conflicts and contradictions peacefully and to find common ground under the supervision of a political apparatus composed of “politically trained elements committed to the revolution’s principles.” Abu al-Fadl denied that the ASU was a ruling party, dismissing single-party rule as either fascist (representing the interests of the economically dominant class), or Communist (representing the dictatorship of the workers), and thus inherently prejudiced against other social groups. The ASU, in contrast, was an alliance of the people as a whole and allowed them all to express their interests and negotiate a means for coexistence. He then explained that the regime rejected political pluralism because in multiparty systems party struggles are proxies for class struggles, which the ASU aimed to eliminate; “in the absence of a basic contradiction between the interests of the people’s productive forces, there is no need for each of them to form an independent political organization.”32
All this rhetoric notwithstanding, it was clear that Nasser aspired for a Leninist-styled organization modeled on Soviet and East European (especially Yugoslavian) experiences. In a meeting with the members of the ASU’s provincial executive offices, on January 12, 1966, he stressed the “vanguard” role of the party: “We cannot succeed unless we understand the masses. We must take their ideas and opinions, study them, organize them, give them back to them, and then point them in the right direction.” His language then turned militaristic: “you must engage with people, recruit them, invite them … to expand the ASU army.”33 But regardless of what Nasser desired, the ASU was not equipped to perform this vanguard role. In his enthusiasm to replicate the superb organization of Communist parties, the president seemed to have overlooked one missing ingredient: communism. Nasser was not a Communist, and did not adhere consistently to any strict ideology. He was a pragmatic man, though imbued with lofty ideas about modernity and social justice. Needless to say, without ideology there can be no ideological indoctrination.
So all the ASU was capable of was to bond key social groups to the regime through material temptations rather than ideological commitment. This was good enough to achieve Nasser’s immediate goal: to revamp the political apparatus and place it on par with the military. Sharaf admitted that much: “We suffered an imbalance; the weight of the military was growing beyond control. Nasser created the ASU as a political counter to the army.”34 And because Amer was aware of this, he fought the new organization fiercely. A good example is the Alexandria summer camp incident of 1964, when the organization’s youth branch (the Socialist Youth Organization) chose the following topic for its cadres to research during their stay: “How should ASU youth resist a possible coup?” When the MID reported the episode to Amer, he was naturally furious.35
The absence of ideology and the hidden goal of neutralizing the army condemned the ASU from the beginning to the fate of a highly centralized totalitarian body that issued directives from the top downward to keep citizens in line with regime policies and curb any opposition, rather than a mass mobilizing organ. The future ASU secretary-general Abd al-Muhsin Abu al-Nur described how he presided over nine organs, one for indoctrination, another for propaganda, a third for monitoring religious affairs, and the rest for “managing” students, workers, and peasants, and none of them tried to go beyond exerting regime control over all aspects of life.36 The organization regulated rather than inspired society. And it did so through presenting ASU membership as a sine qua non, the fastest road to upward social mobility and the safest way to alleviate suspicions of dissent. Instead of instilling belief in the virtue and justice of the regime in the hearts and minds of its six million members, it became a magnet for opportunists from all walks of life. Those who flocked to swell its ranks did so because they realized that one no longer had to be a military or security officer to “benefit” from the revolution; another, civilian route had just opened up, and all one needed to do to join was fill out an application.
That was not the biggest problem with the ASU. Because of the deeply embedded security character of the regime, the new organization was quickly drawn into the security orbit. To begin with, the Interior Ministry screened recruits, nominated candidates for senior posts, and kept the entire body under tight surveillance through informants and bugging devices. Next, intelligence officers, such as Abu al-Fadl, were planted at the ASU to closely monitor its members and overall performance.37 In addition, the organization itself incorporated security functions in addition to its political control duties; its members were not only expected to preach obedience to the rulers, but also to submit secret reports of any dissident views, even if expressed in the form of jokes or asides. By 1966, its secret archives held more than 30,000 files on military officers alone.38 Nasser himself encouraged this role. During the same January 1966 meeting, he openly invited ASU members to act as informers: “You must be courageous enough that when you notice the deviation of another member to bring it to the attention of the [provincial] office, and if it is not remedied, to contact the [ASU] Secretary-General.”39 The organization became so proficient in collecting information that Salah Nasr at the GIS complained to Nasser that the ASU (aided by Sharaf’s PBI) was spying on his own intelligence operatives.40
Obsession with security reached its zenith with the creation of the Vanguard Organization (al-Tanzim al-Tali’ie), a secret body within the ASU originally designed to help with indoctrination, but rapidly degenerating into a full-fledged intelligence organ. The idea behind the Vanguard Organization (VO), as Nasser explained during the founding meeting in June 1963, was to form secret ten-member cells of carefully selected ideological cadres to infiltrate public institutions and indoctrinate its members.41 To help get it off the ground, the president convinced the scores of Communists that were completing their prison terms in the mid-1960s to join the new movement. In 1965, the underground Communist parties dissolved themselves and joined the new organization. Their rationale was that working with the regime would help them proliferate their ideas and—more practically—keep them out of prison. Nasser shrewdly incorporated the talented intellectual cadres and discarded the rank and file, even imprisoned many of them, so that Communist leaders would not have their own mass base within the VO. For Nasser, the VO would serve as an ideological nucleus for the regime itself, a civilian equivalent of the Free Officers cabal that he created in the military two decades before. By 1967, its membership had swelled to more than 250,000. Of course, Amer’s diligent security apparatus could not have overlooked something that big. By October 1964, the field marshal had learned about the VO, and instructed Badran to keep it away from the army.
Despite its alleged indoctrinating mission, the security component of the VO was dominant from the beginning. First, its four founding members had little to do with ideology. It is true that one of the four was a socialist doctrinaire (Ahmed Fouad, who innocently thought he could influence the rest), but the other (Al-Ahram’s chief editor, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal) was no more than a Nasser confidant, and the last two (Samy Sharaf and Aly Sabri) were essentially security men. Second, there was the emphasis on secrecy (its existence came into the open only in August 1966) in this supposedly programmatic organization. Why would a president who openly advocated socialism need a secret body to spread his ideology? Even if Nasser wanted to model his new organization on underground Communist parties, these were underground before, not after their leaders came to power. Also, for ideological indoctrination the president had encouraged freelance socialist intellectuals, led by Lutfi al-Khuli, to issue a monthly magazine—Al-Tali’ah (The Vanguard)—in 1964, so again, why the need for secrecy?
This emphasis makes sense only when one considers the security role that the VO started playing, especially after 1965, when Interior Minister Sha’rawi Gomaa became its head. Instead of preaching socialism and winning new recruits, VO members were fully devoted to infiltrating social associations (universities, factories, trade unions, syndicates, the media, state bureaucracy, and the ASU itself, of which they were all members) to uncover and report on suspicious activities. As interviews with a sample of the VO’s members later revealed, they were told that their primary function was not to win people over to socialism, but rather to submit regular reports on subversive elements in their respective institutions. This was not a simple misunderstanding; the organization’s charter explicitly mentioned: “each member is obliged to present [security] reports … to his superiors,”
