Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen - Hazem Kandil

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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

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