The war scare of May 1973 none the less served Sadat’s purpose. Even more than previous false alarms, it persuaded both the American and Israeli intelligence communities that his repeated mobilizations and threats of war were bluff. The simultaneous attack by Egyptian and Syrian forces on 6 October 1973, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, caught Israel as well as the United States off guard.64 The future DCI, Robert Gates, recalled that day as ‘my worst personal intelligence embarrassment’. While he was briefing a senior US arms negotiator on the improbability of conflict, the news of the outbreak of war was broadcast over the radio. Gates ‘slunk out of his office’. The KGB did very much better. Still conscious of having been caught out by the previous Arab-Israeli War six years earlier, it was able to provide advance warning to the Politburo before Yom Kippur - probably as a result of intelligence both from SIGINT and from penetrations of the Egyptian armed forces and intelligence community.65
After the humiliation of the six-day defeat in 1967, the early successes of the Yom Kippur War restored Arab pride and self-confidence. Militarily, however, though the war began well for Egypt and Syria, it ended badly with Israeli forces sixty miles from Cairo and twenty from Damascus. Sadat drew the conclusion that, because of its influence on Israel, only the United States could mediate a peace settlement. While Soviet influence declined, Henry Kissinger became the dominating figure in the peace process. Until his visit to the Middle East in November 1973 the globe-trotting Kissinger had never visited a single Arab state. Over the next two years of shuttle diplomacy he made eleven further visits and conducted four major rounds of negotiations. The Centre tried desperately to devise active measures to persuade Sadat that Kissinger would double-cross him. In operation IBIS, Service A in the FCD forged a despatch from the Swiss ambassador in Washington to his foreign ministry, reporting that he had been told by a Middle Eastern specialist in the State Department that the United States would not infringe any of Israel’s interests. The forgery was shown to Sadat late in 1973 but had no discernible influence on him.66
The Centre’s anxiety at its loss of Middle Eastern influence to the United States was reflected in instructions from Andropov to the FCD on 25 April 1974 to devise active measures to prevent any further worsening in Soviet-Arab relations, force anti-Soviet Arab politicians onto the defensive and undermine the influence of the West and China, which was currently increasing at Soviet expense.67 The Centre was particularly outraged by Sadat’s links with the CIA. It reported in October 1974 that the Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby, had visited Egypt as Sadat’s personal guest. The KGB set out to take revenge on the thirty-year-old Presidential Secretary for Foreign Relations, Ashraf Marwan (Nasser’s son-in-law), who it believed had overall charge of the Egyptian intelligence community and was responsible for liaison with the Agency.68 Section A devised an active-measures campaign which was designed to portray Marwan as a CIA agent. The Centre attached such importance to the campaign that in May 1975 it sent the head of the First (North American) Directorate, Vladimir Kazakov, to oversee final preparations for its implementation at the Cairo residency.69 Articles denouncing Marwan’s alleged links with the CIA were placed in Lebanese, Syrian and Libyan newspapers. 70 In the course of the KGB disinformation campaign against him, Marwan was accused of taking bribes and embezzling large sums of money given to Egypt by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for arms purchases. The Cairo residency also planted rumours that Marwan was having an affair with Sadat’s wife, Jihan, and reported that these had reached Sadat himself. Predictably, the KGB claimed the credit in 1976 when Sadat replaced Marwan as his Secretary for Foreign Relations. 71
Service A’s active measures against Sadat made much of his early enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler.72 Sadat himself acknowledged in his autobiography that, as a fourteen-year-old when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he had been inspired by the way the Führer set out to ‘rebuild his country’: ‘I gathered my friends and told them we ought to follow Hitler’s example by marching forth . . . to Cairo. They laughed and went away. ’73 During the Second World War Sadat was also a great admirer of Rommel’s campaign against the British in the Western Desert, and later established a museum in his memory at El-Alamein. As late as 1953 he said publicly that he admired Hitler ‘from the bottom of my heart’.74 The KGB claimed the credit for inspiring publications with titles such as ‘Anwar Sadat: From Fascism to Zionism’, which portrayed him as a former Nazi agent who had sold out to the CIA.75 Sadat’s control of the press meant that within Egypt active measures against him were mostly confined to spreading rumours and leaflets. In other Arab countries the KGB claimed to be able to inspire press articles denouncing Sadat as an accomplice in the attempts of both the United States and Israel to keep the occupied territories under Israeli control. Among the allegations fabricated by Service A was the claim that Sadat’s support had been purchased by secret accounts in his name in Jewish-controlled banks.76 Other Soviet-bloc intelligence agencies collaborated in the active-measures campaign. In an operation codenamed RAMZES, the Hungarian AVH forged a despatch to the State Department from the US ambassador in Cairo containing a psychological evaluation of Sadat which concluded that he was a drug addict who no longer had sexual relations with his wife and was exhibiting a marked deterioration in his mental faculties.77
Despite the priority given to active measures against Sadat in and beyond the Arab world during the years after the Yom Kippur War, the KGB remained extremely cautious about operations in Egypt itself. Its caution extended to the illegal Egyptian Communist Party which on May Day 1975 announced its rebirth in fraternal messages to other Communist parties around the world.78 Andropov instructed the Centre to inquire into the leadership and composition of the Party, then prepare jointly with the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee a proposal for giving it financial assistance. ‘Handing over money directly to the Egyptian Communist Party’, he added, ‘is dangerous for us because of the possibility of a leak.’ It was therefore decided to continue passing money to the Egyptian Communists via the Iraqi Party.79 Sadat’s introduction of a limited form of multi-party democracy in 1976 made it somewhat easier for leading members of the still-illegal Communist Party to campaign in public - and easier also for the KGB to maintain contact with them. Three opposition ‘platforms’ were allowed to contest the general election of that year - among them the left-wing National Progressive Unionist Party (NPUP)80 headed by the Communist leader, Khaled Mohieddin, to whom the KGB gave the codename LYUBOMIR. In 1976 the Cairo residency handed over to a Communist contact two sums of $50,000 (slightly more than 18,000 Egyptian pounds): one for the Communist Party, one for the NPUP election campaign.81
At a meeting with Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kulik, Kirpichenko’s successor as Cairo resident, and the leadership of the FCD Eighteenth (Arab States) Department in 1975, Andropov reaffirmed the ban on running Egyptian agents in Egypt itself. He also gave instructions that documents were not to be accepted from confidential contacts - probably for fear that KGB officers might be caught in the act of receiving them. There is little doubt that the Cairo residency was frustrated by the restrictions imposed on it. In May 1976 Vladimir Kryuchkov and N. A. Dushin, head of the KGB Third (Military Counter-Intelligence) Directorate, signed a joint submission to Andropov requesting permission to recruit a senior Egyptian military intelligence officer, codenamed GERALD. Andropov replied, ‘By order of the highest authority [Instantsii] it is forbidden to carry on agent work in the Arab Republic of Egypt.’ GERALD remained a confidential contact.82 FCD files noted by Mitrokhin contain a number of examples of former Egyptian agents, downgraded to confidential contacts, who broke contact with the Cairo residency - among them, in 1976, FEDOR, a colonel in the Egyptian army recruited in Odessa in 1972,83 and MURTARS, an employee of the Presidential Office recruited in Moscow in 1971.84 A Centre report in 1977 concluded that the Cairo residency had no sources in ‘most targets of penetration’. Later in the year it was discovered that KHASAN, an employee of the
Soviet Cultural Centre in Cairo whom the residency had used to channel disinformation to Egyptian intelligence, had in reality been operating under Egyptian control.85
Sadat’s unilateral denunciation of the Soviet-Egyptian Friendship Treaty in March 1976 caused little surprise but predictable indignation in the Centre. The FCD claimed that this indignation was more widely shared. It reported in November, probably with some exaggeration, ‘According to information from Egyptian business circles, the curtailment of relations with the USSR is creating dissatisfaction in a considerable section of the Egyptian bourgeoisie . . .’: ‘In an effort to lessen the dissatisfaction in the country with its biased policy towards the West, the Egyptian leadership is taking certain steps which are intended to give the impression that it is interested in the normalization of relations with the Soviet Union.’ However, the FCD quoted with approval the opinion of the former Egyptian Prime Minister, Aziz Sidqi (codenamed NAGIB, ‘Baron’): ‘The readiness of Sadat to seek a reconciliation with the USSR is a mere manoeuvre based on expediency.’ Sadat, the Centre believed, was bent on moving closer to the United States.86
Though the Centre sought to improve the appearance of its Middle Eastern reports by quoting from confidential conversations with prominent Egyptians, the intelligence access of the Cairo residency had diminished considerably since the early 1970s. One sign of its limitations was the fact that it was taken by surprise by the mass popular protests in January 1977 against the reduction of government subsidies on basic foodstuffs and cooking gas. 87 In two days of rioting 160 were killed and hundreds more wounded before the army restored order. Sadat’s government blamed the riots on an ‘odious criminal plot’ by ‘leftist plotters’. ‘Many Communist elements’, it charged, had infiltrated the NPUP and tried to use it to ‘overthrow the government and install a Communist regime’. Over a period of three months, 3,000 Egyptians were arrested and charged with ‘subversive conspiracy’.88 During the campaign against ‘leftist plotters’ a counsellor at the Soviet embassy, O. V. Kovtunovich, visited its main Communist contact in his office. Fearing that his office was bugged, the contact said little but wrote on a sheet of paper, ‘About 35 members of our organization have been arrested, and 17 are in hiding. The printing press of the organization has not been affected, nor have most of the district leaders of the organization. Assistance must be given to the families of those who have been arrested or are in hiding. We need urgent material assistance, amounting to 3,000 Egyptian pounds.’ Apparently afraid even to hand over the note in his office, the contact waited until Kovtunovich was leaving, then passed it to him in a corridor.89 Probably as a result of this and similar experiences, three Egyptian Communists were sent for counter-intelligence training in the Soviet Union to enable them to set up a Party security service.90 The Cairo residency’s main Communist contact sent his thanks to the Soviet leadership. Only their support, he told them, had kept the Party afloat during 1977.91
On 1 October 1977, the Soviet Union and the United States signed a joint statement on the need to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Moscow believed that it had recovered much of the diplomatic ground it had lost in the Middle East since the Yom Kippur War and at last secured US recognition of the Soviet role in peace negotiations. Almost immediately, however, according to an official history of Soviet foreign policy, ‘Under pressure from Israel, the [US] Carter Administration treacherously violated the agreement.’92 Only seven weeks after the agreement was signed, Sadat travelled to Jerusalem to begin a dialogue with the Israelis. His visit was one of the most stunning diplomatic coups de theâtre of modern times. As Sadat stepped off the plane at Tel Aviv airport on 20 November, an Israeli radio reporter gasped over the air, ‘President Sadat is now inspecting a guard of honour of the Israeli Defence Force. I’m seeing it, but I don’t believe it!’ The former Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, said of Sadat and the current Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, at the end of the visit, ‘Never mind the Nobel Peace Prize [which Sadat and Begin were to be awarded a year later]. Give them both Oscars!’
With its habitual tendency to conspiracy theory, never more marked than in its attitude to Zionism and the Jewish lobby in the United States, the Centre interpreted Sadat’s visit less as a piece of theatre than as a deep-laid plot. Sadat, it believed, had arranged the trip with the Americans, who had known that it was imminent even when treacherously signing the agreement with the Soviet Union. The ‘Framework for Peace in the Middle East’ signed by Sadat, Begin and Carter at Camp David in September 1978 was instantly denounced by Pravda as ‘a sell-out transacted behind the back of the Arab nation, one which serves the interests of Israel, America, imperialism and the Arab reactionaries’. The Centre believed that Carter and the CIA had lured Sadat into an American-Zionist plot intended to oust Soviet influence from the Middle East. It responded with an intensified active-measures campaign accusing Sadat of being a CIA agent with a villa in Montreux waiting for him with round-the-clock Agency protection when he was finally forced to flee from the wrath of the Arab nation he had betrayed.93
In March 1979 Sadat returned to the United States to sign a peace treaty with Israel in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House attended by distinguished guests and television reporters from around the world. As after the Camp David agreement six months earlier, Sadat was welcomed on his return to Cairo by huge enthusiastic crowds convinced that they were witnessing the dawn of a new era of peace and prosperity. There were authenticated reports of Egyptian taxi drivers offering free rides to Israeli visitors. Initially the opposition of the NPUP leadership to Camp David caused resentment even among some of its own rank and file. In much of the Arab world, however, Sadat was treated as a pariah who had sold out to Israel. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League, which moved its headquarters from Cairo to Tunis. Perhaps as many as 2 million Egyptians working in other Arab countries were sent home. Within Egypt, as the new era of prosperity failed to arrive, euphoria gave way to disillusion.94 Though an Israeli- Egyptian peace treaty was signed in March 1979, the plans made at Camp David for a broader settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict came to nothing. Sadat’s opponents accused him of having betrayed the Palestinian people and reinforced Israeli control of the occupied territories.
The Cairo residency claimed that during 1979, thanks to its Communist contacts, it had been able to inspire press articles, public meetings and questions in the People’s Assembly.95 The trials in 1978-79 of those accused of complicity in the ‘conspiracy’ of January 1977 offered the NPUP a platform for attacks on the Sadat regime which it would not otherwise have been able to voice publicly. Mohieddin announced that the NPUP constituted ‘a democratic committee for the defence of liberties, including lawyers who were non-party members, coming together around the principle of providing all the guarantees of legal defence to those imprisoned for their opinions and supporting their families’. The evidence against most of those arrested was too flimsy even for them to be brought to trial. In most other cases, defendants were found not guilty or received lenient sentences. There were only twenty jail sentences, none longer than three years. Mohieddin himself successfully sued the pro-government press when he was accused of unpatriotic behaviour because of his opposition to Sadat’s peace policy with Israel, and was awarded damages of 20,000 Egyptian pounds.96
As well as receiving at least $100,000 a year for the Egyptian Communist Party, the Cairo residency’s main Communist contact also requested - and probably received - a similar annual sum for the NPUP .97 One of its leaders privately acknowledged in 1978 that, without $100,000 a year from Moscow, the NPUP ‘was in danger of falling apart. The fate of the left-wing movement in Egypt depended on this money.’98 The Centre had grandiose plans for the formation of an ‘anti-Sadat front’, based on the NPUP, which, it believed, would organize popular opposition to his ‘pro-imperialist’ policies.99 Its plans, however, achieved nothing of significance. Despite tactical successes, the NPUP was incapable of mobilizing mass support. At the elect
ions to the People’s Assembly in 1983 it gained only 4 per cent of the vote.100
Probably no other Third World leader inspired as much loathing in Moscow as Sadat. While stationed at the Centre at the end of the 1970s, Oleg Gordievsky heard a number of outraged KGB officers say that he should be bumped off. Though there is no evidence that the Centre was ever implicated in such a plot, it was aware that some of its contacts were. In December 1977 it received information that a secret meeting in Damascus between leaders of Syrian intelligence and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had discussed plans for assassinating both Sadat and Ashraf Marwan.101 On 6 October 1981, the anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Sadat was assassinated by fundamentalist fanatics while reviewing a military parade. Though there is no indication in files noted by Mitrokhin that the KGB had advance warning of the assassination plot, the news that it had succeeded was greeted with jubilation in the Centre102 - and doubtless in the Kremlin.
Almost a decade after Sadat’s death, Gromyko could still barely contain his hatred of him: ‘He has been called the “Egyptian darkness”, after the biggest dust cloud in human history which settled on Egypt 3,500 years ago when the volcanic island of Santorini erupted . . . All his life he had suffered from megalomania, but this acquired pathological proportions when he became President.’103 Underlying Gromyko’s cry of rage was his consciousness that the Sadat era had witnessed the complete failure of Soviet policy in Egypt and the loss of the largest military, economic and political investment Moscow had made in any Third World country - extending to the unprecedented lengths of approving in 1965 the dissolution of the Egyptian Communist Party. But the political system which had made it possible for Sadat to carry out what he termed the ‘corrective revolution’ of the early 1970s and remove the pro-Soviet group from positions of power had been put in place by Hero of the Soviet Union Gamal Abdel Nasser. The presidential system developed by Nasser was a thinly disguised structure of personal rule which survived virtually intact into the twenty-first century. The main effect of the supposedly democratic reforms introduced by Sadat and by his successor, former Vice-President Hosni Mubarak, was to reinforce the clientelism on which presidential rule was based. Even the NPUP, on which in the early 1980s Moscow had pinned its hopes for a return to the Soviet-Egyptian alliance, eventually succumbed to the clientelism of the Mubarak regime. The NPUP’s move from confrontation to co-operation was epitomized in 1995 by Mubarak’s appointment of one of its leaders, Rifa‘at al-Sa‘id, to the Consultative (Shura) Council. ‘It was’, declared Sa‘id, ‘crazy to isolate ourselves from the system of which we are part.’104
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