What is important for us is that we now recognize that our main enemy is the United States and that the only possible way of continuing our struggle is for us to ally ourselves with the Soviet Union . . . Before the fighting broke out, we were afraid that we would be accused by the Western media of being aligned [with the Soviet Union], but nothing of that sort concerns us any longer. We are ready to offer facilities to the Soviet fleet from Port Said to Salloum and from al-Arish to Gaza.27
Soviet advisers in Egypt eventually numbered over 20,000. In 1970, at Nasser’s request, Soviet airbases, equipped with SAM-3 missiles and combat aircraft with Russian crews, were established to strengthen Egyptian air defences.
Nasser’s most striking political gifts were his powerful rhetoric and charismatic stage presence, which enabled him to survive the military humiliation of 1967, for which he bore much of the responsibility, and inspired the Arab street with a seductive but unrealizable vision of Pan-Arab unity which would restore the pride and honour of which imperialism had robbed them. He left behind few practical achievements. The celebrated Aswan Dam and vast Helwan steel works, both financed by the Soviet Union and praised as models of socialist construction, were built in defiance of local conditions. Egyptian socialism had failed. As Nasser once admitted, ‘The people can’t eat socialism. If they weren’t Egyptian they’d beat me with their shoes [almost the ultimate Arab humiliation].’ The main growth area during Nasser’s eighteen years in power was the civil service, which increased from 325,000 to 1.2 million mostly inefficient bureaucrats. Cairo, built to accommodate 3 million people, was close to meltdown with a population almost three times as large. Water pipes and sewage systems regularly collapsed, flooding parts of the city. Politically, Nasser left behind him a one-party state with an ailing economy built on the twin foundations of rigged elections and concentration camps to terrorize his opponents.28
The vast Soviet investment in Nasser’s Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s rested on a far more precarious base than Moscow was willing to acknowledge. The influx of Soviet advisers served only to underline the gulf between Soviet and Egyptian society. Russians and Egyptians rarely visited each other’s homes. Though almost half of the 15,000 Arabs who studied in the United States during the late 1950s and 1960s married Americans, marriage between Soviet advisers and their Egyptian hosts was virtually unknown.29 Resentment at the aloofness of the advisers was compounded by the arrogance of the Soviet ambassador, Vladimir Mikhailovich Vinogradov. ‘The Soviet Union’, complained Vice-President Anwar al-Sadat, ‘had begun to feel that it enjoyed a privileged position in Egypt - so much so that the Soviet ambassador had assumed a position comparable to that of the British High Commissioner in the days of the British occupation of Egypt.’30
With Nasser’s sudden death in September 1970 and his replacement by Sadat, the imposing but fragile edifice of Soviet influence in Egypt began to crumble. Almost two decades later, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, was still insisting that ‘had [Nasser] lived a few years longer, the situation in the region might today be very different’.31 Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet Prime Minister, told Sadat soon after he became President, ‘We never had any secrets from [Nasser], and he never had any secrets from us.’32 The first half of the statement, as Kosygin was well aware, was nonsense; the second half, thanks to Sami Sharaf and others, may at times have been close to the truth. On his first day as President, Sadat had an immediate confrontation with Sharaf in his office. According to Sadat:
He had a heap of papers to submit to me. ‘What is this?’ I asked.
‘The text of tapped telephone conversations between certain people being watched.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t like to read such rubbish . . . And, anyway, who gave you the right to have the telephones of these people tapped? Take this file away.’ I swept it off my desk.33
There were times when Sadat took a greater interest in ‘such rubbish’ than he cared to admit to Sharaf. Kirpichenko, who returned to Cairo as resident in 1970, discovered that Sadat was ‘listening in’ to the conversations of a group of pro-Soviet plotters against him: chief among them Vice-President Ali Sabry, Interior Minister Sha’rawi Gum’a, War Minister Muhammad Fawzi and Minister for Presidential Affairs Sami Sharaf. The group, which Sadat privately called the ‘crocodiles’ (an expression adopted by the Cairo residency), had frequent meetings with Vinogradov and, in Kirpichenko’s euphemistic phrase, ‘shared with him their apprehensions regarding Sadat’s line’34 - in other words their plans to overthrow him.35 The plotters sought Vinogradov’s support but, according to Nikolai Leonov, the ambassador was ‘overcome by fear’ and gave no reply.36
The reports from Cairo which most alarmed the Politburo were what Kirpichenko claims was ‘reliable’ intelligence on Sadat’s secret contacts with President Nixon, raising the suspicion that he was planning to loosen Egyptian links with the Soviet Union and move closer to the United States. 37 In January 1971 Fawzi, whose responsibilities included Cairo security, received a report of unauthorized radio transmissions. The triangulation techniques used to locate the source of the transmissions revealed that they came from Sadat’s house. Further investigation showed that he was exchanging secret messages with Washington - despite the fact that diplomatic relations with the United States had been broken off by Nasser. According to Fawzi, he confronted Sadat, who told him that the secret contacts were no business of his. Fawzi allegedly retorted that it was the business of intelligence services to discover such things.38 Kirpichenko may well have been informed of the confrontation between Fawzi and Sadat either by one of the ‘crocodiles’ or by one of his informants within Egyptian intelligence. It is equally likely that Sadat’s radio messages to and from Washington were intercepted by the SIGINT station (codenamed ORION)39 in the Cairo residency. The KGB’s remarkable success with Third World ciphers made its codebreakers better able to decrypt Sadat’s presidential cipher than any Egyptian intelligence agency. 40 Given the anxieties aroused in Moscow by Sadat’s policies, decrypting his communications must have had a particularly high priority. Just as worrying from Moscow’s point of view were the secret conversations in Cairo during March and April between the US diplomat Donald Bergus and Sadat’s emissaries. Tapes of the conversations, recorded without Sadat’s knowledge by a section of Egyptian intelligence, were passed on to the ‘crocodiles’ and, almost certainly, revealed by them to the Soviet embassy.41
On 28 April 1971, for the only time in Kirpichenko’s career as a foreign intelligence officer, he was suddenly summoned back to Moscow, together with Vinogradov and the senior military adviser in Egypt, General Vasili Vasilyevich Okunev, to give his assessment of Sadat’s intentions direct to a meeting of the Politburo. Vinogradov was criticized by Suslov for what he claimed were the contradictions between the ‘quite optimistic’ tone of his oral assessment (which was similar to that of Okunev) and some of the evidence contained in his diplomatic despatches. Kirpichenko, by contrast, bluntly declared that Sadat was deceiving the Soviet Union. Andropov told him afterwards, ‘Everything you said was more or less correct, but a bit sharply expressed.’ He was also informed that President Podgorny had said of his comments on Sadat, ‘It’s not at all appropriate . . . to speak of presidents in such a manner!’ What also stuck in Kirpichenko’s memory was the fact that while the table around which the Politburo sat had on it red and black caviar and a selection of fish delicacies, he and those seated around the walls were offered only sausage and cheese sandwiches.42
The events of the next few weeks fully justified Kirpichenko’s pessimism. On 11 May a young police officer brought Sadat a tape recording showing, according to Sadat, that the ‘crocodiles’ ‘were plotting to overthrow me and the regime’.43 (Though Sadat’s memoirs do not mention it, he had doubtless received similar tapes before.) At a meeting with Vinogradov, the chief plotters had sought Soviet support for a plot to overthrow Sadat and establish ‘socialism in Egypt’. Moscow, however, dared not take the risk of promising
support and Sadat struck first.44 The timing of the arrest of the ‘crocodiles’ on the evening of 13 May took the Cairo residency by surprise. Kirpichenko spent the evening, like many other Soviet representatives, at a reception in their honour in the garden of the East German embassy. At the high point of the evening, just as suckling pigs appeared on the table, news arrived of the arrests, forcing Kirpichenko to abandon the meal and return to his embassy.45
Sadat, however, still went to great lengths to conceal his real intentions from the Russians. Only a fortnight later, he signed with President Podgorny in Cairo a Soviet-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation. His main motive, as he later acknowledged, was ‘to allay the fears of the Soviet leaders’ by seeking to persuade them that he was engaged in an internal power struggle rather than a reorientation of Egyptian foreign policy away from Moscow. As he saw Podgorny off at the airport, Sadat appealed to him to tell the Politburo, ‘Please have confidence in us! Have confidence! Confidence! ’46 His disingenuous pleading had little effect. The Centre’s confidence in Sadat was already almost gone. The Cairo residency had little doubt that he ‘was aiming to cut down Soviet-Egyptian relations and would take active steps to curtail the activity of Soviet Intelligence in Egypt’.47 For the moment, however, Moscow did not voice its suspicions, fearing that open opposition to Sadat would only undermine still further its remaining influence and huge investment in Egypt.
The Centre’s irritation at its declining influence in Cairo was balanced by its hope of a Communist take-over in Khartoum. The leaders of the Sudanese Communist Party were considered by the KGB to be the most loyal and dedicated in the Middle East.48 In July 1971 a coup by Sudanese army officers, supported by the Communists, briefly succeeded in toppling President Gaafar Muhammad al-Nimeiri. Vinogradov called on Sadat to urge him to recognize the new regime. An angry argument followed during which Sadat declared, ‘I cannot allow a Communist regime to be established in a country sharing my borders.’49 With Sadat’s assistance, the coup was brutally suppressed and Nimeiri restored to power. Among those executed for their part in the coup was the General Secretary of the Sudanese Communist Party, Abdel Maghoub. Simultaneously the Centre discovered that a Soviet diplomat in the Middle East co-opted by the KGB, Vladimir Nikolayevich Sakharov, was working for the CIA. Alerted by a pre-arranged signal - a bouquet placed by the Agency on the back seat of his Volkswagen - Sakharov defected just in time. Among the secrets he had betrayed to the CIA was Sharaf’s involvement with the KGB. 50
As Soviet influence declined under Sadat’s rule, Egyptian Communists increasingly regretted the decision to dissolve their Party in 1965. In 1971 the Soviet embassy in Cairo, probably through the KGB residency, paid the relatively modest sum of 1,000 Egyptian pounds to a leading Egyptian Communist, codenamed SOYUZNIK (‘Ally’), to support left-wing candidates for the People’s Assembly.51 Moscow, however, remained anxious not to provoke Sadat by reviving the defunct Egyptian Communist Party and discouraged attempts to do so. In April 1972 the three main underground Marxist groups united and began producing critical reports on the current state of Egypt under the name Ahmad ‘Urabi al-Misri.52 SOYUZNIK and the other leaders of the newly unified underground movement secretly asked the Soviet embassy in Cairo to put them in contact with the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party. Moscow replied that the time was not yet ripe for setting up an open Marxist organization in Egypt. SOYUZNIK responded that the Soviet comrades plainly did not understand the real state of affairs in Egypt but that the new movement would none the less count on financial aid from fraternal Communist parties.53 Two years later the KGB began channelling money to SOYUZNIK via the Iraqi Communist Party.54
By the summer of 1972, Sadat had secretly decided to expel all Soviet military advisers. On 8 July he summoned the Soviet ambassador to see him. According to Vinogradov, ‘Sadat suddenly announced that our military advisers could return home, as they were “very tired”! I was absolutely furious. “Tired, Mr President!” I then challenged [him], “If you don’t need them any more, then say it more directly!” ’55 According to Sadat’s version of the same episode, he simply announced that he had ‘decided to dispense with the services of all Soviet military experts’, and ordered them to leave within a week.56 Moscow, however, still could not bring itself to sacrifice what remained of its hard-won position in Egypt by an open breach with Sadat. The Soviet leadership concluded that it had no choice but to continue political and military support for Egypt for fear that Sadat might otherwise throw in his lot with the United States. It therefore opted for a face-saving official statement which claimed improbably that, ‘After an exchange of views, the [two] sides decided to bring back the military personnel that had been sent to Egypt for a limited period.’ Relations with Egypt, the statement maintained, continued to be ‘founded on the solid basis of the Soviet-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation in the joint struggle for the elimination of the results of Israeli aggression’. After a brief interruption Soviet arms supplies to Egypt resumed. Sadat declared in April 1973, ‘The Russians are providing us now with everything that’s possible for them to supply. And I am now quite satisfied.’57
Sadat’s arrest of the pro-Soviet faction within the Egyptian leadership and the expulsion of Soviet advisers damaged the morale of the KGB agent network and complicated the work of the Cairo residency. Fearful of discovery, a number of Egyptian agents began to distance themselves from their case officers.58 In January 1973, as a security measure, the Centre ordered the residency to cease operations against Egyptian targets ‘from agent positions’.59 Its existing agents, however, though downgraded to ‘confidential contacts’, continued in some instances to provide significant intelligence on Sadat’s military planning.
Like Western intelligence agencies, the KGB was confused about Sadat’s intentions towards Israel. On twenty-two occasions in 1972- 73 Egyptian forces were mobilized for periods of four or five days, then sent home. In the spring of 1973 war appeared to be imminent and Israel mobilized its forces. On Andropov’s instructions, the FCD prepared a report on the crisis in the Middle East which was submitted to the Politburo on 7 May:
According to available information, steps are being taken in the Egyptian army to raise its battle readiness. To raise morale, Sadat and the top military leadership are going out to visit the troops. The General Staff of the Arab Republic of Egypt Armed Forces has drawn up an operational plan to force [cross] the Suez Canal.
Similar measures are being taken in Syria, whose leadership has taken a decision to prepare for aggressive military operations against Israel together with the Egyptian army.
The military intentions of Egypt and Syria are known, not only to the leading circles of other Arab countries, but also in the West, and in Israel.
According to available information, the Americans and the British are inclined to believe that the statements of Egyptian and Syrian leaders about the forthcoming confrontation with Israel are intended for internal consumption, but also aim to exert a certain psychological effect on Western countries and Israel. At the same time, they do not rule out the possibility that Sadat will carry out specific military operations.
Analysis of the available information indicates that the actions of Sadat with the support of [Colonel] Qaddafi [of Libya] and [President] Asad [of Syria] could lead to an uncontrolled chain of events in the Near East.
It is not impossible that with the aim of involving world opinion in the Near East problem and exerting pressure on the USSR and the USA, Sadat might opt to resume limited military operations on the eve of the forthcoming meeting between Comrade Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev and Nixon.60
It was of supreme importance that no Middle Eastern conflict interfere with Brezhnev’s visit to Washington in June. To Brezhnev, notorious for his love of pomp and circumstance, his reception on the immaculately groomed South Lawn of the White House was, according to Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, ‘the moment of his highest triumph. What could be greater than hi
s being placed on a footing equal to the American president . . . ?’61 ‘In order to influence Sadat in our favour’ and dissuade him from going to war with Israel, the KGB suggested sending a senior Soviet representative to hold talks with both him and Asad, as well as delaying the despatch to Egypt of missiles which the Soviet Union had agreed to supply. It also proposed using ‘unofficial channels’, in particular the head of the CIA station in Cairo, to persuade the Americans ‘that the resumption of military operations in the Near East at the present time would not be in the interests of either the Soviet Union or the USA’ and that they should bring pressure to bear on Israel.62
In the event, no conflict in the Middle East disturbed Brezhnev’s Washington apotheosis as a world leader. ‘Even the brilliant sunshine’, Dobrynin nostalgically recalled, ‘seemed to accentuate the importance of the event’: ‘The solemn ceremony, with both countries’ national anthems and a guard of honor, the leader of the Soviet Communist Party standing side by side with the American president for the whole world to see - all this was for the Soviet leadership the supreme act of recognition by the international community of their power and influence.’63
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