is true that it was Nasser who invited Naguib to join the coup at the last moment because he thought that a popular and highly decorated general would add credibility to a movement led by colonels and majors in their early thirties, and guarantee the support of many politically unaffiliated officers, but he kept a close eye on the old general from the beginning because he knew that figureheads usually develop an appetite for command once they get a taste of it. That is why he surrounded Naguib with members of his own entourage. When Naguib became the first president of the new republic, Nasser acted as his chef de cabinet, and appointed his good friend Captain Abd al-Muhsen Abu al-Nur head of the Republican Guard, the elite unit charged with protecting the president. Nasser also held (informal) weekly meetings with RCC members to coordinate their stances before convening under Naguib, who chaired the council.5 These containment tactics, however, represented a modest part of Nasser’s overall plan to consolidate power. His grand strategy stood on three pillars: building an entrenched security force; replacing the existing power centers with a new political apparatus; and garnering geopolitical support.
(i) The Security Community
In most authoritarian regimes, the multiplication of offices is believed to provide an extra security measure. It keeps the central decision maker more informed than any single actor, and allows him to divide and conquer when necessary. Instinctively paranoid, Nasser adopted this doctrine faithfully. He assigned similar tasks to civilian and military security organs, and created within each sector several competing bodies. What emerged was a hydra-headed security community, which was quite successful in terms of domestic repression.
Nasser’s first official post after the coup was that of interior minister. There he found an adequate infrastructure to build on. For seven decades, the British had been improving on the secret police apparatus they found in Egypt in 1882. They created the Ministry of Interior in March 1895, followed by the Special Section in 1911 for domestic surveillance. They also sent officers for training in London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.6 Although the Free Officers promised to abolish the notorious secret police, it soon became clear that Nasser intended to expand the agency and bend it to his purposes.
Already in the 1940s, political detention had become a standard practice against dissidents, especially after political crimes were redefined in a 1937 stature to include any expression of contempt of government. The wide use of detention was not only a result of increased British intolerance in the years leading up to the Second World War, but also a product of the enhanced state capacity for coercion. Prisons, for example, were expanded in the late 1930s to include detention camps built either in the desert (such as Huckstepp, al-Tur, and al-Wahat), or on the outskirts of cities (such as Tura, Abu-Za’bal, and al-Qanater). During the war years, these camps held a total of 4,000 political detainees, and by the early 1950s, the number swelled to 25,000, and it is estimated that during Nasser’s tenure some 100,000 citizens passed through them.7 Another example of enhanced state capacity was surveillance. Nasser inherited the system the British called the City Eye—a modern version of the basaseen (onlookers) structure, which had existed in Egypt for centuries. This was basically an expansive network of informers, or more accurately, common folk reporting any suspicious activities in return for modest rewards; these included beggars, porters, vendors, cabdrivers, telephone operators, and scores of other people.
Increased detention and surveillance capabilities notwithstanding, the system was evidently inefficient—or else how did the Free Officers manage to circumvent it? Nasser’s initial concern therefore was how to close the gaps. After investigating the system for four months, Nasser passed his ministerial responsibilities in October 1953 to his security wizard, fellow RCC member Zakaria Muhi al-Din. The methodical Zakaria was a man of few words and remarkable deeds—the Egyptian journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal recounts being struck during his first meeting with Zakaria, in October 1951, by the fact that he was voluntarily submitting counterintelligence reports to the political leadership, despite only being an infantry officer8—and now he was in charge of restructuring Egypt’s entire security apparatus. Unlike almost all other Free Officers, this vault of a man died in May 2012 at the age of ninety-four years without having made a single public revelation about his founding role in the regime.
Although police officers took no part in the coup, the Free Officers Movement had directed Zakaria beforehand to cultivate relations with the few who resented the regime. We do not have a list of his police contacts, but we know that relying on a handful of policemen, supplemented by several of his own military lieutenants, Zakaria refashioned the police corps, after purging 400 of its 3,000 officers.9 Next, the old Special Section, under the supervision of military intelligence officers, was transformed into a new intelligence organ with expanded capabilities and jurisdiction: the General Investigations Directorate (GID)—renamed in 1971 as the State Security Investigations Sector (SSIS). Combining his ministerial position with that of director of the Military Intelligence Department (MID), Zakaria reoriented this agency as well toward internal political security, i.e., monitoring Egyptian dissidents rather than spying on the armies of other countries, as it was supposed to.10 He then selected a handful of MID officers to help him create Egypt’s first civilian intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Service (GIS), in December 1953, which he headed for a couple of years. Zakaria was also asked to recruit a group of loyal military captains, train them as security agents, and assign them to Nasser’s home-run intelligence unit—soon to be known as the President’s Bureau of Information (PBI). So in a few short years, Zakaria had built a “veritable pyramid of intelligence and security services … [whose] labyrinthine complexity and venality” became the mainstay of Egypt’s new political order.*11 And although he later assumed several nonsecurity posts (including the premiership and vice presidency), Zakaria maintained his hegemony over the country’s sprawling and intrusive security apparatus throughout—an apparatus directed solely to the protection of the regime.
But apart from the ingenious founder, foreign expertise was crucial to the construction of this security community—after all, it was foreign powers that had originally designed modern security systems within the colonies. The American embassy provided a million dollars’ worth of surveillance and antiriot equipment immediately following the coup. Americans also helped Zakaria reinforce the unobtrusive City Eye system through a whole range of electronic equipment and techniques for installing bugs and hidden cameras in hotel rooms, army mess halls, private residences, and automobiles.12 Even in terms of how to prepare timely intelligence estimates, Egypt turned to an American: Charles Cremeans, future head of the CIA’s Office of National Intelligence Estimates. But Nasser expected more. In October 1952, he requested CIA assistance in overhauling the entire security system, and Kermit Roosevelt, director of CIA operations in the Middle East, was more than willing. A few months later, a troika of intelligence operatives set up camp in Cairo; James Eichelberger, Miles Copeland, and Frank Kearn had all served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, and later witnessed the transformation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) into the CIA. In other words, they combined civilian and military intelligence expertise. Their designated contact in Egypt was another Nasser loyalist, Captain Hassan al-Tuhami, who administered an intensive training program that involved inviting several CIA experts for short visits, as well as sending Egyptian operatives for instruction abroad.13 Captain Abd al-Fattah Abu al-Fadl, who was a vital part of that program, recalls how former German intelligence officers provided another important source of expertise; and it was the CIA that initiated this Nazi connection, putting Nasser in contact with prominent SS and Gestapo officers in hiding.* Later, in April 1958, Egypt signed a training and intelligence-sharing agreement with the KGB, which provided the latest surveillance technologies and interrogation techniques. A similar agreement was signed a decade later with Eastern German intelligence, the Stasi.14
If Zakaria did Nasser’s bidding in the domestic security sector, he expected the same of his delegate in the army: Abd al-Hakim Amer. When the republic was declared on June 18, 1953, Nasser insisted that Naguib’s first presidential decree would be to promote Amer from major to major general, and appoint
