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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

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