General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi grew up in the medieval district known as Islamic Cairo. His family’s apartment was a fifteen-minute walk from the closest road wide enough for a car, through a maze of low stone buildings right out of Naguib Mahfouz novels. Middle-class traders and tradesmen had populated the area during Sisi’s childhood, and his father was one of the richest. The family owned a shop selling arabesque woodwork and other handicrafts in the storied Khan el-Khalili bazaar—the second stop after the Pyramids for many Western tourists. The Sisi family employed many of their neighbors.
Hussein Abdel Naby was a boyhood friend of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and lived in a rented room downstairs in the same building, which was owned by Sisi’s father. “He always dressed in a suit and tie, and all the others wore galabiyas,” Abdel Naby, now a lawyer, said. “He was the only one who drove a Mercedes.”
The Sisi family was religious and conservative, and Sisi’s father was polygamous. He had married a second wife and had a second family. He was also ambitious. He once campaigned unsuccessfully for a seat in the rubber-stamp Parliament under Sadat—a position more about prestige and patronage than politics or policy. Another son, Ahmed, became a senior judge.
Neighbors saw Sisi’s father as stern and intimidating. Abdel Fattah was desperate to please his old man, in part by devoting himself to physical exercise. While other boys played in the street, the young Sisi hopped up and down stairs to develop his calves, or he interrupted his schoolwork to do sets of push-ups.
“He used to punish himself,” Abdel Naby remembered.
Sisi’s father once looked askance at his teenage son for the vanity of a necklace and open-collared shirt, so the young Sisi shaved his own head in atonement. “Because I know I did something wrong,” he told his friends.
If he felt any impulse to rebel, he hid it well. But he had grand dreams, as he later confided in private conversations with a trusted Egyptian journalist (audio recordings leaked to the public). Sisi had dreamed “that I was holding up a sword inscribed in red with the words ‘There is no God but God’”—the rallying cry of the Prophet Mohamed and the essential creed of Islam. A voice in another dream told him, “We will give you what we have given to no other.” And in a third, Sisi sat with former president Anwar Sadat to discuss their shared premonitions.
“I said to him: and I know I will be the president of the republic,” Sisi later recounted.
He never saw combat. He specialized instead in diplomacy and intelligence. He served as a military attaché in Riyadh, trained at the Joint Services Command and Staff College in Britain, and studied at the United States Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Sisi arrived at the War College in 2005. The local mosque lacked a full-time imam, and Sisi himself sometimes led Friday prayers. (So did one of his sons, who enrolled at Dickinson College.) Sisi joined campus debates about the American-led occupation of Iraq, and he bridled at arguments that political Islam was inconsistent with democracy. Any Arab democracy must incorporate Islamists, “including radical ones,” Sisi argued in his final paper.
Sisi was “keen that the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist option, be given a chance” in Egypt, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal told me. Sisi told other friends and American diplomats that he would be happy to serve an elected president who happened to come from the Muslim Brotherhood.
He and Morsi started working together almost as soon as Mubarak was gone. Sisi, as head of military intelligence, was the army’s liaison to the Brothers; Morsi, as head of the Brotherhood’s political arm, was its point of contact with the generals. They had piety in common. Sisi and other generals would turn up for meetings with the Muslim Brothers with rolled-up sleeves and wet hands, as though from the ablutions before prayers, Brotherhood leaders told me.
“I can’t believe they fell for it,” a young Muslim Brother who was the son of one of the leaders said. “That is just what I would do when I was growing up if I wanted my parents to think I had been praying.”
Sisi also went out of his way to cultivate Ambassador Patterson, a sign of his ambition. In addition to avowing his comfort with an elected president from the Brotherhood, Sisi emphasized to her that he prized his close relationships with the Israelis. He also hinted at rivalries with other generals—especially General Sami Anan, the American favorite, and former air marshal Ahmed Shafik, who had lost the election to Morsi. (Sisi told Patterson that the other officers saw both as corrupt, although the Americans knew that self-enrichment among the generals was pervasive.)
Looking back, one might have noticed a pattern in Sisi’s advancement. He praised Mubarak like a father but told the military council to push him aside. And Sisi had been a favorite protégé of Field Marshal Tantawi. But Sisi had surprised Tantawi, too, and replaced him (while eliminating a rival, Anan).
Several of Morsi’s Islamist advisers began to suspect in February that military officers were plotting against them. A friendly customs official at the Cairo airport tipped them off that a plane en route from the United Arab Emirates to Malta had stopped to refuel and started unloading crates of money and narcotics (tramadol, an opiate sold on the black market, with presumed facilitation from inside the police). But an army officer had told the customs police to ignore everything. It all disappeared.
About a half dozen Morsi advisers began meeting in random, unlikely rooms of the palace to avoid surveillance. They left their mobile phones outside and sometimes communicated in written notes that they immediately destroyed. They studied the staging of photographs of the president meeting with the generals for hints of their intentions. They implored Morsi to include one of them during his meetings with Sisi.
The president rebuffed them. He told them that Sisi preferred to meet one on one, without those shabab—young people—as the general called the advisers. Morsi said he would manage Sisi.
Sisi, outwardly, appeared almost obsequious. News photographs and videos invariably showed him walking a few paces behind Morsi with his head bowed, or sitting with hands together between his thighs, smiling at the president. Newspapers quoted anonymous military officials disparaging Morsi, but Sisi brushed off the reports. “Newspapers and media exaggerate,” Sisi would tell the president. Yes, there were “tensions toward the president inside the military,” Sisi would acknowledge. But he presented himself as the ally who would control the discontent.
“Morsi trusted him,” Mourad Aly, a senior Brotherhood spokesman, later told me.
At least until April 24, Ambassador Patterson was hearing and believing the same things from Sisi: that he intended to stay out of Morsi’s way. Many thought as much—even former president Mubarak, then being held in a military hospital. In an audio recording made in his doctor’s office that spring and later leaked to the public (the leaks were everywhere in those days), Mubarak insisted that the military would stay out of politics. Sisi was with the Islamists.
“The defense minister, I think, is to their liking,” Mubarak said.
The most authoritative poll that spring, from the Pew Research Center, had put Morsi’s approval rating at 53 percent and the Brotherhood’s at 63 percent. A strong majority of Egyptians favored democracy over stability. So even the most nervous Morsi advisers did not see a military coup coming; for one thing, it would inevitably set off a violent backlash and undo any progress toward restarting the Egyptian economy. “We didn’t think they were that stupid,” Wael Haddara said.
“No one is going to remove anyone,” Sisi said on May 11 to a select handful of Egyptian journalists and intellectuals he had invited to a military exercise in Dahshur. Military intervention “is extremely dangerous. It could turn Egypt into another Afghanistan or Somalia.” It would set Egypt back “for the next thirty or forty years.”
Privately, Sisi presented Morsi a written memorandum of broad suggestions about how to strengthen his position by reaching out to his opponents. Morsi felt reassured; Sisi was still with him. He later proposed, in another memorandum in June, nine specific steps, including a mechanism for amending the constitution, the incorporation of more young people in government, and either a reshuffling of the Cabinet or an early presidential election.
But by late May, senior Egyptian military officers openly told an American lobbyist who worked with them that they supported Tamarrod’s project and hoped it would succeed. “They did not make a big secret of it,” the lobbyist later told me.
The two generals from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces began calling members of ElBaradei’s National Salvation Front at around the same time with a new message. Do not fear, they said. The army would “protect” their demonstrations to demand Morsi’s resignation. On June 30, his one-year anniversary in office, the army would be with them.
El Sayyid el-Badawi, the business mogul who had been recorded talking to the mukhabarat about the Brotherhood and its fate, was so excited that he summoned the members of the Front to an emergency meeting in the garden of his mansion in the suburbs. The military was now on their side, Badawi told them with enthusiasm. “It was understood as ‘we are now good to go,’” Hamzawy later told me.
By June 5, leaders of the Front were confident enough to tell the State Department about their plans. A Washington emissary, Ramy Yaacoub, an Egyptian who had previously worked on Capitol Hill, delivered a memorandum with the cryptic title “Operation 6” that spelled out the steps Tamarrod would follow if Morsi did not immediately resign in response to the June 30 protests.
Tamarrod, leading the Egyptian people toward their liberation, will issue a constitutional declaration to include the following:
The current Egyptian president will step down, ending the authority of the current constitution. . . .
The Council of National Defense will continue to practice its powers . . .
In a small meeting with another Egyptian, Yaacoub handed the memorandum to Thomas Melia, then deputy assistant secretary of state, in the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Melia was incredulous. “So, you guys are going to make a little coup?” Melia asked.
“Mr. Melia,” Yaacoub told him, “don’t say ‘you guys.’”
But with no clear authority behind it, the memo was set aside and forgotten. Melia told me he has no memory of the meeting.