Free The Angel by Uri Bar-Joseph Page A

fifty-two years old when he was chosen, because of his position as vice president of Egypt, to succeed Gamal Abdel Nasser as president. He was born on December 25, 1918, in the isolated village of Mit Abu al-Kum in the Nile delta. In 1938 he completed the officers’ academy and quickly became known as a nationalist fiercely opposed to British influence in Egypt. He achieved renown during World War II when he was arrested by the British on charges of spying for Germany. Later he was charged in the murder of a senior minister in the Wafd Party–led regime in Egypt, which was considered a puppet of the British government—but was then acquitted due to lack of evidence. Sadat was a member of the Free Officers Movement that carried out the coup in 1952, overthrowing King Farouk and installing a new republican regime led nominally by Muhammad Naguib, the republic’s first president, but more substantially by Nasser, who ousted Naguib and assumed the presidency in 1954. Sadat’s coconspirators remembered him principally for his delay, of several crucial hours, in joining the revolutionary movement as it was trying to overthrow King Farouk, because he had been at the movies with his wife. The Egyptian public, however, remembered Sadat on more positive terms, as the officer who declared the overthrow of the king via Egyptian radio.
    Yet despite his high profile, Sadat was not a prominent figure in the Free Officers Movement. The positions he held tended to be more ceremonial than executive. Nasser and the others held him in low regard. “Give him a car and vouchers for gas,” Nasser used to say of Sadat, “and he’ll be happy.” Sadat, it was believed, lackedpolitical ambition and could be bought for a fairly low price. And when he did attain positions of consequence, his performance was substandard at best. One example was his unique contribution to the Egyptian war in Yemen. In 1962, when the Yemenite monarchy was partially toppled by a military coup, a civil war erupted between the new republican regime supported by Egypt and the loyalist forces supported by Saudi Arabia and Western states. Nasser sent Sadat to Yemen to see whether it made sense for Egypt to intervene. When he came back, he announced before the entire National Assembly that helping the republicans win the war would be “like a picnic by the Red Sea.” Basing his decision heavily on Sadat’s opinion, Nasser sent his army to Yemen. The war quickly became a quagmire, occupying fully a third of Egypt’s forces, dragging on for years, and offering little hope of ending. Sadat’s hasty, arrogant assessment resulted in one of Nasser’s greatest international failures.
    The image of Sadat that began to form among Israeli decision makers was not so different from the one held by his peers. The historian Shimon Shamir, who served as a reserve officer in MI-Research Branch 6 (Egypt) at the time, was called to duty immediately when word arrived of Nasser’s death. He was given dossiers of three possible candidates and was asked to give his opinion on each. One was Ali Sabri, considered the most powerful man in the regime after Nasser; there was also Shaarawy Gomaa, the interior minister in charge of internal security; and finally Anwar Sadat. In a memorandum dated October 6, 1970, Shamir concluded that Sabri and Gomaa were the leading contenders by far. Sadat clearly could not fill Nasser’s shoes. In every position he’d held, Shamir wrote, “Sadat was little more than a courier of diplomatic mail, or a pillar in the meeting room.” On the basis of the information available to MI at the time, Sadat was taken to be dull-witted, narrow-minded, “lacking in independent political thinking, a ‘gray’diplomat with little color of his own.” Beyond discussing his intellectual limitations, the report emphasized that according to various sources, Sadat was “thought an opportunist,