Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil

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      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 occupation in 1882, then its powerlessness as the country’s monarch was humiliated by Britain in February 1942, and finally by defeat in the 1948 Palestine war. It was thus only natural that procuring advanced weapons was at the top of Nasser’s agenda. Capitalizing on his CIA links, he first turned to the United States. In October 1954, a meeting was held at the security operative Hassan al-Tuhami’s apartment between Nasser and Amer, on the Egyptian side, with the CIA’s Miles Copeland, and the generals Albert Gerhardt and Wilbur Eveland, representing the Americans. According to Copeland, an agreement was reached to sell Egypt $20 million worth of weapons on easy credit terms. But the following month, Washington announced only an economic aid package of $40 million; Nasser also received $3 million under the table from the U.S. president’s executive budget, which was normally earmarked for CIA operations. Copeland returned to Washington in July 1955 to consult with George Allen, assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, regarding the delayed arms deal. A desperate Nasser followed this with a warning message to Kermit Roosevelt, director of the CIA’s Middle East operations, in mid-September that if the deal did not go through, he might consider requesting military aid from the Eastern Bloc, but the latter did not take him seriously.⁴

      Clearly, America’s intention was to coax Egypt into joining the Western-oriented regional defense alliance known as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), or simply, the Baghdad Pact. The pact allowed U.S. and British forces to use the territories and facilities of member countries (Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan) to block Communist incursions into the region. When Egypt refused to join, the Americans, according to the future foreign minister Ismail Fahmy, encouraged Israeli raids against the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip between February and September 1955 under the pretext of checking the activities of Palestinian guerrillas. The raids exposed Egypt’s military vulnerability even further, forcing Nasser to conclude the famous “Czech arms deal” with the Soviet Union in September 1955—a substantial deal that included 200 fighter jets and bombers, 230 tanks, 500 artillery pieces, 530 armored vehicles, 200 troop carriers, and a naval force of 3 submarines and a handful of destroyers and minesweepers.⁵ Nasser made it clear that the West had only itself to blame. In a speech delivered on September 27, 1955, at a military fair, he said: “When we carried out the revolution we turned to every country … to arm our forces, we turned to England, we turned to France, we turned to America … [but] we only heard demands [that undermine] Egypt’s dignity.”⁶ American strategists were stunned. They had placed too much store in Khrushchev’s public pledge to the Central Committee of the Communist Party to adhere to Joseph Stalin’s policy of never staking Soviet credibility on non-Communist developing countries, especially ones that were too far away and too unstable. Stalin, as is well known, was an advocate of “socialism in one country” (meaning the USSR), and intervened outside Russian borders only when success was guaranteed at the hands of a Communist party loyal to Moscow. Washington believed the Soviets eyed Third World nationalists with suspicion, if not disdain, and would never ally with them. Obviously, however, the success of the U.S. Containment Doctrine, which prevented the spread of communism outside the USSR and Eastern Europe, forced Moscow to treat postcolonial nationalists as “good enough Communists” in order to break its isolation. And before the Americans knew what hit them, Nasser strained the situation even further by recognizing Red China in May 1956. Enraged, the United States not only canceled military aid talks, but also withdrew its offer to help build the High Dam, a massive hydroelectric project that was supposed to double Egypt’s industrial capacity. By doing so, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles played unwittingly into Nasser’s hand. For months the president had been looking for a pretext to reclaim Egypt’s rights over the Suez Canal. Now, citing the need to channel the canal’s revenue toward financing the dam, a defiant Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in front of an ecstatic crowd on July 26, 1956.

      Instead of just aggravating the United States, Nasser’s decision convinced three odd partners to carry out a joint military strike against Egypt, what became known as the Tripartite Aggression. Britain, France, and Israel came to this decision through very different routes, though it was the conjunction of their interests to depose Egypt’s new regime that made their cooperation possible. For Britain, as Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd later revealed, Nasser’s obvious ambition to project power in the eastern flank of the Arab world (Jordan, Iraq, Aden, and the sheikhdoms of the Gulf) undermined its strategic allies and threatened its control of the region’s oilfields. Egypt’s control of the Suez Canal itself represented another problem: not only did a quarter of all British imports come through the canal, but also three-quarters of its oil needs. Of the 14,666 ships that passed through the canal in 1955, for instance, 4,358 were British. If Nasser blocked the canal, Britain might suffer “the worst industrial crisis in her history.”⁷

      France’s grievances had to do with Nasser’s actions in the North African side of the Arab world, particularly in Algeria. The French military establishment blamed Nasser for the Algerian Revolt. Hard-pressed to justify their failure to end the insurgency, French generals needed an excuse, and the most sensible one was Nasser. In the French army’s propaganda, Egypt’s role in Algeria was the same as the Chinese role in Vietnam, the difference being that Egypt, unlike China, could be defeated. So if France had been humbled by China in Southeast Asia, there was no need for it to suffer the same fate in the Middle East at the hands of a lesser power. If only Nasser were deposed, Algeria’s Front de Liberation National (FLN) would lose its capacity to evict the French by force. As with Britain, the Suez Canal also had an influence over France’s decision: “In the Gallic imagination the canal was not just a masterpiece of engineering but a tribute to the Napoleonic mission … On a less elevated level, the Canal Company was the ‘last great international stronghold of French capital.’ Its board was controlled by French directors, it was staffed largely by French technicians, and it provided a modest income to tens of СКАЧАТЬ