Reinstalling the Egyptian-CIA regime

10 out of 12 of what so called "the Free Officers" were members at the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Magdy Samaan

The Egyptian Military regime celebrated the sixty-first anniversary of the military coup of July 1952 that it propagates as “a revolution”. This year, the celebration was different as it comes after the 30^th of June uprising, which the military used a popular dissatisfaction of the ruling of the Muslim Brotherhood and toppled its president Mohamed Morsi. The propaganda machine of the military regime is trying to replicate the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser, by portraying the defense minister, General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi as a long awaited popular hero who “protecting the people from terrorism”.

In order to understand what is going on now, we need to return to what happened 61 years ago, when the army turned against the democratic parliamentary system for the first time in Egypt to install a dictatorial regime compliant to the United States, that still dominates rule in Egypt with a network of influence and interests that it built up for decades.

The ambiguity in the relations of the political forces in Egypt today can be read if we know the history of deception upon which the Egyptian regime was built in 1952.

In the period preceding July 1952, Egypt was heaving with signs of a true revolution to reform the system and establish a true democracy. Egypt was ready to reap its fruit.  This anticipated uprising came at a time that the British occupation was preparing to leave the country. America was concerned that the void resulting from Britain's departure would lead to either a popular revolution that would reform the imperfections of the existing parliamentary democracy, or the adoption of a non-compliant system of government, or the outbreak of a communist revolution in a region of strategic importance to Western power.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created in 1947 to help the US to implement its new polices in taking the leadership of the world after the world was II. Since its inception, it planned and executed a large number of military uprisings, some of which were known and others were kept secret.

Among the coups that remained a secret for a long time, is the coup of July 1952 in Egypt. Preserving the illegitimate relations between the July officers and the CIA was a necessity for the coup’s success. Athar Jamil wrote on the site ‘Kcom’: “The United States wanted to end British power in Egypt, but the popular mood at that time was dominated by the notion to bring into power a government that would be a client to the United States in such an obvious fashion that it would evoke anti-imperialist sentiments.”

Miles Copeland, an American military intelligence agent who contributed to creating the July coup of 1952, wrote a book entitled “The Game of Nations”, in which he recounts the role of the American CIA in the making of the July 1952 coup. According to Copeland, a committee of specialists was composed headed by a senior official in the CIA, Kermit Roosevelt. It developed the first serious that aimed to prepare a white revolution in Egypt.

During the many reconnaissance visits CIA agents paid to Egypt, they became acquainted with a sleeper cell of the Muslim Brotherhood in the army, through CIA agent Mostafa Amin, and his follower Mohammed Hassanein Heikal. The head of this group, Major Gamal Abdel Nasser, was the man the CIA was looking for. His charisma would facilitate creating a compliant leader, who would control the people, and would be controlled by the CIA. Through him, the United States would be able to realize its aims in the Middle East.

In March 1952, Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA director for the Near East, visited Egypt and held a series of meetings with Gamal Abdel Nasser that ended in the ousting of King Farouk. After long discussions between Roosevelt and Nasser and his group, the two parties agreed upon the broad outlines that would determine the relations between the executors of the coup and the United States of America, which are roughly the same outlines of the relations between Egypt and the US until the present. According to Copeland, it was agreed upon that the future relation between Egypt and the US openly would take the form of “reestablishing the democratic process”, “but in reality there was to be an understanding because the right circumstances for a democratic government were not available”. It was further agreed upon that the coup government would fabricate a verbal hostility to cover up the secret relation with the United States. With regard to Israel, they agreed that “as far as Nasser was concerned, talk about a war with Israel was not appropriate at the time, as Nasser’s priority was the British occupation of the Suez Canal.”

The United States established and trained the Egyptian general intelligence apparatus that became, in cooperation with the CIA, the main route to direct the relations between the two countries. This is what caused an American official to describe the intelligence cooperation in a statement made to the Wall Street Journal, as “the cornerstone of the relations between the two countries”.

The aforementioned might explain the cause for the lack of response of the United States to the demands to cut the aid to Egypt that have been repeated for decades, in spite of the fact that members of the American Congress presented moral and political arguments, that are in line with the US policy declared for democracy and human rights. However, the real relation between the two countries is run by the secret apparatuses that are not governed by the moral values of the American people, nor do they pay attention to the characteristics of a people that strives to obtain its freedom.

The course of events from January 2011 until today indicates that this secret relation between the military and the US on the basis of which the July regime was built, still governs the course of events in Egypt until now. If the July coup was an American project to abort a possible popular revolution, then what has happened since January 2011 is an attempt to make the rise of a popular revolution fail. The United State uses the network of power it has built inside the Egyptian state over the course of the years, particularly within the army that is financed and trained by the American government, to influence the Egyptian decision and direct it, in order to guarantee that a democratic transition that will definitely affect the independence of the Egyptian decision and end the Egyptian subordination to the United States, does not take place. The US interests in corrupting the democratic transition matched the interests of the leaders of the army and the ruling elite in Egypt that defends tremendous interests built on corruption and exploitation of power and seizure of land, which can be described as military feudalism. The military regime used a non-democratic political power (the Islamist) to reach this aim by assisting it to obtain power and then using it to create a situation of conflict of legitimacy mixed with violence, which makes any talk of a democratic transition in the future rather elusive.