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Something’s Happened In The Motorcade: The Assassination of Gamal Abdel Nasser By Chris Oakley
Part 2
Summary: In the first episode of this series we looked back at Gamal Abdel Nasser's assassination and initial worldwide reaction to the news of the Egyptian president's death. In this installment, we'll recount Nasser's funeral and the effect his assassination had on the Egyptian armed forces' morale as they carried out their final preparations for war with Israel. ****** Even as Egyptian security forces were starting their manhunt for Gamal Abdel Nasser's killer, the outpouring of emotion sparked by Nasser's murder could still be felt all over the Arab world. During the three days Nasser's body lay in state hundreds of thousands of people traveled from all corners of the Middle East to pay their final respects to the slain Egyptian leader; mosques in every Middle Eastern city from Casablanca to Baghdad were packed to the brim as the faithful gathered to pray both for Nasser's soul and for the quick arrest of his assassin. Even in Libya the Khadafy-sponsored revolt against King Idris I was temporarily suspended to allow Libyan citizens safe passage to Egypt to attend the memorial services for Nasser. There were also plenty of people who came from beyond the Middle East to honor Nasser's memory. Cuba's Fidel Castro personally led his country's delegation to Egypt for the memorial services; his longtime close friend and fellow Communist revolutionary Che Guevara, making one of his final public appearances before his own untimely death in Bolivia five months after the Nasser assassination, flew up from the Congo(where he'd been leading a left- wing insurrection against the Congolese government) to join Fidel in paying respects to Nasser's widow and colleagues. Erich Honecker, who in just three years' time would succeed Walter Ulbricht as East German premier, delivered a speech to the Egyptian parliament full of praise for Nasser's achievements as president of Egypt. North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung sent two squads of his army's best soldiers to take part in the funeral procession and offered to lend the Egyptian government the aid of the North Korean secret police in tracking down and punishing Nasser's assassin. At the U.N. General Assembly a resolution condemning Nasser’s murder and calling for an international probe of the assassination was passed with only two countries opposed and one abstaining; ironically, Israel was among the nations voting in favor of the resolution. The Israeli ambassador to the U.N. told the New York Times he had done so “in the interests of justice and peace”. Unfortunately, the noble intentions of the ambassador's actions were utterly lost on Cairo, which continued preparing for war with Israel even as plans were made for Nasser's funeral. One Egyptian foreign ministry official even accused Tel Aviv of sanctioning, if not ordering, the assassination. As final preparations were made for Nasser's funeral service, the Egyptian army continued marshaling its forces for the coming war with Israel. But the enthusiasm for war that had been red-hot just a week earlier was steadily waning as morale in all branches of the Egyptian armed forces continued to suffer in the aftermath of Nasser's assassination. For better or worse Gamal Abdel Nasser had been the moral and emotional engine driving Egypt's train, and with him gone many Egyptian soldiers and their officers felt lost. Indeed, a secret report presented to then-Egyptian army chief of staff Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer on June 1st indicated a general feeling of melancholy if not outright despair was beginning to take root within the hearts and minds of his troops; as if to punctuate the report's disquieting conclusions, two army battalion commanders shot themselves the same day the report reached Marshal Amer's desk. And not only was he having grave problems with his own military, but Marshal Amer also found himself confronted by growing skepticism from his Syrian and Jordanian counterparts about whether he could still effectively direct Arab strategic military operations in the coming showdown with the Israelis. Eager to lay those doubts to rest and at the same time give his men something to take their minds off their grief over Nasser's death, Amer decided to order a pre-emptive attack on Israel by the combined Arab armed forces to be launched at the stroke of midnight on June 3rd; the thought had crossed the marshal's mind that if he could strike the Israelis when their military readiness was at its lowest he could do some heavy damage to them before they had time to organize a counteroffensive. Unfortunately for Amer the same thought had also crossed the mind of Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan, who positioned IDF ground forces to spring a trap for the Arab armies and encircle them the moment they crossed the border. The marshal's gambit was about to backfire in the most ironic and catastrophic way imaginable, costing thousands of Arab lives-- his own being one of them. ****** Gamal Abdel Nasser's June 2nd funeral procession was the longest and most dramatic such event any Arab capital had seen in at least a generation. Hundreds of Egyptian soldiers, many of whom would be fighting and dying on the Israeli frontier the very next day, accompanied his casket through the streets of Cairo along with the NPKA honor guard sent by Kim Il Sung and a detachment of Soviet marines; Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai drafted a letter to new Egyptian president Anwar Sadat offering his sympathies to the Egyptian people and pledging China's full and immediate aid in tracking and arresting Nasser's killer. People were openly sobbing in the streets as the hearse containing Nasser's body passed by them. One Cairo policeman felt so distraught at the sight of the hearse it took three of his fellow officers to keep him from blowing his brains out-- as it was, he had to be relieved of duty and put on indefinite medical leave while he recuperated in a mental hospital from his breakdown. Anwar Sadat personally delivered the eulogy for his fallen predecessor, praising him as "the greatest leader our nation has had in this age" and "a valiant martyr in the defense of our ideals". Nobody who was present at the eulogy would ever forget how Sadat struggled to maintain self-control from start to finish, or how twice in his opening remarks he had to stop in mid- sentence to clear his throat after a choked gasp. When the eulogy was done, Sadat went into seclusion and wouldn't emerge from it for nearly thirty-six hours. During those thirty-six hours Field Marshal Amer kept on diligently working to guarantee his army, and those of his Jordanian and Syrian allies, would be ready for action when the new war with Israel started in earnest. He also made numerous telephone calls to Amman in an effort to shore up the morale of Jordan’s King Hussein, and by extension that of Hussein’s generals and soldiers. But Nasser’s death was eating away at the fighting spirit of Jordan’s military just as it ate away at the Egyptian armed forces’ morale; some of the Jordanian army’s top officers, in fact, were subtly hinting to Hussein that Jordan should withdraw from its military alliance with Egypt, or at a minimum reduce its role in that alliance. They were beginning to lose faith in their troops' capacity to successfully wage war against Israel. Hussein himself, for that matter, was beginning to have second thoughts concerning the wisdom of binding his country's fortunes so tightly to those of Egypt. But popular sentiment among most of Jordan's civilian population was still in favor of striking at the Zionist enemy, which left the king trapped in a corner. Even in death, Nasser exerted a powerful hold on the hearts, minds, and imaginations of much of the population of the Arab world. In Syria, thousands of demonstrators lined the streets of Damascus to urge their leaders not to back down at this critical point in the history of their country and the Middle East. Nearly all the marchers wore buttons with Nasser's portrait on them; at least half of them also carried placards which were etched with the slain Egyptian leader's most famous slogans. Supposedly their chants of "Nasser!Nasser!" could be heard as far as the Golan Heights; they were certainly pretty hard to ignore at the Syrian presidential palace. When the ill-fated union between Syria and Egypt was first established, many of its most enthusiastic proponents had been members of the Syrian cabinet-- and even with the union now long since dissolved there was still plenty of admiration among the Baathist elite in Damascus for Nasser's ideals as well as his accomplishments. On June 3rd, the day after Nasser’s funeral, the world got a further demonstration of just how strong a grip the fallen Egyptian leader still retained on the hearts and minds of his believers-- and it came in, of all places, New York City, home to one of the largest Jewish communities in any country in the world outside Israel. That afternoon hundreds of young Arabs who were in the U.S. on student visas marched outside the gates of Israel’s U.N. mission, chanting pro-Nasser slogans and demanding that Tel Aviv hand over the supposed Mossad-trained assassin rumor claimed was responsible for Nasser’s murder. None of them knew at the time it had actually been one of his fellow Egyptians who’d pulled the trigger-- and judging by their words and actions at that march, it’s doubtful many of them would have cared even if they had known. Twenty-four hours after the New York rally, the showdown between Israel and its Arab neighbors that the world had been expecting for months finally came as Israeli air force jets struck Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the first of a series of pre-emptive strikes against strategic targets in all three countries. The Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces were effectively wiped out in these surprise attacks. While most of the world was anxiously waiting for further developments from the Middle East and the regular Arab armies were struggling to stave off a relentless IDF ground attack, the man responsible for assassinating Gamal Abdel Nasser was blending in among the poor of Cairo's mean streets. Mohamed el Karin had gone to great lengths to conceal his identity from the police now searching for him, and his efforts had succeeded marvelously on that score. For the next two and a half years, investigators would comb the Egyptian countryside looking for el Karin-- at times literally walking right past him --without knowing he was right under their noses. ****** Besides being one of the shortest wars in history, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war also marked the most decisive victory Israel had achieved to date when combating its Arab foes. Deprived of air cover by the IAF’s preemptive air strikes in the first hours of the conflict, the Arab armies sustained what Field Marshal Amer’s own chief of staff termed “catastrophic” losses at the hands of Israeli ground troops; the Israeli navy, despite its modest size, scored some impressive tactical victories against the Egyptians and Syrians in the battle to reopen the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. While the Israelis were smashing the Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians to pieces on the battlefield Mohamed el Karin continued to freely circulate through the poorer quarters of Cairo, living under the alias Hosni al-Wahid and taking a certain grim satisfaction in seeing the regime he blamed for the death of his son take such a thorough pounding at the Zionists’ hands...
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