, rather than the military. But even that was difficult to preserve despite the energy he devoted to building his popular charisma, simply because Egyptians were tired of the old system and wanted a strong leader to reform the country. As Naguib himself later confessed, the people wanted “an Egyptian Ataturk,” a role he was unwilling to play.⁴⁴ Nasser, on the other hand, did not waver.

BETWEEN TWO MUTINIES

One is tempted after comparing Nasser’s and Naguib’s power strategies to conclude that the latter was clearly outmaneuvered from the start, that the result of their power struggle was decided before it had even begun. Not only was Nasser in control of the new security organs and the country’s only mass party, but he also succeeded at winning the favor of a major world power, the United States. Nasser’s problem, however, was time: he had scarcely enough of it to bring the military in line and subdue the old political forces. Thus, mutiny spread among officers, first in the artillery (in January 1953) and then in the cavalry (in March 1954). Army dissidents cared little about Nasser or Naguib as such; their aim was to establish democratic rule, and they rallied around Naguib because he sympathized with their position. Nasser’s victory seemed impossible considering that by virtue of their equipment and firepower the artillery and cavalry were the most formidable services in the Egyptian army. Also, the second mutiny was backed up by vast popular demonstrations orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and including scores of liberals and Communists. How could the budding security establishment keep such a massive force in check?

(i) The Artillery Mutiny

The first episode in this rapidly unfolding power struggle began with the artillery mutiny. A major bloc within the artillery corps longed for the resumption of parliamentary life, which required withdrawing the military to barracks and handing over power to an elected civilian government. They believed that the coup was meant only to purge political parties of corrupt elements, remove the obstinate king, and force the British to evacuate Egypt. Once these tasks were established, full-fledged democracy should ensue. Also, as a privileged service working with advanced equipment, artillery officers (like their counterparts in the cavalry, and unlike those of the most rudimentary service, the infantry) were professional-minded and eager to turn their attention back to military duties. The ongoing purges and the undermining of military discipline in the name of political loyalty doubtlessly offended their professional temperament. They also held a grudge against Nasser after discovering that his appointment of the admired artillery colonel Rashad Mehanna to the three-member Regency Council, established after the king’s exile to run the country until the crown prince reached the proper age, was meant to sidetrack rather than promote him. In June 1953, Egypt became a republic and all the vestiges of monarchism, including the Regency Council, were abolished. To add insult to injury, Mehanna was discharged that October and placed under house arrest for allegedly conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasr admits that Nasser feared the charismatic Mehanna, the first officer to form secret cells within the army back in the 1940s, and plotted his removal from power.⁴⁵

On December 14, 1952, the artillery captains Muhsen Abd al-Khaleq and Fathallah Ref’at submitted a petition to Nasser on behalf of their colleagues demanding that the RCC be reconstituted to allow each service equal representation, and that each branch should elect its own representatives to the council. The petitioners added, threateningly, that they could not accept overthrowing one king only to be ruled by fourteen (alluding to the RCC members). To explore the depth of their dissent, Nasser asked them to sketch a blueprint of the political system they envisaged, advising them to print it at Military Intelligence headquarters for discretion. The artillery officers did not swallow the bait. Instead, these suspicious requests convinced them that Nasser and his collaborators were beyond reform and must be removed at once. Between December 30 and January 7, they held four secret meetings with fifteen other colleagues from the artillery, in addition to a handful of cavalry officers, to plan a countercoup. They also met the Muslim Brotherhood’s general guide twice to assure his organization’s support. Their plan was to arrest all RCC members (except Naguib) during one of their weekly meetings, using units from the 1st Artillery Brigade, which was stationed a couple of blocks away from RCC headquarters, then seize control of the capital using the 2nd Artillery Division and Artillery School companies, before declaring a short transitional period, under Naguib, to draft a new constitution and prepare for elections.

Samy Sharaf, an artillery lieutenant whose brother was one of the participants, tipped the Military Intelligence Department, and was rewarded with membership of the agency. On January 16, Zakaria Muhi al-Din apprehended thirty-five culprits, tried them summarily, and sentenced twelve of them to prison, including Mehanna, by March 19.⁴⁶ As soon as the ringleaders were detained, five hundred artillery officers met at their service headquarters and threatened to use force to free their colleagues. To deescalate the situation, Zakaria promised to release them after they had spent a mere three years in prison. In a letter from prison, Captain Abd al-Khaleq maintained that the failure of the artillery’s countercoup paved the way for dictatorship under Nasser and his “Beria,” referring to Zakaria.⁴⁷ This might have been true for the moment, but the army still had not lost its resolve; a much bigger mutiny was in the works.

(ii) The Cavalry Mutiny

After subduing the artillery, the stage was set for an even greater challenge to Nasser’s plan to stay in power. For one thing, tensions began rising between an increasingly distrustful Naguib and Nasser’s faction. After complaining, during an RCC meeting on December 20, that the media was deliberately ignoring his speeches, council members hurled insults at Naguib, accusing him of trying to hijack the revolution. Then, on February 23, 1954, RCC members decided to hold their weekly meeting at Nasser’s office without inviting the president. When Naguib, who was actually present in the building, objected, he was asked to go home. The aim was to convince him to accept his figurehead role. But the attempt backfired two days later when Naguib raised the stakes and resigned, declaring that his military honor forbade him from presiding over “a state of informants” run by a security coterie trained by CIA and ex-Gestapo operatives.⁴⁸ Naguib confessed to his legal counselor that his resignation was aimed at arousing the people and the soldiers, which it eventually did.⁴⁹ Feeling threatened, the security branch began to roll. Acting on their own initiative, Nasr, director of the OCC, and the head of the Republican Guard, Abu al-Nur, replaced the guard unit stationed outside the president’s house with soldiers from Nasr’s 13th Infantry Battalion, and detained guard officers loyal to Naguib. With Naguib unarmed, Nasser called his bluff, not only accepting his resignation on February 26 but also placing him under house arrest after claiming to the press that he was becoming unbearably dictatorial and corrupt.⁵⁰

What Nasser did not expect, however, was that Naguib’s resignation would trigger a cavalry mutiny, followed by a vast popular revolt. Like their colleagues in the artillery, cavalry officers felt that the RCC was driving the country toward dictatorship rather than reformed democracy, and was going to entangle the military in politics irrevocably. When Naguib announced his intention leave, cavalrymen formed an eight-member delegation, led by captains Ahmed al-Masri and Farouk al-Ansari, to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the RCC on February 26 before the president’s resignation was declared, whereby Naguib would head an interim civilian government that would write a new constitution and supervise elections before the end of the year. Nasser and his associates expressed their concern that implementing democracy prematurely would bring back reactionary forces. At which point, the delegation withdrew from the talks and called for a sit-in at the cavalry mess hall, the so-called Green Mess Hall. Three hundred officers heeded the call, and units from the 4th Armored Division, the army’s strategic reserve force, began surrounding the military general headquarters (GHQ), which was right across from the Green Mess Hall. The dissidents demanded Naguib’s reinstatement, Amer’s dismissal, the dissolution of the RCC, and the immediate transition to democracy. Nasser rushed to the hall to convince the officers to call off the strike. He was accompanied by Hassan al-Tuhami and his security men to secretly record the names of the agitators. But his attempt was foiled when the strikers refused to admit any of the operatives to the hall, and asked that Nasser come alone. Following a heated debate during which the mutinous officers accused RCC and security officers of corruption and abuse of power, the encircled Nasser exclaimed: “Who gave you the right to speak for the people?” to which one of the cavalrymen responded: “We are the parliament of the people until a parliament is formed.” Thoroughly intimidated, especially after hearing tank movements outside the hall, Nasser pledged to fulfill all their demands, including the dissolution of the RCC and the creation of a new government under Naguib and the cavalry’s RCC representative, Khaled Muhi al-Din. He then headed back to RCC headquarters, informed the council of his decisions, and dispatched Khaled to Naguib’s house in the early hours of February 27 so that the pair could take charge.⁵¹ Nasser was so disturbed that he asked his family to evacuate the house immediately. His wife, Tahiya, remembered how he frantically told her that cavalry units might be on their way to bomb the house.⁵²

It seemed for a moment that it was all over, that the power struggle had ended with Nasser’s defeat. But the tide soon turned. “It took only one hour,” as Khaled bitterly reported, “for the situation to reverse completely. It was during the sixty minutes that passed between my trip to Naguib’s house and back that everything turned upside down.”⁵³ Scholars who examined this critical juncture usually interpreted what followed as a Nasser-orchestrated maneuver, but a close examination of the memoirs of some of those involved reveals that it was the nascent security group that took the lead, and Nasser simply went along. In fact, we know from a future conversation between Nasser and Khaled that the former’s thinking at that stage was set on the impractical plan of returning to the army, lying low for a while, and then plotting another coup.⁵⁴ It was the security men, who realized that democracy would cut their promising new careers short, who pulled the strings that night and tilted the balance in Nasser’s favor. The infantry officer Gamal Hammad, who drafted the Free Officers’ first communiqué after coming to power, was present at GHQ as the events unfolded and described how Nasser was a mere spectator during that bold counterattack.⁵⁵ This was also the view of the three officers who were at the receiving end of this security-coordinated strike: Naguib, Khaled, and the cavalry mutiny leader Ahmed al-Ansari. Naguib noted how the press was already documenting human rights violations and asking for reprisal. It was only natural for security officers, he said, to understand that the resumption of democratic life “would mean their end, that they will be held accountable for what they did.”⁵⁶ Khaled recalled warning Nasser that an intramilitary confrontation could escalate into a bloodbath, but the latter responded submissively: “I no longer understand what is going on.”⁵⁷ Ansari, in a letter from prison to Hammad, blamed himself for taking Nasser’s word instead of arresting him and his associates. Nasser’s integrity, Ansari continued, was beyond reproach, but cavalrymen underestimated the ferocity of the new security elite who stood to lose from democracy; they were the ones who paved the road to authoritarianism; they were the real conspirators.⁵⁸ This last sentence acquires greater significance in light of Sadat’s claim that Nasser had initially defended democracy during the first RCC meeting on July 27, 1952, but it was the power-hungry security coterie he thought would protect the revolution that ended up controlling it.⁵⁹

So if it was not Nasser who called the shots, then who did, and how? Emphasizing how desperate times call for desperate measures, two of these officers-turned-security-men, Shams Badran and Abbas Radwan, convinced a reluctant Nasser to allow them to offer the imprisoned artillery officers their freedom in return for helping to put down the cavalry uprising. The two then quickly sealed the deal and informed their boss, Salah Nasr, that the artillery was at his service. Nasr, who got wind of the impending cavalry mutiny from one of his informers hours before it took place, wasted no time: he advised Nasser to meet with the dissidents at the Green Mess Hall to try to defuse the situation; meanwhile, he sent out agitators to other services to portray the cavalry’s call for democracy as a ploy aimed at delivering the country to Khaled’s Communists.⁶⁰ As soon as Khaled left GHQ, Nasr made his move:

I ordered my old 13th Infantry Battalion to surround cavalry headquarters, and the freshly released artillery officers to block tank outlets. I then asked [Aly] Sabri [the air force captain who joined the new security elite] to send jets roaring at low altitudes over the besieged officers for intimidation. Meanwhile, I dispatched Tuhami and five intelligence officers to detain Naguib at artillery headquarters. When Amer discovered I had ordered troop movements without his approval, he called me into his office, grabbed my shirt, and screamed hysterically, with his gun pointed at me: “I will kill you! I will not allow the country to descend to chaos! I am the commander-in-chief, not you!” But as soon as I assured him that everything was under control, and that the revolution was now safe, he calmed down. At this point, Khaled dashed into the office, asking who ordered the siege against the cavalry. I asked him to warn his colleagues that if they did not disperse they would be bombed to the last man. Finally, I ordered the Military Police to storm in and detain the leaders of the mutiny. By the end of the day, the situation was resolved. I ordered Radwan, my assistant, to keep an eye out and went home to get some sleep.⁶¹

To everyone’s surprise, however, the pendulum swung back in the other direction. Few people were aware of the overnight confrontation that was taking place around cavalry headquarters, but what everyone woke up to on the morning of February 27 was a communiqué by the minister of national guidance, RCC member Salah Salem, declaring Naguib’s removal. The minister claimed that the former president was never part of the Free Officers Movement, but was placed in charge out of respect for his age, and that lately, driven by a clear inferiority complex, he had demanded dictatorial powers. Immediately, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Cairo chanting: “To prison with Nasser! No revolution without Naguib!” The size of the uprising was so overwhelming that even Nasser’s security associates admitted that repressing it might result in a bloodbath. Salah Salem rushed back to GHQ, screaming that the mob almost turned his car upside down and that they must be appeased before they set the country on fire. The Muslim Brotherhood, Naguib’s allies, were the main force behind the demonstrations, as the Brotherhood member, and one of the junior organizers of the uprising, Mahmoud Game’ confessed.⁶² A cornered Nasser was forced to reinstate Naguib to the presidency as well as the chairmanship of the RCC. But the situation was not exactly back to square one: empowered by the people’s revolt, the cavalry called for another meeting, on March 4, 1954, insisting that the military withdrew from politics. Naguib’s triumphant return to office on the crest of popular support and with the backing of the army’s strongest service provided him with a golden opportunity to strike against his rivals. Yet he preferred reconciliation, and to demonstrate his goodwill, he appointed Nasser as prime minister. This proved to be his undoing.

THE NEW REGIME CONSOLIDATES POWER

Nasser’s spies immediately set to work. In three days, the security organs rounded up thousands of those who participated in the uprising. Before the week was over, the RCC carried out its greatest bluff in the form of the March 5 Decrees, which called for the election of a constitutive assembly in three months to draft a new democratic constitution, and lifted the ban on political activity and ended censorship of the press. Naturally, the RCC’s sudden change of heart aroused Naguib’s suspicions, but he had no choice but to go along, otherwise the council would have accused him of opposing democracy. By way of securing himself against a possible plot, though, he demanded on March 8 the right to appoint senior officers down to brigade commanders (to undercut Amer); the right to veto cabinet decisions (to keep Nasser in check); and a popular referendum on his presidency (to legitimize his post). When the RCC accepted without discussion, Naguib became even more disconcerted. But again he did nothing, giving Nasser the benefit of the doubt and convincing himself that maybe the latter believed his Liberation Rally could be quickly reorganized into a political party capable of winning the coming elections.⁶³ Soon, however, the subsequent March 25 Decrees made it clear that a plot was simmering. The new decrees revoked all restrictions on old-regime parties, and prohibited Free Officers from partaking in elections. Formally, the decrees spelled the end of the revolution. In reality they were a veiled call to action by all those who stood to lose by the restoration of the old order: officers who participated in the coup and feared punishment; peasants who benefited from land redistribution; workers who preferred dictatorship to the domination of liberal capitalist parties; the petty bourgeois that had barely begun to enjoy the breakdown of the rigid social hierarchy; and the Muslim Brothers who feared the return of the powerful al-Wafd Party. Again, the most vulnerable stratum was the security elite, for as soon as censorship was lifted, the press launched a concerted campaign against their abuse of power and demanded their trial. According to one artillery officer, these decisions were widely understood within the corps as an invitation to carry out another coup.⁶⁴ Pro-democracy officers and popular forces felt outmaneuvered: their goal was to move forward, not backward; they aspired for a new and reformed democracy, but the March decrees promised the return of the old corrupt one. Forced to choose, they found themselves unwittingly coalescing against the return to democracy.

We know from Nasr’s memoirs that he was the mastermind behind the March decrees. His aim was to provoke “a revolution against the [pro-democracy] revolution.”⁶⁵ To neutralize popular opposition, he advised Nasser to cut a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. After a short negotiation with the imprisoned general guide, the organization agreed to abandon Naguib in return for releasing its detainees and renewing its precoup alliance with Nasser. On March 26, Nasser followed the release of five hundred Brotherhood detainees with a highly publicized visit to the general guide to show respect. Four days later, the guide denounced in a press conference the old party system, and thereafter ignored Naguib’s pleas for support, refusing to return his calls or receive his envoys. Naguib bitterly complained that for days, every time he called the guide, the latter was in the bathroom.⁶⁶ The movement was clearly led to believe that Nasser was finally ready to give it its due.

In believing so, the Islamist movement was not entirely naïve. Nasser, who had joined several political groups in the 1940s to explore them from within, became a member of the Brotherhood shortly before the 1948 war—out of political expediency rather than ideological affinity. We know that the first five-member cell of the Free Officers, formed in September 1949, was entirely composed of Brotherhood members (Nasser, Khaled, Abd al-Mon’iem Abd al-Ra’ouf, Kamal al-Din Hussein, Hassan Ibrahim), and that those who joined later were Brotherhood collaborators (notably, Amer, Sadat, and ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi). We also know that Nasser and Khaled went even further and joined the Brotherhood’s Special Order—the movement’s secret militant arm.⁶⁷ In addition, Nasser’s involvement in training Brotherhood militants was well documented by the famous incident on May 25, 1949, when he was interrogated for seven hours by Prime Minister Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Hady, Chief of Staff Osman al-Mahdy, and Director of the Political Police Ahmed Tal’at regarding an army training manual that was found with the Brotherhood militia in Palestine with his name on it. Nasser got off the hook with great difficulty by alleging that he lent it to an officer who was later killed in action and maybe they found it on him. The Brothers adhere to an even more enticing story, which traces their relationship with Nasser back to 1941 when Major Mahmoud Labib was charged with creating an Islamist base in the army. On his deathbed, Labib entrusted the list of members of the Brotherhood’s Committee of Free Soldiers in the Army to Nasser. After he passed away in December 1951, Nasser ran the committee for his own purposes.⁶⁸ This was confirmed by Naguib’s claim that the Brothers helped Nasser directly in creating the Free Officers.⁶⁹ This story was also corroborated by the Free Officer Hussein Hammudah, who participated with Nasser and five others in weekly Brotherhood meetings between 1944 and 1948, before being suspended because of the Palestine War. Nasser then asked Hammudah in November 1950 to form a new organization within the army based on the members of the old Brotherhood organization in the military. Hammudah added that during this period Nasser was solely responsible for the military training of the movement’s youth.⁷⁰ Nasser’s wife, Tahiya, wrote in her memoirs that around those years her husband used to receive guests at the house and introduce them to firearms.⁷¹ Clearly, these were not military cadets.

On the eve of the coup, Nasser realized that in light of the movement’s vast organizational resources and manpower, it was prudent to enlist its support. During a meeting on July 18, 1952, he asked the Brotherhood cadres Hassan Ashmawi, Saleh Abu-Raqiq, and Salah Shadi to order movement sympathizers in the army and police not to resist the coup; to use their militant organ if needed to help the army intercept any British attempt to reoccupy Cairo; and to organize demonstrations in support of the new regime. In fact, the coup did not proceed before the general guide gave the green light on July 21.⁷² To confirm the story, the young Brotherhood member Mahmoud Game’ says he was instructed by his leadership the night before the coup to secure key installations.⁷³ The honeymoon between Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood continued during the first months following the coup. In 1953, he instructed Interior Minister Suleiman Hafez to exclude the Brotherhood from the ban on political parties, referring to them as “our greatest supporters.”⁷⁴ When movement leaders sought to control the government and name its ministers, and when Nasser learned that they supported the artillery mutiny to put him under pressure, the two sides inevitably clashed. But even after the ruthless Nasser disbanded the movement and detained 540 of its members (including the general guide) on January 14, 1954, he continued to appeal to its popular base by, for example, attending the annual ceremony commemorating the birth of the movement’s founder on February 12, 1954 (while preventing Naguib from coming along), and declaring on that occasion: “I am struggling to fulfill the principles he died for and God is my witness.”⁷⁵ This long and convoluted relationship made the Muslim Brothers assume they could trust Nasser—as it turned out, they were wrong.

Following his fake rapprochement with the Brotherhood, Nasser received a visit from Ibrahim al-Tahawi and Ahmed Te’ima, his security lieutenants, at the Liberation Rally. They offered to organize a general strike, spearheaded by public transport workers, to bring the country to a standstill, and asked for Nasser’s permission to bribe Sawi Ahmed Sawi, head of the transport union. On March 27, one million workers went on strike in support of Nasser. That same day, the Liberation Rally, with the help of the military police, brought truckloads of peasants to Cairo, chanting antidemocracy slogans: “No parties! No parliament! No elections!” The strike and accompanying demonstrations lasted for three days.⁷⁶

Meanwhile, the security trio of Nasr, Badran, and Radwan launched a petition-signing campaign within the armed services, demanding Naguib’s resignation and the retraction of the March decrees. Officers were reminded that they might lose their jobs, possibly their lives, should the old regime be reinstated. Those who objected were bullied by their colleagues in order to sign, and those who persisted were either relieved from their duties (thirty-four officers) or detained (twenty-six officers). The content of this military petition was broadcast by public radio, followed by similar petitions from the police and labor unions. This was followed by a comprehensive military and police strike, organized by security agents within both. People were made to understand that the state’s coercive organs now stood united behind Nasser, and that pro-Naguib demonstrations would be mercilessly quelled—as exemplified by the brutal clampdown against the Shubra al-Khima workers on March 26. On March 29, Nasser announced that—having heard the “impulse of the street”—the March decrees would be revoked, but to maintain order all strikes and demonstrations were now banned.⁷⁷ It was yet another of those Napoleonic moments when a revolution initially espousing democracy gives way to a military dictatorship by mobilizing the support of its peasant and urban poor beneficiaries, then dismissing them.

Naguib tried to fight back. He called the interior minister and asked him to crack down on the antidemocracy demonstrations, but Zakaria said he would not do so unless Naguib sent him a signed order authorizing him to shoot unarmed civilians if necessary. Of course, Naguib refused. He then considered deploying his supporters among the cavalry, but Khaled warned him that this would lead to a massacre. He appealed to the head of the Cairo police division, the former army general Ahmed Shawky, for help. But although Shawky supported him, he was in the minority within the Interior Ministry. To make things worse, Naguib learned through French sources that the United States firmly supported Nasser, and that it had asked the British to intervene on his behalf if necessary. Naguib was left with no other option than to accept—stoically—that the coup was a mistake, and that if he was unwilling to drive the country into civil war, he must retire; “I was as exhausted as a boxer in the final round; I was not yet knocked out, but had lost too many points throughout this long game.”⁷⁸

Naguib’s associates also realized they were on the losing side; some jumped ship, others were pushed over. His legal adviser (the former interior minister Suleiman Hafez) resigned on March 26; his aide-de-camp (Muhammad Riyad) escaped to Saudi Arabia on March 27—after begging him to come along; his ally at the State Council (Abd al-Razeq al-Sanhouri), who was trying to mend relations between him and the Brotherhood, was assaulted at his office on March 29 by military police officers, then spent a few days at a military hospital before being discharged from office; and his main cavalry contact (Khaled Muhi al-Din) was exiled to Switzerland. In April alone, thirty-seven pro-Naguib cavalry officers were imprisoned and dozens were purged. This was followed in June by a more systematic purge, which included another 140 officers. Nasser then followed the stick with a carrot, raising military expenditure from 17 to 25 percent, a conciliatory gesture designed to win the rank and file.⁷⁹

The security then turned to public institutions, detaining 252 pro-democracy civil servants in what proved to be the opening act in a long series of measures designed to “cleanse” the bureaucracy and the media from “reactionary elements.” On April 15, the RCC stripped anyone who held public office before the coup of all political rights, and later dissolved syndicates and student unions. Police trucks surrounded universities, and professors and students were recruited by the security apparatus to spy on their colleagues.⁸⁰ After the March 1954 crisis, the revolutionary government showed its teeth, considering all those not entirely supportive of it to be enemies of the state and agents of foreign powers. Nasser now assumed full control as prime minister, while Naguib, though still officially the president, rarely left his house, confiding to his journal: “Egypt has now entered a dark age of injustice and terror.”⁸¹ Within a few months Nasser’s camp succeed in securing “total control of the armed forces … the neutralization and eventual destruction of other existing loci of political power … the control of education, the media, professional syndicates, trade unions, the rural structures in the countryside, the religious institutions and orders, the administration and bureaucracy, eventually, the whole society.”⁸²

Nasser then proceeded to tie his loose ends with the Muslim Brothers. After a highly suspicious attempt on his life, on October 26, 1954, when he was giving a speech in Alexandria and nine bullets were shot at him at close range from a lone shooter (the Brotherhood member Mahmoud Abd al-Latif) but all missed, the greatest crackdown in the history of the Brotherhood in Egypt began, with perhaps 20,000 detained in newly built concentration camps in the desert, and only 1,050 officially tried. Of those, six leaders were executed, and the rest, including the general guide, received long prison sentences. Expectedly, the movement was disbanded, its property confiscated, and the slightest expression of sympathy with it outlawed. On November 14, it was declared that security investigations had uncovered that the Brotherhood was doing Naguib’s bidding, and the latter was placed under house arrest in a secluded, heavily guarded villa on the outskirts of Cairo, where he would remain for the next eighteen years. Though Naguib insisted he had nothing to do with the unimpressive assassination attempt, he expressed no sympathy for the Brothers who walked into the trap with eyes wide open. In his view, their greed—rather than gullibility—blinded them from seeing the obvious fact that Nasser was only using them to consolidate power.⁸³ This same greed and disposition toward backdoor deals can be observed throughout the movement’s history, and has made it highly susceptible to manipulation by kings, prime ministers, or whoever was in charge; and this same tendency was in play in 2011 in the Brotherhood’s relationship with the officers who held power after the popular uprising of January 25.

On June 23, 1956, a referendum approved Nasser’s presidency (by 99.9 percent) and the new constitution. The RCC was dissolved, and Nasser became sole ruler. Still, Naguib’s story had a postscript. During the Tripartite Attack on Egypt in 1956 (also known as the Suez Crisis), Nasser’s intelligence claimed that the British were planning to drop paratroopers outside the capital to free Naguib and reinstall him. We now know, of course, that no such adventure was ever planned, but two incidents forced Nasser to take this report seriously: first, Naguib sent Nasser a letter pleading for his release to allow him to join the battle as an ordinary soldier; second, Naguib’s legal adviser Hafez met General Commander of the Armed Forces Amer on November 2 to persuade him that Nasser must choose the interest of the nation over his own and reinstate Naguib to appease the British. Within days of this meeting, Hafez was detained, and Naguib reallocated by the military police to a remote desert location on the border with Sudan for two months.⁸⁴

The March 1954 crisis was certainly a defining moment, which set the new regime on its authoritarian trajectory. How can we evaluate the triumph of Nasser’s faction during this first intraregime confrontation? Naguib had greater legitimacy as the acknowledged leader of the revolution and the first president of the republic. His class supporters were key players in the old regime: the landed aristocracy and wealthy bourgeoisie. The declared aim of the coup was to build a proper democracy after driving out the occupation and purging corrupt political elements and royalists, an ideology adhered to not only by most of the educated classes, but also by a significant portion of the military itself. In short, one could consider Naguib a perfect representative of the dominant classes and ideology of the time. And if Naguib had won, Egypt would have probably followed the Turkish path, with the military overseeing the birth of a limited democracy.

Nasser, on the other hand, faced the uphill struggle that comes with trying to instate a new regime. For the founder of a new regime, as Machiavelli reminded us, “makes enemies of all those who are doing well under the old system, and has only lukewarm support from those who hope to do well under the new one.”⁸⁵ So how did his faction end up on top? The answer is that Nasser immediately created a security coterie out of his most loyal lieutenants, and by 1954 it had developed far enough to realize that its interests were not the same as those of the military, and that democracy would bring their new careers to an abrupt end. It was this early division of labor that made all the difference. While the military was still dragging its feet—which is only normal in large and internally differentiated institutions—the sharp-minded security operatives moved quickly and unfalteringly, and as it turned out, quite effectively. The end result was that the military-fostered democracy option was ruled out, at least temporarily.

In Khaled Muhi al-Din’s judgment, Nasser’s success closed the path to democracy.⁸⁶ This is probably an exaggeration. It is true that this early battle was decisive, but it was only one among many more to come. Its outcome planted the seeds of another, grander confrontation, this time between the factions that crystallized around Nasser and Amer. Nasser did not intend to form a military dictatorship, but rather a military-backed populist regime that would allow him to rule in the name of the people. He never conceived of the military as a future partner—but Amer did. The root of the problem was that, unlike the Russian, Chinese, or even Cuban case, Nasser had no political revolutionary party to keep the military in check. His chief revolutionary organization was none other than the military itself. Now that he had consolidated power, he discovered that the only political control instrument available was the security apparatus. Over the next decade, Nasser (the chief politician) and Amer (the chief general) would scramble frantically to enlist the support of the various security agencies that would eventually arbitrate the political-military race to the top.

* It is important to note here that although all these agencies dealt with security, they cannot be considered similar. Amy Zegart, who studies the evolution of security agencies, reminds us: “Reality is not nearly so neat. National security agencies vary. They do not look alike at birth. Nor do they develop along the same path” (Amy B Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JSC, and NSC, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999: 40). This was certainly the case in Egypt, as we will see in the following chapters.

* These included Lieutenant General Wilhelm Farmbacher of the German Wehrmacht; two SS operatives, Otto Skorzeny (SS Mussolini contact) and Oskar Direwanger (of the SS Warsaw branch); and four Gestapo officers, Leopold Gleim (head of the Gestapo in Warsaw), Franz Buensch, Joachim Deumling, and Alois Anton Brunner (Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970: 87; Owen L. Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service: A History of the Mukhabarat, 1910–2009, New York: Routledge, 2010: 33).