Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  It was the holiest night of Ramadan, the night when the archangel Gabriel is said to have delivered the Quran to the Prophet Mohamed. Muslims celebrate it as Laylat al Qadr—the Night of Power. Morsi gave a sermonlike speech at Al Azhar and reveled in his victory.

  “We go on to new horizons,” he said, “with new generations, with new blood that we have long awaited.”

  No one in Washington had seen it coming, and a wave of anxiety swept the Pentagon. Some feared that Sisi was a closet Islamist. “There were worries that he was too close to Morsi,” Derek Chollet, an assistant to the secretary of defense, wrote in a memoir. “Everyone was very suspicious of him,” Chollet told me. The Pentagon, at least, still hoped Egypt’s defense minister might check its president rather than report to him.

  Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates rang more alarms. “Morsi never got it together with the Gulfies and the Israelis,” as Chollet said, putting it mildly.

  But Ambassador Patterson knew Sisi, and she sent Washington a different warning. He was ambitious, calculating, and ruthless, she wrote. “Morsi may have bitten off more than he can chew.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A few days later, I received a phone call from the same skinny bureaucrat who had welcomed me to Cairo. He was still in his job, and he was calling—as cheerful as ever—on behalf of President Morsi.

  The president would be traveling to New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Would the New York Times like an interview before the trip? Steven Erlanger, one of the paper’s most seasoned correspondents, flew in to join me.

  We met in the Ittihadiya Palace—the Unity Palace. It had been built before the First World War as a luxury hotel, designed by a Belgian architect in a combination of neo-Islamic style and Louis XIV decor. Abdel Nasser had commandeered it, and Mubarak kept it. Now Morsi, in a dark suit and a rep tie, met us in Mubarak’s old office. The new president had changed almost nothing. Oil paintings of sailboats still adorned the walls. The only change was the addition of a small plaque on the gilded writing desk. The engraving was a verse from the Quran: “Be mindful of a day on which you will return to God.”

  Our conversation took place a few days after September 11, 2012. Vandals had hoisted a black jihadi flag over the U.S. embassy in Cairo during a demonstration against an American-made movie deriding the Prophet Mohamed, and their exploit in Cairo catalyzed a deadly assault the same night on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya.

  Morsi had flown to Brussels that night for a meeting with the European Union. I later learned that he had videotaped a statement about the attack from the steps of his plane at the Cairo airport. He condemned the attack and pledged to secure all foreign embassies, then took off for Europe expecting the message to be broadcast on state television.

  The presidential camera crew—Mubarak holdovers—had bungled the filming and failed to record his statement. Morsi did not find out until he landed the next morning. It might have been incompetence or sabotage on the part of the camera crew; that question came up often in the Morsi administration. Either way, the result was that Morsi had been strangely silent the night of the attack. He was determined to hide the screwup.

  After the small talk about USC, I asked about that night: Why did he say nothing? “We needed to contain the situation and deal with it wisely,” Morsi said. “At no point was anybody in the embassy under any threat.”

  Obama had recently been asked in an interview whether he considered Egypt under Morsi to be an American ally. “I don’t think we would consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy,” Obama said, dodging the question. “A new government that is trying to find its way.”

  So we asked Morsi: Did he consider the United States an ally? “That depends on the definition of ‘ally,’” he said, chuckling. “I am trying now, seriously, to look to the future and see that we are real friends.”

  The New York Times posted an audio recording of the interview on the internet, and the satirist Bassem Youssef—the self-described Jon Stewart of Egypt—replayed that answer on television as a punch line. The Islamist president was “real friends” with Washington.

  I most wanted to know how Morsi had persuaded the generals to let him take real power. How did he remove Field Marshal Tantawi?

  Wael Haddara had stepped in for the incompetent official interpreter, and he translated the answer: “The role of the armed forces is not a political role. Their role is to protect the borders and the institution of the state, and that is exactly what they decided to do.”

  “No,” Morsi corrected, in English, “no, it is not what they decided to do.”

  Haddara tried again. “And that is what happened on August 12, the armed forces assumed their role . . .”

  “No,” Morsi interrupted again. They had not merely given up power; he had taken it, he insisted. “This is the will of the Egyptians through their elected president, right?

  “And the armed forces are feeling very well,” he continued. “The armed forces as a whole are living at peace with themselves. The president of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the commander of the armed forces. Khalas.” That’s it.

  “Egypt is now a real civic state. It is not theocratic. It is not military. It is a civic state, democratic, free, constitutional, lawful, modern,” he said, still speaking emphatic English. “We are behaving according to the people’s choices and will. Is this clear?”

  I was dumbstruck. I knew the politician’s playbook: thank the departing official (Tantawi) for his service, nod to his desire for time with family, and maybe call his retirement a mutual decision in the public interest. Was Morsi so confident that he could toss out the script? Or so insecure that he needed to boast?

  We stood up to go. Morsi was almost swaggering now. “We are talking now about seventy percent popularity. That is what is going on! That is what they are telling me!” I saw his press aides wince and try to cut him off. Two rookie mistakes: admitting that he paid attention to his internal polls, then bragging about them.

  Shaking hands to say goodbye, Erlanger gently touched Morsi’s shoulder, fifty-nine-year-old journalist to sixty-one-year-old president. “You have a stressful job,” he said. “Take care of your health.”

  I later learned that in Morsi’s inner circle, the remark set off an uproar. Did these American journalists know about a danger to the president’s life? Were they working with American intelligence? Could this be a threat?

  13

  A Day in Court

  July 4, 2012–September 11, 2012

  Even in the honking congestion of Ramses Street in downtown Cairo, the towering Italianate columns of Egypt’s high court are impossible to miss. The double high doors were built to awe, and I felt it. But inside was bedlam.

  People swirled like sand in a windstorm through the cavernous, dimly lit lobby. Men in the long black robes of lawyers and judges stepped briskly over families squatting on the stone floor surrounded by plastic containers of kushari and by a miscellaneous litter of plastic spoons, paper cups, and burned-out cigarettes. Some of the people looked like they had been camped there for days. Small men in grimy smocks hustled up to me selling sugary tea or Turkish coffee from dented metal trays. The air smelled heavily of smoke and, I thought, faintly of urine. I shuddered to think what the bathroom might be like—a question that would grow more pressing for me throughout that day.

  My journey into the labyrinth of the Egyptian court system had begun with a newspaper article published a month and a half earlier, on July 4, 2012. I had quoted Judge Tahani el-Gebali of the Supreme Constitutional Court. She had described her advice to the generals about the danger of Islamists winning at the polls and, thus, about the wisdom of dissolving the Parliament.

  Maybe Gebali had later thought better of a sitting judge bragging to a journalist about the political goals behind a court decision. Perhaps she had objected
to my portrayal of the military council’s shutdown of Parliament as a seizure of power. On the morning that the article was published, she had immediately called Mayy el-Sheikh to demand the audio recording of our interview at the court. Mayy said that we had only two sets of written notes, and Gebali’s next call was to a television talk show. She publicly denied that she had ever spoken to us. She called the New York Times a hostile and offensive newspaper “under the control of the Zionist lobby.”

  She did not claim she was misquoted. She insisted that we had never spoken. “There was no interview at all and no statements. These statements are all made up. It is all lies and incorrect,” she said in a phone interview broadcast on the talk show, “and they will pay a high price.

  “I am being targeted. I am not accustomed to being blackmailed by anyone. I will sue the New York Times and demand compensation and it will be big,” Gebali continued. She would collect $10 million from the Times, she announced, and give it to “the martyrs of this great revolution.”

  And why would the Times target her? The Central Intelligence Agency, she said, was punishing her for calling out Hillary Clinton’s support for Morsi.

  Gebali’s complaint arrived at my office the next day, and it noted the special status of the plaintiff, “Her Excellency Judge Tahani el-Gebali, the first female Egyptian judge” and justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court. Our article was “the work of the writer’s imagination, without regard to professional accuracy or journalistic ethics,” the complaint said, asking “the harshest possible sentence for all those who dare to fabricate such things.” In Egypt, that meant years in jail.

  Few lawyers in Cairo were brave enough to face off against a sitting judge on the Supreme Constitutional Court. I was advised to find a lawyer with connections, but it was hard to know whose favors mattered most—the Muslim Brothers or the military council? In July 2012, the court and the generals had the upper hand over Morsi. No one knew yet who would come out on top.

  Gebali’s lawyer, Khaled Abu Bakr, was known for human rights cases, and he phoned me directly. “Really, I support you,” he told me at the start, and I suspected he was trying to entrap me. “I really like your work,” he continued in English. “I do not want to sue you.

  “I said to Tahani el-Gebali, Why did you say those things? and she denied everything. Then I talked to your assistant”—Mayy el-Sheikh—“and she swore that Judge Gebali did say those things. So I don’t know what to think.”

  Was he more concerned about the opinion of the news media than he was about Gebali? It was not a trick. Days later, he dropped her as a client.

  The New York Times engaged the go-to lawyer for Egyptian news organizations in their libel cases—Negad el-Borai. He handled human rights cases, too, and he was rumored to have nurtured contacts in the intelligence services. (Those were the most valuable connections, if he was not trading information.)

  “Don’t worry,” he told me when I met him in his office. “This is a political case. It is not about the law.”

  Islamists were gleefully using our article to portray Gebali as the face of the conspiracy against them. But she had often expressed similar sentiments in the Egyptian news media. Thankfully, we had brought a photographer, Tomás Munita, to the interview in her chambers. On Borai’s advice, we sent Gebali a date-stamped digital photograph as proof of the interview.

  She dropped all her claims. Mayy and I sighed with relief. Then an Islamist lawmaker from the dissolved Parliament sued Gebali. The Islamist, Mohamed el-Omda, said our article proved that the judges had conspired with the generals against democracy. So in rebuttal, Gebali filed a new suit against Mayy and me. This time Gebali no longer disputed anything we had written. She asked the prosecutors to jail us for insulting a judge.

  “Don’t worry,” Mayy assured me by email. “It seems it is part of the job.”

  The prosecutors summoned Mayy and me for questioning on September 11, 2012, a long day. The generals had stepped back, Sisi had replaced Tantawi, and Morsi was ascendant. More Islamists had filed legal complaints on the basis of our article. But our lawyer warned us that the prosecutors were still loyal to Gebali. Expect them to try to discredit us to defend her.

  The same courthouse handled most criminal charges or legal disputes in Cairo. The vast tomb of a building included Egypt’s highest appellate court, the office of the chief public prosecutor, and the syndicate for lawyers. Disputes here had dragged on for decades. Of course, the worst that might befall me was probably expulsion from Egypt. The general counsel of the New York Times had called the State Department on my behalf. The American consulate sent an observer. But Mayy el-Sheikh, an Egyptian, was not going anywhere. Our lawyer thought the prosecutors might pin it all on her, blaming her for some mistranslation of Gebali. Protecting Mayy was our special concern.

  Our lawyer led us through a maze of hallways to the narrow and windowless office of the prosecutor assigned to our case. Two fat men were waiting at each end of the room. One was the prosecutor, and the other one was the Islamist lawmaker who had summoned us here. He smiled at me, patted my back, and called me a hero. I was mortified. I could see the prosecutor scowling.

  The rules of procedure terrified me. Egyptian courts did not use electronic recording machines or even typewriters. A skinny young man sat at a small desk next to the fat prosecutor, writing fast in an enormous white notebook that must have been eighteen inches tall.

  The prosecutor questioned me in Arabic. But when an interpreter conveyed my answer, the prosecutor very briefly summarized whatever I had said in a few of his own words, in Arabic, and those few words—the prosecutor’s short summation of my testimony—were all the scrivener wrote down in the transcript. It hardly mattered what I actually said.

  I had a lot to say. What, exactly, was Judge Gebali complaining about? She had never named any inaccuracies in the article. And what crime did the Islamists think she had committed? When I showed emotion, the prosecutor threatened to charge me with contempt—another jailable offense—for disrespecting him. Every time I crossed my legs, the prosecutor stopped the proceedings to tell me to uncross them. Mayy whispered to me that some in the Arab world considered leg crossing an insult. The day was dragging on. I badly needed the bathroom, and I was afraid to excuse myself.

  The prosecutor, who spoke no English, was making his way through our 1,450-word article sentence by sentence, and after each one he asked me if Judge Gebali had said it. I tried to explain that only the words in quotation marks were her verbatim statements. It was a newspaper article, not a speech or transcript.

  Was I admitting that she had not said those things? the prosecutor wanted to know.

  He kept stepping out of the room for long stretches. Our lawyer thought that he might be consulting his superiors. He was caught between the new president, the Supreme Constitutional Court, the American embassy, and the international media. I suspected the real question was about who was in power; facts about guilt or innocence—mine or Judge Gebali’s—were much less important.

  Five o’clock came and went. “Your excellency,” Negad el-Borai offered at last, perhaps we could consider the nature of this article? Egyptian newspapers favored interviews in a Q and A form, Borai noted, but Western papers like the New York Times published what he called “analysis,” mixing verbatim quotes with the words of a journalist.

  All the Egyptian papers had reported on our article in Arabic, and their translations were at best imprecise, especially about the quotation marks. Perhaps Judge Gebali and the Islamist plaintiffs had both read some of those translations? None of them read English. Maybe this was all a misunderstanding, the fault of poor translations by Egyptian newspapers.

  The prosecutor jumped at it. He agreed to assemble a panel of academic experts in journalism, and a few weeks later our case was dismissed. Negad el-Borai had found the prosecutor a retreat with honor.

  14

  Pres
ident and Mrs. Morsi

  November 19, 2012–November 22, 2012

  Naglaa Ali Mahmoud was surely as surprised as anyone to find herself, at the age of fifty, the First Lady of Egypt. Raised in a poor family in the Cairo neighborhood of Ain Shams, she was married at the age of sixteen to a cousin ten years her elder. She followed her new husband to Los Angeles. She volunteered at the Muslim Student House at the University of Southern California, translating sermons for women interested in converting to Islam. And she knew what she was doing when she joined the Muslim Brotherhood there with her husband, she told the organization’s newspaper.

  “The Brothers don’t blindfold anyone,” she said. “They told us that the path is long and full of dangers.”

  California suited her; she did not want to move back to Egypt. But she had given birth to a son and a daughter—the first two of five children—and her husband wanted them to grow up Egyptian. Naglaa was independent: she managed the household alone for four years while her husband taught in Libya to earn extra money. (Such temporary migrations to oil-rich neighbors are common for Egyptians.) His earnings enabled the couple to buy a modest apartment and a Mitsubishi Lancer.