Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil

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СКАЧАТЬ fault; after all, it was his reckless decision to nationalize the canal that brought it on. They also warned him that purging his loyal subordinates under pressure from Nasser would irrevocably tarnish his reputation. Personally, Amer became apprehensive of the military prowess his friend displayed during the war. His method to win back the respect of his men was to shower them with favors, to spoil them even further than he had already done. So while Nasser demanded far-reaching changes in military leadership and organization, an embittered Amer remained unyielding, refusing during a stormy meeting on November 15 to even transfer the scandalously incompetent air force commander, Major General Sedqi Mahmoud, because he was “his man.” Not only that, but Amer also lashed out at Nasser, accusing him of provoking an unnecessary war and then blaming the military for the result.¹⁸ Amer’s audacity shocked the president, who began to suspect that the military might be slipping out of his control, that his trusted lieutenant might have built his own power base in the corps. For the first time, a wedge was driven between the two longtime comrades. It could not have come at a worse time. Eisenhower expected a grateful Egypt to embrace his January 1957 offer of U.S. support for countries threatened by communism; instead, Nasser attacked the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine vehemently as an imperialist ruse that justified U.S. military intervention in the Middle East instead of arming newly independent states to defend their own borders. On March 22, 1957, the U.S. president met with the CIA chief, Allen Dulles, and the veteran Middle East operative Kermit Roosevelt to consider means of ousting Nasser¹⁹—plans that would finally take shape a decade later, shaking the Egyptian regime to the core.

      THE DARK YEARS

      The Suez War debacle and the confrontation that followed it made the president determined to remove his friend from military command. This was easier said than done. Building on his amicable and lavish personality, Amer’s security aides had placed him at the center of an elaborate patronage network within the officer corps. They talked him into promoting himself to the rank of field marshal in 1957 (a rank unknown in the Arabic lexicon), and helped him transform the army into a tribe, with him as tribal chief: allocating gifts and honors, granting personal favors, solving family disputes, inviting his men to all-night parties at his house, and making sure that the “field marshal’s men” remained untouchable. During his tenure, promotions accelerated to the point where one could become a brigadier general at the age of forty (compared with colonel in the early 1950s). All officers benefited from his doubling of salaries; his raising of the retirement age; his allocation of summerhouses, automobiles, travel grants, and interest-free loans; his order to have officers’ children accepted at universities regardless of their academic scores; and various other privileges.²⁰ For the army, the field marshal had become something of a Santa Claus. Colonel Muhammad Selim recounted one indicative incident: “A junior officer once walked up to Amer as he was about to leave GHQ and complained that he was forced to use public transportation to commute to work every day. Amer tore the top part of his cigarette packet and wrote on its back: ‘Dear Fiat manager, dispense a car immediately to the bearer of this message.’ The field marshal did not even ask for his name; the fact that he donned the uniform and came to him for help was enough.”²¹

      Amer did not want to replace the president, but aspired to having equal power. So instead of enhancing the army’s fighting capacity, Amer devoted himself to transforming it into “a state within a state” through the help of his security aides. He treated the military as a personal fief, promoting officers based on their loyalty to him, rather than to Nasser or the state. To keep the president on his feet, Amer’s security men provided him with a regular stream of attempted plots they claim to have foiled (such as an alleged plot in April 1957 involving British operatives and eight army officers). The aim was to make Nasser too anxious to carry out a military shake-up against their will.²² So what had originally begun as an attempt to secure the revolution in 1954 had been gradually transformed into securing the dominance of the present military leadership. Nasser’s only hope now was to persuade Amer to leave the military on his own accord, an impossible task by any measure.

      The president thus turned to the next best option: acting on the advice of the PBI director, Samy Sharaf, he tried to create his own secret network within the army. Quickly realizing that the officer corps was effectively sealed off by Amer’s security apparatus, Sharaf shifted his effort to the Military Academy, which was headed by a relative of his, the future war minister Muhammad Fawzy. By the end of 1956, Sharaf had recruited six cadets. Their mission was to lie low until they graduated, then actively build a network loyal to the president once they joined the service. After a few meetings, however, the field marshal’s security men picked them up, and after a fiery confrontation with Nasser, the organization was disbanded. Another PBI operative, Hassan al-Tuhami, decided to bug Amer’s phones on his own initiative. Again, Amer’s alert security apparatus found out, and Tuhami was not only dismissed, but also exiled to Vienna for an entire decade.²³

      Exposed and increasingly on the defensive, Nasser now became entrapped in a cat-and-mouse game with his field marshal. To ease Amer’s suspicions, Nasser surrendered a bit of ground by appointing the OCC director, Salah Nasr—the field marshal’s right-hand security man—as head of the GIS in May 1957, and Nasr’s OCC deputy Abbas Radwan as interior minister in October 1958. But in order to protect himself, Nasser employed the former GIS director Aly Sabri at the PBI to capitalize on his contacts at the agency to neutralize Nasr. The president also anticipated Nasr’s official takeover in May by appointing two confidants (Amin Huwaidi and Sha’rawi Gomaa) to senior positions at the GIS in February. He then convinced Amer to appoint the second-tier Free Officer Colonel Shams Badran as the new OCC director, replacing Nasr. Badran had been acting as liaison between the presidency and the military, and Nasser hoped he would deliver the military back to him. In addition to all these tactical precautions, Nasser was ultimately reassured by the fact that Zakaria Muhi al-Din, the architect of the entire security apparatus, was unofficially supervising all civilian security agencies, regardless of who was in charge at GIS or the Interior Ministry. The president’s safeguards, however, soon came to nothing. Sabri clashed with Sharaf and had to be reallocated, and the shrewd Nasr not only refused to begin his tenure unless the GIS became independent of Zakaria’s hegemony, he also isolated Nasser’s men, Huwaidi and Gomaa, forcing them to move to the PBI in a few months, before proceeding to ally the GIS with the military-based security group.²⁴ Now all military and civilian security organs (except for the president’s own PBI) came under Amer’s control. Worse still, the field marshal won over Badran, Nasser’s supposed spy. Badran relished the fact that his new boss’s laissez-faire management style, which sharply contrasted with Nasser’s tight-leash supervision, would grant him virtual control of the entire military.

      By 1958, Nasser’s position within the security community had considerably deteriorated. That same year, however, presented Nasser with a golden opportunity to sway Amer away from command. The centerpiece of Nasserist foreign policy was Arab nationalism, a policy aimed at uniting all Arab countries under one body (like his European neighbors to the north were striving to do themselves). The first step of this long-term plan was to merge Egypt and Syria, the closest two Arab countries (in institutions and temperament) into one state: the United Arab Republic. To kill two birds with one stone, Nasser decided to combine the expansion of Egyptian influence abroad with the consolidation of his power at home, and so he kicked his friend-turned-rival upstairs by appointing him governor of Syria, now renamed the Northern Sector. The field marshal agreed, believing he would now have his own country to run. But the union lasted for only three short years. This was a disaster for Amer on many levels: first, it was his trusted Syrian aide-de-camp (Abd al-Karim al-Nahlawy) who organized the anti-Egyptian coup that dissolved the union; second, Syria’s new leaders shipped Amer back to Cairo on September 28, 1961, in a humiliating fashion (rumor has it, in his undergarments); third, his military commanders again failed to fly troops to Syria fast enough to avert the coup; and finally, one of the factors that fueled the secession was that he allowed his men to run rampant all over the Syrian corps. Shaken by this spectacular blunder, Amer tendered his resignation, which Nasser accepted with great relief. Three days later, the president reappointed Zakaria as interior minister, demoting Radwan to minister without portfolio, and was preparing for a similar move against СКАЧАТЬ