discipline, but rather of reestablishing it. Their aim was to liberate Egypt from foreign occupation and install a reformed civilian regime that would enhance military power and restore its credibility. They were neither set on assuming political power nor on administering a transformative socioeconomic modernization program, while the quick turnover of military governments in Iraq (between 1936 and 1941) and Syria (between 1949 and 1951) alerted them to the inherent instability of military rule. Nasser and his close allies in the movement, however, thought otherwise. Captivated by the Turkish officer-turned-revolutionary-turned-stateman Mostafa Kemal Atatürk’s reforms in the 1920s and 1930s, they saw the coup as only a first step in the long-term and far-reaching “revolution from above” that would build a strong centralized state with a modern industrial economy. Herein lies the root of the struggle that would consume the country for the next six decades.
The Dark Side of Militarism: The March 1954 Crisis
In a single stroke, on the night of July 23, 1952, eighty middle-ranking officers seized the leadership of the armed forces, arrested all generals (except for the two who endorsed the coup), and cashiered all brigadiers and lieutenant colonels that did not participate. The king facilitated their job in two ways: despite the fact that military discontent pointed toward an impending coup, he left the capital for the summer palace in Alexandria as usual; and once he received news about irregular army movements, he ordered an emergency meeting of the high command at the army headquarters in Cairo, making it easier for the Free Officers to capture the entire top brass and therefore paralyze the military hierarchy. Without his army, King Farouk was powerless. He pleaded for U.S. support, considering that his relations with the British had been strained after their 1942 showdown. But the Americans had decided it was high time for a modernizing coup in Egypt to put an end to political chaos and economic stagnation lest the country drift to communism (the same policy they adopted in Latin America). Besides, the Free Officers had shared their intentions with the U.S. embassy shortly before the coup and pledged to protect American interests. The United States in turn weighed in on the British not to intervene on behalf of a king they already disliked. The king was forced to abdicate and, on August 2, 1952, departed Egypt for the last time.
The ringleaders then organized themselves in a fourteen-member Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) to assume executive authority until a new government was elected. These were roughly the same members of the executive committee of the Free Officers Movement. Demand for secrecy had forced the movement to assume a cellular shape with no hierarchy, branches, or committees. A freshly recruited Free Officer (usually through Nasser’s recommendation, and always with his approval) would only know those in his own cell and a couple of names on the executive committee. Only Nasser had the full list of members. To ensure the military’s loyalty, both the executive committee and the RCC, which replaced it right after the coup, included all service branches: four from the infantry; three from the cavalry (armored corps); three from the air force; two representatives from the artillery; and one from the signal corps (military communications) and the border guards. In fact, real power lay with the infantry. On the council, the three men who would later control Egypt’s political, military, and security institutions belonged to this service. The future president Gamal Abd al-Nasser was the effective leader of the Free Officers; Abd al-Hakim Amer, soon-to-be general commander of the armed forces, had been Nasser’s kindhearted and overgenerous “soul mate” since the day he joined the army; and Zakaria Muhi al-Din, the architect of Egypt’s new security apparatus, was the cousin of Nasser’s intellectual companion Khaled Muhi al-Din (who represented the cavalry on the RCC), but was distinguished from both by his solid, practical, and cool-minded temperament, as well as by his piercing glance and long silences. It was the meticulous and security-oriented Zakaria (referred to usually by his first name to separate him from his cousin and because it rhymed with Beria, Stalin’s security henchman) who was in charge of planning the coup and leading the units that surrounded the king in Alexandria, and it was the second-tier Free Officer Captain Salah Nasr of the 13th Infantry Battalion (later to become Egypt’s intelligence czar) who played a key role in protecting the new regime during its first days in power. The infantryman Youssef Sediq, who did not belong to this troika, was pressured to resign and leave the country in March 1953. RCC members who did not have troops on the ground to fall back on, such as Anwar al-Sadat of the signal corps and the two air force representatives, gave carte blanche to Nasser, who had recruited them to the movement. In effect, therefore, Nasser always had the majority of the RCC vote in his pocket, and was challenged only by the figurehead he had handpicked, Major General Muhammad Naguib of the border guards, and the free-spirited and increasingly left-leaning Khaled.
Once the RCC was established, Nasser directed his infantry aide Salah Nasr to prepare two lists: a list of independent-thinking officers who might compromise the security of the emerging regime, and another of those who belonged to the Free Officers Movement and might therefore harbor political ambitions. According to Nasr’s memoirs, out of the 3,500 officers on the first list, 800 were asked to retire, 2,300 were reassigned to administrative duties within the army, and the rest were appointed to civilian positions. The 329 officers on the second list were placed under strict surveillance before almost all of them were let go in a couple of years. Curiously, another 71 officers were killed in “random accidents” between March and December 1953. In order to preserve their loyalty, the purged officers were told that their role as “leadership representatives” to civilian posts was necessary to revolutionize the bureaucracy.1 These sugarcoated purges killed two birds with one stone: they destroyed the Free Officers power base in the army, while creating a loyal network of commissars within the state bureaucracy. The RCC then created the Republican Guard in June 1953, which in the words of its first chief, Abd al-Muhsen Abu al-Nur, was meant to defend the new regime against the rest of the military, and in October of the same year, the National Guard, to train citizens loyal to the revolution.2 Finally, Law 505 of 1955 introduced mandatory conscription and expanded the promotion of NCOs to officers, since big armies are more difficult to enlist in a coup. The now secure military was used to neutralize political threats from monarchists and landlords, as well as intransigent workers and peasants. Firmly in control, the coup makers began to debate the future.
As in most cases, the success of the coup caused an immediate split within the ranks between those who wanted to return to barracks and resume their professional duty, and those who aspired to create a military regime to revolutionize society from above. The division ran from the RCC downward. Those in favor of withdrawing found support in Naguib, the council’s nominal leader, and Khaled Muhi al-Din, the most intellectually mature member of the group, in addition to the critical mass within the artillery and cavalry, the army’s democratic-leaning and professional-minded elite services. Advocates of revolution from above organized around Nasser, the RCC’s effective leader, and those second-tier Free Officers (lieutenants and captains who had no significant role before the coup) whose loyalty he shrewdly cultivated in his own service (the infantry) and in small branches, such as the air force, and the still minuscule military police and intelligence. The confrontation between the two camps thrust the country onto a turbulent path between 1952 and 1954, and its outcome shaped the new regime—an outcome determined largely by their very different strategies.
NASSER’S POWER BLOC
The position of officers adamant to stay in power was well articulated in a speech that Nasser delivered to weavers in the Shubra al-Khima factory, on December 20, 1953, in which he warned that the military “did not carry out this revolution to govern or lead … one of our first goals was to restore genuine representative life … but we were appalled by the bargains, demands, maneuvers, and deceit … we decided that this country should not be ruled by a class of political mercenaries.”3 Or as he later wrote in his Philosophy of the Revolution, that the Free Officers had considered themselves the vanguard of the nation, that they needed only to take the first step to encourage the masses to follow. Instead, those who flocked to benefit from the coup were none other than the petty stranglers of the old elite.4
