A council of generals had taken power from a president. One might call that a coup. But Arabs everywhere saw a revolution in Egypt. Protests erupted in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Baghdad, Jordan, Sudan, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, and beyond. The New York Times did not have enough reporters or column inches to cover it all. Even the Persian Gulf monarchs handed out pay raises to their subjects as inoculation against the contagion. Everything was up for renegotiation.
I landed in Libya on February 25, 2011, about two weeks after Mubarak’s exit. Security officers were using whips and clubs to beat back thousands of dark-skinned African migrant laborers trying to push their way into the Tripoli airport, desperate to get out of the country before it imploded. The rule of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi was in a way the most honest of the Middle East autocracies. He made barely a pretense of the rule of law, a written constitution, or even a rubber-stamp Parliament. He kept the rank of colonel in homage to his idol, Gamal Abdel Nasser. But Qaddafi never even bothered to give himself a formal title like president or prime minister. He was simply “the leader.” He ruled through undisguised coercion.
Cynicism defined the regime. Even Qaddafi’s most vocal supporters did not seem to believe in what they were selling. Covering it felt like watching bad theater. Qaddafi’s henchmen invited me and scores of other Western journalists to Tripoli but then tried to keep us locked in the five-star Rixos hotel. When the United Nations authorized a NATO bombing campaign to restrain Qaddafi’s military, his right-hand man, Musa Kusa, delivered a prepared address to us that was supposed to convey only defiance. But his hands, like Ben Ali’s, were visibly shaking, and within days he had defected to Europe.
Everyone seemed to be playacting. Ideology or loyalty was hard to pin down. Qaddafi militiamen cruised the streets of the capital with the barrels of the Kalashnikovs protruding from the windows of their white Toyota Hilux Double Cab pickups, and it was prudent to display a green Qaddafi flag in your car window to keep yourself safe. But when I escaped the hotel, I noticed that the same faces turned up at demonstrations for Qaddafi on one day and against him the next. “When NATO bombs at night, I hear my neighbors clap and cheer ‘bravo,’ and in the morning they are with the leader,” the Egyptian who led the only Protestant church in Tripoli, Rev. Hamdy Daoud, told me when I managed to sneak out unnoticed for a Friday morning service. (Christians in the Muslim-majority world often worship together on Fridays.)
One night civilian homes were destroyed in a NATO air strike. A Qaddafi spokesman awoke everyone over the hotel loudspeaker with undisguised glee, eager to bus us all there to see for ourselves. “Attention all journalists, come immediately to the hotel lobby,” he intoned slowly into every hotel room. “There are bodies in the rubble. I repeat, there are bodies in the rubble.”
“Okay,” the same spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, confided to me one night over espresso in the hotel café. “This is not the most legitimate regime.”
One morning in late March, a Libyan woman with a badly bruised face burst into the lobby of the Rixos asking for journalists from Reuters and the New York Times—presumably the only two international news organizations she could think of. She gave her name as Eman al-Obeidi and started telling her story over breakfast in the main dining room. Qaddafi soldiers had stopped her at a checkpoint, detained her because she belonged to a tribe (Obeidi) based in a rebel region, and repeatedly raped and beat her until she escaped, she said. There was a large scar on her upper thigh, narrow and deep scratch marks on her lower leg, and binding marks around her hands and feet. “They violated my honor,” she said.
Before she could finish, our official escorts, translators, hotel waiters, and even the shy hijabi barista from the hotel café were crashing into the room, trying to apprehend her. It turned out that even the uniformed hotel staff serving lattes and clearing plates were all Qaddafi agents. Scuffles broke out as journalists tried to protect her. At least two of the hotel staff threatened her and us with kitchen knives. One of our “escorts” pulled out a handgun. Others snatched and destroyed a CNN camera.
“Turn them around! Turn them around!” a waiter shouted to the other employees, imploring them to keep us away from her.
“Why are you doing this? You are a traitor!” the barista screamed at Obeidi, trying to force a heavy, dark coat over her head to cover her face.
Some journalists wrestled with her pursuers. But she was hauled away, imprisoned again, and eventually deported. I was vigilant after that about what I said in earshot of the hotel staff, certain that the receptionists, barmaids, and bellboys were spies playacting.
In the middle of a night at the beginning of August, one of those escorts drove me to a shuttered and darkened Radisson Blu Hotel where Qaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam was waiting inside on a love seat in a borrowed sitting room. After styling himself for years as an Anglophone liberal reformer, he had grown a beard and he was fingering prayer beads. He told me that he and his father were forming a partnership with Islamist militants to fight off the liberal rebels and rule as a team. “The liberals will escape or be killed,” he told me. “Libya will look like Saudi Arabia, like Iran. So what?” He enjoyed his own irony: “It is a funny story,” he said. He was making it all up, presumably to scare the West, but he insisted he spoke in earnest.
It was his last scene in the play. Tripoli fell to the rebels just two weeks later. On a visit to the headquarters of the rebels’ transitional government I ran into the same Qaddafi functionary who had corralled us into buses for propaganda trips and tracked us down when we escaped the Rixos (I was always caught eventually, including after my visit to the church). The day after the rebel takeover he had found a job organizing transportation for the new government’s leaders.
“My uncle and my son were soldiers for the revolution,” the man, Khalid Saad, told me when I bumped into him. “Everyone will be happy now. Everything is changed now. Everyone is free.”
Many of Qaddafi’s former henchmen switched sides that way. “It is legitimate, all these things they are doing—freedom of the press, the rule of law,” the former chief of Qaddafi’s foreign media operation, Abdulmajeed el-Dursi, told me, sipping coffee at a Tripoli café full of rebels. “We always thought it was the right thing to do.” I came to love Libya, and its bad theater was part of the reason. Everyone seemed to know that everyone else was just pretending.
I felt silly saying the word “revolutionary” aloud, as though I had never read George Orwell. But there was no other word to describe the mood in Cairo. The day after Mubarak’s exit, the organizers of the sit-in had called for another day in the square to clean the mess, and thousands of volunteers had worked late into the night. Our sons’ nursery school was caught in the spirit and the kids had picked up litter in Maadi. New restaurants served high-end versions of Egyptian peasant food, like kushari with brown rice and organic lentils, or fancy fuul—slow-cooked beans, the classic breakfast—in bright pastel beladi flatbreads made with spinach or beets. Egyptian friends told me that for the first time they sought out Egyptian-made products in stores instead of avoiding them. Workers all over the country were holding wildcat strikes demanding better wages, continuing a wave that started during the uprising.
The generals in Cairo insisted that Egypt’s era of coercion had ended with Mubarak’s ouster. The top brass rushed to get pictures taken with the revolt’s best-known leaders, and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was as eager as any of them. “They were very cute,” Ahmed Maher of the April 6 group later told me. “They smiled and promised us many things and said, ‘You are our children; you did what we wanted to do for many years!’”
Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the seventy-five-year-old defense minister and highest-ranking military officer, declared himself interim head of state, ruling on behalf of the roughly two dozen generals of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. The council postured as the guardian of the revolution and promised to move quickly toward elections that would replace Tantawi with a civilian government. They put Mubarak under house arrest in his Red Sea vacation home.
The generals invited small groups of opinion shapers—intellectuals, professors, columnists, and newspaper editors—to a series of dinners at the gilded Al Masah Hotel and Spa in Heliopolis (owned by the military), where they drove home the message that they were proud that they had removed Mubarak and set Egypt on a path to democracy. Sometimes, a senior officer pointed to Sisi and recalled his prediction in 2010 of a popular uprising and his recommendation to break with Mubarak. “They had a plan to go to the streets and they simply moved it forward, to take advantage of the revolution,” Hassan Nafaa, a liberal political scientist at Cairo University who attended one of the dinners, later told me. At the dinners, he said, “We did not recognize Sisi at all.”
That spring, a state television camera followed Tantawi on a stroll through the streets in a business suit. Was he auditioning for the role of civilian president? Egyptians thought it was hilarious.
“Toys ‘R’ Us at Christmas: We have Tantawi in shorts, Tantawi in a tuxedo, Tantawi the sailor, Tantawi the doctor,” ran one joke making the rounds on the internet. Mubarak, like every competent Arab autocrat, had long understood that the most immediate threat to his power was a coup by his defense minister. Tantawi stood out for his meekness. The other military officers derided him as “Mubarak’s Poodle.”
Some countries in transition invite international experts to share the lessons of South Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, South Korea, Spain, the Philippines, and so on. Egypt sought no such assistance. A senior general had a son who happened to work as a legal consultant to the Supreme Constitutional Court, and the military council tapped that son as the first of eight jurists on a panel to produce an interim charter. The panel then turned to Google, and it relied mainly on a website set up by Princeton University, “Constitution Writing and Conflict Resolution.” It was all improvisation.
The goal of the legal experts was to transfer power to civilians as soon as possible. That way the generals would not have a chance to put their stamp on the drafting of a permanent constitution. But when the draft of an interim charter was put to a referendum on March 19, 2011, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces surprised Egypt on the eve of the vote by revising the writ of its panel. A general in charge of legal affairs announced that the military council would still issue its own modifications to the transitional charter after the vote. And the military’s tweaks allowed the generals to stay in control long past parliamentary elections and through the writing of a permanent constitution—undoing what had been the main objective of the panel.
Still, every weekend brought a new reminder of the generals’ need to placate the public. Whenever the transition faltered, the organizers behind Police Day called for another Friday afternoon millioneya—a million-man march. And each Thursday night the generals caved in, just in time to appease the protesters.
The generals removed prime ministers, shook up cabinets, jailed Mubarak, put him and his interior minister on trial for murder, scheduled elections, repealed the so-called emergency law suspending due process rights, and more—all to defuse impending millioneyas. “The only thing that works is going back to Tahrir, but then they back down,” one of the organizers, Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, told me. The “Thursdays of concessions,” some Egyptians called them.
The anonymous officer who had announced the military’s takeover in the name of the revolution now reappeared on television, shaking his forefinger at the camera and demanding an end to the protests. His name turned out to be General Mohsen al-Fanagry, and Egyptians compared him to a flip-flop sandal—shib-shib, in Egyptian Arabic—held on by a finger of plastic between the toes. “A shib-shib has a finger and Fanagry has a finger.” No one was afraid of him.
You could scarcely walk a few blocks without noticing a difference in the status of the police. “We don’t do that anymore, there’s been a revolution,” a young Egyptian woman I knew told a police officer, pushing him aside when he tried to shake her down for baksheesh to let her park her car. It was the police who were cowed.
“They treated people like pests, so imagine when these pests now rise up, challenge them, and humiliate them,” said Mahmoud Qutri, a former police officer. “They feel broken.”
Mohamed Ismail, a thirty-year-old who ran a mobile phone shop near a police station, said the officers had always demanded a 50 percent discount. Now they murmured “please” and paid the full price. “The tables have turned,” he said.
Hisham A. Fahmy ran a trade association for multinationals operating in Egypt, and he, too, was amazed by the way he heard ordinary Egyptians talking to the police. “It’s: ‘Talk to me properly! I am a citizen!’” he told me, dumbfounded.
A small group of demonstrators started a sit-in outside the U.S. embassy to call for the humanitarian release from jail of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheikh imprisoned in the United States for plotting related to the bombing in 1993 of the World Trade Center. “If Mubarak were still around, those guys would be thrown in jail and sodomized with pipes,” an American who worked in intelligence told a diplomat in the embassy.
Retreat was not defeat, of course, and the institutions of the old regime had hardly disappeared. Three days after the referendum, in late March, the generals sent every Egyptian news organization a letter reminding them of “the necessity of refraining from publishing any items—stories, news, announcements, complaints, advertisements, pictures—pertaining to the armed forces or to commanders of the armed forces” without prior approval. The satellite networks were still owned by the same small clique of Mubarak-friendly moguls, and they took it seriously.
One night the left-leaning blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy suggested modestly to a call-in show that “any institution of the country that takes taxes from us should be open to question.”
“No, no, no,” the host, Mahmoud Saad, interrupted. He hung up on Hamalawy. “I will not allow you to say those things on this network.”
A military officer called in Hamalawy for questioning the next day. “When the military says ‘please show up,’ it is kind of like an order, especially when they are ruling the country,” Hamalawy told me.
Curious about the shifting ground rules, I persuaded an officer in the military’s propaganda arm, the Department of Moral Affairs, to invite me to its headquarters, in the neighborhood of Heliopolis.
His office was like a college radio station. The stuffing was coming out of a cushion in the couch. Audio headsets and coaxial cables were lying all over. Like every Egyptian military officer I ever met, my host wanted to tell me how much he enjoyed his American training—in his case in Maryland. But he insisted that insulting the army was still a crime in Egypt.
“If someone presents proof that any officer is corrupt, then the officer would be subject to the law,” he said. “If the journalist doesn’t present any evidence, then the journalist would be subject to the law.”
A blogger had equated the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces—SCAF—with former president Mubarak. “That is why he is in jail,” this officer told me. “If I call you a dictator, you can take that as an insult.”
High stakes, if you took it seriously. But Hamalawy ignored the intimidation. He told his story to me, on his blog, and to anyone who would listen. Bottling up all the dissent coursing through Cairo seemed impossible then. Even atheists—previously afraid of arrest or ostracism, for the crime of insulting religion—were convening public meetings.
The White House and State Department now gushed with enthusiasm for the Egyptian revolution. The United States announced that it was shifting $65 million in economic aid into direct grants to promote democracy. The State Department bought advertisements in Egyptian newspapers to solicit grant proposals—after three decades in which the Mubarak government controlled every penny in American aid. To Mubarakite nationalists, Obama might as well have confessed to funding the protests in the first place.
But at the same time, the administration was more quietly embracing the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces as the best guarantee that the “revolution” would not go against American interests. “First you lean into the idea of Mubarak leading a transition,” one senior State Department official later told me. “When that doesn’t work, you lean into Omar Suleiman, and when that idea goes down, too, you think, ‘Okay, let’s work with the SCAF.’”
The Pentagon and National Security Council brought top Egyptian generals and intelligence chiefs to Washington, or sent senior officials to meet with them in Cairo. And the Pentagon made no secret of its backing for the military chief of staff, General Sami Anan, as Egypt’s next ruler. Anan was “the Pentagon’s man in Egypt,” my Times colleague Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington.
The de facto American policy, Ben Rhodes later told me, was “to hug SCAF as closely as possible.”
The security of Israel, an ever-present concern for American policy in Egypt, took on new urgency that August. An Israeli warplane chasing Palestinian militants inadvertently killed at least three Egyptian security officers inside their own border. Mubarak had smoothed over such incidents before, but now Egyptians demanded retribution.
Bowing again to street pressure, the generals recalled Egypt’s ambassador to Israel. When protesters began gathering outside the Israeli embassy, several stories up in an office building near the Cairo zoo, in Giza, the military government erected a thin metal barricade along the sidewalk to protect the building.
A few weeks later, at an unrelated rally in Tahrir Square on Friday, September 10, I saw a group of demonstrators headed for the Israeli embassy armed with hammers and ropes. I tagged along behind them and found a mob of young men spearheaded by a core group of ultras, the soccer hooligans—conspicuous because they brought their trademark chants, drums, horns, and fireworks. (The Muslim Brothers were notably absent, perhaps conscious of the international attention now on their movement.)
The ultras climbed the barricade, secured rope to it, and used cars to pull it down in chunks. By nightfall it was flattened. The handful of Egyptian soldiers and police stationed outside the embassy did nothing to stop the marauders, who easily climbed a locked gate. Hooligans hauled down the Israeli flag and set it on fire.
The situation looked explosive, and I did not know the half of it. I later learned that a half dozen embassy employees were trapped inside, hiding in a secure room. And they had firearms for protection.
If the attackers had gotten any closer, the night would have ended in “a massacre,” Steven Simon, then director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Security Council, later told me. He was on an open phone line to his Israeli counterparts, who had the terrified embassy employees on speakerphone. Over the phone, Simon could hear the ultras banging on the door of the embassy’s secure room.
Mustafa el-Sayed, a twenty-eight-year-old ultra who was milling around in the street outside, showed me mobile phone video of himself with about twenty friends inside the embassy. They had filmed themselves destroying furniture, rummaging through papers, and throwing binders out the window. He boasted that they had roughed up an embassy employee they found inside, too. Egyptian soldiers had eventually removed them without arresting them. They just regrouped in the street.
It was about 11:30 P.M. when riot-police trucks finally showed up. I counted as many as fifty. By then the rioters had set fire to a police kiosk in the street, and they began hurling rocks at the police in a game of cat and mouse through clouds of tear gas all around the neighborhood. I thought the hooligans might destroy the embassy while the police were preocuppied, and the generals were staying out of it.
Obama spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu. Marine Corps General James Mattis, chief of Central Command, talked to General Sisi, head of Egyptian military intelligence. Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, placed a panicked call to Leon Panetta, who was now defense secretary. Would Panetta please get the Egyptian army to stop this?
But by 7:30 P.M. in Washington—2:30 A.M. the next morning in Cairo—Field Marshal Tantawi still had not yet picked up the phone to respond to Panetta.
“I am sure he was trying to figure out what was going on,” Panetta later told me, charitably.
Panetta left the Pentagon to introduce a performance of Brahms’s German Requiem at the Kennedy Center to commemorate the September 11 terrorist attacks. Aides pulled him from the audience to an adjoining room set up for a secure phone call when Tantawi finally called back. Tantawi made the usual courtly small talk, “so I tried to cut through that shit,” Panetta told me.
“You have a serious situation there with the Israeli embassy,” Panetta told Tantawi. “If this is allowed to happen, not only could it jeopardize lives, but it is going to make Egypt look totally incompetent at providing security.”
Tantawi promised to do “whatever is necessary,” and shortly before 5:00 A.M. in Cairo, Egyptian commandos finally rescued the six employees trapped in the embassy. Two Egyptians died fighting with the police, one of a bullet wound; twelve hundred were seriously injured, and nineteen were arrested.
Israeli officials blamed the “Islamization” of Egypt, but in this case the attackers were irreligious soccer fans and the negligent government was under military control. The Muslim Brotherhood had played no role in the attack. The next day, the Brotherhood condemned it.
I began that night to understand some of the many layers of Egyptian-Israeli relations. The two states were no longer hostile. Their generals got along fine, American military officers and diplomats in Cairo often told me. But Egypt’s state and private news media fanned the flames of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism with undiminished zeal. And state censorship had silenced any debate about the peace or its paradoxes. As a result, Egyptian public opinion had been frozen in place since the eve of Camp David. Egyptian leaders put on a performance of hostility for their citizens at home, and, intentionally or not, that stage show helped convince American policy makers that the peace was so fragile that it demanded constant attention and payoffs—the $1.3 billion a year in aid. In truth, the Egyptian military had no hostile neighbors or, for that matter, known enemies.
Now the supposed guardians of the peace, the generals, were in direct control of the government, and they were doing a lousy job protecting the security of Israel. Without any prompting, they had released from jail more than eight hundred convicted Islamist militants. Some had been imprisoned for assassinating President Anwar Sadat in 1981 because he had made peace. On five separate occasions in the six months since Mubarak’s ouster, unidentified attackers had bombed pipelines carrying Egyptian natural gas to Israel without arrests or reprisals. Islamist militants based in the North Sinai had carried out a series of brazen cross-border attacks, including one that killed eight Israelis. (That set off the chase that ended in the accidental killing of the Egyptian security officers.) Direct military rule in Cairo was a disaster for Israel.
But Jerusalem saw only danger if the generals yielded more power, convinced that the alternative to military rule in Cairo would be far worse. Many in Washington seemed to agree. Even after Tantawi’s dilatory response to the sacking of the Israeli embassy, Panetta had only kind things to say about the Egyptian defense minister. “That is what I liked about the guy,” Panetta told me later. “Usually, if he gave his word about something, he did it.” The generals could still count on Washington.