Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen - Hazem Kandil

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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.

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       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

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