A new song hit Egypt’s airwaves just days after the coup. “Teslam el-Ayadi” ran the refrain. “Bless the hands, Bless the army of my country.” It was everywhere. It saturated the television coverage. It pumped from every taxi stereo. It thumped out of the windows of boats along the Nile. You could not take a walk around the block without hearing it. The president of the state-sponsored musician’s syndicate had recorded it. He lifted a catchy melody from a decades-old Egyptian pop song (its chorus, “The moon is full too soon,” was about the joys of Ramadan). He enlisted an ensemble of seasoned Egyptian pop stars to sing verses in turn, in the style of “We Are the World.”
The lyrics began “This is the hero who gave up his life, who raised the name of my country and sacrificed himself for it,” and the music video cut to Sisi wearing dark glasses and a black beret. Clips of him alternated with military footage of soldiers rappelling down walls, somersaulting over moving vehicles, or firing cannons into the desert. In one clip, Sisi led a morning jog with hundreds of soldiers in fatigues running in rows behind him.
“A real man, son of a real man,” a smiling man sang. “He told Egypt, ‘it does not matter if I live or I die,’ and he never agreed to forgive and forget.” A blond starlet belted out, “Egypt, you order us and we obey.”
By late July, posters of Sisi hung from shop windows everywhere outside the Rabaa sit-in. Everyone knew who was in charge now. Some taped up the posters in enthusiasm, others for protection. Islamists hung Sisi’s posters to help keep away the police. I kept one as a souvenir: Sisi, with his clean cheeks and military cap, juxtaposed against a roaring lion.
State newspapers published long, florid tributes in verse to Sisi’s “flawless appearance” and “Herculean strength.” Stores in Zamalek sold Sisi cupcakes. A lingerie store downtown sold Sisi panties—“for the woman who really wants to show her man who’s boss,” one journalist quipped on social media. The maker of “Bless the Hands” produced a second song saluting Sisi for taking on the “terrorists”; this one concluded with the chorus “June thirtieth was not a coup.” (A third song thanked the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for their role in the takeover.)
When he announced Morsi’s ouster, Sisi grabbed his lectern with both hands and insisted that he had tried to help the president. Sisi said then that he had given up on Morsi only after his last speech, on July 2, because it “failed to meet the full demands of the people.”
In truth, the generals had signaled to ElBaradei’s National Salvation Front and others by the beginning of June that they backed Morsi’s ouster. A general had told Morsi’s team “the pasha must go” hours before the July 2 speech. Yet Sisi sounded almost regretful about ousting Morsi.
American officials reading intelligence reports about conversations among the top generals would later tell me that Sisi was indeed more reluctant than some of the other generals about removing Morsi (the military council had never relished recognizing Morsi’s election in the first place). But the police, the spies, the judges, Al Azhar, the Coptic Church, the owners of the private news media, the Western-style “liberals,” the monarchs of the Persian Gulf—all of them were pushing for Sisi to replace Morsi. Washington did not speak with a single, credible voice on the question.
Sisi acceded to that push, and it transformed him. In his first speeches and interviews, Sisi had cooed to his audience in colloquial Arabic: you are “the light of my eyes.” His honeyed speaking style was so sentimental that it almost seemed romantic, and some compared him with Abdel Halim Hafez, the Egyptian Sinatra.
“Sisi is soft and sweet, as if he is flirting with a beautiful woman,” the political scientist Hassan Nafaa told me. Some on social media dubbed Sisi “the pimp.”
“People think I’m a soft man,” Sisi told his journalist-confidant in another private conversation that was later leaked to the public. But they were wrong, Sisi warned. He would be firm. A Sisi presidency would be “torture and suffering.”
He stayed out of the limelight at first, having installed a civilian figurehead as acting president: Adly Mansour, the chief of the Supreme Constitutional Court. (ElBaradei was named vice president, in charge of relations with the West.) Mansour’s main job was the promulgation of an interim charter, and its preamble based its legitimacy on the words of Defense Minister Sisi. The coup was official.
Sisi reemerged three weeks after the coup for a televised speech on July 24, and he was a changed man. He no longer looked up with his hands between his thighs, or wore his boyish beret and short sleeves. Now he wore dark aviator sunglasses and gilded epaulets, like an Arab Pinochet.
Yet he seemed to fall a step behind his propagandists. The state and private media—all presumably guided by the same intelligence agencies—were denouncing the Muslim Brothers as dangerous, alien terrorists. Sisi still defended the sincerity of his efforts to help Morsi.
Speaking before an audience of military cadets, he told Egyptians to trust him as cubs trust a lion. “Do lions eat their cubs?” he asked. “The Egyptian army is truly like a lion.”
“We did not betray or conspire,” he insisted, again and again. “I did not deceive the president. . . . Do not think I misled the former president!”
“To whom could I lie?” he interjected a few moments later. “To my family of Egyptians?”
He counted out the times that he said he had tried to save Morsi—“once, twice, thrice.” At one point, he cliamed that he had told Morsi as early as January to abandon his whole “project”—“this form of religion.” But then Sisi insisted that he had not given up on Morsi until March or even the last week of June. He recounted advising Morsi on details as small as the wording of speeches. When I read it again later, Sisi’s repetition that he had not betrayed the president seemed compulsive, like compensation for a feeling of guilt.
But his tone grew sterner at last. The Muslim Brotherhood was now out to destroy Egypt, “to bring down the country or to rule it.”
“If anyone imagines that through violence or terrorism! Terrorism! . . ,” he said, trailing off. He called on “all honorable and trustworthy Egyptians” to go to the streets that Friday “to give me a mandate to combat potential violence and terrorism.”
“Show the world,” he said. “Shoulder the burden with me.”
The news media alarms of foreigners, militants, weapons, and disease had primed Sisi’s audience to fear the camp at Rabaa. A kind of nationalist rush surged again through Cairo. We have removed another tyrant! Liberal Egyptian friends who privately dreaded the military’s return to power told me that their own families complained that Sisi was waiting too long to empty Rabaa by force. “We were animals,” the rights advocate and journalist Hossam Bahgat told me later. “We were horrific.”
Egyptians normally spend sleepy afternoons in Ramadan watching television serials made for the season. On the Friday that Sisi had called for a demonstration, eight popular satellite television networks all canceled their programming to push viewers off their couches. Helicopters buzzed low over the city, armored military vehicles patrolled the streets, and soldiers and police turned out to cheer. Tens of thousands marched, just as Sisi had requested, to give him his “mandate.” Posters of his face floated over the throngs.
“Grind away, Sisi,” some chanted. Eviscerate the Islamists. Eight more were killed that day during clashes near Rabaa.
Then, around 10:30 P.M., when the crowds had gone home, an Islamist countermarch set off from Rabaa through the neighborhood of Nasr City. When they reached the open plaza around Egypt’s version of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the soldiers and police opened fire, gunning down more than eighty demonstrators. A second mass killing.
One of Mayy el-Sheikh’s best friends worked in our office. Mayy’s friend had marched with her mother, as Sisi had asked. “If you can live with the blood, you should live with its weight,” Mayy told her. They did not talk for weeks, and never again about politics.
The State Department had urged on the day after the coup that any Americans living in Egypt “depart at this time.” Laura and our sons had left for the summer. Americans who stayed in Cairo might have been forgiven for thinking we had woken up in Tehran or Pyongyang. Posters and banners sprang up all over the city, putting a black X over the face of the American ambassador, or superimposing Obama’s face with Osama bin Laden’s. Former judge Tahani el-Gebali claimed on television that Obama’s Kenyan half brother was financing the Brotherhood.
The same wildly counterfactual line was pushed all over the news media: Obama and Patterson (the “Brotherhood Ambassador”) had conspired with Israel, Turkey, and Qatar to bring the Islamists to power in a plot to divide and cripple Egypt. The White House knew that the Saudis and Emiratis were driving the propaganda campaign, and Ben Rhodes marveled that such vitriol was coming from allies. “They celebrated the military takeover, and yet there was no questioning of that in Washington,” he told me.
The White House made gestures. On July 24, the day of Sisi’s “mandate speech,” the administration delayed delivery to Egypt of four new F-16s. But all in all the United States was remarkably nonchalant about the anti-American invective from its Egyptian client.
Hagel talked to Sisi nearly every other day that summer, for a total of seventeen calls over five weeks, sometimes for as long as ninety minutes. Hagel told me he warned Sisi, “This is what is coming. We are going to pull down a lot of the support. We are going to put on hold the weapons systems. . . . We don’t want to be there either. Hold elections. Let the people out of jail. Let them organize protests.” But Hagel’s tone was still conciliatory. He sent Sisi a biography of George Washington, as a role model, and they laughed together at the vanity of leaders who think they can never leave office.
Sisi ran him in circles, Hagel said. “The excuse that he would always use is ‘These are the courts,’ ‘We are a democracy,’ and all this bullshit. ‘The rule of law! I can’t override the courts.’ He would get me trapped back in the same kind of web.”
Hagel “still just wanted to build a relationship,” a senior White House official told me. Obama, now more focused on Egypt, grew annoyed. Hagel resigned in November 2014, after conflicts with the president over other policies in the region.
Israel was lobbying hard for Washington to support the coup, and Sisi knew it, Hagel said. Sisi “would intimate that to me, too.”
“The Israelis were telling me, ‘This is our security, and this is the best relationship we have ever had with the Egyptians,’” Hagel told me. “And they were working Capitol Hill, as they do. It was all about Israeli security. ‘You can’t let us down here.’”
Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, introduced a bill to end Egypt’s military aid because of the coup. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC, wrote to every senator arguing that any cuts “could increase instability in Egypt and undermine important U.S. interests and negatively impact our Israeli ally.” The Senate voted 86–13 to protect the aid.
I had long ago stopped thinking of Egypt and Israel as hostile neighbors who needed American payoffs to maintain their peace. Now the Egyptian and Israeli military leaders were teaming up with one another against the White House to keep the money flowing.
Kerry was traveling in Islamabad at the time of the “mandate” massacre, when Egyptian soldiers killed more than eighty demonstrators. Susan Rice, the national security adviser, called him more than once and personally reminded him to stay on message: the United States wanted a return to democracy. A crackdown would destabilize Egypt. The American aid was at stake.
Kerry ignored her. The generals “were restoring democracy,” Kerry told a Pakistani television network. “The military was asked to intervene by millions and millions of people.”
In the White House, “it was a WTF moment,” a senior national security official later told me. Obama’s advisers complained to Kerry’s staff, but on a visit to Cairo a few weeks later he again commended Sisi’s government for following its road map to democracy. As late as the next June, almost a year after the coup, Kerry publicly thanked Egyptians “for their hard work in transitioning to a democracy.”
But the massacre of July 26, 2013, alarmed the White House enough that it sent one of the State Department’s most senior diplomats, William Burns, to try to broker some agreement that might stop the killing. The European Union dispatched Bernardino León, a Spanish diplomat, to join Burns.
Sisi’s transitional government allowed them to meet Shater at the Tora prison complex near Maadi—at 1:00 A.M., accompanied by a warden. Shater, cool and matter of fact, made clear he had little regard for Morsi but refused to negotiate for him. Only Morsi had been elected president.
“I am sixty-five years old, I have spent fourteen years in prison,” Shater told them. “Maybe I will spend another fourteen.”
When they met with Sisi, he was long-winded and self-justifying. He told the diplomats that the Muslim Brotherhood had threatened to destroy Egypt. “The people called me,” Sisi insisted. “As the military, we had an obligation to save Egypt.”
For Sisi, “everything was existential,” Burns later told me.
Two Arab foreign ministers had showed up unexpectedly to join them for their meetings: Prince Abdullah bin Zayed—known as ABZ—of the United Arab Emirates and Sheikh Khalid al-Attiyah of Qatar. Burns and León had not asked either of them to come. Each alluded to private conversations with Kerry. The diplomats hoped each foreign minister could work on his country’s client in Egypt. Qatar could persuade the Muslim Brothers to bend. The Emiratis could soften up Sisi.
But ABZ, it turned out, was double-dealing. As soon as he left Burns and León, ABZ goaded the Egyptian generals to do whatever it took to break the Islamists, with as much force as needed. We have your back in Washington, he assured them.
American intelligence agencies reported ABZ’s undermining to Burns, Kerry, and the White House. But ABZ hardly hid his support for the coup. Before leaving Cairo, he grinned for a newspaper photograph with his arms around the shoulders of two Tamarrod founders, embracing them with pride as protégés of the Emiratis.
Kerry, years later, told me that his friends in the Persian Gulf had actively worked against Obama’s policy in Egypt right through that summer. “That is one of the realities of the region,” he said. “They will all look you in the eye, and they don’t want to say ‘no’—they don’t want to displease you to your face—but they will always pursue their bottom-line interest.” Unlike Washington, he said, the petroleum-rich Gulf monarchs “had a free-flowing spigot to back up their interests.”
The month-old sit-in at Rabaa was still growing, but, on August 6, after nearly a week in Cairo, Burns and León believed they had a deal for first steps to build trust between the Brothers and the generals. Sisi’s government would release from jail two notably moderate Islamist politicians; the Brotherhood would begin to dismantle the sit-in at Rabaa. León told the Brotherhood’s lead negotiator, Amr Darrag, that the two Islamists would be released within two hours. Then he called back the next day to tell Darrag to be patient—the releases were coming.
Instead, Sisi’s government announced that negotiations were over. The security forces were preparing to clear Rabaa. Burns and León left Cairo. Two years later, León accepted a lucrative job from ABZ as head of a new diplomatic training center in Abu Dhabi, for the United Arab Emirates.