Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. Hazem Kandil
episode was also highlighted in the memoirs of other leading Free Officers, such as cavalry lieutenant colonel Khaled Muhi al-Din, who together with Nasser devoured piles of history and philosophy books and explored various political movements in search of a way out for Egypt, as well as signal corps major Anwar al-Sadat, who was imprisoned by the British during the war because of his pro-German activities and was only readmitted to the ranks after secretly joining the king’s Iron Guards (while doubling as member of the anti-royalist Free Officers).
But as disheartening as this episode was, the real military disaster took place six years later, in Palestine. The establishment of the State of Israel on Egypt’s eastern border prompted an impromptu intervention by the Egyptian military against this new, unwelcome entity. The operation was framed as a defense of Palestinian rights, but it was also an attempt by the crown to play a leading role in the Arab world and thereby regain some of its lost prestige. Dozens of Egyptian officers volunteered to help prevent the wholesale dispossession of their Palestinian neighbors, but they were worried about embroiling the military in a formal war—after all, the last time it had seen combat was 1882, when it tried, fruitlessly, to prevent the British invasion of Egypt. The Palestine War of 1948 would therefore be the first military engagement in over half a century. Furthermore, the army was utterly unprepared in terms of training and equipment, for even though the British employed other colonial armies in their war effort (notably, the Indian), they reserved the Egyptian forces for logistical support. The military’s reluctance to fight was voiced by the general staff, and supported by the elected government. King Farouk, however, vetoed both generals and ministers and sent his men to their doom. Defeat inevitably followed. Morale was so low within the military that from September–December 1948, 28 officers and 2,100 soldiers were arrested on the battlefield and deported to Egypt for mutiny.7 The tragedy turned to scandal when Egyptian Senate hearings in 1949 revealed that European governments, eager to get rid of their defunct weapons from both world wars, offered the king’s courtiers substantial commissions to help them unload their stockpiles.8 To add insult to injury, Nasser was included in the delegation sent to the Greek island of Rhodes in February 1949 to negotiate the first Arab-Israeli truce, a political defeat no less humiliating than the military one.
These devastating defeats were unquestionably what politicized the officer corps. It is no coincidence that the first leaflet distributed by the Free Officers, in November 1949, was devoted to condemning those responsible for the Palestine catastrophe, and the first communiqué they issued after the coup denounced the treacherous politicians responsible for the army’s defeat in 1948.9 In another letter to his school friend, Nasser, the leader of the Free Officers, invoked the image of their soldiers “dashed against fortifications … using defective arms which had been purchased by the king’s cronies, a collection of petty crooks who profited from the war by realizing huge commissions from arms deals.”10 He also described how his battalion had no maps or tents, how he and his men were left without logistic support, subject to contradictory orders from incompetent palace officers. Nasser had spent weeks under siege in the Palestinian village of Fallujah, where he and fellow officers came to see that the civilian leadership was utterly responsible for their current ordeal. Naguib, who was injured twice during the war, reached the same conclusion: the real enemy was in Cairo.11
Yet the situation worsened: infuriated soldiers returned home only to find thousands of their countrymen locked up in detention centers, because the king saw the Palestine War as a good opportunity to declare martial law and silence the opposition. The monarch expected the army to finish the job and repress civilian demonstrators, especially after the police proved unreliable—in October 1947 seven thousand police officers organized anti-government strikes, which continued intermittingly until 1952.12 Things became still more complicated when Britain retracted its promise to evacuate Egypt after the war, and in October 1951, the Egyptian government unilaterally abrogated the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in protest. The Egyptian military was caught in an awkward position. The treaty had legitimatized British presence in the Suez Canal Zone, but now Britain officially became an occupying force once more. In its rhetoric, the government encouraged citizens to carry out armed attacks against British installations, but then required the army to prevent them. The situation exploded two months later when British forces began scourging villages for sheltering Egyptian “terrorists.” Following a particularly nasty incident, when the British demolished the village of Kafr Abdu, officers sent a petition to the king and government asking permission to defend Egyptian sovereignty, but the petition was ignored. A month later, seven thousand British troops occupied the Suez Canal city of Ismailia. The government ordered the police to resist. In the bloody battle, 50 police officers were killed and 80 injured. The occasion was marked as Police Day, and henceforth, January 25 was celebrated annually in honor of the police martyrs (the revolt of 2011 started on that day to underline the disparity between the heroic police of yesterday and the brutal one of today). The following morning, rioters set fire to downtown Cairo. The army was ordered in to restore calm, but officers now felt they were becoming the henchmen of a regime that had lost all legitimacy—as evidenced by the fact that four cabinets ruled in quick succession from January–July 195213. It became clear that there was a power vacuum in Egypt and that none of the political forces were ready to capture the moment, simply because they only thought of power in terms of “the force of numbers, the force of the masses, and never the force of arms.”14
A final, though less spectacular factor, which had an enormous impact on officers, was the expansion of the monarch’s jurisdiction over military affairs. Throughout his reign, the king strove to wrest effective control of the army from elected governments. As a mark of symbolic power, he changed the army emblem in October 1944 from “God, Country and King” to “God, King and Country.” King Farouk not only refused to be held accountable for his ill-fated decision to send the military to the Palestine War, he now demanded the right to appoint the war minister and the chief of staff, and to create the new position of commander-in-chief of the armed forces—to be occupied by someone beholden to him alone and responsible for all military appointments and promotions. In order to appease the king, the Wafd government agreed in 1950 to relinquish its constitutional right to control the military. Immediately, the king set to work. The list of incompetents he appointed to leading army positions included his diplomat brother-in-law and his corrupt prison warden, who forced prisoners to till the king’s land for free. His intention to install a malicious border patrol officer (who had barely survived assassination at the hands of Nasser) to the top military post days before the coup was one of its immediate causes. Naguib reflected the general dismay within the ranks when he complained to confidants that the army could not obey a high command composed of arms dealers, land speculators, and other criminal elements.15 When the old general was elected chairman of the Officers Club against the royalist candidate in January 1952, it became clear that the palace was losing the loyalty of the corps.
Institutional grievances of this magnitude certainly explain why the coup was endorsed (or at least allowed) by the armed forces as a whole. Regardless of the social, political, or ideological motives of the ringleaders, the coup succeeded because it was perceived by scores of officers and soldiers as strictly for the benefit of their esteemed institution. In their view, the coup was not a matter of disrupting military discipline, but rather of reestablishing it. Their aim was to liberate Egypt from foreign occupation and install a reformed civilian regime that would enhance military power and restore its credibility. They were neither set on assuming political power nor on administering a transformative socioeconomic modernization program, while the quick turnover of military governments in Iraq (between 1936 and 1941) and Syria (between 1949 and 1951) alerted them to the inherent instability of military rule. Nasser and his close allies in the movement, however, thought otherwise. Captivated by the Turkish officer-turned-revolutionary-turned-stateman Mostafa Kemal Atatürk’s reforms in the 1920s and 1930s, they saw the coup as only a first step in the long-term and far-reaching “revolution from above” that would build a strong centralized state with a modern industrial economy. Herein lies the root of the struggle that would consume the country for the next six decades.