Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (66 page)

Sadat, like many world leaders, had a soft spot for theatrical uniforms and decorations – he had uniforms designed by Pierre Cardin as well as by Savile Row tailors. In his youth he favoured cropped hair, a monocle and a swagger cane. Once he was president he carried his field marshal’s baton like a pharaoh’s
ankh
and crowded his chest with medals. Only recently he had awarded himself the green silk ‘sash of justice’. His sense of being an actor was enhanced by all the hours of TV footage in which he starred. He increasingly liked to spend hours alone watching the old video tapes, the filmic record of past triumphs: the address to parliament after the 1973 war, his journey to Jerusalem, his several TV appearances in America. Most of his day would be spent in interviews, almost all filmed. At night he would eat a light dinner, meet more people, then from 10 o’clock onwards watch imported and recently released films (even before they reached the censor) in his private cinema. He usually watched two a night, though he would be snoring before the end of the second. By the time of his assassination this latterday Pharaoh was living largely in a bubble of his own design.

On 6 October, Sadat’s last day had begun like most in the latter years of his presidency. He had gone to bed fairly late after watching a film. He had risen around 9.30 a.m. and eaten his preferred mix of honey and royal jelly followed by a cup of tea. Later he would munch on low-fat cheese and a low-calorie wafer. Sadat ate little as he was careful about his weight. He had then taken some light exercise and received his daily massage.

Sadat had announced a few days earlier that he would ride to the parade in his open-top Cadillac. He had taken to making trips in this
car (which was reminiscent of the vehicle that saw the end of JFK), yet it seems the assassins never contemplated an assault on the car, possibly because the route would never be disclosed beforehand. Certainly Sadat, like most world leaders, was safest when there was no prior warning of his movements. With no warning he could wander through a crowd without protection – assassins need days and days to prepare. Somehow the profession does not attract the spontaneous type . . .

Striding out of his palace in Giza, he left behind on the side-table his field-marshal’s baton. Later, Jehan Sadat, the President’s wife, would say she had seen this as a bad omen, though quite how bad she had had no idea.

Not that there weren’t security measures in place. The Americans had contributed over the years, it was rumoured, $20 million to keep Sadat from being killed. This included signals intelligence and an elite unit trained by the US to deal with any attempt on his life. But in keeping with Sadat’s desire to appear at his most uncluttered before the TV cameras of the world, the elite unit were banished to a position behind the reviewing stand where they would not get in the way of the cameras. The President was like a Hollywood superstar – if it wasn’t filmed it didn’t exist. When Prince Charles and his new bride Diana were passing through Egypt on their honeymoon in August that same year and asked that a picnic with Sadat not be filmed, he was annoyed and puzzled. His love of appearing on television certainly did not make him popular, as he imagined it did.

The head of the Presidential Guard, a brigadier general, explained later that his main task had been making sure that only those invited took a seat on the stand and that the food and drink consumed by Sadat were checked personally by him. The old habits of Nile rulers die hard. It was as if they were protecting against medieval assassins armed with poison when they should have been aware of twentieth-century ones armed with rifles and grenades.

It took some hours for the truck carrying the killers actually to pass the stand where Sadat was sitting. This reviewing stand, which looks like a small section of a football stadium, is situated on the main road to the airport. It is still there, though the chipped concrete at the front has long been repaired. You can see that the front edge of concrete is very thick, and if one lay down on the inside up against the wall (which is what Hosny Mubarak did) you’d be perfectly safe from gunfire. Sadat, however, did not consider such a manoeuvre until it was too late.

At the parade stand Sadat asked Bishop Samuel of the Coptic Church and the Sheikh of Al-Azhar to sit next to him. It was for the cameras, of course – the man of power living in peace with the two religions – but it was the right message to be sending to an Egypt intent on division; it was, however, too late to heal the rifts already about to engulf President Sadat. The religions did not fare equally in the face of fate: Bishop Samuel was killed but the Sheikh of Al-Azhar survived.

The gun lorries, roofed over with metal hoops designed to hold canvas, came to a halt. It’s easy to see why no one suspected anything. On the footage shot by a news team covering the event it looks like a breakdown. The plan had been to recruit the driver as part of the team, but this had proved impossible. It was Khaled, the leader of the assassins, who came up with the simple expedient of ordering the driver at pistol point to stop the lorry. It hardly swerved out of line. Here is yet another instance of the colossal luck that attached to this attempt. Everything was lining up against Sadat, as if destiny had determined that his time, indeed, was now up. If, as had been planned, the lorry had been under the care of a sympathetic driver it would have driven closer to the stand than it did. From where it stopped to the stand looks a good seventy yards. By driving this distance adequate warning would have been signalled to Sadat that something was wrong, and he would have been able to duck down behind the concrete barrier of the stand. (One wonders how simple it would have been to install a long window of bullet-proof glass running the length of the concrete lip – indeed Jehan Sadat was behind such a windowed balcony at the side of the main stand.) Sadat, of course, would never have agreed to this, as it would have looked too much like hiding. There was also the precedent of Nasser, who, after an assassination attempt, had not flinched, had in fact issued an on-the-spot invitation to any future killers, announcing his fearlessness of death.

Khaled, the lead assassin, came from the small Nileside town of Mallawi. Mallawi not only had a sizeable Coptic Christian community, it was a bishopric of the Coptic Church. It was also famous as a place that the Holy Family visited on their journey into Egypt. Kum Maria, not far from Mallawi, is revered to this day as the spot where the Virgin Mary stepped ashore during the journey of the Holy Family up the Nile. Yet it is precisely in these towns with a significant Coptic presence that the terrorists of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad proliferated. With the uncertainty that comes with modernisation, age-old disputes
were again visited as the ‘real cause’ of current problems.

Khaled was a successful student. Though not clever enough to enter the elite arm of the air force, he still qualified for officer training with the artillery. Ironically, one indeed of many ironies, had he been an air force pilot he would not have been in a position to take Sadat’s life.

For a year, ever since the big crackdown by Sadat on everyone who had opposed him in word and deed, but especially word, there had been open talk – if such a thing is possible – among clandestine groups that the President should be assassinated. Killing a ruler is prohibited by most interpretations of the sayings of the Prophet, but the new younger firebrands of the Islamic jihadist movements took their inspiration from the hypocritical Mongol Muslim rulers of the twelfth century who would drink alcohol and eat pork while professing to be followers of Islam. Baiburs had defeated such Mongols, so it was seen as legitimate to take arms against a leader who was not a ‘real’ Muslim. A book written and privately printed by an imam called Farag Atiya extolled this viewpoint.

That Khaled would ever read such a book or even meet its author was again an unlikely coincidence. Khaled wanted to get married (history would have been very different if he had done so) and in order to do so needed a flat of his own. While wandering around the neighbourhood of Boulaq he noticed someone addressing the faithful with vigour and enthusiasm at a nearby mosque. This was in 1980, a year before the assassination. Khaled approached the preacher, Farag Atiya, hoping that the man might help him find a flat. Farag realised that this young army officer was just what he needed. He befriended him and gave him a copy of his book,
The Absent Prayer
. Khaled was one of the very few actually to get a chance to read this book, because when it came to the notice of Colonel Zumr, the originator of Islamic Jihad in Egypt (and the world), the precursor of Al-Qaeda, Zumr declared (in the days before the internet and the anonymity which that provides) that the book was inflammatory and would serve only to arouse suspicions and get people arrested. So 450 or more of the original 500 copies were burned.

It wasn’t the sole reason for Khaled’s conversion, but, rather like that select few who read the first Harry Potter novel when it came out in a tiny print-run and then felt superior, Khaled, having read one of the rare fifty originals, felt honoured. He now knew he wanted to serve the cause.

On 23 September his chance came, though again he sought to avoid the final act. He was summoned by his commanding officer and told to lead the 333 Artillery Battalion’s eleven gun carriages during the 6 October Parade. Khaled asked to be excused. He had already told his family that he would be returning to Mallawi for 8 October, which was the religious ceremony of Eid el-Adha. His commanding officer was adamant – he would have to lead the gun section of the parade. This would place him at the front of eleven lorries towing 131mm guns. At that moment Khaled knew his hand had been forced by fate. Given his commitment to ridding the world of Sadat, and given that he had tried to avoid this fate, this was an unambiguous message that the assassination was ordained.

Other methods of killing their leader had been proposed and rejected: an attack on Sadat’s helicopter was deemed impossible as he always took three of the five that the Egyptian army owned (as long as he wasn’t loaning them out to visiting movie stars – when Elizabeth Taylor arrived he addressed her as ‘Queen’, after her role as Cleo, and let her take one of his helicopters). Usually you never knew which one he was in.

An air attack on his rest-house next to the barrage (the very house, much adapted, that years before Mougel Bey and later Scott Moncrieff had directed operations from) was turned down by none other than Colonel Zumr on the grounds that death could not be guaranteed. Zumr, who hailed from the Nileside village next to the barrage, probably wished to spare his neighbourhood from being the centre of such an operation and the retaliation that followed. He would be arrested after the assassination and his life spared owing to his opposition to the attack. Zumr, who led an abortive uprising in the upper Nile town of Asyut, always believed that the shooting of Sadat was premature.

In another curious irony he would spend the duration of Mubarak’s regime in prison. When the Arab Spring revolution took place in 2011 he was released. He then, after thirty years in gaol, announced, ‘The coming period does not at all require armed struggle with the ruler.’ That the man who imprisoned him, Mubarak, is now himself in prison is rather bizarre.

Khaled went to his mentor Farag Atiya (the hunt for the flat apparently long ago given up) and told him of the role he had been given during the parade and his conviction that this was destined to be the moment to take Sadat’s life. Perhaps a factor that hardened Khaled’s
resolve was that his elder brother in Mallawi was a member of one of the fundamentalist groups picked up by security forces on 3 September – twenty days before he received his orders to lead his section of the parade.

Khaled asked Farag to find two accomplices. In two days Farag rounded up three men including Muhammad Farag (no relation of the other whose first name was Farag), ‘the marksman’, who had been the army target-shooting champion seven years running. They all understood that ‘an element of martyrdom’ was involved. An element! This was wishful thinking, or perhaps an acute perception to keep feelings corralled, not let fear get in the way. All three must have known they would die, but all three agreed that it was worth it. All of them were either reserve or former soldiers doing civilian-type jobs and all had the trademark thick beards of religionists. These were dutifully shaved off before the mission. It was a curious enactment,
sans
irony, of the Arab cautionary saying to the over-religious, ‘I fear, my friend, that your beard is so long it is now mounting a challenge to the hair on your head.’ So, beardless, but still bearded in mind, they moved ever closer to their nightmare destination.

The one problem Khaled had was that the driver of the truck was the only driver in the unit, so there was no alternative to him, and certainly he was no sympathiser to their cause. He was scheduled for the parade and was indeed looking forward to it. Khaled’s proposed solution was to give him a sleeping pill before the event and then take over himself at the last minute. But when the conspirators tested a sleeping pill on Muhammad the marksman it had no effect, so the plan was abandoned. It was at this point that Khaled decided simply to force the driver to pull over at pistol point.

The next obstacle was an order, indicative of Sadat’s lack of trust in his own army, that all ammunition and all firing pins be removed before the parade. This caused Khaled some consternation, and with some difficulty Farag obtained four pistols, several grenades and some firing pins for automatic rifles. But it turned out that the collection of each section’s ammunition and firing pins would be conducted by the section leader – Lieutenant Khaled. It was doubly fortuitous since the illicitly obtained firing pins were obsolete and didn’t fit.

Getting his three accomplices into the truck had also been very easy. Despite the driver’s interest in taking part (maybe because he got to drive), the parade was not popular with soldiers. It meant hours of
sitting in the sun without food and water. So finding places in the truck was easy. One soldier who should have attended was ill, and two more had requested leave – and were rather pleased that they both received it. The necessary identification and paperwork were all drawn up by Khaled, as this was his usual job anyway with regard to his section.