Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ