The World

In 1952, Kim Roosevelt, a thirty-five-year-old American spy, arrived in Cairo to see King Farouk, whom he had befriended during the war, keen to bolster the monarchy. Kermit, grandson of President Teddy, who had joined CIA forerunner the OSS during the war and believed America should back Arab nationalists to counter Soviet subversion, personified the tweedy jauntiness of the early CIA. That tone was also echoed in the name of his Egyptian mission: Project FF (Fat Fucker). King Farouk was the Fat Fucker. Roosevelt had a second mission related to another young king, the shah of Iran. In Egypt, control of the Canal was essential for oil supplies; in Iran, the oilfields were in peril, and the two were connected: Farouk’s sister Fawzia was married to the shah. Roosevelt, chief of the Near East and Africa Division, was ordered to save both.

Roosevelt started with Fat Fucker, but Farouk refused to reduce his extravagance or dismiss the Stork and other favourites, leading the American to probe a coterie of young officers who loathed the inept monarchy. These Free Officers were led by Colonel Nasser and his ally Anwar Sadat, son of a fellahin, a poor Nilotic farmer, who had been imprisoned in the war for pro-German conspiracy. Giving up on FF, Roosevelt encouraged Nasser, who he believed was pro-American.

Farouk, who hated the British, declared that the Canal belonged to Egypt, elevated himself to a new title, king of Egypt and Sudan, and faked a descent from Muhammad: ‘If there was any Arabic blood in Farouk’s veins, it was so diluted that it couldn’t possibly have been traced back to Muhammad,’ fulminated General Naguib. ‘A sacrilege.’ Farouk divorced his queen, the popular part-Turkish aristocrat Farida, to marry a teenager, Narriman, chosen in part because she was Arab and middle-class; but the combination of cold-heartedness and extravagance made the obese sybarite unpopular. When Peter Ustinov played Nero in the new film Quo Vadis

, the resemblance to the king was so strong that the film was banned in Egypt. Farouk was losing control: on 26 January 1952, rioters burned down cinemas, hotels and nightclubs.

Now Farouk promoted his brother-in-law, Ismail ‘Pretty Boy’ Chirine, a playboy who had married Fawzia after her divorce from the shah, to defence minister. It was the last straw for Nasser who, chain-smoking and listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade

, accelerated his coup, recruiting Naguib as figurehead. When some officers betrayed the plot to Farouk he mocked them as ‘a bunch of pimps’. On the night of 23 July 1952, Nasser seized Cairo’s army headquarters. Farouk was at an Alexandrian casino, but he appealed to the US ambassador for help against Communist mutineers. Nasser and Sadat debated whether to execute him, but, deciding to let him live, they dispatched two columns to arrest him.

Brandishing a machine gun, Farouk drove Narriman, his son and Pulli the Stork to the fortified Ras el-Tin Palace, defended by Sudanese guards. When the rebels attacked the palace, he shot four with a hunting rifle; but neither the Americans nor the British backed him and he signed the abdication, in favour of his son Fuad. Dressing up in his white admiral’s uniform, Farouk with his family boarded the Mahrousa, which had taken his grandfather Ismail into exile in 1879. Naguib, embarrassed and moved, kissed his hand. ‘It isn’t easy to govern Egypt, you know,’ said Farouk, ending 146 years of his family’s rule.

The Free Officers appointed Naguib as president, but as his conservatism became apparent, the dashing, tall and exuberant Nasser, who had already become premier, replaced him as president, winning massive popularity with his land reforms and powerful oratory, first in Egypt but ultimately as the voice of secular pan-Arab nationalism. There was always another route in the Arab world: religion. Religious and secular power were always in contact, sometimes clashing, sometimes combining, but like all ideologies always contagious and fluid.