Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin. Sherard Cowper-Coles

best of introductions to the modern Middle East.

Chapter 3

       Death on the Nile

      I knew I shouldn’t have been watching television. As so often, I had promised myself I would be good, and work, but not quite yet. I wanted to see the big parade, to spot the tanks and guns and rockets and trucks in Egypt’s armoury. I wanted to see who was on the saluting base with President Sadat, as he and his ministers and generals celebrated the eighth anniversary of his great and only – the Arabs’ great and only – military victory over Israel, the Yom Kippur or Ramadan War of October 1973.

      I couldn’t go in person, but the Ambassador was there, and so were the three defence attachés – military, naval and air – in tropical uniform. As the Embassy press officer, I had, however, been allowed the only television inside the secure area of the Cairo Chancery, and so I could watch the great day unfolding in grainy black-and-white, from the privacy of my office. It was better than redrafting yet again the Embassy’s Leading Personality Reports for Egypt. Or updating the Calendar of (past) Events every British Embassy was obliged to send to London each January, but which few in the FCO ever read.

      It was 6 October 1981. The television showed lines of lumbering Soviet 6x6 trucks, with rows of soldiers sitting upright in the back, moving past the saluting base. Suddenly, the camera lurched and dipped away. The sound, of bands and truck engines and aircraft overhead, went dead. For twenty seconds or so, though it seemed much longer, the only image was a silent still of the ground beneath the cameraman’s feet. Then the Egyptian equivalent of the test card came up, followed five minutes later by archival propaganda footage of Egypt’s past military triumphs, with patriotic music to match.

      I knew something was wrong, but not how wrong. It could just have been the usual technical difficulties which seemed to plague any outside broadcast in Egypt thirty years ago. But it could have been something more. There was no way of finding out quickly. Mobile phones hardly existed. Landlines were poor. In any case, whom would I call? I wandered along the Chancery corridor, and told one of the other young diplomats what I had seen – or, rather, not seen.

      Then I struck lucky. The ancient telephone in my little office jumped, and its bell rang. The veteran Embassy switchboard operator said a Mr Wright wanted to speak to me, urgently. It was Jonathan Wright, of Reuters. Jonathan had been at the parade, but was phoning from a building near by. All he knew was that there had been an attack on the Presidential reviewing stand, by a group of soldiers. They had jumped off one of the trucks, before charging the saluting base, heading straight for the President and those around him. Several people had been killed and injured. Sadat had been wounded, possibly quite badly. Others too had been hit. All was now chaos. Jonathan assumed that the Ambassador and his three defence attachés were on their way back to the Embassy.

      I thanked Jonathan for what turned out to be the scoop of my diplomatic career. I rushed straight to the office of the Embassy’s number two, Tony Reeve, and told him what I knew. He said at once that we needed to warn London, pending the Ambassador’s return. For the first, and last, time in my diplomatic career, I drafted a FLASH telegram: ‘Sadat wounded at October War parade. Ambassador believed safe. Further reporting to follow.’ Tony approved it, and it was rushed upstairs, for encryption and then transmission by the Embassy communicators. A FLASH telegram took precedence over all other cable traffic, and was supposed to be delivered instantly, at whatever time of day or night it arrived. On a Tuesday afternoon, our cable took a sleepy London by complete surprise.

      Within an hour or so, the Ambassador and the three attachés had arrived back at the office, hot, tired and still in shock. We gathered in the Ambassador’s office. Everyone was on edge. Without warning, a heavy metal roller shutter dropped down, with a loud bang. Not hesitating for a second, the Air Attaché dived under the Ambassador’s conference table, yelling, ‘Get down! Take cover!’, only to crawl shamefacedly back out a couple of minutes later when he realised what had caused the noise.

      The Ambassador described what he had seen at the parade. The soldiers leaping off the truck, and charging at the main stand, emptying their Kalashnikovs as they ran. Sadat had been hit: of that there could be no doubt. John Woods, the First Secretary at the Australian Embassy, whom many of us knew well, had been badly wounded. The Israeli Ambassador, Moshe Sasson, had been pushed to the ground so hard by his bodyguards that they had – it later emerged – broken several of his ribs.

      We soon established that the President had been flown by helicopter to the Military Hospital south of Cairo, with Madame Sadat at his side. The US Ambassador rang ours to say that the Americans believed that Sadat was badly wounded but stable. We reported this to an increasingly worried London, now starting to react to reports on the agency tapes.

      But the Americans were wrong. Sadat was already dead, and had probably been so since the first moments of the attack. He had had over thirty AK-47 rounds pumped into him. His Vice President, Hosni Mubarak, had survived, and so had the rest of the senior leadership. Later that evening, Egyptian television carried a formal statement, announcing Sadat’s death, and that Mubarak had taken over as acting president.

      In 1981 Egypt was still basking in the warm afterglow of the Camp David accords of 1978, and the American-orchestrated Western approval that had accompanied Egypt’s one-sided peace with Israel. In 1977 Sadat had broken the mould of the Arab–Israel dispute by flying to Jerusalem. He had become the first Arab leader to make peace with the Zionist enemy. But he had taken the biggest threat to Israel out of the fight without securing anything for the Palestinians other than continuing talks on autonomy. Three years later, American, Arab and Israeli negotiators were struggling to turn those words into reality – as they still are, more than three decades on.

      Deep down, many of us thought that through his violent death Sadat had paid the price for that peace and, at least as important, for the love affair with America, and with American and Western ways, which had accompanied his accommodation with Israel. There had been many examples of increasingly pharaonic, not to say eccentric, behaviour as Egypt’s leader lost touch with his long-suffering people. For me, and probably for millions of desperately poor Egyptians, the low point had been Frank Sinatra singing at a fashion show for the President’s wife, before the floodlit Pyramids. Another symptom of Sadat’s grandiose style had been the live broadcast, on prime-time television, of three wretched Egyptian professors of English literature examining Madame Sadat on her recently submitted doctoral thesis on Shelley. What the fellaheen made of it I never found out; but the Cairo intelligentsia had plenty to say about the very high mark her treatise had received. Sadat’s decision to offer the Shah of Iran refuge in Cairo when he fled Tehran in 1979 was a gesture of quixotic kindness that did him no good at all with ordinary Egyptian Muslims. Today there are roughly twice as many Egyptians as when I served in Cairo thirty years ago. But then, as now, after a second Egyptian revolution, their priorities are the same: work, security and the dignity of being able to choose how they are governed and how they express their faith.

      Sadat’s funeral was not, however, the time for negative reflections. Solidarity had to be shown. Western politicians were falling over each other to attend an event boycotted by almost the whole of the rest of Arab world.

      I was plunged into making arrangements for the first of four funerals for Arab heads of state I was to witness in my diplomatic career.* The British delegation selected itself: the Prince of Wales, who had visited Egypt on honeymoon only a few weeks earlier; the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington; and, to represent the Opposition, the former Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan, himself a recent visitor to Egypt.

      But, as always in the modern Middle East, we were outgunned by the Americans: three US presidents – Nixon, Ford and Carter – led an American delegation hundreds strong, in which President Reagan’s first Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, cut a relatively minor figure. Not to be outdone, the Israelis sent their Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, and many other senior Israeli admirers of the late President. Typically, Begin’s attendance was complicated by the fact that, as