A dozen men and women had gathered over sugary tea and Nescafé in a Cairo law office. They were all in their late twenties or early thirties, which made them older than most Egyptians. Some were leftists, others liberals, and others Muslim Brothers. Several had been friends since they were students at Cairo University. They had been organizing together for years—against the Israeli occupation, against the American invasion of Iraq, and always against the Egyptian police. Now they were doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Some had young children. Yuppies, we might call them. None of them had known any other president besides Hosni Mubarak.
It was a Monday night, January 24, and the next day was Police Day, the annual holiday that commemorated the massacre of fifty policemen who had resisted the British army in 1952. The same clique of yuppies had used the same day every year to demonstrate against police abuse, always in Tahrir Square—Liberation Square, in English. Almost no one else showed up. The police chased them away in about fifteen minutes. But there seemed a small chance that this year might be different.
My first official day on the job as an international correspondent was January 9, and I had flown that day to Tunis. A young street peddler had burned himself to death about three weeks earlier after an encounter with a bullying police officer in an interior town. His self-immolation had inspired a rash of imitators, including a few in Egypt. I imagined an article about the psychology of suicide.
Tunisia, a former French colony, was once the most benign example of Arab autocracy. Unlike Abdel Nasser, the father of Tunisia’s independence had been a lawyer, Habib Bourguiba. Even while he plotted to overthrow colonial rule, he was also scheming to expand commercial ties with France and Europe. Tunisia broke away in 1965, and he invested in education and literacy. He championed women’s rights, encouraged birth control, and ended polygamy, successfully lowering birth rates and expanding the middle class. (Tunisia was the only Arab state to outlaw polygamy.)
But even the best autocracy had limits. Bourguiba jailed his opponents, bowed to no court, and never contemplated any possible successor. In 1987, his security chief, Zine al Abidine Ben Ali, seized power through a medical coup, enlisting doctors to declare the president no longer fit for office.
In contrast to his predecessor, Ben Ali had no education except military training in France and the United States. Five years after he took power at the age of fifty-three, he left his first wife for a woman two decades younger—Leila Trabelsi, a hairdresser. By 2010, a sprawling clan of Ben Alis and Trabelsis was sucking up so much of the economy that Tunisians described them as a ruling mafia: the Family. The Family had muscled its way into control of banks, telecommunication companies, an airline, hotels, car distributorships, radio stations, a newspaper, prime real estate, a property developer, and much more. The first license to provide internet service had gone to Ben Ali’s daughter. The Assabah newspaper belonged to his son-in-law, Sakher el-Materi, who was considered a potential successor. Two younger Trabelsis, on a lark, had once stolen a yacht from Bruno Rogers, the chairman of Lazard Frères, and the Ben Ali side of the Family included a noted drug dealer.
“Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage, and many of these relations are reported to have made the most of their lineage,” reported a cable from the U.S. embassy that was disclosed by WikiLeaks. “Contacts tell us they are afraid to invest for fear that the family will suddenly want a cut.” The diplomats summarized: “There are no checks in the system.”
Other journalists told me not to bother visiting. The Tunisian police state put Egypt’s to shame. Mukhabarat would follow me from the airport, bug my hotel room, and scare everyone away from me. Tunisians had even less experience than Egyptians with civic debate or competitive politics.
But the chain of events set off by the fruit peddler’s suicide on December 17 had led in unexpected directions. The funeral erupted in chants against Ben Ali. Police fired into the crowd. Grainy mobile phone footage spread over Facebook and Al Jazeera. Within days a widening spiral of martyrs, funerals, protests, and more martyrs was spreading from town to town, toward the capital. Police gunfire had killed more than thirty civilians by the time I landed in Tunis. Ben Ali had denounced the demonstrators as foreign spies and Islamist terrorists—the perennial bogeymen—and he vowed to crush them.
Using Skype to avoid telephone surveillance, an activist I knew in Cairo sent me the contact information of a Tunisian human rights lawyer, Radhia Nasraoui. When I reached her apartment that Wednesday, I saw that its front door had been torn off its hinges. A child’s toys were strewn around the floor. Nasraoui, with a deeply creased face and short curly hair, was sitting in a housedress weeping on the couch.
A group of armed men in plain clothes had broken in and dragged off her husband, Hamma Hammami, who led Tunisia’s outlawed Communist Party. (Arab politics had been in such a deep freeze that there were still Communist parties.) He had given interviews on French television commending the rural protests. “So we were waiting for his arrest,” Nasraoui told me. Her ten-year-old daughter had shrieked in terror when the police broke down the door, and Nasraoui had sent all three of her daughters away for fear the assailants might come back for their mother.
Nasraoui ran a Tunisian rights group that opposed the use of torture, and the police had jailed and beaten both her and her husband many times before. But this time the security forces were jittery and unpredictable. Would I please write about her husband’s disappearance? she asked. The abduction of another Tunisian dissident was hardly newsworthy, but I said I would try.
As I left her, a taxi driver checking Facebook on his mobile device had tipped me off about an upcoming protest. It materialized an hour later outside the French embassy, and I was introduced to tear gas. So the next day I checked Facebook first thing in the morning. I saw calls for a protest in Hammamet, the East Hampton of Tunis, where Ben Ali’s family kept their summer homes, and I made it there by the early afternoon.
A police car and garbage piles were burning in the streets. Rioters had already set fire to every bank in town, including one next to the police station. Most police had fled. The handful remaining—all from local families—stood in front of the station asking the mob for mercy. Leave us alone and go sack the mansions of the Ben Ali family. The police pointed the way.
At the beachfront mansion of Sofiane Ben Ali, the president’s uncle, looters were carrying coffee tables and color televisions out through a broken picture window. Others set fire to a pair of all-terrain buggies on the lawn. Motorcyclists did wheelies around them. Someone “liberated” a sailboat. A chestnut-colored horse ran loose on the beach while a Tunisian coast guard boat observed from the water.
“Look, the people of Tunisia, the people of Tunisia,” rioters told me, showing me mobile phone videos of themselves in action. They were giving me their names, without fear of reprisal. “Now, we can say what we want,” said Cheadi Mohamed, a thirty-two-year-old airport worker. “It has started to change.”
On the road back into Tunis, I saw tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs) heading the other way. I wondered what other protest they intended to crush.
Ben Ali declared a curfew and delivered a third speech. But this time he no longer called the demonstrators terrorists or vowed to restore order. His hands shook at his podium. He jostled the microphone. He had dyed his hair black but he was seventy-four years old and it showed in his eyes. “I am telling you I understand you, yes, I understand you,” he tried to assure Tunisians. Even with my amateur Arabic, I could hear the fear in his voice.
He pledged not to run for reelection. He promised to open up the media. Blocked websites were back online by the end of his speech. From now on, he said, the police would no longer shoot demonstrators.
Outside my hotel, drivers were ignoring the curfew, honking horns and waving placards in celebration. But all the cars were the same, and so were the placards. They were government cars, in a staged demonstration. Tunisians were not fooled.
But they had heard Ben Ali’s promises. Early the next morning, on Friday, Radhia Nasraoui made for the headquarters of the Interior Ministry, on Avenue Habib Bourguiba. She had learned that her husband had been held there since Wednesday, and she wanted to bring him a change of clothes.
She arrived with a handful of Tunisian journalists, and the police guards seemed more anxious than ever. At around 9:00 A.M., about two hours after she arrived, they invited her inside to meet the ministry’s political director, and he offered to let her see her husband—if only she would send away the journalists.
She refused and kept waiting. The journalists were joined by a growing crowd outside, and the numbers swelled further when midday prayers ended. “See what you have done with these demonstrations?” a plainclothes policeman told her accusingly, as though she and her husband were responsible. “Now are you happy?”
As the throng grew, a lawyer called her with a message from the interior minister. Then a Ben Ali crony called with a message from the president. She could take her husband home, they both said, if she sent away the crowds.
“I am not the leader of ten thousand people,” she told them angrily, “and I can do nothing for Ben Ali!”
Hamma Hammami could hear the chants from his cell. This was his third day spent in solitary confinement, much of the time with his arms bound behind him. Around noon, a senior ministry official walked in and told him, “I am bringing you good news. You will leave, you will leave! If you say a word to the people, things may calm down, and we will let you leave.”
The noise outside rose suddenly, and police started running in the halls. The ministry is under attack, they shouted.
I was outside, and by early afternoon a crowd in the tens of thousands stretched for several blocks of the broad boulevard, as far as the old French cathedral. A sign in English read YES WE CAN, mimicking Obama’s campaign slogan. “What happened here is going to affect the whole Arab world,” Zied Mhirsi, the thirty-three-year-old doctor who held the sign told me. Maybe someday, I thought.
By then the protest felt more like a celebration. Ben Ali was still in his palace but his authority had already fled. Political power is like fairy-tale magic: it works only if you believe in it.
Some time after 3:00 P.M., a group of men made their way in front of the Interior Ministry with a coffin on their shoulders. A rumor spread that they carried the body of another victim killed by the police, and the ministry lost patience. Hundreds, maybe thousands of police in riot gear stormed into the throngs.
Almost blinded by their tear gas and doubled over from coughing, I stumbled around a corner. A middle-aged man in an overcoat and with a small mustache grabbed me by the shoulder. I panicked, taking him for a policeman, but he pulled me into the bottom of a stairwell with a half dozen others. There he handed me half of a lemon. Rub it on your face, he told me. A home remedy for the tear gas.
My editors were in a fright, too, I later learned. I had never covered anything grittier than Congress, books, or business—not even a house fire. It was too late to fly in a more experienced hand. Tunisia had closed its airports.
By the time the gas cleared and I’d hiked to my hotel, Ben Ali had fled to Saudi Arabia. The police gave Hammami a ride home to his wife. On January 14, 2011, a popular uprising had removed an Arab ruler.
Experienced Egyptian activists used to send encouragement in online messages to the novices in Tunis. Now Tunisians were writing back with “advice to the youth of Egypt”: “Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.” Apolitical Egyptians were trading jokes online: “Mubarak, your plane is waiting!”
I wanted to head back to Cairo for Police Day, eleven days later, but my editors told me to stay in Tunis. The transition there was the big story. “Nothing is going to happen in Egypt.”
Ninety thousand Egyptians had clicked a link on the six-month-old “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page to say that they would join this year’s Police Day demonstration—a number that would exceed any organized rally in the four decades since Abdel Nasser died. The friends in the law office planning for Police Day hoped that if the crowds were large enough, they might demand the resignation of the interior minister.
With Tunisia in the news, though, someone suggested that this year they try a new twist. They had always reached out to their friends in Cairo’s small middle class. This year, they thought, why not the poor? “We always start from the elite, with the same faces,” one later recalled. “So this time we thought, let’s try.”
Many Westerners would come to see these worldly, middle-class yuppies as more like us than they were like other Egyptians. They were harnessing the technologies of Silicon Valley to the nonviolent tactics of Martin Luther King Jr. And we Western journalists in Egypt naturally accentuated the details that resonated with Westerners. I am sure I had a hand in fostering the feeling that these charming organizers had more in common with readers of the New York Times than they did with their compatriots. But that Police Day their clique galvanized something much broader. The shakedowns and self-dealing, the broken bargains of the Nasserite social contract, the shamelessness of the police, the rollback of rights, the rigging of the vote—the Tunisian revolt had brought it all into focus in a moment of common cause among Egyptians of all ages, classes, and creeds.
The organizers fanned out across poor and working-class neighborhoods on the morning of Police Day, January 25, 2011. They chanted old standbys, like the one mocking the paramilitary state security police, “Amn el-Dawla—Amn fein? Dawla fein?” “Where is security? Where is the state?” The Mubarak government had failed to provide any of the public services or accountability that citizens expect of a modern state, least of all security. Egyptian police were a menace. But this Police Day the organizers also hit bread-and-butter issues, like grocery prices and the minimum wage.
“They are eating pigeon and chicken, and we are eating beans all the time.”
“Oh my, ten pounds can only buy us cucumbers now, what a shame, what a shame.”
“Come down, Egyptians! Come down,” marchers called to the balconies. And down they came. Contingents of a few dozen in each neighborhood swelled into thousands. The tributaries merged into rivers, and all converged toward the central traffic circle at Tahrir Square. “We entered Nahyan street with two hundred and we came out with ten thousand,” one of the organizers told me later. Rich and poor, young and old: this was no yuppie revolt.
The leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood kept their distance, mainly to protect themselves. They knew that they made a big, easy target. Because of their numbers, their members would overwhelm any march that the organization joined. Mubarak’s propagandists would easily dismiss all the marchers as Islamist extremists, and Mubarak’s police would hit the Brotherhood. Besides, compared with Abdel Nasser or Sadat, Mubarak was gentle toward the Brothers. There was no need to risk what they had won.
But some younger Muslim Brothers in their twenties and thirties were among the core organizers who met in the law office and planned Police Day. Thousands of other members joined the marches as individuals, without waiting for a go-ahead from their leaders. And hundreds more gathered at a parallel Police Day demonstration led by former Brotherhood lawmakers at a Cairo courthouse. One of them, Mohamed Beltagy, brought the police a bouquet of flowers, to say thank you for all the abuse and incarceration. A female Brotherhood lawmaker led a contingent of Islamist women who pushed through police lines all the way to Tahrir Square. Islamist women may have been the first to make it.
My friend and Times colleague Kareem Fahim was in Cairo to cover the marches. “Bedlam,” he emailed at midday. But that was just the beginning. “This shit is nuts,” he wrote back that night. “The battle is spreading.”
Amn el-Dawla met the marchers with tear gas, clubs, rubber bullets, and eventually live ammunition; a handful or more were killed by police gunshots. It took the security forces until late at night to expel the demonstrators from the square. Some turned then to Zyad el-Elaimy, who had convened the planning meeting in his law office. What happens now? they asked.
“We are going to jail,” he told them assuredly.
The White House seemed to concur. “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable,” Secretary of State Clinton told journalists in Washington. Vice President Joe Biden, who said he knew Mubarak “fairly well,” told a television interviewer not to call him “a dictator.”
What did Washington know? The American intelligence agencies, I later learned, knew the top generals well and eavesdropped on them, too. But the U.S. government knew very little about what was going on inside the police force, among left-leaning activists, or within the Muslim Brotherhood. Washington more or less depended on Egypt’s own intelligence services. “The leadership we were relying on was isolated and unaware of the tidal wave that was about to hit them,” Michael Morrell, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, later acknowledged.
The embassy had ordered its personnel off the streets that day, and the intelligence agencies were thin on the ground. Steven A. Cook, an American political scientist who happened to be in Cairo, posted an observation on Twitter and a few moments later he got a call from the White House.
“You are my eyes and ears,” Daniel Shapiro, senior director for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council, told Cook. “Can you tell me what is happening?”
I called Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt’s great liberal hope. He had been working on his memoirs in his office in Vienna. “Frankly, I did not think the people were ready,” he told me. Now we were both racing back to Cairo.
We awoke on Friday, January 28, to discover that the government had shut down all internet and mobile phone service. The Police Day organizers had told me to attend noon prayers at a mosque near Giza, and as a few thousand of us were leaving the prayer hall, some started chanting for bread and freedom. The police hit us all with tear gas and water cannons. Our driver had parked our Mitsubishi SUV nearby. A tear gas canister broke through the rear window, destroying the toddler car seat Laura and I had hauled all the way from Washington.
I had been directed to that mosque because Mohamed ElBaradei had also prayed there. He was wearing a suede jacket and clip-on sunglasses, and younger men held him by each arm to steady him against the force of the fire hoses. With their help, he stood his ground for a time, drenched and sputtering, even in the fumes. It may have been his finest hour.
When we both retreated back inside the mosque, he wanted to remind the New York Times that the police had soaked and gassed a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. “This is the work of a barbaric regime,” he told me, still dripping wet and panting. “They have told the Egyptian people that they have to revolt.” Then he retired to his grand villa in a gated community in Giza.
A pudgy twenty-seven-year-old with floppy hair and a baggy sports coat pulled me to a corner of the prayer room. He said he was Waleed Rashed from the April 6 Youth Movement, best known for using the internet to rally opposition to Mubarak or to support striking workers. “Do not worry about ElBaradei,” he told me. “We are making a revolution—not a protest, a revolution.”
On his advice, I made my way back across the river to the downtown side of the Qasr el-Nil Bridge, a flat span with colonial-era stone lions at each entrance. It was midafternoon by the time I made it, and in front of me was a phalanx of more than a thousand policemen in black riot gear, armed with clubs and rifles. Five armored personnel carriers were moving with them and blasting tear gas. Two fire trucks were using their hoses as cannons. But all together they were somehow unable to repel the mass of demonstrators trying to push across the bridge from Giza.
I stood transfixed. The black mass of police surged forward, shooting and smashing, protected by helmets and flak jackets. I braced myself for a massacre. I was sure the police would break through, but they never did. The demonstrators wore motorcycle helmets and scraps of plastic under their shirts. They wrapped onions or lemons under scarves around their nose and mouth (as the Tunisians had suggested), or sprayed their faces with vinegar or cola—more home remedies for tear gas. They picked up hot, smoking canisters of tear gas and hurled them into the river; long trails of gray fumes arced majestically behind them.
As one wave faded back in exhaustion, a fresh one rotated to the front lines. The bridge was thick with marchers; they outnumbered the police. On the sidewalk around me, scrawny police conscripts fresh from the battle sat with their helmets off, panting, soaking with sweat, and shaking their heads in disbelief.
The shadows lengthened, and the battle continued. Phones were dead. The streets were in chaos. The taxis had fled. The three bridges from downtown Cairo back to Zamalek were all closed or obstructed. Worried about getting back across the Nile to my office on the island, I walked by the river to look for a passage by foot across one of the bridges.
Two policemen caught me under the overpass of the May 15 Bridge. Sahafi—journalist—I repeated. But they tore up my full notebooks and then shooed me off. Forget about getting back to Zamalek, they told me.
I set off half running into downtown, turning corners with no idea where I was going. Mubarak had decreed a 6:00 P.M. curfew and my newspaper deadline was approaching. I raised a thumb to hitchhike.
A tall, bearded man let me in his beat-up blue Fiat and introduced himself as Mohamed el-Masry—Mohamed the Egyptian, surely not his real name. I said I was a journalist for the New York Times, and without further explanation he spun his car around. He drove south until, after several tries, he found a passable bridge to Giza, on the far side of the Nile, so he could loop back to Zamalek. It was an hour-long detour on a dangerous night. Mohamed el-Masry asked only one thing: Would I take a message for Obama?
“I call on President Obama, at least in his statements, to be in solidarity with the Egyptian people and with freedom, truly, as he says,” he dictated into my audio recorder. I managed to squeeze his quote into the newspaper, which I hoped might reach the president’s desk.
Late that night the demonstrators on Qasr el-Nil Bridge finally broke through. Looters torched the ruling party headquarters and hauled out computers, televisions, briefcases, file cabinets, and assorted souvenirs with the ruling party logo. Then the crowd proceeded directly to the business headquarters of Ahmed Ezz, steel tycoon and friend of Gamal.
By midnight mobs had set fire to nearly a hundred police stations. As many as two thousand burning police cars littered the streets. I could hardly blame the rioters, but I winced each time I heard Westerners call the demonstrations “peaceful” or “nonviolent.” (I qualified my own coverage, calling the protests “largely” nonviolent.) We were projecting our own ideals onto these “Facebook youth.”
An Egyptian government inquiry later concluded that 849 civilians were killed during the uprising, almost all by police bullets and almost all on that night. (The tally from independent rights groups is roughly the same.) By midnight, though, the defeated police had vanished from the city.
Mubarak stuck to the script. The protests were “part of a bigger plot,” he said in a televised address around midnight. “A very thin line separates freedom from chaos.”
Obama, perhaps remembering the tumult he lived through as a child in Indonesia, told his advisers that day that Mubarak was doomed. “He took one look at what was happening in the streets and he thought, ‘We ought to get on the right side of this,’” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser and a longtime aide to Obama, later told me.
“He knew that the old order was rotten and the status quo was unsustainable,” Rhodes said. “Obama thought this was an opportunity that had to be tested. He wanted the future of Egypt to be the people in the square—not Mubarak.”
Virtually every senior figure on Obama’s National Security Council wanted to stand by Mubarak: Secretary of State Clinton, Vice President Biden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and others. They invoked the Iranian Revolution of 1979. They worried about other autocratic Arab allies across the region, like the hereditary monarchs of Jordan, Morocco, and the Persian Gulf. What if citizens marched on those royal palaces, too? The United States should not “throw them to the wolves,” as Gates later put it.
“The dynamic was established that day that the president wanted to get rid of Mubarak,” Rhodes told me, “and most of his government didn’t.”
After placing a phone call to Mubarak, Obama delivered a statement from the White House. Mubarak “pledged a better democracy,” Obama said. “I told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words.” Despite what he had said inside the White House, Obama talked like Mubarak had years in office still ahead of him.
Tahrir Square was unlike a city square that you might find in New York or London. It was an unplanned urban void of dirt and pavement sprawling over several city blocks, in the shape of an elongated triangle rounded off at its two bottom corners, like a tear. A mosque and government administration building occupied one side of the lower circle, with a KFC opposite. At the northern point the Egyptian Museum stood beside a wide corridor under the overpass to the October 6 Bridge.
That Friday—remembered as the Day of Rage—demonstrators had converged on the square from all over the city. By night they had taken it over. After that the numbers never fell below a few thousand and sometimes swelled to ten times as many—or even to hundreds of thousands. After the success of Police Day, the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood had come off the sidelines and told every able member to march on Tahrir Square and stay there.
With the police gone, the army had stationed hundreds of soldiers inside the iron fence of the Egyptian Museum, presumably to protect the mummies. A few tanks and personnel carriers were parked around the periphery of the square, but the soldiers did nothing. They looked down from their tank turrets with rifles across their laps, or sipped juice through straws from little plastic bags (cheaper than cups) sold by roving street vendors. Protesters—usually young Muslim Brothers—slept at night under the tank treads, to prevent surprise movements.
Military helicopters and jets buzzed low over downtown, and the crowds cheered as though the pilots had turned against Mubarak. I never understood what all those soldiers were waiting for behind the fence of the museum. Was the army replacing the police, turning against them, or waiting to roll out and crush the demonstration? Compared with modern states—where both the army and police answer to the same civilian authority—the Arab world was confounding.
Between the tanks and soldiers a booming tent city quickly sprang up. Smiling volunteers patted me down at the entrance to the square with exaggerated apologies, advertising the contrast with the haughty and brutal Egyptian police. More tents, blankets, chairs, and loudspeakers were arriving each day (from rich donors somewhere). Street vendors hawked drinks, tea, roasted sweet potatoes, and corn on the cob. Tens of thousands surged in again on Tuesday, beginning a biweekly rhythm of larger and larger rallies each Tuesday and Friday. Even in the middle of the night the population of Tahrir Square was still at least a few thousand. The internet returned on February 3, but organizers no longer needed it to spread their messages; satellite networks carried them now.
Politicians, preachers, and pop singers took turns at the soundstage. The Muslim Brothers centered in one spot in the square, the leftist activists in another, and the rich kids from the American University in their own “Gucci corner,” near Qasr el-Nil Bridge to Zamalek. Each constituency had its place. It was a pluralistic little republic, through the looking glass from Mubarak’s Egypt.
Western journalists, myself included, struggled not to sound starry-eyed. The reality of Tahrir Square was hard to fathom even as you witnessed it. Men and women mingled freely, and safely, by day and by night, in galabiyas and suits, niqabs and V-necks. Most were under forty. But there were plenty of older people, too, both rich and poor. Coptic Christians stood guard around Muslims at prayer; Muslim Brothers guarded a Coptic Mass. Patriotic anthems sung by midcentury crooners played from giant speakers. Handsome young troubadours led sing-alongs urging Mubarak to get out already. Couples held weddings there. In the small hours, poets—some well known—held readings.
Doctors established field clinics, with central “hospitals” in the mosque and behind the KFC. Volunteers used Twitter to coordinate donations to a Tahrir “pharmacy” stocked with everything from bandages to insulin and asthma inhalers. Makeshift kitchens doled out cheese sandwiches and flat baladi bread—“country” bread. Social services were efficient and honest. The square felt more like a functioning state than the Egyptian government did.
Incandescent graffiti spread over the walls: Islamic crescents with Christian crosses, mummies screaming in rage, a black king toppled over on a red-and-white chessboard, the Statue of Liberty in an Islamic niqab, dark angels with luminous wings holding Molotov cocktails. My favorite was a sad, pudgy panda staring down a tank. One Western journalist took pictures with her iPhone and covered the walls of her Zamalek loft with 8½ x 11 prints of revolutionary graffiti. We all loved it.
I heard rumors of “revolutionary” counterpolice, vigilantes who would catch and beat suspected government infiltrators, then lock them in the closed subway station below the square. “The people’s jail,” they called it.
“We did not like to report it, but of course it happened,” my friend Ahmad Abdallah, a young engineering professor active with the April 6 Youth Movement, later told me. I tried without success to confirm those rumors at the time. Maybe if I had been less dazzled by the graffiti and poetry readings I would have tried harder.
One day a stranger with a tripod shared a taxi with me from Tahrir Square to Zamalek. He was an Egyptian about my age, and he turned out to speak not only the native dialect and formal Arabic but also fluent French and English. Before the uprising he had produced satiric online videos about police abuse, under the pseudonym Ahmed Sherif. After the police denounced the video of Emad el-Kabeer’s torture as fake, Ahmed Sherif had released an online video in which Jerry Seinfeld appeared to present a best director Oscar to the policeman who sodomized the bus driver. Kabeer took best actor. The Oscar video was a big hit on Facebook.
Now my fellow passenger was filming videos in the open—hence the tripod—under his real name, Aalam Wassef. At forty, he had already made his mark in Paris and New York as a successful publisher, software designer, photographer, and artist. He contributed a regular column about Egypt to the website of Le Monde.
Extraordinary people like Wassef seemed to pop up all the time around Tahrir Square in those days. Educated young Egyptians were as fluent in my culture as they were in their own, and more sophisticated about both than I was about either. They were easy to like, easy to root for, easy to render appealingly for remote Western readers.
Take the clique behind Police Day. One day I was helping Zyad el-Elaimy, who had hosted the planning meeting in his office, to put some folding chairs in the square. How did you end up here? I asked. Without looking at me, he told me that the Egyptian police had detained him for his socialist activism for the first time when he was sixteen. He had been imprisoned three other times after that. When he was twenty-three, the police had tortured and beaten him, broken his leg, and lacerated his back. “Amnesty International did a report—you can look it up,” he told me flatly, unfolding a chair.
Zyad was now thirty and he was running ElBaradei’s presidential campaign effort when the uprising broke out. He and the same circle of organizers who had met in his office before Police Day convened every day in his mother’s apartment downtown to orchestrate the daily demonstrations.
Zyad’s partner, thirty-two-year-old Islam Lotfy, was a rising star in the Muslim Brotherhood. But he worked by day as a lawyer for USAID (a fact he asked me not to print in the newspaper then). He was a liberal when it came to women’s equality, cultural pluralism, and freedom of expression, and he scorned the Brotherhood’s leaders for distancing themselves from the Police Day protest. “On Tuesday, they said, ‘You are making a mistake.’ On Wednesday, it was ‘We are not sure.’ And on Friday, ‘You have done a great thing and we are right behind you.’”
Lotfy and Elaimy took a businesslike approach to their organizing. After the surprise success of Police Day, they ran “field tests” the next night. At 6:00 that evening, each set out for a different neighborhood and chanted for bread and freedom, to find out what kind of crowd he could raise. “And the funny thing is, when we finished up the people refused to leave,” Lotfy told me. “They were seven thousand and they burned two police cars.” They knew Cairo was ready.
Lotfy said the organizers had imagined Mubarak meeting his predecessors, Abdel Nasser and Sadat, in the afterlife. When the dead presidents asked, “What got you? A gunshot? Or poison?” Mubarak would answer, “Facebook.”
Lotfy and Elaimy were close to Sally Toma, a thirty-two-year-old Coptic Christian psychiatrist of Irish and Egyptian parentage. (She used her Irish father’s last name, Moore, when she talked to Western journalists.) She was an outspoken leftist and feminist, and she had helped plan the Police Day demonstrations. She also set up the first Day of Rage field clinic. One day in the square I watched several young Muslim Brothers commend her for an interview she had given to the BBC.
“I like the Brotherhood, and they like me,” she told me. “They always have a hidden agenda, we know, and you never know when power comes how they will behave. But they are very good with organizing. They are calling for a civil state just like everyone else, so let them have a political party just like everyone else. They will not win more than ten percent, I think.”
I had known that trio’s mutual friend Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, also thirty-two, for about two weeks before he let slip that he was a practicing surgeon trained in London. He had been arrested at the Cairo airport for his activism in 2010, trying to fly back to take the exam for the Royal College of Physicians.
Another day I spotted Ahmed Maher, a thirty-year-old left-leaning civil engineer who led the April 6 Youth Movement, at the edge of a crowd in the lobby of an Egyptian newspaper building. How did you do it? I asked him. How did you break through the Qasr el-Nil Bridge? How did you overcome and shatter the Egyptian police?
“Gene Sharp,” he said immediately.
I had to look him up: Sharp was a political scientist at Harvard who studied the use of nonviolent tactics against authoritarians (overt violence plays into their me-or-chaos self-justification). Maher and his April 6 friends had traveled to Serbia to meet with a group called Otpor!—Resistance!—who had relied on the Sharp playbook to oust their own autocrat, Slobodan Milošević. April 6 had borrowed its clenched fist logo from Otpor! They learned tricks like putting scraps of plastic under your clothes to protect against rubber bullets, or jamming up the wheels and exhaust pipes of armored police vehicles. All from a Harvard professor! Of course, I put that in the New York Times as fast as I could.
Wael Ghonim, then thirty-one, became famous in the West. He was “the Google guy”: a Google executive based in Cairo with an American wife and a degree from the American University. “I worked in marketing,” he told me, “and I knew that if you build a brand you can get people to trust the brand.” He was the anonymous creator of the most popular “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page. Ghonim had used Silicon Valley salesmanship to rally opposition to Mubarak. He held online polls, solicited user content, and turned his own anonymity into a marketing gimmick: “My name is that of every Egyptian who has been tortured or humiliated in Egypt.” The Police Day organizers all corresponded online with the page’s anonymous administrator and they had no idea that they were writing to a friend they already knew, like unwitting friends of Bruce Wayne emailing Batman.
The police arrested Ghonim at the start of the uprising and held him for twelve days, often blindfolded, in solitary confinement. Why had he traveled to the United States? his interrogators demanded. Despite their own close partnership with the American intelligence agencies, Ghonim’s interrogators were sure he was an American spy. “Do you think we are idiots? You are an undercover agent to the CIA,” they told him as they beat him.
After his release, a television interviewer showed him photographs of young demonstrators killed in the streets. “To the mothers and fathers, it’s not our fault,” Ghonim sobbed. “It’s the fault of the people in positions of authority who don’t want to leave power.”
They were all so heroic, so ingenious, but also so familiar. Of course I fell for them. We all did, even Obama.
“What I want is for the kids on the street to win and for the Google guy to become president,” Obama told an aide, who promptly relayed the comment to my colleagues in the Washington bureau so they could put it in the paper.
We set ourselves up for disappointment. Where did it go? I was often asked later, in New York or London. What happened to the nonviolent, secular-minded, Western-friendly, Silicon Valley uprising that we cheered in Tahrir Square? Who stole that revolution? That image of the revolution was as much about Western narcissism as it was about Egypt.
Laura spent the Day of Rage with our sons at the home of a neighbor. Mubarak had declared a curfew, and she set out to walk home before dusk. One-year-old Emmett was in his Bugaboo stroller and five-year-old Thomas was standing in back. But as she pushed them out of the neighbor’s gates, she saw clusters of men in the streets. They were armed with baseball bats, crowbars, tree branches, and anything else they could find, and they had hauled rebar, sand, and garbage to build roadblocks on each corner. Was this an ambush? How would she get home?
In retrospect, I think she was safer that night than on any other night we spent in Cairo. After the police had fled, the authorities filled the airwaves with warnings of impending chaos and looting; the military sent text messages to every mobile phone. So the men in every city neighborhood had organized themselves into squads for community protection. And when the men of Maadi saw Laura with the boys, they sprang into action. At each roadblock strangers lifted up the Bugaboo and handed it over. Emmett rode inside like a Pharaoh on a litter. Laura reached our door beaming with gratitude. I shuddered to think what would have happened if the police had vanished from New York or Washington, D.C. Cairo held it together.
Still, neighborhood justice goes only so far. One morning on the way to the square I stopped at our usual supermarket, part of the French chain Carrefour. We needed breakfast cereal, and I wanted to check on rumors of a break-in. It turned out to be much worse than that: the mall around the store had been ransacked. Mannequins in dark abayas and bright headscarves lay dismembered in puddles of water from the overhead sprinklers. Shattered glass cracked under my boots. Two men working on the cleanup told me that the police who normally stood guard had invited in a gang of Bedouins in a pickup truck. Then the police abandoned their stations to let the Bedouins smash the place and take what they pleased.
I called Laura from the wreckage. How would you and the boys like to take a vacation? All the commercial flights and embassy charters were full, so a friend who worked for an oil company stowed her and the boys on the plane his employer had hired to get its staff to Dubai: her first evacuation.
Cairo felt like it was splitting into two cities. One was the sunny city of Tahrir Square and the neighborhood watches. The other was the shadowy city still shaped by the security agencies, businessmen, and news media of the Mubarak regime. The latter was the city where unidentified looters ran wild in the spaces between residential neighborhoods, such as the Carrefour strip mall, and where the state media’s warnings of chaos became self-fulfilling. Both the police and civilians who dwelled in that city were turning increasingly hostile to Westerners like me.
Every voice on the state-run television and radio stations insisted that the protests were all the handiwork of foreign spies. Call-in shows buzzed with theatrical rage at the “hidden hands” and “foreign fingers,” and in the Egyptian imagination the perfect cover for a spy was as a journalist with a notebook. State television reported that foreigners were handing out free dinners of fried chicken to bribe the indigent to demonstrate in the square. Someone called in to report that he had seen two “foreigners” order eight hundred sandwiches at an Egyptian fast-food restaurant, implying conspiratorially that the order was for distribution in the square. Police raided rights groups, arrested liberal activists, and rounded up Muslim Brothers (including a former parliamentarian by the name of Mohamed Morsi). They even detained a few Western journalists, briefly including two working for the New York Times. We all felt the xenophobia.
A distorted narrative of those days would later become a touchstone in future debates about American policy around the region. So it is worth remembering the interplay of events between Washington and Cairo.
The drama in Washington began when Obama convened an emergency meeting of his National Security Council on the morning after the protesters had broken the police and taken the square. After a heated debate, he had agreed with his advisers on a State Department plan to encourage Mubarak to hand power to his seventy-four-year-old spy chief and alter ego, Omar Suleiman.
Suleiman had been Egypt’s main liaison to both Washington and Israel. American lawmakers, diplomats, generals, and spies all knew him well. “He was very wise,” Mike Morrell of the CIA later wrote. “You could ask Suleiman a single question about any regional issue and then sit back for what might turn out to be a half-hour lecture packed with insights.”
But Suleiman was known inside Egypt primarily for his brutality and torture. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks had identified him as an avid player in the American rendition program after the invasion of Afghanistan. “He was not squeamish,” as Edward Walker, a former American ambassador to Egypt, later put it.
Obama was skeptical about the Suleiman idea. To Obama, “you were not going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle,” Ben Rhodes later told me. “But he was not going to tell people, ‘Don’t try that.’ His view was, ‘Let’s try to see what we can do.’” Obama went along with the plan.
Frank G. Wisner, a seventy-two-year-old former ambassador to Egypt, had developed an unusually strong bond with Mubarak, so senior State Department staff picked Wisner as a special envoy to the Egyptian president. The White House sent him talking points on Saturday, January 29. Obama spoke for ten minutes over the phone with Wisner on Sunday morning, and he set off the next day in a military jet for the ten-hour flight to Cairo. He had been instructed to make only a few specific short-term requests of the aging autocrat: Do not use force to crush the demonstrations, and let a successor outside the Mubarak family take over the presidency after the elections in September. The White House demanded neither an immediate exit by Mubarak nor fundamental immediate change to the Egyptian regime. Its goal was to let Suleiman manage a succession, possibly to himself.
Wisner met Mubarak at his palace in Cairo on Monday, January 31, the third day that the protesters had held the square, and events in Cairo were accelerating. At 9:00 P.M. an anonymous general with a gravelly voice and hard-brimmed cap appeared on state television with an unexpected announcement from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). “Your Armed Forces have not and will not resort to the use of force against this great people,” he said, and he praised “the legitimate demands of the honorable citizens.” As far as I could tell, that could only mean Mubarak’s immediate departure.
The generals—taking the advice General Sisi had given them in 2010—had given Mubarak no warning. His irate staff called the chief of the state media’s news division demanding to know how the military’s statement reached the airwaves. Suleiman rushed to a television studio an hour later to respond with a two-minute statement. Mubarak, Suleiman announced, had named him vice president. He was deputized “to contact all the political forces” about constitutional reforms.
Mubarak spoke the next night and in effect complied with Wisner’s requests. By naming Suleiman vice president, Mubarak had taken Gamal out of the succession. And the security forces had stopped shooting. Now Mubarak declared that he would leave office at the end of his term, after elections in September. The White House—despite Obama’s instincts—had not abandoned Mubarak, and Mubarak was doing as the White House requested.
Mubarak’s tone, though, was so defiant that he sounded as if he had conceded nothing at all. “This is my country,” he said. “I will die on its soil.” Protesters in Tahrir Square threw shoes at a television broadcasting the speech.
Obama again called Cairo. “I know you care about Egypt, I know you have given your life,” Obama told Mubarak, according to Dennis Ross, a veteran Middle East diplomat who listened to the call.
“You don’t know Egypt. I know my people. This will be over in a few days,” Mubarak insisted.
Thirty minutes in, Obama was losing patience: “Why don’t we talk again tomorrow?”
“No, we don’t need to,” Mubarak replied.
Obama hung up. “There is no hope for this guy,” he told Ross and others.
“What I indicated tonight to President Mubarak,” Obama said in another televised statement on Egypt, “is my belief that an orderly transition must be meaningful, it must be peaceful, and it must begin now.”
But a White House spokesman struggled the next morning to explain what Obama meant. Was the emphasis on “now” or “orderly”? The spokesman finally clarified that Obama was not seeking Mubarak’s immediate exit. The administration’s vision of “an orderly transition” was still under Suleiman.
The division between the president and his Cabinet over Egypt, though, was no secret in the region. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates—known as MBZ—complained to U.S. officials that Obama advisers like Ben Rhodes were describing one Egypt policy while Robert Gates and Joe Biden were describing another. And Gates sympathized with the complaints. He had always had a high regard for MBZ’s “insights and judgments,” Gates later wrote, and the prince “gave me an earful.”
The crown prince and the Emiratis had deep ties to Egypt and its military. MBZ surely shared his view of the discord behind Obama’s speech with Egypt’s top generals. If the Emiratis knew, then the Egyptian military knew that most of the officials around Obama hoped to preserve a version of the Mubarak regime. The White House’s messages were mixed from the outset, and players in the region could see that Obama sat at a distance from the cabinet around him.
It was late at night in Cairo when Obama finished speaking, and I had a telephone conversation with a former Egyptian diplomat, Mohamed Shokry. I knew he was close to Suleiman.
“What will happen if there is a flare-up, a few bullets shot into the young men, a Molotov cocktail?” Shokry mused aloud. “A million people in the streets. How will we keep the peace?”
Egyptian state radio and television networks reported the next morning, Wednesday, February 2, that a counterdemonstration was forming in the Giza neighborhood of Mohandiseen—a rally to thank Mubarak for his service and say “Enough!” to the Cairo of Tahrir Square. My Times colleague Liam Stack headed over.
A handful of Mubarak supporters spotted him as a Western journalist and started beating him. So Liam snuck back around from another direction.
Organizers were passing out signs that said WE ARE SORRY MR. PRESIDENT, or depicted the face of Mohamed ElBaradei under a Star of David. This crew did not let the first name “Mohamed” get in the way of its anti-Semitism. Hundreds had gathered, and a fair number seemed to Liam to be plainclothes security agents. When he picked up one of the provocative signs, a security agent snatched it away.
The pro-Mubarak crowd began moving, mostly by foot, across a bridge over the Nile to another square on the far side of the Egyptian Museum from the entrance to Tahrir Square. Liam and a photographer, Scott Nelson, took a car to catch up. Rough-looking men armed with clubs, bats, and machetes were disembarking from microbuses. Others brought jerry cans of fuel and crates of empty bottles, for gas bombs. Baltagiya. Liam compared it with The Lord of the Rings. “Like the Orcs pouring out of Mordor.”
I was strolling Tahrir Square with Mona el-Naggar, an Egyptian journalist working for the Times, and men kept stopping us, one after the other. Each one wanted to tell us the same thing: Mubarak’s speech had changed his mind. The president had conceded enough. This chaos in the square was too much. It was time to go home. We could hear the same arguments in the murmurs all around us. Time to go home, time to go home!
Suddenly the tone heated up, and we heard shouting. The clock on my phone read 2:15 P.M.
A middle-aged man with a furrowed brow grabbed my arm. “We don’t know who is with us and who is against us now—we are lost,” the man, Abdel Raouf Mohamed, said.
“I love Mubarak! I need Mubarak!” a burly stranger screamed over his shoulder, cutting him off.
A third, older man—one of the protesters against Mubarak—pulled me away. “In ten minutes, there will be a big fight here,” this man, Reda Sadak, told us. “It is an old game, the oldest game in the regime.”
He was wrong: it took less than eight minutes. He spoke at 2:22, and by 2:30, shoving and punching had broken out all over the square. The Mubarak men had evidently set their schedule in advance. Rocks and sticks rained down on the pavement near the Egyptian Museum, hurled by a phalanx of “thank you Mubarak” demonstrators. Anti-Mubarak demonstrators all over the square banged bricks against metal lampposts—a noisy alarm system improvised to warn of intrusion.
Some of the anti-Mubarak crowd tried to preserve their celebrated ethic of nonviolence, the hallmark of the sit-in. A half dozen bearded men in a tight row held up their hands and presented their chests in a display of passivity, as though ready for martyrdom. Rocks crashed around them. Mona and I saw a clean-cut young man clutching a tree branch as a weapon and rushing to fight the oncoming Mubarakites.
“Put it down,” an older man implored.
“Three of my friends are bleeding inside, and my friend lost an eye,” the young man yelled back, pointing to an apartment building. But he put down the branch, sitting down and sobbing. His name was Sameh Saber, he told Mona.
By 3:15, the last pretense of nonviolence was gone. A battle line between the opposing forces had formed perpendicular to the pink granite hulk of the Egyptian Museum, below the October 6 Bridge overpass. Anti-Mubarak demonstrators were dragging sheets of corrugated steel from a construction site on the edge of the square to build barricades against the attackers. Men and women used scraps of steel to break the pavement into rocks. Others ferried this fresh ammunition to the front line in milk crates or scarves used as slings. Hundreds of young men were crowding to the front to hurl the missiles.
The Muslim Brotherhood, with its disciplined cell structure, provided organizational backbone for the defense of Tahrir Square by the anti-Mubarak demonstrators. But the front ranks belonged to “ultras”—trash-talking soccer fans. They had made sport of clashing with the police for years before the uprising; they had sprayed walls all over Cairo with the English graffiti motto A.C.A.B., for All Cops Are Bastards. Other demonstrators volunteered as medics, carrying away the injured on cardboard stretchers. Motorcycles—“the ambulances of the people”—ferried the wounded to field clinics.
I climbed an abandoned backhoe (left near the construction site, a future Ritz-Carlton hotel) to get a better view of the action. Hundreds of soldiers were still standing inside the iron fence of the museum, but they were just watching, too. They came alive only when firebombs landed inside the fence, and only to put out the flames with fire extinguishers.
When I looked behind me, the scene was surreal. Camels! At least a pair of Mubarak men on camels and eighteen others on horseback were attacking the square. The riders had usually used their animals to sell rides around the Pyramids, and now they were quickly beaten back. But their ludicrous charge gave the day its name: the Battle of the Camel, after a battle between Sunni and Shia in the early history of Islam. (No self-respecting Western journalist ever missed a chance to mention a camel in writing about the region.)
Surely the soldiers would intervene, I thought. Surely the army would crush the protests, which were now clearly violent. But the bloodshed went on—hundreds were hit by rocks, wounded or stabbed in close combat, or burned by the fire of the gas bombs. The soldiers did nothing. Darkness fell and I had to write for the next day’s newspaper before knowing who won.
I finished the edits for the last edition shortly before dawn in Cairo. I was leaving the bureau to hunt for a cheap hotel—there were no taxis home that long after curfew—when an editor called from New York. Al Jazeera was reporting gunfire in the square.
I hitched a ride from a stranger to the base of the October 6 Bridge and set out on foot over the Nile. But on the way across I realized that I had picked the wrong span: the overpass looking down on the square was controlled by the pro-Mubarak thugs. I could see dark figures with clubs milling around the bridge or looking over the railings. I was sure they would pummel me if they guessed who I was. As far as they were concerned, an American walking alone here at this hour and armed with a notebook could only be a spy. I looked at my feet and kept walking.
A stairway! I ducked off the bridge before I was noticed, and at the bottom another group of men was hauling a burned-out car frame into place to reinforce a barrier. I tapped the shoulder of a middle-aged man in a gray hooded sweatshirt. Excuse me, I asked gingerly, in my rudimentary Arabic. Are you with the president, or are you with the square?
Are you kidding? he asked in perfect English, with a yellowing smile. He was a Muslim Brother, he said, and he handed me a business card that identified him as an engineering professor at Cairo University. He led me to a field hospital run by Muslim Brothers in the alley behind the KFC. A short doctor in a white lab coat was standing on an upside-down crate, barking orders. He stepped down to meet me. Volunteers pulled back sheets to show me the bodies of two dead demonstrators, killed by gunshot wounds just before dawn. More than twelve hundred Egyptians had been seriously wounded in the battle that day and at least thirteen had died, though only a few were killed or injured by gunshots. I had never been so close to a corpse, or seen one outside a funeral coffin, but no one else was flinching. I playacted foreign correspondent and pretended that I had seen it all before.
The witnesses all told the same story: At least one of the plainclothes thugs on the Mubarak side had started shooting shortly before dawn. Instead of rolling out onto the tent city, the uniformed soldiers had fired their own weapons into the air in the direction of pro-Mubarak attackers. At that, the thugs scattered, thanks to the intervention of the soldiers.
Several people in the Obama administration later told me that the Pentagon and the State Department had organized systematic call lists to press their contacts at every level of the Egyptian armed forces. Hold back from attacking the demonstrators, the Americans urged. Remember your bond with your people. Do not turn on your own civilians.
But the thugs had attacked the demonstrators at 2:30 P.M. The army had waited until nearly dawn the next morning to stop it, after more than a dozen deaths and hundreds of hospitalizations. Why did the army wait fourteen hours? The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had pledged four days earlier, in the televised message from the anonymous soldier, that it would not act against civilians.
When the eagerness for credit had cooled, several senior American officials—including Leon Panetta, then head of the CIA—later told me that they believed the generals had made up their own minds, for their own reasons, about how to play it. The Egyptian army relies on mandatory conscription. Turning against the body of Egyptians gathered in the square—Egyptians of every stripe—was unthinkable. It might have been different if the crowd was only Islamists. But I learned that only later.
“We are reeling a bit,” Jon Finer, a senior State Department official wrote later that day to my colleague Anthony Shadid, an old friend of Finer’s, who forwarded me the email. “I’ve heard from a bunch of people who got the shit kicked out of them,” Finer wrote. He said the Times report was one of the few that “explicitly called it what it was—a government crackdown, not ‘clashes’ between rival groups.”
“Shocking how much pushback there was to that notion here,” Finer added. Even after the Battle of the Camel, many in the United States government sympathized with Mubarak and distrusted the revolt. The White House did not realize that the square—that pluralistic little republic—had already won.
Two days later, Wisner, Obama’s envoy, publicly backed Mubarak. “President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical,” Wisner told a security conference in Munich. Mubarak should “write his own legacy” and “show the way forward.”
Clinton, at the same conference, backed Suleiman. “It’s important to follow the transition process announced by the Egyptian government, actually headed by Vice President Omar Suleiman,” she told journalists, as though the old spy were perfectly well suited to lead a transition to democracy. “That is what we are supporting.”
Clinton worried privately that she came too close to pressuring Mubarak toward the door. “I am afraid that what I said yesterday is being used to support the idea that we are pushing his leaving,” she wrote in an email to her closest adviser, Jake Sullivan.
But Obama, who had written off Mubarak on that first Day of Rage, wished she had come closer to doing just that. He “took me to the woodshed,” Clinton later wrote.
“There was substantive discord,” Rhodes later told me.
Nine days after the Battle of the Camel, shortly before the end of Friday prayers on February 11, I received an email from the White House telling me to call as soon as I could. The sender was someone I had known in Obama’s Senate office. When I reached him, around 7:00 A.M. in Washington, he sounded like he had not gotten much sleep.
“Mubarak has left the capital,” he said, slowly. “He is no longer in the presidential palace.”
He would not tell me how he knew; officials invariably declined to answer that question in roughly the same way when the information came from classified intelligence or electronic surveillance. What did it mean for Egypt? “I leave that up to you,” he told me.
Why he was telling me was becoming clear enough. The previous day, Thursday, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had released “Communiqué #1” to announce that the generals had begun meeting “in continuous session.” Photographs showed the council without Mubarak. His associates hinted publicly that he would soon step aside. Panetta suggested the same thing, in open testimony to Congress.
Instead, Mubarak on Thursday night had delivered a harangue full of righteous self-justification, fatherly condescension, and vows to soldier on. “The worst speech he had made in his life,” Abdel Latif el-Menawy, the chief of the state news service, later recalled. “It was arrogant. It was senseless. It was a disaster.”
Some in Tahrir Square called for a march on the heavily guarded presidential palace—a walk into a firing squad. The Police Day organizers worried to me that they were losing control.
Now, on the morning of February 11, aides close to Obama had concluded that Mubarak’s ouster was indeed the winning bet. “We were sensitive to the idea that Obama was late to that,” Rhodes later told me, “because we knew that he was there early.” Obama had been right all along, and if Mubarak was going, they wanted him to own it.
I hung up with the White House, posted a tentative article on the Times website about the reports of Mubarak’s movements, and hurried to the square. I was unsure whether to expect violence or exultation. But the tent city was as cheerful as ever. I found Anthony Shadid and told him what I had heard. We called our colleague Kareem Fahim, and he turned back from a trip to Suez. Then we waited, and kept waiting.
At the beginning of late afternoon prayers, I turned to go. Thousands of men were prostrating themselves in neat rows across the asphalt, and I stepped between them as politely as I could, my mind on the placement of my hiking boots.
I heard a shout and looked up. A skinny adolescent sprang from a tent clutching a transistor radio. What was he saying? Soon everyone knew. Thousands rose from their knees as one—a tidal wave across the square.
Omar Suleiman had read a terse statement broadcast over the Egyptian state news media. Mubarak had handed power to the generals. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces announced that it had now taken control. And the anonymous officer with the gravelly voice lifted a hand to his hard-brimmed hat in a salute to those he now called the martyrs of the revolution.
I braced for rioting, maybe looting beyond the square. I expected to hear the signature chants of the sit-in, about bread, freedom, and social justice. But the moment was much deeper and more primal. I had often heard Egyptians laugh off their country’s corruption, incompetence, and complacency, or joke that history had left them behind. Now Egypt lurched forward so fast that I felt my gut sinking. The humiliation had been lifted. The square was filled with a sense of relief. I heard a new chant arise from all corners. “Hold your head high, you are Egyptian.”