By June 5, leaders of the Front were confident enough to tell the State Department about their plans. A Washington emissary, Ramy Yaacoub, an Egyptian who had previously worked on Capitol Hill, delivered a memorandum with the cryptic title “Operation 6” that spelled out the steps Tamarrod would follow if Morsi did not immediately resign in response to the June 30 protests.
Tamarrod, leading the Egyptian people toward their liberation, will issue a constitutional declaration to include the following:
The current Egyptian president will step down, ending the authority of the current constitution. . . .
The Council of National Defense will continue to practice its powers . . .
In a small meeting with another Egyptian, Yaacoub handed the memorandum to Thomas Melia, then deputy assistant secretary of state, in the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Melia was incredulous. “So, you guys are going to make a little coup?” Melia asked.
“Mr. Melia,” Yaacoub told him, “don’t say ‘you guys.’”
But with no clear authority behind it, the memo was set aside and forgotten. Melia told me he has no memory of the meeting.
21
June 30
May 25, 2013–July 3, 2013
Kerry and Morsi were both scheduled to attend an African Union summit on May 25, 2013, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Neither wanted to meet. “He is not going to listen,” Kerry told the aides who briefed him. “This guy is completely hopeless.”
They met nonetheless. Kerry prodded Morsi to make concessions to ElBaradei. “You are going to end up like Mubarak,” Kerry warned Morsi. “You are going to have people back in the streets.”
Morsi thought Kerry was exploiting Egypt’s economic crisis to try to bully or topple its new democracy. “We don’t need you to tell us what to do,” Morsi angrily told Kerry. “We see your pressure.”
After that, Kerry turned instead to the rulers of Qatar, a financial supporter of Egypt under Morsi and an ally of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (Qatar’s Al Jazeera network flattered Morsi almost as assiduously as Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya or the UAE’s Sky News Arabia insulted him). Kerry asked the Qatari diplomats to persuade Morsi to yield power without the disruption of a forced ouster.
“Some sort of acquiescence to the needs of the country,” as Kerry later explained to me. “It was an effort to avoid implosion, not an effort to avoid change in reality, but an adjustment to what had already happened with Morsi.”
Obama had given stirring speeches about Egypt and its chance to build a new democracy. In 2011, his advisers had called the success of the Egyptian transition a top priority. But in 2013, he had detached from day-to-day policy. The White House discouraged staff from criticizing Cabinet members in writing to avoid leaks, and lower-ranking aides who noticed the discrepancy in messages had difficulty communicating about it. It is unclear to me how much Obama knew. But while Kerry was trying to finesse “acquiescence,” Obama and his closest national security advisers were doing their best to keep Morsi—the bumbling but fairly elected president—in office.
The NSC sent Chuck Hagel tough talking points to warn Sisi that the United States would punish the Egyptian military for a military takeover. A so-called coup law mandated a cutoff of American aid to any military that removed an elected government.
Hagel, though, saw his priority as winning over Sisi. “The talking points from the White House are not what you would say to someone you have an ongoing relationship with, so you have to adjust them,” one Hagel adviser later told me. “But with Hagel,” the adviser said, “it was just really difficult to get him to deliver the hard message.”
The White House received reports on the calls and saw that Hagel had coddled instead of scolded. “It was totally, totally different,” a senior official on the National Security Council told me. “The White House wanted the message to be, ‘Democracy is important,’ and Hagel wanted it to be, ‘We want to have a good relationship.’ We never could get him to deliver stern talking points.”
In one conversation, Hagel set aside the talking points to tell Sisi flatly: “Don’t do a coup.”
Don’t worry, Sisi responded calmly. We won’t.
Great, then, Hagel told him, as though that settled the question.
When I met him in early 2016, Hagel recalled that he had been besieged by complaints about Morsi from the defense ministers in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—especially from Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler and military chief of the UAE.
“MBZ and other leaders in the Middle East were warning me then that the Muslim Brotherhood is the most dangerous element afoot in the Middle East today,” Hagel said, and he had always agreed. “I said, yes, it is dangerous. We recognize that. I am not contesting that. You are right.”
“I said the same thing I said to Sisi. ‘We have got to deal with this in a smart way, in a wise way,’” Hagel said. “The Gulf States were focused on ‘Let’s just hammer them and extinguish them now. Let’s just get rid of them now and if anybody gets in the way, well, you don’t understand how ruthless these people are. They will destroy us. It is not in your interests. Why can’t you Americans understand that?’ And they would go back to their old refrain, ‘You let Mubarak go down.’”
The Israelis made clear that they were backing Sisi, too. “Sisi and the generals have a very close relationship with the Israelis. The Israelis were letting us know very clearly that Sisi was the only guy protecting everything here, and they were concerned.”
Hagel agreed with them. “We get that,” Hagel said he told Israeli Defense Minister Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The security arrangement is in our interest, too.”
Hagel said he cautioned Sisi gently: “You have to give it some time, because you don’t want the world against you.”
“Yes,” Sisi responded, according to Hagel, “but you know there are some very evil, very bad forces afoot. You cannot understand it like we can understand it here. These are revolutionaries who want to change our way of life, who want to bring back centuries-old practices.”
“I don’t live in Cairo, you do,” Hagel said he conceded. “So I will never tell you how to run your government or run your country. You’ve got to figure that out. I would never put myself in your shoes. . . . You do have to protect your security, protect your country.”
After the calls, Hagel stunned his aides by telling them to learn from his example: Did they see how he was building up Sisi’s trust and confidence? It was only later—after the question was moot—that Obama paid closer attention and felt irked over the distorted message.
Ambassador Patterson, on the ground in Cairo, urged Egyptians to stick to the democratic process they had started. “This is the government that you and your fellow citizens elected,” Patterson told a gathering of non-Islamist intellectuals and activists on June 18 in a speech at a Cairo think tank.
Beat the Brotherhood at the ballot box, she urged, not in street protests. “More violence on the streets will do little more than add new names to the lists of martyrs.” She explicitly disavowed support for Morsi. The Egyptian, Emirati, and Saudi news media all denounced her speech as a confession of just that.
She met Khairat el-Shater at his office the next day, June 19, hoping that he could convince Morsi to make concessions that would placate his opponents. Shater told her that he, too, was exasperated with Morsi. But he was more frustrated with the Emirati and Saudi conspiracies to undermine him.
How would the Brotherhood handle the June 30 protests? Patterson asked. Shater told her the turnout would be big, but Morsi could survive it.
“I have my doubts,” she told him, “but I hope you are right.”
Obama was trying to help Morsi. Patterson was warning the Muslim Brothers. Kerry had given up on Morsi. Hagel was reassuring Sisi.
* *
*
• • •
On Sunday, June 23, Sisi lectured the military’s Department of Moral Affairs about the protests expected seven days later, and his words were carried over the state media. Widening divisions in society were “a danger to the Egyptian state.” If necessary, the military had a duty “to intervene to keep Egypt from sliding into a dark tunnel.”
He gave political factions one week—“during which much can be achieved”—to find “a formula of real understanding, agreement, and reconciliation to protect Egypt and its people.”
Morsi’s opponents heard a promise. If their June 30 protests were big enough, Sisi would remove the president. But on a visit to the palace after the speech, Sisi was reassuring. He insisted his comments were meant only “to satisfy some of his men,” according to several Morsi advisers. It was “an attempt to absorb their anger.” A military spokesman told journalists that Sisi’s intent was “supportive” of the political process. Morsi again believed him.
On June 26, Morsi advisers drafted a forty-minute speech announcing several concessions that Sisi had recommended. Among other things, Morsi would bring more political opponents into the Cabinet and create a new panel to propose constitutional amendments.
Morsi delivered it, but kept talking. He rambled on for two and a half hours. He railed again against “enemies of the revolution” at home and abroad. He blamed his opponents for refusing to negotiate. He claimed media moguls were trying to bring him down to dodge their back taxes. He threatened to investigate his former opponent, Ahmed Shafik, for corruption. He accused judges of electoral fraud against the Muslim Brothers eight years earlier, in 2005, when Morsi lost his own seat in the Parliament.
“A disaster,” one senior adviser later called the speech.
Morsi promised to take legal action against anyone who claimed he lacked the full support of the armed forces. Television cameras panned to Sisi in the front row, frowning and stone-faced.
Morsi blundered many things that June. He named a member of a political party linked to a former Islamist militant group as governor of Luxor, where a faction of the same group had massacred more than sixty people at a tourist site in 1997. Protests blocked the governor from his office, and he quickly resigned.
Then Morsi attended a conference full of Saudi and Salafi clerics, calling the Syrian uprising a holy war against Shiite Iran. When it was his turn to speak, Morsi surprised his advisers by blurting out that Cairo was cutting off diplomatic ties with Damascus. (Ten days later, a mob in a village near Cairo killed four members of Egypt’s small Shia minority as police did nothing. Foes blamed Morsi for condoning sectarianism at the conference.)
Morsi invited representatives of all political factions to discuss the threat of a proposed dam up the Nile in Ethiopia. Morsi lectured briefly about engineering. The other attendees mused aloud about Israeli and American conspiracies, sabotaging the construction, sending spies to Ethiopia, or manipulating its politics. Then someone slipped in a note telling the participants that their discussion was being broadcast live on state television (a frequent opposition demand, used as a pretext to refuse any dialogue). Morsi looked as shocked as anyone. But his missteps only added momentum to the movement against him.
By the last week of June, the intelligence agencies no longer hid their objectives. Egypt had one celebrity spy: the silent, burly figure who had stood behind former vice president Omar Suleiman when he had announced Mubarak’s resignation. Egyptians had dubbed the anonymous figure “the man behind Omar Suleiman.” His face popped up all over the internet in the background of historic photographs with Abdel Nasser, Sadat, Saddam Hussein, Obama, Carter, Hitler, the Sphinx, Pharaohs, and Darth Vader. His real name was Hussein Kamal Sharif, an intelligence officer and Suleiman’s chief of staff in the spy agency. In the run-up to June 30, he gave a televised press conference full of unsubstantiated allegations of Islamist intrigue under Morsi. Kamal claimed secret intelligence and urged Egyptians to turn out against the president. “We will consider it a referendum” on “the utter failure of the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The state-sponsored police association released a video of an internal meeting in which officers bellowed about their “betrayal” in 2011 and the “catastrophe” of their humiliation since then.
“People who were in prison are now presidents,” an officer complained, and he vowed to kill any policeman who tried to protect a Brotherhood office. “I swear to God almighty he will be shot.”
He got no argument. General Salah Zeyada, a senior ministry official, reassured the boisterous officers, “We all agree, brothers, that there will be no security provided for the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Over three days, unknown gunmen around the Nile Delta had killed at least five Muslim Brothers during assaults on their local offices. The Brothers had fortified their headquarters, in the Muqattam cliffs overlooking Cairo, with iron gates and sandbags. The grand imam of Al Azhar warned of impending “civil war.”
I could not sit still on the night of June 29. I did not believe Egyptians would march to remove a president they had so recently elected. Confused, I called some of the original organizers of the Tahrir Square sit-in. Islam Lotfy, expelled from the Brotherhood for starting an independent political party, called his former Islamist leaders “a bunch of losers.” But the people driving the anti-Morsi protests were “the people who killed my friends and tried to kill me”—the Mubarak security services, Lotfy said. He felt like leaving Egypt.
Some of his former friends from Tahrir Square were marching again and this time arming themselves. “The Islamists, well, most of them are basically terrorists,” Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, the British-trained surgeon, told me. “Molotov cocktails or whatever, but people have to have a way to protect themselves.”
Ambassador Patterson had sent another message earlier that week warning that after meeting with Sisi she believed a coup was imminent. On the night of June 29, American intelligence reports showed Egyptian army troops moving to positions surrounding the palace, the state media building, and other strategic locations around the capital. At least some on the staff of the National Security Council believed that night that a coup was in motion. “It was coup 101,” a staff member on duty at the time later told me.
But no one in the Pentagon, the State Department, or the White House told Sisi to stop moving. No one told Morsi that Sisi had turned against him, or that a coup had begun.
* * *
• • •
The next morning, on June 30, hundreds of thousands swarmed through the streets of the capital. At least hundreds of thousands more came out in cities across the country. It had taken courage to march against Mubarak in 2011. But now the army, police, most television stations, many big employers, movie stars, and the most visible liberals and leftists were all urging Egyptians to join in the protests.
Foes of the Muslim Brothers had mocked them for months as “sheep” because of their vows of obedience. Now someone brought out real sheep, scrawled the names of Brotherhood leaders in black on their wool, and slaughtered them outside the palace.
Uniformed police officers applauded, cheered, and egged on the crowds. Some handed out bottles of water, and one passed out roses. Another tore open his uniform, Clark Kent style, to reveal a Tamarrod T-shirt. Demonstrators carried him on their shoulders. Footage of his stunt filled the newscasts. Military helicopters dropped Egyptian flags fluttering to the ground, and the crowds whooped in gratitude.
“Come on, Sisi, make a decision!” they chanted.
Liberal activists who had marched against Mubarak on January 25, 2011, were startled at the embrace of their old foes. “On the twenty-fifth of January the police were shooting at us; on the thirtieth of June they were giving us flowers,” one of those liberals, Mustafa el-Naggar, a thirty-three-year-old dentist, later told me.
Khaled Youssef was the filmmaker whose movie
This Is Chaos culminated in the revolt against the bullying policeman Hatem and prefigured the uprising against Mubarak. A Nasserite who despised Islamists, Youssef had predicted in television interviews that the army would remove Morsi before the end of his first term in office.
On the afternoon of June 30, Youssef called a friend in the military’s propaganda arm, and the army rushed him to a helicopter so that he could film the demonstrations. And a few hours later, a military spokesman called the New York Times bureau with a similar proposal: would I like a ride in a military helicopter to see the crowds from above? I agreed, but the spokesman never called back. Youssef’s footage must have been enough.
The Brotherhood had held its own competing counterdemonstrations at a public square not far from the presidential palace. At least tens of thousands of its supporters had rallied there the previous Friday, and some were still demonstrating there now. I visited that morning. Battalions of middle-aged men in polo shirts and button-down collars were marching back and forth in rows, kicking up their knees and singing Islamist anthems. Some carried wooden sticks or baseball bats as weapons, or they made shields out of trash can lids and kitchen woks.
“We will sacrifice our lives for our religion,” they chanted. “Morsi’s men are everywhere.” They looked like overgrown Boy Scouts playacting as soldiers. I could not decide if they were frightening or pathetic.
Would Morsi respond to the massive crowds? I asked Gehad el-Haddad of the Muslim Brotherhood over the phone. He made no effort to hide his shock at the scale of the protests.
“You would think he would have to,” he said, shaken. “The president is headstrong.”
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 27