Motorcade, Part 1

He was one of the most charismatic leaders the Arab world had seen since the days of Saladin and one of the most influential Middle Eastern rulers of the 20th century. The mere mention of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s name in most corners of the Arab world was enough to stir a crowd to excitement; since becoming Egyptian president in 1956 he had been the heart and brains of a pan-Arab movement that at its zenith had led to unification between Egypt and Syria in 1958 to create the United Arab Republic and offered millions of people in the Third World what seemed like a certain path to greatness and prosperity.

But just when Nasser seemed to be at the peak of his career, a single act of violence struck him down and radically altered the political map of the Middle East. It happened just as the Arab world was on the brink of yet another war with Israel, which led some to accuse Tel Aviv of having either directly or through a third party orchestrated Nasser’s demise. The Israeli government was quick to dispute this allegation, suggesting it was far more likely to have been one of Nasser’s internal political foes who’d been the chief sponsor of the assassination plot; they pointed out Nasser had made a host of enemies during his rise to power in Egypt and alienated much of the Syrian people by stressing Egypt’s dominant role in the United Arab Republic during the UAR’s brief existence.

The United States, which had extensive ties to both Egypt and Israel, was inclined to share Tel Aviv’s view the assassination had been an inside job; even as Egyptians mourned Nasser’s death the CIA was already running covert investigations of potential suspects with the primary focus of its inquiries directed at Nasser’s army and secret police. Ironically the Soviet Union, at odds with the U.S. on most other Middle East issues, agreed it had probably been one of Nasser’s own people who had orchestrated his demise and directed the KGB to be ready to move against the plotters if the Egyptian government could not do so itself.

When the truth about the assassination finally came to light, it shocked the world. The perpetrator turned out to be not a ruthless cabalist as most people had expected but rather an angry and grieving father who held Nasser responsible for the death of his son in a suspected “friendly fire” incident during Egypt’s intervention in the civil war then raging in Yemen. It would take nearly two and a half years to track him down, but when he was finally caught it blew the lid off a story of personal tragedy intertwined with the larger crisis of a nation teetering on the brink of war with Israel.

The Middle East in May of 1967 was a volatile region to begin with, but Egypt’s involvement in the ongoing civil war in Yemen added fuel to a raging fire. Nasser had long aspired to spread his vision of a socialist pan-Arab union to as many countries as possible, and Yemen was a test case for that vision. A certain young Egyptian Army infantryman would pay a fatal price for promoting that vision on May 16th when a stray bullet caught him in the right temple and blew half his skull off. When the young soldier’s father, a shopkeeper named Mohamed el Karin, learned of his son’s death he became insane with mingled grief and anger-- and in the process was started along the road that would eventually end with Nasser’s demise.

In the wake of his son’s death the once-gregarious el Karin became a quasi-recluse; once a die-hard believer in Nasser’s cause, he had gradually come to sour on the charismatic Egyptian president, and when el Karin’s son was killed it marked the last straw as far as el Karin was concerned. In the next few weeks el Karin’s disillusionment with Nasser would turn first into hate and then into a cold determination to get revenge on the man he blamed for his son’s killing.

El Karin had once served in the Egyptian army himself; a veteran of World War II, he’d fought at El Alamein on the Allied side and counted as one of his most prized possessions a German Luger pistol he had recovered from a dead Africa Korps officer. Convinced his son had been the victim of carelessness and not enemy action that day in Yemen, he now resolved to use the Luger to take revenge on the man who he deemed most responsible for the Yemen tragedy-- Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Unaware of el Karin's intention to liquidate him, Nasser continued to bask in the adulation of his followers and make plans for what he regarded as an inevitable war with Israel. Nine days after the death of el Karin's son the Egyptian president electrified his fellow countrymen and the entire Arab world by closing the Straits of Tiran, a vital Israeli maritime supply lane; the question now seemed to be less if war would break out than where and when the first shots would be fired. El Karin resolved that regardless of how the war started or who emerged victorious at its end, Nasser wouldn't live to see the climax of the conflict.

On May 29th, three days after he ordered the closure of the Straits of Tiran, Nasser traveled to an army base in the vicinity of Alexandria to see how his troops were doing in their preparations for the impending showdown with Israel. Hidden in the crowd, his Luger tucked into his pocket and his face expressionless, was Mohamed el Karin. Although it had been over twenty years since he'd last aimed and fired a gun, el Karin had little trouble in sighting his weapon on the Egyptian president. The second he was able to get a clear shot at Nasser he pulled the trigger.

The first shot hit Nasser in the temple just as his car was pulling up directly into el Karin's line of vision; the second ripped through the side of the Egyptian president's neck. As the civilians in the crowd went into a blind panic and the soldiers at the base frantically searched for the source of those two shots, el Karin fired a third bullet into the back of Nasser's head and ran off to disappear into the throng before anyone could figure out he'd been the one who shot Nasser. The Egyptian president was quickly taken to the nearest hospital, but there was nothing the doctors could for him; at 3:28 PM Cairo time that afternoon a spokesman for Nasser went on television to break the stunning news that the Egyptian president had died as a result of his wounds.

Nasser's assassination shocked not only his fellow Egyptians but also millions of people throughout the world. Among his brother Arabs, his death was treated as if it were a sign of the Apocalypse. From Morocco to Kuwait people wept openly in the streets as word of the assassination spread; one young Iraqi army officer, Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, blew his brains out in a fit of grief just minutes after learning the Egyptian president was dead. Jordan's King Hussein went into seclusion for two full days, spending most of that time fasting and praying for the fallen Nasser's soul. Next door in Syria, where Nasser was still held in great esteem despite the acrimonious end of the short-lived union between Syria and Egypt, hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of Damascus to mourn him. Maronite Christians in the Lebanese capital Beirut tolled church bells as a memorial to Nasser; in Saudi Arabia the Saudi royal family offered a $500,000 reward to anyone who could provide information leading to the assassin's arrest.

Even in Israel, which had had a largely antagonistic relationship with its Arab neighbors from the moment it was founded 19 years earlier, the news of Nasser’s assassination caused a great deal of concern. Then- prime minister Levi Eshkol was placed under heightened protection by his personal security detail on orders from defense minister Moshe Dayan, who feared the Egyptians might blame Nasser’s death on the Israeli government and seek to retaliate for it by arranging(or at least acquiescing to) a hit on Eshkol. Simultaneously the intelligence agency Mossad initiated a secret inquiry into the assassination with the goal of determining whether it had been the work of a domestic foe of Nasser's or Syrian intelligence personnel seeking vengeance for Syria's subordination to Egypt during the three years when the two countries had been merged as the United Arab Republic.

President Lyndon Johnson and his cabinet were holding a meeting on U.S. policy in Vietnam when a priority cable arrived from the U.S. embassy in Cairo informing him of Nasser's murder. Concerned that the assassination might be just the spark for an even wider eruption of internal violence in Egypt, Johnson quickly ordered a precautionary evacuation of non-essential embassy staff and dependents of embassy personnel; as Eshkol had done with Mossad, Johnson directed the CIA to examine the possibility one of Nasser's domestic enemies had played a part in the Egyptian president's death.

Nowhere outside Egypt was reaction to Nasser's assassination stronger or more outraged than in Moscow, where Nasser had long been regarded as a friend of the Soviet Union and a valuable strategic asset for counteracting U.S. backing of Israel in the Middle East. CPSU general secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev exploded in a colossal fury when he heard the news about Nasser’s death; within minutes after the Soviet foreign minister had informed him of the assassination he ordered the Soviet embassy in Cairo to take action to expedite the arrest and punishment of the killer. He also directed the KGB to immediately begin an inquiry into the possibility the assassination might have been part of a conspiracy by one of Nasser’s associates to take control of the Egyptian government.

The fact that the United States and the Soviet Union, two nations as ideologically and culturally different from each other as any pair of global powers could possibly be, both deemed Nasser's death as a potential consequence of internal unrest reflected both a grim understanding of the notorious volatility of politics in the Middle East and a sad recollection of the traumatic effects assassinations had had on the course of both U.S. and Soviet history. For President Johnson and his cabinet it was difficult to ignore the parallels between the shooting of Nasser and the assassination of JFK nearly four years earlier; likewise Brezhnev and his top deputies saw similarities between Nasser's death and the 1934 murder of leading Communist civic official and then-Leningrad mayor Sergei Kirov.

Among the superpowers' respective NATO and Warsaw Pact allies there was a great deal of anxiety about the consequences of Nasser's assassination for their interest in the region. Britain, to name just one example, feared a repeat of the crisis situation that had drawn it into war between Israel and Egypt following Nasser's 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal. France was concerned the budding unrest in Egypt might spill over into neighboring Sudan and Libya, and from there in France's former colony of Algeria. West Germany, whose relationship with Israel had always been complicated to say the least, was faced with a moral and political dilemma as to how to handle the assassination.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain East Germany, Moscow's chief ally in Europe, was nervous about the consequences the assassination might have for existing and future trade and industrial agreements with Egypt. An aide to then East German-premier Walter Ulbricht would later remember that his boss seemed "unusually agitated" in the first twenty-four hours after learning of Nasser's death; should Soviet fears about a revolt against the Nasser regime prove correct, Ulbricht said, it could spell economic as well as political disaster for the German Democratic Republic. In East Germany's neighbor Poland, where memories of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews were still fresh in that country's collective psyche a full quarter-century after the Wannsee Conference, the Polish government was walking a thin political tightrope between maintaining friendship with Moscow and Cairo on one hand and being sympathetic to Polish Holocaust survivors on the other. The Czech government, then in the first stages of the internal political tension that would lead to Czechoslovakia's occupation by the Soviets the following year, took nearly three full days to decide on the text for its official statement regarding the assassination.

In Libya, an army officer named Muammar Khadafy was every ounce as overcome by grief over Nasser's death as Saddam Hussein had been; in sharp contrast to Saddam, however, Khadafy decided to turn his violent impulses outward instead of inward-- specifically, against the then-ruler of Libya King Idris I, who he resented for not letting him lead a military operation into Egypt to hunt down and kill Nasser's suspected assassins. The then 25- year-old Khadafy organized a military uprising aimed at overthrowing the Libyan monarch, only to have forces still loyal to Idris bitterly resist the revolt; from there the conflict escalated into a civil war that would still be raging long after Nasser’s killer had been arrested...

Quoted from the book Meine Tage mit Herr Ulbricht(My Days With Mr. Ulbricht) by Leon Magarre, copyright 1987 Ziegler Verlag(Munich) and translated into English 1993 by Bartlet Media(Boston, New York).