once more that it would not harm American interests. The United States carried out its part of the deal, refusing to extend support to a pleading king, and advising him instead to submit to the officers’ demands. President Franklin D. Roosevelt immediately welcomed the coup, warned the British not to intervene, and directed his ambassador in Cairo—who infamously referred to the Free Officers as “my boys”—to support the new rulers.25
The day following the coup, Nasser relayed an even more important message to the Americans, this time asking for CIA help in reorganizing Egypt’s internal security apparatus. To add a sense of urgency to his demand, Nasser warned of Communist-led disturbances throughout the country. The message resonated with a hastily prepared report by the agency, “The Expected Consequences of a Reoccupation of Cairo and Alexandria by British Forces,” which concluded that violent confrontations would pave the road to a Communist takeover. This is why, according to the Cairo CIA station chief, Colonel William Lakeland, the agency responded favorably. Kermit Roosevelt met Nasser’s delegates shortly after the coup to draw the general guidelines for future cooperation. This was followed by a series of private meetings between CIA representatives James Eichelberger and Miles Copeland with Nasser and his associates at Lakeland’s apartment.26
Parallel to this security track, other meetings were held between Nasser and the Americans to discuss political and socioeconomic reform. The RCC member Khaled Muhi al-Din, who attended a couple of those meetings at the house of Abd al-Moun’em Amin (another officer Nasser charged with contacting the United States), noted that the Americans adamantly requested the quick adoption of land reform.27 At the beginning of 1952, a U.S. advisory committee, convinced that the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions relied mainly on deprived peasants, suggested that land redistribution was an indispensable buffer to communism. This was reinforced, in February 1952, by a State Department brochure entitled “Land Reform: A World Challenge,” calling for swift action in that direction to channel agrarian capital toward rapid industrialization. On August 20, 1952, Washington sent a telegram to its ambassador in Cairo stating, “The Government of the United States will give encouragement and assistance to land reform … to lessen the causes of agrarian unrest and political instability,” and then went on to detail what this law should include.28 Barely three weeks later, on September 9, the RCC issued a hastily prepared agricultural reform law.
In return, Nasser sought the U.S. president’s support to convince the British to evacuate the country. Dwight Eisenhower first sent Steve Meade from the U.S. military to evaluate the power balance within the RCC. Meade reported back in May 1953 that Nasser held a tight grip over the council and that the new regime was fairly stable. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the first high-ranking official to visit the new republic, seconded the report the following month.29 Afterward, the United States exerted so much pressure on the British to negotiate their way out of Egypt that Churchill protested in a lengthy letter to Eisenhower, on June 12, 1953, that America’s bias toward Nasser “in spite of the numerous far-reaching concessions which we made” was surprising and frustrating—concluding, dramatically, “we should not think we had been treated fairly by our great Ally.”30
But while the United States understood from day one that Naguib was merely a front man and acted accordingly, there were other reasons why the CIA in particular was enthusiastic about supporting Nasser. True to its Cold War conviction that military strongmen are more reliable than erratic civilians, the agency was worried about Naguib’s promise to reinstate civilian democratic rule. As early as July 30, 1952, Dean Acheson had noted in a cable to the U.S. ambassador in Cairo that a return to democracy would have unexpected consequences, and that a small group of officers would be easier to handle than a multiparty system.31 The historian, and special assistant to President Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger explains the logic behind this doctrine, citing support for Nasser as one its prominent instances:
[Premature civilianization of coup-installed regimes] would only alienate those who held the real power—the military—and open the door to incompetent liberals who would bring about inflation, disinvestment, capital flight, and social indiscipline and would finally be shoved aside by the communists … the process of development was so inherently disruptive that the first requirement had to be the maintenance of order. The basic issue is not whether the government is dictatorial or is representative and constitutional. The issue is whether the government, whatever its character, can hold the society together … civilian government tended to be unstable and soft; military governments were comparably stable and could provide the security necessary for economic growth.32
But what sealed the deal for the Americans was Nasser’s demonstration that Naguib was soft on communism. Nasser had brandished his anti-Communist credentials in clamping down on the Kafr al-Dawar strike. Kafr al-Dawar was a small textile industrial city on the outskirts of Alexandria. The labor activist Helmi Yassin, who helped organize the strike, explains that workers heard the revolutionary communiqués promising to restore the people’s rights, and so decided the time was perfect to press forward their right to control the organization of production instead of the antirevolutionary factory owners. None of them suspected that on the morning of August 13, 1952, Nasser would dispatch five hundred troops to shoot them, and execute two of the ringleaders after a summary trial five days later. For the workers, the military’s shocking behavior was totally unjustified, especially considering they were demonstrating in support of the revolution.33 In his meetings with CIA officials, Nasser exposed how Naguib was reluctant to sign the execution orders of the agitators; that he openly criticized the land-reform law; and that he nominated a constitutional lawyer with leftist sympathies (Abd al-Razeq al-Sanhouri) to the premiership. Naguib tried to explain to the Americans that executing workers would fuel further radicalism; that progressive taxation on agricultural land was better for the economy than its random parceling; and that Sanhouri was not a Communist. But his justifications fell on deaf ears. The communication channels that Nasser established with the Americans before and after the coup secured their trust and gave him more access to Washington.34 At the end, not only the United States, but the capitalist West in general, leaned toward the strong leader they all believed would be tough on communism: Nasser.
NAGUIB’S NOT-SO-POWERFUL BLOC
While Nasser set himself the task of creating a new order, Naguib continued to invest in the old; while the former was pushing forward, the latter insisted on swimming against the current. Naguib still believed in the binding power of the law, the legitimacy of the old political groups, the need for democracy, and the importance of popularity in general. Instead of the security coterie with which Nasser surrounded himself, Naguib attracted constitutional lawyers who carried great weight in the old regime, notably Abd al-Razeq al-Sanhouri, head of the State Council (Egypt’s highest administrative court), who was charged with issuing a new constitution following the coup, and Suleiman Hafez, another legal heavyweight, who had drafted the monarch’s abdication letter. But while Egypt’s first president busied himself with the process of drafting a new constitution, his rival promoted the view that revolutionary legitimacy trumps any constitution. Perhaps more important, Naguib’s fatal mistake of appointing the lawyer Suleiman Hafez as interior minister in September 1952, to signal his respect for the law, made it easy for Nasser to take over the ministry in June 1953 with the reasonable argument that the country needed a firmer grip than that of a constitutional lawyer at this critical juncture.
Naguib also tried to make himself popular with the old political elites, portraying himself in speeches and personal interviews as pro-democracy and free enterprise, and distancing himself from RCC decrees against political parties and large landowners.35 The problem was, of course, that Egypt’s sociopolitical structure was designed to weaken the hand of those elites vis-à-vis the state. Muhammad Ali, the founder of the modern Egyptian state in the first half of the nineteenth century—following the example of Hohenzollern Prussia, tsarist Russia, and Japan’s soon-to-come Meiji Restoration—had dismantled the Mamluks’ military aristocracy, established in the thirteenth century, and tied the landed class to his expansive state. So instead of dividing sovereignty over the land among loyal warlords,
