Handmade banners welcomed the army, and the soldiers hung their own, distancing themselves from the police. THE ARMED FORCES SHARE THE GRIEF OF THE PEOPLE FOR THE MARTYRS OF PORT SAID one read. The generals of the military council seemed to stand farther from the police than Morsi did.
The general in Port Said, Ahmed Wasfi, set civilian volunteers to work on a cleanup. “I want Port Said to look as beautiful as a bride tonight,” he said to applause. “Shops must not close. People and weddings must come back. The normal work must return. People must see what Port Said is.”
Mayy and I returned to Port Said in time for the March 9 ruling in the riot case, and the same Cairo court confirmed the original death penalties, sentencing two dozen others to jail. But this time the police had fled in advance, slipping off their uniforms and abandoning their stations. We found only a single policeman, Lieutenant Mohamed Gamal, hiding in civilian clothes inside his empty station.
“We are tired of confronting the people,” he told us.
Soldiers watched passively as rioters burned tires near the empty port, and then, to my amazement, civilians linked hands to protect the soldiers from angry citizens. “The army and the people are one hand,” they chanted.
“We are asking for a coup d’état!” one woman, Fatma el-Nabawy, a forty-year-old homemaker, told us. Others around her nodded.
“Military rule was bad, but they would be better,” fifty-year-old Ahmed Abdel Fattah agreed. “Where is the state? Where is the Interior Ministry, the government?” He added, “The military should take over until the police are ready.”
In Port Said, a military coup had already happened.
18
The View from the West
March 12, 2013–April 24, 2013
Not long after Morsi’s inauguration, in the summer of 2012, Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba of the United Arab Emirates met Ben Rhodes over lunch at Founding Farmers, a trendy restaurant not far from the State Department.
Otaiba was the son of a rich and well-connected businessman who served as the first oil minister of the United Arab Emirates. His father had four wives and numerous children, and Yousef’s mother was an Egyptian who had raised him in Cairo. He was born in Egypt. He married an Egyptian. He often said that he understood Egyptians in a way that Americans or Europeans never could.
Otaiba looked and sounded American. He had attended the American high school in Egypt, in Maadi, and while there he attracted the mentorship of then U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Frank Wisner. Wisner encouraged Otaiba on to Georgetown. The UAE later sent him back to the National Defense University. Then he received further tutoring in the ways of Washington from Steven Simon of Obama’s National Security Council staff; Simon had worked for a consulting company training Emirati officials during a break in his government service.
At thirty-eight, Otaiba shaved his beard and his head, worked out every day at the gym, and favored impeccable suits (although he sometimes pulled out a white thobe to look Emirati). He lived in a mansion on the Virginia banks of the Potomac, hired Wolfgang Puck to cook for his dinner parties, and maintained a legendary wine collection. “Bro-taiba,” many in Washington called him, for his one-of-the-boys style.
Among foreign ambassadors in Washington, his connections were almost unrivaled. General Mattis would later call Otaiba “a friend and tremendous ally through some very difficult times.” Michael Morrell, the acting CIA director, was close enough to Otaiba to casually stop by his mansion for a glass of wine from time to time. Richard Burr, the Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, once told the Huffington Post, “I’ve spent probably more time with Yousef than I have anybody.”
Otaiba pushed the UAE’s spending on Washington lobbying higher than any other country’s, to as much as $14 million a year. He donated to think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Middle East Institute. He advertised heavily in influential venues like Foreign Policy magazine or Politico newsletters. He splashed money around high-profile charities, including giving $150 million for a pediatric surgery wing at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington and $3 million to the Clinton Foundation. A party he hosted for a New York cancer institute featured performances by Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, and Ludacris.
It was an open secret in Washington that an anonymous “Arab source” or “Arab diplomat” in a newspaper or magazine was almost always Otaiba (although he never agreed to speak to me). He and his Saudi counterpart, Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir—another suave and generous man-about-town—were singular fixtures in Washington who transcended the roles of mere envoys. “Adel was always one of my best advisers,” General Mattis once said. And Otaiba, in particular, was one of the few foreign ambassadors invited to confidential meetings deep inside the Pentagon to discuss strategy in the region.
Ben Rhodes marveled at their effectiveness. “Youssef and Adel have gained this status in Washington where they aren’t seen as representatives of foreign governments; they are seen as advisers on Middle East issues,” he later told me. “They have a style that is very disarming, like they are telling you something you really need to know, for your own benefit.”
Otaiba may have been the most energetic opponent in Washington of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. The UAE and Saudi Arabia had fiercely opposed both the Arab Spring uprisings and the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement had adherents in both countries, and its idea that Islam could require elections was a unique threat to the Persian Gulf monarchies. With the help of Jubeir, Otaiba was pushing the line that the United States had betrayed its allies by forcing out Mubarak.
Otaiba argued to Rhodes that the Muslim Brotherhood was inherently antidemocratic, no matter what its leaders said and no matter how many elections they won. Its pan-Islamic ideology left no room for nation-states or borders. It posed an existential threat to the UAE and every other American ally in the region. Its rejection should be the bedrock of Washington’s policy toward Egypt. You don’t know these people, he insisted.
Maybe, Rhodes told him. But Egyptian voters could elect a new Parliament and throw out Morsi and the Muslim Brothers at the end of his term.
“I don’t think they will even last that long,” Otaiba predicted.
By April 2013, the Emirati-based satellite network Sky News Arabia, Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya, and other Emirati-linked Egyptian media were all railing against a supposed American plot to bring the Brotherhood to power, with Ambassador Patterson as its ringleader. The Gulf-based satellite networks were full of accusations that she was a Brotherhood “lackey,” “an old hag,” or “an ogre.” They claimed that she had pressured the Egyptian government to rig the election for Morsi and then pushed its institutions to bow down before him—all in the service of the larger American plot to weaken Egypt. It was a conspiracy to benefit Israel, of course.
“They essentially ran a plan to denigrate any nonmilitary Egyptian government, denigrate our ambassador, and denigrate our policy,” Rhodes told me later. “Allies of the United States funded a denigration campaign against the United States ambassador in a country that is one of the largest recipients of U.S. assistance, to overturn the democratically elected government of that country. It was extraordinary, really. . . . Constant, incessant, and effective.”
Patterson knew Morsi was politically inept, awkward in meetings, hopeless as an orator, and ill equipped for power. But, like Obama, she saw an elected president (Morsi) as the best chance for long-term stability: a more responsive government based on the nonviolent rotation of power. In a meeting at the presidential palace in March, Patterson warned two of Morsi’s foreign policy advisers that Mohammed bin Zayed of the Emirates—MBZ—was spearheading a campaign to lobby for a military takeover to remove Morsi. “But that is an era that has passed,” she told them. Senior American diplomats in Cairo told Western journalists in a background briefing the same month, March, that a military intervention was “extraordinarily
unlikely.”
The continual conversations between Egyptian and American military officers, though, were fast becoming mutual “bitch sessions” about the Morsi government, as several of the Americans involved later told me.
General Mattis of Central Command—who still believed that the Brotherhood and Al Qaeda were “swimming in the same sea”—had flown to Cairo in February to meet with Sisi and underscore Washington’s commitment to the Egyptian military alliance.
Mattis later explained his view of the crisis in Egypt in the spring of 2013 to an audience of journalists, intellectuals, and policy makers in Aspen, Colorado: “What happened was Morsi.”
Morsi had fomented “divisiveness,” Mattis said, and he claimed, incorrectly, that the 2012 constitution that Morsi backed had been “rejected immediately by over sixty percent of the people. [In fact, about two thirds of the voters had approved it.] We have a people there who are not very patient with imperious leadership. . . . The Muslim Brotherhood made their own problems.”
General Michael Flynn was the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency that spring, and he was as outspoken as Mattis about his conviction that the Brotherhood was, in effect, Al Qaeda. (Obama later fired Flynn over his management of the agency, and he earned notoriety in a brief tenure as national security adviser to President Donald J. Trump, alongside Mattis as secretary of defense.) “It is all the same ideology,” Flynn told me when I met him in 2016.
Flynn had publicly called Islam “a cancer” and “a political ideology” rather than a religion. The only ornament in his Arlington, Virginia, office in mid-2016 was a foot-high wooden cross on his desk that looked useful for fighting vampires, and he warned me gravely that Muslim Brothers had infiltrated Washington. Both President Obama and Ambassador Patterson, he suggested to me, were dangerously close to the Islamists.
“I would ask the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood today—whoever that person is and wherever that person is—why don’t you disavow the Islamic State and these attacks? And if they do disavow these radical ideas, where are they and why aren’t they saying it?”
I was stunned at his misinformation. For all its faults, the Muslim Brotherhood had consistently and loudly condemned terrorist violence for decades; Al Qaeda and the Islamic State never tired of excoriating the Brotherhood for the naïvete of its faith in elections.
Flynn had been an intelligence officer in Central Command and worked closely with General Sisi. “I had an excellent relationship with Sisi,” Flynn said. “I found Sisi to be, one, a very good guy; two, a strong leader; and three, very secular, if you will.”
By 2013, Flynn was also bonding with Sisi’s successor as chief of military intelligence, General Mahmoud Hegazy (the one who was related to Sisi through the marriage of their children). Hegazy “was a tough guy, another secular-type Muslim, very effective,” Flynn said. He talked at least once a week with Egypt’s military attaché in Washington, General Mohamed el-Keshky, who was close to both Sisi and Hegazy (I later knew Keshky as assistant minister of defense in Cairo, where he once half-jokingly threatened to have me and Mayy arrested for our reporting).
When Flynn returned to Cairo that spring, the Egyptian generals welcomed him as an old friend, organizing a “cultural day” for him to visit the Pyramids. At lunch, Flynn and his Egyptian counterpart scrawled out a map of the Islamist threats they saw around Egypt.
Flynn told me that he had foreseen only trouble from Morsi. “I thought that what we were going to see was a takeover of the country by the Muslim Brotherhood,” creating “a radical Islamic state in Egypt.” He said that he had left his meeting with the Egyptian generals convinced that the Muslim Brotherhood was taking over the Interior Ministry. After that, “in a country like Egypt, it is very hard to get them out, because then they have their hands in every part of the government.”
All this was a fantasy, of course. But what did Flynn advise the Egyptian generals to do about the problem of Mohamed Morsi?
Flynn sidestepped, saying only that he had sought information. “Was the Muslim Brotherhood going to last? Were they consolidating? What other things were they doing in other facets of their government? What was the military doing? How was the military responding?”
I asked again what he advised them. “I have to be cautious here,” Flynn said, more slowly. “I will just say that tensions existed.”
The splits within the American government were becoming obvious to diplomats and soldiers around the region. Obama and part of the White House hoped Morsi would succeed; many in the Pentagon, like Mattis and Flynn, agreed with their Egyptian and Emirati counterparts that Morsi was a danger. The American schizophrenia was so open that Egyptian generals complained about it to their Pentagon contacts.
“It was very clear to the Egyptians that we had a divided policy and we would hear it from them,” Matt Spence, then deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy, later told me. “We were hearing from our Egyptian interlocutors that they were frustrated with the White House and the State Department, and the Egyptians would call them out by name.”
But he was stunned when I told him that Flynn had also been visiting Cairo and meeting with the generals. “There were a lot of actors and agencies in the U.S. government talking to the Egyptians in ways we were not even aware of,” Spence said, shaking his head.
* * *
• • •
John Kerry arrived in Cairo for his first visit as secretary of state on March 2, at what appears to have been a turning point.
Kerry prided himself on friendships around the Middle East that he had built up over his years in the Senate. In Egypt, he was especially close with ElBaradei, often visiting his house in Giza, and with Amr Moussa, the former foreign minister and presidential candidate who had also become a leader of the alliance against Morsi. And the new secretary of state had socialized for years with the diplomats and princes of the Persian Gulf monarchies, including Ambassador Otaiba and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. “I am friends with the whole gang,” Kerry told me later in a conversation in the parlor of his Beacon Hill mansion in Boston. “I like my relationship with them and I think they are very smart.”
Kerry had come to Cairo to push Morsi toward economic reforms like cutting back food and fuel subsidies and reducing the bloated public payroll. (One reason for the shortages, hoarding, and black market in fuel was that the government subsidized the official price so heavily that I could fill up our SUV for less than twelve dollars, while nine out of ten Egyptians could not afford a car.) The cuts were all part of a proposed deal for a badly needed $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund.
Slashing jobs and subsidies looked to Morsi like political suicide, with so much unrest in the streets and no Parliament to share responsibility. After Mubarak’s ouster, the Muslim Brotherhood had hired the prize-winning Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto as a consultant, and he had told the Brothers that Egypt could grow by regularizing more of its vast off-the-books informal economy. But Kerry could not understand why Morsi kept talking about Egypt’s “two economies” as if he did not grasp the severity of the problems.
“He is the dumbest cluck I ever met,” Kerry told his chief of staff as they left Morsi’s office. “This isn’t going to work. These guys are wacko.”
Morsi and the Brotherhood had “started to strip away the veneer of democracy,” Kerry told me later, mentioning Morsi’s Thanksgiving decree. “That is where we just said, ‘This stinks, these guys aren’t doing anything constructive and ultimately they are going to be antidemocratic.’”
Morsi, for his part, was put off that Kerry wanted him to meet with his friend Tim Collins, a billionaire who ran the private equity firm Ripplewood Holdings and did extensive business with the Emiratis. Kerry suggested that Collins could give economic advice and bring in investments. Morsi thought that sounded like Mubarak-style crony capitalism. He had a foreign polic
y adviser take the meeting.
Then Kerry met separately, one on one, with General Sisi. He sounded deeply worried.
“I will not let my country go down the drain,” Sisi told Kerry.
“What do you mean?” Kerry asked.
“Just take my word,” Sisi replied.
“This is a dangerous time,” Kerry told Sisi, without pressing further.
He knew then that “Morsi was cooked,” as Kerry later told me: Sisi was prepared to intervene. And Kerry felt partly relieved.
“It was reassuring that Egypt would not fall into a civil war or a complete massacre of the public or an implosion,” he said. “But it was worrisome in terms of how things were going to unfold. I did not sit back and think, ‘Great, our problems are going to be solved.’”
Sisi later recounted in a public speech that he had met in March with a senior American official visiting Cairo—presumably Kerry. “He said to me, ‘Please, they say you know the reality here, what would you advise?’” Sisi recalled.
“The time is up” for Morsi, Sisi said he had responded. “I have no more advice for you.”
When Kerry returned to Washington, he testified on Capitol Hill and his prognosis was grim. Morsi was leaning away from “inclusion” and instead seeking “to consolidate and to leave people out,” Kerry said. “It’s a question mark whether they’re going to make the right choices, and I can’t frame it any other way.” But he called the nearly $80 billion in United States aid to the Egyptian military over the previous decades “the best investment America has made for years in that region.”
British Ambassador James Watt had been an early optimist about Morsi, impressed by the competence of his cabinet. But Watt was close to many in the Egyptian elite hostile to Morsi, including the anti-Islamist political leaders Ahmed Said and Amr Moussa. By the spring of 2013, Watt’s Egyptian friends and staff had changed his opinion. He began describing the Muslim Brothers as corrupt, dangerous, and even deranged. “They were in fairy land,” he told a friend. Watt met with Morsi’s advisers for the last time that April. The conversation degenerated to a shouting match over the billions of dollars that Egypt owed British oil and gas companies—a longstanding issue that had grown steadily worse since 2011.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 25