8

IN A FIVE-STORY HOTEL on a dark side street in the Imbaba quarter of Cairo, far from Egyptian military headquarters and the Israeli operatives who, it is thought, permeate every square meter of the capital, a light flashes briefly from a high window.

Inside, in the war room of Second Division, Special Operations Branch, Lieutenant Colonel Jamil Anwar slaps the face of the young adjutant pulling back the edge of the blackout curtain to peek at the street below.

“Pitiful lump!” the colonel hisses. “Blackout means blackout. Everywhere are Jewish spies.”

Though only a colonel, as head of field security for all ground forces of the Egyptian Army, Anwar is one of the most powerful men in Cairo. Modeled on the SS—indeed, founded in the 1950s by German veterans of that organization who had found shelter in the Middle East—the Field Security Office is one of unique prestige and privilege, with the power of immediate arrest and trial of all officers below the rank of major general, and even these may be arrested at any time and the charges against them forwarded to the Grand Military Council. The files of the Field Security Office hold dossiers on every serving officer, up to and including the commanding general.

Col. Anwar’s brief is brutally simple: Monitor the activities of all enemies of the state who are in contact with Egyptian enlisted men and officers, all of whom are considered targets of opportunity for the Israeli, American, British, French, German, Chinese, Saudi, and Libyan spies who operate with impunity across Egypt. These are said to work incessantly to listen in on military communications frequencies, photograph military installations, and—most damaging—bribe its underpaid and thus inherently untrustworthy personnel.

Like any good security chief, Col. Anwar often exaggerates the threat of foreign subversion in order to gain leverage for his organization and for himself, but he also knows that the threat, however exaggerated, is real. That is why he set up a war room here, where no one would think to look, and where a curious adjutant peering through a crack in a blackout curtain deserves the back of his hand. If Col. Anwar had his way, the man would be shot, but his adjutant comes from a good family. Besides, the colonel is obese, and the adjutant has been trained to help him into his car, an olive-green 1978 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, without drawing attention to the strenuousness of his efforts.