Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil

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СКАЧАТЬ 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).

       2

       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 СКАЧАТЬ