By the mid-1960s the majority view among Moscow’s Middle Eastern experts was that Soviet equipment and training had transformed the Egyptian armed forces. They were sadly disillusioned by the humiliating outcome of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967. The Israeli attack on Egypt at 8.45 a.m. (Cairo time) on 5 June took the Centre as well as Nasser by surprise. The Soviet news media learned of the attack before the KGB, which only discovered the outbreak of war from intercepted Associated Press reports.
22
The war was virtually decided during the first three hours when Israeli air-raids destroyed 286 of 340 Egyptian combat aircraft on the ground, leaving the Egyptian army without air cover during the ensuing land battles in the Sinai desert.
On 28 June 1967, in one of his first speeches as KGB Chairman, Yuri Andropov addressed KGB Communist Party activists on the subject of ‘The Soviet Union’s Policy regarding Israel’s Aggression in the Near East’. In order to avoid similar intelligence failures in future and have ‘timely information and forecasts of events’, the KGB ‘must draw highly qualified specialists into intelligence work from a variety of academic fields’.
23
Among the Soviet journalists and academic experts sent on missions to increase the Centre’s understanding of the Middle East was Yevgeni Primakov, codenamed MAKS (later head of the post-Soviet foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, and one of Boris Yeltsin’s prime ministers). In the late 1960s Primakov succeeded in getting to know both Hafiz al-Asad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
24
Intelligence analysis, which had scarcely existed hitherto in a KGB frightened of offering opinions uncongenial to the political leadership, made modest - though always politically correct - strides during the Andropov era.
In public, the Kremlin stood by Nasser and the Arab cause after the humiliation of the Six-Day War, denounced imperialist aggression and (to its subsequent regret) broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. Privately, however, there was savage criticism of the incompetence of the Arab forces and outrage at the amount of Soviet military equipment captured by the Israelis. Within the Centre there was grudging admiration for both the Israelis’ military skill and the success of Israeli propaganda which sought to create an impression of Arab cowardice in battle by photographing Egyptian PoWs in their underwear and other unheroic poses standing next to undamaged Soviet tanks.
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The débâcle of the Six-Day War left Moscow with only two options: either to cut its losses or to rebuild the Arab armies. It chose the second. President Podgorny visited Egypt with an entourage which included Marshal Matvei Zakharov, chief of the Soviet general staff, Kirpichenko, then working at the Centre, and Primakov.
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Zakharov stayed on to advise on the reorganization and re-equipment of the Egyptian army. Desperate to resurrect his role as the hero of the Arab world, Nasser proved willing to make much larger concessions in return for Soviet help than before the Six-Day War. He told Podgorny:
What is important for us is that we now recognize that our main enemy is the United States and that the only possible way of continuing our struggle is for us to ally ourselves with the Soviet Union . . . Before the fighting broke out, we were afraid that we would be accused by the Western media of being aligned [with the Soviet Union], but nothing of that sort concerns us any longer. We are ready to offer facilities to the Soviet fleet from Port Said to Salloum and from al-Arish to Gaza.
27
Soviet advisers in Egypt eventually numbered over 20,000. In 1970, at Nasser’s request, Soviet airbases, equipped with SAM-3 missiles and combat aircraft with Russian crews, were established to strengthen Egyptian air defences.
Nasser’s most striking political gifts were his powerful rhetoric and charismatic stage presence, which enabled him to survive the military humiliation of 1967, for which he bore much of the responsibility, and inspired the Arab street with a seductive but unrealizable vision of Pan-Arab unity which would restore the pride and honour of which imperialism had robbed them. He left behind few practical achievements. The celebrated Aswan Dam and vast Helwan steel works, both financed by the Soviet Union and praised as models of socialist construction, were built in defiance of local conditions. Egyptian socialism had failed. As Nasser once admitted, ‘The people can’t eat socialism. If they weren’t Egyptian they’d beat me with their shoes [almost the ultimate Arab humiliation].’ The main growth area during Nasser’s eighteen years in power was the civil service, which increased from 325,000 to 1.2 million mostly inefficient bureaucrats. Cairo, built to accommodate 3 million people, was close to meltdown with a population almost three times as large. Water pipes and sewage systems regularly collapsed, flooding parts of the city. Politically, Nasser left behind him a one-party state with an ailing economy built on the twin foundations of rigged elections and concentration camps to terrorize his opponents.
28
The vast Soviet investment in Nasser’s Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s rested on a far more precarious base than Moscow was willing to acknowledge. The influx of Soviet advisers served only to underline the gulf between Soviet and Egyptian society. Russians and Egyptians rarely visited each other’s homes. Though almost half of the 15,000 Arabs who studied in the United States during the late 1950s and 1960s married Americans, marriage between Soviet advisers and their Egyptian hosts was virtually unknown.
29
Resentment at the aloofness of the advisers was compounded by the arrogance of the Soviet ambassador, Vladimir Mikhailovich Vinogradov. ‘The Soviet Union’, complained Vice-President Anwar al-Sadat, ‘had begun to feel that it enjoyed a privileged position in Egypt - so much so that the Soviet ambassador had assumed a position comparable to that of the British High Commissioner in the days of the British occupation of Egypt.’
30
With Nasser’s sudden death in September 1970 and his replacement by Sadat, the imposing but fragile edifice of Soviet influence in Egypt began to crumble. Almost two decades later, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, was still insisting that ‘had [Nasser] lived a few years longer, the situation in the region might today be very different’.
31
Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet Prime Minister, told Sadat soon after he became President, ‘We never had any secrets from [Nasser], and he never had any secrets from us.’
32
The first half of the statement, as Kosygin was well aware, was nonsense; the second half, thanks to Sami Sharaf and others, may at times have been close to the truth. On his first day as President, Sadat had an immediate confrontation with Sharaf in his office. According to Sadat:
He had a heap of papers to submit to me. ‘What is this?’ I asked.
‘The text of tapped telephone conversations between certain people being watched.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t like to read such rubbish . . . And, anyway, who gave you the right to have the telephones of these people tapped? Take this file away.’ I swept it off my desk.
33
There were times when Sadat took a greater interest in ‘such rubbish’ than he cared to admit to Sharaf. Kirpichenko, who returned to Cairo as resident in 1970, discovered that Sadat was ‘listening in’ to the conversations of a group of pro-Soviet plotters against him: chief among them Vice-President Ali Sabry, Interior Minister Sha’rawi Gum’a, War Minister Muhammad Fawzi and Minister for Presidential Affairs Sami Sharaf. The group, which Sadat privately called the ‘crocodiles’ (an expression adopted by the Cairo residency), had frequent meetings with Vinogradov and, in Kirpichenko’s euphemistic phrase, ‘shared with him their apprehensions regarding Sadat’s line’
34
- in other words their plans to overthrow him.
35
The plotters sought Vinogradov’s support but, according to Nikolai Leonov, the ambassador was ‘overcome by fear’ and gave no reply.
36
The reports from Cairo which most alarmed the Politburo were what Kirpichenko claims was ‘reliable’ intelligence on Sadat’s secret contacts with President Nixon, raising the suspicion that he was planning to loosen Egyptian links with the Soviet Union and move closer to the United States.
37
In January 1971 Fawzi, whose responsibilities included Cairo security, received a report of unauthorized radio transmissions. The triangulation techniques used to locate the source of the transmissions revealed that they came from Sadat’s house. Further investigation showed that he was exchanging secret messages with Washington - despite the fact that diplomatic relations with the United States had been broken off by Nasser. According to Fawzi, he confronted Sadat, who told him that the secret contacts were no business of his. Fawzi allegedly retorted that it was the business of intelligence services to discover such things.
38
Kirpichenko may well have been informed of the confrontation between Fawzi and Sadat either by one of the ‘crocodiles’ or by one of his informants within Egyptian intelligence. It is equally likely that Sadat’s radio messages to and from Washington were intercepted by the SIGINT station (codenamed ORION)
39
in the Cairo residency. The KGB’s remarkable success with Third World ciphers made its codebreakers better able to decrypt Sadat’s presidential cipher than any Egyptian intelligence agency.
40
Given the anxieties aroused in Moscow by Sadat’s policies, decrypting his communications must have had a particularly high priority. Just as worrying from Moscow’s point of view were the secret conversations in Cairo during March and April between the US diplomat Donald Bergus and Sadat’s emissaries. Tapes of the conversations, recorded without Sadat’s knowledge by a section of Egyptian intelligence, were passed on to the ‘crocodiles’ and, almost certainly, revealed by them to the Soviet embassy.
41
On 28 April 1971, for the only time in Kirpichenko’s career as a foreign intelligence officer, he was suddenly summoned back to Moscow, together with Vinogradov and the senior military adviser in Egypt, General Vasili Vasilyevich Okunev, to give his assessment of Sadat’s intentions direct to a meeting of the Politburo. Vinogradov was criticized by Suslov for what he claimed were the contradictions between the ‘quite optimistic’ tone of his oral assessment (which was similar to that of Okunev) and some of the evidence contained in his diplomatic despatches. Kirpichenko, by contrast, bluntly declared that Sadat was deceiving the Soviet Union. Andropov told him afterwards, ‘Everything you said was more or less correct, but a bit sharply expressed.’ He was also informed that President Podgorny had said of his comments on Sadat, ‘It’s not at all appropriate . . . to speak of presidents in such a manner!’ What also stuck in Kirpichenko’s memory was the fact that while the table around which the Politburo sat had on it red and black caviar and a selection of fish delicacies, he and those seated around the walls were offered only sausage and cheese sandwiches.
42
The events of the next few weeks fully justified Kirpichenko’s pessimism. On 11 May a young police officer brought Sadat a tape recording showing, according to Sadat, that the ‘crocodiles’ ‘were plotting to overthrow me and the regime’.
43
(Though Sadat’s memoirs do not mention it, he had doubtless received similar tapes before.) At a meeting with Vinogradov, the chief plotters had sought Soviet support for a plot to overthrow Sadat and establish ‘socialism in Egypt’. Moscow, however, dared not take the risk of promising support and Sadat struck first.
44
The timing of the arrest of the ‘crocodiles’ on the evening of 13 May took the Cairo residency by surprise. Kirpichenko spent the evening, like many other Soviet representatives, at a reception in their honour in the garden of the East German embassy. At the high point of the evening, just as suckling pigs appeared on the table, news arrived of the arrests, forcing Kirpichenko to abandon the meal and return to his embassy.
45
Sadat, however, still went to great lengths to conceal his real intentions from the Russians. Only a fortnight later, he signed with President Podgorny in Cairo a Soviet-Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation. His main motive, as he later acknowledged, was ‘to allay the fears of the Soviet leaders’ by seeking to persuade them that he was engaged in an internal power struggle rather than a reorientation of Egyptian foreign policy away from Moscow. As he saw Podgorny off at the airport, Sadat appealed to him to tell the Politburo, ‘Please have confidence in us! Have confidence! Confidence! ’
46
His disingenuous pleading had little effect. The Centre’s confidence in Sadat was already almost gone. The Cairo residency had little doubt that he ‘was aiming to cut down Soviet-Egyptian relations and would take active steps to curtail the activity of Soviet Intelligence in Egypt’.
47
For the moment, however, Moscow did not voice its suspicions, fearing that open opposition to Sadat would only undermine still further its remaining influence and huge investment in Egypt.