Watt’s new views were at odds with his government’s. He tried in vain to persuade Prime Minister David Cameron to cancel an invitation to Morsi for a state visit to London planned for that summer, and Watt spoke to many around Cairo about his disagreement with Cameron. “I am seriously concerned about mismanagement” under Morsi, Watt told contacts in the Egyptian military and the opposition, and he worried aloud that Morsi might be “beyond rescue.”
“If you do move,” Watt told one general that spring, “try not to be violent.”
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel landed in Cairo on April 24, and he formed a very different assessment of Morsi. “He was Americanized. He had taught in California,” Hagel said. “He was well informed.”
Unlike Kerry, Hagel brought Ambassador Patterson to sit in on his meeting with Sisi, and she noticed a change in his tone: Sisi signaled for the first time in her hearing that the military was considering intervening to oust Morsi. Another general, Assar, had also begun hinting that if the Americans could not control Morsi, the military might need to step in. Now, in an encrypted email to a select readership, Patterson warned the White House in explicit terms.
“She was pretty definitive,” one White House official who read her email later told me. “She said that, if not imminent, a coup was a high likelihood within a few months. She knew his tones and his body language, and she could tell from his responses that a coup was likely to happen.”
Any military intervention, Patterson warned, could only be brutal.
19
A New Front
April 24, 2013–May 1, 2013
Mohamed ElBaradei had insisted to his new allies in the anti-Morsi opposition for months that a military takeover was out of the question: the West would never accept it. His reputation for liberalism was crucial to the credibility of the National Salvation Front. Almost all the other members had compromising ties to the intelligence agencies or the Mubarak government. And no one else had his high-level contacts in every Western capital. He was the Front’s liaison to Washington and Europe. He had met at his home with Brotherhood party leaders as late as February to negotiate plans for new parliamentary elections, and when his allies in the Front complained, ElBaradei explained to them that he had to take the meeting for the sake of Western opinion. Appearing to obstruct democracy would alienate the West.
But by April, ElBaradei and the Front had committed to boycotting the elections. The courts had repeatedly rejected the Morsi government’s electoral plans, always citing technical flaws, and it became impossible to elect a new Parliament before Ramadan that summer in any event. And for some reason ElBaradei’s worries about Western objections to a military takeover also seemed to go away in April, others in the National Salvation Front later told me.
The change was “remarkable,” said Amr Hamzawy, a liberal political scientist and former parliamentarian who was one of the few in the group who had entered politics since 2011. When ElBaradei stopped worrying about the West, Hamzawy told me, “I guess it was a signal.”
After April, “the plan was spelled out quite clearly—popular mobilization, followed by tanks, followed by early presidential elections. I sensed that the National Salvation Front was dead set on its decision to call on the army to intervene.”
Hamzawy was a lone voice of dissent. He argued in a series of newspaper columns that military intervention would throw Egypt back into dictatorship, and he caught hell for it from others in the National Salvation Front.
“They would say, ‘Why are you telling people to be afraid of calling on the army to interfere in a case of popular mobilization or state failure?’ This was an argument in the meeting!” Hamzawy said.
By May, ElBaradei himself finally told Hamzawy to get out of the way. “Without the army, we stand no chance!” ElBaradei told the group.
Sisi, though, held the key. No one imagined any removal of Morsi without the go-ahead of the defense minister, and until May the leaders of the National Salvation Front did not know whether Sisi was with them or against them. Two other senior generals on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had been in contact with the Front since December. But after an abortive offer that month to try to broker negotiations between Morsi and his opponents, Sisi seemed to yield to Morsi or even side with him. Sisi had urged voters to ratify the Brotherhood-backed constitution. Even at the end of April, his allegiance was a mystery.
That was when three twentysomething journalists showed up out of nowhere to propose a new plan for the anti-Morsi movement. All three were unaccomplished freelancers who took on fifteen-dollar assignments from Nasserite or nationalist tabloids, and none of them had experience at political organizing. But they knew the Front’s spokesman, Dawoud, and over coffee at a café near the state media building they told him that they intended to collect fifteen million signatures demanding that Morsi step aside on the one-year anniversary of his inauguration, June 30. “Tamarrod”—Rebellion—the three newcomers called themselves.
“We are in a state of stagnation,” Dawoud told the others in the Front. “We have to stir the waters.”
ElBaradei posed for a picture with them in the garden of his villa. Anti-Islamist political parties printed petition forms and put their offices to work collecting signatures around the country. The billionaire communications mogul and party leader Naguib Sawiris secretly paid to produce a soaring music video promoting the Tamarrod petition. A popular satellite network he owned broadcast the video constantly. (“Tamarrod did not even know it was me!” he told me later. “I am not ashamed of it.”)
The news media and opposition parties rallied around the three young men before they produced a single signature. Tamarrod supporters were immediately deluged with invitations to appear as guests on talk shows across the private networks. Tahani el-Gebali provided legal and strategic advice: she told the organizers that an unwritten “constitutional tradition” would allow the defense minister to replace the elected president with the chief of the Supreme Constitutional Court (a personal friend of hers).
Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the ghostwriter who had advised Abdel Nasser in the run-up to his 1952 coup, coached Tamarrod, too. “Heikal is a genius,” Hassan Shahin, one of the three journalists who founded Tamarrod, told me later. “He told us that on June 30 we would be creating ‘a new history’ for generations to come.”
Heikal was a nexus. ElBaradei visited the book-lined office in Heikal’s apartment overlooking the Nile to vent his impatience at Sisi’s diffidence about intervention. “Where is Sisi? What is he waiting for?” ElBaradei asked.
Heikal and Sisi were so close that the defense minister later personally delivered Heikal a cake for his birthday when he turned ninety, in September 2013. Heikal advised Sisi on the themes of his speeches and even political slogans. Sisi, ElBaradei, and Tamarrod—each party knew that conversations with Heikal reached all the others.
Volunteers and others in the Front later told me that they saw suspicious older men who appeared to be mukhabarat hanging around Tamarrod offices. “We got to hear names around the campaign who were associated with general intelligence—people known as interlocutors or businessmen close to the intelligence services,” Hamzawy told me.
Others said piles of cash turned up around Tamarrod headquarters after someone returned from a trip to Dubai. I dismissed such talk as a conspiracy theory until I later heard a leaked recording of a telephone call sometime that spring from General Sisi’s office.
“Sir, we will need two hundred tomorrow from Tamarrod’s account—you know, the part from the UAE, which they transferred,” Sisi’s office manager told the military’s chief of staff.
“What do you mean by mukhabarat, sir? The mukhabarat guys?” the office manager asked a moment later. “Do you remember the account that came for Tamarrod? . . . We only need two hundred from it—yes, two hundred thousand.”
We were entering a time of shadowy battles betwe
en unseen antagonists when mysteriously leaked audio recordings became an indispensable source of information about events behind the scenes. In the case of the leak about Tamarrod, American diplomats with access to intelligence reports later told me that they, too, confirmed after the fact that the United Arab Emirates had provided millions of dollars through the Egyptian Defense Ministry. In the spring of 2013, I believed Tamarrod was a campaign to push Sisi to act. In fact, Sisi was behind it.
20
A Dutiful Son
May 1, 2013–June 23, 2013
General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi grew up in the medieval district known as Islamic Cairo. His family’s apartment was a fifteen-minute walk from the closest road wide enough for a car, through a maze of low stone buildings right out of Naguib Mahfouz novels. Middle-class traders and tradesmen had populated the area during Sisi’s childhood, and his father was one of the richest. The family owned a shop selling arabesque woodwork and other handicrafts in the storied Khan el-Khalili bazaar—the second stop after the Pyramids for many Western tourists. The Sisi family employed many of their neighbors.
Hussein Abdel Naby was a boyhood friend of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and lived in a rented room downstairs in the same building, which was owned by Sisi’s father. “He always dressed in a suit and tie, and all the others wore galabiyas,” Abdel Naby, now a lawyer, said. “He was the only one who drove a Mercedes.”
The Sisi family was religious and conservative, and Sisi’s father was polygamous. He had married a second wife and had a second family. He was also ambitious. He once campaigned unsuccessfully for a seat in the rubber-stamp Parliament under Sadat—a position more about prestige and patronage than politics or policy. Another son, Ahmed, became a senior judge.
Neighbors saw Sisi’s father as stern and intimidating. Abdel Fattah was desperate to please his old man, in part by devoting himself to physical exercise. While other boys played in the street, the young Sisi hopped up and down stairs to develop his calves, or he interrupted his schoolwork to do sets of push-ups.
“He used to punish himself,” Abdel Naby remembered.
Sisi’s father once looked askance at his teenage son for the vanity of a necklace and open-collared shirt, so the young Sisi shaved his own head in atonement. “Because I know I did something wrong,” he told his friends.
If he felt any impulse to rebel, he hid it well. But he had grand dreams, as he later confided in private conversations with a trusted Egyptian journalist (audio recordings leaked to the public). Sisi had dreamed “that I was holding up a sword inscribed in red with the words ‘There is no God but God’”—the rallying cry of the Prophet Mohamed and the essential creed of Islam. A voice in another dream told him, “We will give you what we have given to no other.” And in a third, Sisi sat with former president Anwar Sadat to discuss their shared premonitions.
“I said to him: and I know I will be the president of the republic,” Sisi later recounted.
He never saw combat. He specialized instead in diplomacy and intelligence. He served as a military attaché in Riyadh, trained at the Joint Services Command and Staff College in Britain, and studied at the United States Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Sisi arrived at the War College in 2005. The local mosque lacked a full-time imam, and Sisi himself sometimes led Friday prayers. (So did one of his sons, who enrolled at Dickinson College.) Sisi joined campus debates about the American-led occupation of Iraq, and he bridled at arguments that political Islam was inconsistent with democracy. Any Arab democracy must incorporate Islamists, “including radical ones,” Sisi argued in his final paper.
Sisi was “keen that the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist option, be given a chance” in Egypt, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal told me. Sisi told other friends and American diplomats that he would be happy to serve an elected president who happened to come from the Muslim Brotherhood.
He and Morsi started working together almost as soon as Mubarak was gone. Sisi, as head of military intelligence, was the army’s liaison to the Brothers; Morsi, as head of the Brotherhood’s political arm, was its point of contact with the generals. They had piety in common. Sisi and other generals would turn up for meetings with the Muslim Brothers with rolled-up sleeves and wet hands, as though from the ablutions before prayers, Brotherhood leaders told me.
“I can’t believe they fell for it,” a young Muslim Brother who was the son of one of the leaders said. “That is just what I would do when I was growing up if I wanted my parents to think I had been praying.”
Sisi also went out of his way to cultivate Ambassador Patterson, a sign of his ambition. In addition to avowing his comfort with an elected president from the Brotherhood, Sisi emphasized to her that he prized his close relationships with the Israelis. He also hinted at rivalries with other generals—especially General Sami Anan, the American favorite, and former air marshal Ahmed Shafik, who had lost the election to Morsi. (Sisi told Patterson that the other officers saw both as corrupt, although the Americans knew that self-enrichment among the generals was pervasive.)
Looking back, one might have noticed a pattern in Sisi’s advancement. He praised Mubarak like a father but told the military council to push him aside. And Sisi had been a favorite protégé of Field Marshal Tantawi. But Sisi had surprised Tantawi, too, and replaced him (while eliminating a rival, Anan).
Several of Morsi’s Islamist advisers began to suspect in February that military officers were plotting against them. A friendly customs official at the Cairo airport tipped them off that a plane en route from the United Arab Emirates to Malta had stopped to refuel and started unloading crates of money and narcotics (tramadol, an opiate sold on the black market, with presumed facilitation from inside the police). But an army officer had told the customs police to ignore everything. It all disappeared.
About a half dozen Morsi advisers began meeting in random, unlikely rooms of the palace to avoid surveillance. They left their mobile phones outside and sometimes communicated in written notes that they immediately destroyed. They studied the staging of photographs of the president meeting with the generals for hints of their intentions. They implored Morsi to include one of them during his meetings with Sisi.
The president rebuffed them. He told them that Sisi preferred to meet one on one, without those shabab—young people—as the general called the advisers. Morsi said he would manage Sisi.
Sisi, outwardly, appeared almost obsequious. News photographs and videos invariably showed him walking a few paces behind Morsi with his head bowed, or sitting with hands together between his thighs, smiling at the president. Newspapers quoted anonymous military officials disparaging Morsi, but Sisi brushed off the reports. “Newspapers and media exaggerate,” Sisi would tell the president. Yes, there were “tensions toward the president inside the military,” Sisi would acknowledge. But he presented himself as the ally who would control the discontent.
“Morsi trusted him,” Mourad Aly, a senior Brotherhood spokesman, later told me.
At least until April 24, Ambassador Patterson was hearing and believing the same things from Sisi: that he intended to stay out of Morsi’s way. Many thought as much—even former president Mubarak, then being held in a military hospital. In an audio recording made in his doctor’s office that spring and later leaked to the public (the leaks were everywhere in those days), Mubarak insisted that the military would stay out of politics. Sisi was with the Islamists.
“The defense minister, I think, is to their liking,” Mubarak said.
The most authoritative poll that spring, from the Pew Research Center, had put Morsi’s approval rating at 53 percent and the Brotherhood’s at 63 percent. A strong majority of Egyptians favored democracy over stability. So even the most nervous Morsi advisers did not see a military coup coming; for one thing, it would inevitably set off a violent backlash and undo any progress toward restarting the Egyptian economy. “We didn’t think they were that st
upid,” Wael Haddara said.
“No one is going to remove anyone,” Sisi said on May 11 to a select handful of Egyptian journalists and intellectuals he had invited to a military exercise in Dahshur. Military intervention “is extremely dangerous. It could turn Egypt into another Afghanistan or Somalia.” It would set Egypt back “for the next thirty or forty years.”
Privately, Sisi presented Morsi a written memorandum of broad suggestions about how to strengthen his position by reaching out to his opponents. Morsi felt reassured; Sisi was still with him. He later proposed, in another memorandum in June, nine specific steps, including a mechanism for amending the constitution, the incorporation of more young people in government, and either a reshuffling of the Cabinet or an early presidential election.
But by late May, senior Egyptian military officers openly told an American lobbyist who worked with them that they supported Tamarrod’s project and hoped it would succeed. “They did not make a big secret of it,” the lobbyist later told me.
The two generals from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces began calling members of ElBaradei’s National Salvation Front at around the same time with a new message. Do not fear, they said. The army would “protect” their demonstrations to demand Morsi’s resignation. On June 30, his one-year anniversary in office, the army would be with them.
El Sayyid el-Badawi, the business mogul who had been recorded talking to the mukhabarat about the Brotherhood and its fate, was so excited that he summoned the members of the Front to an emergency meeting in the garden of his mansion in the suburbs. The military was now on their side, Badawi told them with enthusiasm. “It was understood as ‘we are now good to go,’” Hamzawy later told me.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 26