Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil
were wrong.
Following his fake rapprochement with the Brotherhood, Nasser received a visit from Ibrahim al-Tahawi and Ahmed Te’ima, his security lieutenants, at the Liberation Rally. They offered to organize a general strike, spearheaded by public transport workers, to bring the country to a standstill, and asked for Nasser’s permission to bribe Sawi Ahmed Sawi, head of the transport union. On March 27, one million workers went on strike in support of Nasser. That same day, the Liberation Rally, with the help of the military police, brought truckloads of peasants to Cairo, chanting antidemocracy slogans: “No parties! No parliament! No elections!” The strike and accompanying demonstrations lasted for three days.76
Meanwhile, the security trio of Nasr, Badran, and Radwan launched a petition-signing campaign within the armed services, demanding Naguib’s resignation and the retraction of the March decrees. Officers were reminded that they might lose their jobs, possibly their lives, should the old regime be reinstated. Those who objected were bullied by their colleagues in order to sign, and those who persisted were either relieved from their duties (thirty-four officers) or detained (twenty-six officers). The content of this military petition was broadcast by public radio, followed by similar petitions from the police and labor unions. This was followed by a comprehensive military and police strike, organized by security agents within both. People were made to understand that the state’s coercive organs now stood united behind Nasser, and that pro-Naguib demonstrations would be mercilessly quelled—as exemplified by the brutal clampdown against the Shubra al-Khima workers on March 26. On March 29, Nasser announced that—having heard the “impulse of the street”—the March decrees would be revoked, but to maintain order all strikes and demonstrations were now banned.77 It was yet another of those Napoleonic moments when a revolution initially espousing democracy gives way to a military dictatorship by mobilizing the support of its peasant and urban poor beneficiaries, then dismissing them.
Naguib tried to fight back. He called the interior minister and asked him to crack down on the antidemocracy demonstrations, but Zakaria said he would not do so unless Naguib sent him a signed order authorizing him to shoot unarmed civilians if necessary. Of course, Naguib refused. He then considered deploying his supporters among the cavalry, but Khaled warned him that this would lead to a massacre. He appealed to the head of the Cairo police division, the former army general Ahmed Shawky, for help. But although Shawky supported him, he was in the minority within the Interior Ministry. To make things worse, Naguib learned through French sources that the United States firmly supported Nasser, and that it had asked the British to intervene on his behalf if necessary. Naguib was left with no other option than to accept—stoically—that the coup was a mistake, and that if he was unwilling to drive the country into civil war, he must retire; “I was as exhausted as a boxer in the final round; I was not yet knocked out, but had lost too many points throughout this long game.”78
Naguib’s associates also realized they were on the losing side; some jumped ship, others were pushed over. His legal adviser (the former interior minister Suleiman Hafez) resigned on March 26; his aide-de-camp (Muhammad Riyad) escaped to Saudi Arabia on March 27—after begging him to come along; his ally at the State Council (Abd al-Razeq al-Sanhouri), who was trying to mend relations between him and the Brotherhood, was assaulted at his office on March 29 by military police officers, then spent a few days at a military hospital before being discharged from office; and his main cavalry contact (Khaled Muhi al-Din) was exiled to Switzerland. In April alone, thirty-seven pro-Naguib cavalry officers were imprisoned and dozens were purged. This was followed in June by a more systematic purge, which included another 140 officers. Nasser then followed the stick with a carrot, raising military expenditure from 17 to 25 percent, a conciliatory gesture designed to win the rank and file.79
The security then turned to public institutions, detaining 252 pro-democracy civil servants in what proved to be the opening act in a long series of measures designed to “cleanse” the bureaucracy and the media from “reactionary elements.” On April 15, the RCC stripped anyone who held public office before the coup of all political rights, and later dissolved syndicates and student unions. Police trucks surrounded universities, and professors and students were recruited by the security apparatus to spy on their colleagues.80 After the March 1954 crisis, the revolutionary government showed its teeth, considering all those not entirely supportive of it to be enemies of the state and agents of foreign powers. Nasser now assumed full control as prime minister, while Naguib, though still officially the president, rarely left his house, confiding to his journal: “Egypt has now entered a dark age of injustice and terror.”81 Within a few months Nasser’s camp succeed in securing “total control of the armed forces … the neutralization and eventual destruction of other existing loci of political power … the control of education, the media, professional syndicates, trade unions, the rural structures in the countryside, the religious institutions and orders, the administration and bureaucracy, eventually, the whole society.”82
Nasser then proceeded to tie his loose ends with the Muslim Brothers. After a highly suspicious attempt on his life, on October 26, 1954, when he was giving a speech in Alexandria and nine bullets were shot at him at close range from a lone shooter (the Brotherhood member Mahmoud Abd al-Latif) but all missed, the greatest crackdown in the history of the Brotherhood in Egypt began, with perhaps 20,000 detained in newly built concentration camps in the desert, and only 1,050 officially tried. Of those, six leaders were executed, and the rest, including the general guide, received long prison sentences. Expectedly, the movement was disbanded, its property confiscated, and the slightest expression of sympathy with it outlawed. On November 14, it was declared that security investigations had uncovered that the Brotherhood was doing Naguib’s bidding, and the latter was placed under house arrest in a secluded, heavily guarded villa on the outskirts of Cairo, where he would remain for the next eighteen years. Though Naguib insisted he had nothing to do with the unimpressive assassination attempt, he expressed no sympathy for the Brothers who walked into the trap with eyes wide open. In his view, their greed—rather than gullibility—blinded them from seeing 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